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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

> (It turns out that it's not possible to selectively repress emotions: "I've got to watch what I say about politics" subconsciously spills over into "I've got to watch what I say" which spills over into "I've got to watch what I say about anything new and controversial", and you lose the latter well before the former.)

I don't believe this. I can tune out whatever random BS my coworkers a few desks over are talking about and still be engaged in technical discussions about what we're building.

It just requires some discipline and an expectation of that discipline.

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I don’t know if I could really trust the opinions of a co-worker who believed the earth is flat. I’m pretty sure that would influence my attitude towards them in technical discussions as well.

It's because these extraordinarily stupid individuals started out with the same shitty American k-12 education as the rest of us and then went out of their way to make it worse by believing things that are patently false. Someone unable to grasp the basics isn't worth getting into a technical discussion with. There aren't many of these 'basics' that I would consider an instant DQ, although Holocaust Denial, Being Superstitious, Cannibalism, Flat Earth Belief, etc. would fit the bill.

Do you mean that you wouldn’t trust any objective claims they made without verifying the claims yourself? Shouldn’t you not do that anyway, with anyone, including people with strange cosmological beliefs but also renowned experts?

Literally nobody has time for that. Take a question like “Will this tool meet requirement x?” - you want every person on the team to verify that for themselves?

If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise. Your level of technological sophistication will max out at “can make a thatch hut and gather pineapples.”

> If you only trust facts that you verify yourself firsthand, you can’t really live on the accumulated progress of human expertise.

Arguably, the differentiating factor between humans and animals is our ability to organize on large scales. Monkeys and killer whales can coordinate behavior in groups of sometimes up to 50 or maybe 100 individuals. However, humans can coordinate behavior across millions of people. Building a modern automobile, a computer chip, or the social security system requires coordination across so many individuals, no one person can fully and deeply understand the entire system.

The ability of humans to believe information that they do not fully know is true, is probably one of the defining traits of humanity.

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