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What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#221

Post by nocoment »

LaaT wrote: post #175
selimthegrim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True enough. But then why does the modern Turkish state continue to deny what happened to the Ottoman Armenians? You think they'd have a field day showing how much the Empire sucked.

I might be wrong, but apart from Germany no one has owned up a genocide. I suspect Germans wouldn't have done it if it wasn't forced upon them during allied occupation of Germany. There's little reason for Turkish to break ground in this regard.

I was going to respond with Germany. Specifically, the East German state did not own up to it like the West despite it being great propaganda for the founding of a communist state.

A government does not gain from showing its society a proper mirror. It runs the risk of losing ground by having "insulted" the guilty older generation and national identity, and simultaneously plants the distrust for itself (it mostly is that older generation) to form a youth revolt (the RAF supposedly formed from this distrust in West Germany.)

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#222

Post by [deleted] »

lucisferre wrote: post #138
ggreer wrote: post #68

Here are some things I think future societies will condemn us for: 1. Prison. Almost every modern penal system focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. I think that as our understanding of the brain improves, we'll be able to find the causes of violent behavior and cure them. Punishment will become cruel and unusual. 2. Eating meat (and other animal rights issues). Even if they're not conscious, most tasty a…

Surprised how many people seem to have skipped over your last statement and focused on whether or not 1, 2 and 3 were really things you couldn't say. I'm pretty sure I can guess what it is you can't say though.

[deleted]

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#223

Post by brortao »

existencebox wrote: post #148
ggreer wrote: post #68

Here are some things I think future societies will condemn us for: 1. Prison. Almost every modern penal system focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. I think that as our understanding of the brain improves, we'll be able to find the causes of violent behavior and cure them. Punishment will become cruel and unusual. 2. Eating meat (and other animal rights issues). Even if they're not conscious, most tasty a…

I'm split on #2. I love meat. I will not stop eating meat. Not only because I trust my personal "instincts" as tuned by millions of years of evolution to inform me to some degree what I need to consume to be effective far more than any conscious decision I might make, (e.g. that I think we're rather "young" in our understanding of how nutrition impacts the body), but because when confronted by that "animals have feel…

At the current rate of consumption, it isn't likely that animals will be treated better. A "better implementation" isn't going to happen for a very long time (in the US, 99% of animals are factory farmed [1]). Demand is at such a high rate that it isn't financially feasible to eliminate factory farms. There's also the environmental aspect - meat is very resource-intensive, and a huge source of pollution [2]. A UN report from 2010 stated that "a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change." [3]

This goes not only for meat, but for animal products in general (the dairy and egg industries cause just as much, if not more, suffering than the meat industry).

Eating meat can be morally justified if it's done in a humane way, I think. The problem is that unless you have your own small-scale farm, it's almost impossible to find animal products that aren't the result of suffering. I don't find it very likely that things will change unless we, as a society, move towards a (much) lower consumption of animal products.

[1] http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/factory-farming [2] http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes... [3] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report...

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#224

Post by Blahah »

ggreer wrote: post #68

Here are some things I think future societies will condemn us for: 1. Prison. Almost every modern penal system focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. I think that as our understanding of the brain improves, we'll be able to find the causes of violent behavior and cure them. Punishment will become cruel and unusual. 2. Eating meat (and other animal rights issues). Even if they're not conscious, most tasty a…

I don't really understand how you can think there's a root cause but not be able to say it on HN. Since ggreer says he can't say, can anyone explain what he's getting at?

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#225

Post by brortao »

dragonwriter wrote: post #191
nhangen wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People crave sugar, nicotine, narcotics, and other things that aren't good for them, so your argument falls apart there. You crave meat for a variety of psychological and physiological reasons, but not necessarily because you're missing something that meat provides. My argument for not eating meat is simple - why kill something for food if I don't have to?

> My argument for not eating meat is simple - why kill something for food if I don't have to? Mostly, unless you've developed some kind of novel purely-synthetic foodstock, you have to (well, you can probably get away with dismembering living things rather than killing them, in some cases.) To a certain extent, you have a choice about whether the "something" killed or dismembered is plant, animal, fungus, etc.

There isn't exactly a lot of evidence that plants feel pain or can suffer in the same way that animals can. Even if they could, you'd still be minimizing the amount of killing by not eating meat, since animals have to be fed.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#226

Post by smtddr »

ucarion wrote: post #163
nostromo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, you're not trying hard enough. :) Most unspeakable thoughts today deal with isms and phobias: sexism, racism, agism, Islamophobia, homophobia. There are others of course. For example, I am not a climate-change denier, but if I was I certainly wouldn't say so on HN! I'm gay so I'll pick on my own group: HIV is ridiculously high amongst urban gay men. To me, it's obvious why this is the case. Evolutionarily, men…

I agree with you about most of those phobias, but I strongly disagree about Islamophobia. I think future societies will be surprised by how much human suffering we permit in the name of being "tolerant". Religions are not all created equal, and no intellectually honest person will claim that Islam and Jainism are equally valid moral frameworks (this is why few people fret about Jainophobia). We know that Islam and it…

>>We know that Islam and its adherents are generous contributors to the surplus of misery in the world.

NOPE! You've been made to think that by the media. Time to bring out this vid again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQnxnYEVp4U

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#228

Post by smtddr »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #117
oskarth wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you may be right that future generations will condemn us for them, none of those things are remotely controversial enough. You can say any of them in almost any setting and people will mostly yawn. Many people think prisons should be banished, or at least severely limited (especially US prisons); there are plenty of popular vegetarians out there; assisted suicided is just your average polarizing subject. This i…

It's pretty interesting to think that most people who like someone might hate them if only they knew what their true thoughts were, and that someone can be acutely aware of what most people would hate them for.

Someone should write a movie where aliens come to earth and do some kind of mind-weapon where nobody on earth can tell a lie for 5 years.

It would be the end of society. I don't even know what we'd do; probably just live like wild animals in the forest only worrying about primal needs.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#229

Post by declan »

mikeash wrote: post #109
declan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the same way. I know the chairman of the Calguns Foundation (hoffmang on Twitter), who's also for HN purposes the chairman and CEO of a ~200-employee Silicon Valley recurring billing/subscription management startup. My understanding of his position, and I may of course have it wrong or be misremembering, is that he's okay with some form of background checks, perhaps via proof of backgroundcheckness, for owners…

So you pick two people, one moderate and one extreme, and pretend they're representative? Most people's opinions on this stuff is somewhere in the middle (i.e. there should be some regulations on guns but some private gun ownership should be allowed). There are extremists on both sides. On one side it manifests as "ban them all" and on the other side it's "no regulation whatsoever".

>So you pick two people, one moderate and one extreme, and pretend they're representative?

Ah, but I'm picking two leading advocates for their respective positions.

Re: What You Can't Say (2004)

#230

Post by tempestn »

exue wrote: post #134
tempestn wrote: post #75

A fairly minor but prevalent one is speed limit laws. I personally feel most speed limit laws in North America are ridiculous. In almost every situation it is safe to drive significantly faster than the posted speed, so it seems fairly obvious that there's something wrong with the law itself. Now, in this particular group I expect that isn't terribly controversial. But it can be a very unpopular opinion in some circl…

If Canada is like the U.S., the median traffic speed on those roads you mentioned is greater than the speed limit. Thus it's really not a minority/extremely "can't say" opinion you're espousing, but you're right that there will usually be a (smaller) group of very vocal opponents

It's a strange dichotomy, but at least in my experience it almost seems like although most people drive faster than the speed limit, most are also instinctively against the idea of raising those limits. (Perhaps because the majority of people believe themselves to be better than average drivers.) Or maybe they believe that people will simply continue to drive faster than the limits even if they were raised, so the status quot is preferred. If that's the case though, surely there's a better solution.
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