Comment by fellowniusmonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fellowniusmonk | Hacker News Reader

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The entire intro is so poor I just stopped reading. If the point of the article is valid and well researched they should just remove the entire intro it's so off putting. If they have created a bad intro just for the sake of self selecting credulous individuals (a common tactic for grifters and the incomprehensible) than they are killing it.

Yeah, the inverted quotes look prima facie worse or just obviously false to me.

And often yes, it is due to what you have pointed out.

I mean the first inversion sounds like the most unhappy thing a person can do:

>>>Their Inversion: Learn not to let go. That is the key to happiness.

Learn not to let go? Ok, thanks infinite compounding intrusive rumination. Also people are loss averse by nature so very few people will have to "learn" to "not let go".

Then there is this one, where the inverted statement is so awful the had to fudge and qualify the whole thing.

>>> Quote: Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

>>> Their Version: Happiness sometimes is being pained in body and troubled in mind.

>>> The real Inversion: Happiness is being pained in body or troubled in mind.

Thanks for this feedback! The intro was meant to take some weight off the article, which sounded maybe a bit too serious, rather than an intriguing read. But point taken. The idea behind inversions was to show that the original quote makes sense if you try to understand what it might mean, but if you do the same exercise with a very opposite meaning, you can still try to "understand" what the author had in mind and contemplate some made-up wisdom. I.e. that the quotes don't carry that much information and that a lot our cultural context of what we take for granted is a bit hand-wavy and leaving lots to guess. But point taken, will try to avoid such games, or make the intention clearer in the future.

With the word "learn", the meaning I get is not really "to attain such ability" (which is natural), but "to get accustomed to doing". And "to let go" or "not to let go" may be also be understood as "give up" vs "don't give up", as opposed to the suggested rumination of the past.

The original quotes are deeply profound. They point to something that is beyond understanding. I also found the attempt to invert them to be off-putting.

  "Do not belabor wisdom to examine it;"

  - Niutou Farong

[0]: https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/song-of-the-mind-xin-ming/

> infinite compounding intrusive rumination

pasted this into ddg. now i know my mental illness. are you fucking kidding. (thank you)

I think the verb “learn” implies actions devoid of thought after learned.

Learning to suffer means that it is effortless, automatic, unconscious, same as one would learn to play a piano piece or drive a car or walking. At some point the activity requires little if any conscious thought.

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