Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.

So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.

What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.

Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.

> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."

> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."

> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)

Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?

I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.

I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.

The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.

This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.

You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.

We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.

EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.

Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).

So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.

At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.

The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.

This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.

With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.

We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.

I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.

Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.

We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.

Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.

The large complexities are just a consequence of the modern world doing a lot of things. Conservative types love to whine about the government "doing too much", but only when it's things the government does for other people. Exceedingly few of them are willing to go back to shitting in a hole in the ground so the government can stop wastewater processing. (Even those who run off to live in the woods in Alaska aren't going to sargue against the Permanent Fund or the complex resource extraction that bankrolls it)

The ills of a complex society are an unavoidable cost of that. And they've always been there. Modern politics has corruption in it. Anyone who thinks this is in any way new is a fool who needs to read up on his Roman Politics. That things are significantly better than the ancient days is most evident in how things have gotten significantly worse in the US over the last year and a half. (And as abhorrent as Trump's corruption is by modern standards, again, go read history. It used to be so much worse.)

No, the real problem are the small complexities. These can still vary in size a lot, from the React website that could've been a plain HTML page, to welfare systems made deliberately obtuse and complex to penalize the recipients. (Shoutout to BenefitsCal, which manages to do both of these at once, and doesn't even bloody work at time of writing.)

The distinction is subtle, but large complexities are the result of what systems set out to do. Small complexities are near-universally the result of pointless meandering to get there. The welfare system itself is large. The myriad of rules that have no meaningful impact on fraud, those are small.

The Supermarket and it's supply chain are large. The supermarket's app that slows every boomer's checkout because it doesn't work well, that is small.

A convenient heuristic is that small complexities are easy to remove without affecting the wider system. The supermarket can turn off their app and go back to standard discounts and nobody but their marketing department is going to notice. If the supermarket shuts down part of it's supply chain, everyone notices immediately.

Same with complex government tasks like welfare. Cut the welfare itself and there's immediate problems with people who can no longer afford food and rent (and thus, forced into crime that makes it everyone's problem.) Cut the overly complex rules and it's fine, nobody who's kicked onto the streets or going hungry. At worst there's a little more fraud in the system, which is a small operating cost increase. (Odds are good it'd end up cheaper because such "fraud prevention" is expensive and many countries end up throwing billions at prevention in response to outrage about millions in fraud.)