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Sometimes you can't reverse the damage and societal change after the market has already been created and shaped. Look at fossil fuels, plastic, social media, et

by TFYS 1y ago

Sometimes you can't reverse the damage and societal change after the market has already been created and shaped. Look at fossil fuels, plastic, social media, etc. We're now dependent on things that cause us harm, the damage done is irreversible and regulation is no longer possible because these innovations are now embedded in the foundations of modern society. Innovation is good, but there's no need to go as fast as possible. We can be careful about things and study the effects more deeply before unleashing life changing technologies into the world. Now we're seeing the internet get destroyed by LLMs because a few people decided it was ok to do so. The benefits of this are not even clear yet, but we're still doing it just because we can. It's like driving a car at full speed into a corner just to see what's behind it.

sneak 1y ago
I think it’s one of those “everyone knows” things that plastic and social media are bad, but I think the world without them is way, way worse. People focus on these popular narratives but if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it. Personally, I don’t think they’re bad. Plastic isn’t that harmful, and neither is social media. I think people romanticize the past and status quo. Change is scary, so when things change and the world is bad, it is easy to point at anything that changed and say “see, the change is what did it!”
- TFYS 1y ago
  People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.
  - sneak 1y ago
    > We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. This is handwaving. We can be pretty well sure at this point what the effects aren’t, given their widespread prevalence for generations. We have a 2+ billion sample size.
    - TFYS 1y ago
      No, we can't be sure. There's a lot of diseases that we don't know the cause of, for example. Cancers, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. There is a possibility that the rates of those diseases are higher because of plastics. Plastic pollution also accumulates, there was a lot less plastic in the environment a few decades ago. We add more faster than it gets removed, and there could be some threshold after which it becomes more of an issue. We might see the effect a few decades from now. Not only on humans, but it's everywhere in the environment now, affecting all life on earth.
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest. You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence. But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have. With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.
        TFYS 1y ago
        I agree that plastics probably do have more positives than negatives, but my point is that many of our innovations do have large negative effects, and if we take them into use before we understand those negative effects it can be impossible to fix the problems later. Now that we're starting to understand the extent of plastic pollution in our environment, if some future study reveals that it's a causal factor in some of our diseases it'll be too late to do anything about it. The plastic is in the environment and we can't get it out with regulation anymore. Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
- staunton 1y ago
  > if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it. Do you think Heroin is good?
  - sneak 1y ago
    Is the implication in your question that social media is addictive and should be banned or regulated on that basis? While some people get addicted to it, the vast majority of users are not addicts. They choose to use it.
    - staunton 1y ago
      Addiction is a matter of degree. There's a bunch of polls where a large majority of people strongly agree that "they spend too much time on social media". Are they addicts? Are they "coosing to use it"? Are they saying it's too much because that's a trendy thing to say?
  - Lionga 1y ago
    People who take Heroin think it is good in the situation they are taking it.
  - TFYS 1y ago
    I'm sure it's very good the first time you take it. If you don't consider all the effects before taking it, it does make sense. You feel very good, but the even stronger negative effects come after. Same can be said about a lot of technology.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
> Look at fossil fuels WHAT?! Do you think we as humanity would have gotten to all the modern inventions we have today like the internet, space travel, atomic energy, if we had skipped the fossil fuel era by preemptively regulating it? How do you imagine that? Unless you invent a time machine, go to the past, and give inventors schematics of modern tech achievable without fossil fuels.
- TFYS 1y ago
  Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to. Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive. I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting. The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.

by TFYS 1y ago

sneak 1y ago

I think it’s one of those “everyone knows” things that plastic and social media are bad, but I think the world without them is way, way worse. People focus on these popular narratives but if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it. Personally, I don’t think they’re bad. Plastic isn’t that harmful, and neither is social media. I think people romanticize the past and status quo. Change is scary, so when things change and the world is bad, it is easy to point at anything that changed and say “see, the change is what did it!”

TFYS 1y ago
People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.
- sneak 1y ago
  > We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. This is handwaving. We can be pretty well sure at this point what the effects aren’t, given their widespread prevalence for generations. We have a 2+ billion sample size.
  - TFYS 1y ago
    No, we can't be sure. There's a lot of diseases that we don't know the cause of, for example. Cancers, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. There is a possibility that the rates of those diseases are higher because of plastics. Plastic pollution also accumulates, there was a lot less plastic in the environment a few decades ago. We add more faster than it gets removed, and there could be some threshold after which it becomes more of an issue. We might see the effect a few decades from now. Not only on humans, but it's everywhere in the environment now, affecting all life on earth.
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      You're not arguing in a way that strikes me as intellectually honest. You're hypothesizing the existence of large negative effects with minimal evidence. But the positive effects of plastics and social media are extremely well understood and documented. Plastics have revolutionized practically every industry we have. With that kind of pattern of evidence, I think it makes sense to discount the negatives and be sure to account for all the positives before saying that deploying the technology was a bad idea.
      - TFYS 1y ago
        I agree that plastics probably do have more positives than negatives, but my point is that many of our innovations do have large negative effects, and if we take them into use before we understand those negative effects it can be impossible to fix the problems later. Now that we're starting to understand the extent of plastic pollution in our environment, if some future study reveals that it's a causal factor in some of our diseases it'll be too late to do anything about it. The plastic is in the environment and we can't get it out with regulation anymore. Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
staunton 1y ago
> if people thought social media was bad, they wouldn’t use it. Do you think Heroin is good?
- sneak 1y ago
  Is the implication in your question that social media is addictive and should be banned or regulated on that basis? While some people get addicted to it, the vast majority of users are not addicts. They choose to use it.
  - staunton 1y ago
    Addiction is a matter of degree. There's a bunch of polls where a large majority of people strongly agree that "they spend too much time on social media". Are they addicts? Are they "coosing to use it"? Are they saying it's too much because that's a trendy thing to say?
- Lionga 1y ago
  People who take Heroin think it is good in the situation they are taking it.
- TFYS 1y ago
  I'm sure it's very good the first time you take it. If you don't consider all the effects before taking it, it does make sense. You feel very good, but the even stronger negative effects come after. Same can be said about a lot of technology.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

> Look at fossil fuels WHAT?! Do you think we as humanity would have gotten to all the modern inventions we have today like the internet, space travel, atomic energy, if we had skipped the fossil fuel era by preemptively regulating it? How do you imagine that? Unless you invent a time machine, go to the past, and give inventors schematics of modern tech achievable without fossil fuels.

TFYS 1y ago
Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to. Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive. I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting. The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.