Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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