I agree it's sad to see things disrupted/destroyed, but it certainly lit a fire under a ton of people who have the power to make dramatic shifts. I think this will mark the beginning of a new era in semiconductor abundance and innovation.
My dramatic shift - never work on a project that helps the car industry. They're now on the same shitlist as weapons, coal, and surveillance capitalism.
It seems overly naive to assume any company's actions don't have pros and cons, or aren't part of the larger society/ecosystem you're enabling by existing? You can't take an action (or exist and take no action) without a side effect, and at the scale of any significant company, it is impossible to do what someone somewhere considers to be harm to someone or something.
Picking and choosing the scope, scale, and amount of the type of harm you're comfortable with certainly seems worthwhile, but pretending there is any option that is harm free seems like self deception. Even refusing to play (not living?) has side effects most would consider harmful - at least to those around you.
That is a good point. Perhaps a different statement makes more sense: it's hard to believe that there are no options where the benefits outweigh the harm.
In my experience, the benefits do outweigh the harm in pretty much all cases where it lives awhile - if you pick the right group of people to care about, and the right things or people to be ok harming.
We all do it, directly or indirectly. It’s necessary to survive. It’s common for instance to not worry too much about the earthworms dying on the sidewalk after the sprinklers run. Most people would consider someone pretty weird if they didn’t drive because of the body count of insects on their windshield.
For example - everyone who drives is implicitly or explicitly saying the benefit to them outweighs the harm to those insects. Everything has a trade off.
Most life survives by eating other life (yes even Vegans), and even pure photosynthetic algae has to kill or crowd out (and starve) competitors and things that would kill and eat it, or they would no longer be alive.
It’s easy to be isolated from this reality, especially with modern life meaning we don’t need to gather, raise and/or kill our own food.
Nature is not (just) a national park with carefully curated trails and animals to snap pictures of when they grace us with their presence. It’s wild fight for survival and dominance - full of growth, birth, gore, beauty, and death.
Recognizing that someone’s trade off to make another country less strong (a ‘other’) in exchange for making themselves richer or their country more capable of doing the same in the future is important (one example) - say a defense contractor making a new weapon.
It is a specific mindset and trade off that we might not agree with it even find repugnant, but it is keyed off important survival needs and a fundamental part of the world and nature we are foolish to ignore.
What do you consider ok to harm, to get the benefits for the people or things you care about? At some point it might be worth making it concrete, it can be illuminating.
My point was not about nature though, rather it was about being sustainable. Looking at the classic prisoner's dilemma, there are activities which bring localized benefit, but an overall loss in a non-zero-sum game.
Presuming that human activity is not zero-sum regarding whatever system of values we take, it's clear cut that some activities are bad, period.
This makes the grandparent's examples clearer: coal production benefits some people now but hurts future generations disproportionately. Wars hurt all sides, and allow some of them partially recover, and never as far as if they joined forces. Car companies throw the whole semiconductor industry under the bus in exchange for not having to keep inventory.
In a huge simplification, it's self-destruction I'm talking about, not sacrificing little things to gain greater ones, like exchanging the lives of insects to feed a human cvilization (presuming you value humans more).
Of course, it's possible to construct an arbitrary system of values to justify your own arbitrary deeds as "survival" or "natural", but I don't find such systems convincing.
Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no? Everything else is artificially constructed, and no social or artificial environment I know of has lasted in any meaningfully sustained and stable way for more than a few generations.
My point is that you are constructing your own arbitrary system relying on projections of the results of actions far into the future, and impacts that are purely hypothetical at this point - they might be true/accurate, or they might not. Someone is staking their own success or happiness based on if they think it’s true or not, and I can point you to many examples in the recent past where that was a severe evolutionary negative for many people.
Prisoners dilemma is a thought experiment/theoretical problem because in the real world, what people value, their own understanding of and perceived trustworthiness of others, and their own dispositions and habits means it might as well be talking about spherical cows.
If we get into a shooting war with China next year for instance, global warming is going to be pretty low on the problematic outcomes one could face. If a pile of coal (or billion barrels of oil) is what it takes for the US (or China, or any other nation) to survive, they will burn it without a moments hesitation.
We can all hand wring about if that hurts the global balance, and how it’s terrible, and game theory and all that - but if it’s a fight for dominance, survival, and resources it won’t matter. So far we’ve found enough common ground/everyone is getting rich enough helping each other out it hasn’t come to that. We can hope it never will.
Pretending that folks who are building tools, or capabilities, or working in the areas that would be necessary to survive if something like that happened seems willfully ignorant of the reality we’re in or incredibly naive, IMO.
Some folks make short sighted choices, lose a ton of money, screw people over (intentionally or not), etc. In my experience it’s usually due to environmental factors (regulation, market, competitive forces) strongly incentivizing it, or just plain not being able to predict the future.
That chaos and dumbness is not only inevitable, it happens everywhere. It’s fundamental to the human experience. It’s easy to be high and mighty, much harder to do it differently - and survive.
> Nature is the only known example we have of a sustained environment, no?
No, not really. Looking at the large scale, the Earth will burn up together with the Sun, and then we'll reach the death of the universe one way or the other.
Small scale, we have sustained businesses, economies, families, ecosystems. In those, prisoner's dilemma is real and testable.
I'm getting the impression that you're trying to draw some equivalency between all classes of harms, regardless of their magnitude. I do agree to a certain extent, but I can nary see an argument that would convince me that some options are just not singularly harmful.
As an example, me and my neighbour being paid to grow a field, at the cost of the field insects, versus me and my neighbour being paid to drive each other away and take over the land. One is clearly better than another if human well being is more important than that of insects.
If we fear the neighbour fighting us and we value survival, we must fight ourselves. That's the curse of the prisoner's dilemma, because giving up the fight yields a better outcome. I would call such a greedy "survival" approach naive and unfortunate.
If we value dominance above all, then fighting the neighbour is the better choice. I believe we have a word for such value systems: egoism.
Giving up the fight yields the better outcome only when the other party doesn’t come over
and eat you or kill you no?
It isn’t about dominance over all - it’s about survival and the complex intertwining of all the various strategies (good, bad, failing) being tried simultaneously with the hope that theirs wins. Sometimes it’s domination. Sometimes it’s teamwork. Sometimes it’s passivity.
As any individual player, you have to pick one - and sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses. Most strategies exist not because they are always ideal, but because having the selection is essential and necessary to long term survival in a fundamentally unpredictable environment. A species that only does one strategy at once is going to go extinct when the environment changes suddenly.
I’m definitely not equating all actions as equal, or saying everything has equal cost. I’m noting that nothing, including no action, has no cost, and that assuming a player in the game (you or someone else) will definitely lose or definitely win for a given survival criteria has a very low degree of predictive accuracy in the real world.
Of course, you're right about survival. Sometimes the rational strategy is to fight. What I'm contesting is the view that predicting outcomes is useless.
I gave the example of economies and ecosystems together with prisoner's dilemma to illustrate that we do indeed have a models that are accurate in predicting at least first order effects.
First order effects are not everything, of course, but it doesn't seem sensible to throw away our knowledge coming from game theory (or cybernetics? or plain life experience) and settle on not being able to predict which choices are net positive and which are net negative.
As with any estimation, there will be those that can't be evaluated with any certainty, but also clear winners and losers.
