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I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't. People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away. I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done. A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive. In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years. As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing. My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago. Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century. Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.
- philovivero 4y ago
  > Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century. Not buying that in the slightest. Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present? Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    None of these technologies fundamentally improve anyone's life, and they are all incremental. Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight). Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium. International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing. And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies. And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?

tsimionescu 4y ago

> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago. Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century. Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.

philovivero 4y ago
> Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century. Not buying that in the slightest. Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present? Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  None of these technologies fundamentally improve anyone's life, and they are all incremental. Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight). Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium. International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing. And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies. And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?