Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

16 pointsstretchwithme47 comments

Peter Thiel's famous question. What's your answer?

Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games.

Related: video games have positive mental health benefits.[2]

As a parent, nothing seems to create more issues than screen time. Ive seen other parents get fairly harsh with extreme limits with their kids screen time consumption. It’s like abstinence education for sex: it just doesn’t work and ultimately backfires. Indeed research has shown kids have to get pretty extreme in their screentime usage for it to be harmful [1]

Better to let kids have screen time and teach them safe ways to use it and work with them to moderate their usage. It just so happens this is what treatment for “video game addiction” does - teaches moderation of the activity not abstinence.

1 - https://thenextweb.com/news/screen-time-doesnt-harm-kids-but...

2. - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0026...

> Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games.

That's a preference for action, not an (even debatable) truth.

> Related: video games have positive mental health benefits

That's at least potentially a truth, but not all that controversial.

"What important truth do few people agree with you on, but is also innocuous enough that you can admit to on a public forum where your true identity might be known or revealed?"

"...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts... It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."

~ Solzhenitsyn

Humans aren't nearly as intelligent as they've come to believe themselves to be.

- PROT

I've recently been making a study of misinformation and am forced to agree. The more I dig into how we as humans process and validate information the more I realize how bad we are at it. Myself included. As I've attempted to create formal methods for validating information I've had my confidence in my own rationality severely shaken.

We have obvious needs that are biologically embedded through the forces of evolution. Tracing back from that, actions in most situations, and pitfalls, are predictable.

Acting over time, I doubt there's any misinformation that human intelligence can't see through.

And if it did exist, it would be invisible.

But, yes, in the short run, we can all be duped into believing SOMETHING, given the right circumstances.

What rules can we follow to reduce the chances?

Maybe LIMIT how much we consume from volatile sources like news sites.

Maybe act slowly.

One thing I've found is that it also really pays to explore something fully when you don't understand it. Just because someone isn't explaining something well may not be sufficient to dismiss it.

Your children don't need good grades to be successful.

I'd like to build on this: A good start is of much less importance for success than people think.

Most of success comes from hard work, persistence, the ability to readjust often, and a lot (like really a lot) of good luck.

People often put to much emphasis on goals while they are just the natural result of a trajectory.

Taking pleasure in learning is 10 times much more important than grades.

And the funny part is that if you succeed, you will get good grades.

Better to learn to explore and build knowledge from the ground up than to repeat it back.

It is still good to know what's already known. But the teacher isn't the source for that. Google is. And there are skills for getting the most out of Google.

Those skills are teachable, as is the fact that Google isn't reality either.

All fiat money eventually succumbs to hyperinflation

Eventually is a long time :-)

Which is why this is true.

But I doubt there aren't any currencies around from 1000 AD that haven't suffered that fate.

It's not true because of "eventually" it's true because of "fiat".

When an entity (e.g, the government) decrees (which, remember, is what the word "fiat" means) that some piece of paper or entry in a database is "money" is when the trouble starts.

I prefer my money to be a medium of exchange and account as well as a store of value that I can trust which, by implication, means it cannot be decreed to be so by some "authority".

They will all go, eventually, but how long for the current batch (USD, EUR, GBP, etc)?

A decade? 2? a century?

It might otherwise have been interesting to contemplate, but now that I know it's Peter Thiel's famous question, I can't unsee it as a transparent attempt to gain my confidence by pretending to identify with me, sort of like when police interrogators try to act like the suspect's bro. It also seems to presuppose that I crave an opportunity to be heard and validated by anyone who will listen. If I'm not worried about alienating the questioner, my honest answer is "what crazy beliefs do you envision me holding and what gave you that impression about me?". If it's a high stakes situation, my answer is whatever I think the questioner endorses.

It's nice to be nice. I am amazed how many people think this is the same as being weak.

Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically.

This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.

I'm curious your take about serious climate interventions, i.e. geoengeering. I hear some people with the viewpoint of "we don't need to do anything, the future will be fine" and others, similar to you, who hold more of a "we need to do as much as we can to prevent/correct climate change".

I'm curious how these are balanced in your mind. For instance, if we could solve global warming by activating a load of fusion reactors to sequester atmospheric carbon and pollutants, would you then be okay with rural living, meat-eating, and lots of kids? What about greening the sea to absorb more CO2, or similar ecosystem modifications?

Curious whether this viewpoint is more ideological or practical in its roots.

It's a bit more ideological than practical. But there's just not really going to be a pleasant way out of climate change. If people won't stop eating burgers, they're really not going to like what comes next. Although they'll be dead and their kids will probably be dead before the bill comes fully due, so it really doesn't matter anyway.

Honestly, I believe that the effects of climate change are going to be way worse than anyone alive today can begin to imagine.

The way climate change will "fix" itself is through a massive population reduction and adaptation to an (as of today) unimaginable way of life over the course of a few centuries.

People alive today (and at pretty much any time in history) will do whatever they want and rationalize whatever actions they take in whatever way lets them sleep at night.

If there was some magic way to fix climate change that allowed us to keep living the way we are, sure go ahead and do that. It's not like we're going to change anyway.

All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now, where we can "solve" climate change but don't have the collective political will yet to do it.

What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff. Environment would be completely rekt.

> All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now

Yes and look where it's got us. Time to stop doing those things. The solution to climate change is going to be nothing like what people expect it to be. Nuclear or some magic solution isn't going to present itself. The solution is going to be a monumental shift in how people live and several decades of misery for people who aren't used to being miserable.

> What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff

This would be preferable. London would have been ruined but we wouldn't have been able to scale this to ruin the entire world the way we have now.

> Environment would be completely rekt.

Environment is completely rekt today.

pass

"Put your oxygen mask first, before you help others."

Focus on yourself. Figure out what brings you joy. Follow it. Work hard. Don't complain. Be kind. And once you have something to share, offer it to everyone around you. Anonymously, unconditionally, shamelessly.

Many people seemed convinced that voting is a significant part of the solution. I disagree. Be the best version of yourself and then share that wealth with the ones around you.

Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not.

It can't be truer, but somehow people get really mad at me when I say it.

> Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not.

Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.

This is only a concern with electoral systems that deny the losing group representation. Like winner-take-all.

It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation. And PR can even be implemented in the executive branch, as the Swiss have demonstrated.

> It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation.

Yes, it would.

Any PR system is going to have thresholding, so there will be some number of votes that do not effect the outcome. (Majoritarian elections are just one-seat PR with the Droop quota, maximizing ineffective votes.)

Do I really have to make a likeliness calculation?

You could also perform a systems thinking analysis looking at the n-order impacts and game effects of your decision. It might be a larger impact than your single vote.

There is a third option, spoil your ballot. It's invalid then, yes, but it's a statistic that the election/party analysts will track.

Up to a certain threshold a spoiled ballot might be considered a mistake, but once over that threshold, it could me something more. For instance, that voters are not interested by the policies of any parties on the ballot.

Sure, but there too my vote would never tip the scale either way.

Capability Based Security is essential to the continuation of a free and open internet, and democracy in the USA.

Without it, nobody's computer is safe. Without that, we can't trust random sites on the internet, and get stuffed into walled gardens, and our privacy is mined for the profit of others.

This is corrosive to democracy.

I'm unfamiliar with that term but I found some articles on it.

What's the best source of info on this topic?

That electoral fraud is a vanishingly small problem in the USA.

Success is not the amount of stuff you have. It's about being content.

Capitalist culture is convinced that greed and desire and impatience is good, because it leads to more stuff being created and bought, and from some arbitrary standard, this "economy" is the golden standard of success.

And yet suicide rates and loneliness go up in these places, while family values go down. What are you really working so hard for?

Poverty is a problem, but most poor places are poor because of corruption. And corruption happens because some people think they need 8 cars or whatever to be content. And the reason they're not content is because they think contentment leads to complacency and poverty.

Few people agree with you on this? I doubt it. Most people would agree — they just allow countervailing values drive their actions.

I don't agree with the corruption statement. There is tons of corruption in the US yet it is generally, comparatively rich.

I believe close to most human beings are pathological narcissists (the clinical kind).

Nothing really matters.

At a large scale that's unarguably true. But that's as such a coarse resolution as to be less than useless. At higher resolutions, the scale of a human life, there's a nearly boundless fabric of meaning and mattering to be had.

My corollary is: Nothing matters unless we make it matter. The only place we can find meaning is if we create it. I call this the weird optimism of nihilism.

I'd say the world is a sandbox and we are all creators. Everyone can easily manipulate the world around them. Such is the sandbox.

But the cost is that the easier it is to manipulate worlds, the more temporal it is. Some talk about climate change and the extinction of humans and such. But IMO it doesn't really matter. Better civilizations have perished out there, millions of years ago.

There is only ONE

There is also ZERO, or no computation

Alternatively, there is either "ket 0" or "ket 1" [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit

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