Ask HN: What are we doing wrong?
What big mistakes do you think we (as people, hackers, society writ large) are making? What corrective course do you suggest?
1. Diets of processed food, carbs, sugar, etc.
2. Alcohol
3. Dopamine jerking online content and social media
4. Porn
By mentally enslaving, I mean people are running at a hugely reduced mental clarity, which is stopping them from living life to its full potential. They are essentially living on automatic, with reduced ability to have agency and be agile about how they live
Personally I think number 1 (diet) is the easily the most underated.
Eventually society learns that they're bad and avoids them, but it usually takes a generation. We were faster to build immunity to things like clickbait and frankly we're doing decent with porn.
Diet has been incredibly resilient though. I've tried Frosted Flakes for breakfast last week and I'm surprised how damn much sugar is in there. It's literally 1/3 sugar and some people eat that every day.
My kids actually want to eat broccoli for breakfast, though. So I think the next generation is building up some immunity to junk food, but it's slower than everything else. We're seeing a lot of changes with the sugar tax though and even without that, soda companies have been dumping lots of R&D into healthier food choices.
And the cause has also been fairly well established in the literature. Eliminating the "effects" will do little in solving the problem.
And secondly, the rate of growth and change seems to be working us towards a less resilient system overall. As an anecdote, my co workers are all highly paid, but in private conversations - everyone is burned out and cynical, even when the situation doesn’t necessarily warrant the cynicism.
Maybe it’s always been this way, and I’m just now seeing past my own blind spots.
I don’t know what the solution, and if there was one, I imagine it’s be a hard problem to get people to agree to that solution.
The effects of all this is distrust, disunity, isolation, division. It’s poison to causes, countries, and relationships. Practiced liars eventually can’t even see reality at all, and can’t fix their problems because they can’t see them.
This is good context but isn’t a justification. You didn’t say it was but I wanted to emphasize that a biological reason isn’t a moral justification.
> deception is of utmost value in a competitive environment
All lying is deception, but not all deception is lying in the sense I intended. I make the distinction because camouflage, wood patterned linoleum, or mental reservation (outside oaths and other serious matters) are all forms of deception but are not lies.
> See all of Capitalism, for example
Don’t conflate capitalism with Marketing! It isn’t unfair to characterize marketing as weaponized lying. Selling my beets at the farmers market is capitalism but is not lying.
No. It is not. People have been selling their wares at markets for thousands of years. Capitalism has only been around for about 500 years.
Capitalism is a system of economics where the means of production (Capital Goods) are owned privately by the owning class (The Capitalist). It's a relationship between the owner class, and the worker class. Owning the farm and employing workers would be Capitalist. Selling wares to a market is just commerce/trading.
Says who? Our survival, as does the survival of almost all life, actually depends on Cooperation. I'd highly recommend checking out the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin. You can find it for free online (legally, its public domain) https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341 .
- Brothers Karamzov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
It's better to consume less, not demanding the latest and greatest to impress your peers, budget conservatively, so as to be unsinkable.
There is no "we" since we are all different. Everyone does something wrong, but nobody does everything wrong — yet in aggregate, "we" do everything wrong :) But everyone does something right, too, so in aggregate, we do everything right (nothing wrong) too!
As long as people keep doing that, I think "we" should be good.
Not being a luddite, just making an observation. The biggest threat to modern society, nation security,mental health,etc... you name it, is too much tech too fast with not enough social frameworks to adopt to it. The adoptin will come but all the big social pains are part of the adoption process which could be less painful at a slower pace. Wrt reliance on tech, it creates a power imbalance where adopters gain short term advantage over non-adapting people, the reverse is true as well. For example, the US military us relying on drones and ships with reduced manpower, not simply because they can but they realized getting a large number of americans fit for service or manufacturing ships, planes and tanks at WW2(or more) scale is impossible due to americans being physically unfit but also because of the wastefulness and inefficiency of the military indistrial comples. Instead of solving underlying issues, it was solved with tech. So if China for example catches up with tech against US, all they have to do is not rely purely on tech like the US and use body count to win any conventional conflict. I am just using that as one example.
Let's say I am relying on uber and a grocery delivery app. Being able to have a reliable phone and a working app (and a working not-banned account) is a dependency for my basic needs. This is not a convenience but a reliance. Lack of public transportation or grocery stores within walking distance of residential areas could be an underlying problem covered up with tech reliance and those who refuse to adopt tech are excluded from opportunities. This is an example but I literally can't enter my apartment without an app, every resident is an involuntary adaptor of some app.
I didn't want to pick more controversial examples but every major modern problem I see, I can connect it to this issue.
Sorry if this doesn't help you come up with a solution given this is HN.
Blockchain technologies.
Growing food far away from people.
Eating meat at nearly every meal.
Turning fossil fuel calories into food calories.
Paying teachers too little.
Devaluing the thoughts and feelings of those who are younger than us, or those who have had different life experiences.
Valuing good data too little.
Valuing bad data too much.
Lacking empathy for people that we disagree with.
Falling victim to gut reaction or emotion without critically thinking about why the gut reaction or emotional response exists.
People at large (and local authorities who you'd expect to seek advice from experts!) have no fucking clue about engineering. Fontus, Batterizer, uBeam, solar freakin' roadways...
I'd trust farmers, doctors or software engineers to vote on where the RnD money in their industries should go over a clique of patagonia vests calling the shots based on powerpoint decks.
The non-leading VCs are a bit more troublesome.
When I was born, HIV was a death sentence and pretty quick. Today it is something you live with, which when treated correctly can't even be detected, and a vaccine is being tested.
During my childhood it cost money for every minute you were on the phone, and we didn't have an internet connection at home. The best, newest information on many topics I had access to was a physical encyclopedia.
Today we have driven the cost of global video calls down to zero.
Between 1990 and 2015 we added a billion people and cut the number of those living in extreme poverty down by half. Of course this being a positive thing, nobody much noticed.
Ehhhhhh. This isn't really that close to truth.
These claims are based off of something called the International Poverty Line. This is the poverty line of the poorest country in Earth. In 1990 it was surviving off of $1/day. In 2015 it was survivng off of $1.90/day.
There are not many places in the world people can survive on $1.90/day. I don't care what the IPL says, you are still in extreme poverty if you can only scrounge up $2/day. Many experts argue that the real poverty line should be $5-$15 dollars a day in order to meet peoples basic survival needs. Besides, most of those gains made against poverty were made in China.
The reality is, while people have nicer things the poor are still getting poorer. While more people are getting out of the International Poverty Line, a disgusting amount of people continue to live in poverty. And the third world's continued exploitation by liberal developed countries (not at all claiming the illiberal countries are doing better, just the Liberalism is the prevailing ideology in the world) is a huge cause of the issue.
Just as an example: I live in an urban area and generally take public transportation, but for many reasons having a car would be a good idea. So I buy a car.
First-order effect: my monthly payments go up; going further faster is easier; I can get more groceries at once
Second-order effect: because payments went up, I have less money for other fun things; because I can go further, faster, I drive more often; because I can get more groceries at once, I save money by buying in bulk
Third-order effect: because I have less money for other things, I stay home more often; because I drive more often, I'm walking less and therefore burning fewer calories; by buying in bulk, I have more food on-hand at home
Fourth-order effect: because I stay home more often AND I have more food on hand AND I walk less, I gain weight
Fifth-order effect: weight gain leads to worsening self-esteem, higher risk factors for disease, needing new clothes (and Nth order of less money again!)
But most people just stop at the first one and then are shocked and have to deal with the consequences of their own actions because they didn't think things through.
Not to get political or anything, but think about what people say about these issues:
- anti-vaxx positions ("my freedom!" -> nth-order effect of "my choice kills other people")
- anti-choice positions ("ban killing babies" -> nth-order effects might be: increased poverty, increased populations in schools, fewer taxpayer dollars to go around)
- NIMBYism ("not in my back yard" -> gentrification, eventual collapse of unsustainable economy where poor are priced out)
- labor shortages (and so on)
- various forms of government (and so on)
If people were more likely to think about the Nth-order effects of their actions, I firmly believe we'd be in a better place.
So how do we teach this kind of thinking to more people?
I'm not entirely sure, but my best idea right now is to teach everyone how to play chess.
Anyway, it's something I think about quite frequently. If only my cousin could see past her first instinct and grasp the consequences of her actions, her family might be less messed up.
I do think you describe beautifully, with the car story, how people exist now in systems that offer them an overwhelming number of choices, and how these systems are large and confusing enough that people are cut off from the consequences of their choices: maybe because their choices hurt someone else, maybe because the consequence is delayed, maybe because they just don't see clearly in the blur of everything happening. Many outcomes are dissatisfyingly murky and multi-factorial even when people are paying close attention and conducting scientific research.
Thanks for your post, it made me think.
corrective course: start by removing the "flag" button
many still believe in that dream.
Its fairly specifically about how systems (whether due to racist motivations in the past or not) can exist that produce race-biased results without active racism of current participants who perpetuate them, of any race.
While specific applications of its analytical framework to concrete conditions may identify contributions of active racism, past or present, CRT as a whole is a framework that divides individual racism as an active moral failing from societal processes that produce race-biased results and perpetuate pre-existing racial disadvantage.
The people criticizing it as “blaming White people” are actually afraid of the opposite, that it liberates White people to acknowledge structural racism without that requiring them to see themselves as active racists. As the critics very much do not want racist processes to be acknowledged and addressed (sometimes, because they are conscious, active racists, but sometimes just because their identity is tied up in the status quo being seen as free of racism or some other reason), they fear other people being made more free to acknowledge racist processes.
As evidenced by the poster above quoting MLK as if MLK would be opposed to CRT. Also interestingly, the post on the front page the other day discussing that MIT lecturer who argued that everything in college should be based of merit and fairness instead of taking into account race and discrimination and minority status. Like you said, nothing about that is strictly racist, but it does result in race biased results. Namely that white and often east asian families are more likely to have their children be setup in early childhood to be on a path to ivy league (prep schools, private tutors, etc) than black, latino, and indigenous families. Just boiling it down to merit, or who "deserves" to be there completely ignores the circumstances and challenges faced by minorities and disadvantaged people to get to where they were at.