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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

erikmcclure.com

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Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#281

Post by jhbadger »

yetihehe wrote: post #218
moring wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author almost, but not quite, reached the point where they realize they contradict themselves: Claiming that socialized healthcare would cure cancer, but not explaining how to move the US to socialized healthcare (nevermind that countries with socialized healthcare haven't cured cancer either). Claiming that we could lay fiber cable to every house, but not how to actually do it. Claiming that an alternative votin…

> Claiming that we could lay fiber cable to every house, but not how to actually do it. This one is pretty simple if you can accept 98% as "every house". Reality is that not every house needs fiber. I fully agree with the rest of your comment.

Also, the US basically solved an earlier version of this with the 1936 Rural Electrification Act. In 1936, many rural communities and farmhouses in the US had no electricity while it was standard in towns and cities for decades. It was decided that having electricity was just something everyone should have access to and we were willing to pay the price to make that happen. Eventually it even made sense economically besides morally because many rural areas eventually became suburbs. We could do the same with fiber. It's not some utopian idea.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#282

Post by concordDance »

coldtea wrote: post #269
concordDance wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know that a university degree isn't primarily a signalling mechanism? That would make universal university incredibly wasteful of people's most energetic years.

Because people don't just learn to be doctors, physistics, biologists, structural and civic engineers, chemists, and countless of other professions on their own (not in any significant nunber after the 18th century at least), they learn it in university, with a structured curriculum, theoritical tuition, supervision, labs, and so on.

The vast majority of people with degrees will not use that degree in their job. I certainly didn't and looking at my fellow physics or maths grads the same is true of almost all of them.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#283

Post by croes »

eru wrote: post #82
croes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then we get useless microwaves and in the end dangerous microwaves.

Who buys those useless microwaves? Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?

Who said useless?

Just not as useful as it used to be.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#284

Post by Fluorescence »

Aunche wrote: post #219
coldtea wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author explained very well what they meant (optimizing for lower risk vs profit) and this has little to do with preserving mammoths. That would be a very peripheral concern (if it was one at all).

Mammoths were an easy protein source for ancient people that were hunted into extinction. This is optimizing for short term profit.

I believe it was mainly climate change and loss of habitat during glacial retreat that caused Mammoth and other mega-fauna to die out. Human hunting was likely a minor contributor and nothing like the industrial slaughter of bison.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#285

Post by concordDance »

jhbadger wrote: post #277
concordDance wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies? Not sure which other countries you're thinking of, but each of then have their own issues. E.g. the UK has insane house prices and its rail is awful (I live here).

Yes, compared to many places in Europe (and even parts of Asia), UK's rail system is pretty bad. But it is still a practical way to get from city to city in the UK. In the US, except for the Washington-NYC-Boston corridor (and maybe the San Diego-Los Angeles route) it isn't really anymore. You can technically take a train from NYC to Chicago, but it will take you longer than the same train trip took 100 years ago! An…

I wouldn't call it very practical. Unless you want to go to London you're better off driving from a time, cost and reliability perspective. It's bizarre to me that it's much cheaper to fly to Edinburgh or Nice than to take trains...

The ratio of hourly wage to meter of housing is from 2x to 10x worse in the UK than the USS.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#286

Post by imtringued »

vasco wrote: post #152
hackerlight wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that incentives, especially financial incentives, have so much control over our democracy. Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value. Same answer for why we don't fix global warming, farming subsidies, carried interest loophole. For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo,…

Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics. Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy…

The problem with communism isn't the revolution, that part has worked incredibly well. It's the fact that the communists don't know what they actually want. I've seen them argue against almost every concrete concept or idea that is falsifiable, but has a decent track record of improving people's lives, because it compromises their all or nothing ideology. Xi Jingping said something like "How about we let the ideology slide and try something that works for now" and no, China did not adopt capitalism, they adopted a heavily state controlled market economy with politicians having direct influence over almost every major business with the ability to fire CEOs. If anything, this proves that the western style "anti-statism" ideology that blames all economic problems on government intervention is, like communism, complete bullcrap. Yet you naively hear from people how China has adopted Capitalism, when in reality they broke literally every single rule in both the capitalist and communist books.

It's like the author of this blogpost says. It's hopeless, because we already have the solutions, not because the problems are hard.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#287

Post by SillyUsername »

My take on the medical part is that this is mostly panic from disjointed priorities.

Supply and demand (priority driven) affect the medical treatments available, and the a single cure is a stepping stone to greater efficiency.

For example, take COVID immunisation, due to priority we had multiple companies work on these, and the best won, these delivery mechanisms are now updated with new viral variants, but they don't charge as though it's a totally new disease or drugs. In fact the cost is absorbed by the sale of the original and not in the sale of the updated vaccine which is at the same price point or less.

Which leads me back to the point, if you run socialised medicine, and you have to choose which medicines offer the greatest return, why would you choose a 1st gen treatment curing one person when a older treatment, which you have infra for, and costs thousands not millions cures in 50% of cases?

If you want to fix anything with 1st gen, we need to subsidise the research cost using the same priority as the needs of patients - that gives the demand.

Misalignment is just going to cause articles such as this being written, where you don't actually hear about the other things that are a priority being cured. Did you know we have 3 successful treatments for COVID now for example, or in the UK we've started using proton beam therapy after it was famously denied treatment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case a few years ago, and now I believe also available within the UK?

These are both consequences of a change of priority and normal process, the worry in the article is that a cure isn't being used, which is both 1st gen and probably due to disjoint with the needs of the NHS/socialised medicine, but this would be expected to happen if a company (a single university) wants to carve a well paid niche in an area that has lower priority/demand.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#288

Post by imtringued »

xwolfi wrote: post #158
arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

I agree, it sounds like people saying "our generation can't live as well as our grandparents", typing it from their mind blowing portable computer on the toilets of an airplane, going to vacations abroad. Problems are only solved when they're solved, if we didn't fix a problem, either it wasn't a problem or we couldn't fix it just yet: it's not that some people are so mean they prefer the problem to persist because t…

If you care about nicotine and your health, you can just vape. A pure nicotine addiction is way more benign than burnt tobacco, because you aren't breathing in the byproducts of burnt tobacco and additives. Those additives aren't there for nothing, they make the product more addictive than the nicotine alone.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#289

Post by hamilyon2 »

I am on a fence regarding this.

Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides.

For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course.

Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore.

So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on.

I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#290

Post by inglor_cz »

"We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it."

Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed.

I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now".

If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article.

Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.

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