> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.
rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').
But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.
"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"
It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
I hear this complaint here a lot and I guess there are more cameras, but arrests have gone down in absolute terms in the US despite growing population.
> The total number of arrests in the U.S. fell sharply in 2020 during pandemic-driven shifts in public activity and enforcement—and it has changed little since then. The 2024 arrest total was 25% lower than in 2019, the year before the pandemic, and half the number in the peak year of 1997. The combination of falling arrests and rising resident population has driven down the national arrest rate, which in 2024 was 30% lower than in 2019 and 71% below its peak in 1994.
I think most (non-online) people would prefer more enforcement of laws. I've never had a conversation in real life where someone argued there should be less order and enforcement. That's an insane position to take and ahistorical. The idea you hear online that you can get rid of prisons. It's neither left nor right. You think failed communist states didn't arrest people? It's an idea whose intellectual roots go back only around 50 years and for good reason. It doesn't work, or at least doesn't produce societies that endure and get passed on.
> Climate disasters
Similarly, climate related deaths worldwide have dropped and continue to do so, pretty much a straight line. This is a more reliable proxy than the $1b damage climate events, because the other is due to development on risky coast lines and overall increase in property values above inflation.
> Economic decline
The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing. So it's a bit of a barbell. But I'll also note that many of these measures are households, and there have been changes in typical households. Many people are staying single well into their 30s which means its a household of 1 compared to what would be a 2 person household in the past
> Done warfare
Isn't this better than boots on the ground? I don't think the problem is technology, it's armed conflict. I guess if you consider that armed conflicts are more likely because nations don't need to put as much lives at risk, and maybe that is a factor. But I'm not convinced somehow drones are driving this.
The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city when drones fly directly over your house while you wait for them do dive or get missile defenced into it, a neighbour's house, or somewhere else, and then hear explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people died this night, to such little grief in news' comments it makes you wonder if there is any hope for this humankind at all.
> Growing is size maybe, but the middle and lower classes are both getting much richer.
This is an illusion caused by poor measurement. You can argue all you want about how much a pickup truck's safety/bell and whistles have improved, but from the 60s - 80s, a day laborer carpenter could purchase a new truck on a third of their salary. Now a truck that serves the same function is 1.5x their salary.
This is much too simplistic and ignores the compounding effects of bad decisions. It’s basically an argument for the happy path where nothing goes wrong but things have been going wrong for a long time. We are facing many economic, political, cultural and environmental problems that are the direct result of a viewpoint like this, that everything will just keep getting better if we keep doing more of the same thing without taking a hard look at what the longer term effects of the “progress” we’ve made along the way. We keep doubling down on the same strategies though and so things are continuing to escalate as we accumulate bugs in the system without fixing anything fundamental, worse we continue to chip away at the things that were working well.
Every time we try to fix anything fundamental, we end up with revolutions that make everything much worse and sometimes just get stuck in their new dystopia. Meanwhile incrementalist economies+democracies are racing ahead quite well.
When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.
We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.
It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.
More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.
Not sure if this is clear or how to call it.
2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
A few notes about your comment, that I feel is well-meaning but carries a lot of common misconceptions:
- aiming for an end goal is not fine in most cases, it is simply a very common, terrible idea. You need a process, not a goal. "Journey over destination", yadda yadda
- 99% of human behaviour is governed by processes we call habits. Operating on the habit system is the key to long-term behavioural change, but one also has to recognize replacing habits is a long, delicate affair and one tends to ask too much of themselves. The metaphor I carry in my head is you're trying to steer a bull with a feather; easy does it. "Tiny Habits" is a good self-help book with good science behind it
- life is indeed dynamic but I feel such a hyper-rational, mechanistic way of approaching the conundrum is setting yourself up to failure. I recommend philosophy rather, especially Taoism, to embrace all of these concepts into a unified worldview of change: change being intrinsic to the universe, doing with little effort, and not forcing yourself (to burnout). You are not a machine.
Appreciate your thoughts. I think if we sat down and talked we would agree on a lot of things.
re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process.
re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits.
re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.
Agreed on most things, but it’s worth remembering why we have habits: because it’s much less energy-intensive, and brains are energy minimizer machines. It takes a lot of energy and effort to adopt a new habit. The philosophy angle is to remind one we are not machines and we will never be. The healthiest approach is to work with the grain (of our brain lol), not against it.
In software architecture, we often learn this exact lesson the hard way. Building a system optimized for a single, static perfect end-state almost always results in a fragile codebase.
The most resilient systems aren't built to reach a final form.They are built to be highly observable and easy to pivot when requirements inevitably change. Optimizing for adaptability (what you call dynamic goals) is far more valuable than optimizing for a fixed milestone. It's fascinating to see this engineering principle applied so perfectly to personal life.
This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards.
I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".
So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to look at it is that self-control lifts people up, and the accumulation or dissipation of wealth is consequent upon self-control. Pro athletes and lottery winners who never learned to manage budgets growing up tend to run through their money quickly and end up poor again because they lack the self-control needed to maintain and accumulate wealth. Having or lacking money is a result, not a cause; changing the consequent without addressing what is antecedent to the consequent will not result in lasting change.
Ah yes the old "structural failing is actually a moral failing of the losers".
If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.
Ideally, it's less "redistribute billionaires' wealth" so much as "figure out what parts of the system allow some people to accumulate money orders of magnitude more than the effort they've put in, and tune them to allow anyone who works to afford a comfortable life".
As it is, money makes money, while effort alone makes barely enough to scrape by (or not even that much). There are many, many paths to fix it, and they don't need to simply move the money around. There are assumptions that deserve more consideration, and they can lead to better results.
At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. The author deliberately doesn't wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
> At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year.
We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all.
> The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant.
Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.
"If Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease which is evidently opposite to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."
Isn't this just a case of euphemism treadmill? The Culture and Star Trek are clearly utopian visions of the future and also fits this protoian definition 100%. There is no difference, except that some people think, incorrectly, that you can jump from the current society (imo a utopia itself by any time traveller from 150 years ago) to a new ideal world without passing the intermediate steps. I think of these people as the creationists of social evolution, just totally wrong on basic facts and intellectually dishonest.
> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.
rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').
But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.
"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"
It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
I hear this complaint here a lot and I guess there are more cameras, but arrests have gone down in absolute terms in the US despite growing population.
> The total number of arrests in the U.S. fell sharply in 2020 during pandemic-driven shifts in public activity and enforcement—and it has changed little since then. The 2024 arrest total was 25% lower than in 2019, the year before the pandemic, and half the number in the peak year of 1997. The combination of falling arrests and rising resident population has driven down the national arrest rate, which in 2024 was 30% lower than in 2019 and 71% below its peak in 1994.
I think most (non-online) people would prefer more enforcement of laws. I've never had a conversation in real life where someone argued there should be less order and enforcement. That's an insane position to take and ahistorical. The idea you hear online that you can get rid of prisons. It's neither left nor right. You think failed communist states didn't arrest people? It's an idea whose intellectual roots go back only around 50 years and for good reason. It doesn't work, or at least doesn't produce societies that endure and get passed on.
> Climate disasters
Similarly, climate related deaths worldwide have dropped and continue to do so, pretty much a straight line. This is a more reliable proxy than the $1b damage climate events, because the other is due to development on risky coast lines and overall increase in property values above inflation.
> Economic decline
The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing. So it's a bit of a barbell. But I'll also note that many of these measures are households, and there have been changes in typical households. Many people are staying single well into their 30s which means its a household of 1 compared to what would be a 2 person household in the past
> Done warfare
Isn't this better than boots on the ground? I don't think the problem is technology, it's armed conflict. I guess if you consider that armed conflicts are more likely because nations don't need to put as much lives at risk, and maybe that is a factor. But I'm not convinced somehow drones are driving this.
https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-...
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire...
> Isn't this better than boots on the ground?
The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city when drones fly directly over your house while you wait for them do dive or get missile defenced into it, a neighbour's house, or somewhere else, and then hear explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people died this night, to such little grief in news' comments it makes you wonder if there is any hope for this humankind at all.
> The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing.
Growing is size maybe, but the middle and lower classes are both getting much richer.
This is an illusion caused by poor measurement. You can argue all you want about how much a pickup truck's safety/bell and whistles have improved, but from the 60s - 80s, a day laborer carpenter could purchase a new truck on a third of their salary. Now a truck that serves the same function is 1.5x their salary.
When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.
We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.
It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.
More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.
Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
- aiming for an end goal is not fine in most cases, it is simply a very common, terrible idea. You need a process, not a goal. "Journey over destination", yadda yadda
- 99% of human behaviour is governed by processes we call habits. Operating on the habit system is the key to long-term behavioural change, but one also has to recognize replacing habits is a long, delicate affair and one tends to ask too much of themselves. The metaphor I carry in my head is you're trying to steer a bull with a feather; easy does it. "Tiny Habits" is a good self-help book with good science behind it
- life is indeed dynamic but I feel such a hyper-rational, mechanistic way of approaching the conundrum is setting yourself up to failure. I recommend philosophy rather, especially Taoism, to embrace all of these concepts into a unified worldview of change: change being intrinsic to the universe, doing with little effort, and not forcing yourself (to burnout). You are not a machine.
re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process.
re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits.
re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.
Thanks for the gratifying discussion
The most resilient systems aren't built to reach a final form.They are built to be highly observable and easy to pivot when requirements inevitably change. Optimizing for adaptability (what you call dynamic goals) is far more valuable than optimizing for a fixed milestone. It's fascinating to see this engineering principle applied so perfectly to personal life.
I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".
So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.
As it is, money makes money, while effort alone makes barely enough to scrape by (or not even that much). There are many, many paths to fix it, and they don't need to simply move the money around. There are assumptions that deserve more consideration, and they can lead to better results.
Citation needed. Humans have never been richer in medicine, tech, social mobility, pick your measurement.
We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all.
> The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant.
Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.