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Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#41

Post by amichail »

btilly wrote: post #34
amichail wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that being a good atheist requires a certain level of intelligence that many people don't have? In particular, the extent to which a person can predict the consequences of his/her actions is probably highly dependent on intelligence. Religion can be viewed as taking some of this unfairness away.

In my experience and from statistics I have seen there is little correlation between intelligence and religious inclination. For example Donald Knuth is strongly religious. (Evidence: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/things.html . ) But can anyone honestly deny his intelligence? That is not to say that there is no correlation. In general educated people are more likely to be exposed to thoughtful commentary…

My comment is about the intelligence required to be good.

Religion could reduce this and as a result be potentially beneficial to society.

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#42

Post by crystalis »

icey wrote: post #37
crystalis wrote: post #36

I recently changed my mind about the quality of the producers and consumers on HN.

Can you clarify? You haven't been registered here for long, so I'm curious as to what sort of trends you've noticed that have caused you to change your mind.

I've lurked longer than I've trolled. There is a surface appearance of intelligence (thanks to a couple dozen prolific and intelligent participants) but a great deal of unproductive conversations.

Too often, people talk past each other.

Too often, people nitpick like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782752

Too often, edw519 gets upvotes for 'pithy' statements like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864709

Too often, reposts galore, and even worse, from techcrunch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743735

Too much non-contributing irrelevant self-promotion: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kkleiner http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kkleiner

Too often, votes are based on... zealotry? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902804 Why would jrockway get downvoted for answering a question as to why OSX didn't merit the Apple Tax for his purposes?

HN is useful for the domain knowledge and experience of some notable fellows, but a lot of the active user base dampens a lot of the remaining signal.

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#43

Post by maxklein »

I changed my mind about Django. In practical usage, it does not save time. Most things are faster, stabler, more portable and easier to outsource than Django. So, gone from being a Django enthusiast to making PHP my main web language and Django for things like admin and cron jobish sort of things.

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#44

Post by ottbot »

tel wrote: post #39

My desire to become a doctor. As a college undergraduate in a biomedical engineering major there's a lot of contact and allure toward that field, but after extensive shadowing experience in the ER I realized that while I undeniably admire those who can become doctors, there is absolutely something missing, for me, in that profession: The ability to innovate, build, create, explore. An MD's life is more oriented towar…

You still could become a doctor (PhD) and innovate, explore, etc..

Unfortunately, whether or not a career in academia jives with your idea of what it is innovate/build/create would be another decision you'll have to make!

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#45

Post by req2 »

btilly wrote: post #34
amichail wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that being a good atheist requires a certain level of intelligence that many people don't have? In particular, the extent to which a person can predict the consequences of his/her actions is probably highly dependent on intelligence. Religion can be viewed as taking some of this unfairness away.

In my experience and from statistics I have seen there is little correlation between intelligence and religious inclination. For example Donald Knuth is strongly religious. (Evidence: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/things.html . ) But can anyone honestly deny his intelligence? That is not to say that there is no correlation. In general educated people are more likely to be exposed to thoughtful commentary…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

A modicum of research reveals that 'The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which is “highly statistically significant.”'

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#46

Post by icey »

crystalis wrote: post #42
icey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify? You haven't been registered here for long, so I'm curious as to what sort of trends you've noticed that have caused you to change your mind.

I've lurked longer than I've trolled. There is a surface appearance of intelligence (thanks to a couple dozen prolific and intelligent participants) but a great deal of unproductive conversations. Too often, people talk past each other. Too often, people nitpick like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782752 Too often, edw519 gets upvotes for 'pithy' statements like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864709 Too oft…

I hope you didn't get the impression that I thought your opinion was somehow less valuable than someone else's because of the amount of time you've been registered here. I think that's a weak argument and I hate it when people make it.

I look at people's time on the site when they say the community has changed because I want to know if they're contributing or consuming.

This is a community, and it can be reasoned with by anybody, as long as they take the time to try and do it.

I think for the most part, the responses on the threads you linked showed that. Sometimes people will reflexively downvote people because of a perceived slight. I have a feeling that some of the early voting trains get undone as the day goes on.

That being said, I'm sure I've personally contributed a significant amount of noise to conversations here, but if I wanted pure signal I'd probably spend a lot more time on places like LtU. The value of this place is the conversations, far more than the links (in my opinion).

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#48

Post by Herring »

boredguy8 wrote: post #13
pwmanagerdied wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please elaborate on what led you to change your mind? I'm probably not far from where you were, and would like to see what I may be missing. :)

For me, it's been part of a longer trajectory towards the appreciation of "the mess" in all of its dirty glory. I've always been an "algorithm" person: find the underlying pattern that gives beauty and stability (the two being synonyms, of course!) to the apparently chaotic world around us. Increasingly though, I've come to find that discrete difference has its own beauty and instability (the two being synonyms, or s…

There's an aesthetic component, but mainly it gives flexibility & speed. Think lossy encoding, or maybe dynamic typing.

It's important to note that advantages are not necessary. It wasn't designed. It could just be that it's so widespread that it's impossible to change.

Re: Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about recently?

#50

Post by Alex3917 »

araneae wrote: post #35
Alex3917 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, only the other way. After being an atheist my entire life, I got more interested in religion over the past few months. After listening to dozens of hours worth of podcasts, and reading a few books and academic journal articles, I've decided that there is such a thing as a "primary religious experience." Furthermore, it's pretty clear that while academia can verify that this experience exists, science can't…

The feeling of "spirituality" is certainly universal; after all, so many people have it that it would be absurd to call it purely a cultural construct. However, as far as we can tell, the generation of these feelings is not associated with any external sensor, the way that the experience of seeing is connected with your eyeballs. In all probability, the feeling of religiosity is mind-bound phenomena, much like love a…

"In all probability, the feeling of religiosity is mind-bound phenomena, not capable of detecting any real external phenomena."

That's an interesting use of the word probability.

Can you justify that position using arguments qualitatively different than those used to justify the opposite position? (That the full-blown mystic experience is qualitatively different than anything that science has ever explained before or any experience generated from within the body, and thus there is no reason to believe that it's necessarily scientifically explainable or endogenous.)

As I said I'm actually more or less with you, I just see the logic of what the other side is saying.

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