Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I think the author fixates too much on this one construction of the idea of deathbed regrets and misses that this is just a single modern incarnation of the positively ancient and cross-cultural idea that you should plan your life around the knowledge that you will die.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. [1]

And the Tao Te Ching: The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. [2]

A relevant Buddhist concept is called Maranasati [3].

And in the Quran: And donate from what We have provided for you before death comes to one of you, and you cry, “My Lord! If only You delayed me for a short while, I would give in charity and be one of the righteous.” But Allah never delays a soul when its appointed time comes. [4]

And the Bible: The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘... I will store my surplus grain. ... “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ [5]

There's something fundamentally human about contemplating one's own impending death and making changes to one's life accordingly, and nitpicking the exact wording of a single manifestation of that human impulse misses the forest for the trees.

[1] Meditations 2.11 https://vreeman.com/meditations/#book2

[2] 50 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%E1%B9%87asati

[4] https://quran.com/en/al-munafiqun/10-11

[5] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A16-21...

From the author’s summary:

“small things like short commute times make you happier. ... Going to work most days and dropping a few friends you don’t have time for may actually be sensible right now if you are in the middle of your career, doing something meaningful.”

You’re correct that the author is not representing the other side of the argument sufficiently, but this is because the author is focused on rationalizing why it’s ok for people to overwork, and then suggesting a few “tips” to make it easier.

Personally, I overwork because I’m slow, mistake prone, insufficiently skilled, overly-idealistic, self-sabotaging, and only know how to say yes, while I live for a business that will only try so hard to work with a universal source of randomness before it must be let go, leaving it and its dependencies to the wolves, as it comforts itself that it was the right thing to do.

I often think of myself like one of the workers that built the pyramids, perhaps dropping stones and being whipped. I believe this isn’t the way, but this is where I am now.

> Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”

> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

The answer is presumably "some guys who found the barns." I'm not seeing the issue here. Except I suppose he doesn't even have time to build the barns. So the lesson is, never build anything? Just party like Prince, because we could all die any day?

But mortality makes people crazy, it's true. Planning around your expected death is desperate and twisted planning. You left out such ideas as "I don't care, I'll be dead by then", and "YOLO".

I think it's a little more like... Feed your neighbours, understanding the blessing of grain came only from God, and seeking to share and extend that blessing, rather than hoarding it away for self-preservation.

That may be what it means but I don't believe that's what it says?

> But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

My only interpretation of that text is "you have planned for the future and understood delayed gratification, you fool!".

This is all about context though, the context is “a wealthy man”. This is a parable speaking against greed.

There’s a difference between having enough for yourself, which includes a healthy buffer, and excess beyond what you can ever need.

There are many biblical teachings about investing and looking after your future, this is a warning against excess.

When reading the Bible you should first put it through chat gpt to summarize and fix the distracting artifacts of translation. I believe the idea is that the grain would be sequestered in a place hidden from knowledge and would spoil before anyone could get use of it.

As in the barn being secret somehow? I doubt that's the intent of the story.

The Bible is very esoteric and strange but I promise you I am interpreting it correctly.

The Bible is notoriously difficult to interpret, and depends on massive amounts of ancient cultural context. Trusting that to ChatGPT or even asserting that you absolutely have found the one correct interpretation is wild (even as someone who does not believe the Bible is special beyond its cultural influence).

I agree. That was me being subversively sarcastic for my own pleasure. Please accept my apology for the solipsism.

Lol your comment is hilarious, and I'm a little impressed at how dense I was being

this is the perfect response to this post and here we see the big difference between the pure engineering /logic mindset vs. the liberal arts mindset. When I see these posts on hacker news that are all about some deep philosophical issue, but the writer seems to be approaching the issue as though it were a Google interview question to be solved in isolation of anyone else's experience or knowledge, it emphasizes what a profound blind spot exists throughout much of the tech community, and how the ever more apparent disdain for liberal arts that exists in tech is truly pernicious. Reading up on what humans around the world, across history, across disciplines, and even shudder across cultural backgrounds and gender, have to say on questions that are not actually very novel is essential if you're actually going to open up your text editor and write a blog post about it.

I think this blind spot exists because the pure engineering/logic mindset is such a massive superpower in so many elements of life, people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.

One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work

> Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work.

It does, there just needs to be a proper model of how humans work to back it up. The usual mistake is using logic to prove why a person is right instead of to work out why the relationship is going wrong.

People who don't use logic to guide their interpersonal interactions cap out in some fairly shallow waters. They are more easily suckered by emotions primed to respond to looks and the present instead of properly aligning the relationship for the long haul. The easiest path to push back against those inbuilt biases is logic - there needs to be some set of principles beyond emotions to use as a guide.

Good luck with that :)

There's also the added issue that binary logic (what most people use when they say "logic") is only slightly less constrained than unary logic and is insufficient for modeling reality. Without uncertainty logic, the wisdom available is highly limited. This allows for every emotional story to be engaged and worked through without declaring it immediately and absolutely false, allowing emotions to inform while not letting them drive the decision-making process.

Love this thread.

“Two seemingly contradictory things can both be true”

“Your feelings and fantasies matter, but are not ‘real’”

Yes, I wonder if the two commentors in the thread above you appreciate the irony of their posts.

All people in the relationship have to be willing to use logic (and understand logic) for it to ever work when dealing with the relationship. That’s rarely the case.

Even when it is the case you can logically come to a resolution but if you don't emotional feel it, the problem/conflict is not solved and will come up again. In my experience this manifests in non obvious ways that are far removed from the original problem

Logic is a technique for detecting inconsistent beliefs. Only one person using it is still helpful, one side being logically alert in a disagreement is going to open up more paths toward controlled deescalation and resolution than two people both fighting while being logically inconsistent.

And that is where nerds do massive missteps including horribly ridiculous jumps in the logic. Because nerds and technical people are emotions driven as anyone else. They react to own feelings of anger, fear, frustration etc.

But, since they think emotions dont matter and cant be talked about, they rationalize all above into arguments that sound logical to them and no one else.

> people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.

Sadly, lack of education and worldly experience will do that

> One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work

This is awfully glib for something that rings so wrong for me - logic not useful in emotional conflict?? Emotional conflict itself stems from emotion! How could taking a step back and trying to look at things logically not be productive?

In my experience, one of the only things that can safely navigate conflict, whether emotional or otherwise, is logic - your challenge is to actually be disciplined enough to apply it in stressful situations - and/or to be willing to leave the matter unsettled until you’ve had time to cool down and can afford the luxury of looking at things more practically.

I suspect we’re using the same words to mean different things because I can’t imagine not being able to logic your way out of emotional conflict, I can’t imagine any other route being viable apart from logic - I think the root cause of emotional conflict is getting overwhelmed by feelings and neglecting to think.

Using logic with people who think logic fails laughably short anytime they get emotional does indeed not work.

These people view everything through the lens of power - they are amusingly simple creatures who only use logic to acquire power or for an occasional hoot.

When people like that get into positions of power over others - disaster follows.

I think the reasonable explanation is that logic works great for simple systems, but once there are more than, say, seven variables involved, nobody can properly reason in real-time anymore. Personal relations, politics, raising a child, finding out what to do with life, selecting a web framework, all involve millions of variables.

Even if some abstract concepts (love, power, friendship) allow a scientifically minded person to consider complex systems as simpler ones, the underlying complexity is still there, and is relevant. Human ecosystems do not adhere to Maxwell's laws.

It's really only on HN that I find that people reject the liberal arts so ardently.

Liberal arts was a fairly decent chunk of my engineering courses, and maybe I was annoyed while in school since I was trying to not flunk out, but after some time I came to appreciate them as some of the best education I've ever had.

Old-School scientists were called natural philosophers for a reason.

Liberal Arts is simply a subset of engineering, specifically information theory. Shakespeare, Monet, Banksy, etc. are all humans who produced algorithms expressed with primitive technology. But now we have enough computing power to essentially run an emulation layer on them. And shocker, in a world with ASI it's not unthinkable computers will produce high quality works of Shakespeare in the coming years.

When that happens this field is going to have an existential problem on its hands.

I'm not saying Liberal Arts will go extinct, but if they cannot keep up with the technology they will fall behind. Realistically at some point the field will be rolled under information theory as computers prove that most of it can be broken down into numbers, algorithms, etc.

ah yes, bonkers subsumed everything he didn't understand and called it macaroni.

hubris is more than just a word, evidently. here's a word for you to learn, friend: techne. it's Greek for "hand".

clothed talking apes shouldn't presume to reduce the world to their own limited understanding of it.

it's like thinking you are actually squeezing the sunset when you pinch it in a photo.

The liberal arts provide empathy and guideposts for those dealing with the kind of people HN attracts.

The opposite of nitpickingly missing the point is making grand generalizations and extrapolations.

No the What About Your Deathbed is annoying and has holes in it. You shouldn’t necessarily plan according to what your deathbed-self thinks.

Then you say no, you’re missing the point. It’s about having a finite life. For some reason I am perfectly capable of appreciating wisdom about life being finite when it is delivered in better ways. That is: the ways that I have the capacity to recognize as such.

If this Deathbed narrative is really about having a finite life then it should perhaps be better formulated. Wisdom is also about communication.

(Someone else has already mentioned memento mori... can it get more evocative than an emperor in a parade being reminded by a slave repeatedly that he is mortal like everyone else? The Deathbed formulation is far worse.)

I appreciate wisdom. At worst I can be accused of missing the forest for the trees sometime.

Liberal arts mindset has been that Marcus Aurelius is a fascist. Stoicism is right-coded and tech-coded and has been for the last decade. I think you're right in terms of what liberal arts SHOULD be, but it's been diverted badly from that path.

I'm not sure what your comment is trying to convey. From my experience Meditations is basic and doesn't offer any substance. Popular Stoicism has a lot of legitimate criticism and is very often misused and glamorized in right-wing spaces. So the label "right-coded" seems appropriate.

All in all your comment caused some confusion. I know a handful of "extreme" left-wing, liberal arts people who are enamoured by "Fanged Noumena" whose author is the infamous nrx, 'hyper-racist' father of accelerationism Nick Land. So the politics don't seem to be the problem.

My gut instinct was that you have fallen for the meme/propaganda, as I have seen similar talking points being repeated on other sites. Maybe you can give me a more detailed explanations of what you're trying to get at.

see also memento mori [0]

Edit: spelling correction!

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

Memento - momento would be something like the moment of death ;)

Ha thanks, good catch!

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