What fact do you wish everyone understood?

4 iambateman 28 8/3/2025, 4:20:30 PM
For me, I wish everyone knew that a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same carrying capacity as a 4-lane road. There’s a lot of 4-lane road that could be a lot safer with no tradeoff.

What fact would you like to share with everyone to make the world a better place?

Comments (28)

djoldman · 14m ago
Voting is required in Australia, and the participation rate is >90%.

There is a financial penalty for not voting.

unsupp0rted · 2h ago
The more you travel, the better you understand that there are differences between cultures and some cultures are better at specific things or worse at specific things.

Those specific things have such an outsized impact that it's obvious after living there for a bit that one culture is overall better or overall worse than another.

We're fine to compare company cultures and to insist that company cultures are decisive in company success. But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.

wredcoll · 1h ago
I had the opposite experience.

It is of course possible to make value judgments, there are in fact good things and bad things, but people and their cultures are far too complicated to categorize that way.

We can talk about "things that frequently happen" and whether those are good or bad, but even determining why they happen or how to encourage or discourage them has so far seemed beyond modern science.

unsupp0rted · 47m ago
Do you believe the same about company cultures?
wredcoll · 17m ago
Companies are much smaller and are made of people specifically chosen to be hired and then kept employed. So not really, no.
fuzzfactor · 34m ago
What happens when naive young "Woodstock hippie" musicians tour other countries for the first time way back when digital communication was almost non-existent, and of course all parts of the world not nearly as familiar with each other as they are now?

They write a song about it :)

  You know 1968 was a real fine year
  We've been around the world and now it's clear
  
  It's the same all over (same all over)
  Well it's the same all over (same all over)
  Well it's the same all over good people everywhere you go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0

upvotes for everyone

mmarian · 55m ago
I'm curious which cultures you think are better than others, and why. I personally think most cultural differences can be explained by history and geography.
unsupp0rted · 48m ago
I’m being intentionally vague to avoid blowback
mmarian · 6m ago
Fair enough, but without going into specifics, don't you think history and geography has a lot more to do with it than culture?
Ekaros · 15m ago
A long list, but maybe I would start with thermodynamics.
gregjor · 1h ago
I wish everyone understood that they don't know very much.

At times, especially when I lived in Portland, I would wish people understood that not everyone likes dogs.

oriettaxx · 2h ago
that the whole idea of a Nation is not consistent (to be polite)

That humans are solving problems since the very beginning with no priests or government.

Trust your peers, your neighbour: trust even anybody in the street (even at night) but do start to doubt any 'government'

mmarian · 51m ago
I remember in my politics classes how the professor said that the concept of a nation only existed for a couple hundred years. Crazy when you think about it.
wredcoll · 1h ago
Trusting your neighbors is how governments start.
mathiaspoint · 2h ago
People aren't brains in jars connected to inconvenient bodies, humanity is inherently biological.
eevmanu · 1h ago
understand digital advertisement incentives and modern marketing tactics and techniques

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675527

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187603

maybe this could help people to be more thoughtful on how they invest their attention

nis0s · 2h ago
Physics, it explains a lot about the natural world than people are willing to credit it, including aspects in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
karma_7 · 2h ago
Avoid cursing others—negative energy doesn't disappear; it must go somewhere, and often, it comes back to you, affecting your mind and body.
tobinfekkes · 2h ago
The best metric to optimize for is not money
lazarus0000 · 2h ago
There's a cost to everything
FrankWilhoit · 2h ago
That there are facts.
lazarus0000 · 2h ago
There is always a cost
bigyabai · 2h ago
I wish people understood that America hasn't been an industrial economy for almost half a century, so comparing us to China et. al is like comparing the growth of a toddler to a 67-year-old pensioner.
ultrablue · 2h ago
TANSTAAFL
wredcoll · 1h ago
Really? I find modern americans far too obsessed with who is paying for what.
CamperBob2 · 1h ago
Given that resources are finite, they must be distributed according to some type of rule-based framework, ideally an outcome-driven one. What alternative do you have in mind?
wredcoll · 1h ago
"Resources are finite" is a trite observation that so rarely helps us discuss actual real world issues.

As an easy example, food in america is not finite in any meaningful way. There is, in fact, quite a bit of it. Making sure students in government schools aren't going hungry really isn't an issue of finite resources, it's much more complicated than that.

CamperBob2 · 45m ago
Largely agreed. It's no surprise that a government elected by a brainwashed populace will treat public education as a threat to be eliminated rather than as a goal to be achieved.

But how does that answer the question of how resources -- which are still finite no matter how much you insist otherwise, given that it takes money to distribute food -- should be allocated? If we leave it up to the government, or to the people who elected said government, it's irrational to expect a fair outcome.