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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

In hindsight, opposition to innovations such as mechanical farm equipment or recorded music may seem ludicrous.

How about if the article talked about the problems with the people who rapidly embraced once "nifty and new" ideas like taking x-rays of feet at shoe stores, using Fen-Phen for weight loss, getting on airplanes in the early days of flying, etc.?

What the article ignores completely is the notion of idea survival bias. The article goes through pains to cast reluctance to adopt new ideas as being a defective mode of thinking by not talking about the risk model for the adoption of new ideas.

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That would be helpful. It's not always easy to know which innovation is actually a net benefit.

Leaded gasoline was a superior fuel in many respects but was clearly a fraudulent mistake (it was sold with false assurances of safety).

Even the original Luddites were not wrong in their original critiques - the technological innovations of machined industrialization did indeed replace workers and enrich employers. (That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick).

Chemical warfare was horrible enough to have military strategists more than willing to agree to ban its usage.

New is not universally a good. In fact, every change has benefits and detriments that will be unequally distributed. History has also shown a tendency for the detriments to be mostly felt by the poor and disenfranchised.

It seems fair to be cautious about the new.

>That such technological innovation also created wealth was poor consolation for the workers getting the short end of the stick

That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.

Again, small consolation for workers getting the short end of the stick (e.g. the 13-year old doing 12 hour shifts with no breaks on a fume-laden factory that made your phone). Sure, you have smartphones and the internet and a greater variety of food items. Did this really improve livelihood though?

It doesn't fall flat, it just (potentially) shows a net benefit for most. You've also narrowed the debate to a purely materialistic benefit (.i.e. more things cheaper) while taking a broader view of the whole class of people at a time.

An individual does not have the luxury of evaluating the "good of the many" when they are unemployed by innovation. Equally horrid from the individual's perspective is discovering the skills they've spent a life time accruing are suddenly worthless and make them unhireable.

White-collar workers have only just started feeling this pressure of good jobs disappearing only leaving more menial and lower-paid jobs.

To ignore that some people are harmed by innovation is as silly as pretending that all innovation is a positive.

It's also important to note that you can't just credit changes in living standard to technological innovation. Soft innovations in things like politics and philosophy are AT LEAST as important as technological innovation.

> To ignore that some people are harmed by innovation is as silly as pretending that all innovation is a positive.

You know who really got hammered by innovation? Tobacco companies.

The fact that some people are harmed by innovation doesn't mean we shouldn't ignore them.

Exactly! Poor people have access to clean plentiful water, cheap, nutritious, and tasty food, very affordable housing to own near numerous options for fulfilling income, plentiful education options, medical safety nets, lots of PTO, ethical insurance programs, brain dead simple non-volatile long-term savings programs, and traffic congestion is all but extinct; I mean the list just goes on and on with how much nicer poor people have it these days compared to rich people of 50 years ago.

I hope that this is sarcastic?

It obviously was sarcastic and doesn't deserve the down-votes. If you offered me the deal of exchanging my life today for the life of a "1%er" N years ago, I'd take it for N up to 50, maybe even more, at least back to when penicillin was discovered.

I actually up voted it at the same time as I asked - thinking similarly to yourself...

That falls flat when you consider that lower middle class people have access to much greater things than upper middle class people and rich people did 50 years ago.

To be fair, if you're the guy losing your job today, you probably don't care much about the idea that you might be better off twenty years down the road, or that society in general might be richer in 20 or 50 years. You care about putting food on the table now.

Even if you look at things like re-skilling and the creation of new jobs that results from technology, you're still looking at a potential gap in employment and income where you might starve to death, when you look at this at the individual level. In that regard, it's hard to say that people are wrong to oppose certain kinds of changes.

Along some axes. They still generally aren't taking their summers away.

You're also ignoring survivor bias. The middle class who survived have it better than the middle class who existed back then. In this one metric.

That benefit wasn't obvious at the time. It still is hard to quantify the future benefits with reasonable certainty.

There used to be such a thing as radioactive toothpaste. On purpose.

And we used to think we can build roads and buildings faster by using atomic bombs to make digging quicker. That didn't work out that well either.

And we used to make cold syrup with morphine, cannabis, and other fun things.

Once upon a time, Freud was convinced that cocaine is a viable drug for treating mental ailments. That didn't go far.

For every long-term successful idea or product, there are dozens dumb products and ideas that never went anywhere. There's value in waiting for a product to prove itself before you adopt its use.

>In hindsight, opposition to innovations such as mechanical farm equipment or recorded music may seem ludicrous.

It's also very possible that these oppositions helped shape and amend the use of these new technologies in ways that made them safer and more palatable.

Agreed. A very strong reason to be wary of new technology is that usually new technology is terrible for the first few generations. It only gets good once it's been around for a while. If you had to re-fuel your refrigerator with kerosene every few hours and there was a non-negligible risk that it would explode, you wouldn't be so eager to have one. When it's a simple matter of plugging it into the wall and paying a few cents a day for electricity, it's a no-brainer.

Especially since for one of the areas he cites, refrigeration, it was an issue that early refrigerators could leak their coolant gases and kill you.

Coating bags of hydrogen with thermite paint to keep it from escaping...

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