The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
There is a famous talk by Milton Friedman forty years ago about nobody knowing how to make a standard pencil anymore. The red rubber tip, the yellow paint, the graphite, that little metal brace. Most of us could probably re-create most of it, but nobody could create the whole thing by themselves. (edit: apparently the pencil point (ha ha) was famously made by others going back to at least 1958.)
In my mind there's a (pretty weak) analogy to the gold standard for money, or having an alternative when negotiating. With the gold standard, if somebody offers you one bitcoin (or equivalently X gold) for your widget, and you know how you value your widget and how you value gold, it's easy to decide whether or not to sell (weak analogy, full of holes, I know). Or if someone is offering to pay you some wage, but you could go back to the family farm and just make more food for yourself than that wage would buy you, then there is some kind of grounding of that wage in terms of concrete do-it-yourself alternatives.
The more the things that we rely on and depend on (like the Internet) are so complex that the only alternative is whatever else happens to be furnished by "the market," the more of life turns into sort of a Keynesian beauty contest in a bad way, without a concrete grounding, and only a "what you think other people think that other people think that..." equilibrium instead.
Not that the alternative is any better. I like my computer and my Internet and my prescription glasses and my ballpoint pen. It sucks that I'm practically required to have them, but I really do like them.
The same is true for biology and ecosystems; we just don’t think about it even when effecting large scale ecological changes. We might well be depending on un-understood delicate balances that could easily be thrown out of whack by Eg: hunting certain species to extinction, releasing genetically modified mosquitoes, building dams, climate change, etc.
But I think myself and others in this thread would argue "it was never crossed - it was always too complex to understand".
Not sure if that changes your fundemental point but it might warrant a reformulation of it.
To do so we need a certain quality of understanding of our "technological system", which was maybe attainable but now seems impossible to reach.
This may be summed up in the article by "instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls ((...)) politicians can’t effect change. Not really. They might not understand why, exactly, but there’s this increasing sense that leaders have lost the ability to make fundamental changes to our economic and social realities".
This is all about "technique" (the concept described by J. Ellul) and control.
Terse summary: https://www.slideshare.net/rredekopp/ellul-and-technique
I think the answer is that as we add complexity to the world there is always some benefit, some problem is solved or new form of wealth created, and there is also some cost, not just in the obvious terms of energy used, but also in terms of "brittleness" of the system and long-term sustainability of it all.
As Joseph Tainter said in his ground-breaking 1989 book "The Collapse of Complex Societies", as societies get more and more complex the return on this cost (the ROI on additional complexity) diminishes, i.e. the costs of additional complexity at some point start to outweigh its benefit.
That's what I think is really going on... we've crossed that point and the while the problems we have created with added complexity in the past might be solvable with additional added complexity (i.e. global warming might be solvable with a combination of "green" energy and carbon capture and draw-down) the additional complexity needed for such solutions is now incomprehensibly expensive.
Basically, I'm saying that the world of 50 years ago is probably much more comprehensible to a highly skilled 2020 human than it was to someone actually living in it. It wouldn't be totally comprehensible to either, of course, but certainly the added context brings a lot of advantages.
Instead, as the sphere of human knowledge grows, our awareness of the area just outside that sphere becomes both larger and more obvious.
The general complexity of the universe exists regardless of how much humans understand it. (probably)
> I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible.
This statement rubs me the wrong way, in a similar fashion to what you've pointed out. All of the world's systems and technologies haven't been able to be understood by one human for (most likely) a very long time now.
The world is incredibly complex, but at this point in history I can go and learn about pretty much all of it whenever I want. By definition that means it is very comprehensible. It just isn't practical for me to do so.
Modern scale as you've pointed out, and speed at which things are expected to happen to keep that modern scale going, are the bigger factors I think.
Instead, I found that the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. Finding answers inevitably lead to more questions that I had answered in the first place.
I don't know that we will get to the point that will stop being true, or how many lifetimes it would take a single person to understand it all. It certainly feels like we are past 1 already.
[Edit-] My comment originally focused more on natural sciences in general, but then I changed the opening quip to the personal anecdote about programming. The last paragraph, however, was geared more towards science, and knowledge in general, not programming languages per se.
The bleeding edge changes rapidly, but that’s what it’s there for.
For instance, at various stages in my career, I've done professional work in a lot of different languages and ecosystems: c/c++, objC, Java, Node.js, Swift, React, Rust - and each one of these has it's unique features, strengths, and weaknesses, but I think in general the more different tools you use, the more you see how much they have in common.
For instance, when I pick up a new framework or language, I'm looking for the same basic things: like how does the build system work, and how do I make an http request, how do I optimize for performance, and then I'm generally plugging the new tool into the same design patterns I've been using for years.
If you do algorithms, nothing changed. If you do frontend, everything changed. If you do backend, change is slower - you are now expected to master (the misleadingly named) serverless; and you are once more not considered uncool for preferring an RDBMS to a NoSQL.
And I want to introduce my young children to programming, and also find that there is no obvious good modern starting point. Scratch isn't it. Python isn't it. JavaScript most definitely isn't it.
I'm considering Logo and BASIC -- possibly even a BASIC with line numbers and no multiline procedures/functions. Everything modern has a huge barrier to entry for just-learned-to-read children (and the otherwise uninitiated).
Assembly is easy to grok, but hard to use. Modern stuff is easy to use, but takes a while to grok. BASIC seems to hit the right spot for Beginners (All Symbolic Instruction Code).
It makes me want to go back and get a Master's in CS, focusing on those topics. But I am unsure if I would just be paying for a credential for something I could learn myself. On the other hand, it would be hard to beat the structure of good program.
I recently started working through Network Programming in Rust, but it wasn't as low-level as I wanted.
I am also planning to take a hack at the open source Illinois CS 241 book & course
Information retrieval is its own domain with its own body of knowledge that you don't understand if you haven't done it.
Ditto for dozens of other subfields. (And subfields of subfields like AI.)
Distributed programming is its own thing now. That's why there are so many HN articles on say Raft, eventual consistency, or CRDTs -- those weren't topics of interest when I went to school, etc. People are learning them on the job.
In other words, there's really no such thing as a "programming" expert.
But I would also say, while it's probably impossible to really master more than a handful of domains in one lifetime, an awful lot of problems really can be reduced to inputs and outputs, and the more experience you get with solving diverse programming problems, the easier it is to penetrate some of these "advanced" sub-fields, at least at a superficial level, and solve a problem or two using tools from that domain.
What previously was an issue of "I have no idea how to even approach this problem, not to mention write code that solves it" it is now a question of "I have at least 5 ideas how to solve this problem, I need to analyze which one is best solution for this particular context". It's much less about learning the tools and a lot more about how to correctly apply those tools for the right situation. I feel that this latter part could take my entire life but I can definitely tell I'm getting better at it every year, even if I significantly change the problem domain I work in.
As a matter of fact, every time I change the problem domain now I noticed less and less time necessary to become proficient in the new domain as I am able to pull from the experience I gathered previously. Computer science seems like an "infinite" problem domain but actually what I found in practice is that the more problem domains I move through the more I notice similarities and solving the same problem over and over again (albeit, with some small differences which may matter if you work in a performance or resource constrained environment).
I would guess poster above doesn't yet have 30 years experience. Perhaps 10 or less.
My experience echoes both yours and the above poster's - following a sort of bell curve - after initial ramp up, there was a significant period where every question led to several more. At some point that peaked, and by the time I'd been writing code for 20 years the rate of questions was dropping quickly.
Also the character of problems changed a lot. There's a point where QA sites like StackOverflow become largely useless for your problems, as they're too broad, complex, and dependent on specifics to fit the QA format. Even relevant blogs and academic papers become thin after 20 years.
I agree but more due to the blog author combining interesting topics like complex systems with value judgements asserting that a) the net effects are a major problem that needs to be worried about/addressed more than before, b) it's reached a tipping point, c) it could now get much 'worse' much faster than before and in new, unexpected ways.
It's common these days for authors to try to elevate the relevance or urgency of their topic this way but how we should feel about the 'way the world is' is uninteresting. The world has always been complex and it's always been growing more complex at increasing rates. Such transparent present-day exceptionalism just evokes the "but this time it's going to be different (and much worse)" echoed by every concern troll and prophet of doom for hundreds of years.
In reality, change is constant, net effects at large scale (ie global and decadal) are, on average, generally both positive and negative in roughly similar proportions to broad past trends. While there are certainly significant disruptions and calamities, the long-term, global meta-balance of pos/neg tends to eventually regress to the historical mean. In any given localized context there are always winners and losers and determining whether the net impact is "good" or "bad" is a subjective value judgement which varies based on perspective, context and how one chooses to count.
You could learn any of it, but most certainly not all of it. And that’s a subtle but crucial difference. As the number of pieces/interactions in even a single end-to-end pipeline multiply, it would be extremely difficult for you (or anyone) to stay on top.
For example, it is understood how to safely run a nuclear plant. But human nature being what it is it might not be possible for that large a group to correctly and consistently do so. Someone is going to be lazy or greedy. More processes and controls are added, making it more complicated, etc.
Another example is voting for president. We've made a political system that puts so much authority and influence in the hands of one person, over such a complex society and economy, and we ignore all of the important issues of the day instead squabbling over irrelevant details.
In practicality things keep becoming more complex and the risk of major incidents increase because of this, incidents that nobody sees coming and nobody knows how to fix right away. A serious problem.
Those things change from place to place, but lets put them in Jamaica, for instance. They have no knowledge of the hurricane coming in a month, or the yellow fever next door, or the goings with tax laws back in the metropole, etc. The grand effects of nature and other people outside of your little plantation were totally unknown to our Jamaican.
This has been true for eons, and I'd say it's mostly still true today.
But, strangely, it is a bit less true today. We do have pretty good hurricane predictions now, and pretty good practicing epidemiologists (though with covid it's debatable), and pretty good information on the goings on in the capitol, etc.
I feel that the complexity of the world is finally being laid a bit more bare, whereas it was more covered before.
None of this is based in an increased understanding of nature, these are all problems we've created for ourselves.
And nobody can see the problems coming (like the great recession), or convince all the disparate special interests to fix them (like climate change), until things blow up.
As a programmer I've learned to be scared of too much complexity. I have the same feeling every time I have to deal with the government or big corporations, where they are complex that they are often utterly retarded.
And it seems like everyone's first solution is more of the same :-(
Well this is just academic knowledge. Which is a tremendous advantage, but when you include everything else known about western civilization at the time, there's a much lesser percentage difference. And when you bring in the whole world, we're in the same state of confusion as 300 years ago.
You have to go back a lot closer to the cave man for us to be much more fully baffled.
Even though there sure are a lot more people now spending lifetimes making things un-necessarily complex, it's been pretty gonzo the whole time.
I would also say we may now just be more aware of our complete misunderstanding.
I think it applies to emerging complexity not much differently than it did in antiquity.
Regardless of what you are saturated with, anything more is an overload.
Note: it's just the greatest recession this century. So far. Well, probably until now. The century's still young. Plenty of people saw 2008 coming, even more knew it was inevitable, and way way more than that FELT a downturn like that was going to happen sooner rather than later.
Mitigating that we have better information than ever, but it scares me that these enormous decisions are often made based on greedy influences.
It's not really incomprehensible either, you just have to adjust your expectations toward not knowing everything well enough to predict its behavior.
A thousand years ago there were numerous independent but relatively identical farms and towns, all facing a circumscribed set of similar problems. Life was simplier.
Fast forward and now we have the a limited set of large powerful nation states, and groups of nation states, centrally controlling finance/trade/health/education systems that are invented (by politicians and lobbyists!) as they go, and affect everyone.
Instead of many simple small similar systems we have fewer larger more complicated systems. More eggs in less baskets.
Some politicians in the U.S. decided in the 1990s to allow banks to sell securities, which resulted in an almost collapse of the worldwide financial system not twenty years later, millions of people drastically affected.
That was not possible one hundred years ago, because the world was not so complicated and interconnected.
Wouldn't you agree that the complexity has scaled up enormously? Or were you thinking of something else?
The world has always been too complex for any of us to understand.
Edited to add: if you find the modern world unintelligible, wait until you study the prehistoric one upon which that modern world still depends. It has absorbed millennia of investigation by the best minds in history so far, with no end in sight.
More often than not, there's much complexity / intersecting forces to discern causality.
Now with every passing month the set of known things that are hard to find out gets smaller and smaller.
Or even the set of speculative things.
You want to know how a warp drive might work? There's a Youtube video for that.
You want to know what that Youtube video about how warp drive might work means? There's a Youtube video for that too.
Pick one “simple” part in say an iPad. You might be able to get a general overview on how the part is made, but if you try to drill down the slightest then there is immediately huge swathes of questions that are unanswerable without deep industry knowledge.
A recent example was a “simple” cellphone PCB[1] that was very well documented, plus the help of the manufacturer, yet on every single step in the article there are large quantities of unanswered questions. Mind boggling complexity.
Chip engineers tell me they used to actually understand what was going on and could converse about any part of the chip. They understood a lot about the fab process. Software people knew a lot about the chip. Now, no one has the big picture. Scale this up to airplanes, civil construction, large embedded systems, power grids... people may know their domain if lucky but the integration of complex projects is filled with gaps people don't know how to bridge - they don't even know where the gaps are.
It's not brand new - no known engineer/software person grok'd speculative execution exploits for the two decades it was possible. Now, kernel people know a lot more about chip pipelines and cache architectures because they got bit.
> I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
It is a piece of innocuous technology that looks so simple that everyone thinks they could figure out how to make one. The fact that even something so apparently simple is so complex, makes things that look complex even more astonishing.
https://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-t...
A deliberate, and as it predictably turns out, false, piece of propaganda.
- - - -
FWIW, I think the sane response to complexity of modern society is a kind of physical conservatism, similar to how the Amish live (but with slightly more technology.)
The idea is that you rely on old highly-stable systems (not to be obscure but I'm talking about mimicking ecosystems for our fundamental needs: food, clothing, housing, [most] medicine) and then introduce carefully those aspects of our "modern space-age-a-go-go" civilization that are really indispensable and low-risk.
However, I’m sure that this is true in certain cases, and I would appreciate reading about specific examples of complexity that are well hidden, so the exact nature of the complexity can be described. What complexity do people systematically underestimate? What defies all understanding?
Throwing our hands up and saying it all is incomprehensible is akin to ceding control over everything to the few that have understood everything.
Like describe the supply chain for iron, now do it for gasoline, now do it for silicon, copper, gold, crops, etc. No matter what your think, there isn't some person that understands all of this. They farm off the technicalities to people that are dedicated to it.
I don’t believe so, but there could be limits to the efficiency of collaborative understanding and action on complex systems, such that we have to have one person understanding multiple systems.
To play devils advocate, I see this in science all the time where the great insights come from people with deep knowledge in multiple areas.
The U.S. sits atop the world economy, and politically we've been divided over issues like gay marriage and walling off Mexicans. Nobody trusts congress, yet the federal government grows ever more powerful. Corporations have manipulated us into a culture focused on consumerism and greed, half the country loathes the president, health care is a god awful mess, Americans pretty much have no clue imperialistic their country is, we've invented the internet and are along for a ride, at its mercy, etc. And given the unprecedented complex interrelatedness of all this we can make really big mistakes really quickly.
So much of this stuff is effectively already out of control. We are reduced so often to reacting, putting out fires, and more concerned about who to blame. Theoretically we could address any of these problems through reasoned action, but human nature being what it is we don't even seem to agree on what the problems are.
JC: I don't know... sounds like overkill.
Tong: As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd...
JC: Another Stone Age would hardly be an improvement.
Tong: Not so drastic. A dark age, an age of city-states, craftsmen, government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens.
The opening bit in the article about the shipping container captain receiving electronic orders to slow the ship's speed doesn't necessarily show our willingness to accept orders without question from an algorithm. But it does reveal a lot about how the author may not quite understand how shipping schedules work, or grasp how things like overcrowded shipping ports, available dock personnel and functioning equipment may result in congestion that delays or even prevents unloading product from the ship.
It seems more likely that because information technology has become so ubiquitous in our lives, modern humans have become more detached from the world it, unable to recognize the real-world objects and processes it represents.
Hint: it's not.
Personally, I don't think it's a problem. But I skimmed a little farther and it looks like this chap is trying to stem what he believes to be a wave of misinformation.
I think societies that obsess over misinformation will likely collapse eventually and I'm not particularly interested in fragile societies so unless we get extinction out of this I'm not wedded to the idea that individual people can save us all.
Meanwhile, the world's increasing complexity is exactly why people turn to explanations like QAnon. To help them grapple and make sense of it.
There is nobody who needs more to understand that nobody is driving!
It is absolutely true that our globally connected infrastructure allows supply chains to explicitly take advantage of the fact that there are places where people are willing to work in sweatshops. And this results in creating more sweatshops.
BUT, as is documented in Pinker's _Enlightenment Now_ and elsewhere, this is officially a Good Thing.
The reason why people are willing to work in those sweatshops is that it beats spending your day bent over in a rice paddy and praying that you'll grow enough not to starve. And once there is a sufficient supply of people with the skills to work in a factory, a better class of sweatshops move in, and pay higher wages. This eventually forces the bad sweatshops to find a new place where people are still desperate to move in to.
The result is that the Industrial Revolution is not done. Its leading edge is textile sweatshops. They move in, and improve life. And when they do, it is a signal that life is about to get better for everyone. And when it gets good enough, they move out.
To give a sense of scale, in recent decades, we've averaged that 250,000 people PER DAY come out of extreme poverty. Historically extreme poverty was the norm for over 90% of the human race. And today we are looking at ending it entirely within our lives. Then we'll have to face a change in dynamic. Once there is no place where a sweatshop is an improvement over existing life, the textile industry will have to reform. But for now, they are the first rung on the ladder to prosperity. And a system that makes it more efficient to offer that rung to those who are still desperate is helping create a future with prosperity for all.
Why does that necessarily happen?
We can think effectively about complexity the same way we've always done it, abstractions, facades, black-box thinking, compartmentalization, etc.
The concept of "understanding" a complex system in its entirety is futile to begin with, that's why we call it "complex," that's what that word means.
Are we really going to sit here and say that any one person, at any point in time, was ever capable of grokking an entire societal system of any kind? You think the village chieftain of a 300 person village back when humans first discovered agriculture was capable of "understanding" the entire system required to simply feed his village on a daily basis?
This all seems like pandering to identity-driven, individualistic cultural trends rather than any actual analysis of humans or society or complexity in the world.
Complex: "a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts"
Complicated: "1: consisting of parts intricately combined a complicated recipe complicated machinery 2 : difficult to analyze, understand, or explain"
The thesis here seems to be that an excessively complex system becomes complicated, and that nobody is able to understand a very complicated huge system to the point of being able to control it.
"Jacques Ellul’s claim that technique became an autonomous phenomenon during the middle of the 20th century, and subsequently a system, means that the influence people have on technique is much less decisive than the influence technique has on people." (Willem H. Vanderburg, 2004)
--
I'm intrinsically a deeply cynical, skeptical person.
And I've never been more optimistic.
We're finally able to start answering some of our millennia old philosophical questions.
It's an amazing time to be alive. I can't wait to see what happens next.
> The point is that we don’t know, the captain of the ship itself didn’t know, and that nobody may know
It all boils down to abstraction. Just like the captain doesn't need to know why a certain type of steel is used for the hull of his ship, or how the software works that monitors his engines. The captain doesn't need to understand the calculation that goes behind the optimal arrival time of his ship.
But I'm sure that, if he's curious enough, he can contact the right people at his employer to tell him why certain decisions are made.
But now he can't monitor its performance and intervene when it's wrong or offer feedback. He's turned into an automaton, and we're assuming his central planner has all the knowledge and understanding necessary to successfully manage a central plan and react to (perhaps unexpected) changes.
And that's only considering the perspective of task performance, which is not the only angle here. Is it really a better world if all the tasks are performed perfectly, but if almost everyone's reduced to a deskilled, mind-numbed, burger-flipper?
In your metaphor you're assuming that the captain becomes a low skill automoton. Is he that, or has automation allowed him to set aside drudge and concentrate on the interesting parts of his job?
Do you think calculators make us dumb, or do they help us with the arithmetic while our minds can turn to the important, interesting parts of the problem at hand?
As for this thread, what I'm seeing is: - the thesis of this article is that the world is getting more complex for humans to understand - Some argue the world was always complex but now we're understanding it more - Some say yes but we are adding our own complexity to the natural world - Some say, it not not necessarily much more complex it just that there is a lot information out there for any individual to grasp in their lifetime.
There seems to be some truth in each of those arguments. So to sum up, the world was always complex, but recently we started to uncover this complexity, and in order effort to uncover and manipulate the physical world, we've introduced our own complexity and systems. Makes wonder, once most of human needs are met and we stabilize with the ecosystem, will the complexity we introduce to the world also stabilizes?
> The global supply chains, with their mega-scale engineering projects and infrastructures, exist primarily because global wealth inequality makes it cheap to have stuff made in certain countries — even when you have to ship it halfway across the globe to sell it for a profit. By leveraging stark gaps in wages and standards of living as efficiently as it can, the supply chain network is actively enforcing that global inequality.
I understand how wealth inequality is leveraged, and that it's in shipping companies financial interest to have highest margins, which doesn't really help the inequality. Still, it doesn't follow that they are actively enforcing inequality (they are after all flowing the capital toward poorer parts of world). If they are, which mechanisms are being used?
- The shipping company received 2x what the producer received
- Amazon received 3x what the producer received
- I profited 4x what the producer received
So some capital is flowing to the poorer producers, but not nearly as much as is flowing to every single other person in the supply chain. And if the amount flowing to the producer is only the bare minimum required to live...
So on balance, a bunch of resources (labor, fossil fuels, raw materials) are being expended in order to transport valuable goods from a poor place to a rich place. And in exchange a couple of bits were flipped in an account belonging to a local power broker. Hard to see how that does anything other than further impoverish the "client" nation.
And all the companies involved are incentivized to perpetuate the status quo, in order to maintain access to cheap labor and natural resources. And we have seen that historically they are more than willing to undermine countries that are threatening their profits [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...
The author opened with a list of things that seem impervious to the ramping complexity, instead of vulnerable to it.
The only difference is that now we have more information and information moves a lot faster than before.
So the time we have to digest and filter out the noise is much less, so we feel confused, worrying about things that should be of no concern to us, since we cannot possibly do anything about them.
I think we collectively worry too much.
Before there were gods and kings whose job was to take the worry away, we don't have that anymore.
And trustworthiness matters very much. To choose whom to trust, it seems one needs to have and look for core principles, starting perhaps with honesty, kindness, etc.
Isn't economics the study of all the different black boxes and how they interact in general? Like if you took the honey market, someone out there understands the honey market, who is buying, who is selling, and why the prices are where they are. You repeat this for all markets (or parts of markets) and someone understands either the black box, or the way black boxes usually work together. When you have a large number of black boxes, the system can behave in weird ways because the behavior of the system is defined by each of the sub-systems behaving in a certain range. When that range changes wildly, the system can behave in unpredictable ways.
Economics simply defines general rules for these complicated systems and so are heavily dependent on all the sub systems to function in a prescribed range. I don't feel like you can call economics a black box, but you could say that no one understands those particular problems you put forth because we don't have enough data (and enough correlation) to really determine what that change to a bunch of subsystems has on the system, especially when other factors (bull/bear market, global uncertainty, etc) will probably have a biasing effect.
I think of myself as atheist/agnostic in nature, but the way we have been creating technology flies against the face of God. Humankind, the tool maker, has gotten this way by meddling with & learning about their environment. Computing is, in almost all cases, invisible, something done in a way that we can not see. It is a violation of nature. It is unlearnable.
The modern world is not too complex for any of us to understand. It is too resistant to observation to allow understanding to begin. The world must open itself again, or we face existential peril as a species; we will have trapped ourselves inside endless boxes.
I offer that throughout modern history, awful people were driving. Often monsters. Maybe no one will be better.
Even before human society became complex, the natural world around us was already immensely complex.
Additionally human society was already too complex too understand from before we were born. This title implies he was waiting for the complexity to happen. "Finally."
Things may appear more complex because of the internet and social media. Really what's happening is there's a lot more information that's accessible to us and a lot of it is useless.
One thing people don't realize is they think society is falling into chaos with the pandemic trump and all the garbage they report on the media.
What they don't realize that there has never been a time in history where the world is more at peace then there is now. We are extraordinarily lucky to live in these times, source:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/the-world-is-not...
But humans like drama so to get more views people have to dramatize everything. Really nothing is happening. Trump or Biden being president is more likely to change what you see on the news over an actual change to your way of life.
I dont understand the constant need to radicalize every problem as we technically are "fixing" things. Less war, less natural cause deaths other than old age, less world wide poverty, the world is getting better on a whole. Still plenty of serious problems. No one should discount that. But I had to stop watching the general news the past few months because it seemed like we were living during the black death, world war 1 and 2, and the American civil war (I'm in the US) all at the same time. We're not. Things aren't perfect, but holy shit things were far worse roughly 100 years ago. Theres a point where every radical on any political spectrum needs to get hit with a belt in the ass and told to stand in the corner, same goes for the general media. We all need to take a deep breath, be grateful that things aren't as bad as during our grandparents time, quit thinking the world will end tomorrow, and calmly fix things together. But hey, that's all crazy talk and doesn't produce ad clicks for google, facebook and twitter.
There's rich interaction between how the world is, how one perceives it and how you act on the beliefs you acquire.
And I agree, the technical data concerning (physical) violence, disease and wealth look good.
But that's not all there is to life, is it?
More Americans have died from COVID in the last 9 months than the Americans who died in WWI, and we've surpassed the American South's Civil War deaths, and are approaching how many died fighting for the North, too.
Also you need to make your timeline bigger. Extend the timeline to Past the dark ages.
The initial poster (me) is talking about timescales much bigger than 9/11. There was a time where if your neighbor dropped dead from the black death it was normal. Right now most people don't know anyone who was even in the building when 9/11 happened.
Keep in mind the amount of car accidents in the US constitutes a mass slaughter on a scale far larger than anything you can comprehend yet you are ignoring it. There are plenty of things far worse than COVID deaths and 9/11 going on in the world right now... YET we are still more at peace and safer than we ever have been before.
Does that make you evil and heartless for completely ignoring how car manufactures and drivers are slaughtering people? No. It doesn't. But it does highlight the fact that you are using and throwing around numbers to raise emotions the same way the media does.
Just to keep things in perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
Both are about 100 deaths per day JUST in the US.
I'm not ignoring it, I've even posted about it recently[1]. A typical flu season incurs more deaths than automobiles cause. The former incurs about 40k, while automobiles cause about 32k.
Why do you have to turn everything up to 11 and call red alert, there's no need.
I also find it strange that I'm being accused of "calling red alert" and am told to "Stop being a fucking doomsday prophet"[1] for stating simple statistics by the very same people who are using statistics to drive their arguments. I even went a step further and stated hard figures.
If we're going to rely on a utilitarian metric for peace and human suffering, and use that metric to dismiss criticism of the status quo, what's the issue with using hard figures?
No you're deliberately calling out numbers that blows things out of proportion. 9/11 was deliberately used because it was a tragedy. Why didn't you compare COVID to car accidents which is the bigger more comparable number? Because you want to raise emotions. Don't pretend.
You're not a doomsday prophet but you are definitely manipulating the situation towards your own skewed perspective, you were dialing it up to 11, you're just back pedaling now.
If you indeed had something unbiased to say you would not have brought 9/11 out of nowhere to say that covid is like a bunch of 9/11s happening back to back because so is the flu so is car accidents. You have an agenda and you are promoting it with biased numbers.
> Well, I find it strange that people are easily triggered by reality, so much so that they want to drown it out, ignore it and think that those who are not content with the status quo should be "hit with a belt in the ass and told to stand in the corner", like the comment I replied to said.
Triggered by reality? Nobody is triggered here. We're saying calm down. You're the one that's bringing up 9/11 trying to trigger everyone.
Nobody is saying be content with the status quo, what we're saying is that don't push the panic button, we are not in a 9/11 panic situation... humanity is more at peace then ever before and the numbers show it when you look at the overall timeline of human existence.
I am saying that much of it should be drowned out though. All the news you've been inundated with 2 months ago is already outdated. You're loaded with an over dramatization of problems that humanity basically deals with on a normal basis and becomes useless and outdated within a week let alone a month.
Right now many/most vehicle fatalities were people fully aware of the danger of those vehicles and willing to use them. And most "gun violence" fatalities were suicides (people willing to die). In contrast nearly nobody "accepts" to be exposed to a potentially deadly virus.
116k americans died in ww1 with a 100m population.
271k died of covid with a 330m population.
One death is one too many, but we recovered from the civil war which was 600k+ deaths with a 31m population at the time.
Covid isn't the end of the world. We can recover. The world has been through far, far worse. Stop being a fucking doomsday prophet.
> One death is one too many, but we recovered from the civil war which was 600k+ deaths with a 31m population at the time.
> Covid isn't the end of the world. We can recover. The world has been through far, far worse. Stop being a fucking doomsday prophet.
Let's have a nuclear war, then. Sure it will cause massive death and destruction, but we don't have to worry about that because the Black Death shows we'll eventually recover [1].
Massive tragedies from that past don't free us from having to worry about similarly-sized tragedies in the present, but those acknowledged tragedies can help us acknowledge the scope of the current tragedy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death: "The Black Death ... is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.... it took until 1500 for the European population to regain the levels of 1300."
You realize the rhetoric of life being over as we know it is increasing suicide rates. People are literally killing themselves because they dont want to live in the narrative that life as we know it is down hill from here. What in the hell is wrong with you people? Yea, I dont like Trump that much either, that doesn't mean we just burn the fucking world or imagine that it's incapable of recovery.
When I say we can recover is strictly to keep your head up high and continue to do some good because it can payoff down the line. Giving up and crying about doomsday will lead to nothing but more pain and suffering. But I guess you want that since you're a nuclear war advocate.
Do you understand sarcasm?
> You realize the rhetoric of life being over as we know it is increasing suicide rates. People are literally killing themselves because they dont want to live in the narrative that life as we know it is down hill from here.
There's actually little to no "rhetoric of life being [permanently] over as we know it [due to COVID]" except as a straw man. There is rhetoric arguing for temporary sacrifices for the greater good, and also rhetoric downplaying or denying the situation to argue against making those sacrifices.
A proper appreciation of the seriousness of the situation is not "being a fucking doomsday prophet," as you said; rather it's the mindset that steels one to make the sacrifices that need to be made with the hope that they'll work.
The scale is greater now than it was back then. Now, a city of millions can be obliterated in an instant. Now, we can see the effects of global warming and how it can decimate the world's food supply.
We have more knowledge now than ever before - and before, ignorance was bliss.
The sheer number doesn't matter when compared to the percentage. The percentage is the real number that measures our progress and the actual number is an illusion.
100 people die of car accidents per day does that mean we ban cars? No. The sheer number is an illusion the percentage is the real deal.
>The scale is greater now than it was back then. Now, a city of millions can be obliterated in an instant. Now, we can see the effects of global warming and how it can decimate the world's food supply.
Nobody is saying these aren't threats or problems. But compared with the past these problems are looming problems that we have to deal with as a society.
A peasant in the dark ages had to deal with starvation, black death or invaders. These were actual threats in the sense that an average conversation will be like: "Last week Martha got her head chopped off by a barbarian and Bob died of starvation. "
> A peasant in the dark ages had to deal with starvation, black death or invaders. These were actual threats in the sense that an average conversation will be like: "Last week Martha got her head chopped off by a barbarian and Bob died of starvation. "
To even suggest starvation doesn't exist is...I don't even have the words.
Did you hear about the Nigerian farmers who were executed last week by Boko Haram? Not very different than a barbarian raiding a small village.
Stop over dramatizing the situation. Obviously I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm obviously not implying it.
What I am implying is that starvation is dramatically lower in percentage then it was in the past.
>Did you hear about the Nigerian farmers who were executed last week by Boko Haram? Not very different than a barbarian raiding a small village.
Again tragic but in the big scheme of things historically this would be something happening across the street from you. Nowadays it's happening in few places but you think it's a huge deal because the news manages to cover it.
> What I am implying is that starvation is dramatically lower in percentage then it was in the past.
You aren't implying it. You're directly stating it. This isn't in debate, what's in debate is if, even if the percentage is better, more total suffer. Is that actually a moral good?
It's like saying "we've killed 90% of your cancer cells, but weren't able to kill all of them. The cancer will still kill you, but we killed a greater percentage of it! yay us!" It doesn't make sense in certain scenarios and is only helpful as a delta - plus, to even suggest that we have less poverty than ever in history is unsubstantiated with fact.
The reality is that we're staring down the barrel of not one, not two, not three, but potentially dozens of existential threats. The aforementioned nukes, climate change, environmental collapse, bioweapons, topsoil erosion... it's not an illusion created by the media. We're really not in good shape.
Not really? Nukes only come into play with great power wars, and there's not really any fewer great power wars in the past century than the century before that. Post Napoleonic Wars, the only great power wars (in chronological order) are the Crimean War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, World War I, Russian Revolution/Russian Civil War, and World War II, with the three 20th century wars all being far longer and more violent than the 19th century wars.
What has dropped down considerably is the lesser wars, be they localized conflicts such as the Ecuador-Peruvian War of 1941, civil wars such as the Spanish Civil War or American Civil War, wars between great powers and lesser powers such as the Russo-Japanese War, colonial wars such as the Boer War or the Indian Wars, revolutions such as the Revolutions of 1848. Of these, the only conflict that may have been avoided by nukes is an India/Pakistan conflict--note that Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons hasn't forestalled further conflicts with Arab countries (notably the Israel-Lebanon in my lifetime).
Yes nukes stopped a lot of potential wars. Good. If the mere existence is all that's needed to stop like half the wars that ever could be... and? Obviously I dont want them used. But wars happen and theres nothing anyone can do about that. Its human nature to be a bunch of cunts.
And there have always been a bunch of existential problems on the horizon. A decent reading of history shows that people have been fearful of whatever the latest fad of problems. The only real difference, in the last 100 years we are not at the complete and total mercy of nature. Only partially. It's only fairly recent that a drought here and there, blizzard, tornado, hurricane or volcano doesn't have epically large consequences in death toll. Those numbers are far less than they used to be.
I can pretty easily convince myself that a lot of what I'll call "smaller" bad deeds are primarily deterred by the threat of consequences: I never shoplifted a candy bar because it wasn't worth the perceived consequences. But I have a substantially harder time convincing myself that most people don't commit "grander" crimes largely because of a similar fear. Taking murder as the example and myself as a case study, I cannot fathom committing a murder because it feels wrong, there is a part of my mind that recoils at just the thought of it. Is that because the potential consequences of that act are ingrained into my psyche, or is there another reason? I'm inclined toward the latter, certainly. Not to mention that punishments geared toward deterrence often seem to not prevent murder from occurring.
I don't have any grand insights here, just sharing my observations on the topic, as it's come up surprisingly often recently in my experience on the internet.
First time parents find an issue with this too. People who figure they themselves are perfect angels incapable of harm, now have to care for their new little angel. An angel doesn't protect a weak little angel from the horrors of the world. What happens when someone abuses or abducts their child? Remember that Olympic physician who was touching all those underage girls? One of the fathers begged the judge for 5 min in a locked room with the guy. When denied, he still charged at the bastard in the courtroom. I bet you 100% that father would have always said he would never do such a thing prior to this event happening. We all lie that we are incapable or evil deeds. No, we need the right circumstances to ignore the consequences. We are afraid of retaliation until we no longer fear it for "good reasons". If you live a life where you never test those waters, hey that's a pretty good easy life. But theres something else to be said about understanding and accepting ones shadow prior hand so you dont go ballistic accidentally. I think the thought that you are incapable of evil is more dangerous than knowing you are capable of it. Because you never question if what you are doing is right or wrong if you are already biased that you can only do good.
I see your point here, and will grant that I've been fortunate to not have been in a situation in which I've had to consider anything approaching a "bad deed". Most of my thoughts on the subject are purely hypothetical, and informed by conversations with my dad, who has Seen Some Shit.
Looking back on the 2 times I can think of where I have considered striking someone to cause harm (both in middle and high school, a bully and a fight respectively), it seems to me that there is an element of considering consequences, but in neither circumstance were those consequences external. In both cases, it was very much a question of "am I going to feel bad about this later?", which prompted the question of justification rather than punishment. Perhaps at a certain level this is the same thing, but it seems at least qualitatively different to me, a kind of fear of my own judgment rather than that of another person. Would you generally consider this to be the same process, or not?
In either case, I can only wholeheartedly agree that perceiving oneself as incapable of evil is a Bad Idea. It seems dangerous to me for much the same reason you laid out, and I will occasionally attempt to engage in the kind of introspection necessary to grapple with what I might be capable of in a similar situation. I'm hesitant to say I'm incapable (psychologically) of doing something terrible in a similar situation, and my previous comment was from the reductionist point of view of a spherical murderer in a vacuum, as it were. Were I in that father's position, I know that I would feel _justified_ in taking that kind of action, which may prompt me to seek the opportunity, which is again where I see a slight difference from being prohibited solely by the fear of consequences, if that makes sense.
Again, thanks for taking the time to respond!
I'd peg the number at 30-40% of people who are largely indifferent to murder and abide by the rules simply because of consequences society or habit. This is of course is just a anecdotal and hypothetical number.
The problem is when people judge humanity they instinctively reach for a mirror and believe that other people are a reflection. This is partly true but it causes people to miss many parts of the personality spectrum that are massively different.
Case in point:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
The above is an example of a psychopath who probably would have lived his life as a normal person were it not for his occupation and a serendipitous brain scan.
You will note that he has confirmed psychopathy through genetic evaluation and physical evaluation of the structure of his brain.
Also just want to say that I lied. I'm not like you. I'm a bit lower on the spectrum. I won't murder someone but if a stranger dies in front of me, I won't care. I'll definitely try to help him, but I won't be having problems sleeping at night.
Droughts, storms and volcanoes are on a totally different scale than nuclear war, climate change, or topsoil erosion though. You could argue that we're in control of those problems, but I'm not holding my breath.
I get you think the world is fading away and there are problems left to solve. You are doing a great disservice to the giant's shoulders you stand on that have put in the effort and sacrifice that allow you to worry about this set of problems. They had far harsher problems with less tools than we have today.
In the old days going to war meant getting more plunder in your coffers. Things like gold and resources. Today wealth is stored in information, knowledge, know-how and expertise. Going to war doesn't necessarily grant you access to this kind of wealth. I can't transfer the expertise of how to fab a processor by invading silicon valley with soldiers.
War even runs the risk of destroying know-how and infrastructure related to technology. The way towards wealth in the modern era is through learning, communication and espionage.
You would think this kind of thing is obvious, that everyone should know that the spoils of war in the past when applied to the modern era are basically useless. But alas the complexities and blast of useless information delivered to us by the media makes it hard to pinpoint the fundamental reasoning.
But leaving the political bits aside, I can't help but think this is an article written for the uninformed. Complexity isn't a bad thing. It is the consequence of specialization and technological advancement. A lot of people bemoan things like complexity in our financial system without understanding why things are the way they are, and without honest consideration that this complexity might actually make sense. That ignorance then causes them to distrust the system or pursue change for change sake, which is what it seems like this article is setting up for.
For me, I can accept complexity in many aspects of my surroundings because people voluntarily built up much of that complexity through mutually-beneficial transactions (that is, free trade, supply-demand, and other market dynamics). It means those complexities have survived Democratic policy-making processes, survived market pressures, survived individuals accepting the beneficial tradeoffs that come with complexity, and so on. Without knowing specifics about some complex system, there is automatically a lot for me to trust and accept as a black box.
The reality is that complexity and lack of understanding is inevitable, and it has also always been the state of things even before human-created complexity. No matter what, an individual will not be omniscient and will need to take some things as they come. Some aspects of life and our environment will remain black boxes. That doesn't mean they are broken or need adjustment to fit our fragile egos. It means we need to accept this situation with humility, and learn more about some area with earnest curiosity rather than viewing it as "too complex".
Blue light is defined as roughly 380nm-460nm range of wavelengths in electromagnetic radiation, however the human eye perceives blue when observing light with a dominant wavelength between approximately 450nm-495nm. Objects coloured blue typically reflect or diffuse this range of wavelengths more efficiently than others wavelengths, rendering these objects the appearance of the color blue.
Sources:
I was downvoted for having a different opinion.
Let me dare an explanation. People want to feel safe by siding with the majority on the premise it increases survivability. It is a local minimum. The majority likes to side blindly with "dominant animals" aka pocket-sizedd Messiahs who are afraid to lose dominance and this is how democracy dies and incomprehensibility becomes the new norm.
Easy?