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That's ignoring risks. It's like being the richest you've ever been in 2007. True but not reassuring. We have nukes, very worrying demographic trends in the we
by blfr 10y ago
That's ignoring risks. It's like being the richest you've ever been in 2007. True but not reassuring.
We have nukes, very worrying demographic trends in the west with massive migrations, and a declining hegemon. We're comfortable but fragile.
What I want to say is that Taleb seems to have a better handle on things than Pinker.
- Karunamon 10y agoBut we've always had those things. Every generation has their.. (I don't want to say bogeyman as it's too dismissive, but I don't want to say pressing issue because they're really not all that pressing in the minds of the average person. Let's just go with "long-term hovering externality") ...to deal with. Society has always been remarkably fragile, and we've stepped really close to outright annihilation a few of times, seemingly saved not by the application of the best humanity has to offer, but by what appears to be happenstance. What if someone else had been the Russian negotiator during the Cuban missile crisis? What if a different general that time Russia's radar malfunctioned had thought we were really nuking them? Global annihilation was literally in the hands of this one person's decision! Hell, what if the 1859 CME event were to happen again? We had some near misses a couple years ago. There's a difference I think between ignoring a risk and not devoting 100% of our efforts and mindshare to dealing with it.
- cossatot 10y agoWhat's worrisome about the immigration trends? I personally like them, and feel that they're more stabilizing than not: we're less likely to go to war with a nation of whose ethnicities make up some substantial fraction of our populace, and may be treated better in the case of war (look at German-American vs. Japanese-American treatment in WWII). But these are only my views. You can ask Taleb about his views on Middle Eastern immigration to the West; IIRC he's from Lebanon.
- droopyEyelids 10y agoWorrisome because consequences of climate change have the potential to cause 100s of millions of humans to move in a timeframe that is impossible to deal with.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago>What's worrisome about the immigration trends? Places like the US and Denmark are incredibly non-corrupt, while places like Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria are highly corrupt. Why some places are corrupt and others aren't is poorly understood magic of some sort. One fairly decent guess is something like "cultural factors" - Danish bureaucrats aren't corrupt because they expect that other non-corrupt Danes would punish them for it. If there's a clear plan and proven successes on acculturating immigrants, I'm much less worried about opening up borders. Without that, though, we may be risking a highly nebulous yet incredibly important shared resource - the cultural norms that make our communities excellent places to live.
- surfmike 10y agoI would consider the US a proven success on acculturating immigrants. Over 200 years of importing people from broken corrupt and broken regimes, creating a prosperous and relatively uncorrupt society.
- reflexive 10y ago"A little bit of adversity results in things, a little bit of strain, of stress, results in a little more performance on anything." - Taleb on the Lebanese diaspora http://freakonomics.com/2013/08/29/who-are-the-most-successful-immigrants-in-the-world-full-transcript/ http://freakonomics.com/2013/08/29/who-are-the-most-successf...
- 18972345 10y agoIn Australia, immigration is used to increase the population, which is used to increase gdp. The problem is that infrastructure is not improved to meet the growing population, and the increase in gdp is not enough to go around for the new people, so everybody in the middle and lower class gets a smaller part of the gdp. Cities where you could afford a nice house in a quiet area become concrete jungles where people are stacked on top of each other in apartments. House prices (for the same type of house people were used to living in) increase massively due to the increase in demand. I am assuming something similar happens in America. The increase in population just means a decrease in quality of life for the existing people.
- jree2 10y agoTaleb is a Trump like clown. Just because both have the capacity to point of hypocrisy in the system, don't let that misguide you into believing they are qualified to talk about solutions. There is no comparison to Pinker.
- hash-set 10y agoI don't think Trump would pack those venues so full of people if he wasn't somehow in tune with what a whole lot of people are thinking. He is easy to dismiss. He is not a politician. He is not pre-packaged or polished. He is not particularly well educated. But he's right--the US is not living up to its ideals. We can even run a clean election. America ended in 2008. We've been living off of a corpse ever since. At some point everyone is going to know it.
- mr_overalls 10y agoTo reiterate: just because he recognizes the malaise, doesn't mean he has a cure. I had a political scientist who described Communism as having diagnosed the disease (class struggle), but having been unable to come up with a reasonable cure.
- legodt 10y ago"America ended in 2008" Sorry your racist ass is too upset by a black president to notice how much better things have gotten over the past 8 years
- CuriouslyC 10y agoTaleb doesn't take himself seriously, Pinker takes himself far too seriously. Taleb is entertaining, Pinker draws out his ideas to the point of tedium. Taleb is a skeptical empiricist, Pinker likes to get lost in theory. Pinker certainly has Taleb lapped in terms of old guard intellectual credentials. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
- jordanb 10y agoPinker isn't taken very seriously by historians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tuivk/steven_pinkers_reputation_in_historical_circles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tuivk/steve...
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> That's ignoring risks. Risk prediction is one thing. Unhinged scaremongering is another.
- sjclemmy 10y agoIt's totally not. One thing I think this conversation has highlighted is the way we think about risks to us as individuals and risks to us as a species. So whilst in the past, the thing that worried most people was illness, predation, starvation, conflict (and in parts of the world this is happening, but they are the exception) Now our worries are expressed in nuclear war and climate change. Perhaps in the future those global worries will manifest and it will be the worst time to be a human, but right now it is the safest. Less war, less famine, less disease, more food, better health. I totally get that this statement flies in the face of what most people experience in their everyday reality - I feel that emotional pain as well - so whilst our physical wellbeing has improved, our ability to manage our own feelings is still difficult.
- pmyjavec 10y agoThis is the truth, we've come a long way from a technological and materialistic standpoint, but we've also heavily, heavily stolen from the future, we've stolen from others. People are losing their homes and livelihoods to deforestation, islands are being inundated with rising sea levels, fracking is polluting water tables and mass animal extinctions are a thing. At some point the debt needs to be paid off, or we're probably going to be next. Looking for a purpose? Give back to the natural world and I'm sure some happiness will come out of it! God knows she needs our help.
- wolfgke 10y ago> Looking for a purpose? Give back to the natural world and I'm sure some happiness will come out of it! The problem is the population growth makes it hard to implement that.