Ask HN: Making a better world, how important is that to you?
I believe that most people would prefer such stable co-existence. If it were an easy choice.
But it is not. Often, personal choices conflict with society's interests, or contribute to degradation of the natural environment.
I believe that many HN users -more than average dude in the street- have power to influence these things. By picking sustainable options over non-sustainable ones. By striving for efficiency, rather than go for a wasteful but first-to-market approach. By working on environmental issues, rather than pure intellectual, or money-making pursuits. By pointing their peers to solutions with a smaller footprint. I believe that, in effect, many of you are the "movers & the shakers".
Of course, mouths have to be fed. And there's bills to pay. And skills may be hard to apply outside of a current job.
But how important is "making a better world than the one you were born in" to you, personally?
If you are an entrepreneur, is it the reason you started your business? Does it affect your choice of jobs? Or how you go about your work?
How heavy does "make a better world" weigh in your choices? Has this changed over time? If so, how? Was there some event, idea, or insight, that (in this context) had an outsized impact on you? Perhaps even life-changing?
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Mostly along the lines of "we're powerless to change things, it's all too complex to determine what brings positive change. Family comes first".
While the reality is our world already has changed for the better in many ways: child mortality, # of people dying each year in wars, education (especially for girls), healthcare, internet access, overall wealth, etc etc. Or eg. watch some of Hans Rosling's videos.
It is people who made that change. So on average, ...
> However working at more ethical or environmentally friendly organizations often comes with a pay cut,
... more than ever before in history, people are in a position to put "improve world" above "maximize income".
Especially well-educated people in developed countries, with extensive access to technology, personal networks, etc. Many HN users likely in a prime position there.
And yet they choose to work on more powerful (read: energy consuming) AI systems, fintech startups, intrusive advertising companies, add yet more features to already mature, bloated software, etc, etc.
We can choose to be part of a problem. Or to be part of a positive change. However small each individual's contribution.
In face of these facts concerning 'the state of our species', that defeatism is not warranted.
I can easily make my little bit of the world nice and it is done far more easily by stepping on others or just ignoring them.
If something were better for everyone without trade offs, it would have already been done (technological discover aside).
I'm also the last person to force anybody to anything and bettering the world sounds like a lot of forceful actions
Before you change the world make sure you have the wisdom to know what to change.
I feel a lot of "change" is just a pendulum swinging from one side to another, without true progress at all.
Even in the microscale: almost every junior programmer introduced to a legacy system seems to be fighting the urge to completely rewrite it, long before understanding it at least in a reasonable level.
It's in everything that I do. When I'm dead and all that's left of me is what I've done, I want that to be good. So everything I do, even down to taking a shit, I put thought into it's impact.
While the solution was interesting, the background research revealed that not only was the river I was concerned about significantly less polluted than nearby ones, the source of the pollution was actually known- agricultural runoff from hundreds of farms. This would become a somewhat depressing theme- the problems were actually well understood, the solutions long available, but the actors with agency over the problem have chosen not to act. Through this lens, the sad revelation was that these issues which appeared to be technical were actually purely political.
It's kicked off a broader fascination with perverse incentives. I can recommend David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' to speak to another aspect of this problem. In terms of the high-wire act of political influence around ecological decisions within major engineering projects, I'd suggest 'The making of an expert engineer'.
I do still think there's a significant amount for engineers to contribute. I'm often surprised to see and hear of solutions built by software engineers with little or no regard to operational cost, and I suspect the same is true of energy efficiency. Nowadays, I try to bias towards lightweight, shared cloud resources to deliver my projects. I think that Stripe's goal of shaving off some percentage points off the world of e-commerce to kickstart a market for atmospheric carbon removal is absolutely worth a go. And I'm still fascinated by engineering megaprojects for cleaner energy distribution, such as the Sun Cable.
Have you ever watched The Good Place? What you're saying resonates with me, and there's a character (Doug, S03E08) that you might identify with. I'm wondering if seeing a conversation about the topic played out in fiction might bring you some comfort.
Is it possible that you've gotten fixated on ways in which a role could make things worse, without also noticing ways in which it could make things better? It seems to me that when choosing a career, you should account for both costs and benefits.
One idea is to try & identify a job that does as little harm as possible, then live frugally and donate excess earnings to a charity you believe is making a positive impact.
So I'm 22 now and I decided to focus on leaving the country after graduating, will I have the same motivation/drive to change the world after leaving? or will I be too tired to try?
They care. But most have choosen to improve their local (personal) world. Which mostly means, trying to make more money to buy more things that makes their world better.
For me, the hard part is defining "better place" because I only have my own perspective to know what is "better." An example: I hate car noise, especially at home. I would love to see silent transportation everywhere, especially cities. There are even studies to back up reducing noise pollution for the greater good. However, for some people, having a loud car (or bike) is the best thing they can imagine. Some other people like the ability to have a loud vehicle without actually having one. A "better place" is directly contradictory between our world-views... and that's just one dimension of a place.
But I think reaching a "better place" is the result of the contribution of many people, and everyone should contribute with anything he/she can. For me I can contribute by solving some problems with software, and I think there are plenty of problems that we can solve with software, we just have to make getting money a second priority after making something really useful, and money will come after.
Just be careful to not over-extend yourself. If you do believe in doing good and you compromise yourself to help others, you are compromising a force for good.
The world is incredibly complex. Most people are smart, but not that smart. Or they are particularly intelligent in ways which simply don’t lend themselves to these bigger picture problems.
I rarely meet people who sincerely don’t care. I do meet people who don’t understand, though. Many have no idea what’s wrong.
As a result I believe you’ll find this in just about every place you go, and in most social circles you encounter. This isn’t an Egypt problem but a human problem.
I’m not claiming I understand, or I’m one of the people intelligent enough to see the problems and engage with them. If I was, my life would likely be different and I would be much more useful. So, this is entirely opinion and worth taking with some salt.
Over time I realized how little people really cared about any of it, how little mindspace it occupied relative to their day to day, or even relative to other big issues like the culture wars, the homeless, Ukraine, the Middle East, etc. And the climate situation just kept getting worse, even as wildfires got more frequent and intense for the western US.
And then COVID hit and that was a real turning point for me. I'd never have expected such stupidity, between the anti vax and the anti masks movements, with people signing up to die and kill each other for no real reason at all aside from some misguided personal vendetta against community norms, as though keeping someone alive was an attack on their personal liberty. It was a real eye opener for me in terms of large scale crowd and population behaviors, seeing selfishness increase even as the death toll skyrocketed. And that was against a common enemy, easily witnessed, with acute and deadly effects.
If we can't even deal with an urgent crisis like that, what chance do we have? Climate, invisible and operating on a time scale of decades, doesn't stand a chance.
I've learned to accept that our species is pretty fucked, lol, and my sole remaining prayer is that AI will one day grow powerful enough to benevolently rule over us (heh, probably not the sentence you expected to read). I wouldn't bet on humans having some sort of overnight moral awakening.
Maybe slowly over centuries we can refine our ethics, but by and large I've come to believe we are fundamentally limited by our ape biology and primitive brains. We evolved to survive and thrive in small groups in hostile environments, not a hyperconnected overcrowded world of 8 billion all fighting over finite land, resources, wealth, and even water and atmosphere.
These days I've largely given up on the idea that the world will be meaningfully better in my lifetime. I think it will get much, much worse, and capitalist dystopias will become the norm. I still try to contribute (recently decided to go back to school to get an environmental engineering degree), but that's really more of a bandaid at this point than any sort of real solution.
Despite the pessimism, I think I'm generally pretty happy! As long as I get to go out once in a while, participate in community, etc., here in the rich first world it's still easy enough to compartmentalize all of this. I feel bad for anyone who wants kids or lives in a poorer country though. I think it's gonna get quite ugly...
I stopped caring about 'making the world better' a decade or so ago when I realized this, and that any sacrifices I made to do so could be callously erased in seconds thanks to having the wrong opinions, changing public opinions/politics, the whims of investors and partners, etc.
I'm not a pessimist or anything – more of a NAP-loving hedonist at this point. I won't exploit anyone to pursue my own pleasures, but it is my singular focus. My theory is that if more people adopted that philosophy, probably the would would be incrementally better, and so I try and live by example, showing those around me the way to be a good man, a good father, diligent, but also happy and content with my own life and the pleasures therein.
Sorry if that seems like a downer, but the answer to your question is: It's not. What's important to me is that I make my world better.
I once devised a test for people. It goes like this:
Ask them when they are clean and in a white-collar environment:
You can spend 5 mintues working hard and getting dirty to magically get some random human $1 million worth of stuff they want/need. Let's say you need to carry bags of dirt from one place to another. Beacuse this is magic, you will never know who got that stuff, but you will know that someone somewhere got it.
You can also spend 5 minutes carrying bags of drit the other way, and that will cause someone somewhere in the world to loose $1 million, or eveything they have if their net worth is lee than $1 million. Again, this does not affect inflation because magic.
Would you (A) work to help someone, (B) refuse to do anything because it does not help you or (C) work to hurt someone.
After they answer, ask What if you could work all day to help or hurt others. What would you do?
I've found an amazing number of peple would work all day to hurt many people. To me, this explains the businesses that create artificial scarcity.
I can’t know because I only have second hand information. It’s a common sentiment, though, so I have to wonder if it’s a broad cultural trend. If so, why? Or rather… Why not in my part of the world?
Perhaps I’m naive and it’s actually typical in my culture as well.
As they described it, the region was split up to avoid having too much power concentrated in one country. Each country claims to be the origin of certain products/foods/etc which overlaps with claims from others in the region.
There is also some really tragic folk music in Bulgarian culture stemming from some pretty horrific historical situations. Things like fighting with the dead bodies of fallen comrades when you have nothing else to throw over a wall under siege. The music is as beautiful and tragic as you would imagine.
I know there are plenty of people who want to watch the world burn where I live. Luckily, there seems to be enough people who don't share that trait to offset them. I tend to seek out people who are more positive in their interactions with the world.
My adopted son’s biological dad lives in Serbia and I believe he lived through conflict during the early 90s. A staggering number of people died in that period. I’m fairly sure that living through something like that in my early life would have dramatically changed my outlook on life and my behaviour in society.
My favorite curse is, “may you live in interesting times.” I’ve heard it ascribed to Jewish origins but the Wikipedia article mentions possible Chinese origins. In any case, many people initially take it as a complement or a blessing. It’s usually not :)
Where I live, wishing anything bad happens to your neighbour or even a stranger would be plainly understood to be unkind, unreasonable, and generally mean to some degree (depending on the severity of what you wished on the person).
Edit: my translation "I wish that neighbour's cow drop dead" was not accurate since it shouldn't be in the first person. It's more like "let the neighbour's cow drop dead".
I think one big reason we’re in trouble is that people would rather have a small benefit for themselves and a corresponding larger loss for others. I feel it too. Something that means relatively little to me and a lot to someone else, but I (almost always) choose me. If you go the other way, you give up everything because there is infinite need. Everyone with less than you shows up.
What’s weird is that we all want to be respected and loved, but those we’ve revered most have really worked for others. It’s so hard to emulate that. But it also hints at the fundamental value of a good business: generate your own wealth by delivering maximum value for others. Build something people want.
My "sphere of influence", and therefore my interest, is limited to the people and things I come across.
I may not be able to (nor care about) solve world hunger, but I can make sure my sister doesn't have to eat ramen and work three part-time jobs. I may not be able to solve the world's unending conflicts, but I can lend an ear to a friend who's undergoing some rough patch. I may not be able to solve climate change, but I can pick up the trash on the floor.
And, frankly, that's enough for me.
> My "sphere of influence", and therefore my interest, is limited to the people and things I come across.
Maybe if you claim to be practicing "single generation sustainability" petroleum geologists will pay you to give speeches. Somebody has to pick up Michael Crichton's slack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...
Elon Musk once said that there are too many talented people in finance and law. I transitioned from finance to make battery management systems, low- and high-level firmware. It’s just another programming domain, and there is a ton of hardware-related pitfalls, but I think that if we can reach a high grid-scale battery solution using post-lithium batteries (no criticism of LFP), the biggest problem with renewables can be handled at scale. It’s a lot of fun to aim for the stars and make something useful that is still only on the brink of existence.
However, finding stable peace and improving the world in the ways that you describe is not so simple. Based on the way our current civilization is set up, we are subject to a so-far-insurmountable problem that continuously pulls us away from this ideal.
I would roughly summarize this problem as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is a unique category of coordination failure that undergirds many aspects of the world we might criticize right now, such as climate, disinformation, nuclear risk, and more. Scott Alexander[0] and Daniel Schmachtenberger[1] have written and spoken about this meta-level issue at length. I particularly like this quote from the Alexander piece:
> all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s- eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.
To answer your question directly, I think it’s possible that this meta-problem might now be solvable because we have technologies that empower us to create net new incentives and coordination games[2].
I have a hypothesis that this is particularly relevant today because same coordination failure patterns are very likely to play out with AI alignment - and the tools are showing promise to be able to help with this.
I feel very lucky that this is what I get to spend all my time working on. Making the world a better place in this way is almost all I can think about. There’s a contingent of good people working on this problem in the context of the idea “DAOs.” If you feel called to try to address what might be the highest leverage problem of our time, definitely recommend you check it out.
[0]: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY
[2]: https://medium.com/@virgilgr/ethereum-is-game-changing-techn...
Because what is a better world ? I have one opinion. You have another perhaps.
Personally I don't believe in people doing good for the world by firstly doing good to themselves. That's not feasible imo.
Secondly the world would by default be a much better place by pretty much all means if we were not 8b humans all wanting pretty much the same things. We are simply to many.
Because we are too many we are curing symptoms not root problems. By using the earth resources to a degree that is not sustainable and then create technology around that fact is in my view not sustainable. We could easily live off the planets resources if we were half the population.
No one is willing to really cut down on their footprint on the planet. And pretty much every human believe its their right to do whatever they find best for themselves. That is a path to destruction for all and that path seems more and more set in stone.
The world is fucked. Proper fucked. And we are not going to solve it. Simple because we don't really want to.
You're welcome
It has become part of who I am, an integral part of my family life. I can proudly add that my married children all have similar habits.
It has come at cost of salary, working hours, and other personal advancement, but is totally, 100% worth it. I love my life, and feel that every day I am changing the world and getting real stuff done.
I am sure that some of my proteges will totally improve the world's problems in ways that I cannot imagine.
(In addition, I work at a small place that tries to do what's right - no crusades, political donations or shaming, but internally; EG. We dropped GA when we felt they were being to invasive, no products that we feel are not good for the buyer. Little stuff, but it keeps the focus on being good.)
What's wrong with the world. What stagnates people? People who choose not to help clean after themselves, pick up their trash and/or recycle etc etc. I think we should follow consumerism that helps people be better counterparts for a better tomorrow.
Honestly FB meta has been in that direction of creating community, through technology. The government has been funding public programs. I think the easiest solution is just at its simplest- local activities, diversity, and just planting.
I have a really hard time understanding how a healthy community can be created virtually without also having physical locality.
Eg, from [1], one of the most important things about a community is "basic services." Another important trait is "civic involvement." It's all well-and-good to find like-minded people to communicate with online and professionally but true community has always included physical locality for practically all of known human history. Online communities often lack this and other essential qualities of a healthy community. ie: online communities are secondary communities while we all still need a healthy primary community to thrive.
[1] https://extension.psu.edu/what-makes-the-good-community#:~:t....
“As time, energy, and potential for enjoyment and meaningful work allows.”
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/
They're a career guidance nonprofit that went through Y Combinator in 2015 https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/80-000-hours-yc-s15-helps-t...
A big thing that 80,000 Hours, and EA in general espouses is earning to give, something to the effect of Christian tithes. Choose some flat percentage of your income and give to charities that have good confirmed impact, rather than giving to your local animal shelter because it makes you feel good.
Nice!
>I've had some more extreme circumstances that have led me to take a job that's not particularly concerned with saving the world, but it does give me some proximity to state of the art AI, which is a plus for trying to steer where humanity goes.
Interesting.
I recently saw a blog post that might be relevant to you or other people working on frontier technology: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QsfGEhFpMvgWjyusm/...
The TL;DR is that if you notice a potential hazard related to your employer's line of work, writing an email to your boss explaining the problem can be high-leverage, because having things documented in writing creates a legal incentive to address the risk.
I've noticed a sense within the EA community that they might've screwed up when it comes to AI, in terms of accelerating technological progress more than they've accelerated effective risk mitigation. I actually hesitated somewhat to recommend the 80K career guide for that reason.
There is also some uncertainty within the EA community regarding the degree to which the EA movement played a part in Sam Bankman-Fried's crimes.
Overall I think there are a lot of interesting ideas in EA if you take it with a grain of salt. It's worth being familiar with the material even if you don't participate in the community.
When we talk about making the world better off, this is not the only area where it can be done. A lot of the replies here take it in this direction, but this is only one way among many
For me personally, I care more about things like digital privacy and anonymity than I do about the environment. Not that I don't care about the environment, just that the thing that initially made me study CS was reading Snowden's autobiography
I think that as long as governments (e.g. the UK) are trying to limit/ban encryption, I'm going to prioritize digital privacy over other things like the environment