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Comment by james_s_tayler | Hacker News Reader

Any parameter pushed to the extreme produces perversion.

I don't get this obsession with how much those at the top managed to accrue. My only metric is is it getting better on average for me and other people?

I hope capatilism lasts another couple of hundred years and everyone gets to level 3 or 4 and no one can harp on about "but the 1%!" anymore like a whiny entitled asshole because eventually everyone will have it, if not good, at least acceptable.

It's a pretty long process. It's only taken 300 years to get where we are. Even the last 30 years have been remarkable. Give it another 50 to 100 years. 200 even. Be patient ffs.

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I think there are a couple of problems with the "rising tide floats all boats" argument.

> My only metric is is it getting better on average for me and other people

This might be true for you, but may not be for all. Research suggests that on the whole people value relative wealth more than absolute wealth [1] making inequality an important predictor for social stability, a prerequisite for a capitalist system based on property rights.

> I hope capatilism lasts another couple of hundred years and everyone gets to level 3 or 4

As other comments have pointed out, it looks as though an economic system predicated on permanent growth - or even a particular rate of growth - might have some limits. It seems like it's not sustainable with our current level of technology.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/318/5854/1305.full?ijk...

You know the Marxists (and everyone was one back then) claimed in the 1930s that capitalism was dead. That was almost 90 years ago. [1]

It's the 21st century. It started in the 17th century. It's not dying tomorrow.

I fully support the notion that one day capitalism will eat itself like Marx claimed. I think it actually will. I think that's a very sensible conclusion to come to. Just like I believe my car won't run forever and will eventually break down and be beyond repair or no longer viable. I'm just happy to drive it until the actual point at which it becomes not viable anymore and not proclaim the sky is falling and my car is doomed because I hear one small noise coming from the engine.

[1] http://helian.net/blog/category/socialism/

200 even. Be patient ffs.

That's easy for me to say. It isn't my kid starving in the street.

But that has no bearing on whether or not that's the case.

That's like getting mad at the microwave that it won't heat the food up in 3 seconds and instead the timer says 3 minutes but that's no good because your kid is "hungry now."

If it takes 3 minutes, it takes 3 damn minutes.

When they run campaigns like these, they get more funding. When they get more funding, a few more children will avoid starvation.

Why are you getting so worked up over someone using a means that they have years worth of experience with showing it works in giving them the funds to save more people?

So my point with this comment isn't about Oxfam or charity really at all. It's about peoples sense of injustice and wanting to fix it now, now, now, now, and concluding the system is somehow broken because we can't have the fix now, now, now, now and harboring this desire to rip the system out and replace it with something that will usher in the just world.

Hence I liken that particular notion to a toddler who is upset and is unable to understand that his food is coming he just needs to wait as there is a process that takes time and there isn't any other way to get his hot food than through the process.

I'm getting worked up over the error in cognition that we can have it all now, now, now, now. My point to those would be revolutionaries who want to rip it out and replace it is - it's coming, just wait.

I personally donate monthly to charity water as I think it's a super practical problem that is at absolute bedrock for society and it just requires capital, labor and time to be thrown at it. I do my part to promote it here and there. I am amazed by the progress of access to clean water and I am stoked that the trajectory looks like in the next few decades everyone on Earth will have clean water. It just doesn't make sense to get upset and think things are broken when we have never used a process that has worked so well. Yes, progress is slow, but damnit it's working and I prefer to focus on what we have achieved and not that we personally don't have 12 Ferraris and a mansion and a few individuals do.

It's not an obsession. It's an easy way of illustrating a point that gets a portion of people to consider the current situation unfair and do more to change things. They keep publishing these because they keep getting press attention and as a result get more support and are able to improve the lives of more people.

> like a whiny entitled asshole

I won't say what I think about calling someone entitled assholes for wanting less death and suffering.

It is an obsession.

My claim is that you cannot compute a priori whether it is fair or not because it's not possible to consider both the present reality and the alternatives and fast-forward time in your mind and know exactly how all the possible worlds play out. You can't actually even get close. Humanity runs on one algorithm and that's guess and check. For stuff this complicated as to which way of organizing things actually results in less death and suffering this is necessarily so. Else we would just have sat down, worked it out and followed that course of action.

The river of history runs the experiment for us and it's the only way to honestly compute results.

We're all part of influencing that algorithm, so this is a ridiculous argument. We can choose to do nothing, or we can choose to try. Yes, we won't know if the results are good or not, but that is a shitty reason for doing nothing.

As for this argument being an obsession, I think you miss the point: It's a PR campaign. They've used it year after year, because it works. It gives them press attention. It results in increases in donations. It helps them achieve their goals.

If it's their goals you find "obsessive", then so be it. But this focus on the richest is pragmatic: It's something cheap they know they can milk year after year. I doubt most people at Oxfam goes around thinking all that much about the 26 richest people in the world - more likely they're busy actually trying to run their programs and keep them funded.

What's ridiculous is to conclude from what I wrote that my position is to "do nothing". I'll let you work that one out for yourself.

I don't care about the charity itself and I see your point about it's effectiveness as a PR campaign, sure, and I'm not anti-people donating to charity.

This is a wider narrative that is very prevalent in the West and it's independent of a single PR campaign, and I'm sure even you will acknowledge that.

My claim is that the relentless focus on relative wealth is completely upside down. And I think that's unhealthy. "Look at how much you personally don't have" doesn't serve you emotionally as well as "look at how far we have all come and the trajectory we are all on" does.

It's a matter of personal pragmatism for me. Why should the focus be on the gap?

I know, I know it's just a PR campaign and my yapping about larger narratives in the media won't have any effect on decisions made at Oxfam, yes, yes of course I'm not so deluded into thinking that they will.

But people will read our lovely discussion and some will side with me, some will side with you and it's via this process we tussle for which experiment the river of history should carry out in order to compute the result.

We don't have "50 to 100 years". Our unrestrained greed and obsession with growth and profit is well on its way to cause a Permian-Triassic style extinction event.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-disaster-is-upon-u...

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-33/the-intellectual-situation/...

The absurd accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few individuals is just a symptom of the disease human society is to the environment.

To have any hope of even slightly halting this trend, we have to completely restructure society and put an end to fossil fuel extraction, and to our entire culture of consumerism. Capitalism does not have a solution to this problem, there is no gentle gradual market-based solution. We need a hard stop and at the very least massive carbon taxes on industry.

Yeah, I'm thinking about this every time I see puffs of smoke from exhaust or airplanes pass by... It probably took the earth a few hundred thousand years to bind that carbon, and here we are puffing it off in a matter of decades.

Human short-sightedness never ceases to amaze. It's an evolutionary problem I believe as we're to smart in a micro-sense, but as a whole we fail to take the holistic approach.

A bit like driving at 100MPH -- the human brain is not evolved for that scenario and perspective gets skewed.

The human brain has remarkable plasticity, though. Most people can train themselves to competently drive and react to inputs at 100MPH. The issue is that most people won't put in the necessary effort, either because they're unaware of the risks and consequences, or because they prioritize other things.

Similarly, we can adapt to realize and adequately visualize our impact on the environment, and collectively act to lessen our impact, but most people consider it irrelevant or even downright unpleasant to even think about, so they don't.

The fact that we prioritise different things is a testament to this evolutionary vs. smarts discrepancy IMHO.

We can train and mould our brains, true, but at what scale does this actually have a noticeable impact and and how to achieve this at scale?

It's either through some form of enlightenment or through a totalitarian regime. The former at scale can, again IMHO, only happen through reaching a point of resonable equality, so at this point the latter with China spearheading the way seems most plausible, which is terrifying.

If we follow the metaphor of driving at 100MPH then we are in agreement that it is a skill we learn to do, however I would like to add the caveat that you cannot learn to drive around a hairpin bend at 100MPH because you cannot drive around a hairpin bend at 100MPH and it may well be the case that we are approaching the bend and are going too fast and cannot muster the necessary coordination to successfully navigate the turn.

It would be nice if this weren't the case, but it might be.

It's almost as if ecology will keep us in check if we wont do it ourselves. We aren't causing a perversion of nature, we are part of it and it is responding to us.

I'm ok with that. And human society being a disease on the environment will be cleansed and fought off by the auto-immune response of a warmed planet.

There isn't a problem.

Unless you're perfectly OK with all of humanity and possibly the only sentient intelligent life in the universe dying off, we actually do have a very serious problem. As far as we know, we are the only life in the universe that actually cares about other life, that actually cares about cataloguing the world and the universe and exploring it. We are (as far as we know) the universe's consciousness.

I don't buy into your defeatism. We can save ourselves, but it requires us to take the threat seriously and requires us to act, rather than just twiddling our thumbs and perpetuating the status quo.

Good luck saving yourself from the heat death of the universe.

Edit: I am ok with all humanity dying out. I don't think that is either here nor there. I have the same self-preservation tendencies as you and the others and in public and private I actually try to do my bit as I'm philosophically a defeatist/nihilist because that's ultimately where extreme macro timescale conclusions lead me, but in the micro timescale we live on I don't in practice actually act or live like a defeatist. I'm just ultimately not precious about the human race any more than I am about anything else. I love us, and want us to have a good a run as we can and one day we will run out of steam or do the cosmic equivalent of jumping off a wharf, hitting the rocks, snapping our neck and be snuffed out accidentally. You, nor anyone else can or will stop that.

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