Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue?
This is apparently how Peter Thiel finds talent.
To clarify I'm neither religiously pro or anti global warming (although I do believe that climate change should happen as a byproduct of a chaotic system with high entropy) - to me the question of whether or not it's solely man made is irrelevant. The questions of importance to me are:
Is it possible to sufficiently geo-engineer the Earth's climate to counteract climate change?
If it is possible where's the cost/benefit analysis (i.e. how much do we spend on geo-engineering to achieve the best 'payoff' in terms of success)?
What's the cost of adaptation (i.e. accepting that the change will happen and adapting ourselves to the changing environment)?
Those questions are relevant regardless of whether or not the world is getting hotter or colder. For me the political muddying of the waters makes it impossible to engage in rational debate with either side. It's become a religion, but unless you're a climate scientist (and I'm not) you realistically only know what you've consumed from others, and there's a lot of people on all sides who are more interested in moulding facts to fit a political argument than identifying what's really happened.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions, which is quite interesting, though it's missing the first two I thought of: gods and the Monte Carlo fallacy.
A more interesting variant of the question might be, what do you believe that most well-informed people don't? That's harder.
"Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true."
Link to application: http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
FYI http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-important-misconcepti...
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Most people (who accept evolution) claim there's a definitive evolutionary tree for all species.
I believe there is no single, definitive tree, but rather, several trees. Depending on which feature or gene sequence you're studying, and what method you use to construct a tree, you'll get slightly different trees. Sometimes this is just statistical noise, but other times it's due to different traits actually having different lineages, as a result of events like recombination (say, when a virus injects a fragment of DNA into another creature's genome) or horizontal gene transfer [0]. If you build a phylogenetic tree that covers whole genomes for multiple species, it will typically end up being a phylogenetic network [1] rather than a simple tree.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_network
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I also believe the original language text of the Bible has been very reliably preserved since antiquity. There's a surprising amount of crossover between the subject of textual criticism [2] and phylogenetics -- comparing manuscript variants (between millions of pages across several centuries) is not that different from comparing DNA mutations. There are very few parts of the Biblical text that are seriously disputed by the legitimately well-informed.
I was under the impression that there was very little dissent between believers and critically-minded scholars alike over either: (i) the texts that compose the New Testament (in particular) of the Bible have been well-preserved and accurately replicated with very few claims of interpolation or revision (ii) The Synoptic Gospels were heavily influenced by at least one common source document which appears to be totally lost.
A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face. Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low returns on their savings) for a given level of income.
The so-called dependency ratio is not a real problem because most people in the economy no longer do productive work. Our standard of living is not bound by labor, but by resources (oil, lumber, arable land, etc). As 60 year old workers start to retire, no fewer resources will be produced, we're not going to produce less oil because 60 year olds retire. But we may consume less resources because fewer people are commuting to work and occupying climate controlled office spaces.
I tried this question on a dating site as an experiment for one day... and then forgot I had it up. It generated nearly no responses other than jokes except for one person that was very flustered and was intimidated by it (perhaps unsurprisingly).
As for one thing that I think is true and that most others don't.... well the thing that seems to clash the most is that I find "bad" things funny, regardless of my personal beliefs about them. People really tend to be more of a straight man than you'd think.
Some number of my possible responses, although admittedly I would use none of these for Thiel's essay:
* Modern running shoes increase one's tendency to injury.
* Free will can exist in a fully deterministic universe.
* Saturated fat and cholesterol are not the primary causal factors behind heart disease.
* Keynesian economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to those with political power.
Would you mind going further into this one? Barring belief in dualism, I don't see how this can be possible.
The really short answer is that it boils down to a disagreement over what "free will" means. Compatibilists dispute the claim that free will is definitionally equivalent to something like a videogame with multiple endings, where your actions can change which endings you get (the "garden of forking paths" model of free will).
It's actually usually taken as an alternative to dualism, because if humans are 100% made of physical matter that's bound by the usual laws of physics, and we think something called "free will" is meaningful to talk about, then they must somehow be compatible. The alternatives are: 1. dualism, claim that some part of human thought/action takes place outside of the laws of physics; 2. deny that free will exists; or maybe 3. somehow deny that the laws of physics exist, or at least claim they exist in some different way than usually understood.
Daniel Dennett is probably the best-known-among-the-general-public proponent of compatibilism.
1) Rewrite it as: (fill in the blank) economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to (fill in the blank).
2) Ask yourself how much political power Keynesians have if they don't even have the power to impose Keynsian solutions.
3) Fill in the blanks for the statement in (1) as it actually applies for those with political power.
If you attempt to read it with the (perhaps generous) assumption that I'm not proposing a tautology, than you might see what I mean.
A Keynesian ideology provides justification for the use of state power that differing economic ideologies do not. It would seem rational (warning: assumption of self-interest) that, holding everything else constant, politicians have a tendency to endorse Keynesian thought.
I spend real effort trying to talk family and friends into making reasonable preparations, but I run into a lot of skepticism.
Everyone knows the current breeding situation is a problem.
Everyone knows they aren't allowed to talk about solutions.
Individual: Abortion, genetic modification of fetuses, aborting sick fetuses, etc
Social: Overpopulation. The fact that the poor and stupid significantly outbreed the intelligent leading to all kinds of downward spirals. The welfare system that encourages it's beneficiaries to breed as much as possible - and even to induce disorder into their children to maximize revenue. For instance moms on welfare who have produced several kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, not even to bring up issues like nutritional deficiency.
There are welfare moms who literally have bred 10 children with induced mental handicaps - and they are financially rewarded by society the more they do this.
On a wider but less extreme level, there are psychologically dysfunctional parents who breed at a higher rate than the psychologically sound.
I've spoken with many social workers and teachers and others on the front line of this issue and there is a silent but taboo agreement - the use of force in controlling breeding is essential to the future of humanity.
There is also the wider point that the stupid and poor propagate themselves while the intelligent and wealthy prefer not to. This comes down to economic incentives.
Society would benefit from eugenics programs that specifically encourage successful people to breed and discourage unsuccessful people. Right now the incentives are literally opposite of this.
Anyway this is a big topic with many many facets. But speaking to domain experts and reading widely on the topic, it is very clear that some form of what has classically been described as eugenics is necessary for the success of society.
(I'm kissing my karma goodbye right now.)
I see no reason why a healthy infant from 10 generations of white trash has any less genetic potential than an infant from 10 generations of people who attended Ivy leagues.
It's not only about genetics, it's also about upbringing.
Having said that though, it's pretty clear that IQ is related to parentage.
Also, which of your arguments still apply to the world's most populous country?
Right now it seems we can't account for unintended consequences.
No harm intended, I have my own pretty borderline views, just that one of my "character traits" is that I find radical views that are beyond my comprehension (in this example, very right wing views) absolutely hilarious. Another example would be extreme free marketeers.
There's obviously a difference between preference and policy. But my guess is that you're willing to reap the benefits of eugenics without considering the ethical implications.
There must be a cure for death.
One day, psychiatrists will routinely prescribe touch, including sex, as an intervention against depression.
In our lifetimes, the USA will experience economic or political collapse, and maybe even break apart into different regions.
9/11 wasn't an inside job, but the anthrax scare was.
That's a strange thing to say considering that, in the past, religion was the defining aspect of civilization.
It was religion that civilized the barbarians.
Most people tend to stop at the standard infinity that lies at the top end of the real number line - "bigger than the biggest number you can think of, and then some, plus one."
Never mind that there's another infinity, just as big, at the far end of the negative side of the real number line, and further infinities in all directions when you bring in complex numbers, quaternions, infinitesimals, the uncountable infinities lying between any two arbitrarily chosen adjacent real numbers and so on.
Also, the "Arabic" number system was invented in India. It was only introduced to the West by the Muslims.
Yes, America, if not for Muslims you'd still be counting in Roman numerals.
Whether from unquestioning faith in mere assumptions of classical economics, or some clinging to ideology, a disappointing number of people-who-think-themselves-smart still believe selfishness explains everything.
In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.
Furthermore, humans have language, and can even ask themselves questions like "what would so-and-so do?" Our minds are filled up, it seems to me, mostly with the thoughts and data supplied by others. So I wonder if it makes sense to say that we are all individual minds.
Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.
What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.
I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in one brain.
I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you little about the next level up.
http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_God_Emperor_Come...
(revorad almost got it right but blew the "the one thing" requirement)
Climate change is natural.
The top rate of income tax should be 90%.
Root is a design fault.