4 ms·

It's pointless to look for solutions that's against human nature.

by imeron 1mo ago

soco 1mo ago
So the human nature is to kill ourselves or otherwise let ourselves die out? Sorry dude, I don't want to accept that - I don't even believe it.
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
  - Timon3 1mo ago
    Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
    - MachineMan 1mo ago
      Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
      - Timon3 1mo ago
        I'm not sure how you arrive at "Which means those greedy people don’t have power". What is the "which" referring to?
    - bulatb 1mo ago
      On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted. If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder. There's a hole in the bucket.
      - Timon3 1mo ago
        It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
        bulatb 1mo ago
        Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together. That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't. Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks. Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.) The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak. Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
    - satvikpendem 1mo ago
      That will happen in any system as hierarchy is in human nature, throughout history.
      - Timon3 1mo ago
        Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
        satvikpendem 1mo ago
        That's what ends up happening in practice though, it's not any different throughout time so a moot point.
        Timon3 1mo ago
        Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases. As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this. (of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
        satvikpendem 1mo ago
        The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history. That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
        1mo ago
  - cryptopian 1mo ago
    Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations. We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
    - satvikpendem 1mo ago
      That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
    - apothegm 1mo ago
      Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.
sixtyj 1mo ago
Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more. I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy. Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need. Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else? Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)? Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe? Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.) Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money. Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic. There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors. (Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich. Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.
- noir_lord 1mo ago
  > I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy. I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society". I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
- dns_snek 1mo ago
  > I don’t dispute capitalism But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional. These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency". We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.
burnt-resistor 1mo ago
Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.
- MachineMan 1mo ago
  Earth has an immune system called the atlantic meridian overturning cycle. When meltwater dillutes the salt concentration too much, it collapses and creates an ice age. Short term catastrophe, long term it will be OK.
  - defrost 1mo ago
    > it collapses and creates an ice age. We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
    - kuerbel 1mo ago
      They mean a glacial period, I guess... we are in an interglacial in an ice age
      - MachineMan 1mo ago
        Correct. This is all planned. Colossal Biosciences has already brought back the Dire Wolf and is working on the woolly mammoth. It is no coincidence that these are younger dryas animals, because they are expecting these animals to thrive in the near future glacial period. Don’t feel guilt tripped into causing this collapse, you have no control over it even though you can do some marginal things to reduce your individual footprint. Whatever needs to happen, will happen. AMOC collapse greens the desert. It also happens to be the region that dictates how affordable fossil fuels are and thus how much of the stuff is burned due to OPEC. If you are religiously inclined, that is meaningful. Edit: For reference: https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/
mrkeen 1mo ago
'Against human nature' is where every intervention begins! Otherwise you wouldn't bother intervening.
Fricken 1mo ago
We're acting against our own evolutionary fitness function. Human nature is against human nature.
DavidPiper 1mo ago
Excerpts from a response to "human nature" arguments (source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ) >>> Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful. ... It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others. Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature. You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property, but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity. ... While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours, it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity that neither planted the trees nor cut them down. The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman, does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature. ... The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.

It's pointless to look for solutions that's against human nature.

by imeron 1mo ago

It's pointless to look for solutions that's against human nature.

soco 1mo ago

So the human nature is to kill ourselves or otherwise let ourselves die out? Sorry dude, I don't want to accept that - I don't even believe it.

satvikpendem 1mo ago
You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
- Timon3 1mo ago
  Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
  - MachineMan 1mo ago
    Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
    - Timon3 1mo ago
      I'm not sure how you arrive at "Which means those greedy people don’t have power". What is the "which" referring to?
  - bulatb 1mo ago
    On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted. If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder. There's a hole in the bucket.
    - Timon3 1mo ago
      It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
      - bulatb 1mo ago
        Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together. That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't. Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks. Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.) The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak. Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    That will happen in any system as hierarchy is in human nature, throughout history.
    - Timon3 1mo ago
      Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
      - satvikpendem 1mo ago
        That's what ends up happening in practice though, it's not any different throughout time so a moot point.
        Timon3 1mo ago
        Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases. As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this. (of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
        satvikpendem 1mo ago
        The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history. That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
        1mo ago
- cryptopian 1mo ago
  Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations. We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
  - apothegm 1mo ago
    Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.

sixtyj 1mo ago

Law of conservation of energy can be applied here as well. So you can’t expect something else if you produce and consume more. I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy. Just trying to figure out what I (as person) really need. Every weekend travelling by plane just to experience something else? Ordering some stuff across the globe from Temu, Aliexpress just because it is cheap(er)? Eating e.g. tuna because it is healthy that had to be transported around the globe? Drinking wine from South Africa because I don’t like Californian? (Blind tests by Wine Spectator magazine confirm that even a sommelier doesn’t recognize cheap from expensive ones.) Global export-import statistics is staggering… just a few: all metals, honey, fish, vegetables from Spain, avocados from Peru, almonds from California, cheaper than local milk transported across Europe , bananas from everywhere you can imagine… supply and demand - a lot of people have a much more money. Vessel and plane trackers show so many vehicles moving around that I wonder how whales can handle this traffic. There is chemical and industry that is real spin doctors. (Almost) everyone wants to have house, car, cheap everything, travel everywhere. Those who can’t afford do everything to become rich. Wealth is good. Plundering to get more money not so much. And mankind plunders like there is no tomorrow. All the CSR, circular economy etc is nice but brainwashing and stuff for distraction so people could feel better.

noir_lord 1mo ago
> I don’t dispute capitalism and democracy. I do the capitalism part, or more specifically what form of capitalism because there is a vast range between "society should work for capitalism" and "capitalism should work for society". I'd likely argue that on the whole capitalism in it's current form isn't working for society and the trend is towards that getting worse over time.
dns_snek 1mo ago
> I don’t dispute capitalism But we should. This is a taboo topic but pretending that these consequences are either disconnected from capitalism or that capitalism is some natural law of the universe that should never be challenged is, for lack of a better word, delusional. These consequences are inherent to capitalism because people benefiting from it demand infinite growth and nobody is incentivized to care about the environment. People who care about it get outcompeted by those who don't in ruthless pursuit of "efficiency". We can try to regulate it to the point that people wouldn't call it capitalism anymore but the nature of a system where the only incentive is maximizing profit will always have a natural tendency to harm the environment, so it should be disputed.

burnt-resistor 1mo ago

Leadership by the Tokugawa shogunate saved the forests of Japan. Leadership saved the ozone layer. Leadership can save the climate, although civil war(s) maybe necessary to overthrow corrupt elites who put us all at risk.

MachineMan 1mo ago
Earth has an immune system called the atlantic meridian overturning cycle. When meltwater dillutes the salt concentration too much, it collapses and creates an ice age. Short term catastrophe, long term it will be OK.
- defrost 1mo ago
  > it collapses and creates an ice age. We're already in an ice age (there is ice at the poles). I suspect you mean this would make Europe cooler, but do nothing to reverse the trend of increasing global mean surface (land + ocean) temperature.
  - kuerbel 1mo ago
    They mean a glacial period, I guess... we are in an interglacial in an ice age
    - MachineMan 1mo ago
      Correct. This is all planned. Colossal Biosciences has already brought back the Dire Wolf and is working on the woolly mammoth. It is no coincidence that these are younger dryas animals, because they are expecting these animals to thrive in the near future glacial period. Don’t feel guilt tripped into causing this collapse, you have no control over it even though you can do some marginal things to reduce your individual footprint. Whatever needs to happen, will happen. AMOC collapse greens the desert. It also happens to be the region that dictates how affordable fossil fuels are and thus how much of the stuff is burned due to OPEC. If you are religiously inclined, that is meaningful. Edit: For reference: https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/direwolf/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/ https://colossal.com/mammoth/

mrkeen 1mo ago

'Against human nature' is where every intervention begins! Otherwise you wouldn't bother intervening.

Fricken 1mo ago

We're acting against our own evolutionary fitness function. Human nature is against human nature.

DavidPiper 1mo ago

Excerpts from a response to "human nature" arguments (source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ) >>> Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful. ... It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others. Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature. You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property, but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity. ... While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours, it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity that neither planted the trees nor cut them down. The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman, does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature. ... The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.