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Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

One is struck by the sheer raw amount of time that this woman was separated from us (9,000 years). How many hundreds or thousands of generations of our ancestors lived in this almost completely different world?

And how advanced our technology is to determine so much about her.

But perhaps the biggest mind-blower is that — against this backdrop of 9,000 years, where there was very little change in technology — in a few decades our modern technology progressed so quickly from her first discovery to now to learn so much about her.

We can barely comprehend the rate of change we’re seeing compared to the eons before. And today we’re seeing AI burst on the scene, a few decades since we started digitizing information. Wild stuff. I wonder how far we’ll get before I die.

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Actually it is amazing how few generations it takes to go back that far. Assuming 15-20 years between generations, that’s 450-600 generations.

Using that ruler, go back 6 generations and you are at circa 1900.

Right, but homo sapiens go back 200,000 (!!!) years. That’s a lot of hunting and gathering, shamans, generations, and gradual process where life wasn’t changing much generation to generation (for thousands of iterations).

And here we are going from electricity to AI in 3 - 6 generations.

I just googled when our ancestors started using tools. It’s 2,500,000 years ago. My god.

I bet we won't get far enough that we stop killing each other on a regular basis for not very good reasons.

Science is fantastic in the physical world, but it seems to have not very much utility in the metaphysical world. Shame it's almost the only tool that most everyone (right thinking people anyways) places their faith in.

Aren't like 80% of all people religious? Kinda shitty to casually dismiss them all as not right thinking imo. Many (most?) of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made by people who put their faith in something other than or in addition to science itself.

The not right thinking part is well justified and you can find hundreds of hours of debates on youtube of religious people getting outargued like children with regards to every single argument they could possibly make for believing in religion to make any sense whatsoever.

you can believe in what you want, but if your position on it is anything other than "I do it because I want to even though I know it makes no sense whatsoever", you either just lack some basic info or you are in fact not right thinking.

> The not right thinking part is well justified and you can find hundreds of hours of debates on youtube of religious people getting outargued like children with regards to every single argument they could possibly make for believing in religion to make any sense whatsoever.

You can find similar things for humans of all stripes doing silly things, including people breaking the law in various ways, and hold onto your shorts: some of the people in the videos have dark colored skin! GASP!! Think of all the scandalous beliefs (aka: facts) one could form based on that observation!!!

> you can believe in what you want, but if your position on it is anything other than "I do it because I want to even though I know it makes no sense whatsoever", you either just lack some basic info or you are in fact not right thinking.

Alternatively: you are not actually omniscient.

> Aren't like 80% of all people religious?

You mean they have a confession? That is not the same thing as being religious. I for example have been born into a confession and till I went through the not uncomplicated act of leaving church I would have been counted as religious. I have been an atheist since I was 12 or so.

> You mean they have a confession? That is not the same thing as being religious. I for example have been born into a confession and till I went through the not uncomplicated act of leaving church I would have been counted as religious. I have been an atheist since I was 12 or so.

I think there are four different groups of people:

(1) people who say they believe in some organised religion and it is a big part of their lives

(2) people who say they believe in some organised religion but it isn't a big part of their lives

(3) people who say they don't believe in any organised religion, but nonetheless report having some "supernatural" beliefs (ghosts, reincarnation, etc)

(4) people who say they don't believe in any organised religion, and furthermore report having no "supernatural" beliefs (naturalism, physicalism, materialism, atheism, anti-supernaturalism, etc)

The problem with labels like "religious" or "non-religious", is it is unclear which of the four each label encompasses. Some people define "religious" narrowly to only include group (1), others also include group (2), some will even include group (3).

Not all "atheists" belong to group (4). I know a person who calls themselves an "atheist", and they literally meet the definition; but they also believe in ghosts and an afterlife – which puts them in group (3) rather than group (4). They actually told me once that when theists die, they will be shocked to find out that there is no God, and they "wasted their lives" worshipping an imaginary being. Those kind of beliefs are probably much more common among the general population than among the kind of people who frequent this site.

> Kinda shitty to casually dismiss them all as not right thinking imo.

It is indeed, but being religious myself, it ain't me who does this.

If it was done on valid grounds, fair enough (it's not only the impoliteness that bothers me), but it rarely is in my experience.

> Many (most?) of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made by people who put their faith in something other than or in addition to science itself.

And then there's non-scientific studies that have been, or not made, because we've "decided" as a culture to pour all our money into peering ever deeper into the macro and micro of physical reality, ignoring metaphysical reality (while complaining about it endlessly, like during COVID, where "Trust The Science" was the motto, that failed spectacularly, in ways that will pay negative dividends for years to come).

Ah I see what you mean now, I think I misunderstood what you were saying a bit.

just curious, what would have been your strategy and solution to the covid? In hindsight even.

Not the person you are replying to but in hindsight the "solution" to COVID was to chill out more, get vitamin D and and other than the most comorbid people, go on with life.

My wife and I drove our 6 month old son from NY to Florida in Jan 2021. In NY, everything was shut down, everyone was locked inside, everyone was stressed and miserable. In Florida everything was open, restaurants were having 3 hour waits, everyone happy.

In retrospect mortality rate same in FL and NY even though many old folks in FL. So seems like a lot of it was over reacting.

what about the comorbid people tho lol

lol to put it in your lol own lol words they lol died lol

Personally, I would have had a sophisticated platform for communication between humans in place before the whole thing went down, this way we'd at least have a chance of getting everyone more or less on the same page on the range of possibilities of what is going on, the range of possibilities of actions (and the range of opinions on each), and so forth and so on.

I am endlessly amazed at how disorganized this place is, and no one seems to notice.

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

Again that totalitarian idea that we should all agree on something and then all do the same?

Why not everyone just live and let other live and decide for themselves. Then, if majority is wrong and they all die, there will still be some people to survive.

> Again that totalitarian idea that we should all agree on something and then all do the same?

No, this is the consequence of the evolved nature of consciousness, combined with our current cultural norms (educational curriculum or lack thereof being a key component, the quality and forms of our various media (reality synchronizers) being another). This is but one of the many strange (if you look very carefully) rituals a sophisticated system would address.

> Why not everyone just live and let other live and decide for themselves. Then, if majority is wrong and they all die, there will still be some people to survive.

It's a fine idea! I would run it through some workflows and see if it comes out the other side still intact - my guess: it wouldn't (just at a glance, it would fail based on lack of attention to risk management).

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