For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk, and basically always assumed these things were possible and likely, just a matter of implementation details. A device that can translate any language at a button-push? Sure, I heard about it when I was eight. A device you carry around that instantly connects to some sort of communication network? Yeah, I've probably read about a dozen takes on those. Etc.
Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.
I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers.
Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts.
From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future.
I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed.
Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.
Yeah, perhaps the thing you took from what I'm guessing was a much more literary exploration of Scifi than my own was a sense of a new sort of place, driven by technology. A new way of conceiving of community.
And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it.
So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them.
I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.
Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.
I guess I don't do it much anymore (posting on forums like this notwithstanding), but I'm not sure I've changed my mind overall. There's a certain kind of community that BBSs, along with medium-sized Usenet groups / webforums / mailing lists / etc. gave, that is somewhat different from IRL kinds of communities, and also different from both very small online communities (people you already know) and very large online communities (places like reddit, Slashdot, and HN). Not to promote a replacement of rl with cyberspace, but I think it's an interesting experiment where something is lost by it not persisting.
And it all woulda, coulda, shoulda happened already, if only everyone had taken to the net to the same degree that the futurist authors of those books did. The one thing they never could have predicted was that was that a lot of the people who spent all day online would be doing so because they were unpopular, thus driving a correlation between cyber-community and anti-social tendencies that has stigmatized that possible future to this day. The one thing that made me hopeful again was the ads Blizzard ran with famous, popular, pretty, celebrity-type people saying they play WoW—but we'd need a lot more of that before grandma is jacking in.
> For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk
I remember being 10? (12? not sure) and having my Mum tell me we had not, in fact, landed humans on any other planets. "Only" the moon. Seemed pretty lame.
Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me.
It does to me. But, then, I'm the bibliophile son of a librarian. So the new world manifests as a continuous series of oddnesses: I'm purging my book and map and magazine collection, and it is getting much smaller, and that is weird. The web changes the habits of a lifetime.
It is hard to perceive long-term changes, even when they are big.
Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.
I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum)
If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.
I see what you mean, but my experience is quite often that I have to hunt a lot to get answers to straightforward questions. After a fair bit of effort (if I keep going, sometimes for a considerable time...) I'll get the answer - but not always even then. (of course, for very common questions, the answer does often pop up immediately - I'm certainly pleased when that happens.) Asking in a forum is great, and usually effective, provided you know enough about the question and know an appropriate forum (eg. stackoverflow for programming questions). I should have included "commonly asked questions" as well as "reference questions". Search engines are great at harvesting this low hanging fruit which would otherwise go to waste.
But in the other two cases, the answers are not immediate, which was the thrust of the statement to which I objected - it's quoted above, and includes "instant gratification", "answered immediately" and "almost any question". We're not there yet, we've only got the easy stuff. Wolfram|Alpha is an attempt to go a bit deeper, and it's also part of Google's mission.
Maybe I'm just drunk, having just been kicked out at bar time from the place around the corner[1], but this resonated with me: "When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional?...We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?"
I'm surrounded by exceptional situations every day and they just seem mundane. Tonight I congratulated a guy who just signed a record deal with Sub Pop Records. Earlier this week, I landed a development contract for an iOS app that I think will revolutionize its market come early next year. It goes on from there. These sorts of things seem normal to me now. At 15, I would've been, to quote the article, gobsmacked by my involvement—however tangential—in any of them.
Are human beings just so easily adaptable to their circumstances that they start missing the depth of these 'big' events after a while? What must it be like to be Bill Gates or Bono? "Had dinner with Queen Rania of Jordan and the food was middling to fair. My Gulfstream's flight to New York was delayed due to weather issues. What a joke. Don't they know I'm supposed to have coffee with Bill Clinton tomorrow morning to talk about his philanthropic efforts?"
Where's the magic? What does it take to surprise and delight us? Obviously not a pony.
[1] the haagen-dazs ice cream bar I'm chewing on right now doesn't hurt either: having a 24 hour supermarket across the street is the bomb. Get kicked out of the bar, go buy ice cream. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.
There is a well-known corollary here with happiness. People think that if they are million- or billionaires, or have a super-fit girlfriend, or drive a ridiculous car or live in a massive house or whatever they'll be happy, or at least happier. However all studies have shown that rich people are not happier than poor(er) people. And more interesting is people that have suffered catastrophic accidents or contracted disabling diseases: on average these people are no less happy than anyone else.
Living with no money is sure to impede happiness. When lack of money puts you living in a place that has higher crime / lower life expectancy, I would imagine happiness suffers.
I am curious on the studies on how they measured. People on different places on the survival pyramid must have been a consideration.
Your statement is just wrong. Angus Deaton at Princeton found "Each doubling of national income is associated with a near one unit increase in average life-satisfaction measured on an eleven point scale from 0 ('the worst possible life') to 10 ('the best possible life')". I'm all for deluding yourself with baseless platitudes to rationalize your lack of success, and then getting a Yeah! Yeah! rally of upvotes from people similarly situated, but please don't advance such falsity here.
I think the point retube was trying to reference is that studies have shown that people vastly overestimate the magnitude and duration of changes in happiness due to a windfall or catastrophe (the most recent source I have for this is Dan Ariely's Upside of Irrationality). While there is a shift of overall life satisfaction, major changes are much less impactful to your long-term happiness than you would predict (presumably due to growing familiarity, adaptation, and the general "the grass is greener" bias we all have).
At any rate, I, specifically, would be happier without reading personally-attacking rebuttals on HN. Is that really needed to make your point?
"A worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries included questions about happiness and income, and the results reveal that while life satisfaction usually rises with income, positive feelings don't necessarily follow, researchers report."
And some further recent research on the matter reviewed here:
Basically - increasing wealth makes you immune to the smaller/simpler joys in life.
From the paper you quoted, this was also in the abstract:
"HIV prevalence in Africa has little effect on Africans’ life or health satisfaction"
which actually supports my other assertion that those with disabling diseases or conditions are no less happy than those more fortunate (assuming you equate life-satisfaction with happiness).
I am not saying that and the study is not saying that. Hijacking a statement through abandonment of context is a poor way to make a point amongst intelligent people.
I know it’s not the topic of the submission but I would have very much liked to get an explanation. Is it maybe a guide horse? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse
>Yes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out.
Are you sure. Why could it not be a pet? The image in the OP doesn't appear to show a harness (as in the NYTimes article) as is usual for an assistance animal. In my country assistance animals usually wear some high-vis in public too.
It could be a pet, I'm no expert. They don't have to have a harness, though, I'v seen seizure alert dogs with just a leash. They do usually have to have some kind of identifying clothing on, though, so you're probably right on that one.
A logical explanation doesn't change the analogy. I'm aware that S&M Gimps exist. If I went into an Apple Store where someone was being led around by a gimp, and no-one was paying attention, I'd still think that was unusual.
Not to mention that an aside explaining that helper horses exists detracts from the art of storytelling.
Let's say that I see the horse and I do realize that it's an assistance animal, albeit unusual. If other people doesn't look so surprised I might suspect my ignorance: it seems that all other people know what's going on, and take it as perfectly normal. As I don't want to stand out in the crowd as the only freak who didn't know about this socially accepted habit, I simply play quiet as nothing strange happened.
The same thing could happen in the head of many people and the overall effect would be that of uninterested people not caring about anything.
Group psychology is a very strange and fascinating thing.
> soon Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences, where Rose was attending nursing school, refused Richard access, too. Stories started appearing about Rose and her monkey in the newspaper and on TV. “Suddenly,” she told me, “everyone knew I had a mental disorder.”
Ah, that’s were I read about guide horses! Thanks for the reminder. As soon as I saw the photo in the submission the term “guide horse” just popped into my mind but I couldn’t figure out why I knew that term. Now I know.
I wouldn't have expected horses to be as intelligent as dogs. Probably because I have more experience with dogs. EDIT google's only giving me informal discussions: http://www.petqna.com/other/1014-1-other-petqna.html It seems while they are less intelligent than dogs, they can still give effective assistance.
Aside: I saw a guide dog on a sweltering day in peak summer last year in Melbourne. It was clearly very uncomfortable, licking its lips. But it was also clear there was no chance it would let down its owner. It was touching to see such faithfulness; now I often donate to the guide dogs.
Yes, this is the only way a pony would be allowed in the Apple Store, and probably why people are not going to pet it and stuff -- it's not nice to interfere with the behavior of a guide animal.
You don't have to be completely blind, the person may just have a severe visual impairment, and thus can still see a monitor in 1-2ft in front of them.
I know this is not the topic of submission here either, but I can't help but feel that picture in the wikipedia of the guide horse is horrible abuse. All those straps and chains, UGH. /shudders
I'd say the abuse is in the fact that Apple hasn't tailored their products to the horse market, leaving horses everywhere feeling unimportant and neglected.
Doesn't appear to be significantly different then a normal horse harness. How do you consider it abusive in any way that, say, leashing a dog isn't? Or do you consider that abuse as well?
Blind people generally tend to be so doting on their guide animals that I'm sure the straps and chains are more than compensated by the shower of love he gets from his owner.
My understanding is that guide animals (and drug-sniffing dogs) are intentionally starved for affection and only showered with loving attention for doing what is needed of them. That is how they are kept useful. Showering them with affection and positive attention at other times actually destroys their usefulness as a guide animal. Or so I have heard.
As I understand it: guide animals are generally trained to know when they're "at work" and when it isn't. When "at work", the guide animal is not given affection because it needs to be focused on its task. This is why seeing eye dogs have "don't pet me" signs on them: any kind of affection is a distraction from the necessary task of helping the owner.
When not "at work" (usually there is some signal), it obviously depends on the owner; but most of the disabled people I know pamper and love these animals to death, and they are extremely well treated. They are simply only showered with affection in private, when not expected to be focused.
Actually it looks like it's just wearing a halter. I think what looks like another piece of tack is just coloration.
In any case this is not abuse (is he a troll or just ignorant?). I've rarely had trouble getting a halter on a horse except for one who doesn't like his ears being touched. My take is that if an animal that's basically 1,100 lbs of muscle (OK,not that one :-) lets you do something, it's not too bothered by it! Horses have absolutely no problem letting you know when they're pissed.
I'm completely with you, but this is not the right place for this discussion. Lead by example (adopt a 100% cruelty-free lifestyle) and let your influence slowly trickle out through your social network.
Well, now we're talking in terms of relativity. You're saying that it's not 'horrible abuse' because it is standard treatment, but this says nothing of whether or not standard treatment is 'horrible abuse.' For example,
The Jews that weren't killed in the concentration camps "didn't have
it so bad" compared to the ones were. But this says nothing of whether
or not overall treatment of Jews in concentration camps was good or bad.
Godwin's law only applies when calling someone a Nazi or comparing someone to a Nazi(s). Godwin doesn't cover the word 'Nazi' or 'Jew' turning up in a discussion.
This reminds me of the time I saw Steve Jobs in the Apple Store, Palo Alto. No one was looking at him, except me. Eventually, I walked up to him and said hello. Then, I showed him Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing, the iPad app I developed, on the new iPad I had just bought.
To modify part of the article to fit my experience...
I asked one of the Apple Store employees: "Do you realize Steve Jobs is behind you?"He sighs at me and says, "Yes, he’s in here all the time."
I really like the observations his niece makes, specifically “When I play hide and seek with my friends I have to hide, but if I don’t want to be seen by grown-ups I just have to be quiet.”
The interaction between children and adults in our culture is weird nowadays.
I was at the zoo with my girlfriend in the reptile section. A little boy was staring into the same tank that we were, his mom was maybe ten feet away. You know how reptiles are, they are always hiding behind some rock or branch or just blending in nefariously. So I ask the boy, "Do you see the snake?" It felt awkward to ignore another human being crowding around the glass with us and I figured I would give him a chance to feel good by showing off his superior reptile-spotting ability.
He seemed shocked that an adult he didn't know would talk to him. There's something weird about that being weird.
Probably a U.S. cultural thing. I find it weird talking to other parents' kids too (I'm a father of two), as you don't know how the other parents will handle it. I'd like to think there are places in this world that aren't so paranoid.
It's not just a U.S. thing. I'm a UK father of 3 small boys, and it's a given over here that you should be very wary of interation with any child unless you have some kind of relationship with their parent. It's somewhat relaxed where parents feel more comfortable; a zoo might qualify for that.
Whether you're old or young, you always wish you were 21. Old enough to have responsibility, young enough to have a lifetime of choice in front of you.
I disagree about there being an ideal age (or, at least that it's 21 -- I'm not quite old enough to make a universal comment!).
Are there great things about being young (whether that be 16 or 21)? Sure. But there are a lot of great things about being older too, and it's easy to lose site of those things. I'm 30 now and I'm much more comfortable in my own skin now than I was even 5 or 10 years ago. Generally, I'm happier now than I was back then. I'm definitely smarter and more capable, in work and in life.
It's easy to think about how great it would be if you could be 21 again (while still knowing everything you've learned from your experiences since then), but, as they say, youth is wasted on the young. That's just how life works.
All we can do is encourage people of all ages to make the most of the opportunities they have right now.
That article brought me more enjoyment-per-paragraph than just about anything in a while. I do wish the photo was revealed somewhere in the middle of the post though. I shared it with my wife that way, and it really has a pretty profound affect to wonder if it's just a metaphor for the first half-dozen paragraphs.
Even with the photograph I thought it was just a metaphor until the end. I assumed he had just photoshopped the horse in to make the article more amusing.
Technically, it is not a pony but a falabella horse which is a miniature horse originating from Latin America. I know that it is somewhat irrelevant :) But many people have them as pets.
Great article. The author coins the term "tiny pony" to describe the tendency of becoming acclimated to certain exceptional things. ie: There's a pony in the apple store and no one seems to care. Because its always there..
Maybe its because we're so focused on ourselves? I still have a regular brick-type cell phone. So its a lot of fun for me to play with an iPhone or iPad whenever I'm at the store, or when my friends let me play with theirs. I always get an urge to buy one - it could totally make my life better (especially mobile internet).
But if I buy it, I know the magic will go away. It's particular exceptional-ness will become an expectation, and even a frustration when it doesn't work correctly. And after a certain period, I'd likely refer to it as just another brick-type object, compared with whatever relatively exceptional technology is out then.
Wasn't trying to say anything about model and brand -- if I had an iPhone instead I would probably say the same thing. My point was that getting the thing doesn't necessarily take away the 'magic'.
When I read this post, I thought the whole thing was a just a weird metaphor. I saw the picture at the top, but since there was no explanation in the article of why the pony was in the store, I thought the author had simply photoshopped the pony in. It was only after seeing all these comments taking the claim so seriously that I realized the guy really had seen a pony in the Apple Store.
But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny.
In my experience, there are usually quite a number of children in Apple Stores.
When the tiny pony is a negative thing, many call it Creeping Normalcy [1]. Sounds like the same phenonmenon to me: adjustments that come slowly enough do not get appreciated. Louis CK has a funny bit about it [2].
I loved the article. Like someone said above, it's like reading a mini-drama.
What really made it for me is how I can relate to it. I'm constantly taken back and think things like 'So many people are trying to take the world into new directions, myself included, and some are successful. The rest of the world gets the end results and we get accustomed to them so incredibly fast. Often times ignoring all the work done or the brilliance of the piece itself.'
Like, for example, I can literally work on my idea for a business, listen to virtually any record that has ever existed that I want to listen, watch any movie that I could possibly want to watch and thousands of other activities all in a single day and without leaving my house.
I could witness the huge developments that other people are making all around the globe and watch some of the most brilliant minds the world has, often the developers themselves, give feedback on said events. And yes, I'm talking about HN.
All in all, it's a great age to live. I'm only 20 and not particularly wealthy, but boy has the trip thus far been incredible.
Here's the advantage: both dogs and horses require years to train in this capacity. However, horses then live much longer than dogs, maximizing the value of the training time invested in them.
I grew up with airplanes being old hat. But still prickles run down my spine when I look at that old photo of the Wright Flyer's first flight. What an incredible achievement that was, and how long man had dreamed about flying!
It reminds me on a passage in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by D.Adams. He basically says that people unconsciously ignore / blind out strange not-explainable things.
He also had a funny term for that but I forgot it...
Are you talking about "Somebody else's problem"? From the books: "An SEP [somebody else's problem] is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."
Most interestingly, that is the heart of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posited in linguistics.
The "strong" intrepretation was proven false by the fact that American Indians had no name for ships that sail the high seas. Yet, they still described them best in their own language. There are weaker ways to apply the theorem, but most efforts have went to Chomsky's universal grammar.
Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.