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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

>That's long gone of course, but we had similar heuristics.

To quote someone about this:

>>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.

A book looking legit, a paper being peer reviewed, an expert saying something, none of those things were _ever_ good heuristics. It's just that it was the done thing. Now we have to face the fact that our heuristics are obviously broken and we have to start thinking about every topic.

To quote someone else about this:

>>Most people would rather die than think.

Which explains neatly the politics of the last 10 years.

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> To quote someone about this: >>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life.

So, same as it ever was?

Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That’s what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes—it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again—the same old round. The wind blows south, the wind blows north. Around and around and around it blows, blowing this way, then that—the whirling, erratic wind. All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up. The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do it again. Everything’s boring, utterly boring— no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing. Does someone call out, “Hey, this is new”? Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story. Nobody remembers what happened yesterday. And the things that will happen tomorrow? Nobody’ll remember them either. Don’t count on being remembered.

c. 450BC

One is a complaint that everything is constantly changing, the other that nothing ever changes. I don't think you could misunderstand what either is trying to say harder if you tried.

"everything is constantly changing!" is the thing that never changes.

You sound like a poorly trained gpt2 model.

Culd be my KJV upbringing talking, but personally I think there's an informative quality to calling it "vanity" over smoke.

And there's more reasons not to simply compare the modern challenges of image and media with the ancient grappling with impermanence. Tech may only truly change the human condition rarely, but it frequently magnifies some aspect of it, sometimes so much that the quantitative change becomes a qualitative one.

And in this case, what we're talking about isn't just impermanence and mortality and meaning as the preacher/quester is. We'd be lucky if it's business as usual for old planet earth, but we've managed to magnify our ability to impact our environment with tech to the point where winds, rivers, seas, and other things may well change drastically. And as for "smoke", it's one thing if we're dust in the wind, but when we're dust we can trust, that enables continuity and cooperation. There's always been reasons for distrust, but with media scale, the liabilities are magnified, and now we've automated some of them.

The realities of human nature that are the seeds of the human condition are old. But some of the technical and social machinery we have made to magnify things is new, and we can and will see new problems.

'הבל (hevel)' has the primary sense of vapor, or mist -- a transient thing, not a meaningless or purposeless one.

Heuristics don't have to be perfect to be useful so long as they improve the efficacy of our attentions. Once that breaks down society must follow because thinking about every topic is intractable.

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