5 ms·

It all being about IQ is truley the archetypical HN comment.

nine_k 4y ago
What's your take on the capacity the deficiency of which prevents us, as a species, from making right choices that are going to improve the well-being of everyone? E.g. from harvesting abundant energy our star rains on our planet, when we already have the technologies to capture it? Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  If we were smarter we would just exploit each other/“the Earth” harder because we use our intelligence for selfish and short-term gain. So yes we lack kindness to put it mildly.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    The whole problem is exactly selfish short-term gain that eclipses longer-term common gain. Lack of understanding it, and lack of the ability to create a social system that works better towards it, to my mind, is directly related to our (limited) intelligence as a species. Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
    - avgcorrection 4y ago
      Selfishness is about intent. Not about doing self-serving things because you lack the intelligence to do more altruistic things. That’s just my perspective.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        Even from a completely mechanical, machine-level rationality point of view, a lot of things we humans do is against our best long-term interest, because poorly contained impulses of short-term interest ruin that.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense. These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place. The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105 https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198 https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.

What's your take on the capacity the deficiency of which prevents us, as a species, from making right choices that are going to improve the well-being of everyone? E.g. from harvesting abundant energy our star rains on our planet, when we already have the technologies to capture it? Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?

avgcorrection 4y ago
If we were smarter we would just exploit each other/“the Earth” harder because we use our intelligence for selfish and short-term gain. So yes we lack kindness to put it mildly.
- nine_k 4y ago
  The whole problem is exactly selfish short-term gain that eclipses longer-term common gain. Lack of understanding it, and lack of the ability to create a social system that works better towards it, to my mind, is directly related to our (limited) intelligence as a species. Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Selfishness is about intent. Not about doing self-serving things because you lack the intelligence to do more altruistic things. That’s just my perspective.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Even from a completely mechanical, machine-level rationality point of view, a lot of things we humans do is against our best long-term interest, because poorly contained impulses of short-term interest ruin that.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense. These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place. The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105 https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198 https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.