Plans you're not supposed to talk about • Hacker News Board

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#481

Post by _xnmw » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 8:53 AM UTC

In religion this is nothing new: it's known as hypocrisy, which is despicable because a hypocrite inevitably ends up exploiting true believers, taking advantage of their trust and goodwill. It's a well-studied phenomenon in religious literature (at least from what I know of Christianity and Islam). Tolstoy wrote much about the hypocrisy of the Orthodox leadership in the Russian Empire, and hypocrisy is a central theme of the Koran.

Religious people are well aware of the fact that many of their fellow practitioners (including leaders) do it for societal/family/community/health/power benefits without actually believing in any of the rhetoric. Hence the classic clergy child-abuser, for example. Talking about hypocrisy is not forbidden, rather it is necessary for a person to regularly question themselves to recognize hypocrisy and remain true to their beliefs. Someone who doesn't believe should leave, because otherwise they may inadvertently or knowingly turn into "a wolf in sheep's clothing".

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#482

Post by DarylZero » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

mherdeg wrote: post #54

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…

>You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing

LOL

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#483

Post by DarylZero » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

d23 wrote: post #366

salt-thrower wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug? Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

> Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children. I can't tell if this is tongue in cheek, but it seems to be happening on huge swaths of adults as we speak.

Why do you think that??

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#484

Post by blumomo » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 8:57 AM UTC

vkk8 wrote: post #478

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…

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#485

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #355

noisy_boy wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rat…

That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need. There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.

[deleted]

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#486

Post by DarylZero » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

Kosirich wrote: post #477

Some people have pointed out that this article makes case for "traditionally" conservative issues and I agree. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm greatly influenced by Taleb way of summarizing knowledge in his books and how he deals with this issues, so I'll give it my take: - if something existed through out cultures, it was probably tested and it exists for a reason(1,3,4) - word used today in English might not have…

Society traditionally is overall a mechanism of farming slaves, so that elites don't have to work.

If you don't know the reason for something in society, it's usually that.

(You aren't going to find democratic or moral reasons for things in society, but exploitative strategies.)

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#487

Post by DarylZero » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #38

jvanderbot wrote: post #26

The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy imple…

This is related to an issue I've studied a lot and recently written about. In "Don't make a fetish of having a flat organization" I try to address this in the context of business, making clear that a well-designed bureaucracy can empower an organization to be more flexible at scale, but for various reasons we don't often think of it this way: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin... But perhaps…

Institutions don't create just policy, but also culture. And they create the kind of culture that preserves the institution.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#488

Post by DarylZero » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #347

xvilka wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Eugenics is not the only way to change the human brain. What about drugs?

In fact, eugenics is not even the only way to change human gene expression -- again, drugs! The mRNA vaccines!

21st century is going to be all about human bioengineering.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#489

Post by rkk3 » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #420

rkk3 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The French Revolution inspired the Russian one, which created the Soviet Union; and the Russian revolution inspired the Chinese one, which created Communist China. Those in turn inspired further Communist revolutions in various countries, the most salient being Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Those Communist regimes were responsible for more than a hundred million deaths in the 20th century.

Uhhh...... No the french revolution did not cause Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Just No.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#490

Post by yakshaving_jgt » Wed, Dec 15, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

timy2shoes wrote: post #333

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, can you clarify what you mean by you lost the game?

The game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

Thanks for the Wiki link. This part is hysterical:

> in several schools, The Game has been banned.