[ageofwant]

Pretty disheartening to see the downvotes in a forum like hn which are supposed to be informed about these things. If people that are supposed to be able to critically assess data and have access to as much information they need to verify any claims come to the conclusion that you are full of shit, what hope is there to educate grandpa screaming at the wokes on the street.

[Sharlin]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his startup idea depends upon his not understanding it.

–Upton Sinclair, paraphrased

[mempko]

I love technology and have to keep telling my friends that it's possible there won't be a computer industry in 30 years. I'm not joking. Our technology requires a highly complex and organized society to continue to function and develop. Complex and highly organized societies developed under a stable climate. We created societies built on cities that don't move.

If you love technology. If you love computers. Then global warming is your biggest threat and something you should care about deeply.

[time_to_smile]

HN has become very hostile to reality when reality makes people scared.

I no longer expect any thing I say to convince people, but still keep saying what I do so that other people that see it, can feel a little less crazy/alone.

Consider it my, probably futile, struggle against the upcoming wave of cognitive dissonance. As soon as I realized the way things were headed, I also realized that, paradoxically, the more obvious our situation becomes the more aggressively people will refused to see it.

There was a time on HN where downvotes where pretty exclusively reserved for trollish comments and other inappropriate content. I agree with your feeling that this is disheartening, but strangely serves as evidence that these things are happening.

I myself have days where I can't believe my own eyes as I watch events unfolding I thought I would only see at the end of my life if I lived to a ripe old age.

[notabee]

It's not surprising, actually. The problem with very smart people is that they're often very smart in their particular domains of expertise, but socially they will be treated as just very smart in general. This often leads to an emotional overconfidence in assessing fields outside their domains of expertise, and that extreme cleverness becomes more of a tool to create complex rationalizations of uninformed biases rather than being used humbly, empirically, and diligently as should be the case for a beginner in any topic.

And yes, I'm aware that's essentially a paraphrase of the Dunning-Kruger concept. We're all probably making similar assumptions about domains of knowledge we don't know much about, because that's what the brain does. Just like human vision appears solid and complete but is actually a stitched together amalgamation of the small, receptor-dense fovea in the center darting around constantly, and the rest being filled in by the brain instead of direct perception, so is our impression of the world, and we won't know things for sure unless we take time to study them up close.