100 years of whatever this will be • Hacker News Board

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#421

Post by munificent » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

gtsop wrote: post #57

Excuse me for the dismissive tone, but this looks a dog chasing his tail. Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? No sir, the systems in place work flawlessly for those who put them there, enjoy the benefits of those systems and make damn sure these systems keep benefiting them no matter what. As long as one doesn't acknowledge this very simple fact, they have…

> Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed?

I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:

1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.

2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.

3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.

4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.

Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#422

Post by marvin » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

soco wrote: post #312

moistrobot wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it went well for you :) All of those guarantees are under threat of legal punishment enforced through court systems. All of those guarantees are given to you based on good standing with various institutions. The bank, the intermediary, the seller. If you were a person who was not in good standing with a bank, but you still had the money, could you have completed the transaction? Technology has a trend of des…

If I'm a person who has money but is in bad standing with the banks, maybe I shouldn't be able to do financial transactions at all. It's that, or I'm imagining the wrong reasons why a person with money would have trouble with banks.

Could you get more specific about the reasons or the definition of a financial transaction? Not being able to do financial transactions seems like a slow-motion death sentence.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#423

Post by mnhn1 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #359

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason? It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America bac…

Almost afraid to ask, but how is racism holding back health care?

Johnathan Metzl explores it a bit in his book Dying of Whiteness[0]. Here's an example of something he described in an interview[1] about the book and his other work:

>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”

>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#424

Post by tcgv » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #290

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

Working in finance myself, I totally agree with you on the regulators lint. Everyone arguing regulators are evil is genuinely tech and finance savvy. The regulator is not there to protect them. They are there to protect the vast majority - not only from the outright criminals but also the slightly evil financial services companies (see the Wonga and payday loans debacle in the UK). Say what you like about regulators…

I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results:

> Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to!

In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis not long ago the US government was forced to bail out several banks, basically transferring the cost of that mess to tax payers, so I disagree with this statement.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#425

Post by krmboya » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

colinmhayes wrote: post #130

lm28469 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say that on HN I read it as: "as a young, healthy and well paid tech worker living in _tech hub of a western country_ life is really good and getting better". We have it really easy indeed, but you can't project that on "humanity"

Global poverty has never been lower, things are not just improving for white collar workers.

What counts as global poverty in the course of human history?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#426

Post by criddell » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:57 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #218

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

> they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits

Speaking of first principles...

Do you really believe that there's a purposeful reason why we are all here, or is that something you choose to live your life by?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#427

Post by mcguire » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #388

delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

I usually refer to the streetlight effect as the statisticians' error, or the economist's error---those being two major fields where the data you can get may only be a very poor proxy for the problem.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#428

Post by aaronharnly » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #216

jakub_g wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone can mine gold Bizarre comment - there's only a handful of places in the world where gold is located (most countries have close to zero), and they're probably controlled by some powerful private entity and probably under a gov license.

Nothing is preventing you just going to a gold producing river and panning for gold. You will be just as effective doing that as someone who just runs the Bitcoin client at home. Getting serious requires specialised hardware setup and capital intensive operations in both gold mining and Bitcoin mining.

Interestingly enough, between 1933 and 1975, it was a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#429

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:58 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #388

delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

I like the analogy, but in many cases the societal ills that defi is trying to solve were caused by software in the first place (e.g. internet advertising as a democracy-eroder). Also, the protectors of the status-quo are putting a lot of software people to work in protecting that status quo, so tempting them to the other side means compatibility with their skillset. Lastly, anyone who would overturn the status quo must provide the people with an alternative that's at least as good. As underdogs, we can't afford to out-hire the banks, so the only way forward is to be more effective on a smaller manpower budget--which probably means leaning on crowd-sourced solutions mediated by software.

It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#430

Post by throwaway803453 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

* Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves

I was fortunate to have had a career with mild autonomy to help other team members even if it was slightly out of my job description. But this only happens in a shared office environment where you can see when someone is falling behind or overhear a problem. That physical presence also creates a bond with co-workers that's often more powerful than the corporate mission.

But working from home for the past years I feel like I mercenary working among mercenaries. Working with people that have never met and will never meet and for whom work isn't about the mission or the customer. If I get work done early, I now just call it a day. Why bother with ad-hoc testing, documentation, checking in on that new hire, proposing a conference paper, investigating technical debt, etc. It's liberating but it's also depressing.