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Nobody mentioned reducing pollution and greenhouse emission is the best way to help the situation so I will -- non-polluting alternatives to flying, eating meat

by spodek 9y ago

Nobody mentioned reducing pollution and greenhouse emission is the best way to help the situation so I will -- non-polluting alternatives to flying, eating meat, heating and cooling (I'm surprised how many people heat their homes in the winter so they can walk around in shorts), packaged food. Having fewer children. As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or flying less are misguided wastes of effort.

aneil 9y ago
Conscious consumption doesn't work. It ignores financial incentives, and we know how that story plays out. In particular, companies have a fiduciary responsibility to exploit resources for shareholder gain. Until that problem is addressed, we're headed for disaster.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or flying less are misguided wastes of effort. Yes, because it's the truth. Knowing that reflects understanding. It's orders of magnitude easier to design[0] a nuclear reactor than it is to get a meaningful number of people to voluntarily refrain from flying, or even driving cars. Getting lots of people to agree on something, especially when they have strong short-term incentives for not following through on that agreement, is a near-impossible thing. Pretty much the only way to tackle coordination problems (without going full-authoritarian, one dictator to rule the world) is to develop technologies and strategies that reduce the "activation energy" required for people to coordinate on an issue. We won't get ourselves out of this mess by appeals to our shared human heritage, because responsibility for the planet always takes a backseat when one's tired and has to choose between 20 minutes in a car or 1 hour in a bus to pick up their daughter from school. -- [0] - and build it; but notice where pretty much all the problems with building a nuclear plant are - getting the local population to agree to it.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't considered before. I have to admit that it only fuels my fatalism. If people can't be convinced not to (e.g.) throw their trash out the window, then I can't help but despair.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    This is where public policy, international agreements (with teeth), and other such things come into play, as they have the potential to modify the dynamics and incentives driving the harmful activity. Not that this makes it easy...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I wish I could tell you otherwise; I sometimes try to believe it, but then I go outside to intermingle with the general population, and all of this is plainly visible. Sometimes I wonder, who are those people who don't give a damn and just dump garbage wherever they please. I personally don't know any of them (or at least I don't know I know). But then I realize that current population levels mean we all live in our own filter bubbles. I did a back-of-the-napkin math recently and realized that personally, I've meaningfully interacted with at most 0.1% of people in the city I live in. In other words, I don't know a first thing about 99.9% of people I live next to. This probably explains why everyone seems so surprised come election days, or when they start discussing anything on a mainstream Internet portal. All of this suggests civilization is a fragile thing, and the only structure and semblance of stability it has is thanks to systemic incentives (I wonder how our streets would look like if you couldn't be fined for littering). There's too many of us, we don't know one another, and we can't agree on shit, unless indirectly compelled by self-interest. I think the only way to achieve some large-scale coordination is to work on the incentives and the environment in which they apply, but that itself is a hard thing - especially that for any change you'd like to make, there will be those who profit off status quo and want to oppose you. Really, designing a new nuclear reactor is trivial in comparison.

by spodek 9y ago

aneil 9y ago

Conscious consumption doesn't work. It ignores financial incentives, and we know how that story plays out. In particular, companies have a fiduciary responsibility to exploit resources for shareholder gain. Until that problem is addressed, we're headed for disaster.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or flying less are misguided wastes of effort. Yes, because it's the truth. Knowing that reflects understanding. It's orders of magnitude easier to design[0] a nuclear reactor than it is to get a meaningful number of people to voluntarily refrain from flying, or even driving cars. Getting lots of people to agree on something, especially when they have strong short-term incentives for not following through on that agreement, is a near-impossible thing. Pretty much the only way to tackle coordination problems (without going full-authoritarian, one dictator to rule the world) is to develop technologies and strategies that reduce the "activation energy" required for people to coordinate on an issue. We won't get ourselves out of this mess by appeals to our shared human heritage, because responsibility for the planet always takes a backseat when one's tired and has to choose between 20 minutes in a car or 1 hour in a bus to pick up their daughter from school. -- [0] - and build it; but notice where pretty much all the problems with building a nuclear plant are - getting the local population to agree to it.

Tharkun 9y ago
That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't considered before. I have to admit that it only fuels my fatalism. If people can't be convinced not to (e.g.) throw their trash out the window, then I can't help but despair.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  This is where public policy, international agreements (with teeth), and other such things come into play, as they have the potential to modify the dynamics and incentives driving the harmful activity. Not that this makes it easy...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I wish I could tell you otherwise; I sometimes try to believe it, but then I go outside to intermingle with the general population, and all of this is plainly visible. Sometimes I wonder, who are those people who don't give a damn and just dump garbage wherever they please. I personally don't know any of them (or at least I don't know I know). But then I realize that current population levels mean we all live in our own filter bubbles. I did a back-of-the-napkin math recently and realized that personally, I've meaningfully interacted with at most 0.1% of people in the city I live in. In other words, I don't know a first thing about 99.9% of people I live next to. This probably explains why everyone seems so surprised come election days, or when they start discussing anything on a mainstream Internet portal. All of this suggests civilization is a fragile thing, and the only structure and semblance of stability it has is thanks to systemic incentives (I wonder how our streets would look like if you couldn't be fined for littering). There's too many of us, we don't know one another, and we can't agree on shit, unless indirectly compelled by self-interest. I think the only way to achieve some large-scale coordination is to work on the incentives and the environment in which they apply, but that itself is a hard thing - especially that for any change you'd like to make, there will be those who profit off status quo and want to oppose you. Really, designing a new nuclear reactor is trivial in comparison.