Yeah I get that it's more hip to be cynical. The problem is that cynicism is often an unconsidered attitude without any real substance or rigorous argument behind it.
You assume that the current condition is not due to everyone already doing what you’re describing as best as they can.
The issue is that they are, but the inherent corrupting influences of wealth, power, and human nature counteracting them to produce the current outcome.
At the end of the day, this is the wheel. And the wheel will keep turning, regardless.
Not understanding that just makes proposed reforms naive or ineffective, and usually the end result is worse.
The end problem is not one that can be actually solved. But the borders can be moved
one way or another, a bit at a time.
The thing you're ignoring is that humans have reason, which is able to produce behavior that goes against human nature and its corrupting influences. There's a reason why some people give away large sums of money to reduce suffering in the world instead of spending it on themselves or their genetic offspring, for example. I would argue that we have made substantial progress in overcoming human nature through cultural evolution in the past few thousand years, which is a small fraction of the history of our species. I think your argument relies on an assumption that our current culture is somehow inevitable, but that seems pretty obviously false to me.
To take another angle, we could remove humans from the picture entirely. The problem of how to get autonomous agents to work together to accomplish a task is a computer science problem. I don't see a fundamental barrier to solving that problem. Getting humans to cooperate is a special case of that problem, with the extra requirement that you need some domain knowledge in the social sciences to be able to convince people to cooperate. Again, there's no fundamental barrier preventing us from doing that research.
That doesn't mean it's easy. But that's why I'm skeptical when someone claims that the problem is simply unsolvable. Whether intentional or not, people who deny that progress is possible are reinforcing and justifying the status quo.
The only difference I see between your perspective and gp’s is timescale of change. Gp says current conditions are product of current human nature and the bounds can shift slowly. You’re more optimistic that the change can come fast. As you point out, we’ve changed a lot in the past few thousand — a small fraction of the species history. But gp is also sound in being skeptical of expecting radical change in a single-digit number of human lifespans. So for those of us with an opportunity to respond to this thread, for better or for worse, being able to engage with “corporations” and other extant shapes of power structures may be adaptive and strategic.
I never said change can come fast in terms of a human lifetime. I was pushing back against this idea, which seems to be widespread, that corporations and power structures are inherently bad. The alternative viewpoint which seems more reasonable to me is that the problems we see are caused by the wrong kind of corporations and power structures. GP implied that I am naive for having this viewpoint. It's not actually clear to me which of my statements they disagree with, but I think it's another example of this phenomenon where anyone who expresses optimism or a problem solving mindset gets cynically shot down.
I'm saying people are a mix of good and bad, and there are various levels of power and wealth inherent to the world, and that causes an inherent tension and level of corruption which you see manifest itself in all power structures around us.
Including corporations.
If you have a CONCRETE proposal for some kind of corporation which somehow counteracts the negative influences of humanity, while promoting the positive ones, while also actually working in real life, then please do propose it.
I'm also noting that those are already influences on the current formation and existence of the structures around us, so assuming that this is a new idea isn't helping anyone.
I'm not hearing anything concrete here though. I am hearing that you don't seem to be aware of the active and ongoing work to stop corruption and produce better outcomes in the governments and corporations that currently exist.
Attempts which sometimes succeed, sometimes get frustrated, etc. It's an active war, always has been, and IMO always will be.
>I'm also noting that those are already influences on the current formation and existence of the structures around us, so assuming that this is a new idea isn't helping anyone. [...] I am hearing that you don't seem to be aware of the active and ongoing work to stop corruption and produce better outcomes in the governments and corporations that currently exist.
I never said these are new ideas or that there aren't already people working on these problems. You're putting words in my mouth.
I'm a bit confused about what our disagreement is. In my first post, all I said was that corporations and power structures aren't inherently bad and that rather than abandoning those concepts, as OP suggests, we can work to improve them. You disagreed with me and made fun of me for being naive. However, what you're saying now sounds like a different version of what I was saying.
I don't get why you think I need to make a concrete proposal for this. I'm making a general possibility claim, not a prescription. There are many paths to get there, which probably involve a combination of cultural evolution and the accumulation of knowledge in a wide range of disciplines.
You keep insisting there is a solution here - aka, that this is a solvable problem. Aka, that there is an ‘end’.
That is what I am pointing out is fundamentally naive and impossible.
There is no possible state here where there is a system that is fundamentally incorruptible and fair, because that isn’t what people want, need, or how people work.
Even some options you mentioned (autonomous agents) wouldn’t produce such an outcome, but would just be a tool of despotic behavior (and probably worse than most) as they would
be inevitably manipulated or compromised because you don’t seem to understand the nature of the actual problem.
