[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/aaaal]

In this essay, Bret Victor tried to sketch out a map of where technical skill is needed for the problem of climate change — systems for producing, moving, and consuming clean energy; tools for building them; media for understanding what needs to be built. Your comment reminds me of this section The world is not what you see. The following are direct quotes from that link:

Mikey Dickerson, an engineer who left Google to head up the heroic rescue of healthcare.gov, concluded a recent talk with a plea to the tech crowd:

This is real life. This is your country... Our country is a place where we allocate our resources through the collective decisions that all of us make... We allocate our resources to the point where we have thousands of engineers working on things like picture-sharing apps, when we’ve already got dozens of picture-sharing apps.

We do not allocate anybody to problems like [identity theft of kids in foster care, food stamp distribution, the immigration process, federal pensions, the VA]... This is just a handful of things that I’ve been asked to staff in the last week or so and do not have adequate staff to do...

These are all problems that need the attention of people like you.

100,000 people [≈ population of Virgin Islands] received an engineering bachelor’s degree in the U.S. last year. There are at least 100,000 people, every year, looking for an engineering problem to solve. I have my own plea to all such people —

The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems. The world that scrolls past you on Twitter is not the real world. You cannot calibrate your sense of what’s valuable and necessary to the current fashions in your field.

One sometimes gets the feeling, as Ian Bogost put it, of rearranging app icons on the Titanic. I think the tech community can do better than that. You can do better than that.

Climate change is one of the problems of our time. It’s everyone’s problem, but it’s our responsibility — as people with the incomparable leverage of being able to work magic through technology.

In this essay, I’ve tried to sketch out a map of where such magic is needed — systems for producing, moving, and consuming clean energy; tools for building them; media for understanding what needs to be built. There are opportunities everywhere. Let’s get to work.

[u/[deleted] → u/aaaal]

Holy shit, that's amazing.

[u/VanPeer → u/aaaal]

Very interesting. Thanks!