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Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

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Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#221

Post by tomp »

flir wrote: post #217
tomp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

Well... how do you enforce meritocracy? A pride of lions is meritocratic, in the "might makes right" sense. What definition of "merit" are you ordering your population by?

You don't need to enforce meritocracy. That's the beauty of it, it's based only on mutual consensus and transparency of information (a.k.a. free market).

Would you rather go to a doctor who's good at surgeries or one that's bad at surgeries? One that got into medical school because of affirmative action, or one that was discriminated against and still got in (e.g. Asian doctors in the US)? Would you rather go to a car mechanic that's amazing at juggling but bad at fixing cars, or one that's bad at juggling and good at fixing cars? See, the "definition of merit" just takes care of itself (driven by the self-interest of customers).

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#222

Post by okeuro49 »

palata wrote: post #162
okeuro49 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this sense communism has never been tried anywhere yet From my knowledge of European history, this is not true. Marx also said that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat, who should seize the means of production. The difficulty is, is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, to steal a phrase. The worker's union movement working inside a capitalist system has brought more benefits for workers, than c…

> From my knowledge of European history, this is not true. You will need to elaborate on that. > Marx also said that there should be a dictatorship of the proletariat, who should seize the means of production. Which should be temporary, right? Do you have an example where it was actually temporary? That would answer my point above.

> You will need to elaborate on that.

My particular familiarity is with the German Democratic Republic. There were many true believers in communism, who in their attempt to construct a communist utopia created and contributed towards a police state.

Jordan Peterson said it shows arrogance to suggest that people just weren't doing communism right, and that if only they got the theory right, then they would usher in the utopia.

I would tend to agree.

> Which should be temporary, right? Do you have an example where it was actually temporary? That would answer my point above.

Your point was to assert that communism has never been tried.

Mine was that it has been tried, and is always unsuccessful. So the failure of temporary dictatorships is proving my point, not yours.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#223

Post by nurettin »

palata wrote: post #220
nurettin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only two choices aren't "status-quo vs mediocrity", that's just a false dichotomy. Why can't people invent clean bio-energy, low-powered computation, space travel, cure for all kinds of cancer, or free desalination? Does every invention need to burn society down?

> Does every invention need to burn society down? Apparently, yes. That's called "rebound effect". I don't know of an invention that did not suffer from it. 5G is more efficient than 4G for the same usage, but it allows us to use more, so we will use more. Reusable rockets are more efficient, but they will allow us to launch a lot more rockets, so we will. We don't know how to constraint ourselves. That's probably al…

I don't see a reason to believe this. A lot of my examples went unaddressed.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#224

Post by tomp »

theossuary wrote: post #185
tomp wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually something I 100% support. As long as degrowth or similar non-sensical ideologies ("luxury beliefs") are practices within free-market capitalism. The obvious problem, of course, is that 99% of people won't willingly choose lower quality of life (as described in your post, and as most "green" solutions end up being) voluntarily. So ultimately degrowthers end up trying to coerce others.

Creating communes of tools and such is not "within free-market capitalism." It's individuals choosing to ignore the free-market imperative to make profit for common good. The sooner we deprogram people the better, but sadly I don't think we'll make it before capitalism destroys this beautiful world.

Sorry I meant the whole Western civilisation framework of "democracy + rule of law + contract law + freedom of association + free market + capitalism (private property) + ...".

As in, you create a non-profit (rule of law), buy tools under this non-profit (private property / capitalism), maybe put some specific language in the non-profit's charter to specify what rules members must abide by (contract law), etc.

There's plenty of existing examples of this (such as cooperatives, e.g. Waitrose/John Lewis in the UK and Mondragon in Spain).

The beauty of free market capitalism is that it supports all these!

Instead, communism / degrowth want to trample on several of these principles, starting with "private property":

1. steal stuff from other people

2. ...

3. run out of stuff to steal

4. collapse

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#225

Post by ianai »

palata wrote: post #159
damascus wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow. The mass extinction event is mostly due to habitat destruction AFAIK right? The reason for that is seeking new resources aka energy. You don't need to cut down the rainforest to plant low yield crops if you can more profitably grow higher yield crops vertically with grow lamps and powered watering systems.. no? 'Cheap energy' is very different from 'basically free energy' in terms of what you c…

I get what you are saying, but... yeah I guess I need to elaborate on why I believe fusion is not a solution (and get more downvotes from techno-solutionists, yay \o/). First, let me say that I usually start by mentioning the mass extinction, because technical people (myself included) have a tendency to believe that "the problem is CO2 emissions, and we can find new technology to reduce that". So I find it important…

Energy is not a bad thing in itself. Fossil fuels are problematic precisely because they’re slightly more energy dense than previous forms of energy while having huge, dispersed externalities not reflected in their upfront costs. Fusion and nuclear in general put the power densities of fossil fuels and all other previous forms of power to shame. It’s not a single order of magnitude more dense, it’s very many. And there are high costs up front which can thus be reflected in costs and price. Thus the market can more accurately use them.

Energy is not an evil. We are not “screwed already” as you put it. But thinking we’re past some fundamental point that makes any progress futile absolutely negates the possibility of improvement by keeping us from searching and exploring options. It’s saying we can’t row ashore because we refuse to row the boat despite being fully capable of rowing the boat.

All the rest of us not convinced of the futility need from those people unwilling to figuratively row is for those unwilling to simply let the rest of us row, figuratively, instead of them. That’s all your side needs to do-stop obstructing the rest of us.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#226

Post by bruceb »

eimrine wrote: post #12

A lot of a billionaires which: 1. Exist 2. Actively making us not noticing their existance by shitting us with some fake problems like gays, drugs, foreigners, terrorists, etc (different set of fake problems per country).

Which billionaires are these? You have specific examples?

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#228

Post by clx75 »

rajanaccros wrote: post #64
tomp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if we built more nuclear, we’d have more power to run more A/C. Actually even with solar we can do that (it’s night power that would remain a problem). No solution that requires degrowth, less energy, lower GDP or lower human quality of life, is acceptable to me. Degrowth means less food, less medicine, less power, less transport, more death. Alarmism and promoting degrowth and/or stupid policies (paper straws,…

You actually could not be more wrong. Degrowth is the only thing that is going to solve our issue. That does not meaning cutting off food to populations, that means not maximizing profit as the only imperative to living. Your solution is technical, as many naive people believe, but will not solve the issue. We have planetary boundaries and "renewables" and nuclear will not solve those issues. More AC, means for CFCs…

Based on my personal experience with psychedelics I used to think that these medicines could be a tool to wake people up. Actually, after seeing what else has been tried and failed, I came to the conclusion that psychedelics are the _only_ reliable tool in this arena because of their power. I sincerely thought that psychedelics could make people reconnect to the reality of how things really are. That if they wake up to reality, they would 1.) freak out about our situation and then have an incentive to restrain from doing the "bad" things and 2.) rediscover this deep connection with Nature which is the only viable basis for a harmonious relationship with it.

Unfortunately during the decades I lost my faith even in this. Apparently to have this kind of experience on a psychedelic it's not enough to just dose someone. Of 1000 people taking psychedelics, maybe 1 gets such an experience. And although the scientists at Johns Hopkins try to figure out how to increase that percentage, it's still not enough.

Nowadays I tend to think that all of this is a God's dream and this God for some reason does not want to wake up too soon from its dream.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#229

Post by flir »

tomp wrote: post #221
flir wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... how do you enforce meritocracy? A pride of lions is meritocratic, in the "might makes right" sense. What definition of "merit" are you ordering your population by?

You don't need to enforce meritocracy. That's the beauty of it, it's based only on mutual consensus and transparency of information (a.k.a. free market). Would you rather go to a doctor who's good at surgeries or one that's bad at surgeries? One that got into medical school because of affirmative action, or one that was discriminated against and still got in (e.g. Asian doctors in the US)? Would you rather go to a ca…

> You don't need to enforce meritocracy

So it's ok if I come to your house and take your stuff because I'm bigger than you?

Because that's what meritocracy does - it gives more resources to people who fit an arbitary definition of merit.

Re: Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

#230

Post by spacebanana7 »

s1gsegv wrote: post #106
mikewarot wrote: post #84

Unpopular opinion: Secure general purpose computing isn't available for the masses. In fact, most people here on HN don't have access to it either. Our current crop of widely used operating systems all share the same flaw, the ambient authority granted to any program that is run to access anything that the user account is permitted to access. This causes a host of problems, and almost nobody is aware of them, or inco…

Yes, there's much more work to be done here in the open source community, and I think it might have to be done there due to lack of aligned incentives otherwise. For instance, on platforms such as Android that are meant to be secure in this way, I can't block an app from accessing the internet anytime it wants. Of course, the reason for that is that blocking internet access would also allow blocking ads, which Google…

We also need UX innovations that make granular permission management friendly for average users. I suspect good defaults are half the battle here.

If we use the popup approach for 20+ permissions when users download an app, they'll likely say yes to everything, no to everything or be frustrated at how much time they spend setting up their new app. None of these seem like good outcomes.

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