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Comment by zafka | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like this article. It makes me think that I might have been very wrong in my judgement of GWB. More and more I have been finding out how much of life is a mirage of perceptions, many of them far from reality.

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> I really don't like this article. It makes me think that I might have been very wrong in my judgement of GWB.

Why would that cause you to not like the article? If an article teaches you something new, something true that you didn't know before, isn't that virtuous? If your prior beliefs were wrong, wouldn't you want to know they were wrong?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the above poster was being sarcastic.

Yeah I read it as tongue in cheek too.

I find that most likely it wasn't even my own judgement of GWB, it was the one I accepted as truth, one that was relayed to me over a long time by other people, but not one that I developed by reading unbiased facts over a longer period of time. Simply because thats not possible. You can't consume facts as news, thats not on offer and has never been.

I'm with you. And I've realized lately that what I've come to believe as facts were just merely mainstream public opinion, where the opinion came from somewhere with intent and was adopted by my peers, then adopted by me.

If I truly reflect, I expect that many of my judgements of anything are rarely my own.

The biggest barrier to understanding someone is distance from the source. If you spent more time near a person your judgement would be much better. The problem is we cannot be close to so many people to really understand them.

Ironically perhaps, time heals this barrier. I could never have accepted this article in 2008. In 2016, I've already come to this conclusion and this article is just "duh".

> I really don't like this article. It makes me think that I might have been very wrong

Did you intend to draw a connection between these two statements?

You should take pleasure in chipping away the illusions and exposing as much of the reality as possible.

If you'd like to really explore the feeling you've described, read https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-arg...

Yes, that is a great article. I actually did read it a while back, and it contributes to my changing understanding.

Its funny you say that makes you dislike the article.

I agree with everything he wrote, and it makes me like this article a lot.

> Do you assume that he is unintelligent because he made policy choices with which you disagree?

This was spot-on to who I was 10-15 years ago in the bush years. I've actually come to the conclusion since then, before reading this, that I was very wrong about that (and a lot of other things) but this article is spot-on.

I know its a hard thing to realize and accept that you're living in a delusion, I'm right there with you on that.

Yes, exactly my opinion if Hitler had won.

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