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So the human nature is to kill ourselves or otherwise let ourselves die out? Sorry dude, I don't want to accept that - I don't even believe it.

• satvikpendem 20d ago
  You don't have to accept it but seems like that's what is happening. Humans just don't seem to have the capacity for long term collective action against individual interests. Ultimately that may be what the Great Filter for us ends up being, maybe it'd have been different were we a hive mind.
  • Timon3 20d ago
    Or: humans do have that capacity, but our system is explicitly set up to give the most power to the greediest among us, and these greedy people in power don't have that capacity.
    • MachineMan 20d ago
      Which means those greedy people don’t have power, but the illusion of power, and the positions at the top are gatekept by intermediaries that serve the one who actually holds the power.
      • Timon3 20d ago
        I'm not sure how you arrive at "Which means those greedy people don’t have power". What is the "which" referring to?
    • bulatb 20d ago
      On no other issue would this type of wishful thinking be accepted. If I pour some water in a bucket and come back to find it's all leaked out, and do this every day for all of human history and always get the same result, I don't conclude the water wouldn't leak if it just tried a little harder. There's a hole in the bucket.
      • Timon3 20d ago
        It's ridiculous to imply that throughout human history, there has never been any long term collective action against individual interests. There are so many examples of such collective actions (especially on the local level), but even globally there are obvious cases like the ozone issue.
        • bulatb 20d ago
          Of course, and I'm not saying that. Coordinated action is so stupidly effective that it barely even matters what you do, and long as you all do it together. That doesn't mean it's possible for every problem. There's always a coordination cost. The larger your per-person cost times the number of people you need, the more unlikely the coordinated action is to happen. Spontaneous coordination is an oxymoron and improbable by definition. It's a situation where the system doesn't do what's energetically favored and instead does something else that isn't. Ascribing agency to systems is a human bias. Ascribing it to groups of agents is both human nature and the fallacy of composition. Blaming individuals instead of looking at the system and the context is both human nature and the fundamental attribution error. This is one of many places where the bucket leaks. Currently some groups with low coordination costs (and so high leverage) are coordinating to increase coordination costs for the groups that oppose them, using tactics that are independently high-leverage, multiplying their effect so much that they can make the opposition's costs effectively unbounded. Human nature makes the opposition wilfully, aggressively deny this and insist their costs are low and people are just bad and lazy. (Somehow, everybody being bad and lazy all at once does not reflect on human nature.) The argument about coordination costs is more or less uncontroversial when projected into any other subject. It's only controversial here because of human nature. It's another leak. Your opposition's agency is concentrated and yours is dilute. Human nature tilts the playing field, diluting yours and concentrating theirs. Accept this and adjust your strategy, or lose.
          • Timon3 20d ago
            Your initial comment does literally say that collective action against individual interests has never happened. You might not have meant that, but that is the explicit implication of your bucket example "always get[ting] the same result". But it seems you actually agree with my initial statement? Or what are you arguing against? Because in my mind, altering our social and political systems is the only way to adjust our strategy.
    • satvikpendem 20d ago
      That will happen in any system as hierarchy is in human nature, throughout history.
      • Timon3 20d ago
        Even if we assume hierarchy to be part of human nature, that doesn't imply that every system must automatically assign the most power to the greediest humans.
        • satvikpendem 20d ago
          That's what ends up happening in practice though, it's not any different throughout time so a moot point.
          • Timon3 19d ago
            Could you explain how this holds for monarchies? The succession of power was mostly based on blood relations and frequently brought along major changes to existing power dynamics. Meanwhile the majority of the population was barred from gaining any real economical or political power, aside from very few cases. As far as I can see, greed isn't automatically the biggest determining factor in such systems. It can be, but I'd need to read convincing studies by historians to believe you on this. (of course I'm not advocating for monarchy)
            • satvikpendem 19d ago
              The monarch who's greediest gets to keep the power, otherwise they'd be overthrown or lessened by their nobles. See the shogun taking power away from the emperor; King John signed Magna Carta ceding more power to his nobles under threat of force; various executions of monarchs over civilizational history. That is to say, it's not always a monarch versus their general, oftentimes peasant, populace, it's rich and powerful people against other rich and powerful people.
              • 19d ago
  • cryptopian 20d ago
    Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations. We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.
    • satvikpendem 20d ago
      That was pre social media and the rise of nation state level actors pushing propaganda at scale. The same thing today would be impossible as we already see with climate change suppression efforts.
    • apothegm 19d ago
      Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.