Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 466 posts

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#391

Post by johnisgood »

keiferski wrote: post #168
y04nn wrote: post #25

Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…

This is pretty trite if you stop to think about it. “Everything in your life that you experience has an effect on your experience of life.” We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.

Not if you approach it through epigenetics. :)

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#392

Post by edanm »

feyman_r wrote: post #330
edanm wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. I'm a big reader - and I have lists of thousands of books I want to read. But one reason I semi-on-purpose still pick up random books that I stumble across and look fun, even if they're less "optimally chosen" by me, is exactly so that I sometimes stumble on things I would otherwise miss. Or maybe just, like many readers, I love buying new books almost as much as reading them, and this is just an…

That last bit resonates with me so much! In fact, there’s a word in Japanese for it - ‘tsundoku’! Ever since I stumbled upon it, I feel almost vindicated :)).

The funny thing is, I do the same with Audible books too, even if they aren't something I normally physically see. I just can't help buying books :)

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#393

Post by johnisgood »

prmph wrote: post #331
csomar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though. Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up. If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know i…

If so, then it is also determined whether I believe in free will or not. That is, I don't have the free will to believe in free will or not.

That is true, whether or not you believe in free will at a specific point in time is a result of your previous history (internal and external influences).

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#394

Post by johnisgood »

dsign wrote: post #164
csomar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though. Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up. If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know i…

I'm going to nominally disagree with you, my genes are in total control and I must. Free will is a matter of definition, and certain definitions, no matter how hard we try, can't be formulated as easily as one does in, say, Euclidean geometry. So you can come up with a definition of the free will you don't have, let's call it "absolute determinism", and it has all sort of interesting criminal applications, beyond sla…

> my genes are in total control and I must.

That is not true. Your gene expression is influenced by experiences, and not just yours, but your grand-grand parents' experiences, too. See: epigenetics and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.

> Your lawyers come to court and state that you in turn have no free-will, that you are God's creature.

Some say that lack of free will, i.e. determinism undermines moral responsibility, which in turns means that it conflicts with punishment and so forth. I believe that it ultimately does not matter; you can punish for the behavior alone.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#397

Post by Ghexor »

vasco wrote: post #256
Ghexor wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed. Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in ev…

I agree investigation is worthwhile. As an adult, being aware of techniques like fake sense of urgency or scarcity, playing on your maslow needs for belonging and self-actualisation etc are things you should be aware, to develop a better sense of "smell" for bullshit. I don't think any of this is new though, I'm pretty sure the local Roman seller of beads and nice dresses did the same things to their customers on the…

Thats an interesting point about the age of manipulative sales strategies! I didn't consider it. And I agree with your position that emotions change over a rather long timescale.

In fact that's exactly why I'm concerned about the speed of technological development in psychology and data science. I fear that it's no longer salesperson vs consumer. Now it's salesalgorithm and a large chunk of the behavioral science academic efforts vs consumer. The power that the producer wields is increasing at a much faster rate than the emotional awareness of the consumer.

My perpective is influenced by the Center of Humane Tech's positon. The people behind 'The social dillema' documentary and the 'Your undivided attention' podcast. Manipulative capabilities are increasing FAST. And I believe that this speed of change is unprecedented.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#398

Post by huygens6363 »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #377
vasco wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's free will in the sense that the system is so chaotic and complex that it's impossible to predict for us now at current technology levels, maybe never possible to predict, but I don't see anything in science that would allow free will to be a thing. We're complex automata in the end.

I think this is a failure in imagination not a failure in science. Still, all these free will deniers are basing their worldview on the (radical) assumption that. 1. Everything has a cause 2. Everything is explainable 3. physical matter is all there is 4. Science can describe literally everything about the universe 4a. Corollary - things that aren’t describable by science don’t exist All of those claims are unfalsifi…

I agree, but I have to admit that once we have to invoke mysterious one-off miracles and unknowable states of existence to explain something so radically basic like “free will” we have IMO gone off track.

This feels like a God of the gaps type argument and those give off a particular smell.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#399

Post by InSteady »

keiferski wrote: post #323
gizmo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expressions like "eat your vegetables" and "life is short" are also trite. But the purpose of folk wisdom isn't to shock and awe with fresh insights. The purpose is to remind people of what they already know to be true. That way we steer our behavior more towards the kind of life we want to live.

Maybe "trite" wasn't the right word. More like a tautology. I guess you could call it "folk wisdom" but it seems more like a restating of the obvious to me.

Firstly, I'd argue it's only a tautology when you phrase it in a particular way (and take some knowledge about how the brain works as "given"). The point isn't that the effect happens at all, it's about the degree to which even small instances influence who we are.

But more importantly, we are creatures of habit before we are creatures of intellect. Stating things like "you are the sum of your experiences" isn't necessarily to reveal new and profound information, it is to emphasize a fact of existence that can easily become overlooked or underappreciated. Especially as we get on in the years and more and more of our behavior is on autopilot. There is value in reminding people to look for potential blindspots and providing some motivation a more careful consideration of the aspects of your life that have become unconscious even if the message comes in a trite or tautological package.

It's like people who have been stuck for the past 5 years spending 2+ hours every day scrolling a social media feeds littered with bad news, snapshots of arguments, and fake representations of the world but can't make a connection between this maladaptive behavior and the growing sense of cynicism and existential malaise that's impacting their happiness. Sometimes it is helpful to hear this kind of stuff (assuming it actually gets through) even though it should be obvious.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#400

Post by thomastjeffery »

This goes both ways: the understanding of what you read is constructed from the worldview you contextualize it with.

This is how we are able to use ambiguous language, also known as "Context-Sensitive Grammar". We provide our own backstory (context) that provides a Just-In-Time unambiguous definition of each ambiguous word or phrase.

There is a lot of excitement around LLMs, because they are capable of doing something with Context-Sensitive Grammar. Unfortunately, that something is not equivalent to the arbitrary disambiguation that we do using context. The core feature of an LLM (with respect to natural language processing) is that it never defines anything. Instead, an LLM blindly provides whatever text it deems "most likely to happen next", all without ever associating any text to any meaning. We wrap this process in "training", which hopefully guides common interactions in the direction we want, but that is never a guarantee.

Post reply on HN