Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compu…
What to read on the slice universe?
The past is not true
241–250 of 362 posts
Re: The past is not true
#242He 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…
Some people are generally good and end up living with Guilt.
Most sad stories do NOT have a healing resolution like this. The few times it does happen, then good for them.
Re: The past is not true
#243[deleted]
Re: The past is not true
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think misanthropes aren't being enabled by articles like the above. Many of them honestly don't care deep down about the damage they do. Others like Mark Wahlberg just "forgive themselves" for blinding a neighbor as a teen, even if their actual victim doesn't forgive them, so they can feel better about themselves mentally. https://time.com/3623630/mark-wahlberg-pardon/
Wikipedia says he didn't actually blind the victim[0]. If true, this is fitting given the context of the OP. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wahlberg#Legal_issues .
Ah, that Wikipedia article changed since last time. Which does illustrate the OP's point. Thanks for the correction.
Still, Wahlberg did some terrible stuff and basically just said "forgiving myself is enough".
Re: The past is not true
#245He 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…
This type of mentality is readily observed amongst abusive parents. "That was a long time ago, why can't you move on?" "You were a sensitive child." I will never understand people who seem to lack the ability to see that their actions may have a rippling effect throughout someone's life. One can meaningfully and negatively alter the trajectory of someone's life with one action. I'm not advocating that we live in neur…
I think this gap in understanding is more of an underlying psychological phenomenon, that those people struggle to grasp the concept you're describing because they just don't get it. Like how people learn, say, math differently. If they had the capacity to understand then they might've already and this wouldn't apply. How to deal with this in a society is a complicated matter.
Re: The past is not true
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As someone who has experienced several serious floods, this is my favorite example of imagery's ability to craft a reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgm3_jzcNm4 Floodwaters tend to stir up a lot of dirt and mud, so the water is usually totally opaque. That makes it very hard to tell how deep it is. A lot of overhead views of flooded neighborhoods look completely disastrous, but in reality it's just a foot or t…
A couple feet of water is still disastrous though. You're insurance most likely doesn't cover it and you could be left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage easily.
Re: The past is not true
#247> The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
Yep, flaws I saw in how my parents brought me up definitely informed the way I approached bringing up my kids. But then I look at the childhoods my parents had, and honestly they did a heck of a lot better job than I could have had any right to expect. So I think overall I did pretty well, with lessons to learn for sure, but it's only fair to think of it as an iterative process.
I've had the opposite experience where as I've grown older and had kids of my own, I've began to judge my parent's even more harshly than I had when I was younger.
Re: The past is not true
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment reminds me a lot of XKCD "Ten Thousand" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ). You don't need to denigrate the author's credibility to write about their personal experience and insight from it in order to provide a reference to the much deeper field of study on this to those who are interested. Personally, I had heard of "historiography" but had no idea this is what it meant. And now I do! And that wouldn't have ha…
I'm less denigrating the author and more encouraging people who found this idea interesting to seek out experts. I'm glad that this person is thinking about this topic. I also see a frankly huge number of absolute amateurs having their ideas about history distributed all over the world while professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively.
I think you're doing both things. And I applaud you for the encouragement and useful information! I also don't begrudge you your frustration about this. But I also find the "ten thousand" idea to be a useful re-framing of how to respond to this phenomenon where something seems obvious to you because you know all about it, but it's actually not obvious to most people at all. Maybe you'll find this to be a useful re-framing too, I dunno.
I will push back a bit on "professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively". I don't think that's really true. In my experience, it seems like most professionals and academics prefer to write and speak within their own bubbles. Some few make a concerted effort to communicate effectively to the masses, but more often they look down their noses at the kinds of communication that entails. For instance, my interpretation of your "TED speaker" comment is that TED talks are not a suitable way to communicate about this topic. But a compelling TED talk or blog post or op-ed in a mainstream publication would be a great way for a professional to communicate about this with a large audience. I think this has a lot to do with the way academia is set up. "Publish or perish" provides little incentive structure for effectively communicating your work for amateurs.
Or in more concrete terms: What professionals do you know of in this field who are out there doing everything they can to communicate effectively about this to a non-professional non-academic audience? What is it that they're doing?
Re: The past is not true
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bacterial Pneumonia was not the novel danger of the "Spanish" flu; They cytokine storm it caused in perfectly healthy people was horrifying, with perfectly healthy people who would normally fight off any flu dying from this one. A lot of young twenty somethings, strong people who were not malnourished died from it. Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really ear…
That's a hypothesis. It is known that (supposedly) that strain can cause cytokine storm more than other flus do. I would not assume that means cytokine storm was the primary cause of death or even the primary cause of death in young adults. Based on my experience my guess is that the pneumonia was a much bigger cause of death than the storm
Right I wasn't expressing the cytokine storm as the primary cause of death but rather a phenomenon that definitely pushed it above a normal flu, especially for healthy young adults.
Re: The past is not true
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accepting those things seems like a miserable way to live. No thanks. I prefer to move on with my life, even when I was wronged.
This is about if you have wronged someone else, not if you are wronged, If you've wronged someone else, maybe you should live miserably if you can't possibly make up for the wrong.
Are some accidents truly unforgivable?
No one should be punished for the rest of their life because they wronged someone in their childhood. If they’ve grown, feel remorse and regret, then they’ve done their time and need to forgive themselves.
There no point in carrying around such a burden. Very few people deserve to be miserable.