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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

#171

Post by I_DRINK_KOOLAID »

fallingfrog wrote: post #169
I_DRINK_KOOLAID wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm telling you so, as a fact, not an opinion. Facts are that if you look at places that are experiencing growth at 9% or 10% YoY in real terms, meaning after adjusting for inflation, they are all places which are pretty socially volatile and have a very fast turnover of humans. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Namibia, Vietnam, Philippines, Honduras... In the US , the hotspots for unpredictability , high social volatility and f…

I wish you would try listening for a change. You might learn something. Countries like Ethiopia are catching up from being way behind using imported technology, of course they're growing fast. Their population also has recently exploded, which accounts for much of the growth. How do you not see this? "how the US transitioned from being a country of go-getters to being afraid of losing.." This is just pure contempt an…

> Countries like Ethiopia are catching up from being way behind using imported technology

And who do you think is doing all the importing? A young guy in his 20s , who is working 14 hours per day for his family import-export company and helping his dad cooking the books to convince the bank to loan them money to get access to such foreign technology.

That is to me both a survivor and a risk taker, not an American kid getting out of college today.

> You're flat out wrong about young people and their willingness to take risks

Taking risks entails being open to novel experiences and also believing you are invincible and the world is yours for the taking . So let me ask you:

Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you gamble? How many drugs have you tried? Did you violate lockdowns to go partying? When was the last time you stole another man's girlfriend? When was the last time you had sex with another man's girlfriend? When was the last time you managed to outcompete other men in a club and brought a girl home leaving them with nothing?

I am asking because I did all that (well except escaping lockdowns), back when colleges were still vibrant.

Risk taking is correlated with all the above. It takes arrogance to start or takeover a company, you have to fight and push the barriers, you don't get to have selective arrogance which only applies to one realm of life.

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

#172

Post by SkyMarshal »

White_Wolf wrote: post #167
SkyMarshal wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those edge cases would likely destroy the whole system. The value of an hour of labor isn’t based on the time it took to acquire the skill, it’s based on the value of the good or service produced to society. Whether it takes a normal person 4 years to acquire that skill, or a genius 4 days, the value is what it’s worth to other people. That value not only has a very wide range, but also it’s constantly fluctua…

>The value of an hour of labor isn’t based on the time it took to acquire the skill, it’s based on the value of the good or service produced to society I'd think, the reason that a surgeon is paid more than a garbage disposal person is the ammount of time, brain power and skill it takes to learn/master. In the grand scheme of things, number wise, if the garbage disposal guys are gone (or just refuse to work for 1 yea…

Things like this have been tried throughout history and constantly failed. It was pretty much the running theme of 1800s and 1900s. As the other poster said, the only objective measure of value is what people will pay for it. Nothing centrally planned can handle the variance and fluctuations in the value of things.

There are some supply and demand dynamics to it, for example surgeons are less replaceable than garbage men due to 8+ years of education required, so they will have less supply relative to demand, driving up the cost of their services.

And time is a factor as well - usually when people need a surgeon the problem is urgent and immediate, as you mention about your own experience, so they’re willing to pay more.

Also in your example, you have to compare on a 1-to-1 basis. How many lives does 1 garbage collector save, vs 1 surgeon. And if all the garbage men quit, how quickly could they be replaced, vs same with all the surgeons?

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

#173

Post by peteradio »

galangalalgol wrote: post #170
luciusdomitius wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples): 1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide... 2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens. 3. Abor…

Is this getting downvotes because it doesn't speak to or support the question of the level of trust in the US government? Or is it getting downvotes because the politics of the poster are evident, and people are disagreeing with those politics? I am pretty sure the poster and I would disagree very strongly and on many things, but this post would seem to relate directly on the matter discussed. We do have a decreasing…

I'd be willing to bet that its viewed as "low-effort" because quotes like these generally turn out to be misleading to the actual study (or the study itself has fatal structure), pretty much without fail:

> More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll

Political polling is seen by some as more of a driver of opinion than an extraction of one.

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

#174

Post by lapcat »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #160
lapcat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not endorsing it, and I would rather that we didn't, but > Having more world wars? Shall we declare war on Russia and send troops to Ukraine? Would that create more "progress"? War driving technology forward is a pretty popular idea; it's plausible that if modern society survived WWIII it would create more progress... for the survivors.

> War driving technology forward is a pretty popular idea

I would say less morbidly that government investment often drives technology forward. Sadly, wartime seems to be the only time when many people are willing to invest in government.

> it's plausible that if modern society survived WWIII it would create more progress... for the survivors.

That's the problem with war driving technology forward. The military technology has been driven forward to the level where modern society surviving WWIII is questionable.

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

#175

Post by nradov »

phkahler wrote: post #89
dustingetz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

innovation can?

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…

You are referring to the hedonic quality adjustment factor that the BLS applies to CPI calculations. It's not at all stupid and it doesn't result in trillion dollar cellphones. You should really read up on the basics instead of making ignorant comments about things you don't understand.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...

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

#176

Post by rayiner »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #141
rayiner wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. Go move to my dad’s village in Bangladesh for a year, so what they do, then come back and post on HN.

Let’s assume all of us are curious about what we would learn doing that, but none of us are probably willing or able to actually do that. What would we learn if we did?

Being a subsistence farmer is really hard. When my dad was growing up, 1 out of 4 kids died before age 5. Getting in boats to go to school was a thing during monsoon season. Moreover, most people don’t own their land—they’re what Americans would call share croppers or what Europeans would call peasants.

There’s certain benefits, of course. The communities are tightly knit and there is a predictable social hierarchy. But it’s a rigid one, and the rigidity is driven by the realities of subsistence farming. It’s pretty great if you’re a landowner, but if you’re not born into one of those families then you can’t “work your way up.” Indeed, a lot of the things we think of as “more enlightened” attitudes in the modern west are really the product of us being free from the constraints of subsistence farming. You don’t get to be “child free” (or openly gay) in an economy where having lots of kids and hoping enough survive to take care of you in your old age is the only retirement plan.

Men’s dominance over women, likewise, arises naturally in an economy where people are at the edge of survival and doing extremely physically demanding work keeps the community alive. My mom grew up reading Russian literature and got a master’s degree in chemistry and edited a history of the Bangladeshi independence movement. Not because her father was enlightened, though he was, but because he was a wealthy landowner and didn’t need his daughters to be in the fields harvesting rice, or to get married off quickly so some other man could support them.

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

#177

Post by dpark »

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.

> leaded petrol cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.

And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.

There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.

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

#178

Post by jonkho »

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?

“everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems.”

Ah…age-old gaslight tactic. Using words like “everything” “all” “any” to encapsulate your opponents argument then using a non-sequitor counter-point (leaded gasoline) to argue a tangent point (a point not relating to interest rates).

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

#179

Post by ivan_gammel »

uxp100 wrote: post #98
ivan_gammel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So safe spaces have nothing to do with firearms. It’s sort of a concept about the norms of conversation. So if a support group was a safe space it essentially means you’re not supposed to contradict people even if they’re wrong. Circa 2014 this was a big boogeyman, I think triggered by protests at a college in Mississippi (?) where the library was called a safe space for POCs, and white people where not allowed in, a…

Thanks for the clarification.

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

#180

Post by jolux »

baremetal wrote: post #137
Adraghast wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils." Said Diogenes, "Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king." There are tradeoffs for everything.

The thing is it’s not a choice between living on lentils and fancier food, it’s a choice between having a stable food source and having a food source that is dependent on huge amounts of your own manual labor which will still sometimes fail to feed you through no fault of your own, leaving you or your partner or children to go hungry and possibly starve to death. Ergo: nightmare.
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