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You're being down voted but you're making an extremely important point. It's very, very difficult to convince people to reduce their quality of life because som
by Thriptic 7y ago
You're being down voted but you're making an extremely important point. It's very, very difficult to convince people to reduce their quality of life because something bad is going to happen in the future to people who may or may not be them. You see this all over the place in other domains such as diet (people know they should eat less but don't), exercise (people don't do it), personal finance (people don't save), alcohol and drug use (people don't stop), medication compliance (people can't be bothered to take their meds), security (people can't be bothered to do best practice), etc; and those are problems that directly affect them with shorter time horizons. You're fighting human nature, and you're going to lose. Further, you have a collective action problem where no one is going to act because they don't want to be the person who has to reduce QOL while other people don't. I firmly believe that people will not get onboard with reduction of consumption en masse and that the only way to solve the problem of climate change is to innovate our way out of the problems while maintaining analogous QOL.
I applaud the general HN community for taking a stand against the problem and making sacrifices, but the reality is that most other people won't, and I think we should have that discussion.
- trentnix 7y agoExactly. IF this is the crisis we are being assured it is, the only solution is technological. We've spent thousands of years improving the quality of the life of the average human and now a new set of aspiring tyrants on a great moral jihad believe we must reduce our quality of life. It won't work. And the fight that might come to pass would be a catastrophe unto itself. We either deal with this technologically or it doesn't get dealt with at all.