4 ms·

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get why the baby didn’t defend itself from the bear.”

alexmat 8y ago
Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain! "The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1] [1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html
- danharaj 8y ago
  # of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.
  - arturh 8y ago
    The gene is the unit of selection.
    - folli 8y ago
      The current fashion is subgenes (domains): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/
    - phkahler 8y ago
      No, the collection of genes is. There are exactly zero individual genes roaming around replicating in isolation.
      - marcosdumay 8y ago
        Sexual reproduction uncorrelates the selective pressures over each gene, and each small set of them (with larger sets being possible the larger a population the species has). The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.
      - lisper 8y ago
        This is a common misconception. The collection is the unit of replication, but the gene is nonetheless the unit of selection. This argument was laid out in excruciating detail by Dawkins, but the TL;DR is that reproductive fitness can only ever be measured relative to some environment, and all the other genes in a replicative unit are (part of) the environment for a gene and its alleles.
        phkahler 8y ago
        Collection, chromosome, Gene, base pair. Selection happens at all these levels.
        lisper 8y ago
        Nope. Selection can only happen at the level of something that has an effect on the phenotype. That's the definition of a gene.
      - rjbwork 8y ago
        Not according to modern understandings of gene theory. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is perhaps the seminal work on this topic for the popular audience.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      Actually, it's chemical enviromments.
      - folli 8y ago
        How does a chemical environment replicate and mutate?
  - Radim 8y ago
    Probability of propagation is just a proxy for consuming energy gradients more efficiently.
    - darkmighty 8y ago
      Life can be material-constrained instead of energy-constrained (I know there's E=mc^2, but this may not be technologically feasible hence irrelevant). Environmental domination is more fundamental than energy source tapping imo (you can imagine life in systems that don't even have precise energy analogues, like conway's game of life) -- that is, dominating whatever the basic resources are (space, materials, energy, etc).
- cafard 8y ago
  There is something curious about posters on a techie site lauding the superiority of the hunter-gatherer life.
  - alexmat 8y ago
    It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.
    - aalleavitch 8y ago
      Technology is often the solution to technology.
    - notabee 8y ago
      The people immersed in technology should also be the ones to best understand both its potential and its limitations. Anyone who has dealt with the unpredictability and pitfalls in maintaining human-created complex software systems should also easily intuit our limits in understanding or controlling other even more complex systems such as the planet's biosphere.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    I imagine a lot of them are starting to have families. What resonates in background information provides a foundational structure, and often establishes direction in opinion.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    What's so curious about it? I'd expect an average techie to be able to think about this topic on their own and comprehend various perspectives.
cubano 8y ago
Yet people have done and are doing it on a daily basis.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Do they now? Or are they just successful in areas where the corporation does not care, or even notice? To paraphrase Eliezer's famous quote about AI - the Corporation does not hate you, nor does it love you; you're just a potential revenue source, and as long as it believes you'll net it something, it'll let you have your way.
nkrisc 8y ago
I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains." I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them. Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.
- athenot 8y ago
  That's an intersting point. Perhaps things would be more level if a conflict between an individual would be settled by selecting one RANDOM employee from that company (not the super ninja expert in the narrow field at hand), and have them battle it out in a lower court / arbitration.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    No, just do like you do with children who sign contracts, invalidate any obligations the child has to the adult, but the adult is still bound to any obligations they have, and punish the adult for trying to take advantage of the child. Ideally, the ability for individuals to sign contracts with corporations should be forbidden. Maybe a single 1 person corporation that doesn't involve a lawyer either direct or as a contractor.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      I don't think the world could function without contracts. I get into a restaurant, I order some food. That's a contract where I get into the obligation of paying, and they get into the obligation of serving the food. It's much more likely that the justice system needs a complete rework.
      - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
        You would still have contracts, they would be limited to being between people of similar power, and a lot stronger protections for someone being taken advantage of.
  - 8y ago
52-6F-62 8y ago
With you 100% on this one. Your last illustration there reminds me a little of this: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up-in-immigration-court https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up... >>> His name is Johan. He drank a bottle of milk and played with a purple ball as he waited for the immigration judge, The Associated Press reported. John W. Richardson, the judge at the Phoenix courthouse, said he was "embarrassed to ask" if the defendant understood the proceedings. "I don't know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law," he told Johan's attorney.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  That’s isn’t a matter of smart vs dumb. That is a farcical process subverting the judiciary to abuse someone’s rights. If the judge had integrity he would resign or be disbarred.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      He is asking an infant who is incapable of speech whether he understands legal rights. That’s an insult to the concept of justice.
      - jrs235 8y ago
        >That’s an insult to the concept of justice. Agreed. Unfortunately our justice system has been turned into a legal system. Legalities are more important than justice and it's sickening.
        ink_13 8y ago
        What? "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."
s-shellfish 8y ago
I think lots of people have been aware for a long time that there's a big gap between the individual understanding of what we can perceive machines (and institutions, philosophies based on their mechanical functioning) can do, versus what they do do. It's just when you are caught up in it, you can't afford to think about it. You have to both be a part of it and not allow the responsibility of knowing you influence the system - therefore don't have the capacity to reason about the consequences of every single action - crush you. It's more like you are the bear and you are trying to take care of a baby. There's the idea that you are just this tiny, little singular organism in comparison to the whole, but you aren't. Everything we do has consequences, everything we do directs systems. If you think some things you do just don't matter, you are missing some perspective.
mrlala 8y ago
>We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Not really, it's just that every single thing in the world that we have created is so incredibly complex that 99.99999% of people can't be specialized in more than one or two things. When you dive into the details of any industry it's just crazy complex. So yeah, we're dumb in the sense that no one person can even come close to managing all the systems we've created.. but that is an impossible metric.
olef_ 8y ago
Execs of MNCs can be "nudged" too to do the right thing. That finding is one of reasons Thaler deserves his Nobel. Read his book.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  MNCs?
  - splendidtube 8y ago
    Multinational corporations
api 8y ago
It's not just technology per se. We are dumb when it comes to understanding the behavior of any complex system with lots of emergent properties and feedback loops. I doubt the Roman Empire was understandable by its leaders either. We are also fairly dumb when it comes to understanding things like ecosystems, genetic regulatory networks, the climate, the brain, etc. Those are all systems that have similar properties.
barrkel 8y ago
And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together. At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists. Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage. Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy. Not an easy circle to square.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  It also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is the only way to stop individuals bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
  - mhb 8y ago
    Well it takes collective action to decide what to ban.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      >> collective action to decide No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead. Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.
amorphid 8y ago
> We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. I prefer not to think like that. I'd say we're doing our best to navigate hard problems, and it's not yet clear how to do things more effectively. Worst case scenario we're acting dumb, and I'd argue that is kind of a useless statement. We're acting, and we can do better, so put some time into working on doing better.
walterstucco 8y ago
Are you sure that is the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals and not our perception of it? My grandparents lived most of their life under the menace of a nuclear holocaust, but when they were born the electric power system was still in infancy and they had no electricity whatsoever in their house. Going back centuries, the Ishtar Gate was built so that people arriving to Babilonia would be scared I think that we are more scared by what we don't know that by what we can't manage The world IS hard, but we're also very dumb We know smoking gives cancer, but we still smoke anyway. We know cars pollute the environment, but we ride them anyway. etc. etc. etc.
noonespecial 8y ago
Its worse. The baby doesn't even know that its supposed to be afraid of the bear.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
peacetreefrog 8y ago
"One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own." 1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question. 2. I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful. As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail. What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? Nothing. 3. It's not like there is just one monolithic corporation. There are many, and they have various interests, capabilities and incentives. Usually they're competing with each other. Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them. E.g. see Acorns, Wealthfront, or hundreds of apps that help people use their phones less.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>Our hardware isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend your own interests than the individual? Organizations who have similar levels of resources and expertise as those who are infringing upon the individual’s interests, obviously. Otherwise it ends up being a David vs Goliath situation.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question." Someone who actually knows something about the topic in question? It is highly in the interests of any person to have both a plentiful and safe food supply, and safe, breathable air and safe, drinkable water. Pesticides constantly straddle this line; how much pollution is acceptable for food production, but still leaving the air and water safe? Do you honestly expect any random person to be able to make the correct choice in that situation? No. That's why we have experts in that field which study the effects of these chemicals, and the impact they have on the environment, and come to the conclusion of what's safe or not. Another similar issue: One's actions do not exist in a vacuum. There's a recent story of some farmers spraying a certain herbicide to protect their crops from pigweed. However, not every farmer in the area is using it, or the herbicide resistant crops. The thing about spraying is that it goes in the air, and tends not to recognize property lines. The herbicide kills the crops on the neighboring farms. So while the original farmer who sprayed acted in their individual interest, they most definitely did not act in the interest of society in general, and clearly not in the interest of their neighbors. "I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful." No, we just want government to actually act in people's interests. "As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail." Yes, you broke the law, and so you must face the consequences. And unless you're Al Capone, you're not going to jail. Please stop parroting this ridiculous argument. "What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? " What happens if you stop paying the balance on your Samsung phone because you switched? "Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them." I have huge doubts that many of them do this, and I have huge doubts that they are effective in this.
andrei_says_ 8y ago
Placing refugee children as young as one in front of immigration courts, in seriousness, speaks volumes to this.

alexmat 8y ago

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain! "The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1] [1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html

danharaj 8y ago
# of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.
- arturh 8y ago
  The gene is the unit of selection.
  - folli 8y ago
    The current fashion is subgenes (domains): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258039/
  - phkahler 8y ago
    No, the collection of genes is. There are exactly zero individual genes roaming around replicating in isolation.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Sexual reproduction uncorrelates the selective pressures over each gene, and each small set of them (with larger sets being possible the larger a population the species has). The gene is the unit of selection is perfectly right. It's missing a finer point in that groups of genes are unities of selection too, but it's correct.
    - lisper 8y ago
      This is a common misconception. The collection is the unit of replication, but the gene is nonetheless the unit of selection. This argument was laid out in excruciating detail by Dawkins, but the TL;DR is that reproductive fitness can only ever be measured relative to some environment, and all the other genes in a replicative unit are (part of) the environment for a gene and its alleles.
      - phkahler 8y ago
        Collection, chromosome, Gene, base pair. Selection happens at all these levels.
        lisper 8y ago
        Nope. Selection can only happen at the level of something that has an effect on the phenotype. That's the definition of a gene.
    - rjbwork 8y ago
      Not according to modern understandings of gene theory. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is perhaps the seminal work on this topic for the popular audience.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Actually, it's chemical enviromments.
    - folli 8y ago
      How does a chemical environment replicate and mutate?
- Radim 8y ago
  Probability of propagation is just a proxy for consuming energy gradients more efficiently.
  - darkmighty 8y ago
    Life can be material-constrained instead of energy-constrained (I know there's E=mc^2, but this may not be technologically feasible hence irrelevant). Environmental domination is more fundamental than energy source tapping imo (you can imagine life in systems that don't even have precise energy analogues, like conway's game of life) -- that is, dominating whatever the basic resources are (space, materials, energy, etc).
cafard 8y ago
There is something curious about posters on a techie site lauding the superiority of the hunter-gatherer life.
- alexmat 8y ago
  It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.
  - aalleavitch 8y ago
    Technology is often the solution to technology.
  - notabee 8y ago
    The people immersed in technology should also be the ones to best understand both its potential and its limitations. Anyone who has dealt with the unpredictability and pitfalls in maintaining human-created complex software systems should also easily intuit our limits in understanding or controlling other even more complex systems such as the planet's biosphere.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  I imagine a lot of them are starting to have families. What resonates in background information provides a foundational structure, and often establishes direction in opinion.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  What's so curious about it? I'd expect an average techie to be able to think about this topic on their own and comprehend various perspectives.

cubano 8y ago

Yet people have done and are doing it on a daily basis.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Do they now? Or are they just successful in areas where the corporation does not care, or even notice? To paraphrase Eliezer's famous quote about AI - the Corporation does not hate you, nor does it love you; you're just a potential revenue source, and as long as it believes you'll net it something, it'll let you have your way.

nkrisc 8y ago

I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains." I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them. Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.

athenot 8y ago
That's an intersting point. Perhaps things would be more level if a conflict between an individual would be settled by selecting one RANDOM employee from that company (not the super ninja expert in the narrow field at hand), and have them battle it out in a lower court / arbitration.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  No, just do like you do with children who sign contracts, invalidate any obligations the child has to the adult, but the adult is still bound to any obligations they have, and punish the adult for trying to take advantage of the child. Ideally, the ability for individuals to sign contracts with corporations should be forbidden. Maybe a single 1 person corporation that doesn't involve a lawyer either direct or as a contractor.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    I don't think the world could function without contracts. I get into a restaurant, I order some food. That's a contract where I get into the obligation of paying, and they get into the obligation of serving the food. It's much more likely that the justice system needs a complete rework.
    - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
      You would still have contracts, they would be limited to being between people of similar power, and a lot stronger protections for someone being taken advantage of.
- 8y ago

52-6F-62 8y ago

With you 100% on this one. Your last illustration there reminds me a little of this: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up-in-immigration-court https://www.npr.org/2018/07/08/627082032/1-year-old-shows-up... >>> His name is Johan. He drank a bottle of milk and played with a purple ball as he waited for the immigration judge, The Associated Press reported. John W. Richardson, the judge at the Phoenix courthouse, said he was "embarrassed to ask" if the defendant understood the proceedings. "I don't know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law," he told Johan's attorney.

Spooky23 8y ago
That’s isn’t a matter of smart vs dumb. That is a farcical process subverting the judiciary to abuse someone’s rights. If the judge had integrity he would resign or be disbarred.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    He is asking an infant who is incapable of speech whether he understands legal rights. That’s an insult to the concept of justice.
    - jrs235 8y ago
      >That’s an insult to the concept of justice. Agreed. Unfortunately our justice system has been turned into a legal system. Legalities are more important than justice and it's sickening.
      - ink_13 8y ago
        What? "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

s-shellfish 8y ago

I think lots of people have been aware for a long time that there's a big gap between the individual understanding of what we can perceive machines (and institutions, philosophies based on their mechanical functioning) can do, versus what they do do. It's just when you are caught up in it, you can't afford to think about it. You have to both be a part of it and not allow the responsibility of knowing you influence the system - therefore don't have the capacity to reason about the consequences of every single action - crush you. It's more like you are the bear and you are trying to take care of a baby. There's the idea that you are just this tiny, little singular organism in comparison to the whole, but you aren't. Everything we do has consequences, everything we do directs systems. If you think some things you do just don't matter, you are missing some perspective.

mrlala 8y ago

>We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Not really, it's just that every single thing in the world that we have created is so incredibly complex that 99.99999% of people can't be specialized in more than one or two things. When you dive into the details of any industry it's just crazy complex. So yeah, we're dumb in the sense that no one person can even come close to managing all the systems we've created.. but that is an impossible metric.

olef_ 8y ago

Execs of MNCs can be "nudged" too to do the right thing. That finding is one of reasons Thaler deserves his Nobel. Read his book.

dredmorbius 8y ago
MNCs?
- splendidtube 8y ago
  Multinational corporations

api 8y ago

It's not just technology per se. We are dumb when it comes to understanding the behavior of any complex system with lots of emergent properties and feedback loops. I doubt the Roman Empire was understandable by its leaders either. We are also fairly dumb when it comes to understanding things like ecosystems, genetic regulatory networks, the climate, the brain, etc. Those are all systems that have similar properties.

barrkel 8y ago

And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together. At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a significant source of UK ill will towards it; and also generally what makes nationalists upset at globalists. Collective action problems require collective action solutions. Large actors, however, tend to dislike collective action because it reduces their scale advantage. Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power. Overall, I suspect government and international systems are more likely to be less corrupt because they can afford to build more checks and balances into their institutions, but the distance from the people decreases their perceived legitimacy. Not an easy circle to square.

sandworm101 8y ago
It also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is the only way to stop individuals bent on illegally benefiting themselves at the expense of others.
- mhb 8y ago
  Well it takes collective action to decide what to ban.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >> collective action to decide No. Once upon a time we nominated experts to make most of those decisions. Groups like the EPA or the IRS were given a mandate to examine what was going on and ban behaviors that did harm. But today "regulation" is a bad word. Everything is political. The EPA and IRS cannot ban anything without massive public debate. In fact, most regulatory bodies are so under pressure to reduce any and all regulation that they rarely ever ban anything. Quick and efficient regulation of harmful behavior is dead. Example: the recent bill to ban upskirting photography in the UK. Nothing much to debate. But the bill gets killed by the new breed of politicians who demand every new regulation be subject to the full public process in order to make the act of passing new regulations as difficult as possible.

amorphid 8y ago

> We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. I prefer not to think like that. I'd say we're doing our best to navigate hard problems, and it's not yet clear how to do things more effectively. Worst case scenario we're acting dumb, and I'd argue that is kind of a useless statement. We're acting, and we can do better, so put some time into working on doing better.

walterstucco 8y ago

Are you sure that is the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals and not our perception of it? My grandparents lived most of their life under the menace of a nuclear holocaust, but when they were born the electric power system was still in infancy and they had no electricity whatsoever in their house. Going back centuries, the Ishtar Gate was built so that people arriving to Babilonia would be scared I think that we are more scared by what we don't know that by what we can't manage The world IS hard, but we're also very dumb We know smoking gives cancer, but we still smoke anyway. We know cars pollute the environment, but we ride them anyway. etc. etc. etc.

noonespecial 8y ago

Its worse. The baby doesn't even know that its supposed to be afraid of the bear.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

peacetreefrog 8y ago

"One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own." 1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question. 2. I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful. As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail. What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? Nothing. 3. It's not like there is just one monolithic corporation. There are many, and they have various interests, capabilities and incentives. Usually they're competing with each other. Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them. E.g. see Acorns, Wealthfront, or hundreds of apps that help people use their phones less.

enraged_camel 8y ago
>>Our hardware isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend your own interests than the individual? Organizations who have similar levels of resources and expertise as those who are infringing upon the individual’s interests, obviously. Otherwise it ends up being a David vs Goliath situation.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question." Someone who actually knows something about the topic in question? It is highly in the interests of any person to have both a plentiful and safe food supply, and safe, breathable air and safe, drinkable water. Pesticides constantly straddle this line; how much pollution is acceptable for food production, but still leaving the air and water safe? Do you honestly expect any random person to be able to make the correct choice in that situation? No. That's why we have experts in that field which study the effects of these chemicals, and the impact they have on the environment, and come to the conclusion of what's safe or not. Another similar issue: One's actions do not exist in a vacuum. There's a recent story of some farmers spraying a certain herbicide to protect their crops from pigweed. However, not every farmer in the area is using it, or the herbicide resistant crops. The thing about spraying is that it goes in the air, and tends not to recognize property lines. The herbicide kills the crops on the neighboring farms. So while the original farmer who sprayed acted in their individual interest, they most definitely did not act in the interest of society in general, and clearly not in the interest of their neighbors. "I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful." No, we just want government to actually act in people's interests. "As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail." Yes, you broke the law, and so you must face the consequences. And unless you're Al Capone, you're not going to jail. Please stop parroting this ridiculous argument. "What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? " What happens if you stop paying the balance on your Samsung phone because you switched? "Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them." I have huge doubts that many of them do this, and I have huge doubts that they are effective in this.

andrei_says_ 8y ago

Placing refugee children as young as one in front of immigration courts, in seriousness, speaks volumes to this.