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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#231

Post by globnomulous »

efavdb wrote: post #135
globnomulous wrote: post #106

Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babyloni…

Worldwide poverty rate in 1800 = 81%. Today under 10%. https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/

Could you expand on this?

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#232

Post by onion2k »

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.

Being a polymath was once doable.

Any reasonably intelligent child who can write some poetry, understand basic calculus, and has a working knowledge of chemistry would be heralded as a polymath if you dropped them into the Victorian era. The breadth of human knowledge is just bigger now.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#233

Post by rramadass »

A trivial angsty article.

Philosophy has had an answer to this (and more) since time immemorial. We simply need to start with "control of our self-grasping mind", "lessen our desires", and "let go" of those things which are not under our control. This is the active and subjective way of approaching it via Hindu/Buddhist/Greek philosophies. Learn to live in the world and yet apart from it.

For a more analytical approach, see Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia (free ebook) - https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...

For a non-philosophical but scientific study, see Complex Systems Science to understand the nature of Complexity itself - https://www.santafe.edu/what-is-complex-systems-science and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#234

Post by ian_j_butler »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #218
Forgeties79 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how we have to live?

Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.

> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.

If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started.

Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#235

Post by rramadass »

rglover wrote: post #142

The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

Nice pertinent reference to Jacques Ellul's work. The wikipedia page is a bit sparse but the article Confronting the Technological Society (linked in the bibliography) is a must read to understand the main ideas - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#236

Post by n0on3 »

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…

Except most of the complexity has nothing to do with “understanding and exploring the universe”, it’s just byproduct of the ever changing fractal composition of attempts to gain or obtain something over someone else.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#237

Post by field_reader »

Simple has nothing to do with good. This isn't a deep insight — it's just that "first principles" as an aesthetic keeps tricking people into thinking peeling layers off is the same thing as understanding. A skyscraper is complicated. The answer to "this is too complicated" isn't "live in a hut." The hut is simple. The hut also can't hold a million people.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#238

Post by scoofy »

Zambyte wrote: post #167
scoofy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology. I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum. > I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of…

The nostalgic hunter gather hippies probably thought the plow was unnatural.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#239

Post by DANmode »

> I've realized this article is slightly naïve

Is it?

Or is it simply unresigned?

To the author:

there are ways to get away from much of what you described, and retain great sense of community.

I hope you and I both find the balance we enjoy.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#240

Post by scoofy »

BoorishBears wrote: post #186
scoofy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology. I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time. I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1980.
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