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277 points cebert | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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PostOnce ◴[] No.44361768[source]
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

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lm28469 ◴[] No.44364104[source]
> the average person is using

The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

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john01dav ◴[] No.44364189[source]
I acknowledge that such telling exists, but there is still responsibility for people choosing to listen to it. Skepticism is vital. Beyond being skeptical of what you see, it is wild to me that we don't have approximately everyone blocking all ads, cable news, most social feeds, and other such transparently manipulative shit. Advertisement especially is literally industrialized and research-based psychological manipulation to make people do things that make no sense (see what Alfred Sloan did to GM, for an early example) — it's toxic and should be absolutely avoided.
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beowulfey ◴[] No.44366490[source]
People aren't going to learn to be skeptical or think critically because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools. How can someone be skeptical of something if they don't even know how to be skeptical?

Social media runs rampant with a form of skepticism, but I would call that closer to paranoia than critical thinking, and I don't think it's really being helpful in the same way.

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RankingMember ◴[] No.44366826[source]
I see this as directly correlated with the gradual denigration of liberal arts education, a core tenet of which is critical thinking.
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nradov ◴[] No.44367051[source]
Liberal arts education leaders haven't been doing themselves any favors. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic we saw many college administrations abandon all critical thinking to enforce blind obedience and mandatory compliance with pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns and mandates. Scientists were condemned for daring to even discuss alternative views.

I absolutely see value in classical liberal arts education. But popular denigration is inevitable when people see hypocritical academics casting aside true liberal thinking and using their platform to promote pernicious ideologies.

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RankingMember ◴[] No.44367211[source]
I think it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback administrative decisions about COVID-19 mitigation now that we're past it, when, at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria. I'm not going to relitigate the COVID-19 pandemic response, but I will say I don't think it was inconsistent or ill-advised at all to err on the side of following national health guidance in an emergent situation like that. Even from a purely legal/lawsuit-aversion standpoint, you'd ignore federal guidance/mandates at your financial peril.
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1. bigstrat2003 ◴[] No.44368702[source]
> at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria

If anything, this simply underscores GP's point. Getting hysterical when you lack information is a total failure of critical thinking, so to the extent that liberal arts educators did so, we should be skeptical of their ability to think critically.

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2. Analemma_ ◴[] No.44369015[source]
No, that's not a correct conclusion in full generality. The first days of Covid where a case of decision-making under uncertainty: what if R had been 10 and the fatality rate had been 25%? We did not know at first, and these are not absurd numbers: they have existed in past pandemics and if they had held again, fatalities could have been in the tens of millions. Locking down until you can gather more data to rule out this possibility is a rational decision under that uncertainty, because there's asymmetric downside risk of "tens of millions die" versus "chattering internet commenters are annoyed they can't go to the beach".

There's more of an argument here regarding lockdowns going on longer than they needed to, but as much as people want to blame "the experts", most of that was bottom-up from voters. To cite one example, despite how many times I've heard to the contrary, the CDC never, at any point, recommended school closures: that was pure grassroots demand from parents.