Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

undrr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 255 posts

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

#231

Post by refurb »

blueflow wrote: post #38
refurb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if let's say, Myanmar doesn't stop using CFCs. What's your solution? Send in some Blue Helmets to enforce global law? And what if they start shooting back? You want to send your son or daughter there? And not to mention the politics of rich countries sending soldiers into poor countries to enforce rules. Colonialism 2.0. "It's the developed world's obligations to drag the uncivilized nations into the the 21st cent…

A country emitting enough HCFCs to wipe the ozone layer within a decade is a threat to the security of every other nation on earth (due to increasing ionizing radiation). So yes. Economic sanctions and military intervention. I don't have kids, but i am in military age ("Wehrfähiges Alter") myself.

Ok and do what? Destroy the countries economy? Station troops at factories? Seize all vehicles and remove CFCs? Take all their air conditioners?

The idea is ridiculous.

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

#232

Post by jolux »

baremetal wrote: post #228
jolux wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there are too many bust seasons in a given period and you and all your neighbors’ stocks are depleted? These are the real problems with subsistence farming and they’re the primary reason nobody wants to do it given a choice. There’s ultimately very little freedom in the sort of precarity that subsistence farming entails: all aspects of your life are dominated by the success of your harvest, which requires con…

you assume the only life worth valuing is one that you know. fetishsizing risk is not what subsistence farmers do. look at the amish. when i am in the field, it is as if there is nothing going wrong in the world. headlines dont pierce the stillness. something ineffable has been lost.

> you assume the only life worth valuing is one that you know.

No, I think all life is worth valuing, it's just an objective fact that the vast majority of people would prefer not to be subsistence farming.

> look at the amish.

The Amish are not pure subsistence farmers. Many of them shop at Costco and Wal-Mart if it's accessible to them. They are also dependent on the rest of society for emergency services and healthcare, just like us. Their daily existence is far closer to ours than that of a subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa.

> when i am in the field, it is as if there is nothing going wrong in the world. headlines dont pierce the stillness. something ineffable has been lost.

That's all well and good, I like being in nature and getting away from it all too, but there's no sense in romanticizing poverty like you're doing here. Subsistence farming is pain and suffering for huge numbers of people, not just an escape from the over-technologized mainstream culture of wealthy countries.

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

#233

Post by baremetal »

jolux wrote: post #232
baremetal wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you assume the only life worth valuing is one that you know. fetishsizing risk is not what subsistence farmers do. look at the amish. when i am in the field, it is as if there is nothing going wrong in the world. headlines dont pierce the stillness. something ineffable has been lost.

> you assume the only life worth valuing is one that you know. No, I think all life is worth valuing, it's just an objective fact that the vast majority of people would prefer not to be subsistence farming. > look at the amish. The Amish are not pure subsistence farmers. Many of them shop at Costco and Wal-Mart if it's accessible to them. They are also dependent on the rest of society for emergency services and healt…

fair point.

i think i am trying to solve a different problem. and incorrectly drew inferences.

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

#234

Post by abecedarius »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #224
abecedarius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think of the U.S. Bill of Rights as taking "power from voters to make decisions and manage commonly held resources". You might think of the above claim as simplistic, but it's no less so than is "yay democracy".

Who said "yay democracy", please?

OK, sorry, I take back "yay democracy".

The point remains that restrictions on even democratic government are not a novel idea in liberal politics; it goes back to the beginning of written political theory. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is excellent on history and background and explores some ideas on modern issues.

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

#235

Post by renewiltord »

lapcat wrote: post #217
renewiltord wrote: post #201

It's just a distributed market problem, right? As an agent in the market, if you correctly model tail risk you will still be out-competed by someone who does not model tail risk, since they can allocate resources somewhere other than tail risk mitigation. Given non-catastrophic events, this ends up being okay for the market system. After all, society doesn't care if Google is the search engine or Bing so long as they…

> A few hundred million will die in the top end of what we expect, but that's acceptable. And this is clearly the position of most people, so I'm comfortably in the majority here. Citation, please? I'd love to see the polls saying that several hundred million deaths are ok with most people. From what I've seen, increased government action on climate change polls very well among the public, e.g., https://www.pewresear…

Oh, I’m sorry. I misspoke. I meant to say “I care very much, like hundreds of millions of people, that the government act on climate change”.

By the way, I’ll vote you out if gas becomes expensive, but make sure you do something about the climate change. I won’t vote you out over Climate Change or anything. But it is very important. Gas prices, in comparison, are not at all important. I’ll vote you out over them, but they’re not important.

Just make sure you get the climate change thing right. Won’t win you my vote or anything but it is the most important thing in the world. Nothing is more important.

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

#236

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

ben_w wrote: post #116
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. Musk did not ask for anything outrageous in return for the money. It was a PR disaster from the UN's point of view. Perhaps their perception of the risk of calling Elon Musk out like that was broken?

While I was less than impressed by what I saw, I think calling it “a PR disaster” overstates the impact. I observed people reading into both parties what I already know they wanted to believe about each of Musk and the UN.

Don't get me wrong; I normally don't like Musk's antics. However, we _know_ we can't end world hunger with 6 billion USD. At best, we can solve some urgent crisis, but an actual long-term solution requires more than billionaires flinging money at the problem.

Beasley knew this when he opened his mouth.

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

#237

Post by blueflow »

refurb wrote: post #231
blueflow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A country emitting enough HCFCs to wipe the ozone layer within a decade is a threat to the security of every other nation on earth (due to increasing ionizing radiation). So yes. Economic sanctions and military intervention. I don't have kids, but i am in military age ("Wehrfähiges Alter") myself.

Ok and do what? Destroy the countries economy? Station troops at factories? Seize all vehicles and remove CFCs? Take all their air conditioners? The idea is ridiculous.

Occupy the country and enforce CFC-prohibiting legislature.

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

#238

Post by throwawaymaths »

collegeburner wrote: post #144
inawarminister wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot of reasons why this wouldn't work but fundamentally the LTV is an interesting toy but crap economics. Bottom line is utility to people does not depend on person hours involved in production. Think about it this way: I can have somebody skilled or unskilled do a job. Assume that they make the same output but it takes unskilled 2x the time, let us say maybe producing some leathercraft. Their output is n…

It can even get worse. Fundamentally LTV is subject to a very dangerous question of "who gets to define what is labour"? Is sitting around playing video games labour? Well what if you're at a video games company? Is smearing feces on a canvas labour? What if it's a commissioned art piece? What if it's an uncomissioned art piece that the artist knows will fetch a price? What if the artist is a chimpanzee? Etc.

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

#239

Post by throwawaymaths »

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?

Bad response. Nowhere do I claim that no meddling is good. I simply claim that this one form of meddling is really fucking bad and it's hard to see that meddling can be the root cause when you are predisposed to meddle.

The irony is that you're falling victim to exactly this phenomenon: I claim that meddling in one form is bad and you pull out a knee-jerk argument with a buzzword (externalities) that injects a misinterpretation of the logic in the argument. When you are predisposed to meddle, you put up barriers to understanding my argument.

Anyways, my point is exactly that central banking makes blindness to externalities worse.

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

#240

Post by throwawaymaths »

mort96 wrote: post #125
infogulch wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better. I doubt regulatory policymakers are immune.

That's a non-statement. Nothing about what I have said assumes that policymakers are immune to any form of bias.

> Humans have a strong universal bias towards additive solutions, even when subtractive solutions are clearly better.

That's a very profound statement, are you kidding me?

Post reply on HN