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Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

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Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#101

Post by luciusdomitius »

mort96 wrote: post #66
throwawaymaths wrote: post #22

> broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility" How about artificially low interest rates? An interest rate is exactly the coordination between risk and time, with a low interest rate you're subsidizing stupidity and wastefulness, and with its concommittant inflation you're forcing people into making those investments to stay afloat. Maybe if we weren't goosing the interest rate low…

Your last sentence seems to suggest that if we just let the free market do what it does, everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems. Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?

Yes, externalities must indeed be settled. However, leaded petrol (same chap also invented freon (!) btw - talk about being unlucky :D) cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#102

Post by hash07e »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #64
I_DRINK_KOOLAID wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

In Europe we do not have "safe places in colleges". It is an US phenomenon, that has nothing to do with risk aversion - on the contrary, it is based on the optimistic assumption that society is generally mature enough to own firearms and you only need to mitigate some "edge cases". True risk aversion would be to regulate the gun ownership, education and welfare the same way as it is done in Europe, where mass shootin…

Well you dont have free speech in Europe too.

Because everything against the current narrative is "hate speech".

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#103

Post by glitchc »

jmyeet wrote: post #95

Another perspective: humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function [1]. As for climate change, the only way that ends is after massive death and destruction or due to economics (specifically: carbon emission sources get replaced because they're cheaper). It's too large, expensive and long-term for people to care otherwise. The pandemic should've dispelled any notions you may have…

Well, the US military might is reliant on a resource it does not actually produce locally (in sufficient quantities). If the govt. did not exert control over other sources, it would quickly lose access, rendering much of the heavy machinery useless. The Navy is the most vulnerable to an oil shortage.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#104

Post by sidewndr46 »

jmyeet wrote: post #95

Another perspective: humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function [1]. As for climate change, the only way that ends is after massive death and destruction or due to economics (specifically: carbon emission sources get replaced because they're cheaper). It's too large, expensive and long-term for people to care otherwise. The pandemic should've dispelled any notions you may have…

Are you suggesting that the only way to avoid anthropogenic climate change is a massive die off humans?

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#105

Post by KptMarchewa »

luciusdomitius wrote: post #101
mort96 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence seems to suggest that if we just let the free market do what it does, everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems. Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?

Yes, externalities must indeed be settled. However, leaded petrol (same chap also invented freon (!) btw - talk about being unlucky :D) cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that. Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.

Unfortunately governments can also fail in settling externalities. For example, making it hard to extract oil domestically only shifts production to other countries, which are often bad authoritarian states.

Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#106

Post by Joeboy »

raspberry1337 wrote: post #4
verisimi wrote: post #3

Coming from the UN, we already know what the answer will be. More governance, more/better management of risk by the UN that is then delegated to its administrative regions (the US, EU, etc). This is because as long as we are talking about risk, this plays into the hands of a global governance structure. All risks should be planned for and managed - I mean the covid response was fantastic, right? What was wrong was no…

I stopped respecting the UN when they said they criticized Elon Musk for not giving them 6 billion dollars so that they could "solve world hunger". That's about as much as the state of Sweden donates to poverty every single year, and that is just Sweden alone. The total amount of charity donations worldwide is in the trillions of dollars yet there's always just more required. Bureaucrats with humanities degrees at th…

> "solve world hunger"

I think the idea WFP promised to "solve world hunger" for $6bn originated with Musk or his fans, not with WFP. WFP's original claim was that they'd be able to prevent 42 million people from starving (a much more achievable goal). I'm struggling to find the original interview rather than dramatized reports of it, though.

Disclosure: I've done contract work for WFP.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#107

Post by bluGill »

inawarminister wrote: post #91
phkahler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. One of the fudges is saying that a computer based on today's technology is more valuable than on from a couple years ago. I forget what this is called. But it's stupid and could be really abused to say a cellphone is a trillion dollar device, since that's what the processing power would have cost in 1980. Maybe we should measure GDP via wages. Since all spending has to come from that anyway... not sure how to c…

There were proposals for labor-backed currency, where the basic unit is one hourly work of the worker. So B2B transactions will be valued from the man-hours that went to it. Of course this approach breaks when the gigantic corpocracies are able to bloat into larger and larger sizes. But it might be an interesting research topic.

Labor hours fails because some jobs need more incentive to get into. Why would I study in school when I could make just as much doing basic unskilled labor, with careful savings the unskilled laborer can retire earlier since he starts sooner (also likely doesn't have to pay off student debt)

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#108

Post by nonrandomstring »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #82
nonrandomstring wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that mean that I now have to spend my time in the evening doing the "monolithic state apparatus'" job instead of going for a meal with my partner? Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, you'd be sharing the job with 7 billion other people, so the total workload would be like 5 minutes on a Thursday morning every other month. Could you spare that? Please read a book called "Leviathan" [1] by Thoma…

> Please read a book called "Leviathan" [1] by Thomas Hobbes and maybe a little of Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" [2] to balance it up. The fact that you can bring up two books to support your opinion doesn't mean I agree with it. They are pretty much classics and anybody who was interested in philosophy would have already been familiar with it. > Yes. Because we are all responsible. But guess what, yo…

> The fact that you can bring up two books to support your opinion doesn't mean I agree with it.

Of course. Besides, they are faulted books (and thinkers). It's not really my "opinion" I'm trying to get across so much as the "Western Ideal" (the thing we're all assumed to believe in and accept as a foundation of life). A pillar of that is shared responsibility through the proxy of the State.

Namely that the "State" is there to serve us because it is us. The ideas of a General Will, Social Contract etcetera are the reason we give legitimacy to parliaments, congress, politicians, local councils and even monarchs. They are servants.

Otherwise they're just "people in power to be fought". The only alternatives, understood since Aristotle, are undesirable forms of tyranny where armed revolution is the latent objective of all free men. The deal/contract is that we are also those servants ourselves )we share power and responsibility* to a proxy or figurehead in which we invest loyally/trust and some temporary decision making powers. That's the sense in which the state takes away the burden of daily politics, freeing us for work and living.

> You can't do serious politics spending 5 minutes on Thursday morning every other month.

Not literally. I was joking a little. That's a metaphor for the small effort required by all people to maintain a democratic government of the people.

If anything, internet communication has saddled us with the worry of global affairs and economics that the social contract was supposed to unburden us of. You spend far more time concerned with the affairs of monolithic governance than enjoying nice dinners out - just by reading the "news", and a give it much more mind than a peasant from 300 years ago ever would have.

Another problem is that people are told they have ever more responsibility (through markets) and are stripped of ever more power. Our governments shrug while we are helpless to change things.

In that sense the "Social Contract" is broken. In order to fix it we ought to to know at least what it is (because we've forgotten), hence I make the effort to explain that where I can.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#109

Post by BurningFrog »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #60
blfr wrote: post #57

I think this is completely backwards. We are not risking enough and the progress has stalled as a result. During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion. Since then (also ~70 years) we have maintained a little…

I guess you missed the moment between 1950-2020s when our civilization transitioned from industrial to information society thanks to massive progress in IT. Super-optimistic approach to software design in that period of time has led us to the destructive mess of the social networks, cyberwarfare and buggy MCAS in Boeing 737 Max. EDIT: I also forgot to mention globalization, where optimism resulted in the supply chain…

The 737 Max tragedy wss mainly caused by regulatory constrains on design.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#110

Post by lapcat »

blfr wrote: post #57

I think this is completely backwards. We are not risking enough and the progress has stalled as a result. During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion. Since then (also ~70 years) we have maintained a little…

> During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion.

What is your concrete suggestion for taking more risks? Surely not nuking more cities? Having more world wars? Shall we declare war on Russia and send troops to Ukraine? Would that create more "progress"?

> Otherwise, it has been a time of stagnation.

How so? To take one example: we had a killer virus come out of nowhere, but we were able to develop effective vaccines for the virus almost immediately. The "slow" part was just the safety testing, not the vaccine development. Would this have been possible during the 1880-1950 era? Science and technology continues rapidly; I'm quite puzzled by the stagnation comment.

In 2022, we all have computers in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than anything from 1950, and we can use these pocket computers to instantly communicate with anyone on the planet.

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