How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

I'm not 100% convinced every influencer _feels_ trapped in a world of their own making - but it's correct that truth this day is suffering a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" problem.

> The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true.

Here's a story. I'd guess there's at least a few HN folk with a similar tale.

I'm not a real believer in cryptocurrency, in its current popular form at least. Actual value would be delivered by fast transaction rates at (very) high speed, high assurance, and some kind of oversight or ability to reverse transactions (you can choose your cutoff anywhere from "convicted criminal behavior" to "I disputed a transaction on my Visa/Mastercard just because I could" but ultimately society and the law needs to be an effective backstop of the system). Yet I was introduced to the bitcoin paper sometime near its release by a PhD officemate, and was a specialist in high performance and GPU computing at the time, and resolved to go home and spend a few hours mining a coin, but instead I just chilled out when I got home. I could literally have hundreds of coins right now (or equivalent cash). For years I could have chosen to join the bandwagen, but resolved not to. Currently my parents are profiting - go figure.

So yeah the world offers some interesting trades from time to time!

In any case I found the article meaningful. I'm glad I live outside the US and its current polarization, but I feel we have the same problem growing here. Hopefully we all learn to deal with it and sort out our differences.

I mean, ignore the name itself[0], and the iconography[1], and the things that can be justified by misunderstandings[2], and that the reason he got stabbed in the belly by the Roman soldier was because dying that fast was incredibly suspicious: do you really think there's evidence for someone in that era, actually making genuinely lame people walk, actually blind people see, and actually coming back from the dead?

The account can be fictional even when the person exists. Consider how there's a lot of people today, even on Hacker News, who say that Elon Musk "single-handedly" did all the things done by the companies he owns and the people employed there, and then imagine those "single-handedly" accounts became a book, and people deified his memory a century later based on the "single-handedly" claims in that book — even though there's a real Musk behind it, the person in the book would be a fiction inspired by the truth.

[0] Which will obviously be wrong, given a few layers of mis-hearing, phonetic transcription, ambiguous reading of that transcription, and the way that even William Shakespeare wrote his own name a bunch of different ways none of which is the currently mandatory one to avoid getting dinged points for mis-spelling in an English exam

[1] ironically meaning that almost all Christians will be worshiping a false idol: https://youtu.be/9nPLAlqsWgM?si=spnKIDohGNsocTXm

Also, the Cult of Mithras would have things to say if they were still around…

[2] Take the feeding of the 5000, and apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on the reporting: you could have an actual reality of lots of people bringing their food, not wanting to share, the disciples being told to share what they have, that creating social pressure from everyone else to share, and it's entirely plausible for this kind of thing to be reported as a "miracle" even today, if you look around at the parts of the world press willing to use that kind of language.

Then there's walking on water, where you get the punchline to the old joke about the Priest, the Rabi, and the Wiccan who go on an inter-faith fishing trip together…

Virgin birth: First, the joke about Joseph being a gullible cuckold who just believed the excuse Mary cooked up; second, the possibility of Mary being assaulted while she slept and genuinely not knowing it happened; thirdly, "virgin" having other meanings besides current use; fourthly, pregnancy is possible from dry humping, so technical virginity may be preserved: https://www.allohealth.com/blog/reproductive-health/pregnanc...

This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.

I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood

They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)

The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.

Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.

The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.