Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to grasp how any person could be concerned with things as minor as governance structure when there is math to be done. It might be possible to press those people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly, than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're absolutely right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be others.

Yes, because "good" means preventable poverty related deaths by the millions because it is not profitable to do anything about it \s. Good for you != good, but it is easy to look past that when it isn't right in your face

With that said, is it possible that this passage could be interpreted more charitably? Perhaps some might read it as a comment on how demanding perfection can cause more negative effects while seeking to prevent negative effects.

For example, where might our technology be if our species had refused to extract or smelt metals until we had the ability to do so without any emissions of any sort?

It's not about what real preventable human tragedies can be averted, but aren't, because of the evils of human greed you wisely point to. It's about accepting that imperfect improvements to alleviate human pain and reducing human lives lost can, sometimes, be preferable to hoping for perfection at some future date.

I think the issue has more to do with the Cassandra effect and the tendencies of some to not consider or want to act on potentially catastrophic situations if they believe it imperils their own more immediate well-being or status.

And, well, sometimes the people making those choices are wrong. Or shortsighted. Or egotistical. Or afraid for their own comfort, power, and privilege.

At the same time, I still don't take the warnings of the flat-earthers particularly seriously, so perhaps not all warnings of potentially catastrophic situations are equally credible. As opposed to how seriously I take the warnings of climate scientists.

I read How To Make Friends And Influence People. Then I threw out all the fluff about genuine connection, and realized that people only actually care that you make them feel like they've been understood. This is the implicit thesis of the book, once you realize that a decades-dead author cannot possibly have a genuine two-way emotional connection with you.

In practice, this tends to mean telling people they're right a lot. Then you imply they have the wonderful, glorious opportunity to become more right. Then you remind them of how right they are. If this sounds exhausting, well, it is. But it also matches the structure of my previous comment.

Poverty is the absence of a lot of things. If you're born in a small isolated tribe in the middle of the Amazon, you're poor. Nobody took anything from you, there is almost no inequality, but you're still poor.

But I think I know where you're trying to get: "They're only poor because X took whatever from them". Probably where X is capitalism, Western countries, or whoever is the fashionable enemy.

Nope.

People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.

This doesn't absolve the misdeeds of exploiters - indeed colonies end in independence usually specifically because of mercantilist mismanagement squanders the true potential of the country by seeing it only as a well of land resources instead of an extension to nurture for mutual good but it is important to recognize that getting out "the Imperialists" won't make things better automatically and the wrong replacement can ironically be even worse. As bad as the British were in Rwanda they never decided to genocide the Tutsis even though their manipulations lead to it indirectly. Evil comes from within and without "the tribe" and it is important to recognize that.

Another response is "deprivation". Unfortunately, this response is effectively an appeal to the definition of poverty.

Since you asked what I believe, I don't believe there is a well-defined single cause of poverty.

If anything, Capitalism has lifted 90% of the world's population out of poverty. It's a solution to absolute poverty, not a cause. It may, however, be a cause of relative poverty. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst system for eliminating poverty, after all the other ones we've ever tried.

Of course anyone who experienced life in the 90's can see the glaring problem with this. $1.08 in 1993 has the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2008. Those hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty? They are all still there. The rate of inflation is greater than the rise of the ipl. They did glaringly bad math tricks to make it appear as if half a billion people were lifted out of poverty by neoliberalism and Capitalism. And yet that couldn't be further from the truth.

Now that doesn't even take into account the situation in "wealthier" countries, such as Sri Lanka. A survey of Sri Lanka found that 35% of the country fell underneath their poverty line. However the world bank using the international poverty line reported only 4% were lifted out of poverty that year!. A wave of the hand and suddenly 31% of the population didn't factor in to their feel good story of capitalistic success.

And again I want to point out these absurd arbitrary numbers. $1.25 a day? Are you kidding me? Have you ever lived on $1.25 a day? The UN reports that the average person in 2005 needed at least $4.50/day just to meet the minimum nutritional requirements. The minimum. In India, one of the harleded successes of the world bank, children living just above the ipl had a 60% chance of being malnourished.

New Castle University once calculated that if people we're to achieve a normal life expectancy they would need at least $2.50 / day as the new IPL. But if we adopted that as the new IPL it would mean that now 3.1 billion people are living in abject poverty.

I got these numbers from this video https://youtu.be/A6VqV1T4uYs but in the description they list out all of their sources.

When you stop making up numbers to hide actual real poverty, the picture becomes clear. Rather than lifting people out of poverty, neoliberal capitalist policies are responsible for plunging half a billion more people into poverty today than in 1980.

uhhh. your bubble is astonishing. or your standards for "good" are unattainable by anyone.

how about folks who work on CAD software? is that bad because it will be used to design plastic trinkets, or good because it'll design medical prosthetics?

(are the medical prosthetics good because they help people, or bad because they make someone money?)

if i write the software for a piece of test equipment for batteries, is that good because now people who buy consumer electronics are less likely to catch on fire? or bad because i helped the big company sell more plastic trinkets?

It's actually an awesome place to work, and it's nice to know that I'm actually helping push the needle a little bit in the right direction to help the medical industry succeed.

If you don’t mind me asking, how’d you end up in the medical device field? Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health? And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated? I don’t love asking that last one in the same breath as questions of morality, but I do have a family to take care of.

I was recruited from a B2B company by an old friend/boss. I was skeptical because I had only ever heard bad things about working for medical companies. I was very impressed with the leadership, product, and direction of the company. So I took the job.

> Do you feel like the projects you work on contribute to the advancement of human health?

I don't feel like I'm making a direct impact, no. However, I can clearly see that the work I do is a single cog in a machine that actually makes a real-world difference for medical professionals. I talked to a family friend who is a nurse. He was complaining that software was horrible for medical professionals, then he went in about this new product they started using and how it's made a world of a difference. Turns out it was our product and I just didn't know he used it and he didn't realize I had switched jobs to that company. He went on and on about how it makes things better (easier to diagnose, easier to see patient history, etc etc)

> And do you feel that you’re adequately compensated?

I got a significant raise that beat out other job offers at the time for another B2B company. I have what I feel is a competitive salary (a respectable amount higher than the average in my area) and the benefits are quite amazing (401k, untracked PTO with management who actually does a good job encouraging vacation, 100% paid health insurance, etc)

I can't speak to compensation yet since I'm only on a PhD stipend, but there's plenty of blue chip companies (that bring blue chip salary and benefits) that are going into the healthcare field.

It doesn't take long to notice serious manifestations of societal rot. And yet some of the brightest minds of our generation spend their best years trying to get people to spend more of their cognitive surplus on mindlessly staring at their device screen.

I'm not at all saying this is tech's fault. I think the problem is much more systemic. But that doesn't make it any less troublesome.

Luckily, I think I'm starting to see more people waking up to smell the societal rot that tech has helped foster, and people are becoming more motivated to fight it. I'm just waiting to see if tech folks can mobilize to push for causes like socialism during my lifetime. That would be the ultimate "Revenge of the Nerds" story line at this point.

The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods.

Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate.

But perhaps his point is wrong.

Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet.

Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries.

Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information.

And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants.

The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear.

But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways.

It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok.

Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.

Do you think tech can solve the problem of homeless addiction? There actually aren't that many homeless in the Bay Area.

There is only one problem with socialism. There is no check and balance on the amount of appropriation, which cannot be voluntary. Unchecked power eventually leads to oppression. Systems which you can't opt out of often lead to evil. (This may apply to Capitalism, but there it's somewhat ameliorated by creative destruction.)

1) Alternative Energy has a lot of minds working on it already. Success is dependent on the establishment of large scale infrastructure and changing societal expectations. One "Ah-Ha!" moment isn't going to cut it.

2) Vertical Farming is a world-saving problem that needs solving? Color me skeptical.

3) Asteroid Mining: Also requires establishment of large scale infrastructure.

4) Carbon Sequestration: The laws of thermodynamics are against you on this, unless you can marshal self-replicators harvesting a significant portion of the sunlight falling on the Earth. If we've gotten that desperate, it must mean that building sunshades at L1 has been made unavailable by groundside politics and/or the Kessler Syndrome.

5) Social Democracy Overnight: Why is this desirable, outside of theory? The whole of history indicates to us that collectivism works either on small scales, or as a disguised totalitarianism.

projects that generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of social good

Is that what the Industrial Revolution was? Or has industrialization raised 90% of the world's population out of poverty? Hint: It's the latter.

Another hint: Has there ever been a collection of intelligent, privileged young people who thought they could change the world into a utopia? I think you might want to study the history a bit. There was one utopian project which was implemented by privileged intellectuals, but which was also based on a good knowledge of history and human nature. Though flawed, that project worked, did some good, and has been going on for well over 200 years.

Here we observe the not-so-subtle attempt to shift the debate from "social democracy" to "collectivism", as if the two terms are synonyms.

We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can.

Exactly what is the difference between "social democracy" and "socialism?"

In particular, how is there a system of checks and balances to keep the voters from appropriating everything, thus handing all of the power to the central government and thus initiating totalitarianism?

We also see a denial that mixed economies with strong social safety nets can ever work on, say, the scale of a nation. Despite plenty of evidence available, in the real world, that they can.

It can be argued that all existing economies are mixed economies.

The US doesn't have one of those.

Literally. The people of the United States can, without consent of Congress or the President or the Supreme Court, do everything you just said, via the amendment-convention process (Congress does not have the option to deny a convention when at least 2/3 of states call for it). Once the convention's underway, even state legislatures can be bypassed by conventions in the states.

Thus it's possible to get amendments into the US Constitution without them ever having been voted on or even considered by Congress or the state legislatures. And if you're worried about a populist wave "appropriating everything" in other countries, why not worry about it in the US? It's just as possible.

Another way of saying it, the only check and balance is political.

After the founding, there was another check and balance, in that the voting public, comprised solely of landowners, would never have voted for socialism.

2. If you're unfamiliar with the environmental problems and inefficiencies present in our current food system, I implore you to do some research and get back to me. Decentralized, high-efficiency, urban food production is going to become more and more necessary as human populations continue to move into cities and global warming reduces crop viability in much of the world.

3. I don't understand how "establishment of large scale infrastructure" is a blocker to what I'm saying. Large scale infrastructure means you need smart people to design and build things to make a goal possible. You need "large scale infrastructure" like railroads to ship goods across the U.S. but when that was a need in the 17th century no one was grousing about how much work it was going to be.

4. Say what you will, but a system of distributed C02 scrubbers powered by alternative energy is at least a feasible way to prevent a Hothouse Earth scenario. Better than just accepting climatic doom through inaction.

5. Social democracy doesn't mean we become out-and-out Marxists, it just means that maybe we reconsider government in relation to what people need. Germany is a social democracy, USA is a democracy where people go without clean drinking water. Talk about a false dichotomy.

Over the past hundred years, California has been host to thousands of intentional communities, where people set their sights on something higher than making a living. Nearly all of these communities collapse within a generation, neither living up to their ambitions nor providing for their members’ most basic needs. These failures have multiple causes, but ultimately can be summed up in terms of having one institution serve too many different functions, in an environment where there are already specialized institutions serving those functions efficiently.

People seeking to do good in the world aren’t looking for work, they are looking for religion — in the sense of spiritual community and connection to the godhead. Doing good is the role of something like the Salvation Army and charitable missions — institutions of long standing which are subject to very different guidelines than businesses.

Those who would mix business and charitable, virtuous action are asking to be held accountable for neither while enjoying the rewards of both.

If only society / the global economic system wasn't set up to incentive profit over all else....

Profit is achieved primarily by selling people goods.

people want cheap meat, coffee and toys.

We found ways to give people that.

There are other effects where corporations cheat the laws, corrupt government, and pillage the environment - true.

But the system has always been about you and me getting more choice and more options at better prices.

Your toothpastes offer different flavors, and come in a magic immortal material called plastic which costs nearly nothing to make and is better for our environment than using tin tubes.

Profit has many ills, as single numbers often do - they reduce complex decisions down to a simple number.

That’s the magic of it all. We don’t have to examine the calculus of our morality when buying a pixel or an iPhone.

We just have to Examine the price.

I think we have to come to terms with the fact that humanity as a distributed entity, is not a moral organism.

Profit is just a way to reduce complexity. We have a society that reflects this because our reality is such.

Which is why many of the popular solutions today are prices which reflect carbon costs.

When considering how successful a thing, a person, or a project is, innovation and market success certainly should be weighted heavily but we really need some other metrics to include.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.

Lots of people make principled decisions every single day. You think only rich engineers can afford to put morals over money, and everyone else is selling their soul for a paycheck? Where do you live?

Business and the economy are doing what they are supposed to do. It's our expectations that are out of line.

They aren't exempt from serving any social needs -- that's taking what I said further than I said it. Business do serve many social needs. They just can't serve every social need. They are a limited institution with a limited function.

It's not just government and individual people that come together to make a robust society that can counterbalance business interests; and business, government and the individual are not all we have at our disposal to meet the broad challenge of maintaining a just, livable and inspiring society. The wide variety of "civil society" institutions that, at one time, characterized the American polity -- unions & professional associations, men's and women's organizations, benevolent societies, church groups and religious federations -- are important avenues to political participation outside of (a) government, (b) the individual and (c) business. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order & Political Decay, highlights the great significance of civil society organizations in the survival of democracy in America, and the eventual adoption of it in England, Denmark and many other countries.

Basically just regulate businesses with the expectation that they have no social conscience and hope legislation is enough to prevent them from taking actions that damage society?

They need to be regulated so as to (a) "...prevent them from taking actions that damage society" and (b) encourage them to stick closer to action that is beneficial to society. Were businesses to determine on their own what those things mean, it would effectively be undermining the political will of the rest of society. Businesses are paid to do a job.

Please consider that your reply was a little exaggerated, taking what I said further than I said it. This is quite characteristic of American politics at present; and perhaps of hacker politics in general. It doesn't serve us, though: it neither helps us to understand one another, nor to come to a workable agreement that improves public life.

Ones that actually work as intended in the general case, and don't frequently malfunction by getting a bunch of people exiled, consigned to real poverty, or killed?

The problem isn't that people are expecting businesses to be charities. It's that survival and solvency make abuse of the commons a business necessity.

People want jobs that don't involve abusing the commons.

https://usds.gov/jobs https://18f.gsa.gov/jobs https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/ https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

I would also note that a Computer Science degree isn't necessarily the best preparation for a career building commercial software.

The best way to make sure you are working on ethical projects is to start and run your own company. Any technology can be used for good or evil. Personally, I do think blockchain has a lot of potential, but the best way to ensure that your technology gets used for good is to design it yourself that way - in other words, build a micro-lending system that helps finance small business owners in 3rd world countries with fair interest rates, instead of building a predatory payday lending system that charges unfair interest rates.

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

There is nothing "efficient" about proof-of-work -- in fact, it's deliberately inefficient because it's a zero-sum game and all the miners have to waste as much electricity as possible to compete with the other miners.

The wasted energy is not "on the chain". It's gone, converted into CO2 poisoning the planet.

Banks may do stupid or damaging things, but they aren't in the business of wasting energy just to prove they wasted it.

I have a friend who's a security engineer at a bank. I was surprised when he took the job - he'd always been pretty to the left politically.

But he takes pride in making sure the grandmas of the world don't get their accounts drained. He realizes he's not saving the world, but he's not swapping around debt vouchers until the economy crashes.

It's counter intuitive, but in his mind he's more moral than someone working at Google or Facebook.

(He also brags to me about the vacation - apparently they're encouraged to take their time for anti-fraud reasons?)

BlogSpot is a robust platform and some of the folks who worked on it probably have compsci degrees.

I'm also curing the incurable, but most people don't believe that, so probably no point in trying to convince you that I may yet win a Nobel Prize in medicine someday, if people will ever stop calling me crazy and take me seriously.

Don't mind me. I'm just cranky cuz reasons.

Of course, Social only works if a critical mass of users start actively using the network...achieving that number, no matter what the underlying tech is, is a very hard nut to crack.