by throw10920 | 2025-10-10 03:24:06+00:00
Every line of argument in this comment is very bad.

> If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?

Your argument exclusively rests on the assertion that the converse is true - that if individuals and organizations will invest substantial amounts of effort into making sure that their upstream suppliers will continue to exist if they are dependent on them.

Not only is there no empirical evidence to support this claim, but there is ample evidence to support the fact that it's false - such as COVID, which you literally mention later in your comment, where despite the fact that we live in a highly interdependent global economy, there's very little effort invested into making sure that your suppliers continue to exist, and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.

In addition to the empirical evidence, this is just false based on human nature. If confronted with the fact that "oh, something might happen to an entity that supplies me with things", humans and organizations overwhelmingly choose to increase their internal resilience, not the system resilience. As a trivial example of this - in response to supply chain shocks that hit lean manufacturers like car manufacturers particularly hard, those manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to stock up on parts - internal resiliency - and not to invest in the upstream supply chain, which is what you're claiming they would do.

Your claim is just rooted in an false anthropology that has massive amounts of evidence refuting it.

> I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.”

That's an irrelevant strawman. Nothing in their comment was specifically predicated on exactly that scenario happening - they were arguing for general resiliency, which is effective even in more realistic and broad scenarios.

> To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.

First of all, that claim about the experiment is false. All labor in all sectors did not turn off at once.

Second, that's yet another strawman, because individuals overwhelmingly prefer to engage in tasks for the sake of self-preservation than the preservation of others. If the economy and individuals have resilient practices, they will invest substantially more effort in those practices that directly lead to their survival than if the system is not resilient and they're highly interdependent, because again, of human nature, which prioritizes the immediate.

> It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia.

Yet another strawman. Self-sufficiency is not binary. You can decrease your reliance on others without eliminating it entirely, and history's plentiful examples of system distruptions show that it is an extremely good idea to do so.

It's telling that you have to repeatedly make fallacies, false statements, and misunderstand human nature in an attempt to defend such an absurd point like "making individuals less resilient makes the system more resilient". Factually, it is exactly the opposite - systems with resilient components are objectively less fragile.