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It amazes me how people can compartmentalize their rational brain and their romantic brain and never let the two speak to each other. How can you believe so har

It amazes me how people can compartmentalize their rational brain and their romantic brain and never let the two speak to each other. How can you believe so hard in the supernatural that you feel the need to make a kosher phone, but still be smart enough do it?

names_are_hard 5y ago
Indeed, but this is not unique to religious people. I've been deeply religious and I've been very secular, and one of the things I've learned is that smart people can believe incredibly dumb things. The real hard question we each need to answer is to determine which really dumb things we believe despite our intelligence. PS Isaac Newton spent a large portion of his life on alchemy and the hidden mysterious of the Bible. We all have blind spots, we just don't know they're there.
TheFreim 5y ago
Faith and reason are not contradictory.
- gnadsucks 5y ago
  Believing in the tooth fairy and reason are not contradictory.
gowld 5y ago
You're asking why super smart people can go over the top in pursuing nerdy hobbies?
xyzelement 5y ago
Is it a romantic brain or highly rational? Secular society is battling many problems (tech addiction, isolation, burnout, collapse of community etc) which religious society is protected from because of these superficially backwards practices. As we watch our society grapple with issues that the religious community doesn't suffer from, won't at some point it make sense to question whether we are the rational ones? To make this point another way, the more people on HN learn about the issues of tech addiction, lack of privacy etc, the more their technological preference "converges" to what you are currently making fun of.
- leotaku 5y ago
  It seems to me that there are two different kinds of "rational" at play here. It might certainly be rational to accept a religious viewpoint and way of life to make use of the positive secondary effects you mention, but this won't make the core belief (here, belief in a god) any more rational, no? I'm interested in your take on this.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    // but this won't make the core belief (here, belief in a god) any more rational, no? I'm interested in your take on this. I actually really enjoy this kind of discourse and happy to connect in some direct way if you are interested. But here's one train of thought. A rabbi and an atheist are debating whether there is a creator. The atheist says "there isn't. The universe just randomly happened to be." The rabbi asks if the man reads the NY times and the man says yes. The rabbi says "you know how that got printed, right? In the morning, a paper truck collided with an ink truck and it just happened to come out as the times". The man says there's no way that happened, the NY times is too complex to come out as an outcome of the accident. The rabbi replies: if the times is too complex to occur randomly, how much less likely that the universe, which is infinitely more complex "just happened" to be. That's just the flavor of the ideas. An animal does not contemplate the origin of the world, neither does a simple man. A lightly educated man can be told that the universe just is, and can accept that. A deeply questioning man is not satisfied with that explanation. If you are genuinely interested, you can look into Jewish views on science and how much of what for a long time seemed like fairy tales in religion is actually aligned with scientific thought. Eg on the topic of creation. Science did not know until the 20th century that the universe did not exist one moment and existed the next (the big bang) but religion knew it all along. In fact big bang was first theorized by a Catholic priest. That doesn't prove the existence of G-d as that's a matter of faith, but it speaks to the intellectual rigor of advanced religious thought.
    - AssafNativ 5y ago
      I think Richard Dawkins answered it in the most profound way in his book "The Blind Watchmaker". I don't want to do it unjust by explaining it here with my broken English.
high_byte 5y ago
I worked with that guy. He's not religious (and very smart), it's a business with huge market and to my understanding it became incredibly successful.
- AssafNativ 5y ago
  Thanks, whoever you are. It wasn't incredibly successful, it was just ok. There is too much competition and not enough customers.
AssafNativ 5y ago
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough or didn't interduce myself well, so let me try to fix it. I'm a secular Jew by birth. I was born and raised in Israel. I looked at this project more like a child phone that parents will buy for their kids to be safe and able to call for help if needed, but still protect them from unwanted exposure to an inappropriate Internet content without the required parental guidance. I didn't try to change anyone's way of living. Anyone who knows any orthodox community (there are plenty with many differences, Amish for instance) knows how rigid and inflexible they tend to be regarding technology. In my opinion, this tiny and silly project was just going to help them without compromising their values, something they will not do anyway. It was the time were feature phones and smart phones still existed next to each other, and our customers might have been the few people in the world that were upset from the fact that a device that used to be able to only make phone calls can now be used to browse the Internet. If you want to learn more about the project, I've presented everything back at RECon 2014 https://youtu.be/AMkD75tPRDI https://youtu.be/AMkD75tPRDI

names_are_hard 5y ago

Indeed, but this is not unique to religious people. I've been deeply religious and I've been very secular, and one of the things I've learned is that smart people can believe incredibly dumb things. The real hard question we each need to answer is to determine which really dumb things we believe despite our intelligence. PS Isaac Newton spent a large portion of his life on alchemy and the hidden mysterious of the Bible. We all have blind spots, we just don't know they're there.

TheFreim 5y ago

Faith and reason are not contradictory.

gnadsucks 5y ago
Believing in the tooth fairy and reason are not contradictory.

gowld 5y ago

You're asking why super smart people can go over the top in pursuing nerdy hobbies?

xyzelement 5y ago

Is it a romantic brain or highly rational? Secular society is battling many problems (tech addiction, isolation, burnout, collapse of community etc) which religious society is protected from because of these superficially backwards practices. As we watch our society grapple with issues that the religious community doesn't suffer from, won't at some point it make sense to question whether we are the rational ones? To make this point another way, the more people on HN learn about the issues of tech addiction, lack of privacy etc, the more their technological preference "converges" to what you are currently making fun of.

leotaku 5y ago
It seems to me that there are two different kinds of "rational" at play here. It might certainly be rational to accept a religious viewpoint and way of life to make use of the positive secondary effects you mention, but this won't make the core belief (here, belief in a god) any more rational, no? I'm interested in your take on this.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  // but this won't make the core belief (here, belief in a god) any more rational, no? I'm interested in your take on this. I actually really enjoy this kind of discourse and happy to connect in some direct way if you are interested. But here's one train of thought. A rabbi and an atheist are debating whether there is a creator. The atheist says "there isn't. The universe just randomly happened to be." The rabbi asks if the man reads the NY times and the man says yes. The rabbi says "you know how that got printed, right? In the morning, a paper truck collided with an ink truck and it just happened to come out as the times". The man says there's no way that happened, the NY times is too complex to come out as an outcome of the accident. The rabbi replies: if the times is too complex to occur randomly, how much less likely that the universe, which is infinitely more complex "just happened" to be. That's just the flavor of the ideas. An animal does not contemplate the origin of the world, neither does a simple man. A lightly educated man can be told that the universe just is, and can accept that. A deeply questioning man is not satisfied with that explanation. If you are genuinely interested, you can look into Jewish views on science and how much of what for a long time seemed like fairy tales in religion is actually aligned with scientific thought. Eg on the topic of creation. Science did not know until the 20th century that the universe did not exist one moment and existed the next (the big bang) but religion knew it all along. In fact big bang was first theorized by a Catholic priest. That doesn't prove the existence of G-d as that's a matter of faith, but it speaks to the intellectual rigor of advanced religious thought.
  - AssafNativ 5y ago
    I think Richard Dawkins answered it in the most profound way in his book "The Blind Watchmaker". I don't want to do it unjust by explaining it here with my broken English.

high_byte 5y ago

I worked with that guy. He's not religious (and very smart), it's a business with huge market and to my understanding it became incredibly successful.

AssafNativ 5y ago
Thanks, whoever you are. It wasn't incredibly successful, it was just ok. There is too much competition and not enough customers.

AssafNativ 5y ago

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough or didn't interduce myself well, so let me try to fix it. I'm a secular Jew by birth. I was born and raised in Israel. I looked at this project more like a child phone that parents will buy for their kids to be safe and able to call for help if needed, but still protect them from unwanted exposure to an inappropriate Internet content without the required parental guidance. I didn't try to change anyone's way of living. Anyone who knows any orthodox community (there are plenty with many differences, Amish for instance) knows how rigid and inflexible they tend to be regarding technology. In my opinion, this tiny and silly project was just going to help them without compromising their values, something they will not do anyway. It was the time were feature phones and smart phones still existed next to each other, and our customers might have been the few people in the world that were upset from the fact that a device that used to be able to only make phone calls can now be used to browse the Internet. If you want to learn more about the project, I've presented everything back at RECon 2014 https://youtu.be/AMkD75tPRDI https://youtu.be/AMkD75tPRDI