The valve at the end of the world | Hacker News Reader

The valve at the end of the world

dirt.fyi

65 pointsbookofjoe32 comments

> What a stranger can offer a person in a moment of crisis is solicitude unalloyed by the past or the future of the relationship, unconditional in the true sense of the word.

This is such an interesting idea.

> Warum reisen wir? Auch dies, damit wir Menschen begegnen, die nicht meinen, daß sie uns kennen ein für allemal; damit wir noch einmal erfahren, was uns in diesem Leben möglich sei.

-- Max Frisch

> Why do we travel? Among other things to meet people who don't presume to know us once and for all, so we might experience once again what is possible for us in this life.

i don't think this is true for the majority of tourism, and it's not even true for many who live as expats elsewhere. but it is certainly true for me, both as a traveler and an expat.

This was perhaps my favorite line as well. Maybe a bit of a goofy example, but I think this is why I have enjoyed my weird discord community so much for years now. I don't really know these people, and for that reason I can be and express myself in a way that's not bound to the social identity I've already built up among my "real friends." I've told those people things I haven't told anyone else, and I've developed parts of my personality there that I sometimes bring with me back to my "real life." It's an interesting thing.

The one thing I hope AI helps with is the mess of the medical industry. At a minimum AI should be reviewing MRI's and other diagnostic test before a human does. Your entire life is in droves of overworked / hungover / burned out medical personal.

Once you have a health issue you will learn real fast how bad it has gotten.

I wouldn't call that a minimum, MRIs are a higher dimensional signal representation

all people in the world should have access the state of the art medical chat AI already, but this would "crash" the medical "industry"

but medicine should not be an industry because that creates incentives to make people have poor health

I am very pessimistic about that. How should it be trained?

How? Obviously there are two options:

1. MDs: > overworked / hungover / burned out medical personal.

2. Non-MDs. Probably (not necessary), lacking some of the above listed characteristics. Maybe with those. But not doctors.

I'm not sure which way scares me more. Probably I would prefer 1st option. If we have at least the same amount of MDs in 5 years. Or 10 years.

Because "why train and learn things if I can pay AI for making a job done?". This world would be worse than the hell.

I think the idea of “death is part of life” is more than just “it is what it is”. It means when you say you love life, you want to live, it’s is implied that you also love death, and want to die. Otherwise you don’t really love life and you don’t really want to live.

If that is what that phrase means, then I do not love life. I love living. I know nothing of death, and cannot help but dread its inevitable embrace.

All that I am now, all the things I do and could do, will change. It may be a part of life, but it is the end of living.

the idea is that life and dead are both a side of the same figurative coin

If you want children, then you must die so they can have children and those children can have children and... For if we lived forever then we could not have children, as otherwise the world's population would grow incredibly fast and quickly overwhelm the planet's carrying capacity.

That is - and I mean this quite literally and without any hyperbole - the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Living forever == not having children (for obvious reasons I mentioned below).

Life without children (and grandchildren) wouldn't be worth living.

Even if I accept the axiom of your second paragraph (which I absolutely categorically do not), that still doesn't logically follow:

* You can love something while recognizing that there have to be reasons that it should end _and still disliking that fact_. Someone who loves chocolate fudge cake does not have to be happy about the fact that they cannot eat that and only that forever. They can begrudgingly accept the necessity of sometimes-not-eating-chocolate-cake, but that doesn't imply that they _want_ to not be able to eat it all the time.

* Having children is _not_ incompatible with living forever. Our hypothetical individual could be the only infinite-lifespan person among the population, free to continue living and experiencing and forming new relationships while the planet continues with an otherwise-unaffected level of population.

* But, hey, you know what, we're _already_ living in fantasy land by hypothesizing infinite lifespan already - why _does_ it have to be "obvious" that overpopulation and resource exhaustion are necessary outcomes of an immortal unaging population? I hereby declare that the same magic mystery sci-fi bullshit that caused immortality _also_ gave us reliable interstellar transportation and settlement, and quantum expansion wibbly-wobbly pocket universes. Oh, and world hunger is solved too. Bam, done. You still gonna tell me that I have to love the idea of death?

There are reasons to accept, in our current society and with our current level of technology, that a finite lifespan is a necessary constraint to prevent further privation - but if "a begrudging acceptance of necessity" is synonymous to "love" in your vocabulary, then I feel deeply sorry for you. Just because rational sensible mature adults recognize that there are _currently_ reasons why humans _have_ to have finite lifespans for societal reasons, or just because death is currently a "fact" of life, doesn't mean we are beholden to celebrate that fact. To use the word "love" about death is _deeply_ offensive. Death is the antithesis of love.

I can only hope you mean that life in general wouldn't be worth it if those who wanted kids couldn't have them because deciding for people who choose not to have kids or are infertile that their lives "aren't worth living" would be pretty horrifying.

Of course. Anyone can choose not to have children, and many do, and it's perfectly fine. But if none of us could have children, and we had to live forever...

> if none of us could have children, and we had to live forever...

...then those of us who have at least half a brain would be overjoyed at the opportunity to enjoy one another's arts, personalities, minds, and bodies; to explore everywhere we wanted to go, including realms of thought; to create, to play, to live.

Yeah, I didn't even touch that one because it was too obvious, and tangential to the main point. But _wow_ this person is messed up.

Okay, go tell {your wife, your children, your parents, etc}, and say: “I love you, but there’s a part of of you that I just can’t accept and want to change.” Will they think you still love them? Do you think you can love them that way?

Your love to them should be a source of power to accept all of them. Your love to life should empower you to embrace death.

Well, sure, if you phrase it in that misleading way then it sounds bad. But death is not "a part of them" - quite the opposite, in fact, there is nothing that is less "of them" than "the process which makes them no longer alive, no longer them".

By your logic, I shouldn't care for my partner when they're ill, or lend a friend money if they need it, or teach a child a skill; their illness, their poverty, their ignorance, are all "part of them", and I should just embrace it rather than trying to change it.

I can play with phrasing too - go tell your loved one "I am happy that you're going to die. I welcome it, and I want it to happen. I wish you would die tomorrow". Report back. Do they feel loved?

> Do you think you can love them that way?

I genuinely think that anyone who embraces someone else's death, except in the case of relief from a painful incurable illness, does _not_ fully love them. They're protecting their own feelings - avoiding their grief - by lying to themselves that death is somehow good or noble or pure, simply because it's natural. There are _plenty_ of things that are "natural" that we all agree we're better off without. Or do you want to catch smallpox or be eaten by a tiger because it's natural?

(And don't for one second think, because death provides relief from pain, that it's good. That just means that incurable pain is _worse_. Getting stabbed in the face is worse than getting stabbed in the hand, but neither is to be welcomed)

Language doesn't work like that. Most people hearing the phrase "I love life" will correctly understand that death isn't included in the referent.

Your love to them should be a source of power to accept all of them. Your love to life should empower you to embrace death.

Possibly this is well meant, but all I get from it is that you don't appear to know enough about life to give that advice (both the content of the advice, and the method of giving it).

> As likely a cause as any was interdental manipulation: teeth cleaning, flossing, heavy brushing. Turns out, bleeding gums are a direct conduit for bacteria to the bloodstream. When I told the family medicine doctor I had gotten “really into flossing during the pandemic,” he said that might have done it. But there was no way to know. Anyway, I wasn’t his problem anymore. That’s the nature of the American medical system: disasters are passed from one MD to another, with little care or concern for how the disaster happened in the first place.

Is it safer to floss or not?

> Is it safer to floss or not?

You shouldn't be making your gums bleed. Flossing doesn't mean sawing at the gums, it means cleaning the enamel.

Yes polishing the sides of the teeth to remove hardening plaque, not jamming string to remove chunks of food (that’s just a secondary benefit).

Really? The dentist always tells me "get below the gum line, get way deep in there" and even though it disgusts me to imagine peeling back my gums, I do it. And bleed and feel like shit.

If you're under 60, have a healthy heart valve, a healthy immune system, and relatively healthy teeth (no gingivitis or periodontal disease), the risk of endocarditis from flossing is very small.

I have heard many good things about water flossers and use one. Less risk of bleeding gums, practically zero if you floss regularly imo. Not backed by any comparative studies I know of.

If you are flossing and your gums are bleeding, get to a dentist.

Bleeding gums are generally a sign of some level of periodontal disease. There are lots of things that dentists can do that help this (cleaning, root planing, anti-biotic balls (Arestin), laser ablation, etc.)

> to take antibiotics before visiting dentists, to have antibiotics on hand for any potential infections like strep throat, to avoid lifting heavy weights, to see a cardiologist every couple of years.

Interesting, my wife has a bicuspid valve and did not receive those instructions.

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