Hacker News Reader

Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

The tunnel-vision on this subject is truly astounding. I can't think of any subject that is treated in the same way.

Say that someone was failing at university because they have no motivation. And they have no motivation because they have depression. Then a vocal minority would always butt in with the following truism:

- Failing university courses is caused by not studying enough. There is no subverting the fact that you need to study the material in order to not fail the course.

This is of course a completely useless advice/truism.

Now say that someone overeats because they have depression. Or because of some pathology caused by microplastics. Or let's just say that there is a possibility that a different environment (no microplastics) would lead to them not overeating. Do you still want to derail this conversation with irrelevant “thermodynamics” truisms?

View on HN

As someone who struggled with depression at university, I'd say that's the only useful advice.

"I am failing because I am not studying enough."

Granted, I could introspect on what was preventing me from studying, leverage additional college resources, align to my learning styles, etc.

But until I accepted the above as an honest objective truth, and a path to change, I wasn't able to be successful.

As someone who had the same: it's not useful advice. At all. In the slightest.

How about we stop trying to come up with any reason but the objective one for the cause of the problem?

It’s not looking for a reason besides the objective one, it’s trying to find the reasons behind the objective one.

Many commenters like to slight of hand their possibly objective comments about calories as making their comments about moral or will-power failings just as objective, when it’s not a transitive property.

Probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasitransitive_relation

;)

'The mistake here lies in the assumption that it is possible to describe an object completely (we won't go so far as to say "explain") without making any reference to its relation to its environment (whether this relation be one of indifference, selective relevance and capacity for stimulation, of disconnection, or of closure). In order to avoid these problems, which arise from the point of departure taken, both subjectivist and objectivist theories of knowledge have to be replaced by the system/environment distinction, which then makes the distinction subject/object irrelevant.'

― Luhmann, Niklas (1990), The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown. In: Krohn W., Küppers G. & Nowotny H. (eds.) Selforganization. Portrait of a scientific revolution. Kluwer, Dordrecht: pp. 64–85, p. 66

I'd say more, but frankly, I'm only on hackernews rn because I can't bloody sleep and doing more than copy pasting would wake me up too much

This certainly just made me more confused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com