411–420 of 675 posts
I think Richard Dawkins makes a convincing argument on this with his book "The God delusion" in regards to the article's "dilemma number 3".
This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of…
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There are two ways to improve situation, both are for the very far future (assuming humanity will survive long enough). Either change the human brain itself artificially, to remove hacks and shortcuts made by the mother nature, and make people really rational (I am not speaking about removing emotions, just removing their ability to cloud the judgement) and with minimum of cognitive biases and fallacies, or to make a…
> change the human brain itself artificially so you're saying what basically amounts to eugenics (but instead of race, it's based on some other criteria) is required to "correct" humanity. Or for an AGI, a higher being of infinite wisdom to rule over humanity (aka, losing freedom of action).
The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…
Friedrich Hayek is just a standard idea for mature programmers.
Something that's 10 years old won't just be remade in a weekend or easily changed.
People think their idea will just change HN for the better. For most people it's smarter to trust the decade+ of work put into it.
Things like Wikipedia being hard to edit is a good thing. Many morons, don't know this which is why they keep trying to make editing easier. But it's ok to tell them why edits should be hard.
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I was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D
I think they mean Dungeon Master, the architect / narrator of multiplayer role playing games. A good DM will guide the players through a well-planned story, in part by making the layers feel that they are in control of the story themselves.
Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot. Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group…
We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced... I mean you have to be right, the TV said the same thing!
I realize you are saying this just to be snarky and wage ideological battle, but the fact is that we don't.
The data is readily available about political affiliation as a predictor for vaccination rates, and vaccination status as a predictor for COVID mortality. 90+% of Democrats are vaccinated, and mortality rates are around 20 times higher among the unvaccinated. It is not an exaggeration to say that materially all of the COVID deaths over the past few months have been among conservatives.
May I gently suggest that 100,000+ preventable deaths among your ideological fellow-travelers deserves reflection beyond the political consequences next November?
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-1...
https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-sta...
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I think you’re conflating multiple things here. As far as I know, Chesterton’s fence is not about anything like property rights. We’re not talking about justifying entering your neighbor’s land and tearing down their fence without permission. Presumably the analogy is a fence on some land you’ve just acquired, or a fence on public lands. The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fe…
> The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed. And the point is that no individual person can figure out, just by using their own reason, whether it's a good idea for the fence to be removed. The only way to know that is for the long-winded social process of people interacting with each other to either eventually…
That clearly doesn't apply to every argument.
There are lots of times when "society" was wrong, and regular people could see that, and also aught change it.
Yes, sometimes society makes makes mistakes, or, even worse, does things for fully understandable, but bad reasons.
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Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people fr…
The only reason we no longer live under hereditary monarchies, ruled over by privileged-by-birth nobles who are very explicitly and shamelessly above the law, is because revolutions have done a great job of either killing off those monarchs and nobles, or by scaring the surviving ones into giving up their power. I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct produc…
So if I were to pick a revolution or revolutions that set the pattern for guaranteeing basic rights, it would be the English and American ones, not the French one.
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Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people fr…
> I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths) uh Why? Because of the rights of man and the metric system? Think you need to elaborate.