Even if they're money/energy sinks, people don't have enough savings to invest in a more efficient rebuild.
Poverty is always expensive. That's what keeps people trapped in it.
If it were cheap to be poor, it wouldn't be poverty. It's the fact that you get bled for your time, money, energy and anything else you've got that makes people poor.
A speculative execution bug? I like the sound of that.
Another HN once theorised / joked that the speed of light was the maximum value an integer could store and planks length was the smallest floating point number.
> A few weeks ago, I was mailing my friend a gift for his upcoming birthday when I recalled that he got me nothing for my birthday. I experienced a flash of anger, and was tempted to trash the package instead of mailing it.
This speaks more to the author’s selfishness (more accurately childishness) rather than anger. The need to be completely reciprocated in every gesture is selfish and speaks to a zero-sum mindset.
I know first-hand: Like the author I have been prone to fly off the handle much of my life, and only recently (past year or so) have realized that I was equating reciprocity with justice, and that is an incredibly narrow view of the world.
This was an eye-opener: If everyone gave only as much as they got, the world would be a significantly meaner place. Rather, it’s those who give without receiving that make the world a better place.
Since then, I stopped keeping score, give what I can when I can, and receive happily whatever is given to me, without judgement, although I am still working on that last bit (You gave me what?!?..), but then I’ve also stopped trying to be perfect.
It sounds like there's some stuff in your analogy that is similar to the QM situation. I would caution against placing too much emphases on these analogies though since a very important aspect of all of this is not just that the two systems are correlated but rather that they are entangled.
There's a classic analogy to this when we talk about entanglement: imagine taking a pair of gloves and mixing them up. Put one in one box and the other in another box. Send one of the boxes far away. When you look down at the box that you kept, there is no way of knowing if it contains a left handed or a right handed glove; it's a 50/50 shot either way. Similarly you have no idea what the other box contains. You then decide to open your box and find a right handed glove. You then immediately know that the other box contains a left handed glove. In some sense this feels similar to what we see in entanglement but I don't think most people would claim that you opening your box somehow compelled the other glove to pick left/right. They were just always that way, you just didn't know which glove was where.
The claim, however, is that in QM it's not like this. Instead, your act of measuring your system actually does compell the other system to change.
For a long time there were a lot of heated arguments around all of this (most prominently between Einstein and Bohr) trying to figure out if the state of either box was truly undecided until you opened it or if there could have been some type of "hidden variable" that we had yet not discovered that nonetheless dictated what the state was (i.e. could it be more like the glove example or was it truly a new "spooky action at a distance"?)
For a long time physicists believed that this was an unanswerable question and should be relegated to philosophy. It wasn't until Bell discovered his inequality that this was dispelled. He designed an experiment that could be conducted to tell the two stories apart. When it was carried out, it was determined that nature is not like the glove example but rather consistent with the truly quantum story around entanglement. In other words, your measurement of your system actually does compelled the other system to change.
(First-order) causality actually isn't hard to determine in environments where first-order effects dominate. The way to determine causality here is through a combination of physical laws and controlled experimentation [1]. In fact, we have plenty of causal models (e.g. 1st principles physics-based models, or design-of-experiments models). Without these models, machines/control systems/etc would not work.
The trouble is, outside of these 1st-order effect dominant, deterministic environments, causality becomes much harder. In complex systems, stochasticity, nonlinearity, feedback loops and higher-order effects dominate. There's also emergent behavior -- properties that are true in the small are not true in the large.
Consider a complex system like human society -- can we truly determine causality of broad interventions? Likely not in a first-order way like in the physical sciences. We can do it imperfectly through tools like causal inference (Rubin) which makes much more modest claims about the "strength" of effects (average causal effect). Randomized Controlled Tests (RCT) is another tool for making causal claims.
But in a complex world, 2nd, 3rd and higher order effects dominate and so the notion of root causes itself becomes ambiguous. Richard I. Cook once said "post-accident attribution to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong". Though humans are attracted to the idea of a chain of simple causes (which is why we have the myth of Mrs O'Leary's cow kick over a lantern and starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871), there's typically no easily-identified root cause. First-order causal thinking assumes a Directed-Acyclic-Graph (DAG) idea of a causality chain which converge into a set of effects, but the reality is that such a DAG, if it can be represented, is likely to be infinitely complex in a complex environment.
First-order causal thinking is an insufficient mental model in a complex environments.
Instead, I think instead of aiming for a deep understanding of epistemic causality (where we try to know and represent causality), it's probably more useful to focus on instrumental causality (where we aim to know the main points of leverage that are effective in changing the system). I think we'll likely get very far just by finding the knobs that have the most effect on the variables we would like to change (that don't also simultaneously change variables that we wouldn't want to change).
[1] to determine causality, we typically have to perturb the system -- determining causality through observational data is possible, e.g. via natural experiments, but there are many epistemic restrictions which limit the claims that can be made.
I don't mean to insult or claim you're not thinking thoroughly or clearly, but this appears to me to be gross oversimplification of several deep topics wrt developing new technologies, the mission to advance the advent of sustainable energy and transport, and founding billion-dollar companies.
Also I think it's intellectually dishonest to claim you would be incapable of your perceived level of dishonesty, because you yourself are selling the idea that it's dishonest based on these gross oversimplifications.
Having worked for multiple tech corporations, this idea that creativity levels are going up is ridiculous. Corporations suppress true creativity and only allow it to exist within a very narrow spectrum. Also, the people they hire are not creative. You cannot be creative without being a contrarian and corporations don't hire contrarians.
Free thinkers are contrarians for most of their lives because they are not swayed by the undulating rhetoric of the times. When society is sane, free thinkers appear sane, then society is insane, free thinkers appear insane (when in a group of insane people, those who are sane will be labeled as insane).
Free thinkers are always sane with reference to the reality of the world around them but they can become unhinged from social and cultural norms when these norms start to diverge from observable reality.
"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." --Douglas Adams
Your #1 piece of advice will work better if you rephrase it like "keep at it" or "stay persistent". People, drunks and kids (so humans basically) understand you better if you leave out the negation, which the brain would have to translate first. Critical with children IMWO, "Don't run on the street" vs "Stop" / "Stand still", or less critical "Don't let it fall" vs "Hold it tightly". Focus on what you want.
If you are in flat land (a beginner), you see mountains as mountains. Well defined features on the horizon.
Once you start climbing, you concentrate on the details of the concrete mountain in front of you (rocks, moss, shrubs, ice, snow, caves) and your inner concept of a mountain changes into a collection of such details.
But once you summit, mountains around look like well defined features on the horizon again. Just like from the flat land of the beginners, only the perspective has changed.
For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises. With no agency, they are at the mercy of other people's bad ideas that keep changing. Everything needs to be updated because everything else needs to be updated, because everything needs to be updated. Duh!
Software updates! Guess what! Here's a new UI for ya. We moved all the stuff! It's like someone threw you a surprise birthday party, but not on your birthday, on their birthday, and their idea of the best gift evar is to hire an interior designer (for free! lucky you!) who completely rearranges your house inside and out and springs it on you after you return from the grocery store. And there's no going back.
At first it was exciting--when I was 15--then it's slightly bothersome, then downright annoying, then it's infuriating, then it's just tiring. Your brain learns that there is no point in learning anything anymore because they're just going to scramble it again anyway. Learned helplessness. People age out, ended up feeling old and useless and jaded because their skillset is completely inapplicable, after just a few years.
Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice).
When random person X complains about, say, Google having a monopoly, there are two possibilities:
- Person X means something along "Google has a dominant market position and abuses its power", slightly abusing the meaning of "monopoly".
- Person X means Google is literally a monopoly, that it is not possible to get online ads otherwise and does not know that firms such as Facebook exist.
Somehow a lot of people choose to believe interpretation #2 is true, and spend a lot of time debating whether this or that company is a "monopoly" as if it is somehow more important than the substantive issues.
Poverty is always expensive. That's what keeps people trapped in it.
If it were cheap to be poor, it wouldn't be poverty. It's the fact that you get bled for your time, money, energy and anything else you've got that makes people poor.