> Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries
First off, what is and is not an OECD country is selection bias right from the start. "Among" the highest is subjective as well, and it's far from the highest. Next, the US is a large and diverse country. There are some neighborhoods with very high homicide rates (in Chicago, for example). This is not at all representative of the rest of the country, but it averages into the statistics.
The TV series "Sons of Anarchy" is certainly entertaining, but has nothing to do with reality in the US.
The homicide rate is still very, very low compared to deaths from other causes. It doesn't even rate a mention in lists of deaths from causes. I wouldn't characterize that as "exceptionally violent".
> The US still has legal capital punishment.
28 states have capital punishment, 22 do not. In 2019, 22 people total were executed. While this is 22 too many and it needs to stop, it is statistically insignificant compared to the population of 328,000,000.
> The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based
I agree with that, but don't agree it makes society violent.
> The prevalence of sexual violence
I clicked on the reference, expecting to see rates of conviction for sexual violence. It's not there.
As gods obviously don't actually exist[0], this is just a reframing of the idea that humans give meaning to their own existance.
[0] Don't want to start a flamewar here, but there are so many contradicting ideas of god out there that at least most of them must be wrong. So regardless of some conception of god being true, the purpose is still felt by all the faithful.
It's funny that you would write something like that as if it was a useful statement. Reducing that much complexity in such a nonchalant way... But nevertheless...
> that humans give meaning to their own existance.
If you have time can you share what you think is the reason for why humans have a capability, the will to give their life meaning? Where does it come from? Why is their ability to give life meaning able to produce actual tangible results in their lives and lives of other people? If that ability even implemented through some genetic mechanism, why does the world work that way that it produces this type of genetics, that can create meaning? Genetics could have worked in any number of ways, why this one?
Would you say that love "exists"? Would you say that an integral "exists"? What about if there are no mathematicians that know about it or use it? Does it still exist?
I had no intention to offend, sorry if I came across like that. But this is actually illustrative to the point at hand: Neither in my family nor in my whole social environment do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.
Why humans actually do this is of course a hot topic in both philosophy and psychology, for at least a few thousand years now. I think the cognitive root lies in us being social animals. Being social means needing to keep the group together, which makes communication necessary, to align individual actions to a cohesive whole. Communication is hard, though, misunderstandings lurk everywhere. We therefore have to interpret the signals we got from the others, fill the gaps of the unsaid. We necessarily have to infer intentions, meaning, relations to us and so on. If we couldn't to that, we couldn't form cohesive groups, and therefore cease to exist as a species. We could become some other species, but not the current one, having discourse over the internet, sitting in different parts of the world.
All higher order concepts like "love", "purpose" etc. are more elaborate functions to sucessfully and peacefully live together. They actually exist, even physically, as processes in our brains and bodies. But they aren't necessarily ojective. If we as a species would have originated in a physically different world, say as spherical creatures living in the oceans of Titan, we would also have different sets of feelings and emotions. The idea of "love" of such a species could be a completely different one than our human concept.
> do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.
Ah well yes, :). Being religious - vs - having an inner meaning/{what some people call god}/aka being spiritual - is like having gone through a CS program in an expensive university - vs - actually knowing how to code.
That's how humans think, we often can't fathom abstract ideas directly at all.
Consider the idea of "time". We only think of time as movement in space, with either us moving or the time moving. I left that experience behind me. Looking ahead to the future. She has a great future in front of her.
What you've written is indeed obvious, but IMO that wasn't the point of the article. Consider this quote:
"Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood."
IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance.
Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
>but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings.
Probably grew up in abusive-ish households where the parents didn't respect the child's emotions. I only found out I have severe anxiety when I was like 27 years old. It took me a year of having full blown panic attacks to realize what it was. I thought I was just being "weak", because that's what I was taught my whole life.
It's not even that. It's that we don't teach people what a lot of that stuff feels like. You don't need to go through some big trauma to be ignorant of your own feelings.
Sure, but in a healthy upbringing, it only takes 1 panic attack for a normal person to realize "oook, something's not right". Messed up people think "I'm being weak".
Being a new father, I disagree. It's pretty clear most of the time what's happening with the kids: something happens they don't like, they cry. Something happens they do like, they laugh and smile. Pretty simple. Yes, as infants sometimes they cry without an apparent cause (although it always seemed to turn out to be a bubble of gas!), and certainly toddlers seem to melt at the slightest provocation. But the process is hardly random, in ourselves or in others.
Of course, it gets trickier as you get older, accumulate experiences. Now the same event can carry a unique meaning for every unique individual that experiences it, and that meaning is sometimes very difficult to infer by simple observation.
Yes, but the irony is you're making the same mistake by calling them "messed up". Something is not right with them, too. It's almost like attacking people is the wrong thing to do, no matter what they do to deserve it!
Most of the time what's wrong with them is simple. They are being lazy in their thinking, or they are ignorant of the importance of empathy and acknowledging people's experiences, and helping them through it, even if we don't approve of (or even understand) why they are having that experience. That's not an obvious lesson, and its not "written on the tin" of any baby I've seen!
(Caveat: A very tricky case is when someone seems congenitally devoid of empathy or self-reflection (e.g. NPD, or generic sociopath). In that case you're better off not engaging them emotionally at all, and treat them as a rational actor responding to incentives. A variant, the rational actor who clearly understands the power of emotions, who can learn to simulate them, and has no scruples about doing so--this is the nightmare person because not only are they "manipulative", their existence makes life harder for the rest of us with real emotions, who sometimes get accused of being them. BTW I've read some really interesting stuff about successful psychopaths who are totally open about their qualities, good and bad, and have decided to integrate with society in a classically healthy way! So even here, there is hope.)
> Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Why would anyone instinctively know the terms a psychologist would use to categorize their feelings?
That’s like saying you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know the key of their favorite song.
The examples of my prof were way more basic: It's fine that they didn't know the term panic attack, but they should be able to know how fear feels. The person in my example said they started so sweat, had high heart rates and was feeling somehow unwell every time they had to enter an elevator. An adult usually is able to verbalize that experience as fear, though the actual trigger may not be known to them. The person in question first went to a general practitioner, who found no physiological cause and transferred the patient to a psychologist.
> It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.
We have learned over the last decade or so that there are some rather significant direct connections between gut and brain via direct neural signalling. Chemical signalling can occur within about 60-90 seconds--ask a smoker how quickly nicotine can hit their system.
It is not proven/disproven AT ALL that the brain isn't responding to direct neural/chemical detection of the water by both the mouth and the stomach.
That's most likely true, and there are probably a lot of people like that. It is just hard for me to understand how they live and why it has become like that. And maybe there are some ways in which I am in the same way, perhaps regarding other obvious things?
Absolutely, I myself am obviously procrastinating right now, I know it doesn't exactly help me achieve my goals for today, yet here I am, replying to you instead of doing the work I should :)
The problem I see is that there is no institutionalized way to educate about emotions. For abstract knowledge and training rational thinking we have schools and universities. For feelings/emotions, though, we were are all effecively just getting homeschooled: We can learn from our parents etc., but that's pretty much it.
Perhaps there should be something like a school for feelings. This obviously is a hot topic, though, with different cultures having different ideals etc., especially when it comes to things like purpose in live, like we could already experience in another thread :)
It might be a good idea to figure out how to teach something like that before making a school for it. How would you teach different feelings and emotions?
I find one of the fundamental ones is pain. It's not an emotion, but it's not that easy to classify what is actually painful and what isn't. Holding a phone in my hand isn't painful, but at some point I managed to do it so much that it did become painful. I don't know how to describe the pain, but I know that I am apprehensive of holding a phone in my hand for extended periods of time.
Another one is stress. People might not know they are stressed, but they are. They just can't recognize what stress is.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of things aren't taught explicitly. We don't even know how to teach some of that, because we don't have a good classification system for the feeling/emotion.
Good points! The research and practical experience for many of these aspects is already there, though mostly only in the context of therapy, i.e. in cases where people already experience problems to a degree that it negatively affects their personal and/or professional lives.
What I mostly meant was similar to your stress example. Many people don't actually know what stress is, how it manifests, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Many also don't know that people can have very different thresholds of tolerable amounts of stress, and that those thresholds can siginificantly differ for the same person doing different kinds of work/studying etc. (e.g. some people have very low tolerances for arguing/discussions in work groups but can effortlessly dig themselves into research for 8 hours, others can do meeting marathons but have problems with physical work affecting their mood and so on).
In these cases many aspects of both the basic knowledge, ways of prevention and methods of coping with stress are well known, they just aren't taught in regular school. There is slow progress, though. In my country there often are e.g. social pedagogues in primary and secondary schools, helping with these kinds of things - though often only when they already manifest themselves as problematic behaviour.
The US is irrelevant for European defense though. They're no longer a reliable partner and nobody seriously believes we can rely on them if anything does happen. So we're down to France and Germany, and I'm not sure Germany's military is particularly competent. The way I see it, Russia is far more efficient at defense spending than most of the EU countries, so they're a legitimate threat even if they "only" match France in spending.
> We lived on the bottom floor and mainly relied on wood heat from the backofen in the center of the home to heat the rest, and when we didn't/forget to keep it goin I could literately see my breath while I laid in bed as I lived the furthest away from the source, and as someone born and raised in SoCal it was incredibly terrifying at first.
That is highly unusual for Germany - and most probably you'd be eligible for major reductions in rent paid until the landlord fixes this (depends on the actual temperatures attainable with the heat source).
Anyway, nuclear wouldn't help here: Only a tiny fraction of housing in Germany heats with electricity. It's mostly gas, central heating from power plants (with hot water pipes laid into the neighborhoods), or geothermal.
France didn't really build new plants either, the existing plants are just as old as Germany's. The one big new project under construction, Flamanville, is already way over budget, more expensive than renewables - even before taking decommissioning into account
The article has the answer to your question: There was no lens, just a pinhole. The lens and filter system gets integrated "over the next few months". They tested the sensor array, not the lens.
Ha, that's how I tested a DSLR that I had repaired. There was no matching objective there, so I wrapped aluminium foil over the front and, using a needle, stabbed a tiny hole into it. The pinhole setup was good enough to test what I needed to test :D
Perhaps Civ6 just isn't your thing, but your experience could also be exactly what Sid Meier describes: You have to grasp the different mechanics to get to the fun, strategic part of the game - which takes a while. Like in chess, where learning the game doesn't end, but actually only really starts once you know the basic rules of piece movement.
As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.
I think a big difference between Civ games and chess is that chess has very easy-to-learn mechanics. There are only a half dozen different pieces and the rules are pretty simple. A beginner can start playing almost immediately and have fun from the start. I think Civ’s mechanics are several orders of magnitude more complex.
Yes - chess has a relatively simple and limited ruleset, the complexity comes from the combinations possible.
Civ6 has a crazy amount of complexity to do basic actions - the complexity comes from the UI and all the rules, each city has a ton of things to build which each take many turns, there’s multiple skill trees of unclear benefits, there’s governments and policies, where you can build and what you need to build isn’t clear. During all of this kind of tedious action nothing interesting is happening.
I’d guess there’s a baked in assumption that people playing are already familiar with the game. The tutorial and in game recommended actions were not great.
I don’t mind some complexity (I like KSP, Starcraft) - Civ6 feels like a bad design problem.
Definitely! Multiple core mechanics are downright broken. Religion for example is a complete waste of time, as it has practically zero consequences outside of the mechanic itself. I can routinely beat the game while completely ignoring religion.
Compared to present countries, not the past, the US indeed is exceptionally violent, especially given the wealth in the country.
* Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries, for example: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...
* The US still has legal capital punishment.
* The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based, resulting in very high incarceration rates etc.
* The prevalence of sexual violence, e.g. compare the US with Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health...