141–150 of 362 posts
And how people got used to not taking responsibility for their own actions, communication etc.
People are not speaking directly anymore, only through layers of unnecessary, corrupted, stupid and ignorant lawyers, insurance companies, agents and other meaningless units.
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 c…
"Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice".
Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea.
But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyrant in your life (if you let it) seems like a good insight to me.
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…
Life in general is better now, and we can keep doing better! And to do better, we have to be honest about history.
― William Faulkner, 'Requiem for a Nun' (1951)
I love HN but, let's be honest, we are often tone-deaf. Very much. When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind. He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories…
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 c…
Ehhh that seems a bit uncharitable and leading into a slippery-slope fallacy. "Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice". Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea. But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyran…
I’m talking about the people who already do the things — and not giving them a Tums and Tylenol for the indigestion and headaches it’s causing them.
Stop doing the thing to stop suffering the consequences.
The people also tend to be really brittle. Once someone points out that they’re running around stabbing people they’ll get all offended: “See! It’s not fair! Everyone I’ve stabbed is out to get me. I’m the victim!”
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.”…
Data, information, doesn't rot, but code does because it relies on the implicit promises of the underlying system(s) it runs on top of, the systems it interacts with, and the expectations of it's users. Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital. And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the info…
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.
There is a common conception that we don't know the future, but we know the past. In our heads, we have models of the past and models of the future. Sure, there is an asymmetry between knowing the past and the future - due to thermodynamics. Still, in both cases, it is good to think of these as probabilistic models, far from any certainty.
Makes sense to me. Consciousness forms a closure over a deletion mechanism towards less and less paths over time. Eventually inconsistent architecture. It’s exactly what the universe needs.
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?