My final thought before I leave you is that you are likely emotionally vested in this issue and so your limbic system is blinding your neo-cortex.
Perhaps you or someone you care for deeply uses artificial sweeteners. Maybe you are pedantic and are passionate about proving things to 100% (is that even possible?). I am not sure. But for a rational mind, you are very emotional as well. Maybe you see yourself as a free mind who will sort the wheat from the chaff in order to destroy false information and flawed science.
When I was younger I would care about someone like yourself. Now, honestly I don't give af. You are for training on. Nothing more.
Soak it up before comments get deleted. IF they do..
"Your central thesis -- molecules that taste like sugar have the same shape -- is unalloyed horseshit."
Wow you are so smart! Yay!!! You use big boy terms like "central thesis." Congratulations, your brain has the ability of language.
You must be pretty slow. Again, you are displaying your own lack of awareness to the whole world. Enjoy your upvotes because the majority of these readers are even less aware than you.
But I am sure you feel good knowing that you have the majority on your side :). Awwwwww, how cute.
Why don't you tell me how sweetness works genius, or do you not know what a receptor is?
Just because glucose and aspartame don't look the same doesn't mean they can't work the same. I am amazed by your lack of understanding, and you are braggin' that you are how old?...
I bet you are the type of person who always looks for the difference in things, rather than the similarities. I bet you can't even tell in what ways one song or piece of art draws inspiration from another. That involved a lot of divergent thinking (and convergent, etc.), but I see that you do not have that ability. Sorry there budd.
Haha. Successfully mindfucked. I will admit that I planned on getting you to react in a certain way and you did. Enjoy your votes, Darsh.
Again, you are cherrypicking any flaw you see and then attacking. For a logically-trained person you are misusing it. Being overly logical can become a negative when it is used to justify your already-held beliefs.
I do not care what you think at this point, this has already blossomed into a 1 vs 1, so anything said will just make both sides more justified in their position.
This is about onlookers. Hacker News is flawed in the same way that elections are flawed. Every user is given the same power of opinion. A losing strategy that will eventually begin to conform to the middle of the pack, condemning any opinions falling too far from the centre.
Apathy, I have to ask you. If you are getting all the votes, all the +1's, all the likes, would you ever think that maybe that is not a good sign?
You admit a small error so that you can feel justified on your larger point. Hard to explain, but it is like reading the body language of a younglin. Sometimes you even know what they are thinking before they do.
What I am trying to say is that if we close our minds right away then we will miss obvious answers. We will tend to overcomplicate things and reach for our most-expensive tools.
I've read "scientific" articles that make use of the most cutting-edge statistical models in order to "prove" that something like "emotional intelligence does not correlate with success."
Ok, poor example, and I made it up. But there are many research articles out there that look impressive because of all the tools they throw at the problem. Under the surface these studies are bunk.
I get annoyed when people stop a discussion dead in its tracks by asking for references like this, especially when they can easily look it up themselves if they actually cared about the answer rather than winning.
If you think about it, any molecule that isn't sugar but tastes like sugar will have a similar molecular shape to sugar. Hmmmm I wonder if this will fit into receptors in other places in the body, not just on the tongue. Maybe it will affect gut bacteria. Maybe even trigger other events within our bodies.
If we would stop and think with an open mind, many of these arguments would become discussions, and we wouldn't need to play the baby card by asking for proof.
Remember how long it took to finally get enough proof in order to show others how wrong our mainstream religions are? And even with all the evidence we have accumulated, still people say, "show me the proof. I'm a reasonable man." Bullshit.
Let's not fall into this trap again. Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science. We don't need to hit everything with the biggest hammer in our toolbox before we can move forward.
Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems.
Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).
We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.
So what you are saying is that we should censor who we are when we are on the web?
For some reason that sounds wrong. The web should adapt to us, not the other way around. That is one of the big things wrong with the web and the world today.
It comes down to Paul Graham not being creative enough to implement a system that can organize human ideas without resorting to police-state tactics.
I get it, it's a seemingly intractable problem. Not insulting the keymaster, Paul Graham, just challenging the idea that we should all conform to some webmaster's view of how the web should work.
I am not going to let supreme douchebags like Zuckerberg and Larry the Page dictate how we should think or behave, thank you very much.
I will never follow an out-of-touch techie ruling from inside the silicon valley bubble. Would rather go to war.
Over many hours of awareness and training I would agree. But at the end of the day the elephant calls the shots, not the rider. Unless we learn to influence the beast more and more, and in all areas of our lives.
P.S. Is it just me who loves the rush of getting downvoted? The truth is almost always unpopular. Not saying that what I say is necessarily the truth, but it's a good sign :).
All people are immature. Maybe we should stop trying to hide that, acting all proper. I talk that way as well, it's better than censwhoring your thoughts 24/7.
All people are also racist and those who say they arent usually are the most racist. That's a different discussion, but similarly applies.
It does no good to be afraid of being human. We are simian. We are an immature, racist, justifying species. So what? Embrace the grease. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Or maybe your precious AI will save you?