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Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over

• selestify 5y ago
  But isn't the problem that these abstractions exist precisely to help coordinate real things? The economy (and by extension, to a limited degree, the stock market) directly influences a lot of real things and basic needs.
  • sdenton4 5y ago
    The way we use money to coordinate activity is very selective: Money only solves problems when those with problems have money. This means that the environment and the poor are generally not served by capitalism.
  • jwmhjwmh 5y ago
    Yes. However, using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind". That is, most calculation could be done using the inputs and outputs of millions of processes. Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      >Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts. From what I understand (not an economist, but quoting what I've heard from them), much of the boom-bust cycle can be dampened by limiting debt.
      • jwmhjwmh 5y ago
        I'm not an economist either. It just seems the business cycle has been a persistent feature of capitalist economies.
        • AussieWog93 5y ago
          Perhaps look into Australia. We have much tighter regulations than the US or UK when it comes to lending, and we've largely avoided recessions, including in 2008. COVID got us, but that did have a physical reason behind it.
    • pdonis 5y ago
      > using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind". No, it wouldn't. It's not a matter of the speed of the computing; it's a matter of the number of information channels available. The amount of information that would need to be processed to run a complex economy goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, but the number of information channels available only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. I think it was Hayek who first pointed this out more than a century ago. The proper tool to "run" a complex economy is decentralized computing, otherwise known as a free market. > Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts. The way to avoid cyclical booms and busts is for the government to stop messing with markets. The government should not be subsidizing some products and services and penalizing others. It should let the market work out what products and services are produced and consumed.
      • jwmhjwmh 5y ago
  • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    These abstractions were once configured for specific purposes (e.g. help Caesar expand his empire by incentivising newly conquered villages to feed the soldiers that will soon be conquering their neighbors), and the people who configured them died long ago, and we're just still following the old program. We need to figure out how to reconfigure them. For instance, instead of the gold standard, let's back our money on permanently sequestered carbon. And once that problem is solved, we'll reconfigure it for the next thing.
  • mc32 5y ago
    Yes abstractions here are a distraction. People will consume whether they hunt, barter, trade or use fist money.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    I think the problem is that there's lots of hidden costs or incorrect assumptions in much of the way society functions. We overestimate how rational people are, many costs get swept under the rug or ignored as "something for future people to deal with", certain costs are just hidden, we fail to account for corruption and fraud, and so forth and so on. It's not really that we use abstractions or models, it's that many or all of them are incorrect, and we proceed as if they're correct, even when we seem to know they're not. I don't think this is just limited to the environment. Sometimes I wonder if this is some defining feature of our age, rampant fraud or disingenuousness. Maybe it's always been this way, and maybe it doesn't matter.
    • nradov 5y ago
      Abstractions and models tend to get more correct over time. Sure sometimes we get off track or even go backwards, but if you look back at all of recorded human history our abstractions and models are generally a better fit to objective reality than ever before. You have an opportunity to help improve them further, if you choose to take it.
  • huetius 5y ago
    The problem has to do with the order of values which is evinced by our economic activity. Ideally, money should be ordered towards facilitating the exchange of real things, which are in turn ordered towards a good life, and so on to higher meaning beyond that, but that is not what is transpiring. We can see this not only in the huge tranches of the economy devoted to trivial or deceptive things, but also in routine decisions: be they irresponsible, greedy personal choices, or larger organizational habits which have devastated human communities and the environment for the sake of making a number in a spreadsheet go up. Further, this takes the form of a novel crisis in that the scale and speed at which the consequences keep coming are without precedent among societies with similar vices in the past.
• dbtc 5y ago
  Interesting. I frame it as a problem of radical materialism’s ignorance of intangible importances: [love, beauty, god, consciousness, ...]
• zip1234 5y ago
  Tax/price the negative externalities.
  • quadrangle 5y ago
    We have to start by acknowledging that externalities exist and tell the free-market-is-magic people to shut-up and acknowledge that the market doesn't automatically take care of everything.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  Disagree with this. According to this article, birds aren't dying off because people choose the almighty dollar, they're dying because they smash into windows or are hunted by cats. The solution isn't to examine our relationship to abstractions versus reality, it's to put a screen on the window so the bird will notice it in time.
  • cmurf 5y ago
    And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
    • lettergram 5y ago
      Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again. Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet
      • AlotOfReading 5y ago
        Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >including the cat But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.
      • arbitrary_name 5y ago
        I like birds, i like them alive. I would like your car to not go outside and catch birds.
• nobody9999 5y ago
  >Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. But birds aren't real![0] [0] https://birdsarentreal.com/ https://birdsarentreal.com/
• mkotowski 5y ago
  > "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" > YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. > "So we can believe the big ones?" > YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. (Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett) > Until human society stops serving abstractions […] Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought. I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost. > As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.
  • revolvingocelot 5y ago
    >Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of I'm appalled that such a quote could be used to support such an argument. Grandparent, and Pratchett's Death, agree that humans and human society are supposed to support humans. Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope -- and the biosphere itself that serves as backdrop, stage, and audience all in one. Whether unintentionally or otherwise, the parent is missing the point. The grandparent doesn't argue against abstraction itself, but the reification of corporations as people, the conflation of the stock market as barometer of the economy, and enablers of all this in ostensibly benevolent governments. If one chose the read the rest of the fucking book, one would see that it's all about fighting against those who would use human frailties -- like greed, and desperation, and the smallness of our own perspective -- to trick humans into destroying that which makes life worth living. Of course, it's all couched in the supernatural trappings of the Discworld, but as Prachett points out in several Discworld book intros, the Disc is a "world and mirror of worlds". On Earth, the antagonistic Auditors have names and addresses...
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways. Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of both ends forward, rather than regressing to the one-sided way.
  • Retric 5y ago
    The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy. The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
    • themodelplumber 5y ago
      There are a lot more differences than that. You are communicating a subjective model of reality, one model of many, many models.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 5y ago
        Within the context of a Model. Models that don’t capture the very large scale effects are useless and therefore not worth talking about. What’s left is models that used to capture large scale effects and all the smaller effects that where never captured by the model.
        • mypalmike 5y ago
          At any granularity, knowledge consists of models in the consciousness of the thinker.
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry. We're messing up a lot. And we can do much better. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. When we focus on something, we get it done, massively better so than at any prior point in human history.
  • titzer 5y ago
    Well, there's a lot to quibble about in this rosy portrayal of the COVID clusterfuck, particularly anti-rationality's rearing of anti-Science conspiracy theories and "hesitancy"--but I won't. > When we focus on something, we get it done Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
    • lambdadmitry 5y ago
      We are focusing on it plenty enough. The timeframes for serious climate change are measured in half-a-centuries, remember how much changed in the last decade? Solar got massively cheaper, it became possible to convince countries to reduce their carbon emissions purely through political pressure, billions get spent on energy and sustainability R&D. Hell, even nuclear is quickly losing it stigma after Europe haven't had much wind for a few weeks! We are getting there, regardless of alarmist "we have two years to fix everything or the planet is uninhabitable" nonsense.
      • titzer 5y ago
        I do remember how much changed in the last decade. A very nice decline in solar power cost. But you know what? That didn't solve any problems. Emissions kept rising at an exponential rate, meaning the problem not only kept getting worse, it got worse at a faster rate. Adding solar capacity replaced no fossil fuel capacity. We're using more fossil fuels than ever. We are still on exponential growth. So the next decades look bad. And those half-century bad predictions? They wouldn't be nearly as bad if we didn't continue exponential growth--that literally means no GDP growth, something no politician or public policy advocate will even talk about. Growth is making the problem worse, yet it is literally the only strategy that any one can think of to make life better in any way. Exponential growth of something. We've lost our collective minds, TBH. Like trying to grow a watermelon in a lightbulb. Exponential growth busts this planet's capacity, every time.
• refurb 5y ago
  Money is real, it’s how we pay for medical care, welfare, etc.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  This comment is really hard to parse. "homelessness", "pollution" and "healthy" are abstractions that try to capture in single concept a myriad of different realities, and most of us won't have similar concrete representation of what's behind them. This of course becomes an issue real fast because because solving "homelessness" for instance requires separating all these different cases in their own buckets and coming with appropriate solutions to all of them. Also money is as real as the food you buy with it, the electricity that comes if you keep paying your bills and the factories you buy with them.
• rabuse 5y ago
  Pretty much the premise of the movie Interstellar.
• tengbretson 5y ago
  I don't know if the "population of birds in north America" is a more or less abstract concept than money, but I'd bet they're similar.
  • hungryforcodes 5y ago
    Though population of birds in theory is a measurable real thing -- and money really is an abstraction. Without humans it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, birds would probably exist much better without us.
• deleted 5y ago
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• AussieWog93 5y ago
  There have been massive ecological disasters in command economies too, the most famous being the locust plagues that resulted from Mao's Four Pests Campaign. Hell, before civilisation even existed you had humans wiping out megafauna right across the world. Regardless of what economic system we have, a technologically advanced culture that values hamburgers and Doritos over biodiversity will trample on nature to get what they want. (I'm not making the cynical argument that humans don't inherently care about the environment - in many Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, environmental damage was considered as great a sin as murder - just that you can't blame capitalism for wider humanity's lack of care or respect for the environment.)
  • willob33 5y ago
    [dead]
  • moosey 5y ago
    A "command economy", or even "China", are still abstractions. Arguably, your points further prove mine.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      Really? The whole point of a command economy is to have a central planning authority that oversees production of x tons of potatoes, y tons of steel and z T-34 tanks. They explicitly ignore abstract financial metrics like GDP and stock prices. They still ruined the environment. Unless you're arguing that the mere existence of abstract concepts somehow degrades the environment, I don't see how this proves your point.
      • moosey 5y ago
        My point is, what does it serve to build tanks? If the goal is to protect "our nation", then we are serving the abstractions. If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.
• tristor 5y ago
  > it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost Unfortunately so. As far as I am aware, there are no political movements in any Western country focused entirely on reality and the consequences of reality. We have become enamored, as a society, with abstract ideas and are sacrificing reality on an altar to our delusions.