That attention span exists as a relevant concept and that people are ruining it with technology.
If our attentiveness is struggling it is undoubtedly because life is harder and crueler these days.
Our attention, if we are being treated humanely and sustainability by the societal conditions around us, is fine (we aren’t though, this being the issue).
edit Same thing with all the “kids these days” things about kids not being able to focus, being a kid these days has got to feel hopeless in a million ways that are too crushing to focus on not the least of which are the adults around you condescending your fears of the future even as they destroy it.
life is harder and crueler these days.
I think you just found the popular belief that I disagree with.
Compared to most of human history, life now is pretty good. This article uses childhood mortality (globally 4.4% versus 50% for most of human history) to make the point. There’s still lots of room to improve - the EU has a tenth the global average - but humanity has made incredible progress on that front over the past two centuries.
Looking at a smaller time scale, the human development index is trending upward everywhere since 1990.
facepalm have you tried looking up at the real world around you recently?
No. I live under a rock and haven’t noticed that there’s a global increase in far-right movements, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and a race between Sam Altman and Elon Musk to see who can boil the oceans faster to make better slop factories.
Bad news makes for good headlines, and we absolutely have serious, pressing problems worldwide. Despite that, ask yourself if you’d rather live in 1925 than 2025. 1825? 1725? Think about how the average person lived and died in those times. When was life actually easier and kinder for most people?
Oh my god, this attitude that someone is not allowed to be happy about some things because other things are bad drives me up the fucking wall.
Of course you’re going to be depressed and anxious and feel like the world is ending and there’s nothing that can be done besides wait for full societal collapse if you set these rules that you can’t enjoy the good until things are perfect.
No but the future that was possible for the older people around me in my country is gone and global collapse is accelerating, things are getting worse… what the hell does 1925, 1825 or 1725 got to do with it?
Why would I continue this conversation with you if you’re going to downvote my replies? That’s rude.
Why would I not downvote a comment I consider missed the essential point on something I am passionate about and feel materially impacts us all?
The effect of a downvote is that fewer people see the comment. If you think fewer people should see my comments, I can assist you with that by not posting them.
If you feel I’ve missed your point rather than understanding and disagreeing with it, feel free to articulate it more clearly. Your claim as I understood it was life is harder and crueler (for most people, most places) these days (than at some point in the past).
I think most people have always had short attention spans but technology has taken advantage of that to captivate us. History just tells the story of those who lengthened their attention spans on purpose. History is rarely the story of common people, it is often told by the exceptional about the exceptional and this distorts our perception of humanity significantly
I can think of two relevant things that bear upon your attention here.
Stress, which makes your attention kind of jump around.
Temptation, which makes your attention go places without you choosing it. It’s a kind of loss of control.
Karma.
If it existed, then how come bad people get away with a lot of shit?
Being the bigger man.
I don’t outright disagree with it to where I think it’s not useful, but I don’t agree with it either. There are some specific situations and circumstances at play where maybe being the bigger man wasn’t worth it. It’s hard to tell sometimes but I’ve been in situations where having been the bigger man just meant more bullshit for me in the end. Than, having done something right then and there that would’ve solved the issue and prestige not mattering.
good things do have a way of coming back around, but that’s more so because…well…that’s just kind of how communities as a whole function, people working together to common goal, shouldering each others burdens etc.
bad deeds definitely don’t go punished on their own though, that…takes someone with the agency/time to actually punish bad people
“Natural” means healthy
I like to point out to those people that arsenic is natural. Malaria is natural too.
God.
We don’t care about God here. You got anything we care about?
You said popular belief. You did not say popular belief on lemmy
Well now you know. So do you?
Just answering your question.
That giving the state permission to execute people is ever anything approaching justice.
Karma
People argue back and forth whether capitalism or socialism/communism is a superior system and they are all wrong. Those concepts are just tools. Saying one economic system applies to all situations is as silly as saying the only tool you need to build a house is a hammer.
I think public conversations are made of simplistic ideas. Maybe because they’re stronger. Easier to convey and digest.
So people may think deep and complex but societies think shallow and simple. Something like that.
One of the downsides of democracy no doubt.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
it’s more about which one is better for more situations, no? it is much harder for different situations in the same area to dynamically decide which economic system is better.
Not really. It’s entirely possible to pick and choose. We chose a socialist model for fire department because the capitalist model proved disastrous. Many countries successfully did the same for healthcare, retirement, and all sorts of things. At the same time, capitalism is great when you want a million choices on TV to watch or a grocery store with a whole aisle of different types of cookies.
To me, the difference is the impact of failures. If someone starts a company making a new type of cookie and it proves not to be profitable, it goes bankrupt. Unfortunate, but ultimately not a big deal. If someone has cancer and curing them isn’t profitable, you can’t just give up. That person’s life is more important than profit.
welfare capitalism is still capitalism as even firefighters are still subjugated by class and capital
If the essentials of life are all shifted to “welfare capitalism” the power of class and capital to subjugate is greatly diminished. Add in mass union membership and it gets even better.
let’s use your example of firefighters. the obvious subjugation is the government, when looking at its budget, diverting funds away to pet policies and luxuries (not to mention Robert Moses–style redlining), which is how you have volunteer firefighters that cease all activities at night when you needed them to handle a 4AM electrical backyard fire where i grew up.
the less obvious subjugation is capitalism itself. when the firefighters walk home under this “socialism”, their problems of survival are not solved. they have to take their capital into the nearest grocer and be subject to the horrors of the market: the nearest walmart, the #1 shrink on communities today, replacing the mom-and-pop of memories and community gatherings with a well-oiled, prices machine that runs at a loss until it becomes the only shop (or only competing with similar price machines) in town, at which point it maximizes its profit margin and sells the same cheap items at a markup just enough to be purchasable under welfare assistance. firefighters, historically poorly compensated for their public service, are forced to limit themselves to walmart’s stale options and other working class horrors. this sticks you with the difficult choice of either increasing regulation—risking further government discrimination and costs that burden firefighter funding—or maintaining the status quo. you’ve got every industry risking safety, health, and quality to do things cheaper, and the people relying on regulation and inspection that can never get through every nook and cranny to defend the consumer instead of eliminating the perverted incentive that is capitalism. the final alternative to combining firefighter socialism with capitalism here is to distribute food and other essentials instead of salary, which uh i don’t think is a good idea if legends of government rations and their poor variety hold. maybe when the government is run by omniscient telepaths…
i agree with your last sentence, though. i support syndicalism, which needs to go further—into governance—than just membership. i’ll admit that you could call a syndicalist society capitalist which isn’t something i’ve thought of before
That there is a correct way to live or that objective morality exists
You’d like The Good Place if you haven’t already seen it.
”Doug! We all love Doug!”
There are very few at ease with moral relativity.
Oh definitely. Objectivity schmobjectivity. I think it’s something completely different.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The pilot wave theory makes much more intuitive sense, needs les hypothesis, was supported by a lot of famous scientist in the early days of quantum and is mathematically equivalent.
does the pilot wave theory respect locality?
EPR proves quantum mechanics violates locality without hidden variables, and Bell proves quantum mechanics violates locality with hidden variables, and so locality is not salvageable. People who claim quantum mechanics without hidden variables can be local tend to redefine locality to just be about superluminal signaling, but you can have nonlocal effects that cannot be used to signal. It is this broader definition of locality that is the concern of the EPR paper.
When Einstein wrote locality, he didn’t mention anything about signaling, that was not in his head. He was thinking in more broad terms. We can summarize Einstein’s definition of locality as follows:
(P1) Objects within set A interact such that their values are changed to become set A’. (P2) We form prediction P by predicting the values of A’ while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A. (P3) We form prediction Q by predicting the values of A’ while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A as well as object x where x⊄A. (D) A physical model is local if the variance of P equals the variance of Q.
Basically, what this definition says is that if particles interact and you want to predict the outcome of that interaction, complete knowledge of the initial values of the particles directly participating in the interaction should give you the best prediction possible to predict the outcome of the interaction, and no knowledge from anything outside the interaction should improve your prediction. If knowledge from some particle not participating in the interaction allows you to improve your prediction, then the outcome of the interaction has irreducible dependence upon something that did not locally participate in the interaction, which is of course nonlocal.
The EPR paper proves that, without hidden variables, you necessarily violate this definition of locality. I am not the only one to point this out. Local no-hidden variable models are impossible. Yes, this also applies to Many Worlds. There is no singular “Many Worlds” interpretation because no one agrees on how the branching should work, but it is not hard to prove that any possible answer to the question of how the branching should work must be nonlocal, or else it would fail to reproduce the predictions of quantum theory.
- Einstein, incompleteness, and the epistemic view of quantum states
- A no-go theorem for Quantum theory ontological models
- An Elementary Proof That Everett’s Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal
Pilot wave theory does not respect locality, but neither does orthodox quantum mechanics.
The fear of developing nonlocal hidden variable models also turn out to be unfounded. The main fear is that a nonlocal hidden variable model might lead to superluminal signaling, which would lead to a breakdown in the causal order, which would make the theory incompatible with special relativity, which would in turn make it unable to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory.
It turns out, however, that none of these fears are well-founded. Pilot wave theory itself is proof that you can have a nonlocal hidden variable model without superluminal signaling. You do not end up with a breakdown in the causal order if you introduce a foliation in spacetime.
Technically, yes, this does mean it deviates from special relativity, but it turns out that this does not matter, because the only reason people care for special relativity is to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory. Quantum field theory makes the same predictions in all reference frames, so you only need to match QFT’s predictions for a single reference frame and choose that frame as your foliation, and then pilot wave theory can reproduce the predictions of QFT.
There is a good paper below that discusses this, how it is actually quite trivial to match QFT’s predictions with pilot wave theory.
tldr: Quantum mechanics itself does not respect locality, hidden variables or not, and adding hidden variables does not introduce any problems with reproducing the predictions of quantum field theory.
I’m going to apologize, I love science, have a PhD in biology, so all that goes over my head, you did a good job explaining it, but yeah, I’m not able to fully digest it.
it’s an interesting answer, and In think I understood some of that.
Copenhagen!!! Woo!!
That a hot dog is not a taco
Hey, sorry for coming back a week later. But is your username in anyway referencing the ska dance from the nineties?
Well, that’s random. Lol.
Sorry, but no. It was inspired by a character from Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (MXC)
Right you are Ken.
A surprising number of people on lemmy seem to have this belief, which i think is unpragmatic: They think that to live ones life correctly, or to form a coherent society, one, or the society, must have a Set of Ethical and Moral Principles that crucially, has to be easily enumerable, and preferably named (Like, “The Ten Commandments”). These people also think that they do not have such a named Set, and that this is a really bad problem for them. I think having values is good. However, I think that worrying about how they might be inconsistent seems to be a kind of wild-card disscussion-ender (“Well to solve that problem, we’d first need to sort out Philosophy”), and that therefore, using this worry in any discussion but an abstract one is bad.
(For the society part, holding way too high standards for the Set also creates weird Cultural Homogeneity problems, which irks me.)
If you believe something adjacent, which Sets of values count for you? The Ten Commandments? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Or whatever Kant said?
That the cereal should be poured before the milk.
Thought it was illegal the other way around. You probably think the toilet paper should fold over the back too. Don’t you?
But cereral first is only sane and moral. We can’t have a floating mound. And that’s to say nothing of volumetric concerns.
You sprinkle some more cereal on the milk whenever you run out of cereal.
The whole point is to not have soggy cereal
Really depends on preference and cereal type
It’s less of an argument between milk first vs second, but people that like soggy vs crunchy cereal.
The important thing is to not add too much cereal before you can eat it all. Adding in cereal last just helps make sure you don’t.
I eat my cereal dry by the handful then drink milk when my mouth gets too cottonie
My uncle’s ex-wife would pour a bowl of frosted flakes, pour milk on it, put the bowl in the refrigerator, then eat it the next day.
I don’t think that’s why they got divorced, but I’ve always believed it was a contributing factor…
I think lots of people believe that the ends can justify the means.
But to me, that expression means the same thing as, “Whatever causes a good outcome must not be bad.” And I not only disagree with it, I don’t even think it makes sense.
I heard a story about a guy who was stabbed in a mugging and during surgery for the stabbing, found out that he had cancer, which saved his life.
But nobody is going to go to the judge during the mugger’s trial, and say that his decision to stab the guy was “justified,” and so he should be released to stab again with his completely justified stabbing history.
No, the things that are justifiable are those which are good and informed actions. You can’t justify bad or ignorant actions simply because of luck.
I agree with you, but I think your example is lacking as the stabber purely intended to mug and not uncover cancer.
I see what you’re saying, that there are two cases. One where the ends is the goal of the person who used the means, and one where the ends is not the goal of the person who used the means. I only mentioned the latter in my comment.
But from my perspective, if the stabber purely intended to uncover cancer, and for some reason they actually had the expertise and knowledge to know that that specific person had cancer, and this was somehow the only way to prove it, then the action itself is inherently altruistic. From my perspective, it wouldn’t be less altruistic even if the person turned out not to have cancer. So, I don’t think it would count as the ends justifying the means.
If the same stabber, with the same expertise and knowledge, actually had multiple ways of achieving the ends, like they could have talked about it rather than stabbing, but they chose the stabbing route, then I think you can’t say that the stabbing was justified, regardless of whether the cancer was discovered.
There may be other cases worth digging into. I’m sure there are lots of examples I didn’t think of, but I’d be surprised if they were convincing to me. The reason is that, my experience has taught me that good ends are most predictably the results of just and informed actions.
well put
But it doesn’t mean “whatever causes a good outcome must not be bad”.
It means that sometimes for the greater good, you have to pay a price.
Think of the trolley problem, would you kill 1 person to save 5? Many people would say yes. They’re not saying murder is good, but the ends justify the means
Would the ends justify taking a healthy person off the street and harvesting their organs to save five people?
Cynicism isn’t inherently more mature than believing that things can be made better. For a lot of people “everything is fucked, nothing matters” is a way of absolving themselves from the responsibility and personal risk involved in actively trying to make the world a better place.
They get mad at the very idea that people can work together and successfully create change, despite numerous historical examples. It’s actively immature to be wholly cynical
I agree. And I think that cynicism is just easier. The claims of maturity part is mere justification.
I agree with this. People think being pessimistic is more realistic than being optimistic. They think spinning things as negative is automatically more realistic than the positive spin. In reality, realism sees both sides and adjusts one’s behaviour to make the best out of everything
That “growth” is inherently a good thing to do and if you aren’t trying to grow as a person everyday then you’re not living ‘correctly’
aaah. the morally of cancer
Excuse my curiosity. Do you think learning and experiencing new things is not an important aspect of life? Or maybe you just have a different definition of growth than me?
A life without would be stagnant and boring to me.
I believe where we differ is the degree. I do still learn new things for fun and whatnot, but if there is ever a time I am NOT doing that (besides work, sleep, or helping society as a whole in some other way), I’ve been conditioned to feel guilty. Like, if I’m not growing at all times, then I am personally spitting on the graves of all my ancestors
I think growing/expanding your experience in life is good, but ya, I definitely don’t agree with that definition, that’s intense.
One of the best takeaways from the Wizard of Earthsea books. Ambition can be poison.
I love Earthsea
Can’t even “grow” when your parents destroyed your self-confidence.
Eh, you can circle back through nihilism into absurdism, and wind up in a place close enough to self-confidence to actually turn into it eventually.
Ask me how I know.
Have you considered growing past that? /s. Stupid joke aside, wholly relatable for lots – including myself – i imagine.
the industrial revolution and its consequences. also the enlightenment, fuck those guys
