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Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

That's a pessimistic way of putting it.

"In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving.

My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all the media and books ever produced at your fingertips, free of charge. What you might've figured out in 30 years of your own trials and tribulations can now be learned in a couple of years reading books. Of course pride and arrogance keeps us from learning but that's a different story and will probably be weeded out by evolution much faster now than ever before thanks to free access to information.

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But isn't this exactly why you end up slowing down? You get groups trapped in local maxima of behavior.

An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on.

In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that.

It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method.

But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.

>if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that. It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low.

There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima.

Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.

> In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that.

Depends on the problem. If the problem is complex enough, say nutrition, then you see constantly changing narratives and theories and even competing ones in the present. There's no Best Solution™ way to nourish ourselves yet so people experiment and the top competing theories are being actively discussed and debated. Sure there are keto / vegan / paleo nuts out there but they're just test subjects really. Same argument can be said about software dev, there's no best language or best framework; or about ways to earn money, employment vs entrepreneurship is not a settled debate.

Can you name some problem that you feel has stagnated in the modern world?

> Can you name some problem that you feel has stagnated in the modern world?

Sure - passive cooling for homes. Architecture used to vary dramatically by climate. In the last 50 years or so new homes are generally only designed for electric cooling.

Can you back that up somehow? I Germany at least, people still build passive houses.

Neat, there's your business idea :)

Hah, it doesn't sell, because we're at a local maxima with electric AC right now.

It's so easy to literally build a square box and stick a cooler/heater in it that everyone (including me) chooses to do it.

Does that mean it's the right way for us to be handling heating/cooling for our homes? Sure seemed like it 50 years ago. Sure seems less like it today with climate change, but we've already picked, and now general cultural preferences make it hard to undo (not even mentioning sunk costs on buildings that are hard to modify)

Basically - the point they're making is that as we homogenize, we put all the eggs in one basket. And we have a long history of making decisions that seem GREAT! today, but actually have some downsides at scale (like electric AC contributing to climate change, requiring more electric AC, making climate change worse, etc)

Cooling costs 1/3 the energy of heating per degree day, but comes in for more hate because it seems decadent.

What is the cost of freon on earth’s ability to radiate heat? Even if the cooling cost is less power degree than heating, there’s still a cost, scaled by number and size of units. Do enough of us have the discipline to only use the decadent, luxurious things for the outlying cases?

The substance you're talking about is already essentially banned in the developed world.

What is being used instead, and what are its potential impacts? What happens to all the freon (and other chemicals banned in developed countries) after it is banned? Do we sell it like we did with DDT?

Three-piece suits being the iconic business clothing over most the world, even in hot climates where it's completelly innapropriate and antiergonomic.

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