Understanding Growth, Part 1 | Hacker News Reader

Understanding Growth, Part 1

strongtowns.org

65 pointsvilda16 comments

Let's put it like it is: Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

We can not infinitely polute air, water, soil. We can not infinitely extract all crude materials from the Earth. We can not infinitely exploit most of the others.

What IS infinite is human imagination and ingenuity: We CAN innovate and (at least) greatly mitigate our impact on our Home. Thus the importance of education.

+1.

It boggles the mind how we don't seem to get this, and how the idea of economic growth seems to be directly opposed to sustainable living. This has been voiced for decades (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful ) - wonder how much time have left to get it.

I'm reminded of this great read, "The Impossibility of Growth." http://www.monbiot.com/2014/05/27/the-impossibility-of-growt...

True, but the counterpoint would be that we don't need to stay on this planet. It is at least possible that we can sustain growth until we are multi-planetary.

> VJ-23X sighed. "Space is infinite. A hundred billion Galaxies are there for the taking. More."

> "A hundred billion is not infinite and it's getting less infinite all the time. Consider! Twenty thousand years ago, mankind first solved the problem of utilizing stellar energy, and a few centuries later, interstellar travel became possible. It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the population doubles every ten years --"

[...]

> "Once this Galaxy is filled, we'll have another filled in ten years. Another ten years and we'll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hundred years, we'll have filled a thousand Galaxies. In a thousand years, a million Galaxies. In ten thousand years, the entire known Universe. Then what?"

– http://multivax.com/last_question.html

Destroying earth and leaving a mess behind is not the output of an "intelligent" species.

It's a Darwinian bottleneck.

Evolution selects for immediate survival. Because intelligence is expensive, competitive species evolve enough intelligence to compete with each other. But the extra intelligence needed to guarantee successful long-term management of an entire planetary ecosystem is at the far end of the bell curve, and most individuals won't be capable of it. Likewise for effective off-world colonisation.

So you get a race between the self-destructive effects of short-sighted individual intelligence pursuing the usual goals of fighting, fucking, and accumulating resources, and the amplification effects of whatever collective intelligence mechanisms a species can evolve.

At the moment we're not doing so well with the latter. It's going to take a phase change to move collective intelligence up to a level where the likely default is long term survival.

Why do you assume that individual intelligence's are necessarily short-sighted in that sense? The existence of cultures as ongoing traditions of making indicates that individual intelligences are capable of participating in long-term, multigenerational endeavors....

Cultures, ongoing traditions, religion etc... can be seen as a way to pass on wisdom/intelligence via affirmation to the next generations. Empirically, you could say our ancestors have internalised the notion that individual intelligence isn't enough to persist knowledge at civilisation timescales and implemented mechanisms that would overwise be superfluous (eg, recounting of legends that tell of danger, flood myths, some religious codes).

This is pushing the argument a bit, but it stands to reason that this pattern of information preserval could indicate the necessity even for an 'advanced' civilisation with forward thinking individuals to reinforce diffusion/acquisition of knowledge of little short term value but high absolute value to survival/evolution

We can draw some nice parallels with the startup economy, especially when contrasting manic-depressive growth (unicorns on steroids) versus stable steady growth (boostrapped business). I would argue that there is some good middle ground where you take just enough debt/leverage to grow, but don't indulge in it to the point where it becomes mania and sinks you when the macroscopic environment turns sour.

The concept of 'antifragility' really seems to be popping up a lot in the media I consume via HN. I can't tell if antifragility is trendy, or really a novel, valuable idea of systems analysis that, until recently, hadn't converged upon a single descriptor.. Likely parts of both!

I have been "doing" antifragillity long before I read about it in Talebs book.

I neither consider it trendy nor novel but simply a way to understand the world and thus how to deal with it.

Great! Could you share non-Taleb resources for me to peruse? I like his stuff, but I'm sure you'll understand my aversion to monoculture, even with Taleb as the demagogue, haha.

I can offer you me :) I really wasn't aware of it until Taleb wrote about it. It just always felt natural to me.

It strikes me as somewhat faddish. There is no real argument here that it is feasible, and I think the article would have been better without it.

Yes it sounds like a fantasy to me. People just love trends and hype cycles too much. As humans, we have an innate need to magnify the importance of certain things while marginalizing or ignoring others completely. It's easier to think in black and white instead of shades of grey.

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