One of the most insightful quotes I ever found of HN:
«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.
We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»
I'm not sure "collective intelligence" gives the right feel. We have the intelligence, we're just organised by a few people who have power directing labour towards making those few people even more insanely rich, whilst many people continue without direction and a larger few attempt to direct resources towards the benefit of the majority.
Maybe intelligence is about organisation (of neurons) but still, organisation towards a common goal that isn't further enrichment of the most insanely greedy seems like our major problem on a species level.
even this site filled with supposedly smart educated individuals is filled to the brim with prejudices; jingoism; hate; intolerance; short-term thinking and huge cognitive blind spots
What's your take on the capacity the deficiency of which prevents us, as a species, from making right choices that are going to improve the well-being of everyone? E.g. from harvesting abundant energy our star rains on our planet, when we already have the technologies to capture it?
Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense.
These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place.
The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.
The whole problem is exactly selfish short-term gain that eclipses longer-term common gain. Lack of understanding it, and lack of the ability to create a social system that works better towards it, to my mind, is directly related to our (limited) intelligence as a species.
Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
Selfishness is about intent. Not about doing self-serving things because you lack the intelligence to do more altruistic things. That’s just my perspective.
Even from a completely mechanical, machine-level rationality point of view, a lot of things we humans do is against our best long-term interest, because poorly contained impulses of short-term interest ruin that.
«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.
We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083