That’s interesting. I certainly don’t think mountain biking is outstandingly bad in this way, nor do I think Apple is. My take is that Apple does engage in good design, but they fall short in important ways, especially their higher volume stuff where they don’t prioritize longevity. Their competitors don’t either, and they choose to play that game rather than aim for a more thoughtful market and make substantially less money. Hard to really criticize that on an individual level for the same reasons as I said before.
As for the big military stuff, and bigger things in general, I think only some of the things I mentioned before apply. It’s still obviously wasteful, but at least it’s only big in scale in terms of the project size and not the market. In those cases the market is somewhat perverse, with interests consistent with megalomania. Other people’s lives don’t matter both in terms the extremely unfair distribution of resources and how that affects the existence of others, and the more obvious end uses of killing folks. It’s pretty complicated though. I’m familiar with an example from scientific research that sits between these kinds of extreme examples and the more mundane stuff we’ve been discussing. Some instruments are commonly being improved in mostly incremental ways, and they cost ~ $1M. The academics who use these instruments aim to replace them (yes, multiple) every 2-4 years, and it’s ultimately paid for by us taxpayers. The benefits aren’t obviously there for us, and the people who use and buy these things tend to have some aspects of simple consumerism, and others of megalomania. I really don’t wear a tinfoil hat I should say, I’m just a part-time futurist and these ways of behaving are obviously unsustainable. I’d rather our collective not have to go through an awful bottleneck to understand this reality.
Nov. 5, 2018, 10:16 a.m. - natbrown
That’s interesting. I certainly don’t think mountain biking is outstandingly bad in this way, nor do I think Apple is. My take is that Apple does engage in good design, but they fall short in important ways, especially their higher volume stuff where they don’t prioritize longevity. Their competitors don’t either, and they choose to play that game rather than aim for a more thoughtful market and make substantially less money. Hard to really criticize that on an individual level for the same reasons as I said before. As for the big military stuff, and bigger things in general, I think only some of the things I mentioned before apply. It’s still obviously wasteful, but at least it’s only big in scale in terms of the project size and not the market. In those cases the market is somewhat perverse, with interests consistent with megalomania. Other people’s lives don’t matter both in terms the extremely unfair distribution of resources and how that affects the existence of others, and the more obvious end uses of killing folks. It’s pretty complicated though. I’m familiar with an example from scientific research that sits between these kinds of extreme examples and the more mundane stuff we’ve been discussing. Some instruments are commonly being improved in mostly incremental ways, and they cost ~ $1M. The academics who use these instruments aim to replace them (yes, multiple) every 2-4 years, and it’s ultimately paid for by us taxpayers. The benefits aren’t obviously there for us, and the people who use and buy these things tend to have some aspects of simple consumerism, and others of megalomania. I really don’t wear a tinfoil hat I should say, I’m just a part-time futurist and these ways of behaving are obviously unsustainable. I’d rather our collective not have to go through an awful bottleneck to understand this reality.