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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#181

Post by gerdesj »

drivers99 wrote: post #175
cdrini wrote: post #140

Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait…

But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combination…

"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")

So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.

We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#182

Post by raincole »

terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school

Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#183

Post by abivarman »

cdrini wrote: post #168
_nxwj wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find this interesting https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/ Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/environmentalissues/chapter/1...

Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from. I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an in…

I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.

But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#184

Post by toofy »

Procrastes wrote: post #104

This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences. "Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world gr…

i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.

it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.

ps: the soundtrack is amazing.

pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#185

Post by trgn »

the__alchemist wrote: post #126
angrydev wrote: post #110

Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.

My reaction too, starting with the picture of dense vegetation at the top of the article!

get eaten alive by mosquitos and be slightly moist all the time!

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#186

Post by BoorishBears »

scoofy wrote: post #128
angrydev wrote: post #110

Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.

Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology. I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#187

Post by Aurornis »

terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.

Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.

Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.

The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#188

Post by metaphor »

terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#189

Post by irjustin »

raincole wrote: post #182
terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not.

In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#190

Post by jmilloy »

Aurornis wrote: post #187
terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival. Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them. Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize…

I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
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