The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
Sounds like he just read history, noticed repeating patterns, and believed his own eyes. It sucks that makes him some kind of special person, instead of "people" just being the kind of thing that commonly does stuff like that.
I don't know, man. I'm at a point where not even the tangible effects on me that the policies and decisions some members of my family endorse are enough to get them to think twice.
I can sit right in front of them and describe the problems I'm now dealing with and point out the exact legislative changes that caused them and it's like their brains turn off until the subject changes. More than happy to pray for me, though.
Do you think there's a possibility that while they may love you and sympathize with your struggles, they recognize that with any policy some people will be negatively affected?
The idea is to have political policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit, for the most people.
Is it possible that this is the way they are viewing it, and that perhaps you are the one who isn't thinking critically because you're being directly negatively affected?
Definitely reasonable to question oneself in this way. But realistically, if someone is unwilling to engage with you about policies that negatively affect you, but instead offer their prayers, that "perhaps..." is working overtime.
Normally I'm pretty good at extending intellectual generosity. But for them, it's at the level of voting for a candidate who supports cuts to Medicaid and then wondering why it's suddenly infinitely harder for me to get through to anyone about assistance (not even for myself, for them) following staffing cuts.
"This isn't what I voted for" is a common utterance. They can't help themselves, so I do my best to help, while they undercut my options to help them.
Asimov and Feynman also spoke about similar things (along with many others)
In 1980, Asimov famously wrote The Cult of Ignorance[0], criticizing the rise of anti-intellectualism. Where there was a strong political push of "don't trust the experts". He criticizes claims that sound familiar today "America has a right to know" on the basis of this being meaningless without literacy. He clarifies that literacy is far more than being able to actually read words on a page, but to interpret and process them. Asimov isn't being pretentious, his definition is consistent with how we determine reading levels[2] and his critique would be that most people do not have that of a Freshman in High School. Hell, it is even in his fiction! It is even in The Foundation and is literally the premise of Profession[3].
Feynman is a bit more scattered, but I think his discussion about the education system in Brazil (in the 50's) says a lot[4]. He talks a lot about how the students could recite the equations, ace all the tests, and achieve everything that looks to be, at least on paper, perfectly academic; but how the students did not really have the deeper understanding of the equations. It is a discussion about literacy. Were he around today I'm sure he'd use the phrase "metric hacking". Anyone that knows Feynman may also be thinking about his Cargo Cult Science[5](a commencement speech at Cal Tech (1974)). This is where his famous quote
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
comes from. But there is a lot of important context surrounding this and it is worth knowing about.
[3] Profession has been in discussion lately, directly relating to this topic. If you haven't read it I'll say it is one of my favorite's of his. Not as good as Foundation but up there with Nightfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
I wanted to add Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. Sometimes I feel it should be required reading before arguing on the internet. I find myself coming back to read it at least once a year
So openClaw bots are now even infesting HN with absolutely non-sense phrases ? WTF. Would be interesting what the recent stats on this say @dang / e.g. % new registrations since the claw-debacle, profiles with claw in their username , etc.
> The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays.
>> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
Not really. His prediction actually seems pretty off-base, with only some bits that are coincidentally correct. For instance, he seems to attributing the cause of that decline to superstition, when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on pursing their narrow self-interest.
I don't know the full context of that passage, but my read comports with my understanding of Sagan's biases.
I kind of agree. I find that almost everyone I meet has a firm grasp on tech topics affect their lives. From social media to privacy, they seem to understand the fundamental questions even though they aren't programmers or CISOs or whatever.
Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else.
As economist Stevie Wonder once said,
"When you believe in things that you don't understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain't the way"
> Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs.
I think it's too much of a stretch to label anything "irrational" as superstition.
I think both the purported benefits of the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization rely on plausible-but-false belief in the outcomes created by the 'invisible hand'/selfishness-at-scale, but I wouldn't call it superstition, just wrong.
Also, I think the connotations of words are pretty important, and there are a lot of words that for the most part mean the same thing with different connotations. If I had to describe the connotation of superstition, its an action believed to have an effect, but that effect is a total non-sequitur. At least with what we're talking about, there's at least a plausible basis for believing the effect will happen, even it that basis is wrong.
> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.
>> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
> That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
I think you (and Sagan) are getting the causality backwards. Unrestrained capitalism doesn't serve people, it serves money. "Widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism" is a reaction to an economic system that doesn't serve the common person and is very resistant to change.
Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
I think it's also worth dilating on this notion of "unrestrained capitalism". Capitalism is after all a product of restraints, namely the enforcement of property, contracts, and the validity of money.
> Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
Capitalism doesn't work to satisfy the wants and needs of the people in a society, generally. It works to satisfy the wants and needs of the people who have money, in proportion to the amount of money they have. If you don't have money but need something, Capitalism says "kindly FOAD." If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more.
So as inequality increases and wealth gets concentrated, a capitalist ceremony (without more restraints that we have) will increasingly neglect the needs of a large fraction of the people in society.
A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs, generally (usually just lazily generalizing from US vs. USSR circa 1980), but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
> If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more.
I share this concern about access to scarce goods, though I'm not sure what these scarcity catastrophes look like in practice. To generalize your example, if there is some scarce resource, at most some number N of the wealthiest demanders (which can include corporations such as unions or communes, not just individuals) can access it. I certainly agree that this is a failing of a capitalism, but it's not clear to me how you would propose adjusting it's tenets to recover these drawbacks, and at what additional cost. Like, if the issue is we want to ensure everyone can get what they need to survive, I imagine you can't allow buyers and sellers to negotiate prices, there has to be some neutral third party to do this. And if this modification to prices disincentivizes extraction, production, or delivery of these goods how you would force people to do those jobs.
I hope this doesn't sound like a strawman, I'm just honestly unclear on what should replace what are seemingly basic and natural rights, namely property, physical autonomy, contracts, whatever. I won't pretend that in e.g. the US these rights haven't been abridged whilst the sky remains suspended above us, but my imagination fails me on the question what it looks like when we shave away more of those rights, versus restoring them. Though I'd also imagine that your policy prescriptions would probably include both abridgements and restorations of these rights, so don't let me speak for you.
> A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs,
An apologist here. "Capitalism" is a legion - a near continuum of systems - some of them can meet people's needs quite well.
> but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
It's not an intrinsic part of its popular tradition but there's noting preventing us from adding it to the program in some sensible manner. The lack of guarantees isn't mandatory either, such can be added within the framework of capitalism.
No, I wouldn't say that. I knew what I was good at, and like I say was pretty inured to rejection. I had plenty of confidence, but I think it's a show vs tell issue. I'm thrilled to do the first, but the latter makes me squirm. I think, even since my theatre career, that I've lost opportunities to people more comfortable with self-promotion, when skill is equal or even in my favor.
> a human may make an "(un)ethical" decision based on their social background, religion, a chat with a pal over a beer about the conundrum, their ability to find a new job, financial situation etc.
The stories they invent to rationalise their behaviour and make them feel good about themselves. Or inhumane political views ie fascism which declares other people worth less, so it's okay to abuse them.
Yes, humans tell themselves stories to justify their choices. Are you telling yourself the story that only bad humans do that, and choosing to feel that you are superior and they are worth less? It might be okay to abuse them, if you think about it…
There is quite a difference between indians going to "work" in a shiny building in the business district and native chinese held captive in Myanmar and forced to scam people in China.
Seiken Densetsu 3 is good too. Only released in Japan but got translated by fans to be played on emulators. Now part of Collection of Mana for Switch and officially remade in 3D for Switch, PS4, XBox and Windows named Trials of Mana.
As a SoM fan I'd hesitate to give it 11/10, mostly due to how the optimal strat for an action game is how you menu through spells, interrupting combat flow.
Yeah, I had great memories of secret of mana and SD3 (emulated in translation, I think that was Aeon Genesis?) and I replayed them with my partner in 2020. For a few hours. Honestly, kinda miserable.
Single player it was less fun than I remembered, multiplayer it was awful. SD3 is a beautiful game, and very overrated.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...
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