Chathamization

I've noticed a lot of nuclear advocates talking about climate change but having a poor grasp of the actual issues involved. The aim isn't the unrealistic goal of going to zero emissions, it's to cut emissions such that carbon ppm stays below 450 (or 350, if we had acted sooner). If you look at serious comprehensive plans to fight climate change, nuclear doesn't play a big role for a variety of reasons (time to build, cost, production bottlenecks, etc.). Conservation usually plays a much bigger role (as do renewables).

People blame environmentalists, but nuclear fans acting like nuclear is the one and only silver bullet while ignoring much more important components hasn't helped the fight against climate change.

I was referring to the quasi-apocalyptic belief that was popular after the Iraq War (oil was on the verge of running out, leading to resource wars and societal collapse). The Oil Drum was a good example of this[1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060110135409/http://www.theoil...

You bring up important issues, but there doesn't seem to be an reason to think they are the result of automation. There have been periods in the past with higher levels of productivity growth that have corresponded with a decrease in inequality. Now we're in a period of low productivity growth corresponding with an increase in inequality.

As for self driving trucks, I remember people telling me a decade ago that they would have lead to mass unemployment by now. The predictions of an impending automation crisis haven't had a great track record.

> I believe this is the second graph you should have used: The labor force participation rate.

Here's labor force participation for prime age workers[1] (which is similar to the prime age Employment-Population Ratio I posted above). The problem with your graph is that it's including everyone 16 and over - so baby boomer retirement makes an impact, as does the ACA (college students not working a job for benefits because they're covered by their parents, people who are retiring earlier because they don't have to wait for Medicare).

Though it's worth noting that even if, for some reason, you wanted to look at everyone over 16, the participation rate is still well above anywhere it was in the 50's, 60's, and most of the 70's. If you're looking at prime age, we're only a couple of percents below the highs in the 90's (and much higher than other periods).

> but I have yet to read any compelling predictions of new job sectors that will employ large numbers of people and can't be automated.

I'm always confused by this argument. Practically every day on HN there are articles about problems that it would be great if more people were working on. Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.

I just can't fathom how people can look at the world and say, "Yep, we don't really need to do anything more than what we're already doing."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

"Automation crisis" reminds me of "peak oil." Take a current problem (high unemployment, high oil prices), ignore the reasons for them (the global financial crisis, disruption oil supply along with increased oil demand), and instead construct a strange eschatological reason for the problem (machines are taking all of our jobs, we're almost out of oil).

Let's look at actual measures of automation - productivity growth. It's been very low over the past decade[1] when compared to decades past. Prime age employment has been returning to pre-crisis highs[2] - despite people claiming that the old jobs were gone and new jobs wouldn't replace them (the machines were supposedly going to take them all).

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm [2] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060

> liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.

I often hear people say that a college education is about opening the mind, being able to think critically, being able to challenge one's own beliefs, etc. But then I often find the people make those claims not even able to consider the possibility that many people people achieve that without a college education. We should consider that there might be a certain amount of group think and signaling involved, and that a college education might not improve one's critical thinking skills as much as is often assumed.

I mean, everyone does that at some point. Just about no one would want to see their neighborhood turn into Hong Kong's Walled City, even if that meant squeezing in a few people. Different individuals naturally have different red lines - some might not want to see a historic single-family house neighborhood demolished to make apartment buildings. Others might be OK with that, but not want to see their neighborhood park destroyed to make a big box store. Others might be OK with that, but might not want to see the schoolyard where their kids play cut to a fraction of its size to make room for more development.

There seems to be a general lack of empathy when these issues are discussed - if the people who live there find think something is important but I personally don't care about it, then the people who live there are just selfish NIMBY types.

> what I'm not cool with is when pundits and other public figures on the other side of the spectrum PUSH for its wide-adoption and integration into everyday lifestyle akin to alcohol

While I agree that people should be cautious about taking any mind altering drug, from what I've seen alcohol seems to be even more dangerous (compare your first link with the information here[1] and here[2]). The big difference is that there is immense societal pressure to consume alcohol all the time (and this pressure occurs everywhere - you'll even get it at work events). Contrast that with something like this pro-psychedelic piece, which only advocates the potential of a small number of uses of psychedelics in one's entire lifetime.

[1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/inde...

> We literally have no idea what a >10^6 more advanced civ would look like.

Yep. We don't even have much of a clue about what our own civilization will look like a few hundred years from now, it seems insane to pretend we would know what a far more advanced alien civilization would look like. Imagine showing someone from a thousand years ago a picture of suburbia and them saying, "Nope, this place must be abandoned...no one is growing crops on the land, there are no wells around, deer and other wildlife are walking around houses without being hunted. Must be no humans there." Even just a few decades ago a lot of people thought we would be building cities under the seas by now (hey, maybe not everyone would do it - but with billions of humans, it would only take a few splinter groups).

It's also worth pointing out that even a civilization at our level existing at the nearest star would be undetectable to us in most circumstances (even in the extremely unlikely event that the timing matched up).

Tangentially, if we wanted a strict meritocracy based solely on someone's skills, then we'd base our decisions off of a skill assessment that was open to all people, and do away with college degree credentialism. The current system is based on what you were like when you were 17, what your peers (competition) at the time were like, how admissions personnel feel (what they believe is) your personality at a particular time fits (what they believe is) the culture of an institution at a particular time, etc.

I think this sometimes gets overlooked - no matter what form it takes, the system of college credentialism is in itself fairly arbitrary and removed from actual merit. It shouldn't be surprising that such a system tends to run into a lot of problems.

> Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it.

Before someone could go to the IMDB forums and discuss it. I think they did the job a lot better - if you found a conversation about a particular episode and wanted to comment on it a few weeks after it was made, you could and the topic would come back to the top. With Reddit (and Hacker News), if you're late to the party no one is going to see your comment because the topic is already buried.

Reddit's large variety of user created communities as well as anonymous handles make the site pretty useful. But in terms of the format of the communities, I think the old style of forums were much more conducive to actual ongoing conversations.

> People who go on and on about the Google and Amazon "monopolies" -- which only benefit consumers with low prices and expansive services

That's not really true, things like the abundance of counterfeit goods on Amazon (the result of Amazon's policies and its position) are really bad for consumers.

Yep. Acting as if there was one monolithic black community position is extremely problematic.

> The debate leading up to passage of the laws in 1973 was fierce, exposing rifts within the community. Some black lawmakers dismissed Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's black allies as "palace pets." Others, like Brooklyn’s Vander L. Beatty, one of the top black legislators at the time, said the Rockefeller laws didn’t go far enough. He wanted the death penalty.[1]

It's also problematic to equate wanting tougher laws for dealers with wanting tougher laws for simple possession, or the heroin epidemic with the crack epidemic, or New York with America. There is a point to be made that we sometimes have too simplistic a narrative in our heads, but the solution isn't to replace it with another overly simplistic narrative.

[1] https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...

That reminds me of this IBM press release[1]:

> IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University have piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the U.S., as they move through the supply chain to store shelves. Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds.

[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss

There are so many examples these days. Here's an IBM press release I just stumbled across a few hours ago[1]:

>The two have been able to leverage JD’s expertise in the application of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, big data and other new technologies to protect consumers...Recent testing by Walmart showed that applying blockchain reduced the time it took to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the store from days or weeks to two seconds.

[1] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53487.wss

Honestly, advertising in general is probably a net detriment to society. This is especially depressing when you consider how much money goes into it.

> They were marginalized, by the news and media agencies owned by that same 1%.

That's not really true. There are many other organizations that have been around much longer, with substantially more members, that have accomplished much more than Occupy did and yet receive almost no media coverage. When you hear about a ballot initiative, an insurgent candidate, etc., there is a whole network of activists behind the scenes working to get things done that are largely ignored.

Contrast this with Occupy; just about everyone in the U.S. knows about Occupy because of the media coverage they received. Occupy got a substantial amount of coverage, particularly when you consider the amount of people involved (smaller than a whole lot of activist networks) and the political impact they had (not much). It's true that the poor state of the media in the U.S. is a big problem, but solving that problem would make the media less focused on political theater and more focused on the people effecting actual change.

I agree, the argument seems to come down to saying that human consciousness can't be replicated because human consciousness stems from a "soul" (a non-physical and undetectable element of someone that's at the root of their consciousness).

The amount of attention this argument has received has made me wonder whether the "rigor" used by philosophy departments is mostly just a way to obfuscate bad arguments.

I'd like to see what impact posting limits would have. For instance, let every user make 2 submissions and 10 comments in a month. One of the issues on every forum is that it takes a lot less time to make a ton of low effort comments than it does to make one thoughtful post. Another is that a small minority end up making the vast majority of the posts (even when that minority is well intentioned).

> Users prefer 3-5 videos and so instructors should design courses like that. Instructors that simply upload a classroom lecture are not appropriately transitioning their material for online use. This satisfies your being able to flip from topic to topic.

In my personal experience, it really doesn't. Breaking something into segments can make things a bit easier, but it still leads to a lot of wasteful time if there's a minute and a half of useful information within an 8 minutes block. You can't scan through it the way you can with a book, and it's much more difficult to review a difficult piece of information you just received (it's easy to re-read a sentence slowly, whereas rewind a video to the beginning of the last sentence is more cumbersome and you're going to be watching it at the same speed).

Text also tends to be much more succinct, where as lectures are often repetitive and meandering.

I think the assumption that multiple video segments solves the problem is instructive. Might not a large part of the problem be instructors saying "We've done X, which has solved Y issue" instead of saying "We've done X, let's look at whether or not it has solved Y issue"? I appreciate the fact that people are attempting to solve these issues, but if there's no differentiation between attempting to solve something and successfully solving something than it shouldn't be a surprise

> I will end the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that students are not the best at assessing what they know and that a professional instructor has a better idea of what "knowing" something means.

This is a pretty big assumption, and one that I don't think is accurate (based on personal experience, and my experience talking with both students and professors). The best way I've found to test one's ability is to actually apply it to a task, where it usually becomes quickly clear to the individual where the holes in their understanding are.

> This is ultimately student preference.

Sure. But the last time I checked, almost all MOOCs were lecture focused. Like I said, I've yet to find any with a text component as good as Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way or other free online textbooks. Perhaps there's are a few out there, but every time I've browsed MOOCs I've found just about everyone to be lecture focused. Out of the dozens I've looked at (on multiple platforms) I can only think of one that wasn't, and that was eventually removed.

Plenty of people use the internet to learn plenty of things. I think it's time to consider how much of the "failure" of MOOCs is due to the failure of online learning, and how much of it is due to the fact that university classes aren't a great way to teach people things (at least for a large chunk of the population).

> I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

Instructor anecdotes were an example of why I don't like lectures. With a book you can scan over content that is superfluous and get to the information you need. You can re-read or take slowly the parts you have trouble with, and quickly skip over the parts you already know. All of this is much, much harder to do with lectures.

I'm confused as to why you think professor anecdotes are related to large-scope community building? They're quite different things, and if people view them as serving the same purpose then there's even more of a misunderstanding when it comes to education than I had previously believed.

As for the difficulty of community building, I think you should broaden your horizons a bit. For instance, if you're a bit late on a Coursera course the forums are pretty much dead, and you're better off discussing things or asking questions on another site. Likewise with Udacity - the course might still be active, but everyone that has completed the course has moved on and won't see your message. This isn't because of a difficulty in community building, but because of a conscious decision that most MOOCs take to segregate their forums by class.

> some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

I've done this many times. Why? On some platforms (like Coursera) you retain access to the content of a course you have registered for, but that content isn't available for people who didn't register once the class is over. If I think I might ever want to view that content, my best bet is to register (there's no cost) and then have that content available when I want it.

I've also done this on platforms like Udacity where that's not the issue, because by registering I can create a curated list of courses I'm interested in possibly looking at in the future.

In my experience, the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time. Many people don't find lectures to be useful at all, but the vast majority of MOOCs focus on them. After the fifth time I'm stuck waiting for the teacher to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook.

I don't think I've ever seen a MOOC that had written content anywhere close to the quality of Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way.

Also, MOOC efforts for community building are (at least were) focused on a particular class rather than a particular subject. This doesn't lend itself well to long-term community building, especially when people are going through these courses and very different paces.

There seems to be lots of discussion about how MOOCs can be improved, but not much effort into actually trying different approaches.

> Their "taking into account" seems like mere handwaving away. How would the ending of a civil war not be associated with an increase in mental health?

From the paper:

> The temporal changes in suicide do not appear to correspond with the period of civil war (1983-2002).[27] By the time of the outbreak of the civil war in 1983, Sri Lankan suicide rates were already extremely high – 37.6 per 100,000 in 1982. In subsequent years, suicide rates stabilised. The civil war was still in progress at the time suicide rates began declining in 1995. By the time of the ceasefire in 2002 rates had already halved, and suicides rates were relatively stable in the 3 years after the ceasefire.

They also link to studies showing that wars tend to be associated with decreased the rates of suicide.

It's an interesting reaction. "I didn't bother looking at the studies, but I bet the doctors who studied this didn't realize that correlation != causation, didn't realize that Sri Lanka had a civil war, didn't realize Sri Lanka's economy was growing, etc."

It's worth keeping in mind when people wonder how there could be so many people who reject certain scientific findings. A lot of the time it's a similar attitude - "I'm not going to bother looking at the studies, but I'm guessing the people who studied it didn't think of the problem that immediately cam to my mind, and as such their results are probably wrong."

This study seems to take that into account[1]:

> Restrictions on the import and sales of WHO Class I toxicity pesticides in 1995 and endosulfan in 1998, coincided with reductions in suicide in both men and women of all ages. 19,800 fewer suicides occurred in 1996-2005 compared to 1986 – 1995. Secular trends in unemployment, alcohol misuse, divorce, pesticide use and the years associated with Sri Lanka’s Civil war did not appear to be associated with these declines.

Here's another study[2]:

> Overall suicide mortality dropped by 21% between 2011 and 2015, from 18.3 to 14.3 per 100,000. The decline in pesticide suicides during this same period was larger than for overall suicides: from 8.5 to 4.2 per 100,000, a 50% reduction. This was accompanied by a smaller concurrent rise in non-pesticide suicide mortality with a 2% increase (9.9 to 10.1 per 100,000).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154644/ [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

> I have experienced it first hand with my 4S which became horribly laggy and unusable after all of the iOS updates, and I had no way of downgrading iOS and returning it to the factory state.

This is a big issue. It's one thing for a device to get slower over time as programs become more and more demanding. It's another to have a device that's running great and then suddenly slows to a crawl the moment after an irreversible OS update (what happened to my MacBook after Snow Leopard).

The Do the Math blog is interesting because his core assumption is that growth in energy consumption must keep up with economic growth, and therefore economic growth will run into the physical limits of energy consumption. As the Vox article shows, this is an erroneous assumption (you even see a bit of leveling off in the graph he posts).

I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a whole genre of physicists jumping into a field their unfamiliar with and trying to crunch numbers to prove the experts wrong without ever bothering to learn the fundamentals of the new field.

I've heard someone suggest that Roberta Williams being at the head of Sierra was one of the reasons why Sierra had so many games designed by women. People usually have trouble naming even one prominent woman game designer, but Sierra had several - in addition to Roberta Williams, you had Jane Jensen, Lori Cole (with her husband Corey), and Christy Marx. The first three made some of the most famous adventure game series of all time - King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, and Quest for Glory. Christy Marx isn't as well known, but her Conquest of Camelot and Conquest of the Longbow games are held in pretty high regard by those who have played them (worth noting that Roberta Williams' The Colonel's Bequest is similarly lesser known but still highly regarded).

It's kind of strange. In the U.S., people get angry if they get a speeding ticket for going 12 miles over the speed limit (see any conversation about speed cameras). There doesn't seem to be any push back against having speed limits; rather, it seems like most people think we should have them and then ignore them.

In the U.S. it's often an intentional way to suppress the vote of certain groups (the same with voter ID laws[1]). That's the problem with efforts to increase turnout - there are plenty of people in power who want to decrease turnout because it helps them politically.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...