8 ms·
The Great Forgetting
- GenerocUsername 4y agoI dislike these essay style articles that tell me more about some writers day than the topic of the title
- kfootball15 4y ago[flagged]
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoMerry Christmas Eve, hope you're spreading lots of love and holiday joy to all this year!
- epsilonic 4y agoYou’re not alone
- akamoonknight 4y agoI feel like humans in general work fairly well when story or myth is tied to an explanation, but can understand that's not for everyone. I'm reminded of oral histories that humans make in order to warn about tsunamis. Her linking her brother's ailments with the state of the planet drew me in and I learned a few things that I can look into myself. For example, The Great Unconformity I'm sure I can look up a bit about (and sources are provided in the article) and similarly for the possibilities of things that might give us insight into that time period (also referenced and sourced in the article). My experience is that Nautlius in general has this type of lyrical prose and doesn't really pose itself as a peer-reviewed journal or anything. All that to say that to minimize the story as about "some writers day" feels disingenuous to me.
- avgcorrection 4y agoPeople relating stories around a campfire and people writing stories for the Web are not comparable. I certainly don’t have the capacity to be drawn in to some writers day whom I don’t know with the amount of content that is out there. And even less now these days when some of them might be AI-written.
- avereveard 4y agoThese stories weren't really tied, more like intertwined. Maybe both of them were interesting, but I couldn't follow either.
- dang 4y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- c4ptnjack 4y agoSuper relevant. None of the OP even has to do with the author's average day so it's doubly disingenuous
- avgcorrection 4y agoI agree. All topics I read about on news aggregation sites are for the topic themselves. I don’t want to spend eight paragraphs of “my mother tends to get pensive and quiet around Christmas now, eight years after my father passed” in order to figure out that the article is about the new iPad. So for me it’s not a good style.
- FriendlyNormie 4y ago[dead]
- indymike 4y agoThis story was unreadable.
- cheschire 4y agoIt seems to require a patience I don't have. I'm not a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino-esque articles that follow multiple unrelated paths to an eventual tangential relationship.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoTo be fair, if the article had a lot more Tarantion-like plot elements, I'd have read the whole thing.
- kfootball15 4y agoWhy?
- indymike 4y agoI read three paragraphs and felt like I was reading dry word salad... without croutons.
- stevebmark 4y agoNautilus is where writing goes to die
- cardamomo 4y agohttps://archive.ph/B9VWu https://archive.ph/B9VWu
- throwawayoaky 4y agoIdk the central metaphor of the article reads as legible and correct to me. The take home message is that it seems complex-but-stable systems must spend a lot of complexity on achieving hysteresis across scales, and the degradation of such systems can cascade into failure modes unexpectedly. Does that help?
- giardini 4y agoSeems to me the central idea is to pay attention, especially when someone hits their head. Get them to medical care pronto and if you can't, give them an aspirin, put them to bed and check on them periodically. Did I say "get them to medical care"?
- throwawayoaky 4y agoI mean your advice is correct but if you choose to only look through half of the binoculars you're not going to get depth perception.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 4y agoInteresting. I skipped forward through the brother's story throughout, ignoring the rest. Personal interest, mostly. In any case I've had a few concussions - car accident, soccer collision, and most recently a motorcycle accident. I'm surrounded by people who are quite aware of traumatic brain injuries so I always had support and have mostly recovered. The interesting thing are the impulses you get. The first one had me feeling quite suicidal in periods, and so I got rid of the things I would obsess over as tools to do that. The last one resulted in complete memory loss over the incident. I simply cannot recall it. This is somewhat fascinating to me because I have (or had) an incredible memory. I can still recall things from before quite well - my VIN, 2^64, my friends' license plates - but my working memory appears to have deteriorated significantly from the period immediate pre-accident. Chase's 8 number 2FA code now causes me to reinspect 100% of the times rather than look at once and type, and sometimes I have to do that for 6 number 2FA. But the loss of self in those bad periods is fairly wild. You can't act otherwise because your conscious evaluation of reality is wrong. I find the suicide thing very interesting. I wonder if it has a similar metastructure to Programmed Cell Death in humans. In any case, I find these mental health stories quite interesting because awareness of the condition does allow you some CBT-style self intervention.
- jacooper 4y agoWhen I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements. Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do, its all half-assed political virtue showing. The change your life (to the worse most of the time) to appear as climate conscious as possible, rather than actually focusing on things that matter crowd certainly arent helping either. IMO individual actions don't matter at all here.
- robocat 4y ago> Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth. Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception. Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).
- glitchc 4y agoArticles like these make me mad. Conflating your brother's mental illness to climate change just for shock value is below the belt. You should be ashamed. And no, despite all the doom and gloom the author projects, this is not the first time in history that glaciers are melting en masse worldwide. They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time.
- austinjp 4y agoAbout your second paragraph. Can you clarify? It's a little vague. If you're in doubt of either anthropogenic climate change or the seriousness with which we should take it, I'd appreciate your sharing the sound reasoning underpinning your perspective. Or have I misunderstood, and you're simply expressing sanguine resignation to the inevitability of extinction events, on planetary timescales?
- kuhewa 4y ago> They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time. Why do people repeat this platitude as if it is at all obviatory (or even relevant)?
- RajT88 4y agoIn the language of the article: > I wanted to believe in the limitlessness of resilience
- coldtea 4y ago>this is not the first time in history that glaciers are melting en masse worldwide. They have done so multiple times in the past and will do so again multiple times in the future. Earth has a long storied history, we have been on it a brief fraction of that time. That's irrelevant, as the other times we weren't 8 billion of us, in a highly fragile, interconnected, civilization, with thousands of cities and hundreds of megacities, for the impact to be the same. Nor is the mechanism for the current issue (or the speed of it), as explained by scientists within the current consensus, the same as those times...
- causality0 4y agoEach of the individual stories in this article. Is great. The science is written to inform in an engaging way and the emotional story kept me hooked. By God they should not have been blended together like this.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI think it's an interesting writing experiment, but I ultimately stopped reading because the story didn't get to its point quickly enough.