"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

That reminds me of a cool trick that not many people seem to know, you can tell north with a analog watch: http://modernsurvivalblog.com/survival-skills/how-to-use-a-w...

It worked really well.

...I'd say that modern phones with internal compasses have obsoleted this technique, but given how unreliable phone compasses are, I wonder whether I should try producing an Android version.

So now I can generally (roughly) tell the time by looking at the sun, if I'm somewhere familiar (I know where north is) - and I can generally tell where north it is by looking at the sun, if I know the time.

I suppose most people (ie, those that don't live near the poles) can tell time roughly just by how high the sun is/how long the shadows are - but it's a little tricky in most of Norway, most of the year (except maybe around noon).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches#1920_Wristw...

I have a 1913 wristwatch in my collection. But, I don't seem to have time to wear that and many fine mechanical watches any more; my smartwatch is so useful I end up wearing that instead.

Sometimes I think that it is somewhat disappointing that things didn't work out the way this mid-1980s science fiction game thought they would:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nunnwt6ex5bo7e6/hand_computer.pdf?...

The "tech level" indicates which level of technology is needed for a particular piece of equipment to be available and/or normal (won't get you burned at the stake for using "magic") - in Traveller it is used to label different worlds in the universe AFAIK - with GURPS it also extends to cross-dimensinal travel, alternate realities, time travel etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-playing_game...

(I had realised it should have been from a rpg, but I kept the game term from the previous comment to avoid confusion)

So, when you say "People who wear watches as a status symbol wore elaborate mechanical ones, people that just needed time used their phones." you are wrong in the context of the time Adams was talking about. Digital was very much 'cool' back then, or at least not 'cheap' as we see it today. Also, no-one had a mobile in 1978, as they were first introduced in 1979 (and had no clock).

As for today, fashion works in cycles, and among hipsters the digital is 'in', but who really knows. We do know that the Casio F-91 is the watch of choice for IEDs and Casio admits that they sell "well" 25 years after introduction. I remember reading that the F-91 is a graduation 'gift'/shibboleth for IED school grads, but I can't find the source. I guess that earns a fair amount of street-cred or 'cool' in certain circles (of bastard child-killer terrorists). If you do see a group of people with a lot of old Casio F-91 watches, I really hope they are not company you keep!

Actually, this Q&A from one of his (amazing) talks seems to show otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0keUhMiZ44

I kept my watch. Still wear it. My Fermi estimate is that it's 100 times faster to check the time on your watch than on the phone you have to get out of your pocket. It makes a big difference.

I suspect you're greatly underestimating how quickly you can check the time with a watch on your wrist. Even if literally no thought were required, human reflexes are on the order of 200ms latency; 100x more than that would be 20 seconds. In reality, there's a conscious element and that always slows things way down. I don't think the actual effective time taken to check the time by any means at all is ever less than about a second, even if it feels faster. Maaaybe half a second if you truly don't need to move anything but your eyeballs.

On the other hand, I find that it usually takes me 3-4s to get my phone out of my pocket and check the time on it.

In other words, what's really a bad idea—that digital watches are a symptom of—is the notion that humans have a need to know the time with absolute precision. Having that information available—literally, on hand—seems to result in nothing but bad incentives (in much the same way that having access to stock-market quotes at an hourly granularity, when going long, results in nothing but bad investment decisions.)

I once read an article claiming that the invention of the bell-tower that struck once per hour was the proximate cause of people keeping 9-5 business hours, and that a lot of other things about modern labor followed from this. Whether or not this is true, I still have a vague feeling that we would be happier (and be annoyed with people for being "late" to things less) if all clocks were randomly skewed by ~15 minutes.

"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

We live in the most peaceful time in human history. Yes, it's true that we can't know the tail risk, but we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

http://pablobarbera.com/static/barbera_polarization_APSA.pdf

It's very fashionable, because it has produced jaw-dropping public idiocy with unprecedented immediacy on a huge scale. It has given a voice to the loudest idiots, along with the power of the mob. It has unprecedented power to give people license to denigrate other people and anger them, including people they know or are related to. This only figures, as its viral power comes from precisely that effect. (That effect on our affect, no less.)

Maybe it's just like the stylized mock battles carried out by rival little towns in Tuscany dating from the middle ages and renaissance. Maybe it will just amount to blowing off steam and "local color" in the long view of history. I sure hope that undergrads screaming that Yale is not a place of learning is not a harbinger of the future.

I don't know about that. I mean, sure, it's better to be trolled with tweets than hung, but there is something insidious about the way social media, etc. is changing us collectively. We seem to be getting meaner and more polarized on a macro level. Our interactions are more superficial and staged even.

And, the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

> the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

It looks like it sometimes. E.g. worry a lot when I look what is happening in academia. But then again - it's not like there weren't places that were insane before. At least this time I hope nobody gets burned at the stake.

It's basically:

1. now we can vent frustrations publicly more easily, anonymously (this should, I hope, lead to fewer actual violent incidents, sort of like many smaller earthquakes relieve pressure and reduce the risk of a big one)

2. since venting frustrations is very, very public and there's basically no curation for content these days, there's a deluge of garbage that could somewhat be avoided in the past

I think it's a good process since at some point we're just going to get immunized: we'll discover better channels, we'll improve curation and since all the garbage is floating to the top, there's a small chance people will actually notice it and actually act, i.e. try to take care of some of these misguided loonies.

That is, I was referring to the latter, versus suggesting that humans have never done bad things to each another.

I would suggest this causes greater polarisation and less tolerance. This leads to less reasoned discussion to understand perspectives and work out differences. Which leads to more polarisation... etc.

I also agree with you, and furthermore think that we live in the most prosperous and productive period of history and yet we are arguably the most asinine and facile society since the Internet arrived.

-- my grandmother

While it might be true for you and me, it is not true for a large chunk of populace, There is constant war going on in various parts of the world. For example Africa and Middle East is experiencing constant war and loss of lives. Ignoring the civil conflicts, look at the list of countries invaded.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasions

Well, obviously they just need more social media and wikipedia.

I think that's unrealistic. What group has both the motivation and ability to rally both state governments and a large chunk of the military into open warfare on American soil? Both parties love polarizing rhetoric to keep their base riled up, but they have nothing to gain and everything to lose in an open civil war. Various militias, "patriots," and racial and religious warriors can occupy some government buildings, kill some cops, and provoke disastrous police standoffs, but have no ability whatsoever to prosecute an actual war.

Well, the media us polarising as well only in more subtile ways -- for example by throwing paranoid pro-Trump comments in an article about Wikipedia.

> we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

What about the Yugoslavian wars? Or wars orchestrated by the US in the Middle East. If it's peaceful in your zip code it doesn't mean there's peace in Israel for instance, a country that has been in a perpetual state of war since it came to be.

[1]: http://en.itu.dk/About-ITU/Press/News-from-ITU/Danes-are-rel...

Any actual evidence for this? Or do you just mean the most peaceful for Western countries time in human history?

Knowledge don't always help in addressing a problem.

People usually are willing to acknowledge that knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to happiness, but few are willing to admit that in some cases ignorance is what holds things together.

The emperor is wearing no clothes? Religion? "A classic is a book everyone says is important, but no one gets around to reading."

I think a big part of the problem is deep knowledge and intimate knowledge vs. shallow knowledge. You see this a lot in programming and computer science. Sometimes almost no knowledge is fine, but just a little bit more is dangerous, whereas a lot of it would be much more beneficial. This also goes for knowing your neighbors.

given the existence of expressions such as "ignorance is bliss" or "out of sight, out of mind" in many languages, I have the feeling this is not such an uncommon thought.

> People usually are willing to acknowledge that knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to happiness

One human retina has about 120 million photoreceptors. In reasonably well-lit conditions they will all fire many times per second. I think this figure is too small by a factor of at least 1000, maybe more.

> A light bulb generates 10^60 photons per second.

Back of envelope: energy per photon = Planck constant times speed of light over wavelength (there might be a factor of 2pi or something missing there) or about 4x10^-19 Joules at visible-light wavelengths. A typical light bulb might put out, say, 10W of visible light, or 2.5x10^19 photons. If it's an old-style incandescent, a lot of energy goes out in the infrared; let's be generous and say it's 2.5x10^20 photons.

So this number is too large by a factor of at least 10^39.

It's still true that the great majority of photons emitted by a light bulb don't affect what you see when you look at it. For instance, because most of them are emitted in directions that don't let them reach your eyes. It is entirely beyond me how it is useful to categorize this as "ignorance".

But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.

How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of.

Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition.

There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.

What I've learned about the universe over time looks something like this:

    |         
    |          ____/
    |     ____/
    |____/
    +----------------

    |\
    | |
    | |    __     __.
    | L__.'  \__.'
    +----------------

The more I learn, the better everything seems to be.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. [...]

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." [...]

[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Look at a more serious religion, and you'll see better results: Scholastic Catholicism, or the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari schools of Islam, or almost any form of Buddhism.

http://www.catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution

Catholic doctrine is to deny random mutation (god is twiddling bits manually) and insist adam and eve were real. That along with a host of other silly stuff the believe (virgin birth).

And for Adam & Eve : "[The Church] allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms"

So it's not the case.

Which tells us nothing about theistic belief. It would be foolish to conflate the two IMO; as appears to be happening in this exchange.

You say "mythical intelligent religious person" - few people could be considered more religious than Newton, you presumably consider him not to have been intelligent? What's your yardstick for intelligence?

Or did you mean "mythical" in the sense of "I'm going to ignore examples I know of because they contradict my position"?

That was easy, you answered your own question!

Inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence may be true, just not sure what it tells us. A statistical appeal to authority??

Many more people are theistic or spiritual than are religious -- I doubt any statistics exist for that, but again proving a truth that tells us nothing about the basic proposition seems pretty worthless.

You appear to think reasoning about a position requires someone to come to your conclusion.

Re the anecdotal nature of the data-points, are you disputing that the mentioned people are intelligent. What in particular is questionable about those data-points, they don't disprove the aforesaid conjecture but they do cast doubt on the implied conclusion being drawn.

An absolute value would mean rationality was totally correlated with intelligence. It isn't.

I posted this in another comment -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...

I doubt that was meant, either. There have been studies, most show that intelligent people are less likely to be religious. The more education, the less religion. Etc. It is, of course, a statistical thing.

(I grew up in Sweden and can tell you that to get a large fraction of (mentally healthy) people to be religious, they need to grow up in a religious environment -- without anyone really contradicting that world view. It was a bit of a shock for me the first time I went to Ireland for vacation, since I knew that a large part of the locals were really religious, but they were sane.)

> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.

I offered myself as a simple example. I'm neither the smartest guy nor the best Christian, but I consider myself reasonably intelligent and I try hard to live by my beliefs. I also offered several other historical counterexamples.

I don't see a statistical argument here. But it could be my religion showing.

Many of the founders of modern philosophy believed in some form of a Supreme Being. I would venture to say that this is true of most of human history up until the last 20-30 years. Whether from cultural influences, expectations, or otherwise, many of the smartest people in history have had some religious belief. That religious belief may not have been mainstream or consistent with the dominant theology of the era (see America's founding fathers and the prevalence of Deism), but there is a conspicuous absence of outright atheism.

Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis: these were very smart people who also had belief in some form of God. You don't have to agree with everything they thought or said, but you would be wrong to say they were not intelligent.

In short, intelligent religious people certainly aren't "mythical."

> As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up.

The thesis that there is an inverse relationship between religion and intelligence is not evident when you look at the arc of human history. And if you take the most charitable view: "Of people who are alive today, there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence" there is no proof of causation.

For the sake of argument, I'll consent that there is a growing divide between "religious" and "intelligent." Given that the preponderance of evidence suggests that intelligence is largely hereditary, what would explain this shift?

One could argue that expanding our understanding of the universe is responsible for this divide. That as people know more they believe less. But that doesn't appear to pan out when you look at a longer view of human history. Did the Newton's of the past become less religious as their knowledge increased? I don't see it.

It seems more likely that this divide is unique (or at least more sharply pronounced) in today's society. It could be that this is because it is more acceptable in today's world to be harshly critical of belief in general. That is, while there have always been fighting between sects it was not socially acceptable to be hostile towards belief in general. This is an interesting argument, but is not dismissable nor provable.

It could just as easily be that the growing availability of universities and colleges (that are widely more liberal than the general population) impacts impressionable 18-22 years olds who are branching out on their own for the first time. That a growing proportion of intelligent people are being exposed to anti-religious zealots in the form of their mentors at a very impressionable time.

Show me the statistical argument for one vs the other and we can have a debate centered around numbers. Flaming me for providing counterexamples to an offensive and hyperbolic comment hardly seems like a rational counterpoint. To point your question back to you: what does it say about your position that you can't reason about it?

> Controlling for other factors, they can only confidently show strong negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity among American Protestants.

So... American Protestants. Okay. In the scope of living people, that's... quite specific.

>> I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations.

My use of these examples was not to counteract a statistical argument, but the opening sentence:

>>> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.

The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples. It was a simple exercise in showing that religious intellectuals are not a mythical creature.

>> The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples.

I discussed that and referenced it with "See my comment on the brother comment of yours."

I think I wasn't clear, so sturgill missed my trivial point -- I meant that it was not rational to believe in supernatural phenomena without good support.

And intelligence is probably less correlated with rationality than you'd naively think, so of course you'll find highly intelligent people that believe in anything. For instance, I've talked to a guy with mental issues that believed in lots of conspiracy theories. And so on.

(And many hundreds of years old books are not good support; there is better support and more witnesses that Elvis lives. And so on. This is a really old discussion.)

The fact they don't push their religiosity at you is a good thing, no?

You couldn't have met these two guys [1] [2], but you keep on bumping into what they did for all of us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...

The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do, and holding belief in a deity is not one of them.

PS: Those guys are dead. You haven't met him either. They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.

You cannot use Newton or Einstein as an example of a knowledgeable perspective and simultaneously ignore the fact that there exist more knowledgeable people today. That is a fallacy; you could just as well cite Aristotle or Thales or Zoroaster. They get worse as they get older, and that's not a coincidence.

1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)

2. Do you remember that quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Those two are a couple of the giants we stand on the shoulders of, today. That doesn't imply a claim about intelligence, more than being able to get through a science university education.

No, i think that the categorical statement of bleachedsleet (five levels up the tree) is a bit offending, to me it sounds exactly like if he was claiming absolute authority on the subject, which he obviously can't.

showing a counterexample is not a bad argument, at least not in mathematics.

2. bleachedsleet argument needs that intelligence is very correlated with rationality. Sadly, the correlation is probably quite far from 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...

(Regarding 2: For instance, there is mental disease. For another, if you raise children with one specific set of answers and they don't see any criticism of those answers, you can make most of them believe in anything all their life. Including creationism.)

Most intelligent religious people will reject most of the content in their holy book of choice.

Doubt is often encouraged, though min got the better of me and I've since been pretty distant from faith-based living.

EDIT: grammar and clarity, minor changes

Oh, of course. I am not saying there's only one way to do it. On the contrary, that's exactly what I'm saying is wrong to think :)

"If we replace the word 'religious' in this sentence with 'an Apple user', is this still acceptable comment on HN?"

Or, if we replace 'religious' with 'an atheist', is this still acceptable?

Of course not.

There's no point in being happy if you can't share it, and you can't share share stupid with people smart enough to see through it. Being ignorant fundamentally limits the happiness you can create in the world.

Also, this backward effect of the lack of friction is also why I believe Email is still there. A tiny and sweet spot for communication. It requires time, will to read, understand and respond. If you want to release reflex negative emotions, you'll still have to work a little bit for it.

As ppod said, we live in the most peaceful time in human history. Endless torrents of online vitriol suck, but they're not even comparable to the slaughterhouse of actual war.

Indeed, giving the tool for everyone to communicate with each other did result in everybody shouting their prejudices at everyone else.

What the article notes, however, is that the most biased wikipedia editors DO CHANGE with time and go toward moderation at a surprising pace.

Instant communication IS knitting society together. We are at the beginning of this process, it is far from complete but places like wikipedia already show some progress.