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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

And he would've been right. Any new advancement in technology brings societal change, and it is possible to reach a point of diminishing return, where the bad sides outweigh the positives.

I wish we could, as a society, have a serious conversation about this effect without resorting to name calling ("Luddist nonsense") and straw men ("but what about penicillin?")

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Second that. I see that as a failure of society or democracy as a whole - that we are no longer able to have that broad, public conversation and act accordingly. Why should every "innovation" be shoved down our throats, if we don't want to?

I would place this blame on academia. They're the ones that are supposed to think difficult questions, and drive change. I guess today any serious discussion would just get lost in the ocean that is the Internet. Only echo chambers get reinforced.

Huh. I blame it on the influence of money. Money flows easier when hysteria (really any level of un-rationalized fear) and its peers abound. It is hard to have honest rational objective discussions these days without the influences of earning another buck being just over the cognitive horizon.

Blaming academia is misguided, and "drive change" has never been in their job description until Progressivism took hold. The problem is each one of us: we want to numb out more than we want to do something hard. The problem is also philosophical/religious: we have collectively decided that virtue is following our animal desires (what makes you happy), which is the opposite of historical virtue. I think this can be traced back to the prevailing nominalist utilitarian view: matter is just what we make of it, and since there is nothing higher than matter, the only ethic is greatest happiness. So now, as a society, we do not really have any way to articulate the problem we intuitively feel, because the problem is that our underlying philosophy does not work, but we have even forgotten (societally) the other philosophy that has historically worked, so we cannot easily get back. I think this accounts for the interest in Stocism and traditional Christianity (especially Eastern Orthodoxy), since both unequivocally say that being enslaved to your passions (animal desires) is not the good life.

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