Sapere Aude
Tag: society
What ss the internet doing to boomers’ brains? A naive generation gets sucked in.
“They were indoors for 6 months with nothing to do but watch Fox News and go on Facebook. And now they’re telling me, ‘Oh well, the weak just need to die and then we’ll be over this thing.’”
most schools won’t reopen because they cannot deal with the burden — institutionally, legally or otherwise — of being connected to significant numbers of COVID-19 cases. The question is how this stigma ends. If rates of death and possible long-term damage fell to half of their current levels? One-third? Less? I strongly suspect these same schools still would be unwilling to reopen, due in part to phantom risk.
You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.
2023-12-15: A spiritual successor, the techno-optimist manifesto
We are being lied to.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
We are told to be pessimistic.
The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares.
We are told to denounce our birthright – our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world.
We are told to be miserable about the future.
Truth
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.
I am here to bring the good news.
We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will.
It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.
It is time to be Techno-Optimists.
Technology
Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.
We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”
We believe everything good is downstream of growth.
We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.
Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.
And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.
In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less.
Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: How much more we can produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important, valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.
We believe this is the story of the material development of our civilization; this is why we are not still living in mud huts, eking out a meager survival and waiting for nature to kill us.
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.
We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.
We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.
We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.
We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.
We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.
We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.
We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.
After the pandemic, an ignorance of science will no longer be viable in polite company. 2 cultures will become 1. And the accommodation will have to be made by those of us in the humanities. And it is no longer cute or raffish to be innumerate.
At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos…there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number 1 target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”
And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”
And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.
how censorship worked historically. very interesting.
The failures are fractal, hence I’ll collect different takes from different perspectives.
The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.
the pandemic outed 100Ms as dumb fucks, not really news, but still depressing.
the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the virus’s spread. Twitter amplified Trump’s misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even seasoned health experts underestimated these compounded risks.
Also, this analysis is far too kind on the establishment: so many institutional failures and inertia at the CDC and FDA that have nothing to do with this narrative.
The following piece argued that all the pandemic planning was a waste of time.
The failure of the United States government to respond to the coronavirus was not a failure of foresight. It was a failure to create a coherent strategy and to provide clear lines of authority to implement it. To prepare for the next pandemic, we need to end our current proliferation of planning mandates and overlapping agency authorities (such as that of the Assistant Secretary for Response and Preparedness), strengthen the pandemic response ability of one agency (preferably the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and reform our current National Emergency Act to allow clear delegation of emergency power. Only by examining our current failures and rectifying them, most importantly, by combining authority, responsibility, and accountability in the right hands, can we make sure that our next Pandemic Preparedness Act is not an embarrassment to its name.
We also lost a lot of process knowledge to be able to pivot quickly:
US factories are as productive as ever but they’ve lost the process knowledge needed to retool quickly in a crisis.
COVID-19 crisis reveals paralytic nature of America’s regulatory order:
We need an immediate intervention to break America free from its bureaucratic addiction.
States can’t even redirect 0.3% of their budget:
States and local public health officials have warned for months that they would need more than $8B in additional funding to stand up the infrastructure needed to administer vaccines. Total state and local spending is about $3.7 trillion, $2.3 trillion from the states alone. $8B is how much of that? Our states cannot come up with 0.3% of their budgets to meet the greatest emergency in our lifetimes?
Meanwhile, alcohol producer can’t make sanitizer:
Worse yet, the FDA reversed course, announcing additional restrictions that effectively prevent any sales, even though ethanol companies had already produced and shipped millions of liters of high-grade alcohol for hand sanitizer.
here’s how things went with contact tracing:
But the effort was frustrated as the CDC’s decades-old notification system delivered information collected at the airports that was riddled with duplicative records, bad phone numbers and incomplete addresses. For weeks, officials tried to track passengers using lists sent by the CDC, scouring information about each flight in separate spreadsheets. “It was insane”
Right now, the perception of agency at all levels is falling. Individuals, corporations, governments, heads of state, stock traders, the UN, everybody feels they’re losing the plot, but they don’t see anybody else finding it.
a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s
Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, 6 ka remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized. Megasites were cities like no others that have ever existed.
are suburbs the cradle of civilization?
tasks are so complicated that innovation suffers. by the time smart people have mastered a task, they’re too old to take risks.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 