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Modern Malaise

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Re: Modern Malaise

#111

Post by PontifexMinimus »

ggm wrote: post #22

Hard not to see parallels with the end of the Roman empire. We know we could do better, we can't be bothered trying very hard and we'd rather moan about the good old days. All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't. Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.

> All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't.

Putin thought he could be that horde. He is failing, and failing badly, in Ukraine.

Re: Modern Malaise

#112

Post by anon291 »

PontifexMinimus wrote: post #109
anon291 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our family lives in a major urban metro. We go to a traditional urban church. We have everything you mentioned. No diss to our rural brethren, but rurality is not a prerequisite to this life. Most city people problems are of their own choosing. My wife and I currently suffer from the more socializing than we can handle. But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have de…

> But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on. Self-imposed? People can't just choose to beleive in God, and most religions like their adherents to sincerely beleive in their stuff.

I mean at the end of the day everything the article complains about is people not believing in God.

Americans have a clear religion and its god is money.

Also, I'll point out the religious belief is basically inherited. A lot of the problems we see today are the previous generations refusal to pass on values and attitudes passed on to them.

Re: Modern Malaise

#113

Post by anon291 »

JackMorgan wrote: post #93
seibelj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence. It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.

I'm legitimately happy you are content and satisfied. I have a half dozen coworkers who value family, church, and hard work. Most of them are stress-eating themselves to death. They binge shop on Amazon, buy cars and houses they can't afford or enjoy, and generally seem to hate going home at the end of the day. I've seen them beg to be allowed to come back into the office, so they can escape their family. They seem t…

"hard work" is not a traditional value. That's an American thing which is relatively young as far as tradition goes.

Do your friends value an integrated life? Community? Leisure? These are the traditional values missing and they're so missed even so called conservatives have forgotten they exist.

Re: Modern Malaise

#114

Post by seydor »

Balgair wrote: post #106
seydor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a basic principle of biology which fractally translates to entire societies. Piketty's data shows that historically, the curve was flattened only when the economy itself was upended, i.e. after wars. We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. A parallel money system like cryptos might have been used for that, but so far it has done the opposite

Nit: Power law distributions aren't specific to biology. Even the sizes of asteroids follow a power law. Absent some law of physics or another, your null hypothesis of any measure of just about anything is a power law.

Biology deep down is physics. But not everything is a power law.

Re: Modern Malaise

#115

Post by seydor »

emptyparadise wrote: post #104
seydor wrote: post #64

>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…

What if the one steering didn't need to be a person? What if it was an idea or an ideology? Are we better off in a world devoid of purpose? Or did we never truly have purpose? Did our past generations delude themselves into thinking that they did? Or did we delude ourselves into thinking that our past generations did have purpose?

Ideologies and religions are behavioral tools. Whether we re better or worse with them depends on how they are used by the ones who control them. Delusion is the natural state of humans, at any time we believe that our core beliefs are established (e.g. belief in science) even if we dont have sufficient arguments to convince ourselves. it seems we constantly seek some model structure to explain and guide our behavior

Re: Modern Malaise

#116

Post by DeWilde »

sph wrote: post #84
DeWilde wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hopes for the future are the same. However, until we get there, the current system is quite good at maintaining a stable society with increasing gains in technological development and social welfare. It is far from perfect or ideal, and it is full of lies, but until we have something better that is tangible and real, and not just theoretical, I wouldn't touch it.

We share the same hope for the future, but I do not think our current "democracies" are quite good, as you say. I think they're terrible, and the alternatives are even worse. Sadly we don't have anything to replace them with at the moment, and we're just a hair away from some societal and political event to convince people that this very charismatic leader has all the answers and we should vote for them.

Maybe my standards are too low but the fact that we don't have societal wide unrest, mass murders, famine, revolutions and the like that was pretty common just 100 years ago is good enough to provide for an environment where scientific and technological progress can happen.

Re: Modern Malaise

#117

Post by seibelj »

anon291 wrote: post #113
JackMorgan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm legitimately happy you are content and satisfied. I have a half dozen coworkers who value family, church, and hard work. Most of them are stress-eating themselves to death. They binge shop on Amazon, buy cars and houses they can't afford or enjoy, and generally seem to hate going home at the end of the day. I've seen them beg to be allowed to come back into the office, so they can escape their family. They seem t…

"hard work" is not a traditional value. That's an American thing which is relatively young as far as tradition goes. Do your friends value an integrated life? Community? Leisure? These are the traditional values missing and they're so missed even so called conservatives have forgotten they exist.

Yes there was no such thing as hard work before America. All of civilization sprung up from nowhere in a life of leisure where everyone relaxed, then America came around and made everyone work hard.

Re: Modern Malaise

#118

Post by d0liver »

peyton wrote: post #52
d0liver wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagin…

> Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos…

What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist.

Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.

Re: Modern Malaise

#119

Post by sph »

DeWilde wrote: post #116
sph wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We share the same hope for the future, but I do not think our current "democracies" are quite good, as you say. I think they're terrible, and the alternatives are even worse. Sadly we don't have anything to replace them with at the moment, and we're just a hair away from some societal and political event to convince people that this very charismatic leader has all the answers and we should vote for them.

Maybe my standards are too low but the fact that we don't have societal wide unrest, mass murders, famine, revolutions and the like that was pretty common just 100 years ago is good enough to provide for an environment where scientific and technological progress can happen.

We have enjoyed 70 years of peace in this corner of the world, but I wouldn't say we've solved the government problem. Give it a couple centuries first, but seeing how the post-war enthusiast has turned into unrest and widening inequality even in this side of the world, I think this peace is "just a phase".

It's hard to see it (and admit it to oneself) because of recency bias and thinking this time it'll be different, that we're smarter than our ancestors but history tends to repeat itself.

Re: Modern Malaise

#120

Post by carapace »

seydor wrote: post #91
roenxi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day? The simple fact that so far only war makes the curve flatten suggests that this is not a curve we want to flatten. Nobody comes through a war feeling good.

Define 'comfortable'. It's always relative as people aspire to be what others have become. Wars have always happened, naturally, so it's nothing 'unnatural', and perhaps nature's way to flatten the curve. Our current feelings about war may or may not be correct - wars have many benefits too.

You've never been to war, eh?

> Define 'comfortable'.

Hot and cold running water, a toilet, shower, electricity and internet, shelter, medical care (not dying of easily curable diseases, for example.)

Really, IMO, the baseline is what folks at the Google campus have. If everyone in the world had that QoL as a baseline I think we could declare victory and go home.

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