Conversation

Replying to
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” — Alfred North Whitehead.
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In the past, privileged classes have used relative security to advance civilization in material ways: making it easy to get food, clean water, energy etc without thinking about it. Now it’s getting subtler. How do you “get justice” or “avoid infection” without thinking about it?
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The funny thing is nobody caught in below-the-API wars ever thinks the answer is whatever the above-the-API smug classes are doing. They seem like irritating spectators on Twitter (or whatever the equivalent was in the past). From below the API it can look like all we do is talk.
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It can be hard to believe in your own relevance to the situation when nobody in the heart of the situation thinks you have any role besides staying out of the way and sending money to gofundmes. I’ve seen people buy into and internalize that dismissive, even contemptuous view.
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Saw a tweet for eg from someone saying “I have neuroscience phd and my boyfriend is a car mechanic and he’s essential I’m not”. Nice supportive sentiment but just not true historically. What’s essential in the short term is ephemeral in the long term and vice versa.
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The People of Action don’t exactly think highly of the above-the-API set, so it can be hard to believe in what you do (especially while wallowing in a sense of unfair, unearned comfort and security while others suffer). It’s easy to conclude you’re in the bullshit class.
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Yet the below-the-api wars are never actually winnable by the good guys without whatever the above-the-api classes bring to the party eventually. They’re just buying time in an asymmetric losing conflict. Time for above-the-api classes to bring a decisive winning factor to bear.
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So don’t feel too guilty (feeling a little guilty is good motivation) for safely watching the world burn on twitter and tv while enjoying your grocery and takeout deliveries brought to you by people taking more risk than you, for you even as poor-people resources burn.
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Even in the worst conflicts there are inevitably better and worse places to be. If you happen to be in one of the better places you could of course rush to the frontlines. Possibly you can be of use there. There’s people doing that. Kudos. I’m not one of them.
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But possibly you might be the one to discover a decisive tide-turning factor because you have the safety and security above the api required to bring the right kind of imagination and boldness required to turn the tide.
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For eg, the war against U-boats sinking shipping in the Atlantic was basically won by scientists in labs developing codebreaking tech and radar. Lots of examples like that in history. They didn’t risk being killed by torpedoes. Yet their contribution proved decisive.
Replying to
This seems like an important point: personal risk doesn't always equate to societal reward, but we have a moral intuition that is does. (Also, theres a pseudo-intellectualization of that idea in Taleb's "skin in the game", which I think _does_ sometimes correct bad incentives.)