Regarding the first paragraphs where luddism is mentioned several times; Lord Byron, father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer, was one of the few on the House of Lords to defend the Luddites:
> But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times!—they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. [...] These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless, worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread.
There is a lot of proganda use of "luddites" as anti-tech when luddites main grief was regarding income and inequality.
> In the nineteenth century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren’t primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world.
I frankly expect "smashing them to bits" (or setting them on fire) to be the response in France when self-driving cargo trucks are introduced.
In America and a lot of other rich countries I can imagine a large workforce just sort of slowly dissipating as they are made redundant by the unstoppable force of technology, but at least a few places may strongly disagree about the unstoppability, and put it to the test.
Indeed, that is why I figured (on a trip to the country a few years ago) why self-service supermarkets checkouts haven't been rolled out in South Africa. That is a country of very high unemployment, so perhaps one could expect violence if overt technology to save labour costs were introduced.
self-service checkouts also work well in high trust societies. By themselves, they aren't good enough to prevent shrinkage enough that it is cheaper to use them.
Do you personally feel like smashing such a truck? Or would only ex truck drivers feel that way? Because if they are simply being faded out of existence (replacing retiring drivers with AI), there won't be any ex truckers to smash the trucks.
I don't personally, no; in fact I'm more likely to end up (accidentally?) contributing to the autonomous trucking revolution.
The faded-out version is what I think will happen in the USA. My point was that there are countries with much more confrontational labor movements (France in particular) and I think there will be truck smashers (burners, blockers, etc) there long before a majority of truckers become ex-truckers.
> Because if they are simply being faded out of existence (replacing retiring drivers with AI), there won't be any ex truckers to smash the trucks.
counterpoint:
> Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891779
I would have to say that 'derided by scholars' is a bit much. Most historians who are aware of the luddites in any detail would agree with this take. While Luddites were derided in the past since around the 1930s and works like Herbert Butterfield's the Whig interpretation of History Historians have been very wary of ideas like 'the march of history' and luddites are certainly presented within the scholarship as an example where views have changed away from that kind of narrative.
I quit a job right after college because of the scene in Office Space where they smash the printer with a bat in the field. That movie was kind of a tip of the hat to the Luddites.
He wasn't defending destroying the frames though, he was commiserating with the plight of the workers. In modern developed countries we have social security benefits, health care and such, to varying degrees depending on the country, to try and make sure people don't starve like that.
> He wasn't defending destroying the frames though
Agreed
> In modern developed countries we have social security benefits, health care and such, to varying degrees depending on the country, to try and make sure people don't starve like that.
And the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric. (Both China and Europe have a more stable society compared to the USA so not quite sure how the bet of this thread would have gone if evaluated over either Europe or China)
> the country with the highest GDP lacks anything other than the bare minimum social security and the article is very-USA centric.
As with many similar topics, the US actually spends a much higher amount on social welfare than people realize, more than most developed countries. As always, it just does so uniquely inefficiently, for reasons that are complicated and possibly related to our sclerotic politics.
Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all.
I look forward to a study showing that the US has really good paid leave compared to the rest of the world, so long as you denominate it in dollars not hours so that a marketing exec's six months "gardening leave" to prevent them stealing accounts outweighs Amazon warehouses with zero paid holiday...
> A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all.
Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the steelworker's unemployment check "wouldn't count" is if 100% of it was taxed away in the course of spending it.
Even your fevered conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense! What motivation do you imagine the paper author has? The paper[1] spends a substantial amount of time focusing on poor US outcomes, and its point is that current US policy isn't actually saving us any money relative to the rest of the OECD, so our outcomes aren't even trading off against net economic benefit (at least first-order). Suboptimal distribution of our social spending (as in your ridiculous examples) falls squarely into this category, and as such is a potential target for the paper's criticism.
I'm not really imagining any "motivation" beyond the intellectual exercise of proving America spends lots of money on things it actually doesn't spend money on, by squinting until the whole world is blurry.
Economists would like everything to be dollars, because that means you can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and get answers that work. Centuries of this not working haven't dissuaded them and I don't expect my rant to change that.
People who actually think we should care about population welfare do not try to squint at the dollar figures like this paper, you'll see them looking at policies qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and this way you don't need to draw a dozen charts to come to the apparently startling revelation that the US is a wealthy country in which money is being stolen from the poor to be wasted by the rich and this is a bad idea.
Sometimes this sort of work will be excused on the rationale that it will guide political decision making. This is an error perhaps everywhere and certainly in the US. A Republican is not going to read this paper and say "Aha! My policies were mistaken, I can actually have better impact by reducing tax breaks on the wealthy and directing the increased income to the poorest". They're going to glance at it, conclude it does not support the policies they wish to enact and so it's irrelevant.
It would be oddly specific, IMO, to claim that a country doesn't spend enough on (for example) social security. What people actually talk about is outcomes.
Interesting that a lot is spent on it, but not really much of a counterpoint since, as you say, it's done so 'uniquely inefficiently' that the outcome remains less.
This is not my experience at all. I feel like the vast majority of conversation on the topic I've read is about differential _political will_ for social welfare and other redistribution, usually due to perceived cultural failings.
Eg, "the US doesn't want to take care of its most vulnerable because of muh freedom"
The notion that the US has lots of _political will_ for infra, redistribution, homeless care, etc but simply has an incompetent government is anathema to polite-company discourse, usually leading to handwavy rationalizations about how "starving the beast" has caused the government to be incompetent.
I don't want to be a stickler, but Europe isn't a country. It is simply inaccurate to claim that "Europe have a more stable society compared to the USA." There are countries within Europe that has extreme wealth, and extreme poverty, while most countries in Europe are still far better developed than, say, most countries in Africa. With that said, the best developed countries in Europe do seem to have a better social security system than the USA, but at a high cost.
Why is it inaccurate to claim that? Sure, Europe is not one country but is made out of several countries, but so what? The USA is comprised out of states, some of them poorer than other; heck, even inside a single country there are richer and poorer regions/counties/lands/whatever, with money/labour flows and dynamics very similar to the international ones.
>money/labour flows and dynamics very similar to the international ones
It’s quite different in my experience. Workers can be employed in another state with almost no friction (with the possibility of a income tax declaration at hire) but it’s a lot more complicated to work internationally.
Well I'm a Brit, but I did write that with an eye to the fact that most people here are yank... er, I mean my esteemed colonial colleagues. Yes you have fewer and more threadbare social safety nets that in Europe, but a heck of a lot more than in China.
I am from Latin America though and have a 0.025 USD / year tuition on my current math undergrad education, public healthcare, and a more robust social security net overall.
Is the education, healthcare and social security you’re getting at the same level you’d get in the US?
I live outside the US and I can assure you the universal healthcare here doesn’t not provide the same level of care that even Medicaid does in the US. Sure if I had a routine broken arm there would be little difference, but if I had a serious cancer I’d be dead here.
Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of us on the curve by the early 2010s including in terms of jobs growth. There are pros and cons both ways.
> Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe
I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money.
EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So we can say the EU is keeping financial wizardry in check because if left to the US, no one would know what is going on.
So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad.
Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?
Not sure this is particularly true, it took the US 6 years from 2008 to recover all the jobs lost in the recession [0]. I would assume the bulk of those were low-skilled, manufacturing roles, the ones ever more at risk of being rendered obsolete by automation.
Well given that the biggest looser of 2008 crash were the poorest slice of society that almost could afford a house.
They were tricked into loans they couldn't afford. And with all blue-collar jobs being exported at alarming rate to Asia, i would say that the recovery after that recession doesn't ring true to me.
Sure economy and gdp are higher up, but its not because poor recovered. They were left behind.
Trump won presidency mainly because he turned to those people and promised them the good old time, where the town had its steelworks and everyone had quite life.
Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.
Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.
The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
One problem is fixable.
EDIT: And also, unless your brother has had a major health event, then the reality is he has no idea whether his insurance is any good.
Perhaps there's another way to put this. In an ineffective public healthcare system, people are denied treatment because the public body has determined it is not worth the cost. In an ineffective private healthcare system, people are denied treatment because they cannot afford to pay.
> Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.
Is it? I am fortunate enough to not be in this position, but I'm not sure how much I would care about the reasons why if I were.
And it will matter just as little if you can't afford to pay. The problem is, you seem to think you'd be able to - but that is statistically improbable. The cost of heart bypass surgery in the US (literally the highest in the world) as of 2019 was USD$123,000 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/189966/cost-of-a-heart-b....
That's not including the costs of follow up treatment, the increased cost of your insurance after an event which changes your risk category, or the byzantine system by which your job will be gently encouraged to let go of a "significant risk factor" because it will reduce the cost of them providing health insurance.
And in reality - people in socialized healthcare systems aren't denied life saving treatment. The availability of treatment is a priority list for "elective" surgery - that is, surgery not immediately necessary to save one's life. And this also does not affect the availability of private care - in Australia you always have the option to pay for private treatment, but controversy over waiting times exists precisely because the vast majority cannot afford to pay. And our costs are cheaper then US to start with if you do.
Hence the original question of how rich the OP's father was: because the reality is, if he wanted surgery right away he most likely could have got it. That he didn't is telling - because he actually couldn't afford it. Couldn't afford to fly to the US and have it done either. The US would have "denied" them treatment just as assuredly. And they did eventually get it where they were.
I want to be clear that I do not think the US system is a good one.
However, we should not be blind to limitations of a UK style system. There are also in-between alternatives, such as in Germany or to a lesser extent Japan.
Well my point was to not compare with rainbows and unicorns but how it works in the real world. Also I'm not saying the US has a better system.
But just to entertain this discussion (big mistake), the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, which means that useful price signals for how to allocate resources are missing. You'll perhaps say: "Well it shouldn't be like that". I agree but there is a reason it ended up like this.
My brother doesn't need a serious health event to know (for a reasonable definition of "know") because he has a brain and people to talk to with direct and indirect experience of the system.
>the problem is that you can't pay for surgery even if you're rich, ...
Yes you absolutely can, here in the UK I've had private health insurance from my employers for the last 23 years of my career. I'm not aware of any country that outlaws paying for private treatment.
This is the case for some provinces in Canada, and is used as a healthcare boogie man in the USA. At the same time, US politicians for a single payer refuse to state whether private supplemental insurance would be allowed. This mixes up debate between universal coverage and eliminating private insurance entirely.
>Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.
Not trying to be argumentative, but what is this based on? I’ve known people who received major heart surgeries without insurance and certainly didn’t have that kind of money.
How do you know that was because of their job market?
As far as I'm aware, that was because they printed tons of money. Money was printed in the EU too, but stopped much sooner - far too soon. As if people forgot about Keynes.
And actually I think you have some of this backwards. If you have a good social security net, you don't have to protect workers as much.
Likewise, health care is an investment in human capital. When people are ill, they can't produce.
Well the British recovery was almost certainly slowed by the introduction of austerity following the return of the Conservatives to power.
The European (i.e Eurozone/EU) recovery was knocked back by the raising of interest rates by the ECB in 2011.
And finally, the US did recover better because they put a lot more proportionally into stimulus (even though it wasn't enough, as later events showed).
I'm not sure that you can suggest that the flexible labour market was a cause of that (and indeed, one would have expected the UK to recover quicker than the rest of Europe then, as they have more flexible labour laws).
Nowhere near as flexible as the US though. The ability to hire and fire quickly without high costs has helped the USA recover from crises many times in the past as well. Employers in countries with high protections for workers are often reluctant to hire because it costs so much to slim down the work force once you employ them. It's not like the aftermath of 2008 was the first time this has ever been tested.
To be clear I'm not saying their system is superior, I think it goes too far. Poverty and what I consider labour exploitation are much more common over there. Also I think it's pretty clear now that significant increases in minimum wages don't seem to significantly increase unemployment, for example, but on severance pay particularly it's pretty clear this is a tradeoff.
The US did not "recover" from 2008. It retooled its economy even further towards precarious hiring, with predictably disastrous political consequences.
There are proven links between economic insecurity and the rise of political extremism, and it's manifestly incorrect to suggest that corporate economics operates in a moral and political vacuum with no political consequences.
The US system is truly the worst of a both worlds: a highly centralized, bureaucratic system, with a handful of winner capturing huge margins on the top. The level of regulation and corporatism means that free-market people should be as dissatisfied as those on the left.
This reminds me of the "lump-of-labor fallacy" fallacy [0]:
<< When economists invoke the "lump-of-labour fallacy" I have to wonder how much research they have done on the history of the fallacy claim and how much documentation they have looked at on opinions of people who are alleged to believe there is a fixed number of jobs in the economy. I have done extensive research on these matters and the answer seems to be 0 and 0. >>
Sure, over the long term 'lump of labor' is clearly wrong.
However, that does not mean that those displaced from work will not struggle to find new jobs. You're not going to turn most coal miners into coders. There's also no guarantee that you replace automated jobs with better jobs. Much of the service sector work that's been created in recent years has been low wage.
TLDR: Just because there will still be jobs, does not mean they will be good ones or that the workforce can easily shift to them.
I mean that's the definition of the term "luddite" in our current understand of English. The only thing that could be labeled as propaganda is the application of the term to that movement
Still, it's important to know the story for two reasons. One, to realize that the "luddites" according to current meaning of the word never existed. Second, to realize that the people historically called "luddites" were fighting for the same reason communist revolutions happened, for the same reason you have a good chunk of world's population hating the elites (and arguably for the same reason many prior historical revolutions happened) - and it has nothing to do with technology. It's all about economic insecurity, about being poor, suddenly becoming poor, or being afraid of suddenly becoming poor, all while seeing fruits of your labor accumulate in your economic superiors' laps, and then trickle upwards towards the even more wealthy.
Have you read Lovelace’s notes on her translation of Menebrea? They are perceptive and foreshadow much of modern computing, including hints this sort of computer could become a universal machine.
I understand your gripe. I myself thought Ada Lovelace was a brilliant thinker and mathematician but not a programmer and had little to nothing with even the early precursors of modern computing - at least compared to someone like Alan Turing or George Boole.
But she part of a long line of those special people with far seeing "eyes" and undeniable talent.
> Lovelace is a perfect mirror for our society: a vapid socialite with shallow understanding of the problems and a willingness to make grandiose claims without the ability to back them up.
Can you provide some more context to this? Given that I'm viewing everything related to heroism as problematic(and that includes Claude Shannon) I'd be curious to know more about the context of this statement.
EDIT: I have personally seen/witnessed and experienced plenty of environments where credit was given to those that brought solutions into writing rather than the ones who did all the work to bring things to fruition. So this is always of interest to me (it's also tightly related to the German saying: Wer schreibt, der bleibt/roughly: Only written proof counts)
The funny thing is that your low effort zinger is factually wrong. Something you'd learn in second year compsci:
>In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input to that machine from its own tape.
> Babbage was the first programmer seeing as he invented the first computer.
Einstein invented the theory that later went on to predict black holes yet Einstein himself didn't believe they were possible.
It's entirely possible to invent something and yet still underestimate the practical applications of it. Heck, the hacker culture and even a great many musical genres are based on people saying "this thing is cool, but what if we do this with it instead?"
> In short: if you are the type of person to think she had anything important to add to computer science you are the type of person to think Steve Jobs was anything but a snake oil salesman with a decent understanding of typography.
Lovelace and Jobs couldn't be more different. One was a socially revered individual who made millions selling other peoples work. And the other was mathematical genius who had a significant amount to contribute but society forced to work in the shadows because of her gender.
I'm not saying Lovelace didn't have her flaws. But dismissing her achievements as being Baggages is, ironically, akin to your complaint about Jobs.
> Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
> It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formula of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.
I believe Steve Jobs was a buisnessperson with a focus on design and Steve Wozniak provided most of quality engineering on the early years. I also like to bash Apple for a lot of stuff and I have never bought nor owned a single Apple product but recognize their early products as great and not snake oil.
So that is "anything but a snake oil salesman with a decent understanding of typography" and by modus tollens I am _not_ the "type of person to think she had anything important to add to computer science". Contradiction.
Also, it is no coincidence that the first programmer was working with the person building the first general computer (albeit neither digital nor electronic)
Thanks for providing details. I can think of many phrases for someone who writes careful notes about the promises of a newly-invented technology, but "vapid socialite" isn't one of them.
Is the claim here that what Ada Lovelace wrote is original to her and not Charles Babbage? To be specific: is the claim here that Lovelace saw in Babbage's invention something he himself failed to see and anticipate?
[please don't simply downvote. This is a sincere question. Do we know the answer?]
A comment I made on this when it was posted a few days ago:
I am surprised that this was regarded as a close decision. I guess a lot depends on wording, but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question, I wonder if they're just saying that to be diplomatic.
Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty, but one way to think about it, is that it can get so much worse than it currently is. And it seems like the predictions being wagered over were pointing to the "so much worse". I think the same holds for the environment, and for the proposed war between rich and poor.
I get the temptation to treat those as close, because there's tensions that you could imagine leading to some worst case scenarios. And so one might want to acknowledge the tension, and you want to put that acknowledgment into some sort of partial credit. But I think that way of thinking gets all confused and hair splitty, and comes from a place of thinking everything's a trick question, and not wanting to be perceived as overlooking nuances.
Anyhow, credit to all parties involved for formalizing their discussion and getting a bet out of it. I think those kinds of conversations are valuable, and I think it helps to get people thinking about what it takes for beliefs to be true over the long run.
>“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Great quote! Gradually and unknowingly you approach a tipping point until some factor pushes you over the edge like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back".
I believe Sale was/is broadly right. Some of Nassim Taleb's ideas also play into this viz. our inability to predict the future and the catastrophic effect of non-linear and "black swan" events. It is not "Technology" that is the problem but our stewardship of it. We simply are not taking a holistic system view of it which is absolutely necessary when our system (i.e. our planet) is "closed".
Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West and North America). I feel Sale is incredibly naive in thinking agrarian or subsistence based societies were the pinnacle of human comfort. Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in? A very reductive and simplistic way of thinking, ala 'Lets go back to the good ol days where the world made sense to me...' It's ridiculous.
It's not that simple. Sure "the good old days" wasn't that good, but that doesn't mean he was completely wrong.
>We have made untold advances in the medical sciences
Out of reach of a lot of humanity and for those that can access it it is not without risks (just look at the medical devices debacle in the US). It also isn't as good as we often seem to believe. For example the US is number 7 in Deaths by heart attack but it is still double the amount of deaths as number 1[0].
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Acording to EIA[1] "The share of U.S. total energy consumption that originated from fossil fuels has fallen from its peak of 94% in 1966 to 80% in 2018". 80% is not "divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels". It will be at least ten years before we see another 10% down in the US.
>we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Yet human rights, press freedom and economic freedom are all on a downswing in the US[2][3][4].
The US is just one country and we're talking about the future of humanity as a whole. Here in the UK we've eliminated more than half our carbon emissions from energy generation, and generally the US is lagging far behind a lot of other countries. Covid aside, economic and health improvement trends globally have been incredibly positive. Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. That doesn't look much like a collapse to me.
>Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty
That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above it. The world population grew by 1.6 billion between 1990 and 2010 according to the UN. So on one side we have the "one billion have been lifted out of extreme poverty" but on the other we have "1.6 billion more humans" with the greatest growth in poverty stricken countries like Nigeria. I don't know the numbers but I don't believe that the "about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty" is the whole truth since AFAIK the amount in extreme poverty have grown.
EDIT:
Looking up the numbers it hasn't "grown" but "extreme poverty" is seen as "statically less than 1.9 international dollars per day". Is it a lift to $3 or $30? $3 is still living in squalor and destitution if you ask most people in the West I'm sure. IMO extreme poverty haven't declined outside statistics.
This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.
You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.
It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.
I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).
Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.
And I think you’re underestimating the marginal utility of going from $1.90 to $3 — both would suck for someone with a baseline of Western expenses, but it is the difference between a literal hand-to-mouth life of subsistence farming in a shack, versus a family that all works being able to collectively afford to rent a basic concrete flat with terrible plumbing on an unpaved street (citation: my ex took me to Nairobi a few years ago, we met one of her local friends, the friend’s flat was about $800/year to rent, $800/year is the increased income from two people going from $1.9 to $3 per day).
You're right to call that out. There are one billion fewer people in extreme poverty now than there were then. A bit over 500 million compared to over 1.5 billion, even taking into account the increase in the worlds population. Most of this increase has been in Asia where hundreds of millions of people have risen into the urban middle class. Industrial wages in China have increased almost 10x in the last 2 decades, and industrial employment has ballooned.
The situation in Africa isn't so good, but has substantially improved. Of course the cost of this has been stagnant wage growth and anaemic employment in the developed world, as hundreds of thousands of people in China and South East Asia joined the global labour pool.
Regarding energy: the trend in PV is an exponential with a roughly 2.25 year doubling time, and while I make no claims about how long that exponential will continue for, that trend would reach about 10-17 TW by 2030 if continued.
I feel like equally as many people rejected Pinker because it violated their priors.
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other -- I guess my prior is that I am skeptical of broad narratives one way or the other and I think Pinker is prone to facile generalizations -- but most of the rebuttals I've seen to Pinker seem offended by the idea of progress, rather than taking his arguments seriously.
> The global poverty line has been on steady decline
That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
> If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
This seems surprising to me. What do you think is the best source for me to learn about this metric? I found a lot of info on the methodology behind $1.9/day [0] but couldn’t find much by looking for the $7.50/day mark and how it has changed over time.
I found this guardian article referencing $7.4/day [1] but the link they give to Peter Edward on an ethical poverty line doesn’t work. When I search for Edward’s concept I find papers from him [2] but they seem to reference $2/day.
Edit: I was able to find a gapminder analysis [3]. They break income into four groups, less than $2, less than $8, less than $32, more. The shift in poverty is still positive so I’m not sure what measure is being used to show 1B more under $7.5/day. This may be due to demographic trends where that group is growing faster. It is important to consider the overall proportion, not just absolute number, as well as the alternative of where they would have been (ie, a billion under $7.50 is better than a billion under $1.9).
But it’s hard to discuss without source data and methods.
The author addresses this question, along with how the UN has continually shifted the goal posts to reinforce the narrative that poverty has been reduced.
Thanks for replying, I’ll check out this book and learn about how it’s measuring poverty. The concept seems about inequality though, that is different (although important) than poverty.
This quote mixes the two concepts “ Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day.” and doesn’t provide context on whether the percent of the worlds population living in less than $5/day is better or worse than in 1960.
Right, the book overall is about global inequality, but he definitely addresses the defined poverty thresholds. These thresholds are used by the wealthier countries to claim an improvement in people’s lives, while they’re gaming the numbers to show a decrease in poverty.
Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
> Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
This is not the method described in the world bank web site. I don’t think the intent is to boil down to a single measure.
Tracking data globally is really challenging, so a consistent and meaningful measure is required to even have a hope of a perspective across countries. It’s useful in eradicating poverty to both measure progress or failure as well as to prioritize investment for areas of greatest need.
This also isn’t the only measure of poverty as there’s many others and there’s quite a bit of literature in global health on other measures as well.
That being said, I think there is room for improvement both in developing more useful metrics as well as improving accuracy of measures.
I think you have missed the point. Please see my response to "lamontcg" in this thread for some rebuttal.
Note that it is not just Sale (though of course he is quite extremist in his views) who has pointed to the deleterious effects of our Technology, Social systems etc. which may lead to "Collapse" of our Civilization; you also have Nassim Taleb, Jacques Ellul, Michael Ruppert espousing similar arguments in different contexts.
All that you mention are "local effects" having their own unforeseen long-term negatives, due to self-limiting feedback loops, for example (without making any moral/judgemental/ethical calls);
>global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades
Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
>untold advances in the medical sciences
True but the other side is also adapting itself to work around our efforts eg; "Superbugs". We also don't know what the long-term effects of genetic engineering would be. There is also the problem that advanced medicine leads to longer lives and thus more pressure on social safety nets and healthcare.
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Wishful thinking; we have a long way to go and given our propensity for short-term fixes we may very well run out of time.
>when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Awareness does not necessarily lead to Usage/Implementation.
The above is not to say that "good old days" were "very good" and we should blindly roll back our scientific and technological use. On the contrary just like we have realized that Atomic warfare is unlike anything ever experienced by mankind and hence has to be prevented and dealt with in a whole different way than we have ever handled our "differences", so should our use of Science/Technology towards the betterment of our Societies, Other Species, Natural Resources and ultimately the whole Planet.
> Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
Taken globally, and looking at purchasing power. Things have been massively improving for the very poorest. Because developing countries are doing just that, developing.
Inequality and poverty are two distinct things. Poverty is having lack of access to things you need. Inequality is becoming a big issue, and poverty is far from being solved. There certainly are opportunities to solve both problems. But the depth of poverty for a lot of humans has lessened the last few years, and that is undeniably a good thing.
I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.
Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.
If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.
> I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.
Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated.
I agree though that total nuclear war would be way worse than all the tribal wars in history. Although, interestingly, it seems like threat of nuclear war has prevented lots of wars. There have been no wars between major powers since nuclear wars. Maybe the closest was the Korean War, but China wasn’t a nuclear power back then.
Which non-modern tribal war ended in genocide or mass destruction?
AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.
Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.
The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).
There are multiple theories for what killed Neanderthals [0] but violence by Homo Sapiens seems the most supported by the fossil record. It would be hard for climate change and disease to wipe out an entire species, especially since there was interbreeding with homo sapiens so if a disease was so virulent to span the entire half of the world with Neanderthals it would affect homo sapiens as well.
I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.
I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.
This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].
There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).
Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in?
All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.
Oh and this
we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping).
Not now, not ever. Not possible.
Your own link puts the EROI of renewables in the same range as conventional oil (wind slightly better, PV slightly worse), and way better than shale or sand oil.
And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.
>All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society
I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.
For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.
As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.
Jacques Ellul also has a lot to say on the effects of Technology on Society.
I think the following factors, broadly speaking; will be our (i.e. Civilization as we know it today) downfall;
* Environmental Disaster as a consequence of rampant consumerism. The planet simply cannot sustain it. Our current "Renewables/Recyclables/Carbon Credit etc." policies are a joke. We have forgotten that our planet is a closed system with finite resources.
* Our "Baser" Instincts - We will always subvert any and all technological advances towards the pursuit of power, wealth, and greed and exclude "others" (i.e. those not belonging to our group) thus increasing the "inequalities" in our society.
* Non-linear "catastrophic" effects of many of our social systems - As Nassim Taleb points out in his books, many of our systems are non-linear in their effects and inherently fragile. Thus our ability to predict the long-term future is non-existent.
* The rise of mono-culture biological and social systems. Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units eg. Madagascar/Australia vs. Asia/Europe, small self-sustaining villages/kingdoms bartering amongst themselves vs. megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a "common currency". This makes the entire system fragile to local shocks.
* Adaptation and Evolution of other species against our measures towards controlling them eg. "Superbugs".
> Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units
No, it did not. Evolution does what it does, things that are good enough at surviving survive. For instance, multicellular organisms, and in particular large animals, are "megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a 'common currency'". Fragility is a more nuanced topic too, large coupled systems are vulnerable to internal problems, but they can also withstand external forces that would kill the equivalently populous "loosely coupled federation". All in all, evolution is probably not the best thing to draw lessons about organization from, because a) any system of organization you can think of is likely already effectively used in some organisms, somewhere, and b) evolution doesn't care about well-being of individual cells, but we care about the well-being of individual humans. That last constraint means we can't just do thing the way evolution does, which is throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
>but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question,
He did not think the currency issue was close at all, "Not much contest here" and granted that one unequivocally to Kelly.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
As for war between rich and poor, I think it should be judged compared to historical examples. Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no. Occupy came and went. The global economy recovered ok from the crisis in 2008 by historical standards. Advanced technology is already solving the pandemic for us, and we should be back to normal economically within a few years. Only 4 years ago a Billionair won a US election on a platform of cutting taxes for the rich, which he did. If there's a war going on between rich and poor, I'm not seeing it.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
And this is what scares me. From my point of view, we are already well into multiple major environmental disasters. I wonder how much worse it has to get before more people realise that.
> Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no.
I’d argue the drivers for the war are already here, but the only reason the war isn’t class based is the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them. They’ve successfully driven in dividing lines such as race and religion to distract us as the plunder to their hearts content.
I feel there's also an element of the divide of power between both parties being greater too. For example, the police force - which generally supports the status quo of the powerful - is far more able to control and suppress uprisings than in the past. This lends itself to providing a higher barrier to the poor pushing back, and thus necessitates those drivers (such as blatantly separate outcomes before the law, higher wealth inequality, etc.) to become stronger than in the past before conflict eventuates.
I mean it sort of relates to the 2nd amendment idea that private citizens at home with firearms can overthrow a tyrannical government if need be. When it was minutemen vs foot soldiers that was a drastically different equation to now when it's AR-15s vs a military-industrial apparatus with drone strikes, tanks and automated mass surveillance.
The way I see it the bet was about the statement that the drivers for the war were already there in 1995 and that it would actually materialize in the 25 years before 2020 - which it (IMHO obviously) has not. The struggle is still there, but a society-shattering escalation of the conflict has not happened (yet?).
The observation that "the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them" seems like a reasonable tactic for the society (or the rich) to prevent such a war from occurring, and this might plausibly succeed for a prolonged time in the future - as you say, "successfully driven in dividing lines" that are long-lasting. I see Kirkpatrick Sale's position as essentially claiming that the tensions are stronger than the societal bonds that favor status quo and centralization, that these tensions can cause a society to collapse - and the last 25 years have shown the opposite, that an increase in these tensions is still tolerable and does not lead to a collapse.
>He did not think the currency issue was close at all,
Thank you for catching that, I stand corrected with respect to the judging of the economy. It's interesting that there are commenters here taking issue with my point disputing that, when it turns out not even the judge, Bill Patrick, felt that question was close! People will really debate anything.
As you point out, Bill did, however, remark that the other questions were close, and asserted that Kirk was not merely close, but correct(!) on the other two questions. I am surprised about that, for reasons more or less along the lines you mention.
Yeah, the bet and judgment are both unreasonably favorable to Sale, to an absurd degree.
He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
The first part of the bet is a good one: the dollar -- the world's reserve currency -- becoming worthless is something that makes sense as a part of society collapsing, and more importantly, it's fairly objective to judge. The other two are far more ambiguous.
>He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
Yeah, this is exactly the thing I'm stuck on when I go over these responses. I feel like people really aren't grasping the difference in scale between (a) 2008 financial crisis was pretty bad and (b) dollar becoming "worthless".
People are talking as if those two things are close, or taking up the tone of cautionary finger wagging and saying "well, you know he wasn't too far off" and going off to say this or that about a given poverty statistic.
My best theory as to what's going on here is that people are just cannibalizing the question and using it as a digression into various world problems in ways that don't clearly connect back to the wording of the question.
You’re not taking into account that Kelly bet that it wouldn’t even be close to Sale’s vision. That massively evens the odds, because we aren’t so far from his vision, and most people would agree that the world (or the west at least) is much more going downwards than upwards
Would I rather prefer the society of 1995 or of 2020 ? That is a very simple question for me. I do not find it very close.
If I your were in India which was a deep socialist state in 1980s and 1995 just when the seeds of 1992 reforms were sowed, it was a complete shithole compared to the India of 2020 even with COVID.
Likewise China, I first went in 2001 and it's a different country in terms of most people's every day lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty into comfortable livelihoods and I personally know some of them. There's still a long way to go, but it's incredible how far it's already come.
Future is not for us to see and when it comes to predicting future of nations and societies we are especially pretty bad. Having said that sustainability is a first world problem. There is no point sustaining anything if 80% of your population is malnourished, availability of food per capita and clothes per capita is less than what is needed for sustenance of life where thousands of children die of polio and thousands more disabled.
I would rather live in an unsustainable India of 2020 than in sustainable India of 1985.
Debt is not really much of a problem for India as debt of gdp ratio is pretty low. Debt is not a problem in terms of sustainability either, when the proverbial shit hits the fan the country might go into massive recession but even in the worst of worst cases and even with terrible politicians at help recessions don't last very long. But the gain upto that point are all real. (India has over 50M more young and healthy people purely because the country has eliminated Polio and dozen other diseases that were common 40 years ago).
Rising population and rapid urbanization would require India to manage its forests, water and other resources better and India is not equipped to do so because of government control of key industries and bad policies. But we can hope things will change for better as a more competent government is at helm.
It was close, in 2008. It was frighteningly close. Not before or since, but yeah, I'll give them "close" on that one. ("Worse than 1930" was part of the criterion. We didn't come close to that in terms of the final outcome, but we were, I think, within a very few days of getting there.)
Here was one of the predictions in the words of one of the participants in the bet:
>“The first [measurement] would be an economic collapse. The dollar would be worthless, the yen would be worthless, the mark would be worthless—the dislocation we saw in the Depression of 1930, magnified many times over.
The dollar is not worthless and not close to worthless. There's no reasonable interpretation of that outcome, or of reality, where the dollar becoming worthless was "close" to an accurate prediction. I truly, honestly don't know how to reason with someone who is going to dispute that.
Another prediction was that we would be in an active global military conflict between rich and poor nations. Also not close.
Another prediction was "Africa, from the Sahara to South Africa, becomes unlivable."
If words actually mean things, none of these were close.
First: Those weren't the words of the bet, per the article. The actual words of the measure of collapse, per the article were:
> an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
Now, you sound like you have a source other than the article, and the article sounds like it might be a paraphrase. But it's kind of hard for me to judge without knowing what your source is.
But, using the wording from the article: Were we close to the first of those in 2008? When Lehman collapsed, if there hadn't been intervention the dominoes would have continued to fall. How far would they have continued to fall? Hard to tell now, but at the time it looked like they were just going to keep falling...
I don't know if this changes anything but I think the actual bet is described by the line
>I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe—a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won't even be close. I'll bet on my optimism.
It seems like in the actual terms of the bet Kelly paraphrases Sale. That is how I would read it sans an actual signed legal document. But then again I'm not a lawyer or anyone versed in gambling etiquette and protocol.
> I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to...a global currency collapse
Why would anyone take this bet? If you're right, then $1000 USD probably won't be worth very much after the "global currency collapse", so you'd basically be saying "I'll give you $1000 in 2020 if it's worth anything"
To Kevin Kelly, today, $1000 is barely worth anything anyway. So he also stands to gain nothing. (And, indeed, he didn't even want the money, but asked for it to be sent to charity.)
So ask yourself the question again. Why would two public intellectuals make a public bet, when neither stands to gain any monetary benefit from it? My goodness, it's a mystery.
Good point. I would guess, since it's all moot from the perspective of the person making those predictions, the whole exercise is just a theatric flourish, meant to communicate in a more or less performative way.
The other (perfectly plausible) answer is that the part of one's brain that believes the claim, and the part of ones' brain that believes in the power of bets and value of money that make bets interesting, are brain regions that haven't reconciled with one another.
Sale says (1) all of Africa south of the Sahara will be uninhabitable, and Kelly paraphrases that as (2) "environmental disasters of some significant size".
It would seem to be against the spirit and intention of the bet, in any plausible reading, to grant Sale a win on the grounds that (2) comes true but not (1), when (1) was attempting to paraphrase (2).
How can there even be ‘significant warfare between rich and poor’? Some kind of communist revolution? By definition the poor don’t have the resources to significantly attack the rich.
I really don't think that 2008 was ever close to anything like "Worse than 1930". For example Europe handled the financial crisis in an almost completely farcical way and didn't suffer anything close to the economic problems of 1930's America. There was never a moment where the US or any other important financial center was at risk of a real bank run of any significance.
IMO, it is the memes which will do it. Have you seen the one about capitalism teetering on an ivory tower, unable to to continue growing after moving away from extractivism and hopelessly trying to exert itself into a knowledge based economy? It's a real tickler.
I recently watched the documentary The Man Who Saved the World[0], about Stanislav Petrov, who one day in 1983 made the decision to ignore the early warning system computers telling him the USA had fired 5 missiles at the USSR.[1] It seems had he followed orders, a report to his superiors would have resulted in mass retaliation. The decision was in his hands.
In the movie, as well as a reenactment of the incident, the real Petrov visits the USA to speak at the UN, and visits Kevin Costner, his favourite actor. Costner asks him how many people would have died if not for his actions that day. You expect him to say millions. Petrov explains that everyone on the planet would've died.
They visit a disused missile silo in the USA and Petrov explains to a guard there that just one of those missiles had more explosive force than all the weapons used in WW2. According to this page[2], in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+.
It's very chilling, to say the least. It makes humans seem so very crazy, to create the possibility of that situation in the first place. Petrov explains emotionally to the guard that the Russian people wanted peace, and thought the USA wanted to attack them.
I can't help thinking about that, reading about Whether Tech Has Destroyed Society?
It's possible that had "AI" been in charge at that time, the world would have been destroyed. I don't think "AI" is a threat in itself but relying on technology to make life-or-death decisions without human application, feels extremely dangerous.
There are an awful lot of lines in the sand that have to be crossed prior to "oh, we just rig up nukes to this computer that checks for incoming missiles and fires back."
Using nuclear weapons is one of the most bureaucratic processes the government has by design. There are an awful lot of people in the loop that must work in concert to make something like that happen.
> Petrov explains emotionally to the guard that the Russian people wanted peace, and thought the USA wanted to attack them.
Good reason for us to personally think about (and investigate) whether our political/societal enemies really believe what we're told they believe about us. And I don't mean respond to a tweet, I mean have a real conversation.
Kinda feels like we're in an arms race where Facebook/Twitter are the arms dealers and have so much to gain from continued hostilities.
> in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+.
This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the damage each one of these devices can do why do you need so many.
Lets presume you're in fact a genocidal maniac (i didn't say the roleplaying would be difficult America) 1 bomb per enemy military installation and 1 bomb per population centre over 100k population friend, foe, own country included.
As others have said - the primary reason is that you need 1+ nukes to take out the other side's launch sites, and the other side knows this so they spread the siloses across their whole territory - so now you need 1+ nukes for every silo they have (or suspect they have), and they need 1+ nukes for every silo you have (or suspect you have), and this is a positive feedback loop.
Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
Which won't save you against their SSBN… Granted, they have much less warheads in submarines than in silos, but that's still far enough to obliterate every city above 100.000 inhabitant in your country.
Indeed, which is why submarines are the linchpin of modern MAD. But they weren't always present; the buildup of nuclear arsenal started when the options were limited to ICBMs and strategic bombers.
i don't see any real reasons, i bet lunch the main idea was to be able to credibly publish a bar graph showing your count larger than that of your enemies.
Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"
Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes, and you can very by stock exchange listings.
This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction.
"The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime,”...The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs... which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.
W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each ... the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years."
The US govt spends 7.3 trillion dollars per year. So that’s about 0.5% of spending. As a fraction of US GDP it’s about 0.17%.
It’s tiny. The claim I was arguing against was this:
> the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society
You can’t control society with 0.17% of US GDP!
Note also that most of that spending does not flow to arms contractors so the actual figure is less. The bulk is spend on the defense department and other government agencies.
We currently spend about $750 billion every year on the military, not counting the "black" budget. The stinking, offensive waste will soon exceed a trillion every year. That ain't all going to the VA hospitals. Besides, at this point every American who could have remembered a more normal way to live, is dead. The reptiles won. We literally can't stop spending vast sums killing brown people and preparing to kill more.
Thank you, am reading his Strategy in the Missile Age, which is surprisingly a very enjoyable read. Brodie was evidently a cultured guy and a good writer. There's quite a bit of history and philosophy, and the first 2 pages are entirely about Paradise Lost!
One can't be surprised that Rand Corporation, an entity created by the military-industrial complex to help it control journalists and politicians, would publish such a book.
That might explain the USA part of the arsenal, but it can't be the whole explanation because that would not work for USSR. And, since whatever was the reasons for USSR, it most likely also applied to USA as well, reducing the need to pin it all on commercial interests.
Stalin was (justifiably) frightened by nuclear weapons. Any time between August 1945 and mid-1949, Truman could have picked up the phone and said "we've decided to step back from the brink". Stalin would have eagerly agreed. Instead, USA developed vastly more destructive fusion weapons, and the first unofficial act of newly created CIA intentionally leaked designs to the Russians. That's why their first functional weapon was a carbon copy of early American weapons.
Truman would later regret creating one of the several monsters that ate his soul [0], but he was clearly out of his depth from the moment that he learned of atomic weapons. None of the top military brass wanted to use the atomic bomb. [1] The reptiles knew what they were doing in 1944 when they replaced Henry Wallace with an easily controlled Missouri hick. Truman himself didn't know their precise plans, but he had to know he wasn't the man who should've gotten that job. He let ambition overrule propriety.
Of course, Truman isn't the only human to blame for the mess we've been in for 75 years. Most of the scientists who developed the bomb knew better than he did what the result would be. "MAD" is not an acceptable condition for human life. We endure it because some reptiles desired further enrichment. No good intentions paved their way to their current location.
Throughout our existence, USA's projections of the worst possible intentions on the part of other nations have driven our deepest depravities, to a far greater extent than the real situations we've faced.
Maybe because silos are an important target for the attacking side? So you want to have many in order to reduce the risk of being left without arms in case your enemy attacks first?
Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks.
Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946.
People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational.
And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.
> And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD.
But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone would have cared about the cost?
Even if it is, say, twice the cost to shoot down a missile as to launch it the US can afford more than twice the cost the Russians and much more than North Korea.
I think limited missile defence is sensible for dealing with accidental firings or countries with tiny stockpiles like North Korea.
But it isn’t 2x. Try 10-20x. Modern MIRV’s can have ten warheads, and it is also substantially more difficult to target a moving missile than to hit a launch silo. Tests so far have not been anywhere near the accuracy needed to confidently guarantee you could shoot down a first strength. You need 100% performance, they’re getting less than 50%, for ideal conditions.
The economics just don’t work with a 20x cost gap. What’s more the attempt to built a unilateral defence system would encourage a massive arms race.
Not necessarily. I think the nuclear winder risk for an asymmetrical strike is largely overblown. If a country successfully take the capability of the other to respond, they could see few repercussions.
The best way to destroy an enemy nuclear weapon is by hitting it with one of your nuclear weapons. Add on top of that your other strategic targets and a reserve, and the fact that their calculation is the same as yours, and you can see where this is going.
The US in fact did have a serious problem with nuclear warplan targeting during the Cold War - there was essentially never a reason you could give to take a target off the list, so the plan for a good deal of time was essentially something like "hit every single conceivable target several times" (to account for failed bombs or losses en route).
It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets".
EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.
There is even a case to be made that too much nuclear disarmament could create a less stable situation, because arsenals might deplete enough that an exchange might seem survivable.
Of course they would be. Nuking the USSR would involve resigning yourself to the murder of hundreds of millions. It also means accepting that the USSR will do whatever they can to retaliate with nukes.
In that context, you are already so resigned at killing others over your own safety, that hitting a few other countries is a no-brainer.
The doctrine was M.A.D. .. or mutually assured distruction[1].
I believe the (arguably crazy) idea was that the weapons wouldn't ever be used. The fact that each nuclear superpower has a similar amount of weapons assured that the equalibrium would stop the worst from happening.
That page says "Although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the MAD doctrine continues to be applied."
I get the feeling that's not generally known. Isn't that kind of extremely weird? I've never seen discussion of it on HN, for example, or maybe what to do about the prospect of living indefinitely under the threat of MAD. With more countries with nuclear weapons all the time. Well, you read here about people not wanting to have kids because of global warming, but not because of that. Is it just too big a problem to even think about?
It's not generally known, particularly by the generation that was born at the tail end of the Cold War (like myself), and by people born later. We grew up without the fear of that particular flavor of Armageddon.
But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. It also gives rise to certain paradoxes - like any attempt to create a better defense against nuclear weapons is also the biggest threat to mankind, because it risks breaking the MAD doctrine and thus inviting a nuclear first strike. For MAD to work, countries in their equivalence class (e.g. US, Russia and China are one class) need to be in lock step with their capabilities, so that no one can be struck without the attacker risking annihilation.
> But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful.
There seems a kind of anthropic principle here - it seems successful, but we wouldn't be here talking about it if it had gone terribly wrong, which has come very close to happening more than a few times, apparently.
The risk of that is >0, but the cost is...infinite. That doesn't seem obviously worth the gamble, to say the least.
I think it's less of an anthropic principle, and more the realization that it's the only stable equilibrium available once nuclear weapons become available.
Sorry, by "here" I didn't mean in the sentence I quoted, just in this field.
I just don't buy the apparent absolute certainty it won't kill everyone. Then anything else would have been preferable to the "stable equilibrium" we were assured was necessary. But we won't be around to talk about it. That eternally living under MAD is 'the only way' seems to me more like a religious belief than a realization of a fact. A uniquely insane/evil one, however you want to describe killing everyone on Earth. Perhaps it's not considered so evil or insane to do that if you meant well?
I'd say it's generally known - everyone is aware of nukes and what nukes can do. The difference is they're considered much more of a known quantity these days: you can't use them, you don't use them, and you also can't fight a direct war with any country which has them. The idea of the "mad Russians" launching against the US has worn out, but watch what happens when you talk about Iran or North Korea having them.
What's more worrying is that most nuclear policy in the US was centered around condensing launch authority solely with the President of the United States - there's a heck of a lot of assumption that that person is a sane, rational elder statesmen type.
That MAD continues didn't seem that known on HN earlier today. (I didn't know it either.) When I wrote the GP comment, it had half a dozen sibling comments from different people, now all deleted, talking about MAD in the past tense, as a crazy thing that was believed in long ago.
the problem with MAD is it falls apart when you cross religious extremism with nuclear weapons. It's not rational to douse school girls in acid on their way to school but religious extremism turns it into reality.
The AD - Assured Destruction - part works just fine. Irrational actors don't assemble world ending arsenals (after all if you think you should rush to your death, why not launch when you have 1, given that you're most likely in a "use it or lose it" situation).
Even in your cited example - the people who do this sort of thing attack those who can't fight back. They are never in any danger of being immediately shot dead after.
While yes suicide bombers exist, this is more a question of arms proliferation and control then an indictment of the ineffectiveness of MAD or the general strategic reality of nuclear weapons. And the situations under which non-state actors have them are still a policing rather then political concern - North Korea or Iran leaking a bomb to another entity that then detonates it is the surest possible way that both those states will be dismantled by NATO, since MAD does apply there: proof that you represent an uncontrolled risk of nuclear attack invites conventional or nuclear annihilation, regardless of the mechanism. Civilian casualties go out the window when you have already suffered some.
The obvious - but incredibly difficult to implement - solution is to achieve world peace, through mutual respect, tolerance and trust amongst nations. A lot of people seem to have abandoned that as a goal, in favor of being contented with a perpetual uneasy standoff.
It's a tough goal - perhaps the hardest there has ever been - but it's not impossible.
I would consider world peace "through mutual respect, tolerance and trust amongst nations" as inherently impossible for homo sapiens as we are.
A world peace might be plausible through a single world government that can enforce a world peace and resolution of diverging interests and conflicts without war, i.e. with some "policing" mechanism instead of relying on people not escalating through sheer goodwill. That is possible - world peace based on the expectation that any potential violators of that world peace would face retaliation and lose in that conflict. Si vis pacem, para bellum - that can work, if it can be established.
Or, alternatively, a world peace through mutual respect and tolerance may happen if at some time in future our civilization consists of substantially altered individuals - genetic alteration, chemical brainwashing, computerized circuits in brains, something that changes the way our motivation works on a fundamental level - but not for people as we are.
Otherwise, as long as any people and groups of people have unmet desires (not merely needs) and diverging interests, conflicts will happen, and as long as violence is a practical option for achieving goals (i.e. there's not a threat/expectation of successful powerful resistance to that violence) it will be considered and used if mere threat of that violence isn't sufficient.
The problem with MAD is that it only works with logical people. Once you include religious fanatics then they don't fear the destruction, in their warped sense of reality their death just takes them to the next spiritual level (or whatever claptrap they preach). So they dont care if they are destroyed as long as their enemy is destroyed also. Because their enemy is some sort of heretic/unbeliever they will not be saved, whilst their people will all live happily in heaven because their god excuses genocide if you do it in HIS name.
MAD keeps India from eliminating Pakistan, or China from eliminating India, or any of the Arab states vs Israel, or NK vs USA. MAD is a core doctrine of most countries' defences even today. It's the reason Iran wants to obtain them ASAP.
For both sides, the most important job for the nukes was counter-force, that is, blowing up the enemy nukes. Both sides understood this, so they deployed their own nukes so sparsely that you generally need one to take out one, and since they still expected to lose a lot of them, they built spares.
to me, it was the invention of SLBMs that truly but the concept of a first-strike advantage to bed. With subs under the water in the world's oceans armed with dozes of missiles each armed with multiple warheads the concept of taking out your enemy before they can retaliate is gone.
IMO, if MAD fails it will be an accident that triggers a run away chain of events leading to nuclear war. We've come close many many times to total nuclear war due to miscommunication, simulation errors, procedural errors, etc.
It'll kill the whole world - eventually, but for an effective first or second strike you want to take out the enemy as fast as possible, instead of wait for the fallout and climate change to take over.
Mind you, a single nuke on e.g. DC or NY would cripple the country already, especially if there's minimal warning.
Russia invented the largest nuke ever and are still innovating in the space with the new Satan 2 missile that can pretty much wipe out the eastern seaboard. So America isn't the only homicidal maniac. Putin gives us a run for our money.
I’m reminded of a long bet made a number of years ago between Joseph Romm and Greg Blencoe that 1% of car sales in the US would be Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles by 2015.
I’d done a report on this in college and completely forgot about it, probably because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are near impossible to find on the consumer market.
So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very short post to his blog saying it happened. [1]
What’s most interesting to me is that the blog has since disappeared. At the time these things seemed like such a big deal, but a few years on and it just vanished. It’s like the bet never took place and the advocacy for Hydrogen wasn’t a big deal. It was kind of shocking to me how ephemeral it is, in spite of “nothing ever disappearing from the internet”
I typically avoid the streisand effect by not reacting when something has attention, and then subsequently removing all references to it months later. Nobody important/loud enough notices.
In line with David Mitchell. How will you ensure that your not doing anything noteworthy don't become noteworthy? As him dressing unnoteworthy would itself be noteworthy...
Only because natural gas is so damn cheap it almost isn't worth selling.
If you're a natural gas producer, it makes a lot of sense to pump hydrogen fuel. Ignorant* people think it is green, so it is an easy sell to the populous. Since it is actually made from NatGas, the success of hydrogen would be a significant boon to a substance that has been teetering on the edge of being industrial waste for years.
In theory you can capture the carbon at the point source. It would be far cheaper than capturing it directly from the air.
Although I think turning natural gas into hydrogen is wasteful it still proves that current usage of fossil fuels is not sustainable by showing that a "sort of" sustainable way of using fossil fuels exists.
Are you sure? It’s 5 years after that Million ‘Murican Hydrogen bet was lost, and we’re still 2 full orders of magnitude away. (In spite of massive subsidies for fuel cell in California.)
At least 8,890 FCEVs are on the road today, a far cry from the 53,000 the California Fuel Cell Partnership projected by the end of 2017. "I don't see a lot of automaker interest in hydrogen," DeShazo argued. "Most automakers are betting on battery electric vehicles for the passenger market and delivery trucks."Dec 12, 2020
Where from? I've seen a couple of big government grants announced (which honestly smell more of pork than genuine technology) but nothing approaching a useful prototype that's in any way competitive with battery EVs.
> Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it.
> But Sale had read it—and rejected it.
> “I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.”
> Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short. Sale says he is seeking some sort of appellate relief, if only by public opinion, when in fact the rules included no such reconsideration. Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,” he says.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sale fellow sounds like an asshole.
As a counterpoint, I've seen lots of people become more accepting because of the way the internet connects people. If you lived in a rural place before, you likely had very little interaction with minority groups outside of how they were portrayed in media. Now it's possible to interact with all kinds of people and recognize them as people instead of stereotypes.
I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major communication breakdowns, but I think on the whole it's a positive development.
Well on more anonymous platforms like HN or Reddit it probably doesn't happen that much, but on youtube, instagram, twitter, etc usually identity is no secret.
This is just more of my opinion, but generally the people I know that get caught up in bad echo chambers would have done so without the internet. The Alex Jones fans are just a new iteration of Rush Limbaugh fans, albeit more extreme. I think it's possible for otherwise reasonable people to get caught up in something like that, but they can also get out with time and more life experience.
One consumes information online, that information causes introspection and a better perspective of one's identity.
Usually it's not one specific event but a bombardment of information that over time, hopefully gives someone more perspective and their place in the world.
On the other hand, it closes some people off and causes the echo chamber. Cuts both ways.
I don't know. I can see it going both ways, but I think that modern technology has reduced introspection for many people. In the news today, it's all about sound bites and hyperbolic headlines. I thing the intellectual attributes of news sources has declined. I thought I saw a study or thread on HN supporting the claim, but now I can't find it.
News is very polarizing by design. Just like with social media, news profits more off of driving polarization. So they frame everything to drive traffic and viewers.
Can you share some articles or studies that demonstrate the increasing openness? (I hope it’s true that it cuts both ways, but would like to see more data/research).
This reads like a technocrat's hopeful vision of the Internet in the early 1990s. Sure, in theory it's true, but we all know in reality that that's not how the majority of humanity is using the Internet.
I can't get people I am close with to even consider engaging in conversations about firmly held beliefs they have if I even remotely present myself as possibly holding a different opinion.
Understand that this is the norm. And understand that when you present differing opinions without being asked, you’re acting selfishly — you’re not doing it because you care about them, you’re doing it for yourself.
Ultimately it depends what you want out of your personal relationships. I’ve found people who are willing to talk. But I haven’t found people who genuinely change their mind about deeply held beliefs without a lot of patient — emphasis on patient — conversations over a long period of time. And sometimes I’m the one who changes their mind.
So I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied if you feel you must be able to change your group’s minds about social issues. A group is its own form of entity. If you don’t identify with your group, find another one. They exist. But if you don’t identify with your associates, that’s a hard problem which won’t go away.
It helps to accept that you care about them more than what they believe, and leave it at that.
That's not what I am saying at all. I mean for the sake of conversation and discussion, asking to even explain a belief, for understanding. Sometimes even the question is seemed as a threat. I didn't say I want to change anyone's mind. Wanting to have a discussion about important topics with loved ones isn't an instant trip down selfishness lane. I see what you are saying, but you jumped the gun a little bit.
Most people you'd disagree with generally have a point, if you get past the quick-release talking points. If one tries to have a genuine conversation, it might be surprising to many how much common ground can be found.
I think I get your question now. Honestly, there is an art to it, and you can't always just come out and ask. It exposes that you care more about the information than you do about the person. Maybe bring it up gently the next time it comes up in context. Or, when it's just the two of you, ask if you can bring up a potentially sensitive question with no judgement involved, just to learn.
It's not really anything new: Most people generally don't want to entertain ideas highly contrary to their own. Enshrined in the the old adage that you should never discuss religion or politics in some circumstances. Thanksgiving dinners have been getting ruined for decades by it. The rate of that happening has very likely increased though.
Wanting to have a discussion about important topics with loved ones isn't an instant trip down selfishness lane.
Are you sure?
I don’t know. It helped me to view it as “yes, this is selfish. They’re more important to me than the topic.”
The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Another way to phrase it: why care so much what they think? If they don’t explain themselves, then they probably don’t care whether you agree.
To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
> The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Perhaps. But the interpretation is still not immediately "selfishness" for me. You are not there to please them and make them feel good. But how does that immediately become "selfish"?
> To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Yes, that is a good introspective question, that one maybe should ask oneself.
However, if anything that could somehow be interpreted as "wanting something for oneself" is considered selfish, then we can shut down all our media right now and stop talking to everyone else. You can always claim "You did this or that conversation only to feel good about yourself! So Selfish!"
So I am asking: What is your definition of selfishness?
> Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
You care about the topic, they don't want to talk about it for whatever reason. You are trying to get them to do something they don't like, because _you_ like it.
But that is an assumption right there. Perhaps it is simply an important topic in the context of the moment. It doesn't have to mean one personally likes the topic. There can be a necessity, that one has to discuss this topic.
Same. I want to start a club of people like us. At a library with a coffee shop and bar included. Bunch of us philosophical peeps chillin and talking shit but nobody gets mad. I would love such a paradise.
I don't get how 4chan related to the conversation. My main desire is to find people that are truth seekers. Question what we know and investigate. I don't find that curiousity in most people. How that is related to 4chan is lost on me.
I think the poster means the anonymous, no upvote aspect. Seriously, I’ve been on quite a few different styles of message board and discussion quality is noticeably better when you can’t get any other queues about how “right” an post is except for its content. Depending on the subject, some of the not-pol/b boards can actually be quite nice.
I'm reminded of the stereotypical personality alignment matrix common to role playing games, with lawful and chatic matched to good and evil. Each of to need to strive to sit in the middle, true neutral. In this position one can recognize echo chambers are all around us and one must hop from to the another to gain understanding and sympathy. This would be easy if we mandated the teaching of cognitive and logical fallacies. However, I fear that the powers that be (wealthy, political leaders, and attention grabbing algorithms) intentionally use these against us. Sophistry has long been a weapon of politicians against the plebs and each other. I am at loss on how all of us can transition to a more enlightened state, a state where we don't build walls between us, but recognise the selfishishness and primal fears that lead us against each other. We all suffer from cognitive limitations and fallacies and none of us really know what is the 'correct' opinion on anything. I think if we can agree we all share the same limited stupidity that's the right step go forward.
We have to make choices, often complicated ones, so just the concept of recognizing our limitations doesn't really help. Or rather it does not change the basic fact that we have to live artfully and figure things out with very little information to guide us even in the best of cases. True neutral is not far from evil in a highly contrasted world where work has to be done.
I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all. Facebook et al are still largely echo chambers, where we see what we have cultivated ourselves to see. Sure, recommendation algorithms show us external things once in a while, but by and large you can cultivate what you see on social media.
The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks. How you "can't avoid politics, because everything is political". Ravelry, which is a crocheting website, went mad with us-vs-them discussions. Why?
The fault is mainly with legacy media, because they had the credibility and prestige of their history, plus the consistency of their output (daily, weekly, whatever), which they used to spoonfeed poison to large parts of society. How others are "unlike us", and that "they're evil", and oh by the way, "vote for our candidate" who is the some storybook hero we need.
The "two-minutes-of-hate" has come largely from legacy media, and they are responsible for the schisms present right now.
>I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all.
>The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks.
Everything you've outlined above is entirely the result of technology and the incentive structures that have been pursued in its "advancement".
Instead of blaming technology, why can't we blame capitalism? Capitalism obviously incentives both parties (big tech and the media) to compete for eyeballs and drive content to the bottom to make money. I don't think anybody is so nieve enough to believe that these companies have society's interests at heart. Their very existence is to make money.
Tech didn't force anyone or any org to act maliciously. Either one chooses to uphold their own values every day, or they sway with the wind regardless of consequence, but either way the choice was theirs. If it was so easy to convince the so-called fourth estate to drop truth-seeking and fair coverage for clickbait, then it wasn't a core value to them in the first place.
I think in many ways yes. A local island that now has been turned into residential units, still has some old buildings from the 1920s. Including a dance hall. Its abandoned now. But the scale and grandeur of the place, has played on my imagination. What it was like to be in there with a thousand other people on a weekend just out dancing. No internet, or TV. I've also seen some street photos from NY from that time period. Everyone looks so trim and upright, well dressed and civilized. Its like tech added 30-50 lbs of fat on the average person. And replaced actual social interaction, with poor substitutes of facebook, twitter, youtube and TV.
That is what happens when you see reality instead of carefully selected cheery lies.
You didn't see the mentally disabled in the basement, the arrest of wounded veterans under "ugly" laws justified by maternal impression theory an utterly moronic misreading of biblical miracles as implying what the mother sees influnces form of the child. Except there is a major derth of livestock how to's in the bible and a lot more focus on miracles.
It may be the case that socio-economic issues have worsened those things, not technology. And that we are not fully leveraging technology in order to improve lives.
I don't know if thats alway the case. People used to have liaisons, read books, play music together, go to church, play card games, garden, ride horses, and so on. Often surrounded by friend and family. Just seems like the quality of the average moment was better back then. The experience more authentic and often more social and more dangerous.
For example if you liked to go out and play poker in a local bar in the 1920s. It Required actual poker skills,
but also good banter, and had an element of danger to it. Seems like your brain neurones would be firing, just to keep up with the banter at the table while you downed whiskey trying not to lose too much money.
Now so many people stay at home, watch some TV or watch some porn, fall asleep and go to work the next day. And things are safe, virtual and fake.
Technology has made movies possible, I love movies. But I value the experience of reading a book differently. Its a much richer and deeper experience. And technology made it very cheap now with things like kindles. But still I think there's been a decline in the amount of people reading books. Even though I think society would be enriched from more people reading books. Its now the average person has easier lazier entertainment to occupy them.
There are plenty of people having real experiences today. In absolute numbers, there are probably more of them than in the period you describe, since the population has ballooned. The life you want is out there.
Plus you are ignoring all the bad parts. Don't want to be a stay at home wife and be bored out of your mind? Too bad. Wrong tone or sexual preference? Whoops. Don't want to get black lung or mind numbing-factory work? Better luck next time.
There is a selection bias at work. Only notable people are portrayed in media, for the most part. But the past is filled with atrociously empty and broken lives.
The anxiety from modernity hits different today. We are bombarded with the most realistic forms of imagery ever in human history. What was once a black and white picture in a magazine is now a video in HD.
50-60 years ago you weren't constantly bombarding yourself with people who have more than you. Today, people go on instagram and see the rich living the dreams they'll never be able to attain, despite being told they could do anything in school and by their parents. People watch porn which shows insanely attractive people doing any fantasy imaginable, with no effort on their part.
Their regular lives will never compare with that, they get depressed and anxious seeing how they are nowhere near these people. And then this leads to anger and eventually populism, and it'll eventually lead to war.
There can't be war because the next World War would most likely make us extinct. We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
That's a pretty confident position to take. Really war could be all around us. If climate change continues unabated, large swaths of the earth will no longer be able to produce food. Hot temperatures will cause mass migration (we're already seeing this, see Syria). Billions of people, unable to be fed - desperation - war.
> We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
People in the US literally refuse to wear masks to protect others around them. Do you really think this is possible?
I am very confident in my views because I'm going all-in on them with all my time and my money. That means making sure that I have the best position possible on the subject, which means lots of reading and research. If I was not certain about this path, I would just have fun and live a simply free life. But I will work towards this instead.
But yes, large positive paradigm shifts are possible. They are also necessary, and we must begin the work. To decentralize production of goods/services as much as possible, to make food and energy plentiful and free for all, etc. We will accomplish these goals and more.
> Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. [...]
> “Oh, boy,” Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. “This is easy money.”
> For the men involved, the bet’s outcome would be a personal validation—or repudiation—of their lifelong quests.
Neither man comes through looking good. Kelly seems to have wanted to kick a weak adversary.
Kelly did win, literally (according to the bet/judge) and conceptually:
> [Sales's] book is called The Collapse of 2020—and yes, the neo-Luddite’s latest work is available on Kindle. In fact, Sale has made compromises with technology. He recently moved back to Ithaca with his wife to be near family. He does have a computer, as well as a printer, a land line, a stove, two televisions, and four radios. He draws the line at microwaves and smartphones. Despite believing that social media has “a visible deleterious effect,” he has a public Facebook page
It was an interesting read anyways. The answer should be obvious...
"The very fact that his book exists, he wrote, is the equivalent of tossing his cards face down on the table: If society had in fact collapsed, there would be no books, self-published or not. “So let me just admit that I was wrong,” he wrote. “But ... not by much. And not totally.” "
I agree that Sale should have paid the bet and claimed that he was a bit "early" about when the destruction would come.
In 1995 a person could have bought a US Treasury zero coupon bond for about $130 maturing in 25 years for . . . $1000. No other purchase would have been necessary to cover the bet. Relatively cheap insurance, I think.
That's such a silly way of measuring the answer. Books existed in the Middle Ages (e.g. Dark Ages, yes people will say we don't call it that anymore but still). Tech could have regressed our society in manifold ways and destroyed and rotted away many many institutions and there would still be books.
They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
> They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
They're not in the science game. They're in the selling content game. In that, all three (let's not forget the person writing the article) appear to have succeeded, gaining exposure (and payment for the article writer) thanks to the bet, regardless of rigor.
One could perhaps forsee more books and articles forthcoming as a result of this bet?
Orthagonal and nitpick. I couldn't parse the "e.g., Dark Ages" part until I realised what you may have meant is "i.e., Dark Ages". I read "e.g.," as "for example" and "i.e.," as "that is".
The "Dark Ages" usually refers to a subset of the Middle Ages, the earlier part, so "for example" worked for me and I only stopped and realized that ie was meant after reading your comment.
This is one of those stupid things about English that make life for pupils harder for no reason. In most languages the abbreviation is straightforward and based on the actual language. (Also spelling bees don't exist in most other places). Entire classes of error possibilities are just made up for no good reason in English.
As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part.
I'm curious what distinction you are reading into it. I'm sure that as a native learner I was more apt to just take mental shortcuts rather than resolve these ambiguities.
> As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part.
As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF?
“That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz.) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-derived abbreviation) leads into an example intended to illustrate the broader category which precedes it.
They are not equivalent, nor are they “skip over phrases”.
No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
> Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
Sure, but descriptivism isn't “words lose all distinct meaning if occasionally someone mixes them up” or nothing would mean anything.
> No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used? People don't know which is which, they often don't car,e and they pick one.
Prescriptivist "what should eg mean in this sentence?"
Descriptivist "what does Bob mean when he uses eg in this sentence?"
> Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used?
No, it's not.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “that is” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “for example”.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “for example” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “that is”.
Neither group (not the one with the dominant understanding nor the one with the minority understanding) uses the terms interchangeably, they both use them with distinct meanings.
The existence of some confusion of meaning and minority usages resulting from that does not eliminate all distinction in meaning, even from a descriptivist standpoint.
It's true that “X means Y” is usually a simplification of a distribution to a modal value, but that's also widely recognized and, from a descriptivist standpoint, already incorporated into the meaning of the phrase.
Where does using one over the other cause an actual change in information though? Not just sticking out as the wrong one if you know the proper distinction, but actually conveying different information? The comparison that follows is the important part, the abbreviation is a part of grammatical dressing that provides some flow and framing.
Always, if used correctly. i.e. = in other words, e.g. = for example. Surely, as a native English speaker, you can see the huge difference? One is definitive, the other is presenting one or more examples.
How so? Because I'm not going to assume that you are calling HackerNews the same as technology in any reading of the sentence, purely from context. So what other shifted meaning can be had from the swap?
I assumed "for example" follows a collection/set as opposed to "that is" which is a 1-1 mapping. Sibling comment clarified it for me on why "for example" makes sense in this context.
I'm pretty sure you could destroy a lot of the fabric of modern society and still have a publishing house and a printing company able to produce a few thousand copies of a book.
Thousands of copies of a book is something quaint in our great grandfather's days. The distribution mechanisms are what make it eyeroll worthy.
Really whenever you hear anyone talk about "the fabric of society" they are full of shit. Just like how theater, jazz, rock music, heavy metal, rap, interracial marriage, women voting, and gay marriage destroyed the fabric of society. Those ample precedents of being complete bullshit aside it is a stack of abstractions with no measures. It sounds like it means something but it doesn't - it is just mouth noises to manipulate your emotions.
The stakes were so extreme that it _is_ pretty easy to answer. Sure, there have been economic cycles, but the bet was whether the dollar is _worthless_ -- we are so far from it the Fed still can't reliably meet their inflation targets. A rebellion of the rich against the monied? Surely you're joking. And while global warming marches on, the 'significant number of environmental collapses' haven't happened, and we know we aren't close because I'm not sure even one environment has collapsed (damage ain't the same as collapse, folks).
It wasn't close. It isn't hard to tell that it wasn't close. Let's not give this doomsayer more credit than he's earned -- and he was completely wrong.
>but Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy,
It is generally men who talk about how great the subsistence economy was. For women, a subsistence economy was hellish. There was no reliable birth control, maternal/infant mortality was high, everything depended on physical strength which gave men an advantage due to their larger size and higher musculature on average, and the system demanded lots of children, so women spent much of their lives pregnant and/or caring for small children. Many of these cultures (see Papua New Guinea for example) have huge amounts of violence against women.
Without ending up on an FBI watchlist, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Sales and "Uncle Ted" were on the right track about technology inevitably leading toward psychic isolation and environmental devastation, that corporations are finding ways to turn each human interaction into a commodity, that we're well beyond carrying capacity for the planet and have likely screwed up the ecology for the next million years or so. Just suppose ...
What solution do we have? I'm pretty sure that even before homo sapiens came on the scene, Neanderthals and even earlier versions of humanity thought about labor-saving devices. They dreamed of not dying from little infections, of not dying in childbirth, of spears that went a little further, of furs that were warmer, of fires that would not need tending. Are we not more or less doomed by our rejection of physical misery and the power of our imagination to simply recreate it all?
More interestingly, imagine a human society which selects a place to stop and then also has to enforce it, both internally and against any other societies which might have a different idea of where to stop (boy that gunpowder sure is a nifty idea). You would need a one world government with some kind of technological edge over those ruled ...
For a fictional exploration of the "doomed to recreate it all" phenomena, there's a nice novel called "Canticle for Leibowitz" where post-nuclear-armageddon scientists are in part blamed for the nuclear war and knowledge is explicitly culturally rejected... but then slowly crawls back into the picture.
My comment really doesn't even do your comment justice, but... It really made me think about that scene from the Matrix where Agent Smith described humans as a cancer. There are just so many possible perspectives on it all.
There are a lot of frustratingly silly responses to this article supporting Sale's side of this bet. This is utter madness, Sale wasn't even close!
By virtually every material measure society has improved in the intervening time, in spite of the horrendous response to the financial crisis of 2008 and even the bungled response to SARS-COV-2.
Lots silly self-indulgent stuff that is really indirectly about alienation and whatnot, get over yourselves!
Its not like I don't stress about democratic backsliding and income inequality and God knows what else but the big picture perspective is clear, Sale is obviously so wrong that he should be embarrassed. But he's a crank, so he's doubling down.
Climate change is still not solved, and if you think the response to the financial crisis of 2008 was horrendous an response to SARS-COV-2 was bungled, wait for the hard hits of climate change.
"Not even close" could be premature.
The bet was over a fixed term and has expired, so there is no way for the assessment to be premature as it relates to the bet.
I have to confess that I have never been so optimistic as I am now about global interest in addressing climate change, there is going to be a lot of pain but we have the technology to make a lot of progress. I think that once people get a taste of the benefits of electrification in particular momentum will build quickly.
> Before their rebellion was squashed and their leaders hanged, they literally destroyed some of the mechanized looms that they believed reduced them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production.
Always fun to read that. They weren't against machines because they had a religious fear of machines. The machines were taking their jobs.
Just like Facebook is complaining now that Apple is ruining their business model?
Reading the 3 categories the judge put together, I'd have to say that the win does go to Sales.
Economic Collapse: Kelly, the "economy" is doing just fine if you're in an upper percentile. For most people the economy is not working for them.
Global Environmental Disaster: Sales, many signs point to more chaotic and worse environmental conditions to come.
The War Between Rich and Poor: Much like question one this one is occurring, and it's getting worse not better. Economic inequality has increased and the trend is increasing.
Sale is correct on many points, his timeline just isn't accurate.
>For most people the economy is not working for them.
For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago.
In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding.
Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well.
So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to mean at the very minimum more than 50%) "the economy is not working for them." Which people are these? How do they compare for income or assets or access to things to their ancestors?
The recent spike in homelessness, the health insurance coverage gap, rising economic inequality, we are facing many major urgent crises. But there is a severe lack of imagination to suggest that our problems as a society or species can't or haven't been far, far worse.
A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.
Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.
The median wage gives you a picture that is closer to the real value than just anecdotes. For most people on Earth, there has been a great increase in living standards. It just so happens that much of it took place outside of the West.
My bad. In any case, the principle still stands. Looking up some stats I get a figure of 0.17% of the population being homeless. A tragedy to be sure, but a tiny fraction of the whole. In other words, it makes more sense to look at the median wage than what you see in a given city as a single individual going on about their day, if your goal is to get a feel for the situation.
Those are not economic problems. They are structural problems. People have decided to build their cities all at once and expect them to never change. They have convinced themselves that incremental progress will not or should not happen and that any problems can be solved by running away from them.
A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.
Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.
US homeless population has been steadily dropping for decades, likely even longer if you dig for data. Here's recent numbers [1]. It's also an outlier on the condition of how a person in the US is faring. Taking that as evidence for how people live overall is as reasonable as pointing to the top 0.1% and claiming all is well. Neither gives as accurate a picture as a median.
The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.
The problem with the broad trend prediction format is you wind-up with binaries and predicting a 1 or a 0 is easy.
Economy - "Good or bad"
Environment - "Good or bad"
Wealth distribution - "Good or bad".
If you're betting, someone has to get 2 or more out of 3. But that could be anyone, including complete idiots. So this doesn't by itself tell you anything.
Most of the "bad" would be vaguely "left" positions but they could vary from the left of the NYT to any number of extreme positions as well as including general pessimists.
The environment getting worse is a matter of fact, not ideology. You can argue in bad faith about the meaning of the word 'worse' if you want, trying to claim it's too subjective, but I think we all have roughly the same idea of 'worse' and know that that's what the environment is getting.
"Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short."
This is such a bitter note. I would have paid the 1000, but Kelly was very predatory. He set up a gotcha interview and then a surprise bet on some pretty wild claims from both sides.
In any case, the world has clearly gotten worse and more unpredictable, so the spirit of the bet favours Sale, but because he lost to a technicality, now he's being compared to trump??
By Sale's measures, and since the time of Sale's prediction. I don't care for comparing this year to the past 400 years on issues like poverty, etc, people only do that because it makes them feel better so they can continue on ignoring problems. Equality and environment are clearly on a downward trajectory.
My feeling is not that we are moving towards a complete collapse of civilisation, but instead move closer and closer to the distopian world of of Gibson and cyberpunk.
W. Gibson, N. Stephenson or David Brin (his earth is a highly recommended read) are certainly people I would never bet against in a long bet. The predictive power of some science fiction is fascinating. I always wondered if it is the books that predict the future or if they are the shaping it, by becoming part of culture.
I'll leave a differing opinion on Earth. It was the least favourite book that I've read last decade. Felt like some childish revenge fantasy to me. It's been many years now, and I'm still annoyed by it.
Tech made life better for some people and worse for others. All I can say is that it seems to have made my life and the life of all my relatives and friends worse and it seems to have made my enemies' lives better.
For reference; I'm an altruist, open source developer and value creator. My enemies are greedy psychopaths and zero-sum value capturers.
No, it hasn't. I tended to think that the Internet, or more specifically social media, brought more harm than good to the world and society. But now I don't think it's true. Tech connects people, it shows us that people on the other side of the world are actually the same like us, it gives us instant access to almost all existing information and knowledge, it easily solves problems that were almost unsolvable before and it has a chance to decentralize power and brings us more democratic society. Tech have some problems but still, it's amazing.
> it shows us that people on the other side of the world are actually the same like us
Newspapers and TV showed that message before. That did seem to go well. And shutting down parler and gab also seemed to work. Perhaps connectivity is not for the best in all cases.
> it easily solves problems that were almost unsolvable before
I don't think internet has solved that many problems that were almost unsolvable before 2000.
> Tech have some problems but still, it's amazing.
The atomic bomb is also amazing, but it's a menace anyway. Tech needs control. A lot of it.
The world has undoubtedly changed but mostly for the better. Digital technology, however, is still in its infancy. Many users are brand new to the internet in the last ten years. I have learned to pace my time on the internet, but this is after 25 years of practice and burning out on the novelty of it. We are all figuring out that new does not mean progress.
Case in point: I recently started back with the DVD side of Netflix. This is what I remembered being so awesome: find a good movie list, add it to your queue, pop envelopes in the mailbox when you're done.
It is 1000% better than endless scrolling on 5 different streaming services. I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I avoided the whole smart-home fad because there's nothing wrong with physical controls and buttons that have been developed over generations of human interaction. That's why I'm waiting for a good built-in-the-USA electric instead of buying a chassis with a touchscreen.
But someone else may hate controls and love touchscreens -- cool. The market lets us pick and choose.
If we can continue to reign in the inequality and environmental impacts produced by technology, use the incredible wealth we have as societies to finally end poverty, and continue to make progress against injustice, the future is incredibly bright.
>I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I don't get why you wouldn't be able to do this on a streaming service, unless the catalogue is somehow worse. The DVD part sounds like a superfluous and cumbersome extra layer
Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.
What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.
“ But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy” - from the FA. While certainly modernity and technological progress has negative impact on certain parts of the human population (being in part blamed for societal isolation etc) , for the majority of human population technological advances has been a great leveler and a blessing. Over the last decade this has raised billions of people out of property line and in general increased the health and lifespan of most of the population. Even advanced societies like us have benefitted from it , though there is some negative effect. But to lobby for dialing back technological progress for the entire humanity - it is a very symptom of inequality that has been the result of industrial revolution and previous history and the privilege that certain societies enjoyed over others. We need to use technology itself to level the playing field , ensure wellness and happiness for everyone. What Sale and his fans need is not less technology but more looking inside - spiritual journey. But they have no right to demand policies to reverse technological progress for rest of the humanity.
It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless?
Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.
Not OP, but we are a far cry from a techno utopia. We really had two opposing world views, one where technology would help us achieve a better life, another where it would contribute to us falling off a precipice. Neither won. On the plus side we have a world where global poverty is falling and more people are developing middle class life styles, we have amazing technology like gene editing, incredible computational ability, and entertainment options. However, this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster, has us in the middle of a mass extinction, and has enriched a very small number of people.
You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.
This isn't just "gee, technology sure comes with tradeoffs." It was literally claiming the dollar to be worthless, a global class war, and for most of the continent of Africa to be uninhabitable. It was claiming all three would happen.
I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!
There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.
This seems like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. A close call would be something like, economic collapse reducing paper money to be worthless as a consequence of the global socialist revolution, but global warming only melted the icecaps and flooded major parts of the world while leaving most places just slightly warmer. Two out of three.
The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".
> this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster
This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).
> has enriched a very small number of people
This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.
You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.
What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?
Interesting to see how people made a bet 25 years ago. I wonder what other bets are being done right now.
Tech I don't blame, but the chase of more tech and bad tech is something I'm jaded about.
People commented here that the scientific/engineering miracle in their pocket is mostly used to swipe cat pics. Meanwhile bad management, weird economic structures, changes in social relationships.. all these going in the wrong direction.
I highly reccomend the Podcast "Your undivided attention" by Tristan Harris. Together with experts he explains very detailed, how algorithms and social media affect our society.
Big changes have been made trough technology.
And many of those changes have a negativ impact on our society.
But I strongly believe that humanity can overcome those problems. Altough it may seem impossible from time to time.
So, let's recount the conditions for Sale winning the bet:
1. an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930;
2. a rebellion of the poor against the monied;
3. a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
---
# Condition 1:
Well, the Covid-related depression could be described as worse than in 1930, but it's a toss-up, especially if you don't focus on the US. However, the dollar has not been rendered worthless at all. And while the population is struggling, the world and the US' base of industrial production and infrastructural services are in reasonable working order.
So condition 1 is NOT MET.
# Condition 2:
The poor have not rebelled against the monied. In most of the world, there is some Covid-related unrest - some demonstrations, some strikes (a really huge one in India recently, but maybe not quite Covid related). In the US there has been a wave of mass protests, occasionally bordering on riots, regarding police violence and fueled by Covid. But that has not gotten anywhere close to a rebellion against the monied. I _wish_ it would have, but:
Condition 2 is NOT MET.
# Condition 3:
Is Covid an environmental catastrophe ? Naah, that's too much of a stretch. There's Global Warming - but it's currently only grave, not catastrophic. One might argue the catastrophe is now just a matter of time (not sure I would accept the argument) - but this is a timed bet.
You also have things like mass deforestation destroying cultures; or the state of the great barrier reef etc. But still,
Condition 3 is NOT MET.
------------
Kelly squarely wins the bet. That Patrick guy evaluated the situation unfairly.
There really wasn't much nuance to either side of the bet. Compare "they wouldn’t be just off the grid; there would be no grid" to "technology as an enriching force." I guess it makes for a fun bet, but the messy and complicated outcome ended up being the most interesting part.
Not strictly related, but longbets.org promotes a similar idea. Most famously, it played host to the "million-dollar bet" between Warren Buffet and Protege Partners that the S&P 500 would outperform a portfolio. I believe this bet was made a year before it was established, however.
Tech always provides the tools for destruction but it is those who seek power and wealth with no set limit are those who employ those tools. Greed is worse than fear.
Society is a moving target however. That's what makes it difficult to see how society is being destroyed. It is more that many aspects of it change (are "destroyed"). Something unthinkable a hundred years ago has become normal today. Perhaps we do not need to even go that long a time back to find examples.
Better to live in a shallow but comforting dream, or in fuller knowledge of the world as it really is? To experience only a few things, or to discover that there are more things than we dreamed of?
We were near-sighted, then we put on glasses. We're sharing a time of adjustment. 25 years isn't enough. What do the young say?
Sale was (and still is) cheering for a collapse? And yet he spent the time writing books. If the collapse had happened, he would have spent the time subsistence farming. I doubt that 25 years of that would make him happy that a collapse happened.
Be careful what you wish for. You may not like it as much as you think you will...
Agree. I think social technology has been an unmitigated disaster. I appreciate the engineering technology that has improved our infrastructure and environment. Air is cleaner, pollution is lower, food is plentiful. Cars and almost all other machinery are more efficient and more reliable. Medicine is better; things that used to be death sentences are either managable or more treatable. But compared to the 1980s, I'd take the social environment then vs now without blinking.
Say theoretically everything was the same in this timeline EXCEPT there is no reddit, facebook, twitter, or 4chan.
QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.
Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?
That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.
I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.
You don't need social media or high tech to attack and dismantle democracy, to exert racist police brutality, to mishandle a pandemic, or to flock together and storm a government building like the US Capitol. All of this happened in world history before, with less advanced technology, a century or even longer ago.
What was the actual importance of QAnon? Just a newsreel skevomorphism, an entity easy to defeat as it was easy to setup. Pretty much irrelevant, disenfranchised people still exist. QAnon and other crazy but promoted ideas have served as smokescreens hiding actual problems and at some point people will take their shot at going against some actual structural issues. No easy way out and who knows when that tipping point is but 2100 sounds very optimistic for those structures hold.
On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.
are airplanes tech? can a virus spread around the world easily without planes, trains, and automobiles?
Can people be super dependent on a financial system if it weren't digital?
Even government—people had more freedom under a low-tech monarchy than a high-tech democracy. Can't enforce too many laws when law enforcement doesn't have vehicles or phones.
You must be quite young. 2020 is a minor blip on the huge ups and downs over the past 2 centuries.
The only way I could fathom "society collapsing" is if I felt the interactions you see on the internet were an accurate reflection of society at large. It's not - not even close.
` ...after General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga during the Revolutionary War...a young nobleman...declared that the surrender would be “the ruin of the nation.” To which Adam Smith reportedly responded, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” '
Society has been destroyed thousands of times over and has still survived. We think of the past as glorious and fair. Reality is that this is foolish optimism fed by historical revisionism and survivorship bias.
Shall we conflate "technological progress" with "predatory capitalism"?
If your answer is "yes" then Sale is right.
If your answer is "no" then Kelly is right.
---
Technology by itself never "destroys" anything except certain ways of life, perhaps, and even then many people opt not to have their way of life destroyed or disrupted (assuming they have the choice, which not all do). Case in point: a chunk of the modern people no longer want to live in the cities and start living in more rural areas again (I don't keep around the link for the study though).
Many people described technology as a weapon: it can be used for a number of purposes.
Can it be argued that the more advanced technology has made it easier for the bad guys and thus their predatory capitalism is destroying society? Sure, I would agree with that. But it made it easier for the good guys, too. Arms races will always exist, it seems.
But I can't deny things started grim lately. Not sure what the answer is but it surely isn't destroying all tech.
We do however have to stand up to some corporations, that much seems clear.
I thought this was going to be about a different Wired article written to address another Luddite's predictions from around 25 years ago.. That one seems to be more accurate
Can't help but point out the two of them would have been better off investing that money. With a 3% interest rate they both would have doubled it in 25 years.
Things are better and worse. It is probably impossible to calculate the net difference, but I'd highlight things like the legalization of gay marriage, the decline in violent crime, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as improvements. I don't discount the better toys either.
The only peoples left after the full collapse of technological society will not be those living in concrete and steel towers in the megacities of the west or east. It will be those that are living in the Serengeti, or those in south India, who have lived the way they have lived for thousands of years, whilst those in the megacities strived for decades to 'save' from their 'backward and primitive ways'.
I think that the bet is a bit simplistic in its scope and parameters. Society isnt going to collapse in one fell swoop unless nuclear war kills us all. If things just disintegrate and collapse, there will be a long protracted period where people slowly die and or suffer. I dont even think that any one person can fully grasp how a population of 7 billion + people can collapse accurately. I think that social media and twitter owns the lions share of our current divided society, but I dont necessarily call that "tech". Its one aspect of tech. And for every twitter dumpster fire there is huge medical advances/vaccines/50 metrics that show that now is the best time to be alive. I certainly love living in the now, and hope that we can figure out how to navigate this new territory we live in...
On the contrary, it is tech (sw, ai, bio, solar, crypto, etc) that will save society, or better said: help us move forward. Now more than ever we can witness how tech is helping us go through the pandemic. Yes, there are ugly uses of tech (I am looking at you social networks), but overall, tech is doing good to humans. A vaccine that can be tweaked in a couple of days to attack a new virus variant? Come on! That has to be proof enough that Kelly won the wager.
Technology provides capabilities. Capablities can afford positive utility, as well as destructive power. Even the benign utility, specially if convenient, alters society and societal norms. Changes in society in turn affect the personal and collective mind, from language to philosophy.
Kelly expresses his horror of "no, no, no" when remembering his experiences travelling in technology poor locales in Asia.
'The journey, lasting for the better part of a decade, transformed him. “I was in very remote parts of Asia, parts of which were literally medieval societies in every respect, from the dress, architecture, beliefs, behavior,” he says. “I saw completely vehicle-less cities—people throwing garbage in the streets, no toilets. That's not even to mention the hinterland villages, which were without even metal.” When he returned to the US in 1979, he had a deep appreciation for the technology that made life easier.'
Kelly is focused on convenience. Convenience is reasonably a good thing. And this is the fundamental weakness of his position on the embrace of machine in human society. The mechanised society is clearly far more than just a more "convenient" human society.
There is a fundamental philosophical fork in the road that informs this question: is a human being, as an individual, a complete being, or is species as a whole (and including its civilizational artifacts) the complete being? This can be reworded as: do human beings have souls, or are we mere biological machines?
What Kelly does not consider -- and a cursory grep for "happy"/"happiness" in the Wired article seems to support this -- is what was the individual and social experience of these technology poor societies. Does having "no metal" preclude happiness? Does is possibly promote it?
As hacker news denizens neck deep in technology rich societies, the germinal question is whether we are happier because of technology or not. Obviously we enjoy greater conveniences. Are our societies healthier than before, or not?
Technology comes in two conceptual flavors: as tool, and as garment (immersive environment). It is the latter kind of technology which requires moderation, as it alters our perception and social experiences (whether by extending and/or enhancing senses, or collapsing spatial (transport tech) and temporal (a/v tech) aspects of our reality).
Naturally, those who hold that man is merely a biological machine, should and would argue for unimpeded integrtion of technology into human societies, and in its extremist manifestation, into the very unit organism itself. And it seems entirely reasonable that those of us who reject the notion of a soul-less Human being, to insist that there must be limits to unfettered adoption of technology, for the sake of Human happiness, and well being.
It may not have destroyed society (yet), but it seems clear to me that what began as a way to make life simpler and more efficient and to solve previously unsolvable problems has morphed into a dystopia of surveillance capitalism and dark patterns.
The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.
But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.
I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.
What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?
Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.
if a bet does not have objective conditions, then it's not really a bet but rather an opinion or hunch. So just split the money evenly and call it a day
It's definitely impacted some more than others. There's now an entire class of men who can no longer have romantic relationships because they've been cast out of the dating market as technology altered dating dynamics not in their favor. For these men, their world, their society is destroyed.
I'm not sure exactly what you're hinting at, but I think you should take a cold, hard look at yourself and the expectations you place on your potential partners. Do you imagine them as actual human beings with their own thoughts, aspirations, preferences, goals? What does such a person have to gain (emotionally / socially) by choosing YOU in particular for a partner?
In all relationships, romantic or not, personality is everything. Do you try to be a positive person, or do you complain every time something doesn't go your way? An attractive personality and some self-confidence can go a long way in making you attractive to others, even if you haven't been particularly advantaged by your genes.
If you're talking about the dynamics around bars, hookups, and dating apps, you know that's not the only way to meet people, right? I think some of the strongest relationships come out of shared interest in a hobby / skill / career. Join hobby groups etc (not with the intention of finding a partner -- that will be weird and creepy -- but remain open to the idea that you might bump into someone along the way that really aligns with you)
What do you think accounts for this change? Seems pretty plausible to me that it has something to do with technology. Perhaps it has something to do with dating apps, perhaps young men are substituting porn for real intimacy, perhaps some combination. Either way, doesn't seem like a good change. And by the pigeonhole principle, if more women are having sex than men, it must be the case that some men are sleeping with multiple women (modulo homosexuality and young women sleeping with older guys).
(I don't think "you just need to be a better partner" moralizing has much explanatory power, it's a lecture that can be delivered in any time or place to any gender and doesn't speak to underlying trends.)
Could the explanation be as simple as the economy? Younger people are less likely to have a career and more likely to live with their parents since 2008, both of these are not known to be turn-ons.
I think people who use dating apps tend to focus on superficial features like physical attractiveness or (the appearance of) wealth / status. People will judge you based on their first impression, rather than taking time to know you more deeply as a person.
So, I think for someone who doesn't want to play "the dating game", yes, an effective dating strategy is to accept that they won't be able to easily find a partner in the short-term. Instead, a strategy of self-improvement combined with leading a more social life (via hobby groups etc) in which one regularly meets new people is a great way for them to eventually bump into someone they vibe with really well.
I think many people who are desperate for a partner are also unhappy in other aspects of their life -- joining non-romantic social groups centered around a common interest is a great cure for loneliness, until the right person comes along.
This is complete BS. In our unequal society, some people have 100s of potential partners waiting in line for them while for others, they will never get a single chance in their entire lifetimes. Same with career opportunities. Either you're rich and have more opportunities every single day than you can possibly fathom or you don't have a single good opportunity in your entire lifetime.
What's more tragic about it is that it has increasingly little to do with merit or hard work and increasingly more to do with dumb luck. It's all social networking; but that's totally random. People are only selecting friends and partners based on capital these days, not based on any other meaningful characteristic. People are just appendages to the capital... Capital is the agent. People are replaceable.
Your statements are extreme. There may be some subcultures and bits of society that behave like this, but it is far from universal. Please take a break from your current forums/podcasts/youtube/etc.
What I'm saying is based on first hand experience not being sedated by video games and other mindless entertainment which normally serves as a cheap substitute to real meaningful life experiences which
seem to have vanished from most regular people's lives.
An unfathomable number of people alive today have totally pointless lives because all the good stuff has been taken out and substituted with cheap thrills.
It's no coincidence that rich people have many friends and experience a lot of positive emotions in their lives. I guarantee you that poor people experience very few positive emotions and they don't have a choice. The glass ceiling is unbreakable.
There's defiantly not someone for everyone. In China and India there are millions of more men than women and countless articles about the "left over" men.
I think the prevalence of social media (Not just dating apps) has somewhat shafted average men since now women have far more access to (EDIT: highly) desirable men.
The world continuously becoming more sexually liberal also means that women are more likely to pursue these men, and so average men are looked down upon moreso than before.
I'm sure plenty of people have seen the Tinder/Bumble studies where men rated women around 50/50 attractive/unattractive, whereas women rated men 20/80. I believe this is a result of the above, and a lot more nuanced aspects of the change in culture over the last say, 30-40 years.
I'm in an older group. It feels like much of the same.
In my grade school all of the girls had a crush on one or two guys even the less pretty ones. No one had a chance. High school was similiar. Going to rock concerts changed that as I started to meet girls with similiar interests. Going to a concert would automatically give me a leg up because we were now part of a social circle. Later on in life I would go to a karoke bar and just the act of showing up a few times on the same day for a few weeks puts you in a social circle with others who do the same.
I don't know if things have changed all that much aside from the amount of people online. I use to meet girls from bbses / the early social media sites. The differences is they were smaller and you felt like part of a social circle.
Today I would advise to try to go to social meetups like photography in the park groups.. try to join a smaller group.
In the end the girls from my elementary school grew up and married. Everyone married similiar to them. If they are overweight so are there husbands. If they were an 8 their husbands would be an 8. If they are a 4 their husbands are a 4. They general look like each other.
My guess is the girls from your primary school will end up with someone similiar to them and so will you.
My other point of view is the opposite will happen.
Men will find happiness in porn, paid sex and virtual sexual experiences and will find that women can't live up to those experiences and men will not be satified with regular women.
An average women's sexual peak is later in life and they will not be as satified with virtual sex in the same way.
There will be a need for younger men from an older women group that could bridge the divide.
If you are young and want casual sex go on courage life not tinder for better results.
Definitely becoming a major issue now. I think they're generally gross and it's obvious why they're single, but there has to be an underlying reason for the trend.
It's a form of self-harm. They seek it out. It exists for many of the same reasons as other forms of self-harm. Trying to pin down a specific cause is probably not the best approach as it's likely pretty specific to individual men.
It's a common belief among America's hikikomori who attempt to explain all of life through the lens of sexual contact or romantic intimacy. It's some sort of pop sociology that is highly appealing to these people for no real reason.
> But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times!—they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. [...] These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless, worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread.
There is a lot of proganda use of "luddites" as anti-tech when luddites main grief was regarding income and inequality.
[1]: http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html
[2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/byron-was-one-few-...