He did the right thing by seeking her out to apologize.
The rest doesn’t hold water.
“There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.”
The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.
They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you call them out on it it’s always something like “We’ll if I could damage their career anyone could have.” or “It’s been ten years, why don’t they just get over it?”
Basically: “Yes, I stabbed them. But they didn’t/couldn’t stop me, so it’s their fault that they’re dead, really.”
Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time.
Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did. Telling yourself that the facts of your story don’t matter or that the people you hurt may even be better off for it won’t mend the people you’ve broken.
Just apologize (for real) and attempt to make amends.
I think misanthropes aren't being enabled by articles like the above.
Many of them honestly don't care deep down about the damage they do.
Others like Mark Wahlberg just "forgive themselves" for blinding a neighbor as a teen, even if their actual victim doesn't forgive them, so they can feel better about themselves mentally. https://time.com/3623630/mark-wahlberg-pardon/
I don't know what's inside Mark Wahlberg's heart, but let's suppose it's someone whom, for the sake of argument, we know truly regrets their actions: what are they supposed to do if another person doesn't forgive them?
Accept that sometimes when you do a bad thing that permanently harms someone else you don't deserve forgiveness (not everyone is christian FFS) and it's not wrong for that to follow you around forever. If that makes you uncomfortable, too fucking bad, don't irreversibly blind someone.
One of the profound contributions of Christianity, corroborated in other wisdom traditions, is the assertion that every single one of us ignorantly does irreparable harm to others in the course of our lifetimes. Recognizing this is the beginning of wisdom, and figuring out how to live life in light of this reality has been the driving force behind many different philosophies and religious traditions passed down over the ages. Pretending other people are the problem is the problem. Of course, that doesn't justify gross negligence, but the human ego is very good at dismissing selfish, entropy-increasing behavior as harmless. May I humbly submit that the approach you suggest here is incomplete.
> One of the profound contributions of Christianity, corroborated in other wisdom traditions, is the assertion that every single one of us ignorantly does irreparable harm to others in the course of our lifetimes.
The problem, though, with Christianity's take on it (or at least what some Christians take from it), is that they push the idea that all you need to do to achieve salvation is to believe in Jesus as savior, and all is fine and dandy. Doesn't matter what sins you've committed, or if you're even truly repentant. Just believe Jesus died for your sins, and you're good.
On one hand I agree that this could promote acceptance that we are all flawed beings, and will all end up doing bad things here and there, and that it's pretty much unavoidable. But I worry that this also can promote a sense of invulnerability and unaccountability. "Doesn't matter what I do, Jesus will take care of me."
> or at least what some Christians take from it
> Doesn't matter what I do, Jesus will take care of me
Well yes let's be clear that only a very selective reading of the New Testament allows you to conclude Jesus doesn't think it matters what you do. It's the same kind of logic that leads one to preach the "prosperity gospel". It's very clear that loving Jesus goes hand in hand with loving others and living his commandments as best you can.
I genuinely don't get the prosperity gospel. Can someone please explain how it could at all be a legitimate interpretation of Christianity? Or is it just a flat out scam the entire way down?
It’s not a scam — well, not all prosperity gospel preachers are scammers, but a few likely are. (Source: back in 2007/08 I was a true believer of a more mainstream Christianity and looked into this stuff in detail)
The most charitable interpretation: some Christian traditions really hate wealth, and some see it as a blessing. You can find support for both in the Bible: Jesus is pretty anti-wealth, but then in Revelation 21 you have the New Jerusalem descending down from heaven, and God took the bling and turned it up to 11, and it’s the best thing ever.
Prosperity gospel churches are usually Pentecostal, which means they have a few special ways they like to interpret the Bible:
- They tend to take single Bible verses, often out of context, and use them as a foundation for entire novel lines of teaching. (This is opposed to reading and digesting whole stories)
- Those favorite Bible verses are emphasized, and passages that contradict them are downplayed. Once you decide that the Bible is pro-wealth, it can’t tell you it isn’t. (All Bible-believing Christians do this, whether they realize it or not. It’s called choosing a hermeneutic)
- There’s a culture that it’s common for the individual, especially the preacher, to hear directly from God. It’s pretty hard to argue with someone who claims the Holy Spirit told them something was true. (I always saw this as obviously problematic for a bunch of reasons)
When you put these together, you tend to get weird novel theologies. Other examples in the Pentecostal church include the personal prayer language (aka speaking in tongues) and faith healing.
I don't think the guy who assaulted the moneychangers in the temple, said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter Heaven, and more than once told his followers to give everything they owned to the poor would be down with the prosperity gospel. Jesus would probably recite the parable of the talents, and tell you that if God gives you riches, it's to benefit the community and the poor, not for you to hoard as if you could take any of it with you.
But then again, one could argue that any interpretation of Christianity is legitimate, just as any interpretation of art or literature is legitimate. Prosperity gospel is no more out there than Gnosticism was, and only politics and culture determines what is and isn't canon. It isn't surprising that the prosperity gospel is a product of the capitalist and materialist US.
This is a line of thinking that really intrigues me, are there any external resources you would suggest to further read about it? Other than the Bible, of course
You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh explores this idea a lot. To the extent you consider Buddhist philosophy religious, it is still religious, but it is not the Bible. However the philisophy is similar enough that the author actually references both in harmony. That said it's also a very well received book among secular audiences so if you're intrigued by the idea and don't care much for the Bible, I think you'd like it.
I think this is common theme in eastern religions. I feel like I’ve also seen aspects of this in western philosophy. My disclaimer here is I am not well read in any of these topics!
My more general insight is that humans have put a lot of work into trying to seperate themselves from the complications of our obligate social brains. We will always feel bad, but maybe it can be ameliorated.
If you make a mistake like this, where you owe a debt that can never be repaid, I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure. This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life.
> I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure.
It's called prison.
> This probably should follow you around forever, but maybe it shouldn't dominate every moment of the rest of your life.
Prison (and convictions generally) shouldn't follow folks forever because it disincentivizes rehabilitation, it incentivizes recidivism, it labels someone based upon behavior 20 years ago but not necessarily since, etc.
The victims are not morally obligated to forgive anyone. As a society, it's more beneficial to legally and morally treat offenders as having paid their sentence.
> > I think we need some social mechanism where you can do your best to make amends and get some measure of closure.
> It's called prison.
No.
Prison (and the threat of it) accomplishes a few things:
It's punitive, which allows people who enjoy retribution to feel some satisfaction at their idea of justice being carried out.
The threat of prison theoretically prevents some people from inflicting some societal harms on others.
And it keeps dangerous people away from the general public.
It also has the consequence of lining the pockets of the people running for-profit prisons (this is actually really really bad for society though), and also costs taxpayers a ton of money.
And another nice benefit of adversely affecting minorities, poor people, and otherwise marginalized people disproportionately.
It largely is not successful at rehabilitating people. Maybe some people, sometimes, but in the U.S. at least, there are more people who come out of prison more broken than they were going in, and also have fewer options for living an ethical life coming out. They fall in with gangs for protection, and those networks extend back out of the prison. The money spent imprisoning people (especially for things like nonviolent, victimless crimes) could likely do much more good to society if it was used differently.
If someone theoretically did something bad, and was remorseful for their actions, and we could say with a degree of certainty that they were no more likely to commit the same act again than any random person on the street, I think it would be better to not imprison them, and spend that money on, say, social services instead.
If you're looking for models of actually allowing people to atone and work towards improvements in their future behaviour, we'd do better with a restorative justice model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice
It's absolutely impossible for prison to morally absolve prisoners: most do not enter there willingly (i.e., they plead not guilty) and their entire freedom to do anything, much less make amends, is stripped away. Rehabilitation does nothing for the flesh and blood victim they're in there for hurting.
> most do not enter there willingly (i.e., they plead not guilty)
The idea that most incarcerated people pled not guilty, were tried and found guilty, and are now incarcerated is not true in the US.
Many of incarcerated are still awaiting trial. The DOJ reports that a quarter of those in US jail and prison are awaiting trial [1]. I suspect most of those cannot afford bail.
In terms of after trial, npr reports, "98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain" [2].
No, victims are not obligated to forgive you and neither is society. Sometimes people do bad things that cannot be undone and should not be forgotten. Sometimes that person doing the bad thing is you. Even if you didn't intend to harm someone, even if you did nothing wrong, even if you followed best known procedures and were fully attentive, you can still cause irreparable harm to someone else, and we shouldn't just pretend that's okay as some coping strategy.
Sometimes you hurt someone and you should feel bad about that. Deal with it. It's a part of life to be an imperfect human and this should help you keep in mind that EVERYONE IS AN IMPERFECT HUMAN.
Replying to myself - I didn't understand the context of this conversation before, but I just read Mark Wahlberg's wikipedia page. Yikes. Seems like the guy was (and is?) a violent, hateful, lunatic. Something smells very off about one of his victims releasing a public statement that he has forgiven Mark.
I was not intending to argue that he should be pardoned.
My stance says nothing about punishment, imprisonment, or retribution, and is more about recognizing that there are things humans can do to each other that are irreversibly damaging, and that is not an okay thing to do, and recognizing that you have caused someone irreparable harm that will never be "fixed" is the emotionally mature stance. I'm not even saying you should wake up every day with a weight on your shoulders for killing someone, but rather it's something you should keep in mind, and victims owe nothing to the people that harmed them, and I do not believe expecting victims to tell people doing bad things "everything is okay" is beneficial to society. Being without forgiveness from those you harmed is not equivalent in any way to being in prison for life.
I'm gonna be a bitter cynic here and say that blindness also dominates every moment of the rest of the victim's life, so why shouldn't the perpetrator suffer the same fate?
The only place where you find this mirror Talion punishment today are islamistic countries that implement the sharia. Do you really think they are paragons of fair justice?
He’s an A-list actor who makes tens of millions of dollars per film. He can make what most of us would consider “fuck you money” in the span of a few months. By no means does it dominate his life.
I dont think he shows real contrition either. After that Times article he backpedaled on the pardon request and told an interviewer months later that he was “pushed into it.”
No one should be punished for the rest of their life because they wronged someone in their childhood. If they’ve grown, feel remorse and regret, then they’ve done their time and need to forgive themselves.
There no point in carrying around such a burden. Very few people deserve to be miserable.
This post does not limit itself to true accidents. Indeed, both people involved were negligent. Preventable harm that you do not prevent through your own choices can very well be unforgivable. Pretending that everything should be forgivable is a heinous thing to do to victims, and they have every right to not forgive or forget if you have caused them irreversible harm through negligence or accident. A victim has the right to never forget how you changed their life.
You do not have a right to be free from the burden you have caused someone else.
I can't necessarily agree with this. Some people are hurt over extremely minor offenses, which may or may not have been an accident. What if the perpetrator of the offense has grown and tried to make amends for the wrong they've done? Do they need to carry the burden of guilt forever? I think there is room for forgiveness of oneself, even if those you have burdened do not forgive you. Maybe it's not the same, but everyone is different. I would hate to think that someone in their early teen years did something selfish and stupid (like most of us do), and they were not forgiven by the victim, and they had to carry that with them to the end of their life. Society does not grow with an overwhelming sense of guilt (now, this is very different if you intentionally cause malice and are truly not sorry, and do nothing to make things right).
Eh, not that harshly. Not that you should be miserable but that such a large event SHOULD have a large impact on you as a person and SHOULD maybe cause changes in how you live your life. You should still be treated with dignity and basic human decency unless and until you show yourself to continually harm others for selfish or negligent reasons. One bad action doesn't make you a bad person but it is still a bad action and that should be remembered.
Actions have consequences and we shouldn't try to hand wave those away because some people seem uninterested in going to therapy and dealing with the guilt they have. You can always do better, but that doesn't invalidate the bad.
People are complex, the world is not black and white, everyone is a huge story with complex rationalizations. Reflect on why you do things, reflect on how you affect those around you.
There is also power in discovering how to forgive yourself, especially if your wrong was unintentional, or you made a mistake that you deeply regret. It's too easy to walk around with guilt in your life, and maybe you don't ever get to speak to the one you wronged. Should you take that to your grave? Does that help anyone?
That just breeds more misery and does noone any good.
If you've done something bad, then forgive yourself and be kind to yourself, because you need to do better in the future. This is a better lesson that will do everyone more good.
This is basically the raison d'etre of the American justice system today. Of course, I also think it would be nice if someone who committed hate crimes was justly punished for it, but stepping back from this specific example, I think the bloodlust around what constitutes a "just punishment" goes too far in most cases.
The American justice system seems to be based upon profit, and keeping people reoffending in order to continue keeping the justice system in place. There is no incentive to reform as the system currently stands. It is a major failure of society that recidivism is an expected consequence of being "in the system."
I used to think that it was biased towards profit, but after the last 5 or so years, I think that's just a side effect. American society believes strict and long punishment for wrongdoing is the solution to crime. We had a wave of progressive AD's elected into office and they barely lasted 3 years, they're all getting booted.
The profit part of it really came down to "well, just punishing them is leaving money on the table!"
Now, it might be the case that the people profiting from the string and long punishments are so cynical and greedy that they started campaigning for longer, harsher sentences specifically for their own enrichment, but the people are buying it as purification and penance through pain. The prison industrial complex only works as a business because the people already want what's being sold to them.
My stance says nothing about punishment. Punishment has nothing to do with lack of forgiveness. Forgiveness is also not a necessity to treat other people, including those who have harmed you, as inherently flawed humans that deserve basic things like dignity.
Forgiveness is a broken concept. Just because you can be a better person later in life should not absolve you of bad things you did before. This isn't a call for everyone to carry grudges, but a call that we should stop trying to play this dumb "just keep pretending everything is always and will always be 'okay' in some way" ideology. People sometimes do bad things because they are bad people or do not care about others, and it's okay to not forgive that. People sometimes do bad things through no real fault of their own and it's okay to still not forgive that.
It's an interesting idea. Law, justice systems, were all created in order to adjudicate that level of animosity and prevent it passing on to future generations. Holding on to a grudge, not even out of a sense of justice, but purely out of hate, seems like a path towards poor mental health. But I'm lucky enough to not have any hate that strong -- those I've chosen not to forgive I've instead chosen to forget, which is a privilege relative to the level of wrongs done.
Well that’s the thing. No one deserves forgiveness (Christians especially should know that forgiveness is not earned with merit, but distributed with grace.) But genuine forgiveness is a powerful thing, though it’s very hard.
That just breeds more misery and does noone any good.
If you've done something bad, then forgive yourself and be kind to yourself, because you need to do better in the future. This is a better lesson that will do everyone more good.
important to note that it is not an absolute command. it's qualified as it follows: "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
He did real harm that his victim did not forgive, so he's supposed to hold that. You're not supposed to ask the governor for an official pardon, erasing his crime from the criminal record.
edit:
"“My hope is that, if I receive a pardon, troubled youths will see this as an inspiration and motivation that they too can turn their lives around,” he writes." Yeah, I DO NOT believe the world famous multimillionaire needs a governor's pardon to help kids.
As the article says, they should be pushing for redemption opportunities for all convicted felons (based on a humanistic perspective), not just themselves (based on some confused notion of an “I have become successful enough to buy high-priced lawyers to retcon my rap sheet since I have redeemed myself” perspective)
While he did attack two men, the blinded victim actually lost his eye prior to the incident and claimed Wahlberg didn't inflict any lasting damage. Apparently Marky Mark mistakenly believed he blinded the man. Not that I'm defending him, I don't even like him.
Tangential: those who couldn't care less would be nihilists, or sadists. "Misanthrope" is better reserved for something else. I guess it all just blends together from certain standpoints... it shouldn't.
Supertangential: Nihilists just don't believe existence is intrinsically meaningful, and sadists take pleasure in inflicting suffering. A more correct term for someone who is indifferent to the suffering they cause might be a "narcissist" or "sociopath".
Mark Wahlberg didn't blind that guy -- he lost his eye in Vietnam. Also he forgave Wahlberg. But Wahlberg believed he had blinded him, so it's basically the same story as the OP article.
> Mark Wahlberg didn't blind that guy -- he lost his eye in Vietnam.
Call me an old cynic but I'd love to see the old fella's bank account around 2014 given he seems to have waited 26 years to clear that up and it happened to coincide with Wahlberg asking for a pardon.
Ehhh that seems a bit uncharitable and leading into a slippery-slope fallacy.
"Well, because some misanthrope might misinterpret this as permission to be terrible means it's bad advice".
Dealing with things directly, as close in time to the event as possible, is probably a great idea.
But you'll never get a pure ground-truth on every event in your life... so learning that your narrative of the past can act as a tyrant in your life (if you let it) seems like a good insight to me.
Didn’t say it could be interpreted as giving people license.
I’m talking about the people who already do the things — and not giving them a Tums and Tylenol for the indigestion and headaches it’s causing them.
Stop doing the thing to stop suffering the consequences.
The people also tend to be really brittle. Once someone points out that they’re running around stabbing people they’ll get all offended: “See! It’s not fair! Everyone I’ve stabbed is out to get me. I’m the victim!”
> “There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.”
> The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.
It’s worse than that:
> > She said “that little accident” helped her pay more attention to her fitness, lose weight, and since then has been in better health than ever.
> Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did.
I think you might be missing the point of the story. To my understanding it could have easily have turned from a rosy past to a grim presence and it would have worked all the same.
The point of the story is that, supposedly, the difference in perception is the entire difference. Something is not true, just because it's in the past. The act of reinterpreting is the act of reshaping, what is true.
Personally, I don't know how true that is :) But it's a somewhat interesting thought.
> I think you might be missing the point of the story. To my understanding it could have easily have turned from a rosy past to a grim presence and it would have worked all the same.
I think _you_ might be missing the point of the story.
It "could have" but it didn't: the story was about he'd been punishing himself for 18 years but Really It Wasn't My Fault.
If it was about a situation where he found out 18 years ago a benign situation wasn't, that could teach a lesson about misunderstanding history. Here, everything else is overshadowed by the fact that "You can change history", where history is how he paralyzed a women by driving recklessly.
I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo.
We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc.
If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.
Evolution has also produced fatal cancer in infants, among other miserable horrors. The existence of a property in evolved creatures does not imply that it is adaptive.
Clearly everyone possesses the capacity for bitterness, as they are able to agree on its meaning. Otherwise they couldn't possibly know what the word means.
Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity.
You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificial human doctrines have the capacity to selectively advantage "fatal cancer in infants" but brutal natural selection wouldn't. Natural selection is the abacus of the grim reaper.
You may call it a dark calculation, but do you know whats worse than a "fatal infant cancer"?
Two or more cases of this "fatal infant cancer"!
I know almost no one who has "fatal infant cancer", yet I have never met a person without the capacity for bitterness.
So you then finally agree evolution removes fatal cancers in infants (at least to the point of rare events) instead of producing it as you claimed earlier.
unlike the statistics for "fatal cancer in infants" the capability to feel bitter is essentially universal, so clearly it serves some purpose.
Regardless of the myriads of contributing causes producing such cancers, natural selection eliminates these cancers, especially fatal childhood cancers.
> Your debate approach of declaring my position to be the opposite of what I say is no fun. I'm not going to continue.
The fact that I deduce a statement from your position which contradicts another of your positions is not a bad debate approach but simply an example of the principle of explosion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
That is what happens if you build a strawman: you pretend my argument relies merely on "the existence of a property" ignoring that occurence rates and probabilities actually span a spectrum, from marginally close to the impossible 0% to marginally close to a 100% certain. If the capability to emote bitterness is nearly universal among a species then it is a trait, not "existence of a property".
This type of mentality is readily observed amongst abusive parents. "That was a long time ago, why can't you move on?" "You were a sensitive child."
I will never understand people who seem to lack the ability to see that their actions may have a rippling effect throughout someone's life. One can meaningfully and negatively alter the trajectory of someone's life with one action.
I'm not advocating that we live in neurotic paralysis wrecked with the fear of unknowingly hurting others, but we should accept that whatever hurt we do inflict can have long-lasting implications, and when others shed light on ways we may have hurt them, that we lean in, understand, and make amends if possible.
I think this gap in understanding is more of an underlying psychological phenomenon, that those people struggle to grasp the concept you're describing because they just don't get it. Like how people learn, say, math differently. If they had the capacity to understand then they might've already and this wouldn't apply. How to deal with this in a society is a complicated matter.
I'm sort of reminded of some of those alcoholics anonymous folks who apologize to the people who they have wronged, and are dumbfounded to find they are met with anger, or even being arrested.
> Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time.
I don't think this is always true. For me and you, yeah. For good people. But, there are a significant percentage of humans (I have no idea what the number is) where this is completely false. They can move forward in time without a scintilla of guilt or negative repercussions. I fact, for some people, it seems to be fuel for them. They enjoy it. The percentage of those folks is much smaller, I believe. Thankfully.
I see what you’re saying but I think we’re using the phrase “negative equity” slightly differently.
When I say negative equity I’m talking about the compounding opportunity costs of something happening to you. One missed opportunity could lead to another and another.
Everyone is not among the worst people you (or I) have ever met.
Not needing to be told that they caused harm is one of the things that makes them not among the worst people you (or I) have ever met.
Sivers' parable is about his (and our) interpretations of the past -- Sive.rs publishes parables not facts. Context is relevant, here.
Yes, worst people gonna' worst people. Sociopaths are not Sive.rs audience. His point is that we can't change the past and only act in the present. What the worst people you (or I) ever met did can't be changed. How it affects are behavior can.
Particularly when the worst person you (or I) have ever met is you (or I). Biss-ninny 101 stuff. Which Sive.rs (and I) study.
The people I’m referencing are normal people doing things that are accepted as a normal part of doing business. They do it because there are no consequences and may even been an advantage to engaging in light anti-social behavior.
That lady just had a baby and needs to go home at 5:00 PM says one NPR reporter/podcaster/host early in their career? Sound like she’s not committed, I’ll take on her work as I, for one, am committed. True story. Told on a podcast.
Or how about the kind of person who takes credit for another’s work because they can.
I’m not talking about murderers here, I’m talking about normal people doing shitty things and making the world just a little bit worse for everyone (and a lot worse for some in particular) and use whatever to justify their behavior as part of their personal story.
Agreed. This seems to almost rationalize being a sociopath. You can't change the past. The world has no shortage of extremely shitty people who have no regard for others.
>They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers
Why didn't you stop them?
I think your comment was well intended, but it actually comes from the same place that causes a lot of the hurt: a lack of reflection. Even right there, you are trying to qualify harm without recognizing it. "Actual harm" as somehow being far greater and more deserving of consequences than regular harm, but there isn't. This is another narrative we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.
So I hope you do take your own advice seriously. Most of the time, it's not the "worst people that I've ever met" - it's our own image.
The article's main point is that you can change the story, but the actual example he gives is a change in the facts--the actual facts weren't what he thought they were. That is why the story changed--because he found out that the actual facts weren't as bad as the "facts" he had previously believed were true.
So it's not true that "the actual facts are a small part of the story". They are the story; you can't change the story unless you find out the facts were different. At least, not if you're being honest.
You see how quickly you are to believe these are the "actual facts"? That's how quickly they were to believe their "actual facts" as well.
That is the story. Not the facts. What we tell ourselves, what we tell others. This is why they brought up memories, an unstable collection of flashes in our mind, and we use these to craft a story. The story has changed, and will continue to change, you're in the process of writing it right now.
Unless you don't believe in free will and that your story/stories are already written. That's a very fun thought!
This is why "facts" is misleading here. We aren't talking about observed realities (she is going to the park, I am eating an ice cream), we're talking about our feelings, thoughts, memories, perceived consequences, ambitions, projections, assumptions. None of these are objective. Despite our best attempt to come together and make it so.
> You see how quickly you are to believe these are the "actual facts"?
I am taking the author at his word that when he reports something as fact, he is not lying. If you think he's lying, then obviously we're not going to find any common ground here.
> We aren't talking about observed realities (she is going to the park, I am eating an ice cream)
Um, yes, we are. The woman was not permanently disabled, although he previously thought she was. That's not a "feeling", "thought", "flash in the mind". It's a fact. Unless you think the author was lying.
> I am taking the author at his word that when he reports something as fact, he is not lying
They aren't claiming that the author is lying, but that they might _still_ have the facts incorrect.
For example, as you said, the woman was _not_ permanently disabled (since he could see that from meeting up with her in the present). However, what was the exact extent of her injuries? Maybe he assumed she is 100% fine now but she didn't mention that she actually does have persistent back pain ever since the crash. Maybe they didn't talk about that.
In that case, he may tell himself a story that she wasn't permanently hurt at all, and think that is a fact, which it actually isn't.
I think everyone is agreeing that there is an objective truth to what happened. It's that we never have perfect information to know the objective truth down to infinite detail. Even your eyes and ears can deceive us - all we can know is what we perceive via electrical signals to our brain sitting in our dark skull.
Therefore, our fallible minds will very easily get details wrong for many reasons, and then draw conclusions based on that not realizing that there could be other ways of interpreting the information, or that a minor detail we missed (or have forgotten) changes things immensely.
I think the lesson is that we should just be aware of this, and not assume our perception was 100% correct.
> If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong /s
This, but sincerely! Problem is there isn't an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong. There's only each participants' recollection of the event—both flawed. She thought her inattention was the cause of the wreck, he thought his failing to yield was the cause. Who is right? Both of them? Just her? Just him? 80% him, 20% her?
There is no objective way to answer any of this. What happened during that accident only exists today in the minds of the drivers. Sure, you can look at photos of the aftermath and determine that this fender was bent, or that airbag deployed. But you can't get a similar (objective) level of understanding about the actions of the drivers leading up to the wreck.
When they met, he learned that she was not paralyzed (and that his understanding of the past was wrong in that aspect), and she learned that he blamed himself rather than blaming her. By comparing notes, they both got a better version of "the past" in their minds, but there's still room for more variances and disagreements on what exactly happened.
There may be an objective reality. But there's no way we can completely understand it. We can only know what our limited senses tell us. As time marches on, those senses get recorded in memories, and further distorted. For the tiny slice of events that get recorded in audio, video, contemporaneous notes, etc.; we have even better understanding. But those methods of capturing events still leave a lot out. You can hear the words, but not the thoughts. You can see the actions, but not the motivations. You can read the written diary, but there are no entries there for things considered irrelevant by the author.
There are untold numbers of events that occurred millennia ago that we know absolutely nothing about. But they contribute to how the world works today just the same. Long after the cause is lost to time, the effect chain keeps adding links.
> If only there were an objective reality to know which car was in the wrong.
That's not what I was referring to as a change in facts. The change I was referring to is that he thought the woman was permanently disabled, but then found out she wasn't. That's the key fact that enabled both of them to change their stories about what happened. The fact that the woman also believed the accident was her fault was a nice bit of icing on the cake, but it wasn't the key fact.
> The article's main point is that you can change the story, but the actual example he gives is a change in the facts
Not really. The facts didn't change. The fact still remains that both these individuals collided their cars together all those years ago. That is just as true before they met as it was after they met.
What you call facts are perspectives or interpretations of the facts. They both considered themself at fault. This means they both interpreted the fact of the crash in opposite ways. Now they have had a chance to reconcile their opinions or interpretations, but the fact that they collided in their cars never changed. They just feel better because they realized the other person felt like they caused the accident.
I think the point is that our memories are based on our personal interpretations, not based on fact.
Psychologically this is extremely true, your brain throws facts away very quickly but it holds onto emotions for a very long time.
Imagine you go and pick up a cup of coffee from the coffee shop. You probably struggle to actually remember picking up your coffee at all. It happened, but you will have little to no memory of it. Your brain tosses out facts. But now imagine you go to a coffee shop and a cute barista smiles or winks at you while they give you the coffee. You will probably remember that for years, very vividly because of your brain remembers the emotion of that transaction over the myriad of identical transactions you experienced.
Now using the same previous example, lets say you go home and convince yourself that the barista wasn't actually winking at you, they just had something in their eye. So you never act on the flirtatious act. But then a year later you bump into the same barista at a party and they ask why you never asked them out when they tried to flirt with you. Now when you think back on the event, you probably remember it as obvious that it was clearly a deliberate wink and exasperated smile that they gave you, despite the fact that previous to that reconciliation you were convinced it was an innocent act. Your memories have now changed. Its all based on emotion and interpretation of facts. But the actual facts never changed. The amount of winking, smiling, etc was always the same, your interpretation and memory of it is what changed.
The facts as he knew them did. He thought the woman was permanently disabled. Then he learned she wasn't. That's a huge change in his knowledge of the facts.
> They both considered themself at fault.
As I've already pointed out elsewhere upthread, that's not the "fact" I was talking about. See above.
I had this moment during the Covid pandemic. I read a lot of history and I saw pictures of the Spanish influenza and was told it killed more people than WW1. Somehow I pictured the world in the late 1910s with everyone sick and in hospital but now I think it was more like Covid. People got sick and died but life went on and some people were completely unaffected. The world doesn't grind to a halt for world wars and pandemics. People still have kids and get married and start businesses and hike and play the guitar, etc. History is just what we decide to deem important or not.
Images play a big role in how events are perceived. Whenever there's a natural disaster you tend to see all of the worst examples, even if they're not fully representative of the event. But I think it's sometimes necessary in order to get people to take these events seriously, since they can negatively affect so many people. Otherwise people might look at images where some things look normal and think that those who were most affected are overstating the impact of the event.
Another example that comes to mind is the 2020 protests. If I looked at how conservative news was reporting on events, it seemed utterly chaotic. But I had multiple friends that were present at many local events, and they were all perfectly safe.
Floodwaters tend to stir up a lot of dirt and mud, so the water is usually totally opaque. That makes it very hard to tell how deep it is. A lot of overhead views of flooded neighborhoods look completely disastrous, but in reality it's just a foot or two of water that will just go away once the drains can handle it.
But, sometimes, flooding really is severe and the damage is monumental. But it can be hard to distinguish those from imagery. Every picture of a flood looks biblical.
People also completely underestimate how much force flowing water has. It's hard enough to walk in waist-deep water when it's still. Somehow they see a few feet of rushing water and they think "hey, I'm gonna drive my car through that"
A couple feet of water is still disastrous though. You're insurance most likely doesn't cover it and you could be left with tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage easily.
It really depends. In my neighborhood in Louisiana, most yards sloped down to the street. So when the flood was a couple of feet at its deepest, most houses were still fully above the waterline. It's just that the streets were impassable and you needed a boat to get around.
If you are interested in images' role in public perception of events--particularly suffering and tragedy--you might look to read Susan Sontag's essay collection "Regarding the Pain of Others," published in 2003:
> To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.
> a single photograph or filmstrip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s lens. A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?
> Indeed, the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous.
> And, of course, atrocities that are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images—the total extermination of the Herero people in Namibia decreed by the German colonial administration in 1904; the Japanese onslaught in China, notably the massacre of nearly four hundred thousand, and the rape of eighty thousand, Chinese in December 1937, the so-called Rape of Nanking; the rape of some one hundred and thirty thousand women and girls (ten thousand of whom committed suicide) by victorious Soviet soldiers unleashed by their commanding officers in Berlin in 1945—seem more remote. These are memories that few have cared to claim.
> Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.
> A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence.
While this is mostly a good piece of writing, in the real world handmade images (and handwritten notes) are, like photographs, potentially evidence, and the issues raised with photographs are the reasons both photographs and hand-written/hand-drawn items (and all other physical items) as evidence tend to demand supporting (and admit opposing) testimonial and physical evidence of provenance (and, the physical evidence offered for this purpose has the same features, such that ultimately, it all rests on testimonial evidence of provenance.)
I also don't think the first parr of the sentence is true: pictures may be supposed to show, but pictures have been noted for their evocative power long before this piece was written—pictures are in certaim circumstances understood to show, and under other and frequently overlapping circumstances to evoke; there is certainly a common danger in mistaking evocative power for also indicating informative power, but few anywhere have denied the existence of the evocative power of photography.
The 2020 protests were either dangerous or ok depending on where you were and the time of day. Minneapolis had a lot of damage and someone was even burned to death in their store. US insurance costs were over $1B.
> But I think it's sometimes necessary in order to get people to take these events seriously, since they can negatively affect so many people.
Overreacting can have equally bad outcomes, I think. Social isolation sanctioned by pandemic era school lockdowns left me with depression, social anxiety and suicidal ideations - none of which I have managed to fix so far. And I know I'm not alone with this in my age group (in high-school at the start of the pandemic).
Now, I think the resulting number of suicides does not reach the amount of people saved by the countermeasures in total, but it's nevertheless something to consider. (Well, but it's much harder to find a direct correlation in the first place, so really who knows.)
(Re-reading your comment, I now realize that maybe I was completely missing your point, in which case I'm sorry.)
I think this is an important lesson for folks struggling with anxiety about what will happen with climate change as well. It is already awful for lots of people and will continue to be, increasingly so to some degree and up to some point, but like it did during Covid and the Cold War and the world wars and the flu pandemic, in aggregate, life will also go on.
But I think it's also important to remember that that's only the case in aggregate. For many many individual people, life did not go on during all these events (and all the other tragedies that are constantly happening), they lost their own lives, or their parents, or their children, or their friends.
I personally find it really hard to hold both of these truths in my head at once.
Having an incomplete understanding of history goes both ways. Consider the myriad of diseases that were widespread then, but have practically vanished in modern countries with modern healthcare. Getting brutally-to-fatally sick was common in the early 1900s, and day-to-day life was alot worse because of it.
Life in general is better now, and we can keep doing better! And to do better, we have to be honest about history.
On the flip side, if you're a Gen Xer, you almost certainly grew up knowing an adult whose health was directly impacted by polio. And if you don't, Mitch McConnell is sitting up there in Congress. One of the reasons he didn't push back so much when they were passing COVID legislation was because of his own experiences as a child.
This is important, history will remember emotionally charged comments but indeed a lot of what happens is "normal" and forgotten. We could see that in syria or even ukraine.. the geopolitical tension level was completely removed from most day to day stream we could see.
I wonder if this bias/memory-capacity is studied, I assume so but I don't know the name :)
The historical context also misses a lot of what we know about the impact of malnutrition and stress on the immune system. Was the spanish flu actually that bad, or was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population?
Reconciling modern information with historical events is hard. But I think it's completely necessary if we're going to make policy decisions based on history.
> was it actually a fairly bad flu that wreaked havoc on a war-torn population?
No, because those affected worst by it were young adults in relatively good health. Small children and the elderly were proportionally spared. The prevailing theory for why Spanish flu killed more healthy young adults was because it was an over-reaction of the immune system itself that was most harmful:
It is definitely the case that the war led to many young adults being moved around the world and kept in close quarters, which certainly exacerbated the spread and effect of the pandemic.
The Spanish flu really was very bad but would not have killed as many people if it occurred today. Malnutrition might have been a factor (though today's obesity rate might also be a problem) but the bigger thing was lack of antibiotics. Flu almost never kills you directly- it's the bacterial pneumonia you develop on top of it that does. Without antibiotics back then there would have been little they could do
Bacterial Pneumonia was not the novel danger of the "Spanish" flu; They cytokine storm it caused in perfectly healthy people was horrifying, with perfectly healthy people who would normally fight off any flu dying from this one. A lot of young twenty somethings, strong people who were not malnourished died from it.
Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really early, otherwise it's still a great way to die for a normal person.
That's a hypothesis. It is known that (supposedly) that strain can cause cytokine storm more than other flus do. I would not assume that means cytokine storm was the primary cause of death or even the primary cause of death in young adults. Based on my experience my guess is that the pneumonia was a much bigger cause of death than the storm
Right I wasn't expressing the cytokine storm as the primary cause of death but rather a phenomenon that definitely pushed it above a normal flu, especially for healthy young adults.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
That only shows how wily the Chinese are about IP theft, building time-viewing technology 2,000 years ago so that they could rip off American pop culture. Especially clever of them to steal things that sound like ancient parables and plant them in ancient times.
That Wikipedia page was created in 2020. Northern Exposure predates that.
Going with the OP's theme: if we repeat the GP's comment enough times, over a long enough period, we can change history and then history would really show it to have originated from the "story "Ed" told in the TV show 'Northern Exposure.'"
Taoism has its root run back to at least the 4th century BCE, and quite possibly earlier. Even though this specific telling is probably considerably newer, it carries motives that are very common in Taoism in general. Claiming that the story is then a rip-off from a TV show from the 90s is... Well, it's possible, but not very likely.
Maybe you shouldn't have used "rip off" unless you were absolutely sure that you had the relationship the right way around. And it seems you didn't. There's a lesson to be learned there.
It reads more like someone wrote it at 17 imagining what it'd be like to cripple someone and have this elaborate 'moment' where all is forgiven because nothing is real.
There is a common conception that we don't know the future, but we know the past.
In our heads, we have models of the past and models of the future. Sure, there is an asymmetry between knowing the past and the future - due to thermodynamics. Still, in both cases, it is good to think of these as probabilistic models, far from any certainty.
We have partial impressions of the past. We have seen, felt, thought something at various points in time and then we construct a sequential story of what happened, often employing abstract cause-effect reasoning. Two different observers might come up with different stories. To reach a consensus, they have to exchange their points of view.
Once all the observers forget their story or they disappear, the past "fact" disappears from collective memory, unless that story was passed to newer generations by speech, writing, etc.
Makes sense to me. Consciousness forms a closure over a deletion mechanism towards less and less paths over time. Eventually inconsistent architecture. It’s exactly what the universe needs.
I think this may refer to the second law of thermodynamics - entropy cannot decrease over time in an isolated system. One could argue the entire universe is one.
But our local "system" has a gigantic miasma of incandescent plasma on our doorstep. The Earth itself should not need to worry about entropy for a long while yet...
>But our local "system" has a gigantic miasma of incandescent plasma on our doorstep. The Earth itself should not need to worry about entropy for a long while yet...
I interpret GP's reference to thermodynamics/entropy as generating the "arrow (asymmetry) of time,"[0]
Which exists (at least for us matter-based beings) as remembering the "past," but not the "future," and local fluctuations in entropy don't affect that at all.
What @stared means with the entropy quote is that in a world tending from organised to disorganised, it is impossible to KNOW the future, but also very hard to TRULY KNOW the past. As each step into the future causes the remnants of past to decay.
The past also suffers from survivorship bias. Although there's a 1 in 8 chance of flipping 3 consecutive heads, in the future after flipping 3 consecutive heads you forget about the other possibilities. E.g., there was a 1 in 8 chance that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could have all been born women before they were conceived.
> Although there's a 1 in 8 chance of flipping 3 consecutive heads, in the future after flipping 3 consecutive heads you forget about the other possibilities.
In other contexts, also known as the gambler's fallacy if I recall.
If you are specifically looking for a result of 3 coin flips, then it's 1 in 8 chance of getting 3 of the same. The gambler's fallacy is seeing 2 coin flips come up heads and thinking there's only a 1 in 8 chance that the last one will come up heads.
“I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead:
Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.
We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.”
I’d replace AI with just IT in general. Relatedly, I used to believe in digital rot but now I’m not sure. I can for example search all the photos on my phone instantly to return images with a given text string. So the technology is improving to comprehend any data format and effectively retain its data.
> We lose this when everything is recorded forever.
I'd argue the opposite, we've amplified this affect. Off-hand statements from the past recorded forever get re-examined through a new lens in the present. What previously might have been totally innocuous become a scandal later. Whenever someone rockets into being main character for the day on the internet, their entire history is pulled up and re-assessed.
So like many things, it's amplified by the internet, but largely for the negative.
Data, information, doesn't rot, but code does because it relies on the implicit promises of the underlying system(s) it runs on top of, the systems it interacts with, and the expectations of it's users.
Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital.
And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the information over time is new methods and tools for understanding that information.
Can you tell me what hieroglyphics mean? What about a phrase of latin or another dead language? Information is only as "fresh" as our ability to interpret and understand it. Dead languagues are the same as a file who's format we no longer have the spec for. Yes, the ones and zeros may still be there, but without the ability to understand what they mean, there's little we can do with that information. We're still at risk of losing those capabilities for data.
This touches on Narrative Therapy. Events happened, yes. Facts are immutable and can't be changed or wished away simply because they are inconvenient.
Rather, how we make sense of them—and internalize them—affects our lives in significant ways, especially if the prevaling narrative we believe about ourselves prevents us from thriving.
Similar message, among many other valuable bits, in the book The Courage to be Disliked. Very good read, no fluff like a lot of psychology books. The title is misleading, there’s a strong element of being helpful to others rather than being disliked. I’d recommend it to anyone.
I've read this book and many others like it. I completely agree with your assessment. I felt really good when I read this book and others. But afterwards I go back to feeling bad about myself as always
If you are interested in this topic but would like to understand how historians think about things, look into writing about Historiography and Historical Memory. This person appears to just be some guy who describes himself as an entrepreneur and TED speaker.
The way we understand the past is a deep topic that is analyzed and discussed by actual professionals constantly. Better to read their writing than this kind of stuff, IMO.
This comment reminds me a lot of XKCD "Ten Thousand" (https://xkcd.com/1053/). You don't need to denigrate the author's credibility to write about their personal experience and insight from it in order to provide a reference to the much deeper field of study on this to those who are interested. Personally, I had heard of "historiography" but had no idea this is what it meant. And now I do! And that wouldn't have happened today if this author hadn't published their little anecdote.
I'm less denigrating the author and more encouraging people who found this idea interesting to seek out experts. I'm glad that this person is thinking about this topic. I also see a frankly huge number of absolute amateurs having their ideas about history distributed all over the world while professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively.
I think you're doing both things. And I applaud you for the encouragement and useful information! I also don't begrudge you your frustration about this. But I also find the "ten thousand" idea to be a useful re-framing of how to respond to this phenomenon where something seems obvious to you because you know all about it, but it's actually not obvious to most people at all. Maybe you'll find this to be a useful re-framing too, I dunno.
I will push back a bit on "professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively". I don't think that's really true. In my experience, it seems like most professionals and academics prefer to write and speak within their own bubbles. Some few make a concerted effort to communicate effectively to the masses, but more often they look down their noses at the kinds of communication that entails. For instance, my interpretation of your "TED speaker" comment is that TED talks are not a suitable way to communicate about this topic. But a compelling TED talk or blog post or op-ed in a mainstream publication would be a great way for a professional to communicate about this with a large audience. I think this has a lot to do with the way academia is set up. "Publish or perish" provides little incentive structure for effectively communicating your work for amateurs.
Or in more concrete terms: What professionals do you know of in this field who are out there doing everything they can to communicate effectively about this to a non-professional non-academic audience? What is it that they're doing?
> I will push back a bit on "professionals are doing everything they can to communicate effectively". I don't think that's really true.
For personal reasons, I am very good friends with an unusually large number of history faculty. I do not agree with your assessment at all. My experience is that historians are desperately trying to communicate their expertise in the face of an increasingly hostile culture that either does not value their expertise or considers them to be propagandists. Public History in particular is having a renaissance right now and Digital History (which is often tightly associated with widespread distribution of tools and interactive systems) is comparatively well funded.
History doesn't have the same "publish or perish" model as say CS because individual journal articles don't actually provide much professional clout. You do have the publish the book (which are increasingly distributed open-access) but there is ample time for communication with laypeople (and teaching).
What are that trying? My last paragraph was intended as a call for examples, links, books, blogs, newsletters, YouTube channels, whatever! If they are trying to communicate to an amateur but interested audience, here's your chance to help them reach that audience.
The author’s claim “history is not true” is a huge one and it’s reasonable to look up his background to understand where he might be coming from.
Unfortunately for him (the author) he’s not coming from an expert’s position, and whatever perceptions that creates in people is not fault of the commenter you’re replying to.
The conclusion to this article should have been: it's important to study the past, and find out what the truth is. Memory is fallible, and people often misunderstand or lie. But by investigating -- going to more people, consulting more sources, you can get closer to knowing what really happened.
Finding and preserving the truth about the past is more important than ever. Truth is under attack from all sides, with politicians moving the Overton window on lying, LLMs, the decline of centralized news, fake reviews and comment farms.
If the author meant to say "History is often wrong and surprisingly easy to set right with a bit of investigation," great, but "The past is not true" is an absurd and harmful statement. How would you feel if I hit you with my car and ran, or tried to overturn an election and then said "I'm not guilty because the past is not true"?
The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point.
Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.
Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.
Right. The past is true, but your memories are flawed, and your experience is incomplete. You have to make an effort to get the facts right. To get a full understanding of any situation, a good start is to talk to anyone you can who was there when it happened.
The tricky part is: that's also often a good way to get a misunderstanding.
Above you say "tried to overturn an election" - I'm not sure who it is you are referring to here, but that charge was laid at the feet of thousands of January 6th protesters by thousands of journalists and armchair experts, few of whom even ever considered if that was the actual intent of the people.
People often don't wonder what is true, because they are not able to even try.
It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not. We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie. Headlines like "she'll never walk again" sells more than "she'll be fine".
Your statement is only partly true. The article just says "I found out that I broke the other driver’s spine, and she’ll never walk again" - so you're reading into it that he read it in a newspaper, but maybe it was just hearsay from someone who talked to someone who worked at the hospital who had talked to the doctor who may have treated her (or maybe someone else who also had a car accident that day)? I think the vague formulation is intentional to make it apply more widely.
But I agree with the point that it's not "the past" that's at fault here, it's unreliable sources of information.
> It's not that the past is not true. The past is true, what was reported is not.
How do you know the past even exists? All you have is memory and reports, which are unreliable. You can only make the assumption that "the past is true."
> We know very clearly where the problem lies. The media is a lie.
You're understating that. It's not just "the media" boogeyman, it's memory and records that are the problem. They're never complete and always get stuff wrong.
He's saying what happened, happened. What you make it mean, is up to you. The story you tell yourself, is a story you can rewrite.
This beautiful story is one of the truest things I've read on HN in 8 years.
This guy lived crippled by what the story he told himself about what happened for half his life. Then with a new story, a new encounter, he set himself free. Incredibly brave to tell this tale. Some people live in their story about something for their whole lives. They never do rewrite what they make it mean into one that works better for them. People live imprisoned by things that happened 40 years in the past. It's so sad to see, but so common.
It's true that you can revisit the trauma of the past, and transform it and yourself. It will probably sound like woo, but it's not. Lots of protocols now being tested in studies that combine guided traumatic memory replay, with an adjuvant, like inderol (to create emotional distance), or psylocybin (to help shift perspective), all with the goal of producing a transformative reorientation of your relationship to the past trauma. Powerful stuff. "Plant medicine" retreats run in the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and Central America (iboga, ayahuasca) have similar aims: re-experiencing the traumatic memory through an altered state aids you in rewriting your story about it, and helps you get new liberating perspective and transform what you make what happened mean for you.
If you think you suffer from that kind of traumatic memory, you probably already know what I'm talking about. If not, I encourage you to investigate it for yourself. :)
Just wanted to add that you don't need external chemicals to do this sort of thing. It's pretty easy to learn to enter trance at will and then do things like, e.g. "Parental Timeline Re-imprinting" where you go back in time, give your parents resources to be better, then live forward a whole new life with the new, resourceful parents. Afterward your nervous system will respond as if the fictional, imaginary life was real. (The brain is an evolved organ, it always chooses the best available options. There isn't really any free will, because evolution.) Of course, this only really helps if lousy parenting was a source of your current problems.
But external chemicals may help some people (some people may be in a state where it's really hard for them to learn what may come a lot easier to folks like me and you~~not everyone is good at navigating their own internal terrain).
Just like you don't need a therapist to guide you, but everyone has different capabilities to do so themselves, and therapist can benefit. I know how to do this, sounds like you know too, even folks like us who know how to do it themselves, I think should be open to the experience of being guided by someone else to see what it's like.
This re-timelining can be used for many things. And it's not fiction. Your body makes it real, and it's more real than that, too.
I think chemistry helps, it's not strictly necessary, but there's a whole lot of psych (placebo etc), and structural (makes more sense as a therapy / economic activity in that industry to combine with an agent, probably lead to that therapy getting more traction and helping more people), and real (chemistry clearly helps, ancients have been using it) reasons that make the combination therapy of chemistry plus therapist a really good option to be generally available! :)
I am not with you on there's no free will. There's definitely free will. (and it can be a cope to pretend there's not, I think, because it gets you out of personal responsibility, a thing lots of folks have an issue with!). Because it's a choice. I mean, there's even a choice to rewrite your story in the ways we're talking about. That's clearly free will, to you, right?
> The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
This is why it is important to forgive your parents. They interpret events differently and it usually isn’t until you become a parent yourself do you develop enough empathy to see how those interpretations came to be.
Oof, as a psychologist that deals a lot with people who were abused and mistreated, this is a pretty big generalization.
Yes, as we age we come to see things from a more experienced perspective and the perspectives of the adults we grew up with and change, but going all the way to "that is why it is important to forgive your parents" is a big big step.
It is typically a good idea to try to get to forgiveness, you're right, but there's a lot of very indefensible behavior out there.
You may have a skewed view of the frequency of that level of abuse, due to the (very important) work you do. When it comes to humans there are exceptions to every rule, but not every single exception needs be called out. Not everything is “problematic” nor worth an “oof”.
It’s simply an example, though a somewhat extreme one, of the problem with the GP’s generalization.
I think it actually relates to the original article. There’s a difference between mere interpretation and what actually happened.
“You should forgive your parents, because one day you’ll be older and see their perspective” collapses “interpretations develop and mature” with “some events are a problem”.
Both can be forgiven and it’s probably a good idea to do so. I think it’s not helpful to generalize in that way.
Also abuse happens a lot. It may not be the majority but it is NOT rare.
Thank you. This is important to say, seriously. This kind of "pop psych" notion that you should just "forgive your parents" even if they abused you, definitely is retraumatizing and works to try diminish the impact of the abuse and your feelings about it. Which shouldn't be minimized, but processed, I think. Especially because, it seems a lot of times, people coming from that situation don't see how fucked up it was, because it was their only experience, and until they see how good parents behave they don't realize how poorly they were mistreated. I think this is why it's important to face it, and process it, rather than never understand or just "forgive".
BTW~~what kind of psychological process, thought do people you treat go through when they forgive really abusive people or behavior, people that meant to hurt them, with malice? How does forgiveness look like for the person going choosing it and what are the effects? Sorry, it's a big question! No probs if you don't want to or can't answer it! :)
Thanks for saying this. It's really heartening to see people with this understanding.
So typically there's a lot of exposure, facilitation, and processing work FIRST. There's not really a route to forgiveness in my opinion until someone is pretty deeply in touch with all the feelings associated with how they were treated. I take a mindful self-compassion approach to experiencing and reprocessing memories and emotions drawing a lot from Paul Gilbert, a self-compassion researcher and advocate in the UK.
Once a lot of the feelings have been processed, including anger and resentment, we often get to a point where the anger doesn't seem to serve much purpose for the person anymore. It's not covering up something they didn't want to feel (guilt, shame, sadness, fear, etc) and it's not "punishing their parents" in a way that many people hold on to. More often than not, the client just spontaneously forgives at that point, and forgiveness looks like seeing the situation as a bad one that everyone involved was stuck in and no longer having a need for the perpetrator to suffer or take responsibility.
So acceptance and compassion then processing and reprocessing with self-compassion. Sometimes a discussion of blame and forgiveness and what they do and don't mean.
We have statistics and they are not pretty. The CDC reports that 1 out of every 7 children have experienced child abuse or neglect in the last year. That doesn't even include stuff that technically isn't abuse or neglect but rather just damaging parenting: Plenty of kids had their parents impress upon them some personal neurosis out of their own traumatized problems, and now you start another cycle of that person causing issues in their kids unless they get help for that or find ways to avoid it.
I would consider one out of seven to be "problematic" and "oof" worthy
Yep, flaws I saw in how my parents brought me up definitely informed the way I approached bringing up my kids. But then I look at the childhoods my parents had, and honestly they did a heck of a lot better job than I could have had any right to expect. So I think overall I did pretty well, with lessons to learn for sure, but it's only fair to think of it as an iterative process.
I've had the opposite experience where as I've grown older and had kids of my own, I've began to judge my parent's even more harshly than I had when I was younger.
That sounds as understanding, not forgiving. I think that when it comes to parents, understanding makes forgiving unnecessary, as there is actually nothing to forgive. Except for the cases of actual, malicious abuse, of course.
"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." - Nietzsche
There’s also a chance he went to apologize and never get a relief or forgiveness as the person was really paralyzed. It is not fair to judge based on the result. Mistake made, apologize immediately, don’t wait. And take the consequences whether it is good or bad - that’s a true move on from the past.
Look at it this way, officers see car accidents every day. The majority are cases where someone ran directly into the car in front of them due to inattention.
Humans make a lot of mistakes and unless there were extenuating factors (DUI, for example), they are very unlikely to become criminal. In many cases, they wouldn't even be ticketed.
Given that there was a yield sign involved, it also may be a known problematic intersection. Sadly, we have a lot of those in the US too. Yield signs in places with low traffic and poor visibility are way more common than they should be.
That's very surprising to me. Here in the UK, a serious accident where someone broke their spine would be investigated without a shadow of a doubt. They would want to rule out any criminal culpability.
In some states in the US, if one party was even 1% at fault (like, for example, being distracted like in the story), they may not even be able to collect damages from the other party.
Yeah, the US in general is extremely cavalier with our car culture. Usually the only police involvement when an accident occurs is when they're called to the scene to take a report of the incident. Afterwards, the parties usually just deal with the aftermath themselves and through insurance companies.
Even if you have to show up to court, people almost always walk away after pleading "not guilty," because again, the officer who reported the incident can rarely be bothered to show up on the court date.
It's really just another example of cops in the US choosing to not do their job. We have plenty of laws on the books that could punish inattentive or reckless driving especially when it results in a severe outcome, but that would require a cop to open an investigation and all that noise so they just write up a report for your insurance and try to get you to believe there's nothing else they can do.
The complete inefficacy and refusal to do any work of most american police departments is absurd. It's like they still believe their primary mission to be slave retrieval and violently suppressing strikes, as if it's still 1890.
> What makes Cann’s story notable among the 700 or so bicyclists who are hit and killed in America each year is that San Hamel faces charges in Cann’s death.
In the end he got 10 days in jail, 4 years probation, and had to pay the cyclist's funeral expenses - for plowing him over from behind while driving home drunk from a bar.
So apparently even if you hit someone while DUI nothing really happens.
Manslaughter charges only happen if the driver is drunk or flees. Otherwise it's a traffic ticket AT MOST.
My friend's teenaged son, while biking, was run over by a driver who did it completely intentionally. Zero charges or tickets.
From my link above
>Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault.
>But if the public is at a loss, so are prosecutors. Portland, Oregon, attorney Ray Thomas explains that DAs don’t like to go after “some soccer dad who made a mistake… The police, prosecutors, and courts don’t feel it’s a mistake that should net someone jail time… There are criminally negligent homicide laws. But [a crash] has got to be really, really bad.”
Ok, this article shocked me more than the post this thread is about. What has manslaughter have to do with whether you are drunk or not? Does that make the person you killed any less dead? Is this a consequence of DAs being elected officials in most of the US? So, as long as there are more drivers who could see themselves in this situation than cyclists who could get mad about this in the electorate, drivers killing cyclists will be off the hook?
The definition of vehicular manslaughter is unlawful or negligent operation of a vehicle resulting in a death. If the driver was not driving unlawfully, such as DUI, then it is not manslaughter. Fleeing the scene of an accident is unlawful so that also makes it meet the definition. Other reasons could include speeding or running a red light.
That still leaves us with the second part - "...or negligent". I find it a bit hard to believe that in all those cases the cyclists were at fault? Unless you consider that they were already acting recklessly because they tried to use a bicycle on a public street (I know a lot of people subscribe to this opinion, but I don't).
I don't want to be too insistent, but: if you get hit by lightning or a falling rock while cycling or driving along, that's no-ones fault. But as long as two vehicles are involved, there is a set of well-defined rules that are designed to make sure that these vehicles don't collide, and if they do collide, in the overwhelming majority of cases one (or both) of the parties involved has failed to follow these rules, i.e. negligence.
Well, accidents do happen, don't they? Thing is so, if one party was reckless it amounts, usually, to some charges of hurting / injuring someone.
But you show nicely the differemce between history / facts (number of accidents from official statistics matched against charges and results of analysis of each accident) and feelings / story / narrative (someone says something to a journalists who then reports on it).
I don't always fully agree with anecdotal feel good stories that seem to imply a greater universal point due to a by-chance outcome. What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault?
It's nicely written, but it speaks to most people's general positivity bias: our yearning for a benign truth underlying all things that are bad, or more specifically, that bad things aren't really real, that they're a mirage over the real state of all things which are actually good and wholesome and better than you could have even guessed. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably draws miserable people to religions that offer eternal salvation.
> What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault?
In this case his story would have never been written. Thus we get a big survivorship bias to hear only about unlikely events and get some kind of wisdom tidbits from those.
>> What if the author had paralyzed the woman? What if he was solely and entirely at fault?
>In this case his story would have never been written. Thus we get a big survivorship bias to hear only about unlikely events and get some kind of wisdom tidbits from those.
That's not necessarily true. Many years ago, I killed a 77 year-old woman by striking her with my bicycle. Her skull fractured when she hit the pavement. I heard her skull being crushed, but I didn't realize it at the time -- after I realized what that sound was, it's haunted me to this day.
I was completely at fault (I blew through a red light and hit her after avoiding someone else) and while I don't think about it every day any more, I bear the responsibility for her injury, eventual death and the grief it caused her family.
While I don't consider myself a bad or evil person, I made a really bad decision that cost someone their life. And I will bear the guilt of that bad decision forever.
I don't give myself a pass because it wasn't a malicious act, mostly because that poor woman is still dead regardless of my motivations.
I can't go back and change the past, but I've tried to make better decisions since then. That's not enough, but it's all I can do to avoid such things moving forward.
I think magical, positive thinking is protective even in the most dire times or atrocities. This is an intuition that's based on anecdotes from watching the documentary Shoah and reading Man's Search for Meaning, both of which cover how survivors dealt with the Holocaust.
True. If humans didn't have a positivity bias our own intelligence would be unbearable. We have to be able to viscerally imagine and reckon with the worst possible realities while keeping our heads above water. It's also why I believe humor exists: it provides a psychological and social reward for effectively navigating negative circumstances.
I think that people tend to mix emotion and reason too readily. To an extent we are governed by our emotions, but we shouldn't let them consume us. Negativity bias is definitely detrimental but so is positivity bias. That's different from being compassionate. Compassion is a principle, a moral axiom that many people hold, but positivity bias is saying we should feel blindly feel good. We should have a tempered view of our principles and personalities.
Your explanation of humor seems woefully inadequate. What is the corresponding solution to a negative solution in making a dad joke?
I think the article is sending a pretty problematic overall message.
The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.
I think the point is that interpretation is all we really have. We believe that memories are these absolute things, but rigorous studies show that no human being remembers things perfectly, even when they believe they do.
For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.
If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.
Yes, I agree that “interpretation is all we have” is the point they are trying to make. I also agree that there is an important point there. Memories are often not what we think they are.
However, in the story, the author did NOT have a memory of breaking a woman’s back. He had a memory of getting in an accident. He interpreted it as his fault. He was told that he broke her back. Not his interpretation. It was a belief about events that he wasn’t present to (what happened in the woman’s car and inside the woman’s body) not really any different than anything else we’re told but don’t witness firsthand. It sounds like it may even have been a lie the police told him to scare him.
Your story is different because you did have an actual experience and misinterpreted it’s meaning (man in red suit = real Santa Claus).
I am not sure that differentiating between "that which I physically sensed with my own body" and "information I received from others" leads to particularly good place. Yes, we should probably put a little more weight on things we experienced, but even they are subject to massive differences of interpretation based on prior experience and knowledge. Humanity has made enormous strides by being able to believe in information we obtained from others, and discarding that is something I am convinced does not lead to positive outcomes.
I acknowledge that not discarding it can also lead to negative outcomes, as in TFA.
I agree with this point. I hadn't meant to suggest that we should discard information received from others.
But I think it would be crazy to not to differentiate between immediate experience and what we've been told. Not even because immediate experience is always more accurate. Sometimes it is NOT, but it's a different source of information subject to different problems. Often more trustworthy but not always, though the "not always" can be ameliorated a bit by understanding some of the limits of personal experience.
I was really only taking issue with "interpretation is all we have" applying in the original story - that there is a difference between "my interpretation about something I experienced" and "my beliefs about a thing I did not experience".
Yes the author's story changed, but it changed because he found out that he was lied to by the police (or perhaps, if we want to be generous, "unintentionally misled") not because his memory was fallible.
To get back to the point I took issue with, in the story "the facts" mattered an awful lot. It was a lack of access to the facts that caused the problem not "an incorrect interpretation" of what the author experienced. The latter happens all the time, but interpreting our experience differently (e.g., reprocessing a traumatic memory with self-compassion and seeing it as unfortunate and something to learn from) is a different thing than finding out what we were told was a lie. Both change our story, but one is indeed a reinterpretation and the other is a change in belief or knowledge.
I think it's important to separate those two things. I think some want to treat them as the same. I think that can cause problems.
I am impressed with the clarity of your thinking on this. Since you value epistemological hygiene, you might like Ayn Rand's work in metaphysics and epistemology.
As a parent-governor, the headmaster shanghai'ed me into performing as Father Christmas; I had to put on the costume, and go round all the classrooms going "ho ho ho".
When I got to my daughter's classroom, she didn't recognize me. But some other kids did; they told her "That's your Dad!". She was mortified, and burst into tears.
I always despised the Father Christmas lie, and I should have refused; but the headmaster was very dominant and manipulative.
This story made me realize a common pattern. A story in your life may lead to an insight. This does not mean the series of events make a good argument, like the conclusion is supported by the events that lead up to it.
I think that’s what happened here. Author carries guilt about an event. Finds out the guilt was unfounded. This makes them realize a story can change at any moment. So you can change a story at any moment, change the narrative around a situation.
Is this conclusion supported by the story? To your point, no, not really. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or absurd, either. There may have been a ton of other information in the author’s head and this event unlocked it. Maybe it will for some readers, to. But it’s not something that will stand up to scrutiny.
What point? That this person is saying "I believed I did a bad thing and it turned out to be wrong so I exclaim that there is no objective reality and you shouldn't beat yourself up over bad things you think you did because maybe they weren't really that bad"?
Come on, this fails even basic logic. One event being misremembered is not valid proof that all or even many events are misremembered to your advantage.
Thanks for sharing what you found there! I don't know, I get if you take that from it, but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.
> , but it just seems a narrow interpretation. And there's a wider view, that's a very useful one, that I think you've missed too.
This is why I didn’t elaborate in a follow-up reply. I knew I was going to get a reiteration of the first reply (“wider view”, who the hell knows what that means).
So the reason you didn't reply is because you knew what other people were going to say if you did? Why would that stop you? Because you felt misunderstood?
What if people understand you, but just think there's more than one way to read it? Do you really think the only way to read that story is the way you did?
Memory is a process. We do not have fixed objects we could call representations stored in our brains. Someone asks "what did you have for breakfast" and I respond with a word "pancakes" — a process and action occurs and we call it memory, I don't go looking up some representation of "the facts" and wheel it out before them, nor do I produce an actual pancake.
In other words, of course memory is an interpretation, and historical thought is basically a collective form of these kinds of processes.
What's fascinating, and what powers the drama of the article is that even if we know this scientifically and philosophically, we often can't help but act as though our memories were objects, were these concrete things that we have at hand. A person can remember, but no person actually possesses memories (unless you want to talk about the dynamic and constantly changing states of a neuronal system).
There's certainly a lot of baggage carried by almost everyone almost all the time. We spend a big chunk of our lives worrying that X thing will happen, and another big chunk of our lives worrying that Y thing did happen.
And yet we only ever live in now, so the baggage that we carry can be adapted. For some of this - eg in the case of trauma - it's severe, and difficult, and requires lots of working through with therapy and drugs etc, and sometimes you just can't escape the fear or the past. But sometimes if you spend time examining what the fear or regret or guilt or whatever actually is, what it actually feels like, you can come to understand it much better - and it is possible to make peace with these feelings.
MBSR / meditation / psychedelics / etc are all about providing new forms of perspective to help manage and come to understand these different angles.
The story is not about past, but about how many middlemen there these days.
And how people got used to not taking responsibility for their own actions, communication etc.
People are not speaking directly anymore, only through layers of unnecessary, corrupted, stupid and ignorant lawyers, insurance companies, agents and other meaningless units.
Not only the past, but all thoughts of the future, all interpretations about present events, all religions, all expressions in any language, even the seemingly separate self "you" take yourself to be... the very center of the narrative, are all only stories.
They are only conceptual representations made of thought.
This is quite profound. Consider a sentence. Every additional word has the ability to completely change the meaning of the whole sentence. In the same way, every passing moment is an opportunity to completely change the preceding moments. Sure facts are “real” in the sense that atoms are real. Atoms might be the building blocks of “reality” but it is up to the individual how clusters of atoms are interpreted, used, etc. Facts in the same way are surely the building blocks for the universe of emotion and dynamic interaction, but when you zoom in on them, as with atoms, they vanish. Even if this woman had answered the door in a wheelchair, an interaction filled with love and forgiveness would’ve left the author with the same feeling.
Most of the narrative of WWII I learned in high school is built off of grains of truth, but other grains of truth are much more important, depending on where you live.
You learn that Japan surrendered because of the atom bombs, then you learn that they surrendered because the Soviets invaded Korea, then you learn that it's a combination of factors.
People want to hold a complete story in their heads, with a satisfying conclusion. If you can find someone or something to blame, that is a very satisfying conclusion. If you are fighting a fight, you will read that fight into all of the history you encounter.
.. and then there is faux forgiveness that covers up for something else.
In the movie Hired Gun, Liberty DeVitto, former drummer for Billy Joel, tells in gruesome detail how Billy screwed him over, along with his two bandmates.
Then he tells us how he bears no ill will for Billy, and shows a letter to him saying that he'll always be there for him.
I think a lot of people like to say they've forgiven because it sounds good.
This is the so self-serving and self-congratulatory! He had the nerve to cry on her doorstep, which says he didn't want to apologize, but to be forgiven and to make a show of it.
Amending past wrongs is about showing up without any regard for your own feeling and the intention to do whatever is in your power to set the wrong aright. You admit the wrong and then you listen.
I get it that to the author this is some cute meta-story about "we were both wrong!" But truly acknowledging one's fault is antithetical to this kind of fawning over oneself and infantile moralizing.
That’s harsh. Showing up is demonstrably an action in the direction of making things right , apologising is not out of a pure disconnected entity, but out of a being with feelings, driven by them to do right. Perhaps if the story was different, he would have gotten the proper moralising tune, but that was his experience and that’s the tune he found appropriate. I don’t agree with his findings but that does not mean I question his intentions.
That's funny, I read it more as a story about forgiveness and how often we carry around these life burdens (guilt, anger, whatever) solely on an emotionally-charged misunderstanding of what we think to be the truth. It got me thinking about what stories I keep telling myself that I may be clinging to that are potentially incomplete or incorrect.
I'm not a native speaker of English and I think I found out that the meaning of "past" in English contains the memory of someone, as well as - this might not be correct, though - factual events.
Anyway, this is a warm story, I have more belief in human being, especially as a being who has lived in Asian culture, who have learned 人間, the human, which in fact has more than mere human being, but also the one in the community of human beings.
Rhetorical, I know, but we need more love of each other, I think. :-)
> History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
> It’s never too late to change a story.
I'm not sure I draw the same conclusion. It seemed to me like the facts did matter as much as ever in that case, it's just that none of the two principals had the facts at first. By learning new information, they changed their interpretation of the events. The facts change the story, never the other way around.
This reminds me of the "second arrow." A buddhist idea.
What happened in the story, the ground truth, is real. There was an accident, people were injured.
That this story really highlights is the danger of a second arrow that is not that we tell ourselves stories about the past. The danger is that we tell ourselves stories so false they cause undue suffering.
The point isn't that the past isn't true. The issue is the story.
I typically get salty about big picture feel good garbage getting posted on here, but this one kinda warmed my heart.
The past as we understand it is indeed a lie. And while we should strive to reconcile ourselves with our past, apologizing, forgiving, remembering, and regretting as appropriate, ... it's important to work to leave the past where it belongs, behind us.
Had the same feeling. The man is a writer after all and he has just way too many stories at this point that I'm wondering if they're all true or if he's just using made up stories as a tool to convey messages.
Then he should be more careful in public spaces and around other people, shouldn't he? Assuming it is true, that is, otherwise he should switch to fiction books.
Backing up your point by making up a bullshit story is called "lying" and "disinformation" and should be rejected outright by anyone who wants a high trust society. We should not build policy, intentions, or any ideologies based on a single lie from some dude trying to push a "nobody is ever guilty of anything" agenda.
This post adds nothing to the world, especially with the horrific conclusion it is encouraging you to accept. "The past is not real" is utter horseshit, and does not follow from "I did something I thought was really bad but was only kinda bad actually" in the first place.
Once, my physics teacher from high school told the class that the only history we should "trust" is the one that we rationally felt and maybe, the one that was told by our parents, while the other historical "facts" are just the result of tons and tons of interpretations of random people that you end up taking as universal "truths".
Because of quantum mechanics this is a genuinely open philosophical question. The equations which time evolve the wave function are time-symmetric, which means that even if you know the current state of the universe's wave function somehow, you still only get a probabilistic projection for the state in the past. I think this leaves open the genuine physical possibility that the past does not exist in the same way that the present exists. A lot comes down to what you think about the ontology of quantum mechanics.
This has nothing to do with fiction. Roughly speaking, if you are some kind of wave function realist, then the implication that the past has a similar kind of uncertainty as the future is a simple consequence of the time reversibility of quantum mechanics (without the measurement postulate). Read a book.
I feel like the internet has really made the fault ones of our memories very apparent. I have a lot of old memories that I will think about and then try to research the event online and realize a lot of my memories are impossible because of the actual timeline of events.
For us with anxiety problems the past is very often a lie. Imagining the worst possible outcome for everything tends to make things stick in the brain that are fundamentally not true.
I think this story is meant to be uplifting to those who are troubled by their past, but to me, I just see all the politicians and grifters looking on hungrily like "Yeaaaaaah?"
Yeah, many corrupt politicians, fascists, murderers and other criminals would love the idea that "the past is not true". I'd bet that the story is fake because of the conclusion "you can change history". Both of them didn't change the history, they have changed their knowledge about history, which was given to them by third parties.
I think you're wrong about historiography (and your highschool history teacher too).
"History" is accounts (stories) about the past.
"Historiography" isn't about the past; it's an account of how historians "do" history. I mean, historiography would include accounts of how past historians used to do history.
> I think you're wrong about historiography (and your highschool history teacher too).
you're wrong about me being wrong. I remembered a little better now:
"there is no history, the proper name of this subject is historiography" he taught us this
but also, your reply suggests you missed the point (and my teacher's) that there is no history, it's all accounts by some "historian"
I would use the name meta-history, or 'philosophy of history' for what you describe as 'historiography'.
then again, maybe you're just being nitpicky about things and are focusing on what I said wrong instead of on the point i was trying to make
further again, I cannot help but notice how going forwards "metahistory" may even be understood as the story behind Mark Zuckerberg's giant coorporation
Well, I said that history consists of accounts (stories).
I agree that what I (and most historians) call "historiography" could be called "meta-history". But that activity already has a name; we don't need to construct a new term (with a Greek prefix and a Latin suffix) to stand-in for a word that already works fine.
Historiography isn't some handwavey version of the past; it's the study of how historians do their work. That's the word historians use. Honestly, I think your history teacher got the wrong end of the stick.
Like, Humpty Dumpty had a point: you can use words to mean whatever you want. But it's not helpful for intelligent discourse to redefine commonly-understood terms.
check out the movie ‘rashomon’ by kurosawa, one incident recalled from different folks and it is all colored by their own perspective, Truth, is hard to glean.
> You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable.
Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new things about the past. You can change your stories about it. You can even assist others in doing that.
But the future? That is always out of reach, and already encompasses all your attempts to change it.
Do you know the concept of space-time, block universe, B-theory of time, etc? How physics assumes that the laws of physics don't know the notion of "now"? And how physicists usually start every calculation with "let X denote the set of events", all the past and future events?
Isn't that depressing? The future is true, even if we can't know it. (Even in a finite, discrete and deterministic universe, which we can compute on computers, habitants of the universe can't know the future. A software can't compute its future. A similar reasoning to the halting problem can show this.)
May I interest you in an other view? Slice Universe to the rescue! There is only now, and the now is true. There is matter, in a particular, ever changing spatial configuration. In 3d. The now is true, also it changes. Only the real people, made out of matter can experience things, simulated people, or the people that are not even simulated don't have real experiences. The past is not true, but we have some information about it, what the past can possibly be. So is the future, it is not true, but we have some information about it. There is no ontological or qualitative difference between the past and the future, only quantitative (which comes from the ridiculous amount of negentropy at the beginning of our universe).
We live in a set of time slices that we are able to control through the choices that we make as we slide through the deck. The past is done and locked up, carved in stone and can be recalled with high fidelity if we choose to dwell there. The future is always in your face - another decision to make, lives to influence, bullets to dodge - all presented as you color the current time slice with the events your choices allow. Choices are filters on possible paths for your future, some can be looped many times while others permanently exclude specific outcomes. As we color the time slice we can know parts of the future by understanding consequences of the choices we are making though we can't know it will all fit far into the future. The past is left as an exercise in recollection to serve up reminders of all the unpleasant loops we threw in our life path and most importantly, to help us choose a better, more productive path when we find ourselves at a similar node in the future.
I mean, relativity already means everything depends on location, so this should just fit right in, right? The contents of your “slice” are from right now at your location, from 20 years ago at locations 20ly from you, 30 years ago at 30ly, etc. We literally can’t know what’s happening at any time other than 20 years ago at locations 20ly from us, after all. So I’d say this jives well with the various “curves” relativity implies exist in spacetime. (Note: I am not a physicist so I’m happy to learn why/if I’m wrong here!)
How do you think this conceptual model fits at the subatomic scale; everything being a warping of fields? At first glance I can't tell if it works because there is no such thing as a slice at the quantum level. Well, depending on which theoretical model you're looking at. I suppose either way it's might be considered true if mathematically we're talking about the properties of a particle. But even then no one alive today can say for certain why those properties exist, conclusively I mean, outside of theory. We barely have a grasp on the manor in which they exist, which is the theory. For example, based on what we know about the proposed axion particle, how does this slicing concept affect the nature of it warping spacetime? Bringing something new to the table there would be quite the accomplishment here!
Nah, if we allow virtual experiences, than any model naturally becomes the block universe.
I believe, that question of experience is still unsolved. Why do we seem to live in a world made of matter and governed by physics? Is it the same for people that are simulated in a computer? Is it the same for people that are not simulated by a computer (because it is plugged out)? How do they perceive if the data is mangled? Etc. BTW the block universe also needs to solve this problem. But in order to not to be in a block universe, we need the answer that being material based is different than being simulated on a material based simulator, or not even being simulated, just the possibility of it.
@sobellian: relativity doesn't need the block universe. It works perfectly fine if people just get shorter when they speed up. Then the simultaneity of events in a frame is not the same as being in a slice.
This is interesting! What do you make of retrocausal effects in "image exposure" experiments, and other psi related phenomena. I'm curious if you have ideas for a physical theory that speaks to precognition and remove viewing?
It sounds similar to (but possibly different from since I never heard the term "slice universe") the theory of presentism in the philosophy of time.
That's the view that all that exists is the present. What we call the past is what used to be present and what we call the future is what one day will be present, but neither the past or future exist so long as they are not the present.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation."
OK, you've discovered post-modernism.
Next step is to avoid its pitfalls.
The actual factual events are infinite and one is exposed to a small subset to interpret. That does not mean you're allowed to make up, distort, and selectively ignore facts to suit whatever narrative you'd like to push. You need to construct the narrative in good faith, based on the best possible set of facts you're exposed to, and adjusting it when you're exposed to new facts.
Unless you want to organize a cult or a totalitarian regime, in which case go as crazy as possible with the narrative. People love it.
History is absolutely true, factually true at that. Facts are sometimes hard to come by, heck some facks of modern history are still classified, but that does not give people carte blanche to make up stuff as they go...
Like yeah, he was in an accident, media misreported it. Thing is so, how comes he, and the women, never knew who was at fault? Insuramce sure did some investigation as did police. Not knowing the facts, and coming to conclusions based on feelings, is the problem. But it doesn't mean history is wrong...
And if he was driving recklessly that fact doesn’t change simply because the other driver also wasn’t paying attention and didn’t blame him for it. Past mistakes are also painful to remember but the best way to deal with them is to acknowledge the reality and then change what you need to in your character to make sure we don’t repeat them.
To some extent what you’re disagreeing about is linguistics. Is history the actual events that took place or our knowledge of events that took place. And to be honest, there’s also a question of whether there’sa difference because what we don’t know about the past might as will not have happened.
Is "the reality anyone knows" not also part of greater aggregate reality though (conflicting with reality is true), or is it an ontological component of something else?
Ugh. Of course we should be mindful that "history" is created by people and people are fallible (and worse, e.g., intentionally biased), so caveat emptor.
But it doesn't mean that historical facts don't exist (shit happens - those are facts), but the recounting of such should be consumed knowing that there are likely inaccuracies.
This is not license to only take in the history we like or rewrite it to suit our agendas.
I'm technically a Boomer and my education on the history of the US was amazingly light on any details that would today seem unsavory (e.g., the expansion to the West was not simply moving into uninhabited territory, etc.).
A People's History of the United States was eye opening and a welcome revisiting of the "official story". Some might say that Zinn had an agenda to shit on White Men, but I saw it as a heartfelt attempt to correct the record.
I didn't learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre until about 10 years ago, and already there are attempts to squash that because, and I kid you not, "it makes white people feel bad".
The past is not true . . . but self-help author Derek Sivers is?
Somehow I'm not as convinced as he is that it was a really good thing to break someone's spine years ago because he was a teenager who didn't follow road signs.
I am not a fan of self help stuff, but I think that’s a somewhat uncharitable reading of the article; I don’t think he was implying that it was “good” to break someone’s spine.
I think it was saying that it’s very easy to convince yourself of something much worse than reality. He felt guilty because he thought he ruined a woman’s life forever, he felt immense guilt over that, when in reality the woman mostly recovered, not that it was good the accident happened.
I thought The idea is that a slight misunderstanding of the can have a severe “compound interest rate”.
A couple things are being confused by the author. Correcting bad memories is one thing. That occurs when we receive new evidence or knowledge that contradicts the memory. This is simply your every day revision of beliefs in practice. Nothing new to see here. But note: there is a justification here. There is knowledge that motivates the revision. There is also good will, a desire to submit to the truth. Willfulness, on the other hand, puts what we want to be the case above what is the case. This is at the core of pride, queen of the vices, and delusion.
"History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story."
Well...no. Facts are a huge page of the story. They're kind of the whole point, if by facts we mean that which is true (the word "fact" is problematic, but the quotation, as well as the title of the article, draw an equivalence between fact and truth). We may not have all the facts, we may be mistaken about them, or we may not yet have inferred some truth. And where we can't reasonable know the truth, we will simply lack that knowledge, leaving us capable of only speculating about possibilities. But there is a truth of the matter. It's not whatever you want it to be.
Once in the past, facts are immutable, as it were. That the past only exists as a memory does not give you license to toy with that memory in one direction or the other, in your (ostensible) favor. I say "ostensible" because willful self-deception (which is what attempts to tweak memories is) does a few things that are harmful. First, it destroys our connection with reality. I don't think I need to explain why that's bad. Second, denial is repression of uncomfortable truths (or at least what we hold to be true), and not like overwriting a file on disk. It's more like sweeping a dangerous animal under the rug. It reach out from under and bite you, you will trip over it even when it is sleeping. Occasionally, it will lash out from under the rug and cause terror. There will always be a lingering anxiety about the ever present possibility that it will escape from under our control and attack us or something we care about. A repressed truth introduces all sorts of weird tensions into the psyche, perverting our perception of reality, enslaving us to fear. That's the paradox: caging uncomfortable truths makes them our greatest enemy and gives them power over us. Acknowledging them sets us free. Repression is only something we use to suppress inappropriate impulses or desires (the basis for self-discipline and the moral life), not the truth; indeed, failing to repress inappropriate impulses alienates us from the truth, not least of all because it entails a repression of the truth to enable the indulgence of that desire and a weakening of the intellectual faculties. Repressing guilt always leads to self-destruction. It's why human history is full of human and animal sacrifice. (It's also why, in Christianity, God provides Himself as the perfect sacrifice, as the Lamb of God, bloodlessly offered at each Catholic mass on the altar, and why the sacrament of penance exists: to accuse oneself before God and receive absolution.) Guilt will destroy you, but denial only doubles its power, not to mention the added guilt of having repressed the guilt. The psychotherapy industry is funded by the guilty conscience. But if you think denial is some kind of escape hatch, sorry. That ways lies madness.
Anytime some even vaguely anti-realist claim shows up in a HN headline, such as "the past is not true", a bunch of predictable and dull comments inevitably show up to perform some table thumping about reality being factual and objective, likely paired with some sanctimonious moral panic about the dangers of relativism (normally with a political slant one way or another).
I think these comments are sincere and well-intentioned in their concern for the truth, but I also think that they speak to the impoverished state of anything like public philosophical discourse today. Lest I waste too much time and emotional energy on an internet comment, I'll wrap up by stating my endorsement of the seemingly forgotten, and distinctly American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It is a picture in which truth and falsity exists, but being products of inquiry, experience, adversarial disagreement, and experiment, remain permanently open to revision. The pragmatist statement of the author's (fine) thesis might be "the past is never finished", since the past exists and is real, but our discoveries, experiences, interests, etc. in the future might demand a revision or reinterpretation of it.
I love HN but, let's be honest, we are often tone-deaf. Very much.
When the author writes "the past is not true", he's not trying to make a Physics or Epistemology point of any kind.
He's just telling that we torture and limit ourselves with things that no longer matter or, in this case, never happened. The anecdote might not be what you wanted to read or what would have fit the "message" best, but real world stories seldom do.
Let me ask you something: do you have something in your past that's holding you back?
Then his example is so garbage as to be worthless. He DID DO SOMETHING OBJECTIVELY BAD by driving recklessly and harming someone else. It doesn't matter after that point what narrative is spun by who, that reality happened. You don't get to absolve yourself of guilt by pretending actually it usually ends up better than you remember"
The rest doesn’t hold water.
“There’s a small chance that the chaos and ruin I’ve visited upon others may not be as bad as as those people made me think. Thanks, I knew my negligence/malice wasn’t that big a deal.”
The worst people that I’ve ever met would love for that to be true.
They’ll stab people in the back or work to damage people’s careers and when you call them out on it it’s always something like “We’ll if I could damage their career anyone could have.” or “It’s been ten years, why don’t they just get over it?”
Basically: “Yes, I stabbed them. But they didn’t/couldn’t stop me, so it’s their fault that they’re dead, really.”
Negative equity is a real and it compounds over time.
Most people who have been told that they’ve caused actual harm, probably did. Telling yourself that the facts of your story don’t matter or that the people you hurt may even be better off for it won’t mend the people you’ve broken.
Just apologize (for real) and attempt to make amends.