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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

#411

Post by travisjungroth »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #380
travisjungroth wrote: post #98

If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution . A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You h…

I think it’s worthwhile to be able to say “we could solve the problem if it weren’t for X” so we can talk about why “X” is the way it is. That is, the job of philosophers is not to solve problems, but to articulate a way of looking at problems which may lead to solutions.

I’d say something similar. But, I don’t think the value is in talking about why X is the way it is. The value is in knowing the next obstacle to overcome. Having a space drill except it needs higher voltage than the station supplies is what I mean by “near-solution”. So now you need to lower the voltage need or increase the supply.

Here’s where things go wrong. You’ve identified the next obstacle, and it is likely going to need time and attention to solve. It’s worthy of respect in a “respect your enemy” sort of way. But when the near-solution is engineering and the obstacle is social, people adopt this harumph attitude. Making glib statements like “we could, but we just don’t”. I don’t think that does anything to actually help solve the problem. It reduces a tremendous amount of someone else’s work to an annoyance.

This is the exact same as an idea guy coming in and expecting the engineers to “just implement it”. This is not an effective way to motivate people or enact a vision.

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

#412

Post by maxbond »

nolongerthere wrote: post #402
maxbond wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon? When did I do that? Murder is inexcusable. Terrorism is inexcusable. I don't see where I ever implied otherwise.

You forcefully made a claim that was totally false that essentially firmly excused murder. I see you finally kinda corrected in it a follow up, but of course the follow up will not get nearly as much attention as the very false initial statement.

I think you should take a step back and engage differently. You say you're here to engage in good faith, but you're interpreting people's statements with very little charity. It seems like you're very quick to jump to the conclusion that someone who says something you don't like is a supporter of mass murder, you've accused two people in this thread. Which is both uncharitable and straight up flamebait.

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

#413

Post by maxbond »

WalterBright wrote: post #410
maxbond wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already addressed this. Why does a fish swim? What would a fish do if it wasn't swimming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_and_intrinsic_val... Alternatively; why do you do things you enjoy? Why do you do things that benefit you? Why does it matter to derive benefit? --- As far as I see it, the point of contention here is that you believe there exists only one intrinsic goal. I not only disagree but co…

> Why does a fish swim? It will likely die if it does not. Animals' actions are an endless search for food and mates and stimulation. > you believe there exists only one intrinsic goal Only one? No. But it does underly our decisions and actions. > I was trying to demonstrate that you don't have access to other people's experiences and can't really know what motivates them, but you seem unmoved I'm unmoved because I s…

>> Why does a fish swim?

A fish swims because a fish swims. (It's an idiom.)

> Only one? No.

If you actually believed this I don't think you'd have much reason to doubt me when I said I had an intrinsic goal other than selfishness. Why would you unless you believed it was impossible?

> Frankly, I don't believe you do things from which you derive neither benefit nor satisfaction.

This would seem to imply you do believe there exists only one intrinsic goal. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.

Is it possible to have an intrinsic goal other than selfishness, or isn't it?

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

#414

Post by maxbond »

tptacek wrote: post #409
johnnyworker wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you please stop haranguing people like this? If your arguments are as strong as you clearly feel they are (for instance: you have responded to people challenging them by simply repeating them verbatim), you should be able to make them without this kind of incivility. A casual survey of the site suggests that, if one is forced to distill the conflict down to two simple sides, "Israel" and "Palestine", the side you…

If you're going to call out this person multiple times, will you acknowledge that the other commenters are also haranguing them? They were responding here to a comment deliberately twisting their words. They were responding elsewhere to a comment that accused them of supporting murder. You even replied to that one, without identifying it as "uncivil."

I agree this conversation has gone off the rails, but you're putting it all on one person quite unfairly.

If you're unwilling to call people out in an even handed way, I think it's better to just send the link to dang and let him do it. Otherwise it creates the appearance of abusing civility to silence just one particular party when everyone is throwing mud. (I don't think that's your intention, to be clear. Just that it creates the appearance.)

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

#415

Post by panick21_ »

pvdoom wrote: post #403
panick21_ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both broad generalizations are wrong. Yes historically many societies have put in place various solutions to the tragity of the commons. But its also wrong that this was always the case and that all these solutions were great. > It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen. That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the co…

> I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic. Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and…

Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about.

What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.

> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit

There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.

In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.

Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.

With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.

We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.

Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.

So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.

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

#416

Post by grecy »

chthonicdaemon wrote: post #224
Fbnkigffb66tfbj wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $8,000,000,000,000 It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.

$8 trillion is ambiguous and forces me to understand whether you're using long or short scale (particularly for me, coming from a long scale culture, it trips me up often) [1]. I've often wondered though why scientific notation or SI prefixes have never caught on for currency. 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion

> 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous.

To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important.

A single trillion is an absurd amount. Now make eight of these: https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/what-does-one-trillion-d...

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

#417

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

eru wrote: post #212
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It assumes simple rational actors which act in… well… their own best interests?

That 'best interest' can be anything you are interested in. Eg eating lots of chocolate, or feeding starving children in an orphanage. People aren't even assumed to be rational. Bounded rationality is a thing that gets investigated a lot.

Yeah i suppose it’s not fair to say that the entirety of economics is designed around “selfish” actors.

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

#418

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #206
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“costs too much money or other societal concerns“ Uhh you coupled these together which is a little odd, since societal concerns might be more addressable than the basic fact of resource scarcity is.

"costs too much money" isn't resource scarcity. It's at best a synthetic proxy for the general concept of resources (and at worst, the scarcity is entirely artificial)

Sure “costs too much money” is an umbrella term that includes scarcity as a cause but can include other things. When its a consequence of something other than scarcity, the purpose of the article is to point that fact out. Unlike issues of scarcity, societal problems are often solvable but for lack of widespread will, and awareness that solving that underlying societal issue could solve a more obvious and important problem we’re interested in solving is useful because it helps rouse that will.

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

#419

Post by mikewarot »

maxbond wrote: post #372
ryanjshaw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that Linux capabilities are correctly named. They describe an ambient privilege, whereas capabilities represent explicit authorisation i.e. one invokes a capability to use it, and this is why entire classes of security vulnerabilities aren't possible in true capability-based systems. Unfortunately capabilities have long been misunderstood as equivalent to access control lists, and therefore ignored or…

Hmm, I'm not sure we share an understanding of "ambient." Smartphone permissions are scoped to the app. It's been a while since I've messed with SELinux, but iirc, the rules can be scoped to an executable. Whereas in my mind, an ambient permission is scoped to a broad category, like a user or group.

Ambient here is defined as the programmer assumes that they don't have to ask permission, nor does the runtime, you can just open any file at will that the user is allowed to access, without restrictions.

So if an image viewer is given permissions to access your photos, it includes a broad swath of permissions, including the ability to just corrupt them all.

With a capabilities based system, the image viewer would get access to a single photo, or a folder of them, and perhaps read-only access, decided by the user at run time, instead of the system administrator at some earlier time, or the manufacturer as a category choice.

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

#420

Post by dawnbreez »

bawolff wrote: post #274
dawnbreez wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Non-profit" does not imply nobody gets paid. https://donorbox.org/nonprofit-blog/guide-to-nonprofit-salar...

That's my point. Money still has to come from somewhere. Being a non-profit doesn't solve the problem of things costing money.

"Non-profit" also does not imply that money isn't coming in from donations, grants, or fees.
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