Ask HN: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

19 pointsrblion60 comments

The idea that No One Is Coming.

No one is coming to fix your problem, help you out, give you the magic "tip" you need, point you in the right direction, throw you a rope, help pay your bills, show you "the way," etc.

"But if I just see the right specialist..." "If I could just hire the right consultant..." "If I could just..."

Bullshit.

No one is coming.

You own your problems.

Whatever your problem is -- raising money, finding the "right" therapist, quitting cigarets, finding the right partner, getting the right degree (if I just had an MBA...), learning the right skills -- whatever it is, it's your problem. It's okay to ask for help. But it's your problem. No one's going to fix it on your behalf, make you better on your behalf.

No one is coming.

"Yeah, but..."

No. No one, is, coming.

I completely agree with you.

Fully agree as well.. Took me a long while to really believe it though. Yet once I did finally "get it", it provided me with a new sense of freedom.

I keep a few months of food/medical supplies in the house in case of emergency. People think I'm weird for it. And to be clear I'm not a doomsayer and believe I will not likely ever need it. But once I was looking at insurance and considered what I care about in the house. Two things I wouldn't want to lose, my photos and my family. So I got cloud backup for my photos and pulled together some suppliers that would keep the family going in case of emergency.

While I don't think I will ever need it, on a long enough time scale there is bound to be some emergency be it my generation or following ones.

I find it strange most people have contents insurance on their house, to protect tables/chairs/TV's and think I'm strange for this. The way I see it, is while I'm significantly likely more likely to lose my house contents via theft/fire etc, I don't care about these things. And there is nothing a few shopping trips wouldn't fix. However in the rare event food supplies were cut, then I really would care. Also its significantly cheaper than contents insurance actually saving money as I bulk buy food on special I already eat so a bunch of what we eat is on permanent special.

As a side comment the crazy test for people to prep seems to be ask them how the world will end. If they think they know how or when, they're crazy. Otherwise its just being prepared.

That's interesting, I never looked at it that way. What exactly do you keep around the house, if you don't mind me asking? Do you also keep any arms to protect supplies in case of catastrophe? I imagine the neighbours wouldn't mind taking some by force if food was scarce.

Ask away. I don't keep that much. I have food, water, some limited medicine and a bunch of household stuff like candles & matches. Some hygiene things like soaps and planning to add some bulk fishing equipment (lines and hooks) as I live close to a place this would be a food option. Also I'm looking at some wind up radio/torch/usb charger combos to buy. Between that and my gardening/camping equipment I think I'm reasonably placed to have a buffer against supply issues.

I haven't planned anything for defending my property. If something did happen I would likely try and round up local family/friends for safety in numbers. And hopefully try to help people vs hoard.

Here in Germany lots of houses still have bunker type cellars. Huge heavy steel sealable doors and the like from the cold war period, when Germans expected to get bombed by the Russians.

I've been looking at buying a house here, so I've seen a lot of cellars recently! I was surprised just how many have this kind of thing built in.

Yeah if you haven't planned on defense, there's a chance its all for nothing. A sad commentary on the human race, but unavoidable.

And even if he doesn't need to use them, his guns and ammo will be great trade goods after the apocalypse.

Make sure you have tons of honey I read somewhere that it never goes bad and it is an excellent source of energy.

In 7 Days To Die its the best food option possible

Good luck finding bees. Most honey is corn syrup nowadays.

Microsoft have turned multiple generations into the digital equivalent of abused spouses, constantly saying "this time is different" every time a new OS is released. They'll buy new PC's and downgrade to windows 7, or grit their teeth and use win 8.1. If you show them a shiny, modern KDE-based Linux distribution, their eyes glaze over while they proclaim "yeah, but Linux is hard." Even if you prove that it's easy as pie to use, they'll keep saying that, while they look uncomfortable from the cognitive dissonance they're experiencing.

>Even if you prove that it's easy as pie to use, they'll keep saying that, while they look uncomfortable from the cognitive dissonance they're experiencing.

I love Linux, and I think it has the potential to be the best operating system for end-users. Unfortunately, it is hard for the average person to use. Even the most user-friendly distro, Ubuntu, suffers from incompatibility issues and broken drivers after I update. It doesn't happen often, but the average person doesn't EVER want to spend hours fucking around with his / her computer just to get it working properly. The interface is user-friendly, but that won't matter if something breaks.

My dad installed Ubuntu for a friend of his - a non-computer-savvy poet - and she was quite happy with it. There's a distinction to be had between "use" and "administer" (I'm not sure how much administration of the box she did or didn't do).

I'd say windows is similar in this regard. Using Terminal Services on a Server 2008R2 computer as an unprivileged user is still going to hide all the administration tasks required.

The most user-friendly distribution is now Chakra Linux, which is KDE-based. Rolling distributions experience none of the problems you mentioned.

Further, as the kernel has everything (but AMD/NVidia drivers) built-in, I'm curious as to how an upgrade broke drivers.

> Linux is hard

This is a bit patronizing. I'm a Windows/OS X user who used Linux as a daily driver OS longer than he's used Windows or OS X. I came to (Soft Landing) Linux from Minix on Amiga, and AmigaOS before that.

It's not that Linux is hard, I feel more comfortable with it than I do in either Windows or Linux, but I'm tired of messing with things and not having available common apps I desire. And yeah, there's OSS alternatives, but I find them almost always awful (GIMP and Wireshark are exceptions, though).

It's not that I find KDE too hard, it's that it's hideous (just my opinion) and it too closely emulates the stuff I like least about Windows. And yeah, you can change its appearance but I'm tired of messing with things, or having to tweak UIs to look right because they were designed to function with the default theme.

Every year or so, I take another look at desktop Linux to see if it will meet my needs. I want to go back, but there's just not enough there for me to pull the trigger.

But God, I want to.

That morals and what's right and wrong are not universal, and up to each individual. That you can do whatever you want to do, if you feel it's right. However, when the onslaught of someone else doing something that appears right to them affects you, then, suddenly they aren't doing the right thing.

You think moral relativism and "if it feels good, do it" are unpopular minority views? Where do you live? Saudi Arabia?

On the contrary, I'm saying they are popular views accepted in public and I'm told I'm wrong. I live in India.

Are you saying "morals are not universal" or "morals are universal"?

I believe that people who don't vote can be just as patriotic as those who do.

When a person votes during a presidential election, all that is accomplished is the person is making a choice between 1 of 2 carbon copy shit-bags that have been hand-picked corporate lobbyists and other kinds of sociopaths. To make it even more ridiculous, its just a single vote out of ~40,000,000. I think it makes far more sense to vote in local elections and primaries, because, even though the effort is still futile, that's the closest you are going to get to making an actual difference.

The entire point of the thread was to discuss unpopular viewpoints. Apparently I won, because instead of intelligent discourse I just got down-voted.

I almost downvoted you for presentation, despite fundamental agreement on the content.

Honest question here. What specifically did you dislike about my original comment?

I would say local elections should be stressed not only for the reasons you say, but also because they often have a bigger effect on your life.

And as it happens, in some local elections your vote matters a lot: http://www.co.washington.ar.us/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?doc...

Sarcasm in any form is harmful to discourse and ruins communities.

I bristle whenever I see someone responding to a popular opinion on Reddit with a sarcastic "But... but...!" anti-comment.

Ayn Rand was a brilliant thinker that most people are incapable of understanding today. Here are the essentials of Western thought;

Plato => Kant (Primacy of Consciousness)

Aristotle => Rand (Primacy of Existence)

Kant took Plato's work and removed all Aristotelian influence. Rand took Aristotle's work and remove any Platonic influences. The future of Western Civilization depends on rejecting the Platonic line of thought (which is dominant today) for the Aristotelian line of thought.

Let me guess: are you a young, idealistic intellectual? What position does fitness of the community occupy in that world view?

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

QED

That's not an answer.

All you've shown is that people disagree with you. The question asks about truth.

Who's truth? Your interpretation of the question makes no sense.

The question is about truths, not about opinions. Just because you have an oddball notion that most people disagree with, doesn't mean you're the keeper of secret wisdom.

LOL

I think this gets at a question of the purpose of this thread. Is it to catalogue rare-but-strongly-held opinions or to try and educate everyone about truths we're missing?

If the former, demanding a vigorous defense is clearly counterproductive. Anything anyone posts would find more people leaping to object than affirm, unless it happens to be a point this crowd happens to hold that particular contrarian viewpoint.

If the latter, the usefulness of such challenge likely depends on how well other readers are expected to do at assessing veracity themselves.

Personally, I find it valuable to read clear statements of positions I disagree with, and would weakly rather this thread promote such - there are plenty of threads that are better places to argue the meat of things.

I'm a generally disagreeable person, so I feel like this could be a long list. Here are my top five:

1) Democracy != voting 2) History is a science, with verifiable and repeatable results 3) Pacifist direct action (a la Ghandi or MLK Jr.) fails 4) History books that lack a 'methods' section shouldn't be taken seriously 5) Journalists are not qualified to report on the topics about which they are reporting

Democracy = voting if you take away propaganda, campaign funding, educate voters and design a fraud-proof voting system -- like maybe a 'blockchain' voting software?

I would amend this to say "if voters educate themselves". If you (I guess meaning the government?) "educate" voters, the results are neither good for education nor good for government.

I don't think it is actually an equality, even there.

I agree with you here on democracy. On many issues the population neither has the knowledge nor time to make an informed decision. The vote would naturally be distributed except margin groups who block vote have the power to tip it one way or another. Thus power and favors -> anti-democracy.

Can you elaborate more on what you mean by 'methods', and list any history books which, by your measure, should be taken seriously?

Common cold does not come from exposure to cold weather but from bacteria/viruses. That humans are immune to 99,99% germs out there and that you should not be so much afraid of infections. And that carbohydrates in your diet don't and cannot change into fat. Fat is fat, sugar is sugar, period.

Psychiatric drugs are not effective in treating mental illness---at least not more effective than placebo.

I totally agree; many drugs are a racket these days, made only for profiteering "sick care", and the government is totally on board with it.

Two examples I can personally testify to: treating people who don't yet know their life's purpose with mental drugs / electroshock, and treating people who are carbohydrate intolerant with.. more carbs.

> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

That psychology isn't a science, although public perceptions are slowly catching up:

http://arachnoid.com/science_of_mind

Excellent one. I'd add economics, sociology and, although I am just 80% sure - medicine.

There is a book out there called something like "Curing factors in psychoanalysis" which ends with a sentence: "Well, we know that talking to a person certainly has some impact, but what impact, how and why, we're not sure at all."

That overpopulation isn't binary, it's qualitative, and having more than two kids/family is reducing the well being of the rest of us.

Is it still controversial that all 3 NYC skyscrapers were CD's? I remember when someone first mentioned it to me... I chewed him out.

This may be too late for you to see my reply, but what? First of all, there are far more than 3 skyscrapers in NYC. Also, what does CD stand for here? Obviously, I think I'm missing a lot here.

My guess, at substantial risk of being wrong:

CD stands for "controlled demolition", and "all 3 NYC skyscrapers" are World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7.

And my understanding is that it is still controversial, and still the minority opinion, although I'm not sure what the thresholds are for "very few".

- Facebook is an excellent product and has never violated anyone's privacy.

- Democracy is as arbitrary as monarchy.

FIFA is better than the alternatives.

What are the alternatives?

Exactly.

Pro Evo

That web is a legacy platform that hinders innovation.

The truth that security is a very expensive illusion.

Control is an illusion.

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