Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawkice | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless?

Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.

View on HN

Not OP, but we are a far cry from a techno utopia. We really had two opposing world views, one where technology would help us achieve a better life, another where it would contribute to us falling off a precipice. Neither won. On the plus side we have a world where global poverty is falling and more people are developing middle class life styles, we have amazing technology like gene editing, incredible computational ability, and entertainment options. However, this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster, has us in the middle of a mass extinction, and has enriched a very small number of people.

You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.

> this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster

This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).

> has enriched a very small number of people

This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.

This isn't just "gee, technology sure comes with tradeoffs." It was literally claiming the dollar to be worthless, a global class war, and for most of the continent of Africa to be uninhabitable. It was claiming all three would happen.

I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!

There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.

This seems like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. A close call would be something like, economic collapse reducing paper money to be worthless as a consequence of the global socialist revolution, but global warming only melted the icecaps and flooded major parts of the world while leaving most places just slightly warmer. Two out of three.

The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".

You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.

What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com