The logical end state of this belief is a civil war. I assume that in lieu of trying to change minds you're buying guns and ammo and trying to organize like minded people into a militia to protect your safety? Cause if not, I don't really think you really believe that a significant fraction of the country wants people like you dead.
Not sure which hated demographic you fall in, but I have friends that are suddenly being threatened by individuals who now feel free to expose their true selves. I can't believe almost half the population are like that though. Escape may be the best option for a lot of people at this point. My friend doesn't realistically have that option due to finances and skillset. I do think people who aren't in immediate danger can pull a lot of people supporting those fueled by hate away from their positions with calm dialogue.
In my experience as a chronic immigrant, most people are nice but there are some a-holes who would want to harm you or see you get harmed but they would not act unless they feel in power.
Therefore, most of the time you can just ignore them and your experience wouldn't any different than the natives who would also encounter a-holes for different reasons. The problem starts when someone in power to affect your life is one of those but in normal times you still can push back by questioning their actions as they still seek approval from the larger society.
The case with Trump seems to be the same with the case with Brexit: Those a-holes(not everyone who support those but a subset of them who are a-holes) start believing that they are in power and the society approves them therefore they can act on their instincts or plans.
I was working in London on the Brexit referendum day, some of our Spanish developers had trouble with people from their neighborhood right after the referandum.
The largest single payer in the US is the Federal government. Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, the VA... The problem won't be fixed for the vast majority of expenditures because the government will need to perform the same function the FDA is now for it's drug costs.
They'd probably still have a big problem paying retail rates. They'd much rather buy from solar farms that have a much lower price of generation in that world.
But they'd have no problem paying today's retail rate. In this alternate universe, the actual retail rate would be higher.
And that would suck for consumers, but it would also reflect the real cost of electricity, which someone is going to pay one way or another.
Right now, we effectively subsidize dirty energy by allowing utilities to ignore the consequences of releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So it's okay—good, even—to force the utilities to pay more for the cleaner energy instead.
I really don't get the point you're trying to make. If there were a carbon tax, net metering of retail solar would still be unsustainable, just with different price points. The spread between wholesale and retail rates would still exist, and having a grid connection but no net usage would still be a large benefit at no cost.
The source of the rest of the power on the grid just isn't the relevant consideration for this particular issue. It's a very relevant consideration in general, just not for this specific question.
> If there were a carbon tax, net metering of retail solar would still be unsustainable, just with different price points.
If there was a (correctly priced) carbon tax, I wouldn't be making this argument. Clean forms of energy would naturally win in the market, because they are in fact much cheaper when you take the long-term consequences of dirty energy into account.
We don't do that, so we need to subsidize clean energy production instead. The free grid connection is a reward for performing a social good.
And, it is not "unfair" to make PG&E pay extra for clean energy when we let them release carbon into the atmosphere for free.
Yes, it has to turn off industrial solar production on sunny days. Less frequently, it has negative wholesale prices where it pays other states to take the excess power.
Yeah this is exactly why the new version of the policy (attempts to) incentivize storage in addition to solar, because that makes the excess solar power more useful, by allowing it to be time-shifted to times when there is a dearth instead of an excess (ie. when the sun goes down). The big subsidy of net metering for stand-alone residential solar is no longer beneficial; there are better things for the system at large to be spending its resources on, like storage, and also transmission and distribution improvements.
> And those primitive humans had the same capabilities we do today.
Evolution has been ongoing on humans the whole time we've been a species. Drinking milk in adults has only been a capability we've had for ~6000 years. I'd be hard pressed to claim that there haven't been other capabilities that have evolved over that time that led to our ability to have more social organization.
Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what you are saying. Specifically, that is a tiny adaptation compared to the organization of the human brain. Is 30x more time than lactose tolerance enough for significant brain changes? I find it implausible, I would guess the major adaptations of the brain are on the order of millions of years, not a couple hundred thousand.
The adaptations for social organization seemingly have been with us for a long time. AFAIK humans have been in large groups for a very long time, as long as they have been homo sapiens (Large being over 50 members, and take that with a grain of salt, that is only my possibly incorrect understanding).
I do find it very plausible that people 1k, 10k, 50k and maybe even 200k years ago were all smart (Plato probably is far smarter than most alive today). Though, smart and education are different, while smart- the body of knowledge was limited.
> Lactose tolerance AFAIK is a single enzyme. That taking 6000 years to develop I think is evidence against what you are saying.
Also relevant: lactose tolerance is something we start out with, babies need it. So lactose tolerance, or more properly lactase persistence, was not the development of a brand new trait out of nowhere, it was maintaining a capability past the age where it would previously degrade out of functionality.
TL;DR: (1) brain shape has not changed for about 160k years. (2) The framing/facts of the discussion is bad. Mutations are happening all the time, it is 'natural selection' that seemingly made lactose tolerance more prevalent in the last 20k years.
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Long answer:
## Natural Selection / Lactose Tolerance (as an example of a very recent adaptation) / Why the discussion is so far incorrect
In my first reply, I notice now a big flaw. Having an adaptation be present in a population for 6000 years does not mean it took that time to evolve it. (According to [3], the adaptation has become prevalent in 20k years rather 6k)
To frame what we are discussing, I hope we can all agree:
mutations are happening all the time and in aggregate we each individually carry a vast quantity of genetic differences/mutations apart from every other individual.
For lactose tolerance, really what we are talking about is more natural selection. At least I think we are. As an example, a population can change very quickly via natural selection if an event kills off everyone that is missing a mutation. That perhaps 1% mutation suddenly becomes the surviving population. (For completeness, I'll mention that this process can happen more slowly as well over time, but it can depend on single mutations, aggregates of mutations, and environment and random luck [eg: asteriod] are all factors). This is to say, there could have been plenty of lactose tolerant people well before. This NPR piece on the history of lactose tolerance states it well [3] "But now that doesn't happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years — the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute — but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure."
What's more though too, nothing is to say that natural selection always works to favorably select genes. EG: The village idiot might be the only one immune to the plague. It's way complex of course since there's so much variation between every individual, but I just wanted to underscore that natural selection is a function of individual, time & place. Sometimes some mutations are useful, other times they are not and are dumb luck of what is left over from some time before.
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## Brain Size & Human Cognition
With the issue of natural selection out of the way, what I do wonder is how long it took for the brain to get the way it is today. According to this resource, The Smithsonian [1], the answer is approx 7M years, with most of that happening in the last 2M years until 200k years ago. That is in terms of 'size' (does not account for wrinkles).
According to 'newscientist' [2], the shape (now talking wrinkles here) of the human brain today is very similar to what it was 160k years ago, and has not really changed since. The resource mentions that the biggest changes since then have been in how our faces look rather than how our brains are shaped. Those changes are specifically smaller jaws: "Faces in modern humans are far smaller, with subtler indentation, than those of their ancestors. Studies show that this change accelerated when hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists around 12,000 years ago and ate softer foods, probably due to less loading on the skull from chewing."
Summing up, given that brain shape has been about the same for the last 160k years; it's plausible that is how far it goes back for people that felt & thought about exactly the same way we do today. If anyone knows about more research around the rise of human cognition on this topic, I'd certainly like to learn more.
I'd say that's excessive. An hour max would be more reasonable otherwise you're just creating a discouraging workplace. Note that would be an hour of real effort though, not half arsed googling. Making a genuine effort is more important than the time taken.
The amount of time is entirely dependent on what kind of work it is and what kind of blocked you are. Can’t get your build to succeed? Ask for help quickly. Can’t get your research model to produce useful results on the first try? Maybe try a few things first.
Yeah, it's a bit disheartening to hear some (presumably) experienced people advocates for never allowing the junior to dig and deal with things on their owns.
I can imagine the scenario where a build fail due to some missing incantations that needs to be invoked, and sure, you shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes on trying to resolve it. But that should be rare, while the common blockers for junior tend to be their lack of understanding in even bog-standard systems and situations (why can't system X do Y, why did person Z require A). In those cases, part of the expectation when assigning them the work would be for the junior to learn those on their own.
It's unfortunate that the article downplays resilience so much. It's entirely true that you can control your level of stress by making different choices, but for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it. The best way to learn is guided practice under stressful conditions, speaking from personal experience.
Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
Stress is neccessary to grow and even to keep going, I'm with you in that. But I think the article is right in pointing out that there's too much focus into some inner force that makes you accomplish everything.
This has been going for a while, and coupled with other factors, I don't think it's paying good dividends. I think that everyone paying attention can see the steep increase in depression and medication. It's not only the US, it's happening in Europe too.
My impression is that we're removing people from their support networks, manufacturing lonely individuals, and eroding their financial float line through housing.
I don't think mental thoughness or resilience can overcome this for too long, and many people is exposed to this stressors for many, many years, if not their entire life.
Even Taleb, who is really tiresome talking about stress, recognizes that stress is only useful if it is more or less bounded.
I think the increase in depression is due more towards the increasing isolation in our (American) society, and not so much stress. I moved to a new city a few years ago, and between living alone, working remotely, the pandemic causing many things like tech meetups online, and people in the groups I have been involved with not appearing to reciprocate my interest in getting to know them, I've had a lot of times where life has felt pretty meaningless. This is despite a fair amount of internal energy, interest in learning things, etc. (personal growth / fulfillment). My conclusion is that relationships are a fundamental human need.
But we have designed ourselves into isolation. Half of marriages (built-in community) end, most people no longer go to church, there are not really civic organizations any more, etc. I can spend an entire, active Saturday without interacting with anyone: drive to the park in the morning and walk in the woods, go to the art museum (electronic tickets, so not even interaction purchasing a ticket), check books out from the library (self-checkout), buy groceries to cook dinner (self-checkout is usually faster), watch a movie on my home theater setup. That's even without mobile phones, or the numbing false sense of community of social networks.
So not only do we not have the normal human difficulty in actually caring about and loving another person, but we do not even have the social structure to find people to care about. As a result it's easy to live a life where you experience little of enjoying others and being enjoyed by others.
Yes that is the tendency, but it's still possible to fight it to some extent. Unless you're in a pretty rural area there should be local meetups you can attend. They might not be about exactly the subjects you're interested in, or be attended entirely by people you like, but if you give a couple a chance and keep showing up they might surprise you and you might get some friends out of it.
I still periodically hang out with about a dozen people I met via meetups like 9 years ago. Used to be a lot more, and some moved or drifted off (on both sides, I'm guilty of it as well), but that's still a decent number.
That's not including the group of game designers I befriended by hosting playtest nights, or the local writing group I still do things with every November for Nanowrimo, or a handful of people I met from a couple new meetups I started going to recently.
I've attended funerals, friendsgivings, baby showers, and the like for a few of them too, so we're not just casual friends (although a love of board games and geeky things does tie a lot of us together).
I can't imagine that many people in the rich countries in the modern era are among the most stressed humans in history, even despite the erosion of social support networks. Nearly everyone has adequate shelter, food, security, and access to virtually magical health care from the perspective of everyone before 70 years ago. Children consistently make it into adulthood and famine has been kept at bay for a century or more, interpersonal violence is at an all time low. If in the midst of this unparalleled prosperity and wonder we're just as stressed as a peasant farmer who just lost half their family to disease, war and famine then something is badly wrong with how we handle stress.
Here's another perspective... it isn't just about how we handle stress, it's about the causes of stress...
In her 90s, my grandmother said to me "Your generation has far more money than we had, but we were happier and had less stress." She grew up in a just slightly more than a subsistence level farm family, then with my grandfather achieved just enough farming success to send the next generation to college. She travelled away from home just a few times in life, but as she said - it was a generally low-stress life.
Modern life on the other hand often starts the day with an utterly toxic commute. When we eat, it's often while working at our desk. Our housing costs are far above what was historically considered a safe % of income. We take almost no vacation and when we do, we take our laptop and phone with us. Even if we have health insurance, it is often very challenging to actually get preventative care.
I could go on and on, but my point is - modern life is stressful in completely different ways than the stressed encountered by the historical "peasant farmer." His stress involved things he might be able to do something about, like storing up grain for winter or reinforcing his dwelling. Our modern stress is far more obtuse and difficult to control, like the Fed raising rates or Congress introducing a rider on a bill that wipes out a tax credit that was the only thing keeping us profitable.
Stress is subjective. It doesn't have to align with objective measures. Evolution has selected for stress to work to favor survival in a certain environment, but we're no longer in that environment. If we needed support networks in the past, then we should expect to be unhappy without them, regardless of how important they are to survival in the present.
I don't think it's necessarily just true that there is something wrong with how we handle stress. We also subject ourselves to different types of stress.
A peasant farmer was dramatically more likely to experience violence in a given year. But (from studies I've seen) they probably spent fewer hours in a week working and more with family and friends than a modern-day office worker.
It seems quite possible that the chronic, low-level stress of much modern life
- requires different methods of prevention and healing
- does more damage over the long term if untreated
> If in the midst of this unparalleled prosperity and wonder we're just as stressed as a peasant farmer who just lost half their family to disease, war and famine then something is badly wrong with how we handle stress.
I wonder why your phrasing feels like blame-the-victim?
The people I know under stress in modern society often lack clear options for alternatives or need a completely radical change in their situation.
Or alternatively perhaps we don't actually have prosperity?
Framing things in terms of a victim blaming mindset is a frame that leads to preventable stress because it takes the locus of control away from someone which is a major cause of stress. Focusing on things you can control, like your attitude and perspective, and learning ways to maximize the impact of those things is much, much better for people. I've had a set of life circumstances that are pretty bad objectively over the last couple years and I've been less stressed than nearly any other point in my life because I've been really focusing on gratitude and resilience. I really hope that others can see the same sort of improvements with a similar sort of mindset shift.
I'm guessing your original comment meant to imply that we all have agency to deal with stress: sorry if I misread that.
I also tend to find the idea that we can "control our attitude and perspective" is sometimes used to blame others or self-guilt ourselves for outcomes that are truly outside ones own rational control. The extreme example of this is the belief in manifestation: we can pay for courses to learn how to remove "blocks" so somehow the cancer is ones own fault for not thinking right.
I agree with you that we need to take responsibility for what we can change. I believe we can learn new mindsets or Jiu-Jitsu our minds into grooves that work better. I also think that doing that is extremely difficult and that also that there is much that remains beyond our control (internally or externally). Also the territory of self-help has many traps and deceptions - a hard road to find.
Stress seems best for the primordial hunt and battles of my ancestors who needed a powerful drive to see through an ideally short term situation with more response than they might have otherwise been able to muster, I have always found it living hand in hand with adrenaline.
Stoicism seems to also provide plenty examples of people finding stress and emotion to be first reactions muddying the waters of perception necessary for loftier goals and work than simple hunter gatherers.
Stress long term is unusual for the body and a major disadvantage imo.
And stoicism seeing some quantifiable research into aiding in depression leads me to believe the individual in the current cultural hegemony of western culture is simply a victim, a child never truly raised.
"Work, play - at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen." - Brave New World
An example of this is that obese people don't legendarily have the strongest joints in the world, since they are constantly adding additional strain on every single joint all the time. In fact being significantly overweight does the opposite!
Both cost time, which is finite and precious. Stress reduces the amount of time you have available - if all of your time not working is spent destressing, you're not much fun to be around, and that impact your ability to make and retain friends
This is why most friends are made in high school and college.
The difference is very stark. I probably made 1-2 good friends in the _10 years_ after college, compared to 30+ friends in the 10 years prior to that. Luckily, I managed to keep most friends from before starting work.
Full time work is an absolute black hole of time and relationships.
People who don't have good networks _before_ they start full time work are absolutely boned and I don't think there's an easy solution.
As social animals who will eventually face the loss of every friend we've ever made, cultivating both a good network of friends and a kind of internal resilience is probably the best way one could choose to invest their time.
There are many very questionable ways to invest this finite/precious time, and most of us don't think twice about how much of it we squander (e.g. spending time online). There is a small category of things to focus on that is almost universally worth the effort: sleep, diet, exercise, social connection. Focusing on these things also tends to help establish that inner strength.
Find a hobby that you de-stress with others with so even though you're not fun at the beginning of the class/session, by the end of it you've screamed your frustration out and are pleasant to be around. Make friends at the end of this de-stressing event.
The article does not downplay resilience. It merely says that resilience has both internal and external components. That is, you can only get so far while just focusing on your personal ability to overcome adversity, but you'll do even better if you combine that with external support.
To be honest, I'm not sure how that can be misconstrued on Hacker News, when people frequently focus on the power of groups working together (whether that's open source, corporations, or other organizations). It's clear that some of the most lauded organizations are ones that often support their members, especially in times of hardship.
This comes from someone who is very much a proponent of perseverance. My first tattoo enshrines this Japanese proverb on my forearm where I can always see it:
The proverb is associated with a figure called Daruma, with a round physique that always gets up no matter how it's knocked down. It's cute and symbolic, popular in Japanese culture.
Resilience is important, grit is important. I say this having been on a very dark path when I was holding my personal world up with very little support (so little we can round down).
With that said, friends and resources are important and necessary. It is important to have someone you can call or text and say "I need help" and the cavalry is coming. Be that person to people in your life if you can be. I'm not able to fix society, but I'll take care of the people around me until death.
There's probably a lot more Christians talking about Calvary than there are military historians talking about an obsolete horse unit. Although it does seem like if it's uncapitalized it's likely to be military horses and not geographical locations. I bet trying to optimize autocorrect is a fun challenge!
In italian "La vita è un calvario", in french "La vie est une calvaire" and in spanish "La vida es un calvario" they all mean "Life is an ordeal" or "Life is a torture". May be the context of the topic plays a role here much more that the geography location.
> but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
It's one thing that we get the occasional natural disaster, financial crisis, or some war in some remote country. We can handle that, this has been the case throughout human history.
But we just came out of a four-year pandemic (and hell, if you look at sewage monitoring, hospitals or half your colleagues being out sick, it still isn't over), after decades of wage stagnation, multiple crises, seriously escalating wars, exploding rents, masses of people living on the streets in the US, climate change is looming, autocrats are on the rise across the world - it's fucking enough already. Politicians aren't doing a thing to help us, no one is looking out for anybody else any more because no one has the mental/physical/time/financial resources to do so.
We are in unprecedentedly bad times, and I can completely understand anybody saying "screw this, I'm out" and just going mental in one way or another. Some resort to drugs, some just break down completely, some off themselves, some off others - everyone reacts different in response to too much stress.
Resiliience is good, but it barely pays the bills.
People don't get rich with resilience, but by charisma, family support, genetic lottery, connections, friends, and opportunities.
Resilience and ingenuity are cool too, but there are tons of resilient and ingenius people that never make it. And there are extremely resilient single mothers working 2 jobs and making ends meet without complaining. But that doesn't get them any success.
> for a given level of stress you can definitely improve how you handle it
And in that toolbox should be venting to a friend or taking a break for the evening or weekend and splurging on a nice dinner or small holiday. That’s the article’s point: it’s insufficient to insist on managing it all internally.
It's significantly easier to handle stressors when the stakes are lowered by friends and money. For example, it is so much less stressful to handle legal disputes (everything from traffic tickets to rough divorces to criminal cases) if you don't have to worry about how much your lawyer costs or who will cover your shifts at work etc.
It is much less stressful to handle a cancer diagnosis when you can afford private medicine. And not to mention how super, duper, uber less stressful having an illness like diabetes is if you can afford insulin. Imagine how much more resilience a rape victim could have if they could afford therapy.
When I was younger, there were those who were commonly late or no shows, and their futures rarely went in a good direction. For myself I found I had to acquire quite a bit of resilience to reach average reliability. The youngest generations now see things like a non-fixed schedule as a lifestyle perk—and they're right—but I worry about how they can acquire resilience from this and other areas.
I don't see how it's downplaying anything, except in comparison to money and friends. Given that it's fairly obvious that almost all problems can be solved or seriously mitigated by money and friends, I think it's a fair conclusion to say that money and friends are strictly superior to (internal) resilience. I also think the example and conclusion they gave was perfect: little problems are much bigger when you don't have the tools available to effectively solve them, and those tools are money and friends, which are sources of external resilience. They're not saying internal resilience is bad; they're simply saying that not having to get to the point of needing to be internally resilient is strictly better.
These all seem like fair statements that sound like they come from the department of "no shit, Sherlock," to me.
