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Alright, thanks for taking me seriously. I'm feeling a bit touchy today. I think the problem is that I'm using the words artist, job, rules, authority, and creativity in a very liberal way.

I guess my general point is that to be an artist, you have to be creative. To be creative, you have to do something new. To do something new, you have to depart from what exists in some way. Whatever exists can be called authority, tradition, or "the rules". And then something new is a challenge to that authority. If you build a skyscraper in a town with no skyscrapers, you are challenging authority, even if all the other towns have skyscrapers. When parents make a baby, it's a creative act, and the baby ends up challenging the authority of the parents; the baby breaks the existing rules of the family structure. It's the same with the work that an artist does. It doesn't have to be socially rebellious in nature. An expression of beauty that has not been seen before is breaking the rules about the limits of beauty.

Even more generally speaking, when an artist does manage to break the rules, they end up challenging our preconceptions of what can be - these preconceptions are the true "rules" - and it opens us up to a deeper experience of the world. As examples, anything that creates a feeling of awe, anything that touches on sublime beauty, is operating on this level. I think if you look closely, all of the artists you named are working in this way; it's not mere repetition of what came before.

The problem is that you're talking down to me. If you can't or won't see this, I don't want to engage in a debate.

Okay, but that's not actually how cysts work if you look it up. They are sacs that can have cancerous tissue inside them, but they can also have fluid or air. The operational definition of benign and malignant tumors that doctors use boils down to rudimentary observation, yes, but in the lab we've really identified many of the key mutations in the transition from benign to malignant. So I guess you could say we have a reasonably good idea of what cancer is and how it works, but it hasn't fully made its way onto the front lines yet, either in terms of assessment or treatment.

I understand your cynical point of view about funding, but I guess I would say two things. First, cynicism is a cancer unto itself (ha), and all academics are faced with the corrupting influence of money. Second, if you go and talk to the cancer researchers in the nearest university you'll probably find a great deal of them really do care about the work; they just might care about a very tiny corner of it rather than a cure-all solution.

Incivility is against the guidelines, I don't want to argue with it.

That was unnecessarily condescending. Incivility is against the guidelines. What I have to say doesn't lose its validity simply because you shame me for my point of view. If you were sure enough of your position, you wouldn't need to humiliate me about mine.

I see what you're saying, but we probably don't have the same interpretation of the words 'job' and 'artist'. More broadly, the nature of creativity is to challenge authority. Look at any time period, any medium, and the most creative work is always going against the grain. Breaking the rules can be as simple as using an uncommon kind of brushstroke. It doesn't have to be against the wishes of whoever is paying for the work, and furthermore, just because something is challenging authority doesn't mean it's creative.

Okay, fair point. I'll revise: the job of an artist is to break the rules intelligently.

Also, I think you're conflating legality and morality. I can think of situations for all 8 cases of (legal|illegal)(moral|immoral)(agree|disagree). However, you're probably right that agreement/disagreement influences morality judgments.

The job of an artist is to break the rules.

So I think the general claim is that focusing on cancer is a middle ground between seeking treatments for obscure well-defined illnesses and searching for a panacea for illness or disease in general. Cancer has a precise operational definition: unregulated cell growth. It isn't nearly as vague as illness or disease. We understand a lot about all the different pathways inside cells that can lead to it. A "cure for cancer" is an attempt to address the issue upstream, such that it will affect all different types of cancer in the body. Unlike seeking a panacea for all illness, this is not obviously a waste of research effort. There are highly similar mechanisms at work in every cancer. Even if a cure-all cannot be found (I would be surprised, personally), just trying to understand the mechanisms still has value.

Sorry, I don't understand. If you meant PaulHoule's comment I'm not sure how that answers my question, and I didn't find any other comments by you. Do you mean because cancer isn't a simple, isolated thing like polio or TB?

Why is it a waste of research effort? We've made dramatic non-palliative strides in the area of cancer treatment, and most importantly have been able to induce complete remission in a significant number of cases.

Social pressures both to differentiate and conform to a particular sub-group during adolescence, and the kinds of groups that girls and boys tend to form. At least in part.

On reflection, maybe I got confused with the number of days you can go without water (also 7, at least according to my memory). I stayed awake for 5 days once and there was only a bare minimum of hallucination at the end. I could have stayed awake longer, it wasn't really hard by that point. The people I've known who stayed up forever on crystal meth typically started hallucinating after a week. I'm surprised that the limit is so much shorter, but I'll believe it, thanks for the link.

The thing about personal experience is that you can't really quantify it. His 3 anecdotes (3 SSDs over 3 years) are just as valid as your 13 anecdotes.

Oh shit, I totally misread your sentence! I think the problem is most people just aren't in touch with their bodies and the effect that having a body has on the mind.

Well, it's a testable hypothesis. We will probably never test it in humans or higher mammals due to ethical concerns.

If you don't sleep for long enough (about 7 days), you'll start to have visual and auditory hallucinations and also delusional thinking. You'll also experience severely reduced effectiveness of just about every system in your body. You might not die if you don't sleep for a year (say), but you'll probably get permanent brain damage.

Women are defined relative to men, just as men are defined relative to women. If there were no men, women would just be "people". In discussing one, you implicitly discuss the other. Whatever makes women into women, men are not that. Except, "woman" and "man" can also be seen as archetypes, and it's possible to integrate both, at least to some degree.

> I always wince whenever I see a person espousing any inherent gender differences or preferences, because they are consistently ripped to pieces.

Well, there are studies demonstrating the effect of sex hormones on cognition. Also, if there weren't gender differences, there wouldn't be genders.

You're not wrong about the percentages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175603

There was a similar poll this year with similar results but I can't find it.

That's an interesting philosophy. I guess it's like that, with the exception that eventually I'll withdraw from a persistently hostile conversation because I know my own limits and I want to avoid getting destructively angry. Similarly, I'm learning to avoid saying precisely what I think on certain topics around certain people, even if I know that it's a balanced position, because dealing with the aftermath isn't worth it. But yes, it's nice hanging out with friends who don't get all worked up just because I happen to have an opinion that they don't share.

Sure, whenever there's a massive imbalance between the genders, it's going to be less productive than when there's a balance. It also doesn't help much if the sexism discussion occurs among a group of 95% females - which is typically what happens.

> a lot of the factors that make HN a good place for technical discussions make it a horrible place for softer discussions like those about sexism.

Such as being 5% female.

> The issue is that with some particular topics, HN is unable.

Agreed, it's actually just impossible to have a non-polarized discussion if people identify too strongly with one of the poles. This isn't unique to HN, we essentially live in a bipolar society. Even if you present a middle ground, someone identifying with either pole will assume you are identifying with the opposite pole, because they see that part of the world in black and white.

Nevertheless, these discussions are good for clarifying your understanding of the world, just try not to expect much in the way of respect, appreciation, agreement, or understanding.

My claim is simply that much as force causes legal rights to exist, belief causes n/h rights to exist. Since you cannot take away my belief (except through brainwashing, but even then I can recover it), you cannot take away my n/h rights.

Or, might makes legally right, belief makes morally right.

It's interesting, because if you look back far enough you'll see I had the opposite argument with somebody else, where I was explaining that force was the only thing that caused legal rights to exist, and he was accusing me of immorality on that basis.

All of these arguments for success implicitly appeal to our fear that we are not going to be able to have a good human experience if we don't have enough power over other people.

You can succeed and you can fail, but you cannot be a success or a failure. The entire problem is identifying too strongly with the outcome of your actions.

Incidentally, if you really commit to this worldview, then traditional motivators like guilt and money stop working. The transition period can be difficult; it's usually the crux of a mid-life crisis.

It's also possible to have a large and clean non-spaghetti codebase that does not rely on some framework, be it pre-existing or ad-hoc. For example, Linux.

Incivility is against the guidelines. Civil arguments and debate are fine. Normally I'd be happy to discuss the nuances of aggression and passive aggression, but the tone of this conversation has become overly hostile and I don't want to participate any more.

I disagree with you as to what passive aggression means, in that you have a narrow view and I have a broad view, but there's likely many mental health professionals who actively rely on the DSM in their work that would agree with you. I will certainly keep that in mind when I use the term in the future, so thanks for pointing it out.

> The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally.

This is only true if you take the "corporations are psychopaths" view. Getting away with everything you can under the law and adhering to a fairly obvious social morality are not nearly the same thing. Famously, Oscar Schindler ended up running labor intensive businesses so that he could save the lives of his employees. There are many fair trade businesses that operate in developing economies under similar principles - profit matters, but so do the employees.

That was my only real objection, the rest of what you wrote is great, thanks for the perspective.

A perspective doesn't have to be false for it to be myopic.