_tulpa
This is human behaviour, and causality is really not as simple as wanking some stats around and making a bunch of super tenuous inference. 'fuck outta here with that reductionist bullshit.
That's really not how choice seems to work in real life.
Anecdotes about recovered junkies are meaningless until you talk to those, which in my experience are the majority, who a) haven't recovered and b) repeatedly choose to try and c) fail to recover because humans just don't have the infinite willpower and rationality that this freedom of choice dogma always assumes. I mean people often don't even have enough information to make rational/good decisions in the first place. Until you stop looking at only success stories, and really have a look at the rest of the iceberg that is human failure, you're just chewing on ideological preconceptions.
> I am addicted to caffeine
Apples and oranges. Caffeine doesn't have much in the way of negatives, and if you experience one of the negatives then the positives most likely aren't strong enough to keep you coming back. So sure, Mormon judgements would then in the 'eye of beholder'.
Maybe talk about alcohol, there's some pretty objective negatives - not only for the person 'choosing' to do it but almost anyone around them - and I know plenty of alcoholics who wouldn't be alcoholics if they were capable of making that choice.
> The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.
Well now I really can't tell if I'm just feeding the trolls...
If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation. And detriment there is definitely not subjective. Maybe there's a little more nuance to the equivalent in social media but it's not all that different, and negative effects on mental health are even more scary because they're not as blindingly obvious as the results of a physiological addiction.
Maybe you should try understand the limits of rationality in human decision making, especially with immediate vs. delayed rewards, then you might get some idea that choice is often more a function of the options in front of you than whatever might have the best outcome. Reality is just a little more nuanced than this oversimplified ECON101 libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice.
This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.
The implication of all this (partly from the shitty phrasing on the part of the authors) is that we’re better off not being forced to think about the things that technology trivializes. A bunch of research on physiological and cognitive or neurological adaptation (or whatever happens in the absence of a stimulus to adapt to ) would raise some proper questions about that implication.
To me the way they present this is irresponsible.
If you write a scientific publication you should really really aim to avoid stuff which can easily be misinterpreted by laypeople and opportunistic journalists/influencers. The audience for scientific material is now way closer to the average human with no reference for how to interpret this kind of shit.
This sounds... incorrect.
Small players are much more vulnerable to fines and other penalties which range from 'cost of doing business' to 'slap on the wrist' for the big guys. And small ones don't seem to have much in the way of lobbying power or other direct influence over regulators.
Maybe more accurate to say that it's a bit harder to police lots of small players, but also that it's only the small players who produce good behaviour under regulation.
> It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association.
It's not about disagreement or conspiracies, just that everyone talks like they're selling you things now even if they just own the thing and aren't being paid or intentionally 'influencing'. And I remember when it wasn't like that - even on reddit. I don't think it's an intentional thing (which would be your conspiratorial thinking) so much as an emergent property of large, anonymous, loosely connected groups of people where some of the people are only there to sell stuff, which just so happens to be convenient if you're there to sell.
The real thing is shills posing as independent third parties posting praise/visibility/reviews or even complaints about some thing that they have a vested interest in you buying or using. It's most egregious and obvious on reddit, but I guarantee you it's here on HN too.
I do have strong opinions about exploitation of other humans though, and probably stronger ones about modern mental gymnastics apparatus which lets people justify the whole thing.
Sure! This is exactly where ignorance is bliss.
Modern marketing is just spreading dissatisfaction (sometimes borderline misery) with the false promise of relief through consumerism.
Dang, that's just the most perfectly succinct phrasing of (an answer to) my pet hate in software/developer attitude/life in general.
But it also seems that the 'possible' facet is just nowhere near as financially lucrative as 'simple'.
For me it's the other way round, git clicked way faster than other systems.
> 4. Same as 1.
> ... saves tons of time
No. It really fucking doesn't.
How is it ever supposed to be faster to try and figure out which search result for 'index.html' is the file in the somewhat-cluttered folder I just fucking navigated to for the express purpose of opening index.html, so that I don't end up selecting another file named 'index.html' from one of the subfolders? Just jump to the goddamn file in the current folder as I type, it's so much faster, and it's what everyone who has ever used the type-while-in-a-file-dialog feature expects to happen anyway.
Also how have people not figured out that file search on your local computer kinda really sucks? The stuff you want to search for probably doesn't have a unique/meaningful file name. Folders namespace non-unique file names, and the full path then has some semantic meaning. And since humans are pretty good at semantics, we seem to be pretty good at navigating the semantic hierarchy of where we put stuff. Recursive search makes you read some inevitably tiny and low-contrast text to get the meaning back. Useful if you're truly lost but absolutely 100% not useful as the global default.
Also also, what the hell do we do with years (decades?) of muscle-memory? Pretty much everyone else still uses the old behavior too so if you're cross-platform (or use only some stuff that is GTK3) that muscle memory isn't going away.
Also also also, why the shitting fuck was #3 not the new default behavior (or why isn't the old default the new default for that matter). Why isn't this only-sometimes-useful recursive search bullshit hidden behind some non-intuitive undiscoverable hotkey?
Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.
The main tangible thing that gave the label it's public power.
And at the same time, did everyone expect an entire geopolitical region to just sit there and let themselves be curb-stomped by various international superpowers without at least trying to retaliate? And in lieu of making a dent on the military front, and noting the impact of curb-stomping on civilian life, where else would you expect the response to be aimed?
Nah mate, pushing past the knee-jerk reaction of fear takes too much effort, empathy is too hard, my life is easy and thinking about what my lifestyle costs other people is too unpleasant. Just slap a terrorism label (or maybe 'think of the children', or maybe 'war on drugs', or...) on it and call it a public license to go round fucking up cultures/demographics/human rights/geopolitical regions with impunity.
I'm not the one playing bullshit word games.
Because outside the little western bubble it might be understood more accurately along the lines of self defense, or a response to aggression and political interference motivated by any shady bullshit from proxy wars to controlling oil supply.
Because "weapons of mass destruction" definitely deserves the quotes and was used for a similar purpose.
But mostly because giving something scary a name that abstracts away everything except that it's scary not only makes it super easy to sell publicly, but also makes it super easy to aim the public response to said fear at whatever the label can be twisted into applying to.
Price-gouging is absolutely acceptable capitalism, we only call it 'gouging' because being a greedy asshole doesn't align too well with the moral compasses of most of society. Which is why government 'interference' is a thing in the first place, because otherwise capitalism doesn't give a shit about morals or correctness or acceptableness or anything that isn't capital.
It there's any interference it's so much more likely that it's corporate money interfering with the government.
'the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943. Even then there were many steep grades, a poor surface, switchbacks to gain and descend hills ...' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction) plus bridges which were temporary, impassable sections in 1943 when stuff started to melt, etc, etc ,etc.
A war-time dirt-road constructed by the army and only traversable by stuff that could probably go off-road anyway is not really the same as building something in an existing city which has to support regular bus traffic.
> There are no biodegradable plastic cups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic - Why not?
There's also no practical reason you can't have biodegradable plastic cups for steel shot.
I grew up hunting, mostly bigger animals, I never bought meat until I moved away from home. We didn't use shotguns at all, mostly because it's been clear that lead is bad news for ages, and you couldn't really get steel shot where we were. And a bonus of hunting bigger animals is that if you do it right the projectile doesn't exit. The whole post above just sounds like a bunch of entitled whiny "I want to have my cake and eat it too" bullshit.