Why does the world suck?

I was glancing through eminent computer theorist Scott Aaronson's blog, and found the following insightful post, parts of which I quote below:

"Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.

Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan.

Why is science hard? Because so many of the easy problems have been solved already.

Why do the people you want to date seem so cruel, or aloof, or insensitive? Maybe because, when they aren’t, you conclude you must be out of their league and lose your attraction for them.

Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium."


This make so much sense. This gives me renewed passion to study mechanism design in grad school--tweaking the incentives so that the equilibrium outcome is good. Such tremendous power seems to lie therein.

Or maybe I'm going through an idealist phase again...