Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
bbc.com
bbc.com
In the grand scheme of things, everything that happened this year is probably minor in comparison to Petrov's decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200807-the-nuclear-mist...
>>As it happens, on this occasion there was no imposter – at least, not a human one. The figure skulking around the fence is thought to have been a large black bear. It was all a mistake. But back at Volk Field, the squadron was still unaware of this fact. They had been told there would be no practice runs, and as they boarded their planes, they were entirely convinced that this was it –World War Three had begun.
It’s a unique confluence of incredible capability with little understanding of the consequences of using it. Nobody 100 years ago had the slightest clue that the industrialisation at the time could cause global warming, for example.
As for examples of pivotal moments, WW2 is a good example. We came very close to the world being completely dominated by Orwell style authoritarian one party states. A boot stamping on a human face, forever. It might even still happen. With social engineering and modern surveillance technology as used in China, we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime with no way out.
Nuclear annihilation is another example. We came scarily close several times as you pointed out.
Global warming is a huge issue, it may even be too late to stop massive changes in our environment that will last thousands of years and shape human history and global biology permanently.
Genetic engineering could change who and what we are as a species in ways that might be hard or impossible to undo. It’s not any one of these that create the hinge either though, it’s all of them happening together.
Look at some cities in Europe. Many have waxed and waned, some even many times. They have been parts of different countries and empires. Many have influenced the world greatly for the better.
The AIs might not need to take over, we might actively hand ourselves over to them.
I think that's what GP meant when they wrote that "we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime". Because the oppressive regimes so far weren't oppressive for long.
Oh, also switching dynasties frequently resulted in the entire previous royal family being summarily executed.
For a brief(?) summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history
Burning of books and burying of scholars, Qin dynasty, 213 BCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...
Xianyang Palace Archives
Rome continued to rule the world for a ~15 centuries. There is still a sizable chunk of the global population that obeys Rome, even though they are not ruled by anything like the Roman Empire.
Realising that the military empire wasn't going to work any more, and changing Rome's historically laisse-faire attitude to religion into an effective method of rule... that's genius at work.
And they were overrun by the Sea Peoples, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Kush, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Persia, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Macedonia. Overrun by Rome. Each of those was an end of an established government.
Byzantium (and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire) disagrees [0]. They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed.
I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.
Sidenote: incidentally not coincidentally. The closure of the Silk Road and other important East-West land routes as a result of the Ottoman conquest was one of the important spurs that kicked off the Age of Discovery, as everyone scrambled to find new routes.
The Roman Republic learned from Athens’ democracy. Even late Republicans like Sulla and Cicero and Caesar recognised the Republic’s overuse of checks and balances, as well as its lack of a state army. Caesar almost uniquely recognised Rome’s broken voting system. Unfortunately, they were too late.
America’s founders were not. The lessons of the Republic gave us our strong executive and state-funded armed forces. Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.
Analyses abound about [what's wrong with American democracy](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_the_curren...). The nail in the coffin though, will be the first part of your sentence. The American Constitution is notoriously hard to amend, which means that it is just too easy to maintain as it is by those who benefit from the status quo. We can already see this by how the will of the majority is routinely ignored through unequal representation. My opinion is that this is not sustainable and will have to be resolved through unlawful means, exactly because of the unflexibility of the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_Sejm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Partition_of_Poland
This is incorrect. The first measurements and effects were calculated at the end of the 19th Century (quoted as 1896).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
Fossil fuel companies have paid large sums to lie about the effects of their products on climate change, just like tobacco companies have directly killed innumerous people by lying about the negative health impact of cigarettes for decades. Nowadays, the evidence that these companies collaborated on misleading the public is openly accessible but back in the 70s or 80s YOU were the enemy for trying to warn about health dangers. Climate is the same now, propaganda has done its work for a long time.
And again, the same cancerous people jump on the bandwagon of an increasingly aware public and try to profit off the new movement by ways of green-washing and other pseudo-helpful bullshit.
These are significant problems where short-term profit motivation is more influential than long-term sustainability and "positive" development of society. Our only hope is the few people in human society who are motivated enough to study, learn, read and act for the greater good.
That's kind of hingey if you ask me.
Who do you think has or rather should have more power than corporations? The state! And who is constantly crying for a less influential state? The current US administration.
As long as we as the voters do not allow the state to be the one in power but rather companies it will be companies doing whats best for them.
We can choose to buy zero emission cars and purchase products exclusively from environmentally friendly corporations. Corporations will either adapt or go bankrupt.
Even ignoring the problem of those 1% potentially being the richest 1%, there is the issue that harmful businesses often have lower costs than ethical businesses, and some consumers are too price-sensitive (or don't have time to become informed about every corporation's business practices) to vote "correctly" with their purchasing power.
High and mid income earners can and should choose more ethical/environmental businesses as they have the means to do so.
Just from the numbers yes because the other side isnt saying more or even same but less.
https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...
> Arrhenius saw that this human emission of carbon would eventually lead to warming. However, because of the relatively low rate of CO 2 production in 1896, Arrhenius thought the warming would take thousands of years, and he expected it would be beneficial to humanity.
It still seems that scientists at that point looked at it more from an interesting terraforming perspective and less like a looming catastrophy perspective.
I doubt that would have lasted for long. Fortunately enough for humanity, free human are more productive than slaves.
Compare also https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi... and https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard
In the end war is expensive because fighters aren’t producing food etc.
East Germany vs West Germany; North Korea vs South Korea - and that's in less than a century. On a longer timescale, think Ming and Qing dynasties compared to Europe on the same timeframe - China was much more stable during that time, but stability was not sufficient in the long run. However, the current PRC is perhaps a counterexample, though there is a lot of nuance, external conditions and multiple very different approaches that the China leadership tried out during the last 50 years.
Early tyrannical states and back-breaking agriculture outcompeted relatively free and comfortable hunter gatherers.
Also people knew about and have already experienced pollution and other effects of industrilization. Read about London big stink.
Social aspects too, ludites, social disruption, leading to labor as a political / social force. Urbanizatiin. Communism. Labor laws. Etc.
Since ancient times "birth of civilization" we have deforested, over fished/hunted/farmed.
We have continously, dramatically changed our environment and ourselves. We've already genetically engineered ourselves (modern man and medical man are quite different) and numerous other species.
Everybody in every time period believes their time is different. Is frantic changes. Is etc.
Its only because they know more about recent events. Recent events are in memory.
The more you study human history, the more you realize it has always been a dramatic.
It seems like not only we came close, but it is the very reality we currently live in, we just don't like admitting it. Although instead of one party, we have one class.
With all the new elements in society, I think we're all "finding our balance". And once we have, we'll be able to explore the future much more safely and effectively.
I guess that's the "hinge-y" argument. The negative argument might be that we're a house of cards, destined for greater instability not less, and we're experiencing what it is to fall apart.
If anything the current time marks the point where politicians were given too much control of otherwise free countries.
So a little late, but: happy Stanislav Petrov day!
https://www.quora.com/How-close-did-we-come-to-a-nuclear-war...
- Vasily Arkhipov was a Soviet submarine flotilla commander in charge of a submersed fleet that was being bombarded by depth charges from US navel ships. A captain on one of the subs thought war had broken out and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo. Vasily thought the bombardment was a signal for the submarines to surface. He was right, a ceasefire had been announced and the warships were dropping practice depth charges to try and signal the submarines should surface and communicate. link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)...
- Boris Yeltsin sat in front of an activated nuclear briefcase because Soviet radar detected an inbound US nuclear missile. The launch location and trajectory matched a war game scenerio of the US detonating a nuclear missile in the atmosphere, causing an EMP to wipe out Soviet electronics. His military officers wanted him to launch a counter attack and he only had minutes to decide. Turned out to be a missile launched to study atmospheric conditions. The Soviets were notified, as were other nations, but the message didn't get to all forces due to the internal strife and collapse the USSR was undergoing. Link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
- A computer simulation of an incoming Soviet nuclear attack was accidentally fed into NORADs network. Everyone thought it was real. The National Security Advisor was awakened by a call and almost called the President, but was luckily able to determine it wasn't real. Link - https://gizmodo.com/the-computer-simulation-that-almost-star...
There is a whole list of other incidents. Yes, many of them occurred during the cold war. They seem to have slowed down as time goes on, maybe nations are just better at covering things up. You still have incidents like in Hawaii, where residents were notified of an incoming ballistic missile from North Korea and that it WAS NOT a drill.
Turned out to be a drill...(or was it)?
The number of nuclear weapons worldwide has decreased, but proliferation has increased. Think of each nuclear capable nation as a node in a weighted graph. Each node is connected to every other node. The weight is the probability of conflict between the two nodes. Each time a node is added, risk goes up (proliferation). You can have dramatic changes in foreign and domestic policy, risk goes up (US politics anyone?). You can have long standing animosity between countries (India/Pakistan), risk goes up. You can have new animosities (India/China), risk goes up. There can be just plain system bugs or miscommunication as illustrated in the examples listed above.
Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix. Or a truly mad guy with a nuke. We haven't had large scale war for a long time, but as countries deal with internal pressures and external competition for resources and global standing, the risk is never off the table.
I would says the risks are still high today and are rising.
> Petrov's decision.
Petrov's decision is one of the most overhyped propaganda on social media. It's a non-story turned into a story for some reason.
If people just took the time to think about the content rather than mindlessly consuming content maybe we'd get less nonsense.
Or will see the power center of the West shift to Europe, and a more powerful, and expansionist Russia threaten peace in Europe.
I put in a "yes" vote for the hinge of history simple due to the fact that our inability to drastically restructure our economy today will severely negativity affect billions in the future. Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream IMO, and the big question remains to be seen of whether we see big positive feedback loops that result in greatly increased warming (8°C or so). If that happens, WWII will look inconsequential by comparison.
I think/hope it's possible by a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal.
We not only have to stop all emissions to zero, but should probably start removing co2 from the atmosphere as well:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-remov...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-w...
But there are a lot of social issues going along with this: Up to 8% of greenhouse-gas emissions come from concrete, so building things.
I cannot imagine a world without construction, there are so many business processes and jobs involved with that.
That said, coronavirus is not even close to being a threat to human civilization. Compare this to 1918 Spanish flu and the contrast can't be clearer. Despite enormous growth in human population and much higher connectivity, we are managing global death toll an order of magnitude lower. We absolutely can be much better but we can't ignore 100 years of progress either.
If anything, it has shown that people have the capacity to pull together when they need to.
Have you seen how things are looking in the UK, France, and Spain right now?
Ain't that the truth.
Before that, it's just not feasible or possible in a human society.
> [a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal] is a pipe dream.
I'd love to be convinced otherwise. While technically possible, I'm wary of the social/economic/political aspects not being surmountable.
(Edit: Your comment was edited while I pondered mine, and now includes mention of the social, etc. aspect :) )
Anything short of forcing people to consume less now is pie in the sky thinking.
Then markets, our most advanced coordination/optimization method can be utilized to figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions.
The majority of people end up getting more back than they are taxed.
The problem is the perception problem at the gas pump or heating bill.
While I agree that redistributing wealth should also be a goal, any solution that doesn’t lower total consumption is useless, so the pain of less consumption would be felt by anyone consumer more than average (which is probably everyone in the developed world).
1) tax rate: $/ton of CO2
2) wealth distribution: 100% goes to state vs 100% goes back to population or anywhere inbetween.
The two knobs are independent. You could crank tax rate of co2 way up while still equally dividing the revenue generated and heavily discouraging co2 emissions.
We want the tax rate to be high enough to disincentivize carbon-emitting actions relative to carbon-neutral (or carbon-capturing) actions. But if government's ability to finance public operations is also affected, then we have a problem. The revenue-maximum tax rate is based on a completely different optimization problem than the carbon-minimum tax rate.
Making carbon taxes revenue-neutral decouples the two policy objectives.
Since we cannot arrange for a supervolcano yet, we could purposely emit sulfur from ships and existing smoke stacks. But wouldn't this cause acid rain eventually? Crops would receive less sun. Fictional remedy to fight solar-powered machines in "the Matrix" - global solar grids would have reduced input.
This is why I think that, even facing the chaotic "sloshing" due to projected >8C temperature within a century referenced in parent, a civilization that has practiced/standardized/mass-produced greenhouses at a hectacre-scale could fare well despite the projected drought/storm/fire/sea-rise/permafrost-methane-feedback that is being suggested as consequence. The only "silver bullet" specialty that I know would be beneficial at any point in the future anyways (ability to grow large variety of food in barren areas with limited resources).
Norway has large greenhouse production for higher latitude growth. Commercial sized greenhouse footprint to replace existing traditional outdoor grazing and staple crops would be enormous, which is why it may be more efficient to think of how to modify a biome instead of mass producing plastic/glass/steel enclosed micro climates (which may not be compatible with traditional tractors/combines/dusters which have long been mass produced).
You don't want to do the first because future millions of people are not worth the lives of present millions. And you're not going to do the latter because you can't afford it. You burnt too much to get here.
So guess what? You're fucked. I'm not going to help you for free.
It's like Europe giving Brazil shit over the Amazon. Buddy, you guys clear cut your forests. Your absolute forest cover doesn't matter. You've killed so many of your forests. Brazil has 60% forest cover. Germany has 30%. You cut your trees to build cities. And I can't? No, raze your cities or pay me for 400 years of treelessness.
What I'd honestly want to see happening instead is developed nations doubling down on greentech, and donating all of that (+ expertise and IP) to developing nations, so that the latter can leapfrog the CO₂-intensive energy generation methods. After all, the developing nations aren't into greenhouse emissions for the sake of greenhouse emissions - they just want to have the same level of prosperity for their people as the West enjoys. So I say we should just give them the means to achieve that without burning fossil fuels, for free - and screw intellectual property and some perceived "fairness". This is a global problem, we're all in this together.
Increased space per person => increased fossil fuel usage => increased emissions.
Maybe the greatest “greentech” would be dissuading having kids, either culturally or economically.
The amount of (developed) land a person uses is a rough proxy for quality of life in the developed world, and it is afforded by ignoring the long term externalities of fossil fuels.
Obviously everyone wants a detached single family house with a garage and a couple cars and a backyard for their kids and a few flights every year for the family, but if the environment is buckling with such a small portion of the population enjoying these benefits, there is no chance everyone can.
Overall consumption needs to go down, which means lower consumption per person, and/or fewer persons.
Families with children all over the world have been accepting that. The urbanization of the developing world is mainly people moving from villages where they had their own home (or at least a family compound) to cities where they live in modern blocks at best, shantytowns at worst. Once the first generation gets installed in that modern block, successive generations simply accept living in a block as normal – yes, some might dream of their own home on their own land, but that is regarded as something available only to a select few, not a mainstream thing.
It's just not enough until it becomes crazy cheap, though. You have to be way better than fossil fuels to match up because of their advantages.
And no one has the power for global subjugation. No single group of currently allied nations has that power. So that's a safe thing. It simply can't happen. I doubt America could even subjugate Mexico, which is next door.
Ha, that's funny. Europeans have to subsidize their agriculture to compete with Brazil, but Brazilian practices aren't modern?
If Brazilian farmers practiced farming in the same way as Europeans do, the country would ban bankrupt.
Yeah, mechanization is lower in Europe... (This is related to the subsides.)
Anyway, those waves of temporary immigrants that every year go to Europe from poorer neighboring countries aren't much more expensive than Brazilian labor.
To say nothing of the fact that the first American soldier who dies to stop climate change will cause, by his death, the crucifixion of your "liberal tree huggers". Your internal politics will fracture and break you. You are too weak for this.
And if you're European, your populace doesn't have the appetite to use guns and bombs to stop climate change anyway.
Other than that, some parts of American / Western population would be gladly sold on "the overpopulated non-whites are destroying the world by over-consumption and need to be kept in check" - without realizing the irony of "over-consumption" and without seeing the parallels between "overpopulation" rhetoric and eugenics of old.
Moreover eternal war is more money for the capitalists, while there's little profit in saving the world peacefully. And you know who truly rules the West.
So hopefully we can all agree on stuff. I'm not sure it's all that likely.
EDIT: also if you're a "leader of a developing nation", chances are you're going to see effects of climate change, like drought and famine, way sooner than the rich parts of the world. And if you get no aid because you refuse to cooperate ... you know. Maybe your replacement that got to power after you got hanged by an angry mob will do more solar panels or whatever.
You just can't do it.
And the benefits of industrialization are huge. Especially now before we put carbon caps in because everyone knows you get grandfathered in.
When the famines come, you'll be expected to buy food. And the West will be expected to sell it. Because what are you going to do, say "No aid because you didn't play along"? You'll get absolutely mulched in your Parliaments and your Congresses.
To say nothing of what will happen, which is that China will sell them food because it is unlikely everyone gets a drought at the same time. And then you will have committed a geopolitical own goal.
You can force a lot of things. A lot of things. But China put the cat among the pigeons. Everyone knows that burning hella fossil really fast is optimal, because sooner or later the West is gonna ask for some deals. And since we'll wipe the slate clean of emissions then, it is optimal to burn now. Burn everything because the jubilee will come.
You can:
1. Try to disarm me, but you are unable.
2. Try to not screw me, and it'll be fine.
3. Do your bit, and it'll be fine.
Listen, what that will look like is that the US+Europe has to reduce carbon emissions some 75% for a few decades and India+Brazil+developing_nations get to boost theirs to 250% for a few decades. Then we will all have emitted the same carbon into the atmosphere and the playing field is leveled. Fair. Equitable. Unachievable only because you don't want to be fair or equitable.
But your line of reasoning perfectly shows that it fine - humanity going extinct is a good thing. The universe is better off without the like of us.
If you consider that coal plants also come with negative health effects on a population (elevated cancer rates, etc) - it makes even more sense.
Compare this to how the U.S. invested in developing fiber optic technology - it was INSANELY expensive to build out fiber networks in the 80s/90s, and now it's nearly free.
The small countries who waited until ~2005 or after were able to build out their internet infrastructure for a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps a similar effect is taking place with energy, but I may be overly optimistic.
Know that doom predictions, being very emotionally appealing, travel around the world before science can get its shoes on.
The size of the climate disaster, and the urgent need for radical changes in the global economy, simply can't be overstated right now.
Unfortunately, the amount of status quo propaganda, especially in the US, is also staggering. You can't open a media site and not read false information like 'we still have time', 'scientists aren't really sure', 'new technology will help address this', 'if people did this one easy thing, the problem would go away', 'track your personal carbon emissions and the world will be saved' - all dangerously misleading and outright false information. But cleverly disguised as of we can keep the status quo and things will just improve.
I'm really curious where did you get this information from. I suppose it must not be popular or mainstream media, because of course msm telling you that science shows a worse reality than msm is a contradiction.
So does which primary literature does it come from?
Just saying that means nothing without a reference to this alleged science.
Nothing!
> The size of the climate disaster, and the urgent need for radical changes in the global economy, simply can't be overstated right now.
...and your take, which I fully agree with:
> "Science" (...) finding that we are causing the climate to change into something that is less favorable to humans than our current climate is abundantly clear to anyone
Personally I think it's true that the size of the climate disaster is absolutely enormous and we really do need radical changes throughout the global economy. But if you don't share that opinion then I see why you'd want to see a citation with such a statement, even if you don't deny that the CO2 in the air is man-made and causing the planet to become a lot less hospitable to us.
So I'll oblige and go to Wikipedia's climate crisis page, which provides under the heading of "Scientific basis":
> While powerful language had long been used in advocacy, politics and media, until the late 2010s the scientific community traditionally remained more constrained in its language.[13] However, in a November 2019 statement published in January 2020 issue of the scientific journal BioScience, a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that describing global warming as a climate emergency or climate crisis was appropriate.[14] [...]
> Also in November 2019, an article published in Nature concluded that evidence from climate tipping points alone suggests that "we are in a state of planetary emergency", defining emergency as a product of risk and urgency, with both factors judged to be "acute".[15] The Nature article referenced recent IPCC Special Reports (2018, 2019) suggesting individual tipping points could be exceeded with as little as 1—2 °C of global average warming
The page does warn for the backlash from the alarmist phrasing, but at least many scientists appear to find this phrasing accurate. They're not infallible but it does seem to be our best understanding of the situation.
> A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.
The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ...
This says two things to me:
1. "a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming" says that this is NOT what the experts in the field are saying.
2. "from a broad range of disciplines" says that these are mostly not climate scientists.
Here is the best article I know about the real climate science vs doomsday predictions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...
> the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.
That rings very true unfortunately :/
> often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop
I have literally only ever heard that argument in articles that say this is a stupid argument. Who'd ever say that? These people have bigger problems than climate change and don't have the resources or infrastructure or do something about it. The poorest also pollute the least per capita. It's us who can do something.
But then the article builds on that logic by saying:
> “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,”
Which doesn't logically follow. No, we can't expect the poorest of this planet to buy or build hi-tech solar panels and batteries when they could simply dump coal in a steam turbine and be done with it, but it's also not the case that we're optimizing for CO2 in 50+ years. Those are two different statements. In fifty years we'll be long over our CO2 budget and potential runaway effects have long been triggered.
Anyway, the premise of the article is not necessarily wrong. The last sentence captures its point reasonably:
> Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.
And it also captures why I'm afraid the article is (unintentionally) a bit misleading. The author clearly understands climate change, and he's also clearly frustrated with extremists calling it an apocalypse (or, in your words, doomsday predictions). Indeed, I'd describe something as apocalyptic or doomsday if it threatened the lives of most of us, and that's not the case here.
So he's arguing against exaggerating to a point that very few people (a vocal but tiny minority perhaps) agrees with. That's a correct argument, but it's very easy to extrapolate that to what was said above: "[no] urgent need for radical changes in the global economy". It might not threaten most humans' lives, but that doesn't mean it's not big enough of a deal to implement radical changes. Intuitively, the "plenty of middle ground" between apocalypse and denial centers around "it's there but not that big a deal". I don't think that's what the author meant to argue. Especially if one only looks at the headline and is already inclined (as many Americans seem to be) to think that the whole climate thing is not as important as activists make it out to be. Those readers are now going to be more strongly convicted, while the article isn't actually that blunt. The headline is meant to catch readers' eyes but thereby sends the wrong message.
The question that remains is how bad it's going to be. The author didn't really convince me there. There are error margins on any prediction, and most meaningful predictions build on other predictions with their own error margins. We don't yet know how to be self-sufficient. If we're fine with letting natural food chains collapse, do we have all the dependencies needed for growing the food we need to stay healthy? Not everything will go extinct at once, but we don't know which parts will be able to adapt, so we need to make sure we captured the whole (circular) dependency chain.
We'll probably find solutions to missing pieces, hence my not expecting it's going to be the end of humanity, but how fast will we figure it out? How fast can we scale up synthesizing that? There's just so many unknowns. Reducing a single variable, CO2 in the air, seems trivial when compared to the engineering feats we'll need to artificially make the earth hospitable to 10 billion people.
One thing in the article that keeps coming back is the koala. I don't know why he keeps bringing it up, it really doesn't matter if koalas specifically are still around. The question of food chains would be much more relevant.
Another thing is the wildfires, cited in a few places to not currently be solely caused by climate change. Again, not something I think many people really claim in the first place. The message, as I see it in climate activists' promotional materials, is more that we'll see more of this in the future. The article confirms that climate change is already playing a role, albeit small and definitely not a singular cause, and the climate has as of yet barely changed.
Another place where the article is a bit odd is this:
> “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”
The "notes IPCC" part is a link to a PDF which does not contain that citation, even in part (the world "displacing" doesn't occur at all and "robust evidence" is used in one spot but not something that seems relevant to this quote). I looked it up because it sounded weird in the first place. Why would a panel on climate change look at displacement caused by sea level rise when it has been changing on the order of centimeters per decade? Of course you would find "limited" evidence for that directly causing displacement.
The cited rise itself is also using 2007 numbers which were adjusted by the IPCC in 2014 (and the article is from 2019 so it could easily have used those numbers), but whether it's 0.6m or 0.9m, I guess the consequences aren't all that different.
As a Dutchman I also feel obliged to say something about the representation of our situation. It says we learned to live 7 meters below sea level 400 years ago... even with today's tech we couldn't simply manage a wall of 7 meters of sea. This -6.76m point is 30km inland. Every meter of rise would be a really big deal (glancing at a heightmap (AHN3), one of the higher sea-to-land-after-dike height differences seems to be -1m). But we're just a tiny country and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to do a lot of effort just for us, so enough about us. This thing about the Netherlands just isn't accurate in multiple ways.
That said, I thought the predicted sea rise would be on the order of meters, not less than a meter. That's one takeaway from this article in which the effects of climate change will be less bad than I thought. Wikipedia has another chart that shows a few meters of potential change, but of course I can't tell who among all the smart people is most likely to be right, so I'll stick with that it's very likely going to be less than 1m.
So let me just try to end on that. I spent 3 hours looking into this now, from reading the article to putting my concerns into words while learning more about various aspects. Another takeaway in the same vein is that when digging into Wikipedia's citations, it's often not put as starkly as Wikipedia's text actually says. Nevertheless, I hope I also showed that the article doesn't argue that we don't have a very big and urgent problem (even if it's not an "everyone will certainly die" kind of big).
Increasing exposure of people and economic assets has been the major cause of long-term increases in economic losses from weather- and climate-related disasters (high confidence). Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not been excluded (high agreement, medium evidence). [1]
The message that what is causing these major natural disasters is mostly people living and building in the wrong places, not climate change, is what the media should be saying, but they tend to link it almost entirely to climate change, which is an overstatement.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/SREX_FD_SPM_...
Read the first few paragraphs of any paper in climate or environmental science; their outlook is usually much bleaker than anything you find in the general public.
Are there really science papers claiming worse?
Meanwhile the IPCC worst-case scenario is that world GDP in 2100 will be 8.2% lower with a +3.7°C temperature increase, compared to the aspirational +1.5°C increase.
If there's any direct threat to the planet, it's insane amount of industrial waste entering the environment daily that gets downplayed in this ridiculous song and dance about CO2.
https://publicintegrity.org/environment/industrial-waste-pol...
https://www.buschsystems.com/resource-center/page/why-indust...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5699236/
Industrial waste poisons drinking water, destroys the oceans and their ecosystems, poisons the land and our food.
Everyone's busy worrying about how much CO2's being produced, very few people seem to be worried about what kind of mysterious proprietary petro derived chemicals are being pumped into rivers, lakes, the ocean. Few people seem to sorry that groundwater and resevoirs are contaminated by agricultural runoff, runoff from factories, manufacturing plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, fracking operations.
Every day, thousands of tons of carcinogenic, toxic, environmentally altering chemicals are relaeased into the environment doing damage we don't even understand yet.
I don’t know why it isn’t talked about more. There has been a significant drop and at the current rate it won’t be too long until the average man is considered essentially infertile.
Climate change killing us, while planning on "going to Mars", is one of the funniest modern narratives.
Unabetted climate change will be "devastating" in many ways, but it likely won't wipe us off the face of the earth in a generation. We are incredibly resourceful.
Climate change can absolutely be reversed by sufficiently determined technological and industrial civilization.
The reason most climate activists don’t acknowledge that is because they don’t want it to be true. They prefer being noble doomsayers before the “ignorant sheep.”
There are (expensive) geoengineering projects that would give humans direct control over global temperature.
The most common suggestion is to add particles to the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. I think sulfur was first proposed, but I think study of calcium carbonate has been ongoing to avoid the ocean acidification issues that sulfur presents.
At least at first. If we start doing it, and don't reform our ways, it gets progressively more expensive.
Probably a nice stop gap if we ever get our shit together, but are staring down some really bad after effects.
This is obviously false. Please take this nonense elsewhere.
I agree with the rest of your comment more than with the person you replied to, like, of course we can have a major effect on the climate if we see the need to (if we indeed see 8°C warming and traditional food supplies failing, suddenly the powers of this world will see ways to do something about it that they aren't doing today) and it doesn't automatically mean an imminent end to history like GP claimed. I just don't get why you had to add the cited part. We're all on the same team.
This would quite obviously result in death and misery for billions (again, this is the worst case scenario), but I haven't seen any evidence that the Earth will become fundamentally uninhabitable a la Venus.
So it would be a disaster in any sense of the word, but I don't see how it would become a humanity-ending event. I'd like to understand why people think otherwise.
Also with end of history, I didn't mean the end of the human race. Just the end of the current civilization and possibly written history. Another dark age, so to speak.
To echo what another reply said, our own planet contradicts the idea that we would turn into a Venus for some reason. In that all the carbon we're putting back into the atmosphere is from organic processes that took it out of the atmosphere eons ago.
So, again, yes, the change will be enormously traumatic for humanity, but I don't see any evidence that written history will somehow disappear, for example.
On the whole, the same folks who fear climate change the most, praise the mission to make life multi-planetary. Those two beliefs held concurrently are a head scratcher to me... if you believe in our ability to make life multi-planetary, then surely we can adapt here. Mars is much more unforgiving than any forest fire, hurricane, or massive earth bound event.
Venice and New Orleans might be a write-off, and NYC will have sea walls, but folks must have some drive to adapt beyond just bland acceptance.
Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model.
The rise in nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is another phenomenon that could unleash forces of global conflict which might lead to cataclysms like a nuclear war or another world war at least.
Of course pivotal moments in history can only be declared as such in hindsight. But the forces leading up to them usually gather steam decades before. It looks as we have no shortage of those in our time.
On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow.
I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person. The expansion of diversity and knowledge in the last few hundred years is much like the expansion of the universe, in that we can't seem to be able to beat it at all in terms of speed no matter what we do.
Any sci-fi device that could perhaps offset that eventually (e.g. a future neuralink-thing being able to "upload" knowledge into you) is not the kind of thing I would bet my savings on in terms of time constants when compared to much more immediate events like climate change wrecking our modern civilization.
By my way of thinking about such things I think this is the best comment in the thread so far, in that:
- it recognizes that there are even more risks (disagreement over climate change --> political changes --> war) from climate change than the obvious first order ones
- it recognizes that the world is a system, and that it contains complexity
- it recognizes that complexity can cause vast disagreement
- it does not speculate about (and consider to be a fact) the causation of an observation ("to vastly disagree about this somehow") but rather, correctly notes that the causation is unknown
> I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person.
I agree, and I estimate that most other people here would as well, but only when thinking about this concept abstractly. But if one is to closely(!) observe how people talk about our (infinitely complex) world, you may notice this phenomenon where it seems as if people are literally not aware of the complexity of the world. Now, if one is to respond to such a comment pointing such a shortcoming out, typically (in "smart" communities) the person can then(!) skilfully recognize whatever aspect of overlooked complexity you noted...but at the time they made the initial comment, was this complexity ~"included in the cognitive context of their mind" when pondering the problem, or was their mind working with a vastly simplified model of the world (because that is efficient, and the mind seems to often err on the side of efficiency rather than correctness)? If one is to ask that question, the person will typically assure you with supreme confidence that of course they were aware of it, but that they were "speaking loosely/generally" or something along these lines - which of course may be true, but is it actually true? I would say the fact of the matter is unknown, because we do not seem to have that level of insight into the workings of the mind. (And if you then respond with this theoretical question, extremely interesting things often transpire, but that's a whole other ball of wax that I'll skip for now.)
I believe if you treat this very general and speculative philosophical idea as a kind of lens through which to view the activities of human beings from an abstract, curious alien entity perspective (no prior or presumed knowledge of "how it is" with Earth and Humanity, but infinite curiosity about the highly paradoxical nature of our species), you may start to notice a set of repetitive patterns everywhere you look, in all sorts of different levels of dimensional abstraction and aggregation. And if you notice that and then speculate about what unseen/undetected Force in the Universe could be causing all this, maybe some interesting new theories might start to emerge about why things are the way they are.
Obviously not true.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
> Obviously not true.
I think GP was referring to predictions of climate sensibility to changes in CO2 concentration appearing to track the predicted worst-case [1]. He was not referring to the predictions of CO2 concentration per se.
And the predictions about CO2 rise you refer to are not very comforting anyway. If the 2 degree line is crossed, as predicted by these data, then a cascade of tipping points [2] will likely put the earth into a permanently "hot" climate state.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
And we ("hackers") give them both the open society they can hate against and the tools to potentiate their propaganda for free.
Except that most models are piss-poor at predicting anything and that they only cherry pick the ones that happen to make it with new data.
On top of that, climate change is a slow moving disaster, and we are typically good at mitigating long term changes (at least way better than urgent crises). Scientists calling for the end of the world at every opportunity will look ridiculous 100 years from now.
I wish I could share your optimism. Climate change may be a slow moving disaster, however it is more a "high latency" moving disaster. In the sense that once the symptoms start hurting us, it will not be possible to administer any control inputs that will effect the course of climate change within an acceptable period of time.
And while we may be good at mitigating long term changes, I think "existential crisis" kind of long term changes may not have any modes of mitigation that would be acceptable to the current generation of humans (like accepting that 90% of world population just won't have a chance of long-term surivival).
The science is absolutely certain on this one: the only way to prevent disastrous climate changes, including massive rises in sea levels, extreme temperatures and drought in many highly populated areas of the world etc. is to stop emitting CO2 TODAY, literally. Or, well, to be more accurate, a few years ago, more likely.
Either way, urgent overhaul of our whole global economy is the only option, but it remains of course an absurdity in the current political climate.
Given that there's no chance at all of this happening, what's Plan B?
It will require the deployment of direct air capture tech at a total-war level of industrial mobilization.
An adequately priced carbon tax could make it profitable?
That statement is laughably incorrect, in fact the complete opposite of what is pointed to by the evidence. Humans are much better at dealing with urgent crises than long term threats due to our evolutionary history. We even have three branches of emergency services and the military that are trained to deal with urgent crises.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this is something you can safely ignore. If you do, your children will pay the price.
The pandemic, when combined with widespread misinformation and mistrust, increasing inequality and climate change makes for a potent combination and people are right to be worried.
Calling this a prosperous time is also flawed, for who? The middle class is nearly gone, freedoms are being eroded, racial tensions are still high, the world order is destabilizing as many governments lean into more dictator-like structures. I genuinely want to understand what you see to give you hope because right now I'm failing to find much to grab onto.
- It is a prosperous time for far more than ever before. Within the last thirty years, a new world power has risen and raised 400 million people out of poverty in an unprecedented act of economic engineering with no military conquest to enable it. Never before has this been done. Its neighbour during this time has simultaneously raised 180 million people out of poverty. During this time neither nation has fought its neighbour. Before this massive reduction of human unhappiness, the loss of the median American's third car pales.
- Absolute measures of human standards of living have continuously increased. They are not going down. The major world economies have all improved continuously. You will need to define the middle class and why that measurement is meaningful to you. If Bezos gets Mars and I get a piece of American land the size of San Francisco, our relative inequality will have increased, but I will take that trade every day.
- Racial tensions were way higher in the past. Black people were segregated! In South Africa, they had apartheid. And a little farther back and Japanese-Americans were in concentration camps. In California, the fourteen thousand Army National Guard troops suppressed race riots.
- The world order is being destabilized as America withdraws the shield that preserved Pax Americana. This is true. But that was a subsidy to (or perhaps an investment in) the world, a tide that raised all ships, and America's more than anyone else's. America prospered with world trade. By these actions, America weakens herself. But that's geopolitics. The sands shift with the wind. We shall see what happens. Other generations faced greater threats.
Inequality has increased, and I think this is bad, but I don't get the point of an over-the-top statement like this. Median household income in the US is over $60,000 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N). How is that gone?
Look at the Spanish flu, it gets a cursory mention in this history of the early 20th century. WW1 and the Great Depression dominate that narrative.
"You may also like: - Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? - The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat. - The greatest long-term threats facing humanity."
I know even discount supermarkets put their highest-converting items at eye-level on the shelves across, so I'm sure the same considerations go into news media and the placement isn't an accident. I remember Facebook's research project inserting more-positive or more-negative stories to a person's personalized News Feed yo successfully influence their mood in that direction. The ability for Facebook or anyone to do such a study makes me pretty confident BBC could detect three "negative" wordings if they hadn't directly paid somebody to write them this way, and they could avoid say I'll "like" them so a momentary positive hits first to maximize my emotional whiplash.
The first one for example, seems like an adapted doomsday argument: given that we continue to exist for x years at a certain societal level, and given the certainty of a hinge, our prior for the hinge being this century would be very low.
But this is begging the question. The entire point of a hinge is that we don't know if we're going to continue to exist at a certain level of development, thus our assumptions required to develop the prior are dependent on our conclusion that this isn't the period of the hinge.
The other arguments boil down to accusations of bias. These are a little more substantial in that we do actually know these biases exist, and we should account for them. But that doesn't mean necessary that we're not living in a hingey period. It's not necessarily an argument against moreso than a stern warning that more research is needed and the conclusion isn't warranted yet.
I'd think there should be stronger arguments against the premise, and some comments in this post have given far better arguments already.
Sure, technology is developing fast, but its been quite fast since just before the start of the industrial revolution or when humans started walking or farming etc. I would speculate during those times of rapid development of some of the historical civilisations there was probably just as much of a feeling of it being at a hinge as now.
It's just that right now we like to attract people's attention and creating suspense and that sense of hingeyness is good at attracting attention and there's now a lot of money to be made from attracting attention. Not just money, but you can drive political action if you give people this kind of sense of do or die urgency. This could turn the hypothesis into a self fulfilling prophecy. That's why we need better arguments against it.
Stretching the analogy... A hinge matters because the door it hangs is flat. It "only" moves at the hinge. History is anything but flat. It can bend at any point and in any direction.
The 18th century gave us most of the political and economic institutions we have: nation states, republics, liberal democracy, maritime law, modern philosophy, limited liability companies and stock markets.
I don't think this means the 19th and 20th century were determined by those. The US/USSR standoff could have been something else entirely if the nuclear cold war had preceded WWII instead of succeeding it.
The "lever" is technology, and this just gets increasingly powerful as we go along.
The only way that, in retrospect, any century is a "hinge" is if in the following century, we have less powerful technology and ability to impact the world.
So, in a sense, hingeyness simply means "collapse." A century is a hinge inasmuch as it is enough of a collapse to destroy technology.
In any case, I think we are currently underestimating the threat of nuclear war. The threat has not really receded much, if at all, since it was at athe top of everyone's list of fears.
We're still likely to have mass death and ecodestruction appear out of a clear blue sky.
If we look at the 21st century so far, it just hasn’t been... that interesting! Indeed some scholars of technological change (to take just one metric) actually think the pace of change has slowed. The 20th century gave us flight, the Haber-Bosch process, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, space flight, computers, the Pill, the Internet. The 21st? The iPhone? Meh.
Think long term. Expect a humdrum next decade and an interesting next century.
My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.[1] Antibiotics are another great example. Several hundred million lives saved.
With respect, I think this is in a different league from saving some people a little time waiting in traffic.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...
It also kept Germany going in WW1 far longer than otherwise, by compensating for blockades on saltpeter for explosives.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-04-29/nitrogen-crisi...
For the vast majority of people, food production is something that just "happens" out there. They don't grow anything, they just get it from a store.
I've seen people on the Internet who can't afford a simple boiler or an indoors toilet (but they have a phone/computer)... and that's sad, but also amazing.
Because the impact is different it’s very hard to compare. One interesting thought experiment that can help is to imagine the technology disappearing and think about what the consequences would be. Thinking that through for smartphones and the Haber-Bosch process is left as an exercise for the reader.
We can debate its cause... I'd go for financial incentives drawing smart people to banking and advertising instead of more socially beneficial pursuits.
Only 20 years in (or is it 'already 20y in'?), and there's already reusable rockets, CRISPR, 3D printing and the combo deep learning + astonishingly both powerful and affordable CPU/GPU/TPU.
I would say this is already an interesting century, invention-wise.
Also, one could argue that the 21's internet is not the same as the 20's, in which case modern, cheap and massively deployed internet can be classified as a 21st great invention.
But we're splitting hairs. Centuries are an artificial construct. Measuring pace of change by such a crude method makes no sens to me.
- Instant high fidelity communication and work/business;
- Private and ever-cheaper space flight;
- True automation (it's only the beginning of the 21st, I bet on automation hitting hard mid century);
- AR/VR (which will likely become the escape of choice for much of the world later this century);
- Renewable energy that most can afford (it's already realistic for everyone to be self-sufficient);
- Viable artificial/grown organs (for use in medicine and food production);
And more. It's already been a hell of a century. If your life is boring, it's most likely because it's easy. There's no lack of choice when it comes to excitement, but we're risk averse at the core. The media is full of over-exaggerated bad stuff because it's exciting to watch (and again, risk-free). I hope we don't fuck it up.
I agree with your comment except this one. I don’t see anything that has come close to the benefits of fossil fuels, and I don’t see the political will to tax fossil fuels sufficiently to curb consumption sufficiently to curb climate change. Any reduction of fossil fuel use in developed countries with the luxury of being able to spend more on less polluting sources of energy will be made up in increased consumption in developing countries.
20-30 years ago, if you wanted a stable ~3KW supply, you needed a generator and diesel/petrol. Lights, computers, power tools consumed an immense amount of power compared to today.
Now you can have one turbine and several solar panels coupled with a battery bank and you have the same supply of electricity without burning anything. It can power your whole house and everything you own for decades.
I'm a fan of decentralized energy production, though.
As for specific 21st century technologies, let’s take those you mention one by one:
> Unprecedented access to information;
Yes. Although this was the growth of the internet and the web, both late-20th century technologies.
> - Instant high fidelity communication and work/business;
Same as the first point.
> - Private and ever-cheaper space flight;
To do basically 20th-century things like putting satellites into orbit... but cheaper! I hope we do something genuinely new this century like going to Mars - but that’s some way off.
> - True automation (it's only the beginning of the 21st, I bet on automation hitting hard mid century);
You’ll need to be more specific but sounds like this isn’t here yet? I agree automation has been improving but again, it’s a long-term trend.
> - AR/VR (which will likely become the escape of choice for much of the world later this century);
Sure, although sounds like this is more about future promise than what we have now, which is a fun but niche entertainment.
> - Renewable energy that most can afford (it's already realistic for everyone to be self-sufficient);
This is good but... again 20th-century tech becoming better and cheaper.
> - Viable artificial/grown organs (for use in medicine and food production);
Promising research but still a way off from becoming a routine medical treatment.
So... I think all of these things are great but, as I mentioned in another reply, they just don’t have the world-historical impact of key 20th century tech like the Haber-Bosch Process, or antibiotics, or powered flight, or effective birth control. I think we are in a phase where we’re mostly improving what we already have (which is great!). Maybe a novel 21st-century technology will come along with that kind of impact, but I don’t think it’s here yet.
(Edited for formatting)
Humph. I think the iPhone (actually, smartphones) is right up there with the biggest changes of the 20th century. It's what put humanity on the Internet. That may not be so obvious to someone from developed countries, where pretty much everyone already had a PC with Internet connection by then, but that was only about 1 billion out of our nearly 8 billion population... about 6 billion more were connected by smartphones over the last decade. The final billion can't afford those yet, but that's changing fast.
The thing is, the smartphone wasn't just cheaper than a PC; it's more accessible and provided greater motivation for connecting people. Messaging like WhatsApp has lowered the cost of what people were already considering essential (staying in touch with friends and relatives) enough to justify the higher initial cost, and voice commands and voice messaging made it usable even for people who were essentially illiterate. The impact on billions of people's daily lives has been enormous.
Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
It's also extra interesting, because if Gavrilo Princip hadn't randomly ran into the Archduke's car, history might have turned out very differently.
You made me really curious how we measure this! Sorry this turned into a massive wall of text but considering how depressing every news cycle has been for the past few years I hoped it would feel grounding to be able to put some numbers to things, even if they aren't happy numbers :)
Worldwide average human is what I want an idea of, but the closest and largest "good" or "bad" measurement I see in the news on a regular basis is USA economic health as a graph of GDP-per-capita of the entire economy, no divisions based on any geographic boundaries since the economy is borderless, with 'health' seemingly the result of Worthington's Law on the entire-economy scope.
U.S. Economy health data doesn't seem to provide a path to any physical human scope at all, since . I hate the idea of defining "good life" in monetary terms at all, but it seems impossible with only the whole-USA data due to income inequality within a region like the Bay Area, huge disparities in other regions compared to the coasts, people who don't "participate" in the economy directly or at all, etc. The graph of USA GDP growth over time did show a general upward curve, never under 0%, in a way that felt like things getting "generally better" as we hope. Looking at headlines made the data more confusing though, like Bloomberg's from a 2019 report:
> "U.S. GDP Grew a Disappointing 1.2% in Second Quarter — Economic growth was well below expectations; cautious business investment offset robust consumer spending"
I had assumed "Good Health" (or at least "Okay" health) was growth over 0.0%, but I guess not if growing by 1.2% was disappointing. The headline is unclear if that's some sort of official expectation percentage or just theirs, but since it doesn't say what the expected rate was I dunno.
I gave up on the officially-published data being usable here, but I remembered a bunch of press in 2018 about California having the 5th largest economy in the world, larger than the UK's. No "world" or even "USA" average would come from CA-only data, but at least it might be personally fulfilling for me. Unfortunately all the news websites ultimately just link back to this tweet as the original source https://twitter.com/psaffo/status/992530974515781633
I'm aware of the World Happiness Index, but it asks people to describe their own happiness in their own words based on their own area which is useless here. I guess I will have to trust that US GDP growth has the possibility to be an okay representation on the country-wide scale, as long as any growth is separated-equally per capita :)
I don’t think the word hubris does justice to this line of thinking.
Edited to add: the “hinge” people think they can make out is likely just an illusion caused by the phenomena known as the present. Reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s essay “The singularity is always near”: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-singularity/
I’m also amazed at how good Betteridge’s Law actually is in practice, considering it’s meant to be a joke and not a reliable tool for finding the truth.
I think something like this can only be determined in retrospect. The importance of a specific event usually makes little impact at the time it occurs, and reverberates through the future. It's only upon looking back that we can see how important it was.
Was Nietzsche world-renowned when he was actively writing, or Einstein when he made his discoveries?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XXLf6FmWujkxna3E6/...
Its often a human mistake to think that right now is the most important time ever because it is literally the moment we are in. With the perspective of history and with the imagination for the future you can start to see how what we think is the most urgent things maybe not so, and you can see how small changes elsewhere might be the best thing for the future.
It can inoculate you against being manipulated by urgency-based calls for action.
Perspective of history however does not show that being passive is universally what is needed more that if we wait, it gonna be alright. Now that current need is not urgent.
I mean, not being the most important historical moment does not imply it is not important for us and those right after us. Generally we should seek to avoid those super important moments by working on issues before they get so bad.
I think it's very telling that the post that started this whole thing off was on an Effective Altruism forum.
Whenever I ask my youngest child what their favourite toy is, more often than not it is the one they have just played with, or what their favourite book is, and it is the one they have most recently read. I suspect that our view of history is similar. Now is always the most important moment in time, whichever time now is.
I agree. Another form of cognition error is our tendency to conceptualize things in Boolean terms, such as whether:
- now is the "most important time ever" (and therefore we should seriously consider doing something about it), or it isn't (and therefore no action is required)
or
- now is plausibly an extremely important time (and therefore we should should seriously consider doing something about it)
On its face, this distinction may seem excessively pedantic and trivial, and it very well may be, but it also very well may not be.
I believe that if one can manage to practice this sort of thinking skilfully, that it can help inoculate one from confusing heuristic predictions about reality, with objective reality itself (which seems to be an extremely common behavior regardless of internet forum).
It seems like with climate change and loss of biodiversity the next 3 decades will see a steep decline in world wide stability.
[Edit: I find it highly unlikely the peak of human civilization, whatever it means, should happen during my lifetime. Surely the Romans in 100BC might have thought the same as you do? Why do you think there won't be people in 2222 who think the same?]
Geopolitics is one thing, but climate and environment are another. I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid hearing all this talk about the environment and if we act now we can turn it around etc. That turn around never came. Global weather events seem to be getting more extreme / frequent. The number of animal species we've wiped out is pretty mind boggling.
It feels like the combined trajectory of geopolitics, the climate, and biodiversity are heading in a direction that won't support life as we lived it in the 20th century.
Id be happy to be dead wrong about that. But it seems to me we've definitely wrecked the planet and that'll have huge consequences that'll change the nature of life on earth. It also seems to be the case that when a society collapses and another emerges the default seems to be an authoritarian regime with democracy being somewhat of an anomaly.
All of our Institutions have an embedded growth obligation they haven't been able to meet since the 1960s, which lead to their being run by people willing to fudge the truth to keep the illusion of competence and power going.
We're on the edge of the abyss... and many people don't even realize it.
That makes me wonder at what point the world's nuclear arsenal became big enough to be an existential threat. For reference, there were apparently ~300 atomic bombs in the world in 1950:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
This is an example of how an idea is granted false legitimacy by having a catchy alliterative name.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Technically, the legitimacy of this idea is unknown, necessarily.
This is an example of how heuristic predictions about reality (and the future of it) can easily be mistaken for facts.
By gathering data from each individual, it is possible to build a profile that can be used to predict how that person would react to different stimuli. And at scale, it can be used to trigger people's emotions like playing a piano, manipulating them at will.
Today we can already see that by emphasizing divisive topics like: "abortion", "gun control", "immigration"... it is possible to make people upset towards each other with a high success rate. What if the reason these topics are emphasized is not morality but really about how people will emotionally react to them?
The fact that we even recovered from it is amazing (although some didn't, certainly).
I live in the US because my grandparents' generation lost the war. And the US has a generation named after the effects of the war (baby boomers).
I remember reading the phrase "post war" dozens or hundreds of times as a child, but it took awhile for the reality of it to sink in.
C.f. altitude vs geographic prominence.
Also, I think the fear of A.I. has distorted the fact the outward rate of change has declined massively from say the "special century" of 1870-1970, even if it has picked back up a bit in recent years.
I mean, an entirely new source of energy was first harnessed (really the first since the invention of fire) and the first human made object was sent (briefly) into space...
WW2 setup an era defined by one very unusual property: the absolute dominance of the United States and it's economy as the global hegemon.
But the US is not adapted to the notion that what it achieved from that era was a set of historically unique advantages that are not a property of "American exceptionalusm" but rather what you get when you're one of the few nations on the planet which didn't have its cities bombed.
As people living through it we know the reality is far more complicated - there are wars, rising popularism, the rise of China, a hyperactive media and a million other factors. COVID will be the convenient way to explain the big changes to the world order that are already underway, just as we were taught the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I.
Meanwhile, we're struggling to get past history properly re-paradigmed.
More generally, everything else is grist for the mill - now is all that counts. We are always at the "hinge of history", surely.
We neither got that much potential to either break or fix things, nor we make a wiser use of what we have. Yes we got Elon Musk sure, but apart from him, all that the humankind is doing is finding progressively sneakier ways to make people click on ads, which is hardly a great achievement. Everything else from art to politics is just a tool to this end.
Throughout all of human history, the human has not changed. If you somehow time traveled a human baby from 10k BC to present day, they would grow up and fit in with no issues. Now the very nature of what is human could change due to genetic engineering. Again, this has never happened before in human history.
There may be A hinge in the future that we are close to, sure.
But you could argue too that post nuclear has been continually the highest stakes by far.
How high were the stakes 300 years ago? Should we think people living in 1720 didn't have it that bad compared to now? Will people in the future look at now and think the same?
As far as I know, it's only really since the enlightenment/industrial revolution, that people feel like the future is going to be better. The idea that the past was the golden age, where Humans were much more advanced, knew more, Had better technology, etc, seems to be the common position in history.
Im not sure about the feeling that society was"hungry" ala the article, but I suspect that feeling is connected.
Pair this with neural interfaces, AI, asteroid and celestial body mining, cheap space travel, and economics are going to start looking weird. I say this as an avid fan of capitalism. It isn't going to fail because of corruption, it's going to fail because markets are optimized and technology is increasingly pushing your average bloke out of the game.
By what standard are we "valuing humans less" ? This seems to fly against the facts.
Global death from almost all causes have gone down.
e.g. "Battle" related death - which is the most clear evidence of valuing human life less than political gains have dramatically fallen:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-...
Global life expectancy is higher than ever in the history of human civilization and still rising:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy
Global poverty rate has been dropping dramatically and steadily:
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
Global education spending has been going up.
Air pollution has been going down, steadily and dramatically:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollu...
Tell me. In what way are we valuing human less ?
Black lives matter.
By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement.
New Tsunami Sea Wall in Japan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-... https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/
Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.
I don't mean we value human life less in the way that a woke 14 year old means that, which is the way you seem to have interpreted it. I mean it in the sense of market value. Technology and market efficiency are leading to your average person being less valuable to other people, and fewer people being substantially more valuable. Maybe one farmer can now feed 100,000 people. The 999 people it used to take to feed those 100,000 people are actually less valuable to society than they were prior to the technological and market advances that allowed that one person to feed 100,000 people. Sure they can get different jobs, and new jobs are created, but there is no guarantee that this happens according to any functional ratio; it's certainly not 1:1.
This is essentially why wages are stagnating. Most people are actually worth less to society than they used to be. And again, I don't mean that in the woke sense, I mean it in the market sense. I mean that wages are accurately reflecting their true market value, and that value is less and less as time goes on. I think that the minimum barrier to entry in order to produce market value is constantly rising, and is basically happening on the basis of something like IQ. Maybe the next century will be characterized by more jobs like software and hardware engineers, while even those jobs will change and eventually be done by fewer and fewer people, but the point is that not everyone will actually be able to do those jobs. If nurses and doctors and PAs are phased out in favor of diagnostic algorithms and service utilities, for example, that doesn't mean that those millions of roles will have millions of new roles created in order to service the technology. And more importantly, the new roles to service the technology might actually require capabilities that most of those people are not actually capable of.
I'm not making a statement about society being some way and it should be some other way. I'm saying that our societies are fundamentally predicated on the notion that stability can be achieved simply due to the idea that people provide relative value to one another. This idea is what has allowed liberal democracies to function with minimal authoritarian influence. That most people are capable of providing sufficient utility to one another such that, left to their own devices, they are able to secure resources for themselves by providing utility to others. This is less true now than it was, and will continue to be less true as time goes on. All I'm saying is that we're approaching a hinge point where we have to grapple with this reality.
> "Are people becoming obsolete?" (1946)
If the future will hold millions of years with humanity prospering on earth with roughly current population number then picking a human born today is very small, it is like winning the lottery.
If humanity expands quadratically to other solar systems then the chance of being born today is basically none.
The most likely scenario would be that human population is currently at its peak and the population will within not that many generations dwindle down to almost nothing and probably go extinct.
But you are right, civilization lasting another few thousand years isn't that improbable. Just that it is strange that it would last a thousand years but not a million, seems like humanity should have figured out how to stabilize things if civlization lasts that long.
Edit: Or maybe our ultimate downfall will just be lack of evolutionary pressure so at some point nobody can sustain civlization. That wouldn't happen in a thousand years but a million years is definitely enough.
Edit2: Or we solve our lifespan issue very soon and people no longer die, so people also no longer can procreate or they would exhaust available resources.
I do not believe the world hinges on 2020. It is certain more than one nation is going through defining moments, but the world will survive it - as it will the coronavirus.
I do believe that the United States is at a tipping point unlike any moment in the past 50 years. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are the world's leading consumer and second leading producer (GDP). We have massive influence on foreign affairs, soft power, and the global environment.
Domestically, four more years of the current administration and its lack of rule of law will drive more people toward resistance. It will enable those who envy our president's unchecked power to emulate it at any level - the shamelessness, the gaslighting, and the bullying - so that our politics makes the 20th century look downright polite.
The decision to, or not to, participate in global efforts to reduce human impact on the environment could be a defining moment for the next few hundred years of human existence. So yeah, I think this is a huge moment for the US, and the world.
[1] compare http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...
> "In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's."