Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

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Why should I care about tech? As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.

That’s why your comment is not particularly well-received. I’ve had the exact opposite experience as you, I’ve seen overwhelming sadness and misery and depression spawned from a tech-filled life. I hardly can count the few crazy deep into tech who seem at peace simultaneously. So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point. The only defense I ever hear is “well if people would just…” but people DON’T just. They never just. They never have just, and they never will just.

In nature, this works out just fine, because there are many natural guardrails. Don’t piss off the tiger. Guardrail: it eats you. Don’t gorge on your fish pond. Guardrail: you deplete and starve.

In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.

> Why should I care about tech?

Because we're on a news discussion site about technology, run by a technology incubator, frequented by those who work with and use technology? More substantively, you don't have to care about technology, but if you're arguing that technological society makes people miserable, that's an empirical claim.

> As someone who grew up in a city, with a family that ran a business building mainframes back in the early computer days, there is nothing to romanticize.

I agree! Human labor should not be romanticized.

> So many people leave tech for something more meaningful is almost a meme at this point.

Anecdotes are not data. Can you actually show this?

> In society, there are no guardrails because individuals can have massively outsized impacts. One man can start a construction project that depletes his pond, then deplete 40 other ponds refilling his own.

Society has guardrails: laws, property rights, regulation, liability, prices, taxes, permits, and collective institutions. You seem to be taking an example of an externality and then twisting it into an argument that these don't guardrails don't exist, when they plainly do.

And I'm not sure “deplete your food supply and starve” is a very compelling example of nature's superior guardrails. We have built those social guardrails precisely because we'd prefer to prevent the damage rather than have starvation enforce the constraint afterward.

I’m not arguing that human labor shouldn’t be romanticized. I’m arguing that computer labor shouldn’t be romanticized MORE than the agrarian variety. Of course labor should be romanticized. Every single thing we have to show as a species is the result of labor.

And us being able to create guardrails which sometimes work if you’re caught is not the same as a force of nature. There are no good or bad outcomes in nature, there are only consequences. This is absolutely not true in civilization.

We have nearly zero guardrails to prevent the damage. Did… you see Nepal? You realize this is a direct result of us either not having, or easily ignoring those guardrails?

As it turns out, starving because you chose to overeat is not going to have the same intensity as a law requiring you to please choose to throw back a fish which is too small (ignore the story about third world countries doing bomb fishing).

Do you have an actual response to the points I made, or are you going to continue appealing to emotion instead? Yes the flooding in Nepal is bad, terrible even. Yes externalities exist. Yes things could be better. That does not mean, and you have not proven, that there are "nearly zero guardrails" or that "guardrails do not exist". And in fact, you actually seem to be arguing they don't exist but are ignored at the same time? How does that follow?

Can you not connect the ideas that “nobody pays attention to this guardrail in any meaningful sense” and “there are no guardrails”?

I can spell out every point I was making just as specifically as this one if the only thing you were able to pick up was an “appeal to emotion” (note: that’s not what I’m doing, of course, I’m simply showing that the guardrails are effectively useless… how you brought up that point and yet still somehow completely missed it is beyond me), but I’m holding out hope that you’re just being hyperbolic, and it wasn’t actually out of your grasp.

Edit: and stop with the stupid misuse of phrases, or I’ll pull out equally stupid ones. You think I’m appealing to emotion, and yet you’re Gish Galloping! You have no argument then!!! (See how dumb this looks?)

Breaking down your sentences and going over them point by point is not a Gish gallop. And you're now resorting to insults instead of answering my points, so we're done here.

Y-yeah. That was my point.

This thread made clear that your conversation partner will say whatever it takes to avoid understanding the virtue in another way of living than the way they've chosen for themselves. Some people are like this. I for one really appreciated your writing so thank you for your role in this thread

I understand perfectly well what you consider virtuous about Berry's way of living. I simply don't agree that those things are virtues; in fact I consider most of them to be the opposite. Understanding another value system does not require agreeing with its values.

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