3 ms·

I watched "Star Trek: Into Darkness". At first I was like "Kirk should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone on the Enterprise should be fired." Then I was li

by Eliezer 12y ago

I watched "Star Trek: Into Darkness". At first I was like "Kirk should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone on the Enterprise should be fired." Then I was like "Everyone in Starfleet should be fired." Then I was like, "Wow, I've never wanted to fire an entire civilization before, and this movie has given me a new appreciation for the importance of rules and regulations in real life."

api 12y ago
The competent bureaucracy part is really the lynchpin. Because bureaucracies are so incompetent, criminal syndicates just run circles around them. This is why the mafia state looks like the logical endpoint-- basically anarcho-syndicalism, and it's not a utopia. I think this is also why the most bureaucratic states -- the USSR and Communist China -- have been the first into this brave new future. The criminal mammals triumphed easily over those byzantine dinosaurs. The bottom line is that we have the scientific method and we have the discipline of engineering, and those together can reliably produce progress in the technical realm. We have no set of tools or techniques that reliably produces progress in the human realm. There are no institutions charged with understanding and healing us psychologically. The closest we come is to pop pills, and even that is poorly done -- diagnosis is incredibly unscientific and haphazard. I personally blame -- directly and indirectly -- the war on drugs. I am not one of those people who thinks that dosing everyone with LSD would create some kind of utopia. I've known too many drug users to think that. But beneath the pop culture misuse of those substances, there was some really visionary research into genuinely understanding and even changing deep human psychology at work back in those days. The ridiculous moral panic that followed had the effect of shutting down almost all of that research, even some of the non-psychedlics-related stuff, and leaving us with nothing but talk-talk psychotherapy and the ham fisted pill pushing approach. To this day attempting to delve deeply into human psychology in an active way immediately leads into realms since declared utterly taboo.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  There is a point of view that Stalin and Mao were essentially criminal in a way that national leaders have not been since the 19th Century. So a Putin and whatever they have in China actually represents a modicum of progress. Russia's history at the level of empire is pretty nasty. We may never be able to get out of our own way. Who knows? Not a big pill fan ( although they've absolutely gotten better for people with real brain-chemistry problems ) but these days, it's easier than ever to identify bad sources of information and understand what's gone wrong. My parents' (Silent) generation had no idea why there was a Depression; mine actually has a few theories. The emphasis on LSD as "better living through chemistry" was as much about advertising-propaganda as anything else. Regardless of any War on Drugs, that went badly.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
That's what you got from it? I never managed to finish watching it (I love Star Trek too much to do that), and all I could see is that Abrams should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into molten lava.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
If we're talking futurists, I tend to take David Brin's trust in civilization as actually pretty well-evidenced. I mean, let me put it this way: most of the time, our so-called awful, so-called incompetent bureaucracies actually do work. Seen from the inside (of any large, complicated system that has to deal with real people's lives instead of neat database columns), the amount of dull, everyday effort necessary to stave off entropy and keep the whole system functioning is massive. The fact that it all keeps working on a daily basis is amazing. The older you get, the more you notice that for all the constant sky-is-falling talk of societal collapse, the end never hurries up and arrives. From there, anyone who remotely understands probability ought be able to update to "actually our institutions are pretty competent at their core job of keeping society going."

by Eliezer 12y ago

api 12y ago

The competent bureaucracy part is really the lynchpin. Because bureaucracies are so incompetent, criminal syndicates just run circles around them. This is why the mafia state looks like the logical endpoint-- basically anarcho-syndicalism, and it's not a utopia. I think this is also why the most bureaucratic states -- the USSR and Communist China -- have been the first into this brave new future. The criminal mammals triumphed easily over those byzantine dinosaurs. The bottom line is that we have the scientific method and we have the discipline of engineering, and those together can reliably produce progress in the technical realm. We have no set of tools or techniques that reliably produces progress in the human realm. There are no institutions charged with understanding and healing us psychologically. The closest we come is to pop pills, and even that is poorly done -- diagnosis is incredibly unscientific and haphazard. I personally blame -- directly and indirectly -- the war on drugs. I am not one of those people who thinks that dosing everyone with LSD would create some kind of utopia. I've known too many drug users to think that. But beneath the pop culture misuse of those substances, there was some really visionary research into genuinely understanding and even changing deep human psychology at work back in those days. The ridiculous moral panic that followed had the effect of shutting down almost all of that research, even some of the non-psychedlics-related stuff, and leaving us with nothing but talk-talk psychotherapy and the ham fisted pill pushing approach. To this day attempting to delve deeply into human psychology in an active way immediately leads into realms since declared utterly taboo.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago
There is a point of view that Stalin and Mao were essentially criminal in a way that national leaders have not been since the 19th Century. So a Putin and whatever they have in China actually represents a modicum of progress. Russia's history at the level of empire is pretty nasty. We may never be able to get out of our own way. Who knows? Not a big pill fan ( although they've absolutely gotten better for people with real brain-chemistry problems ) but these days, it's easier than ever to identify bad sources of information and understand what's gone wrong. My parents' (Silent) generation had no idea why there was a Depression; mine actually has a few theories. The emphasis on LSD as "better living through chemistry" was as much about advertising-propaganda as anything else. Regardless of any War on Drugs, that went badly.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

That's what you got from it? I never managed to finish watching it (I love Star Trek too much to do that), and all I could see is that Abrams should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into molten lava.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

If we're talking futurists, I tend to take David Brin's trust in civilization as actually pretty well-evidenced. I mean, let me put it this way: most of the time, our so-called awful, so-called incompetent bureaucracies actually do work. Seen from the inside (of any large, complicated system that has to deal with real people's lives instead of neat database columns), the amount of dull, everyday effort necessary to stave off entropy and keep the whole system functioning is massive. The fact that it all keeps working on a daily basis is amazing. The older you get, the more you notice that for all the constant sky-is-falling talk of societal collapse, the end never hurries up and arrives. From there, anyone who remotely understands probability ought be able to update to "actually our institutions are pretty competent at their core job of keeping society going."