Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

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I'm responding to the linked article and the broad "collapse community" not to your claimed "depressed friends with PhDs".

Anyway, the vast majority of climate scientists and economists don't think that civilization will collapse. Maybe they aren't "polymathic" enough for you. Even if they entertain the possiblity of collapse, they aren't certain about it (again, compare to the linked article).

At any rate, the idea that scientists can model the collapse of civilization is silly. We can't model the market and civilization is much more complex.

> Casting the group as expecting some absurd "population collapse without civilization collapse", or cheering on a massive societal regression, is a clear signal your sample set is biased.

I don't know what the first part of this means. There absolutely is a "collapse community," well represented by the linked article and elsewhere on the internet, and I think it's very clear that they eagerly await the collapse for transparent psychological reasons.

> Anyway, the vast majority of climate scientists and economists don't think that civilization will collapse.

Do we really know what they think? I suppose we know what they say. To the question of the article, let's say that one or more of them are actually fairly certain that collapse is coming within a few decades - what would be the point of telling anyone that?

I think being hailed forever as the genius who predicted some cataclysm before it happens is a pretty big reward, especially for an academic.

But anyway, the whole idea that scientists can predict the collapse of civilization is wrong. At some level this is a question of optimism vs. pessimism. That's not a question of models, it's a question of taste or, as the kids say, "vibes".

If civilization collapsed, it seems reasonable that anyone predicting it wasn't wouldn't be remembered. Anyone left standing after a collapse would have bigger things to worry about, and the medium in which predictions where published could very likely be lost in the collapse.

If someone were of the honest opinion that broad scale collapse was imminent I can only expect they would also not expect fame afterwards. Anyone sharing this opinion disingenuous is more likely to be sharing it for gain before the collapse that may never come, via book sales or speaking engagements for example.

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