9 ms·

It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire.

It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It was fun as a child to pull grass and pick it apart, to smash glass with a hammer, and to burn things with fire. It’s a way to explore. Now that I’m older I’m much more mindful about what I break. Are we collectively too child-like as a species?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice. Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).
- giantg2 5y ago
  I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
  - genericone 5y ago
    Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
    - Retric 5y ago
      That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
  - simonsarris 5y ago
    minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
  - kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
    You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
    - fooker 5y ago
      And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
      - ljp_206 5y ago
        Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
  - DeRock 5y ago
    This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
  - ativzzz 5y ago
    Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
- jtolmar 5y ago
  Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
  - nahuel0x 5y ago
    Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.
est31 5y ago
> Are we collectively too child-like as a species? See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc). Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.
- kiliantics 5y ago
  You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the glass")
- watwut 5y ago
  No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult. Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology, wish to prove himself or practical need.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    The child in this metaphor refers to adults too.
sergiotapia 5y ago
I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?
- asdfman123 5y ago
  I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy. And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us. But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
- cwillu 5y ago
  Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.
  - sergiotapia 5y ago
    Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?
TooKool4This 5y ago
I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent. But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.
asdfman123 5y ago
It's not that we're childish. It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd behave similarly. We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being economic automata who simply react to their circumstances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
  - asdfman123 5y ago
    You should summarize what you mean instead of linking to an academic article. It's clearer that way.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have cited this paper quite a few times because I think it offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've observed informally, that being that there's a few distinctly different personality types that pursue quite different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks, optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but I've found it an extremely useful model.
      - pie420 5y ago
        That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc. The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc. "Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.
forgotmypw77 5y ago
Yes, it does make me think of a child sitting in a sandbox, claiming it as ,,mine,, without knowing the first thing about how it came to be.
rhacker 5y ago
Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.
- to11mtm 5y ago
  > Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth. Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor. But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them). It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
- staticman2 5y ago
  In TNG most humans act like a different species altogether: almost angel-like beings who don't experience the broad range of negetive human emotions. I see no evidence that we are evolving in that direction in real life.
raffraffraff 5y ago
I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then heat it to 1700°c and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that pane with a rock? Takes an instant.
Black101 5y ago
> It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It builds itself...
xg15 5y ago
I think "childlike" is too friendly. Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value". This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers. /Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago

Is this a problem of behavior or of system? They whole economy (and the political system that now work for it) is organized to maximize profits over everything else. When you can generate profits by destroying stuff, you destroy and rejoice. Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).

giantg2 5y ago
I think it's similar and deeper that. If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work. For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
goatlover 5y ago
Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
- genericone 5y ago
  Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
  - Retric 5y ago
    That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- simonsarris 5y ago
  minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
dcolkitt 5y ago
Realistically, there's very little in the economy that depends on biodiversity. A few crops might suffer from the loss of certain pollinating insects. And potentially some drug discovery might slow from lower biodiversity. And some tourism in places like the rainforest may decline (but mostly replaced by tourism to places like Vegas). But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
- amelius 5y ago
  Sorry, but I very much question that. This might not be a gradual thing, but it could be exponential at some point.
- kachnuv_ocasek 5y ago
  You're underestimating the effects of breaking points and phase shifts. The planetary system could at any point snap and transition to a completely different mode of functioning with irreversible changes cascading one after another.
  - fooker 5y ago
    And we could get wiped out by a gamma ray burst at any point. So what?
    - ljp_206 5y ago
      Given consensus on a way forward and well-meaning intentions, we can at least tap the brakes on biodiversity loss/ecosystem destruction/human-related changes to our environment. Suggesting we should be fatalistic about circumstances we at least have a toe hold on today when tomorrow could yield an event we can do nothing about isn't helpful.
- DeRock 5y ago
  This argument feels hollow to me. You may be right, perhaps we overvalue the purely economic contribution of biodiversity. But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
brobdingnagians 5y ago
One solution is to eliminate corporations. People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care. It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors. Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Eliminating corporations is more than a few steps outside the Overton window.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  Eliminating corporations is like eliminating feudal lords during feudalism. The only way is to kill enough of them in wars and replace them with an entity with even more centralized power.
jtolmar 5y ago
Corporations are controlled by their shareholders, who elect a board to act in their interests. The shareholders are paid either by dividends (profit) or growth (increasing share price so they can sell at a profit). So corporations are controlled by people who primarily care about profits and growth, and it's in the shareholders' best interest to pick the corporations that grow fastest. Some shareholders might not do this, but they'll end up with less money, less control over corporations, and less of a say than the shareholders who do prioritize growth. I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
- nahuel0x 5y ago
  Ludwig Feuerbach in his analysis of religion postulated humans first imagined God but then we "forgot" we are the creators of God, so the idea of God became a force controlling the behavior of humans (yes, you can relate this to Dawkins memes, but Feuerbach lived 100 years before Dawkins) Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital. This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.

est31 5y ago

> Are we collectively too child-like as a species? See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc). Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.

kiliantics 5y ago
You make it sound like it would be so difficult to prevent people from behaving in a certain way, but our governing structures are very good at forcing people's behaviour such that it protects people's right to amass huge piles of wealth (which is mostly, if not all, procured by "smashing the glass")
watwut 5y ago
No child ever made as much harm as a motivated adult. Regardless of whether the adult is motivated by ideology, wish to prove himself or practical need.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  The child in this metaphor refers to adults too.

sergiotapia 5y ago

I think about this a lot. Entropy is a bitch, every single resource is consumed. A piece of wood is burned and it's gone forever. You can't put that heat back in. Makes my head hurt, what's the end-game? Nothingness?

asdfman123 5y ago
I remember reading a theory that life itself springs from entropy. Energy finds way to expend more energy. And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us. But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
cwillu 5y ago
Ultimately, the entire biosphere serves only to more efficiently reradiate energy absorbed from the sun (plus a bit from older stars in the form of fissiles) into space. All of the energy that originally went into carbon chains to form that wood came from those sources originally, and while the energy released by burning it has been lost forever, there's no shortage of replacement energy.
anigbrowl 5y ago
But it's not a closed system. You have essentially free energy from the sun, waves, wind, geothermal etc. and and a whole natural energy conversion apparatus, which offsets the resource limitations that do exist. It's not like we inhabit a cold dark cave with only a limited supply of combustible fuel.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  Suns go out. And like in The Last Question, let's say we can somehow combine 50 dead stars to make one working star. Eventually there are no more stars. And then?

TooKool4This 5y ago

I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent. But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.

asdfman123 5y ago

It's not that we're childish. It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd behave similarly. We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.

anigbrowl 5y ago
This assumes too much homogeneity. There's some evidence that people fall into multiple distinct groups rather than being economic automata who simply react to their circumstances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451 Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  You should summarize what you mean instead of linking to an academic article. It's clearer that way.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    I am disputing your claim that everyone would react in the same way to the same incentives/circumstances. I have cited this paper quite a few times because I think it offers a rigorous falsifiable claim for something I've observed informally, that being that there's a few distinctly different personality types that pursue quite different incentives, rather than everyone being pretty much the same. The key insight in the paper is summarized in figure 3; people tend to consistently be jerks, optimists, pessimists, or suckers in diminishing order of probability. It's a heavy read and not dispositive, but I've found it an extremely useful model.
    - pie420 5y ago
      That's incredibly meaningless, because if you put someone in someone else's shoes, that means you are giving them the same genetics and life experience that caused them to become a jerk, optimist, etc. The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc. "Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.

forgotmypw77 5y ago

Yes, it does make me think of a child sitting in a sandbox, claiming it as ,,mine,, without knowing the first thing about how it came to be.

rhacker 5y ago

Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.

to11mtm 5y ago
> Yes. For the life of me I don't know why we passed Q's test in TNG. Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth. Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor. But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them). It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
staticman2 5y ago
In TNG most humans act like a different species altogether: almost angel-like beings who don't experience the broad range of negetive human emotions. I see no evidence that we are evolving in that direction in real life.

raffraffraff 5y ago

I always used the glass analogy! Just think about the effort involved in making a pane of glass. Collect the right type of sand, mix it with sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate, then heat it to 1700°c and pour it into a vat of molten tin. A shit ton of work, with a lot of prerequisites. Smashing that pane with a rock? Takes an instant.

Black101 5y ago

> It is easier to destroy than it is to build. It builds itself...

xg15 5y ago

I think "childlike" is too friendly. Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value". This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.

bagacrap 5y ago
I assume you're talking about crypto currencies, in which case your comment seems several years out of date, as well as hyperbolic concerning the abilities of their designers. /Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.