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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#261

Post by hnfong »

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…

> I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history.

"If plows had not been invented nobody would have to plow the fields!!!"

OK, if that logic sounds ridiculous to you, just realize that this is the whole basis of the argument about things getting complicated.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#262

Post by exitheone »

zdragnar wrote: post #116
MichaelZuo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological. If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such. Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.

I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team. I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it. Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at l…

I don't think that's necessarily true.

I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations.

It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare.

So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on.

So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#263

Post by numpad0 »

terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today.

Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem.

Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#264

Post by Levitz »

qsera wrote: post #256
pibaker wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years? There were more slaves and serfs 250 years ago than today. It takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are actually a slave when you are not, in fact, being shipped off to a foreign land in shackles just to pick cotton and get whipped because your owner got bored. I wish your kids the best. Livi…

So using your perfectly working and well adjusted mind, you can only imagine a single kind of "slavery"? Would it have helped if I said "bondage" instead of "slavery"? I think so, because you seemed to have latched on to some imagery strongly associated with that word, without trying to understand the point that is being made.

If you have to stretch the meaning of words in order to try to paint the present as comparable to the past, you've already lost the argument.

I'm sorry but an statement like:

>There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains.

Is an obscene display of ignorance. Do you know what dysentery is? Do you have any idea of the immense amount of pain and suffering caused through the ages by famine? Sickness? Have you in your life taken a history course?

You worry about your children, how afraid were you of their mother dying when giving birth? Because that happened constantly.

I mean the word. It's obscene. That people like you can be so utterly detached from the harsh realities of nature is the greatest testament imaginable that by God yes, we do have it easy.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#265

Post by Levitz »

qsera wrote: post #225
terbo wrote: post #141

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 1…

>But he some how didn't know when to stop. I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more. No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

>No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#266

Post by [deleted] »

keiferski wrote: post #49

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones. At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing…

[deleted]

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#267

Post by numpad0 »

IMO the problem is that most people work to earn food allotment by means so far removed from its production because those detached means appear lucrative; software engineers especially do so by proving the first order derivative of their performance, and oh no that's not so sutainable, but they're always too late to do anything about that.

I don't know if eg. farm works are better than white collar work and there is no buts to follow. All my guts tell me is that too many things in this world require everyone to be above-average within the exact cohort from which the said average is derived from, which just burns down everything.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#268

Post by kleene_op »

roenxi wrote: post #199
irjustin wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not. In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.

There is only one ethical way to solve that moral issue: Schrödinger birthing

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#269

Post by ivanjermakov »

angrydev wrote: post #110

Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.

Real world is always more complicated than any model of it we design.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#270

Post by ksec »

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

-Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple

And I say this to pretty much every tech we have at the moment, from USB, CPU, GPU, Web, Programming Languages, OS. And the same with every day life appliance as well. Making something simple and elegant is perhaps the hardest thing most people never achieve.

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