On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/crisis/crisis.pdf

by barishnamazov • 6 months ago

169 159 6 months ago

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about.

But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view

npunt2• 6 months ago

Part of the role of college education is to expose students to the broader world and help them become informed members of society, raising unanswered/unanswerable questions, getting young people to think and grow and find their place to contribute in the great experiment of civilization. Cramming for exams is def part of the college experience but so is/should be these listen to the wisdom of your elders kinds of talks, even if some are kooky or you don't agree w aspects of them.

Discourse around college education has shifted a lot in the last 20 years toward a kind of optimization for job readiness, which itself is both a reflection of economic conditions and a misunderstanding of what elements are necessary for civilization to persist and thrive. College is supposed to be full of messy ideas among a menu of disciplines to challenge us and help us find our passions, and it's supposed to prepare us to become members of a society where all of these ideas and disciplines co-exist. In other words, college is under-optimized for the individual because its purpose is to optimize for society as a whole.

The kind of bigger picture discussion that this lecture is doing is especially important in engineering disciplines since they don't focus much on humanities and the stuff they get isn't tailored to their approach and mindset. We might live in a different world if a little more 'why' had been introduced into the 'what' and 'how' of eng education.

tomaytotomato3• 6 months ago

I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow".

Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too.

My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.

Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.

So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem.

The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.

9dev• 6 months ago

The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.

Until it isn't. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have put a very permanent end to it all, hadn't cooler minds prevailed, but that was a binary moment. There's absolutely no guarantee the coin won't flip to tails the next toss.

cheschire• 6 months ago

It must be quite depressing to live life always wondering what could have been.

tomaytotomato3• 6 months ago

The Cuban missile crises I would say was a lot less precarious than Able Archer or the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm alert - which was averted, by, ahem - an engineer!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

jimmcslim• 6 months ago

I think if someone came up with a liquid solution that could be easily carried and sprayed on dog poo, such that it harmlessly (to either the pavement or grass/soil it was deposited upon) dissolved in the space of a few minutes leaving nary a trace… that person would become very very rich.

xandrius• 6 months ago

Dog poo is detrimental to the environment and us, so that would only make things worse actually.

ramraj073• 6 months ago

You want a spray that converts dog poo into dog diarrhea, and you think thats better?

seu2• 6 months ago

then I switch back to objectively And that's one of the issues: there's no "objective" way to look at reality. What to you looks objective, to me seems optimistic, in the way that the author denounces as not helping.

czechonetwo• 6 months ago

My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.

The people that put up the “no pee or poo” signs in the yard have dead bushes from dog urine.

Dogs pee and poo, dogs are good companions, you shouldn’t get rid of dogs or their people, there will always be dogs, resistance to pee and poo are futile.

hyperman1• 6 months ago

In my country, there are little parks where dogs do their business. If you walk with a dog in public places, you are expected to have means for cleanup with you. If your dog soils the road, you're expected to pick it up in a tiny plastic bags and throw it in a garbage can. Violating either rule carries a fine. There is markedly less dog poo than there used to on the roads.

Which demonstrates grandparent's point. There are solutions to the problem. Nobody got rid of the dog, and dogs still pee and poo. There just are technical and legal means to keep the problem managed, even if not perfect.

1970-01-014• 6 months ago

wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem

I'll say it. That's a bad wife.

jvanderbot2• 6 months ago

You, sir, need an education in some stereotypes.

More seriously, I think GP was commenting on the stereotypical response that when a "wife" brings up a "problem" they often want "emotional support" rather than "discussion of solutions".

Not that wife literally gets mad when he solves a problem, unless his problem solving is yet another "engineer system solution" (vs manual labor) which I know from experience, try the patience of everyone involved in family life :D

abraxas• 6 months ago

The apocalypse is delayed, permanently

That is your survivorship bias. There are societies that collapsed never to rebuild or became mere shadows of themselves. I'm not just talking complete collapses like the Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. In very recent past we witnessed the cultural collapse of Japan after their bubbles of the 1980s burst and derailed their economy. But the most spectacular collapse has been that of the Soviet Union. The moral and cultural sickness of that society is now on full display. It's a potemkin village of a society. On surface things look like they still hang together - they still have electicity, internet and even their iCrap. But the will to live, the idea that there is a better tomorrow is all gone from that society. It's a nation of ghosts who don't live but merely exist in a post collapse stupor. Things still function just enough to not spark a revolution but almost nobody finds it fulfilling to live.

senordevnyc3• 6 months ago

I would argue you're just not zooming out far enough. Those things were definitely a society-wide collapse, and horrible for the people who lived through them, but humanity as a whole has just continued to grow, develop, and thrive, at least from my perspective.

Let me put it this way: is there a time anywhere in the past 300,000 years where you'd prefer to jump back to if you were going to be born as a random person anywhere on earth?

In spite of everything we face today, I struggle to think I'd want to be born anytime in the past.

gopher_space• 6 months ago

There are societies that collapsed never to rebuild or became mere shadows of themselves.

Yeah but the people were still there. Collapse of a society is a change in people's point of view, not always (or just) fiery death for everyone. Armageddon is a change in social order.

To bring this closer to home; the dot-com bust wasn't really noticed by cash positive startups with clients in the real world. One person's collapse was another's Herman Miller and Ducati Monster sale.

kurige• 6 months ago

You're talking about the "cultural collapse" of both Japan and Russia as if it was common knowledge. What exactly do you mean by this? Is this your personal opinion, or a reference to some quantifiable metric?

Japan is currently one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world. First because of the strength of the dollar vs the yen, but also because of their culture.

rekabis• 6 months ago

My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.

There is also a strong gender imbalance there, in that men have been evolutionarily hardwired as problem-solvers.

This is evidenced by the near-ubiquity of women who have been enraged by their male partners always trying to solve the problems that they bring up, when “solving” wasn’t even in the same universe of why they raised the issue.

It takes an immense amount of effort for most any man to just sit there and listen to a problem brought up by someone they care about, and to not offer up any solutions to that problem. Mainly because the only reason why any man would proactively confide in others with a problem is when they are actively soliciting for - or, at least being open to - advice on how to solve it. We simply cannot imagine why any proactive b*tching about a problem isn’t done explicitly for the purpose of finding a solution.

voxleone• 6 months ago

Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment.

The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.

lazide3• 6 months ago

The issue is how much of the helping is a trap.

Helping someone who refuses to deal with the underlying behaviors causing the real problem is just wasting energy better spent on other things.

Taken to an extreme, it’s being a martyr.

_heimdall11• 6 months ago

What you're describing perfectly describes our modern medical system. We define disease only by symptoms and as symptoms arise we paper over them with some combination of pills and surgery. There's never time made to understand the underlying cause, only how to patch up symptoms and send the patient home.

jijijijij2• 6 months ago

I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy.

The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better.

Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.

senordevnyc3• 6 months ago

I think you're onto something here, but I do wonder if self-efficacy is actually all that modifiable by individuals. I know some folks who struggle with nihilism and depression. I don't really identify with that, even though when we discuss the issues they're ostensibly depressed about, we share similar views. I wonder if I just got lucky with a brain that leans towards optimism and action, even when it doesn't seem like it'll make much difference in the grand scheme of things, and they were unlucky and were born with an absence of that self-efficacy.

grunder_advice5• 6 months ago

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.

You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.

I'm not immune from this, and neither are you. I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help. It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.

GardenLetter27• 6 months ago

IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.

Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc.

And this all creates a huge pressure for ordinary people, just housing alone has a huge impact now - stunting the formation of families, and effectively taxing productive people to fund those who were lucky enough to buy the assets in the past.

watwut2• 6 months ago

That does not explain radicalization and anti-democratic turn of billionaires.

Ordinary people who are turning fascists are not turning fascists because of economic anxiety. They reject party that make economy better.

grunder_advice5• 6 months ago

Propaganda always builds on real greviences that the electorate has.

It's good that you bring up housing. There are, to my knowledge no political parties that have made housing their top agenda item. They only use housing as a talking point to serve their message. For example the extreme right will just say, immigrants are occupying all the housing supply. The extreme left will say it's just capitalism that is to blame.

lljk_kennedy• 6 months ago

Failure of the markets, and capitalism in general. Surely if the markets worked properly there would be ample housing due to demand?

AlecSchueler2• 6 months ago

Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure.

The reason we need non stop housing construction is because the underlying issue is capitalism's demand for infinite growth.

cycomanic• 6 months ago

This is one thing that I don't understand, take for example Germany, the population barely grew over the last 20 years [1], at the same time there has been a building boom that building costs have risen dramatically (more than doubled between 2010 and 2024). Compare that to the 60s and 70s where population was rising much faster in combination with the rebuilding effort. So is the growth of housing stock lower than the population growth? If yes how come that this was not the case when population growth was significantly faster (even 30 years ago). I don't recall there being more building going on when I was young than now, in fact if anything my impression is it's the other way around.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/germany-popul...

antman• 6 months ago

I will agree but rephrase, they were not incapable limiting supply of housing or chinese imports or international information channels is the model. Artificial barriers, ethical redefinitions, rag pulling, tollboothing have been the way to divide and conquer to channel the decaying international and domestic market share to political affiliates. Most political , maga, lgbt, policing, race etc issues are highlighted and disproportionately promoted to noise out discourse about money. If money and safety is considered as a key factor of historical actions and current events, then countries grievances are eastbti explain. When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”, “they are barbarian subhumans” I know I am being manipulated.

atmavatar• 6 months ago

IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.

I can't speak for other countries, but in the US, a big reason the real problems aren't being addressed is because of propaganda.

To my mind, the biggest problem is ultimately wealth/power consolidation in the hands of a shrinking group, resulting from massive consolidation of markets, repeatedly eliminating taxes on the most wealthy, and legalized bribery finally cemented in the Citizens United ruling.

As a regular worker, you have limited job mobility because there are fewer businesses within any market you may specialize in, those remaining players in the market often act as cartels, and emboldened shareholders demand layoffs on the regular. It feels like you're drowning in costs because housing has long outpaced inflation while your typical yearly raise rarely meets or exceeds it.

You can turn to your representatives for some relief, but voting Republican is guaranteed to make the problem worse (and they aren't shy about telling you they'll screw you over for the benefit of the wealthy), while voting Democrat doesn't actually make things better because they're controlled by the same special interests and merely present the illusion of an alternative.

The consolidated media, owned almost entirely by wealthy individuals with explicit mandates to support right-wing messages (e.g., Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Sinclair Broadcasting group, and now Paramount Skydance) and constantly tell you that all your problems are really the fault of immigrants and other minorities - hence how we ended up with ICE-occupied cities, while simultaneously only making the problem worse with tariffs, which both increased prices and led to a slump in job creation.

zavec• 6 months ago

IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. There can be real problems, and propaganda can magnify those and lead people to decisions that are for the benefit of the propagandist rather than things that will actually solve the problem.

lazide3• 6 months ago

It’s always been the case (people getting hi jacked with propaganda campaigns!)

The difference now is how targeted, specific, and external said campaigns can be - for cheap.

Previously, if you started to send the anti-every-other-group propaganda to each individual, you’d be clearly identifiable, it would be more visible (flyers, leaflets, etc.) and consequences could be aimed in your direction.

What is going on now appears to be more like most people have ‘your own little narcissist’ in their pocket, poking their buttons in a way designed to drive them and everyone else crazy while deflecting the blame on everyone else.

Also, as the peer comment noted - all of this distracts from people’s actual real needs being met, which makes them easier to manipulate. It’s a classic strategy for any Narcissist.

grunder_advice5• 6 months ago

Thanks for making this point. I 100% agree. I think previously the way politics worked, there was an element of people keeping each other in check. Now everyone can become as radicalized as their individual limits allow them to become because they live in a personally crafted narrative.

goatlover• 6 months ago

Who is responsible for these sustained propaganda campaigns? Some of it is foreign interference looking to destabilize, but a lot of it is sponsored by wealthy individuals whose interests are a lot different than the average person, and whose opinions are sheltered from the realities of ordinary life.

arethuza2• 6 months ago

"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

Warren Buffet

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...

Spooky233• 6 months ago

The core are reactionary people who control resource extraction businesses. The Koch’s, Waltons, etc.

Now there are many players. The useful idiots have enriched themselves enough that they are a force unto themselves,

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

Even if everybody agreed on the basic facts (which is only possible if they're all drinking from the same well, eg impossible if the press is free) there would still be huge disagreement on what political course of action to take in response to those agreed upon facts, because different people have different values.

Take your global warming example, and suppose we have a magic wand to make everybody agree that it's happening, that humans were causing it, that its happening fast enough to cause massive extinctions, and that action now might still prevent this. With all of these given as universally held beliefs, it should be easy to resolve right? Well no, because in this scenario the magic wand aligned just about everything except values. Does somebody really care about the long term ecological impact of the thing more than they care about how environment austerity would impact them and their family personally? Some will, some won't, so the political debate remains standing. In fact, many of those selfish people will probably decide to stubbornly insist on a narrative that global warming isn't real, even though they know it is (thanks to the magic wand), so you'll be left wondering if your wand even worked at all.

rahimnathwani2• 6 months ago

Apart from facts and values, people differ in their ability to predict the outcome of policy choices.

grunder_advice5• 6 months ago

I don't discount that people have different values and interests. I said that propaganda compounds on those divisions. I think aligning values is also something that is actionable, but that's another topic altogether. My general feeling is that our democracies would be much healthier without embellished fake new narratives about what is happening around us, irrespective of how different our values might be.

For example, let's take global warming as an example. The embellished fake news narrative is that any action at all to reduce our carbon footprint will bring about complete economic collapse, and that global warming is fake news anyway and extreme weather has a completely intangible effect on the life of people living today.

Both of those are false embellished fake news narratives that build upon real concerns. It's true that we should keep the economic health of the nation in frame when we discuss measures. It's true that we might to some extent insure ourselves against natural distastes. But the fake news narrative is the embellishment of these concerns.

fc417fc8025• 6 months ago

In fact, many of those selfish people

Is it selfish to take the attitude that humanity will deal with the consequences of its actions as they arise? That rather than expending vast amounts of capital reorganizing and regulating society to prevent disturbances before they happen we can instead accept the disturbances and deal with the consequences as necessary?

I don't personally think very highly of such a plan but neither do I think that it is reasonable to apply a blanket label of "selfish" to anyone who speaks in favor of it.

jonstewart• 6 months ago

I dunno monied interests leveraging newfound scale of propaganda through internet monopolies might also bear some of the blame.

rolandog• 6 months ago

You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. [...]

Personally, I don't think it's that hard of an ask. The problem was allowing the platforming of disinformation sponsored by adversary nation states that led to the mental pollution and radicalization of so many individuals.

Also, not protecting the neutral institutions and allowing that distrust be sown was a big mistake.

Finally, not taking the reports of infiltration of police and security agencies by extreme right organizations seriously has been proving to be a nation-ending level of an error.

XorNot• 6 months ago

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.

No America is pretty uniquely having one, but because of American exceptionalism instead it can never just be an American problem it simply must be a global one.

_heimdall11• 6 months ago

In my opinion these types of problems always boil down to fear. When a person or people are afraid they act erratically. At a large scale it often leads to the wrong type of leader stepping up to use that fear for their own gain, in many cases they pull the majority together by pointing at a smaller group and claiming they're the cause of all the problems.

The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled. People need to know what core fundamentals matter to them and they need to stick to those guns consistently.

Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely. Most people hold strong views on certain topics or policies but they aren't driven by principles, that becomes clear when their strong opinions contradict themselves at a pretty fundamental level.

There are plenty of symptoms of the problem and I'm oversimplifying here, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing it would be to restore principles back in the average person. I honestly don't care what their principles are, I don't think that's the point, we simply can't move in a good direction without people knowing what matters to them.

microtonal2• 6 months ago

The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled.

...and educated.

Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely.

We replaced it by egoism. Through decades of neoliberalism we are taught to only care about ourselves, not our communities. Making money and buying things became our main philosophy. It does not matter if you are actually well-off, everyone is in a race with everyone else.

As a result, we don't stand up against injustice as long as it does not affect us much. And the egoism makes everything seem like a zero-sum game, if an immigrant gets a house paid by taxes, then I must be losing something.

This is also what permeates current US policy - you can only win if someone else loses. In this mindset it is not possible to have cooperation that is mutually beneficial.

I hope we can heal as mankind and take care of each other again.

AnimalMuppet5• 6 months ago

You stopped too soon in your analysis. Why is there so much fear? Why is there more than, say, the 1980s? The 1970s? (Or was there this much fear then, too, and we just don't remember it that way?)

Is it basically economic? We had this amazing economic ride from 1945 through the early 1970s, and that gave a view of what life could be like that permeated society and gave hope, and the hope continued long past the growth. Now people are realizing that the hope is not likely to happen to them. Is the fear caused by realizing that the hope is in danger? (That hope is in danger in another way, too. People are realizing that, even if they get better economic circumstances, past a certain point prosperity is still kind of empty.)

Or is the fear manufactured? Is it part of the propaganda? Are we being made to feel afraid, so that we can have a crisis of democracy? So that more non-democratic leaders can take over?

Or is it something else?

rsp19842• 6 months ago

The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.

In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.

In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.

I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.

Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.

jhbadger2• 6 months ago

I'm not sure "keeping out outsiders" is a bug. The US is experiencing what it is like to be governed by an outsider with no previous political experience and who thinks things like "laws" don't apply to him, and who thinks experts can't be trusted and puts unqualified people in charge of the military, science and health. Politicians need to develop -- they should start with a local position, and "graduate" to a national-level position before they even attempt to rule a nation.

pousada2• 6 months ago

IMO the 5% rule is pretty good.

Otherwise we would have loonies like the Grey Panthers (old people party), the “Spiritual Party”, or the extreme right-wing “Republicans” (AFD is moderate compared to those) being able to vote on laws etc.

Of course that also cuts out some parties that I have supported in the past, but the system allows a lot of parties to participate that aren’t _that_ populist (e.g. the Greens, the Left, the Pirates (I think they managed to get a seat or two in the past))

Of course it’s not perfect, but I still think it’s one of the best flawed systems we came up with so far. We should keep iterating on it but very slowly and carefully.

racktash• 6 months ago

I think you've described the problem (or one of them) very well.

We've seen how misinformation -- including ideas that were once fringe, believed only by a minority of cranks -- spreads and becomes acceptable, becomes a "legitimate alternative opinion".

We've seen, too, how hostile states, populists within, spread falsehoods to sew havoc and division.

My only hope, really, is that I think some of the younger generation are slightly more alert than some Gen X and millennials (my own generation) as to the dangers of misinformation online.

I wish I knew the solution too. Like you, I feel quite helpless even in terms of what to WANT. Can the Twitters of the world be regulated? If so, are we as a society able to agree on how it should be regulated, or are we too divided to agree on anything?

It's a mess. I don't know how we get out of it.

raincole• 6 months ago

You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask.

But it's more or less the premise of democracy.

A professor in our school jokingly said that the key of functional democracy is to distance average voters from decision making processes. Now I am not so sure whether he was joking at all.

rjdj377dhabsn• 6 months ago

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.

Genuine question: what exactly is a "crisis of democracy"?

I see this term thrown around all the time now, but all I can conclude is it's just part of the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates mainstream and social media.

hackable_sand• 6 months ago

Then why are you propagating class divide in your very comment? Like what the actual fuck?

SCdF3• 6 months ago

and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change

In case you didn't mean this, do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence? eg the propaganda is the thing that is asking them to decide on covid or climate change.

I don't think anyone who is genuine expects the public to have expertise in these topics. The propaganda seems centred around a constant war against intellectualism and expertise, such that people think they should have an opinion on things they are woefully unqualified to have opinions on, and politicians just align themselves to what they think will get votes.

xtiansimon• 6 months ago

“…do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence?”

?? The op is making “propaganda” by some assertions in their comment?

redkoan• 6 months ago

Sometimes it seems to me that the general population should forsake the illusion of privacy on the web, and that mass interactions (comment sections, social media etc.) should embrace and enforce verified identities online more to curb the amount of influence being exerted on the public opinion.

To much poison in the well without any (social) accountability

kylecazar• 6 months ago

Populism tends to emerge from real grievances. Economic hardship, job insecurity, rapid social change. We're definitely seeing it.

Simultaneously, propaganda is getting worse. If you read the NY Post/Facebook and watch Fox, you aren't just getting a different opinion from someone watching CNN and reading the NYT. You're getting different facts. I encourage people to do a comparison. Its wild.

starryex• 6 months ago

I think one think we can do as engineers is refuse to build these propaganda machines. All the tools used to infect people with the propaganda are built by us. Refuse to work for the biggest offenders - Google, Meta, Twitter, etc. Engineers lust after these jobs and then complain about the fall of democracy. This is the biggest thing we can do. Refuse to build the tools of misinformation.

albertdessaint• 6 months ago

In time of despair, I like to remember what Albert Camus said about being a rebel What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.

shswkna• 6 months ago

Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion. On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action.

But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.

tomaytotomato3• 6 months ago

Indeed, it makes you wonder how prevalent this psychological malaise is in the world of teaching and academia.

I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.

Self reflection yes, abstract and critical thinking yes, expressing feelings yes.

No - "sorry the world is burning, I think you should be sad about this and maybe reconsider being an Engineer".

guitarlimeo• 6 months ago

I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.

Except that wasn't the point? The point was to critically evaluate what value your work brings to the world and if it is positive. It emphasizes that having ethics as an engineer is maybe a better thing than being a apolitical robot who is only motivated by money.

If there was something similar to the Hippocratic Oath but for engineers, I would vouch for it.

Fricken• 6 months ago

Woe is you

password54321• 6 months ago

I was reading an interview with Peter Thiel and he put it pretty well even if you don't like Trump:

The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park.
...we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket?

I have been nihilistic in the past but took action where I could in life and accepted the reality that there are a lot of problems but you have to look at the places where you can have agency in your own life and focus on that. Thinking more like this improved my life a lot but it can still be easy to engage in doomerism online as it becomes its own form of entertainment.

kleiba• 6 months ago

We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse.

Could I have that in a smaller size, please?

dash22• 6 months ago

I predict that in 25 years (or 50 or 100):

- human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced

- people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse

Let's see.

fedeb95• 6 months ago

if not in 25, in 26.

qarl• 6 months ago

I think most Americans agree with you. And that itself will answer where we go from here.

Let's see indeed. I'll reach out to you again each year on this date and we'll see how your prediction is holding up.

_heimdall11• 6 months ago

Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources. Look up graphs of countries' GDP and oil consumption if you're ever curious.

If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.

senordevnyc3• 6 months ago

If you're focused on oil consumption, is the issue "consumption of natural resources", or is the issue "energy"?

pcthrowaway3• 6 months ago

Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources

I think the more relevant factor is control of natural resources

ramraj073• 6 months ago

Part of humanity will be sure. But what about the rest?

Climate change will not kill humanity off, but its likely to cause suffering we haven’t seen since WWII (or worse).

Unfortunately I've seen a glimpse of how the bottom 50% of people (not in a developed country but globally) get by today. If one doesnt care for their suffering and their lives, its easy to confirm that the society on average (not on median) will be more prosperous. But that will more likely manifest through a few hundred trillionaires living in space and a few ten thousand billionaires who serve them with their services.

The bottom billions will likely just starve, move around desperately due to war, famine, fire and flood, turned away at closed borders, and who knows what new type of cruelty that will bubble up in the future. What do we tell them?

tim333• 6 months ago

If you look how the lower 50% globally have done over the last 50 years they are way better off materially on the whole. Asia has gone from typically shacks and bicycles to aircon and suvs.

dash22• 6 months ago

I don't know of any serious climate scientist who believes that climate change will cause billions of deaths. Can you point to one?

As another comment pointed out, if you care for the bottom 50%, you should be extremely happy about progress over the past 50 (or 100 or 200) years.

SCdF3• 6 months ago

How does the climate crisis fold into that, or do you not think that's a problem, or do you think it's a problem with no ramifications?

seu2• 6 months ago

I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech. I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it. These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.

barishnamazov• 6 months ago

I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.

npunt2• 6 months ago

Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.

_heimdall11• 6 months ago

When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources.

You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 months ago

After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet.

Pretty much all economic activity is detrimental to the planet. Your spending would have to be extremely low for you not to be part of the problem.

asdff3• 6 months ago

You can however reduce your impacts substantially relative to peers with trivial behavior changes. Switch to biking instead of driving for just half your trips and now you’ve essentially doubled your fuel efficiency without any technological advancement necessary.

pcthrowaway3• 6 months ago

This is true, but the tech world is very interconnected and broadly supports/enables human rights abuses and war crimes to agree that most industries are not.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft develop tech used in the genocide of Palestinians, this is basically an IBM and Nazi Germany situation. And many more directly support genocide and human rights abuses as well, while many others are happy to pay those companies millions of dollars for their services.

pcthrowaway3• 6 months ago

Are you me?

but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech

A wake-up call for me was when I requested fair trade coffee for the office due to potential human/child slavery issues with coffee, even sourced the roast from our supplier that was fair trade (which wasn't more expensive), then after getting one order of it, since one of the execs preferred the other coffee we stopped getting it.

These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.

How do you find work that aligns with your values?

roenxi• 6 months ago

I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad.

If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself.

And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.

msuniverse2026• 6 months ago

Sorry but you can't critique the problem using the same mode of consciousness that creates it.

Computer science and university in general trains consciousness to see reality as decomposable into discrete, manipulable units. It's the systematic cultivation of a particular relationship to existence. Students graduate with powerful analytical tools and withered organs for perceiving meaning and life.

soufron• 6 months ago

"We stand today at the brink of civilizational and envi- ronmental collapse."

No we don't.

End of me reading this paper.

huge_rank_rat• 6 months ago

yeah but meta pays me an OBSCENE AMOUNT of money to literally farm the minds of the vulnerable, so I la-la-la can't hearrrr youuuuu

subpixel• 6 months ago

When reading about the multiple civil wars in the modern history of my wife’s native country I was really stumped by the formation of liberal and conservative “camps”. Basically the country was halved by people who detested and feared the other half - despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented.

I’m less puzzled now.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 months ago

despite the foundational difference of opinion being largely invented.

It seems the smaller the difference the more vitriol is generated.

asdff3• 6 months ago

Wait till you learn about racism

1970-01-014• 6 months ago

What we needed, and still need, is mandatory time for all working citizens to be directly involved in federal government decisions. Something like jury duty for our national democracy. Yes, this does mean reducing one's freedom, but the benefits far outweigh seeing everything atrophy and collapse.

asdff3• 6 months ago

Jury duty is exactly why that shouldn’t happen. A lot of jurors want it to end early and will decide whatever seems expedient vs what is actually proper in light of the law and evidence.

morgengold• 6 months ago

What if we do not fight back because deep down we hate the current state of affairs? So why fighting to preserve this?

sershe• 6 months ago

The modern alarmist environmentalist projections have even less plausible basis in any kind of science (compared to e.g. IPCC ones [1]) than the Population Bomb et al. Let's hope their moral panic doesn't inspire genocidal policies like Indian forced sterilizations and One Child policy.

We live in the age of unparalleled prosperity, as displayed in part on one of the first slides, human vs wild biomass. Just like with their forebears, framing it as a bad thing in the very beginning really betrays the fundamentally anti-human nature of the modern environmentalists.

"Corporate capitalism" is part of the package that delivered said prosperity; "social media", "surveillance" is just people making choices that old man yelling at cloud disagrees with - like, I am totally with him on privacy, but most people don't care about privacy, and unlike him I do not think I have the right to decide for them.

Just like Paul Ehrlich et al, these people are delusional and truly evil.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios

jonjacky• 6 months ago

See also Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptographic Work[0], which is a more technical talk for an audience of cryptography researchers. It's been noted several times on HN, most recently in 2023 with 56 comments [1] and in 2015 with 93 comments [2].

0. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901885

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055

On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

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