4 ms·
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't contr
by j_maffe 5mo ago
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
- renticulous 5mo agoYou liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoI hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.
- j_maffe 5mo agoPerhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.
- BirAdam 5mo agoThis isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.
- XorNot 5mo agoDo you know how to make paper? Can you? Is it any good? Do you really understand it then?
- latexr 5mo agoYou’re stretching the meaning of understanding to ridiculous levels of uselessness. If you’re slapped across the face, do you need to understand physics and biology to know how the movement and speed of a hand interacting with the tissue of your face and interpreted by your brain and nervous system makes it hurt?
- scheeseman486 5mo agoUnderstanding why pain happens is what allowed for anesthesia and modern medicine, which massively improved the quality of life of our species. Did we need to figure out how to do that? Sure, in the same way we needed to figure out how to create fire, or craft tools.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pixl97 5mo ago>do you need to understand physics and biology to know how the movement and speed of a hand interacting wi In one sense, no because we get this programmed in for free by our ancient biology. But do note that it did not just pop up full formed and took quntillions of complex interactions over eons of time to get to the point it is now. This is why making robots that behave like biological entities is insanely hard, evolution has spent an epic fuckton of compute on the problem already. Now, if you're building human like robots, then yes, you need to understand all the above.
- notahacker 5mo agoWe're downthread of someone moaning about the complexity of a world which requires him to understand sidewalks, strangers and rooms he isn't allowed to enter. Doesn't feel like paper is any more intuitive or 'natural' at any level than those, and tbh if I don't have to understand it well enough to understand how it's made, glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either...
- 0x1ceb00da 5mo agoYou don't even need society for that. Remember the bear scene from the revenant?