[HN Gopher] Pessimists Archive
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Pessimists Archive
Author : Jugurtha
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-11-23 19:28 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pessimistsarchive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pessimistsarchive.org)
| po1nt wrote:
| I really hope AI will be added in future.
| janto wrote:
| This is representing only one quadrant of the predictions x
| outcomes matrix.
|
| Where are the pessimistic predictions that turned out to be
| accurate? Where are the optimistic predictions on disruptive tech
| that did turn out net negative? Where are the nuances?
| gameswithgo wrote:
| How many bad outcomes did the pessimism prevent!
| [deleted]
| nbzso wrote:
| This is bias in propagandist form. Give me pessimistic archive
| with right vs wrong facts. Why in the era of digital information
| we don't have public tools to fact-check political and corporate
| propaganda vs scientific evidence. This will be a good
| nonprofit"startup" :)
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| What is a "wrong fact"?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Ok, but television really did make the world worse. Arguably also
| the personal automobile.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| It's certainly the case that neither television not automobile
| were inventions completely free of negative effects. But to say
| that they made the world worse is a very myopic view, focused
| on first world moral panics rather than attempting to evaluate
| what these inventions meant for a Turkish or an Indian village,
| for example.
| [deleted]
| dash2 wrote:
| Yeah, up to a point, right? It's interesting they have TV in
| there but TV addiction is (probably) a real thing (http://sites.o
| xy.edu/clint/physio/article/televisionaddictio...).
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Wouldn't TV addiction be an addiction problem?
|
| There also are knife accidents, car accidents, swimming pool
| related drownings, email addiction, work addiction. These
| exist, but what are the externalities in general?
| dash2 wrote:
| Heroin addiction is an addiction problem too... but TV
| addiction, like heroin addiction, seems quite widespread.
| (Average screen use is now something like 8 hours per day,
| IIRC.)
|
| There might also be externalities. Suppose you want to play
| outside, but all your friends are watching TV.
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| TV addiction is almost definitely a real thing. So is social
| media addiction.
| wayeq wrote:
| The 2015 bitcoin entry will just be a link to
| news.ycombinator.com
| shaolinspirit wrote:
| this is hilarious. I'm wondering if blockchain will be there :D
| tolstoywasright wrote:
| Not surprised seeing Pinker is a fan. These are the same type of
| people that parrot the "technology is neutral, it's how you use
| it" line.
|
| "Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new,
| can we have rational constructive debates about emerging
| technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and
| incumbent protectionism."
|
| Sure ok, start with this:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228250.Four_Arguments_fo...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| > "technology is neutral, it's how you use it" line.
|
| Seems like such an obviously true statement to me, that the
| only thing to add is that you cannot un-invent, abolish or wish
| it away. Folks who believe in the "complete nuclear
| disarmament" fairy tale have a hard time with this.
| janto wrote:
| Is Twitter neutral?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| You might not be able to wish away nuclear weapons, but if
| all countries in the world wanted there to be no nuclear
| weapons, they could (after solving climate change) introduce
| a global ban on nuclear energy and the possession of
| fissionable elements.
|
| This would have to be accompanied by a powerful inspections
| regime, with big rewards for whistleblowers. Also, if a
| country did announce it had secretly produced nuclear
| weapons, or was discovered to have them, that would probably
| have to be treated as a _casus belli_ , and all other
| countries would have a legal duty to launch a massive
| (conventional) bombardment of that country.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The entire world was able to come together to ban CFCs, so
| there's at least one precedence of a harmful substance
| getting universal prohibition. And there are all sorts of
| human rights conventions on what may or may not be used in
| war.
| mrzool wrote:
| > When the car began replacing the horse, pessimists didn't treat
| it like a great new tool. They called it "the devil wagon," and
| said its mission was to destroy the world.
|
| They were absolutely right.
| [deleted]
| i_cannot_hack wrote:
| The authors of the website really undermine their own point by
| including a lot of "hysterical" comments that are still
| reasonable warnings or complaints, were completely reasonable
| at the time (things change!) or are just sensible questions.
|
| The sections on computers includes an article matter-of-factly
| informing about a virus being found on 3000 computers. Calling
| the virus a time bomb is not hysteria - it was literally
| designed to be one. And surely computer viruses are an even
| bigger problem today?
|
| The clipping titled "Perils of the lazy age", which predicts
| that people sitting down in front of the television instead of
| chopping firewood will make people "unable to stand on their
| own feet" sure is obnoxiously written, but the sentiment is not
| wrong: Obesity and cardiovascular disease is basically an
| epidemic today.
|
| If these are some of the best examples of past hysteria, I
| guess we should listen more to those we consider hysterical
| today?
| Flankk wrote:
| I'd blame obesity on diet before I'd blame it on television.
| Six of one, half dozen of the other though. The entire food
| chain is GMO and soaked in poison.
| tyre wrote:
| What's the issue with GMO? How is it different from cross-
| breeding and husbandry which we've been doing for
| millennia?
|
| (I'm asking honestly.)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| First, it's a bit of a red herring, the biggest issue
| IMHO is the synthetic pesticide use which correlates it.
| Many plants are primarily GMO to make them pesticide-
| resistant. The issues with pesticides you may be aware
| of.
|
| Another issue is that often GMO correlates with patentry,
| terminator seeds, IP lawsuits, and so on. But that's also
| a tangential issue.
|
| The main issue is that, just like anything new, it puts
| us in the "beta testing in production" area, where the
| product being tested is "things which none of our
| ancestors have ever encountered, evolutionarily" and
| production environment is "our bodies".
| Flankk wrote:
| Atrazine and glyphosate were also believed to be safe to
| use. We now know that Atrazine causes Parkinson's and
| glyphosate causes cancer. Fruits and vegetables now have
| half the nutrition they did 20 years ago. This is due to
| herbicides decimating the soil fertility. The pessimists
| were right.
| shlurpy wrote:
| Last I heard they were still considered safe to use, if
| environmentally damaging, by scientific sources. Could
| you provide citations, so I might update my knowlege?
|
| Similarly, my understanding was that soil depletion
| (caused by farming methods) and crops optimized purely
| for high yield (via breeding or otherwise) are problems
| causing nutrition drop in foods. And that neither are
| problems solved simply by going organic or GMO free.
| Flankk wrote:
| The EPA uses bogus studies funded by the pesticide
| industry. Independent studies have found links to cancer,
| birth defects, and more.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/epa-atrazine-
| herb...
|
| There is a trove of studies showing the harm so I'm not
| sure you're being genuine. If you really can't find
| anything on Google I'll help.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| You have some Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and some exclusion
| fallacy going on here.
|
| Destroying the world was never the automobile's mission. Like
| many inventions that have benefited mankind, it has come with
| unintended consequences, both positive and negative.
|
| I would not discount the negative effects the automobile has
| had and will continue to have. However, I would argue that the
| effects of the automobile's existence are so profound and far-
| reaching, we are incapable of arguing whether the world is, or
| will be, ultimately a better or worse place as a result of its
| existence.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| I feel like leaving the subject of whether automobiles are
| good/bad as something that cannot be determined is just
| shying away from the question, and the possibility that the
| answer to it is that it is generally a bad thing. When you
| design cities and cultures and entire lifestyles around the
| assumption that everyone has or must have a car, all the
| unintended consequences of the automobile become bigger--
| necessary places aren't walkable, air becomes so polluted you
| can't jog outside, you create huge market demand for cheaply
| produced energy, and so on.
|
| I'd like to hear anyone's thoughts to the contrary? Are there
| any benefits that are bigger than the cons?
| chriscjcj wrote:
| A couple of easy ones:
|
| The ability for people to travel to so many places and
| engage in the human experience in ways they otherwise never
| could or would. The expansion of humans' radius to get
| together, be together, work together, exchange ideas, make
| love, and make families.
|
| Because humans were able to be with so many more humans, I
| would argue that knowledge, learning, and thought, took
| place at a level that's orders of magnitude greater than it
| would have been otherwise. And if you subscribe at all to
| the idea of the butterfly effect, it's impossible to begin
| comprehending what mankind wouldn't have if the car hadn't
| existed. Would we have the cure to as many diseases? Would
| the rate of poverty have declined so profoundly? Would the
| Internet exist?
| shlurpy wrote:
| Simply put, yes. The same effects could have been
| accomplished with extensive public transportation,
| subsidized to the point of being free for the same cost
| as the car and road subsidies. And with far greater
| positive effects on poverty, due to providing a smaller
| barrier of entry. Also likely far more free money and
| labor being diverted to more creative endeavors, due to
| the freedom from funding being forced to be allocated to
| a car for basic needs.
| jl6 wrote:
| We desperately need longitudinal news media.
|
| Current news works like this:
|
| 1. Something looks bad 2. Generate outrage 3. Forget all about it
| 4. Go to 1, on another topic.
|
| Can you imagine a form of journalism that picks its topics for
| the year, then relentlessly follows up on them every day, not
| getting distracted by passing outrage, but actually digging
| deeply?
|
| Sites like this could be a start, to help us stop forgetting.
| qsort wrote:
| Digging deeply into anything requires time and focus most
| people won't put in if they have any choice at all.
|
| We have far greater means to temporally cross-reference media
| now than at any other point in history, and yet most news
| outlets outright abitually lie about publicly available
| information.
|
| We vastly overestimate how much people care whether things are
| true or false.
| mjklin wrote:
| That's one reason I appreciate podcasts like "You're Wrong
| About" that revisit past news stories and tell them properly.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| In many ways, the news that we get is the news that consumers
| of news generally care about--so if an issue gets buried under
| much more current ones, it's just a consequence of people
| caring about the current ones. We're pretty much asking for
| human nature to change here. You also can't reasonably expect
| journalism to report on something where there is nothing new or
| significant to report, which happens a lot in long legal cases.
| crtasm wrote:
| https://private-eye.co.uk/ do some excellent investigations and
| special reports, I think mostly only available in the print
| copy though.
| spedru wrote:
| The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page
| after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said
| timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small
| viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace,
| perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web
| Technologies(tm).
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(page generated 2021-11-27 23:02 UTC)