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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see something like this in Nature. Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes, but it can't tell us what outcomes we should aim for. Different people have different preferences, and there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs people's quality of life.

Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts. Because many people lack the ability to distinguish between facts and opinions in scientific publishing, so they just end up distrusting all science.

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> Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes

That's what this paper does.

It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change.

> Recent scientists’ warnings confirm alarming trends of environmental degradation from human activity, leading to profound changes in essential life-sustaining functions of planet Earth

It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway.

This paper simply identifies causes contributing to the unsustainablity of the current system and makes some proposals to mitigate or eliminate it. It's analyzing and providing options.

Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.

>It seems like you may have missed the part that this situation is not sustainable, as well as the prior science that establishes that quality of life depends on the environment, which is why many people care about phenomena like polution and climate change.

It seems you missed the fact that many people don't care about sustainability, and are unwilling to accept even a small reduction in quality of life in the name of the environment. Clearly their values differ from the values of the paper's authors regarding what is "necessary societal change".

>It's going to be hard to argue that the life-sustaining capacity of Earth is not a universal subjective value of all life but the paper isn't arguing the opposite anyway.

If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems. The more limits there are on economic growth, the longer this will take. Similarly, life-extension technology will allow people to extend their lives longer; the slower the economy grows, the longer it will take to develop this. The paper didn't even consider this, or any other downsides of limiting economic growth.

>Make sure you understand what unsustainability means as far as consequences. Moreover, that's hardly a subjective value judgement. It's simply a measurable property of systems.

The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do", it's in the format "this is what we should do". For example: "economic systems that exploit nature and humans" - that's clearly a value judgement, not science.

> If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems.

That's not really true, there are other solutions. Bombing us back to stone age, or keeping everyone poor and occasionally decimating the population through resulting pandemics and wars, are both working solutions that align well with the ideology behind the article.

Now if we want civilized solutions that actually improve life for everyone, becoming an interplanetary species is mandatory.

I feel like you didn't read what I wrote or the article: Life itself depends on sustainability.

> If we look at sustainability from the perspective of "preserving human existence as long as possible", then the only long-term solution is expanding to other planets/solar systems.

Or not have a system of infinite growth at all.

> The language and tone used in the paper is not in the format "if we want to increase sustainability, this is what we should do"

It's literally what the paper says.

> "economic systems that exploit nature and humans"

This is also objectively measurable. They're talking about externalities. Is economics also a bunch of value judgements now too?

>Life itself depends on sustainability.

"Life" isn't a sentient being with values, people are. Humanity makes decisions based on some aggregate of the preferences of living humans. If most humans want to enjoy a good life now at the expense of the future environment, there's no objective standard to say they're wrong. It's a classic argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument , as noted by Sextus Empiricus, the founder of empiricism. There's no way to empirically justify a moral judgement.

>Or not have a system of infinite growth at all.

This betrays a misunderstanding of what growth means in an economic context. If your barber learns how to cut your hair twice as fast, that's economic growth. If the paperboy adopts a more efficient paper route to deliver papers faster, that's economic growth. If enough paperboys adopt more efficient routes, that shows up in GDP growth.

>This is also objectively measurable. They're talking about externalities. Is economics also a bunch of value judgements now too?

Yes of course it is. It's based on utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism), basically the philosophy that there is some quantitative form of value that we should aim to maximise. That's why there are different schools of economics: they disagree on the foundations.

> This betrays a misunderstanding of what growth means in an economic context.

Nope, you're just ignoring the limits of optimization.

We're so far away from those limits for them to be irrelevant to any practical considerations. Compared e.g. the performance per unit energy of the human brain to that of the best current CPU designs.

> Trying to push a certain set of values like this

"This science disagrees with my political beliefs so it must be wrong." -you

> there's certainly no objective measure of the value of preserving the environment vs people's quality of life.

If we fail to preserve the environment, there will be no quality of life, there will be no life.

We are literally talking about a universal mass extinction as we simply outconsume the planet's ability to support us.

> they just end up distrusting all science.

No, YOU distrust all science and you project this on others.

I mean, you don't question your airplanes, cars, or internet, do you? You only question the parts of science that disagree with your personal political beliefs.

The consequences of a population overshoot http://www.approachingthelimits.com/CC_Overshoot.html are unbelievably terrible. The consequences of uncontrolled climate change are also unbelievably terrible.

These negatives are so bad that a rational, prudent person would expend almost anything to prevent them.

When your eminent scientists uniformly warn you that a mass extinction is underway, you should listen.

---

I love old SF novels, and every permutation of catastrophe was worked out, except this idea - that the scientists of the world warn that catastrophe is coming and people say, "Fake news!"

Humans are addicts, and the addiction is consumer goods. This addiction will decimate the planet, and you might well live to see it happen.

As other commenters have pointed out, a quality life is dependent on a liveable environment. Moreover, the article isn't making value judgments -- it is just discussing outcomes. This really seems like you're projecting your own political stance, and aren't engaging at all with what is written in the article.

Also, if someone were to distrust science because of a factual article -- well, I don't think science could really do much for them, and at this point in history they're probably best ignored.

> Science can tell us what actions will lead to what outcomes, but it can't tell us what outcomes we should aim for.

I'm really disappointed to see anti-intellectual nonsense like this on HN. Science can be positive and normative, when it needs to be.

Maybe people do have different preferences, but there are objective, universal goals that benefit 99.9% of people and improve their quality of life. We are content with a minority in a democracy not getting their way when their candidates lose, but suddenly, in science, if 0.1%'s preferences aren't exactly in line with the rest, it's a grave offense?

Fresh water, heat, electricity, all available as many hours a day as possible aren't objective goals? Is there a person on this planet that would refuse a washing machine or a refrigerator?

Please.

> Trying to push a certain set of values like this risks giving science a bad name in the public eye, and making the public less willing to accept actual scientific facts.

The only thing trying to give science a bad name here is your comment, through inventing unreasonable and ever-moving goalposts, hiding behind individual preferences of people.

I suspect the Venn diagram of people who read Nature and people inclined to altogether lose their faith in the concept of science if they encounter a scientist's opinion they dislike consists of two separate circles that don't intersect. It would certainly be odd for Nature's editorial priorities to focus on the latter group.

You only need to look further down in the comments section here to find people dismissing the paper as leftist/Marxist propaganda. I'd bet that if it was written in a more neutral tone, such people would be more likely to actually read it. It's harder for people to trust a paper when it's author clearly has an agenda because it's hard to trust the author to be unbiased and include all relevant information.

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