Conversation

Replying to
Sometimes I think we need a proper new religion based on unironically and genuinely sacralizing "tech." It is insane that we think people who uncritically worship rocket launches are somehow lesser humans than ones who worship mythical memories of long-ago fake news pseudoevents.
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Even if you understand nothing about a thing, worship is a way of centering it and ridding yourself of the assumption that you are at the center when you are not. That's epistemic progress. Even if your mental model of the thing you're centering is completely wrong and childish.
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Even if you think rockets work on the principle of dragons hidden in the fuselage breathing fire out the bottom, that's better, tbh, than thinking the world was created in 7 days in 6000 BC by some dude with a white beard who still interferes with "miracles" to guide events.
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Yet, which belief gets ridiculed, and which ones gets deeply centered in everything from the social calendar to tax policy to social-distancing exemption policy? Merry covid-spreading Christmas.
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I'm not saying ignore human concerns and save the system. I'm saying don't forget that the option of paying attention to human concerns only exists if you pay adequate attention to the workings of world machinery first.
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The world today is in a financially bombed out state. If balance sheets and budgets were buildings, it would look like Dresden or Tokyo after the firebombing attacks. Utter gutting and devastation of large sections of the financial built environment.
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We don't see this because we never admitted to ourselves that the way the world works, the financial software is in fact the center. We tagged it the preserve of sociopaths, and guess what, system adversely selected precisely the people who had no problems being viewed as such.
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Our world works as well as it does, feeding and provisioning 7.8B people with food, water, antibiotics, vaccines, smartphones, roads, transportation, etc. because it does NOT center humans the way a small 30-person hunter-gatherercommunity did when world-pop was 100,000.
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The only way to be human at this scale and complexity of civilization is to realize that humans are not the center. Merely the privileged beneficiary of the system being somewhere close to working order.
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Replying to
I guess so / I wrote it when researching Autonomous Vehicles and realized the human centeredness was the chief issue of not being able to scale autonomous mobility.