241–250 of 496 posts
Simple has nothing to do with good. This isn't a deep insight — it's just that "first principles" as an aesthetic keeps tricking people into thinking peeling layers off is the same thing as understanding. A skyscraper is complicated. The answer to "this is too complicated" isn't "live in a hut." The hut is simple. The hut also can't hold a million people.
Emphatic disagree with your points.
I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones. At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing…
Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”
Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.
i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge…
> I've realized this article is slightly naïve Is it? Or is it simply unresigned ? To the author: there are ways to get away from much of what you described, and retain great sense of community. I hope you and I both find the balance we enjoy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't be curmudgeonly on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. Could you explain how this applies? I don't mean to be difficult -- really. I appreciate that Hacker News is a great place for discussion, and I very much appreciate that's partly because of the work you're doing. I'd just like to think that my criticism is thoughtful and is neither rigidly nor generically nega…
> a profound absence of (historical) awareness
> weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness
> strange insistence
> [the whole Jonestown (?) bit as a metaphor – at least a little disproportionate, no?]
> I hear the same cluelessness in this piece
I guess the issue is the number of negative terms and characterizations all crammed into one paragraph. It just seems to lay it on too heavy.
The writer is clearly wrestling with something and trying to process it, and the post has tapped into broader sentiment here, given the amount of front page time and discussion, so the dismissal seemed excessively scathing.
It may be that you underestimated how strongly your words come across to the reader, which is a common pitfall with online discussion forums; words often don't seem as harsh when we formulate them in our own mind as they do when read by others.
Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait…
humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars ... sentience and free will.
;)
This is the main line for me. Even around the bonfire with fellow grugs if you got eaten by a tiger, I'm not sure you fully would understand that either. So I'm not exactly sure what this post is getting at? That human history so far is "bad" and we "did it the wrong way"? I'd argue 99% of human adults are just folks trying to do their best to provide for their family. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist though.
"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival. Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them. Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize…
That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".
Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
>Modern life is easy mode.
I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.
Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...