This is awesome. I always think about this. As humans, we are very limited in what we can perceive and experience. A higher form of entity could have a completely different way of viewing nature and the world.
Just a thought experiment for you guys: imagine a bacteria that survives inside humans. It doesn't even know what a human is. For the bacteria, its entire world is simply the environment in which it lives. It doesn't know that we are living beings actively trying to maintain ourselves and survive.
Now, suppose a harmful bacteria enters our body, makes us sick, and we take medicine that kills all of them. From the bacteria's perspective, it could look like a natural disaster or some unexplained event in which they all suddenly get wiped out. They have no idea that a living being called a human actively tried to eliminate them using something called medicine, which was engineered specifically to kill them.
Similarly, what if our world, or nature itself, is part of some higher-level entity that we simply exist within? What if the reason for our deaths, natural calamities, and other events is something completely beyond our perception? Whatever we do, we may never be able to understand what is actually happening at that level, just as bacteria may never be able to understand that humans exist.
One thing that could potentially support this idea is self-regulation. We see self-regulating systems throughout nature, and these patterns seem to repeat at different scales. We ourselves are self-regulating organisms, and nature also has countless cycles and mechanisms that regulate themselves.
Maybe these patterns continue at scales we cannot perceive. We can observe certain things at the scale of humans, but we still don't fully understand what happens at the nano scale or on the scale of the universe. Perhaps there are higher levels of organization and self-regulation that we simply don't have the ability to perceive yet.
This is very true, but I don't think this is an AI-only problem. It is fundamentally a human problem.
There are so many things happening around us, and one of the biggest things that separates people is knowledge. A non-technical person who puts in the effort to learn technology becomes a technical person. The only way to become good at something is to actually do it and practice.
Someone who still doesn't know what AI is also doesn't know what is possible in the world today. My mom is a good example. She comes up with a lot of ideas and tells me about them on calls. Recently I told her, "Just tell ChatGPT. It can probably build a lot of what you need." But even that sentence isn't enough for her to understand what I mean, because she doesn't yet have a mental model of what AI can actually do. She simply isn't aware of its capabilities.
I'm going home in a few days and will be staying with her for a couple of weeks. I'm actually going to try an experiment: teach her some of these tools and see what happens. Can someone with essentially no technical background learn to use AI effectively and actually build something meaningful within a few weeks?
She already has a good job and doesn't really need to become technical, so there is no practical necessity for her to do this. But I think it would be a fascinating experiment.
Just my perspective on this: A PhD student at my university recently died by suicide, and it made me realize that the way most of us cope or escape from difficult situations is shaped by what we consume, what we experience, and what we constantly see others doing.
For most of us, that escape mechanism can be something else instead of taking such a drastic decision. If we can make sure people don’t grow up believing that suicide is even a way to cope with what has happened to them, we could significantly reduce the number of suicides.
We only have one life. There’s no respawn. This world has so much to offer, and once we’re gone, we won’t get to experience any of the good things that are still ahead of us.
> If we can make sure people don’t grow up believing that suicide is even a way to cope with what has happened to them, we could significantly reduce the number of suicides.
The fact that there is a plan B (suicide) keeps me going.
I was actively (almost daily) considering suicide around ages 13-16. I made a decision to postpone it every day I thought of it because I believed I had seen too little of life by that point to make a decision to end it. But it being available as an option made things easier. There was a “backup plan” and I could always use it, which made it possible to endure another day.
I’m in my 30s today. I have used the same strategy in some other complicated life situations since my teenage years, although only a few times and very briefly. Knowing that you can just end it and that it’s available to you not just today, but also tomorrow and the day after that, is so unbelievably useful in my opinion that I’d personally like to see it normalized, rather than the opposite.
For example, when I was in enormous physical pain, my thinking was: “If there are no other options left, I can always just end it. But there are other options, so let’s try those first.” Reminding myself that I am working on solutions, and that if I run out of them, there is still one final option, took all the edge off the pain. It lost its power over me. I was fully in control of how this issue was going to be resolved. And it takes the edge off suicide itself - it’s just one of the solutions, nothing special. Compared to other solutions it has one terrible drawback: you can’t try any of the other solutions once you’ve tried this one.
To go a bit further, I find it important to discuss suicide rationally, without fear.
About half of the reason for wanting to kill myself as a teenager was to escape my situation, but the other half was about this “romantical” idea of others finally seeing how much pain I was in. That it would make them care. They would have to finally admit to the harm their actions have on people around them.
As an adult, I recognise that people who don’t care when you’re alive, won’t care when you’re dead. That’s half of the original reason gone. I think there’s some way to communicate this to people who are considering suicide to make it more “rational” and take its power away. Instead of hiding from suicide, clear away the fog around it.
If you could somehow shelter people from the idea of ending it, you'd have created the torment nexus. People who do so usually do it because they see negative things coming up and they're too tired to continue. What you're advocating for is everyone to run an endless marathon where if you fall behind or stop, you'd get endlessly whipped to continue no matter how much your wounds are bleeding from it.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm advocating for. I'm not saying people should be forced to run an endless marathon regardless of how badly they're suffering. I'm saying that when someone is suffering that badly, we should help them rather than let suicide become the way they escape from it.
I'm not blaming people for the circumstances they're in or saying their suffering isn't real. I'm questioning the environment that teaches people what to do when they reach that point. Different people go through incredibly difficult situations and develop different ways of coping. My point is that ending your life shouldn't be one of those ways.
If someone is so exhausted that they feel they can't continue, the answer should be to help them, change their circumstances where possible, and help them find another way through it. Otherwise, what is the point of helping someone who is suicidal in the first place?
The goal isn't to force people to keep suffering. The goal is to help them stop suffering without ending their life.
> we should help them rather than let suicide become the way they escape from it.
> the answer should be to help them, change their circumstances where possible, and help them find another way through it.
You left that part out originally. You meant it implicitly, so I may seem pedantic, but this kind of thing must be said explicitly.
For example: the asylum system. Abolishing it's ubiquity was unarguably good, but then they just... stopped there, leaving many people in the lurch.[1] To paraphrase and oversimplify MLK, "presence of justice is much harder than absence of tension."
I'll go ahead and assume you are from India. While all suicides do carry certain commanalities, the academic ones seem much more Indian. The meritocratic view perpetuated has caused generations of kids who's belief becomes that being academically well-off leads to better life outcomes.
The shame, and to a lesser extent guilt, associated with a possibility of not acheiving this goal is often too hard to handle that they give up. 4 kids dead this way last year in my school, 2 more so far.
Torment run would be becoming a masochist to cope. The comment likely refers to the ability in being able to identify the alternatives, and being flexible.
Torment run would be slogging under the student's adviser, the other option being reporting him, or switching advisers, or any other option life presents.
Yes, you are right. If someone reaches a point where they feel that their situation is so bad that they have to die because of it, then reporting the adviser, switching advisers, escaping to another place, completely starting a new life, or whatever other option life presents could potentially make their life much better, and in some cases even be life-changing. I mean, what worse could happen by trying these options than ending your life? If someone has the courage to make such a drastic decision as ending their life, you could also help them muster the courage to completely restart their life instead.
The damage is already done for most people who already use it. Whenever I go to a restaurant and see friends, families, and couples together, I feel sad that instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels. On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.
At least, hopefully, this rule helps future generations. People’s brains are so addicted that they can’t even focus for 10 minutes straight. On top of that, I see moms giving their toddlers mobile phones while they eat or whenever they need to get something done. People should really start considering how social media affects us in the long term.
Believe it or not many people actually read news and books on their phones.
I think there a lot of survivorship bias in this observation, where the thing you’re most likely to see people watching is the thing that’s most flashy.
Yes and public transport isn't exactly a great environment for interacting with your friends - either its already loud or you're going to annoy other passengers.
I kind of agree, but I will push back just to work through my conflicted feelings. In America 50% of people basically can't read. I think the official stat is 48% read at or BELOW a 6th grade level. The average American reads 0 books a year, shamefully myself included. Especially post covid, there is a serious degradation in social skills and using a phone instantly makes people more comfortable and less likely to socialize. The mobile gaming industry is 148B this year.
All that is to say, I don't think this forum is indicative of wider behavior AND smart people definitely inflate the value of "work" and "productivity" they do on their phone. We will never know unless we get Apple data, but I suspect a phone might be like 90% entertainment and 5% communication for most people. Maybe 5% is semi-productive work email, reading an article, etc.
I guess I am not sure if it matters where their attention goes. Although, it might be a bit of selective memory in how social people were before phones.
Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.
A lot of those suggestions mean staring at a phone or smilar device and a bystander like ggp might not be able to tell them apart from looking at social media.
Comments like this always ignore the fact that in the olden days before phones, a majority of people read newspapers or books and busybody news columnists bemoaned how everyone was lost in their media instead of socializing.
Literally nothing has changed in the past century other than the variety of idle tasks one can keep in their pocket. People chose to not engage then exactly the same as they do now.
Social media companies are also telling you what to do in your free time- they're just doing it in a much more subtle, pernicious way that goes straight to our dopamine pathways.
I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves.
I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus
I would say it's pretty common to talk to strangers on the train in England. I could just be the "Northerner terrifying Londoners by saying Hello" though. I do know not to start a conversation with a stranger on the tube.
I think it depends on the train journey personally. I'd never dream of striking up a conversation on the Tube or a busy commuter line; personally I'm the definition of 'not a morning person' so I've no social battery to spare in those circumstances. On the other hand I quite like a chat when I'm not in a hurry or it's not the morning, makes the time go faster.
Mind you most of the talk seems to be along the lines of 'GWR couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery' these days.
I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.
The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy.
Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.
Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.
Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.
Do people really ignore family and do completely separate things on their devices right next to each other?? Usually when I'm next to someone, I'm using my device to look up things related to the conversation, just like how I'd use a search engine during an internet discussion. I can't imagine just sitting around watching shorts right next to someone during a family gathering.
Not in my family or extended family. But you can see examples of this all the time when eating out. So many young couples sit at a table at a restaurant, get out their phones and scroll away, occasionally showing their partner something they enjoyed. It's rare to see them talk more than a few words on what is presumably a date night.
There isn't any need to "look things up related to the conversation", and if that is seen as acceptable then that itself is a sign of how things have changed, and how addicted we all are to information.
Instead of spending 45 minuter discussing back and forth whether Tim Burton is still alive, we can take five seconds to look it up, and then move on to more interesting topics.
I dunno, to me it feels kind of like pulling a book off the shelf to double-check something from there. It's just, you know, digital instead. It's definitely something that's been acceptable to some kinds of people even before devices, but of course it's not for everybody. Some people prefer to say "I'm not sure", leave the conversation, and then come back later (or not) after they've studied up. Some people prefer not to have their conversational partners dwelling on details by digging into books during conversation. I personally like to get to the bottom of details on the spot, but that's probably my ADHD. (potentially also other things too)
Well, I don't watch shorts... but I do open my phone and read HN sometimes, when I don't want to actively participate in the (current) conversation. Which also shows that "curated" feeds will not solve this particular problem of interesting content on phones distracting one from boring family and friends.
> instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels.
There's only so much to talk about, and if they're doing that, they've probably already said all there is to say. I'm glad we have something to do now besides make awkward trivial banter or sit in awkward silence.
It's more that servi simply weren't included in the returns from the sixth circuit (covering the East Midlands and Yorkshire) - each circuit was independent, and decided for itself what to count and how. That led to some surprising inconsistencies, like this one.
People in the cubing community often call all twisty puzzles "cubes".
In this parlance, the "pyraminx" (regular tetrahedron twisty puzzle) is a cube, the face-turning octohedron is a cube, and the "Megaminx" (dodecahedron) is a cube. I've even heard Rubik's Clock[1] called a cube.
80 years if career? Is that even possible? I mean if that is true definitely he was good at his job that his employer did not want him to leave or he was really really loving his job that he was the best at it.
Just a thought experiment for you guys: imagine a bacteria that survives inside humans. It doesn't even know what a human is. For the bacteria, its entire world is simply the environment in which it lives. It doesn't know that we are living beings actively trying to maintain ourselves and survive.
Now, suppose a harmful bacteria enters our body, makes us sick, and we take medicine that kills all of them. From the bacteria's perspective, it could look like a natural disaster or some unexplained event in which they all suddenly get wiped out. They have no idea that a living being called a human actively tried to eliminate them using something called medicine, which was engineered specifically to kill them.
Similarly, what if our world, or nature itself, is part of some higher-level entity that we simply exist within? What if the reason for our deaths, natural calamities, and other events is something completely beyond our perception? Whatever we do, we may never be able to understand what is actually happening at that level, just as bacteria may never be able to understand that humans exist.
One thing that could potentially support this idea is self-regulation. We see self-regulating systems throughout nature, and these patterns seem to repeat at different scales. We ourselves are self-regulating organisms, and nature also has countless cycles and mechanisms that regulate themselves.
Maybe these patterns continue at scales we cannot perceive. We can observe certain things at the scale of humans, but we still don't fully understand what happens at the nano scale or on the scale of the universe. Perhaps there are higher levels of organization and self-regulation that we simply don't have the ability to perceive yet.
reply