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The past is not true

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Re: The past is not true

#131

Post by hammock »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #127
tppiotrowski wrote: post #96

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and p…

Images play a big role in how events are perceived. Whenever there's a natural disaster you tend to see all of the worst examples, even if they're not fully representative of the event. But I think it's sometimes necessary in order to get people to take these events seriously, since they can negatively affect so many people. Otherwise people might look at images where some things look normal and think that those who…

Why have you been downvoted?

Re: The past is not true

#132

Post by tivert »

zacksiri wrote: post #4

It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".

> It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not.

How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true."

> We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie.

You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.

Re: The past is not true

#134

Post by miiiiiike »

He did the right thing by seeking her out to apologize.

The rest doesn’t hold water.

“There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.”

The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.

They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you call them out on it it’s always something like “We’ll if I could damage their career anyone could have.” or “It’s been ten years, why don’t they just get over it?”

Basically: “Yes, I stabbed them. But they didn’t/couldn’t stop me, so it’s their fault that they’re dead, really.”

Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time.

Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did. Telling yourself that the facts of your story don’t matter or that the people you hurt may even be better off for it won’t mend the people you’ve broken.

Just apologize (for real) and attempt to make amends.

Re: The past is not true

#135

Post by kritiko »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #124

I don't always fully agree with anecdotal feel good stories that seem to imply a greater universal point due to a by-chance outcome. What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault? It's nicely written, but it speaks to most people's general positivity bias: our yearning for a benign truth underlying all things that are bad, or more specifically, that bad things aren't really r…

I think magical, positive thinking is protective even in the most dire times or atrocities. This is an intuition that's based on anecdotes from watching the documentary Shoah and reading Man's Search for Meaning, both of which cover how survivors dealt with the Holocaust.

Re: The past is not true

#136

Post by rcoveson »

ideamotor wrote: post #106

We lose this when everything is recorded forever. Stated more eloquently: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336... : “I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead: Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember. We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.”…

> Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.

What's the word for something that's phrased like wisdom but doesn't hold up at all to mild scrutiny?

"Just as much the ability to forget as to remember", feh. One of those things is a bit more important, isn't it?

Re: The past is not true

#137

Post by high_priest »

ChrisSD wrote: post #99
yakcyll wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may refer to the second law of thermodynamics - entropy cannot decrease over time in an isolated system. One could argue the entire universe is one.

But our local "system" has a gigantic miasma of incandescent plasma on our doorstep. The Earth itself should not need to worry about entropy for a long while yet...

What @stared means with the entropy quote is that in a world tending from organised to disorganised, it is impossible to KNOW the future, but also very hard to TRULY KNOW the past. As each step into the future causes the remnants of past to decay.

Re: The past is not true

#138

Post by agumonkey »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #96

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and p…

This is important, history will remember emotionally charged comments but indeed a lot of what happens is "normal" and forgotten. We could see that in syria or even ukraine.. the geopolitical tension level was completely removed from most day to day stream we could see.

I wonder if this bias/memory-capacity is studied, I assume so but I don't know the name :)

Re: The past is not true

#139

Post by gmarx »

nostrebored wrote: post #121
tppiotrowski wrote: post #96

I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and p…

The historical context also misses a lot of what we know about the impact of malnutrition and stress on the immune system. Was the spanish flu actually that bad, or was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population? Reconciling modern information with historical events is hard. But I think it's completely necessary if we're going to make policy decisions based on history.

The Spanish flu really was very bad but would not have killed as many people if it occurred today. Malnutrition might have been a factor (though today's obesity rate might also be a problem) but the bigger thing was lack of antibiotics. Flu almost never kills you directly- it's the bacterial pneumonia you develop on top of it that does. Without antibiotics back then there would have been little they could do

Re: The past is not true

#140

Post by Etheryte »

BatFastard wrote: post #105
keepamovin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of: https://thedailyzen.org/2015/03/20/zen-story-maybe/ There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaime…

This is a rip off of the story "Ed" told in the TV show "Northern Exposure", but it has always been one of my favorites from that show.

Taoism has its root run back to at least the 4th century BCE, and quite possibly earlier. Even though this specific telling is probably considerably newer, it carries motives that are very common in Taoism in general. Claiming that the story is then a rip-off from a TV show from the 90s is... Well, it's possible, but not very likely.
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