I Choose Optimism
secularhumanism.org
secularhumanism.org
Addressing those things for those people in those places should certainly be a top priority but we shouldn't let that blind us to the broader reality that by most standardized, objective measures things are mostly getting better for more people more of the time.
Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened.
Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's what allows us to ensure that the underlying currency - human labour time - isn't wasted because there is no call to use it today.
Instead we have a currency - "here's a pig, owe me one" that causes a surplus to arise. Some people won't be able to fulfil that promise in which case it will, in advanced societies, be cancelled. That's what bankruptcy is for. The assets you used to secure the loan are then transferred to others. However the use of labour time in others to create the capacity to generate a surplus remains somewhere down the induced transaction chain.
Debt is the magic by which money is created on demand. That causes information to be transmitted down the supply chain that causes the capacity to make more to arise.
Which is why those societies that use debt are more advanced than those that chose to outlaw its use. They ended up with fewer days wasted in aggregate and more capacity to produce.
Most people fulfil their promises since it is inherent in human society to do right by others. And quite a lot of people like holding the assets that represent the debt as a status symbol of how well they have done - whether they can actually really call in those promises or not.
Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.
All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.
Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.
This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.
Just how great is the risc of filling them with hidrogen? I know it's flamable and leaks through many materials. But in the context of party balloons just how great is that risc? The quantity is very small. And no ones life depends on it. And in the case of fire, that quantity would burn almost instantly. I doubt it would even have the time to ignite anything other than another flamable gas.
Apparently 8%. But all of these industries waste it unnecessarily, due to our failing to price in or consider the future scarcity.
Helium as a waste product of fusion reactors is such a pipe dream, and will produce such tiny volumes should that ever happen, that it is not a remotely realistic solution to the problem.
(*) I'm more or less convinced that such a miracle technology is the only hope we have of avoiding catastrophic change. I'm baffled why there's not massively more funding into researching potential geoengineering solutions, given the stakes. Even fossil fuel companies would benefit!
What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology.
Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of similar importance that would be more accessible through access to helium.
The problem is that today Helium is cheap enough we’re happy to boil an MRI machine’s worth off into space for a child’s birthday party.
Climate change is simply another face of the same coin of indifference to the costs we confer on others.
Apparently there's plenty on the moon...
At current rates, fossil fuels will last a few centuries, nuclear a few millennia.
Although geothermal would last for geological timescales, the estimated maximum output only covers current electricity use (~2 TW, well short of the ~17 TW total power use, and ideally we'd increase the minimum power use per person to get closer to European or American levels rather than keeping our current distribution).
The kinetic rotational energy of the earth would last us 400 million years.
Sun will last a few billion, but then we're no longer talking about extractive technologies.
I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.
And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.
Money doesn't stop at its first use. And debt is nothing more than allowing you to spend the real thing without selling it first.
> Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it
This just means that the people that you paid have better lives but you haven't explained how things are better are better for yourself unless you have some way of paying that debt back.
The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.
Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.
Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.
Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could.
Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the time.
Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Catholicism without the threat of hellfire.
Bankruptcy works on a small scale, as an act of grace, because the bankrupt party can bootstrap themselves back into productivity using the functional economy around them.
When too many people go bankrupt at once, the economy crashes.
When the whole planet runs out of ecological credit, and we all go bankrupt at once, where are we going to find another civilization to bootstrap from?
All the easy energy is gone, forever. There will never be another coal- or oil-driven industrial revolution on planet Earth. If we reach bankruptcy on the scale of a planetary ecosystem, it will most likely be permanent, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.
> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.
I am stating that some people _don't_ have a way of paying the debt back, and yet they have been loaned to, incurring debt, and thus ruined (as the parent you were originally replying to suggests)
This simply isn't true. On small scales, people lose their businesses and families declare bankruptcy. That's why I said this isn't a hypothetical. And on a large scale it causes financial collapses if many people go bankrupt at once.
We have system autostabilisers that rebalance the ship when the private sector has a blow up.
Bankruptcy is the reset mechanism. It's a mechanism that actually works, unlike the debtors' prisons we had previously.
No wonder the trust in media has fallen to the lowest. Reuters/AP are informative as a root source, but I have stopped trusting environmentalist doom-and-gloom stories from MSM.
Environment is going to get far worse though. Germany is busy burning the shittiest form of coal as its primary fuel (35%): Lignite coal with 1/5th water content. It is the worse than burning literally anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Again, thanks to the utterly idiotic emotionally-driven environmentalists that are going to make the planet worse ironically. We need to stop giving them fodder and look to the tech/engineering community for solutions.
I used to trust climate science. That trust is being eroded for me. Just the other day, someone reported that kids are gaining weight due to climate change. The reason? They can’t go out and play when it’s 2 deg C hotter. Come on.
I despise climate catastrophization by the media.
Go read how the IPCC reports are authored, you’ll hopefully develop some faith about the accuracy of what is in them. Then go read the summaries for policy makers to get an idea of what they say. You’ll see that most of what both sides are saying is in there is not what is in there.
> In late June, after Russia reduced supplies by 60%, Berlin triggered the second stage of its national gas emergency plan — one step away from gas rationing.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/07/18/a...
Environmentalists also invested in Solar energy in Germany. It has to be the dumbest idea ever, solar power in Germany is like 10% as efficient as Western USA. It is one of the worst places in Europe to stick solar panels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
In general, Environmentalists do not understand the difference between gardening and farming. It's the Greta crowd that's going to lead this world towards mass starvation of humans. They have no solutions, only blind clueless activism.
Tried, but then they got back-up in the form of European and US weapon shipments that are trouncing the Russian's poorly trained forces and equipment - or, that's what the diverse media in my neck of the wood is saying. Russia doesn't seem to be winning or gaining though.
Trump is siding with the Russians and rejected military / financial aid to the Ukraine because they refused to find dirt on Biden or whatever it was about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal
Maybe we will rise to the challenge and go green on these, I'm not convinced yet but I am definitely not ruling it out.
When it comes to optimism, it boils down to two distinct modes. Necessity is the mother of invention. Less energy, stuff and stimulation will be good for most people in wealthy countries.
Fossil fuels will decline, we will make some cool new stuff that makes that decline easier, we will demand less stuff and use of energy. This doesn't sound so bad. Hopefully we will move into something akin to Solarpunk + cottage core. A declined future that is more fair. But the pessimist in me feels like that is but fantasy.
Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406
Definitely not a panacaea, and super-inefficient, but that's OK if we're just using it for storage/transportation.
What experts? Power to gas has been really energy inefficient with little sign of improving from what I know. It can't really compete with pumped hydro even where pumped hydro makes less to no sense it seems.
Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. And there are no lifeboats.
We can adapt to climate change. We can create new (clean!) energy sources.
Solar is getting more efficient every year. There are new storage solutions appearing every year.
As TFA says, despair is not the answer. We can (and will) overcome all these problems.
Don't make the mistake of confusing energy use with quality of life.
People like to make such alarmist statement around standard of living but we should instead ask ourselves what makes for quality of life.
A good example is planned obsolescence in technology: it greatly increases energy usage and pollution without making consumers happier (on the contrary they hate it)
Hell at this point whoever does will just conquer whoever doesn't. Just like the industrial revolution let whoever burn coal take over the rest. I'm hoping to be in a country that isn't conquered, but the west seems to have entered a death spiral of self delusion.
This is still theory unless they actually use it for that.
Also, Russia's own Kursk 2 isn't very far from the captured one. They could turn that into a dirty bomb too. Recency bias on a threat shouldn't overwhelm normal analysis.
Where I live is at risk of declining political stability in the near future. I don't worry about living next to a nuclear power plant because I'm worried about maintenance or operational safety or whatever, I worry about what happens when a thousand men with machetes and an apocalyptic ideology show up. And perhaps you look at the news in your country and wonder if you also may be heading towards declining political stability.
Note my example was also nuclear. I don't know what you're countering with this.
Also, nuclear plants can be a target for plenty of states or groups that don’t have nuclear weapons like terrorists.
As for your second claim: So can hydro plants, causing enormous destruction. So? Secure the vulnerable asset, create defensive and preventative strategies. You don't go through life not building genuinely useful things because somewhere, somehow, somebody might aim to do them harm. The logic is absurd if taken to any other level. For example, I should never buy or build a house because some group of landless lunatics might coalesce and try to take it from me one day. Better to not have my own useful home in the first place then? Absurd.
Moreover even that is most likely only temporary, we are living inside a consumerist bubble that will soon burst (growing social unrest, ravaging pollution, probably a major war) leaving a horrible mess behind (we don't know how to endure physical discomfort anymore).
If I could choose my beliefs, I would choose to believe in an almost completely different set of things. All of my beliefs would be self-serving, I'd be really happy about how everything was going every day.
The reason I can't do this is because it would be really damaging to the people around me, and to society. I can't choose to ignore that.
> All of my beliefs would be self-serving
This is not a true statement.
Why cannot one choose what one feels to be the most appropriate construct after careful inspection and introspection?
To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting. Asserting that this construct simply _is_, where choice isn't there or doesn't exist, doesn't pass the smell test.
The fact that one may choose to live a life only for oneself were one left to one's own devices is simply commentary about that individual. But again, one may choose not to do that.
Worldviews and beliefs are answers we come up with to the difficult questions that life asks. If you've done any work to come up with those answers, then your beliefs are built on top of a lot of observations, introspection, and analysis. For me to change my beliefs I would need to discover some kind of mistake I've made in my work or some important piece of information I was missing. How can you casually choose a different belief set unless your original beliefs were not built on anything substantial to start with?
I don't casually choose a belief set. I've deliberated this for decades. My beliefs, or more accurately the code that I live by, is just that, my code. I have a choice in the matter, it doesn't come from somewhere else where it's inflicted upon me. I formulated it.
> For me to change my beliefs I would need to discover some kind off mistake I've made in my work....
Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.
Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice.
But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?
And if you do encounter that invalidates those beliefs and makes it obvious that they are wrong - can you still hold them? Definitionally I would say once you know that they're false they are no longer your beliefs.
Suppose I believe that humanity is facing incredible social, economic, technological, and environmental threats and yet our governments and societies cannot even agree that these are threats and when they do their reactions are half-hearted; that I believe the economic system we in has provided lots of powerful people and lots of ordinary people with a vested interest in protecting the most destructive parts of our status quo; and that I think most of these problems are incredibly time sensitive and if we can't address them in the next half-century then we will see cascading failures in the environment and human civilization that cause incredible amounts of death and hardship.
This all sounds very bleak, so you have to imagine that seeing peoples' comments about how pessimism is bad for your mental state, how we should be optimistic about the future because theoretically all our problems are solvable, and how we've solved problems in the past so we'll definitely solve these ones too just bounces off of that. It often feels like people are talking around the major structural problems that are not on trajectory to being solved by focusing on little bits of tech that seem like maybe they'd help in a way or extrapolating lines out from the last that can't obviously be extrapolated.
These beliefs, from your example, are something I arrived at through reason. They are always subject to change.
I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.
I do share your concerns, your beliefs, as you described them. There are many, many different perspectives at play there, which is one reason why it is such a difficult problem to solve, from a grand-scheme-of-things perspective. We are only human, after all.
You don't choose your beliefs. You choose your actions. You don't choose to believe generosity is good; you choose to follow a code of generosity. Conversely you don't choose to believe that your own interests and self-preservation are paramount; you choose to follow a code that reflects that belief. It is not a could-have-gone-either-way single choice you make in a single moment. If you try to follow a code that is deeply discordant with your actual beliefs you will struggle with it forever. Which is why "choose optimism", which seems to be the dominant opinion in TFA and this thread, is such garbage advice. Frankly I think a much better avenue of advice to give is telling people who are deeply afraid about the future of the world how to productively cope with it instead of telling them to pantomime a belief that everything's gonna turn out swell.
In my life I've made the conscious choice not to worry too much about the existential problems that I believe will utterly destroy civilization as we know it. I did this because I need to function in society - make friends, pay the bills, marry the husband, buy the house and so on. But this is not optimism; it's not even productive pessimism; it's a selfish decision to ignore the bleak future and focus on living my own happy life and insulating myself from the worst of what's to come.
That's a completely unsupported statement presented as fact; therefore I'll dismiss it with just as much effort.
Belief based in empirical evidence is at least bound to that evidence.
Belief unmoored from empiricism --- blind faith or revelation --- suffers no such limits. Your criticism would apply all the more so to same, with the further failing that others' beliefs are "wrong" because they ... are simply revealed or adopted faiths. Which is frequently observed.
If my evidence-based belief differs from your evidence-based belief, then we can compare evidence. Evidence does not have to be directly experienced (though for various reasons of psychological evolution we tend often to more highly weight that which is); we can also rely on evidence presented by other trustworthy witnesses. There are numerous social institutions dedicated to precisely this (science, courts, journalism, politics, ...)
The Empire Did Nothing Wrong™
Was Lucifer actually incorrect in his position in the Garden of Eden?
I'm pointing out how completely different and valid perspectives can be derived from the same set of data, the same circumstance.
The problem arises when one claims their perspective was "inflicted" upon them by some uncompromising, external agent, which implies there is no choice in the matter, which is absurd because there most certainly is.
I don't think you're wrong, by the way, I just see things a little differently.
My comment allows for that. Many-sidedness, a/k/a Anekantavada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada).
But many sidedness is not the any sideness which revealed or blind-faith belief permits. Experiential understanding is bound to and by that experience. Further, the cases you're referring to largely discuss social relational worldviews which are informed by status, standing, and affiliation within a society or culture. There are of course non-social instances of multiple interpretations, such as wave-particle duality, in which how one looks at a phenomenon influences the model arrived. at.
Factory owner and worker at least have beleif and understanding grounded in experience, and might be convinced of or sympathetic to the validity of views generated by the alternate experience. Your "which implies there is no choice" is reading meaning to my comment I did not intend and disagree with strongly.
The fact that people see things differently, that is, arrive at different conclusions based on different empirical evidence or experience is in fact my point.
> others' beliefs are "wrong" because they are simply adopted
But are they... wrong?
I certainly don't operate as you described, but I see plenty who do. I also choose not to judge their "wrongs".
That is, good models are useful, in some way.
Usefulness, like value, is itself relative and depends on intent, goals, and starting positions.
That said, there are models with greater or usefulness over a wide range of circumstances. Holding to a model which is demonstrably inferior in this regard might well be considered "wrong", in this sense.
Personally, I would only make one modification here for my own purposes:
> Holding to a model which is demonstrably inferior in this regard might well be considered "wrong" to me.
I know what is right and wrong for me and to me, but stop short of extending that judgement outside my person. That's just me though.
Anyway, the point is, there is data out there that leads to pessimism. Absolutely. There's plenty of it. There is grounds for pessimism.
But there is also data that leads to optimism. There's plenty of it, too. So you choose your belief by choosing which set of data to pay more attention to. (Except it's not that simple. You're choosing which set of data you think is more credible, or more relevant, or more important, or reflects a more accurate picture of the situation. But there still is an element of choice - you choose which data set to pay more attention to, and that data set usually winds up being the one you consider more valid.)
I see no value in beating myself down on things that I cannot control. The world around me is beautiful. I just have to make the best of it day by day.
Facing hardships is a natural part of life.
However, I’m also trying to not beat myself down over things I cannot control.
What? Citation needed.
A negative view of individual sin is certainly part of the Christian worldview, but gods are not, nor is an overall negative outlook. The whole point is that God loves his people enough to save them, the Church will expand, and Christ will return in glory.
If the author is describing paganism ("pawns for the gods") I'm curious to know which of those had an overall negative view with such widespread influence that those religions could describe people generally. Certainly the Greeks and the Romans thought very highly of themselves and believed that the gods were with them, hence they flourished.
This seems more like an atheist talking point than anything grounded in history.
Her statement: "They could bring logic and the scientific method to bear and actually fix things that were bad, wrong, or deadly. That is our inheritance, and a priceless one at that. We were given tools, not answers. But those tools, when properly deployed, transform human lives."
Lines up with the Christian purpose for people: "God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
But we all misunderstand each other all the time. I'm sure I don't fully understand the authors beliefs. I'd love for her to meet some "Christian nationalists" to find out what they really want. I think we all have more common ground than most realize. It's a shame things have become so tribal.
In practical terms, for most of history the large majority of people were farmers and simply thought that the world was just about the same as it had always been.
Traditional belief systems were usually structured in terms of cycles, whether the yearly change of the seasons, the growth and decline of a human life, or the silent movements of celestial bodies.
Leaving aside great wars or catastrophes, social and economic changes happened slowly and would have been hard to identify by an individual living through them.
A reasonable attempt at an unbiased point of view on this issue would acknowledge some kind of selection effect -- one would expect that a few hundred years experience would appear particularly favorable to civilizations and cultures that you get after a few hundred years of that same experience, so maybe things are not objectively quite as good as they look to us.
A simple statistical estimate of how long the current era might be sustained can be made by coming up with a number for how long it has already been here, and considering ourselves as occurring at a uniformly random point in its total lifetime. That procedure produces ~90% certainty that things will continue as is for at least 1/20th as long as the era has been here but not more than 20 times as long. For example, if you put the start of the era of technological progress around 1620, this kind of know-nothing (about specific current conditions) estimate would put us 90% sure that it will last at least another 20 years, but not more than 8000 years. YMMV.
ish. It also promises that not even death is an escape, but that God will raise all the dead and judge an enormous majority to be literally thrown into a valley of fire.
Reading the Bible I see more of a threat, than a promise.
God's wisdom is made that much more powerful in what some might call foolishness, just as he prescribed circumcision to the Jews. Abraham was required to put off his pride and simply believe God, that circumcision was a commandment from God for the Jews, and this faith in God is what saves. You don't think Abraham received a lot of judgement for prescribing circumcision?
Just as Christians receive judgement for prescribing the new circumcision, which is the circumcision of the heart to believe in Jesus Christ. It requires people to put off their pride, realize their very nature offends God (because he is perfect so anything less than perfect is an offense to him) and repent of their unbelief in the only begotten son of God, who knew our same struggles here on Earth and was killed without reason so that we could live. This belief covers our heads from wrath, because now when God looks at us he sees Christ.
So it's called the good news because it is. We can defeat death and enter into an unimaginable state of perfection. What I find with people who don't believe is that they're blinded by what they think Christianity is. So for you I would say you're blinded by the problem of hell. But if God tells us it is real, that is true and you have no say in the matter. Your belief or unbelief doesn't change the truth of the word of God. God is above politics, above human wisdom, and also above the people that claim his name.
I should note that I used to have the same opinion as you! No judgement!
Yea, that's the threat.
> I should note that I used to have the same opinion as you! No judgement!
Common thing to hear. I have never believed anyone has ever gone from a strong atheist who reads the bible and can so obviously see the cruelty and madness, and then suddenly turn around and become a christian apologist? It's just as believable as the bible in the first place.
You do your taxes every year so you can avoid jail time. But you won't simply call out to Jesus Christ with a true heart and ask for salvation?
Think about it! That's all it takes!
(actually this is a thing, some republicans like Ted Cruz (he ate my son) are going on about how the IRS should be abolished: https://twitter.com/SenTedCruz/status/1561360677255643136)
> So for you I would say you're blinded by the problem of hell.
I'm "blinded" by the threat of torture for the majority of humans? I don't think you can be "blinded" by such an atrocity that makes Hitler look like a total wimp. You are LITERALLY claiming that ALL jews that were killed by Hitler will be reincarnated by God and then tortured. And of course all other Jews, past and present. And all atheists, muslims, sheiks, hindus.
And somehow you can't see the problem...
>don't say stuff like "the circumcision of the heart" (lol!).
This is not a term I made, it's biblical. And as my post says I'm aware the entire gospel is foolish to unbelievers, and the Bible and God is aware of that. That's the basic hurdle of accepting the gospel.
"But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
1 Corinthians 23-25
"But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;"
1 Corinthians 27
"At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."
Matthew 11:25
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire (ish). This is the most important quote about how to live in the world. It explains Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, but also the mass rape done by the Catholic Church, 9/11, the current climate change crisis, and on and on. It's the Grand Unified Theory of atrocities.
console.log("maybe it's something you should look into");
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So if you care so much about evil you should ask yourself, who was the only person to walk the Earth who had no evil. That would be Jesus. And what did Jesus say? He said he was God, and quoted the old testament that correctly spoke of his coming.
Shouldn't you look into it?
> who was the only person to walk the Earth who had no evil. That would be Jesus.
Of course it wasn't. I've read the bible. I remember "pearl before swines". That was evil.
> He said he was God
He didn't though. "You said that" is what he said. He was very clear. You are now lying about what the bible says. As is common among christians sadly.
Why not just be a decent person without being threatened? It's how the majority of people in the world do things.
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." - Ephesians 2:9
"know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified." - Galatians 2:16
So Christianity is simply placing your faith in Jesus Christ. If you believe that God forgave your sins at the behest of Christ, and that you will enter an eternal kingdom also as a son of God, wouldn't you eventually be more liable to forgive and love others?
So being good is a side-effect, not the point, of Christianity. God will not let me enter heaven because of how good I am, and if that was the measure none of us would make it. The point of Christianity is to know God and have faith that through Christ's death on the cross, burial, and resurrection, he can impart the mercy of God onto you. That he quite literally died for every sin everyone had ever committed.
“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” - 2 Corinthians 5:21
No. History has been the judge and has left Christianity wanting. You want a faith that truly causes love and care for others? Jainism. "By their fruits you shall know them" Jesus said didn't he? Well the fruits of Christianity are rotten.
No matter what you personally believe to be the message of Christianity, this was the thinking for a huge chunk of Christianity's existence so far.
Robyn E. Blumner did not choose optimism, she choose ignorance, because she is among the priviledged few who can be freely ignorant. Optimism is not a choice in any case. We are biologically inclined to be optimistic, even when we are fatalistic, in which case we are optimistic about a negative outcome. This is a cognitive limitation, not something to be proud of.
Still, I choose optimism too. We have collectively become the stewards of spaceship earth, and nature does have a more minor part from here on out (for a while); anthropocene era is here. It's just a fact. I forget the quote, please help someome, but 'we are all gods now and it's about time we start acting like it', or something to that effect.
I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good.
You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause.
The alternative to these things is worse. To be sustainable (no or renewable electricity, sparse population, no cars, no factories, no meat, land used for growing food) you need to remove the things society wants by sheer will. And I don't think you'll sell anybody on that.
In other words, telling people that they need to give up good things is not enough.
The good things we enjoy are destructive and have externalities.
To offer a solution, if the people who do bad things such as not dispose waste properly or want to cut down rainforests for profit, we need to solve the incentives behind those decisions. Such as universal basic income. Or lowering crime.
Unfortunately poverty is the baseline. In other words you need to expend resources to get resources. I said in my comment things are sustainable by sheer will.
To implement sustainability we need to invest profound amounts of resources and do extreme amounts of work by sheer will to solve the problem. We also need the right people working on these problems. The smartest people from my simple perspective are working on the wrong problems. What we have is an improper allocation of limited resources.
This is not actually a good thing. This is actually a problem.
There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living.
I've been to Morocco lately, with dry 45-48 degrees celsius outside. I've experienced that "vernacular architecture". Every single one of those buildings I have been in (including stalls in the soukh, which is ridiculous because they are essentially missing a wall towards the street) had some form of air conditioning retrofitted.
Of course, the tendency of Americans to set their air conditioning to below 20 degrees is ridiculous.
American homes are built cheaply (and needlessly sprawly but that's another story) without any heed to ventilation because the US government has put every policy in place possible to make sure energy prices remain low which has removed any market incentive to decrease energy usage, partially because fossil fuel companies spend lots of money lobbying the government. But strategic use of AC in a properly ventilated home is absolutely life-changing.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...
Imagine that those environmentalists are correct. Doesn’t advocating for change, palatable or not, make them at their core more pro-human than most? They are, after all, trying to make the human species survive.
> If it's substantially less than the current population, then the cure is worse than the disease.
If that is the case, then there ain’t no cure that any elected politican can pursue.
A perceived "good cause" does not make an argument - or an action - necessarily good. Remember that medieval witch hunts were doing the "humanitarian" thing when they set people aflame because they were trying to save the suspected witches' souls from eternal damnation.
> If that is the case, then there ain’t no cure that any elected politican can pursue.
... so have unelected politicians do the dirty work? Just like with every radicalism, radical environmentalism will eventually lead to a less-than-democratic system.
I sympathise with the environmental movement, even if I think that there's a lot of doom porn happening there and some people's energies would be better invested looking for workable solutions instead of protesting. But we need to watch them. radicalised, they are likely to become dangerous.
Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht.
> What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's substantially less than the current population, then the cure is worse than the disease.
In our current industrialized, consumerist, global economy? Far less than 8 billion. You're painting me as a rabid anti-human eco-fascist though, so let me assure you I'm none of those things. I want humanity to succeed and I want all people to be happy and successful. But the current rate of resource extraction and ecological disturbance that we're directly responsible for will drive our species into a brick wall very soon. Along with millions of other species. We will come to a point where we simply cannot extract the energy we need to feed everyone, and where the biosphere has been so damaged that the necessary agriculture yields just won't be there. And also the other things, like the tropics becoming uninhabitable, ocean acidification killing marine life that the food chain depends on, etc.
I'm not anti-human, I'm very much a humanist, and pro-nature. Humans are part of nature. Unfortunately, we seem incapable of limiting our consumption to sustainable levels when given the opportunity to overshoot. Or at least our current civilization does (past ones have done better, but they also didn't have to try to resist the temptation of internal combustion engines like we do now). I've lost hope for any political solutions given how lackluster all efforts have been thus far, so we don't really need to sit here and debate solutions, because no one's at the wheel and the brick wall is getting very close. Enjoy the surplus of energy while we can still extract it.
TL;DR the famous book "Limits to Growth" was very prescient and it mostly hit the mark.
Even if we could push a button and solve climate change, I’m sure there would always be a reason why we need to stop having babies, turn back time, and live a subsistence lifestyle (Which is also incredibly racist, since it’s usually directed at people in developing economies, as their standard of living increases). And this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
I'm also aware that people have been predicting the apocalypse for as long as there have been people. But this is not as simple as manure storage, and it's a bit disingenuous to draw that comparison. You simply cannot have 8 billion people living in huge houses with air conditioning. It will not work. If our definition of racial equality and harmony is to let everyone fuck up the environment equally, rather than restricting everyone's (including rich white people) ability to overconsume, then we are all equally toast.
> And this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
Reminder: all the information and points I'm citing come from the world's leading climate and environmental scientists. If you think the IPCC is just being racist when they lay out the data about how bad climate change will be and say we need to reduce our emissions (i.e. consumption), then I don't know what to tell you.
I wish some people would have this sentence printed and framed on a wall. Yes, equality-wise it's unfair that only we have energy-consuming QoL improvements. Environmentally speaking, it would be a massive disaster if everyone did it while we still rely on fossil fuels for our energy supply.
The world didn't end in nuclear fire, for much the same reasons it didn't end in a civilisation-breaking IT meltdown at the start of the new millennium - because everyone put in a shit-ton of work to make sure it didn't happen in the first place. Calling those dangers a "boogeyman" is showing ignorance of titanic efforts that went into mitigating them.
The other issues that you described as "failed boogeymen" - it's great that we've been able to outrun them, but how long have we left to run, exactly? We don't have a silver-bullet solution for climate change, whether flawed or perfect. Nobody seems to be keen on doing the hard work, so I'm not bullish on making it to 2050 without damaging the ecosystems across the planet.
> this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
FWIW, I'm a white Western guy and I 100% believe that we should try to do without some luxuries, me included. Part of the problem of getting rid of such luxuries is that they may not be luxuries at all to some - urban planning can be often very car-centric (which makes not owning a car either impractical, or a huge waste of time), AC can be required because other ways of cooling down buildings haven't been put in place, etc. Holistic change AND a reduction in resource use across the board is what we need.
Didn't he get pretty much everything wrong? Like embarrassing wrong even messing up, or intentionally misunderstanding, basic economic theories?
The book makes a point of how you can't predict the future. Instead it enumerates a bunch of shapes the future could take given various sets of assumptions. Some of the shapes look decent but require a lot of things to go right in the meantime.
Why not? Do you think it's impossible for energy to become 'to cheap to meter'?
The same applies to cars. Take something like a Rivian and it’s easily more efficient than a Prius or a subcompact car, while being larger, faster, more performant, and more comfortable. Bigger and more comfortable does not necessarily mean worse for the planet.
The parent comment said that no amount of renewable energy would make larger houses sustainable. That makes me think he believes that the real issue is about land use, building materials for larger houses, or some other point aside from energy.
I should've been more direct rather than focusing on the energy point, but I suppose I was hoping the commenter would reply about why energy isn't the problem.
We have set the minimum so high that some people simply cannot attain it. Such individuals end up being a net drain on society in many cases due to their lack of housing.
Some hospitals have found that simply providing housing to some of their most expensive charity cases saves them money.
Steven Pinker is popular among accomplished people, and there's no conspiracy about this: rational optimism just gets that crowd going. Maybe it's because they don't have much better to worry about!
Reading this kind of writing is like eating a bag of candy. I eat one saccharine piece of "{X} good thing has grown by {Y}%", and then I grasp for the next morsel before I've finished chewing the first.
The original article and Pinker are quite clear: there are HUGE problems to be solved. Theirs is not a philosophy of complacency, but of hard work. REAL hard work that can actually SUCCEED. Unlike complaining, and unlike just ignoring the problem, and unlike pretending everything is getting worse when we know it isn't.
That's... not the impression I get from reading Pinker. On the contrary, he has an infuriating habit of presenting "x is getting better" shortly after bashing a straw man version of the groups working hardest to make x better. Everyone from civil rights activists to software developers who worked on on the Millennium Bug were, in Pinker's eyes, committing the cardinal sin of Availability Bias rather than focusing on all those nice comforting trend lines pointing in the right direction.
What’s different about this moment in time versus any other in human history is that we face not one but two known existential risks.
Climate change is the sort of knotty long-term vs short-term, private vs public, incentives problem that we as a species excel at fucking up.
In addition to that, we have a new cold war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states that haven’t previously had them and have different ideas about using them. If you’ve read any accounts of nuclear near-misses from the last Cold War, you’ll know that “there was never any real danger” is the wrong conclusion to draw.
Respectfully, I don’t understand the case for optimism at all. The fact that the vast majority of people are good (and I believe that they are) has little bearing on it.
We've had mad men with nuke since we've had nukes. The more time we spend in that situation the higher the chances someone uses them but I think we're far safer now than times such as the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets had their nukes on a dead man switch. That was insane and could have killed billions accidentally.
Most countries aiming for them want them to prevent American(and maybe Russian ones too now) invasions like what happened in Iraq.
That said, I always choose optimism over so called realism and pessimism. This optimism doesn't mean that anything changes for the better by itself but that personal decisions can have an impact for the better.
One day a beautiful lady from a nearby mountain comes into his shop and needs new hinges for her daddy's barn door. The little blacksmith thinks she's attractive even though she's well over 6 feet tall, and he eagerly agrees to do an outstanding job. She's quite agreeable herself and he asks her if she's married, and she is not.
So he asks if he can come and call on her in the future and she said that would be alright and she bent down and kissed him right on the cheek. He hopped right up on his anvil and kissed her back and she said good-by until the next day when she will pick up the hinges.
On the next day she came back and before she was going to leave he invited her to take a look around his part of the mountain a little bit, they went to where he had a wonderful garden, the birds were singing, it was so romantic.
He looked up into her eyes and sincerely told her how much he was thinking of another kiss.
She was a little too bashful right then and told him to wait until the weekend when he could be her date at the barn dance.
He understood, and couldn't complain, so he said "well if there's not going to be any more kissin' today, I think I'll put this anvil down."
But here's the weird part. Most individuals bias towards optimism. Most people are unable to see the hard truths of the world or even about themselves. The world is indeed cruel and hard and on the individual level people can't admit certain things about themselves. We see the world through rose colored lenses.
When people look at the world or news, they think everything is going to shit. But on the individual level when they look at things locally or at themselves, things are actually a bit too positive. People lie to themselves.
It's a strange dichotomy.
You will note that no one on this thread talks about what goes in between pessimism and optimism. What is the middle ground? That's how deluded everyone is. They read her article and buy into her BS. To be pessimist is to be negatively biased. To be optimist is to be positively biased. Logically the middle ground will then be unbiased.
Truth is what lies in between positive and negative biases. I choose to be unbiased. I choose to not be pessimistic or optimistic. I choose truth.
I don't think it's possible to actually sit perfectly in the middle, won't you always end up thinking slightly positively or negatively about whatever situation comes up?
In that case I think that 'Expect the best but prepare for the worst' is a good mindset to have.
Enlightenment is realizing that everything shares the same nature as a rock.
The neutrality is gone as soon as people are involved
You present this example to me as if the truth doesn't even matter. WHY did the person throw the rock? That is the truth behind it all. Seems like a critical part of a hypothetical situation that is entirely missing from your example.
Your biases are so strong that you didn't even feel a need to mention it. It's like talking about a flying turtle without describing why or how the turtle can fly. You inserted so much emotion and violence into this hypothetical situation that basically you are blinded by the fact that it's missing a critical point.
And that is the essence of what I'm talking about. A state of mind. If you can't view the situation neutrally. Then you are crippled. Forever blind from asking the critical question and realizing the ultimate truth.
But let's be straight here. The OP of this article is not in an emotionally charged situation. She's a neutral arbiter observing a changing world shielded from all the flying rocks being thrown all over the place. And from this neutral vantage point she makes a choice... she says, I choose to be biased... I choose to lie to myself... I choose to be an optimist.
That particular scenario of civilization collapse I think is unlikely, however it does create the question of whether history always gets better over the long term.
And the long term scales of history are long, long enough to make it impossible to tell a definite trend from a possible one if you are looking for meaning behind history.
But I am a religious man and I have hope things will stay on the uptrend in some way. I think a CB lot of faith in history is ultimately a matter of faith, one with arguments behind it but I don’t think those arguments are bulletproof
- Energy is getting fixed. Simply because wind and solar are cheap, and electric vehicles work well. There will be lots of kicking and screaming during the transition, but 20 years out, it won't be a problem.
- We seem to be past peak crazyness in major national leaders. Donald Trump is out. Boris Johnson is out. Benjamin Netanyahu is out. Putin remains a problem.
- Vaccine technology has made huge strides in recent years. Omicron vaccine ships in October. Broad-spectrum vaccines for most of the flu/coronavirus family are in test. We have a monkeypox vaccine already. Cranking out a designed vaccine for a new threat is now routine. Even an AIDS vaccine, which is really hard, now looks possible.
- The supply chain disruptions of the last few years have led to major investments in new manufacturing capacity all over the world. From wafer fabs to fertilizer factories, plants are going up. Having multiple sources is now important again. It takes a while for this to have an effect, after which prices go down.
- The population bomb fizzled out. World population is leveling off. All the major developed countries are now below replacement rate.
Not to throw cold water over this too much but Johnson's likely successor is basically him again but without any of the charisma that sold many of the public on him in the first place. Liz Truss is an author of Britannia Unchained which pretty much accuses the British public of being workshy good-for-nothings and bemoans the fact they won't cheerfully volunteer for long hours and exploitative wages. The irony is by Dominic Cummings' account at least Truss is a bit of a chocolate teapot herself! It's said that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, I think Margaret Thatcher might be about to get her farcical repetition in a month or so.
Humanity indeed faces a lot of problems. Each of them have many possible solutions (The only one unsolvable is a heat death of the universe).
Thing is, the solutions usually may be divided into two categories: technical and societal.
For example, for the horse manure problem in big cities there were two possible solutions: invent a car, or limit the number of horses in the city.
The thing is: technical solutions are always cool. They open up new possibilities, the one which could not be foreseen. Technical solution also creates new problems, that require solutions of their own. Societal solutions always suck. Societal solution is to make people do less of the thing that causes trouble. The problem therefore kind of resolves, but the life become more boring and less free. Such solution does not bring new possibilities, does not advance life, but there is no risks of unforeseen new problems.
Examples of the problems and possible solutions:
Global worming: limit consumption and consumerism - or - perform climate engineering (spray high albedo particles in stratosphere, send controllable aluminum foil mirrors to the orbit, install more solar cells and wind turbines
Cancer, Alzheimers, heart diseases, obesity, etc.: live "healthy life", eat boring non-tasty grass, die 5 times a week at the gym, don't eat most awesome sugar, don't dring amazing coke, don't smoke, don't enjoy, don't ... - OR - Concentrate on solving the cause of those illnesses, that is the ageing. Treat ageing as a disease and fund anti-ageing research.
"Overpopulation": Make people believe that earth is dying and they shouldn't have children - OR - Build habitat (O'Neil cylinders) on the orbit thus opening virtually endless living space
Nuclear war: Pacify a horrible dictator, leave him "ways to retreat" - OR - build habitats on the orbit; atomic explosions in space won't do much damage at all (there is a constant atomic explosion already there, called Sun).
Hunger: Not a problem, earth agriculture is overproducing; the real problem is horrible dictators and the lack of new land that people can escape to from that dictator.
Where would you place something like efforts to increase a population literacy rates? It's not a new technical advantage, but it doesn't suck or limit possibilities. If anything, it creates them, since a literate population is one you can teach to drive, where employers can assume literacy for training purposes, where governments can give information to their people in writing, where people can read their own religious texts without intermediaries, etc.
The main thing I learned from the book, is knowing when it is good to be optimistic or pessimistic. There is a time and a place for each. But, on average, optimists tend to win, because they keep trying longer.
> Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
No, the title should be "optimism chose me". Articles like this are the product of scientific progress. People don't have ideas, ideas have people. Science took itself off once it got started. (in tandem with capital).
It's funny that 'rational optimism', Enlightenment obsessed people stress science and secularism so much. They may not notice it but the framework they're in is fundamentally religious and idealistic, assuming they can move the world in directions they want by thinking the right thoughts.
"Appreciation and its close cousin, gratitude, are something we need a lot more of these days. But our gratitude is not for heaven-sent good fortune. It’s for the innumerable positive changes and advancements forged by science,"
The author is even somewhat self aware of the fact that this sounds suspiciously like worship, but somehow not completely.
The attitude you want to cultivate is meliorism. Start with realism and then progress to meliorism.
Read Thomas Hardy's poetry. He'll help you understand.
If the only problems we face were war and rising Christian fascism, I would also be optimistic, because those things can and have been fought successfully in the past. However...
The very real situation of climate change, described by leading scientists as "code red for humanity," cannot be waved away by comparing our current struggles to that of medieval peasants seeking freedom from monarchy. We're talking about a collapsing biosphere. We're talking about mass extinction. We're talking about large areas of the Earth becoming functionally uninhabitable.
I would even be optimistic about that, too, if world leaders (economic and political) seemed to take any of it seriously. But they don't, so I'm not. And I think the author is conveniently ignoring this entire subject.
And if they won’t, life itself is even more resilient.
You realize that's hardly reassuring, right? You're right though - life is resilient. Life has survived worse.
But our fragile global civilization, propped up by fossil fuels at a core level, is not resilient in the worst case outcomes of climate change. And keep in mind: in order to avoid the worst case scenarios, massive economic and political change needs to happen. No such changes are happening yet, though.
So yeah, I agree that humans and life in general will probably survive, but not in any way that would be recognizable to us now.
Now, I believe that human civilization is not there yet for coordinated global action. At the very least, it requires world peace, and we are on the brink of the next world war. Civilization can disappear even before we’ll feel consequences from climate change. Nothing is permanent.
Having said that, I think we should do everything to improve our prospects and our long-term quality of life, like building a lot of climate-safe nuclear power plants, stopping burning fossil fuels, and preparing for mass climate migration (which will not even be the first in humanity’s history). I think we’ll manage. But if not — I’m pretty sure that there are many other fine civilizations in the universe that will pass this particular test. We are not that important on the cosmic scale, and everything there is temporary anyway.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything, converting our energy needs to nuclear and solar is the first priority. But yes, there’s a significant probability that it won’t happen soon enough, so we might want to think how to live when famines and mass climate migrations will happen. Linear progress is an exception, not a rule.
Some people are used to such a good life that the concept of actual, intense, long-term suffering doesn't even register as something that can happen to them. And even when it is pointed out to them there's no gut feeling for how shit life can be
Here is the last paragraph:
"The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. (very high confidence)"
You can find more information here: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g...
[1]: https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg2/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPo...
It literally says "livable future." As in, a future that is as livable for humanity in general as the present currently is.
There are numerous scientists that predict sea level rise coupled with lethal wet-bulb temperatures in the tropics will make living around the equator difficult if not impossible. Here is a direct quote if you need it:
"SSP5-8.5 — Imagine a world where humanity doesn’t just do nothing about climate change but continues to make it worse... The net result would be 4.4°C of warming, with a range between 3.3°C and 5.7°C. As if large-scale coastal inundation and extremely destructive weather weren’t enough, parts of the planet would become unlivable during the hottest times of the year."
Source: https://www.vox.com/22620706/climate-change-ipcc-report-2021...
That's a timeline in which we continue to increase emissions year over year and actively double down on business-as-usual. So far, that has been the case (emissions dipped in 2020 during lockdown, but we are now back to emitting more than ever before).
First, is that this optimism is indefinite in words of Peter Thiel. It's gonna be fine but without any directions how to make that future actually happen. Can we just sit and wait?
Second, it addresses factors that just aren't important.
Doesn’t she know that Christian nationalism has largely taken over the Republican Party and that the Enlightenment values of freedom of inquiry, tolerance, and reason are being threatened from the political Right as well as—to a worrying extent—the political Left?
These are downright silly concerns in the world with collapsing birth rates on the verge of a world war with Russia and China trying to use their last gasp for empire building.
Living five years longer in a larger house with AC is nothing to sneeze at but perhaps not quite the win in the world of record-breaking obesity and drug addiction. We're trading biological capital for material comforts. And not even at a good exchange rate.
This author clearly lives in a place where he can afford such optimism. It's not so easy in the slums of Tanzania.
Ask yourself why people in the slums of Tanzania might not be "optimistic about the future". Is it because of their poor current living situation, or is it because they don't see as much of the political, scientific, and social progress being made over time globally? I'd argue it's more likely the latter.
I base my pessimism on the childishness I see flourishing in adults who have lost contact with reality because they've never endured serious hardship. These people can be easily manipulated because they have little fear. They have never made life or death decisions. So they don't understand the significance of forming an accurate model of the world. The result is a nation full of dreamers. Such people are ill adapted to the real world and will naturally be ineffective in all that they do.
There are very strong incentives for forming an optimistic outlook. None of these are conditioned on data or serious consideration. I think people look for reasons to justify how they want to feel. In other words, optimism precedes the reasons one has for being optimistic.
Voltaire lampooned optimism very well in Candide. His ultimate conclusion was: don't waste your time on idealistic notions of a world in which terrible things are always happening; instead, tend to your garden--do your best to improve what you can and no more. This is a wise suggestion. Optimism and pessimism are both traps. They are pathological extensions of present conditions.
I wish I could heed this wisdom...