Comment by lapcat
5 hours ago
> Neither is a car, but I still take it to get checked out when a warning light is on.
I can't believe I need to say this, but cars did not evolve by natural selection. Cars are intelligently designed (by humans, not by God) to show a warning light when there is a problem you should get checked out. So cars are actually rational in that respect.
Hacker News comments never fail to depress me.
> I can't believe I need to say this, but cars did not evolve by natural selection.
You didn't need to say that because that's not relevant. The issue was about signal to noise. The logical stance is to assume signal is signal, until you know otherwise.
> Hacker News comments never fail to depress me.
That's also a signal.
> The issue was about signal to noise. The logical stance is to assume signal is signal, until you know otherwise.
I know otherwise. I have a lifetime of experience—lifetimes of experience, counting the experiences of other people—to know that pain is often just noise.
Pain is ancient. It predates rationality by millions of years, perhaps billions. The dumbest animal experiences pain. It's not a finely tuned system with documented diagnositic codes.