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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not get carried away with hubris. Nature wrote our genes. Nature made us the way we are.

All this nonsense you see going on is ultimately a result of cognitive biased thinking, especially confirmation bias. The fact that we differ so deeply from these biases was not our decision, it was thrust upon us by nature and it helped us survive in an environment very different from the one we found ourselves in now.

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However those biases are supposed to favour our survival and, more importantly our children's survival. That's how we got this far.

It says something when we act against that.

All it says to me is that the modern world is far more complex than our simple biases (heuristics) can deal with.

You're getting downvoted, but you have pointed to a possibly important factor. We're intelligent, but definitely have primate intelligence, and we're closest to the murderous bastards known as chimpanzees.

That said, nothing about this has been inevitable. So many accidents along the way. There are many other results that have been possible. Our social/political setting may be related with technology but it's wholly unclear how deterministic each step has been.

The path we’ve taken was definitely not inevitable, just like the path a ball takes down a long bumpy hill. Yet the broad strokes of where that ball ends up are reasonably foreseeable: at some local minimum but not necessarily a global minimum.

So what are the broad strokes of humanity that could have reasonably been foreseen? A trend towards greater societal social complexity, increased resource consumption, increased energy use, economic efficiency, and wealth concentration.

No, most people believe in climate change. In a fundamentally anti-human move, oligarchs have put a climate denier in office so he would push against doing anything about it, as it goes against their short-term interests.

My pet theory, if we indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory about the oligarchs, is that they're in fact benevolent and that the final outcome with be a net good for humanity in relation to the climate challenge.

I mean, Trump is so blatantly destroying american influence that it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. When you think about the alternative, that is, a "regular" american elite saying that climate action is important with their regular hypocrisy, pretending to be doing anything at all, but in fact going the other way, then things don't look so bad in the medium term. Sure, a bit of short term pain, but otherwise, might end up being better off.

I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of those oligarchs a few years ago and ask yourself how you'd actually solve the climate problem, given current cultures around the world. Maybe you'd come up with the "let's prop up Trump".

That being said, it's just a pet theory. I actually have doubts that such smart oligarchs exist.

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