Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

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> "My personal feeling is that if humans would quit wasting their time bullshitting on the Internet all day, and we figured out a way to collectively be more productive, we could cure cancer, create artificial organs, extend life by a few healthy decades, eliminate poverty"

You just wasted time on the internet telling people not to waste time on the...internet. Let's not take from the importance of the internet and how much we accomplished in the past years just from being able to ask strangers about our problems and receive answers...among many other things.

You can't add/multiply intelligence. Even if 1,000,000 researches work on curing cancer compared to 1,000 it might still be solved around the same time. In other words, putting 1000 people bad at math together in a room doesn't mean they are going to bring any new algorithm out.

It's all a symbiotic process and things need to move in all directions just so you can tackle certain issues at the right time with the right tools.

Yes, I get that every time I make the observation. I waste a lot of time on the Internet too, much less than in the past. i'm certainly as guilty as the next person. However, I'm trying to be more self-aware about it. Thirty years ago I thought all the Internet conversation would amount to more.

I didn't offer a solution to the problem. I simply threw it out there for others to ponder. Yeah, I know i'll get a bunch of answers that start with "you can't..."

Still, collectively we waste a lot of time, which i see as untapped potential. We're going to get self-driving cars and we'll probably just get an early start on HN.

Finally, the observation that you missed as you rushed to tell me that I was wasting time too, and it can't work because... is that we need to collectively figure out a way to capture the wasted time of millions of people.

> is that we need to collectively figure out a way to capture the wasted time of millions of people.

This is the topic worth discussing. The time I spent on HN e.g. today, bitching about Uber, would not likely contribute anything to curing cancer if I were doing anything else with it. It would be great to have more ways to capture little amounts of unskilled effort from many people and channel them into something good. But besides working more to give more to charity, I'm out of ideas.

Thirty years ago I thought all the Internet conversation would amount to more.

Thirty years ago (reading Marc Stiegler's book "David's Sling" [1]), I expected that the Internet would enable us to more effectively communicate, and enable us collectively to make better and smarter decisions as a society.

And... that's not exactly what happened. We've instead made it even easier to find groups of people who will reinforce our existing beliefs, and easily exclude inconvenient truths. Sigh

[1] https://www.baen.com/david-s-sling.html

And yet I'm here reading a comment against my high rated belief that the Internet makes information much easier to get.

The Internet does make information easy to get. It is truly wonderful in that regard.

What I was expecting with the Internet is that it would lead to a widespread increase in correct beliefs and (eventually) wisdom as well.

Certainly, some individuals do use the increased information availability to great benefit. But this isn't nearly as widespread as I predicted and hoped it would be.

> You just wasted time on the internet telling people not to waste time on the...internet.

How I wish there was some way I could persuade you never to do this again...

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