23 ms·

The past is not true

• signa11 3y ago
  check out the movie ‘rashomon’ by kurosawa, one incident recalled from different folks and it is all colored by their own perspective, Truth, is hard to glean.
• philipov 3y ago
  I think this story is meant to be uplifting to those who are troubled by their past, but to me, I just see all the politicians and grifters looking on hungrily like "Yeaaaaaah?"
  • dandanua 3y ago
    Yeah, many corrupt politicians, fascists, murderers and other criminals would love the idea that "the past is not true". I'd bet that the story is fake because of the conclusion "you can change history". Both of them didn't change the history, they have changed their knowledge about history, which was given to them by third parties.
• WA 3y ago
  In an alternate universe: the lady couldn’t walk, got obese and died of a heart attack 10 years ago. So, the past isn’t true until it is and then, maybe, it’s even worse. Not sure what to make of this story.
  • keepamovin 3y ago
    Reminds me of: https://thedailyzen.org/2015/03/20/zen-story-maybe/ https://thedailyzen.org/2015/03/20/zen-story-maybe/ There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
    • thieving_magpie 3y ago
      Complete tangent here. My favorite book to read my kids is Zen Shorts by Jon J Muth. It features a panda named Stillwater who tells this story (among others) in it.
      • javert 3y ago
        I would highly recommend "The Parent's Tao Te Ching" by William Martin. It's a retelling of the Tao Te Ching into plain English, using parent/child relationships to make the points. I recommend this both to parents, and to children. Which is all of us. We never stop being children of our parents. I don't have children, nor do I plan to, yet this is one of the most powerful books I've read.
    • BatFastard 3y ago
      This is a rip off of the story "Ed" told in the TV show "Northern Exposure", but it has always been one of my favorites from that show.
      • sharkjacobs 3y ago
        I don't know exactly when that episode of Northern Exposure aired but this story dates back to 2nd century BCE[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse
        • wpietri 3y ago
          That only shows how wily the Chinese are about IP theft, building time-viewing technology 2,000 years ago so that they could rip off American pop culture. Especially clever of them to steal things that sound like ancient parables and plant them in ancient times.
          • keepamovin 3y ago
            That's pretty funny! Thanks for the laugh :)
  • dubeye 3y ago
    My exact response too. I guess the point of the story stands either way, so you might as well pick the positive outcome.
  • libraryatnight 3y ago
    It reads more like someone wrote it at 17 imagining what it'd be like to cripple someone and have this elaborate 'moment' where all is forgiven because nothing is real.
• rodelrod 3y ago
  "History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation." OK, you've discovered post-modernism. Next step is to avoid its pitfalls. The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts. Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    History is absolutely true, factually true at that. Facts are sometimes hard to come by, heck some facks of modern history are still classified, but that does not give people carte blanche to make up stuff as they go... Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
    • rgrieselhuber 3y ago
      And if he was driving recklessly that fact doesn’t change simply because the other driver also wasn’t paying attention and didn’t blame him for it. Past mistakes are also painful to remember but the best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the reality and then change what you need to in your character to make sure we don’t repeat them.
    • ttonkytonk 3y ago
      History is true, but the history anyone knows is selective, a mental model, often guessed or interpreted, and usually secondhand information.
      • hef19898 3y ago
• zacksiri 3y ago
  It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".
  • rob74 3y ago
    Your statement is only partly true. The article just says "I found out that I broke the other driver’s spine, and she’ll never walk again" - so you're reading into it that he read it in a newspaper, but maybe it was just hearsay from someone who talked to someone who worked at the hospital who had talked to the doctor who may have treated her (or maybe someone else who also had a car accident that day)? I think the vague formulation is intentional to make it apply more widely. But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
    • zacksiri 3y ago
      Yes I did assume the "news" being local news media covering the case. I guess this is a prime example of what could have also happened. Sweet irony.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true." > We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.
    • QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
      https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple-truth https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...
• drewcoo 3y ago
  The past is not true . . . but self-help author Derek Sivers is? Somehow I'm not as convinced as he is that it was a really good thing to break someone's spine years ago because he was a teenager who didn't follow road signs.
  • tombert 3y ago
    I am not a fan of self help stuff, but I think that’s a somewhat uncharitable reading of the article; I don’t think he was implying that it was “good” to break someone’s spine. I think it was saying that it’s very easy to convince yourself of something much worse than reality. He felt guilty because he thought he ruined a woman’s life forever, he felt immense guilt over that, when in reality the woman mostly recovered, not that it was good the accident happened. I thought The idea is that a slight misunderstanding of the can have a severe “compound interest rate”.
• benjaminwootton 3y ago
  Would there not be some police investigation and possibly prison time if you recklessly caused such a serious accident? I’m not sure how this misunderstanding could occur for so many years.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Because history is true, stories on the other hand can be totally made up.
  • n6h6 3y ago
    Police aren't known for their investigation skills.
  • astura 3y ago
    No, even if you kill someone while driving, if you're not drunk and don't leave the scene then you don't get more than a traffic ticket. https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-you-want-with-your-car-as-long-as-you-dont-really-mean-it https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bzdpv/you-can-kill-anyone-y...
    • PcChip 3y ago
      Manslaughter is a traffic ticket these days?
      • astura 3y ago
        Manslaughter charges only happen if the driver is drunk or flees. Otherwise it's a traffic ticket AT MOST. My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets. From my link above >Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault. >But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  The moral of the story: drive safely, pay attention always!
  • JanNash 3y ago
    Well put.
• lacrimacida 3y ago
  Is this story made up though?
  • zzzeek 3y ago
    It does feel a little made up right ? Could be true. Could be maybe a little bit dramatized. Derek Sivers seems to have so many stories like this
    • hef19898 3y ago
      Then he should be more careful in public spaces and around other people, shouldn't he? Assuming it is true, that is, otherwise he should switch to fiction books.
      • zzzeek 3y ago
        careful about what, that he makes shit up? I think you'd be surprised how many people operate at that level by default.
        • mrguyorama 3y ago
          Backing up your point by making up a bullshit story is called "lying" and "disinformation" and should be rejected outright by anyone who wants a high trust society. We should not build policy, intentions, or any ideologies based on a single lie from some dude trying to push a "nobody is ever guilty of anything" agenda. This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you to accept. "The past is not real" is utter horseshit, and does not follow from "I did something I thought was really bad but was only kinda bad actually" in the first place.
          • zzzeek 3y ago
            I feel you
    • manuelmoreale 3y ago
• polyterative 3y ago
  expected more from Sivers
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  Rubbish. You can’t extrapolate anything from this.
  • keepamovin 3y ago
    So sad that you missed the point. Open up to it man
    • avgcorrection 3y ago
      Thanks for the concern, but I didn’t miss the point. There is no wisdom in extrapolating absolute statements from fringe coincidences.
      • keepamovin 3y ago
        I stand by my comment, your interpretation misses a lot :( But, maybe I'm the one missing your view here--could you explain more what you mean specifically?
      • mistermann 3y ago
        > There is no wisdom in extrapolating absolute statements from fringe coincidences. What method did you use to determine this is comprehensively true, in fact, rather than simply intuition?
        • avgcorrection 3y ago
          Just save us both the time and call me a hypocrite/inconsistent based on whatever figment you have in your mind.
          • mistermann 3y ago
            Doubling down with mind reading, nice.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
• bmacho 3y ago
  Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events? Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compute on computers, habitants of the universe can't know the future. A software can't compute its future. A similar reasoning to the halting problem can show this.) May I interest you in an other view? Slice Universe to the rescue! There is only now, and the now is true. There is matter, in a particular, ever changing spatial configuration. In 3d. The now is true, also it changes. Only the real people, made out of matter can experience things, simulated people, or the people that are not even simulated don't have real experiences. The past is not true, but we have some information about it, what the past can possibly be. So is the future, it is not true, but we have some information about it. There is no ontological or qualitative difference between the past and the future, only quantitative (which comes from the ridiculous amount of negentropy at the beginning of our universe).
  • abiro 3y ago
    What to read on the slice universe?
    • zogrodea 3y ago
      It sounds similar to (but possibly different from since I never heard the term "slice universe") the theory of presentism in the philosophy of time. That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/
    • hef19898 3y ago
      https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Slice/Legends https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Slice/Legends
  • 3y ago
• yakshaving_jgt 3y ago
  Fair point. Indeed, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
• youssefabdelm 3y ago
  "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." - Nietzsche
  • MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That's a nice quote!
• ngvrnd 3y ago
  Celebrity death match: Olin Shivers vs. Derek Sivers
• anbende 3y ago
  I think the article is sending a pretty problematic overall message. The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic: >History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were. And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything. In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.
  • mmusson 3y ago
    I think the point is that interpretation is all we really have. We believe that memories are these absolute things, but rigorous studies show that no human being remembers things perfectly, even when they believe they do. For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa. If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.
    • anbende 3y ago
• keepamovin 3y ago
  He's saying what happened, happened. What you make it mean, is up to you. The story you tell yourself, is a story you can rewrite. This beautiful story is one of the truest things I've read on HN in 8 years. This guy lived crippled by what the story he told himself about what happened for half his life. Then with a new story, a new encounter, he set himself free. Incredibly brave to tell this tale. Some people live in their story about something for their whole lives. They never do rewrite what they make it mean into one that works better for them. People live imprisoned by things that happened 40 years in the past. It's so sad to see, but so common. It's true that you can revisit the trauma of the past, and transform it and yourself. It will probably sound like woo, but it's not. Lots of protocols now being tested in studies that combine guided traumatic memory replay, with an adjuvant, like inderol (to create emotional distance), or psylocybin (to help shift perspective), all with the goal of producing a transformative reorientation of your relationship to the past trauma. Powerful stuff. "Plant medicine" retreats run in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and Central America (iboga, ayahuasca) have similar aims: re-experiencing the traumatic memory through an altered state aids you in rewriting your story about it, and helps you get new liberating perspective and transform what you make what happened mean for you. If you think you suffer from that kind of traumatic memory, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. :)
  • carapace 3y ago
    Just wanted to add that you don't need external chemicals to do this sort of thing. It's pretty easy to learn to enter trance at will and then do things like, e.g. "Parental Timeline Re-imprinting" where you go back in time, give your parents resources to be better, then live forward a whole new life with the new, resourceful parents. Afterward your nervous system will respond as if the fictional, imaginary life was real. (The brain is an evolved organ, it always chooses the best available options. There isn't really any free will, because evolution.) Of course, this only really helps if lousy parenting was a source of your current problems.
    • keepamovin 3y ago
      Totally agree man! But external chemicals may help some people (some people may be in a state where it's really hard for them to learn what may come a lot easier to folks like me and you~~not everyone is good at navigating their own internal terrain). Just like you don't need a therapist to guide you, but everyone has different capabilities to do so themselves, and therapist can benefit. I know how to do this, sounds like you know too, even folks like us who know how to do it themselves, I think should be open to the experience of being guided by someone else to see what it's like. This re-timelining can be used for many things. And it's not fiction. Your body makes it real, and it's more real than that, too. I think chemistry helps, it's not strictly necessary, but there's a whole lot of psych (placebo etc), and structural (makes more sense as a therapy / economic activity in that industry to combine with an agent, probably lead to that therapy getting more traction and helping more people), and real (chemistry clearly helps, ancients have been using it) reasons that make the combination therapy of chemistry plus therapist a really good option to be generally available! :) I am not with you on there's no free will. There's definitely free will. (and it can be a cope to pretend there's not, I think, because it gets you out of personal responsibility, a thing lots of folks have an issue with!). Because it's a choice. I mean, there's even a choice to rewrite your story in the ways we're talking about. That's clearly free will, to you, right?
• thenerdhead 3y ago
  > The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
  • anbende 3y ago
    Oof, as a psychologist that deals a lot with people who were abused and mistreated, this is a pretty big generalization. Yes, as we age we come to see things from a more experienced perspective and the perspectives of the adults we grew up with and change, but going all the way to "that is why it is important to forgive your parents" is a big big step. It is typically a good idea to try to get to forgiveness, you're right, but there's a lot of very indefensible behavior out there.
    • simonh 3y ago
      I think it's fair to say it's something we should all strive for if we're able.
    • thanksbucko 3y ago
      You may have a skewed view of the frequency of that level of abuse, due to the (very important) work you do. When it comes to humans there are exceptions to every rule, but not every single exception needs be called out. Not everything is “problematic” nor worth an “oof”.
      • anbende 3y ago
        It’s simply an example, though a somewhat extreme one, of the problem with the GP’s generalization. I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened. “You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”. Both can be forgiven and it’s probably a good idea to do so. I think it’s not helpful to generalize in that way. Also abuse happens a lot. It may not be the majority but it is NOT rare. I stand by my objection in this case
• foobarbecue 3y ago
  The conclusion to this article should have been: it's important to study the past, and find out what the truth is. Memory is fallible, and people often misunderstand or lie. But by investigating -- going to more people, consulting more sources, you can get closer to knowing what really happened. Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms. If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
  • mmusson 3y ago
    The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point. Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady. Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.
    • foobarbecue 3y ago
      Right. The past is true, but your memories are flawed, and your experience is incomplete. You have to make an effort to get the facts right. To get a full understanding of any situation, a good start is to talk to anyone you can who was there when it happened.
      • mistermann 3y ago
        The tricky part is: that's also often a good way to get a misunderstanding. Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people. People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.
• narag 3y ago
  I love HN but, let's be honest, we are often tone-deaf. Very much. When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind. He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do. Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?
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  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    Then his example is so garbage as to be worthless. He DID DO SOMETHING OBJECTIVELY BAD by driving recklessly and harming someone else. It doesn't matter after that point what narrative is spun by who, that reality happened. You don't get to absolve yourself of guilt by pretending actually it usually ends up better than you remember"
• dmje 3y ago
  There's certainly a lot of baggage carried by almost everyone almost all the time. We spend a big chunk of our lives worrying that X thing will happen, and another big chunk of our lives worrying that Y thing did happen. And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings. MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.
• sirodoht 3y ago
  “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell
  • cortesoft 3y ago
    I never knew this was the source of the Rage Against the Machine lyric.
• b450 3y ago
  Anytime some even vaguely anti-realist claim shows up in a HN headline, such as "the past is not true", a bunch of predictable and dull comments inevitably show up to perform some table thumping about reality being factual and objective, likely paired with some sanctimonious moral panic about the dangers of relativism (normally with a political slant one way or another). I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.
  • jajag 3y ago
    > "the past is never finished" Very well said.
  • 50 3y ago
    worth looking into c.s. peirce's[1][2] pragmatism material 1: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Sowa-2/publication/200043306/figure/fig6/AS:340106910158864@1458099214605/Peirces-cycle-of-pragmatism.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Sowa-2/publication... 2: https://newcriterion.com/issues/1997/11/vulgar-rortyism https://newcriterion.com/issues/1997/11/vulgar-rortyism
• athenot 3y ago
  This touches on Narrative Therapy. Events happened, yes. Facts are immutable and can't be changed or wished away simply because they are inconvenient. Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/narrative-therapy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/narrative-t...
  • frankthedog 3y ago
    Similar message, among many other valuable bits, in the book The Courage to be Disliked. Very good read, no fluff like a lot of psychology books. The title is misleading, there’s a strong element of being helpful to others rather than being disliked. I’d recommend it to anyone.
    • akkad33 3y ago
      I've read this book and many others like it. I completely agree with your assessment. I felt really good when I read this book and others. But afterwards I go back to feeling bad about myself as always
• user8501 3y ago
  This is quite profound. Consider a sentence. Every additional word has the ability to completely change the meaning of the whole sentence. In the same way, every passing moment is an opportunity to completely change the preceding moments. Sure facts are “real” in the sense that atoms are real. Atoms might be the building blocks of “reality” but it is up to the individual how clusters of atoms are interpreted, used, etc. Facts in the same way are surely the building blocks for the universe of emotion and dynamic interaction, but when you zoom in on them, as with atoms, they vanish. Even if this woman had answered the door in a wheelchair, an interaction filled with love and forgiveness would’ve left the author with the same feeling.
• none_to_remain 3y ago
  This is a versatile trick, it works for cars with one victim and it works for camps with millions of victims
• stared 3y ago
  There is a common conception that we don't know the future, but we know the past. In our heads, we have models of the past and models of the future. Sure, there is an asymmetry between knowing the past and the future - due to thermodynamics. Still, in both cases, it is good to think of these as probabilistic models, far from any certainty.
  • abirch 3y ago
    The past also suffers from survivorship bias. Although there's a 1 in 8 chance of flipping 3 consecutive heads, in the future after flipping 3 consecutive heads you forget about the other possibilities. E.g., there was a 1 in 8 chance that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have all been born women before they were conceived.
    • firebirdn99 3y ago
      > Although there's a 1 in 8 chance of flipping 3 consecutive heads, in the future after flipping 3 consecutive heads you forget about the other possibilities. In other contexts, also known as the gambler's fallacy if I recall.
      • mitchdoogle 3y ago
        If you are specifically looking for a result of 3 coin flips, then it's 1 in 8 chance of getting 3 of the same. The gambler's fallacy is seeing 2 coin flips come up heads and thinking there's only a 1 in 8 chance that the last one will come up heads.
  • qwnp 3y ago
    > there is an asymmetry between knowing the past and the future - due to thermodynamics Would you please elaborate on this?
    • yakcyll 3y ago
      I think this may refer to the second law of thermodynamics - entropy cannot decrease over time in an isolated system. One could argue the entire universe is one.
• tppiotrowski 3y ago
  I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and pandemics. People still have kids and get married and start businesses and hike and play the guitar, etc. History is just what we decide to deem important or not.
  • nostrebored 3y ago
    The historical context also misses a lot of what we know about the impact of malnutrition and stress on the immune system. Was the spanish flu actually that bad, or was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population? Reconciling modern information with historical events is hard. But I think it's completely necessary if we're going to make policy decisions based on history.
    • gmarx 3y ago
      The Spanish flu really was very bad but would not have killed as many people if it occurred today. Malnutrition might have been a factor (though today's obesity rate might also be a problem) but the bigger thing was lack of antibiotics. Flu almost never kills you directly- it's the bacterial pneumonia you develop on top of it that does. Without antibiotics back then there would have been little they could do
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        Bacterial Pneumonia was not the novel danger of the "Spanish" flu; They cytokine storm it caused in perfectly healthy people was horrifying, with perfectly healthy people who would normally fight off any flu dying from this one. A lot of young twenty somethings, strong people who were not malnourished died from it. Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really early, otherwise it's still a great way to die for a normal person.
• kangalioo 3y ago
  This story brought me to tears within two paragraphs, wow
• FigurativeVoid 3y ago
  This reminds me of the "second arrow." A buddhist idea. What happened in the story, the ground truth, is real. There was an accident, people were injured. That this story really highlights is the danger of a second arrow that is not that we tell ourselves stories about the past. The danger is that we tell ourselves stories so false they cause undue suffering. The point isn't that the past isn't true. The issue is the story.
  • nightpool 3y ago
    ("undue" suffering, in the sense of "unwarranted", "disproportionate" or "more than your due". "undo" suffering would be removing it or undoing it.)
• ideamotor 3y ago
  We lose this when everything is recorded forever. Stated more eloquently: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336?s=20 https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336...: “I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead: Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember. We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.” I’d replace AI with just IT in general. Relatedly, I used to believe in digital rot but now I’m not sure. I can for example search all the photos on my phone instantly to return images with a given text string. So the technology is improving to comprehend any data format and effectively retain its data.
  • wbobeirne 3y ago
    > We lose this when everything is recorded forever. I'd argue the opposite, we've amplified this affect. Off-hand statements from the past recorded forever get re-examined through a new lens in the present. What previously might have been totally innocuous become a scandal later. Whenever someone rockets into being main character for the day on the internet, their entire history is pulled up and re-assessed. So like many things, it's amplified by the internet, but largely for the negative.
  • 0xCMP 3y ago
    Data, information, doesn't rot, but code does because it relies on the implicit promises of the underlying system(s) it runs on top of, the systems it interacts with, and the expectations of it's users. Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital. And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the information over time is new methods and tools for understanding that information.
    • pyinstallwoes 3y ago
      That distinction is not rigorous. To be rigorous the distinction must not be made.
    • polygotdomain 3y ago
• cortesoft 3y ago
  I feel like the internet has really made the fault ones of our memories very apparent. I have a lot of old memories that I will think about and then try to research the event online and realize a lot of my memories are impossible because of the actual timeline of events.
• badrequest 3y ago
  Reminds me of The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant: https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/the-necklace https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/shor...
  • vacuity 3y ago
    While it's a thought-provoking short story, it's somewhat orthogonal to this article.
• neilv 3y ago
  > Seems we had both been told the accident was our fault, and had spent eighteen years feeling bad about it. Did they both have the same insurance company?
• electrondood 3y ago
  Not only the past, but all thoughts of the future, all interpretations about present events, all religions, all expressions in any language, even the seemingly separate self "you" take yourself to be... the very center of the narrative, are all only stories. They are only conceptual representations made of thought.
• BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  history doesn't exist. at most we have "historiography": the made up mythical tale of the past[3]. why? it's easier to remember[2,4] in oral cultures people just re-adjust their memory, subconsciously[1] in written culture, people burn books, driven by their leaders.[2] in transitional cultures, 'bad' comments are donwvoted, or moderated away, or the users get shadowbanned[2] [1] "Orality and Literacy" by Walter J. Ong, An american jesuit monk and academic. [2] I made this up just now [3] my highschool history teacher taught me this [4] arguably, [1] also says this
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    I think you're wrong about historiography (and your highschool history teacher too). "History" is accounts (stories) about the past. "Historiography" isn't about the past; it's an account of how historians "do" history. I mean, historiography would include accounts of how past historians used to do history.
    • BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
      > I think you're wrong about historiography (and your highschool history teacher too). you're wrong about me being wrong. I remembered a little better now: "there is no history, the proper name of this subject is historiography" he taught us this but also, your reply suggests you missed the point (and my teacher's) that there is no history, it's all accounts by some "historian" I would use the name meta-history, or 'philosophy of history' for what you describe as 'historiography'. then again, maybe you're just being nitpicky about things and are focusing on what I said wrong instead of on the point i was trying to make further again, I cannot help but notice how going forwards "metahistory" may even be understood as the story behind Mark Zuckerberg's giant coorporation
      • denton-scratch 3y ago
        Well, I said that history consists of accounts (stories). I agree that what I (and most historians) call "historiography" could be called "meta-history". But that activity already has a name; we don't need to construct a new term (with a Greek prefix and a Latin suffix) to stand-in for a word that already works fine. Historiography isn't some handwavey version of the past; it's the study of how historians do their work. That's the word historians use. Honestly, I think your history teacher got the wrong end of the stick. Like, Humpty Dumpty had a point: you can use words to mean whatever you want. But it's not helpful for intelligent discourse to redefine commonly-understood terms.
• Jun8 3y ago
  For an excellent story on this theme you can read Ted Chiang’s “ The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemist's_Gate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemi.... I think it’s one his best.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  Corny: "The past is history, the future's a mystery, the present's a gift". My memory has been getting worse for years. People can take advantage of me by insisting confidently that I've misremembered something. Crime witnesses often confabulate; they don't know what they saw, so they "enrich" their memory by adding spurious information. The title's wrong, though; the past is true, it's just that we can't remember it.
• UncleMeat 3y ago
  If you are interested in this topic but would like to understand how historians think about things, look into writing about Historiography and Historical Memory. This person appears to just be some guy who describes himself as an entrepreneur and TED speaker. The way we understand the past is a deep topic that is analyzed and discussed by actual professionals constantly. Better to read their writing than this kind of stuff, IMO.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    This comment reminds me a lot of XKCD "Ten Thousand" (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/). You don't need to denigrate the author's credibility to write about their personal experience and insight from it in order to provide a reference to the much deeper field of study on this to those who are interested. Personally, I had heard of "historiography" but had no idea this is what it meant. And now I do! And that wouldn't have happened today if this author hadn't published their little anecdote.
    • UncleMeat 3y ago
      I'm less denigrating the author and more encouraging people who found this idea interesting to seek out experts. I'm glad that this person is thinking about this topic. I also see a frankly huge number of absolute amateurs having their ideas about history distributed all over the world while professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively.
      • sanderjd 3y ago
        I think you're doing both things. And I applaud you for the encouragement and useful information! I also don't begrudge you your frustration about this. But I also find the "ten thousand" idea to be a useful re-framing of how to respond to this phenomenon where something seems obvious to you because you know all about it, but it's actually not obvious to most people at all. Maybe you'll find this to be a useful re-framing too, I dunno. I will push back a bit on "professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively". I don't think that's really true. In my experience, it seems like most professionals and academics prefer to write and speak within their own bubbles. Some few make a concerted effort to communicate effectively to the masses, but more often they look down their noses at the kinds of communication that entails. For instance, my interpretation of your "TED speaker" comment is that TED talks are not a suitable way to communicate about this topic. But a compelling TED talk or blog post or op-ed in a mainstream publication would be a great way for a professional to communicate about this with a large audience. I think this has a lot to do with the way academia is set up. "Publish or perish" provides little incentive structure for effectively communicating your work for amateurs. Or in more concrete terms: What professionals do you know of in this field who are out there doing everything they can to communicate effectively about this to a non-professional non-academic audience? What is it that they're doing?
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  I don't always fully agree with anecdotal feel good stories that seem to imply a greater universal point due to a by-chance outcome. What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault? It's nicely written, but it speaks to most people's general positivity bias: our yearning for a benign truth underlying all things that are bad, or more specifically, that bad things aren't really real, that they're a mirage over the real state of all things which are actually good and wholesome and better than you could have even guessed. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably draws miserable people to religions that offer eternal salvation.
  • kritiko 3y ago
    I think magical, positive thinking is protective even in the most dire times or atrocities. This is an intuition that's based on anecdotes from watching the documentary Shoah and reading Man's Search for Meaning, both of which cover how survivors dealt with the Holocaust.
    • atleastoptimal 3y ago
      True. If humans didn't have a positivity bias our own intelligence would be unbearable. We have to be able to viscerally imagine and reckon with the worst possible realities while keeping our heads above water. It's also why I believe humor exists: it provides a psychological and social reward for effectively navigating negative circumstances.
      • vacuity 3y ago
        I think that people tend to mix emotion and reason too readily. To an extent we are governed by our emotions, but we shouldn't let them consume us. Negativity bias is definitely detrimental but so is positivity bias. That's different from being compassionate. Compassion is a principle, a moral axiom that many people hold, but positivity bias is saying we should feel blindly feel good. We should have a tempered view of our principles and personalities. Your explanation of humor seems woefully inadequate. What is the corresponding solution to a negative solution in making a dad joke?
• azubinski 3y ago
  It is too convenient wisdom to be real wisdom.
• miiiiiike 3y ago
  He did the right thing by seeking her out to apologize. The rest doesn’t hold water. “There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.” The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true. They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you call them out on it it’s always something like “We’ll if I could damage their career anyone could have.” or “It’s been ten years, why don’t they just get over it?” Basically: “Yes, I stabbed them. But they didn’t/couldn’t stop me, so it’s their fault that they’re dead, really.” Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time. Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did. Telling yourself that the facts of your story don’t matter or that the people you hurt may even be better off for it won’t mend the people you’ve broken. Just apologize (for real) and attempt to make amends.
  • corry 3y ago
    Ehhh that seems a bit uncharitable and leading into a slippery-slope fallacy. "Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice". Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea. But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyrant in your life (if you let it) seems like a good insight to me.
    • miiiiiike 3y ago
      Didn’t say it could be interpreted as giving people license. I’m talking about the people who already do the things — and not giving them a Tums and Tylenol for the indigestion and headaches it’s causing them. Stop doing the thing to stop suffering the consequences. The people also tend to be really brittle. Once someone points out that they’re running around stabbing people they’ll get all offended: “See! It’s not fair! Everyone I’ve stabbed is out to get me. I’m the victim!”
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    > “There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.” > The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true. It’s worse than that: > > She said “that little accident” helped her pay more attention to her fitness, lose weight, and since then has been in better health than ever.
• aristofun 3y ago
  The story is not about past, but about how many middlemen there these days. And how people got used to not taking responsibility for their own actions, communication etc. People are not speaking directly anymore, only through layers of unnecessary, corrupted, stupid and ignorant lawyers, insurance companies, agents and other meaningless units.
• bookofjoe 3y ago
  >The past is never dead. It's not even past. ― William Faulkner, 'Requiem for a Nun' (1951)
• swombat 3y ago
  A saying that's stayed with me recently is: > You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable. Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new things about the past. You can change your stories about it. You can even assist others in doing that. But the future? That is always out of reach, and already encompasses all your attempts to change it.
• dandanua 3y ago
  Wrong. The human knowledge is subjective, but we believe (for good reasons!) that there exists an objective past, which is true for everyone.
• libraryatnight 3y ago
  This reeks of bullshit.
• pdonis 3y ago
  The article's main point is that you can change the story, but the actual example he gives is a change in the facts--the actual facts weren't what he thought they were. That is why the story changed--because he found out that the actual facts weren't as bad as the "facts" he had previously believed were true. So it's not true that "the actual facts are a small part of the story". They are the story; you can't change the story unless you find out the facts were different. At least, not if you're being honest.
  • gochi 3y ago
    >actual facts You see how quickly you are to believe these are the "actual facts"? That's how quickly they were to believe their "actual facts" as well. That is the story. Not the facts. What we tell ourselves, what we tell others. This is why they brought up memories, an unstable collection of flashes in our mind, and we use these to craft a story. The story has changed, and will continue to change, you're in the process of writing it right now. Unless you don't believe in free will and that your story/stories are already written. That's a very fun thought! This is why "facts" is misleading here. We aren't talking about observed realities (she is going to the park, I am eating an ice cream), we're talking about our feelings, thoughts, memories, perceived consequences, ambitions, projections, assumptions. None of these are objective. Despite our best attempt to come together and make it so.
    • gtirloni 3y ago
      So both of them based their story on flimsy/incomplete evidence and they keep reshaping their stories. If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong. /s
      • function_seven 3y ago
        Sorry if I'm misinterpreting the /s here, but: > If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong /s This, but sincerely! Problem is there isn't an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong. There's only each participants' recollection of the event—both flawed. She thought her inattention was the cause of the wreck, he thought his failing to yield was the cause. Who is right? Both of them? Just her? Just him? 80% him, 20% her? There is no objective way to answer any of this. What happened during that accident only exists today in the minds of the drivers. Sure, you can look at photos of the aftermath and determine that this fender was bent, or that airbag deployed. But you can't get a similar (objective) level of understanding about the actions of the drivers leading up to the wreck. When they met, he learned that she was not paralyzed (and that his understanding of the past was wrong in that aspect), and she learned that he blamed himself rather than blaming her. By comparing notes, they both got a better version of "the past" in their minds, but there's still room for more variances and disagreements on what exactly happened. There may be an objective reality. But there's no way we can completely understand it. We can only know what our limited senses tell us. As time marches on, those senses get recorded in memories, and further distorted. For the tiny slice of events that get recorded in audio, video, contemporaneous notes, etc.; we have even better understanding. But those methods of capturing events still leave a lot out. You can hear the words, but not the thoughts. You can see the actions, but not the motivations. You can read the written diary, but there are no entries there for things considered irrelevant by the author. There are untold numbers of events that occurred millennia ago that we know absolutely nothing about. But they contribute to how the world works today just the same. Long after the cause is lost to time, the effect chain keeps adding links.
• brudgers 3y ago
  It's not even past.
• jklinger410 3y ago
  I hate hyperbole. The correct title is that your memory of the past is incorrect.
• whispersnow 3y ago
  There’s also a chance he went to apologize and never get a relief or forgiveness as the person was really paralyzed. It is not fair to judge based on the result. Mistake made, apologize immediately, don’t wait. And take the consequences whether it is good or bad - that’s a true move on from the past.
• weare138 3y ago
  The past is real. Your memories, feelings and interpretations of it may not be. Reality is not subjective. You are.
  • nathan_compton 3y ago
    Because of quantum mechanics this is a genuinely open philosophical question. The equations which time evolve the wave function are time-symmetric, which means that even if you know the current state of the universe's wave function somehow, you still only get a probabilistic projection for the state in the past. I think this leaves open the genuine physical possibility that the past does not exist in the same way that the present exists. A lot comes down to what you think about the ontology of quantum mechanics.
    • hef19898 3y ago
      We are not living in a Star Trek / MCU multi-verse so.
      • nathan_compton 3y ago
        This has nothing to do with fiction. Roughly speaking, if you are some kind of wave function realist, then the implication that the past has a similar kind of uncertainty as the future is a simple consequence of the time reversibility of quantum mechanics (without the measurement postulate). Read a book.
        • hef19898 3y ago
          I do read, history books for example. Using quantum physics to argue some meta-physic view on life is, well, it is I guess... I think it is loughable.
          • nathan_compton 3y ago
            Just telling it like it is.
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  A couple things are being confused by the author. Correcting bad memories is one thing. That occurs when we receive new evidence or knowledge that contradicts the memory. This is simply your every day revision of beliefs in practice. Nothing new to see here. But note: there is a justification here. There is knowledge that motivates the revision. There is also good will, a desire to submit to the truth. Willfulness, on the other hand, puts what we want to be the case above what is the case. This is at the core of pride, queen of the vices, and delusion. "History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story." Well...no. Facts are a huge page of the story. They're kind of the whole point, if by facts we mean that which is true (the word "fact" is problematic, but the quotation, as well as the title of the article, draw an equivalence between fact and truth). We may not have all the facts, we may be mistaken about them, or we may not yet have inferred some truth. And where we can't reasonable know the truth, we will simply lack that knowledge, leaving us capable of only speculating about possibilities. But there is a truth of the matter. It's not whatever you want it to be. Once in the past, facts are immutable, as it were. That the past only exists as a memory does not give you license to toy with that memory in one direction or the other, in your (ostensible) favor. I say "ostensible" because willful self-deception (which is what attempts to tweak memories is) does a few things that are harmful. First, it destroys our connection with reality. I don't think I need to explain why that's bad. Second, denial is repression of uncomfortable truths (or at least what we hold to be true), and not like overwriting a file on disk. It's more like sweeping a dangerous animal under the rug. It reach out from under and bite you, you will trip over it even when it is sleeping. Occasionally, it will lash out from under the rug and cause terror. There will always be a lingering anxiety about the ever present possibility that it will escape from under our control and attack us or something we care about. A repressed truth introduces all sorts of weird tensions into the psyche, perverting our perception of reality, enslaving us to fear. That's the paradox: caging uncomfortable truths makes them our greatest enemy and gives them power over us. Acknowledging them sets us free. Repression is only something we use to suppress inappropriate impulses or desires (the basis for self-discipline and the moral life), not the truth; indeed, failing to repress inappropriate impulses alienates us from the truth, not least of all because it entails a repression of the truth to enable the indulgence of that desire and a weakening of the intellectual faculties. Repressing guilt always leads to self-destruction. It's why human history is full of human and animal sacrifice. (It's also why, in Christianity, God provides Himself as the perfect sacrifice, as the Lamb of God, bloodlessly offered at each Catholic mass on the altar, and why the sacrament of penance exists: to accuse oneself before God and receive absolution.) Guilt will destroy you, but denial only doubles its power, not to mention the added guilt of having repressed the guilt. The psychotherapy industry is funded by the guilty conscience. But if you think denial is some kind of escape hatch, sorry. That ways lies madness.
• hnmullany 3y ago
  "The Sense of an Ending" is a good book (then movie) with this theme (although in the opposite way) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_an_Ending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_an_Ending
• chad1n 3y ago
  Once, my physics teacher from high school told the class that the only history we should "trust" is the one that we rationally felt and maybe, the one that was told by our parents, while the other historical "facts" are just the result of tons and tons of interpretations of random people that you end up taking as universal "truths".
  • vacuity 3y ago
    By that model I wouldn't be able to say anything about the Holocaust (extreme example, I know) or its implications.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• csours 3y ago
  Every history book is a narrative. Do you listen to: The generals and presidents and industrialists? or The privates and citizens and workers? Most of the narrative of WWII I learned in high school is built off of grains of truth, but other grains of truth are much more important, depending on where you live. You learn that Japan surrendered because of the atom bombs, then you learn that they surrendered because the Soviets invaded Korea, then you learn that it's a combination of factors. People want to hold a complete story in their heads, with a satisfying conclusion. If you can find someone or something to blame, that is a very satisfying conclusion. If you are fighting a fight, you will read that fight into all of the history you encounter.
• 123sereusername 3y ago
  why is this even worth talking about?
• voidhorse 3y ago
  Memory is a process. We do not have fixed objects we could call representations stored in our brains. Someone asks "what did you have for breakfast" and I respond with a word "pancakes" — a process and action occurs and we call it memory, I don't go looking up some representation of "the facts" and wheel it out before them, nor do I produce an actual pancake. In other words, of course memory is an interpretation, and historical thought is basically a collective form of these kinds of processes. What's fascinating, and what powers the drama of the article is that even if we know this scientifically and philosophically, we often can't help but act as though our memories were objects, were these concrete things that we have at hand. A person can remember, but no person actually possesses memories (unless you want to talk about the dynamic and constantly changing states of a neuronal system).
• pstuart 3y ago
  Ugh. Of course we should be mindful that "history" is created by people and people are fallible (and worse, e.g., intentionally biased), so caveat emptor. But it doesn't mean that historical facts don't exist (shit happens - those are facts), but the recounting of such should be consumed knowing that there are likely inaccuracies. This is not license to only take in the history we like or rewrite it to suit our agendas. I'm technically a Boomer and my education on the history of the US was amazingly light on any details that would today seem unsavory (e.g., the expansion to the West was not simply moving into uninhabited territory, etc.). A People's History of the United States was eye opening and a welcome revisiting of the "official story". Some might say that Zinn had an agenda to shit on White Men, but I saw it as a heartfelt attempt to correct the record. I didn't learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre until about 10 years ago, and already there are attempts to squash that because, and I kid you not, "it makes white people feel bad".
• arpowers 3y ago
  “Who controls the past, controls the future… Who controls the present, controls the past…” — Orwell
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  The lesson was that facts can and do expire. Truth relies on facts. Ergo, a past truth expires when its replacement fact is revealed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. > It’s never too late to change a story. I'm not sure I draw the same conclusion. It seemed to me like the facts did matter as much as ever in that case, it's just that none of the two principals had the facts at first. By learning new information, they changed their interpretation of the events. The facts change the story, never the other way around.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  .. and then there is faux forgiveness that covers up for something else. In the movie Hired Gun, Liberty DeVitto, former drummer for Billy Joel, tells in gruesome detail how Billy screwed him over, along with his two bandmates. Then he tells us how he bears no ill will for Billy, and shows a letter to him saying that he'll always be there for him. I think a lot of people like to say they've forgiven because it sounds good. https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/management-lessons-from-alice-cooper https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/management-lessons-from-...
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    That was a damned entertaining read, friend. Thanks for putting it together.
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      You're welcome, and thanks!
• frithsun 3y ago
  I typically get salty about big picture feel good garbage getting posted on here, but this one kinda warmed my heart. The past as we understand it is indeed a lie. And while we should strive to reconcile ourselves with our past, apologizing, forgiving, remembering, and regretting as appropriate, ... it's important to work to leave the past where it belongs, behind us.
• chunsj 3y ago
  I'm not a native speaker of English and I think I found out that the meaning of "past" in English contains the memory of someone, as well as - this might not be correct, though - factual events. Anyway, this is a warm story, I have more belief in human being, especially as a being who has lived in Asian culture, who have learned 人間, the human, which in fact has more than mere human being, but also the one in the community of human beings. Rhetorical, I know, but we need more love of each other, I think. :-)
• d1l 3y ago
  This is the so self-serving and self-congratulatory! He had the nerve to cry on her doorstep, which says he didn't want to apologize, but to be forgiven and to make a show of it. Amending past wrongs is about showing up without any regard for your own feeling and the intention to do whatever is in your power to set the wrong aright. You admit the wrong and then you listen. I get it that to the author this is some cute meta-story about "we were both wrong!" But truly acknowledging one's fault is antithetical to this kind of fawning over oneself and infantile moralizing.
  • cgio 3y ago
    That’s harsh. Showing up is demonstrably an action in the direction of making things right , apologising is not out of a pure disconnected entity, but out of a being with feelings, driven by them to do right. Perhaps if the story was different, he would have gotten the proper moralising tune, but that was his experience and that’s the tune he found appropriate. I don’t agree with his findings but that does not mean I question his intentions.
  • kirse 3y ago
    That's funny, I read it more as a story about forgiveness and how often we carry around these life burdens (guilt, anger, whatever) solely on an emotionally-charged misunderstanding of what we think to be the truth. It got me thinking about what stories I keep telling myself that I may be clinging to that are potentially incomplete or incorrect.
• Pent 3y ago
  blame is a sin
• omgmajk 3y ago
  For us with anxiety problems the past is very often a lie. Imagining the worst possible outcome for everything tends to make things stick in the brain that are fundamentally not true.