Sometimes I have the nagging feeling that everyone I idolize would leave me disappointed if I knew them personally. The further back a person is in history the more mythical he becomes
Some people might do or were something that I won't like. I have learned to not let that influence me in way, and be comfortably ambivalent.
I especially felt bad after I came to know that Richard Feynman slept with many of his friends' wives and tried to sleep with even more of them. He burnt a lot of bridges this way. One Physicist had told me that Feynman hit on his wife twice, and when discouraged by the wife, he let it go as a perfect gentleman.
Despite this, Feynman remains one of my most revered icons and his picture still hangs on my wall.
I don't overlook what he did or try to find some naive justification. I know he was this way and that does not make his mind less fascinating to me.
> Richard Feynman slept with many of his friends' wives and tried to sleep with even more of them.
If you're going to indict people for having immoral sex, you'll have to indict probably 90%. If you include trying to have immoral sex, how many would pass your test?
For me personally it's not sex or even immoral sex, it's betraying one's friends.
I know the wives were equally guilty. He seduced but never ever forced to anyone's knowledge.
He often committed these acts of adultery when he was welcomed as a guest at someone's home.
Having adventures on the bed with the wives of the people who invited you in their homes- pretty low to me.
The women were adult and consenting, but it is still betraying the trust of people.
If all these were to happen with the consent of the husbands, although it would be extremely weird and unnatural, not to mention- immoral, by the standard of the stark majority of any society, I wouldn't have given it any thought at all.
I recently bumped into this Arte documentary about his life. I believe in the first 5 minutes they list his achievements and what he was like as a kid.
I don't think you would have been disappointed :-)
Thanks. The video description states that "If, one day, an artificial consciousness supplants human intelligence, it will be largely due to him." (Si, un jour, une conscience artificielle supplante l’intelligence humaine, ce sera en grande partie de son fait.).
In fact, his last work is an unfinished book "The Computer and the Brain". Now is the best time for us to continue this work.
He probably would - he was incredibly warlike and had quite little regard for human life. Just like anyone else he had violently wrong opinions and predictions and had his biases - he was certainly a fallible mind though a genius.
That being said, there are quite a few historical figures (Einstein, Penrose, Hawking, Ramanujan, Bertrand Russel, Grothendieck) that are nowhere as morally questionable as many, though they are all flawed people.
On a purely intellectual level I doubt that you would be disappointed though they are all human in the end.
Early in the Cold War -- while the US had a nuclear monopoly -- Von Neumann was a strong proponent of an all-out, surprise first strike against the USSR by the US. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when. If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
I'm quite happy sharing the home with two other wives just because our husband can provide properly and is very sweet. I'll leave the whole empowered woman shtick to those who can handle it
Highly religious people like Mormons and Amish have 3 kids on average, same for highly religious societies in Africa and Asia. Fun times ahead. Ironically from a darwinian point of view religion is a great adaptation for fitness
Healthy attitudes are the ones that promote life and human flourishing, period.
By definition, nature always purges unhealthy attitudes from the gene pool. And the biggest threat to health in the modern era is not global warming, but people becoming hysterically moralistic about what are complex issues that we have little understanding of. Every purchase, every job, every interaction is judged on some creepy moralistic lense by those who would make the Spanish inquisition look nuanced in contrast to their own nursery-rhyme fanaticism.
Some have become so absolutely certain of their own self-righteous stance to the point of sabotaging themselves and removing themselves from the gene pool. Thank goodness we will be rid of these attitudes in a few generations, and through no violence on the part of the sane. We can simply let them line up and drink the koolaid while the rest of us go about our pragmatic lives, living humbly in understanding that we don't really know what is right or wrong unless it has been proven to promote human flourishing over hundreds of generations. Everything else is speculative and prone to error.
Note that this is not to say people shouldn't be concerned, from a technical or engineering point of view, with various problems facing us, but when you cross the line to turning everything into a hysterical moral stance, that's when knowledge turns into blind faith and becomes toxic.
> Maybe those who believe they are bringing souls into the world, rather than bags of meat and water, tend to have a more positive outlook on having children?
I think it is more likely that following religions where you can only have sex in the context of attempted procreation leads to more children.
You are asserting that moral weakness leads to a lack of children, with no exanation. I said that I don't see how that follows, and plenty of morally weak people have children. I don't see how I'm attacking a strawman by giving a counter example, you've given no reasoning for your statement
How is it not? The matter is obviously a personal choice and there are certainly exceptions, but in my opinion raising the next generation is the most important thing one can do, and willfully ignoring it is selfish.
Mozilla / Firefox isn't lacking in new technology. Firefox has made far more aggressive under-the-hood improvements than Chrome over the past 5 years.
Rust, WebRender, Stylo, Pathfinder, wgpu, Dav1d, asm.js (which resulted in WebAssembly) etc.
And they helped bootstrap a lot of efforts that benefited everyone massively. Take the list above and add: LetsEncrypt, Cranelift, AV1, Opus, WebGPU, Wasmtime
Have you ever considered that in doing this you've made it harder for said individuals to realise the error in their ways? Placing people inside echo chambers (involuntarily or otherwise) only allows said views to fester, potentially leading to something more dangerous.
HN has all potential (the participants) to make clash fruitful; unfortunately, it lacks systems to prevent dead ends. (It is a pity though: well thought and mature ideas lost diluted in the space, and not meeting their natural matches in strenghtening, refinement, correction.) It is not "perfect" as a debate platform (it's not built to be a perfect debate platform as a goal - that would require proper exposure of different ideas and ingenuous organization of the confrontation spaces and methods).
Even worse. So much of it is digital lookism. Failing to use the right words or not genuflecting appropriately. People don’t even engage with thoughts. They haven’t any.
What I find most interesting is that on HN, the Correct Thought depends on the time of day. I have seen quite a few comments that either didn't get any votes or even got a few upvotes in the European morning. Then, later that day, when the US folks start reading it, the upvotes disappear and the comments got downvoted. Seen that several times...
It's a cultural thing (if you meant that "Correct Thought" was different depending on the platform). I'm pretty ure this came from the US, and to be more precise, from McCarthyism, and bled through the cultural dominance to other western countries.
Actually "Correct Thought" is a Gene Wolfe reference =>
> Although Ascian is their mother tongue, adult Ascians don't understand plain Ascian sentences, unless they are direct quotations from governmental propaganda materials (called Correct Thought). So, in order to communicate, an Ascian has to know by heart thousands of these quotations (sentences) on many different topics.
I always had to work more to impress people in interviews than some of my better looking friends. Doubly so for dating, this should be no surprise people are biased towards genetic fitness as are all animals
The current us stock market is overvalued and will continue to be as long as they keep printing money. The billionaires know this and are diversifying into real estate
Agreed. We are already beyond the tipping point. Positive feedback loops already kicked in (thawing of Tundra, lower albedo due to glaciers melting, ...). We would need to go carbon negative right away and stay at those levels for years. Or go big about engineering the climate until we carbon levels return to normal levels.
The environment is collapsing the government is stealing my money through reckless printing and inflation. I am priced out of a home and a decent life. Corona is here to stay. Why should I still bother with working
