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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, but I think the argument is that even if they're doing it for the wrong reasons, it might still end up being a good thing.

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A core assumption of capitalism is that when individuals act in their own self-interest, their actions tend to produce outcomes that are beneficial for society as a whole. This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!

I think that's, generally speaking, not true, as evidenced by the fact that climate change is still happening almost entirely due to selfish motivations of oil companies and bribed politicians.

I think it's probably a good thing in this case.

Yet, globally, the world is moving towards renewables regardless of big-oil interests. I don't think even the most hard core activists are expecting to close everything coal, gas and oil related overnight, so we need to wait until the energy transformation is finished. It won't be led by the US, Russia and the Middle-East, that's for sure, but it will happen.

Even if that's true, we're already facing negative consequences from climate change, and it's affecting developing countries the most. The oil companies knew about the risk of climate change in the 70's, and actively suppressed it and pushed pro-petroleum narratives instead.

Certainly the selfish greedy ambitions of corrupt politicians and short-sighted corporations aren't good for the people dying and being displaced. I mean, we can play with numbers and try and argue a "greater good", sure, but it does seem a little convenient that we can act like greedy self-interests are helping everyone when there are current victims.

I think the idea behind that concept is not that it's true. The idea is we will never change human self-interest and greed. So we build systems where even with that as the primary motivation, it still has more important secondary effects that probably benefit us.

And I'm saying that that hasn't historically been the case.

There are plenty of quarries that effectively condemned land that destroyed entire ecosystems because of greedy mineral companies. Pretty much anyone using this forum is using a product that was produced by unethical and/or child labor. We're already seeing negative effects from climate change, effecting many, many people, mostly in poor countries, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better.

You could argue that these systems benefit some people; I certainly benefit from having cheap electronics, but of course you can always cherry pick good examples from pretty much anything. This is with the current system that we built.

Now sure, there might be some hypothetical system that maybe fixes these problems, but due to the use of the word "evidence" in the comment I was responding to I didn't think we were talking political theory.

> This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!

Bit of a premature celebration here, we won't know if it is for 10-30 years.

What kind of logic is that? It reminds me some people I know that vote to extreme-right parties because "well, we know that the regular parties are not gonna change anything. These new guys may do something new. Who knows, let's vote them and find out"

Well, no, I think that the claim is that having nuclear power plants is better than not having them. If they're not sucking energy off the grid (like what is happening right now), that at least will help avoid regular people like us having to pay the increased prices and indirectly subsidizing them.

And nuclear energy is clean (from a climate change perspective at least), and so if they're going to keep spending huge amounts of energy AI training anyway, it's probably better to do that in a way that isn't going to keep boiling the planet.

Also, if there is any kind of excess energy then it can be fed back into the grid, meaning that grid power can be fed from something relatively clean compared to something dirty (like coal).

I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the party thing. I'm saying that sometimes something selfish in a capitalistic system can occasionally still be a net good. I didn't think that was controversial. I'm not saying we give Zuckerberg a trophy or anything.

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