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Ask HN: What do you believe that most people don't?
- yaya69 8y agoBelieve is the death of intelligence
- jstewartmobile 8y agoIt's 2018. We are all believing many many things. Doesn't make you wrong though.
- oreganoz 8y agoYou go around testing and reproving everything you encounter? Or do you believe in what a scientific community tells you, even partly?
- cpt1138 8y agoThat quantum entanglement is limited to strong gravitational fields. Like we see the probability field because we are in Earth's gravitational field. But it doesn't span the entire universe infinitely.
- jstewartmobile 8y agoThat most ailments in the western world are ones of modernity: over-nutrition, over-medication, physical inactivity, excessive hygiene, lack of sunlight, non-ancestral diets and/or environments, environmental pollutants, etc, etc. If something is bothering you that the doctors can't fix, it's a pretty good heuristic for plan-B.
- agitator 8y agoI strongly agree with this. It irks me that doctors often prescribe drugs first without seeking to find the root cause of a problem. But I guess such is the culture these days. People want a quick fix without being told to change their lifestyles.
- jstewartmobile 8y agoMost docs I know feel the same way, but when you get shaken-down for pills all-day every-day, most people are just going to give up and start passing out nexium and lipitor like it was candy on halloween.
- laex 8y agoThat you don't need to eat three or four meals a day. You can compress all the meals into one and still stay productive, energetic & healthy. ( Speaking from 2+ years experience of daily fasting and strength training )
- BigHatLogan 8y agoThis is very interesting to me. What made you adopt this habit? It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life. What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day? A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?
- laex 8y ago> What made you adopt this habit? For losing weight. If you're obese to begin with, this regime will give very good results at the beginning which also helps with the motivation. Note: Fasting + Strength training is superior to justing fasting. Why ? Because fasting decreases your metabolism. Strength training does the opposite. > It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life. Yes, I'd say so. > What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day? 1 ) Increased mental alertness - I've noticed how quickly the alertness disappears once food enters my body & digestion begins. Not sure If I should attribute this to increased insulin sensitivity or something else. 2 ) Increased productivity - It's amazing how much you can get done when you're not thinking of what & when to eat. I spend most of time writing code, learning new guitar riffs, & planning my workouts. 3 ) Prolonged workday: Related to (2). You can effectively prolong your daily work hours easily from the standard 8, up to 12 - 16 hours. This is because of (1) and (2). Heck you can also go 24 hours+. 4 ) Better quality sleep: On multi-day fasts (24+ hours), I get good quality sleep. I do believe they're of "good quality", because of an interesting effect I've noticed - you don't get the usual grogginess when you wake up. It's non-existent. > A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less? Yes - All calories in one meal. However, this is not optimal for muscle growth. For athletes, it'd be ideal to spread out protein intake across two meals, at the least.
- nugget 8y agoThat the majority of high school seniors would benefit more from trade school, apprenticeship, and small business entrepreneurship programs than four additional years of formal classroom education.
- oreganoz 8y agoIf we could only remove the stigma of being seen as somehow lesser for choosing a profession over another. The only way people make me dislike them immediately is when they start showing arrogant and elitist behaviour towards blue-collar workers.
- anotheryou 8y agoThat there is no free will. (and a few things deducted from that, like how anyone is innocent in some way and how this relates to criminal justice (protect society, resocialize, but never revenge)).
- ddorian43 8y agoSome people with ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) can't (don't want to) be fixed.
- nils-m-holm 8y ago"Don't want to be" assumes free will, which I reject. "Can't" is still no justification for revenge. Even if we assume that the "can't" is absolute, re-socialization should be attempted for the rest of the life of the individual. See it as an analogy to medicine: we don't say, "this guy cannot be helped, so we'll just let him die."
- anotheryou 8y agoExactly, locking someone away might be unjust to this person, but can be necessary for the greater good of protecting the society. The conclusion should be to lock such persons away in a reasonably humane way¹ (and not to sentence him/her to death). ¹ something in this direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
- nils-m-holm 8y agoI agree completely! It is my experience also that things just happen without anybody being in control. Given the same circumstances, all individuals would act in exactly the same way. Of course, "the circumstances" include a lot of hard-to-describe factors, like the mental model of an individual, as it was created during their life so far. Naturally, this point of view attracts a lot of criticism, most of all from people who think they would achieve better results in the same situation, e.g. not resorting to crime when faced with social exclusion and hardship. The assumption, in my experience, comes from lack of reflection, though. What enables one individual to perform "better" than the other? I would say, it's their mental model, created solely by their previous experiences. The "you" that allegedly makes all those "right" decisions is merely an automaton that was programmed by past experiences. So you are performing better because you learned to perform better or, in other words, you were lucky to live in an environment that fostered those traits. Indeed, there is no achievement and no guilt. They are both purely social constructs without any substance, and all they do is create a gap between those people who were lucky and those who were not.
- BigHatLogan 8y agoI may be preaching to the choir here (because this is largely a tech audience) but I don't buy into the stereotype that gamers play videogames (video games?) because of laziness or sloth or some other unfairly negative characteristic misattributed to them. I saw a post on Reddit where a group of gamers had recreated King's Landing, the main city from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft. The entire project looked like it took years to complete. It was something of an architectural marvel and a sight to behold. The reason I bring that up specifically was because it was not the work of a lazy and apathetic group of people. I would imagine the entire project took more hours than I spent studying for much of my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the collaboration involved. The entire project was a collective team effort towards a goal that the group deemed meaningful. I have seen multiple projects of this scale on Minecraft. If the people involved were lazy and slothful, where would they muster up the energy to work on such an endeavor? A project like this involves a certain level of planning and discipline to see to completion. I have felt the same way about competitive games like Starcraft in that I'm amazed at how much effort people put forth to obtain proficiency and competency. There are thousands of hours of YouTube videos online dissecting every aspect of that game, not unlike the way a football quarterback might analyze game film. Again, there is nothing particularly lazy about this. I see it no differently than I would see a chess player studying old chess matches and strategies to improve their skill. My preliminary thoughts are that video games offer a fair simulation of perfect competition in a world that is otherwise devoid of fairness. Reality is messy. Much of it, maybe most of it, depends on where you started out economically, who your parents were, and what kind of people were around you while you grew up. It's easy to fall into patterns of thought that resemble a "Why Me?" view of the world. I suspect a lot of gamers fall under this umbrella. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Instead, the way I see it is: If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? Especially when the simulation offers you what you crave in the real world: status, competency, hierarchy, friendship, community, etc. All of those can be found in video games. To me, many of them resemble a sort of perfect and fair world where one lives and dies by their own merits. I see the appeal of disappearing into one of these. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I was thinking about this recently and I am still hashing out my thoughts.
- 8y ago
- whataretensors 8y agoConsciousness is all around and estimates the same thing. The global minima consciousness is the mind of the universe.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoThat most of us struggle in a pointless daily grind, in the false belief that it gives our lives some sort of meaning. Most of us are wasting our lives doing stuff we don't really want to, instead of remembering to enjoy life. After all, we only get one shot at this. That people should open their minds and be more accepting of new experiences that may challenge their own strongly held beliefs. That we are much too terrified of drugs that are currently illegal, and not nearly terrified enough of drugs that are currently legal.
- cerberusss 8y agoThat it's entirely possible to save enough in order to retire early.
- charlesdm 8y agoI can agree with that, though in part it obviously depends on how high your income is, and how you invest and compound the money you have made. If you're making $25k a year it will be a lot harder and take much much longer to retire than for someone making $150k a year.
- cerberusss 8y agoYeah, I agree. Psychologically, I found it's easiest to simply not use raises in income.
- charlesdm 8y agoWell, I think you need to find a balance. Don't blow through everything, but also enjoy life because you only live once. I know guys who save up to the last penny to try and achieve financial freedom. It's infinitely easier (and more efficient) to try to make more money than it is to, for example, not buy the occasional starbucks coffee.
- presidente20 8y agoThat's right. The approach that works for me is optimising top-down. Save on the big expenses (accommodation, car, groceries) which requires planning and System II thinking. Try and save on the smaller stuff but as you're fighting your impulses (under social pressure, marketing influence etc) its much harder, so go with the flow.
- charlesdm 8y agoYup, exactly my line of thinking! As an example: I had the opportunity to take over a very nice corporate car of a friend at a ridiculously low price (for a variety of reasons). Basically I managed to purchase at half the actual value of the car -- it was a few years old but looked almost new and had super low miles. It was in perfect condition. I could've bought and sold it on the spot for close to double the price I paid. But I'll drive it for a few years and likely be able to sell it for close to the same price I originally paid for it. Others go buy a new car, take a massive depreciation hit, and in the end spend tens of thousands more. The expensive tickets are worth focusing on. Then go drink all the coffee you want.
- desdiv 8y agoChild labor laws, environmental laws, workplace safety laws, etc should apply to all goods transported, stored, or sold within a jurisdiction. One hundred something democratic sovereign states and not a single one implemented this yet.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoAgree 100%. Make local companies liable for the conduct of their international partners.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoThat you can have a good life without spending much money. That most technology has little or no real value. That web development sucks.
- ManlyBread 8y agoOne has a right to dislike an another person based solely on gender, race, religion or ethnicity; I can be tolerant but I won't feign acceptance or force myself to like such a person.
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- ironjunkie 8y agoThat most life decisions for most people are based on their social and cultural environment that force them into a predefined path. Wandering out of it comes with a price of continual self-doubt. Staying into that path is an easy way to live an ok life but it comes with the greatest price of all: a terrible feeling of regret at the end of your life. Something I also believe is that most people will not question those life decision and ask themselves if this is really what they want.
- ramblerman 8y agoThat most office jobs are useless, and contributing nothing, and what they do contribute could be done in far less time.
- hansthehorse 8y agoSugar is as toxic as alcohol. People here may agree but try that one at a neighborhood block party.
- ThatGuy64 8y agoThat all mental and physical reactions presented by all living things do not yield a true bearing of value. Every entity in the universe reacts with every other entity it comes accross to produce an outcome and nothing more. Being ecstatic bears no difference in value of being tortured.
- rayalez 8y agoThis doesn't make sense to me. There's no such thing as "value" determined by the laws of physics or floating around in the universe. Things that don't have minds don't have the concept of value. But we do. Value is created by human minds. And if value is created by human minds, then it's definition depends on what we find valuable. I find not being tortured pretty fucking valuable, so are many other people [citation needed]. If I place value on a thing or a state of mind or some state of the world, then it's valuable.
- ThatGuy64 8y agoby value im talking about morality/ethnicity of the whole occurence. sorry for not clarifying that.
- Marc66FR 8y ago1) Destiny exists: events of our life are pre-determined 2) There is life after death to transit and prepare before your next reincarnation
- latexr 8y agoWhy do you think most people don’t believe this? Aren’t those major points of the most popular religions? I feel (I haven’t searched for hard data) those views are shared by billions of people.
- ajurna 8y agoThat we are all part of a macro-organism. we all act as parts of the body and the more we organise the more we collectively grow. populations that are decimated lose massive amounts of knowledge and only increase in numbers increases the complexity of the technology. in a lot of ways we act like cells in the human body. nothing tells them to be what they are, they find an opening and fill the role required of them. this doesn't mean we are going anywhere specific, but it does mean that as we work together our collect potential grows.
- anotheryou 8y agoI believe this too and my biggest fear about it is, that globalized humanity is a single specimen (at most a single pack).
- Spakman 8y agoThat birthdays are stupid. I love celebrating life and try my best to do so in every moment, but this forced celebration is a total turn off.
- muzz 8y agoI feel the same way about New Year
- brudgers 8y agoMost people are smart.
- jj109 8y agoI can't tell you.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoThe only way to be truly happy is to be ignorant of all the ills we are inflicting on the world and each other. Once you attain this awareness as part of growing up, the only way to drown out the awareness of this deplorable state of the human existence, is to numb the mind with drugs or to damage the brain to such a degree that it stops mattering to you.
- muzz 8y agoDoes it require ignorance of those ills, or can knowledge of them but with resignation be sufficient?
- KozmoNau7 8y agoI find that leads more to a sort of nihilism.
- agitator 8y agoI think there are two sides to this. Either ignore it, or embrace it and accept it as part of the human experience. If you accept that suffering is inevitable, you recognize the positives in life more readily. To me, this approach allows me to be present in life, as opposed to numb with drugs, waiting to expire.
- KozmoNau7 8y agoThe main problem is that no matter what, those positives are only tiny points of light in a big pile of shit.
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- pythia__ 8y agoCorporal punishment is more humane and a more effective deterrent to crime than prison. I am not actually sure if most people don't believe this.