The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change.
A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.
I was thinking of lately to the people holding power these days and their responsibility and involvements into the current state of affairs (politics, large corporations, climate/energy crisis, etc.)
I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth.
That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in.
Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
We still have plenty of problems we can solve but don’t. The concept of food insecurity should not exist as a problem in 20th century, but we still have it around.
Well you’re framing it as a problem that can’t be solved. My point was food insecurity is a problem that CAN be solved, but we don’t.
And the issue I take with the framing of “it encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub problem” is that if you use that excuse, a lot of things can be framed as unsolvable, including the ones that have been already solved. Going to the moon is a solved problem. But if you say we can no longer go to the moon because it would mean solving the conflict between people don’t want to spend on the project and people who do, then going to the moon becomes an unsolvable problem.
expertise and funding to build a rocket, years of training to sustain and adjust to the lack of atmosphere,and the priveledge of being chosen to man these machines which only house maybe a few dozen astronauts at most. All solvable problems, though there's a huge policial/social slant which may obstruct your goal. Maybe you get filtered out for not having a degree, or simply because a director's son got dibs over you. Maybe NASA got defunded and no one gets to go.
I don't really know what the point here is. These are all solvable problems. Not by an individual, but it doesn't take as many key individuals to influence as you'd expect. Likewise, forming a treaty doesn't take as many key individuals as you'd think, but the political roadblocks and other internal incentives block a lot of this progress.
It sounds like social/political problems as well as funding are indeed problems in the causal chain of going to the moon that are not solved.
From what I'm gathering, people consider a problem solved if the engineering problems are solvable. The point that I'm making is that social, political, and financial problems, if impediments, remain unsolved, because in fact one cannot "go to the moon" without solving them.
Only considering a problem real if it's in the engineering path is counterproductive to accomplishing the goal.
sadly there's at least a few more decades minimum, pending sudden turns of health or an abrupt event. 20 years is a lot of time to destabilize a nation.
> not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change.
I see what the author suggests play out routinely on a smaller scale though.
If you grew up with a narcissist, you can spot it in other people, when you see them taking over organizations if you speak up about it you're always the bad guy. Nobody wants to listen to it. Then everyone is surprised when it turns out badly in the end.
A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.