we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood, with large numbers of men dying before they couldn't afford reading glasses they would need. (my gf was 1 of 5 surviving from 10 born, with horsedrawn transportation and starvation)
all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities undreamed of 100 years ago, including corrective vision.
now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.
Terrestrial and marine diversity is crashing. We're keeping people alive and the way we allocate resources means that's a bad thing. The individual human is more replaceable that ever before. The sheer scale of things unfolding, and the momentum of them is necessarily unstoppable. Most of what we've done is eking out extra carrying capacity, which has then been exploited while the net quality of life has actually not appreciably gained, while the things that can't be meaningfully quantified have taken a visible decrement. Did we forget climate change? Finite resources? Expectations for these advancements to continue as things get increasingly complicated and the likelihood of reaching the threshold where it all breaks down...
I'm certainly thankful we'll have 10 billion people to share that ride with. Misery loves her company.
It's all a monkey paw and we've been standing in place for a century.
> we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood...
> We're doing pretty well.
You know it's interesting to think about who is doing well and who is not thanks to global industrialization. In the last 50 years "we" in the OECD countries simply moved our polluting industry to poor countries, where people have had their ancestral farm land taken by governments and replaced with polluting factories. This has left many of them with few opportunities other than to work in dangerous factories while living and raising their children in toxic wastelands.
We don't fix them, what on earth are you talking about?
Nobody has any idea what to do about Wittenoom, it's screwed for a relative forever as far as human timescales are concerned. PFAS contamination is the same. So many of our mistakes are. We can't fix Chernobyl, the tens of thousands of barrels of DDT at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of California or scores of other atrocities we have committed. This isn't a case of breaking out the dustpan and broom and packing away our toys!
That was extremely sad event for a relatively short period of time and small percentage of American families, but it certainly isn't worse than the average child or maternal mortality rate of the 19th century.
Almost all not American. Thalidomide was never approved for general use in the United States -- in fact, the FDA rejected it six times. As a result only 17 thalidomide babies were born here. Today, it is used for several conditions, but never in pregnant women, or women who might become pregnant.
Yes. One of the Wikipedia articles I linked above, talks about and has a photo of an official receiving an award from the then US president, from preventing thalidomide from being approved for use in the US (early on).
And yet there were deaths.
So, not only American.
Plus, the article itself says many non-American deaths happened.
What's "responsible" about putting the breaks on technological progress, when that technological progress has statistically-positive net QALY effects?
Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?
Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!
Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.
If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)
And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!
"The constant pressure from the nosepads and arms of glasses on your face, has potentially deleterious long-term consequences to the lymphatic channels of the face, resulting in increased incidence of sinus pressure headaches, fibromyalgia, middle-ear infections leading to tinnitus, and potentially even blockages of glymphatic drainage leading to increased likelihood of brain aneurism in old age."
...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)
My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.
But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?
Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You can get glasses now and not put PFAS in your eye and have improved vision. Some people don't like wearing glasses and would prefer contacts. Maybe they can make an informed decision between long term discomfort and the very low increased possibility of a future eye disease? People aren't good at long term thinking though.
re laser eye surgery, there was a story pretty recently about the number of post surgery issues being downplayed and under-represented. If you had a full and true picture of the risks then you might avoid laser eye surgery, but people running laser eye surgery clinics don't want you to have all the information.
Those people saved by cancer treatments or IV drips should die, for the environment of course(!) This is what they really believe so you can be damn sure they will make you poorer by denying you the luxury of contact lenses. And they'd have a more acceptable excuse of "wear glasses".
If you're cold and start burning your furnitures in the middle of your living room you'll feel nice and cozy for a little while, it's not sustainable though
> we're not going to have glaciers in like 5 years
This isn't a good-faith reading of the comment. Would most people give up the myriad of benefits of industrialization to reverse our impact on the climate?
> Fix that
People are trying. If there's one thing that doesn't help them, it's folks suggesting progress on climate change requires de-industrialisation or permanently and drastically reduced standards of living.
It's hyperbolic (and this whole subthread thread is a good example of how hyperbole goes poorly on HN), but it' definitely a within-many-people's-lifetimes kinda problem.
Kaczynski-style anti-industrialism doesn't make for good discourse, but neither does Benthamite rah-rah-ism. Our increased material comfort comes at the price of a techno-panopticon and toxic consumerism, or as one astute observer described it, a 'boring dystopia'.
> 75% chance that within 5 to 7 years there could be a period of no ice cap [paraphrasing]
If you look at the trend line between 1995 and 2010 in the NASA data this was a reasonable prediction. The Northwest passage is now open for the first time in recorded history, things are melting fast.
The source is me: I go outside where glaciers were and they're not there anymore. This is not something that's been up to debate. What do you think is causing the sea levels around the world to rise? Have you seen the news about Greenland, Antarctica, and the North Pole, recently?
all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities undreamed of 100 years ago, including corrective vision.
now as a society we uncover problems, we fix them. We're doing pretty well.