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So like with climate change the ones responsible knew for decades but preferred the profit.
by croes 1mo ago
So like with climate change the ones responsible knew for decades but preferred the profit.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1mo agoI don't understand it though. These chemicals poison their own families right?
- brokencode 1mo agoBut money
- AngryData 1mo agoThe people making the final decisions on their usage have the money to avoid 99% of it themselves and figure they will be dead before it would really matter to them. The rest are either ignorant or put their livelihood at risk oppossing a massive corporation.
- Sharlin 1mo agoAnd tobacco. And leaded gasoline. And... We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- traviswingo 1mo agoI’ve long suspected it’ll take us _almost_ going extinct to actually take this stuff seriously. There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit. Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better. IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
- tracerbulletx 1mo agoWe're our own moral judges. Biology doesn't have an ethical opinion.
- Sharlin 1mo ago"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
- someothherguyy 1mo agocheater detection and self-correction is important in systems. i am not sure "fucked-up" is a meaningful way to look at species-level things.
- Sharlin 1mo agoYes, and our cheater detection is entirely broken, given that we prefer to give power to cheaters, as long as the cheater is smart enough.
- someothherguyy 1mo agoyeah, sometimes cheaters winning is a net benefit or at least acceptable. although, i don't think those cases above are, heh.
- _puk 1mo agoIt's just a bunch of grapes. If there's more than enough grapes for everyone and one person takes more than their fair share, then, on the whole, it's fine. There's enough to go round. If everyone tries to take more than their fair share, then the whole system falls apart. When there are this many people, and this much visibility of the hustle, just seeing others prosper by cheating means a not insubstantial number of people will be in the "well I want grapes, and likely need to cheat to make sure I get my fair share" camp.
- tux3 1mo agoEven looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely. People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw. The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
- customguy 1mo agoNo, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this. If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
- Sharlin 1mo agoNo, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
- wongarsu 1mo agoAs a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
- unethical_ban 1mo agoPerhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem. If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe. Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society. You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
- root_axis 1mo ago
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1mo agoOh, evolution certainly can. The bad ones always get killed off.
- ceejayoz 1mo agoBad's a matter of perspective, as a quick review of Wikipedia's parasite articles will reveal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1mo agoIt’s not a matter of perspective to evolution, it’s a real binary between whether you can survive or not. We’re free to pollute the planet as we like, but it’s up in the air whether we can survive nature’s response to our actions
- mitthrowaway2 1mo agoThe only species I can think of that coordinate better than humans do are ants, bees, and naked mole rats.
- clickety_clack 1mo ago…gambling, social media…
- culi 1mo agoAsbestos too. And glyphosates which have devastated insect populations. Veritasium did great documentaries on both of those crises glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
- saikrn112 1mo agoyup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
- culi 1mo agoOne of the more depressing things to me is the "forever chemical" debacle. Even though we've banned PFAS in pizza boxes, food packaging, firefighting foam, and many consumer products, we're stuck in an endless cycle of the industry coming up with new chemicals that only differ slightly in their chemical structure and making all the same safety claims about them that they know will soon be disproven. It's no bother to them as they can continue to play this game indefinitely and advertise that they don't use those forever chemicals There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
- cute_boi 1mo agothere is reason why every civilization rise and fails.