6 ms·

It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, wo

by willeh 5y ago

It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate. I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.
- 0xfaded 5y ago
  I see this thrown up regularly and often the poster implies that everyone knows why wage growth separated from economic growth. You've alluded to monetary policy, so in this case I guess inflation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Up until the 1970s unions were incredibly powerful and this was coupled with labour friendly "full-employment" policies. People still argue over exactly what triggered the inflation, but it's clear (at least in my reading) that this was a rare period were labour held sufficient negotiations power to claim it's share of productivity growth. What follows is known as the revolt of capital, where for many reasons, including the inflation, it became impossible for return on capital to keep up with the printing press. Then begins a continuing period of dismantling of labor's power through union busting, policy, and globalization. Fundamentally, labour lost it's negotiating power, and hence it's claim to wage growth. Inflation was merely a driver of change.
  - throwaway6734 5y ago
    It's just goldbugs being goldbugs.
  - clarkevans 5y ago
    Yes, there is much more besides the change away from the gold standard in '71. For example, starting '73 congress got electronic voting; since then, becoming more accountable to those who observe and influence them. With the 401k introduction in '78, retirement money was directed to the stock market, reshaping main street investment for decades. In '80, software became expressly copyrightable, opening the frontier of intellectual property. It's a history novel, not a single cause or effect. Our legal/business environment is under constant change, every year transforming the civil game that is our economy.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Great charts but unfortunately the site is hawking Bitcoin! Newsflash: some faux limited supply monopoly money is not sound currency. In fact there is no place in the world where Bitcoin is used a general currency. None.
alexpetralia 5y ago
I think your point on zero-sum vs. positive-sum is illuminating. Innovation is positive-sum. When games are perceived as positive-sum, people collaborate. When games are perceived as zero-sum, people compete. Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together.
- generalizations 5y ago
  > Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together. It also has other implications. If you change the perception of reality, while reality remains the same, you're creating a deception. Eventually people will see through the facade, and then you're worse off than before.
  - chownie 5y ago
    How certain are you that the current reality is not a constructed deception?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      With a sufficiently strong feedback loop, it very much is. For example, to the extent our aggregate perspective on the future influences our market decisions now (and by "our" I mean everyone, including the political and industrial leadership), we can pretty much state outright that our outlook on the future will determine the severity of climate challenges ahead. Markets are as good in being affected by hard reality as they're good at amplifying our collective delusions and making the reality conform.
soared 5y ago
I don’t understand this viewpoint unless it’s literally just rose colored glasses. Is your argument that nothing cool has been invented in the past 40 years? Dude you can instantly speak face to face (digitally) with someone anywhere in the entire world right now. I play games with a group of people who’ve never met, but chat all the time from all over the world. I can travel the world renting other people’s homes, have a device that translates my speech into theirs, can look up their history in seconds, don’t need to use a map, and it’s all way way cheaper than it was in the 80s. There are dreamers and they are changing the world, you’re just too much of a pessimist to see it yourself.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I understand the sentiment of the parent post. All of the things you've described are cool, but aren't exactly awe-inspiring feats of engineering. I think the fact that Elon actually does take on these high-risk, high-difficulty challenges is what makes people so excited.
- eloff 5y ago
  While there obviously has been innovation over the last 40 years, the pace of innovation seems to have slowed. We got lots of dubious things like bitcoin and twitter. Not a lot of things that required real world risk and engineering - maybe because that's a harder way to make money and the low hanging fruit has been picked. That's what makes Elon Musk so interesting, he tackled two incredibly hard real engineering challenges and succeeded wildly at both. He changed the world and brought the future closer. That's impressive. I wish there were more entrepreneurs like him.
  - new_realist 5y ago
    Elon is willing to go wildly unprofitable, which allows him to be a few years ahead of everyone else on the natural tech. curve. That’s literally all there is to it.
    - eloff 5y ago
      I strongly disagree, if you look at either SpaceX or Tesla, what they've accomplished is far more than a simple willingness to lose money for a number of years while developing the business. Also, that's not how you use the word literally.
throwaway6734 5y ago
We've seen massive innovations since the 1980s. This nostalgic pessimism seems to be exactly the kind of pessimism you're complaining about
justbored123 5y ago
>prognosis becomes self fulfilling It's not self fulfilling if it's accurate to begin with. I assume that what you are trying to say is that they became to pessimistic at the dismal state of affairs and "gave up". But that is not the case at all. Our progress as a species is faster than ever in every account and that is the problem, we are going very fast an the errors we make have larger consequences as a result an we have less and less time to fix them. The first step to solve a serious problem is to diagnose it correctly. You cannot lie yourself out of a bad situation. The "relativist" as you call them or "realist" as I prefer to call them did their contribution by identifying the problems and setting up a framework to do so going forward, now is up to the rest of society to solve them. That is perfectly within our grasp if we stop pointing fingers at each-other and get to work.
passivate 5y ago
100% agree. To add, even here on HN, pessimism is very much rampant. So many comments here are just about unfairly dumping on an individual or an organization or just pointing out "flaws" by analyzing someones hard work in 10 seconds before writing a comment. I truly believe some of this is due to over-confidence in ones abilities. With the widespread access to knowledge, it is tempting to feel like an expert without actually having any hands-on experience on the topic. Covid has shown that quite amply. We should celebrate the downfall of so called 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, and average joe's being able to disrupt entrenched players in industries. But at the same time I believe we need to be very humble, and not overvalue knowledge and information over experience and hard-work.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Pessimism is weirdly addictive. It is a king size chocolate muffin of the soul. Also, people reward pessimists by paying them attention. We are always more ready to hear bad news. It makes evolutionary sense, but, similar to said sugary muffin, it can be easily overdone, especially with technology ready to serve you large amounts of pessimism every waking hour.
m463 5y ago
What I noticed is that the really cool scifi novels sort of disappeared. The ones I remember that filled me with wonder were rendezvous with rama, gateway, ringworld, asimov's robots, etc. Somehow they were replaced with more dystopian cyberpunk stuff. I also think franchises like star wars/star trek sucked a lot of mindshare (steady paycheck vs independent writing). And fantasy has changed... lots of urban werewolf/vampire stuff. (I don't know, maybe crappy stuff like this happens in all eras and I've forgotten the unimportant stuff from then) I wonder if this has sort of stunted the growth of our imagination.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  Perhaps it's the average buying power of US citizens. People today aren't able to afford as comfortable a life in the important things as their parents despite all the new tech, so what use is all the dreaming.
  - m463 5y ago
    Maybe idle dreaming has been replaced by "more stuff to do". And I just thought -- maybe reading has been replaced with scifi/fantasy "experiencing" like Halo or Skyrim or WoW
chakhs 5y ago
I don't understand why people like hype, being realistic is more helpful than selling dreams. I prefer a pessimist researcher explaining why some things are really difficult and need a lots of work to achieve, or even saying some things might not be achievable, than someone claiming L5 self driving is coming next quarter
- drw85 5y ago
  Investors and customers don't pay for pessimistic explanations. They want someone to say it'll happen and many people are okay paying for it then. Just take a look at kickstarter and things like Star Citizen. They still make huge money, six years past their planned release date. It's also partly an identity thing. Many get so invested that driving a Tesla is part of their identity and lifestyle.
  - chakhs 5y ago
    There's a difference between a kickstarter product being delayed, and solving self driving. The first one you know it's doable, for the second you only hope it's doable. I agree with the identity part, it's more like a status symbol and hype feeds that.
    - drw85 5y ago
      I think there is a similarity, though. As a customer or buyer, you don't know if Tesla will ever be able to do L5 self driving. Neither does someone spending 1k dollars on items in a video game ever know if it'll actually be done. You can take a wild guess in both cases and for most kickstarter projects there might just be some normal hickups and delays. People are still willing to shell out a lot of money based on some promises, because of "wanting to be involved" or part of that lifestyle.

by willeh 5y ago

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.

0xfaded 5y ago
I see this thrown up regularly and often the poster implies that everyone knows why wage growth separated from economic growth. You've alluded to monetary policy, so in this case I guess inflation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Up until the 1970s unions were incredibly powerful and this was coupled with labour friendly "full-employment" policies. People still argue over exactly what triggered the inflation, but it's clear (at least in my reading) that this was a rare period were labour held sufficient negotiations power to claim it's share of productivity growth. What follows is known as the revolt of capital, where for many reasons, including the inflation, it became impossible for return on capital to keep up with the printing press. Then begins a continuing period of dismantling of labor's power through union busting, policy, and globalization. Fundamentally, labour lost it's negotiating power, and hence it's claim to wage growth. Inflation was merely a driver of change.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  It's just goldbugs being goldbugs.
- clarkevans 5y ago
  Yes, there is much more besides the change away from the gold standard in '71. For example, starting '73 congress got electronic voting; since then, becoming more accountable to those who observe and influence them. With the 401k introduction in '78, retirement money was directed to the stock market, reshaping main street investment for decades. In '80, software became expressly copyrightable, opening the frontier of intellectual property. It's a history novel, not a single cause or effect. Our legal/business environment is under constant change, every year transforming the civil game that is our economy.
morpheos137 5y ago
Great charts but unfortunately the site is hawking Bitcoin! Newsflash: some faux limited supply monopoly money is not sound currency. In fact there is no place in the world where Bitcoin is used a general currency. None.

alexpetralia 5y ago

I think your point on zero-sum vs. positive-sum is illuminating. Innovation is positive-sum. When games are perceived as positive-sum, people collaborate. When games are perceived as zero-sum, people compete. Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together.

generalizations 5y ago
> Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together. It also has other implications. If you change the perception of reality, while reality remains the same, you're creating a deception. Eventually people will see through the facade, and then you're worse off than before.
- chownie 5y ago
  How certain are you that the current reality is not a constructed deception?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    With a sufficiently strong feedback loop, it very much is. For example, to the extent our aggregate perspective on the future influences our market decisions now (and by "our" I mean everyone, including the political and industrial leadership), we can pretty much state outright that our outlook on the future will determine the severity of climate challenges ahead. Markets are as good in being affected by hard reality as they're good at amplifying our collective delusions and making the reality conform.

soared 5y ago

I don’t understand this viewpoint unless it’s literally just rose colored glasses. Is your argument that nothing cool has been invented in the past 40 years? Dude you can instantly speak face to face (digitally) with someone anywhere in the entire world right now. I play games with a group of people who’ve never met, but chat all the time from all over the world. I can travel the world renting other people’s homes, have a device that translates my speech into theirs, can look up their history in seconds, don’t need to use a map, and it’s all way way cheaper than it was in the 80s. There are dreamers and they are changing the world, you’re just too much of a pessimist to see it yourself.

AussieWog93 5y ago
I understand the sentiment of the parent post. All of the things you've described are cool, but aren't exactly awe-inspiring feats of engineering. I think the fact that Elon actually does take on these high-risk, high-difficulty challenges is what makes people so excited.
eloff 5y ago
While there obviously has been innovation over the last 40 years, the pace of innovation seems to have slowed. We got lots of dubious things like bitcoin and twitter. Not a lot of things that required real world risk and engineering - maybe because that's a harder way to make money and the low hanging fruit has been picked. That's what makes Elon Musk so interesting, he tackled two incredibly hard real engineering challenges and succeeded wildly at both. He changed the world and brought the future closer. That's impressive. I wish there were more entrepreneurs like him.
- new_realist 5y ago
  Elon is willing to go wildly unprofitable, which allows him to be a few years ahead of everyone else on the natural tech. curve. That’s literally all there is to it.
  - eloff 5y ago
    I strongly disagree, if you look at either SpaceX or Tesla, what they've accomplished is far more than a simple willingness to lose money for a number of years while developing the business. Also, that's not how you use the word literally.

throwaway6734 5y ago

We've seen massive innovations since the 1980s. This nostalgic pessimism seems to be exactly the kind of pessimism you're complaining about

justbored123 5y ago

>prognosis becomes self fulfilling It's not self fulfilling if it's accurate to begin with. I assume that what you are trying to say is that they became to pessimistic at the dismal state of affairs and "gave up". But that is not the case at all. Our progress as a species is faster than ever in every account and that is the problem, we are going very fast an the errors we make have larger consequences as a result an we have less and less time to fix them. The first step to solve a serious problem is to diagnose it correctly. You cannot lie yourself out of a bad situation. The "relativist" as you call them or "realist" as I prefer to call them did their contribution by identifying the problems and setting up a framework to do so going forward, now is up to the rest of society to solve them. That is perfectly within our grasp if we stop pointing fingers at each-other and get to work.

passivate 5y ago

100% agree. To add, even here on HN, pessimism is very much rampant. So many comments here are just about unfairly dumping on an individual or an organization or just pointing out "flaws" by analyzing someones hard work in 10 seconds before writing a comment. I truly believe some of this is due to over-confidence in ones abilities. With the widespread access to knowledge, it is tempting to feel like an expert without actually having any hands-on experience on the topic. Covid has shown that quite amply. We should celebrate the downfall of so called 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, and average joe's being able to disrupt entrenched players in industries. But at the same time I believe we need to be very humble, and not overvalue knowledge and information over experience and hard-work.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Pessimism is weirdly addictive. It is a king size chocolate muffin of the soul. Also, people reward pessimists by paying them attention. We are always more ready to hear bad news. It makes evolutionary sense, but, similar to said sugary muffin, it can be easily overdone, especially with technology ready to serve you large amounts of pessimism every waking hour.

m463 5y ago

What I noticed is that the really cool scifi novels sort of disappeared. The ones I remember that filled me with wonder were rendezvous with rama, gateway, ringworld, asimov's robots, etc. Somehow they were replaced with more dystopian cyberpunk stuff. I also think franchises like star wars/star trek sucked a lot of mindshare (steady paycheck vs independent writing). And fantasy has changed... lots of urban werewolf/vampire stuff. (I don't know, maybe crappy stuff like this happens in all eras and I've forgotten the unimportant stuff from then) I wonder if this has sort of stunted the growth of our imagination.

jhanschoo 5y ago
Perhaps it's the average buying power of US citizens. People today aren't able to afford as comfortable a life in the important things as their parents despite all the new tech, so what use is all the dreaming.
- m463 5y ago
  Maybe idle dreaming has been replaced by "more stuff to do". And I just thought -- maybe reading has been replaced with scifi/fantasy "experiencing" like Halo or Skyrim or WoW

chakhs 5y ago

I don't understand why people like hype, being realistic is more helpful than selling dreams. I prefer a pessimist researcher explaining why some things are really difficult and need a lots of work to achieve, or even saying some things might not be achievable, than someone claiming L5 self driving is coming next quarter

drw85 5y ago
Investors and customers don't pay for pessimistic explanations. They want someone to say it'll happen and many people are okay paying for it then. Just take a look at kickstarter and things like Star Citizen. They still make huge money, six years past their planned release date. It's also partly an identity thing. Many get so invested that driving a Tesla is part of their identity and lifestyle.
- chakhs 5y ago
  There's a difference between a kickstarter product being delayed, and solving self driving. The first one you know it's doable, for the second you only hope it's doable. I agree with the identity part, it's more like a status symbol and hype feeds that.
  - drw85 5y ago
    I think there is a similarity, though. As a customer or buyer, you don't know if Tesla will ever be able to do L5 self driving. Neither does someone spending 1k dollars on items in a video game ever know if it'll actually be done. You can take a wild guess in both cases and for most kickstarter projects there might just be some normal hickups and delays. People are still willing to shell out a lot of money based on some promises, because of "wanting to be involved" or part of that lifestyle.