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Comment by Memosyne | Hacker News Reader

But how will they know they have made a mistake when it's all they have ever known? Humanity has reached where it has because of the combined knowledge base of our ancestors. Do we really need to touch fire to realize our mistake? We don't have to relearn everything when our predecessors have already accumulated the wisdom and are willing to share.

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Actually, you should relearn everything. That doesn't mean that you need to put everything into production. But re-learning everything is, IMHO, the only way to adapt.

I think there is a sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff

If you are conservative, you reduce variance (by sticking to your experience), and if you are progressive, you reduce bias (by learning new things).

> Actually, you should relearn everything. That doesn't mean that you need to put everything into production. But re-learning everything is, IMHO, the only way to adapt.

I actually agree with this! But wouldn't you say that using social media is "putting it into production"?

No, using social media is like discussing it in a meeting (it doesn't really harm anything, just wastes time). Putting it into production means to actually change the society (the laws, customs, etc.) in that way.

Negative consequences/feedback from their social group tend to do the job quite nicely, in most of the cases :-) To paraphrase the old comedian Will Rogers, there's always been three kinds of people in this world:

those who learn by reading

those who learn by observing others

but that third group just _has_ to go and pee on that electric fence.

We can't optimize society to coddle the fence-micturators 100% of the time, unfortunately. Solutions to that problem "don't scale", or get terribly fascist in a hurry.

Yeah. A free society will always have a percentage of the population who do dumb and potentially lethal things, and a percentage of those will get injured or killed because of their own stupidity.

Bu that doesn't mean the answer is to ban everything potentially dangerous. All kinds of activities nowadays (from everyday things like driving to extreme sports) carry a large degree of risk. The answer is simply to accept that freedom to make your own choices means freedom to screw up, and accept that if you're not hurting someone else, then it's your responsibility to stay safe and society won't stop you.

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