Ask HN: What got us stuck into our greedy, environment killing ways?

3 points by Clownshoesms 9 years ago | 3 comments

As IT people, I thought I'd like to ask other IT people what they think about the current state of play. VC's can go back to their yachts and paid whores.

Have we, as developers, sysadmins, IT people in general, been co-opted into an advertising scheme? Why does Google produce so much pure revenue?

Is constant growth OK on a finite planet? Who started this?

billsimms 9 years ago |

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 9 years ago |

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 9 years ago |

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