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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.

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Can you point to any examples where democratic populations have engaged in the kinds of sacrifice at scale needed to avert this problem?

Do you have any specific, actionable proposals to solve this problem that don’t rely on us magically solving the collective action problem?

A vague sense that “we can do it if we just try!” is no better than what you’re decrying.

There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large.

With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.

With respect, those examples are about tiny heterogeneous populations and do not involve tremendous sacrifice. The actions required to make meaningful difference for climate change are orders of magnitude larger.

And your solutions are basically “we could all change our view and start taking coordinated collective action together”, which is not actionable. I mean, it clearly hasn’t happened, and you can villainize whoever you want about that, but the problem remains. You can declare that the problem is cultural, but the problem remains. You can blame Elon or Sam or Trump, but the problem remains. People do not vote for what you want, politicians do not do what you want, and that’s not even getting into the fact that we need action that requires great sacrifice from the majority of the globe, and quickly. What are we actually going to do about it? Do you have anything tangible that people can do today that will make any difference whatsoever? Because if not, why waste my life shaking my fist at the clouds?

Your original derisive comment implied that because we’re hackers, we should be able to do something more here. What is that? How do we hack this?

EDIT since I cant reply:

Many of the “cynical” people you’re deriding here have been doing the actionable things you suggest for decades now. Hell, in the last decade my fellow Americans have elected a man who promised to undo all the climate progress we’ve been fighting for, and then cheered as he did so. They voted for this! Twice!

Can you blame us for realizing that our fellow citizens don’t actually care enough to do the stuff you’re talking about, especially in time?

I’m actually an optimist, I think the future of humanity is bright, I think we’re a remarkable species who can do amazing things. I don’t think we have demonstrated any ability whatsoever to rise to the scope of this challenge in the time required to avoid a lot of suffering in the coming decades.

You’re underestimating both the size and the heterogeneity of those cultures. Politics attains anywhere with a population that exceeds Dunbar’s number, and both of those cultures were easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They’re also just two examples out of many - most of human civilization has managed to handle this over time.

And, yes, the solution here is in fact that we change our behavior and build political alliances, starting at the local level and building up. The datacenter fights are a good place to look if you’d like a blueprint, as are the anti-Flock movements, and Minneapolis if you want to see what sharper action looks like. I don’t know what else you’re expecting with regards to “what to do” - I’ve never heard of any effective magic wand, any solution here involves getting off your ass and advocating for what you want.

And, we hack this the way we hack everything else: by actually understanding the system and how it works, not just listening to what we’re being told by the people who built the system, by identifying places of high leverage within the system, and by using those to enact change in the system. To just sit around and say “well, my Econ professor said we’re fucked, so I guess that’s that” is just fucking lazy.

You know, as a follow-up to “democratic populations making sacrifices at scale” - have you _looked_ at the US lately? Our lifestyle is atrocious - we work shitty jobs too many hours, drive everywhere, live in isolating suburbs in crappily-built and ugly houses surrounded by bland box stores hawking shitty wares that break by design, restaurants hawking garbage food by the truckload, and grocery stores that are a bare minimum box-checking exercise with crappy produce and shitty meat, and that’s before you get to the meat factory we call a healthcare system. One trip to a proper first world country ought to be enough to disabuse us of the notion that our choices are value-neutral. It seems like we’ve already collectively sacrificed a ton for the sake of enriching the same people telling us collective sacrifice is impossible.

climate change became to be discussed as an issue since the 80s. I am in my late 40s and I have been hearing about since forever, and yet so little has been done since then. Now you can understand why I, as probably many here, have zero faith in this being solved in any sensible way.

Go and get depressed... or maybe go and eat your Brazilian meat burger, drive your SUV and book your flight to Hawaii, it won't last long.

What’s always struck me as interesting about these conversations is that both you and I and many, many of the other people we talk to are willing to make significant life changes to deal with this problem, and yet we all seem convinced the blocker here is that everyone else is an asshole.

It seems to me that assholes do in fact exist, but by all measures make up a much smaller percentage of the population than we’ve been lead to believe, and so the notion that a bulk majority of people would act in the interests of others and humanity at large is perhaps not the unthinkable notion we’ve been told. It might be that the actual action here is to recognize the people telling us everyone else is an asshole are trying to pull the wool over our eyes and treat them accordingly.

I tend to attribute most problems to low intelligence and/or ignorance more than plain asshole-ness. I don't disregard the complexity of fixing climate change, and the need for global cooperation, but we have had plenty of time and too little was done, even in more peaceful times than today.

I think that the problem won't be solved by us, it will balance itself out. A bigger chunk of the planet will become more hostile, human population will shrink, we will live at much lower scales, consume less and pollute less, for thousands of years to come.

I hope I will be proven wrong.

I think the problem is not recognizing the assholes as a separate problem from the ignorance. Ignorant people hear “giant impending calamity that will harm you and your neighbors” and think, “oh, we should do something about that!” They’re currently not doing so because a cabal of assholes has spent half a century muddying the public waters.

And, regarding “living at lower scales and polluting less” - consider how many things in your life are sold to you as disposable items and how many don’t need to be, and how many things can be produced in a substantially more sustainable fashion without negatively impacting their utility or quality. The average person can live an extremely rich, fulfilling, and comfortable life on a low carbon budget.

> low intelligence

You have a lot of personal problems to fix before you have to worry about climate disaster.

I mean, I damn sure hope we can do both in parallel, because if we’re gonna wait for everyone to reach enlightenment, we’re sure not gonna make it in time.

That's fine. We're literally all in this together.

It would help to abandon antiquated ideas of specific superiority, not to mention specified or genetic superiority.

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