Comment by Sharlin
1 day ago
And tobacco. And leaded gasoline. And...
We really are one fucked up species. But can evolution even produce anything better? Anything that's not so prone to coordination problems?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
No, these are really fucked up people, to leap from that to "the species" and from that to "evolution" which humans had no clue about even hundreds of years ago... is just avoiding confronting that and them. It's half of the the reason for why these things happen and get worse, a sort of global bystander effect. We feel okay to in public dismiss this.
If you were one in a group of 4 people, and one of them fed poison to a child to remove a stain from their shoe, or just for a laugh, or for 2 cents, and someone got upset, would you talk about the species or evolution first thing? What habit did we normalise here?
No, we as a civilization are ultimately responsible for giving bad actors power, and indeed often glorifying those actors. There are evolutionary reasons why it is so, but that's absolutely not to say that these things just happen and a species with a very different psychology couldn't avoid the same trap.
As a society we tend to reward sociopaths with power, which leads to stuff like forever chemicals. But society providing neither checks-and-balances nor even a credible thread of punishment after the fact is also part of the issue. Even sociopaths are influenced by the threat of punishment
Perhaps the centralization of governance and the asymmetric power of government over the people is the problem.
If a village of 20 people found out one of their members had been poisoning them for years, knowingly, to attain status as the mage/technocrat/leader, I suspect their punishment would be severe.
Instead, any one person or small group of people feels powerless against a seemingly infinite bureaucracy and a justice system that would sooner punish "vigilantes" than hold powerful people to account for their malice and damage to society.
You give more agency to the modern individual than I do, I think.
Exactly. It's a pretty small number of people who are this terrible. Thinking of it in evolutionary terms creates a sense of fatalism. If you look globally since the invention of agriculture, it's very clear that a) humans are extremely flexible, and b) culture matters hugely to how societies turn out.
Culture is something we inherit, but it's something we can change. If we want things to be less fucked up for the next generation, we can do that. As many before us have.
Nah, it's the species. Corporate greed is near the bottom of the list among the accolades of human cruelty.
No previous era of cruelty has threatened the existence of life itself. Corporate greed is the most hideous, horrific, inhumane era of human culture that has ever been.
these people were simply handed money and power to not do anything about it
I blame governments for not providing a way for whistleblowers to put the companies in a bind to actually do something
the best way to stop these is to force them to do something, not have them voluntarily admit wrongdoing etc.
it's like the whole "well the other ones are doing it too!" which can only be solved with aggressive regulation.
I don't think even today this stuff is being taken seriously enough.
In the real world, two out of these four people vote to protect the poisoner because poison is a conspiracy against the freedom to feed children anything you want.
The only thing that allowed them to be this 'fucked up' is allowing the creation of corperations which can make your companies actions not directly responsible to you. If boards of directors were able to be jailed for their companies actions, we would not be in anywhere near this situation. Corperation law has a lot to answer fdor.
I’ve long suspected it’ll take us _almost_ going extinct to actually take this stuff seriously.
There are too few of us who understand asymmetric risk, and too many in power who are willing to roll the dice for the entire species for profit.
Realistically, it will have to get much, much, worse before it gets any better.
IMO this is part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
Asbestos too. And glyphosates which have devastated insect populations. Veritasium did great documentaries on both of those crises
glyphosate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxVXvFOPIyQ
asbestos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx139eTxoc
It took decades for the science to finally flow freely since both of these industries heavily targeted the scientific institutions themselves. Who knows what other pesticides and chemical companies are following the same playbook that we won't get to know about for decades.
yup, this actually changed the way I look at capitalism now. This shows how much companies hold power over government and it takes a long time for public to hold companies accountable.
One of the more depressing things to me is the "forever chemical" debacle. Even though we've banned PFAS in pizza boxes, food packaging, firefighting foam, and many consumer products, we're stuck in an endless cycle of the industry coming up with new chemicals that only differ slightly in their chemical structure and making all the same safety claims about them that they know will soon be disproven. It's no bother to them as they can continue to play this game indefinitely and advertise that they don't use those forever chemicals
There's no way to fix it until we start punishing white collar crime the way we punish blue collar crime. Bad actors are bad actors
The only species I can think of that coordinate better than humans do are ants, bees, and naked mole rats.
We're our own moral judges. Biology doesn't have an ethical opinion.
"Better", as in, capable as a civilization of avoiding doing things that are incredibly harmful according to their own morals. Capable of defeating their own Moloch, if you will.
cheater detection and self-correction is important in systems. i am not sure "fucked-up" is a meaningful way to look at species-level things.
Even looking only at different cultures, saying nothing of nature, the degree to which people are willing to cooperate or defect against the group varies widely. The level of trust varies widely.
People aren't motivated solely by the risk of being caught. Some people tell themselves that everyone else must be trying to cheat, so it's okay for them to cheat. But this type of thinking isn't a law of nature, it's just a human flaw.
The amount of cheating is not a fundamental constant. Given that people are social animals and that we tend to be stronger as a group, in fact you'd expect that prosocial behavior is good for the species. If fucked up is to mean anything, poisoning the environment with forever chemicals ought to make the fucking cut, if you'll pardon my French.
Yes, and our cheater detection is entirely broken, given that we prefer to give power to cheaters, as long as the cheater is smart enough.
yeah, sometimes cheaters winning is a net benefit or at least acceptable. although, i don't think those cases above are, heh.
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Oh, evolution certainly can. The bad ones always get killed off.
Bad's a matter of perspective, as a quick review of Wikipedia's parasite articles will reveal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
…gambling, social media…
there is reason why every civilization rise and fails.