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Comment by juujian | Hacker News Reader

I see this idea sometimes in the context of climate change. It's fundamentally flawed. Collapse is not binary, it's not collapse or no collapse. If we miss one climate goal, then the next goal comes up. If we cannot limit warming to 2°C (and it doesn't look like we will)... Well, 2.5°C is more than a magnitude worse than that. Those who survive 2°C warming would be glad that it's not 2.5°C. It's not like a test where you can say "screw this, I'm gonna fail anyways."

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By this logic a car crash isn’t binary either, because the car could have always set on fire, or exploded, or fallen into a spontaneous black hole etc.

It’s still a car crash regardless of the magnitude, and a collapse is still a collapse if it’s a small or a large one.

Well… a car crash is absolutely not binary. There’s a huge spectrum between a fender bender at low speed and a deadly multi-vehicle pile up on the motorway. And there’s a huge spectrum of injuries from whiplash, fractures, loss of limbs, and death.

You absolutely can’t treat all car crashes as equal, same way you can’t treat all collapse as equal. The Soviet Union collapsed for instance, and the 90s were absolutely a struggle, but it didn’t mean all Russians regressed to subsistence agriculture and there was eventually a recovery. Its member states are still around, with some doing better than others (the Baltic states for instance).

> By this logic a car crash isn’t binary either

Uh... yes? Would you rather take a 50mph head on collision driving a 2023 Outback or a 1930 Model A?

The point is that car crashes are indeed dangerous, and we've spent a century of engineering making them significantly (vastly, really) less so. And that's a good thing to be celebrated, and not rejected just because we don't want to get into crashes in the first place. Climate change mitigation follows the same ethical principles.

No idea, I don't drive. But both of those are a crash, regardless of the speed or model.

Then let me be clearer: one is a routine, eminently survivable collisoin that happens dozens of times every day, the other is a certain death sentence. They are different, and they are different because smart people cared to fix a problem they saw instead of just throwing up their hands in despair. To wit: if you genuinely care about this stuff, get off your ass and help instead of whining on the internet.

Both of the situations are car crashes. What are you even claiming?

That deaths in car crashes[1] are not a fait accompli and that their impact may be mitigated by careful engineering and hard work. And by extension, that fatalism regarding other problems[2] is subject to the same kind of solutions. And finally that using car crashes as a metaphor for other such problems[3], as the upthread poster did, is a poor analogy and actually supports the case for action, and not despair.

[1] Actually climate change. It's a metaphor.

[2] Climate change, again.

[3] Yup.

It is possible that some sort of runaway effect can happen after a tipping point is reached. Many scenarios lead to that. e.g.

- AI could have a singularity.

- Ice reflects heat, so there can be a vicious circle as ice melts.

- Ocean currents could suddenly shift into a different pattern.

- Any sort of stressor, like global food shortage, can lead to instability and thus nuclear world war over resources

- A contagious disease could cause infertility/death globally. Or, say, if the covid vaccine or microplastics had an unexpected delayed effect after a few years

We tempt all these risks more and more as we continue living unsustainably

Surely at some point it is binary.

Total human extinction. That’s how you break it down to a binary outcome. There are so many levels of survival and civilization above that.

Not sure why I'm downvoted. Who the hell disagrees that even a total extinction isn't a 'civilization collapse'.

At the point that energy and food production break down, in their ability to carry world population.

You can't produce energy without energy. And you can't produce food without energy and soil.

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