s-shellfish's comments

Stoicism is the closest I can get away from appealing to emotional harmony blindly (choose the happy way now but potentially make a grave error by doing so).

Thinking about things that aren't presented with a face... one face or many.

Unity with concepts. Read Nichomachean ethics in college, but funnily enough now that I look at it, the professors may have found much more literal value in it than did the students.

Humor, the Greeks, educational systems. Life, sigh.

The directions things go in.

> In math and logic agreement is attained by a proof.

Of course I agree with this. Just makes me think of bad ways of understanding math and logic. Having to carry it around inside myself as though I am it, because nothing else besides myself, others like myself, and actual computers can test the understanding. Proofs can be written with the utmost rigor. There's still room for error. No proof is perfect.

I'm not sure if that's more so, an artistic interpretation of mathematics and logic, or, just the other side to it. Even if my memory was eidetic and I knew all there was to know about all existing mathematics and logic, I'm still not sure I'd be certain I know what I know. What's the difference between seeing a connection between two pieces of data, and identifying an inferential rule? Direction, intentional direction. Backwards chaining.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining

> and not by some social pressure to force a predetermined outcome

This is what I always find, I dunno, bizarre. It really seems like, overriding thinking in favor of something, some way of forcing an outcome.

I agree, but this is the root of my dilemma from which my own understanding has grown.

If I agree with you right here and now, have we not technically formed our own 'echo chamber'?

Echo chambers from the outside look like inside out fishbowls because they are. But every set of agreeable statements, whether shared between individuals or distributed through time, same system - pieces are just labeled differently.

However, I do understand the emotional feeling that occurs when conforming is heavily pressured, from nearly every side. That's disharmonous emotionally to the people it is disharmonous to. The ones who get silenced.

I understand both sides. Can't say I know more than that. Can't say I have an opinion on the matter because it goes beyond the facts.

Another way to look at the problem: are math and logic an echo chamber?

One has to grow to not react to it. If explanations don't make sense, you need to be able to find the right questions to ask, to be able to know what is meaningful from what is nonsense.

That's just tech in general. Or business. Anything that deals in hard facts. Hand waving bullshit without evidence or at least, validity in reasoning - that's just bad long term.

Of course the real truth though is no one can know everything. To me, that implies there's a limit where people say 'this is the line we stop thinking at, when we hit this line'. I'm curious to know whether the belief that the line exists there to begin with is there because it retains some tolerable amount of bullshit, or because some people just really aren't used to actually being aware of their own occasional idiocy.

I dunno. I don't think it's a positive long term to make people feel dumb. Probably something that gets retained because it just works, an evolutionary heuristic, not necessarily one planned for, designed, selected.

Which.. (the universe truly does have a divine sense of humor) - intelligence can literally be stupidity. Therefore, it doesn't mean whatever intelligence designates most intelligent is actually the most effective way of getting to the truth, or defining the best way to do things. Just means, it's the way things get done, until a better way is revealed or found.

> I could have said something about harming children and would have been less reviled.

Yes, but that's literally because people see their technologies as being more human than most humans. It's something that goes down to an individuals core and is intrinsically defining of how they understand and express.

Not saying it makes sense to average Joe. Just a different breed of person.

For example, the soundness property of a language. Think about why that might be what creates the echo chamber, rather than thinking about how the echo chamber reacts when whatever contributes to verifying soundness is modified. The reaction might be a side effect, rather than an outright planned action.

Yea, it seems to occasionally bubble up, unfortunately I've noticed that happens in real life to people as well, I suppose that is what gets called passive aggressive - deep internalized, unresolved issues. Always makes my heart hurts to watch.

At the end of the day, a lot of us here are developers, engineers, programmers, still. A knack for pedantry, precision, and clarity leads to coming to, and accepting an awareness. Otherwise, bugs, bugs, bugs. Bugs everywhere. Clear thinking. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and so on.

On HN, I really try to ignore the points. I personally know for me, if I simply read a point of view that is valid, that is enough to stick with me such that it continues to be part of my personality, or allows me to draw from my own self in slightly stronger way - the world is accepting of me, tolerant. I don't need to encourage it to be that with points. All I need to do is see 'Is it? Or is it not?'.

People are affected and influenced because they accept it as a rule of functioning. They want to influence things in such and such a way therefore they are subject to the same tactics of manipulation. Always depends on the rules you choose to believe in about the mind. Nerves that fire together wire together, and so on.

I think the big thing is with the internet, it makes a lot of these things much more discrete, as in, parsing information and evaluating it in chunks, rather than have a sense of continuity. Everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white. Encourages a frame of mind that selectively gathers and redistributes information. It may make sense with present 'state' but it might not make sense with respect to the humanities, respect to art, respect to many of the other sciences, history, etc. Picking up on lots of patterns and applying the data of today to fit the model. Then upvote, downvote, change the world.

Totally agreed. It's just chaos, because the mind that constantly requires a reflection of itself to prove it is healthy is not a healthy mind to begin with.

Behaving in that pattern in a conditioned sense opens oneself up for all sorts of manipulation, which long term, that's quite a bit of suffering (if there's no genuine connection between members of a social group, hence, the group is prone to rapid shifts in likes/dislikes'. It becomes hard to determine intent - which makes the social environment untrustworthy, which in my opinion, is the basis of what is required for sanity. Trust. You can have that as something established over a long time, or you can have instant connection, just really 'get' someone and where they are coming from.

Facebook is an addiction. There's plenty of places on the internet that encourage healthy dialogue and it's obvious / quite plain to see what is effective and what is ultimately destructive.

I like HN a lot. So many other places on the internet, it seems like a popularity contest. Here I can get 0 or 1 upvotes but not feel ignored, not feel worse off for it.

Healing, in many regards.

That always depends on whether whatever is contained within the abstraction is something that might change. Sigh, humor.

Leaving it as a primitive basically says 'you may have to hack the programming language or framework in order to modify code that depends on this piece of the logic'. Global state is something you can manage in terms of modular components. Allows for dynamic orchestration of components.

It's more the long term issue that keeps repeating (more humor) than it is just replacing an integer. Being able to decide 'is this component something that needs to be reasoned about in it's own independent logical layer from the rest of the system or is it not' or 'does this component relate to other components in a well defined way'.

Connect is an action, an observable action has occurred. An abstraction can trigger a behavior to other abstractions through that predefined relation. That's the point.

Of course it's a big deal. I never disagreed with that to begin with. Some people understand ostracism. That's why they don't do the things that cause ostracism.

This is very a good depiction of a Markov chain. However, it's always a coin flip on your emotions to anthropomorphize math.

Pronouns.

I imagine people are just trying to help.

This is very good advice. However, healing will always take time and experience.

Maybe just trying to attract a certain type of person who wants to get out of a job they find crushing.

A job can be seen as crushing or a team effort. Einstein wasn't an island.

Mitch Hedberg is much more similar to programmer/hacker humor IMO. Puns, jargon, word play, grammatical structure, lots of modification to simple statements for comedy. That creates a different kind of overarching structural complexity. I find that much more funny than traditional comedy, because it's my flavor of clever. Many elements of Shakespeare minus the explicit narrative.

It's easier to see it as 'if I attack you, you attack me'. Because if not now, eventually.

Just write them down if you consider them of great importance. Cite. History repeats itself.

Can't control how every system gets managed.

Deleting or not deleting, I dunno.

I started talking on the internet when I was 9. I've always had to live with the paranoia of my data following me around everywhere. Because it does, it could exist somewhere, even if I delete it. Who sees it? The people that matter (other technology folks, since that's where I've directed my career towards), or the rest of the world?

At the end of the day, my feelings are this. Everyone has issues. Everyone looks brilliant sometimes, and dumb other times. Everyone makes mistakes, some are better at hiding them than others, but that doesn't mean anyone is perfect.

It's easier to just not judge. Don't let others past drag behind them, don't use their past against them. Because, it's a mental prison you either force yourself in, or force others in. The way you treat the world either is the way you see the world, or it becomes the way you see the world.

Also, all those mistakes can add up to something great. Error seeking mentality can turn into error prone mentality. It's important to have tolerance for yourself, and others.

This is the direction everything went in. Collect as much data as possible. Inferences can be blinding. Of course it's going to affect people.

> I like the focus on loneliness, I hate the focus on disorders.

Again though, that's you, your understanding. This is always the problem with psychology. Projecting all the information you've ever encountered through your understanding of yourself and through your understanding of others, onto others.

Disorders suck, yes. It's not always just loneliness in a physical presence sense. Sometimes it's intellectual/emotional loneliness.

> I don't think half of the people who think they're on the autism spectrum are anywhere close to it.

We are what we make of ourselves. You might not know the reason someone would prefer identifying with autism. But again, that comes down to how you observe information on the outside, versus an how an individual has understood their own self internally, in a stable sense, their entire life.

Intellectual loneliness, only seeing a singular connection between sets of information people externalize. One singular one that matches with everything. And then, trying to have one's own sense of self, instead of having to perpetually match with every person intellectually, to keep their own perspective maintained, validated.