"I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people."

"a perfect microcosm of the problem with everything right now."

https://cohost.org/hystericempress/post/1731218-reflecting-on-it-th

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Reflecting on it, the reason I think the OceanGate situation has become such a flashpoint for anger is because it's such a perfect microcosm of the problem with everything right now. Decisions are not made based on safety, reasonable caution, or concern for human life. Every decision is instead made from a default assumption of 'what if the bad thing just DIDN'T happen?' We are given pie-in-the-sky promises and sizzle reels and an endless PR hype-cycle for every new innovation and inevitably it fails to work, harms people, and then is maybe barely apologized for before the next bad idea comes down the pike. OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost. I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.

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Cathryn Townsend (@[email protected])

I have a new paper out with Mark Flinn, Joe Ferraro & Heather Habecker on the evolution of human cooperation: several million years from bipedalism to the emergence of private property. Part of a special issue on socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2021.0414

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