Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later).
Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).
By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
The similarity between the EoG and Genesis flood stories can probably be laid to the fact that the first major human societies were built around flood plains of rivers in regions that have otherwise stable climates. When your society spends centuries in that situation, floods are the single most important natural event that happens to you. If would be shocking if they didn't feature prominently in your stories.
There are other similarities between the epic of gilgamesh and genesis beyond just the flood, it's a very interesting subject imo. Ultimately both were originally oral traditions long before they were written anywhere, both emerging out of the ancient east mediterranean/west asian cultural milieu.
IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier story that was widely told across cultures in that region.
The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis flood story are far too extensive to be due to chance.
For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.
Genesis 8:6-12:
After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
Epic of Gilgamesh:
> When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back.
Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely well known in Babylon.
> Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile.
That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff linked with it that is older than that. You might be able to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no way Genesis itself is only from then.
According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before then. It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around. Genesis records how Abraham traveled widely telling his story, including to kings.
There are many linguistic and historical hints that the early chapters of Genesis were written during or after the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great" cities that only became great during that era, borrowed Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the Babylonians, etc.
There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.
> It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.
At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior to the Exile, because we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.
At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile.
There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including references to great cities and powers that were long, long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite recently down some rabbit holes.
I wrote specifically that the early chapters of Genesis date to the exile.
The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).
> we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.
From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.
Sure, I don’t think anybody disputes that the Bible is a not single book written at once.
But the claim that any part of Genesis dates to the Exile is a weak historiographical claim, based primarily on a few pillars of very weak circumstantial evidence: a) we don’t have many physical examples dated to a prior time - but that’s not at all surprising; the vast supermajority of texts don’t survive, and many of the most ancient copies we do have are relatively recent discoveries; b) it makes sense to some people to argue this based on (reasonable) speculation about the development of the Jewish religion and the pressures at different periods of its development and c) as a corollary to b, one mainstream opinion is that Genesis can mostly be attributed to two different sources by a stylistic analysis and one of them is simply believed to date around the Exile.
This corresponds to the general current fads in historiography and history but it is by no means definite, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it is all overturned in a night by a single discovery, as these things very often are. This type of historiography is not really rigorous in a meaningful sense and is based essentially on current academic trends and a few authorities.
So we can safely consider the arguments underlying the dating ourselves without getting in too much trouble, but we don’t even have to do that to address your particular claim that the portions of Genesis must have been devised by an Exilic writer due to Babylonian influence. This essentially requires engaging in a deliberate pious fraud, which then was taken up by the other Israelites without question and who accepted the new stories with no recorded debate, and which also received no pushback when the Israelites who did not go into Exile. We would expect the possibility of diverging traditions on this point, but for example, the Samaritans have precisely the same story on this point, although the dating of that is also a point of contention. Either way, we should keep in mind that only some Israelites went into Exile, and plenty remained in Israel and Judah and maintained their traditions through the 70 year Exile.
It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time. Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion. And indeed, at some point, they all shared a common origin. Rather than adapting a Sumerian-via-Babylon story in a very late period, it’s a much more parsimonious explanation that some version of the story always existed amongst the Israelites in their oral tradition regardless of when it was committed to writing.
Whenever you date the writing down of the early chapters of Genesis, it's clear that the flood story heavily copied directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The parallels, down to little details, are too strong to be simply due to similar stories floating around.
I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.
They wouldn’t have just been similar stories, they would have been descendants of the same story originating from the proto-Semitic people they both came from. We’re not talking about a coincidence, we’re talking about the same story.
Exactly as Romans and Greeks had basically the “same” stories, in most cases they were not copying from each other, they had the same source.
At any rate, as the example in your other comments shows, it doesn’t share the same “little details”, the little details are different.
> I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.
Because you’re suggesting some Israelite in Babylon basically saw the stories and then inserted it into Genesis under different names, probably existing ones, and that everyone else just went along with it. That is, they all knew it was not part of their tradition and that some guy was just adding it in based on the Babylonian story but accepted the insertion anyway because…
Most religions are syncretic. You're taking a very modern view of Judaism, as a very clearly defined set of beliefs that cannot just borrow from other religions. Early Judaism (if that's even the correct term her, because this was a very different religion from what we now know) was not even clearly monotheistic. The idea of borrowing stories from neighboring peoples (especially incredibly powerful neighbors with great cultural influence) would not have been as shocking as it would be nowadays.
> they would have been descendants of the same story originating from the proto-Semitic people they both came from.
The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years. The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin. Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.
> You're taking a very modern view of Judaism, as a very clearly defined set of beliefs that cannot just borrow from other religions. Early Judaism (if that's even the correct term her, because this was a very different religion from what we now know) was not even clearly monotheistic.
Yes, as I said:
> Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion.
Early Judaism was obviously polytheistic. The Flood story is almost certainly a story that dates back to those times, well before the Exile.
That said, by the Babylonian Exile, Judaism was clearly monotheistic and not "syncretic" (that's not how syncretism works anyway).
> The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years.
This is the issue. You're conflating the current academic consensus (very rough and subject to change) on the composition of Genesis with "when did the Genesis stories originate among the Israelites." Nobody thinks Genesis was written ex nihilo by some priests in Babylon and pressed on the rest of the Jewish population. (If nothing else, this would make post-Exile events totally untenable: how did they convince the non-Exile Jews of...anything?)
> The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin.
There's nothing handwavy about this. This is exactly how it works, in religions and myths across the world. Sometimes we've been able to trace it very clearly, as with Indo-Europeans. The more closely related the peoples, the more their stories match up. Two Semitic peoples in the same region having two near-identical stories without them having borrowed from one another is the least surprising thing in the world; oral tradition actually holds up pretty well in most cases (as documented in the original article.) This is in fact clearly supported by the theory of the composition of Genesis by multiple authors, with very slightly different narratives.
If you want to be more technical about the composition of Genesis, opinions vary, but the current consensus holds there were three or four main authors: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priest. The only one of these believed to date to the Exile is the Priest, with all the others predating it. The earliest source is believed to be the Yahwist, supposed to be writing in the 800s BC. Critically, much of the Flood story and the details about birds are specifically believed to originate with the Yahwist source before the Exile period.
> Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.
Yes, as I specifically said:
> It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time.
Either way, all the Semitic versions of the Flood myth likely depend on a Sumerian original, along with the general influence of Sumerian myth on Semitic belief. (Personally, I have no problem with supposing that it was based on some real event and then the tale grew in the telling, just as Gilgamesh was a real king.) It's of course conceivable that before the Exile the Canaanites and the Babylonians crosschecked each other's versions, but it's not at all necessary. There was never any reason for "late" contamination of the story by Babylonians; the pan-Semitic influence always existed, and whoever the proto-Israelites were, obviously they were wandering around somewhere concurrently with the other Semitic peoples.
At any rate, the Babylonians were very definitely on the downslope during the Exile period, as evidence by their permanent fall from notability after their conquest by the Persians at the end of it. They and Egypt were the two regional powers Judah was stuck between at the time. Israel, of course, was earlier destroyed by the Assyrians, who had been a definite superpower but saw their glory days end with Nineveh.
Why do we think peoples of the past would be unable to distinguish between a normal river flooding and a “world ending” flood? What about the ~450 feet of sea level rise in the last 15k years?
At the most accelerated rate of sea level rise, meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at about 1-2 inches per year (about 10 times current sea-level rise rates, FWIW).
While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.
To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?
> That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood
I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.
Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.
So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).
They almost certainly could, but also they would also almost certainly be prone to the same kind of embellishments of such stories as they are passed on.
The other quite reasonable hypothesis is that these are tales of the fairly rapid sea level rises that accompanied the end of the last ice age as the breaking of ice dams in the north released massive glacial floods into the North Atlantic and Pacific.
This is less reasonable: the sea rise was rapid by geological timescales, but hardly something you would notice as a massive change during a human lifetime.
The whole premise of our present civilization is that every one before us was a nose picking drooler, and that we have more to say to the past then the past has to tell us about ourselves.
We lack the collective self consciousness to see ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times, thinking through what it means to be understood through artifact, and the distortions it produces.
The closest we come is prophesying that future generations will blame us for the destruction of the natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.
The people of the future probably won't think of us as bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for future generations with no care but for ourselves and our consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot, fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping with sweat.
If it's based on a real flood, they presumably follow a power law distribution, where you have relatively frequent "normal" floods, and progressively larger floods are rarer and rarer, till you get an occasional gargantuan one.
My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated version.
For the same reason people in places where it snows every year still remember the really big blizzards: some floods are worse than others. Any given generation will have a flood they recall that set the (ahem) high water mark for comparison to future floods.
I don't know, if I know it floods every year, and there is a really big flood, I don't think I would act like the flood was something completely out of the blue. I would probably mention how it was much bigger than the normal floods.
For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.
I have often wondered if these flood stories document something much larger that might have occurred as the major ice sheets collapsed and raised the sea levels to unseen heights.
But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???
The show itself sure, but Graham Hancock just happens to be the loudest proponent of this theory, there is solid evidence to support it, from Randall Carlson and a few other people I’m not remembering atm.
“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”
> You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story.
Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.
The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.
An ideology can be seen as a collection of rituals in action, reasoning, and rhetoric situated among core beliefs about what life is, what the world is, and what's important to them.
And each ideology has a specific history of events, founders, and later elaborators that shape what these rituals and beliefs are.
Many ideologies reject deities or are at least ambivalent about them, but they're not really operationally different than religions.
So for as much as little bits of history linger in relgious rituals, both blurred and resharpened in later years, the same is absolutely true for ideologies.
The capitalism or feminism or humanism or atheism or whatever else you point to today is similar to the one sharing its name in the past, or in some other region, but is not the same, and these differences are all vestiges of little seed events that happened here or there.
I certainly would (not as a comprehensive explanation though of course). The range of forms of conceptualization any one individual is capable of (or not) is strongly influenced by the ideology to which they subscribe (or are captured by).
If you simply consider how the human mind works, this "should" be fairly obvious. But one's ability or likelihood to think about such things is once again a function of the norms and accepted practices of one's ideology. That which is not known of, essentially does not exist.
Do you have an example? It sounds like a complete category error. That or you're using the word very differently than most people do..?
An adherent of an ideology might, like, have rituals. But the ideology isn't the rituals.
Here are some ideologies off the top of my head: democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism, atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.
None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual inherently associated with them.
If you categorically define an ideology to be a system of pure concepts, independent of any practice of thought, speech, or action by a professed adherent, then you will inevitably see it as a category error, yes.
(You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts in a complete and consistent way)
But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are, then a definition like that isn't interesting or productive. From that perspective, ideologies are something that people profess adherence to and express statements about and behave in self-identified accordance to.
They gather in elections, they discuss power through the lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against inequality, etc
If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies, that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I doubt I could change your mind here. :)
Well, you're right about that. I suppose I don't see the point in calling what you're describing an ideology. Just call it something else so ideology can mean what it means to everyone else..? I see all your examples as like, social behaviors that happen to presently align with the ideologies. But in the past or future they won't, while the ideologies will persist, cause they live in 'idea space'.
(nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those fields)
If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea space"
There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety of use is well-represented and has been since the word came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific concept that some people accept as sensible and others don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).
You can actually see an example of this kind of differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape and study in the West, the that statement would strike most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and trying to make some distinction is as alien and "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are to you.
And yet, of course it's interesting to think about Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable using techniques that you know how to work with and have confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on with social scientists/philosophers who think about ideology in the way I've been describing above.
And likewise, you can choose to not associate all the particular rituals surrounding the practice of any particular denomination of Christianity with Christianity itself.
Like, at its core, all it says is that there's one god, and he was his own kid, who died, and there's an afterlife, and you should live well.
Yet, I don't think you'd say that Christianity doesn't have rituals, even if no particular instantiation of it has the same rituals as any other one.
Well-I wouldn't call Christianity an ideology, either. I have problem disagreement with a religion or a practice of a religion having rituals. Those aren't category errors to me at all.
Varies by jurisdiction of course. Under American law and similar systems the admissibility of a type of evidence is established by it having been admitted before, and the initial admission is based on the judgement of some individual judge.
It would also vary by use-case. Some regulated industries have specific standards required for an electronic signature — and hitting those standards is typically an add-on cost for systems like Docusign.
Just want to highlight that this is not from Google/Gmail and I would never be convinced to install a plugin that can read my emails which is not from provider.
P.S not saying this company/product is malicious, just that it requires too much trust
I don't think it's a fair comparison. Yes, Google and Apple and Meta all collect data, but they are part of a country where their misuse can be challenged in fair courts and they can (and have) been fined.
I don't think if Meta was a Chinese company they would have ever had released(or allowed to) end to end encryption
Genuine question: At what point do we actually declare that we are in recession. Do we wait for GDP figures out these signs are enough to assume we are in bear markets now.
Recession is a loosely defined economic term where the exact definition depends on who's reporting it, traditionally, it's meant 2 quarters of decline in GDP growth. But now:
The NBER defines a recession as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales
But recession is a macroeconomic term that may not reflect the actual impact on consumers -- conusumers could be suffering through an economic downturn that's not technically a "recession".
Yeah, recession start and ends can only really be determined accurately in retrospect. And like you said it's marked by the decline meaning it starts when growth hits its high point and ends when it hits a low point. In terms "feeling" like a recession, it'll be more like midway through the descent until midway into a recovery. A stock market crash is frequently a leading indicator of a GDP recession though not always. We could be seeing the early signs of recession for the past six months, but we won't really know for a while.
Some crypto collapsing does not mean it is a recession. The exploding prices for real goods and less and less people being able to afford basic things are the indicator for that.
Real GDP has to shrink for it to be a recession. GDP in the United States is currently growing strongly. The Conference Board is not predicting a recession in the U.S. in 2022, and they just updated their forecasts a few days ago.
Sure. And if GDP goes negative, and if employment falls etc etc then people will start saying recession. I was just trying to answer the GPs question, not predict whether or not this is a recession!
By the way the official declaration by the U.S. bureaucracies of the onset of a recession typically lags the actual onset by a year or so.
When growth actually slows. The stock market has little to do with whether we are in a recession. If it fell by 10K points tomorrow, most stocks would still be wildly overvalued.
I think your premise that coding is bad for kids is incorrect. Coding is not typing. It's an art of solving problems.
My childhood was coding, it was(is?) something I was good at and I thoroughly enjoyed doing.
My initial days were just writing random macros on Excel or coding out my maths problems on BASIC.
That has what shaped my career
i myself started at 12 (actually with BASIC!) and while there’s no denial that it has helped my career at later point in life, it has completely alienated me from the rest of people
my schoolmates still introduce me as “nerd” to other people (not in front of me of course)
So, if you discovered your (hypothetical or not) kid being interested in solving puzzles and programming, would you stop them? Instead of encouraging them to find some offline hobbies and spending time with other people to balance it out?
Also, people can be a**holes to others for any and no reason. Being different is just the most common and a seemingly rational one. It's an important life lesson to learn that it's often not possible to change people, and frequently not even worth trying. Adapting to them to fit their small worldview is even less promising.
I too learned BASIC when I was 12 and often felt alienated from my peers.
Turns out the alienation was from being a know-it-all, argumentative asshole and had very little to do with my programming skills. Most of my classmates probably would have found the programming somewhat interesting had I not lofted it over their heads as a badge of self superiority.
it just so happened that my knowledge helped me perform better at IT class than anybody else, so they got pissed at me for being able to comprehend something they themselves don't
For what it's worth, it sounds like you had a childhood that was very different than what kids today are growing up with, at least in my area.
By around 2014 the cool kids in my local high school were the nerds, and it's pretty much stayed that way. I worked with a neighborhood youth group where the kid who was at the center of everything was super into fortnite and coding. When he introduced himself to me the first thing he said was "I'm pretty much a nerd"—and he said it with pride! A few of the other kids felt the need to establish their nerd cred, too. This was in a neighborhood in the poorest part of a nearly-rural town. Their parents were mostly in trades, not tech.
"Nerd" has become a badge of honor that is sought after and claimed by kids, not a derogatory label assigned by others.
For those commenting that it's just common cold and about herd immunity, I think we should not miss out on overload on our medical system.
This is what happened in India, due to high number of cases (even if mild) the medical infrastructure completely crashed under the load and lead to far more deaths than just a flu could have caused.
Politicians have had time to start improving healthcare systems. Corporations that currently pay no taxes could help to fund this stuff. Billions of dollars of war industry purchases could have been slightly delayed. Billionaires could have chipped in a bit more, and we could have started ratcheting up capacities and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare systems. But no it seems that's all teetering on the brink of collapse for some astounding reason.
So it's become quite clear to me that we are not, in fact, "all in this together". The situation is that the ruling class are in it for themselves, and they are demanding everybody else lose their jobs and businesses and we comply and mask up and shut ourselves in, so that they all may carry on as usual and refuse to invest our own money in our healthcare systems.
Given what we know about this situation now, I think perhaps a better approach might be to instead not comply with these demands. Ridicule and hound and vote out anybody who insists that after two years of complying we have to continue to shut ourselves away because the healthcare systems they have not adequately invested in are still on the brink of collapse.
That's no problem people who are petrified and happy to be owned by others may continue locking themselves inside their homes. I'm not asking let alone demanding that everybody or anybody else do this, it's just a possible alternative I suggested.
The poster I replied to made some weird "argument" about owning ourselves not helping anything.
> > continue locking themselves inside their homes
Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified that you think everybody else must "wear masks and stay indoors if possible" in response to new covid variants as OP said. It's a great way to reduce contact and minimize your own risk.
> Not melodrama or hyperbole. Keep shutting yourself in if you are so petrified
You don't see the contradiction in what you have written here? You're trying to belittle people taking precautions by saying that they're "petrified". You're using emotive language to try to force through a weak argument.
Obviously you can't stay indoors all of the time. People need to get food, fix their houses, and so on. People who are especially vulnerable to the virus are the ones who have to leave their homes the most for essential medical care.
I don't see the contradiction, no. Petrified isn't belittling it is quite a suitable word for people who are so scared of this that they demand everyone else in the country should shut themselves in, wear masks, stay indoors, etc. How is that belittling? Aren't they pretty much self-describing as incredibly fearful?
And food can and is delivered. Not everything can be but almost everything for most people.
"The ruling class has proven that they don't actually care about anyone else"—yes, that's a reasonable message to take away from the past year and a half...
"...So we should stop abiding by all the good medical advice and just party" how the hell do you come to that conclusion? The reasonable conclusion to come to from your first two paragraphs is something along the lines of "So we should protest the politicians who want to deny the science, boycott the companies that are actively making things worse, and push for real societal change that prioritizes human lives and well-being over corporate profits."
You're basically saying, "The very wealthy just want us all to shut up and die, but screw them! We should all get out there and die very loudly!"
The interventions promoted by the ruling class to "curb the pandemic" have resulted in 20 million people going into starvation in the poorest countries, restrictions and hardships only being placed on the poor in the richer countries, and no resolution in sight.
Meanwhile, half the population has taken it upon themselves to start dehumanizing the rest because of politics, and all the money in society is funneling upwards to the ruling class while small businesses collapse.
What exactly do you not understand about this? There is no "us" in this situation, just division and demands.
I'm not sure what it is exactly you are unclear on, but that is certainly not what I am saying. I'm saying what I wrote no more and no less. If you want to reduce it to a quip it would be the exact opposite, we should get out and live.
There's tradeoffs for everything. We weren't all grandma killing fascists in the previous years for not locking ourselves in our homes and wearing masks and not going to large gatherings and shutting down businesses in response to influenza. Yet the flu killed many many people every year.
We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles despite that statistically contributing to killing many many people.
There are safe and effective vaccines available and people can make up their own minds to use effective masks and isolate themselves, shut down their businesses, and take advantage of all the online and remote services that now pretty much means they never have to leave their house or see another living person if that is what they choose, and that's fine they can make that choice. That's not the responsibility of everybody else though. This strange collectivism where apparently I am responsible for the choices of others and that I must change my lifestyle to keep you safe is where things are going way off the rails, in my opinion. You keep you safe.
> We're not hateful anti science bigots for daring to drive automobiles
In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.
Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
> In most developed countries there are strict rules about driving. You are expected and required to drive according to certain rules to keep other people safe. There are rules for driving because the right of other people to not get injured or killed are considered more important than your right to do what you feel like.
Driving your automobile legally on the road is statistically responsible for many many deaths. No two ways about it. That makes your next rhetorical question a failure. You also couldn't address the flu one either.
> Do you think restricting your right to drive drunk on a pavement is "strange collectivism"?
For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.
If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one.
Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.
"Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised.
If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
> I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.
They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them.
IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it.
They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory.
Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.
The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods.
This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.
As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside
Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends):
longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask
Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.)
Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by.
It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc.
If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).
There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.
"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic
seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a
29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."
So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.
> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness
> So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.
It is a real word example. It's not an increase of 29%, it's an absolute difference of 29%. Specifically, mask wearing in the intervention villages was 42%, in the control 13%. That is, in a hypothetical village where mask wearing approaches 100%, you might expect something like a 20-30% reduction, assuming a linear correlation. Again, that's not the real world.
> Why?
If an intervention is effective, the effect needs to reproduce. If it doesn't, the larger effect likely occurred by chance. Publication bias promotes positive results and inhibits negative or null results.
You have the same problem with all these COVID drugs. Remdesivir appeared to have an effect in early trials, now it's proven useless. Molnupiravir was initially report to be 50% effective, now it's down to 30%. At the other end of the aisle, you see that Ivermectin has many small studies showing remarkable effectiveness, but the larger ones show little to no effect.
If you apply scientific standards, you must apply them across the board. You must not let wishful thinking guide your decisions.
Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses.
I am sorry but no. I have already lost 2 years of my life just following and obeying the orders. Enough is enough.
This is not on me to solve. The government had enough time to convince everyone to vaccinate or prepare the healthcare sector for influx of cases of unvaccinated.
I hate to break it to you, but a virus doesn't really care if you're sick and tired of the situation. It sucks, yeah. No, it's not OK to stop caring only because it's been so long. The socially responsible behavior is still the best course for an individual, even if surrounded by morons.
I'll be sure to tell that to my neighbor who lost both of her parents and a sister to COVID before the vaccines were available. I'm sure she'll understand.
If omicron is actually a breakthrough variant, I'm sure all the people who are about to die will also understand how hurt your feelings are.
I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.
>I'm merely pointing out the selfishness in your stance and how harmful it is to the overall efforts of the medical community. That's not bad faith.
We've all had an absolutely shit time. You're not special.
Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
> Medical community should not be the only one making decisions that have such a massive impact on society.
Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
> Why is your right keeping families separated not selfish?
My family has been separated, too. By almost half the planet. Your victim appeal doesn't work here.
> Perhaps not when it's economic, technological, wartime, etc. Sure. But when it comes to the healthcare of everyone (not just the individual), they absolutely should. The problem is that politicians seem to think they know more about healthcare than the experts do.
In pandemic times medical community matters more but nobody should be the only one making decisions about the life of others. People on the front-line lack insight about everything else that's happening. And experts on other fields and even politicians know things that epidemiologists don't. This has gone too far.
There are many bright individuals around the world that could contribute to this fight but as long as their opinion goes against the built consensus they will stand no chance of getting heard. As a global society we are committing all in to a local optima that sucks.
For the last two years I tried my best to stay at home and used respirators even at outdoors. Please see that politicians are the ones that benefits from this new status quo because on this long lasting and seemingly eternal crisis they have absolute power over people freedom to travel, to gather and to express on public. This being the new normal scares me.
Of course, because there's no local context and you have all the information required to infer that. If you're in Europe I understand but in my local context "staying at home" as I was doing would have a near zero impact on improving this global pandemic while being a huge cost for my well-being and health.
I live in a poor country with cases slowly approaching zero, a high vaccination rate and in the midst of the hot/humid season. Also staying at home is a luxury that the large majority of the population can't afford so my decision has a linear effect because nobody on my neighborhood will be "staying at home" or using masks anyways. Right now poverty and hunger are more of an issue than Covid.
Oh yeah let's ignore all the economical, social and health issues that are side effect of the "staying at home" and insist on social shaming and in a policy that is unsustainable. Let's adopt a dogmatic approach to solve novel issues.
If you want to shorten the global pandemic please lobby your politicians into not holding but subsidizing vaccines to poor countries.
I'm a supporter of building longer term effects that contribute into making society more robust against Covid and other kinds of airborne diseases. Like proper indoor ventilation in public spaces, load balancing, better respirators for daily use. Improved vaccine manufacturing capability and shorter lead times for vaccine development. I understand that they are not mutually exclusively in theory but there's so much we can lobby for at the same time and I prefer not to waste it.
How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.
And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity and attempt efforts at preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals available to staff those hospitals. In fact a lot of countries have an artificial cap on the number of doctors and nurses which is driven by various medical professional associations, the government could easily have said “STFU, well take as many doctors and nurses as the universities can graduate” to these “industry self regulations”.
> Two years isn’t an inconceivable time to build additional hospital capacity
The limiting factor is medical professionals, not adding buildings. You can't train a doctor in 2 years.
> preventing normal causes of medial and nursing school drop outs in order to bolster the number of adequately trained medical professionals
What's the drop-out rate? How would you "prevent" this? Do people drop out because they can't cope with the role, or some other reason? What would the overall effect of this policy be in terms of numbers? I suspect it would be minimal.
I did mention the fact that in many countries the medical students are put through a course structure designed not just around individual achievement on simple academic competency, but aimed and structured sometimes explicitly capped to only graduate a fixed number of doctors. Many put forward justification for this such as “there aren’t enough placements in the field once they graduate” and other semi-valid arguments to put downward pressure on the number of doctors able to and willing to (many migrate to other non “doctor” fields after the first few years of medical school) finish a medical school education as a doctor capable of working with patients on the front line.
I’m well aware it’s not possible to train a decent doctor in two years, which is why my point was more that they could have applied positive pressure like merit based scholarship opportunities or any of a number of other ways to assist students in the second/third years of medical school to stay on track to graduate as doctors and nurses. The point is that there’s never been a shortage of people trying to become Doctors, we have social, educational and economic effects in play that limit the number of people that manage to get there all of which the governments around the world could have done things about.
Why not? Do you really need a "doctor" to treat COVID, or just a "person trained in treating COVID and putting people on the respirator"?
Case in point, in Italy in 2020, at the peak of the first wave ("Bergamo"), they fast-tracked final year medical students. Looks like the change is permanent [1]. So clearly "you can't doctor in X years" (AFAIK 6-7 years in most of Europe) was wrong before the pandemic. We can and should do better.
Maybe if more people voted for the party that typically funds healthcare, instead of the one that tends to defund healthcare, we would be further along on hospital capacity. There's only so much democrats can do when republicans insist on opposing everything sensible just because the hated opposition supports it.
That’s certainly one element of what’s happened in the USA… but I was trying to keep a more global perspective as the fact we are clearly watching the development of what may become an endemic infection like the seasonal influenza virus waves currently are makes it more clear than ever that in the long term this is a massive global issue we need to be coordinating better on.
The global nature of the situation makes any solutions focused on a single nation and their own citizens inadequate as they will just be eventually defeated by the natural mutant strains developing elsewhere. In fact “more doctors and nurses and hospital beds because we’re just going to let it happen” is the only local to national level strategy that has any long term ability to make a difference if the virus continues on its course to become endemic.
For starters I would want my government to change the narrative. They should do their own independent research and present their own facts. Instead they blindly buy vaccines from US and repeat the agenda as everyone else.
There is way too much politics involved. Pandemic should make people naturally empathic not forced by their governments to blindly obey.
>How was the government supposed to convince anti-vaxxers to do what they believe contains micro chips or what they believe is worse than the virus itself? This isn't on the government, this is on anti-vaxxers for swallowing garbage information, hook line and sinker.
This is solely on the government. It's immoral to keep vaccinated people in uncertainty and include them in any sort of lockdowns.
>And you didn't lose 2 years of your life. You're alive, you didn't die due to the pandemic, did you? That's much less than can be said for 5 million others, mostly older or unhealthy to begin with. They're dead because people didn't follow the guidelines early and it kept spreading and spreading.
This is not arguing in good faith. Healthy people in their 30s are not dying.
Of all the 0.5m children infected in Israel only 200 were severe cases.
>So, be grateful you're not dead, and do your part to increase collective resilience.
I already did my part. Now my part will be attending a demo with all those "antivaxx / 5G chips believing people" and I will fight for my right to live a normal life.
Covid is not the only threat. And what is being labeled as convenience sometimes is just physical/mental health. How I'm supposed to exercise, be healthy and productive by staying indoors all the time? Also, am I supposed to substitute IRL social activities with video calls and social media?
Don't get me wrong, I know there's some sort of middle ground but I wanted to provide food for thought.
This isn't about you. And those 2 years are sunk costs for all of us.
You're engaging in magical thinking, here. We can't afford it. It's self-centered. And it does nobody any good, most especially not you. Might get you killed, though.
As an aside, no, the healthcare "sector" is not at all prepared, it has never been prepared, and it can't magically be made prepared, either. The only solution there is to avoid overloading the system. There aren't any other solutions. So rational people will continue to argue for all of the mitigation measures that we know are effective. Whether you like it or not. It's just as much "on you" to participate in that as it is "on" all of the rest of us.
It’s wild how few campaigns I am seeing for vaccination. I want 1950s era propaganda posters on every street corner and at every tv and radio break until we get these numbers to 100%.
We had plenty of posters and advertising on this. Vaccination rates were great in early 2021, before an entire major political party decided to cynically pretend that fighting vaccination was somehow defending "freedom".
Works at Facebook, opinions are my own.
I find this article highly speculative. Facebook or Meta has not said anything on future uses, but that's for a lot of other things. Company hasn't said anything about not making weapons in the future as well.
In my opinion facial recognition technology has genuine uses, however from the privacy perspective, I personally would want all of these models to be running on my device. Google does it and so can other companies including Meta, and I find that completely fine as long as it's relevant to me and I have an option to turn it off.
They seem to have firsthand sources to support the articles title:
> While Meta says that facial recognition isn’t a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company’s new commitment doesn’t apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode.
Then further down, the article also links to other articles that goes deeper:
> Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth told employees that the company is evaluating the legal and privacy issues around facial recognition for its upcoming wearable gadget.
Not sure why you think it's speculative when it's based on Meta/Facebook employees own statements.
By the way, thanks for leaving a comment here and being public about working at Facebook, can't be easy to receive so much hate, especially here on HN, but we all need everyone's perspective, so thanks a lot for providing it here!
Yourself as a Facebook employee, you should know first hand that your employer lies to their own workforce without flinching. The only thing I will trust Facebook with is when they report their earnings.
The Facebook brand has become utterly toxic. Meta is a clean slate, but there is almost zero chance they will not load it up with toxins again. They have no incentives to be a good citizen.
