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
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were severely exacerbated by tech. Let's argue about it and prove my point.
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…
It is a failure of leadership, the humanities, not STEM.
Biology can only do so much if we ignore it.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#73It destroyed the average Joe's faith in the average Joe.
Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#74A 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,…
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.)
There is a pretty good chance that the period of 2022-2035 or so will be a lot worse than the 2008-2015 one.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#75He may have lost his bet, but maybe he came close. 2020 was the closest I’ve come to feeling that society was collapsing.
Let's call that one when we're at the bottom of the slide.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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...
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
There is a pretty good chance that the period of 2022-2035 or so will be a lot worse than the 2008-2015 one.
Get ready for a Peripheral style Jackpot ;)
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#78It destroyed the average Joe's faith in the average Joe. Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.
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.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#79Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-deriv…
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.