alt Hacker NewsWe've made the world too complicated
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Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.
Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
"To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. " I am learning that a "Just this" attitude, like in these words, improves our experience of life. You may enjoy a Kwan Um school (or other) Zen group, where this is reinforced continually.
I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.
At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.
The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.
This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.
"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy
This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences.
"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."
The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears.
There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
> Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
I think it’s the opposite - Kant did too.
But modern way of life don’t leave time and space for people to think about right and wrong. One really has to elevate his spirit to begin pondering about that, most people are living for the next paycheck.
Kindest advice: read Derek Sivers's "how to live". Think of it as a distilled wisdom and a choose your own adventure book which will give you perspective, options, frustration and probably become a "quake book".
Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account.
If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...
"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."
Who is this "the world"
Anyway keep up the writing.
Have a great day/evening/night
I think the key is to find the right work/life balance to maintain a fulfilling life. For the work portion of your life, you should find problems that interest you and people that you enjoy working with. For your life balance, you should connect with nature in way that resonates with you, be it hiking or growing food, or exploring new places. And of course, in your life balance you should have relationships that can bring witness to your life's journey and help you along the way.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand
that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.
Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.
>I want to never pay with money or read a written word again
not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in
>Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.
>Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.
a life unexamined is not worth living
There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.
The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
I'm paying someone €500 a year to file my taxes and I just want to go back to trading sea shells. Why do systems have to be so complicated. I have to pay my road tax in bills and I get my change in coins what is that about.
This is just one detail, but I think something must have gone wrong if you go for a walk and even the "city-owned sidewalk" seems part of an alienating scene? How are sidewalks part of the problem?
This argument has been made before by Vernor Vinge in his 1999 novel A Deepness In The Sky: civilisations fall due to the sheer complexity they accumulate.
> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)
I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles
I was trying to explain to my wife how I felt last night. AI and the pressure to use it and balancing the potential and with the pitfalls is stressing me out. But it’s more than that.
This post perfectly captures the feeling.
Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world.
Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.
So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.
I don't want to downplay the argument, and more importantly - the author's feelings about the topic, but I'd suggest (unsolicited, sorry) the author take some hobbies away from the screen, find a decent friend or two and spend more time with them, and stop or at least reduce the time spent reading news/twitter/whatever.
Maybe the goal isn't to reject complexity entirely, but to be much more suspicious of complexity that gives no corresponding increase in dignity, beauty, autonomy or peace
this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.
You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.
We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.
I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.
Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.
I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.
With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.
Just as it has always been.
EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.
Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).
So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.
relax man, just go and touch some grass, there is no 'we', do what you wanna do, go where you wanna go.
also, block the internet for a while, buy a commodore and code some machine code, make a forth, you will be alright.
read `the soul of a new machine`.
the world is in the middle of a storm right now, you cant do much, but weather through it.
> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
The world doesn't need another JavaScript framework.
There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
the world is far more complicated than we may ever understand, what we're doing is quaint by comparison
I think another framing could be: the world doesn’t have to be this complicated
It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.
Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?
And it's all for what, really? I read an article earlier today about plans to build a data center the size of Manhattan. I want everyone reading my small comment to please just think about that for a second. Just think about it. What are we doing? We lived for thousands of years without this kind of technoforming activity. Why are we doing this to our planet, to what end?
> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
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Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.
Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.