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Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

Having been in the field of software, I know a lot of software is rickety. Having studied and learnt a lot about finance, I know one rarely gets rich following advice of financial planners. Having worked in fast food, I know during busy period a lot of procedures are skipped. Working with other students and myself in high school and university I know how haphazardly put together most homework and assignments are. The miracle isn't in how good is the best humanity has to offer, but how good human life is, despite human civilisation building itself on a mountain of crap.

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Whats really interesting is that despite all its flaws and a million things that could go wrong, the systems designed by humans actually work.

Despite open source is developed by a bunch of hackers who keep delivering buggy code, you can still close your eyes and install Ubuntu and it will usually work in 95% of cases.

Even if you go to the most popular fast food outlet during the busiest of hours, you usually get to eat that tasty pizza even the humans did not all procedures. You see, they are humans, they may err but they have an uncanny judgment that comes from practice which is capable of finding and fixing their errors before they are delivered.

More than that: cars.

We have millions of explosive-powered heavy metal boxes running fast on unprotected lanes, their path solely directed by unreliable biological organismes following conventions from blinking lights and painted signs.

But most of the time, it works.

Heck, sometimes I'm amazed that when I turn on my computer it does anything at all with all the complexity going on inside it

That's primarily because the biological organisms don't want to die, end up in hospital, get sued, etc. =) Those are powerful motivations.

How good human life is for those who won the birth lottery. Everyone else gets to enjoy the mountain of crap.

Good point. However, I think the miracle is exchanged for another one if you believe that civilization was built not on a mountain of crap, but through the efforts of the few who put true rigor into their contributions. Science, philosophy, art, politics, religion and so on have been developed by a relatively minuscule handful of individuals throughout the ages. These greats have built us the walls of civilization which have been filled with crap from within. In my opinion civilization is not built upon a mountain of crap, but is the very walls keeping the crap in place. That these walls are strong enough is the true miracle.

"civilization is not built upon a mountain of crap, but is the very walls keeping the crap in place" is my new favorite sentence.

I find it hard to reconcile that view with the historical examples. For example, assuming you agree that Newton made such contributions, how do you fit his thirty-year dabble in alchemy with the concept that such individuals put "true rigour" in their works?

I have confidence in the rigor of Newton's alchemy.

"Yep, this doesn't work."

A handful of people invented the internal combustion engine, but thousands of engineers and hundreds of thousands of factory workers and mechanics, of various shades of competence, designed and built the actual engine in your car.

A handful of singular individuals penned the broad outlines of our Constitutional structure, but it's the masses of people that built the system and keep it running. The difference between say Bangladesh and the United States is not the ingenuity of their respective founding documents, but the file clerk at the American courthouse who wouldn't even think of taking a bribe, versus his counterpart.

Big ideas mean nothing without execution, and it's the plebes that do the execution. Every great endeavor lives and dies by the virtue of the rank-and-file people undertaking it.

Word. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-cour...

A few days ago someone here said something like "design things to work even when things are broken."

I'm guessing humans have evolved to "work" even when our uniquely intelligent brains combine with our opposable thumbs to fuck things up.

Any intelligent species can make a mistake, but it takes a human to really fuck things up.

Beautiful comment

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