
Ask HN: What got us stuck into our greedy, environment killing ways? - Clownshoesms
As IT people, I thought I&#x27;d like to ask other IT people what they think about the current state of play. VC&#x27;s can go back to their yachts and paid whores.<p>Have we, as developers, sysadmins, IT people in general, been co-opted into an advertising scheme? Why does Google produce so much pure revenue?<p>Is constant growth OK on a finite planet? Who started this?
======
billsimms
The thin book "The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex
Situations" by Dietrich Dorner offers one explanation of how and why we got
where we are today. If I remember correctly, he says that a million years ago
we were so few and the world so large that there was nothing we could do that
would make a dent in the world, it was all about grabbing everything you could
to just survive and side effects meant nothing. Fast forward to the present,
the teeter totter has tipped, the situation has reversed, side effects far
outweigh getting what you need to survive. But our brains haven't caught up
with the changes in last 2000 years, let alone a million. He goes on to show
lots of current examples of our intuition being no match for current complex
problems and how to try to learn to better deal with that.

------
PaulHoule
Back before agriculture, Hunter-gatherers had a very slow population growth
with a timescale of thousands of years. By the time they started getting
crowded, some startup discovered agriculture and bread and beer and now we
could support a larger population and a higher growth rate.

Living without growth would be hard too. The zero-sumishness which
characterizes our politics would be even worse.

------
azeirah
Important question, but I'm afraid I don't know. I have no idea.

