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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#191

Post by Aurornis »

jmilloy wrote: post #190
Aurornis wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".

I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.

You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.

The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.

If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#192

Post by throw7 »

AGI is the postmodern tower of babel. Ignore.

If you feel that the devices and technology you use are making you the slave, then master it (learn about it and make it your slave) or dump it.

I'm not being unrealistic. I had a facebook account for about 2 years and then decided I had enough of being Zuckerberg's dumbfuck and deleted it. I still keep a gmail account, but I pay for an email account also. At the very extreme are monastics which is a very real thing even today.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#193

Post by lotsofpulp »

_nxwj wrote: post #147
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…

> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

> This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes.

That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#194

Post by farley13 »

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…

Agree.

If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.

on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.

No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.

I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.

It's also a good idea to learn our own nature better. Example: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#197

Post by frogcommander »

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…

[flagged]

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#198

Post by fzeroracer »

BirAdam wrote: post #125
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…

This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.

Do you know what went into Roman Concrete?

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#199

Post by roenxi »

irjustin wrote: post #189
raincole wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#200

Post by nradov »

jmilloy wrote: post #190
Aurornis wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

How much money and power is required? Should we stop technological development now or do humans still need new stuff?
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