>We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.
OP seems to be a young European urbanite, and given the average age of the active European voter base (pretty old), I wouldn't say that recent political/electoral trends are demonstrative of the younger generations' (read: the future of Europe) values and beliefs.
This is very well said and accurately describes my impressions of Elon's speeches. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who appreciates his down-to-earth, authentic delivery, and it wouldn't be surprising if Elon and those around him are aware of the attractiveness of this approach themselves.
That is a very interesting perspective. It reminded me of the book Scale by Geoffrey West, which I've been planning to read for some time now. From what I've heard and read about it, one of the things it seems to do is examine organizations, corporations and cities as emergent complex systems that both emerge from life and appear to share many properties of life themselves.
God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations.
Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.
It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.
This is such a wonderful comment. It reminded me of the link between the World Wars and subsequent philosophical developments in the West (which culminated with postmodernism), a topic that I've always found fascinating. It's easy to underestimate just how profoundly WWI and WWII shook Western civilization and changed the course of history, and that they weren't just another group of conflicts notable solely for their sheer scale.
While your comment may seem simplistic, as years pass and as I study human history in more depth, I'm afraid that I'm beginning to nurture that exact sentiment as of late.
It seems that Western civilization was not an inevitability, but a lucky roll of dice (or unlucky, depending on who you ask).
On average, we are not as intellectually capable as our civilizational accomplishments may indicate, quite the contrary. Seeing the missteps that we keep making, looking at our shortsightedness and our inability to act collectively towards long-term prosperity..
It's just depressing.
What bothers me the most is the degree of such incompetence. It should't be so widespread.
I know we don't on usually quote poetry on HN but there's some apropos Bad Religion - "I've got this one problem where I live forever // I've got just a short time to see."
The human mind is not apparently built for thinking at the scales (sizes, time frames) at which humanity operates. The limited distribution of competence is an amoral phenomenon - as a first approximation, I like to think about it as a natural consequence of limited information transfer between generations. Should or shouldn't is beside the point.
I am kind of disappointed by the community's response to his remarks.
Yes, some of them were quite inappropriate, such as:
>His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
However, after that he says:
>There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
Now, this latter quote is in my opinion a perfectly reasonable presumption, considering that hundreds of millions of humans historically lived in a myriad of drastically different environments and circumstance. These genetic differences among populations (I'm not talking about the rigid contemporary interpretation of "race", I'm talking about geographical populations) do exist, and it would be absurd to presume that for some magical reason it wouldn't affect cognitive ability as well.
And yet people would still get emotionally triggered and shoot this hypothesis down, just because of the way they are socialized and because it strongly deviates from the mainstream idealization of equality.
Not related to this issue - reality generally is not simple, and I am sad that even contemporary developed societies nurture expectations that are so simplified, idealistic, fictitious instead of being more mature and grounded in scientific reality, regardless of the topic at hand. I just wish that more people were more educated and scientifically literate, and that this would translate into better, proper political positions, instead of the idiotic clusterfuck we have today.
Obviously, these concerns will be a thing of the past considering the future potential of genetic engineering to amplify intelligence, and presuming that eventually such services would be available to your average person.
On point.