7 ms·
I wonder what modern day ideas are considered utter insanity in 70 years.
by marcinzm 6y ago
I wonder what modern day ideas are considered utter insanity in 70 years.
- austincheney 6y agoGiving your personal data away for free to social media for public exhibition and to be monetized as a weapon against you.
- paulcole 6y agoNot even going to be in the top 50.
- Shared404 6y agoAlthough you may be right, something like [1] showing election manipulation very well could end up in the top 10, I would think. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... edit: Change tone to be less snarky/combative. It was unintentional if I came across as rude.
- paulie_a 6y agoWhich had zero long term implications. Some minor and now totally forgotten short term repurcussions. The policy could be updated "we will sell the creepiest of the creepiest data on you and your friends. Hell your friends don't even need to sign up." And it would hardly change usage patterns. Cambridge was a tiny distraction of the week that had no lasting effects.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y agoBrexit??? It's going to have massive effects for a long time.
- kortilla 6y agoElections have been fraught with various levels of targeted propaganda for a long time. Cambridge Analytica didn’t really even prove it worked better than previous methods of targeted advertising.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoDoesn't have quite the same punch as terraforming earth with nuclear bombs.
- k4runa 6y agoI reckon trying to grow all our food in smart greenhouses will seem silly in hindsight.
- dylan604 6y agoTell that to the Martian colonies. Maybe if you're considering feed the population of Earth it might seem silly, but for off-world populations that will be the only way to grow food.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThe idea that we can even have Martian colonies is ludicrous given our current skills. Getting there is the easy part. Building a self-sustaining ecology on Mars is harder - much harder. And if you look into the research, you'll see there's much less than you'd think.
- dylan604 6y agoThe reduction of CAFE standards and other decisions not to reduce harmful emissions.
- valuearb 6y agoCAFE isn’t an emission reduction program.
- mhh__ 6y agoclimate change denial, it will have probably become obvious by then.
- est31 6y agoThere are corona denialists out there still to this date. So I'm a pessimist on that one :(.
- Shared404 6y agoIt seems like this is partially because (in the US at least) covid is a largely political thing, as stupid as that is. Once we are 50 years in the future I think both of these will be regarded as stupid/backward.
- labster 6y agoOn a fragment of a stele recovered from Atlantis, this was inscribed and translated: “Daddy, why do we live under water if we breathe air?” “Darling, it’s just because of natural variability.”
- mamon 6y agoEven if coronavirus actually exists I would still consider COVID-19 epidemic to be mostly a social experiment, basically the extended version of War of the Worlds [1] Governments are testing how many idiotic rules can they make us follow, preparing for the switch from democracy to surveillance-based totalitarism. The actual mortality rates are not enough to justify all those limitations - most people infected by coronavirus don't even have any symptoms, majority of those who have symptoms will get through them as they would through a normal flu. If anything, we should order the old people (say 70+) to stay home, as they seem to be the only real risk group. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_d...
- microcolonel 6y agoCritical theory.
- kwistzhaderach 6y agoIt’s utter insanity now
- microcolonel 6y agoIt's also the mainstream, now that millennial graduates are seeping into the institutions. I'm sure some important people knew phrenology was dumb when it was big, didn't make it less dumb 70+ years later.
- Kednicma 6y agoThis has been kind of a content-free thread. Could you explain more? Critical theory itself is almost a century old, in terms of who originally talked about it, and today the idea of critical thinking and critical reading is not just mainstream, but part of public education; meanwhile, nothing bad seems to have actually happened as a result of critical theory. Edit: I don't like the phrasing I used in this first paragraph. To be more clear: The fact that the government publically funds an effort to teach children to examine the government's official declarations, question their authorities, and study the power structures which control them, is a surprising success of critical theory. Phrenology is roundly countered by basic genetics; pedigree collapse directly implies that humanity forms one single race. Similarly, we have studied skulls enough to be confident that phrenology has no predictive power. What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory? The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia [0], but I don't think that you are talking about either of them. (Those criticisms are that critical theory is insufficiently Marxist, and that it lacks praxis.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory#Criticism
- microcolonel 6y ago> ...and today the idea of critical thinking and critical reading is not just mainstream, but part of public education... Critical theory is not critical thinking > The best criticisms against critical theory are listed on Wikipedia That's quite a bold claim, how often are the best criticisms of anything listed on Wikipedia? > What sorts of similar "showstopper" evidence do you have against critical theory Well, it is explicitly not concerned with evidence, the thing you are attempting to appeal to in this question. Hacker News calls upon us to assume good faith, so I'll stop here.
- labster 6y agoLegacy systems in Go and Rust.
- tandr 6y agoIf that's going to pan out somehow, you can get a bit of sneak peek into what future developer will feel like by looking into k8s code today...
- emptybits 6y agoLarge scale meat farming practices.
- Gibbon1 6y agoI think meat production, inorganic fertilizers, and pesticides likely. Also read an essay where the author claims the biggest mistake of the last 10,000 years was basing our food crops on grasses.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoWhat was the suggested alternative to grasses? Guns, Germs, and Steel goes into this a great deal and the conclusion there is that in many ways precursors to today’s wheat is the miracle that gave birth to modern civilization. Potential alternatives would need to provide similar nutrition (esp protein), be easily amenable to “naturally” providing selective breeding for choice traits, be easy to sow and harvest for hunter gatherers to become farmers, and be resilient enough to provide a model for civilizations around the globe.
- Gibbon1 6y agoI can try and dig for the original source, though google search has turned to shit in the last few years. What I remember is the advantage of grasses is as annuals you can selectively breed productive strains quickly. And that's true of other annual crops. Downside is they require a lot of nutrients and water because the whole plant needs to regrow from seed every year and they have shallow roots. That leads to energy and environmentally damaging agriculture. Potential solution is perennial shrubs and trees. Perennials have deeper roots and require less water and fertilizer. And don't require the land to be plowed every year. The latter is a real problem. People talk about global warming, less well known is the world is very quickly losing topsoil.
- kwistzhaderach 6y agoIs there a link to the article?
- pratnala 6y agoPoliticizing wearing masks. Oh wait, that's utter insanity even today
- Kednicma 6y agoProbably at least one part of our current electrochemical model will be considered hilariously wrong, on the same level of wrongness as the planetary model of the atom is considered today. Perhaps our hopes of the island of stability [0] will be dashed. Economists and mathematicians will eventually have a conversation which upends all known slogans of economics, forming a new school. It happens every few decades. The era of antibiotics is drawing to a close, as antibiotic resistance continues to grow. Meanwhile, phage therapy [1] is still being discovered but likely will give us a route to a kind of antibacterial and antibiotic therapy which is not as broad-spectrum as our existing drugs. Similarly, chemotherapy may give way to more targeted ways to deal with cancers, and eventually we might see some of these harsher treatments as akin to the overuse of radiotherapy during the era of radioactive quackery [2]. High fructose corn syrup may yet have its reckoning. Strangely, before 2020, this wouldn't have been thinkable, but we know from history that the Great Depression and World Wars changed the composition of dishes all around the world and even in industrialized recipes. The pandemic may yet change peoples' diets in ways which we won't understand for a decade or two, and the proper nutritional correction may take another few decades after that. Our children may be sincere about dealing with climate change. If so, then they may fly less, shrink standing armies, forbid the import/export of oil, drive less, set the thermostat a couple degrees hotter, or take many other relatively minor changes to parts of society which we usually imagine not changing at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
- xkcd-sucks 6y agoChemistry is all about good-enough approximations, of which the planetary model is one, for simple organic reactions at least. Doubt it's going away
- Kednicma 6y agoFor simple organic reactions, the shape of benzene [0] matters. Benzene has its quirky ring shape thanks to pi bonds [1], which only make sense in a 3D orbital model. The planetary model already has trouble with benzene formation and reactions. Another good example is water, whose hydrogen atoms are physically positioned almost entirely within the oxygen atom, according to the planetary model. Water's actual orbitals [2] have massive "echo" interactions on the hydrogen sides, which "push" the electrons onto one side of the molecule. Doing this with orbital mechanics alone would be, at a minimum, a headache. The essential main problem with the planetary model is in the word "planetes" or "wanderer"; electrons are not exactly point charges whizzing about the nucleus at high speed (although they kind of are, because of gold's color and other properties) but more like smeared-out across an orbital. Think of soft electron-butter being spread by a galactic butter knife. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_bond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_bond [2] http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/h2o_orbitals.html http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/h2o_orbitals.html
- 7952 6y agoThat burning wood is a really neat idea.
- kortilla 6y agoThe low bar for most of the social science publications and subsequently most of the findings from these fields so far. Entire branches of science make sweeping claims about races/classes of people based on one study in a small college town with 20 participants. Now that the reproducibility crisis is shining light on this modern tea leave reading, hopefully the groundwork is being laid for overhauls of these fields.
- Balgair 6y agoFingers-crossed: Chemotherapies. I'm soooo hoping that CRIPSR and the like help out with cancer and other diseases that use chemo as treatment. Seriously, fuck cancer.