Comment by lolcraft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolcraft | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, yeah, cool stuff, but those aren't ideas. Those are technologies. Evolution theory, universal democracy, organized labour, atheism, those were massive ideas. The Internet was a massive technology. Well, to be fair, that was a bad example. You will tell me that the Internet was a great technology that enabled great ideas, and I will agree with you [1]. But tell me, do you believe any of these ideas here could do that? I doubt it.

Real ideas that could change the world? I would put Big Data there, or my understanding of what Big Data could be: instead of focusing on thinking the best, fanciest hypothesis you can, focus on getting a lot of the best data you can find. Pure thinking from principia won't bring understanding to the human genome, but smart data crunching might.

Do you people have any thoughts on more ideas that could be like that? I'm actually interested.

[1] Technology provide the material/economic substrate from which philosophies and understanding comes. Automation, division of labour and credit brought capitalism, that brought bourgeois values: democracy, meritocracy, disdain for aristocracy, disdain for the disdain of "usury"... So it's given that technological progress becomes more than just "technological".

The idea that will likely change the world the most in the next major time span, is through improved neuroscience and imaging, the understanding that we do not have "free will" as we currently perceive it.

We can currently, with fMRI tech, already see a decision being made before the agent is conscious of the decision (though we can't determine what that decision is). As this technology develops, our ideas of free will, consciousness, responsibility, and ultimately justice will shift.

EDIT: not just the knowledge of this, but the general acceptance of it.

one idea that could change the world: stop causalism. let independent facts be independent. replace "because" for "at the same time".

that would kill almost all journalism, which is never tired of telling us the why, when there is no why.

that would narrow a lot most social science researches.

we, humans, are still not adults, we need reasons, we need good stories, those that make sense. but the probable truth is that there are no reasons.

could be called correlationism.

i believe (without proof) that this is too deeply embedded in basic human psychology ever to change.

Pure thinking from principia won't bring understanding to the human genome, but smart data crunching might.

Says who? I don't know if Newton would've come up with classical mechanics if you simply gave him a ton of vectors.

I'm not so sure nature is self evident once you get enough data. Maybe we need more thinking and less data harvesting. We have google for example, almost all human knowledge just seconds away, and we still don't have a clue on what's conscience and what makes us humans.

The difference is complexity. There is no F = M * A waiting to be discovered based on human DNA. There may still be plenty of usefull things but there complex useful things with exceptions not simple universal laws.

How do we know that? Sometimes all it takes is an insight to change your perspective and suddenly insurmountably complex problems are within reach.

I kind of agree with you .. skyscrapers out of diamonds !? give us a break here :)

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