3 ms·

The blog post where he talks about slow-moving disasters has this gem: > When I was a kid, it looked as if the country was heading for an eventual race war. To

The blog post where he talks about slow-moving disasters has this gem: > When I was a kid, it looked as if the country was heading for an eventual race war. Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting. It's funny how things that seem impossible one year can start to seem much more possible a few years later. Problems that you think have gone away sometimes resurface. Y2K was a good example of something that didn't happen, and probably in large part because everyone was working to stop it from happening. But to claim that it will always work that way is to assume that there is always something significant that can be done by the people who care. There often is, but there are a lot of forces that work against this too - collective action is always hard, and it gets harder when it has prisoners-dilemma features or wealthy opponents who are better at spreading their viewpoint. Some problems may well have solutions that are too radical or costly to be deployed in the time that we have, and the fact that we haven't seen many catastrophic problems like that so far is a form of the anthropic argument. The other thing is that the 'problems always go away or get drastically ameliorated if they are predicted by society', is an interesting example of an argument that undercuts itself. If enough people believe it, it'll stop being true.

mrtksn 6y ago
In pre-social media proliferation ideas wouldn't move as fast, so you could have people who are worried and take care of things and a tolerable number of free riders can do their thing, so it wouldn't lead to a disaster. In the occasions where the worries were unsubstantiated the free riders can safely be the mavericks who didn't listen to the conventional wisdom and won. The problem today is, I believe, ideas can travel faster than they can be challenged so we risk to have a maverick that is terribly wrong, go mainstream without being challenged and make all of us loose it all. We can no longer have a stable equilibrium of conflicting ideas, everything would spontaneously go to one directions or another all the way, winner takse it all style.
arinod 6y ago
> Y2K was a good example of something that didn't happen, and probably in large part because everyone was working to stop it from happening. But to claim that it will always work that way is to assume that there is always something significant that can be done by the people who care. I worked on adjustments in cobol code for the y2k bug in accounting systems. We had to start well before, because contract with payment in the future did not work. Cobol at that time had no date type and stored the data as 3 integers, day, month and year. The job was basically to redo the calculation of terms adding 100 to year when it was greater than 00 and less than 50. (2000 to 2050). Anyway, who had a system susceptible to the bug, had no option but to make adjustments or lose their payment controls. Edit: ading 100 to year, not 2000
- mrtksn 6y ago
  I am fan of Dilbert but someone should help Scott Adams understand that y2k bug did not go away spontaneously(So he can stop preaching that we should not worry about climate change and so on because look they said the world would end in 2000 because of the y2k bug but nothing happened). I like following the creators of the stuff I enjoys but Adams is proving to be a challenge for me. I should have stuck with the "never meet your hero" mantra.
- acqq 6y ago
  I've led the team that worked for more than two years to prepare our products for the Y2K, in real time finance, and there was not a single but many points of failure, some completely not obvious before they were detected, so most of the time was spent on developing different tests and procedures to actually in advance test, verify and diagnose the big amounts of code where anything could be implicitly based on the assumptions that won't be true at 2000. When there were (almost) no issues at the begin of 2000, it was because of a lot of concentrated work correctly done before, early enough. The luck was that the problem was in the consciousness of everybody making decisions, and that those making decisions had a good motivation to do the changes (e.g. the company can charge for fixes, or the company will not be able to sell the product if it's not fixed). The real danger is when those who make decisions (and those who directly influence them) have a good motivation (from their narrow point of view) to continue ignoring the problem. That's how the environments described by Octavia Butler develop.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting. which basically translates to "that seems impossible unless I just identified big obvious problem that makes it possible"

mrtksn 6y ago

In pre-social media proliferation ideas wouldn't move as fast, so you could have people who are worried and take care of things and a tolerable number of free riders can do their thing, so it wouldn't lead to a disaster. In the occasions where the worries were unsubstantiated the free riders can safely be the mavericks who didn't listen to the conventional wisdom and won. The problem today is, I believe, ideas can travel faster than they can be challenged so we risk to have a maverick that is terribly wrong, go mainstream without being challenged and make all of us loose it all. We can no longer have a stable equilibrium of conflicting ideas, everything would spontaneously go to one directions or another all the way, winner takse it all style.

arinod 6y ago

> Y2K was a good example of something that didn't happen, and probably in large part because everyone was working to stop it from happening. But to claim that it will always work that way is to assume that there is always something significant that can be done by the people who care. I worked on adjustments in cobol code for the y2k bug in accounting systems. We had to start well before, because contract with payment in the future did not work. Cobol at that time had no date type and stored the data as 3 integers, day, month and year. The job was basically to redo the calculation of terms adding 100 to year when it was greater than 00 and less than 50. (2000 to 2050). Anyway, who had a system susceptible to the bug, had no option but to make adjustments or lose their payment controls. Edit: ading 100 to year, not 2000

mrtksn 6y ago
I am fan of Dilbert but someone should help Scott Adams understand that y2k bug did not go away spontaneously(So he can stop preaching that we should not worry about climate change and so on because look they said the world would end in 2000 because of the y2k bug but nothing happened). I like following the creators of the stuff I enjoys but Adams is proving to be a challenge for me. I should have stuck with the "never meet your hero" mantra.
acqq 6y ago
I've led the team that worked for more than two years to prepare our products for the Y2K, in real time finance, and there was not a single but many points of failure, some completely not obvious before they were detected, so most of the time was spent on developing different tests and procedures to actually in advance test, verify and diagnose the big amounts of code where anything could be implicitly based on the assumptions that won't be true at 2000. When there were (almost) no issues at the begin of 2000, it was because of a lot of concentrated work correctly done before, early enough. The luck was that the problem was in the consciousness of everybody making decisions, and that those making decisions had a good motivation to do the changes (e.g. the company can charge for fixes, or the company will not be able to sell the product if it's not fixed). The real danger is when those who make decisions (and those who directly influence them) have a good motivation (from their narrow point of view) to continue ignoring the problem. That's how the environments described by Octavia Butler develop.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting. which basically translates to "that seems impossible unless I just identified big obvious problem that makes it possible"