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Comment by HumblyTossed | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.

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The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.

Wikipedia says invented in France and developed by the Germans and Japanese. Do you have some references for US involvement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History

"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"

The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).

(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

>(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

Haha my exact reaction when I first found out.

> the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy

Something one specific party has been fighting against for decades

Encouraging a desirable behavior is a better way to elicit more of that behavior than labeling someone as the worst no matter what. At that point, why wouldn’t they lean into the villain role?

It’s not like the current villains we have care about their reputation

> Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.

Scratching my head on that one.

I mean... is something not better than nothing? Or do you only get rewarded if it's 100% perfect? If so then by that metric nobody should be rewarded here. There's nobody in the world who has done enough, certainly none of the major economic powers.

Yes, none of the major economies get rewarded because fossil fuel usage needs to be zero now, already, to avoid catastrophic warming by the end of the century.

Do you reward a bull after wrecking a China shop because it decided to at least leave the employees in alive with near fatal wounds?

So what have you done to avoid using fossil fuel in your own life? fossil fuel, like almost all things sold, is a demand driven market. You want it to stop, stop doing things that use it.

You call it a demand-driven market like they don't lobby for the usage of coal or gas power plants and sabotage electric mobility and public transit.

Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.

Because it’s different entities. The market creates more solar power despite the actions of the government

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