> Could it be that people who see the world Realistically, get depressed?
This fits my experience quite well.
To give a software development analogy:
The more you learn about deep, esoteric details of various parts of computers (i.e. you get to see computers more realistically than idealized), the more depressed you get about the current state of software development. And yes, late at night, I often work privately on how to improve this situation - but I talk to a brick wall.
> esoteric details of various parts of computers (i.e. you get to see computers more realistically than idealized), the more depressed you get about the current state of software development.
Honestly the most depressing part is hearing all these older guys talk about the really cool problems they worked on during the dawn of modern computing, knowing I'm just gonna be writing shitty business apps till I retire
> Honestly the most depressing part is hearing all these older guys talk about the really cool problems they worked on during the dawn of modern computing, knowing I'm just gonna be writing shitty business apps till I retire
You can do this cool stuff at night and weekends (I do!).
> What's depressing about the current world of software?
For example the insanity that it is impossible to understand what actually happens below the surface. The ideal that I have in the back of my mind is that a highly gifted person who can afford to spend a few years of intensive study can really understand each individual line/byte of code that gets executed on the computer (i.e. all of the software that runs on it) completely.
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An interesting lecture by Jonathan Blow:
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
I had this sentiment quit often in the beginning of my career. Now, I simply realize that my lack of understanding crosses every single piece of technology there is. Fridge? No idea. Cars? Well, I can drive it almost as well as I can open a fridge, everything else is magic. How about bicycle? That's easy, right? Well, I challenge you to just now sit down and write a detailed schematic, describing everything that is needed to make a bicycle what it is. Extra points if you can explain why driving on two wheels actually works out.
I know nothing about anything and almost don´t care anymore. The last bit of wanting to understand is bathed the absurdity of it all.
Fridge - well, the standard compressor powered refrigeration system is essentially a heat moving system. What we are doing is moving heat from the inside of the system (which is insulated and mostly "isolated" from the outside of the system) to the outside of the system. This is why you can't cool your house by opening your refrigerator's door, because the heat from the inside of the fridge is moved to the "outside" (the room it is in) - eventually, it would reach equilibrium (and the compressor would probably be overheated). So anyhow, how does this work?
Well - basically by compression and expansion.
A working fluid (the refrigerant - usually a gas in the low-pressure state, and a fluid in the high pressure state) is compressed using a compressor. This turns the gas into its fluid state, and also heats up the gas. It is moved (via the compressor) thru coils on the inside (insulated) of the system, where it is allowed to expand.
Note that in this system there is also a series of check valves and such to prevent the fluid and gas from "moving backwards" in the system; there are also stages where the gas and fluid exist at the same time (like a fizzy drink if you could see it).
During this expansion, it absorbs heat and it also gains volume (turns from a fluid back into a gas). It continues to move (with it's heat content) from the insulated side of the system (inside) to the outside of the system, where it goes thru other coils (radiator), usually with a fan or other cooling system blowing over them to remove the excess heat from them, before the gas goes back to the compressor to be compressed and turned into a fluid again - to begin the cycle anew.
That's the basics of how a refrigerator work. Now - usually, if there's a freezer section, the freezer is where the heat exchange really happens, and cold air from the freezer is periodically circulated from the freezer to the refrigerator portion to keep that side at a cooler temperature.
Air conditioners work the same way - except the "inside" is the house and the outside is...the outdoors. Heat pumps can run in reverse, so to warm your house, heat is moved from the "outside" to the inside of the house, by the very same process (even when it is "freezing" outside - there is still a ton of heat energy available).
This cycle can also be done with heat alone, provided you have a working fluid (refrigerant) which is liquid at the "outside" temperature (under whatever pressure the liquid is at); add a check valve, heat the liquid up, it will expand and turn into a gas, feed it into the insulated part of the system to absorb more heat and then into some outside coils to be cooled down and turned back into a liquid. You can make a fridge where the refrigerant is gasoline (petrol) if you so wanted to. Ammonia is another alternative. LPG can also be used like this, too.
That's basically how a propane or solar powered refrigerator works (I won't go into how dark-sky refrigeration works, suffice to say it is another form of "solar" refrigeration, more of a "backwards" method).
Car? Well - a four-cycle engine is basically this: suck (intake), squeeze (compression), bang (ignition/power), blow (exhaust). Also, for an engine to run, you need fuel, spark, and air - miss any of those (or wrong timing or proportions) things won't work. I won't go into further detail - I really could, I'm sure you can see.
Suffice to say - I could also describe that bicycle very exactly, how it works, how it is steered (the whole "turn in the opposite direction of the lean" thing...), etc.
I've got a ton of this crap shoved into my head; I relish learning new stuff all the time, no matter what it is. Sometimes (most of the time) I don't absorb it all in one shot. But I usually retain enough of it to be able to understand more a second and third time around. Some things I will probably never fully understand (higher math is my bane, though I try - also, I'll probably never understand chemistry or biology on anything more than a superficial level), but that doesn't keep them from my interest.
Why am I like this? Not sure, I've always been a very curious and inquisitive person since I was a child. I've found that having these tidbits and more of knowledge and such socked away has helped me make connections and analogies in other areas, to solve problems - and sometimes raise other questions, which just leads me down another rabbit hole at times.
As you can tell - take me to a library and I could easily get lost for hours. Don't get me started on any of the warrens available on the internet (or the internet itself for that matter)...
Just finished the Youtube talk on degrading technology / knowledge. Really liked that perspective, although I disagree with quit a bit of Jonathan Blows points.
About the challenge: I had the feeling, that you and a good chunk of readers here could go explain good deal of it all. But my point goes further: We all hit the wall of understanding sooner or later and all what is truly required is to know how use the technology. And that's exactly the same in information technology. I use databases daily. Do I know how they work? A bit, just enough for work and that is all what is needed. That's why I like to disagree with Jonathan Blow. Some people abstracted a great deal of complexity away, because it's simply irrelevant. As a result, we've seen an explosion in tech, just not in the nieces where he's looking. The modern ecosystem in tech is the normal way of economics, where everyone specializes him or herself further and further, understanding the specific domain better at the cost of everything else. Today, the average Joe can code as a result of all this simplifications. But Jonathan Blow compares the elites of coding, people who build engines, with Joe. That's misunderstanding what has happened, the level of analysis is wrong. Also, people like John Carmack are not gone, they simply work on new problems.
And as you mentioned yourself, there is so much technology surrounding you that you have no idea of how it works, like chemistry. Still, you use it to your benefit because other people who know this stuff simplified its use. And not just for you and me, also for other chemist, like coder for other coders.
Now a bit of a rand, skip it if you like: The school system, including university, killed so much of my curiosity, it's insane. I had to learn so much bullshit that I'm almost glad for one of my least great attributes, my bad memory. Because there was really no point remembering most of it. It's just too bad that I can't control my own garbage collector. Last year, I learned a great deal about machine learning (again, as I did it in college, too) and now can remember almost nothing. Despite really enjoying the course and throwing myself into it. What I don't use, I forget and of course I use only a tiny bit of skills and knowledge at work. I'm not happy with the way it is, but it simply is. I also learned so much about databases and liked that subject, but the only thing I really retain is what I use in my work.
That brings me to my final thought tidbit: My brain obsesses with ideas that you would put more in the category of philosophy. It's what you think about when you have nothing to do or start daydreaming that's probably where your brain is best at. I never asked people in tech what they think about in those moments. I'm really, really curious about the answer.
> My brain obsesses with ideas that you would put more in the category of philosophy. It's what you think about when you have nothing to do or start daydreaming that's probably where your brain is best at. I never asked people in tech what they think about in those moments. I'm really, really curious about the answer.
My experience with these is: I often think that I have some deep mathematical insight. The problem with these insights is that they "partly right" - they are often based on a good mathematical intuition of mine. But unluckily the mathematical research typically has come a lot farther than my insight - i.e. my insight is actually a really old hat in mathematical research.
So instead of daydreaming about some clever mathematical insight of yours, better cram advanced math textbooks - they will teach you a lot more than what you will ever come up with by daydreaming.
For sure. Study the literature of your subject. The point is, what do you think about automatically when you don't focus on a specific task? My expectation is, that people who are great at what they do continue to think and daydream about their work. When I read about philosophy (or related subjects), I'm continuing to think about it for days or weeks. That doesn't happen with tech, although that's my daily business.
I wouldn’t call it depressing but I think for example, when you look at even the most fundamental types, for example in c#, they have difficult problems.
For me it's the amount of bloat and too many levels of not so good abstraction. It's not really depressing yet, but more irritating to me. And I take it as an opportunity.
1. The world is, in fact, pretty messed up a lot of the time.
2. There are different ways to deal with it:
2a. Don't deal well with it; get depressed
2b. Denial: Refuse to face up to how messed up the world is.
2c. Deal with the world in some other way that is neither denial nor depression.
Presumably in their study 2a and 2c would both score more "realistic" and 2b would score less "realistic"; but 2b and 2c would be grouped together in the study, causing the "not depressed" group as a whole to score lower on the "realistic" axis.
IOW, the simplistic conclusion of this study would be, "The only way to avoid being depressed is to go into denial"; but the study may also be consistent with, "One way people avoid being depressed is to go into denial; but there may be ways to avoid depression other than denial".
The two (realism/knowledge and depression) seem to be in a feedback loop. Probably children are happier because they dont know enough yet. And fools/ignoramuses - that conventional wisdom has some merit. It's a question though why humans would evolve to become inert in the face of knowledge. Who knows, it may be an advantage.
Isn’t it the other way around? The OP is making a causal claim (“depression causes realistic world view”). The parent is merely pointing out the room for selection bias. Burden of proof should be on the OP IMHO.
I just learned about King Leopold and what he did to the people of Congo [1]. How anyone can be at all educated about the world and not be depressed is beyond me.
It's not "dying out" -- people are working very hard to reduce it.
Sometimes we say things like "the world has changed" but the truth is that people have changed the world, through tremendous efforts.
It's easy for a bystander to say "the problem just seemed to go away!" when the people who are doing the work can stare at them and say, "Ahem... it didn't just go away."
I don't deny that. Atrocities have reduced partly because people have worked hard to reduce them. Also technology has helped - you do bad stuff now and someone will film it on their phone, upload to youtube and the whole world can see and make a fuss.
