<story><title>You can&apos;t reach the brain through the ears</title><url>https://www.experimental-history.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-brain-through</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmbche</author><text>&amp;quot;A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us.&lt;p&gt;If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.&lt;p&gt;The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it.&lt;p&gt;And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn&amp;#x27;t have asked.&lt;p&gt;Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qawwads</author><text>&amp;gt;If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.&lt;p&gt;This is what they told us in computer class back then to make sure we don&amp;#x27;t learn anything wortwhile. Reading it on HN of all place makes me very sad.</text></comment>
<story><title>You can&apos;t reach the brain through the ears</title><url>https://www.experimental-history.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-brain-through</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmbche</author><text>&amp;quot;A final obstacle that stops us from filling each other’s buckets with wisdom: it might kill us.&lt;p&gt;If you’re on a Mac, you can open up a program called Terminal and, with just a few lines of code, ruin your computer. You’re not supposed to screw around in there unless you really know what you’re doing.&lt;p&gt;The human brain does not have Terminal, for good reason. If you could muck around with your own source code, you could suddenly make your lungs stop working, or destroy your ability to see blue, or get yourself sexually attracted to birds. That’s why you have to wall it off, so that neither you nor anyone else can break your brain.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I like this idea - reminds me of hearing of sci-fi stories where even cursory communication with aliens is catastroohic because they share knowledge we are not meant to know and destroy ourselves because of it.&lt;p&gt;And the comment of someone(?) on TV being bad for children because it gives them answers to questions they wouldn&amp;#x27;t have asked.&lt;p&gt;Talk is cheap, but maybe we should be a little careful, and most of all careful of what we listen to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joelfried</author><text>If you haven&amp;#x27;t read it, the book you haven&amp;#x27;t realized you&amp;#x27;re looking for is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.</text></comment>