A classic in the genre of misunderstood agents. This is such a common thing these days I really wonder at it.

"Why do we have to build Electric Vehicles? Why don't we just build more trains?"

There's no 'we' here. 'We' are not doing anything. 'You' are sitting writing a blog. 'I' am writing a HN comment. 'They' are building EVs. You might as well say "Why do we want to build a dumpling store here? I never asked for that. I wanted Thai food" when someone else is building a dumpling store. It's not a 'we' decision.

The fact of the matter is that you can't redirect my money and effort to your goals. You can maybe find alignment between my objectives and your objectives, and when I try to find such alignment you can work with me or you can reject me. But we're free individuals. I'm not going to make you your Thai food. I'm going to make Chinese food. And if you want some, you can eat some by paying me, and if no one wants some I go out of business and it sucks for me.

I neither hate you nor love you. And you neither hate me nor love me. We are strangers to each other and where our interactions align we can work with each other; and where they don't we can't. The world is full of other people with other objectives. Some are opposed and some are aligned.

In the words of the Spiderman antagonist Sauron:

> I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs

And no matter what, I'm not going to try to work with anyone who's going to jump my case the moment the cosine of our vectors is not precisely 1. It never surprises me when all these perpetually angry people find themselves with no allies, because a desire to coordinate is fairly built-in to human nature and people recognize defectors from that framework easily and stop attempting coordination with habitual non-coordinators.