7 ms·

The scarcity of the long term

123 points by galfarragem 3y ago

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Scarcity of attention is one thing. It is complemented by scarcity of commitment. The digital world gives the illusion that everything is possible and easy. In such a world, why bother to do anything? Over the years I also noticed students getting ever more abstracted into wishful thinking. They hugely underestimate research and development. Proposals are filled with the word "just... ". On realising that something is difficult, they recoil and abandon the whole project. Although the article talks about the hubris of planning over multiple lifetimes, we have more serious and immediate problems of getting people to plan over mere weeks or days. Everything seems to be making that worse, "AI" in particular.
- graemep 3y ago
  Take a look at would be start up founders and software projects. "I have a great idea, I just need it implemented", "I have a design done, I just need someone to make it work".
roenxi 3y ago
This is almost a solved problem; institutions are capable of sustaining intentions for insane periods of time. The major organised religious institutes have been pushing some basic standards for ethical living for millennia. There aren't a lot of projects that humans have considered worth a millenium of effort. Due to the limited abilities of humans that long ago they are all philosophical projects. But we can do it. And on a smaller scale, institutions can keep grinding away far longer than makes any sense. A grant and a trust fund can last centuries. Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture. It is pretty easy to imagine a group like that sustaining long term technical projects. I don't think a millenium of sustained technological effort is actually that hard to achieve. We've obviously never done it before because industrial society is less than 1,000 years old. But assuming we don't self-immolate as seems likely then setting up ultra-long-term-projects isn't that hard to see.
- 5y345ywy 3y ago
  Doesn't this really only hold true if you handwave away the emergence of new denominations within those religions over time?
  - graemep 3y ago
    Not really, many old denominations have persisted for a very long time. Catholic and Orthodox churches, for example.
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Institutions sustain themselves or rather the jobs of the controlling minds of the institution. Today’s Catholic Church would be viewed by its founders as some kind of uber-hippy bunch of democratic maniacs out to destroy civilisation. I think the difference here is we can view a company / institution as a machine to do a job, and between a company that has a controlling mind able to change its own machine “code” hence chnage its job. Without software the two things are needed - but with software we can concieve of a programmable company that just does its tasks as assigned for as long as inputs occur. If those tasks involve say sending jobs out to gig workers the idea kind of works It does mean you could build a Death Star using robots in place of gig workers (which is the obvious multi-generational solution) But it does imply something about our companies - that once the whole company can be specified in code, splitting off the “controlling minds” bit (ie management, plus developers) into seperate location seems interesting It also explicitly makes the issue of who decides what chnages and how come to the fore
  - js8 3y ago
    > Today’s Catholic Church would be viewed by its founders as some kind of uber-hippy bunch of democratic maniacs out to destroy civilisation. Are you sure? It seems to me that Jesus would be dismayed by how establishment they've become and not nearly radical enough.
    - Filligree 3y ago
keep320909 3y ago
> The chief hurdle in constructing a Death Star is not the energy, materials, or even knowledge needed. Any proof for that? Death Star is big as a Moon, it has energy of several millions of Suns (it can blow up entire planet to pieces in seconds, just calculate energy needed to overcome gravity well). The only thing we know that could even remotely theoretically approach it, are impacts with asteroids at almost light speed. Saying the only thing preventing us from building it, is unstable political system, is just delusional! We really need to get away from this "technology will solve anything" mentality!
- lukas099 3y ago
  They go hand in hand. The materiel and personnel cost make the project less popular as time passes, and the shrinking political will makes obtaining those less viable.
dobin 3y ago
Many cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. The following around 500 years: Cologne Cathedral, St. Vitus Cathedral and Milan Cathedral. Sagrada Familia was started in 1882, and Gaudi is dead for 98 years. If the emperor demands, it will be built.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Cathedrals were public works projects that guaranteed generations of employment for local craftsmen. Plenty of cathedrals were left half-finished after funding dried up. > If the emperor demands, it will be built. The emperor rules for 50 years at best. His descendants may have different demands.
- admp 3y ago
  Cologne cathedral didn’t actually take 500 years to build — construction was restarted after a 250+ year halt. “Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 but was halted in the years around 1560, unfinished. Attempts to complete the construction began around 1814 but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.”
  - Timwi 3y ago
    That seems to me irrelevant to the point being made.
  - samatman 3y ago
    So it took 500 years to build. If a building took one year to build, but they didn't work on the weekends, would you object and say no, it only took 260 days?
    - zokier 3y ago
      Lets take an example closer to home. Babbage famously started working on his Analytical Engine 1837. He never got it very far though, and the project remained dead for 150ish years. Until jgc and friends got the idea to complete the project and construct the Engine. So would you say it took 200 years to build Analytical Engine, or would you consider the Babbages original attempt and the current day attempt two separate projects?
deleted 3y ago
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darepublic 3y ago
> I am asking myself what would I need to hear and get from a past generation to convince me to complete a project they began? For me a language, culture, sexual arousal.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  For many others, especially with regards to cathedrals and religious institutions more generally: religiosity / God.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> The only real scarcity would be of a long attention span. I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion. The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals. I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".
- lloeki 3y ago
  So essentially the problem is one of being able to foster a meme+ that outlives the scale of an individual's life. + the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > to foster a meme+ So, I guess, pyramid-building; that's a collective project spanning a few centuries. I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise.
    - NeoTar 3y ago
scotty79 3y ago
What's scary is that at time scales of one generation or longer societies seem to forget even very important things. How pandemic looks like. That war and militarization is not such a good idea.
- XorNot 3y ago
  > That war and militarization is not such a good idea. These are really not two sides of the same coin.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    They are the same side, just stretched over time.
- lukas099 3y ago
  Conversely I think NATO and being the "world's policeman" was more popular in the US after WWII when we realized we could be pulled into European conflicts. After decades of relative peace a lot of people are wondering why we're spending so much on defense.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Another motivation was to inhibit nuclear proliferation. Without a global policeman, everyone has a motivation to acquire nuclear weapons.
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
There is scarcity of scarcity, which leads to this madness. People didn't use to have a particular problem thinking at least a generation ahead, but there us no demand for such things. There is no way to make too much money on any established product. Anything that has existed for more than several years is available in vast amount, and cheap. Anything that isn't completely new is good enough to the point where only an insignificant improvement can be made at monumenta costs. What is desirable now are things like a fidget spinner, that makes some quick cash, and gets forgotten soon after.
pfdietz 3y ago
The Death Star illustrates a problem with long term thinking: that goals become obsolete too fast. The thing in A New Hope was a gigantic waste of resources. Freeman Dyson famously commented that no project should be planned that takes longer than five years. Anything beyond that and the ground shifts out from under the foundations of the effort. One ends up with efforts that persist not because they are useful, but because they are established, because there is an entrenched constituency for the consumption of resources the project entails.
gmuslera 3y ago
One problem with long term projects is advancement on technology that would had made a faster, sturdier, cleaner or whatever the original project if it started from zero using it. We send a mission to Alpha centauri that would take, lets say, 100 years to get there with the current propulsion technologies, and in 30 years we discover a new one that would take 20 years to get there. Or the same for big buildings (I don't know, arcologies) where new materials and techniques would turn obsolete how it started if it was long enough in the past. And not only new ways to improve, but different priorities or things that are out of our control that happen during its development. What if the land where the The Line in Saudi Arabla is being built gets permanently flooded because sea level rise or the entire region becomes unlivabable because frequent high enough temperatures in the region? Even social trends may turn something built for the future obsolete, there are plenty of ghost megacities in China. Both acceleration in technologies, and acceleration in changes outside what is the construction by itself (climate, society, etc) can turn into (potentially hamrful) waste decades of effort.
- blurrypepe 3y ago
  I agree but just wanted to point out that The Line probably will never be built!
alexpotato 3y ago
Seeing a lot of comments about human lifespan, projects shouldn't take more than 5 years etc The Florence Cathedral took over 140 years to build. There is clear precedent that humans can design, plan and then execute a project that spans multiple lifetimes. Even better, they didn't have a final design when they started: > While the main structure of the nave was completed by 1380, a solution to constructing a dome to top it was not determined until 1418. [0] This also reminds me of a personal story when visiting Florence: Florentine Tour Guide: "It took 140 years to build the Cathedral. How do you think they were able to do this given that it took so long?" Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die" Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened." 0 - https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/construction-florence-cathedral https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/constructio...
- badpun 3y ago
  > Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die" > Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened." This also implies that C++ will potentially live forever...
- fritzo 3y ago
  That's a good example, but I wonder if people now have more options and are more career-mobile. 700 years ago masonry was a family profession. Now it would get brain drained by AI.
TedHerman 3y ago
I once hosted a European researcher in my home (which is in flyover country America). He saw the utility poles and wiring stretching to houses in the neighborhood and remarked that his father had said a hallmark of undeveloped countries is that power lines are above ground. This was 20 years ago. Now, I do see that new neighborhoods have buried power and fiber. But that quality of fiber wasn't affordable decades ago. In retrospect, it might have been wise to delay putting infrastructure underground in urban settings because of high cost. Who knows what advances in material science, computing, energy and transport will bring in coming generations? Not to mention climate changes. Therefore it can be presumptuous to think that sticking to a long term plan is the best course. To the extent that a long term plan depends on the supporting environment of the plan staying the same, a plan might be judged foolish in retrospect.
sotillan 3y ago
I think the problem the author describes is a result of short-term factors that are unlikely to affect humanity forever. Right now, technology and culture are progressing extremely quickly, relatively to any other point in human history. As a result, our understanding and our capabilities are radically different from generation to generation. Also, many problems remain unsolved and present serious, short-term challenges to our survival. Understandably therefore, our priorities frequently change, reacting both to changes in our capabilities and the most immediate threats. However, this situation will not continue indefinitely. An advanced, post-scarcity human civilisation will (hopefully) not face constant danger of war, disease and famine, Technology will still advance, but at a slower pace, and not in ways that significantly transform day-to-day lives. Human lifespan will probably also be significantly increased. The result will be a more homogenous, stable and static society. There will still be differences, bug huge disparities of economic and societal status will no longer exist. In this environment, having no longer to deal with a constant background of threats to their survival, it's likely that humanity will have the time and space to turn to far longer term projects. Indeed, such projects will probably be the only way for a person to imbue their life with a greater meaning in such a future society.
- Solvency 3y ago
  This is heavily reducing the human experience. Even better technology and post-scarcity aren't magic solutions to all of the insanely weird evolutionary quirks/pitfalls/problems built into our monkey brains. Having a planet of hyper long-lived people who never have to work hard, who are constantly fed without concern, fully dependent on advanced technology sounds like the context of a YA novel. In reality, none of us are hardwired for that kind of lifestyle. Hell, we're not even hardwired for this one. We're just messily and sloppily trying to hang on as we stumble forward. Core human conflicts and oppositions and disputes and wars and existential meltdowns and all of the other things our emergent survival consciousness deal with aren't going anywhere.
m463 3y ago
"The wise man plants trees whose shade he will never enjoy"
Timwi 3y ago
The article assumes, without evidence, that the human lifespan is forever constant and unalterable. In my opinion that shows a lack of long-term thinking... how ironic.
kaycebasques 3y ago
Remembrance Of Earth's Past trilogy [1] is a good meditation on the problem of keeping humans aligned/focused across generations. (Trying not to spoil anything.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Pas...
webdoodle 3y ago
There are so many real life projects that have been abandoned part-way-through. One of the biggest that still irritates me is the Superconducting Super Collider they were building in Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
syngrog66 3y ago
"long term oriented thinking" is an emphasis of the education software I've been building. If anyone wants to encourage or accel its dev contact me and toss cash at me/us
justincredible 3y ago
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DennisL123 3y ago
> I am asking myself, what would I need to hear and get from a past generation to convince me to complete a project they began? „It‘s emitting lethal doses of radiation for the next 100k years.“
wonderwonder 3y ago
Imagine being born and dying on a generation ship and when your grand children reach the destination they find a thriving society established a 100 years before by the children of the people that launched your parents. They just created a new much faster means of travel in the mean time while your ancestors were condemned to a life on a ship with nothing to do but live, breed and die.
Duologic 3y ago
This reminds me of the Danish Navy oak: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visings%C3%B6#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visings%C3%B6#History
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I worked for a Japanese corporation that had a ten-year planning window. The farther out, the more abstract and fuzzy, but they had a long-term view. Also, they kept employees forever. The app I just released (for a small nonprofit -I no longer work for that company) was three years in the making. I also was the initial author of an infrastructure service that is doing quite well, but it took ten years to get there.
deleted 3y ago
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r14c 3y ago
I have trouble squaring "people can't do long term planning" and the existence of megalithic structures like the pyramids in Egypt and the Americas or even the Great Wall of China. All of which took generations to build. Especially calling that lack of long-term planning/executing ability "human nature". I have to wonder if there's something about the current material conditions that orients us towards short term thinking?
- zokier 3y ago
  Wikipedia says that Great Pyramid of Giza took 27 years to build. Long time, but I wouldn't call it generations. Smaller pyramids presumably were faster to build. Cathedrals might be more typical example of centuries long projects, although for me its not clear how expansions and renowations are delineated from initial construction
  - r14c 3y ago
    Ok, but you get the point right?
- imtringued 3y ago
  The Egyptians didn't have metallic money. They had rotting grains and their grain banks charged yearly storage fees if you deposit your "money" i.e. grains. The easiest way to avoid the storage costs is to invest in long lasting assets generating future benefits. Hence the pyramids. In fact, liquidity preference theory is the theory of reluctance to commit resources in the present for a future cause because the future is uncertain. Only the most versatile assets have any chance of being useful in the future and the most versatile asset is money. Metal money is easy to hoard dragon style. Metal currencies therefore make people artificially short term oriented, simply because thinking about the future is irrelevant beyond a certain point, the money is perfectly versatile after all. Except, this is an illusion. You cannot hoard money in the long term without causing deflation and once trade is unprofitable it simply stops and business closes down. The value of the money becomes more volatile until there is enough scarcity in production that prices start rising again and you get boom and bust cycles. In this way, money fools people into being short sighted and unwilling to commit to longer time frames. Deflating currencies inherently discourage doing work in the future and actively encourage short term thinking. Being an early adopter and HODLing a cryptocurrency as soon as possible while it's value rises let's you get rich without working. As time passes, the quantity of money that an hour of labor buys keeps shrinking until it is utterly impossible. Earning money in your 20s becomes your top priority so as to maximize the total return from the deflation. Meanwhile working in your 50s and 60s is meaningless. Do you see the problem? The best time to earn money will always be in the past, but the past is already over! It's too late! I hope it is clear that an economic system that rewards the past and punishes the future is inherently counterproductive to any long term project and incompatible with the fact that the arrow of time points forwards, not backwards.
patrickmay 3y ago
"There’s an ethical dilemma around transmitting a mission into the far future. We don’t necessarily want to burden a future generation with obligations they had no choice in; we don’t want to rob them of their free will to choose their own destinations." This is why government deficits and long term debt are evil (regardless of one's political views). Spending money today that must be paid back by people not yet born is, at the very least, a dick move.
- zokier 3y ago
  That only holds if you think that goverment debt will ever be paid off in full. With current economics, that seems unlikely.
- idontpost 3y ago
  [dead]
- Arainach 3y ago
  That doesn't hold at all - particularly if spending now yields dividends over time (infrastructure), and particularly with inflation - debt is a great investment (it's why any person or business with liquid assets is usually leveraged).
- imtringued 3y ago
  Is it? How else would you fund any long term project that has benefits in the future? I mean, think about it. If you have a project that has a $1000 benefit every year, why shouldn't the recipient of this benefit pay for it? The fact that the beneficiary is in the future doesn't fundamentally change anything. What matters is that the project is a net positive for the future. Do you think it would be justified to tear up all the roads after we are done with them so that we don't leave anyone with debt?
yawboakye 3y ago
because they haven’t been mentioned: stewart brand’s book, the clock of the long now[0] and the long now foundation[1] tackle the same problem. excellent exposition that doesn’t necessarily transmit despair amidst the shortening attention span. i think the thrust of the message is towards the end of the book where he talks about infinite games, and the finite games that can be played interim. it appears we need to think like game designers, after all. [0]: https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibility-stewart-brand/ https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibi... [1]: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
ofou 3y ago
You just secure the money, and the mission will prevail.
mikhailfranco 3y ago
World's oldest company, a Japanese temple builder, founded in 578 AD, acquired in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi Those VCs were waiting a long time.

123 points by galfarragem 3y ago

Scarcity of attention is one thing. It is complemented by scarcity of commitment. The digital world gives the illusion that everything is possible and easy. In such a world, why bother to do anything? Over the years I also noticed students getting ever more abstracted into wishful thinking. They hugely underestimate research and development. Proposals are filled with the word "just... ". On realising that something is difficult, they recoil and abandon the whole project. Although the article talks about the hubris of planning over multiple lifetimes, we have more serious and immediate problems of getting people to plan over mere weeks or days. Everything seems to be making that worse, "AI" in particular.

graemep 3y ago
Take a look at would be start up founders and software projects. "I have a great idea, I just need it implemented", "I have a design done, I just need someone to make it work".

roenxi 3y ago

This is almost a solved problem; institutions are capable of sustaining intentions for insane periods of time. The major organised religious institutes have been pushing some basic standards for ethical living for millennia. There aren't a lot of projects that humans have considered worth a millenium of effort. Due to the limited abilities of humans that long ago they are all philosophical projects. But we can do it. And on a smaller scale, institutions can keep grinding away far longer than makes any sense. A grant and a trust fund can last centuries. Look at the educational institutions like Oxford for interesting examples of maintaining a culture. It is pretty easy to imagine a group like that sustaining long term technical projects. I don't think a millenium of sustained technological effort is actually that hard to achieve. We've obviously never done it before because industrial society is less than 1,000 years old. But assuming we don't self-immolate as seems likely then setting up ultra-long-term-projects isn't that hard to see.

5y345ywy 3y ago
Doesn't this really only hold true if you handwave away the emergence of new denominations within those religions over time?
- graemep 3y ago
  Not really, many old denominations have persisted for a very long time. Catholic and Orthodox churches, for example.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
Institutions sustain themselves or rather the jobs of the controlling minds of the institution. Today’s Catholic Church would be viewed by its founders as some kind of uber-hippy bunch of democratic maniacs out to destroy civilisation. I think the difference here is we can view a company / institution as a machine to do a job, and between a company that has a controlling mind able to change its own machine “code” hence chnage its job. Without software the two things are needed - but with software we can concieve of a programmable company that just does its tasks as assigned for as long as inputs occur. If those tasks involve say sending jobs out to gig workers the idea kind of works It does mean you could build a Death Star using robots in place of gig workers (which is the obvious multi-generational solution) But it does imply something about our companies - that once the whole company can be specified in code, splitting off the “controlling minds” bit (ie management, plus developers) into seperate location seems interesting It also explicitly makes the issue of who decides what chnages and how come to the fore
- js8 3y ago
  > Today’s Catholic Church would be viewed by its founders as some kind of uber-hippy bunch of democratic maniacs out to destroy civilisation. Are you sure? It seems to me that Jesus would be dismayed by how establishment they've become and not nearly radical enough.
  - Filligree 3y ago

keep320909 3y ago

> The chief hurdle in constructing a Death Star is not the energy, materials, or even knowledge needed. Any proof for that? Death Star is big as a Moon, it has energy of several millions of Suns (it can blow up entire planet to pieces in seconds, just calculate energy needed to overcome gravity well). The only thing we know that could even remotely theoretically approach it, are impacts with asteroids at almost light speed. Saying the only thing preventing us from building it, is unstable political system, is just delusional! We really need to get away from this "technology will solve anything" mentality!

lukas099 3y ago
They go hand in hand. The materiel and personnel cost make the project less popular as time passes, and the shrinking political will makes obtaining those less viable.

dobin 3y ago

Many cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. The following around 500 years: Cologne Cathedral, St. Vitus Cathedral and Milan Cathedral. Sagrada Familia was started in 1882, and Gaudi is dead for 98 years. If the emperor demands, it will be built.

kibwen 3y ago
Cathedrals were public works projects that guaranteed generations of employment for local craftsmen. Plenty of cathedrals were left half-finished after funding dried up. > If the emperor demands, it will be built. The emperor rules for 50 years at best. His descendants may have different demands.
admp 3y ago
Cologne cathedral didn’t actually take 500 years to build — construction was restarted after a 250+ year halt. “Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248 but was halted in the years around 1560, unfinished. Attempts to complete the construction began around 1814 but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.”
- Timwi 3y ago
  That seems to me irrelevant to the point being made.
- samatman 3y ago
  So it took 500 years to build. If a building took one year to build, but they didn't work on the weekends, would you object and say no, it only took 260 days?
  - zokier 3y ago
    Lets take an example closer to home. Babbage famously started working on his Analytical Engine 1837. He never got it very far though, and the project remained dead for 150ish years. Until jgc and friends got the idea to complete the project and construct the Engine. So would you say it took 200 years to build Analytical Engine, or would you consider the Babbages original attempt and the current day attempt two separate projects?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

darepublic 3y ago

> I am asking myself what would I need to hear and get from a past generation to convince me to complete a project they began? For me a language, culture, sexual arousal.

DiggyJohnson 3y ago
For many others, especially with regards to cathedrals and religious institutions more generally: religiosity / God.

denton-scratch 3y ago

> The only real scarcity would be of a long attention span. I get the author's drift, and broadly agree. But I don't think it's really a long attention span that would get in the way of (e.g.) a Mars colony, or interstellar travel; it's that people's views change from one generation to the next. My kids have been imbued with some of my attitudes, sure; but I've not had much of a hand in the raising of my grandchildren. And kids rebel against their parents' views, even if they're objectively less sensible than the latest kids' fashion. The Death Star, to take the author's example, is the product of a particular hypothetical society that looks a lot like fascist authoritarianism: a Glorious Leader, militarization, and oppression. But how many societies like that have lasted 500 years? The Golden Horde lasted about 250 years; the Roman Empire lasted about 200 years. Chinese imperial rule lasted much longer, maybe 1,500 years? Egyptian pharoahs about the same, if you treat the Early, Middle and Late as distinct empires. But these empires changed their character as the centuries passed, and were not characterized by any particular continuity of social outlook or collective goals. I have only a vague knowledge of what the attitudes of my grandparents and their generation were - too vague for me to either support them or to rebel against them. So I think it's not so much a matter of attention-span, and more a question of plain old memory; history lessons and books are no substitute for talking to the people who were there, and after 200 years there's nobody left who "was there".

lloeki 3y ago
So essentially the problem is one of being able to foster a meme+ that outlives the scale of an individual's life. + the original meaning, not the internets one, which is only an extremely short-lived subset.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > to foster a meme+ So, I guess, pyramid-building; that's a collective project spanning a few centuries. I struggle to think of any collective project that spans centuries, that isn't fundamentally a religious enterprise.
  - NeoTar 3y ago

scotty79 3y ago

What's scary is that at time scales of one generation or longer societies seem to forget even very important things. How pandemic looks like. That war and militarization is not such a good idea.

XorNot 3y ago
> That war and militarization is not such a good idea. These are really not two sides of the same coin.
- scotty79 3y ago
  They are the same side, just stretched over time.
lukas099 3y ago
Conversely I think NATO and being the "world's policeman" was more popular in the US after WWII when we realized we could be pulled into European conflicts. After decades of relative peace a lot of people are wondering why we're spending so much on defense.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Another motivation was to inhibit nuclear proliferation. Without a global policeman, everyone has a motivation to acquire nuclear weapons.

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

There is scarcity of scarcity, which leads to this madness. People didn't use to have a particular problem thinking at least a generation ahead, but there us no demand for such things. There is no way to make too much money on any established product. Anything that has existed for more than several years is available in vast amount, and cheap. Anything that isn't completely new is good enough to the point where only an insignificant improvement can be made at monumenta costs. What is desirable now are things like a fidget spinner, that makes some quick cash, and gets forgotten soon after.

pfdietz 3y ago

The Death Star illustrates a problem with long term thinking: that goals become obsolete too fast. The thing in A New Hope was a gigantic waste of resources. Freeman Dyson famously commented that no project should be planned that takes longer than five years. Anything beyond that and the ground shifts out from under the foundations of the effort. One ends up with efforts that persist not because they are useful, but because they are established, because there is an entrenched constituency for the consumption of resources the project entails.

gmuslera 3y ago

One problem with long term projects is advancement on technology that would had made a faster, sturdier, cleaner or whatever the original project if it started from zero using it. We send a mission to Alpha centauri that would take, lets say, 100 years to get there with the current propulsion technologies, and in 30 years we discover a new one that would take 20 years to get there. Or the same for big buildings (I don't know, arcologies) where new materials and techniques would turn obsolete how it started if it was long enough in the past. And not only new ways to improve, but different priorities or things that are out of our control that happen during its development. What if the land where the The Line in Saudi Arabla is being built gets permanently flooded because sea level rise or the entire region becomes unlivabable because frequent high enough temperatures in the region? Even social trends may turn something built for the future obsolete, there are plenty of ghost megacities in China. Both acceleration in technologies, and acceleration in changes outside what is the construction by itself (climate, society, etc) can turn into (potentially hamrful) waste decades of effort.

blurrypepe 3y ago
I agree but just wanted to point out that The Line probably will never be built!

alexpotato 3y ago

Seeing a lot of comments about human lifespan, projects shouldn't take more than 5 years etc The Florence Cathedral took over 140 years to build. There is clear precedent that humans can design, plan and then execute a project that spans multiple lifetimes. Even better, they didn't have a final design when they started: > While the main structure of the nave was completed by 1380, a solution to constructing a dome to top it was not determined until 1418. [0] This also reminds me of a personal story when visiting Florence: Florentine Tour Guide: "It took 140 years to build the Cathedral. How do you think they were able to do this given that it took so long?" Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die" Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened." 0 - https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/construction-florence-cathedral https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/constructio...

badpun 3y ago
> Me: "I would think they needed a committee since that can last longer than a lifetime if the current members add in new people as the old members die" > Tour Guide: "Yes! Exactly! So few people realize that is what happened." This also implies that C++ will potentially live forever...
fritzo 3y ago
That's a good example, but I wonder if people now have more options and are more career-mobile. 700 years ago masonry was a family profession. Now it would get brain drained by AI.

TedHerman 3y ago

I once hosted a European researcher in my home (which is in flyover country America). He saw the utility poles and wiring stretching to houses in the neighborhood and remarked that his father had said a hallmark of undeveloped countries is that power lines are above ground. This was 20 years ago. Now, I do see that new neighborhoods have buried power and fiber. But that quality of fiber wasn't affordable decades ago. In retrospect, it might have been wise to delay putting infrastructure underground in urban settings because of high cost. Who knows what advances in material science, computing, energy and transport will bring in coming generations? Not to mention climate changes. Therefore it can be presumptuous to think that sticking to a long term plan is the best course. To the extent that a long term plan depends on the supporting environment of the plan staying the same, a plan might be judged foolish in retrospect.

sotillan 3y ago

I think the problem the author describes is a result of short-term factors that are unlikely to affect humanity forever. Right now, technology and culture are progressing extremely quickly, relatively to any other point in human history. As a result, our understanding and our capabilities are radically different from generation to generation. Also, many problems remain unsolved and present serious, short-term challenges to our survival. Understandably therefore, our priorities frequently change, reacting both to changes in our capabilities and the most immediate threats. However, this situation will not continue indefinitely. An advanced, post-scarcity human civilisation will (hopefully) not face constant danger of war, disease and famine, Technology will still advance, but at a slower pace, and not in ways that significantly transform day-to-day lives. Human lifespan will probably also be significantly increased. The result will be a more homogenous, stable and static society. There will still be differences, bug huge disparities of economic and societal status will no longer exist. In this environment, having no longer to deal with a constant background of threats to their survival, it's likely that humanity will have the time and space to turn to far longer term projects. Indeed, such projects will probably be the only way for a person to imbue their life with a greater meaning in such a future society.

Solvency 3y ago
This is heavily reducing the human experience. Even better technology and post-scarcity aren't magic solutions to all of the insanely weird evolutionary quirks/pitfalls/problems built into our monkey brains. Having a planet of hyper long-lived people who never have to work hard, who are constantly fed without concern, fully dependent on advanced technology sounds like the context of a YA novel. In reality, none of us are hardwired for that kind of lifestyle. Hell, we're not even hardwired for this one. We're just messily and sloppily trying to hang on as we stumble forward. Core human conflicts and oppositions and disputes and wars and existential meltdowns and all of the other things our emergent survival consciousness deal with aren't going anywhere.

m463 3y ago

"The wise man plants trees whose shade he will never enjoy"

Timwi 3y ago

The article assumes, without evidence, that the human lifespan is forever constant and unalterable. In my opinion that shows a lack of long-term thinking... how ironic.

kaycebasques 3y ago

Remembrance Of Earth's Past trilogy [1] is a good meditation on the problem of keeping humans aligned/focused across generations. (Trying not to spoil anything.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Pas...

webdoodle 3y ago

There are so many real life projects that have been abandoned part-way-through. One of the biggest that still irritates me is the Superconducting Super Collider they were building in Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

syngrog66 3y ago

"long term oriented thinking" is an emphasis of the education software I've been building. If anyone wants to encourage or accel its dev contact me and toss cash at me/us

justincredible 3y ago

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DennisL123 3y ago

> I am asking myself, what would I need to hear and get from a past generation to convince me to complete a project they began? „It‘s emitting lethal doses of radiation for the next 100k years.“

wonderwonder 3y ago

Imagine being born and dying on a generation ship and when your grand children reach the destination they find a thriving society established a 100 years before by the children of the people that launched your parents. They just created a new much faster means of travel in the mean time while your ancestors were condemned to a life on a ship with nothing to do but live, breed and die.

Duologic 3y ago

This reminds me of the Danish Navy oak: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visings%C3%B6#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visings%C3%B6#History

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I worked for a Japanese corporation that had a ten-year planning window. The farther out, the more abstract and fuzzy, but they had a long-term view. Also, they kept employees forever. The app I just released (for a small nonprofit -I no longer work for that company) was three years in the making. I also was the initial author of an infrastructure service that is doing quite well, but it took ten years to get there.

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r14c 3y ago

I have trouble squaring "people can't do long term planning" and the existence of megalithic structures like the pyramids in Egypt and the Americas or even the Great Wall of China. All of which took generations to build. Especially calling that lack of long-term planning/executing ability "human nature". I have to wonder if there's something about the current material conditions that orients us towards short term thinking?

zokier 3y ago
Wikipedia says that Great Pyramid of Giza took 27 years to build. Long time, but I wouldn't call it generations. Smaller pyramids presumably were faster to build. Cathedrals might be more typical example of centuries long projects, although for me its not clear how expansions and renowations are delineated from initial construction
- r14c 3y ago
  Ok, but you get the point right?
imtringued 3y ago
The Egyptians didn't have metallic money. They had rotting grains and their grain banks charged yearly storage fees if you deposit your "money" i.e. grains. The easiest way to avoid the storage costs is to invest in long lasting assets generating future benefits. Hence the pyramids. In fact, liquidity preference theory is the theory of reluctance to commit resources in the present for a future cause because the future is uncertain. Only the most versatile assets have any chance of being useful in the future and the most versatile asset is money. Metal money is easy to hoard dragon style. Metal currencies therefore make people artificially short term oriented, simply because thinking about the future is irrelevant beyond a certain point, the money is perfectly versatile after all. Except, this is an illusion. You cannot hoard money in the long term without causing deflation and once trade is unprofitable it simply stops and business closes down. The value of the money becomes more volatile until there is enough scarcity in production that prices start rising again and you get boom and bust cycles. In this way, money fools people into being short sighted and unwilling to commit to longer time frames. Deflating currencies inherently discourage doing work in the future and actively encourage short term thinking. Being an early adopter and HODLing a cryptocurrency as soon as possible while it's value rises let's you get rich without working. As time passes, the quantity of money that an hour of labor buys keeps shrinking until it is utterly impossible. Earning money in your 20s becomes your top priority so as to maximize the total return from the deflation. Meanwhile working in your 50s and 60s is meaningless. Do you see the problem? The best time to earn money will always be in the past, but the past is already over! It's too late! I hope it is clear that an economic system that rewards the past and punishes the future is inherently counterproductive to any long term project and incompatible with the fact that the arrow of time points forwards, not backwards.

patrickmay 3y ago

"There’s an ethical dilemma around transmitting a mission into the far future. We don’t necessarily want to burden a future generation with obligations they had no choice in; we don’t want to rob them of their free will to choose their own destinations." This is why government deficits and long term debt are evil (regardless of one's political views). Spending money today that must be paid back by people not yet born is, at the very least, a dick move.

zokier 3y ago
That only holds if you think that goverment debt will ever be paid off in full. With current economics, that seems unlikely.
idontpost 3y ago
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Arainach 3y ago
That doesn't hold at all - particularly if spending now yields dividends over time (infrastructure), and particularly with inflation - debt is a great investment (it's why any person or business with liquid assets is usually leveraged).
imtringued 3y ago
Is it? How else would you fund any long term project that has benefits in the future? I mean, think about it. If you have a project that has a $1000 benefit every year, why shouldn't the recipient of this benefit pay for it? The fact that the beneficiary is in the future doesn't fundamentally change anything. What matters is that the project is a net positive for the future. Do you think it would be justified to tear up all the roads after we are done with them so that we don't leave anyone with debt?

yawboakye 3y ago

because they haven’t been mentioned: stewart brand’s book, the clock of the long now[0] and the long now foundation[1] tackle the same problem. excellent exposition that doesn’t necessarily transmit despair amidst the shortening attention span. i think the thrust of the message is towards the end of the book where he talks about infinite games, and the finite games that can be played interim. it appears we need to think like game designers, after all. [0]: https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibility-stewart-brand/ https://longnow.org/store/clock-long-now-time-and-responsibi... [1]: https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/

ofou 3y ago

You just secure the money, and the mission will prevail.

mikhailfranco 3y ago

World's oldest company, a Japanese temple builder, founded in 578 AD, acquired in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi Those VCs were waiting a long time.