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Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

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21–30 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#23
post #22

Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. It can't be truer, but somehow people get really mad at me when I say it.

> Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not.

Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#24

Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games. Related: video games have positive mental health benefits.[2] As a parent, nothing seems to create more issues than screen time. Ive seen other parents get fairly harsh with extreme limits with their kids screen time consumption. It’s like abstinence education for sex: it just doesn’t work and ultimately backfires. Indeed research has shown kids have to get pretty ex…

> Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games.

That's a preference for action, not an (even debatable) truth.

> Related: video games have positive mental health benefits

That's at least potentially a truth, but not all that controversial.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#25
post #22

Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. It can't be truer, but somehow people get really mad at me when I say it.

> Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.

Do I really have to make a likeliness calculation?

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#27

Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically. This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.

All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now, where we can "solve" climate change but don't have the collective political will yet to do it. What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff. Environment would be completely rekt.

> All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now

Yes and look where it's got us. Time to stop doing those things. The solution to climate change is going to be nothing like what people expect it to be. Nuclear or some magic solution isn't going to present itself. The solution is going to be a monumental shift in how people live and several decades of misery for people who aren't used to being miserable.

> What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff

This would be preferable. London would have been ruined but we wouldn't have been able to scale this to ruin the entire world the way we have now.

> Environment would be completely rekt.

Environment is completely rekt today.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#28

Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically. This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.

“Don’t have kids”

A little cliche but isn’t this how we get Idiocracy? Assuming we’re not already there.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#29
post #19

Success is not the amount of stuff you have. It's about being content. Capitalist culture is convinced that greed and desire and impatience is good, because it leads to more stuff being created and bought, and from some arbitrary standard, this "economy" is the golden standard of success. And yet suicide rates and loneliness go up in these places, while family values go down. What are you really working so hard for?…

Few people agree with you on this? I doubt it. Most people would agree — they just allow countervailing values drive their actions.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#30

Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically. This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.

I'm curious your take about serious climate interventions, i.e. geoengeering. I hear some people with the viewpoint of "we don't need to do anything, the future will be fine" and others, similar to you, who hold more of a "we need to do as much as we can to prevent/correct climate change".

I'm curious how these are balanced in your mind. For instance, if we could solve global warming by activating a load of fusion reactors to sequester atmospheric carbon and pollutants, would you then be okay with rural living, meat-eating, and lots of kids? What about greening the sea to absorb more CO2, or similar ecosystem modifications?

Curious whether this viewpoint is more ideological or practical in its roots.

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