I agree with your abstraction of the problem, but I think you stopped half-way.
Regulators, producers and consumers are all following the same interconnected incentive structures, many of which have been designed with efficient production and an exponential increase of consumption in mind, not environmental concern.
It makes sense for these companies to operate, following their obligation to shareholders. They are, by definition, successful and so the idea that they should be diminished in any way by taxation/regulation creates a dissonance that can easily be loopholed or simply undone by the next gov't. Tax is a political lever, but the incentives are emergent economic atttributes. This means that, as soon as there is enough economic influence within politics, the lever doesn't do much anyway.
This seems to amount to asking an LLM how it feels about Cheryl, discovering that it is performatively happy about her existence, and then deducing that the LLM has no capacity for genuine emotion, expressed in the form of logic.
The faulty premise lies in the formulation of the test and makes the responses both predictable, but also does a disservice to 'mind' because it tries to interpret it in such a way that an LLM could begin to grapple with the basics, but not in a meaninful way.
Perhaps it is useful to help build better context-specific logic flows (generally known as software) but it doesn't seem to provide any progress on the "theory of mind" front, which I guess is a borrowed notion.
I'm working on https://exeud.com. It's an open-source VR framework, including a Unity toolkit that includes character control and interaction, and a Web3 template that allows you to self-host your VR scene on the Internet Computer, which is a website-in-a-smart-contract.
I see it being useful for artists, indie devs and anyone else who want to fire up their immersive ideas and keep control of the content, code and costs of running it.
I love the word 'megabomb' as much as the next guy, and I'm about all threat escalation, but isn't ammonium nitrate also fertiliser?
Since this is one of the main (and historic) exports from Russia, I would imagine that one or two cargo ships have carried the stuff before.
A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.
It's probably a fertiliser shipment, but if it were to explode while unloading the intended use does not matter much. If you've seen some footage from the Beirut port explosion in 2020, calling something 7 times as large a 'megabomb' is not inappropriate.
There are or were this kind of fertilizer shipments from other dates or countries that weren’t cataloged as megabombs? Maybe even bigger. A weapon is a weapon no matter who holds it. If coming from other sources, maybe in even bigger amounts, it is seen as something normal, then we are not talking about the ship.
I think the fact that the ship is damaged, making the fertilizer much more likely to explode, is why they’re calling it a megabomb. Circumstances have made the cargo more hazardous, and pushed the “explosive substance” part of its dual nature to the front of everyone’s minds
Experts have said in Swedish media that no such risk exists due to how it's packed/stored, unless someone intentionally mixes it with "organics" or stores it with fireworks (as in Beirut).
Organics such as fuel oil, which the ship likely has on board and might also refuel. If it accidentally or "accidentally" leaks into the AN, you get ANFO, "a widely used bulk industrial high explosive".
If Russia wants to nuke an European port city without using an actual nuke and while being able to at least leave some doubt whether it may have just been an accident, this certainly looks like a plausible way.
Who cares, it's quite enough to reason to refuse a ship to dock in port. The Beirut ship also had a Russian owner. The AN was bound to Mozambique to be used for explosives.
> A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.
I agree. In fact the premise of the article - that this should be treated as a threat from Russia - hangs on the understanding that there is a legitimate reason a European port would accept a ship carrying this cargo. So how many such shipments are regularly made from Russia to Europe? What ports are designated to accept them? What safety measures do they have to handle the cargo? In what way is this particular ship different from those legitimate ones? Without this information, the article is incomplete.
If there are no such legitimate shipments the article cannot claim there is any ambiguity about the threat posed by this ship.
It could just be fertilizer, but Russian sailors are known to be reckless and often dangerously incompetent. Given that Russia's national interests are served by an explosion regardless of cause, it's just not safe to let them anywhere near shore.
No, Russia is deliberately using this ship to harass NATO countries. The ship was recently unusually close to a NATO base in Norway before the Norwegian coast guard chased them away.
Here in Denmark the Danish coast guard also had to confront the ship.
The ship has enough Ammonium Nitrate to cause an explosion several times the size of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
Basically any other country with a faulty ship full of dangerous explosive material would tow the ship back and fix their own mess.
Russia is instead using it as hybrid warfare against geopolitical adversaries.
This is quite possible, equally though, what is stopping all these countries from simply refusing access to territorial waters for this ship. It seems to be travelling for thousands of miles just fine, so can't claim emergency shelter, and even then the danger to third parties seems to justify any refusals. The crew is likely tiny and easy to rescue if need be.
I can imagine this being a simple ruse to annoy NATO countries and their navies too, that wouldn't be out if character, but beyond that... That would be a very petty hybrid risk.
Or maybe Russia is just trying lots of things just to see what sticks..?
From my side, while I think using a semi damaged ship as a hybrid threat would be within the Russian MO, it also seems like an easy one to protect against.
I get that, and it is odd. Though Russia can also wash its hands off of that ship. IIRC it is Maltese-flagged, owned by a Maltese company, and the crew is international. It "just so happens" that it contracts for Russian cargos. Russia may perhaps (?) be the ultimate beneficiary but it's also not strictly speaking Russian.
Back to my question: can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story?
> can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story
Pretty much. Entire crews can be (and are) abandoned in international waters for years at a time if the company decides they don't want to deal with the ship any more.
Which makes some sense as to why the crew would bring the ship down to the North Sea from the far northern Norwegian coast (weather this week: down to 2 degrees C, wind up to 40mph). If you think you might be abandoned in late September, and ports in Murmansk and Arkangelsk could also decide not to admit you, do you want to overwinter at sea in the Arctic, or go literally anywhere else? And that's if the company does forsake them, which is also a hypothetical. More likely, the company also would probably rather the ship is not at risk of being disabled in the Arctic considering they presumably couldn't get a guarantee readmittance to the port of origin and decided to at least get to relative safety down south with better weather and near countries that at least plausibly would lift a finger if the ship really was at risk.
The ship started in Murmansk. How would it have gotten to Lithuania (or Kaliningrad, St Petersburg or anywhere in the Baltic) if it's not allowed though the passage by Denmark?
I'm not sure if this can be described as "warfare"- hybrid or not. You'd need to call the migrants boats that "harass" Italian ports a tool of war, too. Maybe that's warranted, but to me, it sounds like an unnecessary escalation.
Obviously, the ship shouldn't be used in such a way, but I would save the war-like language for a situation where it tries to ram its way into a port against the coastal guard commands.
For those who downvote the above, yes it presents speculation as if verified fact, but what it puts forth is actually plausible when you see how Russian military efforts tend to make use of uncertainty.
If you are going to dismiss it: dismiss it with facts and arguments. Don't just lazily downvote it.
Just to be clear, you want HN users put effort into a rebuttal of the factless speculation presented as a fact? This isn't how discussions work, this is flamebait (just like the article itself) and has no place on HN. This doesn't contribute to the discussion, and should be downvoted and flagged.
The two last statements of the post are indeed speculation. What was said up until that point can be verified. However, the speculation should be seen in light of recent history. Russia does have a history of shady maritime dealings covered by deniability. For instance you have probably heard of cables that have been mysteriously cut in the northern regions.
As for you accusing me of posting flame-bait: that's not very nice. I presume you have some way of proving your speculation?
The interesting thing is that ship was damaged almost immediately after leaving the port, had a chance to stop in Russian ports along the way but instead is doing a tour near EU countries.
The crew is either amazingly incompetent or malicious/complicit.
You don’t put a ship that can blow up near: a. Gas&oil terminals, b. military air base
...said the Filipino deck hand to the Egyptian navigator, no less.
(I don't know what nationalities the ship's crew has, but based on the ship's ownership, it would be pretty unlikely to be all Russian unless they've already disposed of and replaced the entire crew).
So not only is there now a suicidal crew of mad Russians, but they also killed the old crew. They just keep getting more dastardly! They probably caused the bad weather too! Andøya is usually so lovely this time of year!
Actually this rampant speculation thing is quite fun. I should sell this stuff to whoever is running the Tom Clancy estate.
This is a relatively constant factor along the Norwegian coast and has been for many years. In recent years the behavior has become a bit more aggressive with communication cables at sea going missing.
This tends to not make international news as this activity isn't exceptional. It just varies in intensity and scope over time.
That is true, but given the current level of trust between Russian and 'Western' authorities, would it not be prudent to assume the vessel is indeed a threat and keep it away from infrastructure and the general population if at all possible?
In the case of Arctic Norway, there are plenty of unpopulated, sheltered fjords. No need to dock it in a commercial port in an urban area.
If this were a threat, how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by navy when trying to escape the aftermath (assuming they even have boats that can get away from the blast)?
> (...) how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by (...)
Have you paid any attention to Russia's meatwave tactics in Ukraine that so far already piled up half a million of Russian casualties?
If you did, you wouldn't be considering this scenario implausible, because we see videos of said Russians needlessly marching towards their deaths on a daily basis.
Are the sailors actually Russian military? Or are there suicidal commissars on board along with them to put a gun in their backs 1000km from home?
I'm not saying it not possible, but the fact that there isn't a rather more concerted response involving, say, the SBS or an encounter with an Astute within the last several weeks while it's been tooling around the North Sea implies that the intelligence services don't consider it as much of an actual active threat as the media circus wants it to be.
Certainly if there was even a breath of Russian military on the ship, I don't think "hey sure, just drop anchor outside Margate and chill next to these other ships and right by the Thames and Channel shipping lanes" would be the call they'd make.
The people Russia is sending to their deaths in their meat wave tactics aren't exactly Russian military either. They are at best civilians under contract and moved to front lines weeks if not days after being hired.
Then there are the civilians pressed into service such as unsuspecting immigrants and Ukrainians who found themselves in occupied territories.
The key factor is complete disrespect for those under your control, and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the smallest reason.
Kind of seems like climbing onto or sending a message to the anchor hoy currently alongside and requesting asylum from the murderous Russians would be the obvious way out of that one.
Margate may not be luxurious, but it's not a Ukrainian front line.
The only evidence that it's anything other than a damaged ship in a shit situation (even shitter than your average Syrian/UAE cargo ship, which is probably saying something) with a very low chance of a very big explosion, trying to find somewhere to put in, is that the word "megabomb" makes good headlines and people want to have exciting things happen, even if "it" is blowing up a town, no matter how dreary, from 12 miles away with what would presumably be the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history.
“The [Ukrainian] commanders estimated that 50 to 70 per cent of new infantry troops were killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation.“
The same way Russia coerces soldiers to go into the meat grinder against Ukraine - money, assurances their families will be cared after (well it might be with a sack of potatoes, but the poor fools can't know that).
Do not underestimate the importance of drugs cocktails in the meat wave tactics employed by Russia. Also the running Buryat and other ethnic-minorities from the east of the empire aren't told that IR scopes can see through smoke-grenade clouds, and seem not to be told that the trenches in front are not full of friendlies.
If the plan was to deliberately detonate the ship rather than just be an annoyance that can't be ignored, then it seems like a very obvious option to rig it with a timer and have the crew escape during the night. Risk of arrest for sure but they'd have a chance, and the west has shown no shortage of willingness in the past to exchange assassins for hostages. People take on worse missions all the time.
I'd far rather be crew on this ship than on HMS Campbeltown.
And if that were remotely on the cards, even within a shadow if a doubt, there'd be an exclusion zone around the ship. And there isn't. There are ships going right past it, right now.
This sentiment, that each is entitled to a life of choosing, resonates strongly with the spirit of individualism. Within it there is a disregard for obligation or belonging that, I think, is connected to the desire for mindless occupation and distraction.
I suspect that, the more one is cut off from a sense of collective purpose, the more one finds solace in activities that reinforce a sense of "alright" in place of true wellness.
Btw, I'm also a big procrastinator and I consider it a gift. Many wonderful things in my life have been helped by it. In this sense, I agree that there is something about an inner drive that should be listened and reacted to, but I am not sure that all activities are of equal value.
Given that the vast majority of people go to work to earn money for businesses that exist either to exploit natural resources or appreciate in value in the eyes of an economic system that prioritizes increasing capital valuations above all else, including human dignity, long-term survival and the life of other species, I would say we're already there.
Talking about a dystopian future is a convenient way to assuade our sense of dissonance that the present is most certainly not that.
Case in point, nobody wants to rid the Earth of insects, fill the oceans with plastic or plough microplastics into every orifice, but we are all complicit and can't seem to gather ourselves to fix it.
This is something I regularly read, something in the line of 'we're doomed and it's our own fault since we are actively part of this destructive system'.
I think while humanity is destroying things they are fixing things as well. Banning of heavy metals in environment, removing asbestos, getting most people to stop smoking, eating less meat, energy transition... it's not perfect but we are working on it. Meanwhile average age increases and violence decreases (averaged over a large period at least)
> First of all, I know it's all people like you. And that's what's so scary. Individually you don't know what you're doing collectively.
- The Circle by Dave Eggers
> In the course of her job, Resaint had met people like Megrimson, executives who went into work and sat down at their desks and made decisions that ravaged the world. They didn't seem evil to her. They seemed more like fungal colonies or AI subroutines, mechanical components of a self-perpetuating super-organism, with no real subjectivity of their own. That said, she would have happily watched any of them die.
- Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
I know it's still science/climate fiction, but very relevant to your point.
> Given that the vast majority of people go to work to earn money for businesses that exist either to exploit natural resources ...
Or for governments, doing government jobs that produce absolutely nothing of value and force people to waste a big chunk of their lives on administrative tasks...
I come from a town where the biggest employer is the state in a few different forms. I think it's entirely valid for the government to keep them all busy 9-5, salaried and pensioned. Main function of the state IMO.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted, it is very legitimate point.
I think there is a role for public organisation, with political groups being one type. I am, however, critical of the prevailing agenda, since they often exist in a system where money can play a big role in deciding which priorities rise to the top.
I am not sure that politics plays such a central role as it used or as many people assume. Our society today seems to be divided functionally... we answer to many bosses, some economic, some political, some technological, and so on.
For me the more/less gov't debate misses the important points. It is the incentives, mechanism and processes that determine their value. I think you are referring to maintain order and keeping the peace - valuable functions, but made more necessary when people are under such strain in their daily lives.
"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case" — Nathan Heller
Whats the public vs private split to this idea? Its not a new idea -
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” — John Wanamaker
It would take someone mentally ill (i.e. "neurodivergent") to actually go beyond the routine and take drastic action to fix. Normal people don't go against what society deems normal. Normal people will lie to themselves rather than face the truth, and that's a good thing usually. Almost always is it better to be united in a less optimal path than divided. This is true for the individual as well as socirty.
However, in certain situations a society's path becomes so misdirected that its better to be alone than follow the group.
Doubt is not a strategy and nay-saying rarely moves a conversation forward.
My comment was not intended to illicit the abdication of responsibility - quite the reverse.
Where was my petitioning? Your response is combative, seemingly intended to be personally offensive and built on a straw-man argument, likely the result of a multitude of others treating your opinions like crap. I'm not them...
You are absolutely right, agency and the realisation of it is a key component to shifting us out of this mess. I put significant daily effort into building an alternative kind of personal existence, at significant personal cost. I attempt to carry as much of this as I can since I recognise my own complicity in this mess.
My more relevant point to the OP, with reference to your comment, is that no, we are not amusing ourselves to death. It's more that we are worrying ourselves to death, despite a lack of personal indicators about this or that. If you want to proceed meaningfully to self, this requires prioritising one's personal experience over the provided stats, which are as much a control/guidance mechanism as anything.
I have lived in South Florida, close to the Atlantic ocean for close to 40 years. In the time I have lived here, the insect populations have noticeably dropped. I have also queried relatives from the midwest. It used to be every summer your car would get covered with dead bugs, not so any more.
As for plastics in the ocean, every time I go to the beach I see a lot of macro plastics.
Thank you for your personal testimony. It's good to hear that in your experience it seems that the insect populations really have dropped. Of course, there may be other reasons - eg if there are highways where it used to be small roads, you would expect insects to stay clear of the area. Also, litter you can see, is not microplastics - you can't see the microplastics.... But they are there! Apparently.
One has to ask oneself, is it better to have a comforting story, that is likely leveraged for someone, somewhere's benefit, or to start with the honest position, which is that "I don't know". One can of course become more certain of whatever-it-is, but not without attempting some personal research. Or, one can just defer all personal responsibility and parrot whatever the consensus view is.
So then, obviously, you've been personally responsible and tried to replicate all of the studies that led to the conclusion that microplastic concentrations in reservoirs are increasing, as well as the ones that concluded that bioaccumulation of microplastics have deleterious effects on human health, and then got them peer reviewed, right? And you also decided that 'personal responsibility' is actually tacitly accepting that when petrochemical lobbyists write op-eds that deny these scientific consensuses and that you don't need to make any lifestyle adjustments and their clients don't need to make any changes to their supply chain, they're telling the truth. Truly heroic that you still have time to shitpost on HN after all that.
And demanding that everyone else adopt this policy of radical individualist solipsism, built on a deliberate misunderstanding of what scientific consensus is. The net effect of which is basically indistinguishable from being contrarian for its own sake because to do otherwise is actually quite discomforting.
Well to be honest, we don't truly 'know' anything, we can only make best guesses. My best guess based on what i've read from who i perceive as smart people is that microplastics are everywhere, not enough exercise makes you ill, looking in the sun kills your eyes and doing drugs is no good. Are you just can say "I don't know"
Yes, we don't truly know much (not nothing). We can, on occasion, drill into whatever is being claimed, look at the data and see if we agree with the conclusion.
If you personally sample test studies, comments or whatever you then get a handle on how many assumptions you feel are being made, whether you always/occasionally/never agree with what is stated.
Are you aware of widespread fraud in the data associated with insect population decline? Or are you arguing that science is just inherently fraudulent or unreliable? These sound like pretty extreme responses of the type ancaps gave for years to the claim that global surface temperatures were rising. Those looked pretty quaint even without the benefit if hindsight.
Which is simultaneously broad and vacuous. Why? Compared to what? In this specific context, what method would provide a better intellectual foundation?
Well, did you see with your own eyes the earth is round rather than flat? No, so you can't state either? That makes most reasonable statements impossible to make.
Are you able to say that 'you assume that the earth is a sphere but don't know that to be the case'? Do you actually say 'I know the earth is a sphere' even though you don't "know"? Do you know the difference between belief and knowing?
I think/believe/know that the main difference between thinking/believing/knowing is in their nuance. Fundamentally i believe they reflect the same meaning, mainly their strongness is different.
I believe the earth is sphere shaped. I'm pretty sure it is, but I haven't seen it with my own eyes. I have seen parts of the curvature of the earth, but can't be 100 percent sure this was not due to lens effects of the atmosphere. Nonetheless I am quite strong in my belief because all i read and heard about the topic seems to make sense. I never met Newton, Keppler but I believe what was written by/about them is correct.
Great. I'm glad you are happy to use 'believe' rather than 'know', if you are trying to convey your meaning clearly.
I think there is a huge value in this, in being clear on what one knows (that I am sitting on a chair) and what one believes (that the earth is a sphere). Belief in a thing indicates that something is a hypothesis to oneself, while knowing conveys whatever-it-is is a fact.
I totally accept that think/believe/know are used interchangeably in conversation etc, but I also hold that there is a (huge) value to oneself in being able to keep these distinctions clear.
Taking a moral angle to it, misusing these terms is actually to lie or mislead others by overstating or understating your certainty.
Do you have a definition for 'know', in a hard/technical/non-colloquial sense?
I understood what you are trying to say an i mostly agree. I guess most people find it a bit pedantic to make a hard distinction between believing and knowing. One of the pet peeves of mine is to use words correctly. Often in the office we use words that are incorrect but everybody uses them and hence I'm the pedantic one pointing them to the fact those wrong wording might create a wrong view on things. There are plenty such words and expressions and often things would clear up by using the most appropriate term or expression.
That said, indeed saying 'I know God exists' is misleading. It is trying to convince by stating beliefs as being True.
The thing is, i believe knowing is simply a colloquial term. I read the book 'reality is not what it seems'. We make models of the world. Those models are wrong but mostly good enough to get along, but over time science prooves that each should be replaced by a less wrong model. Models stay wrong ad infinitum. That all to say that just maybe Truth with a capital does not exist, we can only converge toward it. Hence non-colooquial knowing might not exist.
Yes, the model one has and the terms one uses probably vary from person to person. However, a meaningful exchange of ideas can occur anyway, if we are prepared to hone in on definitions of words, and correct the difference in personal meanings. This requires patience and good will.
It is the opposite to making Barnum statements, such you get in politics like: 'this is a good thing' allowing each individual to mislead themselves with their own definition of 'good'.
Imo, truth with a capital T does exist - it is that which has happened. This is valid if we are not living in a simulation... which I personally don't think we are in. However, we only have our personal view on truth/reality. Pretending we can have anything more (via shared models such as religion or science) is flawed. Recognising the (very limited!) boundaries of what we know, and knowing the difference between belief and knowledge is essential.
Leave it up to a human to overgeneralize a problem and make it personal...
The explosion of dull copy and generic wordsmithery is, to me, just a manifestation of the utilitarian profiteering that has elevated these models to their current standing.
Let us not forget that the whole game is driven by the production of 'more' rather than 'better'. We would all rather have low-emission, high-expression tools, but that's simply not what these companies are encouraged to produce.
I am tired of these incentive structures. Casting the systemic issue as a failure of those who use the tools ignores the underlying motivation and keeps us focused on the effect and not the cause, plus it feels old-fashioned.
I suppose it comes down to using the metric as the measure, whatever makes the company the most money will be the preferred route, and the mechanisms by which we achieve those sales are rarely given enough thought. It reflect a more timeless mantra of 'if someone is willing to pay for it, then the offering is valuable' willfully ignoring negative psycho-social impacts. It's a convenient abdication of responsibility supported by the so-called "free market" ethos.
I am not against companies making money, but we need to serious consider the second-order impacts that technology has within society. This is evident in click-driven models, outrage baiting and dopamine hijacking. We still treat the psyche like fair-game for anyone who can hack it. So hack we shall.
That said, I am not for over-regulation either, since the regulators often gather too much power. Policy is personnel, after all, and someone needs to watch the watchers.
My view is that systems (technological, economic or otherwise) have inherent values that, when operating at this level of complexity and communication, exist in a kind of dance with the people using them. People obviously affect how the tools are made, but I think persistent use of any tool will have lasting impacts on the people using it, in turn affecting their decisions on what to prioritise in each iteration.
Not 100% sure what Will was trying to say, but what jumped into my head was perhaps that we'll see quality sites try and distinguish themselves by being short and direct.
This is the most generic trap of all. Get good at something and then extrapolate to claim that you know how everything works. I suggest that, given the insane proliferation of valueless derivatives and ejection of human values from these systems, a more suitable conclusion might be that this is how the world dies.
Agree with the sentiment of your comment in isolation but when I went to the article to see the quoted line in context, the author isn't saying anything of the sort.
They're not taking a narrow definition of knowledge & extrapolating that once one has that specific knowledge it explains everything. Instead they're broadening the definition of "hacker" (& also invoking the idea of continuous interrogation) to describe an approach to always seeking & finding "how the world works" in any given context.
It's there three times, which is partly what triggered the comment, as it came across as something of a theme.
Certainly this article is less dogmatic that many, but I still got the sense that author was using effects like causes.
The less lazy version is to do with treating the metric as the measure. Sure, the quant revolution is in full swing, but it's a terrible way to gauge the success (or failure) of society, and is perhaps a better metric for describing detrimental human activity.
That said, I fully appreciate the author's efforts to break with convention, but I felt that the points made actually give creedence to the system that, in my view, is actively corrupting the values that might get us out of this mess
This is exactly how most on this website sound to be honest--people who got good enough in their field to convince themselves that they can speak authoritatively on some unrelated complex topic.
Which is strange, because one might expect that as someone gains expert knowledge in a particular field, they would recognize that most fields are similarly complex, require just as much nuanced knowledge as their own, and would not try to speak authoritatively on it.
An effective hacker has to be competent at social engineering as well as having a very deep understanding of software/hardware.
By the time you have accrued detailed experience of how both these technical systems and social systems work, you may be well on your way to understanding how the world works (in abstract, at any rate)?
I think the term 'social engineering' gets right to the point. We aren't machines but we have found very effective way of hacking our rewards systems so that we can manufacture demand, modify behaviour etc.
The author describes the phenomenon, but doesn't seem to see the broader picture. This is where a meta-systematic, or paradigmatic (if you're allergic to the word 'meta') perspective is needed, which transcends both social and technical systems, but appreciated how they fit into a larger scheme.
Through this lens the world is decidedly pluralistic and cannot be condensed to 'it's like X, we gotta do Y'. That can work for a personal strategy, and the author is kind enough to make some suggestions, but it's intellectual overreach to try and label the world
> I think the term 'social engineering' gets right to the point.
"Social engineering" is just dystopian newspeak for "deception, manipulation, lying, and bullshitting to get what you want". If honest language were used, maybe it wouldn't look so sexy.
Anything else that avoids immoral means is just a matter of rhetorical skill and ability to negotiate.
I don't think there's especially compelling evidence out there that the world is dying.
People have been saying that forever. Especially during downswings like we've had lately (which is somewhat minor all told).
And then the world doesn't die but they spent a bunch of time dooming instead of staying ready for the inevitable opportunities that come from things turning around.
This is super depressing, but probably on point. I agree that the article has good points.
I think the spirit that the author is trying to capture is that there is a better way. I just think that they don't go far enough. There is a tendency to arrive at a idea and believe it to be a good global model - my intention with these comments is to try and provoke a more holistic assessment of the issue, despite the fact that I think their criticism of startup culture is valid
I suppose memecoins represent a form of this, but I was really referring to financial instruments, in particular those that exist based on a derived sense of value, rather than an actual quantification of it, such as:
Stock and, to a lesser degree, commodities futures, stock index futures, currency futures, interest rate futures, index options, currency options, interest rate options, credit default swaps, total return swaps, currency forwards, interest rate forwards.
The more exotic of these, which are usually more lucractive and less well regulated, include:
derivative-based exchange-traded funds, leveraged ETFs, inverse ETFs, equity-linked notes, credit-linked notes, principal-protected notes, collateralized debt obligations, weather derivatives (yes, you read that right), catastrophe bonds (eesh) barrier options and lookback options, to name a few.
They are all mechanisms to leverage expectation and uncertainty and most rely on the quantification of risk at some level. Risk, however, is defined in terms of expected return and subject to an assessment of externalities that is, at its core, resource-blind.
My point is, it is not just about computers. It's about understanding how
the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep
society running, those machines are programmed by people--people with
managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is
about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.
Regulators, producers and consumers are all following the same interconnected incentive structures, many of which have been designed with efficient production and an exponential increase of consumption in mind, not environmental concern.
It makes sense for these companies to operate, following their obligation to shareholders. They are, by definition, successful and so the idea that they should be diminished in any way by taxation/regulation creates a dissonance that can easily be loopholed or simply undone by the next gov't. Tax is a political lever, but the incentives are emergent economic atttributes. This means that, as soon as there is enough economic influence within politics, the lever doesn't do much anyway.
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