Comment by holmesworcester
2 months ago
The trouble is, if you think in abstract terms at all you'll start seeing the patterns in the reasons many people are suffering, and the patterns in your relationship to them.
Then you'll have to ratchet up boundaries to address the relational patterns with people who are having a hard time, so that you're not a participant in their suffering.
And you'll have to start working on the patterns underneath the problems, which when you get into it starts to look more and more like the kind of megalomaniacal moonshot ("give computers arms and legs" / "fix the government now!") that the author ran out of gas on.
I think where you end up if you think about this is just recognizing that a) you probably should try to do some ambitious, high-leverage project to make the world better and b) reflecting about the world and about life in a thorough way is emotionally difficult for most people, so you also have to deal with those emotions.
The author's original somewhat manic intentions were probably right, and maybe he needed a bit more of a rest but was plowing forward out of fear that he'd lose his nerve. Now he's getting some rest and will probably figure out something big, important, and hard to work on in the next few years.
The barriers/boundaries thing I think is interesting.
I've never really been able to identify with this sort of "make money and then fix the world" stuff because I feel that everyone hugely simplifies every issue and looks only at first or maybe second order effects.
You fix malaria/give to the poor/raise the minimum wage/etc. Cool, now we have a wealthier population with more people doing more stuff to modify the environment. We accelerate biosphere collapse and global warming. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I think that if you're being truly logical about these things you could just as easily come up with a grand solution that's something like drawing a graph of social connections from you, go out a few layers, and then press the button to delete everyone else on the planet and rewild most of it. Or go back in time and don't discover oil (or was the suffering of the pre-industrial era worse? maybe it was, probably it was...!).
I don't think I'd be chosen to go to Elysium but I can't really see the logical flaw in the argument either. Why should the super rich care about the rest? Move forward a few years/decades; why should superintelligent AI care about humans? We don't care about mosquitoes.
Making a company that makes a prettier table or a faster car or whatever feels like it's directly solving a problem. Making a company that aims to "improve the world" just seems like a fool's errand to me, second law of thermo, that sort of thing.
Big waffle.
Raising the standard of living for the poorest people in the world does very little to increase the rate of climate change since these people have very little impact on the environment and consume so little in the first place. I'd argue that we also owe it to them because the poor are also least capable to handle the consequences of climate change and the other issues facing developing nations. I don't know why this needs to be said but those are real issues.
The flaw in Elysium is moral and practical. You have to accept that humans by virtue of being human deserve some consideration, and the well being of society deserves consideration. If a rich person don't believe this then they are irresponsible. Too much inequality in society makes it shittier for everybody for plenty of reasons.
Nonsense, you’re engaging in first order thinking as I stated.
China is a great counterexample of this, or just the life story of anyone who goes from rags to riches.
You may as well say that a broken down car has no emissions so let’s fix it. Once you fix it it does.