Item — HN Reader

Good. Here's how things should go:

1. First America stops being world police.

2. America plays ball with rest of world (adopts metric system, becomes a leader in climate, shares control of internet, turns concern toward to real issues like asteroids, population growth, health issues, cyber security)

3. Citizens acknowledge that war is a tool for siphoning tax money into the coffers of people with connections/government-contracts, and move towards a post-war-era.

4. Citizens start to move to a post-nation era, where we acknowledge have more in common with each other than our own politicians who drive us apart for financial gain.

5. We move toward universalizing language, so we hit a point that declaring war with Iraq seems as absurd as declaring war with Canada.

6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.

[Link to Pentagon's study: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/download.cfm?q=1358]

11 comments

As nice as your list is, I have a few issues with it:

1 - "World police" tends to stick around, or soon comes back. (depending on how encumbering you define the "world"): US, British Empire, Rome, Ancient Persia, Chinese Dynasties. All have sought and won control of major parts of the world because it was beneficial to them and their trading partners.

2 - Sharing control of the internet with whom? China? Russia? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Cuba? The internet is fragmenting and soon each country will have their own local control. No need to share. (unfortunately)

3 - War is about power. As long as one person wants power, there will be war of some kind.

4 - Politics is also about power. As long as politicians have that power, they will seek to keep it (see also #3). See Venezuela for a current example of how sad this can get.

6 - Status, attention, and ego are just a few things that cannot be automated away. If your point were even remotely true, then the difference between a typical underpaid school teacher and Elon Musk (or Larry Ellison, or Donald Trump, etc.) would be trivial after the 100+ years of automation we've experienced.

Finally, collapse of empires tends to be followed by periods of lower economic output and higher violence; not to mention significant loss of knowledge. I'm not happy that we have one, but seeing it disappear could easily be worse.

1. Historical fallacy (just because things were a way in the past does not mean they will always be that way)

2. What if, like blockchain, we build a DNS model that is server agnostic? People are already working on this, if you think it's not possible you should learn more.

3. That's not valid logic.

4. That's not valid logic.

6. [There seems to be no 5?] Historical fallacy.

This is a laundry list of stuff that will never happen in any current country in any of our life times.

I've heard people say that before, but I don't see why I should believe it. 230 years ago America didn't exist. 150 years ago black people were property. 100 years ago women could not vote. 50 years ago nobody owned a computer. Until recently, weed was illegal.

The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?

Countries rise and fall. There is still slavery in America, and (separately) black people and women are often still disadvantaged compared to other races and to men. Weed is still illegal in the majority of states and under federal law. These are things that change and shift over time.

1+2. One way or another, America will "stop playing world police". It might do things like adopt the metric system (depending on how long the "rugged independence" streak runs). U.S. climate policy is about as important to the world as Californian climate policy is to the rest of the country (near zero). The internet is already splintering into interlinked regional networks, and will continue to do so naturally.

3. War isn't inherently a way to enrich private entities, although it's clearly true that that's one effect of it, in this country right now (and arguably, currently the primary reason). War has been a constant reality, at least since the time humans began agriculture. Maybe it'll go away in the future, but I see no evidence of it.

4. One over-arching nation, with some division of regional governments. Conflict will just move down the tree.

5. A single, universal language isn't an inherently good thing. It sounds like a great way to kill off cultural diversity.

6. We'll have to change the nature of the human animal. We're naturally prone to categorizing, ranking, organizing, and using those structures to assess threat levels. Denying that is fighting nature; you won't win that war.

> The world is changing really fast, and the rate of change is getting faster. When people argue "That could never change!" I have to wonder if they have any real evidence... Do you?

True, true. Things will change. They'll follow the path of least resistance, on the macro and micro levels. Your 6 steps are fighting entropy the whole way. They're radical claims. Radical claims require radical evidence...do you have any?

War won't go away until people stop wanting other people's stuff.

All those changes you mentioned are trivial compared to completely reworking how human society has functioned for thousands of years.

No, they're not.

I'm sure people argued the American economy would collapse without slave labor.

And America not being world police isn't a revolutionary change, we only started being world police in the last 70 years or so, and it's done more harm than good realistically.

I'm unclear what your defeatist motivation is, but it doesn't seem like you've actually sincerely thought this through.

Pretty wild oversimplification there. War is complex and doesn't happen for one reason. For instance Russia's involvement in Syria and Crimea is more about expanding territory and sphere of influence than funneling tax payer's money, Putin and the Russian oligarchs do that well enough already.

> 6. The very concept of "superiority" and "class" becomes meaningless as we move into an era of excess due to automation.

We already have excess of some things such as calories and clean clothing. The cost of 2k calories per day is a pretty small fraction of minimum wage. We are also witnessing a rise in food classism that is targeted at the foods that are hard to bring the price down on. It has become a status symbol to "know where your food comes from" or to eat at a "farm to table" restaurant. These are associated with ways to get your calories that have high logistical & labor costs.

I agree that we will see eras of excess in more and more goods and services, but the idea that humans won't find a way to show superiority or class by consuming higher cost goods/services seems kind of out of touch.

> For instance Russia's involvement in Syria and Crimea is more about expanding territory and sphere of influence

For the record, these places were Russian sphere of influence before the conflicts started. Though not strictly Russian territory, indeed.

That's a good way of becoming weak. Your enemies will be very glad to watch you try this.

"The Americans have brought their armed forces back home, adopted sensible foreign and domestic policies, and are starting to see eye-to-eye with people whom they once found too foreign to relate to. Now is the perfect time to strike!"

Our global hegemony ensures stability of trade for the entire world, and that stability is the reason that other countries eagerly trade and generally deal business with the US. Unfortunately, if we back away from our role as world police, the resulting power vacuum will see some other country take up the role at best, and at worst we could see another large scale conflict as emerging powers compete for dominance.

Our current foreign policy is far from ideal, but there is a delicate global balance which would be dangerously upset if we ceased global operations and "world policing." The GP is niave to think that such rosy, utopian intentions would not be taken advantage of by other global players. Look, for instance, at the current posturing by China in the Pacific. Imagine the scaling of their operations if there was no one in our position to apply pressure against them.

Someday, sure. But, globally, humans are still viciously tribal, and some form of enforcement keeps everything running smoothly for everyone. And while Americans foot much of the bill, there is no denying that our benefit is of larger proportion as well.

I feel like a lot of people have a lot of trouble appreciating the wars that _didn't_ happen under American hegemony. I don't believe we're perfect in anyway, but under our influence the world has been more peaceful and interconnected than at any other time in world history.

Similar to the violence that was quelled under Saddam. It's difficult to appreciate and measure that which is absent.

Rephrase that last sentence a few different ways and you'll see the problem:

"Now is the perfect time to close the Suez Canal" "Now is the perfect time to invade South Korea" "Now is the perfect time to plunder any ship with cargo" "Now is the perfect time to take Qatar"

The reality is, America's military presence abroad is a stabilising force. Take that away and other powers will move in to fill the vacuum.

Please elaborate how exactly this leads to weakness? And how do you define it in the first place?

power and political vacuums tend to want to be filled

You do realize that a bunch of our present political instability is because quite a lot of people viscerally hate and fear 4 and 5, and are voting for politicians who promise to block them, yes?

The people who viscerally hate (4) and (5) have little stakes in the economy, and will have less and less, to the point that their vote will be essentially meaningless.

If that were true, then neither Trump nor Brexit would have happened. You could always claim that it is not true now but will be "in the future", but that claim is unfalsifiable.

>1. First America stops being world police.

Yes, how do we do this? I'd like to see us declare victory, and remove our troops from South Korea, Japan, Germany, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and everywhere else. The UK did essentially this over the course of the 20th century. Is there any way to accelerate the process without world wars?

Does anyone have examples of groups working "together" that share one common interest, and are opposed on many other fronts?

War has been a part of society for as long as society has existed. What has changed in your mind to make post-war era possible?

Also does post war mean war never again happens? Or just happens less frequently?

I truly believe a post war era (war not happening for millions of years) will not be possible without genetic mutation of the human genome.

That may work if nothing else changes, but things would change and likely drastically, and many many peoples lives would be turned upside-down. The upside-down is coming regardless, but I'm hoping delayed past our lifetimes. Modern day humans are great at delaying rather than fixing!

You forgot an important one (probably a prerequisite): fix the political system.

are asteroids a real issue?

From what we can tell, they've caused mass extinctions before, no reason to believe they won't again.

i believe that i just don't think the timeline is short enough for it to matter. afaik there is no impending asteroid disaster within the next 1000 years, although there could be hundreds of factors in my ignorance on this matter.

There's not enough data to support this claim. At present the budgets spent on policing space for foreign objects is puny, and currently less than 5% of the night sky is being policed or analyzed. Asteroids can come from a bazillion different trajectories up down left right.. all in 3d space... it's not like looking left/right and left again crossing the street.

It's very possibly an asteroid could strike us and we wouldn't even be aware of it till after the fact, or at the very least till a week or two before it strikes... if it's in one of our blind spots (i.e. the other 95% of the sky)

It is not yet possible to know when the next one is going to show up. We are only currently aware of a bunch of rocks that most likely wont hit us.

Mass extinction due to meteor strike is just one hypothesis.

That's 100% of the point.

If other planets/moons/whatever haven't been colonized by the time humanity gets empirical data for that hypothesis, a lot of people are going to wish they'd put that a little higher on the list.

> We move toward universalizing language

Perhaps Chinese would be a good choice.

I think picking any one existing language would be too emotional for people.

I don't have the implementation details. But just to illustrate how doable it'd be, I'd suggest we take something neutral (like Esperanto) and every language start adding 20 Esperanto words to their language per year, with a plan to coalesce after 200 years.

40,000 shared words isn't a full language, but it's enough to make conversations and debates possible.