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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

This is a perfect example of the trendy "everything's leading to a doomsday" sentiment among some people on this site.

"We might get lucky" - humans have overcome every adverse condition in our 2 million years alive, why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.

"stop the coming disaster" - again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.

"could snap back to...centuries ago" - this has happened once in the past 2000 years, you really think you're going to be alive when we enter a 2nd Dark Age.

I think it's the same sort of thinking with the "Jesus is coming back in the next 5 years" religious crowd. You want to feel important and part of something bigger than yourself, something planet-wide, so you're almost looking forward to being a part of it so you can feel like you're part of history.

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By the same token, one could argue your comment is part of the trendy progress worship that's been happening since the beginning of humanity.

Mental disorders are at an all-time high. Extinction levels are well beyond their natural baseline rate, due to human activity. Environmental destruction is at an all-time high. Now, with the Internet, we've managed to build a system that can amplify nearly every negative aspect of human society but at the same time offers a shield of sorts from those effects.

Yes, humans are likely to survive in the same way that a virus survives. We find a way but it isn't always a virtuous path. We humans have yet to understand that nature is a balance and that we choose to operate outside of that balance. Everytime we progress we invent new ways for people and other animals to suffer.

> Mental disorders are at an all-time high

Please provide some references that show mental illness is higher now than during the Dark Ages. Or in Egypt among the slaves under the Ptolemy's.

Infinitely more people are being diagnosed now than in the dark ages

That’s probably the underpinning of his correct argument that we have zero clue and no leg to stand on to claim that modernity has more mental illness than any other, much less every other, period in history

That was the joke. ;)

They didn't say the things you're interpreting them as having said.

> why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.

They didn't say we can only survive if we get lucky. The dichotomy they painted was between 'getting lucky' and civilizational regression, not extinction.

> again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.

This is clearly not what they said: they said 'some technological or social innovation' might 'negate or stop the coming disaster'.

You can make an argument that we should lean more heavily on base rates rather than an inside-view attempt to predict the future. But here you've just psychoanalysed a strawman.

Humans being able to invent new existential threats is a very recent development. The way that we have been addressing them so far does not exactly fill me to the brim with confidence.

Seems like an awful lot of armchair psychology you're doing here.

Please soapbox on someone else's comment.

Someone had to do it.

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