Reckoning with Our Mistakes | Hacker News Reader

Reckoning with Our Mistakes

scientificamerican.com

85 pointsbookofjoe41 comments

Kudos to them. Good to see consciousness rising.

Expectations need to be realistic.

If you have spent your life painting with your right hand and suddenly something makes you conscious that you have a left hand and you want to use it too. That is no easy thing.

It will take Time.

It will take lot of practice and repetition.

It will take the right environment without people walking in interrupting, distracting, mocking, provoking.

It will need patient teachers who don't use guilt and shame, blame and judgment as their tools.

It will be annoyingly uncomfortable and easy to give up on.

It will tempting to take shortcuts that cause more issues than solutions.

etc etc etc.

And that is just for an individual to go from realization to action and positive outcome. Getting teams, groups, orgs and entire populations to do the same will take similar amounts of Time and Discomfort too.

As connectivity increases consciousness will increase.

But going from consciousness to painting with the left hand. And then painting something beautiful will take time.

The challenge to the technical crowd is to develop an awareness of what the psychological/sociological blockers are and to chip away through new info architectures at the amount of time it takes to go from consciousness to healthy outcomes.

On the bright side, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that psychedelics can massively accelerate this learning process. And with the foolish restrictions on (and falsified reputations of) these mysterious compounds finally relaxing, I see the possibility that a phase of massive advancement of humanity could materialize.

But then if that did start to get underway, the old guard could assert its control just as easily as it did last time. In my estimation, Communist Russia was a "reasonable" excuse for that unfortunate decision, and China seems like at least as good a reason this time around. Freedom of communication afforded by the internet could have been our saving grace this time, but as luck would have it we happen to be well into an era of that freedom becoming more censored as time goes on.

A very good article on a topic rarely faced head-on.

Science is not truth; science is the neverending pursuit of truth. It reminds me of a Carl Sagan quote:

“Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”

Excellent article. We would all do well to routinely practice coming to terms with a past full of errors. It's the most human thing to do.

Hein, "The Road to Wisdom": https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvEKp.jpg

I like the histograms at the end. Is there a good name for those plots? They help you see the valence of the use of the terms.

I quite like them as well. They are just time series smoothed line charts with a pleasing. but nonessential gradient. But they do bear a strong resemblance to a graph type called "sparklines." Sparklines usually dispense with the axes, so these graphs have a minimalist x-axis of sorts, which distinguishes them from true sparklines, but not by a lot.

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