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Comment by julienreszka | Hacker News Reader

Progress is an illusion. No such thing as progress. According to the second law of thermodynamics things can only get worse we can only conserve what is good already before its inevitable decay. Progress is snake oil, eternal yough, perpetual machines, ideal cities and so on : Utopias, scams, wishful thinking at best. All this has the fear of death as a root cause.

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The Second Law of Thermodynamics is eventually right in the grander sense, I guess, but conditions for order to emerge from more chaotic circumstances are everywhere, even if order is temporary in the eternal sense. Stars form out of nebulae, heavy elements form out of dying stars, and heavy elements combine to make planets with metals and living things, living things engineer structures, machines, societies, etc.

Progress as we understand it seems to be baked into nature and the emergent systems we live in and are. You don't give up on life as soon as you are born because you will die one day right? Whether you're aware of it or not, your body naturally preserves the order it can, and you actually grow up before you die.

Soooo ... when you go to the doctor with an ailment, you'd settle for leeches and trepanation, then?

You're not allowed to say these things in tech circles or imply that a person from an older era might prefer it over ours (or god forbid that a modern person might prefer to live an older or less tech-ey lifestyle), or limits to growth...

Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it.

What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?

>Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it.

Yeah, it was a turn of phrase, didn't mean its literally banned.

You're not banned, you're just not welcome to say it, you will be treated as pariah for saying it, you will get downvoted to death, and if a discussion happens to grow around such a viewpoint, it will be in all probability marked "dead".

>What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance.

No, what I request is that people give thought to such propositions and argue with counter-arguments as opposed to facile dismissals and outrage...

Already the parent didn't make a big effort to argue, it was more like literature ("progress is an illusion"), paired with a very far-fetched conclusion from the second law of thermodynamics. On the latter, a proper counter argument was given.

You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.

I would say that progress is stealing from the future generations.

You need to read more history. We're vastly healthier, wealthier and wiser than our ancestors, and getting better every year.

So there are no limits on a spherical world? you need to read things like this: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... or William Catton's overshoot.

Thankfully we are not restricted to the resources available on this spherical world as without energy from outside it we would all freeze to death in short order.

So is that constant inflow from the sun at our disposal to use at ever increasing rates?

so 2 things:

1. "progress is stealing from future generations" is not the same thing at all as "progress is limited by natural resources", even if you accept the second one is true. Our grandchildren are still better off if we make progress now, even if there is a limit at some point.

2. value in a knowledge-based economy like ours is not linked to natural resources. I can spend this afternoon on my computer either coding or playing games. The resource consumption is the same, but one generates economic value, the other doesn't. The basic assumption that all economic value arises from the consumption of natural resources is flat wrong.

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