Is it me, or is this whole article failed out of the gate by the fact that you can't prove a negative?
"Prove that x didnt happen" is impossible.
Now, if he said to prove that the earth IS only 10,000 years old, that would be at least something to shoot for, but changes the whole scope of the article...
To prove the earth is not 10k years old, you could simply prove that it is 4.5G years old, though. The inability to prove a negative is only valid for binary issues, this seems binary but is actually a statement about a value on a continuum - the age of the earth.
EDIT - obviously in the context of last-thursdayism being used in the article, this doesn't work...
He's not saying anything didn't happen, just that our speculations about differing ideas about what happened should give more weight to the simpler explanations. He also seems to imply that simpler should be defined with some sort of complexity measure that borders on information content in the description. Yet no measure of complexity is given.
There is no reason to import what you don't need. This is why wildcard imports are generally frowned upon in most development teams. (I say most, thats unqualified, of course, but from my experience, its always been a part of the code standards)
Your code is much more readable and clear when you are explicit about what you are importing.
This isnt just for you, more of a general thing. Ive seen it a lot in this thread alone.
Creating an OSS project doesn't entitle you to be treated a certain way either. Nothing does. Being entitled at ALL is bad, so expecting good or bad is just a waste.
I try to live more by the "give everything you can, expect nothing in return, be grateful if something comes" mentality. Shitty people are going to be shitty people, and most of them are shitty for a reason - so feel bad for them, not angry or annoyed at them. Nobody WANTS to be an asshole...
I don't want any thank you notes. Never asked and never will. I just don't like people who are rude, and I find them annoying. I don't know what's wrong with feeling annoyed by them being rude to me.
Because being annoyed doesn't affect them, only you.
Choosing to experience negative emotion because someone does something is self-harm.
When you are entitled to something, you expect it, and you can't expect something and be truly appreciative of it at the same time. When you don't expect good though, the bad doesn't upset you, and the good, you actually genuinely appreciate.
"Choosing to experience negative emotion because someone does something is self-harm."
Hi :-) Fascinating comment. Do you really live that, or just it's something you read/heard and aspire to?
Trying to unpack that a little: Calling experiencing negative emotion (i.e. feeling bad) "choosing to experience negative emotion" seems psychobabble. Do you choose all your feelings? I doubt it. So, you will never feel bad because of anything anyone does, because why would you, and that would be self-harm. All that just strikes me as jargon out of a bad self-help book. It doesn't sound human, but like a robot, or maybe a guru. (e.g. Nisargadatta: 'In my world, nothing ever goes wrong.') I guess that's why gurus/monks/priests aren't supposed to have wives, girlfriends, careers, possessions etc. Because ordinary humans do get upset about stuff. And feel good about stuff. The way you call people "someone" and reduce most of life to "someone doing something" I find absolutely chilling.
That last bit about expectation sounds likes the ridiculous pessimism I thought made sense as a child. If you expect things to turn out for the worst, you will never be disappointed. That was before I realized that in life your attitude makes a huge difference to how things turn out. In the real/everyday world of someones doing somethings anyway.
What he's talking about is putting yourself in a mindset of very low expectations to maximize your own happiness.
For example, if your baseline "expectation" of people is that they will be rude and shitty, then you won't become annoyed when someone is rude and shitty to you. And when someone is nice to you, they have exceeded your expectations and it makes you happy.
So what you perhaps "expected" is that people generally would not be rude, which led to your disappointment when you encountered a rude person, which ultimately just generated annoyance/unhappiness for yourself (i.e. their rudeness is static regardless of how it made you feel).
The point is not really to go around bleakly expecting everything to be shit all the time, but just in general, the lower your expectations are, the less power you give people to disappoint and upset you, and the more you appreciate people for exceeding your expectations. It's not really about whether it's "right" or "wrong" to be annoyed at them but just a mindset shift for your own contentment.
Entitlement only leads to disapointment. It's bad all around, from my perspective.
You can't be entitled to something AND appreciate it at the same time. So, a lack of entitlement of being treated well leads to appreciating more when you are treated well.
If nothing else, its a fun sociology/psychology conversation.
Just because it was unclassified doesn't mean it was released...
Im sure there are literally millions of documents that have been "unclassified" due to time, but have never seen the light of day since then. Its not like they broadcast when something is unclassified
I think the interesting part comes from our (and i say our, as in, the HN demographic) tendencies to hold strict beliefs based only on (and limited by) our own perceptions.
The thing is, it comes at you when it comes at you, and you cant tell someone else why they should believe in something they cant see, feel, experiment with or experience.
I was an atheist, almost militant atheist, for most of my life... then my wife became spiritual, started doing tarot and stuff like that, doing reiki (energy healing) etc, and i was open to it, but didn't really buy into it. Then she started having mediumship abilities... and then I felt totally like it was kinda a crock... but then something ridiculous happened.
My father died before I was born, a few months before... She has supposedly been in contact with him, and i liked that as a form of comfort, but again, im a skeptic. Then she described a scene... she described the interior of a car, sitting in a field, with my mom in the passenger seat, from the view of the drivers seat. The car, after she described it to me, was an impala, and she got that it was a 62 model year... and said it was dark gray with one wheel white and the others black... and it was in a field of yellow and purple flowers, and my mom had a red shirt on and jeans... Ive never heard this story, i couldnt have possibly told her any of it, she doesnt speak to my mother, so she couldnt have gotten it from there... but i asked my mom, if they had an impala at one time, and he response was "yeah, it was a dark gray 62 impala with red interior" ... and i asked about the field, and she knew exactly where it was, and even the mis-matched tire... so, to me, I believe now, that there is more than we realize. Be it supernatural, be it a bug in the programming of a simulation we live in, be it just a natural form of energy we dont understand or cant perecieve... but there is something more...
But i dont tell you that story to convince you, or to justify my own beliefs (i have no need to justify them), but to show you that, until something happens to you that pulls your perspective, your personal perspective, so far out of line with your current beliefs, you will never believe, and you will be certain even... and thats the problem with spirituality or religion... you have to come to it yourself, which is near impossible to do, when the religions themselves are constantly trying to force people to believe...
> until something happens to you that pulls your perspective, your personal perspective, so far out of line with your current beliefs, you will never believe
I would argue that these are the circumstances under which it is most important to push back against claims that are manifestly, self-evidently false according to basic empirical criteria.
> ...manifestly, self-evidently false according to basic empirical criteria.
Which is fine, as far as it goes. I think there's an argument to be made against Scientism, however, where people are rejecting notions that aren't "manifestly, self-evidently false", but instead aren't even falsifiable. How does that make sense? How can someone take that position, and still consider themselves rational?
Some of the greatest names in the history of science were also mystics. (I'm not talking about Newton being an alchemist and drinking mercury; I'm talking about the likes of Bohm, Einstein, Schrödinger, &c.) We've, instead, decided to repudiate that kind of thinking, and I think that costs us, dearly. The number of scientists of faith, who do perfectly legitimate science but have to hide their beliefs, is staggering, and, frankly, offensive. We have failed if that's how we want to play.
Yes, defending the credulous from the predatory, a stated motivation of so many anti-religionists, is a valuable thing. It should be lauded. So very, very many of the anti-religionists I've met are profoundly smug about their beliefs, though. That's not valuable. That serves no-one. That is actively harmful.
Anything that creates a narrative where you're somehow "better than" the people around you, is mental garbage. It's an ego trap. It should be shouted down far more loudly than whether or not people believe in an invisible man in the sky who watches them masturbate, if that belief is not subsequently used to disenfranchise and dehumanize others — not least because that very "better than"-ness is the root of how we disenfranchise and dehumanize one another.
Hard atheists are often among the most vocally, militantly, confrontationally proselytizing people I've ever seen. The irony is really ugly.
Do you really think we know all of the forces at work, that we can perceive them or detect them with the tools we have?
Its rather arrogant to think that we know even "most" of how the universe works, let alone all of it... and if you can admit that we know very little overall, then the empirical data we do have has a lot less weight...
Thanks. I was confused as well... most articles would have started off with the term and then used the acronym... i knew the context of what it was, but not knowing what it actually stood for was driving me nuts...
"Prove that x didnt happen" is impossible.
Now, if he said to prove that the earth IS only 10,000 years old, that would be at least something to shoot for, but changes the whole scope of the article...