At this point it’s a clear problem of human bias. We love our instincts so much that when we have sufficient power, we’ll assure that people never challenge them, even when the offices we hold require reason contrary to those instincts.
The whole bit about bullshit jobs serves as an example, because our upper management desire to hold court and have courtiers and garden hermits buzzing about them like components of an orrery (I’m teaching my spellchecker words today).
In the media industry the process of crunching developers to make deadlines (even though it kills productivity and slows the rate of progress) is another example, and yet all the AAA game development companies do it… or are doing it so long as they exist. Our private equity firms are now doing to the big ones what was once done to Toys 'r Us, leaving a sinkhole of debt and bankruptcy where there was once a reputable company.
Our inability to see our community past our top fifty Facebook friends (or fellow villagers) prevents us from thinking in terms of cooperating with society, rather we deign ourselves part of the true Americans (or Belgians or Maoists or whatever), and so we fail to recognize personal greed as a mental disorder, rather a moral failing.
In a Star Trek society, someone who hoarded liquidatable assets would be regarded similar to someone who filled their house with junk (and hopefully not as they are abused on Bravo), we’d intervene, put them in a rehab center for a year, where they learn to exist in the comfort of minimalism. But in our own world, extremely wealthy people are regarded as a a higher strata of person, given power and authority to command PMCs, and eventually swarm-armies of killer robots managed by AI.
Currently, our tolerance of human billionaires is killing us, and it poses a global catastrophic risk not just of the human species but of 90%+ of all species on the planet.
That’s the problem, we won’t. There is too much now that needs to be done, and your neighbors don’t care. Try telling your neighbor not to use a dirty 2-stroke gas lawnmower, or weed killer on a residential law, they’ll hate you, won’t understand what you’re talking about, and think that you are stupid. Everything then becomes a state intervention with police, courts, laws, jails.
We may well be. As we careen towards great filters like the climate crisis (and running out of fresh water for agriculture) we may drive ourselves to extinction, or (if we’re… lucky?) close enough to extinction that all our present culture and most of our scientific knowledge is lost.
The version in which one out of eight people survives, is the good ending. Then we might be able to adjust our institutions to the smaller population. But expect all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to put on a show, and claim their due.
But here we are under Trump dealing with the same kinds of problems that arose under Hitler and Mussolini and countless other dictators. We’re going to keep doing this thing where we let small factions game the system for themselves until we figure out how to effectively prevent it. If we don’t figure it out then in a hundred-thousand years, when the atmosphere has healed and the plastic has mostly been cleared from nature and we start populating again, we’ll still have the same problem… or maybe not. Maybe we’ll have evolved a bit.
(Homo Erectus experienced a similar period of scarcity and a population of less than 10,000 until the world got more habitable, and they got pushed out by competing hominids like us.)
We need to end the war of kings and resolve our grievances so we can face the ice zombie army from the north… and unlike Season 8, we’re pretty sure killing the Ice King isn’t going cause an ontological collapse the way killing Sauron collapsed the organization structure of the goblins and they fled back to the mountain caves. (GRRM was all about subverting fantasy tropes that didn’t mesh with real-life experience)
At this point it’s a clear problem of human bias. We love our instincts so much that when we have sufficient power, we’ll assure that people never challenge them, even when the offices we hold require reason contrary to those instincts.
The whole bit about bullshit jobs serves as an example, because our upper management desire to hold court and have courtiers and garden hermits buzzing about them like components of an orrery (I’m teaching my spellchecker words today).
In the media industry the process of crunching developers to make deadlines (even though it kills productivity and slows the rate of progress) is another example, and yet all the AAA game development companies do it… or are doing it so long as they exist. Our private equity firms are now doing to the big ones what was once done to Toys 'r Us, leaving a sinkhole of debt and bankruptcy where there was once a reputable company.
Our inability to see our community past our top fifty Facebook friends (or fellow villagers) prevents us from thinking in terms of cooperating with society, rather we deign ourselves part of the true Americans (or Belgians or Maoists or whatever), and so we fail to recognize personal greed as a mental disorder, rather a moral failing.
In a Star Trek society, someone who hoarded liquidatable assets would be regarded similar to someone who filled their house with junk (and hopefully not as they are abused on Bravo), we’d intervene, put them in a rehab center for a year, where they learn to exist in the comfort of minimalism. But in our own world, extremely wealthy people are regarded as a a higher strata of person, given power and authority to command PMCs, and eventually swarm-armies of killer robots managed by AI.
Currently, our tolerance of human billionaires is killing us, and it poses a global catastrophic risk not just of the human species but of 90%+ of all species on the planet.
you should don a hoodie and start something like fsociety, I am ready to lay my life bare for your cause
That’s the problem, we won’t. There is too much now that needs to be done, and your neighbors don’t care. Try telling your neighbor not to use a dirty 2-stroke gas lawnmower, or weed killer on a residential law, they’ll hate you, won’t understand what you’re talking about, and think that you are stupid. Everything then becomes a state intervention with police, courts, laws, jails.
There’s your problem, right there.
Have a conversation. Ask questions. Live by example. When asked, demonstrate the advantages of doing differently.
We’re fucked.
We may well be. As we careen towards great filters like the climate crisis (and running out of fresh water for agriculture) we may drive ourselves to extinction, or (if we’re… lucky?) close enough to extinction that all our present culture and most of our scientific knowledge is lost.
The version in which one out of eight people survives, is the good ending. Then we might be able to adjust our institutions to the smaller population. But expect all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to put on a show, and claim their due.
But here we are under Trump dealing with the same kinds of problems that arose under Hitler and Mussolini and countless other dictators. We’re going to keep doing this thing where we let small factions game the system for themselves until we figure out how to effectively prevent it. If we don’t figure it out then in a hundred-thousand years, when the atmosphere has healed and the plastic has mostly been cleared from nature and we start populating again, we’ll still have the same problem… or maybe not. Maybe we’ll have evolved a bit.
(Homo Erectus experienced a similar period of scarcity and a population of less than 10,000 until the world got more habitable, and they got pushed out by competing hominids like us.)
We need to end the war of kings and resolve our grievances so we can face the ice zombie army from the north… and unlike Season 8, we’re pretty sure killing the Ice King isn’t going cause an ontological collapse the way killing Sauron collapsed the organization structure of the goblins and they fled back to the mountain caves. (GRRM was all about subverting fantasy tropes that didn’t mesh with real-life experience)