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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
- capnahab 5y agoI am thankful haemoglobin can carry so much oxygen without the iron in it turning to rust. Otherwise we wouldnt be able to breathe. Well described here,and i have no affiliation https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102010332 https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102010332
- TwinProduction 5y agoHahaha this article is a lot more meta than I thought it would be on a Thanksgiving morning. Great article nometheless; it seems like we just got really, really lucky.
- Lamad123 5y ago0. That some HN commenters rush to call bullshit out when they detect a lot of it.
- blackbear_ 5y agoI actually wondered why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China, great to see one possible explanation menioned in the article [1]. Does anybody know other theories about this? [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/03/book3.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/03/book3.htm
- versale 5y agoThis is clearly an idealistic approach. A materialistic view is better explained in Fernand Braudel's "Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century".
- mwcampbell 5y agoI assume the intent of that item is to be thankful that the industrial revolution happened at all, not that it happened in England specifically.
- nine_zeros 5y agoArmchair philosopher - From my reading, it appears that the corporation structure really took stronghold in Europe, giving huge incentives to tinkers and risk takers. That, and the collapse of Dutch East India outposts to British East India company opened up access to new trade. Resources from the new world also jumpstarted the process. It was the perfect combo of corporate incentives and unrestricted access to global resources that propelled people to wealthier lives and thus, higher level of productivity (you can spend years researching on steam engines if you don't have to spend your life farming). This is exactly the state of America since after WW2, if you were to compare. In comparison, China was not handed any colonies, lacked the corporation structure and was caught up in dynastic infighting. There was no new world to extract resources from and almost certainly wasn't united the way it is today. No systemic incentive structure and inability to access global resources left people in poverty or produced little in the way of innovation.
- andi999 5y agoPersonal opinion: same reason why it didn't take off in ancient Greece (steam engine was invented back then) , no shortage of cheap labor.
- rrss 5y agothough Hero’s engine is a steam engine, it is practically useless as anything besides a curiosity and certainly could not have powered an industrial revolution
- andi999 5y agoYes, but I am confident if there would have been demand, they would have improved on it. It can open temple doors so I do not think it is too far away from a useful machine.
- JackFr 5y agoThere’s an argument to be made that the Black Death broke Europe (or especially Britain) out of a local minimum, by killing off labor. This reduced the necessary rate of return to physical capital and innovation. (Why invest in an iron plow, when you can just set more serfs to the task with wooden ones?) and ultimately this planted the seeds of the industrial revolution.
- _hao 5y agoThere's a very good book that goes into it (and other things) by Ian Morris - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...
- lenkite 5y agoSame reason it didn't happen in the Gupta Empire in India
- cyberpunk 5y agoI'd recommend guns germs and steel by Diamond if you're interested in such thoughts. He doesn't cover china, but the book is basically about this topic. Nice easy read, recommended if you've got time to kill over the holidays.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI really like that list! Thanks!
- omnicognate 5y agoYou'll not make me thankful for aspartame however hard you try. Some good ones there, though.
- fnord77 5y agoI am thankful for sucralose.
- swader999 5y agoHoney and maple syrup.
- tyleo 5y agoSame. I have a sucralose energy drink every day after lunch. I generally don’t add sugar and buy low-sugar products. The joy this drink gives me sometimes feels like a drug trip. Shameless plug: https://www.alaninu.com/products/energy-drinks-12pk-cosmic-stardust?variant=31633332830306¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic&keyword=&creative=355427913249&gclid=Cj0KCQiAhf2MBhDNARIsAKXU5GQgWUwoG9W56B_teEMeQYYEWOAE2Ut_ff5f_pVhysd4A9OSKtWC_bUaAkdsEALw_wcB https://www.alaninu.com/products/energy-drinks-12pk-cosmic-s...
- randlet 5y ago> The joy this drink gives me sometimes feels like a drug trip. Caffeine is a drug so saying "it feels like" is rather understating it.
- pfdietz 5y ago"it’s surely better than the light of consciousness vanishing entirely when the sun eats the Earth in 7.5 billion years, no?" The Earth will lose its oxygen in about 1 billion years and undergo runaway warming in about 1.4 billion years. By the time the Earth is eaten by the Sun (if it is; mass loss by the Sun might prevent this), the Earth will have been sterilized for longer than it has currently existed.
- pfdietz 5y agoAlso, thankful that (despite the timescale for O(1) changes to O2 in the atmosphere being ~10 million years) not once since the Precambrian did O2 levels fall low enough to wipe out vertebrate life. Although I'm not sure it's really correct to be thankful for effects of observer selection bias.
- ask_b123 5y agoI think it is perfectly correct. It is a great thing to be an observer and I'm thankful I can be subject to the effects of observer selection bias. :)
- kiba 5y agoThis is assuming that humanity or our successor won't do any stellar engineering or starlifting, or moving the Earth for that matter.
- pydry 5y ago>That even though the turn humans made from hunter-gatherer bands into agriculture pretty clearly made life worse, it eventually led to the industrial revolution Which also made life worse to begin with. Without the enclosure movement depriving peasants of their land and pushing them to work in the factories in horrendous conditions for pitiful pay it likely wouldnt have happened. Though I'm pretty thankful for the workers' movement that followed that led to innovations like the weekend and criminalization of child labor.
- okr 5y agoI would like to see evidence, that people were pushed into the factories. I was under the impression, that many went into the factories, because working in agriculture was not easy, as machines were not common. And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoIn seeing what has recently happened in China, I would agree. A gigantic migration has occurred in the past few decades where Chinese peasants moved from rural areas to the cities to work in factories. I thought for a long time "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony. I watched a pretty good documentary about this, and the answer pretty clearly seemed to be opportunity. It's kinda similar to how legions of people move to LA to be actors. 99% of them will be worse off for the experience, many of them much more so, but even the chance to escape the conditions of their situation is a powerful draw for a lot of people.
- okr 5y agoOpportunity, yes, it describes it pretty well. I also have seen friends from east europe leaving their home countries for opportunity in the west, even when judging from my warm, cosy, settled place, i thought, that their jobs were crappy. But it was opportunity for them. And now they also judge from their warm, cosy, settled place. and try to make working conditions better for for their fellows.
- jll29 5y agoI like this more unusual list of things to be grateful for, as it complements well what one is usually reminded to be grateful for. I'd like a more fundamental point there, though: Gratefulness seems to be primarily a ternary operator: "<SOMEONE> is grateful to <SOMEONE> for <SOMETHING>." (like "a ? b : c" in C). That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.) Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly?
- thwave 5y agoUnless gratefulness is actually binary (x is grateful for y), and directing this gratefulness towards someone is completely optional. (One might argue that the object of gratefulness is optional as well, and you can be grateful simpliciter, in an unqualified way. But to them I'd say there's an implied, general, object: the world, life, existence, or something like this.)
- vcxy 5y ago> Does that not mean that every grateful person acknowledges God's existence, at least implicitly? No. It means that the emotion of gratefulness isn't always a simple reduction to what you have there. Similarly, I think thwave who replied to you is also wrong. The emotion doesn't have to always follow such a simplified framework or be legibly caused. Of course it has to have some causal chain, but I think the legibility could be as opaque as "X is grateful for Y because Z suggested that maybe they should be" where Z didn't have anything to do with Y, Y doesn't necessarily do much for X, and so on. It doesn't make the emotion of gratefulness any less valid. I expect the ways the emotion could come about is varied enough to avoid these simplifications.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoActually, it depends on if there is free will, which by definition is supernatural, else we have as much choice to be grateful as a rock.
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- swader999 5y agoI'm happy that ice floats.
- pfdietz 5y agoAnd that the carbon 12 nucleus has that excited state at just the right energy to make the triple-alpha process work.
- dclowd9901 5y agoHappier that water freezes at a pretty tolerable temperature and happens to be our main source of sustenance. Makes adding water ice to things a very refreshing experience!
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoI wrote an essay about this for my AP Chem test in high school. I still remember this question almost 25 years later!
- fnord77 5y agohow about: Ice is less dense than liquid water, so it floats. That means bodies of water don't freeze solid in the winter, which would have precluded life anywhere colder than the tropics.
- zivkovicp 5y agoSometimes I think #1 could have gone either way, and that would still be OK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ldehaan 5y agoI'm thankful for my kiddos, single dad full time for years and after the alternative i wouldn't have it any other way. I've got a shock of white now because of them though :D I couldn't be more thankful. And I'm gonna stay single until they grow up so they know beyond a doubt how important they are.
- hunter2_ 5y agoIf we have something like #2, would that debunk the idea that backing things up exclusively on magnetic media (HDD, tape) is sufficient for restoration? I've never found optical media to be particularly reliable, but it might be a decent hedge against a huge magnetic event.
- mrleinad 5y agoI know optical media deteriorates over time, so in order to be a hedge, you would need to record it over and over again periodically, preparing for an event you are not sure when it might come. Poses a problem with waste and needed resources.
- scubakid 5y agoNot about to start being grateful for aspartame, sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- that_guy_iain 5y agoWhy, what has it done to you?
- scubakid 5y agoNothing concrete I can point to of course, I'm just wary of being actively grateful for it... it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood, and there could also be better alternative sweeteners that didn't make this list.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago> it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood There have probably had hundreds of studies done by people who were actively trying to prove something and wrote that they fully believe that there are bad side effects yet not one states they proved something.
- cheese_it 5y agoI've found that aspartame gives me really bad insomnia. Almost every time this happens I'll go through what I ate that day and it's always something containing aspartame that was not in my normal diet. This is how I learned that those flavor packets that are mixed into water bottles and some zero-calorie flavorings used at coffee shops contain aspartame.
- achillesheels 5y agoThat even though we evolved as ruthless replication machines, we’ve somehow risen out of the muck and we currently find ourselves running cultural software that’s way out of sync with what game theory would dictate, and perhaps we can seize the moment and build a civilization that can tame the brutal dynamics that created us. This. Our scientific understanding on how humans cooperate to not simply feed each other, but prosper with endless creative opportunities of cultivation, demonstrates we are at a tipping point to potentially permanently limit the recurrence of violence inter-generationally. Think of it as reversing unjust hereditary trauma. So many humans being born now see a path to their own prosperity, this century will be remembered as leaving the Planet of the Apes behind.
- __s 5y ago?? I feel quite the opposite. Game theory helps understand why people act, & it let's you reverse engineer what they really value, as opposed to what they claim to value It's like saying physics has been conquered because airplanes should fall out of the sky. No, your existing notion was flawed, but reality didn't change People don't act towards incentives because of game theory, it's that game theory models their incentives. If you're acting differently, it means you've built a different incentive system This is important because it means game theory can be used to construct incentives to guide corporate behavior (ie we can avoid tragedy of the commons by forcing externalities to be accounted for, rather than left for the people), but pleas that corporations will act for the incentive of moral goodness is only a method to fool public debate into letting the tragedy go on. Because it's in the corporate interest to not pay for their externalities Maybe we're getting at the same thing, & I'm just picking up too much of a "shed thy mathematical yolk" vibe
- achillesheels 5y agoI look at things from our universal cellular life substrate which ends up ordering ourselves to such civilized dynamics. That natural substance is still propelling ourselves, beyond contract laws - it is not up to profit motivation to end inter generational violence. If anything, there is profit motivation to keep being brutal! It requires simply the technological possibility - now becoming realized - to enlighten the human race on what is proper accordance with natural motion.
- krisrm 5y agoRealized after reading this that it's American Thanksgiving today. Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. I'm thankful for a lovely forum where we can read and share articles like this one.
- kubb 5y agoAlso respectful condolences to the Native Americans in their day of mourning.
- borepop 5y agoAgreed. The tone of the HN comments section is occasionally somewhat more contentious now than a few years ago, but it has not generally devolved into the sort of partisan pissing match/bad-faith clusterfuck seen elsewhere in the interwebs. To some extent I attribute that to the fact that valuing science and reason can be a helpful quality in moderating the tone of interaction, even among anons. Which is really a lucky thing.
- Method5440 5y agoProve it, you partisan hack. :)
- throwamon 5y agoOn Thanksgiving I'm especially thankful I'm not a Native American living a few centuries or decades or even seconds ago.
- seba_dos1 5y ago> meaning that people with a sweet tooth can avoid the large, known harms of sugar with minimal exertion of willpower Aspartame tastes so awful I can't see how that's going to make me thankful.
- brink 5y agoOn top of it tasting bad, it gives me migraines. The only theory I have for why that is is that I'm allergic.
- Kranar 5y agoAnother more plausible explanation is that it's psychological. It's common among many who believe aspartame is unhealthy that it gives them migraines or headaches, but in a double-blind study, every single person who self-reported adverse reactions to aspartame were unable to do so over the course of the study. On the other hand, those who claimed sensitivity rated very high on various psychological metrics such as perceived stress and anxiety: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364783/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364783/ This is not to say that you don't genuinely feel something and are just making it up, but that it's not a consequence of aspartame and is rooted in an entirely different phenomenon that you've associated with aspartame for one reason or another.
- jturpin 5y agoDiet sodas to me taste awful, but lately I've been putting a single packet of Equal in my coffee with some vanilla and it tastes great. Lord knows I can cut out the sugar wherever possible.
- LocalH 5y agoI'm thankful for existence itself. Sure, it's not always pleasant, but the mere fact that we perceive reality as we do is a fascinating rabbit hole, one that I wish I had discovered decades ago. The subjective experience of existence is one of the big unknowns left in this world, one that I don't think we'll ever truly understand. That's good though, because human curiosity is one of the wonderful, amazing things we have the capability to do (if other Earth-native, non-human sentient beings have similar curiosities, they don't have nearly the ability to explore them, that we know). I hope everyone who reads this is having a good day today. May you all have fortune and blessing in your lives.
- tim333 5y agoYeah if there was nothing at all things would be a bit dull.
- yourapostasy 5y agoI wish more people were aware that we are likely the only radio-using sapients in a 4'ish light year sphere around us [1] (4.4 ly for a 1MW broadcast, where the most powerful radio transmitter in the world is at 2MW). And that we're roughly in the center of the KBC Void [2], about a billion light years from the nearest "normal" baryonic density of the currently-known universe. We might not be alone inside the KBC Void, but if we aren't, they and us are on a pretty isolated island of sapients in the currently-known universe. Sapience is astronomically, vanishingly rare as far as we can tell so far. Some of us treasure it and are thankful for it accordingly. Perceiving reality at the level we do, with the understanding we only scratched an atom of the total surface so far, is both inspiring and humbling at the same time. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-far-do-radio-signals-travel-into-space-before-they-degrade-to-a-degree-beyond-being-possible-to-be-detected https://www.quora.com/How-far-do-radio-signals-travel-into-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void
- gnulinux 5y agoMaybe other sides of the universe is teaming with complex life but we live in an isolated island?
- Mary-Jane 5y ago> Due to some [reason], an overpopulation calamity hasn’t yet happened and we might coincidentally stabilize at a level that’s somewhat close to what maximizes average utility... Given the birthrate trends in developed countries, it's more likely the population will peak and then decline as prosperity spreads. The cause isn't hard to discern - child labor laws - they turn children from potential assets into guaranteed liabilities. A declining population will be a bad thing; our modern way of life is built on systems that depend on growth (from Wall Street to our tax structures to the various Social Security safety nets countries have in place); take that away and we will have real problems.
- riazrizvi 5y agoThank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started investing their very expensive free time tinkering because it might lead to profit. Ancient Greece (23) developed the Solonian Constitution which similarly protected the property rights of ‘citizens’ like never before, so Athens became a cultural center of tinkerers, hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, and the ideas are what we still have today. Because unlike with Ancient Phoenicia, the Greeks wrote on clay, not on perishable papyrus. (24) Obviously the US Constitution managed to establish unusual property rights for its European male citizens, and again we see hustlers, thought leaders, influencers etc, because their efforts are far more likely to be rewarded. But this time we see what this political environment looks like close up and we see regular people’s bright ideas materialize in society because the law protects them. I am thankful that we still today, I mean 11/26/2021 today, still maintain the balance of power that enables our egalitarian laws to stand, and hope that some new technology won’t kill that balance.
- jaclaz 5y agoTo be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off: Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC Aesop (?) 620-564 BC Solon (Athens) 630-570 BC Pericles (Athens) 495–429 BC Aristophanes (Athens) 446-386 BC Sophocles (Athens) 497-406 the: >That some unknown miracle blend of circumstances happened to arrive in Athens in 500 BC leading a tiny city of 250k people to produce Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aesop, Solon, Pericles, Aristophanes, and Sophocles, and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this? is more accurately something like: In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area. Sounds a lot less a miracle, between 630 and 300 BC is three centuries.
- elil17 5y agoI’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one maybe does more harm than good)!
- dclowd9901 5y agoI had this same exact thought the last time i was making bagels. What an absolute miracle it is! And whoever came up with using it to fluff and soften bread through some natural symbiotic reliance of raw nature is just such an incredible step it seems utterly designed from above. Yes, I’m saying maybe a god exists and loves us because they gave us bread.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoBenjamin Franklin thought beer was enough proof that there is a God who loves us and wants us to be happy :-)
- flatiron 5y agohttps://www.anchorbrewing.com/blog/say-what-says-who-benjamin-franklin-on-beer-or-not/ https://www.anchorbrewing.com/blog/say-what-says-who-benjami... He never said that.
- luckman212 5y agoNever let the truth get in the way of a good story.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoInteresting, thanks! Looks like he actually said something similar about wine though: We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana, as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy! (from a 1779 letter from France to his friend André Morellet)
- dheera 5y ago> That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event Is anyone thinking about what to do? It's only a matter of time before we have another flare 2X or 3X the magnitude of the Carrington event.
- dclowd9901 5y agoIf it really would set power lines alight, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do aside from going off the grid and having a small warehouse full of electrical wiring. Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
- dheera 5y agoBy what mechanism do they set power lines on fire in a way that it wouldn't set the lines in my house on fire? Is it the power lines themselves or is it just vicious currents being induced in the lines that cause devices plugged on the other end of the power lines to go up in smoke? If the grid just shut off power for 24 hours until the CME passed would that solve the problem? I can easily go 24 hours without power, but not months.
- 323 5y agoMy understanding is that the flare will induce currents in the sub-station transformers, and this is the big problem. Not sure if disconnecting them helps to prevent damage.
- mistermann 5y ago> Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly. Me too. I'm hoping we'll get lucky and a relatively small-scale catastrophic event will occur, demonstrating to us how ill prepared we are both materially and socially/culturally/cognitively/etc, and that lesson will provide the incentive for us to launch a serious project to get our act cleaned up. And in the event that no political leaders rise to the occasion, I am hoping that normal civilians realize there is a problem and begin seriously discussing the risks we are running, perhaps eventually leading to some sort of a plan that our leaders do not have the ability to formulate, or perhaps even realize we need.
- butwhywhyoh 5y agoI can't tell if this article is tongue-in-cheek or not. These are all just excruciatingly detailed versions of "I'm thankful the human species came out on the positive side of a lot of dice rolls". Just say you're happy to be alive and move on.
- ElectronShak 5y agoI'm thankful for the Internet, you wouldn't be reading this otherwise
- okl 5y ago> Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
- EForEndeavour 5y agoObligatory: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmigaraFault https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmig... > "This hole...! It was made for me!" > A short horror manga story by Junji Ito. A boy named Owaki, and a girl, Yoshida, meet on Amigara Mountain, where an unsettling discovery has been made. An earthquake has created a huge fault in the mountain, and human-shaped holes are scattered across the face of the fault line. It soon becomes clear that the holes are "calling" to the people they are shaped like. So what happens when they enter the hole? Well, you can be sure that massive amounts of claustrophobia and Nightmare Fuel are involved.
- mistermann 5y agoImagine if it actually was! That'd be pretty funny I think.
- elwell 5y agoIt's all perspective.
- mrtnmcc 5y ago"Oh, and also that the universe exists at all" That's the one to keep coming back to. Could've been nothin.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoOn the other hand, nothingness has no cause or means for suffering.
- a_wild_dandan 5y agoWhich comes back to #19: > That even if, as most scientific-minded people seem to assume, there is no afterlife, that’s not ideal, but is much better than other possibilities like, say, being tortured for eternity. Like, we could all be a bunch of Boltzmann brains[1] popping into existence in an empty universe, writhing with unimaginable pain in every pseudo-neuron of our temporary brains. But it's not like that, at least yet. Which is pretty cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- saltyfamiliar 5y agoThere is no "we" that could be like that if it's boltzmann brains all the way down. It could very well be mostly unimaginable agony that exists, it's just that the temporary boltzmann configuration of "posting a thought on HN as a human with human memories" happens to not be a part of that.
- 323 5y agoSome, like Stephen Wolfram, say that the universe must exists, that non-existance is not possible. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-universe-exist-some-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- flycaliguy 5y agoI really like this idea of listing things to be thankful for. I might just start up a mega list in my house for my kids to contribute to. Maybe a binder? Something we can revisit together and contribute to.
- mgraczyk 5y agoI'm thankful for Hacker News and internet cultures that support and share articles like this. Things that are intellectually gratifying without being overly specific, topical, or focused on any particular goal. Just interesting thoughts for the sake of their interestingness.
- _a3nw 5y agoNot going to argue my point or bring up any real evidence because this guy didn't either, but Hunter Gatherers absolutely lived better lives than we do now and the amount of human beings who die to homocide or suicide is higher now than during that time period. This time period is hell, just look at suicide rates and mental illness rates. No other point in human existence has our life held as little meaning as it does now. And our biggest killer in the West happens to be a disease that has some of the worst comorbidites. Most people in the west are living their life in a inflammation, sleep deprived, vitamin defficient, hormonally disrupted brain fog. I also don't think people realize how the suffering of lack of pleasure and of short excruciating pain like being eaten, is infinitely better than a lifetime of stress, deppression, and nihilism. Slavery to pleasure is the worst hell, and most of us are enslaved in one way or another. p.s. False positivity doesn't do shit for your brain, it can actually cause harm. Even if it could do something good, you are basically just brainwashing yourself to have a less truthful understanding of the world. Joy is self-evident for Joyful people and doesn't require deceiptful mantras.
- wintermutestwin 5y agoI'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized: 1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for. 2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves. I find that bookending my days with gratitude like this makes it easier to live each day in a state of thankfulness.
- k8sToGo 5y agoTo me this sounds too much like the daily scrum meetings or stand ups where you have to come up with something just so you can say something and, in this case, go to bed. But I only mean this as a joke. I think it is great to have "rituals" that help us look and appreciate more stuff what we have already or where we are and where we came from.
- cgriswald 5y agoMaintaining sleep hygiene takes precedence to me over essentially anything else and coming up with four things before sounds anxiety-inducing. We do this type of thing before our evening meal, instead. For me, anyway, this is much lower stakes and so there is less anxiety. Which results in it just sort of flowing out—especially after doing it for awhile—but not in an 'autopilot' sort of way.
- wintermutestwin 5y agoPart of the point of our bed time ritual is to look for and accumulate "gratefuls" throughout the day. In this way, I am training my pattern recognizing CPU to spot the positives rather than the negatives that it tends to focus on.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago"I'm thankful for the way the adversity you gratuitously create in my life advances my spiritual practice. Sweet dreams!"
- decremental 5y agoI'm thankful for the HN moderator dang.
- matbatt38 5y agoMost items are speculative, subjective or even historically inaccurate.
- notreallyserio 5y agoMaybe that's why I found this article kind of weird or off-putting. A lot of these things, if they happened or didn't happen, would have meant I wouldn't be alive and thus I wouldn't know to be unhappy about it.
- latortuga 5y agoMany things we are traditionally thankful fit the same criteria. I'm thankful for my business partner who I may never have met under different circumstances. Just because something could not have been, doesn't mean you can't be thankful it did.
- lisper 5y agoI've done a lot of traveling in less developed countries. That has taught me to be thankful for the fact that I live in a house with heat and air conditioning, and hot and cold running water that I can drink without getting sick. Many people in developed countries (especially the U.S.) take these things for granted, but in many parts of the world these are things people only dream of.
- lovecg 5y agoModern plumbing and sanitation is one of those things that’s nearly invisible and taken for granted, but is almost miraculous how well it works most of the time. If I had to choose, I’d rather have a weeklong electric outage than a weeklong water supply disruption, it’s not even close.
- autarch 5y agoOddly, I regularly think about how great plumbing is, and I've been noticing this for the past 5-10 years, I think (I'm in my 40s). I think one day I was probably in the shower and thinking about how awesome it was to have a hot shower. Then I started thinking about how great not having to use a "night soil pot" or an outhouse is, especially in hot or cold weather. I don't think I've spent as much time contemplating the joy of HVAC systems, but I know I've thought about them from time to time.
- lisper 5y ago> I don't think I've spent as much time contemplating the joy of HVAC You haven't spent enough time in hot, humid climates. Go to Houston in the summer and you will not have to contemplate for long.
- arduinomancer 5y ago#5 is actually pretty amazing if you think about it If zero-calorie sweeteners didn't exist I feel like we would view discovering one as a holy grail/miracle drug I bet a ton of obesity has been prevented just due to diet soda Imagine if the same thing existed for carbs
- tejohnso 5y agoI wonder why #5 singles out aspartame though.
- sm4rk0 5y agoThat's really weird. I'm not thankful for aspartame or other sweeteners, and even less thankful for corrupt food agencies approving them. Refined sugars aren't healthy, but aspartame isn't a solution. In my household, a kilogram of sugar lasts for months if not a year. Yes, we do buy food with added sugar, but always avoid artificial sweeteners, except when they are unavoidable in drugs or food supplements. I'm 192cm 75kg in early 40s and just occasionally ride a bike or take a walk. #5 is like: I'm thankful that you can smoke a cigarette and not die immediatelly of it.
- arduinomancer 5y agoWhat science are you basing that on?
- bricss 5y ago> When your body processes aspartame, part of it is broken down into methanol.
- arduinomancer 5y agoWhich is also found in citrus fruits. Do you think those are unhealthy too? > Aspartame is one of the most rigorously tested food ingredients.[5] Reviews by over 100 governmental regulatory bodies found the ingredient safe for consumption at current levels.[6][7][8][9][10] As of 2018, several reviews of clinical trials showed that using aspartame in place of sugar reduces calorie intake and body weight in adults and children. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame
- lnxg33k1 5y agoI'm grateful to have been born in the good part of the world which allows me to be grateful that we're allowed to sustain our lifestyles thanks to the exploitation of others, and I'm not the exploited one
- cyberpunk 5y agoYaay! Me too. Wait.. :/
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- a_wild_dandan 5y agoI'm thankful that the freak accident of multicellular life happened, possibly once ever, billions of years ago.[1] The near impossibility of that momentous event happening could be The Great Filter that explains the Fermi Paradox.[2] Thanks for being here, fellow multicellular friends. [1] (Start at 2:15) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cellmates https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cellm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
- 5faulker 5y agoWhen we understand that life is an opportunity rather than a given, it really changes our perspective on life.
- supernova87a 5y agoThere is really something to the idea that despite the daily news and political doomsaying that goes on every day, it's hard for people to remember or celebrate the long progression that we've experienced towards living in the most peaceful, materially prosperous, and positive trajectory time in the history of humanity. (I think there was a podcast on Hidden Brain about this. Also video like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU). It's really good to periodically think about how much we benefit from, say, the miracles of air conditioning, available infrastructure and cheap travel beyond your town, clean water and air, medicine, vaccines, public health -- and reset what you're grateful for. And stop making every little transgression of modern life feel like a disastrous setback. But of course it's very unfashionable to point this out when someone's <xyz> cause is being neglected, or is in the news and everyone is outraged. Of course when you make such comparisons you get hissed out of a room for being so callous, because anyone's relative suffering is supposed to be treated with utmost respect. And the short, acute, headline making problems are always louder than the long progression of gradual improvement. But taken in perspective, by intelligent people who can discuss such things, we've really reached the age of 1% problems. (which are being exposed because our huge disastrous human-generated conflicts, etc. are decreased compared to 100 years ago). Health, social issues, etc. are such luxuries to have problems about now (and glad to have them discovered and debated), but remember how wonderful a time we live in. We aren't generally dying of terrible diseases during childhood, etc. or because of world wars. More people are living longer to experience the wonders of humanity than ever before. Although, things like climate change we'd better allow to rise to the top of our list of problems, soon... Anyway, definitely very thankful for all these things, and all the daily unsung people who make our humanity's progress possible.
- notfed 5y agoRelated: a TED talk by Steven Pinker about his analysis on whether the world is getting better or worse: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers/ https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
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- bluishgreen 5y ago"That other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which, yeah, that limitation of our minds is frustrating, but it also hints that there are huge unseen dark continents of qualia lurking out there which someday we might find a way to visit." This is based on a misunderstanding regarding the rise of qualia. It is processing power and not sensor capacity or at least both together in some combination with processing power doing the heavy lift. Humans have less cones but several OOM more neurons to make sense of what we have. So no - the shrimp doesn't see in spectacular color. Experimentally proved: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2015/12/mantis-shrimp-myth-about-vision-debunked https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2015/12/mantis-shrimp-... https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1245824 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1245824
- ravi-delia 5y agoIt's still true that if we had cones outside our current color range we'd have new qualia, even if animals don't.
- 323 5y agoIn 100 years it will probably be possible to genetically engineer humans with more or extended range pigments, which are sensitive to IR / UV. Or maybe we'll just have bionic hyper-spectral eyes which plug directly into the optical nerve.
- lovecg 5y ago…and sadly those humans still won’t be able to describe their experiences in any way we would understand. “It’s just its own color that’s separate from all the others. You know, the color the black lights are”.
- hardlianotion 5y agoWould we? It seems possible that some other sensation could be overloaded as well - ie seeing red where others see only blackness...
- soheil 5y agoI think it's important to be thankful only about stuff that are not descriptive but took some agency to make happen. To keep rehashing that we should be thankful that sun exists or that earth has a magnetic core to shield us against the nasty solar flares, etc. fall in the first category and devalue the idea of thankfulness. Because you wouldn't be here to talk about it otherwise. So let's show thankfulness for things that took agency to make happen so we learn to do more of those things.
- pyrrhotech 5y agoI'm thankful we still live in a society with personal and economic liberty. Both those on the far left and the far right are trying to take those from us, and the center is vanishing as America becomes more polarized each cycle. I'm convinced one day in the future, we will no longer have the freedoms we enjoy today, so I live each day to the fullest knowing that nothing good lasts forever.
- makach 5y agoWell that article made wonders with my preexisting depression
- cmehdy 5y agoIf you are receptive to lists of gratitude, it is worth noting that one of the many tools of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is to try to keep a journal of everyday gratitudes[0] (something like "write 3 a day in a journal" works, but other things like open prompts about "what are you grateful for this week?" can also work). Plenty of other examples out there[1] can help too. Not everybody will enjoy doing that or benefit from it, but CBT overall is proving itself to be very valuable for people suffering from clinical depression, and if that tool from the toolbox doesn't resonate with someone it's always possible to look at other tools[2] too. [0] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_changes_you_and_your_brain https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_... [1] https://positivepsychology.com/gratitude-journal-pdf/ https://positivepsychology.com/gratitude-journal-pdf/ [2] https://www.therapistaid.com/index.php/tools/cbt/none https://www.therapistaid.com/index.php/tools/cbt/none
- esarbe 5y agoHot shower in the morning. Think about it; how many of your ancestors did have the option of having a hot shower every morning. Think about the labor involved!
- alexanderdmitri 5y agoThankfulness as an end is not necessarily valuable or positive. I think the associated feeling does little to the make the world a better place, I put it in the same category as remorse. Just as remorse should lead to rectifying action, thankfulness should lead to reciprocal action to provide objective value. What's interesting is the impetus between internal perception and outward action both share is a sense of indebtedness. Thankfulness becomes a passive accumulation of debt in this lens, whereas remorse casts our hero in a more active role. I think also actions spawned from thankfulness will be more comedic [dynamic] in nature and whereas those from remorse will tend toward the tragic [static]. The efficacy of either approach will reflect the constraints of the systems they are acting within and how well conceived the individual's solution is. Not sure where I'm going with this. Spitballing, not preaching ...
- polishdude20 5y agoI think thankfulness is more of a tool to be used to counter act nihilism. That's why it can be useful. not on its own, but as a buttress against despair.
- alexanderdmitri 5y agoI think this very good point. There is an undeniably good vibe to it. Maybe something akin to a general faith?
- exolymph 5y ago> Thankfulness as an end is not necessarily valuable or positive. Yes it is; it makes me feel good.
- alexanderdmitri 5y agoIf the inherent value is solipsistic and self-justifying, then it is more likely to be detrimental to the overall system. This would make it a net negative.
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- agumonkey 5y agoThat rotten milk is edible and quite tasty AND that heated up again it becomes semi-fluid and even more delicious than before.
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- pkdpic 5y agoIm thankful to have a job and a roof over my head and a little bit of savings. Not having to really worry about money still blows my mind now and then. Looking across the street every day in California and seeing the homelessness crisis in full swing is an ever present reminder of what this economy and this society can do to you if you slip up for even a second and / or have even a minor run of bad luck. Working in software isn't always easy or fun or fulfilling but its still an incredible privilege to be working in this industry.
- elzbardico 5y agoI hear you man, I hear you
- _huayra_ 5y agoEven things like not having to budget for groceries and the occasional going out to eat is something I often take for granted. I stay frugal, but have never really had to hem and haw about whether I should spring for the organic produce or fair trade coffee. "I can't afford this" is a lot more difficult of a circumstance to be in than "boy that was a dumb idea to purchase some pricey, fancy, but nasty cheese on a whim"
- pkdpic 5y agoI could agree more with this, word for word. It still hits me almost every time I go to the grocery store somehow.
- LiquidPolymer 5y agoThis strikes home for me. I come from an extended family of laborers and addicts. All of us had the same future: miserable work, low wages, multiple bankruptcies, and early death. I’m 57. I’ve worked as a photographer for 32 years, made a great living and traveled the world. I’ve collaborated with incredible people, and seen (and documented) amazing things. I live in a beautiful house (I paid it off years ago) in a great city. I have zero debt and have so many options about what I’ll do. My retirement investments have been done very well (good luck getting me to stop working). I have a wonderful family and an incredible daughter. I never take any of this for granted. I am so thankful. My siblings, cousins, aunts, etc see me like an alien creature. At 57 I’m the oldest living male in generations of my family.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoI’m thankful for every HN user and moderator who helps remove political or mean comments.
- wholinator2 5y agoIm thankful for the miracle of modern medicine which has allowed my mother to see so much more of my life than otherwise would've been possible. And though there are many bad things that have led to the situation, the good things still exist also. The extension of the human life may seem strange or counterintuitively painful at the large scale but for the individual human/family is the most important thing about our modern existence.
- huttongrabiel 5y agoThere's an interesting paper that touches on #2. From Assistant Professor Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi. Definitely worth a read. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~sabdujyo/papers/sigcomm21-cme.pdf
- moneywoes 5y agoI’m thankful for Hacker News and this post
- quickthrower2 5y agoRe #15 I watched a show about a boy who got infected with ecoli. The defence was plasma transfusion (I think) which was experimental at the time. He survived … barely. The bacteria tore through his body, made a hole in his stomach. The point is out sophisticated defence goes beyond the immune system into the knowledge, technology, science. Imagine what covid would be like without technology, governments, money, coordination. May have spread more slowly at the global level of course without technology but would be way more deadly.
- Findecanor 5y agoI'm thankful for living in a time when there is modern medicine, in a country with modern healthcare, without which I would not be alive today. BTW. If society does not prepare for the next Carrington Event, it will suffer greatly. Technology is great, but it would be stupid to create too hard dependencies on it. Also, there will be a next pandemic - as there always have.
- danschumann 5y agoFeelings wheel is the most underrated thing I have discovered this year.
- WalterBright 5y agoEvery day you can wake up, put your feet on the ground and stand up, is a beautiful day.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoGreat now I'm terrified by how utterly screwed the world will be when another Carrington Event happens.
- maxpaj 5y agoAlternative title: “All the things that make it so that I can experience typing this into something we call a computer.”
- dham 5y ago> That large animals like humans seem to be able to develop sophisticated defenses against parasites that parasites can’t counter-adapt against, meaning that parasitism is way less of an issue for us than it is for smaller animals, which is good because parasites are bad. The lack of parasites probably leads to most auto immune diseases in humans.
- avl999 5y agocitation needed
- dham 5y agoBasically after populations are treated for parasites (in 3rd world countries) the rate of autoimmune diseases goes up. It's thought that since the immune system has nothing to do, it starts attacking itself which makes sense from an evolutionary stand point. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618732/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1618732/
- skim_milk 5y ago>25. That evolution happened to settle on this trick of “love” to serve the interests of evolution rather than, like, causing us to feel like we’re being burned alive every time we don’t find mates or feed our kids or whatever I liked the article but this strikes me as strange because this is clearly not the same for everyone. Depending on who you ask there's a sizeable population of people who, because of environment and genetics, cannot focus on the "love" parts of relationships and are predisposed to focus on fears of abandonment etc to stay in relationships without lots of help and drugs. Be happy you got a decent dice roll if you regularly feel positive about your relationships, triply so if this "positive affect" guides the majority your life decisions!
- krosaen 5y ago> That the FDA, Health Canada, and the European Food Safety Authority all agree that at the doses humans consume, aspartame is perfectly safe—not genotoxic, not carcinogenic, does not cause an insulin spike—or at least has small, unknown harms, meaning that people with a sweet tooth can avoid the large, known harms of sugar with minimal exertion of willpower, and this is still true even though people for some reason seem to reject and despise this extremely lucky fact. 2020 paper published in Cell: "Short-Term Consumption of Sucralose with, but Not without, Carbohydrate Impairs Neural and Metabolic Sensitivity to Sugar in Humans" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32130881/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32130881/ From Huberman Lab (deep link to part where he talks about this): https://youtu.be/E7W4OQfJWdw?t=4404 https://youtu.be/E7W4OQfJWdw?t=4404 Takeaway: if you consume artificial sweeteners with foods that increase blood glucose, your brain will learn to secrete insulin in response to artificial sweeteners even when consumed by themselves. So if you drink diet soda all the time with and without snacks - you can throw your insulin regulation system out of whack and even cause pre-diabetes!
- autarch 5y ago> 11. That it happens to be a game-theoretic equilibrium to have a near-equal sex ratio, although honestly, I have no idea what things would be like if that wasn’t the case and maybe it would be fine. Well, let's think about if this would be fine. If there were a 10:1 female to male ratio, I think we'd expect that a modern, "civilized" society would be reasonably fine for everyone. There'd probably a lot more polygamy and polyamory than we have now, but the polygamy wouldn't be the "old school backwoods fundamentalist" type, because women would be in charge of the government and effectively make all the laws. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also a requirement that all healthy males donate at the sperm bank once a month from the onset of puberty to age 50 or so. This doesn't seem too onerous. If there were a 10:1 male to female ratio ... it would be a dystopian hellscape that's makes me shudder just to think of it. Women would have basically no rights. There'd be an incredibly high level of violence. Nearly everyone except the alpha males would be miserable a lot of the time. Anyway, that's my idea of how things might be like in an extreme scenario. If we're talking 1.1:1 or 1.2:1 either way it might not be a big deal, though I'd expect men outnumbering women to get bad at a surprisingly low ratio, well before even 2:1. Note that this isn't because I think men are inherently bad and women inherently good. It's simply that nearly everyone has a very strong genetic drive to reproduce. In the world with more women than men, everyone who wants to have a biological child can do so quite easily. In the opposite world, most men cannot do so, which means reproduction is a scarce resource. And we know what humans do in response to a very strong need for a scarce resource.
- jiri 5y agoWow, this seems like our society needs to control this ratio in the future! We can have more peaceful society if we reduce "men count" to keep ratio above 1:1.1 (male:female) :-)
- ateng 5y agoThis is done “accidentally” with major conflicts in history. Post WWII Soviet, for example. Lots more men than women got killed during the war and the post war male:female ratio is (from memory) around 1:1.15
- AlbertCory 5y agoGreat article overall. 10 and 13 are somewhat contradictory. 10 posits "the hard problem of consciousness" and "for whatever reason we have phenomenal experiences" while: 13 says "That selfhood is possibly an illusion... and the idea that you are the same person you were yesterday is an illusion your brain-meat gives to you" I happen to think 13 is closer to the truth. As we learn more about the brain, it will become more clear that "consciousness" is just a movie your brain puts on for you. Bats and dogs and dolphins watch different movies, but we cannot say they are "not conscious."
- endorphine 5y agoI'm thankful for all the humans over the centuries, all over the Earth, that created music which I can experience, now, effortlessly. I'm thankful for all the strong feelings that that music awakes. Thank you everyone putting their heart out there through music.
- noisy_boy 5y agoI am thankful for online bill payment. I remember my dad having to go and queue up for paying electricity and water bills every month - even when it was sweltering hot.
- blago 5y agoOnly 12 hours ago I was grateful the we hadn't been hit by another, even more dangerous, COVID variant but's that's back on the table now.
- hasmanean 5y agoWas this article written by a shill for aspartame? They just threw it in there as something to be thankful to for, right after the sun, the earth, nature etc.
- jaqalopes 5y agoThis blogger (whom I like don't get me wrong) is a health crank who has written before about the health harms of sugar and how aspartame is comparatively not as bad. It's part of his beat, if you will.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago"12: That private life exists and that markets, while we all (some?) appreciate their power to allocate resources, don’t permeate every single part of life, that there are moments of beauty and grace that aren’t best understood as competition and harnessed selfishness." Hackernews/Facebook in annoyed response: Um, we're WORKING ON IT. Sheesh, penetrating all aspects of off-time via social networks will have to wait for Meta.
- FloNeu 5y agoI disagree with 14. Imho 'we' are implementing cruel measures by neglected and obsolete destructive systems like global unrestricted capitalism, causing a structural hunger problem and mass death in exploited/unprofitable regions.