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Comment by swman | Hacker News Reader

I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.

Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.

I’m not sure how we can solve that.

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The problem is defining “greed”.

It feels like when I want more stuff per unit time/effort, I’m just “trying to support my family and build a better life for my children”. But when other people do the same, it’s “greedy”. Is there any definition of “greedy” we could use for the purposes of this discussion that would apply yo all humans equally?

Yeah, especially when there's occasional extremists that refuse to acknowledge that putting one's own first isn't the natural state of things.

I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.

> putting one's own first isn't the natural state of things

I am very confused about this statement, can you please explain what is the "natural state of things" ?

Let's imagine a hypothetical crisis, say a building on fire. You can save your own child/spouse/relative or you can save a complete stranger. You will succeed in saving any of them, but not both.

Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be taken into the equation.

Luckily, reality isn't that black and white in most cases, but most people will prioritize their in-group. That's just the way people work.

Clearly, people will prefer their own in-group. I think, however, you just made the parent poster's point.

People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves.

Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests.

Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment:

>It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.

showing how the 'in-group' has shrunk. Used to be a larger tribe, now you could be lucky to consider it an atomic family.

Definitely. I was agreeing with the parent post, while adding a semi-sarcastic reply about everyone having to agree before things start moving.

Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?

Rent seeking and corruption are two definitions that spring to mind.

I think those are good ones because they're definable in ways that we can probably come to a consensus on.

The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism.

Oh, and rent seeking and corruption are because capitalism too and not at all human flaws seen to an even greater degree in every other economic system ever devised.

I think that the issue is when the financial rewards are dramatically greater than how much harder someone could conceivably be working.

A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).

They may not work 8000 times harder, but they may bring to the table a skill which is 8000 times more valuable than a shelf stocker at Walmart.

That's certainly possible, but the argument that usually gets made is that they worked harder and therefore earned being a billionaire.

That being said, I think it's also unlikely that they brought a skill to the table that's 8000 times more valuable. My understanding is that people who become billionaires do so by leveraging capital.

The thing is nobody gets to build a fortune in the billions from saving up their salary. The principal way to do it is through ownership and control of a company. So what's the alternative to private individuals founding companies, finding ways to provide valuable goods and services, employ lots of people and grow successful businesses. Is that something we want to discourage? I think we all benefit from having hard working, innovative people creating, leading and running big companies. Or even from investors deploying capital so that it grows companies and expands beneficial economic activities.

part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.

On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.

I don't think it's black and white. I have no issue with someone starting a business and becoming hundreds of times more wealthy than the median American. However, I think that's a lot different than becoming thousands of times more wealthy.

Opposition to addressing inequality in the US tends to take the form of arguing that the rich worked harder, earned their wealth, are more valuable, etc.; therefore, it is immoral to redistribute that wealth. The argument that I am attempting to make is that the differences in wealth are so dramatic that it isn't realistic that they earned it in the sense that free market advocates are implying.

I think if you're opposed to people obtaining that much wealth is, how do you stop them? How do you prevent Elon Musk from investing heavily in Tesla, growing the company and ending up owning billions of dollars worth of it's shares?

Why is the "hardness" of the work the key criteria? If you compare "value to society based on peoples willingness to pay", then the ratio of that between a billionaire and the median person probably is 8000x - the founders that become billionaires usually capture only a tiny fraction of the value they create, but we tend to take that value for granted and it's hard to measure. So we only see the billions of dollars they have, not the 10s or 100's of billions of dollars of value they create.

They both seem fine to me. Rent seeking keeps system stable. It keeps a balance between crash-and-burn vs absolute no risk types by taking little risks to collect rent and providing some useful service.

As a third world native I find corruption works better than everyone mindlessly following law under one self-righteous government becomes illegal under the next one, thereby making citizens life hell.

Greed is to defect in game theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Its somebody who instills distrust in society by taking advantage of it.

One approach might be to compare how much wealth someone is attempting to attain with how much they could conceivably be outperforming the average person.

For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.

What if our elite 30x productivity person takes a significant risk? If he flips a coin and wins he should rightfully expect 60x

And you can be much more than 10x more productive than your average person without being 10x smarter. You can just have skills or have an idea that allows you to scale your contributions much more than an average person.

For instance, if we can teach cars to drive themselves, we have the capacity to save hundreds of millions, if not billions, of man hours a day.

The people who made significant contributions to that effort will have contributed thousands of times more to society than an average person.

If a surgeon saves 50 lives a year, I'd say that's a lot more than 10x what I'm doing.

I agree, it's perfectly reasonable for someone who takes a risk to receive more than I do. I could even see them receiving hundreds of times more than I do. That's a lot different than them receiving 8000 times more ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122 thousand).

I have a trick to define greed: pauses. A bad greed impulse based system won't survive a stop, it's a hog, a leak .. it needs to keep going to survive.

I think there are many examples, from French Revolution to day to day examples of people throwing others under the bus for a promotion.

Absolutely, most problems are caused by either of:

- stupidity

-fear

-greed

The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.

History shows us that greedy people end up with their heads on sticks. Even when they have armies to protect them. It doesn’t take a lot to regress to that again.

I think it's excessively greedy who end up on sticks. Moderately greedy are doing just fine...

One of the main properties of many of the communist revolutions of the 20th centuries was the mass killing or removal of property of the landed gentry in those countries - sometimes more directly violent than others. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, N Korea, etc.

I think recent history has shown that simply killing the Bourgeoisie tends to just eventually create another in the form of whoever had the power to do the other killings, and not always to better ends for the people. That form of communism has been shown to not really work. Democratic socialism though seems to work out pretty well for people.

There’s still plenty of money sloshing around the coffers of European royalty, even in modern republics. If you’re good at the greed thing I think the head-on-stick risk is pretty small.

Problem is the process that brings those heads on the sticks. It often involves death & destruction of plenty other people and infrastructure.

Not to mention the countless rebellions that ended with the rebelling peoples' heads on spears. Farmer rebellions usually fail.

I dont really think history shows that. The "greedy people" can keep power for very long and it takes special circumstances for the overthrow - and overthrow usually means instability with a lot of death, torture and pain for everyone.

Yes it's not pretty

>I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.

That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.

Much of technology we don't really need, and even more so for most technology we consume (of course, you can't convince tech workers for that, as their salary, and hobbies, are based on the stuff).

It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy), (no work-life balance, but here's Netflix you can watch when you're home exhaused from work), (no community, but here's social media, go argue with strangers), etc.

> That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.

I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.

However personal interest (i.e. greed) is a big factor that motivates them to devote their lives not to something that's simply very interesting to them personally, but rather something that just happens to be practically useful for large numbers of people very unlike themselves.

Smart people who have the ability and resources to change things don't really share the same problems as the target audience of mass market tech (I mean, hackernews is full of product reports illustrating this) - greed motivates them to solve problems of their "outgroup", filling the needs of all the people they don't really care about much.

I feel like greed is what drives technological progress and that you can not have the one without the other

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he put forth the idea that the only reason humans even have civilization is because of sociopaths. We're apparently wired to function in a community of 30-50 where everyone depends on everyone else for survival so, he reasons, larger groups of people require perverse systems control. Sociopaths, having no empathy and seeking to use people for their own gain, seized power and conquered other tribes and imposed such perverse systems in order to exert their influence over a larger populace and land area. Only now, having lived for many many generations in one kind of civilization or another, people know nothing but the perverse system and think of it as natural and even good.

There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?

This might not be directly related but the decline of birthrates tells me that there is something horribly unnatural going on.

Most of the progress is caused by greed too.

greed or ambition?

also, scientists, doctors, researchers, even maybe the military?, progress has been defined by a lot of different motivators than just greed i would think… (was einstein full of greed when he made his breakthroughs?)

A big part is our greed to procreate, take out 3/4 of humanity and climate change is solved

Is it though?

Even if there were an event that wiped out 75% of people, it kicks the can down the road at most 30 years due to a baby boom.

Refusing to solve the real problem is what got us in to this mess.

It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.

> It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.

Individuals aren't really responsible for the mass amounts of pollutants put into the atmosphere the same way corporations are. In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.

Kicking the can down the road 30 years is by far the best option we have available to us at this point (not that it will happen in my lifetime).

> would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.

Capitalism won’t go without a fight.

In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.

Yes.

To add to this, just doing away with capitalism does not solve this problem, and creates myriad others.

Absolutely the scale of the problem is unprecedented though, but that message hasn’t changed in 50 years.

That's horrible and would not solve the climate change.

It would not solve climate change, but really, what's horrible about it?

We live in a world of finite resources. If we, as a species, overpopulate to the point where these finite resources run dry, what are the best options?

Because climate change is the only reason to do something like that - we need to solve the short term issue of pollution, because in the long run (e.g. a few centuries) overpopulation is not a problem as we're going to get a population stabilization and decrease just with current trends without a need to sacrifice anything for it; and we are getting more resource efficient over time, GDP growth has now finally (unlike all history) decoupled from growth in energy use and mineral use, etc.

Climate change is a problem that makes us need a rapid solution right now even if its costly and painful, general depletion of resources really isn't; if it wasn't for climate change then we could just let the replacement of oil to renewables happen "naturally" as oil prices slowly increase as the supply decreases, the usual market incentives would be enough to manage the resource allocation.

Finiteness of resources is not as big of an issue as it looked in 1970s (when the original Limits to Growth study was made) - with a stable or shrinking population (current situation in developed world, soon-to-arrive globally) each person's share of physical resources is the same all the while as each person's need for physical resources (except energy) is not growing now (unlike 1970s), with advances in tech meeting the same needs now requires less resources so we can continue to grow our economy within the limits of the same finite resources.

We could decrease our rate of consumption/production, for one. The rate at which we're consuming is what's unsustainable. We have enough resources today to cover everyone's needs. The problem is we are producing well past that, and even still not everyone is getting what they need. Just look at how much food is thrown into dumpsters every day. Or all the energy locked up in landfills in the form of deteriorating plastics and electronics. All the junkyards filled with cars. Look at the thousands of acres of almond farms in CA's central valley. It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond, yet the central valley is in perpetual drought. A better allocation of resources is what's needed.

We live in a society where everything is disposable, and that has a huge energy cost that we don't factor in because energy is so cheap right now. When energy is more expensive, repairing, conserving, and reusing a thing will be a better choice instead of throwing it out and buying a new one.

I agree but it seems we’re in minority. I don’t see the rate of consumption decreasing willingly

And you think the people in the 3/4th are going to let you do that? Because I'm guessing that the 3/4th doesn't include you and your loved ones.

PC probably meant "by not making more children", not the thing you assumed.

Well the OP didn't talk about wipe out people, but birth control. That can be enforced in many ways but for sure the best one is education https://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-chil...

No, you just have about 4 times longer to become carbon neutral.

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