Hacker News Reader

Comment by backprop1993 | Hacker News Reader

backprop1993

I think back to how we have responded to this pandemic. We were in denial until the pandemic was spreading unchecked wildly through the population, and even a good chunk of the population is still in denial after 100,000s of dead.

We are a hopeless species when it comes to organizing effective collective action ahead of known disaster. We seem to only respond collectively once disaster has struck, and even then it takes time.

I read a book in 1997 that was about this. Can not remember the name or author of it for the life of me. It was about climate change and the risk that North Atlantic currents would shift causing a state change that would be hard to reverse. 24 years later we think it is getting closer, but we still do not act swiftly.

View on HN

That's because there is no "we". The most popular way to deal with coordinating important collective efforts is to give up all power to a small elite group and hope their members are magically not self-interested. The effect is predictable and manifested with the Covid pandemic: elites were informed in time, prepared their own affairs adequately [1], and let the rest fend for themselves.

Figure out some actual governance and coordination schemes and "we" may have a chance at beating the Prisoner's Dilemma.

[1]: I have personal anecdotes, but publicly available data speaks for itself: https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pand...

You forgot a step - the elites will ban any community attempts to self-organise and solve their own problems. Note that in the COVID pandemic it is typically illegal (at least in the West) for non-government actors to decide what controls and remedies are appropriate.

I’m pretty sure governments only set minimum controls and remedies and communities are free to implement additional measures on top of that.

I seem to recall someone, possibly the US CDC, banning alternative COVID tests to their faulty one in the early days of the pandemic.

If someone attempts set up emergency mask production they'd probably get hit by anti-gouging laws, because that isn't cheap.

And the vaccines are presumably only available because the governments relented, fast-tracked them and provided special guarantees to help people get over the testing hurdle. Normally it takes 4-8 years to get a vaccine to market. We've got evidence here that those years are more red tape than requirement, it suggests up to 75% of the regulatory process is destructive theatre.

Clinical testing is affected by diminishing returns. Anything is a lot safer after a month of testing, but the usual safety standards demands a little more safety, and improving on “100 times less likely to kill you than the disease” thing often takes years.

This will not be our last pandemic. The lessons we leaned, and the lessons we should have learned, will come back a lot.

I wonder how the elite will approach climate change when it really starts to bite? If I wanted to survive a dystopia I'd be making friends with the common people and using my considerable personal resources to help address their concerns and earn their loyalty, not elevating myself stratospherically above them then trying to hide when shit hits the fan.

They actual elites have enough money to live comfortably for hundreds of years. They don’t have to care about climate change, maybe they even see it as welcome since it will kill billions of people if nothing is done. That’s how detached they are from the rest of us.

Don't give up hope. We licked CFCs and leaded gasoline. There are probably plenty of other times in history when we mobilized to solve a problem at scale. These are discouraging times for sure. But ultimately there's just no point in being hopeless.

What’s the reference of licking cfcs referring to?

CFC == Chlorofluorocarbons, "lick" is slang for "defeating". It means we passed law prohibiting the use of CFCs.

Banning ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

I see this as a very US centric view. I remember ecological issues were huge in Germany as early as the 80s. The pandemic has been well managed by a number of countries across the globe.

Especially about global warming, it is not a specie problem. It is possible to fix, and some countries / groups of people are better than others at it.

A very large fraction of the population is still in denial, and will continue to be so until they are personally hit.

My pessimistic take is that they’ll continue to be in denial until we’ll after they are personally hit.

Exactly. Those same people that are in denial right up to the point where they're being shifted onto ventilators then change their tune to "wishing they took the vaccine" will be the same denying climate change right up to the point they burn to death from wildfires consuming their homes.

At some point last year I realized we just aren't going to deal with climate change. Human society isn't capable of the scale of changes required. My children are going to inherit a world quite unlike the one I was born in.

Collective thinking before collective action: https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity

The popular attitude to the pandemic is set by politicians and the media.

If those groups want urgent action on climate change, they will get it.

Those groups wanted lockdowns, and they got it (along with most of the $5.2trillion printed in the US alone since the pandemic began).

This not a new concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

The question is, why don't the elites want urgent action on climate change? Presumably the answer is that they're still making too much money under the status quo, or have not yet aligned themselves to exploit the transition to sustainable energy and transport.

Because it's a choice between two apocalypses. One is slow motion and over the horizon, and "no ones fault" and the other would be voluntary.

I wrote about my thinking on this last year.

https://www.riknieu.com/no-one-believes-in-climate-change-no...

I bailed out half way, but despite the disclaimer, that post does sound like climate change denial.

"Dealing with it would be just as bad as not dealing with it" appears to be the core of your claim, and I don't think thats backed up by anything I'm aware of. It is a fairly common trope of people who would be widely described as climate change deniers though.

Even more so, dealing with it say 20 years ago would have been even more straightforward.

We couldnt do it because we couldbt co-ordinate, like the prisoners dilemma, not because the two outcomes were equally bad but by working towards out own best outcome we've headed towards the worst overall outcome.

I read your blog post. I agree with most of it. But...

> resource-depleted hellhole within a century or two

I wish I could be as optimistic as you are. We're seeing extreme, unpredictable weather _right now_. This could lead to reduced food production a few years from now.

With money, you can mitigate the consequences of climate change for yourself or even avoid them altogether; you can't do that with the coronavirus.

> you can't do that with the coronavirus.

Wealth sure managed to make it easier to reduce your risk of getting covid, as well as substantially reducing the quality-of-life sacrifice from lockdowns.

Look at how many wealthy people somehow managed to achieve entry/residency/citizenship to countries where Covid was well-contained.

The wealthier you were during the quarantine, the more likely you were to be able to access services that were denied to others. Gym is closed? No problem, I have a home gym anyway. Many elite athletes brought their trainers, cooks and physical therapists into their households (IIRC Russell Wilson said he had a staff of ~11 in his family's bubble, meaning he was paying those people to isolate with his family instead of being with theirs.

At a lower level of wealth, access to WFH-able jobs, more living space (including being able to avoid living with multi-generational and potentially vulnerable family members), delivery everything, tech and tutoring for your kids' educations, and private transportation options certainly made it easier to mitigate the lifestyle sacrifices of avoiding contagion.

Don't fix it if it ain't broken. The revenue stream, that is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com