I disagree. But maximising the acquisition of bits of paper and numbers on a screen above happiness and day-to-day needs is the American way.
We've made the world too complicated
271–280 of 496 posts
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 immen…
What? we don't have sickness now? Or an ever increasing amount of sickness? We now have kids with diabetes now! Childhood cancer anyone? We don't have Dysentry for kids, but we have diabetes, and cancer for them now. They can now happily live a 100 years in a hospital!
Congratulations! What a win!
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era. You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine t…
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in…
Just like almost everyone above... 40 years? 50 years? talk about their childhood with rose tinted glasses on and how nowadays children are spoiled brats.
But if you actually paid attention to what adults were saying when you were a teenager, you would remember more or less the same concepts.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#274"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…
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival. Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them. Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize…
Yet most people don't learn anything in those 10 years. The last 3 are more or less when learning happens.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#275Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite. There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated. The world is a complex place, but…
> It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#276The 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-...
Addendum:
My previous comment chain is also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980929
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#277The image of the article says it all. Look at it. World is already super complicated, and failing in all the possible ways. then it gets recycled for parts. The delusion that order can be sustained easily and in a prolonged manner without immense amounts of energy/information consumed, just does not match the direct observation. Look at the ground and what grows and lives in the grass, it is already super complex, and overcrowded. All of it moves and breaks and comes back.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#278"human kind cannot bear very much reality."
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#279"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 reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#280Kindest advice: read Derek Sivers's "how to live". Think of it as a distilled wisdom and a choose your own adventure book which will give you perspective, options, frustration and probably become a "quake book". Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account. If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you w…
Zen Buddhism has been advocating this precise teaching for millenia. What's new here?
Does it need to be new?