7 ms·

Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynica

by iSnow 5y ago

Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynical about everything.

FpUser 5y ago
Well, Google and Amazon are megalomaniac in progress. I doubt one has to be cynical to be disgusted by where all of this going. But yeah people had dreams and those were exciting at the time (when one did not know all the consequences of course).
stinos 5y ago
Cynical, or realistic because everyone has seen what the consequences of such projects can be? Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.
- LiquidSky 5y ago
  Exactly. If anything, the opposite of what the parent says seems to be true: as each new shiny technology or development pops up (e.g., social media or the crypto space) there is an explosion of utopian idealism that is only later dampered when the reality of the downsides sink in. It would be a nice of change of pace if we actually seriously considered the potential downsides of the new cool thing (say, the privacy implications of the social media explosion before universal use).
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Societies do that to a greater or lesser degree. The Amish are so famous for it that the neologism 'amistics' has been proposed to refer to a society's choices around adopting technology that is technically feasible. What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  The Suez Canal? The Panama canal? The various locks and dams that save hundreds of thousands of lives by preventing mass floodings, generate clean power, and allow deep continental shipping? Nothing is perfect, but only the most delusional think these projects were not MAJOR improvements for humanity.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Hoover dam & Central Valley aqueducts come to mind…
user-the-name 5y ago
Do you have any idea the insane amount of damage that was done in that period? That we are still paying the price for?
ineedasername 5y ago
I think I'd prefer cynical skepticism to megalomaniac. It may be a bit stifling at times, but it's also the result of sort of collectively rising a little bit above societal Dunning Kruger. We now realize that things are a lot more complex and that the balance in chaotic systems can be a lot more precarious and fragile. It might be healthy for any large project to have a well informed skeptic in the room telling people it won't work. That person could be wrong, but figuring out how to deal with their projected outcomes can be the difference between success and failure. Or outright disaster.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > well informed skeptic Ah, I found the problem. We have the skeptic, and they effectively stop major projects dead in their tracks, but rarely are they well-informed.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Yes, that's why I made that stipulation. There are some people that are simply resistant to any change. That can be almost as useful if they're nudged into giving their reasons, but only if they're not in a leadership/decision-making position. An uninformed naysayer with decision making authority will kill just about any initiative.
flohofwoe 5y ago
That sort of 'progress' made the Aral Sea vanish, I guess that's why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects. Also see the "Northern River Reversal" project which thankfully was abandondend eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects China seems to be doing fine with large-scale projects. People didn't get jaded. Certain cultures did.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    Well people should better get jaded (and angry) about destruction of the environment their children will need to live in.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      On the other hand, the grand canal is the archetypal megastructure, and it's got a strong claim to being the defining feature of China. If you look at the planet on google earth, you can see a lot of human structure. Mines, fields, tree farms, deforestation, waste-water runoff - these things are often vast. I don't know if giant engineering projects really move the needle that much; we're already engaged in a giant engineering project, it's just a completely blind one with no actual goal.
jbay808 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if it was an effect of the war. Seeing all the normal rules and power structures of society suddenly vanish, to the point that you can blow a hole in a 1000-year-old cathedral just by saying to your specialist "I need a door here, can you make it happen?", must have had a certain impact on how people think.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in. It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
  - RankingMember 5y ago
    I think the Vietnam war played a particularly strong role in damaging trust in government in the U.S., and we've never really come back from that. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust-in-government-1958-2021/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
    - bserge 5y ago
      Reading this chain, I'm reminded how we wonder, believe and think way more than do.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    >I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in. The Russians, the US government, the Chinese government, the British government, and most other governments around the world. >It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up That's true. And when you have a huge number of operatives, like the CIA, it's even easier to escalate nascent conflict. Read up on Conintelpro and watch the Church Committee hearings to get an inkling of what we were (and are) engaged in on a global scale.
jzymbaluk 5y ago
It is extraordinary how public health officials in the US were able to just add Fluoride to water and iodine to salt. If that were being proposed today, people would throw such a huge fit. We can't even build bike lanes on roads today without having meetings about it for a decade
- mbg721 5y ago
  They were added at a time when deadly diseases were a ubiquitous fact of life--imagine having ten kids and expecting four of them to die. Now that that isn't something people have to think about, we are rightly suspicious of the motivations of health bureaucrats.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Well this is the thing I find baffling about the most intense of the COVID vaccine and lockdown skeptics who go on about "new world order" type conspiracies. We are coming out of one of the most lenient -- in terms of public health administration -- periods in the modern era. The mental health system up until the 70s, 80s, was frequently used to just "commit" people (even unruly "hysteric" housewives) without regard to liberty at all. Vaccination campaigns were done on a huge scale, and rationing was a part of life for many people in the west not just during the war but in post-war periods as well. [Some] people may have lost sight of what it truly means to live in an (even mild) emergency and what kinds of decisions we need to make as a collective to solve certain problems.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      If you're going to look at it that way, then we have a mostly-white middle-class who is experiencing for the very first time the government wielded against it as a weapon. (They are less than thrilled.) But I don't think that's exactly what's going on; I think it's a clumsy attempt at a rehash of Lyndon Johnson-Great Society-style governance. And it's obviously not working, so there's a rush to find the most plausible people to blame.
- kleton 5y ago
h2odragon 5y ago
Absolutely! I've got a project to correct the Earth's axial tilt, and banish Winter forever to the benighted polar lands where it can be enjoyed by those who want it, without troubling the rest of us who have the sense to live in actually habitable climates. You would not believe the trouble I've had submitting grant applications. The main problem is that the planet when viewed as a whole is rather squishy. We're gonna have to apply a lot of energy with extraordinary gentleness somehow. Still working on that part.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  Please double check your calculations this time, to avoid another faux-pas like the first attempt back in 1891.

by iSnow 5y ago

Makes me envious, it must have been great living at a time where progress was good and megalomanic projects were seriously discussed. Now, everyone is so cynical about everything.

FpUser 5y ago

Well, Google and Amazon are megalomaniac in progress. I doubt one has to be cynical to be disgusted by where all of this going. But yeah people had dreams and those were exciting at the time (when one did not know all the consequences of course).

stinos 5y ago

Cynical, or realistic because everyone has seen what the consequences of such projects can be? Progress can still be good, just like it never was if it also means there are severe downsides and they are just ignored for the sake of progress.

LiquidSky 5y ago
Exactly. If anything, the opposite of what the parent says seems to be true: as each new shiny technology or development pops up (e.g., social media or the crypto space) there is an explosion of utopian idealism that is only later dampered when the reality of the downsides sink in. It would be a nice of change of pace if we actually seriously considered the potential downsides of the new cool thing (say, the privacy implications of the social media explosion before universal use).
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Societies do that to a greater or lesser degree. The Amish are so famous for it that the neologism 'amistics' has been proposed to refer to a society's choices around adopting technology that is technically feasible. What I think many people are lamenting is that their own society is not optimistic enough about novel technology for their liking. Given that many of the people on Hacker News are near the vanguard for technological innovation by global standards it would seem there's a desire for more permissive amistics than currently exist. If anyone knows where those kinds of subcultures could be found I'd be interested in knowing about it.
koheripbal 5y ago
The Suez Canal? The Panama canal? The various locks and dams that save hundreds of thousands of lives by preventing mass floodings, generate clean power, and allow deep continental shipping? Nothing is perfect, but only the most delusional think these projects were not MAJOR improvements for humanity.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Hoover dam & Central Valley aqueducts come to mind…

user-the-name 5y ago

Do you have any idea the insane amount of damage that was done in that period? That we are still paying the price for?

ineedasername 5y ago

I think I'd prefer cynical skepticism to megalomaniac. It may be a bit stifling at times, but it's also the result of sort of collectively rising a little bit above societal Dunning Kruger. We now realize that things are a lot more complex and that the balance in chaotic systems can be a lot more precarious and fragile. It might be healthy for any large project to have a well informed skeptic in the room telling people it won't work. That person could be wrong, but figuring out how to deal with their projected outcomes can be the difference between success and failure. Or outright disaster.

rootusrootus 5y ago
> well informed skeptic Ah, I found the problem. We have the skeptic, and they effectively stop major projects dead in their tracks, but rarely are they well-informed.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yes, that's why I made that stipulation. There are some people that are simply resistant to any change. That can be almost as useful if they're nudged into giving their reasons, but only if they're not in a leadership/decision-making position. An uninformed naysayer with decision making authority will kill just about any initiative.

flohofwoe 5y ago

That sort of 'progress' made the Aral Sea vanish, I guess that's why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects. Also see the "Northern River Reversal" project which thankfully was abandondend eventually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> why people got a bit jaded about such large scale projects China seems to be doing fine with large-scale projects. People didn't get jaded. Certain cultures did.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Well people should better get jaded (and angry) about destruction of the environment their children will need to live in.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    On the other hand, the grand canal is the archetypal megastructure, and it's got a strong claim to being the defining feature of China. If you look at the planet on google earth, you can see a lot of human structure. Mines, fields, tree farms, deforestation, waste-water runoff - these things are often vast. I don't know if giant engineering projects really move the needle that much; we're already engaged in a giant engineering project, it's just a completely blind one with no actual goal.

jbay808 5y ago

I sometimes wonder if it was an effect of the war. Seeing all the normal rules and power structures of society suddenly vanish, to the point that you can blow a hole in a 1000-year-old cathedral just by saying to your specialist "I need a door here, can you make it happen?", must have had a certain impact on how people think.

koheripbal 5y ago
I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in. It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up
- RankingMember 5y ago
  I think the Vietnam war played a particularly strong role in damaging trust in government in the U.S., and we've never really come back from that. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust-in-government-1958-2021/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...
  - bserge 5y ago
    Reading this chain, I'm reminded how we wonder, believe and think way more than do.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >I believe it's a consequence of the Cold War and the disinformation campaign that the Soviets and now the Russians engage in. The Russians, the US government, the Chinese government, the British government, and most other governments around the world. >It takes only a small number of operatives to organize grass roots groups that spread hate, cynicism, and division. It's easy to take amplify and escalate nascent conflict to ensure that discourse fails and that conflicts flare up That's true. And when you have a huge number of operatives, like the CIA, it's even easier to escalate nascent conflict. Read up on Conintelpro and watch the Church Committee hearings to get an inkling of what we were (and are) engaged in on a global scale.

jzymbaluk 5y ago

It is extraordinary how public health officials in the US were able to just add Fluoride to water and iodine to salt. If that were being proposed today, people would throw such a huge fit. We can't even build bike lanes on roads today without having meetings about it for a decade

mbg721 5y ago
They were added at a time when deadly diseases were a ubiquitous fact of life--imagine having ten kids and expecting four of them to die. Now that that isn't something people have to think about, we are rightly suspicious of the motivations of health bureaucrats.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Well this is the thing I find baffling about the most intense of the COVID vaccine and lockdown skeptics who go on about "new world order" type conspiracies. We are coming out of one of the most lenient -- in terms of public health administration -- periods in the modern era. The mental health system up until the 70s, 80s, was frequently used to just "commit" people (even unruly "hysteric" housewives) without regard to liberty at all. Vaccination campaigns were done on a huge scale, and rationing was a part of life for many people in the west not just during the war but in post-war periods as well. [Some] people may have lost sight of what it truly means to live in an (even mild) emergency and what kinds of decisions we need to make as a collective to solve certain problems.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    If you're going to look at it that way, then we have a mostly-white middle-class who is experiencing for the very first time the government wielded against it as a weapon. (They are less than thrilled.) But I don't think that's exactly what's going on; I think it's a clumsy attempt at a rehash of Lyndon Johnson-Great Society-style governance. And it's obviously not working, so there's a rush to find the most plausible people to blame.
kleton 5y ago

h2odragon 5y ago

Absolutely! I've got a project to correct the Earth's axial tilt, and banish Winter forever to the benighted polar lands where it can be enjoyed by those who want it, without troubling the rest of us who have the sense to live in actually habitable climates. You would not believe the trouble I've had submitting grant applications. The main problem is that the planet when viewed as a whole is rather squishy. We're gonna have to apply a lot of energy with extraordinary gentleness somehow. Still working on that part.

m4rtink 5y ago
Please double check your calculations this time, to avoid another faux-pas like the first attempt back in 1891.