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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Society doesn't decide shit.

People need to stop thinking about the free market as some kind of oracle. It's not. It's a collection of feedback loops between greedy optimizers. It drives people down the local gradient of profitability, which has only a minimal relationship with long-term social utility. It can, and will, drive us all off a cliff if there's enough money to be made stepping off the edge.

And yes, I'm with you here. I just don't see it as society deciding. If asked, most people will also be baffled how it is you and me get more than a climate scientist or a nuclear engineer. They also can't directly express their individual preferences on this using their wallets, because the market isn't structured in a way to allow that.

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A more informed customer base makes more informed decisions. So over time it can be said that the market does actually choose things. Like how if more people want products sourced from ethical materials suppliers, the trend becomes more products being sourced from ethical materials suppliers.

I couldn’t care less about good software engineers making more than “climate scientists” or “nuclear engineers” because those lines are more blurred than ever. If you’re in one of those roles and you can’t code, you’ll be obsolete within a matter of a few years.

> if more people want products sourced from ethical materials suppliers, the trend becomes more products being sourced from ethical materials suppliers.

Or rather, the cheaper option is chosen: companies just lie. This is what actually happened.

> A more informed customer base makes more informed decisions.

The market has already worked around this. We've created the marketing industry. The business world has learned how to bamboozle customers at scale. We're at the stage where spending a marginal dollar on marketing has a better ROI than spending it on improving the product.

> I couldn’t care less about good software engineers making more than “climate scientists” or “nuclear engineers” because those lines are more blurred than ever. If you’re in one of those roles and you can’t code, you’ll be obsolete within a matter of a few years.

And I do care, because while I agree that coding is becoming essential for productive scientific and engineering work, it's not those people who get the good salaries. Guess what programmers are getting the most money? The ones building technology for advertising. Because of course they do. See my previous point: we've created an industry that can play customers like a fiddle, undoing the main feature of a free market that made it socially beneficial.

Kind of amazing how your third point so neatly wrapped around to the first one.

I've become tremendously cynical in the past decade regarding all the ecofriendly stuff I'm supposed to be doing. It always seems to come out that the effort I was committing to Thing X turned out to be either worthless or even worse than that.

Recycle my plastic bottles? Nope, they're just getting dumped into the Yangtze River. (I put the bottles in the trash now.)

Okay, but my sink faucet no longer drips, so that's good right? I guess, but that one container of almonds just wiped out whatever yearly water savings I achieved with the repair.

I would consider buying carbon offsets if I had any faith at all that they really truly represented a net reduction in atmospheric CO2. I don't have that faith. Way too easy to launder or fabricate.

It reminds me of the 90s, when grocery stores switched from "forest-destroying" paper bags to "ecofriendly" plastic bags. Then we all did a 180 on that. Now I'm paying for the bags--also they use roughly 3x the amount of plastic--and I still use them twice (once for the items, once as a trashcan liner), just like I did before.

How many of those things are just unnecessary red-tape and bureaucracy, intended to justify spending on what is essentially jobs programs? I too remember the "save the forests" campaigns back in middle school when alternative bags were recommended. Some politician and their office somewhere were getting an easy cushy job mandating those types of things and moving paper around to "save the forests." So I am skeptical when things are mandated and taxes collected for paper pushing, optimistic when companies are formed to earn contracts as rewards for the problems they solve.

Book recommendation that can dispel cynicism about the future: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. Few years old at this point but still relevant and worth reading.

You can google news about vegan trends in the market. Customers want more vegan products and therefore businesses are responding with more vegan products. Certainly could be marketing, and it can also be the case that there are more vegan products. This is just one example. Renewables are another clear example.

Because of reviews and Youtube and etc, companies are in an information economy where they depend on what the customers want/demand more than ever. So if those tools get leveraged more, then yes, the market responds and marketing for lying only goes so far before your brand is tarnished forever.

And I don't work in advertising - I still get paid very well as an engineer. And if someone wants to work in advertising, that's their choice and there are legitimate needs for that.

You can't be a climate scientist right now and not code. (You don't have to be good though.. urgh.)

I do think the people working on upgrading the energy grid do have more utility at this point though.

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