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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

> We completely screwed up the industrial revolution.

Wait, WHAT?!

The thing that allowed millions of people to ascend from what would now be seen as abject poverty and subsistence farming?

The thing that enabled mass tool manufacture that eventually led to the Green Revolution and boosted agricultural yields enough to increase the planet's carrying capacity a few orders of magnitude?

THAT screw up?!

Say what you want about the environmental consequences and our failure to manage carbon and toxic byproducts.

But there's objectively no way you can say the Industrial Revolution didn't vault the entire world's population technologically, medically, and materially forward.

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What price do you put on a species?

We are losing 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal every 24 hours.

That’s an estimated 1,000 times the natural rate.

We fucked up real bad, and the fact that there’s 7 billion of us now and we’ve got iPhones doesn’t change that a shred.

we Will pay for this destruction, in unforeseen, invisible, and difficult to imagine ways.

We could have done better, and ignoring that blocks our path to a better way.

But if the benefit of it is enjoyed only by a few generations out of tens-thousands, then no. It'd be a failure.

If the oil lobby hadn't suppressed research and political will from doing something about climate change back in the 70s, we could be saying something different.

Our failure to do something about carbon (in the last 30 years we've comprehended it) doesn't diminish the progress made.

We wouldn't be having this conversation but for the Industrial Revolution, because none of us would be wealthy enough (in real terms) to afford the technology to do so.

Indeed, the technology itself likely wouldn't exist because the world as a whole wouldn't be wealthy enough to afford the research.

Avoiding progress out of fear for its effects is Luddite in the truest sense. And I don't say that pejoratively -- simply to note that it's tantamount to advising "Stop making progress!"

Innovate. Overcome challenges. Build and discover a better future.

You can make that argument without all the histrionics and performativity. Please give it a try.

I don't believe I can.

I'm honestly flabbergasted that I read "Burn the mechanized mills!" on Hacker News.

I'm not advocating groupthink, and there are certainly ways we could have built a better present, but the blind ungratefulness to say "Mass manufacture and electricity were mistakes" deserves some outrage.

anigbrowl is right. Please don't post in the outrage style to HN. Your comments would be more persuasive for being less flamey. This is a case of medium-is-the-message.

Also, please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. That's also a flamewar trope and a vector in the unwanted direction.

Apologies. I'd be in favor of removing the first line, and decapitalizing THAT. I feel everything else stands as content.

I'll try to limit double quotes to avoid confusion, though I was under the impression quote consensus was > demarked.

I'd certainly characterize my reaction as incredulous and shocked. I re-read the parent 3 times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding their point.

I realize we're not making progress in some areas we should be as a species, but I had no idea people had gotten this cynical.

I think you misinterpreted sgc's comment to mean that everything about the industrial revolution was bad. More likely it meant that some things, not all, were bad. Of course sgc didn't specify what things—which made that comment pretty unsubstantive. Still, that's no reason to go on a flamewar tangent.

The site guidelines try to address this like so: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Let's talk in 50 years. Odds aren't great, but there are still odds to talk about for a little while at least.

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