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There was a popular HN post on the front page called "color has been disappearing from the world"[0]. There are comments on it about "regression to the mean", "
by rcoveson 4y ago
There was a popular HN post on the front page called "color has been disappearing from the world"[0]. There are comments on it about "regression to the mean", "commoditization", etc. One commentor proposed that "barren inoffense is maximum profit".
This blog post is a good example of that trend. Most humans enjoy alcohol, but some of us abstain, just like how most humans enjoy many colors but some of us of us are put off by some colors. Ergo, drinks trend towards water and colors trend towards grey.
Let's not have an alcoholic drink. Let's not go to a long sports game. Let's not see an irreverent movie. How about we just go to work, do our jobs, keep our heads down, and not do anything we can't all agree on. Obviously that's not what the author intends, but it's where you end up if you try to appease every opinion in the same family as the one in this post.
"If you don't [x], you feel like an outcast." This is true, and unfortunate. It's also unavoidable when you let people act human around each other. Common interests will be discovered, emphasized in conversation, and may begin to exclude others to some degree. The appropriate reaction is to discover those other interests that you have in common with a subset of your team and draw attention to those. However, the end result is not necessarily equitable. Sometimes a team member just has less in common with others. Worse still, not all people have the same degree of openness or diversity of interests as others. I don't know what else to say except that I sympathize, but not so much that I think we should keep on marching towards grey to lessen the impact.
0. https://tumblr.macleodsawyer.com/post/691054353059053568/color-has-been-disappearing-from-the-world https://tumblr.macleodsawyer.com/post/691054353059053568/col...
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- paganel 4y agoThere's nothing colourful about drinking and about alcohol, to the contrary, there's only grey and black from a certain point on. That's what the article is all about (at least imo), i.e. about this wrong equivalence between "having a good time" and alcohol.
- rcoveson 4y agoTo the deaf there's nothing colorful about music, just silence. To the diabetic there's nothing colorful about cake, just "grey and black from a certain point on". So why do people always have to involve music and cake in their celebrations, and spend so much time talking to each other about it?
- paganel 4y agoI've said something similar before, music alone doesn't make you come home at 2 in the morning and beating up your wife and kids. I've seen alcohol do that. Eating cakes doesn't make you fall asleep in a ditch, at the side of the road, with drool coming out of your mouth (and with some kind person stopping from time to time checking if you're dead or not). I've seen alcohol do that. I fail to see the "colorness" in beating your wife or in navigating between life and death at the side of the road.
- rcoveson 4y ago> I fail to see the "colorness" in beating your wife or in navigating between life and death at the side of the road. I'm sure I speak for all light social drinkers when I say: These are the two things I like most about it! Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
- hello_marmalade 4y agoYes, because the only way to drink, is to drink to excess. There are no other ways to drink alcohol.
- duxup 4y agoI don't drink much. When out with the beer drinking crowd I would ask a question or two. I don't care for beer, but I did learn some things. That was enough for me. Eventually the conversation would wander to other things. I know more than I would like to about owning a boat (mostly that I don't want to). But hey that's something.
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