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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#41

Post by j_maffe »

KurSix wrote: post #6
Terr_ wrote: post #2

Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world. Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often. So now we do…

Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through

But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#42

Post by bspammer »

nkrisc wrote: post #15
lordkrandel wrote: post #8

[flagged]

As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water. The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example. The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#43

Post by Quarrelsome »

this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.

You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.

We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#44

Post by tornikeo »

Just as it has always been.

EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.

Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).

So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#45

Post by j_maffe »

nkrisc wrote: post #15
lordkrandel wrote: post #8

[flagged]

As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water. The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example. The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#46

Post by renticulous »

j_maffe wrote: post #38

> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers. This has be…

You liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#47

Post by dnnddidiej »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #43

this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime. You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software…

To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#48

Post by jorisw »

doginasuit wrote: post #37

There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction…

Agreed.

I myself have long ago begun ‘curating’ stimuli actively, mostly by shutting out that which isn’t relevant or actionable to me. Social media being #1, not counting DM apps.

Push notifications of any kind except for DMs being #2. Sound off.

News that could never affect me or anyone I know, #3.

Noise cancellation to shut out traffic noise and unwanted conversation.

It has served me well

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#49

Post by keiferski »

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.

At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.

The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.

This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.

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