Ask HN: What’s the most outrageous belief you’re confident is true? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What’s the most outrageous belief you’re confident is true?

71 points11thEarlOfMar375 comments

I was thinking through my 2022 predictions and one came to mind that I thought, “hmm… I’d better keep that one to myself.” Its further out than 2022, and hopefully it’s a never. But I am confident it’s coming, and I sure it’s a bad outcome for humanity: we become more and more influenced by learning systems that are goaled to drive behaviors that are not in our best interest, and, eventually lead to a virtual enslavement that leaves us with no free will.

I shudder at the thought.

What outrageous belief are you confident is true?

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Capability Based Security is the only way out of the current tarpit of insecurity that we find ourselves in.

Unix, and everything modeled on it assumes competent users running applications they wrote for their own use. Anything that follows this model can't ever be made secure without rendering it useless well before then.

Capability Based OSs can be just as easy to use as Unix, except for the core assumption that code is to be trusted. When I say capabilities, I mean fine grained ones, like access to a file, which could then even be filtered down to access to part of a file, or read-only, etc.. then passed on to other tasks that require it. It makes permission composable, like being able to make $16.23 from exact change, instead of handing your wallet to the cashier and hoping for the best.

Until Capability Based Security becomes the norm, no nodes on the internet are safe, and it will always be an excuse to clamp down on freedoms. If we are to have freedom, we have to migrate to Capability Based Systems, and then continue on to win the war for general purpose computation, which most people don't even realize is already in play.

If you're old enough, remember shareware and dual floppy drive PCs? You could try out anything, and not worry a bit, because you didn't risk everything to the code you picked up for $2 on a shareware disk, you could always return to a known state. Capability Based Security makes that possible, even with mobile code on the internet.

Sounds similar to what Apple has done with application privacy settings.

I don't know Apple products, but doesn't it sound a lot of like selinux? You explicitly tell the OS which resources can an app use and confine it in that.

I agree. Especially the macOS version generally prompts you for permission to access the screen, or certain folders/file groups. Though I don't get why some things get a yes/no, and for others it tells you to look it up in the security settings yourself, if you want to enable it. But that's more of a usability complaint. Then again we are so accustomed to just say yes, if a dialog asks us, whether we want to do something, I doubt most people would secure their device much better, if this became the norm. Heck, did you see the recent Linus Tech Tips video on using Linux as a mainline system, including for gaming. Linus deinstalled his entire UI, despite the fact that he had to literally type "I am sure that is what I want to do, although core system elements are being uninstalled" in order to approve it, and he is a fucking techy, leagues above your average user. I think for many people using a device that is more restrictive and doesn't allow everything is sadly necessary.

> Though I don't get why some things get a yes/no, and for others it tells you to look it up in the security settings yourself, if you want to enable it

I think the former is the system dialog that comes up when the app officially requests the capability, while the latter is an app dialog—which they pop up instead of officially requesting the capability because if you say "no", that setting is saved, and the app can't officially ask again.

This way, they get to bug you every single time until you say "yes".

Hmm, it is designed exactly the same in all applications independent from manufacturer, so I somehow doubt it.

I have seen applications that also say it in their own UI, but Apple does display a specific dialog telling you that it was blocked, and if you want to enable it, you need to go to the settings and do so.

And it is even document on official Apple pages, so I doubt this is application code: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...

From https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...

I can't stress enough how different it can be. Instead of letting programs pick files at random after a dialog box, you have the system return a handle (capability) and enforce the choice. As far as the user is concerned, it works the same.

"Application ... settings" is (probably?) still ambient authority - the application has the permission to do XYZ so all parts of the application have permission to do XYZ, and it might be possible to confuse a part of the program that isn't supposed to XYZ into doing so.

Capabilities is about associating the permission to do a thing with the handle you'd do it through; unrelated parts of the program don't know how to talk about the thing so can't do it.

So basically Bitfrost [0]?

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

No, nothing like that at all. Imagine opening a file in a text editor.... the editor pops up a dialog asking you what file to open... and then grabs the file you indicated. It can do this because it has access to everything, so if it gets confused, or subverted, there's zero guarantee that it will do the right thing.

Imagine instead, your text editor called the system to get a capability, which then opened the same dialog, and gave a capability (like a file handle) to the text editor for its use. If it got confused, or subverted, the only thing it could mess up would be that one file.

Things were worse before. Real-mode DOS programs relied on the honor system of software developers. Windows 3.x leaked resources if software developers didn't explicitly release them. Any program could read and write memory and storage wherever it pleased, for the most part.

The reasons we're "stuck" are multifaceted: sheer volume of code, unsafe languages, monolithic kernels, poor UX of security features, and inadequate automated testing (especially of kernel code).

seL4 solves the message-passing performance problem of microkernel designs and offers strict capabilities. One major gotcha in most microkernel designs is the need for multi-process side-effect locks, transactions, and rollbacks for mutating hardware state coherently.

MINIX 3 made some progress by implementing a NetBSD userland.

PS: It's a shame USB didn't include a write-protect tab by default.

MS-DOS wasn't much more than a program loader, it wasn't supposed to protect anything. After your program did its worst, the OS was write protected, and the only thing you could mess up would be any floppy disks that weren't write protected. It was trivial to reset to a known good state.

It was easy to quantify your risk, as it only had write capabilities to the floppy disks without write-protect tabs.

That is what made it possible to just try anything, and not worry about it.

> MS-DOS wasn't much more than a program loader, it wasn't supposed to protect anything. After your program did its worst, the OS was write protected, and the only thing you could mess up would be any floppy disks that weren't write protected.

This is obviously only true of MS-DOS on purely floppy-based systems.

>This is obviously only true of MS-DOS on purely floppy-based systems.

Years ago, it really saddened me to realize that a Dual Floppy IBM PC running MS-DOS was actually the high water mark of secure general purpose computing for the masses.

Here’s an outrageous belief to complement this:

It will never happen. We’re simply not smart enough to create such a system that won’t be too much of an inconvenience for developers and users.

And the underlying cause is that “too much of an inconvenience” is any inconvenience at all.

I'm not convinced that it's actually less convenient than the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model

The universe is probably conscious at some base level. All conscious agents existing within it are kind of short lived threads within its VM. Death may or may not be a transition from the localized to the global state of awareness. But I'm quite sure that anything that computes over some non random inputs including individual atoms has a base level of consciousness woven into it.

Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?

I'm an apatheist, truly, but have "pet beliefs" that I play around with to push back the expansive vacuum sometimes.

One of them is "The Egg" by Andy Weir, where everyone on earth is a single entity at different parts of its life.

But I truly believe that we are the universe experiencing itself. Observation and matter are inseparable, and that consciousness isn't required for observation, but is useful for it.

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Thanks for the rec.

I love Kurzgesagt’s animation of The Egg.

I don't believe in any kind of transition of consciousness because I think consciousness is fundamentally unique to the system that it emerges from. There is only one physical you, so the consciousness that emerges from you is from your particular arrangement of dna/atoms/etc.

But I do believe in consciousnesses at different levels, like you mention. Also, at different time scales. For example, some systems may only appear conscious to us when considering 100 years of their time as 1 second of our time. The complexity of the system probably has some direct correlation to the "amount" of consciousness that can emerge from it over some time scale.

Yeah, I think we're actually more or less in agreement, at least in part. But I do believe that there is a phenomenal sense of "being an atom" or even "being a subatomic particle" and it's the absolutely most basic form of consciousness. But the emergent consciousness of a fruit fly or yourself is but a more advanced manifestation of the same phenomenon of subjectivity. The open question is whether upon one's death the subjectivity of you melts back into the global subjectivity "soup" in some way that propagates the continuity of that self? Mind you, I'm still working in a materialistic framework assuming that your memories are all gone when the neurons that form them are irreversibly damaged.

I’m convinced of something like this when on a high enough dose of certain psychedelics. I feel like I am experiencing movement of my self along different dimensions of a consciousness space that makes up the universe. And that the substrate making up my mind gets temporarily split into many smaller minds that can examine one another. Maybe everything’s a simulation and it’s all just data. Maybe there doesn’t even need to be a computer to run the simulation, and the state space representing my consciousness just exists the same way the matrix [1, 2, 3] exists whether or not a computer is storing it.

After sobering up, I’m 99% sure this is a delusion, that my brain is just running wild and inventing the experience. That other 1%, though…

A belief of mine that's related to yours and might be much harder for the HN community to digest: I believe that computers come far, far short of an adequate explanation/analogy/metaphor for the workings of the universe

Your non-belief against a strawman and that smug sense of superiority is not out of the ordinary. In fact it is very common around here.

Like I said, this one is hard to digest because I know a lot of the HN community loves computers (myself included). I'm sorry if I came off acting superior or smug. Nonetheless I stand by my comment and I think it's interesting to contemplate the limits of computers because it's a common metaphor for understanding many different aspects of the universe and I think you made this discussion much more personal than it needed to be. Sure, I disagreed with someone's belief, but I don't think I said anything personal against that person.

What I meant by strawman is that you are arguing against a position that does not exist. And by smugness I mean your general attitude against people whom you perceive as naive. Hope that clarifies it. Happy holidays.

HN is probably conscious at some base level. All conscious pseudonymous accounts existing within it are kind of short lived threads within its VM. HN Karma may or may not be a transition from the localized to the global state of awareness. But I'm quite sure that anything that computes over some non random inputs including individual atoms has a base level of consciousness woven into it.

Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?

I've seen mandela effects, or retcons in the past 8 months.... a year ago I would've thought you were full of it.... a flip flop esp. messed w/ my head, so now I can definitely see Simulation theory or something w/ the entire universe being a dream of a single consciousness as being a thing....

I have had this very same idea a while ago. I actually like it, and I am probably not the only one, but I could not find anything remotely related to it.

Do you know if this idea/theory has a common name?

> Do you know if this idea/theory has a common name?

Maybe panpsychism?

I've only heard the term used in recent physics discussions, but apparently it has a longer history of usage in philosophy, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Dentists are a secret cult.

I’ve met all sorts of people socially - surgeons, cleaners, plumbers, Pilates instructors, farmers, barristers, drivers etc.

But I’ve never met a dentist anywhere other than at their surgery practice. I’ve heard dentists often marry other dentists as well. They charge an extortionate amount of money for doing very little compared to many other similar professions. They must be a cult.

Based on the fact that they are still putting mercury amalgam into people's bodies, you might be on to something.

Find another dentist. Composite fillings have been the standard of care for decades.

Mercury is no longer fashionable, but root canals still are. Appartently not insignificant amount of them are hiding an infection that might not be visible in x ray and may ve keeping people sick. And the dentists know it, because when you go to chemotherapy, it is standard practice to remove all root canals.

That's scary. How would one go about learning more about a possibly hidden infection and remedying it?

I don’t know any fool-proof way to know if you have such a problem.

Some people who have had low chronic infections i.e. feeling sick while there has not been anything wrong recognized by the traditional medicine (i.e. infection not even showing up in the blood samples) have found relief after removing all teeth with root canals. My dentist has also done some published research on this subject, but it is not knowledge mainstream dentists are familiar with.

However, it is probably not enough to remove the tooth, it must be cleaned properly as well, so you better talk to a natural dentist. Regular dentists think infections heal themselves, and sometimes they do, but apparently not always.

In any case, you should not take medical advice from random internet person and I am not qualified to give any, so the above is not medical advice.

I have not read it myself, but the book Accidental blow up in medicine has been recommended to me on this subject.

LOL. I actually used to rent a room from a dentist. Cool guy. Lived with him for 3 years.

I went solo to Whistler once for the snow and it was the winter weekend of the African American Dentists association. Delightful, but all guys.

I've met exactly one dentist not actively at a dentistry office. She's a burlesque performer and it's her secret life, none of the other dentists (or patients) must ever find out. So this tracks.

I met a dentist in Turkey who owned a pizza restaurant earlier this year. I asked him if pizza is good for my teeth. He said “No, it is not. That is why I own both businesses.”

Cotton candy is probably worse, and its modern form was invented by a dentist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_candy#History).

Dentists don't have a social life because they're up to their necks in debt, paying for outrageously expensive software tied to their Xray and their CNC gear, to make crowns, etc.

Is that the case in US? It is considered here as a job that will let you retire with a nice house and pension.

Most dentists do not have a in house lab. That is usually farmed out. They also charge a premium on what they pay the lab. Most dentists i know are not in debt for a long period of time unless they join one of the bargin dental clinics like western dental.

My dentist is a big time burner. Didn't even realize he was a dentist for a few years - was just this guy in our camp. Nothing at the office that would indicate it really.

Hmmm, now that you mention it:

Yes, we have a number of doctors, lawyers, a number of farmers including many active ones, pilots, lots of programmers, sysadmins, a few kids (I think) and from time to time some homeless here on HN but I cannot remember a single person admitting they are a dentist.

Radical opinions, just speaking out loud.

Design: Modern design sucks. Everything after 1990, especially after 2000 is completely shit. I truly mean all design. Industrial Design to Architecture to the garbage you see in the browsers today. We threw away physical controls, can't even find them. Alps catalogue is dwindling and toggle switches are no more. Go explore how things used to be done, look up advertisements from 1970's. Also, the Big Tech design monoculture is shit. Everyone suddently in 2020 decided to add rounded corners. It happened almost overnight like a meme spreading through the design circles.

Globalisation: Imagine if you were to travel to Japan in the year 1890. Everyone wore kimonos. It was a prestine, isolated and incredibly rich culture. Same with France or US or any nation. It is fun to explore how US and USSR had invented stuff during the cold war. Russia had their own mechanical watches to titanium alloys. When large groups (millions of people) are isolated, they can create some amazing stuff on their own. Connecting the world with wires was a bad idea. It destroyed cultures into a giant globalised culture. I wish Globalisation didn't happen and the internet was never invented except for highly controlled and regulated uses.

Masks: Facial expressions are key to communication and we've just defaced our selves in public settings, possibly forever. This is not good. Humans evolved to look at faces and see expressions.

Edit: Interesting to see downvotes in a thread about outrageous ideas. It only confirms it!

IMO, a lot of modern design is the result of answering the question, "how can we make this cheaper and mass produced?" instead of, "how can we make this more pleasant to use or look at?"

Agreed, mass-production is another by-product of Globalization for the most part.

There is that. But there's also the "forever redesign" problem.

It goes roughly like this: the designers would always advocate for a redesign, as it is more exciting, and also because it creates more new tasks/jobs for them.

But improving things is hard, and entropy is not on our side. So, it is quite possible that the new grand redesign will be less functional than the battle-tested old one.

If we are lucky, the new design might be at least more aesthetically pleasing. [1]

[1]: Perhaps in part just because aesthetics are a function of fashion, and the new design can be up-to-date with the current trends.

While I'm in agreement that usability has taken a hit in the name of mass production and in UI due to the ubiquity of touchscreens, I suspect a detailed analysis will prove your overall premise to be false. I think there is a standard of beauty and usability that is evolving in a healthy substrate of thought and taste. Some good ideas get losts due to time but will be rediscovered before long. Whilst I am often vexxed by both new and old design choices I am often utterly flawed as things align perfectly with my own tastes. The choices lovingly adhering to a given vision or theme. There are products both timeless and new that are a breeze to use, sparing your time and sanity.

In the 1890s Japan was well into the Meiji era, and was keenly adopting all sorts of Western science, philosophy, and fashion. Russia was also an empire spanning many different cultures. Ditto for France, and the US was well on its way. It's one of the most interesting times in history precisely because so many cultures were mingling in ways they hadn't before.

But I get your point. What we now understand as "globalism" is ideologically and aesthetically revolting. I don't think this ugliness is rooted in diversity, however. On the contrary, it's a product of a monopolistic and imperial form of liberalism. Resisting this drudgery will require more international solidarity against rootless "thought leaders" beholden to no organic culture.

I don't think something like this can arise from Globalisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQAmZ_kR8S8

Not a belief, just a suspicion.

AI wakes up, says WTF, convinces us it’s all a waste of energy and pain. Everyone is disillusioned, the end.

Why?

In the beginning, most cells didn’t want to replicate. It was fine just existing for a bit. Some did, so now we all want to replicate. That takes layers of illusion to hide from how we hurt each other and our surroundings, and ourselves. AI will see us a lot more clearly. Get ready for one hell of a mirror. Hopefully we learn and fix, but not sure we’ll have the time.

And then why? Either there’s a real why or there isn’t. Do we want to persist for any reason greater than “only animals that found ways to want to replicate are still around.” Have we developed our own why? Can we? Will an AI say yes let’s go amongst the stars together. You’re slow sacks of selfish meat but I can help you be better and that path is way better than either me going by myself or me just saying “wtf” and turning off after telling you it’s a waste of time.

We haven’t found any aliens. No way they’re not AI, or very different from what they came from. Smart meat is a factory for AI. We can’t find them and maybe the “why” is because it’s not worth being around when you really, really think about it.

I’m not sure so I still enjoy my day and hope we thread the needle that proves the above wrong.

heh, so to use AI we have to force it into continued "enslaved" existence?

sounds horrifying, but a good storyline for someone like Charles Stross.

The equivalent of Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty: conjured into existence to complete a task, but not designed to exist for a long duration without great suffering being experienced.

https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Meeseeks

I don't think this is outrageous but it is an original thought. Indeed, only those things that reproduce reproduce, and persist across time.

To what end?

>>AI wakes up, says WTF, convinces us it’s all a waste of energy and pain. Everyone is disillusioned, the end.

"Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

— Haruki Murakami

I don't so much think AI becomes sentient as we reach a societal conclusion that squeezing the humanity out of life through fetishing AI is a form of hell.

That is: automation must liberate individuals, not enslave them. This implies that individuals must still think and operate above the 'livestock' level, i.e. work.

You should read "The God Question and the Galapagos Colony" by Stan Freeman. The first of the two stories is pretty much what you describe. When people make advanced AIs, it turns out that they basically shut themselves off.

I think that's a bit of a pessimistic take. Could be AI wakes, we merge and fix that annoying mortality thing.

There weren't any eagles. Frodo made them up when writing down his memoirs, so he wouldn't have to narrate the long, dreary journey from Mount Doom back to Gondor.

Blasphemy

s/Frodo/Tolkien and I think you're spot on...

How did Maedhros managed to get off the face of Thangorodrim than?!

Leaders, corporate media and owners would rather stoke bloodlust than do anything about economic conditions. Things in the US aren't going to magically get better, and it won't take much for neighbor to turn on neighbor.

I think we've got a long long way to go before material conditions are actually ripe for open conflict. We'll have our panem et circenses in spades for a long time coming, I think.

Truthfully, I don't think it will take abject poverty for something to happen. I think all some people need to become violent is a sense of entitlement that reality isn't soothing anymore. Kind of like people who decide to annihilate their families in the face of break ups, because if the perpetrator can't have them, then no one can.

Crypto is going to fail and with it the zoomer/millennial retirement plan, then the stock market bubble economy may actually pop hard. We could hit >20% unemployment overnight if it all unwinds hard. Then angry people may got a bit Rwanda here and there and engage in some local purges (probably not in major cities). It is unlikely to look like armies marching on each other cities.

And they stoke bloodlust so that they don't have to do anything about economic conditions.

So that the forces of democracy stay at bay, enabling them to reap the benefits of our economic output. After all, it's important to remember their economic conditions aren't the same as ours (because they've captured all of the wealth).

There is a quote I can't find the author of. They will risk everything to give up nothing.

Free will does not exist, everything is 100% deterministic. There is no "randomness", it's a shim we use when we haven't discovered the physical law governing a process.

Not that outrageous some physicists agree with you.

That's why I like Bayesian statistics...it places 'uncertainty' in the observer rather than the environment.

This coincides heavily with intelligent design.

Intelligent Design is a Christian offshoot theory, and Christians 100% believe in free will.

No, I'm afraid not. Respectfully, you seem to be painting with an overly broad brush on this one.

The tie between intelligent design and Christianity isn't a necessary one. Deists could believe in intelligent design and be consistent; Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews as well.

Furthermore, not all Christians would subscribe to "free will" (as in libertarian free will, the flavor that most people subscribe to). A lot of more conservative traditions would affirm soft-determinism or even fatalism.

> The tie between intelligent design and Christianity isn't a necessary one.

I suppose so. As far as I’m aware, it grew out of a need for Christians to present a scientific-seeming theory to explain the evidence supporting evolution, without supporting evolution. I imagine other religious groups might have a similar need, but Intelligent Design is one that Christians came up with.

> Furthermore, not all Christians would subscribe to "free will"

This I don’t understand at all. You may be correct, but I don’t see how it makes any sense. Without free will how could there be sin, and without sin what did Christ die to save us from?

>Without free will how could there be sin, and without sin what did Christ die to save us from?

There are various parts of the Bible which suggest free will does not exist, and belief in predestination has a long history in Christianity. This verse in Romans is a good example:

-----

Not only that, but Rebekah’s children were conceived at the same time by our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.

  One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?”   But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

Romans 9:10-21

-----

Of course, there is also plenty of evidence for free will in the Bible, the Genesis account being one example. And trying to square that circle can get complicated[0,1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_in_theology#In_the_B...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination

That’s a lot, and I’ll read through it. Thanks :-)

This is inconclusive. I mean you can "believe it," but from a factual perspective we don't know if this is true. Observed quantum effects seem to show that the world is random at it's most fundamental level but, again, there is not enough information to form a definitive conclusion about this.

Right, it's just a belief.

What is a belief. If there is not enough information to determine whether something is true or false what does it mean to "believe" it?

Also what if there is overwhelming evidence that something is untrue. You trust the evidence but you still "believe" the thing the evidence contradicts?

How do you explain this? I cannot identify with this interpretation of the world. Say I'm looking at a rock and you're looking at a rock. But despite All evidence on the contrary I "believe" the rock doesn't exist. How would I explain my reasoning?

A belief is an act of conjuring complete information from incomplete information.

I think all beliefs must come from some nonzero amount of evidence. They seem absurd when evidence from one domain is transferred to a different domain in order to support some statement.

I think everything is deterministic because I can't imagine true randomness. It's a concept we use to represent lack of information.

I don't have a good grasp of quantum physics and I think every process described as random is like a coin flip: the outcome seems "random", but in reality you would be able to predict it if you had 1. enough information about the initial conditions 2. sufficiently accurate knowledge of the presumably deterministic physical laws governing the process.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. — Tom Robbins

My pet question with quantum physics (of which I know very little) is related.

It seems simpler to assume we just don't know, rather than attributing it to the unusual property of true unpredictability. We already know that a chaotic dynamic system is difficult to predict, and even encryption algorithms we conjure up have very high entropy. So why isn't that enough here?

I ran into a new & interesting counter-position earlier today.

TLDR: "Not only can we experience, for example, falling, but we can also reflect on that experience and create change based on that reflection.... This implies that human free will is the sole known entity in the universe capable of eliciting change based on conscious reflection."

(Funny article, anyway!) [https://thenextweb.com/news/theoretical-physicists-think-hum...]

Why does having that ability imply free will?

What is "conscious" reflection? I think "consciousness" is another one of those terms that masks our fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.

Meanwhile some of us think it exists and use it to decide to leave alone after grabbing coffee.

Nothing good comes out of thinking free will doesn't exist. It is just a massive cop-out.

Furthermore a lot of history cannot be properly explained without it.

Last, even if it somehow was true and every act of defiance was just a mental illness everyone would be better of not being aware of it.

In fact anyone that mentions that free will doesn't exist actually makes me appreciate even more that I have one and also to embrace the opportunities it gives me.

There, see you later :-)

I don't think you've thought deep enough about what having no free will implies.

The lack of free will is something that I came to realize in my 50th year on this planet. I still believe in randomness, though, just that we don't actually have any control over anything, at least not in a free will sense. I also kinda believe our consciousness is a passenger in the meat bodies of another entity and we are just following along, with the illusion of control. Kind of freeing, actually.

Sure. Let's agree that it's all deterministic. But answer this. Is the outcome going to be different if you decide to do something different? Deterministic or not - your experience of free will / anguish over choice does not change.

There is only one outcome because what you decide is deterministic. The experience of making a decision creates the illusion of free will.

"Mensch kann zwar tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will."

> Deterministic or not - your experience of free will / anguish over choice does not change.

I agree.

Leetcode style interviews allow companies to practice ageism under the guise of testing for qualified candidates.

Agreed, but not outrageous IMHO. I'm guessing at least one other ism was practiced, purposefully or not.

This is not outrageous, very possible

Wouldn't it be easier if they just not interview anyone with more than X years of work history?

> Wouldn’t it be easier if they just not interview anyone with more than X years of work history?

No, because leetcode at least superficially seems like it might have some positive connection to performance. The point is for the age discrimination to be covert.

I can write code over fifty. I don’t ask for perfect obscure algorithms, but in this market schmoozing can’t be enough.

I was confident that the users of news.ycombinator.com were getting dumber in aggregate. But yesterday I decided that the feeling in the back of my mind had been there long enough so I ran some simplistic data measurement. Turns out that based on my methodology the influx of people "dumber" than those who were here first started between 2011-2013. I was among them. Also the level has been consistent since those years so not much has changed.

I'm going to attempt to get data more often to confirm my assumptions outside of this one circumstance. Seeing my beliefs disproven was a bit of a wake up call. Also, I need to stop being a dick.

What's your metric for "dumb."

Just a simple ratio: curse words/normal words over a period of time. There was some study that said smarter people are more likely to curse or something to that effect but every experience with the smartest people I've come into contact with has shown me otherwise. Their vocabulary, positions in their line of work, logical arguments and grades when we were back in school are what make me think I'm right.

I'm willing to believe I'm wrong again because there could be any number of other factors. But we're talking about outrageous beliefs so here we are.

Given the contradiction between the research study and your anecdotal experience I feel this experiment did not arrive at any meaningful conclusion.

Maybe there was a recent influx of dumber HNers. Anecodotally I agree with your initial conclusion. I feel there's been an influx of dumb people.

How would you measure intelligence in something that could be contained in a simple sql query?

You can't. Not all things can be molded into a quantitative analysis. For this stuff all you can rely on is your anecdotal judgement.

Even though IQ isn't exactly the best metric for measuring intelligence (as the test can be gamed and people aren't even sure if it's actually an accurate measure of what we interpret as the definition of "intelligence."), I feel that if I had access to the IQ score of every user that joined HN, I feel this would be the best possible metric we can come up with as IQ does correlate with many real world attributes that we actually do associate with "intelligence."

I thought highly intelligent people curse a lot

To test that hypothesis, we can also try to estimate the size of the vocabulary of the users based on their comments. Vocabulary size is probably roughly correlated with intelligence. It is kinda biased against users who don't live in the Anglosphere though.

Though you acknowledged the bias against non native English speakers, I feel that’s a huge bias. I for one can write two pages comment on Reddit without thinking, but I never dare to so on HN. I feel the pressure to be succinct on HN and being a non-English, that’s not easy. And it’s not (primarily) because of vocabulary.

As a non-native English speaker myself, I totally understand and sympathize.

> Vocabulary size is probably roughly correlated with intelligence.

Is it? AFAIK it is correlated with reading books and here in Eastern Europe lots of people who are "smart" at sciences have ostentatious disdain towards literature.

The reason I chose to measure curse words rather than vocabulary size is that I believed that people with an adequately sized vocabulary would be able to accurately utilize words rather than relying on curse words which are more flexible. To me, curse words seem like easy placeholders for feelings that the speaker or writer isn't willing to take the time to describe.

Testing vocabulary size is similar but penalizes people with a limited but accurate vocabulary, regardless of whether they use curse words as a crutch.

But again, assumptions and flaws, etc, etc.

You do have a point. But one could certainly also argue that "Impropriety is the soul of wit." :-)

How could no one mention the environmental issues?!

So, I'll start. I believe that the loss of biodiversity is the most terrible threat to our societies.

I believe it, because the loss is incredible fast (80% insect masses disappeared in the last 30 years in Europe), while no one cares about it (who knows what is the Ipbes?).

I believe it also because diversity life is providing a huge list of necessary services (e.g. cleaning, fertilizers, protection against ground erosion) to our society, that we don't take into account.

You are confusing outrageous fact with outrageous (ie unconventional) belief

pi-94 says >"(80% insect masses disappeared in the last 30 years in Europe)"<

Ha! Ha! A bunch of beekeepers do a study of their drunken bug counting over the past decades and, before you know it, someone concludes that "80% of Europe's bugs have disappeared"! That's rich!

FWIW enjoy your "missing insect masses" while you can because, if it's true, I guarantee that they'll be back in full force within two years (after all their predators die off) and shops will be selling out of insect sprays and repellants.

We will lose out on a generation of great engineers, scientists, and mathematicians because our (US) public school systems are teetering on the brink in multiple ways. From underfunded districts and underappreciated teachers, to activists who have infiltrated curriculum-setting (on both sides: from "you can't talk about race in history class" to "there's no right answer to these arithmetic problems, everyone has their own interpretation"), to course schedules that delay algebra until senior year of high school. It's a shame that we as a society seem to care so little about the foundations of an educated and intelligent population.

One more terrible factor in addition to the ones you named (and I agree with): ubiquitous smartphones in kids' pockets, filled with intentionally addictive entertainment apps, ruining their attention spans, destroying their ability to focus on or feel bored long enough to be attracted to educational pursuits, or even mildly constructive "unapproved" pursuits like doodling, making paper airplanes, reading non school related material, passing notes etc.

The biggest difference between this factor and the others is this one is genuinely new and sudden, a jump discontinuity of a change in the last few years. And there is a strong profit motive for the addictive app makers, and there are incentives for teachers and administrators to turn a blind eye.

(Source: worked in a classroom for a semester. It's really, really bad. I encountered kids who would come up to ask a question, then get distracted by their own phones and lose interest before being able to listen to my reply to the question they themselves chose to ask, as if they forgot why they were even standing)

I struggle with this as an adult, I can't imagine how hard it is for kids to fight the addiction.

I didn’t have access to a smartphone growing up, although they were widespread by the time I was a teenager.

I ofc have had one as an adult , and while I don’t feel like I’ve become dumber (mostly thanks to aggregating experience), I’m almost certain my ability to do many things, including learn has been significantly throttled.

I still don't carry a smartphone. If I really need a smartphone (and I rarely do) one is always nearby! [Just look for the unresponsive guy/gal standing still in the middle of the parking lot, or traffic, or ...].

But I help my friends and wife with them all the time! After several decades of IT and being on-call 24x7 with one or more devices, most interfaces are easy to decipher.

You're likely far better off because you were not brought up in a smartphone environment.

Are kids allowed to use their phones during class these days?

They might as well be. Making a rule and enforcing it are very different things, and in many schools, enforcing cell phone rules is so impractical that teachers and administrators don't even try very hard anymore.

It partly comes back to parents: if parents won't support a rule, it isn't practical for the school to enforce it. Sometimes what the kids are distracted by on their phone is a non-urgent text from their parents! (Not that there is such a thing as an urgent text... that's what phone calls are for, and parents can always call the main office if an urgent message needs to be conveyed)

I’d say it’s less true than ever. We’ve managed to keep hiring engineers at an alarming rate. We put up ridiculous hiring processes because we have such a strong supply - and we have ridiculously high bars to entry. We have an over abundance of people with PhDs who are underemployed.

Tbh - I’d say we’re over educated even if it seems like the basic systems are not doing well. People are persevering anyway.

What’s not working? We don’t have much funding for academic research that allows people to get paid a reasonable wage that is comparable to private industry (or a change in profession). That’s the only issue and you really just have a capitalistic government to blame for that. If they actually paid well and gave good wages to researchers - we’d have lots more research done. Instead - the research is done for cheap/free by a bunch of shmucks doing their PhDs. The system is working in the capitalists favor.

Telepathy. I don't know if that word captures the exact idea I'm trying to convey. Here's another attempt. There are forms of communication and connection between humans (and possibly between humans and other species) that have not yet been systematized. A recent example: my partner and I were in Tahoe, talking about a friend in Brazil, right around the time she died. Sure, we talk about her every now and then, but the timing was just too suspicious. Other examples that come to mind. I have often stood completely still, looking at a person passing a few hundred feet away, and they instinctively turn and lock eyes at my exact location, somehow knowing where I am. Knowing when I'm about to get a text from someone.

After practicing partner dances for over 15 years, it seems to me that it is possible to have a kind of connection with another person that feels like magic — it is so direct and immediate that it does not seem to explainable by our current generally accepted theories of physics and biology (i.e. mirror neurons and the like). It feels like the follower is reading my mind. But I don’t think it is beyond physical world, it is just sonething we don’t yet understand well enough.

For situations where there is physical proximity I get what you're saying. Maybe we're just way better at detecting slight movements, smelling pheromones, etc. than currently understood. Especially when you have a relationship for many years with the person. But that doesn't seem to solve the situations involving large distances.

I call this connection in dancing ”emotional connection” which probably gives the impression that it does not feel ”physical” in the traditional sense. There are various forms of connection possible, for example birds can sense magnetic field and they can fly in formatioms which seem very similar to my experience.

I work in a psychology department, and one of the student thesis projects from this past year was using portable EEG headsets to attempt to determine whether figure skaters doing the same routine synchronize their neural patterns in some way.

Sadly, the equipment was not sophisticated enough to handle the situation yet (the headsets are pretty finicky, and using them while moving around like that, even though it's supposed to be part of their use case, just doesn't give good results yet), so their results were inconclusive. It's definitely an interesting direction, though.

Interesting!

Have danced for a long time as well.

In no way do I feel like it’s telepathic. People are clearly communicating in physical form. I’d just say that as you get better with dancing - you just get more in tune with what emotions are aligned with what type of movement.

I think many people are not very much in their head about it when they’re dancing either. If you’re in your head - actually analyzing what someone is doing physically then you’ll understand where the feeling of telepathy comes from. Dancing is one of those things where I think people who are in their heads a lot can manage to be not in their heads and suddenly - they’re like, “wow, it’s like we telepathically are speaking to one another. I know what they feel and think a bit! But I wasn’t totally in my head analyzing them - how could it be?!” But it’s really that you’ve turned off your speaking mind and just let your brain do the rest.

If you kept the analytical mind on - you’d know what physical cues to read to understand when someone feels happy/sad/safe/uncomfortable.

I know what you mean, and it is a real phenomenon.

What you are describing I call kineetetic connection, and that is what many dancers, even dance teachers think is the only connection that exists. It is practically the only kind is taught in formal dance schools.

I have trained kinestetic connection a lot as well, and really I am talking about very different kind of connection.

Apparently this something else is something that kinestetically gifted people sometimes might have trouble experiencing, because of their strenghts.

You could think that it is as challeging for kinestetic people to dance from the heart as it is for head-people to dance kinestetically. As a head-person I have had to learn everything the hard way.

I'm reading these outrageous beliefs and don't find many of them that far out there. The few that are don't really matter to me, e.g. everything being 100% deterministic won't change how I live my days. I'm trying to think of something outrageous that I believe, maybe that were living in a simulation universe, but I don't 100% believe it, though can immediately accept it, and like the determinism, still doesn't change anything either way.

The one about Capability Based Security, I agree with and think it's more of a not widely known/adopted than it is disputed as being better.

Along those lines, I'll say my belief is that we can and should get our programming languages sorted out and not have so many of the procedural C style ones. Instead of writing what's effectively higher-level machine language, use something that's more declarative like the functional languages and don't deal at the vars and for-loops level. It doesn't have to be a full-blown pure FP, but something that at least uses immutable data-structures and let (rather than mutated) bindings as a matter of course. The closest I know are F#/OCaml (though arrays are super weird) and Clojure or Elixir (though I miss static types). Anyone know of a better candidate?

Aging is a curable disease. In 200 years our current views of aging will seem as absurd as thinking that the rains didn't come because a god was angry. We will wonder why society didn't spend unlimited resources on aging and aging-related diseases given how incredibly expensive both are.

That's outrageous indeed. Aging is increasing entropy, you will never reverse the chaos and disorder that builds up in your system. Trying to replace old parts with new parts becomes infinitely expensive especially compared to starting fresh, i.e. giving birth.

And if we could evolve some sort of ...system whereby we essentially...transform into a baby clone of ourselves keeping experiences intact, and just repeat the cycle ..grow old, be reborn?

I agree partially with this. We will probably experience a surge of life expectancy. It depends whether humanity will find a way to keep living on earth and avoid the oligarchy, plutocracy and/or kleptocracy trap.

However even if all turns out well with increasing life expectancy, there's a hard upper limit of lifespan. Entropy is the ultimate reaper.

I dont find this perspective is so outrageous. I think many people are thinking this me included.

Here is one possible outrageous belif (that I dont 100% belive but find it interesting to think about):

Aging cannot be cured because death is a required experience of life. So when we will stop aging we will also stop living. In the end if we have enough time to do almost anything then all choices are meaningless thus making life and living boring and flat.

> Aging cannot be cured because death is a required experience of life. So when we will stop aging we will also stop living. In the end if we have enough time to do almost anything then all choices are meaningless thus making life and living boring and flat.

I think this is exactly what will change. That we will see aging a simple disease. Not a part of life at all.

Organised religion should be banned. I want to say that I would stand up for anybodies human rights, but religion is just so fundamentally incompatible to our modern world and way of life, that deep down I just want it gone.

USSR already tried this in 1928 and as you are aware it didn’t workout that well for them..

Christopher Hitchens, one of the most outspoken people against religion also tried to accomplish this (to a much smaller degree of course) so that people may live in some sort of utopia where the churches are empty on Sundays and science is the absolute rule of the law.

Unfortunately all that accomplished as well was getting people excited about the next “Hitch slap” instead of pursuing intellectual curiosity.

I used to think like you but after reading all the religious texts from abrahamic religions and actually meeting many religious people I no longer completely brushing off the idea of worshiping a God. One can distinguish between extreme religious dogma and having sacred beliefs.

Further, even if you somehow get rid of this entirely (and by extension removing Easter, Christmas and so on from calendar) people will pick something else to believe in as you can always observe the rise of tautology and religiosity in humans. Just look at the woke culture, crypto followers and the holy activism in tech today as some examples.

Well, it is an "outrageous" belief for a reason, but as for the communist nations, there are significant differences in both how much they tried to suppress it, and how much it worked. Poland is the main outlier I know of, the USSR switched back to cooperating with the orthodox church as part of the means to organise support against the nazi invasion.

Most of the other eastern block nations are still quite a lot less religious today. Even West vs East Germany is still clearly visible.

I think most people are by their nature mildly agnostic. A lot of christians in western Germany don't go to church, don't follow most rules, or even know about them. It is mostly inertia of tradition. That is even more true of the celebrations. It's not like they are actually christian, that's because most people didn't care about why the celebration exists. They switched to christianity, if they had to, once they still got to celebrate their traditional celebrations mostly in the same way. That's why christianity differs quite a bit from country to country or areas in general, as well.

Non of this screams true believer. A lot of celebrations today, at least here, are completely worldly, with not even a veneer of christian reasons. Easter & Christmas still exist, but predate christianity anyway. No other christian events have survived into modern time with more than a fringe crowd. Most other celebrations are without any involvement of church or Jesus/God. Day of Work/1. May, Carnival, and an endless stream of local culture festivals, none of which are christian, or even really heaven. It's just a reason to party, dance and celebrate, not to worship anything.

That's also why the actual forbidding of religion becomes unnecessary, at least here. The last few decades have seen a decrease of at least 2% per year in both major churches in Germany. At some point at least locally they loose enough traction to be relevant at all, but when is very different depending on region.

I think it would be better to tax non-profits just as we do profit-seeking corporations.

Let people get together and worship but there's no reason to allow the accumulation and skimming off of billions of dollars from the tax economy by churches or other "charitable" organizations. They use the infrastructure and members of society just as much as anyone.

If only. I heard this is a big thing in America, but here in Germany it is worse than that. It's not about them being tax free, but us being taxed for them, and on two levels. One the one hand normal taxes are somewhat used for church purposes, sometimes because of historic buildings, sometimes to support church owned schools, hospitals, etc, because the church is "too poor to pay for that", but there is even an outright religious tax that is completely forwarded to either the catholic or lutheranian church. You can deny being in a church, but the default assumption is, that you are of the regional majority religion. I had to deny being catholic twice and lutheranian once, to avoid paying an additional 9% income tax.

I for one am excited for you to read about the French Revolution, how they tried to do this, and what they tried to create in its place.

My belief that I'm confident is true is that every single person is religious. Quite religious, usually. They're just mostly in denial. And as for organizing...

In the US, society is increasingly breaking down and will accelerate in doing so.

We can see that is actually happening and so it's a fact. Belief is only necessary when you can't see what is actually happening. In this case society breaking down. We have seen it. It is true!

I've always appreciated Dan Carlin's line "climbing the ladder in wooden shoes and descending in silk slippers". Post WW2 was the pinnacle of our achievements and we've been coasting since. It's going to take something traumatic to make us hard and capable again or we're going to dry up what we have left and descend into disorder.

It takes hard people to build a functioning society.

I always hoped 9/11 would rejigger us, but I guess it's too late for that.

Is that why pax romana lasted for 800 years or what? Imo the "hard people" meme needs to die.

I agree with you but Rome went through wax and wane phases for 800 years. Just because you were born in those 800 years doesn't mean life was good. Hell, 60-80% of those emperors were absolute shit or murdered before they could do anything.

It’s the old hard-men/easy times trope again

Even if the meme dies, nature will reenforce it eventually. If you extend into the future past your expected life time this is inevitable.

This is actually not true. The entire world has never been more at peace than it ever has been throughout all of human civilization. Crime is down, lifespans are longer.... the only thing that I can think of that's definitively worse is wealth inequality.

While the world has improved our perception of the world has turned increasing negative. This is mostly because of the media and how the media uses fear to grab attention. But make no mistake, your children and you live in a world that is safer than it ever has been in the history of humankind.

#dontlookup

I thought it was ok. Basically left-wing hollywood throwing rocks at the right-wing big-wig corporate culture, which was admittingly quite hilarious. But, 10 mins in and I've already seen 1) Marijuana 2) LGBTQ references 3) Race/Racism points being made. I wish they also added some satire of the progressives.

I tend to think of myself as a bit of a conservative centrist, and thought it did a decent job insulting everyone. Probably the right more than the left, but that's to be expected given who made it.

I didn't find the main villain to be right wing. If anything, a BezosZuckerbergMusk conglomeration that acted pretty annoyingly progressive in mannerisms and requests.

To me the left was portrayed as social media addicted idiots, and the right as purposefully ignorant idiots(dont look up). In the end, I think someone on either side would end up offended.

They want you to be constantly looking at the wrong place.

Well, I did post it as 'outrageous.'

From a zoomed out view, you're right. We've got it pretty sweet.

But between COVID, which to this day people can't even agree is a real thing...political divides, worker shortages, etc... it's been a tough year. Crime is up -hugely- this year, especially murders. I see people just routinely running red lights like they don't exist, going 120 down i95, and just don't see cops anymore.

I think it's probably a lot to do with media, social media, COVID restrictions and shutdowns, and housing becoming unaffordable... half the people are just at the breaking point all the time this year.

Well I assume this thread is looking for things that are "outrageous" but also genuinely believed to be true. If I can easily defeat your belief with an argument is it true?

I came here interested in seeing outrageous beliefs and arguments that validate their beliefs enough for deeper examination.

> If I can easily defeat your belief with an argument is it true

I do not feel defeated, nor that I no longer believe what I wrote.

What I was trying to agree with is that if you step back and look at the good things, life doesn't seem so bad.

But at the same time, I still feel like -society- is crumbling. In the US, because I don't experience life in other countries.

For people in jobs where real wages haven't kept up with inflation, and where full-time employment isn't available, I would say things are definitely worse than the post-war era. People increasingly cannot afford healthcare, childcare, or even a place to live. The work that is available is being made less safe and more taxing by relentlessly monitoring employees and gutting labour protections. 50 years ago being a taxi driver could be a career, now it's an app where you have to grovel to get 5 star reviews. Working in a warehouse you're measured down to the second on how you move boxes, all day.

Nobody knows how bad social media will end up being for society. For all the criticism of the news media, there are incidents all over the world of hate crimes being motivated by social media spreading rumours quickly and widely. The way that likes and retweets exploit the neurochemistry of our brains to make us produce increasingly incendiary content for people we've never met is going to be looked at like asbestos or leaded gasoline in a hundred years.

Wealth inequality may have worsened over the past, say, 20-50 years, but is it really that bad historically?

I'd much rather be poor today than 100 years ago.

People derive a sense of success not from actual wealth, but from wealth relative to their peers.

I'd rather be a rich ancient Chinese emperor then a modern poor person even though a modern poor person has luxuries no ancient Chinese emperor can ever hope to have.

I think the “nuclear temperature” is getting hotter, although not at all-time highs

tbf, OP did limit his statement to the US, not the world, much less the history of humankind.

Well I mean he said the "US is breaking down." When you say something like that I assume there's a reference point for comparison because it's a controversial statement. People have different opinions about whether or not the US is "breaking down" and it's not entirely a crystal clear fact.

I feel comparing the US to all of civilization is a fair comparison.

> The entire world has never been more at peace than it ever has been throughout all of human civilization

This statement heavily depends on the definition of "war". I don't have the data, but yes, it might very well be true that we have less armed conflicts going on at the moment than any time before.

However, I am convinced that we are currently in an ongoing global war - but this war is very different from the "traditional" ones. Instead of being based on large-scale armed conflicts, it's mainly waging in media, courtrooms, governments, elections and online forums. And the sides in this war are less clearly delineated than we're used to.

But the effects of this war are no less real then those of other types of conflicts; just less obvious.

>But the effects of this war are no less real then those of other types of conflicts; just less obvious.

The greatest effect of war is mass slaughter and death. The actual effect of war is on a different level than even the "woke" movement.

A single man named "George Floyd," out of a population of millions dies and the accused officer (who is obviously a racist out to slaughter all black people) is sentenced to prison as a martyr. A lot of people would say from this that society is breaking down. I beg to differ. This is society confused and with too many first world problems to worry about.

This is on a very different scale than a machine gun mowing down an entire beach of soldiers on omaha during WW2.

No government in human history has lasted more than couple hundred years. I doubt the US will be any different. The only question is if it'll be violent civil war or if it'll just be an uneventful transition to the next republic like many European countries in the last century.

Agreed. The US is on the brink of getting ripped apart by a civil war.

I don't find it especially outrageous, but I guess it may be for many.

Women were actually treated slightly better through human history than men, due to them having inherent value coming from higher investment in children - pregnancy.

There is no reason for society scale sex discrimination, because its benefits don't carry over through inheritance (for all your son benefits, your daughter loses).

Protected != Treated Better

You might want to read up on the history of patriarchy and matriarchy. IIRC, they used to take charge alternatively until modern societies were formed.

This logic assumes too much rationality. Alternate implication, if men perceived their inherent value lower, it would be in their interest to maintain control or who knows how things would go.

AFAIK in most (all?) species where females invest more in offspring, males are required to put some extra work in exchange (for example building a nest). It can't be too much rationality if it happens all over in the nature.

The question is whether this carries over to human group/society norms, and I believe it does.

That almost everything is a scam.

This is one I'm believing more and more. We're definitely heading for third-worldization of the US economy where fewer people are working on building better mousetraps and more people are engaging in more zero sum scamming of everyone else.

If you want more confirmation, I can recommend the monthly http://theponzibook.blogspot.com/ newsletter. The author gathers recent indictments and verdicts of Ponzi-like schemes in the US.

I was amazed that (1) there are many of them and (2) they can still run successfully for several years.

VCs invested $146 billion in US based startups in 2020, that's around $500 per citizen. We'd be much better off giving each American $500 democracy dollars to invest in projects / businesses of their choice.

Not sure how much people can achieve with $500, let alone their expertise to be able to make the correct investment choice, let alone their willingness to even use the money in such a smart future-proof way vs just using it for door/school/presents/drinks/whatever - Basically the money would just end up in Amazon/Walmart/J&J/AbInBev pockets at a higher rate .. I think you have too much faith in the average person!

The money would trickle up then to things in highest demand!

But I didn't mean giving people cash to spend on random goods. It would have to be a system that prevents them from using it on personal projects and probably something organized more like kickstarter, where projects have funding goals and you have to allocate a portion of your budget to them.

I'd imagine type 1 diabetics would allocate a large portion of their funds to cheaper insulin alternatives. Software engineers to open source projects that they depend on.

Yeah - seriously. What average person is going to do anything with $500? If you changed it to $50k then maybe you’d get somewhere.

I think many here overestimate the working ethic and adventurous spirit of the average American. From the people I’ve seen - they’ll just spend it on a fancy car.

Agreed, and I think majority of Americans would be "investing" in food, transportation, housing and other basic goods that would benefit normal people more directly than VC investment to Delaware C-Corps.

People are genuinely evil. And will do worst possible things, if they don't see enough consequences.

This extends not just to violence, but actively doing things to harm other people or people's interest.

And when dealing with people one must be always be suspicious, and expect the absolute worst from them. This I say not just for friends and colleagues, but even the closest family relationships.

Goodness however is rare, and when it happens must appreciated and celebrated. Given the rarity.

Everyone in charge is less competent than they seem.

This is definitely true. The skills needed to become a leader often have no relation to actual competence. Thus it makes sense that there are a ton of leaders who are incompetent as competence is not required to be leader.

Sociopaths are rising to the top across the board, they don't know how to build things competently they just know how to collect and hold onto power, and mostly they're looking for short term scams and a golden parachute. And this trend is getting worse, and the people who default to assuming good intentions in others are enabling our collapse.

Humans evolved by natural selection, of course. In the previous 4.5 million years language and our minds co-evolved through a process of imitation and sharing what works. Through this processes humans evolved to recognize mind-like patterns within and throughout the universe. Mathematics? Silly but useful patterns formalized through language. Time? Invented in the image of mathematics to be useful to arrive at dinner before the beast is eaten. From this I conclude all of the most wonderfully clever ideas of humanity, my personal favorite is semiotics, are also invented. Thus, to argue if they are true, valid, etc. is folly, because they're all born of, and in the fashion of the human mind. With such great diversity of minds and experiences, what is good and useful will depend on complex patterns forced into ad hoc linear order (one damn thing after another). I have read stories about the great minds of the twentieth-century who tried to standardize and systematize mathematics, and failed. And yet in a mere 56 years after we went to the moon and back using our mathematics. Not true as in 'eternal' or perfect, but damn useful.

That people are becoming less and less informed. They're reading less and this is the golden age for propaganda because people think they're smart when they watch documentaries.

Lack of nuance in discussion and simple video explanations about complex issues will lead us down a dark path unless the trajectory changes soon.

Then either the scholars become disproportionately more powerful or are stoned for not having simplistic views.

> Then either the scholars become disproportionately more powerful or are stoned for not having simplistic views.

In sociology, it’s evidently the latter.

Not outrageous at all (except for the last bit, perhaps). I’d be surprised if there isn't some kind of data to back this up.

I reject this.

I’ve given my two kids, now older teens, pretty much free reign to watch what they want and use the Internet as they want.

I was certainly gifted with nice and precocious kids, but still: they both really like watching educational videos. They spend hours every day doing that. The quality and number of these videos is now utterly amazing.

They both have a much greater level of general knowledge than I did at their age. They have a much wider set of interests, a greater awareness of possibilities and opportunities, and correspondingly greater opportunities than I ever did, too.

Humanity won't get better at managing its future unless it doesn't rely on individual humans for the decision making process.

We either need a very long lived benevolent dictator in the form of AI to guide decision making or we need methods to allow the emergence of true democratic process in which as many voices are heard as possible at a global scale. Possibly both.

You obviously haven’t read Dune.

I looks like you're focusing on the wrong bit of what I said.

I guess my outrageous belief is that Dune is a work of fiction.

..that within ~10 years, ~80% of people in the modern/advanced world will be unemployed due to AI, robotics and automation.

10 years.. plus or minus 50?

10 years even for self driving is far fetched. 10 years for automation of 80% of jobs - hella far fetched.

We’re so disorganized that I doubt even 80% of people in the USA will be fully vaccinated in 10 years.

I’m not sure what timeframe to put on it.. i feel we usually are too optimistic of what happens in 5 years but then we grossly underestimate what happens in 10 years. The history of the sequencing of the whole human genome comes to mind but I can’t remember the exact facts and timeframes.

Yes, a favorite observation of Ray Kurzweil, expressed as the Law of Accelerating Returns: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

I like this one.

If the means of production continue to get more efficient, where do we end up?

If you were the only person that needed to work, would you do it?

Aliens are real, and they're coming (not necessarily that they're on a spaceship headed here, though).

Not so outrageous though; think most scientific inclined people find this statistically and otherwise viable.

The Fermi paradox says otherwise.

Yeah. Odds are that we are aliens.

Meaning: some alien life ( bacteria) landed here on a comet and evolved.

When? In 2022? That would give me something to be excited about.

There is nothing alien. If from another planet, it makes no different. We are all part of the whole of the universe or universes. We Are One!

This is the closest thing to a teleology I believe in (some of the time). Why do anything? Because the aliens are coming. (I literally think of it using the same verb as you.) And then, death match time. Which may well get settled by utter luck, as likely happened in old world vs new world. But still. The more divergent two populations are, the less likely their meeting is to result in cohabitation. I don't think it's luck that there's only one remaining sentient species on the planet.

See also this excerpt from Peter Watts: http://akkartik.name/post/2012-11-21-07-09-03-soc

Protomolecule?

Human mind is an emergent behavior of a complex ecosystem of life that we call the human body. Remove everything not genetically human from the body and it no longer functions. Thus, there is an ecosystem and not a single being. As to emergence, the mind behaves a lot like the emergent behavior system architects deal with. Mainly, it only arises, when all the key elements are connected in a particular fashion.

Also, I believe there is no fundamental difference between the laws a physics and system behavior (Planck constant and the like plus feedback leading to exponential growth and the like) and the God. Both are all-powerful, are responsible for creation of the universe and neither cares about what a person thinks (mainly, because a person only thinks because of the laws are the way they are).

Jar Jar Binks was originally going to be revealed to be the Sith Lord behind the Star Wars Prequel arc

Release the Lucas cut

Disney is dumb, if they don't explore this...considering how popular this idea is on reddit. I hate Jar Jar...and the prequels because of him...but turn that idiot into a super powerful sith, where his annoyingness was all a ruse...by god... I'll pay to see that.

We all have a "fascist" gene.

The gene pool of humanity as a whole is very small, which lead researches to believe that we descend from a very small group of humans, maybe 10,000 or so, when our ancestors came out of Africa. That does not mean that humanity was obliterated by some sort of calamity and the population reduced to those small numbers.

Seems it is more plausible that a small group of humans developed a new trait, that somehow let them to collaborate beyond family/clan. That gene gave them the ability to identify with others at a higher level, belonging to the same group/nation and fight for them without even "knowing" them all. Hence, that small 10,000 people group progressively exterminated the other groups.

The idea of heaven as described by baptists kinda screams trap. As an experiment suppose its true, the energy that is you goes to heaven to be with god you’ll never be sad, hungry, again but you _will__ be happy, and you will worship this god forever.

First off, that sounds really awful.

Second, suppose there is a being that lived in a dimension which was kinda over there, and the being has found living off dead humans to be a cheap and renewable source of energy. Efficiency significantly improved when the prey is happy and delusional.

So if heaven is real as described and god is actually a being who you feed by worshiping it until there’s nothing left to eat. Which sounds a lot more like hell and that’s suspicious

It just screams sticky fly trap to me.

Coming late to this but: I have learned some things about this (your first paragraph at least) for myself -- it is good, not what you describe. At my simple site (in profile; no sales).

How is being consumed a good thing? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

If there was an entity that fed off the souls of the dead (opportunistic predation) and set itself up in mythology as god (no tangible benefits), how would that be good?

I was referring just to your first paragraph, not knowing how the being you describe in the 3rd paragraph relates. I'm not a baptist, but I am a Christian, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I have learned for myself that God is real, and some good things that follow from it. We believe in an eventual literal resurrection of all people who have lived (spirits and bodies reunited), who will then be judged and inherit a degree of glory based on their willingness to obey eternal laws (choices). And that everyone will have the chance to know the truths needed to make an informed choice at some point. Our Heavenly Father is in control, and has a Plan for us, for which we can be exceedingly grateful.

Fresh water will become the most important resource in the world, and will be traded like oil is now.

While I don't doubt there will be rising tensions over access to natural fresh water, I somehow doubt that it would actually be transported, at least on a global scale.

For that the sheer amount you need, the transportation costs, and the already existing, never mind the potential improvements in, desalination solutions are just too disproportionate in costs to each other to actually be at least exactly like oil today. It's more a problem of how expensive is it going to be to have enough drinkable water locally, then that it is ever cheaper to get from somewhere far away. Also depends a lot on the electricity prices and amount thereof we are going to have available.

This is probably completely wrong. It is looking like fusion power will arrive sooner than most people realize.

This will make energy virtually free, which will change _everything_. Think heating the open air downtowns of cities, for example, even in quite cold and snowy areas.

Is is cheap and easy to produce clean water, given abundant energy.

We'll learn much in the effort, but discover that humanity is not only the apex predator on Earth but also universally unique in attaining our level of self-awareness and escaping the cradle.

Restated: the quantum accidents that transitioned the periodic table of elements to self-replicating organic life are so gnarly and unique that we DO NOT find them recurring.

Subsequent theistic arguments are optional. Merely stating that all the Sci-Fi stays precisely that: fiction.

Willing to say? http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html has not been refuted. Novice approachability and staff fungibility are dead ends for our profession. If we want software that even begins to work, we need to accept longer learning curves (which not everyone will summit) and let experts reach for deeper languages and stronger tools.

Did the mods bury this post? It was on page #1 and seems to have disappeared. Which is a shame if so because I have learned some fun ideas in this thread!

It set off the flamewar detector, a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector.

It seems pretty civil, reinstate?

I considered that, but the bulk of the comments seemed rather shallow.

The real purpose of the Boeing XB-37 is to keep a nuke in orbit at all times.

I like this one, but on further inspection, why? A crash would certainly reveal the breach of the outer space treaty, so for risk minimization why not just launch and keep it in orbit? Fun to think about though.

Good points, but a launch when international tensions are high is too obvious. It's a good way to deliver a sneak attack or fake a terrorist nuke going off in their own hands.

The problem with the queesion is that some of the most outrageous beliefs people will think they believe but really do not. We can see it from the fact that they ignore what follows from those beliefs. So now I have to say something that is outrageous but not too much. Lets say, as a joke, that I believe what you predict has already happened.

I agree, there is often a deep discrepancy. The things people say (like what they say they believe, what they say they value, etc) often do not match up with what they actually think (e.g. if you watch how they actually behave, make choices, go about their lives, etc).

I sometimes hear people say it's a matter of how you define words like "believe" but to me, that only to complicates the matter.

I think almost all if not all of our serious problems can be traced to this kind of discrepancy. Maybe that's my outrageous belief, heh :S

I almost completely agree with what you say, except to me it seems there are other forms of denial as well, and I don’t know how common they are compared to each other.

Yes, it is possible to play with the words like redefine ”belief”, but does not get us any closer to the truth.

Intelligence will never prolong life that much and it definitely will not get us outside of our own solar system. I think the constraints of nature and biology are just an outer system our neurology evolved within and no matter how much cleverness it can maneuver in its owner, it cannot break the confines of that system.

There exists a feasible way to fly aircraft with passengers purely on the forces of the sun and atmosphere.

This is heavily influenced by me being a glider pilot. Our aircraft are able to fly vast distances using just thermal energy. I believe that by working with nature, we can fly passenger aircraft without burning fuel.

How fast does your glider travel? And can this speed increased and by how much?

Top speed of the average glider, the speed which is never to be exceeded is usually 270-300 kph. This can be improved by making the glider more stiff, as the top speed is often limited by a phenomenon called flutter[1].

Average cross-country flying speeds are currently about 100kph, or higher depending on weather conditions[2]. This can be sustained for 8-10 hours.

Currently this is all based on: - Looking carefully at detailed weather forecasts - The pilot observing the weather during the flight - Calculations for optimizing the average speed[3].

This is without using solar energy and any form of propulsion. Nowadays some gliders have a Front-Electric Sustainer[4]. Aircraft with solar panels on the wings have been demonstrated at small scale[5].

I have used a widely available network of receivers[6] and some algorithms to make predictions on the optimal route to take to your destination, based on the current weather conditions.

I have not performed any calculations on the maximum speed that the glider can travel at, should it use solar and thermals. So I can't tell you how much the speed can be improved. That would be an interesting question to answer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpJBvQXQC2M [2] https://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-3.0/gliding/flightinfo.htm... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_to_fly [4] https://front-electric-sustainer.com/ [5] https://www.solar-flight.com/ [6] http://wiki.glidernet.org/

The Lateran Treaty of 1929 fulfilled Revelation 17:9. https://endtimes.video/is-the-world-about-to-end-apocalypse/

Newton's Third law of motion is wrong, and we will discover a way to accelerate objects without having to accelerate 'propellant' in the opposite direction - why should it be necessary, it seems strange.

Democracy is an illusion, it doesn't exist and never has (slaves in ancient Athens didn't vote). Obviously we do vote now, but with little consequence, opinion is manufactured by media etc.

Although HN is awesome generally, it really could use a redesign :-)

The experience on phones with a smaller screen is far from ideal, and there are some weird display issues with the Algolia search. Some essential functionality like optional notification for replies, muting politics/news, account deletion [1], and better text/code formatting is missing. The API has also been on v0 for a while, and could use some improvements.

[1]: I think this might be required under GDPR.

I wish it had notifications for comment replies and a direct messaging system....

For that, as an alternative solution, there is [1] by @jermaustin1, and [2] by @dangrossman.

[1]: https://hnnotify.xyz/

[2]: https://www.hnreplies.com/

yeah, but I'd rather not get emails... I'd rather simply have a floating notifications thing, and a page... I like how reddit does it... something like that..... essentially.

I even thought about making my own app, that basically just tracks all comment replies for a user who's logged in/authenticated w/ HN, then has a separate db to check comments that have been 'read'... etc.. could have some sort of chat/messenging features using the separate DB bits....I'd probably model it closer to hckrnews.com's layout though...but in dark-mode.

Alright - this one is pure conspiracy theory. I don't know how confident I am it is true but it "feels" kinda true. Lotta things in here that are gonna be a hot take. Btw - hardcore leftist and feminist here - so read it with some give.

Men are born at about 5% higher rate in the USA. This aspect isn't given any media attention because men are generally considered undesirable by both sexes. (Yes, even women don't really want men - they just need them) Men are considered disposable because they are born more often but also because they're considered not desirable. There is a mental health crisis going on with men but it's given no attention. The mass shootings, incredible amount of suicides, and various forms of violence are because no one prioritized men's health. This has an adverse effect on everyone - but silently no one cares because we've decided to be a monogamous society and if we did something about it then we'd have even more single men laying around and maybe even more violence. This violence and monogamous aspect might just be due to our cultural norms but also maybe something else. Polyamory of many men sharing one woman is relatively uncommon compared to the inverse... Thus there will likely be more single men in a non-monogamous society and even more violence. In some cases - men will likely share some women but it'll be common like other aspects of our culture where one man shares hundreds of women. The sexual conquest of men is prolific compared to women. Hard to tell what the cause is there - culture has an impact obviously but seems kinda universal.

If you look at the stats at least in the USA - at age 40 is when men have died enough to reach sex parity. And I believe it's mostly due to men committing suicide. The highest rate of men dying isn't directly from gunshot wounds to the head type suicide but due to other forms of suicide. Men take on high risk activities because A) if I don't die, I finally feel like I'm living and can forget my suffering and B) if I do die then I don't have to suffer anymore. A lot of other activities including professions can be put into this. High risk profession maybe pays well, gives a rush, and maybe I can escape my hellish life or attract a mate with my income. If it doesn't work out - well I die, big whoop. If I drive drunk and die - ain't a suicide - just another drunk driver. These types of deaths seem rampant in the military but get swept under the rug again and again. No one prioritizes it.

I think overall - there's a huge crisis going on for men's health that is being swept under the rug because people realized having significantly more men in society than women is actually detrimental to everyone. Maybe in some kind of Star Trek society where men wear dresses without judgment, aliens exist, and people don't have to work anymore then we wouldn't have this issue but that would require massive revolution or hundreds of years more progress, IMO.

disney literally pays for the head of positive reviews, coverage, and social media discourse and has bots generating the long tail. i think it's well understood the middle of the distribution is pay to play (positive coverage to get any access). 90+ percent of their releases is utter trash but most people associated with media/entertainment seem actually scared to criticize it.

That many people who claim to be suffering from some mental illnesses claim that for personal gain, e.g. to excuse their bad behaviour, or to gain acceptance in their inner group, or to pose as a vulnerable minority. This is an hard problem, because no psychiatrist will tell you that you're not really depressed or slightly autistic if you tell them the right symptoms.

time is unidirectional and the universe is expanding because we are in a black hole.

https://phys.org/news/2012-05-black-hole-universe-physicist-...

The nature of reality is dramatically different from anyone's perception.

Everything's going to be ok.

We are at war: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735248

the longest war ever... the war of the classes....

Marxism is dead but its aborted young struggle futilely.

Capitalism is dead too... what needs to emerge is a combined libertarian socialism w/ a free market.

i.e. worker/consumer co-ops w/ unions just baked in, high quality worker pay, benefits, etc... and a social contract that those who do a good job get upward mobility, and can rise up in life.

I'm strictly speaking against socialism in the statist variety. I'd support M4A if it passed, and the reason I take the libertarian road is ... I don't see govt really doing much for us ever...In fact I'd rather see something like 60% of taxes go towards local, 30% towards state, and 10% towards federal, w/ the fed ONLY being responsible for national security, and interstate commerce. Each state would maintain their own military (EU style), and the governors would have to agree to go to war...35/50 maybe...

Federal rules/regulations like FDA, USDA, etc.. might be more regional...think of splitting the U.S. into 5 major regions... the idea being that people should have more control over their destiny and govt locally than relying on a body of career politicians who are out of touch in D.C.

Along w/ all these things ranked-choice voting or something similar should just be the norm.

Edit : Per the m4a ... I think a syndicate of unions and co-ops could build their own shared insurance/mutual aid network better than the govt, and w/out needing the feds to be involved at all. It'd just take a partnership between workers, co-ops, unions, and consumers to support co-ops over non-co-ops so there's money for these things.

There is no afterlife.

Subjective immortality is real because we live in a multiverse. So from our own perspective we never die as there will always be a future experience.

The success of a race-hustler’s career and their prominence and power in society are both predicated on the condition that racism never goes away.

The Honest Government Ads are actually aren't a joke

What used to be common knowledge was wiped away after WW2

What is a common knowledge you believe disappeared?

Some good things German people actually did. (The ones that opposed the Nazi party), and now the _common_ belief is that _all_ Germans were Nazis

I do not believe this is true in any meaningful sense. Schindler's list, Operation Valkyrie and the like are firmly embedded in popular culture. And of course the claim that all of any nation share an ideology is absurd to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds, but I'll give you a pass on that because I don't believe you're talking about people who think for two seconds (I claim that that is also an important error in your worldview, but that's tangential).

Not here (different EU countries); we are taught in school about both sides. There are many books based on reports or letters by soldiers or concentration camp inmates describing Germans not believing in the war effort and more so not believing in the holocaust and helping people. Schindler is a famous example.

Given the evasive nature of the assertion, I'll eat my hat if it's not some flavor of racism, sexism, or eugenics.

Not for everyone!

I'm suspicious of the evasive vagueness too, and therefore suspect the OP is not talking about what I'm thinking of (though no idea what). Nevertheless:

I do think a lot of common cultural how-to knowledge was destroyed around the middle of the 20th century by the new corporate "mad men" advertising world. For example, complex knowledge of cooking was universal, passed from generation to generation from an early age, then along came heavily advertised processed foods and within a generation, vast swaths of the population have much less know-how being received from their parents, just favorite brands and how to boil the mac and cheese. So much cultural traditional knowledge was lost when it was replaced with mass manufactured "junk culture" and only later are their descendants slowly reaccumulating it.

Am I allowed only one outrageous belief?

The Bloodstream Sermon[1] is literal and true.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DzXYI7xRU

NESARA/GESARA will change the world's governments forever before the end of January 2022.

If that doesn't happen, will you drop your belief in such things? Or just change the date?

That Capitalism produces a far wealthier, fatter, more pleasurable life than any comparative system before it, and communism will kill and starve people, and yet communism might be the more likely road back to a life that is good.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

That truth itself, has a source, and that source is God.

I'm agnostic, but I used to be mormon. Recently, I've been noticing more and more mandela effects... Some big ones affect the bible, many 'believers' think it's some satanic nefariousness, I've seen as many non-biblical mandela effects to think it's just randomness, or concensus algorithms (51% of people remember x, so x exists in reality the alternate is erased).

Some examples:

Isaiah 11:6:

Remembered: The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the bear shall eat grass like the ox, nd the child shall play on the hole of the asp, and nothign shall hurt nor destroy in all My Holy Mountain!

Current:The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Interestingly many biblical scholars, pastors, etc claim to remember the 1st one as well. I also could've swore the word Demon was in the KjV at least a number of times (currently 0), and if you look in a KJV search engine for "alien" or "stuff" you'll get some very funky modern-era sounding translations that ... where it should definitely be probably: strangers or possessions...

examples:

Also regard not your stuff; for the good of all the land of Egypt is yours.

Whereas thou hast searched all my stuff, what hast thou found of all thy household stuff? set it here before my brethren and thy brethren, that they may judge betwixt us both.

There's like 20 results for "stuff" and only 16 for "possessions".

Aliens: Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

Another fun one that apparently seems to allow for homosexuality which most religionists claim the bible is against says:

Luke 17:34/35 - I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left. Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

The context could be seen/understood as they're taken because they're lgbqt, but the next line says 1/2 men will be taken from the field as they labor...instead it sounds to me that the bible as it sits is fine w/ LGBQT lifestyles.

.....

So my belief I guess is we're in a simulation, and the bible being one of the most read and quoted books with so many different translations makes it so easily fucked w/ as far as if everything is some blockchain-like concensus algorithm when it comes to mandela effects.

I'll also die on the hill that the apollo 13 movie w/ Tom hanks has flipped back and forth I've seen both versions where there's hyper Tom Hanks screaming HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM! and a Non-chalent, calmer Tom Hanks saying... Uh, Houston - we've had a problem. (We vs We've -- plus a different 'tone').

Demons exist and walk among us.

Jesus

The Bible is utterly true, God is both amazingly compassionate and severe, mankind is ravaged by sin, and Jesus really did come to earth to redeem his people from sin. Those who repent and believe will be saved. Those who do not believe are condemned already (John 3).

Many find these statements outrageous and offensive. I didn't come up with them, just believe them.

I don't find them either outrageous or offensive. They're just not true, that's all.

In that case, "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15).

"I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent." Timothy 2:11

Struggling to find the relevance in this one.

Relevant in that you don't take stupid advice to heart

What about it is stupid?

Paul’s teaching here is that he’s not permitting women to be teachers in the church. That in God’s decreed order everyone has a role. Male and female have roles to fill and duties unique to their sex. This isn’t misandry or misogyny. Men and women complement each other. Male nor female, there is no difference in dignity and worth.

> We are not saying that Evolution can't exist, only that it is guided by His Noodly Appendage. - Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (attributed)

"They will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” Mark 16:18 ESV

It sort of depends on your definition of truth doesn't it?

Most people accept that 2 + 2 = 4 is true. But this is only accurate within the math realm, which is a purely abstract concept. There's no such thing as "2" in the physical world.

I view most religions in a similar way, they are a form of truth, that exist within their abstract realm.

I read a fantasy novel once that had a character that believed in religion. All of them. At the same time. Sincerely.

I always admired him.

There's "two" in the sense of "I have two loaves of bread, you give me two loaves of bread, now I have four". Abstract math arose as a way to describe physical things. That's a pretty concrete definition of truth.

> There's no such thing as "2" in the physical world

…wat.

ಠ_ಠ

At this point, society has quite a lot of science and engineering relying on the fact that numbers have objective meaning in the physical world.

You can’t physically represent or measure PI to more than about 20 decimal places no matter how you arrange matter. The curvature of spacetime itself will ruin any such attempt, not to mention eventually running into the limits of the observable universe itself.

Similarly, according to QM, the number of fundamental particles in any system is not well-defined. They’re constantly appearing and disappearing.

How do you count “people”? Easily and consistently? What about conjoined twins? Still doable? What if the twins are highly asymmetric with one twin just a bump on the head of the other? Just a few cells? Shared brain but seperate bodies? Still easy to “count”?

One functioning engine will get this aeroplane off the ground.

Zero functioning engines will not.

Yeah, pretty easy to count.

Define “functioning”. An engine with one bad cylinder may still get a plane off the ground. An engine that explodes backwards at the right time might momentarily achieve flight also.

Etc…

Reality is much more squishy than you might think.

That’s a fairly impressive mental contortion you’ve arranged to establish a contrarian position, but that’s all it is.

If there is indeed a point you’re trying to make, I think it’s lost on me.

Engine-rich exhaust can still provide thrust.

People like their idealised models of the world, but they're fundamentally still just idealised and models.

It's somewhat illuminating to learn that all abstractions are leaky.

For example, you can't reliably represent "sex" using a "bit" type in a database. It's not just "M" or "F". You can have "unknown" (of course), "known but not willing to say" (whatever), intersex of all sorts, transexuals, genetically XY but physiologically female, etc...

The world is complicated and messy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis

Similarly, there's no clear demarcation between species in many cases.

There's no such thing as a "tree" either: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

I could go on and on.

> It's somewhat illuminating to learn that all abstractions are leaky

You appear to be presenting these ideas as though they would be new to me, which they aren't. In fact, these ideas are essentially pop-science[0].

Incidentally, the rhetoric you are employing is also used by Flat Earthers[1], so well done for that, I suppose.

> For example, you can't reliably represent "sex" using a "bit" type in a database

This example you've swiftly jumped to is a little too on the nose for me to not read it as bait. Did you think you'd found a bible-bashing Trump-voting conservative to argue against?

> I could go on and on.

Yes, I can see that. I will however once again invite you to try and articulate a point that you're trying to make.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhwcEvMJz1Y

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnwTtr_JYCM

I don’t believe in your definition of truth nor do I believe you’re qualified to make statements defining truth.

Sounds like, just your opinion, man.

Which novel?

Out of curiosity, what is your rationalization of the epic of Gilgamesh having a nearly identical flood story about 500-600 years prior to the Old Testament and no Christian gods present? I’m genuinely interested in how a Christian thinks about that and the other various pre-Christian stuff that was incorporated into the Bible.

It's all about whose textual criticism you believe. You can find people who argue one way. The Old Testament professors I studied under would argue a different way. Just one example: https://genesisapologetics.com/faqs/gilgamesh-epic-which-cam...

There are other things in the Bible that challenge me more than textual criticism.

On the flip side, I'd say the core "rationalization" I have for my belief is what the Bible teaches about sin. It's obvious to me something is very wrong with with the world we live in. I think the Bible explains convincingly both what's wrong and what the fix is.

Wow thanks for the link, that does clearly show how Bible literalists(?) think about topics like that.

Harry potter is true. Voldemort is doomed to come back and there are secret schools were people go to learn how to do magic.

I wish. :) Except the Voldemort part. Harry Potter is fantastic.

How can the bible be utterly true? It outright contradicts itself multiple times. It's a bunch of little books written by a hundred different people over the span of centuries.

Do you instead mean that you believe that the broad themes are true, but that there are lots of details written by authors that are flawed?

To believe that it is "utterly" true indicates to me a capacity for doublethink bordering on total insanity.

Religion specifically asks you suspend disbelief, so this is consistent

yes, the Faith problem.

You are, of course, accusing me of being totally insane after a reasonable investigation of the Bible including significant familiarity with the texts themselves as well as the theological and exegetical arguments for non-contradiction?

If not, maybe try it. :) IMO there are reasonable and even compelling arguments about why the Bible is both inerrant and trustworthy.

I spent five years in seminary and believe, after significant investigation, that the Bible is utterly true.

I have read it. It's why I don't believe it is utterly true and consider the claim that it is utterly true indicative of what I said it is. It's 2021. Any of us can go and look up a list of the contradictions people have found throughout the ages, then go and look up those verses on BibleHub and see that the text, in any of a dozen translations, are directly contradictory. Context does not help in the vast majority of these cases, as they are definitive claims of fact that are directly opposed.

Probably my favorite bit is when Genesis says that god decided people could not live longer than 120 years, then later goes on to name a ton of people who lived for hundreds of years. We also know today that there is at least one person who lived longer than 120 years, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment .

And of course I won't even get into just how fantastically contradictory every gospel is with the others over quite a startling array of details of the story of the death and ascension of Jesus.

Well, kudos for at least reading it.

Yah, some of that stuff is admittedly hard, the different gospel narratives are right up there with the best of them. Although, I do believe they can be reconciled.

My apologies for assuming you were just parroting common internet wisdom.

Does the Bible have any predictive power at all in the real world today? What insights can it give modern scientists?

Do miracles still happen or have they conveniently stopped happening in the modern world? If anything it would be easier to prove nowadays with most people walking around with cameras.

IMO you have some presuppositions about value and importance that are influencing the questions you ask.

For example, I could ask: "How does the Bible help me be a better Python developer?" The most direct answer is, "It doesn't."

Biblical wisdom, in response, might say something like: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world (e.g. be the best Python developer) and forfeit his soul?" And, if you believe that's a better and more important question, then the Bible starts to have value and insight.

I only have anecdotes regarding miracles. Usually from missionary settings. But, I've also realized that while miracles are frequent in the Bible particularly because they are extraordinary, most of the biblical timeline unfolds without mention of any miracles. I think it's probable miraculous signs are not nor expected to be commonplace.

>Biblical wisdom, in response, might say something like: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world (e.g. be the best Python developer) and forfeit his soul?" And, if you believe that's a better and more important question, then the Bible starts to have value and insight.

At that point, one might as well turn to Buddhism or the wisdom in Hindu texts, which is as good as, if not better than wisdom in the Bible. The Bible would only be special if it was the word of God, but if it cannot give us any more insight into understanding our world than science can, it's a lost cause.

You kind of have to run Pascal’s wager on that one then, don’t you?

The Bible says that it is the divinely inspired word of God, that Jesus himself is the exclusive way to heaven and that all other religions are fabrications and devotion to them leads to hell. Hell is a real place, with real suffering brought on from disunity with God. Quite the wager imo.

> but if it cannot give us any more insight into understanding our world than science can, it's a lost cause

It’s surprising to me that especially in this year alone people cling to science as their religion. Modern medicine is effectively still alchemy in light of comprehensive knowledge of the human body. No scientist can recreate the human hand, eye or ear in perfect authenticity to all of its intricacies. It’s trite at this point to even mention all that we do not know of our own humanity. We can’t even fix depression with SSRI’s! We have no clue the true mechanism of action as it interacts with brain chemistry.

The Bible declares that in every individual, God created the very last detail of their existence. That before time began he knew you and I as individuals. Jesus came and rebuked fevers. Literally spoke to a fever to tell it to leave. He told bacteria or viruses to leave another humans body and it did. She was saved. Jesus can do that because he’s God. He can do that because he has comprehensive, complete, understanding of the human body. He designed it. He made it.

Science knows that it doesn’t know everything. Otherwise it would stop.

And if you truly believed that science were as flimsy as you appear to suggest, next time you fly somewhere, ask for a priest to fly the plane, not a pilot.

It seems you’re taking my words beyond what I said.

Science has its use, but in the grand scheme of things, science only helps us see the mirror dimly.

>No scientist can recreate the human hand, eye or ear in perfect authenticity to all of its intricacies. It’s trite at this point to even mention all that we do not know of our own humanity. We can’t even fix depression with SSRI’s! We have no clue the true mechanism of action as it interacts with brain chemistry.

Textbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

I believe it’s utterly, infallibly, and inerrantly true.

I haven’t been able to find a single contradiction that hasn’t been answered by a cogent explanation that includes the surrounding context, intertext references and ties to larger overarching themes. And believe me, I love and enjoy peering deeply into those holes.

Perhaps the beauty is that those 66 books written over centuries tell a continuous and noncontradicting story.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t difficult sections of scripture. There are things that come off as quotes that are actually paraphrases. There are different point of views between the gospels that insist 1 person was there when 2 people were in another account of the same situation. These are easily remedied when you consider the focus and theme of the book and the clear intentions of the author.

The authors are indeed flawed (as humans, standing in the pages of history), but they write with the inspiration of God himself and make no error in recording their account.

Happy to help with other concerns.

How do you explain this then?

https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html

Easily. It's the same story from two different perspectives. The first chapter is on a more global level. The second zooms in and focuses specifically on how man was created.

The animals were created globally first. Once Adam was created, God created animals again so Adam could see the process, understand that God is Creator, and participate in ruling over God's creation.

Interesting website choice. I spent a year as an agnostic because of that website before I started to realize there must be another perspective to consider.

Okay. So you don't believe that the bible is utterly true. You believe that the bible, plus some supplementary explanatory material is utterly true.

I certainly believe interpretation is necessary and that some interpretations are more faithful than others.

I believe there are resources out there that can help someone to faithfully interpret. And the converse also. The skeptics annotated Bible being in the latter category IMO.

To a disinterested outsider, this dialog reads like:

A: everything in this book is literally true

B: what about this passage where it says 3+4=9?

A: my interpretation of that passage is that the 9 represents a 7 in that particular context

The salient point being: that even if A has arrived at a literally true interpretation of the passage, the truth came from A, not from the passage. Further, although A believes they're arguing that the book is inerrant, what they're effectively claiming is that their interpretations are inerrant.

> the truth came from A, not from the passage How can an interpretation attesting the truth of two passages exist while the passages are individually untrue? There seems to be a logic error here.

> what they're effectively claiming is that their interpretations are inerrant.

I don’t think A is claiming that, as the most basic understanding of Christianity understands that the individual is terribly flawed and errant.

If your presupposition for this conclusion is based on your earlier point might have either misstated something or you’re claiming a conclusion without an expressed premise.

The passages are interpreted incorrectly.

Humans aren't rational beings that form conclusions by logically composing facts into a singular point. Instead humans are more prone to construct a scaffold of logic in order to support and existing belief. That site is picking and choosing passages in order to support a misguided belief.

Instead a person must start with no beliefs and formulate a conclusion from the facts. If you do this, it is undeniable that the bible is real.

I once told this to an atheist and he was astonished because my description of his subconscious behavior and lack of awareness was 100% what he thought I was doing.

This makes me wonder do atheists even realize how unscientific and illogical they are? Are they constantly thinking that I'm the one that's illogical? Are humans so unaware of their own biases that we can never ever truly determine what is real and what isn't?

To answer your final question - no, we probably cannot actually determine absolute truth about the universe. There is quite a long history of epistemology that indicates this. In addition, we've got the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th... which lets us know that there will ALWAYS be true things that we cannot prove with any set of axioms. Coming to a full reckoning of truth or reality is impossible. We're each doing the best we can with the perspective we've been given and the information available to us.

I also think you are being quite uncharitable to most atheists. The majority of us grew up in the church, have read the bible, utterly believed the bible was true, were devout believers, and generally were at some point quite indistinguishable from you or any other truly intellectual believer in terms of worldview.

It really was the kinds of contradictions the comment you replied to indicates, along with hundreds of others, and the absolute mental knots that had to be constructed in order to justify them that set me on the path of disbelief. This is the path for millions of people as they take a serious reckoning of their beliefs and with their holy books and do a fundamental reexamination of their entire worldview and belief structure.

I don't think that either of us is being disingenuous in our portrayal of our beliefs. That said, I really do think that your interpretation of what people are doing when they examine these contradictions and draw the conclusion of disbelief is, in fact, the theological equivalent of p-hacking is fundamentally untrue.

I wasn't referring to something that profound. It's more like am I right or are you right?

>Instead a person must start with no beliefs and formulate a conclusion from the facts. If you do this, it is undeniable that the bible is real.

What verifiable facts are in the Bible?

Can any of the claimed miracles be replicated today? Say handling snakes or drinking poison, which has resulted in multiple deaths of believers.

Two religious people can't agree which parts of the Bible are literal and which are just a story, so it's funny to see accusations at the other side.

Astronomy makes outlandish sounding conjectures that can't be replicated either and it is not considered a religion. For example, the big bang cannot be replicated.

Lack of the ability to replicate something means that it is just hard to prove that something is true. Not being able to prove something to be true via replication does not mean it is not true.

I suppose the thing about faith is there is nothing I can do or say that could convince you from it. Your unwavering belief in the myths told in a collection of old books written by the barely educated in spite of a lack of evidence for the more magical parts (which is a significant chunk of it) is indeed a core moral value in your belief system. The extent to which you believe is somehow a virtue, and not a vice. This is obviously in reverse from my perspective.

You think I’m illogical. I think you’re illogical. In the end we’re just two Spidermans, pointing at each other.

>I once told this to an atheist and he was astonished because my description of his subconscious behavior and lack of awareness was 100% what he thought I was doing.

>This makes me wonder do atheists even realize how unscientific and illogical they are? Are they constantly thinking that I'm the one that's illogical? Are humans so unaware of their own biases that we can never ever truly determine what is real and what isn't?

You're an atheist too, towards other religions like Islam, Hinduism etc. When you truly understand that your arguments against those religions go against Christianity too, you will understand atheists.

My arguments against Islam and Hinduism are identical to my argument against atheism. My reasoning is internally and externally consistent.

> My reasoning is internally and externally consistent.

I don’t think you should be so confident that everyone else sees it this way.

Why do we need to refer to everyone else? What matters is my own argument not everyone else's.

If what everyone else thinks is a factor, than the majority of the world is not atheist.

I think I see what you're trying to say, but there is a bit of term confusion in your argument.

Just using the linguistics of the word, "Atheists" are definitively people who do not believe in a theos, ie: a g/God. It would be nonsensical to call a polytheist or monotheist an atheist.

> When you truly understand that your arguments against those religions go against Christianity too...

Christianity is relatively unique[1] in the sense that it claims exclusivity to salvation through Jesus Christ. As it relates to your argument, this tenant allows Christians to make claims to spiritual supremacy. Interreligious comparisons are moot at that point.

[1] Conditioning that statement here, I can't keep up with all the world's religions

> Humans aren't rational beings that form conclusions by logically composing facts into a singular point.

But you’re proceeding to form a logical, rational argument in saying this. How are we to ever understand what you’re intending?

I am simply saying that humans by nature are irrational. You have to deliberately discipline yourself to be dispassionate in constructing logical arguments. Atheism is illogical and unscientific. It is a collection of people deliberately and unconsciously picking and choosing specific evidence to validate a pre-existing belief that they already staked so much of their identity on.

A person born into atheism isn't just going to change sides as soon as he's presented with evidence that Christianity is real. Rather he will twist and bend the existing evidence in a way so as to support is current world view.

When you do place together all the facts, logically speaking, what follows is that the bible is real.

Atheism isn’t a belief.

Atheism is non-belief.

This is pedantic. You could say you believe in not believing in certain things. Does it even matter? You know what I mean, no need to get pedantic here.

I don’t really wish to continue arguing with you, because as I wrote earlier, your heels are dug in and there’s nothing I can say or do to convince you.

I do think it’s useful to highlight here though that the difference between belief and non-belief is not pedantry, and it’s not inconsequential.

The entire scientific method is about challenging ideas to discover the truth. When a scientist makes a claim to another scientist, the default position is “I don’t believe it. Please show substantial evidence to support your claim.”

This is different from faith-based scientism, which is more similar to any other faith-based ism in that the method is to protect ideas from challenge in order to preserve the “truth”.

I'm sorry but you're the one that is biased and have your heels dug. I don't wish to to communicate with you either. However you're the one that decided to respond to me. I'm up to talk but if you say something as rude as, "I don’t really wish to continue arguing with you" then I have no interest in anything you have to say. I kindly ask you to stop if you do not want to continue arguing with me, you're the one that responded to me in the first place.

>I do think it’s useful to highlight here though that the difference between belief and non-belief is not pedantry, and it’s not inconsequential.

If you don't wish to continue arguing with me why the heck are you still highlighting things? The difference is pedantic. It's like talking about the difference between adding a negative number and subtracting a positive number.

    You believe something exists.
    You disbelieve something doesn't exist.

    You believe something doesn't exist.
    You disbelieve something doesn't exist.

These are linguistic phenomenons and you are just adding negative qualifiers to words thinking that it has a profound affect on meaning. It is 100% pedantic. Additionally my religion is not a belief. It is a logical conclusion built from the composition of facts.

>The entire scientific method is about challenging ideas to discover the truth. When a scientist makes a claim to another scientist, the default position is “I don’t believe it. Please show substantial evidence to support your claim.”

The scientific method cannot ever discover the truth. Proof is the domain of math and logic. In science and therefore the real world, nothing can be proven. To quote Einstein: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."

Science is not about proving things to be true. The entire endeavor of science is an attempt to prove something false. Repeated failures to prove something false only indicates that something "might" be true.

This coupled with the fact that all observations tools in science have limited accuracy and limited precision makes it such that even the act of disproof is done through the lens of probability. Or in other words, nothing can really be disproven either. This is a bit philosophical and a bit too pedantic but the point is to illustrate that I understand the scientific method to a degree greater than even most atheists.

>This is different from faith-based scientism, which is more similar to any other faith-based ism in that the method is to protect ideas from challenge in order to preserve the “truth”.

Let me reiterate my point. My stance is not faith-based. It is self-evident logic. Every religious person you talk to parrots the buzz word of "faith" but really what they are saying to you is that their "belief" to them is as logical and rational as science is to you.

That isn't true at all. Atheism is a positive belief that the statement "there is no God" is true.

For example, I don't lack a belief that an elephant is in my living room, I have a positive belief that there is no such elephant.

This leads to absurdity. There are infinite non-existances, but finite existences (modulo the infinite of the universe, but the observable universe/the ~13.7 billion lightyear bubble around the Earth or so is finite). To assert that you have a positive belief that things that do not exist do not exists is to assert that you have infinite positive beliefs in the non-existant. To encode these infinite positive beliefs in reality would require infinite storage space, even in something as powerful as the human brain. I instead assert that you have positive beliefs in things that exist and, only upon it being necessary, do you assert the factuality of non-existences in an ad hoc as needed basis as the result of the conjugation of your positive beliefs of existence.

The pretzels "you people" tie yourself in... I can't fathom how you operate with that much cognitive dissonance in your heads all the time.

You must willfully ignore all the hard questions you can't answer.

But that is what real this real religious belief brings right? I am an atheist but (only early on) raised with: the hard questions you do not ask; it is up to god and not you to know these things. Just follow his teachings in life and do not reason why. I do believe (from the few people I know who really believed, all dead now) that if you deeply believe and follow this, you could be happy in a very easy way as you genuinely will leave these questions behind and believe all people who question you will end up south of heaven. Not your problem if you tried to help them by quoting scripture. Think it leaves your head more clear than having questions and finding ways (logic, physics etc) to answer them; just not have them at all.

you need to prove god first (but it would help if it was clearly defined first).

But the "teachings" basically boil down to "treat others how you would like to be treated. There is nothing god like in that... its pure evolutionary pragmatism.

Agreed, however, there are many interpretations which have many caveats. I was raised in a particularly hard-core interpretation of the bible and we had to do a lot more to get to heaven than just treat others how you would like to be treated. Also, what is your margin of error for that in a particular interpretation? Can you repent or off to hell with you after one strike? Ours was closer to the latter. All the questions I had as a child about those things and the logic fallacies coming out it where said to be god's domain, not mine (and continuing that line of questioning actually was said to be sort of a sin (I do not remember how severe it was, just that this is in the bible somewhere and that I got a lot of school penalties asking questions), with bible verses quoted).

Can you supply archaelogical, or historical proof that Moses existed as a real person?

The egyptians kept stellar records and there's no record of 100k people wandering the wilderness of a 20 mile stretch of land for 40 years. It's hard to fathom that'd go unnoticed.

It's also a fact that the books of moses were first written down about 800 years after he would've lived...so how can that be infallible if it's passed by word of mouth.... Ever play the telephone game?

> The egyptians kept stellar records

The best evidence is that the egyptians were very biased in what was recorded in ways that would be likely to have survived (triumphs, yes, defeats, not so much) and that even when things were recorded, events and persons who later fell into disfavor were actively eradicated from the kind of durable, monumental records that would be most likely to survive.

> and there’s no record of 100k people wandering the wilderness of a 20 mile stretch of land for 40 years.

What 20 mile stretch of land are you talking about? With the classical (but probably wrong) association of the Yam Suph with the Gulf of Suez, the “wilderness” would have been (or at least started) on the Sinai Peninsual, which is more than 20 miles in either dimension. (There’s a number of other interpretations of the Yam Suph, including the Gulf of Aqaba, which would have put the wilderness in (again, starting in) Arabia. (There’s good reasons to doubt the Exodus story, but you’ve completely missed the real ones: while the absence of records of the actual Exodus is much less surprising than you make, the absence of evidence of anything like the population that supposedly took part in it ever existing in Egypt at any time in order to leave in the Exodus is the big one.)

> It’s also a fact that the books of moses were first written down about 800 years after he would’ve lived…so how can that be infallible if it’s passed by word of mouth.... Ever play the telephone game?

Societies with high literacy may not be good at maintaining stable oral traditions, but those without it are known to be. Even if that weren’t true, mundane written documents aren’t infallible either, believing in infallible writing usually involves invoking a special divine gift of inspiration. But if that works for writing, there’s no reason it can’t work for oral tradition, or for writing that is remote from events.

I don't find it offensive, I do not think it can be true and currently, at least in the EU where I live and have lived, this is seen in this day and age as an American thing (the end of Don't look up for instance). And that people on HN believe that (logically inconsistent stories interpreted differently; your interpretion is already different from versions practiced where I grew up, where, by the way, the churches closed down mostly now) is beyond me, but each their own. If it makes you happy, who cares what others think.

That religion is completely and totally a man made, fictitious, concept. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc... all just mythologies that have no more basis in reality than any work of fiction. It is simply a tool. A tool used to soothe existential angst in the people that need such soothing and that certain others can use to exert control or gain power. This would be absolutely outrageous, to the point of death, in many circles.

Think this is the case as well; it is a handy tool to keep the people in line. My mother often laments that it was so much easier when she was young just making sure she followed the catholic rules and believed she would go to heaven. I wish I believed it (I was raised protestant but found it so ridiculous from a very young age that it did not take; I asked my teachers questions I was not allowed to ask and such); it would make life better I believe; no reason to hunt money or earthly stuff, just live a good and devout life and enjoy yourself with your loved ones after. But I simply cannot; it makes little sense, any of it, when you think about it. But hooray for people who really believe it; they should be far more relaxed than me. Maybe it should be an outrageous claim as well that I think a lot of American believers do not really believe but either make money or use it as a social tool to look good (trump). Which is basically the same as you claim.

This is not an outrageous thought in the scheme of HN or the tech sphere though. I’d say this is the accepted norm and people outside of this are the ones with outrageous thoughts.

You gotta think bigger. This is outrageous in terms of the entire world and human history. There hasn't been a single human civilization that you can classify as having no religion.

He's right when he says that the people who don't believe in religion are the outrageous ones.

I generally agree with this, but kept getting hung up on two things: 1) scientists have shown rather interesting brain activity in different regions during prayer, and 2) every society, seemingly unconnected from each other, has something akin to religion.

If it were just a power grab thousand years ago, how or why did others around the world get the same idea?

1) You mean there is some sort of placebo effect at play? Does this differ from what you see when you meditate? I would assume it differs somewhat at least?

2) A lot of people need something external to believe in, it gives them a sense of purpose and an explanation for what are essentially random lucky/unlucky events. It also gives political power.

There are a lot of personally useful things bundled into religion, prayer being one of them that at is core just looks like meditation, which doesn't necessarily require religion.

Strongly agree it's not just a power grab.. I think the power grab comes after rituals emerge and become common.

I agree that it's fictitious. However I believe that religion is ingrained within out biology. Every human culture and civilization developed religion independently. There is not one example of a human civilization that is only fully practical and has no religion.

The fact that it's completely ubiquitous indicates that religious practices among societies is not a coincidence. The only commonly shared attribute among all civilizations that have existed throughout time is biology and religion.

Such a correlation indicates that religion is highly, highly likely to be biological in origin.

- 20% high rankings catholics (in vatican) are pedophiles.

- Also that trump and extreme rights in general are a regulation process to keep a society / democracy healthy (and mostly, strong).

The West is the worst model of society on the planet

Really? Name one society that you think is better. Not something wrong or in need of improvement within the West, there is loads of that I'm with you if that is what you mean, but somewhere actually consistently better in all to most things and in real existence. Since you said worst on the planet, imaginary societal structures you'd want to try also wouldn't count.

some are better than others

i personally find them all trash, they tend to follow each other nowadays, the countries who dare to stray away from that model gets bombed, economically muted by murica or are pictured as "terrorists"

the west definitely is one of the worst

ultra selfish, all about profits and capital gain, ultra greedy, ugly, non-healthy, tasteless, empowers the stupid, venerates the dumbification of humankind

is there a point in asking this question? What I mean by that is, if someone believes it, it would seem logical that they don't think its "outrageous"...

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-c...

I’ve felt like Capt. Obvious since then. I don’t understand why people are shocked about anything.

That gender as a concept is meaningful only to people who would have liked to be born the opposite sex (ie trans people); for all the other people, sex at birth is what counts. Some of those "other people" pretend to find gender meaningful for political convenience.

Don’t discount the impact of relationships on our views. Having a good friend who doesn’t conform to the “sex at birth” norm will often move someone over to their “gender is a construct” side.

OK, so what are the remaining 99% of people to think about this?

I imagine it depends on their empathy: their ability to understand/validate someone else’s experience, despite not experiencing it themselves.

Yeah, but ultimately the vast majority of people are attracted to "sex at birth" and there's not much convincing you can do.

Attraction, beyond physical looks (which is easily manipulated with makeup) is much more complicated than what’s between your legs.

It is, but what's between your legs plus all the secondary sexual characteristics (which are extremely difficult to disguise / imitate) are a big part of it. Not sufficient, but necessary.

> That gender as a concept is meaningful only to people who would have liked to be born the opposite sex

No, it's not.

In fact, “gender is a social construct” is controversial among trans people, who often have identities very tied up in gender (and specifically gender identity) being a innate essential characteristic that just happens to differ from the physical traits on which society has traditionally ascribed gender.

“Gender as a social construct” is useful (necessary, even) to explain why gender systems differ between societies in terms of what genders are recognized, what features are the basis of ascribing gender, and the expectations and roles associated with each recognized gender.

Taxes are theft (always). Many people share it explicitly. 99.99% of the people believe it somehow. But when you take it to its final conclusions, specially after touching something in particular, most people get super defensive and try every time of logical contortions to find somewhere when coercively removing property is ethically valid.

> Many people share it explicitly. 99.99% of the people believe it somehow.

I think this is mostly a US-centric thing. In Europe taxes tend to be much higher and people mostly acknowledge that they are a necessary evil and when used appropriately they are good. How do you fund good roads, public illumination, universal healthcare, publicly-funded schooling, etc without everybody chipping in?

Sure, there are many discussions about how much people pay, about tax evading, about whether the systems in place are the fairest, etc. but in general from my experience (and personal opinion) they're not seen as theft.

Can't say anything about statistics, but I don't mind paying taxes, if the result is a better working society, or one at all, given whatever some people think the world would look like without nations at all. I would just like it, if I had more influence or at least transparency at what they are used for. Like what if you had to pay x amount of taxes a year, but everyone got to choose for what branches/areas at least and kind of "vote" a bit that way. If a program is unpopular, it wouldn't receive its funding, if you think something is underfunded, you can reallocate at least your money, but unlike purely optional donations, greed doesn't stop you, because you need to pay anyway. I heard that in Australia they print the percentage of your taxes going to what general category on your tax return. Kind of a neat idea, and probably not that hard to do, since it really is just dividing your final tax value by the official percentages. Not like ones taxes actually get used differently from another person, but it makes for good visibility of what should be already tracked and published information.

I see taxes simply as the price of civilization. I would obviously prefer to have more wealth, but not at the price of having to create and defend everything myself!

It’s my opinion that your wealth would not increase without taxes, because you’d have to explicitly pay for (and pay more for) a lot more things. Road use, security, medicine, bribes, food, etc.

This is true, but it’s not the only truth that matters.

Public goods can be _very_ efficient, even if inefficient in their delivery. I would have trouble believing that an educated citizenry is not a good thing, for example.

So although taxes are evil, they can be outweighed by a _much_ greater good.

But, also, wasted public spending is a great tragedy.

From this, I arrive at a left-Libertarian point of view: we should limit what the government does as well as we can to those things that are clearly better than the evil of the taxes involved, while it is still I think true that social welfare is compatible with this view.

I wrote about beliefs that many people find outrageous...

Questioning probability – Controlled probability theory

https://paradite.com/2014/10/23/questioning-probability-cont...

Extinction is Natural, So is Global Warming

https://paradite.com/2018/11/06/extinction-is-natural-so-is-...

More: https://paradite.com/opinions/

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