You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection.
Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.
Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?
Rejecting evidence that is right in front of our eyes because of some kind of religious faith or political beliefs.
Or rejecting research/statistics/math/science/etc. because of some anecdotal evidence.
Thinking that tailgating the vehicle directly in front of them will make thousands of other vehicles in front of that vehicle magically go faster. And many other reckless car-brain stunts.
Is this the root pathology behind traffic? Like, I never understood traffic, is there someone at the front refusing to go fast enough or is it the result of some distributed error like this that everyone mis-optimizes for that in aggregate results in traffic?
Based on a game* I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they’ll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:
- A slows down because it’ll turn
- B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
- C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
- […]
There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they’re often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.
*The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.
You forgot one solution.
Teaching people how to drive safe and smart. Way too many people focus on the car in front of them instead of the traffic ahead. If you watch for brake lights as far up as you can see and let off the gas when appropriate, not only will you be less likely to be in or cause a wreck, you will also save wear and tear on your brakes and use less gas (even more pronounced with regenerative braking).
In addition to the above. When you are driving a route you know well, get the fuck over from which ever side is more likely to be used to turn off. For most highways this means moving left before you near an onramp. Plan ahead and get over before you need to do so you don’t have to speed up or slow down to let people in.
That won’t help much. By the time anyone notices the roads are slowing down there are six times as many cars on it as it can safely handle. Driving skills will help on backroads, but that isn’t where most people are driving. No amount of training can make heavy traffic safe.
This is false and sets a bad example.
It will most definitely help. All it really will take is a certain percentage of people driving smart to make a difference.
As for safety. Heavy heavy traffic at a crawl is much safer than lighter traffic moving at or usually way above the speed limit. Yes, the chances of a rear-end collision are higher but no one is going to flip their car at 10mph. It’s the lighter traffic with idiots weaving in and out that makes it even more dangerous and more likely that someone dies when said idiot makes someone swerve out of the way or misjudges and hits something or someone they didn’t see coming.
I drive more miles in a couple of days than most people drive all month. I’ve probably racked up 500k+ miles in the past 25 years of driving. I’ve been almost run off the road more times than I can count and it wasn’t when traffic was at a crawl at the pinch points where traffic merges on to the highway.
Driving safely and smart is essential for other reasons, it does prevent additional bottlenecks (you mentioned one, wreckages), and it reduces the impact of the unavoidable bottlenecks (because the cars won’t waste so much time re-accelerating after them). But if my reasoning is correct, most of the time there isn’t much that drivers can do against traffic besides “don’t use the car”.
Laughs in good public transit(rail based is based, but buses are good too), where it can achieve 10~100x the capacity in the same footprint
With rail, as long as you have a good timetable and a robust signaling system, 27tpdph with multiple service patterns is achievable, and >33tpdph if you run just one service pattern, all while having a top speed of 120km/h and an average speed of >50km/h
Railway in general (excluding Line-of-sight based light rail and trams) can move stupendous amounts of people at full speed really quickly due to signaling and mass transit inherently being more efficient in general
Most of the time and places a city doesn’t need that capacity. Since your rail cannot get the garbage from my house, or my new bed to the house, we need roads as well. Thus for most a bus running in mixed traffic (remember most roads do not have heavy traffic!) is good enough and a lot cheaper. Where you need capacity a train is really good, but you don’t need it.
That said I support trains in a lot more places because trains can run fully automated and thus in the real world can achieve the high frequency people need to choose transit even when a car isn’t a problem to own (they can afford it and there is no traffic). This is however just a stop gap since self driving buses don’t exist (yet?). In most “first world” countries cost of labor is high and automated trains are thus useful in places where a bus could do the job.
It may be helpful to think of it as a stream or a river, and not a collection of individual drivers. We can only control ourselves, not the stream. People working so hard to put themselves and others at risk are maybe shaving a minute or so off of their commute. Just not worth the risk.
Traffic is a numbers game. I’ve often observed that in free flowing traffic where I live (a tiny city with only about 700k people in the entire metro) that if you take two cars that are a safe following distance apart there will be 5 cars in between. If we put in 6 times as many lanes (already a 3-4 lane freeway each way, so we are talk 20 lanes for my tiny city!) traffic wouldn’t go any faster, but they would space out to most maintaining a safe following distance. (if you put in 7 times as many lanes they would get farther apart yet, but still not go faster)
There is research showing that adding lanes only helps for maybe six months. Then people realize that the route is better and change the routes they take, which leads to more congestion again. Fewer lanes can actually decrease congestion.
https://smv.org/learn/blog/how-does-roadway-expansion-cause-more-traffic/
That research is useless! Sure they measured it, so it isn’t wrong. However it is useless. What it is really saying is your city was so bad that people were not taking advantage of living in the city because they couldn’t conveniently get places. Those people could have lived in rural Montana for all the good a city did. Cities are about all the things you can do by living in it, so if people change because of new roads then you are a city were not meeting their ideals.
Also note that they measured one lane. I already asserted that by the time a city is thinking about adding one more lane they already need to add 6 times as many lanes (not 6 more lanes, 6 times!) IF your city needs 6 times more lanes than it has, no wonder people are choosing alternates, and once a lane exists they will start using it.
Again, the moral is build transit in cities.
If I’m understanding correctly, your example wouldn’t apply to a highway that is experiencing heavy congestion.
It would, but worse. Both are a case of more cars than there is space. Heavy congestion would just need a lot more lanes to fix - maybe 10x as many. (don’t ask me to pay for that or where those lanes go)
Or in short, support better transit for your city. For that cost of miles of 15 lane highways you can put in a lot of transit.
Transit? PUBLIC transit? Wow that sounds a lot like socialism! Why do you hate freedom?!
/s
No, PRIVATE transit. I don’t support the government building roads - that is meddling in the natural state of things and makes private industry unable to compete. If you must have socialist roads than you must have socialist transit as well, but I reject that.
I just drop a mph every couple seconds until they fuck off. Don’t break check, as that’s super dangerous for you and everyone around you; don’t change lanes to accommodate them (unless you’re the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO), since transitions are when accidents tend to happen; but you can absolutely slowly annoy a tailgater until they leave your bubble.
If you do this in the left lane and cars are passing you on the right, you in fact are the asshole.
Very strong emphasis on the “unless you’re the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO” part of my post!
I get tailgated all the time despite being in the right lane . Sometimes I can see that person hang up their phone, finally look and move over. (This was on a rural highway, I was doing 20 under the limit and over 15 minutes 3 other cars passed without issues, which accounts for a 5 cars going my direction in that time)
Sure, but I’m the guy doing the speed limit in the right lane.
LOL, I also do the passive-aggressive slowdown thing. 99% of the time it works. But then there’s that rare psycho that refuses to get off your ass just to…uh…prove a point…by slowing themselves down? There was a post on schmeddit several years ago where a guy came to a complete stop in the middle of nowehere with the tailgator just sitting 1" from his bumper.
My favorite are the red light racers who have to pass me while I’m going the speed limit and zoom to the next stop light… Just so they can wait at a red light longer than I do.
A friend of mine calls that “racing to stop”.
You get off the line to get across the intersection so that everyone queued behind you can get across before the light turns red again.
I’m amazed that so many people fail to realise that there is a solid time penalty for dawdling off the line.
I’m not dawdling off the line though. I’m just not going 10 over the speed limit like this guy in the lifted truck wants.
Sadly it works out for them overall. It only takes a few times of getting to the next light as it turns yellow and they are way ahead while you are sitting there at a red light. Sure sometimes you get to see them when it doesn’t work out, but when it works out they are long gone.
Timing traffic lights is a hard problem.
This isn’t my experience. Traffic lights are extremely easy to time. Assuming you can see the other lights, watch them. There are a few lights in my city that have a right turn light while the other is red, when the turn light goes yellow that means the red will be green soon. I regularly blow past people sitting at the red while I coasted towards the red and gunned it as it turned green.
They also won’t be going anywhere when they get t-boned by someone else doing the exact same thing or straight running a red. It’s not worth the risk.
Oh and this isn’t a race. The goal is to get to your destination safe and sound without hurting yourself or anyone else. The sooner more people realize that, the safer all of us will be.
I was referring to the city engineers timing all the lights in a city. As a driver paying attention can help, but when you have several square miles of road network, with roads unequally spaced, different speed limits and all the other weird stuff they do in a real city it is not easy. It gets worse if you go from city to a metropolitan area.
I have concluded we will never convince people of that enough to change behavior (they will answer the question correctly when asked, but drive the same) thus i’m supporting transit as much as possible.
Again not my experience. I grew up in Tampa and have lived/worked in other big cities like Charlotte. On the big main roads through town, the lights are usually timed so if you hit one green your golden (outside of extenuating circumstances) if you hit a red you’re screwed. They are also usually timed so if you hit a green and do the speed limit you should be fine and have all greens. It’s the idiots speeding or crawling that mess that up for themselves or others.
In addition to the above you have big cities like NYC, Vegas, etc that have a central traffic control and will change the timing to account for traffic. In my current city we don’t have that but a lot of the lights will go into red/yellow flashing mode where the main drag can cruise through but the cross street should be stopping but is free to go without waiting for the full cycle.
I’m not sure where you have lived or worked but in most places I’ve lived there have been only a couple of main thoroughfares and the rest all neighborhood roads that take twice as long even with traffic. Where I am now most of the time you are using the interstate to get across town east/west or for north/south you have like 3 options depending on where you are going. Some places you literally can’t get to without getting on the interstate or going some long ass way around.
Or constantly inching forward at a red light as if you moving the extra 5 feet will make any significant difference in the time it takes for you to get where you’re going.
That actually has purpose, sometimes. Some lights are triggered by a sensor in the road. If I feel like the light has been red longer than it should be I’ll inch up in case my car didn’t trigger the sensor. Same happens in reverse, cars will be stopped too far back to trigger it so everyone sits until either they move up or the programmed cycle kicks in.
The above said. You aren’t wrong. Plenty of people do that where there aren’t sensors, they also stick their nose way too far out, especially in the left turn lane.
Nah, this is in Toronto. Almost every light has so many cars waiting, it’s not a sensor thing. People are just so eager to get going.
We saw on mythbusters that tailgating is really good for fuel economy so we’re all just amateur scientists collecting data.
At highway speeds, tailgating 10 ft behind a 53 ft tractor-trailer will net you about a 39% boost in fuel economy. And further your fuel usage will drop by 100% after the trailer flattens your hood from a sudden stop maneuver!
Also, the closer you are to the trailer, the safer you are! Because the speed difference is much smaller, when you touch the trailer!
Scope.
Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like “well that’s just one guy.” I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.
But you are not wrong. I am wrong.
Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.
Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you’re saying there’s a chance, right? This is why we don’t react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.
We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.
To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.
I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale
I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.
Emergence is a hell of a thing
Great to know that “fucky” is an officially accepted sciency term.
In some cases that’s probably true. I’m not sure it applies to things like war, time, etc.
Probability. If something has a 50% chance of occuring, that does not mean it will happen every second time, and our brain has a very hard time rationalizing that. For example, we assume its near impossible to flip heads on a coin three times in a row when really, the probability is 12.5% - not that low. Another example would be something with a 95% chance of success - we naturally round up and assume thats basically garenteed success, but theres still a very decent chance of failure, esspecially on repeat attempts. Our brains are just not wired to handle randomness well, which is part of why gambling is so addicting and why games like X-Com have to rig the odds in the players favour to avoid pissing them off.
And that past random events have no influence on future ones.
If a coin landed on one side ten times in a row, it’s still a 50% chance on the next throw. Something a lot of people have trouble with.
No, but you see, the chance you get the same side twice is… (HH, HT, TH, TT) 50%, shit
When we add another toss, you get only two possibilities of always same side, and 6 that are not.
So which is it? The coin itself may always have 50/50, but the universe which tosses in a series doesn’t?
Every combination is equally likely we just ascribe special meaning to certain ones due to overactive pattern recognition. Hx6 is just as likely as any seeminly more random result from 6 consecutive throws there are just more options we don’t ascribe special meaning to.
This is my answer as well.
We have developed intuition around things like naive physics - you can catch a thrown frisbee without doing calculus in your head - but it’s really, really hard to think through statistical questions in an intuitive way.
It’s one reason I’m extremely skeptical about the utility of informed consent in medicine. A physician can tell a patient’s family that if they don’t do the procedure then the patient will definitely die, but if they do it there’s a 20% chance of complication A and a 5% chance of complication B. The right thing to do is plan on the complications happening and having a realistic idea of what that will entail. But people, especially under stress, really aren’t able to deal with that kind of thing as easily as they can deal with catching a ball thrown to them.
RPG games like Fortnite use an algorithm which tricks people into believing their skills are improving.
When you hit a pixel, it doesn’t automatically score a hit like Space Invaders, it runs an algorithm based on the time you have been playing the game to determine the amount of damage you cause. The more you play, the more “accurate” you become.
This kind of thing definitly exist, usually part of adaptative difficulty where for exemple you get an invisible buff after dying so you feel like you are improving.
But I fail to see that in fortnite since it’s a multiplayer game, only your skill and luck influence the outcome, not playtime. Fortnite isn’t an RPG either (As far as I know), so I guess you meant an other game ?deleted by creator
I never heard of that since I stopped playing asphalt but that seems like something Gameloft would do. Gameloft really fell off, they used to make good games…
But yeah, it can also be used badly, like making the game really easy after a purchase and then slowly go back to difficult. I don’t think I’ve heard of something like that yet, but it probably exist.
Sounds like the conspiracy BS I read in the call of duty subs on Reddit
That you cannot extract billions of years worth of stored energy from the earth (like oil and coal), release it, and expect there to be no consequences.
Humans aren’t much better than dogs taking a shit on the lawn in our little finite planetary backyard and kicking a few tufts of grass over it. Dumping stuff into the ocean or waterways. Can’t see it! Must be gone, right? Burying toxic chemicals. Can’t see it! Same with CO2.
Shit’s still there. Keep shitting everywhere and there’s no way you’re gonna avoid stepping in it eventually.
Many people, including myself, are too dumb to understand that other people don’t value the same thing in us that we value in others.
You see them try and become what they like, in order to try to appeal to others. “Well I wish I got more attention, so I’m going to give tons and tons of attention to others”. “I wish someone would make a grand romantic gesture to me, so I’m going to do that to someone else”. That kind of thing.
This is sometimes called “fundamental attribution error” although I think that concept covers a bit more ground.
This is not the fundental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is seeing an action from a person and assuming it is a fundamental attribute of them. Literally in the name. E.g. you seem someone being rude in public so you assume they are a rude person. Meanwhile if you are rude in public you chalk it up to being in a bad mood as a result of something that happened to you, not because you are a rude person.
It’s really similar to the fundamental attribution error, though, as you can see if phrased this way: “I value $foo by a certain amount because I’m a human being, thus other human beings value $foo as much as I do”.
This is the most charitable interpretation of why guys send dick pics
I think it’s exactly why they do it
I’m a guy, I received unannounced boob pics, that EXACTLY what men sending dick pics want.
Humans totally ignore that they are part of nature. Most think that reduced biodiversity won’t include them.
Most of us also ignore that ‘the world’ is a model in our heads that we’ve created with our senses. Some may make better models than others. But what does ‘better’ mean? Stubbing your toe less, getting sick less? Sherlock Holmes?
Also ‘the world’ is very complex and constantly changing. You’re either revising that model or, at some point, you’re living in the past.
In a lot of ways we aren’t though. The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time in a built environment of some type.
Even when we’re in the “outdoors”, most of us spend most of our time on manmade tracks or paths.
We engage with nature on our terms in a way that is very unique.
Deer mostly travel on trails they built themselves. They also change their environment greatly (the act of eating thins the trees)
They don’t drop off tonnes of gravel by helicopter to build a walking track to somewhere though.
That is a difference in degree though.
I kind of feel the opposite. Most people I know is wary of “destroying nature”.
I think meh. It is just getting streamlined. We are getting for the next phase of human civilization. We are more like an organism with white blood cells and well separated and controlled compartments of bacteria filled sacks. It is bound to get more homogenous.
Higher civilization means the meaning of biodiversity will change domains.
Capitalism isn’t purpose and purpose doesn’t exist.
I wouldn’t say they are too dumb to realize this necessarily, people are just misled by endless propaganda or don’t have the time and energy/skills to really contemplate things properly.
I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I’m not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that’s really it.
Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there’s no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can’t even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there’s no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.
And let’s not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can’t even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.
Well technically we can group things and do maths and we also have scientific notation, so there’s also that
Aye, really makes you appreciate just how important language and writing are to our society. Imagine what the parrots could accomplish with their base-17 number system, if they could write!
Earth is the only planet that we’re adapted to live on. Nowhere else will be as forgiving of our mistakes.
I suspect that colonizing Mars (or wherever else) will turn out to be much more than just an engineering problem. If we get things like food, water, atmosphere, and even gravity right, I think we’ll still find an endless list of requirements that we didn’t know were requirements… and some mystery problems that don’t seem to have any cause at all. Those problems will be because of factors we never thought of, or don’t even know how to detect.
There could also be surpluses/deficiencies in our diet or environment that will take years (or perhaps generations) to show up. Again, that would be because of unanticipated, and maybe unsolvable, problems.
I remember sitting in on a briefing from the Biosphere folks when they reached out for collaborating institutions. One of the things that stuck with me was that they discovered that trees that were not subject to wind failed to develop a healthy trunk and tended to fall over and die. That’s not something that the researchers had even thought of.
I suspect that there’s going to be a lot of that.
Interesting! Plus, that’s exactly the sort of weird, unanticipated thing I’m talking about. How do you plan for everything? You can’t.
The first human colonists (who are just ordinary people) won’t be the rich. They’ll be desperate people who are sold a dream of the future and treated as human lab rats.
Can I ask what year that was? We’ve known that greenhoused cuttings need an oscillating fan in order be able to hold themselves upright once they start to gain height for the 30 years that I’ve been growing that way. It’s like a little work out for them.
It would have been something like 2005 or so. It may have been a known fact at the time, but they mentioned specifically that they were caught by surprise by the phenomenon. I didn’t fault them for it - the whole project was kind of a mess. I’m a biologist and I wasn’t aware of that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.
That’s weird though. You’d think they would have had multiple botanists on the design team who could have pointed that out.
I’m sure it was just that no one realized it would scale to trees, since that hadn’t been done before. As far as I know you don’t have to do anything special in that regard with small seed-grown plants in a green house, only cuttings that root from stems, and so have weaker roots at first and stalks that were previously branches. I’m sorry I sounded critical, I was just curious.
Also there’s that documentary where the group that organized it was kind of cult adjacent. They weren’t scientists first. Still very interesting and impressive they did what they did.
We for sure will need to exercise, because low gravity turns our muscles into mush.
I could still see people trying to make it work for generations for some reason, many early colonists in the West died before stable states could be founded.
Holy shit, you’re right.
We’re playing permadeath on the easiest level, and failing.
When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.
This one is so baffling to me, it’s really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It’s really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you’d expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.
Same with elevators!
Worst with trains
Or getting baggage from the baggage claim at the airport
This one so much. How can people not realize if everyone stood back in a larger halo around the carousel, it would be so easy for everyone to get their bag when it’s up. I usually stand back at a distance, and if people have it completely blocked standing right next to it I grab right around them getting uncomfortably in their personal space.
The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate. We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates. Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
🍇 😡
You gonna eat those
We’re not yet in a post scarcity world. We’re tantalizing close, but not quite there yet.
There are three main areas we need to work on.
First is power generation. We need more, and it needs to be decupled from fossil fuels. Nuclear is the obvious answer for massive amounts of power output without using massive amounts of land, but fossil fuel lobbies have been hamstringing development since the 50s.
The important thing here isn’t just replacing fossil fuels. That would just leave us were we are now. No we need to double or triple world power generation as a start.
The second area that needs work is connected to the first. Transportation. Not just electric cars, but container ships and trains and everything in-between.
This is where that added power generation comes in. We need to make it basically free to move things from point A to point B. There are some ways to do this, particularly for container ships. But we need the raw power available before they become viable.
The final area is automation. We need more. Once people need to be put out of work in massive numbers. We need to decuple work from life.
That final step is the hardest with the most pitfalls. It will happen. Well, the automation and unemployment will happen. After that we can either spiral into a hell scape or rise above into a post scarcity utopia…
It really depends on when and how the guillotines come out
You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.
I study a lot of geopolitics and history and I have read of many different aid programs, domestically for citizens or abroad to poverty and war stricken countries.
Unfortunately it’s not as easy as dumping a bunch of money, food or whatever resource into the problem. For example there are cities with tons of homeless shelters but many stay on the streets. There are massive teams of social workers dedicated to helping people in need but many of them refuse their help.
When it comes to countries sometimes this aid is embezzled and only given to those loyal to the government. Sometimes used to fuel armies to continue conflicts, or just disappear into corruption and resold by crooked politicians to make a profit. Additionally it can hurt local, and in turn, the wider economy. The aid distributed for free kills many local businesses and livelihoods because you can compete with free.
Especially when you have some stupid company pulling a publicity stunt to send their own products as aid to struggling countries. One example was this brand of shoes that would donate a pair for every pair sold. This “friendly gesture” killed off all local cobblers, shoe manufacturers, shoe stores and prevented anyone from doing so to make a living, not to mention preventing self sufficiency of the country. That’s just one example, there are a lot of companies and misguided companies that do exactly this and many economists recommend that these poor countries should refuse this aid.
Despite it being parroted by the terminally online, we do not live in a post-scarcity world.
Gambling. Everyone knows the house always wins and the exact probability of winning any specific lottery but people can’t grasp this. I don’t know how people look at these massive luxurious casinos and think they win against this company with an unfathomably profitable business model by taking money from people who think they can win.
I think the logic there is not that they constantly win against the casino, but more that they only need to get lucky once or twice. They just see that some people, sometimes win and there is no reason that they would not be the winners. Not sure I’m being clear about it but I hope you get my point.
It makes it more understandable but I also think of it as “what is going to make ME win versus all of the thousand other poor souls here”
I play the lottery a few times a year for the following reasons:
-Permission to dream about what I would buy if I won for a few days
-Justification for bitching about not winning the lotteryLottery: tax for dreams.
Instead of buying a ticket I just search the sidewalk for the winning ticket (that someone else lost) while I’m otherwise doing my normal activities. My odds are winning are nearly the same as someone who buys a ticket, so I can dream just as much - but I can spend the money on something else.
First, someone has to have bought the winning ticket. Then, that same person needs to have lost the winning ticket. Next, that person has to have lost that ticket near where you are. And finally, you have to find that lost ticket.
So while both situations are very very far from certainty, and both are approaching zero, one of the two is much, much closer to zero than the other.
Things that take place over too long a period of time. Like heart disease, injustice, climate change, diabetes, addiction etc. We’re evolved to prioritise short term pleasure over long term benefits, hence that cigarette, drink, line, burger is so difficult to say no to.
I think uncertainty plays a big role here.
You could bump a line and smoke a pack a day and get to 90.
You could do nothing harmful and die at 30.
Even if you make it to 90 avoiding lots of fun, was it worth it or would you rather trade 20 years for more fun?
At the end of the day it is a matter of personal risk tolerance towards an impossible to quantify risk.
As someone who treated their 20s like that, I strongly suggest at least dabbling in restraint along the way. Hell, shibari counts.
The zipper merge.
