Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

joylere.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 131 posts

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#111

Post by eyelidlessness »

carabiner wrote: post #94
eyelidlessness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a concept I’ve wanted a word for, for over 20 years. Thank you for sharing it.

The sad thing is, it's a fake Tumblr word not recognized by any dictionary. Not OED or MW or anywhere else. Tumblr has coined a lot of interesting words though; "genderfluid" is another that started as a joke, then had people adopting it as sexuality for real.

I’m not sure when this supposed joke began, but from what I found[1] with a quick search “genderfluid” was used at least as early as 1994 and not as a joke. The same source cites an appearance in Urban Dictionary in 2007, but the entry doesn’t appear anymore and the Wayback link is currently returning 503 errors for me.

1: https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/Genderfluid#Etymology

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#112

Post by atoav »

NovaVeles wrote: post #96
atoav wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the great thing of having a nerdy side: You know that literally everything will get interesting if you just dive into it deep enough. Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.

Alternatively - "The nicest thing about anything is not knowing what it is." - George Carlin. Not knowing how a cloud works is magical for instance. But taking this line of thinking too far can be disastrous. There is a happy middle ground.

I don't think so. There is of course a childlike magic in looking at the clouds and dreaming of the people who live there. But the feeling of fantasy a child gets when looking at clouds does only partly stem from not knowing what they consist of.

I have many topics that still fascinate me as much as they did when I was a kid – to be honest, maybe even more than back then, because now I know how ridiculously complex they are and what ultra-specific conditions needed to be there for this to emerge. Knowing more doesn't make things less miraculous, but more so.

And despite knowing a lot about fluid dynamics and clouds I can still just stare at a beautiful cloud in awe and wonder how it would be to live up there in the naive, romantic sense. I know a lot about acoustics and what makes my instrument work, but in the end I can still just sit there and play it. If anything that knowledge allows me to connect more intimately with the world around me

Losing your childlike side is something that happens to many people, because they are afraid of how it is being perceived from the outside – and then they internalize this so much that they don't even allow themselves awe and wonder even inside the privacy of their own heads.

Maybe this is coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect? So if someone is in the valley of people who don't know a lot, but think they know everything, the wonder of the world around them might indeed be lost for them.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#113

Post by csours »

samtimalsina wrote: post #9

I’m a little drunk and I have not even read the article but I was discussing this very thing with my friends. We have so many stories and we are each going through so much struggle individually. Why can’t we be kind and considerate of each other?

In a word, righteousness. The human mind grew up in a world of divided bands and fighting. Us vs Them is a very comfortable paradigm. So now we have people fighting about Woke-ism or Gamer's Gate. People get bitterly angry about this because their personal morality is challenged; shame is a knife to cut the sinner. We feel a shared sense of righteousness with our own band - how dare they oppress minorities / how dare they challenge the way I was raised / how dare they take away my rights and personal choice / how dare they behave so recklessly.

Maybe you're angry about one of those things right now. Anger is an emotion that tells you to change something. If you can't change the thing you get angry about, then you get angry at that feeling of not being able to fix things; you get angry at people that get in the way. You get angry at people on 'the other side'. Then they respond by defending themselves and saying things that make you more angry. Once the fighting starts, you have the original problem and the original feelings about the problem, and you also have anger about the fighting, which quickly becomes bitter.

I don't know how or if humanity will stop this at scale. A path forward would be choosing not to use shame and righteousness, but that is a deeply alien feeling. Of course you want racists/wokists to feel bad; they are doing harm and they want you to feel bad! It would be unrighteous to not attack them!

----

I do not believe wokism is a problem in the way that racism is a problem. I believe that many people experience historic structural inequality. I believe that some people want their own race to prosper ahead of other races. I believe that people try to advance their own personal interests without regard to the power structures they participate in. I don't believe that shaming non-minorities really helps fix this.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#114

Post by jvm___ »

atoav wrote: post #90
routerl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought of this as another perspective on Shakespeare's "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." To believe otherwise is to have lost the wonder of discovery.

This is the great thing of having a nerdy side: You know that literally everything will get interesting if you just dive into it deep enough. Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.

My current theory is that everything is a network.

Prove me wrong, find something that's not a node on a complication network.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#115

Post by jvm___ »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #87
thombat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shades of the old joke: A man driving on the autobahn hears a newsflash on the radio "Warning for drivers on the A7 northbound! A car is going the wrong way!" "The hell ya say!", snorts the man , "It ain't just one car. It's hundreds of them!"

This reminded me of another joke. Apologies if I botch it, I’m terrible at joke delivery. A person is driving with a passenger. The driver goes straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “that light was red! Aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.” After crossing several red lights this way, they come to a green light and come to a complete stop.…

A man climbs into a taxi, "Airport please, I'm late!".

The driver speeds up and starts going straight through a red light. The passenger is terrified, “That light was red! I'm not that late, aren’t you afraid we’ll be hit?” The driver says “Don’t worry, my brother does it all the time.”

After crossing several red lights this way, they come closer to the airport, and at a green light they come to a complete stop. The passenger says, “Why did you stop? The light is green now!” The driver says, “Oh, my brother works on this side of town."

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#116

Post by Kye »

carabiner wrote: post #94
eyelidlessness wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a concept I’ve wanted a word for, for over 20 years. Thank you for sharing it.

The sad thing is, it's a fake Tumblr word not recognized by any dictionary. Not OED or MW or anywhere else. Tumblr has coined a lot of interesting words though; "genderfluid" is another that started as a joke, then had people adopting it as sexuality for real.

You've misunderstood the function of a dictionary. It doesn't create or validate words, or identities.

Also: genderfluid isn't a sexuality. You've taken a terrible tumble into things you do not understand.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#117

Post by btilly »

NovaVeles wrote: post #96
atoav wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the great thing of having a nerdy side: You know that literally everything will get interesting if you just dive into it deep enough. Sometimes I feel sad for people who cannot experience that joy.

Alternatively - "The nicest thing about anything is not knowing what it is." - George Carlin. Not knowing how a cloud works is magical for instance. But taking this line of thinking too far can be disastrous. There is a happy middle ground.

You think you know how clouds work?

Did you know that water vapor is less dense than air, so it rises, and this is part of why clouds form?

Seriously, the atomic mass of H2O is 18. Compare to the other major parts of air which are N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40, and CO2 at 44. Everything beyond that is a rounding error.

Therefore, all else being equal, wet air rises.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#118

Post by b3morales »

chaps wrote: post #51
hatsunearu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I'm just an asshole but I've felt whatever is the opposite of sonder these days when I come across people that are so clueless and inattentive they might as well be zombies.

At some point in your life, somebody's undoubtedly thought the same thing about you. Probably even a bunch of people over many years.

As depicted by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#119

Post by b3morales »

satisfice wrote: post #100

The Narrative Takeover section is lazy thinking and lazy writing. Nearly every sentence is a claim made in thin air, devoid of practical guidance. So much advice about communication is couched in the language of victimhood vs unspecified aggressions. That’s fine for memes on LinkedIn, maybe. We should expect more from someone who studies psychology for a living. No one should say “It’s not about me.” It’s always, for…

That section is not wrong, it's just being implicit about the second-order choice that you allude to in your last sentence. You certainly don't have to do anything that the article suggests, unless your conversational partner, and your goals for the relationship require it.

Re: What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

#120

Post by fllawless »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #57
hatsunearu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I'm just an asshole but I've felt whatever is the opposite of sonder these days when I come across people that are so clueless and inattentive they might as well be zombies.

I try to remind myself that there are perfectly fine reasons for this to occur. For example, the person might suffer from insomnia. They might have a lower functioning brain due to developmental issues. They may have been in an accident which caused brain trauma. They might operate on a wavelength sufficiently different from you in that moment such that communication seems impossible, and you perceive that as their d…

There's another explanation which should be very realistically considered, but which people are (probably intentionally) blind to: they're not as dumb as you think, and you're not as smart as you think.
Post reply on HN