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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

861–870 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't talking about needs, I was talking about complaints. Innovators/Inventors are driven by their needs, not by other people's complaints. Unless they need to stop their spouses complaining or something like that.

Complaints may be communicating needs, so if you remove complaint then you stop the flow of communication about needs.

You can complain, all I said is that innovators are not driven by complaints.

Not sure if people complained about horses a lot before the automobile came along.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about not recognizing problems.

You did because you stated there is no utility in communicating needs via complaint. I think you are digging a hole and instead of realizing how deep you have dug, you just keep going hoping to find yourself on the winning side of this silly semantic debate.

I think the "complaint fraction" is digging the hole, not me.

Maybe you could point out some inventors/innovators who were driven by complaints?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#863
post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to and getting worse are two different islands. Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. More people are living healthier and wealthier than ever. Crime, wars are all down. How is software making society worse?

> Things are better than ever for all progressive issues. Except for economic inequality and the climate. More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social…

Our forests are growing, wetlands protected and lakes cleaned up. We've done a great job cleaning up some of the heavy industry and part of that is exporting those jobs to clean. China has a massive pollution issue but things in the western world have been getting cleaner. More new species are being found than we lose. Our ability to save a population has increased not to mention the possible of bringing back species might exist.

Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.

I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#864
post #148

The way the article cites "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is slightly off base. The essay argues that lack of structure is not an effective way to dismantle hierarchies, because it merely masks them instead of dismantling them. It does not go as far to claim that hierarchies and power structures are inevitable (although many people citing it claim that it's making this argument). Although I guess you could argue t…

The Tyranny of Structurelessness literally says power structures are inevitable and when a group has no explicit structure an elite will form from either a pre-existing network or an informal network of those who are good at networking and match whatever qualities the larger group deems as "good".

So quoting that seemed to be about making the point that in the absence of formal, structured regulation decided through a well-defined process what happen is that you get elite insiders exerting control for their own reasons which may or may not benefit the general group, and without any oversight at all.

Both articles were in favour of formal structures with accountability and open processes that allow for changes when required, and against unstructured groups that invariably wind up controlled by unelected elites.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#865

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…

> people are ok with being wealthy. Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs. Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respe…

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I've been wary of wealth for so long that I've internalized that feeling, so I forgot to phrase it more like "people are ok with being wealthy while others are poor".

I could never be a billionaire or even a millionaire, and then walk around and not see the countless people suffering all around me, and around the world.

Now, I imagine many of them feel that they are making a positive contribution to the world by employing people, creating products that help people, making charitable donations, etc.

But that stuff stems from the ego. I believe that true wealth is in divine things like the love between a parent and child. Stuff that doesn't cost money.

This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies. Science and technology's greatest failure is that there's still scarcity. A contrived scarcity now, that keeps people working so hard and distracted that they never get a chance to catch a breath and question the system. Just so that a chosen few can suckle on the priceless time of the poor, using them as human chattel.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaints may be communicating needs, so if you remove complaint then you stop the flow of communication about needs.

You can complain, all I said is that innovators are not driven by complaints. Not sure if people complained about horses a lot before the automobile came along.

They sure did complain about slow transit. Of course, the key isn't listening to customer's solutions but to their problems, and then inventing on their behalf. This is what Amazon calls "customer obsession".

Jeff Bezos on learned helplessness, innovation, making decisions with data and despite data (2005): https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WhnDvvNS8zQ

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. That only works for up to N parties. You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable. You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.

> 4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. Submission and compromise may be similar in many cases, but they are not the same. > That only works for up to N parties. In the cases where it only works for N parties (which can vary wildly depending on the situation), agreed. > You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable. Tha…

That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.

But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#868

> I find myself linking to this article way too much lately, but here it is again: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. You should read it. The summary is that in any system, if you don't have an explicit hierarchy, then you have an implicit one. We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one,…

> We’ve almost completely discarded “the establishment” because it’s so hard to fix. But when we lose that, we lose an explicit hierarchy and get the implicit one, which has problems that are impossible to fix. Rather than chasing a thousand new systems, we should be fixing the one we have.

Attacking "the establishment" is a common tactic of those who want to replace the existing somewhat democratic and somewhat accountable elite with their own unelected and unaccountable elite.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what seems really off is just that we've legislated a single concrete version of something instead of it's abstraction (a person capable of making good choices). It makes sense to give people a way to indicate they intend to give a person legal rights, but it doesn't make sense to imply (by the concrete choice of "marriage") that it's basically going to be a person that you're having sex with, or monogamous w…

The people who fought gay marriage argued that expanding the institution to include same sex pairings would demean what they consider sacred and what they think all of their countrymen should consider sacred too. A common meme was "next you'll be saying we can marry X" with the clear implication that we should not be able to just marry X. But your idea of a win-win compromise is "let's expand it even further so I can…

i think somewhere along the conversation i either misrepresented myself or you missed something though...

The compromise is to cede the word "marriage" from a governmental legally defined word to a word that can be used by each person for their contextual meaning -- which is the only globally true usage of "marriage" -- marriage hasn't meant exactly one woman and one man in a literal monogamous pairing in basically any culture. Even in America it's at best serial monogamy. This would nullify the christian argument that we have to stop X group from "marriage" because it wouldn't be about _that_ anymore, by removing the terminology and insinuations they're concerned about it would become no different than a license to drive and afaik there aren't any christians arguing to remove drivers' licenses from X groups.

Anyways I cant help but feel like there is a lot of bad faith or miscommunication happening here, time will tell how it all get's solved, I do think we'll land on something that gives all groups of people a governmentally recognized status which gives basically powers of attorney and maybe financial responsibility (alimony)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, Do you define regression as absolute position or relative position? For example does it matter if Jeff Bezos has 100 Ferraris if the middle class, on average, have .25 more cars per capital than 50 yrs ago? I would love to put some data behind this discussion because it's long been mixed up as to which case is the ethical…

I would argue it does matter. Not to say that absolute position doesn't matter, it does, and probably even more so, but relative position has some very real effects. The main one that jumps out for me is power, and influence. As an example, it doesn't really matter if I can donate $100 to the EFF instead of $50 when a billionaire can outspend me 1,000,000:1 without even flinching.

here we'd agree that money/power should not be used to influence elections. To which I'd say citizens united seems to have been a loss.

I found this interesting on the topic: https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars

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