Permanent and temporary solutions.

I want to write a proper article about this, but for now just to pin down some ideas.

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There are temporary solutions to problems. Are they good? When I first realized that some solutions I was excited about were pretty short-term in the grand scheme of things, I thought I stumbled on some groundbreaking idea. I think this conversation is mostly about environmentalism, so I'll use examples from that, but there might be other similar areas where this applies.

It starts with a question, "what if we build things, what if we use more resources, build more things and solve the problem?" There is lots of CO2? We should burn more, spend the energy on developing better technology and capture it all back with this better technology. This kind of idea. The default naive assumption is that it just works. There is not enough labor? Let's build robots. There is not enough energy? Let's build power stations. There is not enough metal? Let's mine more. And so on and so forth. Sounds pretty simple.

The realization of temporary nature of such solutions is the next step. We bulid robots, but that doesn't address the reason there's not enough labor. For example, birth rates. We mine more metals, but we can only mine so much, there is a finite amount, so we will run out eventually. Same with fossil fuels. It's all just band-aid solutions that miss the real problems.

My current iteration* on this idea is that life is a series of such temporary solutions. I eat today, but it's just a temporary solution. I'll have to eat tomorrow as well, why don't I just solve the fundamental problem of nutrition instead of participating in this pointless cycle of putting off the inevitable? Okay, that's a very drastic example, but I'm pretty sure there are some problems where the repeating temporary solutions are by far the best. Moreover, these problems are everywhere. We build more energy if we need it. And if we need more, we build more. We mine more metals. And if we hit the bottom and run out, that's when we switch, not (much) earlier. Basically, temporary solutions help us make the society and the world better and more advanced, which opens up more options which make the world even more advanced. So in the end the greedy optimization of civilization might be a good strategy.

Imagine people of the early 20th century realizing where technology was headed and what environemental catastrophes awaited them. So they start rationing carbon emissions and stop pollution. I find it hard to imagine that by the year 2000 they would have nearly as much tech as we did.