Most human effort is being wasted on endeavors with no abiding value.
Nothing we do matters for any of several reasons (moral non-realism, infinite ethics, living in a simulation, being a Boltzmann brain, ..?)
Things certainly feel very doom & gloom right now, but I still think there is scope for optimism in the current moment. If I had been asked in February last year what the best and worst outcomes would have been of the pandemic a year later, I would probably have guessed a whole lot worse than what turned out to be the case. I also don’t think that we are living in some special age of incompetent governance right now, and I would argue that throughout history we have come up with policies that have been disastrously wrong one way or the other. Competence have appeared elsewhere—as Tyler Cowen has argued, businesses seem unusually competent in the current crises compared to governments. Where would we have been without supermarkets’ supply chains, Amazon, Pfizer, Zoom etc during the pandemic? According to this article there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic right now:
As people lose jobs and income, many go hungry. Projections from the Food and Agricultural Organization point to an increase in the global number of chronically undernourished from 8.9 to around 9.9 per cent. A terrible outcome, but it still represents a reduction by a quarter since 2000.
It took mankind 3,000 years to develop a vaccine against polio and smallpox. Moderna designed a vaccine against Covid-19 in two days. Had we faced this new coronavirus in 2005, we would not have had the technology to even imagine such mRNA vaccines, if it had appeared in 1975 we would not have the ability to read the genome of the virus, if it came in 1950, we would not have had a single ventilator on the planet.
[T]he progress of the last few decades has been so fast, and human creativity under duress so impressive, that even major setbacks only pushes us back a few years. Only three years in history have been better in terms of GDP per capita, extreme poverty and child mortality – 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Things certainly feel very doom & gloom right now, but I still think there is scope for optimism in the current moment. If I had been asked in February last year what the best and worst outcomes would have been of the pandemic a year later, I would probably have guessed a whole lot worse than what turned out to be the case. I also don’t think that we are living in some special age of incompetent governance right now, and I would argue that throughout history we have come up with policies that have been disastrously wrong one way or the other. Competence have appeared elsewhere—as Tyler Cowen has argued, businesses seem unusually competent in the current crises compared to governments. Where would we have been without supermarkets’ supply chains, Amazon, Pfizer, Zoom etc during the pandemic? According to this article there are more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic right now: