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> as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose We tried out the grand visions to improve the human condition with one great push in the 20th century-
by portaouflop 2y ago
> as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose
We tried out the grand visions to improve the human condition with one great push in the 20th century- didn’t work out so well
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoThe failure of some grand visions doesn’t doom all future ones. That’s just silly.
- vlovich123 2y agoEveryone knows that if at first you don’t succeed, never try again.
- portaouflop 2y agoGrand vision (or ideology as it’s also called) is a dead end of history - has been tried too many times, always failed spectacularly. Instead we need small incremental lasting change - thinking we can transform life within a generation without repercussions, that’s just silly
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoWe actively live under an ideology, and the idea that we should only seek to change things in small incremental ways is a fixture of that ideology. I think that’s called liberalism but I’m not really sure. Either way, who said anything about grand visions being restricted to a short time window of implementation? Any grand vision I could remotely conceive of would have to take centuries at least, unless maybe you consider some benevolent AI dictator or something.
- Nasrudith 2y agoGrand visions are more in service of megalomaniacal egos than actual solutions. They all just paint over the very real complexities of the world and expect things to just work as they envisioned. Just get rid of the sparrows eating grains and it will just be fine! There are limits to what complexities can be contained within one human mind, and with a world already orders of magnitudes more complex than that we need the humility to admit that the vision of one human mind is not and cannot be all-encompassing. I think it is fair to say that the usefulness of grand visions is dead.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoThere’s no requirement that a vision be constrained within one person’s mind, that it be inflexible to changing conditions, that it be incapable of testing policies before it implements them, and who’s to say that sufficiently complex machines or new organizations of people wouldn’t be capable of successfully abstracting society’s irreducible complexities well enough to make good decisions? Couldn’t a grand vision, for example, be one in which local communities make most important decisions for themselves, thus removing most of the computational failures of central governance? I just think you’re picturing fascism or communism when I say grand vision, but imo those aren’t representative of what every grand vision would look like.
- CalRobert 2y agoThe Green Revolution, vaccines, and space exploration have been pretty great.
- throwaway2037 2y agoLiteracy too!