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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front.

Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely.

Everything we have is thanks to them.

Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans.

No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.

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There aren't any risks to take. Modern society is approaching a steady-state solution.

Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.

I think it is fairly shortsighted to think that modern society is approaching "steady state" when we are on the "stick" part of the hockey stick curve of progress.

There are plenty of risks to take today (with things like gene editing - which does not mean "monoculture") and there will be plenty of trajectory-changing risks to take tomorrow.

Maybe it's not risk-aversion, but an adjacent concept I'll call stifled freedom of action.

It's very hard to just do stuff nowadays. For example, building something on your land, selling stuff to other humans, marrying someone, immigrating somewhere, renewing your id, paying your taxes.

The immense burden of paperwork and the knowledge required to navigate it all, and the paralysis that comes from just being aware of the burden, is not trivial.

The individual really ought to stay in their lane and fit into the template that's expected of them by the systems they are subject to.

It legitimately wasn't like this a century ago. We were oppressed by nature (disease, material poverty), but in many real ways we had more freedom of action to just do life stuff.

Steady state solution? Christ, imagine if they had decided that's where they were at in 1800.

> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children.

There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.

I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?

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