Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobsievers | Hacker News Reader

Humans remain humans. Blame the systems that amplify extreme voices.

People are responsible for their own behavior and can make choices. You can make choices. They aren't victims of systems.

Choice is an illusion, it's all just chaos

Choice is an illusion, it's all just an order too big to load into RAM.

The ability to classify any system as chaotic requires an ordered mind against which the system is compared.

Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.

> Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.

The results show that humans do a pretty good job and do advance, and do have civic duty (I don't know what "common will" means). IME, the problem is the people who make choices like refusing vaccines and then say humanity is fundamentally incompentent. They have an easy solution!

True but I doubt you’re as immune to persuasion and logical fallacies as your comment suggests. The point remains that we’re all human and will make many mistakes in our lifetime. Our circumstances are a huge part of that.

> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Ad Hominem, 1852

Look how much the world has changed since then!

I think it is fair to say that some aspects of the human condition will never, by definition, change.

That doesn't really assert anything. Many aspects will change dramatically, and often they are aspects that nobody previously imagined possible. The people who believe in change and possibility are the ones who do good things. The question is, what can we change and how much?

When people don't want change, they pull out that parent argument and apply it, through some general claim, and not actually address the issue at hand.

They are both. Theoretically they can make their own choice, but the are also heavily influenced by systems. So people who build, maintain and execute the systems have a large responsibility too.

Only if you can argue free-will exists.

"It's not me it's the 'system'". What a weak excuse!

It's not really an excuse if you think about the bigger picture. A sentiment of anti-vaxxers is that pharma and doctors cannot be trusted. And while clearly helping a lot of people, systemic problems with medicine also did a number on people, to pick just one example, consider the Opioid Epidemic in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic

Dang it.

> Blame the systems that amplify extreme voices.

you mean like the voices that pretend that vaccines are 100% effective and have zero side effects?

Please, show us evidence of these voices. Particularly if they are influential. Let’s see the evidence for your claim.

President of the US influential enough for you?

"There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

Fair. He should not have used that language.

Hey, why use a new throwaway account? Don’t be a chickenshit. Stand behind your claim. Especially since it’s truthful.

> Don’t be a chickenshit

Kind of rich after asking someone for proof instead of spending 1 minute to google to verify the claim.

Help me improve my Google skills: kindly provide the search term that will bring up evidence of all these voices you have claimed.

Those who ignore scientific methods, get gullible people to not get vaccinated and cause preventable outbreaks and hardship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com