The past is not true
sive.rs
sive.rs
The rest doesn’t hold water.
“There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.”
The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.
They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you call them out on it it’s always something like “We’ll if I could damage their career anyone could have.” or “It’s been ten years, why don’t they just get over it?”
Basically: “Yes, I stabbed them. But they didn’t/couldn’t stop me, so it’s their fault that they’re dead, really.”
Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time.
Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did. Telling yourself that the facts of your story don’t matter or that the people you hurt may even be better off for it won’t mend the people you’ve broken.
Just apologize (for real) and attempt to make amends.
"Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice".
Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea.
But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyrant in your life (if you let it) seems like a good insight to me.
I’m talking about the people who already do the things — and not giving them a Tums and Tylenol for the indigestion and headaches it’s causing them.
Stop doing the thing to stop suffering the consequences.
The people also tend to be really brittle. Once someone points out that they’re running around stabbing people they’ll get all offended: “See! It’s not fair! Everyone I’ve stabbed is out to get me. I’m the victim!”
> The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.
It’s worse than that:
> > She said “that little accident” helped her pay more attention to her fitness, lose weight, and since then has been in better health than ever.
Many of them honestly don't care deep down about the damage they do.
Others like Mark Wahlberg just "forgive themselves" for blinding a neighbor as a teen, even if their actual victim doesn't forgive them, so they can feel better about themselves mentally. https://time.com/3623630/mark-wahlberg-pardon/
You can’t control what other people do, only how you react to it.
If you've wronged someone else, maybe you should live miserably if you can't possibly make up for the wrong.
No one should be punished for the rest of their life because they wronged someone in their childhood. If they’ve grown, feel remorse and regret, then they’ve done their time and need to forgive themselves.
There no point in carrying around such a burden. Very few people deserve to be miserable.
You do not have a right to be free from the burden you have caused someone else.
Actions have consequences and we shouldn't try to hand wave those away because some people seem uninterested in going to therapy and dealing with the guilt they have. You can always do better, but that doesn't invalidate the bad.
People are complex, the world is not black and white, everyone is a huge story with complex rationalizations. Reflect on why you do things, reflect on how you affect those around you.
If you've done something bad, then forgive yourself and be kind to yourself, because you need to do better in the future. This is a better lesson that will do everyone more good.
Sometimes you hurt someone and you should feel bad about that. Deal with it. It's a part of life to be an imperfect human and this should help you keep in mind that EVERYONE IS AN IMPERFECT HUMAN.
I was not intending to argue that he should be pardoned.
This is generally unpopular among liberal and left leaning spaces, and is only marginally popular in right leaning ones.
It's called prison.
> This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life.
Prison (and convictions generally) shouldn't follow folks forever because it disincentivizes rehabilitation, it incentivizes recidivism, it labels someone based upon behavior 20 years ago but not necessarily since, etc.
The victims are not morally obligated to forgive anyone. As a society, it's more beneficial to legally and morally treat offenders as having paid their sentence.
Please explain how prison enables someone to make amends and get a sense of closure.
The idea that most incarcerated people pled not guilty, were tried and found guilty, and are now incarcerated is not true in the US.
Many of incarcerated are still awaiting trial. The DOJ reports that a quarter of those in US jail and prison are awaiting trial [1]. I suspect most of those cannot afford bail.
In terms of after trial, npr reports, "98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain" [2].
[1] https://www.ojp.gov/files/archives/pressreleases/2022/us-jai....
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim....
> It's called prison.
No.
Prison (and the threat of it) accomplishes a few things:
It's punitive, which allows people who enjoy retribution to feel some satisfaction at their idea of justice being carried out.
The threat of prison theoretically prevents some people from inflicting some societal harms on others.
And it keeps dangerous people away from the general public.
It also has the consequence of lining the pockets of the people running for-profit prisons (this is actually really really bad for society though), and also costs taxpayers a ton of money.
And another nice benefit of adversely affecting minorities, poor people, and otherwise marginalized people disproportionately.
It largely is not successful at rehabilitating people. Maybe some people, sometimes, but in the U.S. at least, there are more people who come out of prison more broken than they were going in, and also have fewer options for living an ethical life coming out. They fall in with gangs for protection, and those networks extend back out of the prison. The money spent imprisoning people (especially for things like nonviolent, victimless crimes) could likely do much more good to society if it was used differently.
If someone theoretically did something bad, and was remorseful for their actions, and we could say with a degree of certainty that they were no more likely to commit the same act again than any random person on the street, I think it would be better to not imprison them, and spend that money on, say, social services instead.
If you're looking for models of actually allowing people to atone and work towards improvements in their future behaviour, we'd do better with a restorative justice model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice
I dont think he shows real contrition either. After that Times article he backpedaled on the pardon request and told an interviewer months later that he was “pushed into it.”
Forgiveness is a broken concept. Just because you can be a better person later in life should not absolve you of bad things you did before. This isn't a call for everyone to carry grudges, but a call that we should stop trying to play this dumb "just keep pretending everything is always and will always be 'okay' in some way" ideology. People sometimes do bad things because they are bad people or do not care about others, and it's okay to not forgive that. People sometimes do bad things through no real fault of their own and it's okay to still not forgive that.
Now, it might be the case that the people profiting from the string and long punishments are so cynical and greedy that they started campaigning for longer, harsher sentences specifically for their own enrichment, but the people are buying it as purification and penance through pain. The prison industrial complex only works as a business because the people already want what's being sold to them.
The problem, though, with Christianity's take on it (or at least what some Christians take from it), is that they push the idea that all you need to do to achieve salvation is to believe in Jesus as savior, and all is fine and dandy. Doesn't matter what sins you've committed, or if you're even truly repentant. Just believe Jesus died for your sins, and you're good.
On one hand I agree that this could promote acceptance that we are all flawed beings, and will all end up doing bad things here and there, and that it's pretty much unavoidable. But I worry that this also can promote a sense of invulnerability and unaccountability. "Doesn't matter what I do, Jesus will take care of me."
Well yes let's be clear that only a very selective reading of the New Testament allows you to conclude Jesus doesn't think it matters what you do. It's the same kind of logic that leads one to preach the "prosperity gospel". It's very clear that loving Jesus goes hand in hand with loving others and living his commandments as best you can.
Also of course Matthew 22:36-40.
But then again, one could argue that any interpretation of Christianity is legitimate, just as any interpretation of art or literature is legitimate. Prosperity gospel is no more out there than Gnosticism was, and only politics and culture determines what is and isn't canon. It isn't surprising that the prosperity gospel is a product of the capitalist and materialist US.
Still... it seems like a reach.
Prosperity gospel churches are usually Pentecostal, which means they have a few special ways they like to interpret the Bible:
- They tend to take single Bible verses, often out of context, and use them as a foundation for entire novel lines of teaching. (This is opposed to reading and digesting whole stories)
- Those favorite Bible verses are emphasized, and passages that contradict them are downplayed. Once you decide that the Bible is pro-wealth, it can’t tell you it isn’t. (All Bible-believing Christians do this, whether they realize it or not. It’s called choosing a hermeneutic)
- There’s a culture that it’s common for the individual, especially the preacher, to hear directly from God. It’s pretty hard to argue with someone who claims the Holy Spirit told them something was true. (I always saw this as obviously problematic for a bunch of reasons)
When you put these together, you tend to get weird novel theologies. Other examples in the Pentecostal church include the personal prayer language (aka speaking in tongues) and faith healing.
My more general insight is that humans have put a lot of work into trying to seperate themselves from the complications of our obligate social brains. We will always feel bad, but maybe it can be ameliorated.
https://chrismowery.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-life-lesson-from-...
If you've done something bad, then forgive yourself and be kind to yourself, because you need to do better in the future. This is a better lesson that will do everyone more good.
edit: "“My hope is that, if I receive a pardon, troubled youths will see this as an inspiration and motivation that they too can turn their lives around,” he writes." Yeah, I DO NOT believe the world famous multimillionaire needs a governor's pardon to help kids.
edit2: given the wikipedia article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36805073's links to, it seems like Wahlberg himself now doesn't believe he should have tried to obtain a pardon.
If true, this is fitting given the context of the OP.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Wahlberg#Legal_issues.
Still, Wahlberg did some terrible stuff and basically just said "forgiving myself is enough".
https://jezebel.com/mark-wahlberg-beating-victim-says-actor-...
Call me an old cynic but I'd love to see the old fella's bank account around 2014 given he seems to have waited 26 years to clear that up and it happened to coincide with Wahlberg asking for a pardon.
Not needing to be told that they caused harm is one of the things that makes them not among the worst people you (or I) have ever met.
Sivers' parable is about his (and our) interpretations of the past -- Sive.rs publishes parables not facts. Context is relevant, here.
Yes, worst people gonna' worst people. Sociopaths are not Sive.rs audience. His point is that we can't change the past and only act in the present. What the worst people you (or I) ever met did can't be changed. How it affects are behavior can.
Particularly when the worst person you (or I) have ever met is you (or I). Biss-ninny 101 stuff. Which Sive.rs (and I) study.
That lady just had a baby and needs to go home at 5:00 PM says one NPR reporter/podcaster/host early in their career? Sound like she’s not committed, I’ll take on her work as I, for one, am committed. True story. Told on a podcast.
Or how about the kind of person who takes credit for another’s work because they can.
I’m not talking about murderers here, I’m talking about normal people doing shitty things and making the world just a little bit worse for everyone (and a lot worse for some in particular) and use whatever to justify their behavior as part of their personal story.
I will never understand people who seem to lack the ability to see that their actions may have a rippling effect throughout someone's life. One can meaningfully and negatively alter the trajectory of someone's life with one action.
I'm not advocating that we live in neurotic paralysis wrecked with the fear of unknowingly hurting others, but we should accept that whatever hurt we do inflict can have long-lasting implications, and when others shed light on ways we may have hurt them, that we lean in, understand, and make amends if possible.
We are all connected.
I think you might be missing the point of the story. To my understanding it could have easily have turned from a rosy past to a grim presence and it would have worked all the same.
The point of the story is that, supposedly, the difference in perception is the entire difference. Something is not true, just because it's in the past. The act of reinterpreting is the act of reshaping, what is true.
Personally, I don't know how true that is :) But it's a somewhat interesting thought.
Parables are supposed to be stories that teach us something about ourselves, the world, and how we engage with it.
I fundamentally disagree with the moral of this story as written.
Make it about something other than thinking that you paralyzed someone through negligence and it’s a different ballgame.
I think _you_ might be missing the point of the story.
It "could have" but it didn't: the story was about he'd been punishing himself for 18 years but Really It Wasn't My Fault.
If it was about a situation where he found out 18 years ago a benign situation wasn't, that could teach a lesson about misunderstanding history. Here, everything else is overshadowed by the fact that "You can change history", where history is how he paralyzed a women by driving recklessly.
Why didn't you stop them?
I think your comment was well intended, but it actually comes from the same place that causes a lot of the hurt: a lack of reflection. Even right there, you are trying to qualify harm without recognizing it. "Actual harm" as somehow being far greater and more deserving of consequences than regular harm, but there isn't. This is another narrative we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.
So I hope you do take your own advice seriously. Most of the time, it's not the "worst people that I've ever met" - it's our own image.
Most sad stories do NOT have a healing resolution like this. The few times it does happen, then good for them.
I don't think this is always true. For me and you, yeah. For good people. But, there are a significant percentage of humans (I have no idea what the number is) where this is completely false. They can move forward in time without a scintilla of guilt or negative repercussions. I fact, for some people, it seems to be fuel for them. They enjoy it. The percentage of those folks is much smaller, I believe. Thankfully.
When I say negative equity I’m talking about the compounding opportunity costs of something happening to you. One missed opportunity could lead to another and another.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/evolution-the-self/2...
We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc.
If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.
Deterrence being one obvious function.
Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity.
You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificial human doctrines have the capacity to selectively advantage "fatal cancer in infants" but brutal natural selection wouldn't. Natural selection is the abacus of the grim reaper.
You may call it a dark calculation, but do you know whats worse than a "fatal infant cancer"?
Two or more cases of this "fatal infant cancer"!
I know almost no one who has "fatal infant cancer", yet I have never met a person without the capacity for bitterness.
Your argument is devoid of logic.
Me neither. Perhaps you and I don’t hang out in the same places as those who died in infancy.
the rate of incidence of "fatal cancer in infants" is extremely low compared to the rate of incidence of the capacity to feel bitter.
unlike the statistics for "fatal cancer in infants" the capability to feel bitter is essentially universal, so clearly it serves some purpose.
Your debate approach of declaring my position to be the opposite of what I say is no fun. I'm not going to continue.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_education for one of many contributing causes.
Regardless of the myriads of contributing causes producing such cancers, natural selection eliminates these cancers, especially fatal childhood cancers.
> Your debate approach of declaring my position to be the opposite of what I say is no fun. I'm not going to continue.
The fact that I deduce a statement from your position which contradicts another of your positions is not a bad debate approach but simply an example of the principle of explosion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
That is what happens if you build a strawman: you pretend my argument relies merely on "the existence of a property" ignoring that occurence rates and probabilities actually span a spectrum, from marginally close to the impossible 0% to marginally close to a 100% certain. If the capability to emote bitterness is nearly universal among a species then it is a trait, not "existence of a property".
So it's not true that "the actual facts are a small part of the story". They are the story; you can't change the story unless you find out the facts were different. At least, not if you're being honest.
You see how quickly you are to believe these are the "actual facts"? That's how quickly they were to believe their "actual facts" as well.
That is the story. Not the facts. What we tell ourselves, what we tell others. This is why they brought up memories, an unstable collection of flashes in our mind, and we use these to craft a story. The story has changed, and will continue to change, you're in the process of writing it right now.
Unless you don't believe in free will and that your story/stories are already written. That's a very fun thought!
This is why "facts" is misleading here. We aren't talking about observed realities (she is going to the park, I am eating an ice cream), we're talking about our feelings, thoughts, memories, perceived consequences, ambitions, projections, assumptions. None of these are objective. Despite our best attempt to come together and make it so.
If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong. /s
> If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong /s
This, but sincerely! Problem is there isn't an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong. There's only each participants' recollection of the event—both flawed. She thought her inattention was the cause of the wreck, he thought his failing to yield was the cause. Who is right? Both of them? Just her? Just him? 80% him, 20% her?
There is no objective way to answer any of this. What happened during that accident only exists today in the minds of the drivers. Sure, you can look at photos of the aftermath and determine that this fender was bent, or that airbag deployed. But you can't get a similar (objective) level of understanding about the actions of the drivers leading up to the wreck.
When they met, he learned that she was not paralyzed (and that his understanding of the past was wrong in that aspect), and she learned that he blamed himself rather than blaming her. By comparing notes, they both got a better version of "the past" in their minds, but there's still room for more variances and disagreements on what exactly happened.
There may be an objective reality. But there's no way we can completely understand it. We can only know what our limited senses tell us. As time marches on, those senses get recorded in memories, and further distorted. For the tiny slice of events that get recorded in audio, video, contemporaneous notes, etc.; we have even better understanding. But those methods of capturing events still leave a lot out. You can hear the words, but not the thoughts. You can see the actions, but not the motivations. You can read the written diary, but there are no entries there for things considered irrelevant by the author.
There are untold numbers of events that occurred millennia ago that we know absolutely nothing about. But they contribute to how the world works today just the same. Long after the cause is lost to time, the effect chain keeps adding links.
That's not what I was referring to as a change in facts. The change I was referring to is that he thought the woman was permanently disabled, but then found out she wasn't. That's the key fact that enabled both of them to change their stories about what happened. The fact that the woman also believed the accident was her fault was a nice bit of icing on the cake, but it wasn't the key fact.
The actual facts is that a person who is walking is certainly not a person who "has irreversible spine damage and can't walk as a result".
The rest is absolutely irrelevant and philosophical bike-shedding.
I am taking the author at his word that when he reports something as fact, he is not lying. If you think he's lying, then obviously we're not going to find any common ground here.
> We aren't talking about observed realities (she is going to the park, I am eating an ice cream)
Um, yes, we are. The woman was not permanently disabled, although he previously thought she was. That's not a "feeling", "thought", "flash in the mind". It's a fact. Unless you think the author was lying.
They aren't claiming that the author is lying, but that they might _still_ have the facts incorrect.
For example, as you said, the woman was _not_ permanently disabled (since he could see that from meeting up with her in the present). However, what was the exact extent of her injuries? Maybe he assumed she is 100% fine now but she didn't mention that she actually does have persistent back pain ever since the crash. Maybe they didn't talk about that.
In that case, he may tell himself a story that she wasn't permanently hurt at all, and think that is a fact, which it actually isn't.
I think everyone is agreeing that there is an objective truth to what happened. It's that we never have perfect information to know the objective truth down to infinite detail. Even your eyes and ears can deceive us - all we can know is what we perceive via electrical signals to our brain sitting in our dark skull.
Therefore, our fallible minds will very easily get details wrong for many reasons, and then draw conclusions based on that not realizing that there could be other ways of interpreting the information, or that a minor detail we missed (or have forgotten) changes things immensely.
I think the lesson is that we should just be aware of this, and not assume our perception was 100% correct.
Not really. The facts didn't change. The fact still remains that both these individuals collided their cars together all those years ago. That is just as true before they met as it was after they met.
What you call facts are perspectives or interpretations of the facts. They both considered themself at fault. This means they both interpreted the fact of the crash in opposite ways. Now they have had a chance to reconcile their opinions or interpretations, but the fact that they collided in their cars never changed. They just feel better because they realized the other person felt like they caused the accident.
I think the point is that our memories are based on our personal interpretations, not based on fact.
Psychologically this is extremely true, your brain throws facts away very quickly but it holds onto emotions for a very long time.
Imagine you go and pick up a cup of coffee from the coffee shop. You probably struggle to actually remember picking up your coffee at all. It happened, but you will have little to no memory of it. Your brain tosses out facts. But now imagine you go to a coffee shop and a cute barista smiles or winks at you while they give you the coffee. You will probably remember that for years, very vividly because of your brain remembers the emotion of that transaction over the myriad of identical transactions you experienced.
Now using the same previous example, lets say you go home and convince yourself that the barista wasn't actually winking at you, they just had something in their eye. So you never act on the flirtatious act. But then a year later you bump into the same barista at a party and they ask why you never asked them out when they tried to flirt with you. Now when you think back on the event, you probably remember it as obvious that it was clearly a deliberate wink and exasperated smile that they gave you, despite the fact that previous to that reconciliation you were convinced it was an innocent act. Your memories have now changed. Its all based on emotion and interpretation of facts. But the actual facts never changed. The amount of winking, smiling, etc was always the same, your interpretation and memory of it is what changed.
The facts as he knew them did. He thought the woman was permanently disabled. Then he learned she wasn't. That's a huge change in his knowledge of the facts.
> They both considered themself at fault.
As I've already pointed out elsewhere upthread, that's not the "fact" I was talking about. See above.
Reconciling modern information with historical events is hard. But I think it's completely necessary if we're going to make policy decisions based on history.
Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really early, otherwise it's still a great way to die for a normal person.
Yes.
> was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population?
No, because those affected worst by it were young adults in relatively good health. Small children and the elderly were proportionally spared. The prevailing theory for why Spanish flu killed more healthy young adults was because it was an over-reaction of the immune system itself that was most harmful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm
It is definitely the case that the war led to many young adults being moved around the world and kept in close quarters, which certainly exacerbated the spread and effect of the pandemic.
Another example that comes to mind is the 2020 protests. If I looked at how conservative news was reporting on events, it seemed utterly chaotic. But I had multiple friends that were present at many local events, and they were all perfectly safe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgm3_jzcNm4
Floodwaters tend to stir up a lot of dirt and mud, so the water is usually totally opaque. That makes it very hard to tell how deep it is. A lot of overhead views of flooded neighborhoods look completely disastrous, but in reality it's just a foot or two of water that will just go away once the drains can handle it.
But, sometimes, flooding really is severe and the damage is monumental. But it can be hard to distinguish those from imagery. Every picture of a flood looks biblical.
I thought it was really weird the way she was paddling but that line at the end of the video is probably the explanation.
Yet people still drive into flooded roads and get swept downstream on a regular basis because "it's just a couple inches of water".
> To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.
> a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
> Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous.
> And, of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images—the total extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly four hundred thousand, and the rape of eighty thousand, Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some one hundred and thirty thousand women and girls (ten thousand of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945—seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.
> Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.
While this is mostly a good piece of writing, in the real world handmade images (and handwritten notes) are, like photographs, potentially evidence, and the issues raised with photographs are the reasons both photographs and hand-written/hand-drawn items (and all other physical items) as evidence tend to demand supporting (and admit opposing) testimonial and physical evidence of provenance (and, the physical evidence offered for this purpose has the same features, such that ultimately, it all rests on testimonial evidence of provenance.)
I also don't think the first parr of the sentence is true: pictures may be supposed to show, but pictures have been noted for their evocative power long before this piece was written—pictures are in certaim circumstances understood to show, and under other and frequently overlapping circumstances to evoke; there is certainly a common danger in mistaking evocative power for also indicating informative power, but few anywhere have denied the existence of the evocative power of photography.
In English, supposition too frequently implements the unforgivable passive voice.
Overreacting can have equally bad outcomes, I think. Social isolation sanctioned by pandemic era school lockdowns left me with depression, social anxiety and suicidal ideations - none of which I have managed to fix so far. And I know I'm not alone with this in my age group (in high-school at the start of the pandemic).
Now, I think the resulting number of suicides does not reach the amount of people saved by the countermeasures in total, but it's nevertheless something to consider. (Well, but it's much harder to find a direct correlation in the first place, so really who knows.)
(Re-reading your comment, I now realize that maybe I was completely missing your point, in which case I'm sorry.)
I wonder if this bias/memory-capacity is studied, I assume so but I don't know the name :)
Life in general is better now, and we can keep doing better! And to do better, we have to be honest about history.
But I think it's also important to remember that that's only the case in aggregate. For many many individual people, life did not go on during all these events (and all the other tragedies that are constantly happening), they lost their own lives, or their parents, or their children, or their friends.
I personally find it really hard to hold both of these truths in my head at once.
I highly recommend The Great Influenza:
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-Deadliest-Pandemic-Hi...
We were so desperately lucky. It was not "like covid".
So, the past isn’t true until it is and then, maybe, it’s even worse.
Not sure what to make of this story.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
It features a panda named Stillwater who tells this story (among others) in it.
It's a retelling of the Tao Te Ching into plain English, using parent/child relationships to make the points.
I recommend this both to parents, and to children. Which is all of us. We never stop being children of our parents.
I don't have children, nor do I plan to, yet this is one of the most powerful books I've read.
> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
That Wikipedia page was created in 2020. Northern Exposure predates that.
Going with the OP's theme: if we repeat the GP's comment enough times, over a long enough period, we can change history and then history would really show it to have originated from the "story "Ed" told in the TV show 'Northern Exposure.'"
In our heads, we have models of the past and models of the future. Sure, there is an asymmetry between knowing the past and the future - due to thermodynamics. Still, in both cases, it is good to think of these as probabilistic models, far from any certainty.
In other contexts, also known as the gambler's fallacy if I recall.
Would you please elaborate on this?
I interpret GP's reference to thermodynamics/entropy as generating the "arrow (asymmetry) of time,"[0]
Which exists (at least for us matter-based beings) as remembering the "past," but not the "future," and local fluctuations in entropy don't affect that at all.
Once all the observers forget their story or they disappear, the past "fact" disappears from collective memory, unless that story was passed to newer generations by speech, writing, etc.
Makes sense to me. Consciousness forms a closure over a deletion mechanism towards less and less paths over time. Eventually inconsistent architecture. It’s exactly what the universe needs.
Stated more eloquently: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336...:
“I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead:
Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.
We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.”
I’d replace AI with just IT in general. Relatedly, I used to believe in digital rot but now I’m not sure. I can for example search all the photos on my phone instantly to return images with a given text string. So the technology is improving to comprehend any data format and effectively retain its data.
I'd argue the opposite, we've amplified this affect. Off-hand statements from the past recorded forever get re-examined through a new lens in the present. What previously might have been totally innocuous become a scandal later. Whenever someone rockets into being main character for the day on the internet, their entire history is pulled up and re-assessed.
So like many things, it's amplified by the internet, but largely for the negative.
Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital.
And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the information over time is new methods and tools for understanding that information.
Can you tell me what hieroglyphics mean? What about a phrase of latin or another dead language? Information is only as "fresh" as our ability to interpret and understand it. Dead languagues are the same as a file who's format we no longer have the spec for. Yes, the ones and zeros may still be there, but without the ability to understand what they mean, there's little we can do with that information. We're still at risk of losing those capabilities for data.
What's the word for something that's phrased like wisdom but doesn't hold up at all to mild scrutiny?
"Just as much the ability to forget as to remember", feh. One of those things is a bit more important, isn't it?
Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/narrative-t...
The way we understand the past is a deep topic that is analyzed and discussed by actual professionals constantly. Better to read their writing than this kind of stuff, IMO.
I will push back a bit on "professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively". I don't think that's really true. In my experience, it seems like most professionals and academics prefer to write and speak within their own bubbles. Some few make a concerted effort to communicate effectively to the masses, but more often they look down their noses at the kinds of communication that entails. For instance, my interpretation of your "TED speaker" comment is that TED talks are not a suitable way to communicate about this topic. But a compelling TED talk or blog post or op-ed in a mainstream publication would be a great way for a professional to communicate about this with a large audience. I think this has a lot to do with the way academia is set up. "Publish or perish" provides little incentive structure for effectively communicating your work for amateurs.
Or in more concrete terms: What professionals do you know of in this field who are out there doing everything they can to communicate effectively about this to a non-professional non-academic audience? What is it that they're doing?
For personal reasons, I am very good friends with an unusually large number of history faculty. I do not agree with your assessment at all. My experience is that historians are desperately trying to communicate their expertise in the face of an increasingly hostile culture that either does not value their expertise or considers them to be propagandists. Public History in particular is having a renaissance right now and Digital History (which is often tightly associated with widespread distribution of tools and interactive systems) is comparatively well funded.
History doesn't have the same "publish or perish" model as say CS because individual journal articles don't actually provide much professional clout. You do have the publish the book (which are increasingly distributed open-access) but there is ample time for communication with laypeople (and teaching).
Unfortunately for him (the author) he’s not coming from an expert’s position, and whatever perceptions that creates in people is not fault of the commenter you’re replying to.
"The past is history, the future's a mystery, the present's a gift".
My memory has been getting worse for years. People can take advantage of me by insisting confidently that I've misremembered something.
Crime witnesses often confabulate; they don't know what they saw, so they "enrich" their memory by adding spurious information.
The title's wrong, though; the past is true, it's just that we can't remember it.
Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms.
If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.
Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.
Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people.
People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.
But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true."
> We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie.
You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.
This beautiful story is one of the truest things I've read on HN in 8 years.
This guy lived crippled by what the story he told himself about what happened for half his life. Then with a new story, a new encounter, he set himself free. Incredibly brave to tell this tale. Some people live in their story about something for their whole lives. They never do rewrite what they make it mean into one that works better for them. People live imprisoned by things that happened 40 years in the past. It's so sad to see, but so common.
It's true that you can revisit the trauma of the past, and transform it and yourself. It will probably sound like woo, but it's not. Lots of protocols now being tested in studies that combine guided traumatic memory replay, with an adjuvant, like inderol (to create emotional distance), or psylocybin (to help shift perspective), all with the goal of producing a transformative reorientation of your relationship to the past trauma. Powerful stuff. "Plant medicine" retreats run in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and Central America (iboga, ayahuasca) have similar aims: re-experiencing the traumatic memory through an altered state aids you in rewriting your story about it, and helps you get new liberating perspective and transform what you make what happened mean for you.
If you think you suffer from that kind of traumatic memory, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. :)
But external chemicals may help some people (some people may be in a state where it's really hard for them to learn what may come a lot easier to folks like me and you~~not everyone is good at navigating their own internal terrain).
Just like you don't need a therapist to guide you, but everyone has different capabilities to do so themselves, and therapist can benefit. I know how to do this, sounds like you know too, even folks like us who know how to do it themselves, I think should be open to the experience of being guided by someone else to see what it's like.
This re-timelining can be used for many things. And it's not fiction. Your body makes it real, and it's more real than that, too.
I think chemistry helps, it's not strictly necessary, but there's a whole lot of psych (placebo etc), and structural (makes more sense as a therapy / economic activity in that industry to combine with an agent, probably lead to that therapy getting more traction and helping more people), and real (chemistry clearly helps, ancients have been using it) reasons that make the combination therapy of chemistry plus therapist a really good option to be generally available! :)
I am not with you on there's no free will. There's definitely free will. (and it can be a cope to pretend there's not, I think, because it gets you out of personal responsibility, a thing lots of folks have an issue with!). Because it's a choice. I mean, there's even a choice to rewrite your story in the ways we're talking about. That's clearly free will, to you, right?
This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
Yes, as we age we come to see things from a more experienced perspective and the perspectives of the adults we grew up with and change, but going all the way to "that is why it is important to forgive your parents" is a big big step.
It is typically a good idea to try to get to forgiveness, you're right, but there's a lot of very indefensible behavior out there.
I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened.
“You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”.
Both can be forgiven and it’s probably a good idea to do so. I think it’s not helpful to generalize in that way.
Also abuse happens a lot. It may not be the majority but it is NOT rare.
I stand by my objection in this case
BTW~~what kind of psychological process, thought do people you treat go through when they forgive really abusive people or behavior, people that meant to hurt them, with malice? How does forgiveness look like for the person going choosing it and what are the effects? Sorry, it's a big question! No probs if you don't want to or can't answer it! :)
So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.
Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.
So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.
I would consider one out of seven to be "problematic" and "oof" worthy
I am not talking about forgiveness as an act, but as an attitude here. You probably know better than most of us what that means.
The attitude can be generalized as you just did in even your response. The act however, shouldn't.
I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could occur for so many years.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-y...
My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets.
From my link above
>Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault.
>But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
But you show nicely the differemce between history / facts (number of accidents from official statistics matched against charges and results of analysis of each accident) and feelings / story / narrative (someone says something to a journalists who then reports on it).
In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar.
So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
It's appalling.
Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed.
Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic intersection. Sadly, we have a lot of those in the US too. Yield signs in places with low traffic and poor visibility are way more common than they should be.
Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.
It's a huge contrast between the US and European approach though.
The complete inefficacy and refusal to do any work of most american police departments is absurd. It's like they still believe their primary mission to be slave retrieval and violently suppressing strikes, as if it's still 1890.
Our system is really weird.
It's nicely written, but it speaks to most people's general positivity bias: our yearning for a benign truth underlying all things that are bad, or more specifically, that bad things aren't really real, that they're a mirage over the real state of all things which are actually good and wholesome and better than you could have even guessed. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably draws miserable people to religions that offer eternal salvation.
Your explanation of humor seems woefully inadequate. What is the corresponding solution to a negative solution in making a dad joke?
In this case his story would have never been written. Thus we get a big survivorship bias to hear only about unlikely events and get some kind of wisdom tidbits from those.
>In this case his story would have never been written. Thus we get a big survivorship bias to hear only about unlikely events and get some kind of wisdom tidbits from those.
That's not necessarily true. Many years ago, I killed a 77 year-old woman by striking her with my bicycle. Her skull fractured when she hit the pavement. I heard her skull being crushed, but I didn't realize it at the time -- after I realized what that sound was, it's haunted me to this day.
I was completely at fault (I blew through a red light and hit her after avoiding someone else) and while I don't think about it every day any more, I bear the responsibility for her injury, eventual death and the grief it caused her family.
While I don't consider myself a bad or evil person, I made a really bad decision that cost someone their life. And I will bear the guilt of that bad decision forever.
I don't give myself a pass because it wasn't a malicious act, mostly because that poor woman is still dead regardless of my motivations.
I can't go back and change the past, but I've tried to make better decisions since then. That's not enough, but it's all I can do to avoid such things moving forward.
The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.
For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.
If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.
However, in the story, the author did NOT have a memory of breaking a woman’s back. He had a memory of getting in an accident. He interpreted it as his fault. He was told that he broke her back. Not his interpretation. It was a belief about events that he wasn’t present to (what happened in the woman’s car and inside the woman’s body) not really any different than anything else we’re told but don’t witness firsthand. It sounds like it may even have been a lie the police told him to scare him.
Your story is different because you did have an actual experience and misinterpreted it’s meaning (man in red suit = real Santa Claus).
I acknowledge that not discarding it can also lead to negative outcomes, as in TFA.
But I think it would be crazy to not to differentiate between immediate experience and what we've been told. Not even because immediate experience is always more accurate. Sometimes it is NOT, but it's a different source of information subject to different problems. Often more trustworthy but not always, though the "not always" can be ameliorated a bit by understanding some of the limits of personal experience.
I was really only taking issue with "interpretation is all we have" applying in the original story - that there is a difference between "my interpretation about something I experienced" and "my beliefs about a thing I did not experience".
Yes the author's story changed, but it changed because he found out that he was lied to by the police (or perhaps, if we want to be generous, "unintentionally misled") not because his memory was fallible.
To get back to the point I took issue with, in the story "the facts" mattered an awful lot. It was a lack of access to the facts that caused the problem not "an incorrect interpretation" of what the author experienced. The latter happens all the time, but interpreting our experience differently (e.g., reprocessing a traumatic memory with self-compassion and seeing it as unfortunate and something to learn from) is a different thing than finding out what we were told was a lie. Both change our story, but one is indeed a reinterpretation and the other is a change in belief or knowledge.
I think it's important to separate those two things. I think some want to treat them as the same. I think that can cause problems.
When I got to my daughter's classroom, she didn't recognize me. But some other kids did; they told her "That's your Dad!". She was mortified, and burst into tears.
I always despised the Father Christmas lie, and I should have refused; but the headmaster was very dominant and manipulative.
I think that’s what happened here. Author carries guilt about an event. Finds out the guilt was unfounded. This makes them realize a story can change at any moment. So you can change a story at any moment, change the narrative around a situation.
Is this conclusion supported by the story? To your point, no, not really. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or absurd, either. There may have been a ton of other information in the author’s head and this event unlocked it. Maybe it will for some readers, to. But it’s not something that will stand up to scrutiny.
― William Faulkner, 'Requiem for a Nun' (1951)
― George Orwell
But, maybe I'm the one missing your view here--could you explain more what you mean specifically?
What method did you use to determine this is comprehensively true, in fact, rather than simply intuition?
Come on, this fails even basic logic. One event being misremembered is not valid proof that all or even many events are misremembered to your advantage.
This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).
What if people understand you, but just think there's more than one way to read it? Do you really think the only way to read that story is the way you did?
Did they both have the same insurance company?
In other words, of course memory is an interpretation, and historical thought is basically a collective form of these kinds of processes.
What's fascinating, and what powers the drama of the article is that even if we know this scientifically and philosophically, we often can't help but act as though our memories were objects, were these concrete things that we have at hand. A person can remember, but no person actually possesses memories (unless you want to talk about the dynamic and constantly changing states of a neuronal system).
I think it’s one his best.
And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings.
MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.
And how people got used to not taking responsibility for their own actions, communication etc.
People are not speaking directly anymore, only through layers of unnecessary, corrupted, stupid and ignorant lawyers, insurance companies, agents and other meaningless units.
They are only conceptual representations made of thought.
Do you listen to:
The generals and presidents and industrialists?
or
The privates and citizens and workers?
Most of the narrative of WWII I learned in high school is built off of grains of truth, but other grains of truth are much more important, depending on where you live.
You learn that Japan surrendered because of the atom bombs, then you learn that they surrendered because the Soviets invaded Korea, then you learn that it's a combination of factors.
People want to hold a complete story in their heads, with a satisfying conclusion. If you can find someone or something to blame, that is a very satisfying conclusion. If you are fighting a fight, you will read that fight into all of the history you encounter.
In the movie Hired Gun, Liberty DeVitto, former drummer for Billy Joel, tells in gruesome detail how Billy screwed him over, along with his two bandmates.
Then he tells us how he bears no ill will for Billy, and shows a letter to him saying that he'll always be there for him.
I think a lot of people like to say they've forgiven because it sounds good.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/management-lessons-from-...
Amending past wrongs is about showing up without any regard for your own feeling and the intention to do whatever is in your power to set the wrong aright. You admit the wrong and then you listen.
I get it that to the author this is some cute meta-story about "we were both wrong!" But truly acknowledging one's fault is antithetical to this kind of fawning over oneself and infantile moralizing.
Anyway, this is a warm story, I have more belief in human being, especially as a being who has lived in Asian culture, who have learned 人間, the human, which in fact has more than mere human being, but also the one in the community of human beings.
Rhetorical, I know, but we need more love of each other, I think. :-)
> It’s never too late to change a story.
I'm not sure I draw the same conclusion. It seemed to me like the facts did matter as much as ever in that case, it's just that none of the two principals had the facts at first. By learning new information, they changed their interpretation of the events. The facts change the story, never the other way around.
What happened in the story, the ground truth, is real. There was an accident, people were injured.
That this story really highlights is the danger of a second arrow that is not that we tell ourselves stories about the past. The danger is that we tell ourselves stories so false they cause undue suffering.
The point isn't that the past isn't true. The issue is the story.
The past as we understand it is indeed a lie. And while we should strive to reconcile ourselves with our past, apologizing, forgiving, remembering, and regretting as appropriate, ... it's important to work to leave the past where it belongs, behind us.
This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you to accept. "The past is not real" is utter horseshit, and does not follow from "I did something I thought was really bad but was only kinda bad actually" in the first place.
in oral cultures people just re-adjust their memory, subconsciously[1]
in written culture, people burn books, driven by their leaders.[2]
in transitional cultures, 'bad' comments are donwvoted, or moderated away, or the users get shadowbanned[2]
[1] "Orality and Literacy" by Walter J. Ong, An american jesuit monk and academic.
[2] I made this up just now
[3] my highschool history teacher taught me this
[4] arguably, [1] also says this
"History" is accounts (stories) about the past.
"Historiography" isn't about the past; it's an account of how historians "do" history. I mean, historiography would include accounts of how past historians used to do history.
you're wrong about me being wrong. I remembered a little better now:
"there is no history, the proper name of this subject is historiography" he taught us this
but also, your reply suggests you missed the point (and my teacher's) that there is no history, it's all accounts by some "historian"
I would use the name meta-history, or 'philosophy of history' for what you describe as 'historiography'.
then again, maybe you're just being nitpicky about things and are focusing on what I said wrong instead of on the point i was trying to make
further again, I cannot help but notice how going forwards "metahistory" may even be understood as the story behind Mark Zuckerberg's giant coorporation
I agree that what I (and most historians) call "historiography" could be called "meta-history". But that activity already has a name; we don't need to construct a new term (with a Greek prefix and a Latin suffix) to stand-in for a word that already works fine.
Historiography isn't some handwavey version of the past; it's the study of how historians do their work. That's the word historians use. Honestly, I think your history teacher got the wrong end of the stick.
Like, Humpty Dumpty had a point: you can use words to mean whatever you want. But it's not helpful for intelligent discourse to redefine commonly-understood terms.
it is in a sense poetic that the stick is sourced in the 3rd world
but I get it, you're both, correctly nitpicking and I'm wrong. this is the hierarchy of the "worlds". I feel really bad now, highly recommended.
nonetheless, you refuse the deeper point. may somebody form the 0th world help you
> You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable.
Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new things about the past. You can change your stories about it. You can even assist others in doing that.
But the future? That is always out of reach, and already encompasses all your attempts to change it.
Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compute on computers, habitants of the universe can't know the future. A software can't compute its future. A similar reasoning to the halting problem can show this.)
May I interest you in an other view? Slice Universe to the rescue! There is only now, and the now is true. There is matter, in a particular, ever changing spatial configuration. In 3d. The now is true, also it changes. Only the real people, made out of matter can experience things, simulated people, or the people that are not even simulated don't have real experiences. The past is not true, but we have some information about it, what the past can possibly be. So is the future, it is not true, but we have some information about it. There is no ontological or qualitative difference between the past and the future, only quantitative (which comes from the ridiculous amount of negentropy at the beginning of our universe).
That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present.
No? Why would it be?
Nah, if we allow virtual experiences, than any model naturally becomes the block universe.
I believe, that question of experience is still unsolved. Why do we seem to live in a world made of matter and governed by physics? Is it the same for people that are simulated in a computer? Is it the same for people that are not simulated by a computer (because it is plugged out)? How do they perceive if the data is mangled? Etc. BTW the block universe also needs to solve this problem. But in order to not to be in a block universe, we need the answer that being material based is different than being simulated on a material based simulator, or not even being simulated, just the possibility of it.
@sobellian: relativity doesn't need the block universe. It works perfectly fine if people just get shorter when they speed up. Then the simultaneity of events in a frame is not the same as being in a slice.
edit: typo
- https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf (original experiments)
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706048/ (replications review)
- https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... (review of related evidence)
Here's something more far out I just found trying to connect physical theories to some of this: https://old.hessdalen.org/sse/program/Antonella.pdf
Some related light discussion of similar issues and intersection of physics and consciousness: https://quantumphysics-consciousness.eu/index.php/en/2022/06...
And a few other ones:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4141237/ (review of many experiments)
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.6584.pdf (discussion of possibly physics)
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
But it doesn't mean that historical facts don't exist (shit happens - those are facts), but the recounting of such should be consumed knowing that there are likely inaccuracies.
This is not license to only take in the history we like or rewrite it to suit our agendas.
I'm technically a Boomer and my education on the history of the US was amazingly light on any details that would today seem unsavory (e.g., the expansion to the West was not simply moving into uninhabited territory, etc.).
A People's History of the United States was eye opening and a welcome revisiting of the "official story". Some might say that Zinn had an agenda to shit on White Men, but I saw it as a heartfelt attempt to correct the record.
I didn't learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre until about 10 years ago, and already there are attempts to squash that because, and I kid you not, "it makes white people feel bad".
Who controls the present, controls the past…”
— Orwell
Somehow I'm not as convinced as he is that it was a really good thing to break someone's spine years ago because he was a teenager who didn't follow road signs.
I think it was saying that it’s very easy to convince yourself of something much worse than reality. He felt guilty because he thought he ruined a woman’s life forever, he felt immense guilt over that, when in reality the woman mostly recovered, not that it was good the accident happened.
I thought The idea is that a slight misunderstanding of the can have a severe “compound interest rate”.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story."
Well...no. Facts are a huge page of the story. They're kind of the whole point, if by facts we mean that which is true (the word "fact" is problematic, but the quotation, as well as the title of the article, draw an equivalence between fact and truth). We may not have all the facts, we may be mistaken about them, or we may not yet have inferred some truth. And where we can't reasonable know the truth, we will simply lack that knowledge, leaving us capable of only speculating about possibilities. But there is a truth of the matter. It's not whatever you want it to be.
Once in the past, facts are immutable, as it were. That the past only exists as a memory does not give you license to toy with that memory in one direction or the other, in your (ostensible) favor. I say "ostensible" because willful self-deception (which is what attempts to tweak memories is) does a few things that are harmful. First, it destroys our connection with reality. I don't think I need to explain why that's bad. Second, denial is repression of uncomfortable truths (or at least what we hold to be true), and not like overwriting a file on disk. It's more like sweeping a dangerous animal under the rug. It reach out from under and bite you, you will trip over it even when it is sleeping. Occasionally, it will lash out from under the rug and cause terror. There will always be a lingering anxiety about the ever present possibility that it will escape from under our control and attack us or something we care about. A repressed truth introduces all sorts of weird tensions into the psyche, perverting our perception of reality, enslaving us to fear. That's the paradox: caging uncomfortable truths makes them our greatest enemy and gives them power over us. Acknowledging them sets us free. Repression is only something we use to suppress inappropriate impulses or desires (the basis for self-discipline and the moral life), not the truth; indeed, failing to repress inappropriate impulses alienates us from the truth, not least of all because it entails a repression of the truth to enable the indulgence of that desire and a weakening of the intellectual faculties. Repressing guilt always leads to self-destruction. It's why human history is full of human and animal sacrifice. (It's also why, in Christianity, God provides Himself as the perfect sacrifice, as the Lamb of God, bloodlessly offered at each Catholic mass on the altar, and why the sacrament of penance exists: to accuse oneself before God and receive absolution.) Guilt will destroy you, but denial only doubles its power, not to mention the added guilt of having repressed the guilt. The psychotherapy industry is funded by the guilty conscience. But if you think denial is some kind of escape hatch, sorry. That ways lies madness.
I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.
Very well said.
1: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Sowa-2/publication...
When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind.
He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do.
Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?