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

Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 675 posts

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#451

Post by skinkestek »

hanspeter wrote: post #447
skinkestek wrote: post #432

Regarding number 3, I should probably be in the same place since I hang around here and have had a bit of both biology and astronomy and astrophysics in school, except 2 things: - Besides it being massively useful[1] I've experienced too many weird coincidences now. So many that I cannot in good faith say I think it is just placebo or just survivorship bias. - Recently I have also realized that if I were to leave my…

I hope noone _believes_ in Big Bang. It's a hypothesis about the origins of the visible universe with a lot of observational data to support it. Nothing more. It creates just as many questions as it answers, and it's as useful for an explanation on our greatest existential questions as the hypothesis that we live on a spherical body suspended by gravity in vacuum and not on a flat disk supported by four giant turtles…

Exactly.

And if anyone goes back and checks my comments they will not find any comments denying Big Bang, in fact I can comment fine on both evolution and big bang, my religion doesn't quite care exactly how the world was created and after all "all models are wrong, but some are useful".

What I meant is that a number of people will believe Big Bang as a form of magical creation story that somehow proofs nothing else can be true way stronger than the average Muslim or Christian around here it seems.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#452

Post by gxt »

divbzero wrote: post #259

There seem to be many more examples along the same lines: – Managers not talking about potential M&A or layoffs to avoid distracting the team. – Leaders not talking about their backup plans to avoid demoralizing their organizations. – Athletes not talking about strategy and tactics to avoid tipping off opponents. – Investors and traders not talking about ideas and methods to maintain their edge. – Business owners not…

These are only examples of security through obscurity.

They likely have a better open alternative.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#453

Post by seer »

danblick wrote: post #83

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…

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.

In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.

A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.

You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#454

Post by DarylZero »

danblick wrote: post #83

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…

LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#455

Post by [deleted] »

norswap wrote: post #217
taraskuzyk wrote: post #188

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me understand what the last few sentences of it meant, it kind of flew over my head: "So I guess this is kind of an argument in favor of humility, or against open-mindedness. If you have high openness to experience (and if you read this without a gun to your head, you probably do) you might wonder why so many people have low openness. Maybe this is part of why." What…

A big part of "the normal way" things are done is related to subtle (and by-design, unspoken) social reasons. If you are open-minded, you're open to considering that the normal ways things are done might not be the best way -- which it is not along all axes, but it does incur some advantages for reasons that must remain unspoken for the advantages to be incurred. This has two potentially bad consequences: (1) you mig…

[deleted]

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#456

Post by Apocryphon »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #139
gipp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not talking literally about how marriage came to be. It is just laying out a set of incentives that probably play a role in the success of marriage as an institution.

yes I realize it is not literal, but the structure of that part of the text as you progress from two people in love come up with a plan to always stay together ends up a just so story about how marriage was created. Does it work as a list of incentives for how marriage came to be a successful institution? Well since it structures it as an origin story of marriage that you realize is an origin story of marriage at the…

It's a just-so story.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#457

Post by monodeldiablo »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #399
rootusrootus wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).

Politics is simply preference, some people prefer to speed, some would rather drive below the limit. They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.

That characterization doesn't match my experience at all. You presume we all want to go in the same direction, but that our main disagreement is about speed.

In my experience, the main source of political conflict is direction, not speed.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#458

Post by monodeldiablo »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #400
BurningFrog wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called it "the sane version of Conservatism". There are many others. Political scientists probably have a more specific name for mine. I should learn that some day. Yeah, many people with very different ideas call themselves conservatives. > I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing. Have you never known conservatives…

Most conservatives I know want to decentralize decision making, lower taxes, and deregulate the economy.

Except as regards gay or abortion rights, military funding, and drug policy. Right?

I know that's the case for every conservative I know, at least. They stand for those values in the abstract, as an ostensibly philosophy to undergird their politics... But oppose those values in practice.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#459

Post by raxxorrax »

pdonis wrote: post #267
bwestergard wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy" A more judicious takeaway might be that revolutions often have tragic periods. The French revolution had its blood-soaked Terror and Thermidor, lead to the Napoleonic wars in which many perished, etc. But it also liberated millions, spread an ideal of democracy and human rights cherished by much of the world today. The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction were in every s…

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 revolution itself was absolutely brutal, but overall had a positive effect on all kinds of emancipation.

While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back.

Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized that thought.

That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

liberty equality fraternity - yes, the revolution was bound to happen. You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes. And democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#460

Post by forgotmyoldname »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #433
Ensorceled wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shots are NOT truly protective. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective. I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

91% is truly protective, as long as that effectiveness lasts long enough to be meaningful. In fact, 91% is an amazingly high number - I don't know if any pre-mRNA vaccine has ever reached that level of effectiveness. So I return to my original point -- if they're really that effective, why the hubbub?

Not to be condescending, but because people have been saying for a year now or more now that the virus will rapidly evolve and any vaccines will become less effective over time because of it.

And the virus rapidly evolved and the vaccines we have became less effective to new strains, as expected. A quick deployment of vaccines would greatly reduce that risk (see: Japan currently having infections in the double digits following a rapid deployment in vaccines and universal masks, leaving little room for new strains to adapt).

The pandemic has been a long chain of some insightful people saying "This bad thing will happen if people don't take X precaution." People say that's a lie--then don't take X precautions. Bad thing happens. People get angry and say they were lied to because bad thing happened when they were told it wouldn't happen (because loads of people took no precautions). Then there's a warning about another bad thing happening, followed by denial.

Post reply on HN