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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#311

Post by cindyllm »

dalvasorsali wrote: post #287
qsera wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

What's your point? The fact that we still have sickness means things are worse? What I find fascinating is how people like you, who reference a "pure" and "analog" world, have very "binary" views. Nature is complex, everything is continuous and lives on a spectrum, nothing is binary (not even death). Things can be way better, slightly better, worse etc. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad", everything exists some…

[dead]

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#312

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

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…

You don't even need society for that. Remember the bear scene from the revenant?

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#314

Post by lanyard-textile »

hariseldom wrote: post #305

> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well. This is not always true, it depen…

:) I think this very mindset is the one the article resists.

How complicated.

The best gift you can give yourself is enjoying the simple moments of life, no matter who you are and what your role is.

And that's all this is about.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#315

Post by 7bit »

umeshunni wrote: post #179
_nxwj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

What a load of bollocks, that can only be said by someone who clearly hasn't read a history book in his entire life ...

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#316

Post by derangedHorse »

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…

If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#317

Post by steveharing1 »

I agree with this "Our world is an explosion of environmental harm and damage to everything around us." As humans its our responsibility to protect our mother nature by protecting trees and our nature by planting more to at least be able to give back what our nature gave us. I believe if we can't give back then we should not destroy either.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#319

Post by krapp »

latexr wrote: post #279
metaphor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.

But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power.

It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power.

It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#320

Post by jstummbillig »

> I've realized this article is slightly naïve.

Well, I would discard substitute "slightly" for a much stronger adverb but alright, directionally: Good!

The uncomplicated past was horrible. The complications exist for a reason. The natural world is mostly fucking mental by any modern human standard.

Yes, we can do without some regulations and maybe whatever social media is. I don't know.

But we are quite smart at identifying things that are bad for us, over some span of time (due to us discussing them, case in point) and also making them better, working against or in spite of millions of years of evolution. Our lives are short and thus we are incredibly impatient with each other – as we should be! It keeps us on our toes and makes the now important. But we do sometimes forget that, if you are close enough to the now, not everything is a smooth curve and it's not always immediately clear which parts in this complexity do what.

But thing's really do get better. Yes, we do not understand all the systems but it's not like the natural world is a system we understood better in the past. We used to think dancing made rain. And yes, things are getting more dangerous as we are getting more powerful through complications. This is a separate, also complicated issue, because it only requires one rogue agent to do incredible harm anyway. Best I can tell: We need to all get better and keep each other in check.

Unless you are a sort of tourist (and that includes all forms of opt-in naturalness today), the natural world is by and large a complicated, hostile and horrible place by all human standards. We do things for good, selfish reasons and somehow, miraculously this works our fairly well.

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