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Comment by brokenmachine | Hacker News Reader

Our entire society is set up to push people right to the edge.

The modern work week is ridiculous and everything costs exactly the maximum you would possibly pay for it, or takes exactly the maximum work you would possibly do to get it done.

There's no assistance and it never ends.

I don't know how people with less education/privilege/luck do it.

I feel like I'm right on the edge and I'm relatively rich/well educated, and have no health problems.

It doesn't have to be like this. The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest. Our elected officials aren't working for the majority.

But it seems that people are too tired from work to make guillotines. Things are working exactly as planned.

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Things are working exactly as planned.

I don't think any of this was planned. I think it's an emergent phenomenon.

Perhaps I am wrong, but for me that is super obvious (that it is an emergent phenomenon).

Sadly that makes it a lot harder to solve, if it was planned we could find the people planning it and take back control, but when it is just chaos and general greed that makes this happen it is really hard to stop.

It doesn't make necessarily make it harder to solve. It potentially makes it easier to solve.

The hardest part of solving social problems is getting buy-in from the necessary parties. If it caused by guilt and intentional malice, you have little to no hope of getting buy-in from those parties.

If you can analyze it and figure out what went wrong without trying to find some scapegoat to pin the blame on, there is hope of something better arising from this.

Something better may already be quietly arising from it, just as yet unnamed and not fully understood. Good information would be helpful, sort of like having a midwife attending a birth. The baby is likely to be born anyway, but the right help will make a difference in the health of both mother and child.

Well it's abundantly clear who is benefiting from the current situation, so it's unlikely they will voluntarily "buy-in" to any change.

What is less clear is what the unwashed masses can do to stop ever-growing wealth inequality, when the institutions which are our only hope of prevention are willfully inactive, and have been for decades.

Well it's abundantly clear who is benefiting from the current situation.

That implicitly assumes that poor people are worse off than they used to be. I think it's more complicated than that, but I don't really want to invest more time and energy in this discussion today.

>That implicitly assumes that poor people are worse off than they used to be.

No it doesn't.

Poor people can be better off (debatable but could be true), while still not getting nearly their fair share of the profits from much increased productivity.

Doreen's Law: Societal complexity increases to the limits of general psychological breakdown.

Doreen's Law: "People are a product of their environment."

Except I didn't make that up. It's not original to me. So it won't be remembered as Doreen's Law.

HN had a better shot at naming a homeless phone after me and that went nowhere fast.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16728494

Stigler's law of eponomy ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

So ...you're telling me "There will be a Doreen Phone someday, but it will be known as a Sally Phone or a Jim Phone"?

;)

Sorry!

Citizens United.

Things are working exactly as planned.

It's a form of the Red Queen's Race, with strong similarities to the "P-laws": Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill available time), the Peter Principle (people rise to their level of incompetence), and Putt's Law (technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand).[1]

Organisational or societal complexity will increase so long as the marginal returns of complexity are greater than its costs. The complexity will stop at the point at which marginal cost and marginal benefit are equal. That is, in an equilibrium condition, everyone is on average at the bare limit of their capability to cope and function.

This isn't a conspiracy, it's an emergent phenomenon. You'll find this in any circumstance in which complexity provides increasing capabilities with decreasing returns to scale.

One solution might be imposing some additional non-psychological cost on complexity. Another perhaps varying the environment in a way that pushing up to the complexity frontier is not sustainable --- some psychological reserve would be necessary to address exceptional circumstances, say.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See:

Red Queen's Race: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

Parkinson's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Peter Principle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Putt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...

Also Gamesmanship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship and Systemantics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

Yeah, this is the truth right here. Capitalism isn't a system that optimizes human happiness. It optimizes production and profit, which can be correlated to human happiness, but in recent years it has become more and more detached.

Interesting point, I guess when that caveman he can use a rock as a hammer or a knife, he decided that thing is a tool that can be exploited to make himself more productive.

Fast forward several millennia and Bezos, et al, look at other humans and think "Look, things I can exploit.". (although we're all probably guilty of this to varying degrees).

So some humans are probably living happy luxurious lives, but the rest of us...

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