The Oil Drum

The geeks played their part, as did the scholars, researchers, philosophers, politicians, lobbyists, advertisers, corporations, media, religion, and the vast, unwashed, blissfully ignorant masses. ... We haven't been able to wrap our heads around all ... Our system is unmanageably complex.

Well said.

The human mind is good at not seeing the gaps and boundaries.
How often do you notice the blind spot in your retina?
How often do you notice the edges of your visual field?
Answer: almost never.

We are in constant denial of our every limitation. Why isn't each of us an expert in everything?

We don't question. Instead we have invented a beehive system where each of us is a "specialist" in some narrowly focused aspect of our hive works. One of us is a "politician, lobbyist, advertiser, corporate animal, media maniac, religionist", etc. and yes, even a techno geek.

The geek is no better or smarter than the rest of the worker bees. None of us can see when stuff slips past our blind spots. For example, most techno geeks are blind to social interactions. Dilbert can't see when the management is beating him down yet again. Dogbert wins every time.

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I don't view it as unreasonable to have a "default" belief in progress, since empirically it has been what's happened in recent memory: My grandmother told stories about life from just before WWII, through the blitz and in to postwar deprivation. My mother had a better quality of life. My sister and I have had even better lives (so far). I'm an educated computer scientist/engineer, and I personally wouldn't bet against pulling a technological rabbit out of the hat. But until I see a multiply verified, production scale rabbit I'm planning for the possibility of a severe energy and resource crunch.

The two things I find most worrying is that (i) people in general won't entertain even the possibility that things may be heading for a crunch, and (ii) almost everyone these days regard it as more important to win an argument than figure out "the truth". Although it'd be disappointing for an engineer not to figure out theoretically that the fridge won't cool the containing room, the unforgivable thing would be to not go grab a thermometer to validate whether a claimed cooling of the room was occurring but just maintain one's argument about what must be happening.

The geeks (and I number myself among them), who are atypical in their pursuit of technical excellence, have contributed tremendously to the problem. They have given these "magical" devices to vast numbers of people who don't understand their principles or the full consequences of their use. In fact, they themselves, in their narrow focus on making and creating things, do not understand the systems into which they inject these devices and cannot apprehend the full consequences to the world when the widget they have worked on multiplies into the millions and billions. The humble refrigerator and air conditioner both have produced vast quantities of CO2 and affected the development patterns of suburbia on a large scale. And even knowing these things, it seems unlikely that the geeks would stop what they are doing, not when there are so many rewards to be made from it.