> If we collectively decide we can't trust our own individual senses, what do you think happens to our chances for survival?
What does "collectively" trusting our "individual" senses even mean? Anyway,
> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
Before you brush someone like Heisenberg aside, read him first. Everything you wrote before that last rhetoric question is perfectly technically true, and yet also perfectly orthogonal to Heisenberg et al. "having a point".
Even the idea of "objective" truth that everybody ought to accept is so new, that in regardless whether you consider humankind to be 100 000 or 10 000 years old, it's nothing. We survived perfectly fine without it. So unless you're claiming that going forward that would change, I don't even understand the question.
We can't "collectively" trust our senses because collectively we can't do or think or be anything. That's an abstraction, not a real thinking entity. It's an idea that damages, not one that is useful. The actually existing entities have to continue the hard work with communicating and sussing it out as individuals, instead of fleeing into abstractions from moral responsibilities, from the things that cannot easily be measured or counted or voted on.
How often do you hear the excuse that action X is permitted because the "world" (as if the person they are speaking to is not a part of the world) "changed" (it's always passive voice) in way Y? As if to say "I didn't make the rules"... this will continue to lead us to ever darker places. Dehumanizing others is one thing, but we're already at the point of people gladly dehumanizing themselves. It's not more objective, it's not more rational, it's more cowardly, as it just excludes* parts of the human experience that are hard to deal with and agree on.
> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.*
> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.
It can be fixed in CSS. Add scrollbars to <pre> on small viewports, or have it wrap on small viewports.
Opera Mini could do magic with forcing text to wrap on small displays, why are mobile browsers shit today? If you don't want this to be usable on an actual computer, why not make HN an app and be done with it? Comments could become even shorter and more inane than they generally are already.
Society is not a person, it doesn't have a definition. It's just an abstract excuse used by actual individuals. If you want to propose, as a person, a particular notion of privacy, do so.
> There is a catch, though: the Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G technology, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialled scientists in the radiation research field”, according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like mobiles, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
Just out of curiosity, how would one go about locating the direction of 5G antennas? At the very least, I'd gleefully shit-talk anyone involved I come across. Just out of principle. It doesn't even matter how safe it turns out to be -- just how needy and dumb people are adopting anything thrown into their through, how reckless not just with their own lives, but with their effects on others and the environment, calls for some serious fucking wrath. And this is as good a starting point as any.
Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's a million times worse than even what we have now.
The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, exactly, are you arguing for?
Dramatic things already happen for those reasons every day. Being numbed to them happening to someone else doesn't reduce that actual drama that the current victims of it suffer through.
These things pervasive on the internet, just like the are in the writings of many greats I can think of, because thank God some people still care; if that is exhausting to you, become a better person and start caring, try to step in the road and get run over, or get out of the way.
How is this "not being new" relevant at all? People posting inane "corrections" anytime someone makes a comment worth a fuck isn't new either. Doesn't mean I accept it.
No, it's one persons decision to help make their part of the world so, excuse it with "that's how it is", and ignore all the people living in the same "world" and having completely different outcomes, because they retained the integrity others got tricked into giving away.
My experience with honesty is sometimes some added initial challenge, sometimes less challenge, and always a long tail of payoffs. Meanwhile, some people cheat each other and themselves in the hopes for some material gains that they hope will give them some charisma, because they threw the natural charisma that comes from a fully developed person away in the beginning, as a price of admission -- and then it never does.
Of course, if everybody went the same route, if everybody also sold out their own person, then nobody would realize what shadows of their potential these people have become, and that's why they try to drag everything into this pit of cowardly dishonesty. But even if everybody suffered from their affliction, their suffering wouldn't be lessened, therefore it's better to not join them in their suffering.
Oh, and that's not being cynical either, it's just being cold. Being cruel would be working on "immortality", so people can get what they ask for, forever. You know, as in the curse variant of "may you live a long life (as the pathetic person you are)".
> Everybody knows by now, all businessmen are completely full of shit; just the worst kind of low-life, criminal, cocksuckers you could ever wanna' run into – a fuckin' piece of shit businessman. And the proof of it, the proof of it is, they don't even trust each other. They don't trust one another. When a business man sits down to negotiate a deal, the first thing he does is to automatically assume that the other guy is a complete lying prick who's trying to fuck him outta his money. So he's gotta do everything he can to fuck the other guy a little bit faster and a little bit harder. And he's gotta do it with a big smile on his face. You know that big, bullshit businessman smile? And if you're a customer – Whoah! – that's when you get the really big smile. Customer always gets that really big smile, as the businessman carefully positions himself directly behind the customer, and unzips his pants, and proceeds to service...the...account. 'I am servicing this account. This customer needs service.' Now you know what they mean. Now you know what they mean when they say, 'We specialize in customer service.' Whoever coined the phrase 'let the buyer beware' was probably bleeding from the asshole. That's business.
The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
I never caved in, and encourage others to resist, what more are you asking? Anything you're actually giving yourself? You won't get to action without thought and words, and this textbox literally doesn't allow any other input than words, so what's the point of complaining about that?
> You assume stopping "revolution" is the goal. It is not. All you have to do is look at what outcomes "revolutions" in an info saturated/low attention span/consumption culture based society have produced in the last 20 years.
And from that follows that the Chinese leadership wouldn't mind a revolution (that they didn't concoct themselves to tighten their grip, that is)? That doesn't follow at all.
> China is overvaluing control
You're overestimating your own attention span. Either they "value control" (what a disgusting euphemism) or they wouldn't mind a revolution.
In your case, not egging it on would be a start even.
There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims, the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody, "forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global, perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not stability.
Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have developed.
"A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a constructive force.
What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible. Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening nightmare.
People had their flagging privileges removed before, in cases "someone at HN" actually gave a fuck. If you give people the tools to flag this and let them abuse it, you're complicit, and you cant't effectively support browshirts and then cry about being called a meanie. It's like doing a murder and then complaining about being called an asshole. Which is not a nice thing to do, in a vacuum, but this is not a vacuum, and it's hardly the first time either.
This is "not applicable", yet the top comment just causally is "putting aside the Automation/Job Replacement fears".
Working in a call center is basically the last easy to get job for people who aren't very intelligent, it's the one job where a physically handicapped but attentive person can get treated like a normal human being. And they all just get tossed in there, "trained" by people who don't know their ass from their elbow either. They don't exactly have it good as is.
But let's "put that aside", because they are not eloquent enough to post here, and the few who think of them in earnest can be easily ignored. And then double think and "struggle" to think how putting someone else's suffering aside could have anything to do with this.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
What does "collectively" trusting our "individual" senses even mean? Anyway,
> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
Before you brush someone like Heisenberg aside, read him first. Everything you wrote before that last rhetoric question is perfectly technically true, and yet also perfectly orthogonal to Heisenberg et al. "having a point".
Even the idea of "objective" truth that everybody ought to accept is so new, that in regardless whether you consider humankind to be 100 000 or 10 000 years old, it's nothing. We survived perfectly fine without it. So unless you're claiming that going forward that would change, I don't even understand the question.
We can't "collectively" trust our senses because collectively we can't do or think or be anything. That's an abstraction, not a real thinking entity. It's an idea that damages, not one that is useful. The actually existing entities have to continue the hard work with communicating and sussing it out as individuals, instead of fleeing into abstractions from moral responsibilities, from the things that cannot easily be measured or counted or voted on.
How often do you hear the excuse that action X is permitted because the "world" (as if the person they are speaking to is not a part of the world) "changed" (it's always passive voice) in way Y? As if to say "I didn't make the rules"... this will continue to lead us to ever darker places. Dehumanizing others is one thing, but we're already at the point of people gladly dehumanizing themselves. It's not more objective, it's not more rational, it's more cowardly, as it just excludes* parts of the human experience that are hard to deal with and agree on.
> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.*
> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"