At least some of life for some people is luck in the real sense that undeserving people (Joe Biden's son, say, merely to cite one example) are lifted up thanks to who their parents are.
Bad luck is when you're effectively ruined by the age of 5 thanks once again to who your parents were. The only way out for someone that fits this description is to adopt a self-reliant, goal directed attitude.
Self-reliant, goal directed behavior is essentially what people not born lucky or ruined do to improve their position in life.
What society can do to help is communicate clearly that the virtues of persistence, resilency, self-reliance and goal directed behavior are "cool" or in sociological-speak, society's normative values.
Unfortunately, since Rousseau and Marx, we have birthed a counter-culture that is determined to do the opposite. It's determined to place the locus of control over one's life outside of the individual and onto a nepharious "society".
Marx personally was an unhappy, deeply defective, and cruel personality. His philosophy stems directly from this. It attracts people who share his defects- namely people filled with resentment, envy, a desire to extract revenge for perceived slights and a lust for absolute power.
The hope is that eventually, through CRISPR and other techniques, that as a side effect of improving human functioning the well-spring of such people will simply dry up.
Until then, we have to do battle with a philosophy which preaches the diametric opposite of what we know leads to human flourishing and happiness.
Life is full of luck and for every Hunter Biden there are 100 children growing up in failed homes. I didn't say luck and privilege don't exist but I absolutely do not agree that as a nation we have institutionalized racism. I can't even believe it's such a controversial statement to get downvote bombed.
Poverty rates are disproportionately high among black and hispanic citizens but as a percentage of total population they are absolutely dwarfed by white poverty. What is the reason that so many white Americans are living in poverty? Is it perhaps possible that it is a similar reason that black and hispanic citizens are living in poverty?
Poverty rates are always written as a percentage of the population of that race but if you rewrite them to be a percentage of US population a different narrative starts to emerge...
~2.7% of Americans are black people in poverty.
~3.0% of Americans are hispanic people in poverty.
~6.5% of Americans are white people in poverty.
We have problems of economic opportunity in this country. Writing it off as racism is missing the elephant in the room.
I agree with you which is why I got downvoted too. People with nothing better to do in their lives than get paid to downvote on public forums. My solution I guess is to leave this forum and find one that doesn't enable downvote brigades the way this one does.
Supposedly, commentors here have something of value to offer, otherwise it would just be a news headline site without commentors. I am taking whatever value I have to offer and going elsewhere. I suggest you do the same. Sure, HN will turn into a political echo-chamber but it's really that already, right? I had 10% of my karma- whatever that is and whatever it's good for- disappear in an hour when I proferred the opinion that I didn't blame Trump for the virus.
You get a result like that - people telling you that that should NOT be your opinion and here's the punch in the face to teach you that lesson- and you know the forum is already a lost cause.
Gab has a browser plugin that will let you comment on any website, including this one and not be censored. Also there are scrappy alternatives to Reddit, saidit I think is one, where its not a groupthink party.
It's just a period of time we're living through and technology will catch up with it.
Historically, problems had to go on much longer than people reading about them later realize they did before corrective action was taken. This is no different.
For all the busy-beaver downvote-assassins on HN- way to waste the days and hours of the prime of your life, fighting the losing battle against freedom!
How about the future value of dollar spent today? What the best and brightest do is advance science, including the science which later alleviates the issues plaguing the the bottom 1%. This is the whole idea of universal education in the first place. It pays for itself in the long run. The top 1% pay super-extra dividends to everyone.
2). If you include civil war and if you allow that civil war to be a war of factions within the CCP then you're wrong. There will be a new leader of the CCP, call him / her China's Gorbachev (and SARS2 is China's Chernobyl) and this will eventually lead, with assistance, to the de-Communization of China within at most 15 years but possibly just two.
Consumers are expert at detecting what has value for them. Putting the "correct" price on it means locating it on the can-pay / will-pay / will-pirate normal distribution of price vs profit chart you've seen .
If something saves me thousands of hours, I am not likely to both miss that fact and stay in business to be a customer for long.
Sellers have a harder problem figuring out what consumers value. The solutions to that are things like collecting useage data, eating your own dogfood or BYOC (be your own customer), outright feature requests, competitor's decisions ( which are market-proven value assignments) etc.
Also 0.xxx versions serve this purpose- it's partially a pre-market exploration of the value of features before a pricing / version segregation attempt is made .
There's just no way consumers doesn't know what they value when they use it or its not there.
There is a class of things which consumers dont' know they value because they've never had it to value in the first place (Pinterest, Instagram) but that's a different thing than assigning different values to different aggregates of established features.
I have a folder named "proofs" on my machine which is just this. About 1500 and counting little programs that demonstrate or prove that something works some way or another. The class name expresses the proven fact. When I find out I am wrong, I change the name of the class to reflect the correct understanding. I read through the names in my IDE when I need to know some detail about something I've forgotten.
This. It is discovered in the same sense that humans "discover" facts about humans via science- we're not born with perfect self-knowledge.
It is "created" because there is no guarantee that our efforts correspond to reality. In that sense we are just playing in the sandbox of what we can conceive.
The fact that mathematics corresponds so "unreasonably" to objective reality is because what we call objective reality is mediated by our brain's own idiosyncrasies and limitations of thinking.
It's no more surprising that external objective reality is mathematically predictable and describable than it is that our eyes can see shapes and some, but not all, light. That's the purpose of eyes and they tell us enough of what we need to know that we can survive.
Our brains are exactly the same thing- they tell us a story in a way which helps us to survive. Actual reality may be beyond our capacity to conceive of or worse, may seem like nonsense to us because it's aggressively illogical or specifically contradictory and reality therefore makes no "sense" to us.
>It is "created" because there is no guarantee that our efforts correspond to reality. In that sense we are just playing in the sandbox of what we can conceive.
But doesn't this dance kinda near the notion that I am a brain in a vat and none of you exist (read this question with me as the speaker or with yourself as the speaker)?
I would say our brains do have limits. I can't well envision a 4D object. But once we reduce things down to simple logical axioms and constructs, these exist as much as anything can be said to exist. Even if I was a simulation that didn't even have a brain, much less eyes, the concepts I come up with would exist more than the flesh I incorrectly thought I had.
>>But once we reduce things down to simple logical axioms and constructs, these exist as much as anything can be said to exist.
I agree.
But this assumes logic and at least the principle of non-contradiction: not both A and not A - is how reality "really" is.
We can't get past the idea that it must be this way because only provable nonsense lies on the other side of this assumption. But our brains may be fundamentally unable to process ultimate reality and the nonsense a contradiction represents may be a statement not about reality but our brains, our thinking.
So logical contradictions aren't actually nonsense, they're the sound of us hitting the walls of what our minds can conceive of. All animal have such limits. We assume those limits look like darkness- stuff we can't peer into. What if they look like impossibility instead?
That's the point of view I'm entertaining here. I am not saying this is true. It certainly isn't useful or provable as far as I know, but it is possible.
The practical value of such an exercise, if it has any (and I think it does) is to twofold.
One seems to expand my imagination to the maximum extent pops me out of the assumptions that frame my thinking and this seeps into my thinking about things, technical problems, generally.
Two it confers humility and a certain openess and makes me less judgmental. So that, for example, when I hear or read people with claims to spiritual knowledge I don't automatically blow them off as crazy / bitter / ignorant because what they're saying "makes no sense".
Thinking and talking about Ultimate Reality capital U capital R, ought to fill us all with humility if we're being intellectually honest by our own standards. Yet, I find people totally lack that humility. They make huge pronouncements about Ultimate Reality which they can't really be sure of, and the effect this has on the world, and how we think of each other, and therefore how we treat each other, and even the effect on one's own mind, is one of diminishment generally.
Mea culpa, I was one of those people and I didn't like it.
If you get down to the core of knowledge and how we know something, this is what's really there, and it's good to be reminded of it.
Luxottica is an unusual case. Most monopolies aren't that durable and Luxottica has challengers now. Also, the law in the US which says you can't buy glasses unless you have had an eye-exam in the past year is an anomaly amongst nations.
The functionality delivered by products is not screwing people unless you're talking about surveillence capitalism ala Google et.al. Capitalism and the pricing of goods is how we incentivize people to bring things to market and more importantly how we allocate resources. No one, anywhere, through any scheme has ever replaced the market for performing these functions and thereby driving civilization and invention forwards.
People keep believing they can (socialism/Venezuela), or give up on the project entirely after decades of trying (communism/ China / Russia). Maybe one day someone out there qwill have a genuinely new idea which works. Until then you have a right to feel good about contributing, in whatver little customer support / feature adder / managerial capacity you do, to the forward progress of society generally and the amazing, rocket-like increase in wealth absolutely everyone on this earth is experiencing relative to the past 30,000 years.
Not to be cruel, but the preexisting, running total of human suffering and tragedy in this world points to the fact that transcendent reality, the realm of God or a God, must have an alternative interpretation for human events, one which humans cannot fathom.
So for example, the tragedies which occur in your nightmares, after you wake, are given a different interpretation- the interpretation of "non-reality", i.e. it didn't really happen in some basic way that puts them into the category of "life non-tragedy".
From God's (or "a god's", for our dedicated atheists) POV, there is some enclosing context to the events of our lives that makes this mess we call reality "make sense". We don't have that perspective, so we think we suffer, pointlessly.
Along the chain from amoeba to goldfish to humans the understanding of events in our shared environment by each species changes. We think of that change as progressively
achieving a "deeper understanding" of reality. The zinger in this recitation of prosaic facts is: your consciouness is not the last one in the chain.
This is what Christians experience (and think of) as "faith". Faith in the wisdom or sense-making of a transcendent God and His plans.
> the preexisting, running total of human suffering and tragedy in this world points to the fact that transcendent reality, the realm of God or a God, must have an alternative interpretation for human events
You're begging the question. It doesn't point to that at all.
Furthermore, I'd feel terrible accepting that "fact" if I were faithful. It would reduce my faith to that in a demiurge who can't (ergo impotent) or won't (ergo ignorant or malicious) build/maintain a reality that (1) makes sense in the enclosing context and (2) doesn't require the depth of horror and pain for its components/participants that this one does.
Exactly, unless one sees the suffering of others as suffering of NPCs or punishment for a former life, I cannot understand how one can believe in a benevolent omnipotent god. The cruelty that some have to endure is simply not explainable with a such a god. It cannot be benevolent AND omnipotent by definition. It becomes far far far more likely that there is simply no such a god. It's not like this dilemma is new so there should be a better explanation by now.
It's a deep problem with a long history of attempts at answering it, some more satisfying than others. One answer that appeals to many faithful is the idea that all this suffering will be "redeemed", or made to be worth it at the end. Augustine, for example, would take the "NPC" prong of your dilemma by saying that our earthly existence "in time" is not a full experience of reality at all. Indeed, you can find this view, that our conscious experience of reality-in-time is somehow illusory, in many non-Christian sources anywhere from Buddhism to Daniel Dennet. In Augustine's view it's only outside of time, with God, that human beings can fully exist - thus earthly suffering is nothing compared to the joy of being in Heaven. Obviously this is not a foolproof argument, but HN deserves to know the best answers Christian thinkers have come up with.
All religions have a mystic branch which describes an awareness , usually transient, of a higher order to reality in which the suffering of people is "redeemed" or put into perspective or somehow negated.
One interesting thing is that the language and imagery used by the mystics of these different and separated religious traditions are often indistinguishable from each other- it's not clear if it was St. John of the Cross or Augustine or Zen Masters Ikkyu or Dogen who is saying them.
On thing they refer to in this transcendent reality is apprehension of "the coincidence of opposites". So for example, the obvious fact that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time is itself contradicted or "resolved". In logic we say "not both A and not A" (or else a contradiction is permitted and from there literally anything can be proven).
If I were a goldfish, no matter how right the math you read to me was, I would not understand it, you or anything it referred to. Even as the atomic bomb it described exploded, I still would not understand the nature of reality which now quite literally impinged itself on my flesh.
What would it feel like to be confronted with that kind of knowledge? Would we recognize some formulation of it but reject it, as in: both A and not A?
Would it be something impossible, existing outside of what appears to us to be exhausted possibilities?
Not A
Not not A
Not both A and not A
Not not both A and not A.
etc?
We can feel the limits of our own thinking when we reach something which is logically impossible. We just can't get our thinking around these things; contraditions seem like an absolute dead end, leading everywhere and nowhere.
Are there things in our lives which we literally experience, like an atomic bomb disntegrating a goldfish, which even as they touch us and we feel them, we simply fail to comprehend the "real" meaning of them? The breeze? A look? A birth? Suffering?
Spirtual insight may be a thing like mathematicqal talent- some people have a talent for it and some people don't. Such a talent may be completely disconnected from normal intelligence. To people who don't have it, it seems like garbage, i.e. self-contradictory, self-pacifying wishful thinking.
It always seems to me that faithful people just don't confront themselves with the suffering that is happening and has happened. When you know about such events it seems to me to be either a lame escape or maliciously ignorant to claim there might be a god who sees the big plan and is still omnipotent. When there is not even a glimpse of a reason for certain acts against children I refuse to accept any far fetched esoteric excuse.
How is the demiurge taking utility from humans if humans ending up in heaven is the optimal outcome for both humans and diety?
> Argument?
It’s an argument that a diety can both be omnipotent and benevolent if humans don’t know true pain or pleasure in their earthly lives. After all, both earthly pleasure and pain are temporary, so if you can conceive of eternal happiness it might render earthly suffering negligible in comparison.
I always hear this back from people, but it's a failure in understanding what's being said. You can't conceive of any future "knowledge" or state of being or most broadly, "configuration of reality" which could retroactively justify or "make right" proven and real human suffering already suffered. That is just not possible to you.
That is what you're saying. It's isomorphic to your argument; it is your argument's essence.
Expressed that way, the issue becomes apparent. We cannot conceive of something; it is inconceivable. But that inconceivability is exactly what the original argument is asserting - it's a thing beyond human conceptualization. Exactly.
All parties to the argument find agreement on this point.
Aren't there more than two explanations for "won't" beyond (1) ignorance or (2) malice? Perhaps we are the ones who are ignorant for why things are this way.
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