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On the topic of seeing across many fields, it's occurred to me there is a common theme across the crises of 2020 (particularly as seen through the lens of the U

On the topic of seeing across many fields, it's occurred to me there is a common theme across the crises of 2020 (particularly as seen through the lens of the US): "I can't breathe". Covid: check George Floyd's murder which sparked worldwide protests: check Smoke covering half the US: check Not that I'm a polymath or have any answers. My approach to these problems is to leave the fate of the world to those who hold the power and just do my best to locally mitigate the damage.

paulmd 6y ago
the internal instability within western nations has reached the point that our national psyche has regressed to the lower levels of maslow's hierarchy we've regressed from self-actualization and are now focused on issues of survival
- daveslash 6y ago
  If our ecology really is collapsing, this is going to get worse. As resources become more and more scarce, powerful first-world countries are not going to want to regress in their standards of living, which I speculate is going to lead to increased global conflict.
  - gdubs 6y ago
    The US defense department has been saying basically this for over a decade in fact.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    our inability to deal with the climate collapse is only a second-order effect, we are completely unable to deal with anything right now. If it wasn't the climate crisis, and if it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. Our political system is far too polarized and far too plagued by anti-intellectualism, it simply can't respond to anything. Russia and conservative media (murdoch media, etc) seeding regressive/anti-intellectual movements has been massively successful, western society is just completely unprepared to deal with freedom of speech being leveraged to spew an unending firehose of bullshit, it's a "copyleft" style trojan approach of using our own democratic values against us. The firehose of bullshit has led to the rise of anti-intellectual movements, an anti-intellectual president, and a party that just votes absolutely lockstep with him no matter what he does. They don't give a shit about absolutely anything, not fires or hurricanes or plagues, and just let all these problems fester. It has a lot of other negative effects too of course, but we have reached the point where we simply can't respond even to acute crises anymore, our system has long-since lost its higher functioning in terms of setting goals and being able to execute them (what you'd call "self-actualization" in maslow's hierachy) and now is struggling even to maintain basic homeostasis (the "physical needs" tier of the maslow hierarchy). (I include Brexit, Bolsanaro, Duarte, etc in this as well - western democracy is in deep fucking shit worldwide and if we don’t get our shit together and deal with the firehose of falsehoods we will be supplanted by more authoritarian forms of government that don’t suffer this vulnerability because they don’t tolerate free speech and dissent.) It is also super depressing to know that even with everything that's gone on, less than 5% of america has even changed its mind. Even with the plague, even with the fires, even with civil unrest and mass arrests, even as the post office is dismantled and we lose the ability even to get a fucking package on time, 40% of america will go in the booth and pull the lever for more of this. It goes beyond just "doesn't affect me, who cares", or "that's 20 years from now me's problem", this has all affected everyone, now, today, and people still want more as long as they get to own the libs. It's maddening.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
      Anti intellectualism has a root cause. Intellectuals have led us to credit crisis. But "Nobody saw it coming!" Is not a response. Remember that statement? Intellectuals have led us to forever wars everywhere. Intellectuals have overseen the collapse of the family unit in the last 70 years Intellectuals old us in the 90s that the polar caps would melt in....2020 Intellectuals have led us to a permanent underclass of people in cities like detroit, chicago, NY and Philadelphia. I'd say that's enough. People have a right to call out the bullshit. Because most of what intellectuals say is bullshit. Human knowledge is limited. intellectuals have failed to exercise basic humility. The bill is now due and those institutions need to dissappear (unis, newspapers etc) so something new can rise.
    - dontcarethrow2 6y ago
      I agree with your observations except the anti-intellectual movements. Those are grassroot, obviously allows us to believe anyone to be the boogeyman. I really struggle with the perspective of 'The Russians are out to get us and enslave the world(forever that is their goal) so buy our guns and install our defense systems. Economy machine go brrrrr'.
  - jnurmine 6y ago
    Are you familiar with Jem Bendell's "Deep Adaptation"? Its premise is that near-term (climate-induced) ecological-societal collapse is inevitable and unavoidable, and the way forward is to adapt to this, as there is no longer a way to mitigate it.
    - daveslash 6y ago
      No, I'm not familiar. I'll look it up. Thank you.
- indigochill 6y ago
  It's not actually the instability as such (I think), but the scale of the power and decision-making. The US in particular has centralized a ton of power and decision-making in Washington, where the original vision (at least among the early Federalists) would be that the federal government would remain weak and the power would be largely left in the hands of the states. If government were better-federated, to push the power and decision-making to smaller and smaller units, then citizen buy-in would be a lot easier because the answer would always be "get involved in your local legislature", not "cast your vote into an ocean of millions of votes and hope for the best". Americans sometimes look at Iceland as an example of Scandinavian Utopia, but I think the single best thing Iceland has done that's the cause to a lot of the effects has been to stay small. It's easy to know someone in government personally even if you're an outsider. Sure, there's still corruption and centralization of power and wealth, but the scale is so much smaller that it's a lot easier to just kind of shrug it off than when the fate of the world's data is at stake.
- hinkley 6y ago
  The anti-mask folks have chosen self-actualization over survival. Like the stages of grief, the hierarchy is not necessarily chronological.
  - pjkundert 6y ago
    I'm really not sure if this is meant as an insult or not, but I'll take it as respectful. Wearing my high-bypass N95 mask, or a sloppy ill-fitting "surgical" mask or an un-rated cloth mask around a vulnerable person with multiple comorbidities is a dangerous show of virtue-signalling: it does essentially nothing to protect that individual. Encouraging vulnerable people to wear a powered HEPA ventilator on their hip, connected to a full face mask would be useful. Not perfect, but statistically 100x-1000x better outcome, should they be unfortunately exposed to a cloud of SARS-CoV-2 bearing particulates. Isn't a hundred bucks a worthwhile investment to actually protect a vulnerable person? Forcing people to do worthless things (wear masks, when they have no comorbidities, which do nothing to protect the vulnerable) is ridiculous, and is rightly held in contempt by many caring people. Its very strange, to me, that even on a platform like HN, we get many (most?) accounts involved in denigrating entire groups by name-calling them "deniers" -- without actually materially addressing any of the concerns of the individuals within the "group"...
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      > virtue-signalling [...] Forcing people to do worthless things (wear masks, Hello! Would you take your right-wing cant elsewhere, please? Decent people are thoroughly sick of the likes of you right now, I'm sorry to say. Two hundred thousand are dead, thanks to people spreading unscientific lies like your unsourced claims above, and the rest of us, who haven't gone mad and decided all of science and medicine are wrong, wish you could go back to your death cult and stop screaming at the rest of us. Thanks, and have the day you deserve!
      - pjkundert 6y ago
        No comment on the HEPA ventilator, then? :) My father is significantly at risk; I'd much rather he wear an inexpensive HEPA ventilator (99.97%+ vs. 95% suppression, fresh air, ...), than even an N95. Wouldn't you? And what exactly to "people like me" deserve? I'm used to being hated by both right- and left-wing people, so I'm OK -- but who's going to give "it" to me? Edit: FYI: https://www.hamilton-medical.com/en_US/E-Learning-and-Education/Knowledge-Base/Knowledge-Base-Detail~2020-03-18~Efficiency-of-HEPA-filters~d5358f88-753e-4644-91c6-5c7b862e941f~.html https://www.hamilton-medical.com/en_US/E-Learning-and-Educat... Note especially the effectiveness of HEPA vs. particulates in the size range of SARS-CoV-2... If this is rated HEPA in the US, this must provide 99.97%+ filtration in the "worst" particulate size, 0.3micron, and apparently even better in the .06 to .2 micron SARS virus size: https://www.amazon.ca/AirPro-Rechargeable-Electrical-Purifying-Respirator/dp/B07YWLBVF2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hepa+respirator+mask&qid=1600290517&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.ca/AirPro-Rechargeable-Electrical-Purifyi... Its a hundred bucks... Why not opt for this option for people at high risk from viral respiratory illnesses? Why the push-back, here?
josefresco 6y ago
Just wait until November where depending on the outcome, American democracy itself might be saying "I can't breathe".
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494075.

paulmd 6y ago

the internal instability within western nations has reached the point that our national psyche has regressed to the lower levels of maslow's hierarchy we've regressed from self-actualization and are now focused on issues of survival

daveslash 6y ago
If our ecology really is collapsing, this is going to get worse. As resources become more and more scarce, powerful first-world countries are not going to want to regress in their standards of living, which I speculate is going to lead to increased global conflict.
- gdubs 6y ago
  The US defense department has been saying basically this for over a decade in fact.
- paulmd 6y ago
  our inability to deal with the climate collapse is only a second-order effect, we are completely unable to deal with anything right now. If it wasn't the climate crisis, and if it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. Our political system is far too polarized and far too plagued by anti-intellectualism, it simply can't respond to anything. Russia and conservative media (murdoch media, etc) seeding regressive/anti-intellectual movements has been massively successful, western society is just completely unprepared to deal with freedom of speech being leveraged to spew an unending firehose of bullshit, it's a "copyleft" style trojan approach of using our own democratic values against us. The firehose of bullshit has led to the rise of anti-intellectual movements, an anti-intellectual president, and a party that just votes absolutely lockstep with him no matter what he does. They don't give a shit about absolutely anything, not fires or hurricanes or plagues, and just let all these problems fester. It has a lot of other negative effects too of course, but we have reached the point where we simply can't respond even to acute crises anymore, our system has long-since lost its higher functioning in terms of setting goals and being able to execute them (what you'd call "self-actualization" in maslow's hierachy) and now is struggling even to maintain basic homeostasis (the "physical needs" tier of the maslow hierarchy). (I include Brexit, Bolsanaro, Duarte, etc in this as well - western democracy is in deep fucking shit worldwide and if we don’t get our shit together and deal with the firehose of falsehoods we will be supplanted by more authoritarian forms of government that don’t suffer this vulnerability because they don’t tolerate free speech and dissent.) It is also super depressing to know that even with everything that's gone on, less than 5% of america has even changed its mind. Even with the plague, even with the fires, even with civil unrest and mass arrests, even as the post office is dismantled and we lose the ability even to get a fucking package on time, 40% of america will go in the booth and pull the lever for more of this. It goes beyond just "doesn't affect me, who cares", or "that's 20 years from now me's problem", this has all affected everyone, now, today, and people still want more as long as they get to own the libs. It's maddening.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
    Anti intellectualism has a root cause. Intellectuals have led us to credit crisis. But "Nobody saw it coming!" Is not a response. Remember that statement? Intellectuals have led us to forever wars everywhere. Intellectuals have overseen the collapse of the family unit in the last 70 years Intellectuals old us in the 90s that the polar caps would melt in....2020 Intellectuals have led us to a permanent underclass of people in cities like detroit, chicago, NY and Philadelphia. I'd say that's enough. People have a right to call out the bullshit. Because most of what intellectuals say is bullshit. Human knowledge is limited. intellectuals have failed to exercise basic humility. The bill is now due and those institutions need to dissappear (unis, newspapers etc) so something new can rise.
  - dontcarethrow2 6y ago
    I agree with your observations except the anti-intellectual movements. Those are grassroot, obviously allows us to believe anyone to be the boogeyman. I really struggle with the perspective of 'The Russians are out to get us and enslave the world(forever that is their goal) so buy our guns and install our defense systems. Economy machine go brrrrr'.
- jnurmine 6y ago
  Are you familiar with Jem Bendell's "Deep Adaptation"? Its premise is that near-term (climate-induced) ecological-societal collapse is inevitable and unavoidable, and the way forward is to adapt to this, as there is no longer a way to mitigate it.
  - daveslash 6y ago
    No, I'm not familiar. I'll look it up. Thank you.
indigochill 6y ago
It's not actually the instability as such (I think), but the scale of the power and decision-making. The US in particular has centralized a ton of power and decision-making in Washington, where the original vision (at least among the early Federalists) would be that the federal government would remain weak and the power would be largely left in the hands of the states. If government were better-federated, to push the power and decision-making to smaller and smaller units, then citizen buy-in would be a lot easier because the answer would always be "get involved in your local legislature", not "cast your vote into an ocean of millions of votes and hope for the best". Americans sometimes look at Iceland as an example of Scandinavian Utopia, but I think the single best thing Iceland has done that's the cause to a lot of the effects has been to stay small. It's easy to know someone in government personally even if you're an outsider. Sure, there's still corruption and centralization of power and wealth, but the scale is so much smaller that it's a lot easier to just kind of shrug it off than when the fate of the world's data is at stake.
hinkley 6y ago
The anti-mask folks have chosen self-actualization over survival. Like the stages of grief, the hierarchy is not necessarily chronological.
- pjkundert 6y ago
  I'm really not sure if this is meant as an insult or not, but I'll take it as respectful. Wearing my high-bypass N95 mask, or a sloppy ill-fitting "surgical" mask or an un-rated cloth mask around a vulnerable person with multiple comorbidities is a dangerous show of virtue-signalling: it does essentially nothing to protect that individual. Encouraging vulnerable people to wear a powered HEPA ventilator on their hip, connected to a full face mask would be useful. Not perfect, but statistically 100x-1000x better outcome, should they be unfortunately exposed to a cloud of SARS-CoV-2 bearing particulates. Isn't a hundred bucks a worthwhile investment to actually protect a vulnerable person? Forcing people to do worthless things (wear masks, when they have no comorbidities, which do nothing to protect the vulnerable) is ridiculous, and is rightly held in contempt by many caring people. Its very strange, to me, that even on a platform like HN, we get many (most?) accounts involved in denigrating entire groups by name-calling them "deniers" -- without actually materially addressing any of the concerns of the individuals within the "group"...
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    > virtue-signalling [...] Forcing people to do worthless things (wear masks, Hello! Would you take your right-wing cant elsewhere, please? Decent people are thoroughly sick of the likes of you right now, I'm sorry to say. Two hundred thousand are dead, thanks to people spreading unscientific lies like your unsourced claims above, and the rest of us, who haven't gone mad and decided all of science and medicine are wrong, wish you could go back to your death cult and stop screaming at the rest of us. Thanks, and have the day you deserve!
    - pjkundert 6y ago
      No comment on the HEPA ventilator, then? :) My father is significantly at risk; I'd much rather he wear an inexpensive HEPA ventilator (99.97%+ vs. 95% suppression, fresh air, ...), than even an N95. Wouldn't you? And what exactly to "people like me" deserve? I'm used to being hated by both right- and left-wing people, so I'm OK -- but who's going to give "it" to me? Edit: FYI: https://www.hamilton-medical.com/en_US/E-Learning-and-Education/Knowledge-Base/Knowledge-Base-Detail~2020-03-18~Efficiency-of-HEPA-filters~d5358f88-753e-4644-91c6-5c7b862e941f~.html https://www.hamilton-medical.com/en_US/E-Learning-and-Educat... Note especially the effectiveness of HEPA vs. particulates in the size range of SARS-CoV-2... If this is rated HEPA in the US, this must provide 99.97%+ filtration in the "worst" particulate size, 0.3micron, and apparently even better in the .06 to .2 micron SARS virus size: https://www.amazon.ca/AirPro-Rechargeable-Electrical-Purifying-Respirator/dp/B07YWLBVF2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hepa+respirator+mask&qid=1600290517&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.ca/AirPro-Rechargeable-Electrical-Purifyi... Its a hundred bucks... Why not opt for this option for people at high risk from viral respiratory illnesses? Why the push-back, here?

josefresco 6y ago

Just wait until November where depending on the outcome, American democracy itself might be saying "I can't breathe".

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494075.