> Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.
Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.
> All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.
Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.
You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.
I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.
I have been thinking over this comment for a while now. I think yes, you are correct that thought is involved in writing but I don't think it is possible to claim "all writing is thinking when done by a human". Like what type of thinking are you claiming here?
Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is different from thinking logically about a concept and writing it down which I think is where you are getting at.
The definition of writing and thinking is too broad in that sentence even though it does apply in several obvious cateogires within that at different levels.
And also "writing helps us think about the world" is too broad again. Why? Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? I just wrote it because i felt like writing it. Why wouldn't you consider that writing?
Yes, but not to understand or think about the world. In this case, writing was to express something, not to understand something. The overall point is that claiming that "human writing = human thinking" is too broad a general statement to make seriously.
That's what I am saying, zero thoughts is not possible unless you define what thoughts/thinking are you referring too.
Of course you cannot do anything without like basic thought otherwise you will not be able to do anything.
So I am not sure what you mean by non-contrived? It has to be contrived because we are talking specifics like I said.
If thinking = consiousness then yes you cannot write without being consious. But if thinking = having complex logical thoughts and writing about them then I would say yes it is possible to write without that.
My only claim is that just because you are writing something doesn't automatically mean you are having complex thoughts about what you are writing. So writing = thinking doesn't sit right. I can tell you i often just mindlessly write words on my journal sometimes but that is also a contrived example. Yet the existence of the example is the point. You cannot categorically claim something if exceptions (no matter how contrived) can be raised.
You wrote "apt apt apt apt apt apt" to prove a very specific point no? Absolutely requires reasoning and understanding the problem to go there. And good luck getting an LLM to do that.
Yes, I wrote it to prove that writing doesn't mean I understand the world. It responds to "writing helps you understand the world." My point was that, yes, of course you can find categories within it that apply, which is why the answer is not fundamentally incorrect. Claiming "writing = thinking" in a general sense is very broad, and that's my point.
This is an example of the problem. I did choose to write it in the way that although I knew it can be interpreted trivially, if the reader assumes I'm an imbecile. It was a "punchy" recap of the relatively long explanation for a HN comment and hopefully decently argued point.
It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment.
And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.
Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation.
The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution.
Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India are all well-positioned to do this. The limitation is political will, which is more difficult than it should be, but definitely easier than convincing a critical mass of Americans to go vegan.
Culture can be changed - we changed the attitude toward and prevalence of cigarette smoking in 2-3 generations, we could change other practices as well. Success doesn't need to mean 100% adoption - material changes in attitude toward meat consumption (luxury/celebration vs everyday) would make a material difference in the overall impact. And yes, some/many ranchers, butchers, etc would need to turn to some other industry for income. Solar farms should do pretty well on ranchland. Full disclosure - I'm NOT a vegetarian and love a nice steak. My doctor has recommended I incorporate more plant protein in my diet. But I'm not really trying to convince anyone that they should do the same. I'm mostly reacting to the opinion that it's impossible/silly. My 2 pack a day smoker dad thought the same thing back in the 1960s. By the time he was in his 70s, he was a firm non-smoker. Things can change.
Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.
I think the difference is that smoking is also horrible for the smoker, and many want to quit, but can’t very easily. People don’t want to stop eating meat, driving their SUVs, buying cheap shit on Amazon, and flying to cool vacations. Stopping doing those things doesn’t benefit them unless everyone else stops too, and unlike smoking, we’ve made little progress in the last few decades (other than the progress unlocked by technology that means it’s immediately beneficial to the one making the change, like solar), so I can’t blame anyone for thinking that giving up meat to save the planet is stupid since their entire lifetime of lived experience tells them that the vast majority of their fellow humans are not going to do the same.
Culture can be changed indeed, as can be seen in religion where branches has happened and whole demographics has gone and switched to different religions.
The reason for the decrease in smoking is still being researched and debate, but the main arguments that I have seen is the main role of smoking as social stress relief and as such it has been replaced by other addictions like opium use (mobile phone use, social media, and games has also been argued).
If we consider food culture to be malleable, we definitely should move to aquaculture as a main source of nutrients. Farms on land compete with forests and human activity, and land based farms uses artificial fertilizers (derived from natural gas) and massive amount of fresh water. Shellfish, invertebrates, and seaweed can provide both protein and calories, and has the lowest environmental impact of anything we eat today and can even have a positive environmental impact if farmed correctly. Changing farming from doing harm to doing good would have massive impact, and all it takes is a cultural change.
Energy policy is set by governments, which makes it a part of the political sphere
Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture
Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular
I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.
It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.
I don’t think that is a majority behavior. Few people consume to own the libs. At least far fewer people than those who just like meat more than they care about their marginal contributions to climate change.
I think that’sa harmful oversimplification. You should avoid arguing against a boogeyman version of your political opponents. People vote for crazy candidates for a multitude of reasons. Most people have fairly average opinions on the majority of topics but can only vote for candidates that partially represent their preferences. I for example have fairly radical preferences when it comes to environmental policy but agree more with conservative opinions on other topics. There are no parties in my country that promise to make me completely happy.
Stop being so fucking patronizing. I was raised by these people. Most of my family are still these people. I’ve experienced their bullshit for over 40 years. Your high minded nonsense in no way applies. I see what they cheer for.
And here you are playing their fucking game. They wouldn't be such degenerate shitheads if people weren't mean to them. As if there isn't a strong line of cruelty throughout all of conservative history in this country. Your argument is she wouldn't have been raped if she hasn't been wearing what she was wearing. That black boy wouldn't have been lynched if he hadn't cat-called a white woman. Regardless of whether or not he actually did. It puts the fault of the worst of our society on the normal folks just trying to live their lives. Conservatives are shit people because are incapable of empathy for the out-group. Not because liberals were mean to them online.
Democracy breaks down when you demonize people with different opinions instead of figuring out on why they believe what they’re believing and on which topics you can find consensus. When you assume to know everything about a person by where they put a cross in an election you give up on trying to convince them of your convictions. You can’t have a functioning society if you let the identity politics propaganda win. If you believe that roughly half of your country is a raping, lynching mob beyond reason you might as well stop elections and proceed to civil war.
> instead of figuring out on why they believe what they’re believing and on which topics you can find consensus.
They already told us. They hate anybody who isn't a cis white christian male. There's not a lot to find consensus on when one side wants healthcare for everyone and the other wants some people to cease to exist within the country.
Going vegan 1 day a week is trivially easy - if everyone does this, the emission reduction is not trivial. We need not have to go full militant vegan to make a dent. And I totally agree with energy/transit/real estate planning being the sectors where a government can twist knobs a bit easier with greater effect. But I strongly believe that we need holistic approaches- reducing emissions on an individual level will move the needle en masse.
If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.
It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.
To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.
If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).
Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.
That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.
The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.
The straw man is claiming that "strict vegan diets" are necessary. People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action. It's a hindrance to achieving the very possible change we need.
> People bring up "strict vegan diets" to sabotage climate action.
They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.
how fast do you expect vegan diets to be distributed through society? What is the relation between the expectation of how fast they can be distributed through society and the requirement for speed of distribution to have the desired effect?
Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.
How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?
I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.
When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.
Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?
Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.
I think current livestock usage is driven by demand? I don’t think everyone needs to become strictly vegan. If every ate meat just two days a week that would have a big impact. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all that. For example if meat usage was rationed by the government WW2-style that would likely effect demand too.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
I don’t think it’s silly to say there’s a potential revolution and ask what it might be. Overly cynical comment I think, trying to be Vaclav Smil in a conversation not mentioning energy.
This guy remembers what I thought I was saying. In my defense I stole the whole thing from Stephen King’s It which I read … forty years ago, that can’t be accurate. Let me sort out my instruments and get back to you.
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.
And not all thinking is writing is a clear truism, there’s no point to even stating that.
Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.
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