Hacker News Reader

Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

What good is our species having the ability of written language, if we never learn from our past mistakes.

Many memes also require written language. There are still benefits.

Investors wan't leverage. Always. When you plug one leak, they will scramble and innovate until they find another way to get it. Buying on margin, options, CDS, structured products... the list goes on.

Might be a product of the generous bankruptcy system in the US. I.e., investors are rational in their willingness to take big risks because of the asymmetric payoff associated with highly-leveraged investing. It's a great system, but not without negative unintended consequences such as this kind of moral hazard.

Written language can be used to overturn history as well as reinforce it.

In this case, the article mentions "meatier yields", and that two-word combination by itself is something I would bet on in a fight against any article-length analysis of the 2008 crisis.

We do learn from past mistakes, paraphrasing Friedman: “We won’t make the same mistake again, but we’ll find another new way to fail”

There is nothing wrong with CDOs. The mistake was treating junk loans as investment grade. You can do that regardless of how the loans are securitized.

Once we evolve to consist only written language then we will be perfect. Until then any new tools come with the luggage of all the old tools.

You will always have the haves and have-nots. You will always have tribal borders.

The haves will gain and use knowledge and technology to make their lives and those of their tribe easier and it will benefit them more than those of the have-nots.

So written language containing the body of science and technical knowledge benefits them always. The effect on the entire species is unimportant to those with comfortable, limited lives.

Other non-technical written language to create a world of mystical morality to keep the other side in check also benefits the haves.

Until the human species changes into something new where competitive behavior is not a base need/instinct, nothing will ever change.

You can't escape this.

So basically the evolutionary gift we've received, is being wasted on us.

100%. We have a powerful conscious mind that we use to rationalize our primate biases. It used to bum me out, but I've developed a more zen-like outlook. It just is. Everything just is.

This is an ideological claim, not a normative one. I will similarly claim with st least as much validity that humans can cooperate more then compete in the right context and dont need to be physically changed to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com