6 ms·

On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

169 points by barishnamazov 9mo ago

RugnirViking 9mo ago
Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about. But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view
- npunt 9mo ago
  Part of the role of college education is to expose students to the broader world and help them become informed members of society, raising unanswered/unanswerable questions, getting young people to think and grow and find their place to contribute in the great experiment of civilization. Cramming for exams is def part of the college experience but so is/should be these listen to the wisdom of your elders kinds of talks, even if some are kooky or you don't agree w aspects of them. Discourse around college education has shifted a lot in the last 20 years toward a kind of optimization for job readiness, which itself is both a reflection of economic conditions and a misunderstanding of what elements are necessary for civilization to persist and thrive. College is supposed to be full of messy ideas among a menu of disciplines to challenge us and help us find our passions, and it's supposed to prepare us to become members of a society where all of these ideas and disciplines co-exist. In other words, college is under-optimized for the individual because its purpose is to optimize for society as a whole. The kind of bigger picture discussion that this lecture is doing is especially important in engineering disciplines since they don't focus much on humanities and the stuff they get isn't tailored to their approach and mindset. We might live in a different world if a little more 'why' had been introduced into the 'what' and 'how' of eng education.
gizajob 9mo ago
[flagged]
- 9dev 9mo ago
  These are questions worth posing. Everyone working in tech right now plays a part in a lot of horrors haunting the world right now, and all of us are partly guilty. If your answer to this is, "I don't care about the environment, everyone's right to privacy, psychological effects of social media use, or any of those other adverse effects as long as I get a good salary"—that's a valid answer for sure, if you aren't bothered by it. If that is not your answer, maybe it's time to change some things.
  - gizajob 9mo ago
    I mean “begging the question” in the traditional philosophical sense – assuming the conclusion (societal collapse) as part of the premises. Not the more common vernacular usage which has come to mean “asking questions”. Plus the sky wasn’t falling in the last few times I checked.
tomaytotomato 9mo ago
I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow". Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too. My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them. Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again. So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem. The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.
- 1970-01-01 9mo ago
  > wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem ? I'll say it. That's a bad wife.
  - jvanderbot 9mo ago
    You, sir, need an education in some stereotypes. More seriously, I think GP was commenting on the stereotypical response that when a "wife" brings up a "problem" they often want "emotional support" rather than "discussion of solutions". Not that wife literally gets mad when he solves a problem, unless his problem solving is yet another "engineer system solution" (vs manual labor) which I know from experience, try the patience of everyone involved in family life :D
    - 1970-01-01 9mo ago
      I'm not looking to get into a whole thing here, but I disagree. There are such things as people that will simply need emotional supportz and then there are those that cannot disagree and commit.
voxleone 9mo ago
Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment. The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.
- lazide 9mo ago
  The issue is how much of the helping is a trap. Helping someone who refuses to deal with the underlying behaviors causing the real problem is just wasting energy better spent on other things. Taken to an extreme, it’s being a martyr.
  - _heimdall 9mo ago
    What you're describing perfectly describes our modern medical system. We define disease only by symptoms and as symptoms arise we paper over them with some combination of pills and surgery. There's never time made to understand the underlying cause, only how to patch up symptoms and send the patient home.
- jijijijij 9mo ago
  I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy. The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better. Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.
grunder_advice 9mo ago
Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns. You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate. I'm not immune from this, and neither are you. I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help. It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.
- GardenLetter27 9mo ago
  IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed. Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc. And this all creates a huge pressure for ordinary people, just housing alone has a huge impact now - stunting the formation of families, and effectively taxing productive people to fund those who were lucky enough to buy the assets in the past.
  - watwut 9mo ago
    That does not explain radicalization and anti-democratic turn of billionaires. Ordinary people who are turning fascists are not turning fascists because of economic anxiety. They reject party that make economy better.
    - hojofpodge 9mo ago
      Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context. The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole. I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent. A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.
albertdessaint 9mo ago
In time of despair, I like to remember what Albert Camus said about being a rebel What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.
shswkna 9mo ago
Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion. On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action. But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.
- tomaytotomato 9mo ago
  Indeed, it makes you wonder how prevalent this psychological malaise is in the world of teaching and academia. I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers. Self reflection yes, abstract and critical thinking yes, expressing feelings yes. No - "sorry the world is burning, I think you should be sad about this and maybe reconsider being an Engineer".
  - guitarlimeo 9mo ago
    > I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers. Except that wasn't the point? The point was to critically evaluate what value your work brings to the world and if it is positive. It emphasizes that having ethics as an engineer is maybe a better thing than being a apolitical robot who is only motivated by money. If there was something similar to the Hippocratic Oath but for engineers, I would vouch for it.
  - Fricken 9mo ago
    Woe is you
- password54321 9mo ago
  I was reading an interview with Peter Thiel and he put it pretty well even if you don't like Trump: >The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park. >...we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket? I have been nihilistic in the past but took action where I could in life and accepted the reality that there are a lot of problems but you have to look at the places where you can have agency in your own life and focus on that. Thinking more like this improved my life a lot but it can still be easy to engage in doomerism online as it becomes its own form of entertainment.
kleiba 9mo ago
> We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse. Could I have that in a smaller size, please?
dash2 9mo ago
I predict that in 25 years (or 50 or 100): - human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced - people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse Let's see.
- fedeb95 9mo ago
  if not in 25, in 26.
- qarl 9mo ago
  I think most Americans agree with you. And that itself will answer where we go from here. Let's see indeed. I'll reach out to you again each year on this date and we'll see how your prediction is holding up.
- _heimdall 9mo ago
  Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources. Look up graphs of countries' GDP and oil consumption if you're ever curious. If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.
  - senordevnyc 9mo ago
    If you're focused on oil consumption, is the issue "consumption of natural resources", or is the issue "energy"?
    - _heimdall 9mo ago
      Oil is a good example today, but not the only example or only one I would be concerned with. Energy (oil, coal, etc) is a problem today and is highly correlated with our consumption, but that's mostly a side effect of how we've built economies for the last couple centuries rather than a fundamental link to oil.
  - 9mo ago
seu 9mo ago
I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech. I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it. These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
- barishnamazov 9mo ago
  I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
- npunt 9mo ago
  Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
- _heimdall 9mo ago
  When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources. You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.
roenxi 9mo ago
I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad. If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself. And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.
msuniverse2026 9mo ago
Sorry but you can't critique the problem using the same mode of consciousness that creates it. Computer science and university in general trains consciousness to see reality as decomposable into discrete, manipulable units. It's the systematic cultivation of a particular relationship to existence. Students graduate with powerful analytical tools and withered organs for perceiving meaning and life.
soufron 9mo ago
"We stand today at the brink of civilizational and envi- ronmental collapse." No we don't. End of me reading this paper.
huge_rank_rat 9mo ago
yeah but meta pays me an OBSCENE AMOUNT of money to literally farm the minds of the vulnerable, so I la-la-la can't hearrrr youuuuu
subpixel 9mo ago
When reading about the multiple civil wars in the modern history of my wife’s native country I was really stumped by the formation of liberal and conservative “camps”. Basically the country was halved by people who detested and feared the other half - despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented. I’m less puzzled now.
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  >despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented. It seems the smaller the difference the more vitriol is generated.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Wait till you learn about racism
1970-01-01 9mo ago
What we needed, and still need, is mandatory time for all working citizens to be directly involved in federal government decisions. Something like jury duty for our national democracy. Yes, this does mean reducing one's freedom, but the benefits far outweigh seeing everything atrophy and collapse.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Jury duty is exactly why that shouldn’t happen. A lot of jurors want it to end early and will decide whatever seems expedient vs what is actually proper in light of the law and evidence.
salemh 9mo ago
[dead]
morgengold 9mo ago
What if we do not fight back because deep down we hate the current state of affairs? So why fighting to preserve this?
sershe 9mo ago
The modern alarmist environmentalist projections have even less plausible basis in any kind of science (compared to e.g. IPCC ones [1]) than the Population Bomb et al. Let's hope their moral panic doesn't inspire genocidal policies like Indian forced sterilizations and One Child policy. We live in the age of unparalleled prosperity, as displayed in part on one of the first slides, human vs wild biomass. Just like with their forebears, framing it as a bad thing in the very beginning really betrays the fundamentally anti-human nature of the modern environmentalists. "Corporate capitalism" is part of the package that delivered said prosperity; "social media", "surveillance" is just people making choices that old man yelling at cloud disagrees with - like, I am totally with him on privacy, but most people don't care about privacy, and unlike him I do not think I have the right to decide for them. Just like Paul Ehrlich et al, these people are delusional and truly evil. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios
jonjacky 9mo ago
See also Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptographic Work[0], which is a more technical talk for an audience of cryptography researchers. It's been noted several times on HN, most recently in 2023 with 56 comments [1] and in 2015 with 93 comments [2]. 0. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055

169 points by barishnamazov 9mo ago

Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about. But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view

npunt 9mo ago
Part of the role of college education is to expose students to the broader world and help them become informed members of society, raising unanswered/unanswerable questions, getting young people to think and grow and find their place to contribute in the great experiment of civilization. Cramming for exams is def part of the college experience but so is/should be these listen to the wisdom of your elders kinds of talks, even if some are kooky or you don't agree w aspects of them. Discourse around college education has shifted a lot in the last 20 years toward a kind of optimization for job readiness, which itself is both a reflection of economic conditions and a misunderstanding of what elements are necessary for civilization to persist and thrive. College is supposed to be full of messy ideas among a menu of disciplines to challenge us and help us find our passions, and it's supposed to prepare us to become members of a society where all of these ideas and disciplines co-exist. In other words, college is under-optimized for the individual because its purpose is to optimize for society as a whole. The kind of bigger picture discussion that this lecture is doing is especially important in engineering disciplines since they don't focus much on humanities and the stuff they get isn't tailored to their approach and mindset. We might live in a different world if a little more 'why' had been introduced into the 'what' and 'how' of eng education.

gizajob 9mo ago

[flagged]

9dev 9mo ago
These are questions worth posing. Everyone working in tech right now plays a part in a lot of horrors haunting the world right now, and all of us are partly guilty. If your answer to this is, "I don't care about the environment, everyone's right to privacy, psychological effects of social media use, or any of those other adverse effects as long as I get a good salary"—that's a valid answer for sure, if you aren't bothered by it. If that is not your answer, maybe it's time to change some things.
- gizajob 9mo ago
  I mean “begging the question” in the traditional philosophical sense – assuming the conclusion (societal collapse) as part of the premises. Not the more common vernacular usage which has come to mean “asking questions”. Plus the sky wasn’t falling in the last few times I checked.

tomaytotomato 9mo ago

I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow". Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too. My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them. Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again. So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem. The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.

1970-01-01 9mo ago
> wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem ? I'll say it. That's a bad wife.
- jvanderbot 9mo ago
  You, sir, need an education in some stereotypes. More seriously, I think GP was commenting on the stereotypical response that when a "wife" brings up a "problem" they often want "emotional support" rather than "discussion of solutions". Not that wife literally gets mad when he solves a problem, unless his problem solving is yet another "engineer system solution" (vs manual labor) which I know from experience, try the patience of everyone involved in family life :D
  - 1970-01-01 9mo ago
    I'm not looking to get into a whole thing here, but I disagree. There are such things as people that will simply need emotional supportz and then there are those that cannot disagree and commit.

voxleone 9mo ago

Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment. The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.

lazide 9mo ago
The issue is how much of the helping is a trap. Helping someone who refuses to deal with the underlying behaviors causing the real problem is just wasting energy better spent on other things. Taken to an extreme, it’s being a martyr.
- _heimdall 9mo ago
  What you're describing perfectly describes our modern medical system. We define disease only by symptoms and as symptoms arise we paper over them with some combination of pills and surgery. There's never time made to understand the underlying cause, only how to patch up symptoms and send the patient home.
jijijijij 9mo ago
I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy. The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better. Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.

grunder_advice 9mo ago

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns. You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate. I'm not immune from this, and neither are you. I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help. It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.

GardenLetter27 9mo ago
IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed. Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc. And this all creates a huge pressure for ordinary people, just housing alone has a huge impact now - stunting the formation of families, and effectively taxing productive people to fund those who were lucky enough to buy the assets in the past.
- watwut 9mo ago
  That does not explain radicalization and anti-democratic turn of billionaires. Ordinary people who are turning fascists are not turning fascists because of economic anxiety. They reject party that make economy better.
  - hojofpodge 9mo ago
    Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context. The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole. I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent. A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.

albertdessaint 9mo ago

In time of despair, I like to remember what Albert Camus said about being a rebel What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.

shswkna 9mo ago

Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion. On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action. But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.

tomaytotomato 9mo ago
Indeed, it makes you wonder how prevalent this psychological malaise is in the world of teaching and academia. I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers. Self reflection yes, abstract and critical thinking yes, expressing feelings yes. No - "sorry the world is burning, I think you should be sad about this and maybe reconsider being an Engineer".
- guitarlimeo 9mo ago
  > I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers. Except that wasn't the point? The point was to critically evaluate what value your work brings to the world and if it is positive. It emphasizes that having ethics as an engineer is maybe a better thing than being a apolitical robot who is only motivated by money. If there was something similar to the Hippocratic Oath but for engineers, I would vouch for it.
- Fricken 9mo ago
  Woe is you
password54321 9mo ago
I was reading an interview with Peter Thiel and he put it pretty well even if you don't like Trump: >The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park. >...we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket? I have been nihilistic in the past but took action where I could in life and accepted the reality that there are a lot of problems but you have to look at the places where you can have agency in your own life and focus on that. Thinking more like this improved my life a lot but it can still be easy to engage in doomerism online as it becomes its own form of entertainment.

kleiba 9mo ago

> We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse. Could I have that in a smaller size, please?

dash2 9mo ago

I predict that in 25 years (or 50 or 100): - human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced - people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse Let's see.

fedeb95 9mo ago
if not in 25, in 26.
qarl 9mo ago
I think most Americans agree with you. And that itself will answer where we go from here. Let's see indeed. I'll reach out to you again each year on this date and we'll see how your prediction is holding up.
_heimdall 9mo ago
Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources. Look up graphs of countries' GDP and oil consumption if you're ever curious. If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.
- senordevnyc 9mo ago
  If you're focused on oil consumption, is the issue "consumption of natural resources", or is the issue "energy"?
  - _heimdall 9mo ago
    Oil is a good example today, but not the only example or only one I would be concerned with. Energy (oil, coal, etc) is a problem today and is highly correlated with our consumption, but that's mostly a side effect of how we've built economies for the last couple centuries rather than a fundamental link to oil.
- 9mo ago

seu 9mo ago

I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech. I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it. These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.

barishnamazov 9mo ago
I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
npunt 9mo ago
Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
_heimdall 9mo ago
When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources. You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.

roenxi 9mo ago

I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad. If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself. And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.

msuniverse2026 9mo ago

Sorry but you can't critique the problem using the same mode of consciousness that creates it. Computer science and university in general trains consciousness to see reality as decomposable into discrete, manipulable units. It's the systematic cultivation of a particular relationship to existence. Students graduate with powerful analytical tools and withered organs for perceiving meaning and life.

soufron 9mo ago

"We stand today at the brink of civilizational and envi- ronmental collapse." No we don't. End of me reading this paper.

huge_rank_rat 9mo ago

yeah but meta pays me an OBSCENE AMOUNT of money to literally farm the minds of the vulnerable, so I la-la-la can't hearrrr youuuuu

subpixel 9mo ago

When reading about the multiple civil wars in the modern history of my wife’s native country I was really stumped by the formation of liberal and conservative “camps”. Basically the country was halved by people who detested and feared the other half - despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented. I’m less puzzled now.

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
>despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented. It seems the smaller the difference the more vitriol is generated.
asdff 9mo ago
Wait till you learn about racism

1970-01-01 9mo ago

What we needed, and still need, is mandatory time for all working citizens to be directly involved in federal government decisions. Something like jury duty for our national democracy. Yes, this does mean reducing one's freedom, but the benefits far outweigh seeing everything atrophy and collapse.

asdff 9mo ago
Jury duty is exactly why that shouldn’t happen. A lot of jurors want it to end early and will decide whatever seems expedient vs what is actually proper in light of the law and evidence.

salemh 9mo ago

[dead]

morgengold 9mo ago

What if we do not fight back because deep down we hate the current state of affairs? So why fighting to preserve this?

sershe 9mo ago

The modern alarmist environmentalist projections have even less plausible basis in any kind of science (compared to e.g. IPCC ones [1]) than the Population Bomb et al. Let's hope their moral panic doesn't inspire genocidal policies like Indian forced sterilizations and One Child policy. We live in the age of unparalleled prosperity, as displayed in part on one of the first slides, human vs wild biomass. Just like with their forebears, framing it as a bad thing in the very beginning really betrays the fundamentally anti-human nature of the modern environmentalists. "Corporate capitalism" is part of the package that delivered said prosperity; "social media", "surveillance" is just people making choices that old man yelling at cloud disagrees with - like, I am totally with him on privacy, but most people don't care about privacy, and unlike him I do not think I have the right to decide for them. Just like Paul Ehrlich et al, these people are delusional and truly evil. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios

jonjacky 9mo ago

See also Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptographic Work[0], which is a more technical talk for an audience of cryptography researchers. It's been noted several times on HN, most recently in 2023 with 56 comments [1] and in 2015 with 93 comments [2]. 0. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055