> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?
Problems, yes. "Biology is going to kill me soon" shouldn't have to be one of those problems, and in fact I think it makes us all slightly crazy in different ways, from not caring about the future to unscrupulously believing in afterlives.
No, I was disputing "mortality" while agreeing with "challenges", which I've written as problems in the nice sense of "please let me finish my problem". That's some historical figure's alleged last words, I think.
(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)
The vote to extend it for years failed. Then they voted to extend it for days in order to negotiate further. The 10 day extension was by voice vote (basically, they all shout at the same time), so there's no record of that.
> If you are elected to congress, your job is to get bills passed.
This is a vast oversimplification. Your job is to represent your consistuents. In many cases, this means your job is to stop bills from getting passed, especially in the current political situation.
> The more the left supports Bernie, the more people like Warren struggle to get elected
This is a very strange take. Sanders and Warren are mostly close allies and rarely compete. Both are successfully elected Senators, from separate states. Warren declined to run for President in 2016 and appeared to be supporting Sanders. In 2020 they both ran for President, but guess what, neither one of them won the Democratic nomination. In any case, it's important to recognize that elections are popularity contests and not competency tests, as should be obvious from our current President.
The issue is not even "the left." Sanders is more popular than Warren, indeed more popular than almost any politician of any party (including male politicians, if you insist on making this about gender), among political independents. Because of his popularity among independents, he's the most popular politician in the US and would have a better chance of winning the Presidency than any Democrat (of any gender), but the Democrats nonetheless refuse to nominate him. If Warren were equally popular among independents, then Democrats should nominate her, but she's not. Of course this lack of popularity among independents is not specific to Warren: most non-Democrats dislike Democrats.
In 2016, Sanders put up an unexpectedly stiff challenge to Clinton, who was considered an overwhelming frontrunner at the beginning of the race. The natural next step for the left would be to build on that momentum and push Sanders over the top in 2020. In my opinion, it's quite delusional to expect that the left would for some bizarre reason abandon Sanders in 2020 and throw their support behind Warren instead. That would make little sense. Why start over from scratch? In any case, I doubt that Warren would have fared better. The establishment doesn't want a leftist, no matter who, and they quickly conspired to consolidate around Biden, who didn't even pick Warren as his running mate.
IMO voting tactically makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers tactically. Perhaps it makes less sense, because people do actually win the lottery. Unless you are a Supreme Court Justice, the odds that your vote will change the election outcome are practically nil.
It's a bit odd to believe that you can't change who the candidates are, but you can nonetheless change which candidate wins. In fact, you can't do either. Collectively, we determine both, but each voter is only a grain of sand in the collective heap.
Tactical voting is far more important in the UK, where there are typically more than two candidates to vote for in any given seat, the government is not directly elected and most candidates are not selected in primaries.
It's _incredibly_ common there to vote to unseat the current government, or avoid splitting the vote on one side of the spectrum or the other. For example, I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
> I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
Are you attributing the electoral result to your individual action?
Yes - and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
Of course, I understand what your are clumsily and nihilistically trying to suggest, so here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote [1]. This is not the only one, naturally.
> and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
That's my point. You have no control over those other thousand people. Even if you hadn't voted, or had voted the opposite, it wouldn't have changed the outcome.
I would love to be able to make a difference, or perhaps just to believe that I could make a difference. Unfortunately, I've learned the hard way that I can't.
It's crucial to note, moreover, that determining the winner of an election is not the same as determining the winner's behavior in office. There's no evidence that the voters want FISA extended. But the military-industrial complex does, and it has the money to buy whoever happens to win. Somehow the damn thing keeps getting extended no matter who is in power.
> here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote
I don't deny that occasionally a small, local election is determined by a single vote. However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress. I found no Congressional elections decided by one vote over the past 100 years. That circumstance was more common (though still unlikely) in the distant past when the population was much smaller.
In 1974, the US Senate election in New Hampshire (one of the smallest states by poulation) had a margin of 2 votes after the second recount, though the initial count was 355 and the first recount 10. This election was disputed and was eventually decided by a subsequent special election, with a margin of 27,000.
In 1984, the US House election in Indiana's 8th District also had multiple recounts, the latest—controversial, partisan, dubious—having a margin of only 4 votes.
In 2020, the US House election in Iowa's 2nd District again had multiple recounts, the latest having a margin of only 6 votes. This result was contested on claims of counting errors, but the contest was denied.
As with the 2000 US Presidential election, whenever the count is very close, the results are usually decided politically (e.g., Bush v. Gore) rather than by the voters. Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
> However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress.
The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference. If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people. For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid", look no further than the recent Texas Democratic primary, where selecting the best _candidate_ (rather than the person who might be closer to the ideals of many voters when in office) was achieved via exactly that means.
> Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
There are no voting machines, everything is done by hand, under the strict observance of the campaign teams for each candidate. Every non-obvious vote is presented to all candidates teams with a proposed disposition. There are, to a first approximation, never allegations of process issues, because they would be so absurd on their face.
> The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference.
Not exactly. The "No reason to vote then" commenter was referring to a hypothetical Rubio vs. Newsom contest, whereas they expressed some enthusiasm for Ro Khanna and/or Thomas Massie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809316
In other words, the commenter wants to vote for someone they perceive as good, not for someone they perceive as only the lesser of two evils.
And I believe this attitude is not at all tactical. They aren't saying, "I'll only vote for Khanna to prevent him from losing by one vote." The margin doesn't even matter if there's someone good to vote for.
> If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people.
If everyone develops the mentality of not voting for the lesser evil, then evil candidates will receive no votes, which would be a good outcome.
> For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid"
What do you mean by "not a thing"? Of course people vote tactically. People say they vote tactically, and I believe them. What I dispute is the effectiveness of it.
I wouldn't say that tactical voting is "stupid" per se. What I think is that tactical voting is not somehow mandatory or uniquely rational. I wouldn't chastise people for voting their conscience and refusing to give in to "lesser evil" calculations.
Let me put it this way: if, as some argue, the only rational choice is to vote for a duopolist candidate, no matter how bad, as long as one dupolist is less bad than the other, then we are doomed to the same duopoly until humanity becomes extinct (which I would say is sooner with the duopoly in place), and the duopolists are destined to get worse, more evil over time, because there is no incentive for politicians not to be evil in a lesser evil voting situation.
This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model.
I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.
> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.
This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect.
In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
Past performance is never a guarantee of future performance, that's a gambler's fallacy. Just because we found out more groundbreaking stuff before, doesn't mean we will continue to do so.
There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.
"physics being solved" feels like it backs the original refinement point - we still use the formulas of Newtonian physics in non-extreme cases, and while those extremes definitely matter in important areas (nuclear power generation, semiconductors), they feel more like exceptional circumstances.
In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.
It still takes 3 - 5 years or more even for that incremental progress. It takes years to just catch up on the field! Do we expect PhD candidates to subsist on barely livable wages until they eventually publish a ground-breaking result? That kind of disincentive to even start a PhD would not be conducive at all to progress.
Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.
Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.
In order to enter the mainstream market and challenge the consumer OS duopolies, a new OS needs at least two things:
1. Retail presence
2. A large advertising budget
This is why it's so difficult to challenge the existing duopolies on desktop and mobile. If a consumer can't walk into a retail store, see a device on the showroom floor with the new OS installed by default, and buy a device with the new OS installed by default, then the new OS has zero chance of becoming mainstream.
Among other reasons, this is why Linux has failed to go mainstream. Linux has no retail presence, and it's not advertising to consumers.
I suspect the app ecosystem was a problem with Windows Phone. iOS and Android already had a head start of a few years, with Windows Phone not appearing until late 2010, and "Windows" was a bit of a misnomer, because desktop Windows apps couldn't run on the phone, so the preexisting software ecosystem didn't help.
Certainly the app ecosystem was part of the challenge, and Microsoft spent a fair bit of effort trying to both encourage developers to make apps, and filling obvious gaps (like Youtube) itself. If their resources, retail connections and brand recognition weren't enough, it's hard to imagine that anyone else stands much chance until conditions change drastically.
I would seriously consider if you've developed an imaginary caricature in your mind that you apply to people you don't know. Further, I would consider if any living person actually lives up to it.
On the one hand, I admire (at some level) you sticking to your guns here, willing to take on all comers. On the other, though, I don't entirely understand the inference that you're drawing from the piece; what, exactly, is getting commoditized?
What he prides himself in (in this context) is craft, which LLM use probably can enable, but definitely isn't commoditized by the kind of vibe coding that Garry Tan is doing.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
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