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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Only mass hysteria will force societal change.

This is the kind of comment that sounds sarcastic on first read, but is entirely genuine. Human societies, en masse, are terrible rational decision makers.

Or maybe it's that they're very good rational decision makers on the individual level, leading to the tragedy of the commons? So we'd need mass hysteria to cause group rationality? Ooop, that's the bell, Pretzel Logic class dismissed!

> Human societies, en masse, are terrible rational decision makers.

Never seen "societies" making any decision. Most of the time, there are very few people in positions of power who make such decisions. If you want to see "societies" making decisions every single day, look at the market. Not so irrational at all, though.

> If you want to see "societies" making decisions every single day, look at the market. Not so irrational at all, though.

Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.

>Except for the stock market crashes of 1929 and 1987, the dot-com bubble, the housing bouble followed a crash, the tulip mania, ... Markets are not always rational.

Crashes are expected in the market theory. Crashes are actually healthy outcomes that get rid of mal-investment. There could have been much less severe crashes in the situations you described if there has been less government involvement (there is ample evidence of the government agencies and the FED being involved in the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble).

Except the crash of 1929 taught the world that free economy knows no bottom. It can spiral down continuously and require a world war level stimulus for extra-market reasons to pull up.

Rational markets fly in the face of complexity theory. I would very much like to see the evidence.

You forgot the biggest insanity of all: the wholesale undermining of our ecosystem for short-term private gain. The biggest offender by far is idiotic practices that deforest and degrade soil in agriculture and animal husbandry. Throughout history these practices have made more land "useless" through desertification than nuclear accidents could even dream of.

Currently the Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned for a mere decade or so of beef production, before the fertility is washed out to sea, the vegetation dies, the continental transpiration cycle shuts down, and that land too is desertified. A similar process has already happened the Middle East, which was forested in accounts as recently as Napoleon's campaigns.

I liken it to the crew of your spaceship busily axing away at the life support generators... :-\

The paradox of the efficient market hypothesis disagrees with you. For EHM to hold enough people must be acting irrationally.

Are you referring to the EHM that says that all stocks are traded at their fair (long-term) value? It's very easy to debunk that economical theory when you see some bubbles occurring in certain fields, not related at all to the actual long-term expectations of said company/sector (especially when no market changes and no productivity increase occur to indicate otherwise).

And it's called a hypothesis for a very good reason.

I'm glad you caught my earnestness. The saying is that "counties will say they're going to war for whatever reasons, but it always boils down to water, food, or resources." That's because it takes a serious threat to the livelihood of every single person for people to rise up in one way or another. Right now, climate change does pose a threat and has harmed many. The negatives are too diverse though. People won't demand change until the Florida Keys aren't anymore. They're going to need to see camera footage of an entire nation finally washing under the sea. They're going to need to see crazy things coming their way before burning oil becomes unpalatable. Only then will they see the actual motive to change.

I'm still waiting for someone to invent a mathematical formula for predicting society's behaviour, akin to Hari Seldon in Asimov's books!

Ridiculous claim. Societal changes occur when the right incentives are at play for the change to occur.

Maybe gradual social change works that way, but you certainly can't force change without a little insanity.

I'll remind the court that irrationality merely means "not rational". I.e. "No identifiable rational is known". Often times decision makers appear to be acting without reason merely because they're responding to something the observer does not see/know about. The root reason is stil up for grabs. I'd bet that existential threats tend to motivate people only once they can comprehend the threat as a reality.

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