It's great to have a note system where you can get general information about a subject. However, such a system will not encourage you to read and recollect the information on a regular basis.
It seems to me that the only good personal knowledge management system is a self-testing tool, like Anki. When going through your daily tests, completed questions can have links to the source of the information. If you find yourself interested in studying the material again, you can follow the link, or retest using decks that you can build on the fly based on the tags of the question that caught your interest.
Personally, I just link to the original material that I found, instead of a personal note system. When I write notes, I write them by hand and regularly throw away binders of material. The handwriting was the important part, fully reinforced by constant self-testing.
The reason that this is so difficult, though, for technology, is the rate of change and how much technological bifurcation exists. Each company that I might go to will have their own stack of similar technologies with the same goals. How many languages do I actually want to know all the details of? Probably one. The ability to think as a programmer (or server administrator, network administrator, container system engineer, etc.) is the important part. Otherwise, I can learn the details of any utility on the fly as needed. It will stick with practice, and doesn't require the same level of personal knowledge management.
Learning a language, or things that don't change much (STEM subjects, for example), can benefit from the use of such a system.
We already have the language to describe someone who claims an expertise in a knowledge area without the study necessary to be an actual expert: dilettante.
And that's all that we'll actually be without memorization. There is a huge gap between someone with knowledge and expertise ingrained in their head, with a solid knowledge of the gaps in their knowledge, or understanding the layout of a knowledge realm that can only come from dedicated study of a subject, vs a dabbler or whatever level of expertise another individual might have with less stringent studies.
This same problem exists in our education system and cramming. You can cram subjects and pass tests, but research had shown that the knowledge gain from this process to be extremely limited.
Without a well ingrained knowledge of a subject, it is difficult to use that knowledge in creative thought, connecting with other realms of knowledge.
If all of these human mental processes are replaced with computation, and people no longer put in the effort to learn challenging things, then I predict large amounts of mental decline. We may already be seeing this process. Perhaps I should say... "As we offload more mental processing to computers...", Because it's definitely a process that many people are going through.
That isn't too say that computerized information is all bad. My wife would probably leave me if I didn't have a calendar app.
This ignores data that shows how many older people retired, and how large that effect is.
Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.
I made no claim here other than my opinion changed beaded on my observations. And I am pretty sure that creating 20% more money out of thin air has a downstream economic effect far beyond the day the check was cashed
If I were a leader of a country that engaged economically with the US, I would be less concerned with the use of the dollar for UBI than it's current use, which is too enrich a small financial elite. A group that not only had outsized power in the US, butt also around the world, since the power of the dollar is so generalized.
It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.
If I were a trading partner of the US, would I want to continue to accept the US dollar as the currency became less and less valuable as a result of excessive money printing?
Eventually austerity measures will come, and it's unlikely it will be the boomers who pay for it but the younger generations.
Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions.
Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared dreams, but meeting basic needs. This can already be seen in homelessness. How long before things like this means our planet can no longer manage pollution, or produce soil healthy enough to feed us?
As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. One such consequence is the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it due to serving things that aren't real. I think that a million dead will be remembered with whimsy in the coming decades as not being so bad.
There have been massive ecological disasters in command economies too, the most famous being the locust plagues that resulted from Mao's Four Pests Campaign.
Hell, before civilisation even existed you had humans wiping out megafauna right across the world.
Regardless of what economic system we have, a technologically advanced culture that values hamburgers and Doritos over biodiversity will trample on nature to get what they want.
(I'm not making the cynical argument that humans don't inherently care about the environment - in many Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, environmental damage was considered as great a sin as murder - just that you can't blame capitalism for wider humanity's lack of care or respect for the environment.)
The whole point of a command economy is to have a central planning authority that oversees production of x tons of potatoes, y tons of steel and z T-34 tanks. They explicitly ignore abstract financial metrics like GDP and stock prices. They still ruined the environment.
Unless you're arguing that the mere existence of abstract concepts somehow degrades the environment, I don't see how this proves your point.
My point is, what does it serve to build tanks? If the goal is to protect "our nation", then we are serving the abstractions.
If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.
But isn't the problem that these abstractions exist precisely to help coordinate real things? The economy (and by extension, to a limited degree, the stock market) directly influences a lot of real things and basic needs.
I think the problem is that there's lots of hidden costs or incorrect assumptions in much of the way society functions. We overestimate how rational people are, many costs get swept under the rug or ignored as "something for future people to deal with", certain costs are just hidden, we fail to account for corruption and fraud, and so forth and so on.
It's not really that we use abstractions or models, it's that many or all of them are incorrect, and we proceed as if they're correct, even when we seem to know they're not.
I don't think this is just limited to the environment. Sometimes I wonder if this is some defining feature of our age, rampant fraud or disingenuousness. Maybe it's always been this way, and maybe it doesn't matter.
Abstractions and models tend to get more correct over time. Sure sometimes we get off track or even go backwards, but if you look back at all of recorded human history our abstractions and models are generally a better fit to objective reality than ever before. You have an opportunity to help improve them further, if you choose to take it.
The problem has to do with the order of values which is evinced by our economic activity. Ideally, money should be ordered towards facilitating the exchange of real things, which are in turn ordered towards a good life, and so on to higher meaning beyond that, but that is not what is transpiring. We can see this not only in the huge tranches of the economy devoted to trivial or deceptive things, but also in routine decisions: be they irresponsible, greedy personal choices, or larger organizational habits which have devastated human communities and the environment for the sake of making a number in a spreadsheet go up.
Further, this takes the form of a novel crisis in that the scale and speed at which the consequences keep coming are without precedent among societies with similar vices in the past.
These abstractions were once configured for specific purposes (e.g. help Caesar expand his empire by incentivising newly conquered villages to feed the soldiers that will soon be conquering their neighbors), and the people who configured them died long ago, and we're just still following the old program.
We need to figure out how to reconfigure them. For instance, instead of the gold standard, let's back our money on permanently sequestered carbon. And once that problem is solved, we'll reconfigure it for the next thing.
Yes. However, using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind". That is, most calculation could be done using the inputs and outputs of millions of processes. Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.
> using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind".
No, it wouldn't. It's not a matter of the speed of the computing; it's a matter of the number of information channels available. The amount of information that would need to be processed to run a complex economy goes up exponentially with the size of the economy, but the number of information channels available only goes up linearly with the size of the economy. I think it was Hayek who first pointed this out more than a century ago.
The proper tool to "run" a complex economy is decentralized computing, otherwise known as a free market.
> Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.
The way to avoid cyclical booms and busts is for the government to stop messing with markets. The government should not be subsidizing some products and services and penalizing others. It should let the market work out what products and services are produced and consumed.
You mean you should let decide to monopolies and oligopolies what products and services we need right? There is no such thing as an ideal free market. Free market is an human model and therefore just an abstraction. The gap between theory and reality makes all the difference in the world.
Sure there is. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. That's the natural state of a market. We see many markets that are not free only because governments either prevent people from engaging in transactions they would otherwise choose to make, or force people to engage in transactions they would otherwise not choose to make (the obvious example of this is coercive taxation).
I'm not sure what you mean by "information channels". Wouldn't a factory mainly just need to communicate its inputs and outputs the computer or computer cluster doing the calculation? Similarly for distribution centers. In particular, would much more information need to be transmitted in a planned economy than in a market economy? Remember that, while there are millions of products in the economy, any given center of production or distribution is unlikely to use more than a few thousand.
I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy. Paul Cockshott claims to have found a planning algorithm with O(n log n) complexity, which is very manageable.
The main problem with free markets is that they lead to extreme inequality and subsequent conflict. A planned economy could distribute the surplus much better.
I disagree that the government should withdraw from the market economy. The government can help alleviate the failures of the market. For one thing, the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term. For example, it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation. You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.
By the way, the following are some of what have informed my opinion here:
> I'm not sure what you mean by "information channels".
I mean information channels to and from the central computer.
> Wouldn't a factory mainly just need to communicate its inputs and outputs the computer or computer cluster doing the calculation?
If that's all it's doing, a free market does that fine. There is no need for any additional computation. Similarly for any other economic actor.
If the central computation is going to improve anything over what the individual economic actors would do on their own, it can only be by computing what the inputs and outputs should be for all economic actors, better than those actors can do themselves, and then dictating those inputs and outputs to the actors. Otherwise there's no point to it. And that is what it can't do based on the information argument I gave.
> I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy.
Wrong. The decentralized free market computer's capacity scales exponentially, since each individual economic actor is computing their own actions. The centralized computer, however, has to compute everyone's actions. That's why it faces an insurmountable information problem that the individual actors doing their decentralized computing do not face.
> The government can help alleviate the failures of the market.
No, it can't. That is the lesson of history. Every time governments have done this, they have made things worse, not better. That is not to say that market failures do not exist, only that the failures of government are worse.
> the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term.
You have this backwards. Government time horizons are the next election. Individual market actors can have time horizons going out decades--for example, individuals saving for retirement. Governments can't even keep their social security trust funds safe from being raided by the legislature when it wants to fund some white elephant.
> it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation.
Quite possibly it has. That in no way means China might not be even better off if it were not centrally controlled by the government.
> You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.
No, I wouldn't, because I don't think climate change is a crisis. And as far as I can tell, neither do the Chinese. They are investing in those technologies not because they believe they need them themselves, but because they believe they can sell them at a substantial profit to Western countries who are much more worried about climate change than the Chinese themselves are.
> I mean information channels to and from the central computer.
This makes no sense to grow exponentially then. Information channels grow exponentially in a peer-to-peer network but only linearly in a centralised one. You can trivially see this in computer networks. One server with eight clients will have 8 connections. Eight peers will have 64 connections. Adding one more node will make the centralised solution add one more connection. Adding one more node to the peer-to-peer solution adds 17.
You say "a free market does [calculation] fine," but it has obvious deficiencies that I have already remarked upon. As I have said before, the optimization problem can be solved on modern computers without the problems of the market. The inputs and outputs of individual processes are known in a market system, so logically this information can be centrally recorded for use by the planning process. If a production center doesn't produce output at exactly the expected rate, the expected rate can be adjusted.
About computing capacity: Maybe free market capacity scales exponentially (with the number of actors?) but I don't see how it could. If an economy of n actors has a "capacity" of e^n, the average capacity of an actor would be e^n/n, which is about the same as e^n. How could an individual actor have such capacity? Perhaps my analysis here is mistaken.
Regarding government intervention, let's look at an extreme example. Do you think that, during World War II, the U.S. should have structured its wartime economy around free market principles? Did it make things worse by not doing so?
About government planning for the future: First of all, social security gets gutted because the U.S. government is not a government of the people. Business interests have too much control (that is, more than no control at all.) You also say governments are shortsighted because of elections. Even if this is the case, this is not a necessary part of government. The governance model described in the book I linked is based on sortition rather than election. China's current system, while authoritarian, is also able to plan for the future.
It seems you agree that China investing in solar power is beneficial to it, even if you disagree on the reason. So you agree that, all else being equal, it is better for China to have invested in solar power than to not have done so. In this case, this is a clear example of a government acting in the market with a good outcome. This contradicts your previous point.
> You say "a free market does [calculation] fine," but it has obvious deficiencies that I have already remarked upon.
And as I have already remarked, central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse.
> the optimization problem can be solved on modern computers without the problems of the market.
I strongly disagree, for the reasons I've already stated, but it doesn't seem like we're going to resolve that here.
> Maybe free market capacity scales exponentially
Yes, because the computation consists of the individual actors deciding their actions and the communication of price signals between them. (Note that while I say "price signals", these are much more general than just money prices. Many positive sum trades are made that do not involve money.) That's a general feature of distributed computing: you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.
> Do you think that, during World War II, the U.S. should have structured its wartime economy around free market principles?
Yes.
> Did it make things worse by not doing so?
Yes.
> social security gets gutted because the U.S. government is not a government of the people.
Ah, the No True Scotsman argument. Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.
> The governance model described in the book I linked is based on sortition rather than election.
I'll take a look. However, I am extremely skeptical that any governance model can fix the fundamental problems with centralized control.
> It seems you agree that China investing in solar power is beneficial to it
I said that China's government believes it will be beneficial to China. They could be wrong. But even if they're not, that is not at all the same as saying that it is the most beneficial thing that could be done with the same resources. I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do. That is also not the same as saying a free market would always achieve an optimal result; in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result. But that does not mean all achievable results are equivalent.
> central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse
How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?
> you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.
But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the number of nodes, why doesn't the computing power of a supercomputer scale exponentially with its number of cores?
> Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.
Don't be ridiculous. There are plenty of countries with much better safety nets than the U.S. The U.S. government is just especially dysfunctional.
> I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do.
I guess we just disagree about this.
> in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result
If you take "optimal result" to mean "best possible result," then there is, by definition, always a way of achieving an optimal result.
> How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?
Because your system has to be implemented with humans, and humans cannot be trusted with the power to tell other humans what to do. Your system requires that in order to work. (Existing governments also require this in order to work, which is why they're dysfunctional, but your system requires it much more.) A free market does not; in a free market, all transactions are voluntary and nobody is given the power to tell anyone else what to do.
I don't see the point of further discussion since we appear to have a fundamental disagreement about this vital point.
Very well. Let me just say that any large company involves humans telling other humans what to do, even if the workers work there "voluntarily". Many people have no choice but to work for such companies.
Perhaps look into Australia. We have much tighter regulations than the US or UK when it comes to lending, and we've largely avoided recessions, including in 2008.
COVID got us, but that did have a physical reason behind it.
The way we use money to coordinate activity is very selective: Money only solves problems when those with problems have money. This means that the environment and the poor are generally not served by capitalism.
Disagree with this. According to this article, birds aren't dying off because people choose the almighty dollar, they're dying because they smash into windows or are hunted by cats. The solution isn't to examine our relationship to abstractions versus reality, it's to put a screen on the window so the bird will notice it in time.
That's not what the original paper says. This is why you want to read the actual scientific paper and not the article about it. The researchers, in the article's text, state:
> "Steep declines in North American birds parallel patterns of avian declines emerging globally (14, 15, 22, 24). In particular, depletion of native grassland bird populations in North America, driven by habitat loss and more toxic pesticide use in both breeding and wintering areas (25), mirrors loss of farmland birds throughout Europe and elsewhere (15). Even declines among introduced species match similar declines within these same species’ native ranges (26). Agricultural intensification and urbanization have been similarly linked to declines in insect diversity and biomass (27), with cascading impacts on birds and other consumers (24, 28, 29). Given that birds are one of the best monitored animal groups, birds may also represent the tip of the iceberg, indicating similar or greater losses in other taxonomic groups (28, 30)."
This points to agricultural pesticides having impacts on insect populations, and additionally this mirrors where losses have been most extreme, in grasslands most impacted by agricultural activity:
> "Across breeding biomes, grassland birds showed the largest magnitude of total population loss since 1970—more than 700 million breeding individuals across 31 species— and the largest proportional loss (53%); 74% of grassland species
are declining. (Fig. 1 and Table 1)."
I've made it a habit to always seek out the original paper instead of just reading the 'science journalism' take on it, for reasons like this.
This illustrates why it's a terrible shame that the overpopulation topic has effectively been silenced and demonized in science conservationism and environmentalism.
I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably, let alone a much larger one. They'll angrily insist that the earth's "carrying capacity" is 20, 50, 100 billion people! Or that countries should be looking to increase their populations, or that natural population stability and decline is a terrible thing.
As though we have not _already_ caused (and are continuing to cause) a great extinction event almost entirely before any significant effects from greenhouse gas emissions have made an impact.
Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do).
The funny thing about that is, if our population was a very healthy, say, 5% of its current level, greenhouse gas emissions would be practically a non-issue too. The problem would literally be solved. Gradually moving toward cleaner and more renewable sources of course should and would happen, but while that was responsibly and efficiently changing, there would be no imminent climate catastrophe occurring.
"Earth has established a totally balanced and ecologically stable underground society (similar to that portrayed in Asimov's novel The Caves of Steel). But one man, Cranwitz, regarded as a deviant and eccentric because he keeps a few animals as pets, refuses to get rid of these animals, the last non-human inhabitants of the planet.
He is finally persuaded by his sector representatives to exterminate his pets, but also commits suicide. This leaves Earth in 'perfection', with its fifteen trillion inhabitants, twenty billion tons of human brain and the 'exquisite nothingness of uniformity'."
Greenhouse (specifically carbon dioxide) specifically might be solved, because trees exist and are pretty good at what they do, but I absolutely do not believe that a 95% reduction in population would lead to a consistently-healthy world. I think you dramatically underestimate our ability to pollute in small populations. Consider how bad air pollution was in London during the 1700s and 1800s.
But in the 1700s and 1800s you could leave London and go to the countryside and have very little pollution. That would be wonderful today. Instead we are filling and polluting every space in the world.
I didn't say a 95% reduction in population would lead to a consistently healthy world. I said if global population was 5% of what it is now, greenhouse gas emissions would practically be a non problem.
Fair enough, and for carbon dioxide I mostly agree. But it definitely seems like this:
>Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do).
is claiming broad relation to population being above some threshold, since the whole comment is about overpopulation.
What do you think about our ability to raise qualified adults enough to manage the continuing industrial sectors of the planet, if we were 5% of our present number?
Subjectively and with zero rigor I think that possibly 150 to 100 years ago levels of population were capable of creating so much of the modern world. But from the Holocaust to Pol Pot, the Bangladesh civil war, mass exterminations of some of humanity's most capable gene pools is something that I very badly want to be convinced hasn't badly harmed the species potential.
I'm not saying 5% is the correct population mind you, several hundred million people is quite a lot though. Certainly enough to carry on civilization in my opinion.
You are not the first "genius" realizing this. Look up Ted Kaczynski. But he was smarter than you because he considered what this reality entails for the ruling classes: Namely the decision whether they shouldn't give up on maintaining the masses once technologically feasible. It is for this reason that it is a taboo and has to remain one. Everything else is propaganda and chatter.
> and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably,
because you are wrong. 100 years ago people said we would all starve when the world population reaches 1 billion people. then we not only not starved but became wealthier as well. Doom predictions are mostly damn wrong.
No it's not because I'm wrong, because you can argue with or debate with people who are wrong (or you believe are wrong) without becoming irrational and angry.
And I'm not making any predictions, just observations. This might come down to semantics on what exactly you suppose sustainable to mean or whether or not it is desirable, but causing an ongoing mass extinction event does not meet my definition of sustainable.
I'm talking about environmental sustainability to be clear (hopefully it was from the context but I may not have been explicit enough). I don't doubt we could physically feed billions more people at least as long as we have cheap energy and fertilizers from fossil fuels if we accepted ever increasing environmental destruction.
> And I'm not making any predictions, just observations.
Claiming we are in the middle of a mass extinction event is a prediction, not an observation. It will become an observation when you have actually seen billions of species disappear over time. You don't extrapolate an extinction based on trends over dozens of years (especially on mostly imperfect data).
No I'm talking about actual observations. I'm not going to nitpick about semantics with you no this. Extinction rates are 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than normal, which is not sustainable.
Please be aware there is also the "The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement".
https://www.vhemt.org/
It is led by Les Knight.
Here is quick explanation, from their site:
'''
VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.
We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.
Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.
As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.
'''
I certainly like the promotional video, "Thank You For Not Breeding".
Organizations (mostly) don't self-perpetuate through sexual reproduction. It's perfectly possible for the VHEMT to expand if they manage to convince enough people.
Not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or you actually think what I wrote equates to antinatalism, but no that's not my believe. No more than someone who believes the earth's carrying capacity is 100 billion saying that 200 billion is too many people would be antinatalism.
> I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably
Arguing about how many people the earth can sustain is pointless without defining what kind of life you expect people to be living. How many billions can capitalism + western rates of consumption sustain and for how long vs a simpler way of life.
> aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away
and neither are all the people deemed excess by your world view, which is probably the part people get riled up about.
> Arguing about how many people the earth can sustain is pointless without defining what kind of life you expect people to be living. How many billions can capitalism + western rates of consumption sustain and for how long vs a simpler way of life.
Not really, 10 billion "simpler way of life" people have huge catastrophic footprints as well. Farming being a major one. But the point was not to come to a precise figure and metrics, it's an unhinged kneejerk reaction to any suggestion that the population is not sustainable. Which it is not.
> and neither are all the people deemed excess by your world view,
This false ad hominem suggests you are one of the people my original post refers to.
_My_ world view deems no person "excess". It acknowledges a simple reality that our population is not sustainable and reducing it or limiting growth is critically important for the environment and makes all other environmental efforts simpler or less severe.
> which is probably the part people get riled up about.
No, it's not. They get unhinged about the idea that population is a serious environmental problem at its current levels let alone increased levels. The (baseless and unfounded) claims they make being that it's not a problem "because earth's carrying capacity is 50 billion people" or other absurd statements along those lines.
They probably get upset as they assume you are implying some moral judgment against having kids. Most people want kids, just like those before us for untold hundreds of thousands of years.
There’s a difference between one kid, two kids, three kids, and that guy who had 150 kids or somesuch.
There isn’t an infinite carrying capacity to any planet, nor is it reasonable to have excess of a singular species for it is at the expense of others.
Some may have hurt feelings if you explain that more than 2 kids increases the population, but then “go forth and multiply” is probably not currently sound guidance, given what we now know, vs what we knew, say, 5 thousand years ago.
It was arguably bad judgment to completely finish the great grazing herds and the Mastodons but try telling that to a hungry lot of humans.
The more we come to grips with the human as another animal species, one of many on earth, the easier it is to see how our own hubris is the issue everytime.
To the person above who thought 7 billion humans above wasn’t pushing any planetary limits: while no individual human wants to feel like excess, and certainly homicide is never what is being suggested, the fact remains that a wise human race that wishes to have a healthy planet and lots of resources per capita will steer their population over generations to be healthy.
I’m rather convinced that the same way a rabbit population without predators will suffer disease if it blooms too much, that this is what we are starting to encounter as we brush with the limits of our host in terms of our reckless dominance and destruction on the only known home to life so far…
No one wants to hear about limits or rules but hey, reality called…
No I don't think it's that either: for example many seem to get especially upset when I suggest that most developed countries have naturally slightly declining populations so they should more or less be left alone rather than implement policies to drive population growth.
No, they are not. Most countries would be happy to get back to population replacement. Countries like Korea, Germany or Japan CANNOT even dream of increasing their population at 1.2 fertility rate. Get your facts right.
> This false ad hominem suggests you are one of the people my original post refers to.
It's not an ad hominem, and if you think that my reply is "wildly irrational and upset" then I question if you actually get that kind of reaction in general.
It's merely my interpretation of what you said, since you've given no concrete details and left nearly everything to the imagination of the reader. Given your 5% figure, you are arguing for reducing the population by ~7 billion people, but how? On what timeline? Just saying the world is overpopulated is uninteresting.
> The (baseless and unfounded) claims they make being that it's not a problem "because earth's carrying capacity is 50 billion people" or other absurd statements along those lines.
You've stated that the earth's carrying capacity is 5% of current population, which seems to be equally unfounded.
So we don't have "too many" people? The world is not OVERpopulated? Because excess means "too many" or "more than needed," so if you're saying there's no excess, then you're saying there's not too many people.
I definitely agree with you, by the way: the world does not have an excess of humans!
Please explain to me how the survival of birds is linked to the survival of human life on Earth. We are already in a civilization where we don't depend anymore on foraging stuff that grows in nature anymore.
It's not so much the abstract idea of depopulation that has people upset at you, it's that every concrete proposal for getting there involves genocide and suffering.
First, no they don't. Look up successes in Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, South Korea, and other nations that lowered their birth rates through noncoercive means that improved health, longevity, prosperity, equality, and stability.
Second, not lowering birth rates involved billions of people suffering and dying. There is no option where we keep living above sustainable levels without consequence.
No it's not that at all actually. It's a plain head-in-sand denial of reality that I'm talking about encountering.
Same kinds of thinking cause the exact same kinds of knee jerk reactions, denialism, conspiracy theories, etc. when you suggest green house gas emissions are not sustainable and should be reduced too.
And I should say that you're wrong about that genocide assertion too. In most of the countries with the highest consumption and environmental footprints, populations are naturally in slight decline on their own. No genocide or suffering needed to reduce populations in those places.
You seem quite convinced that you have the carrying capacity argument correct. I can understand why: it's really easy to come up with doomsday arguments of this form. Extrapolate any rising trend against any perceived constraint and bingo bango you have your prophecy. Thing is, people have been doing this since the dawn of history, and they've been spectacularly wrong since the dawn of history. Doomer models just never seem to be nearly as clever as real human beings.
One day the doomers might actually get it right for once. I'm not holding my breath, but even if I were, proactive genocide would be a tough sell.
> populations are naturally in slight decline on their own
I am aware.
> No genocide or suffering needed
That depends entirely on why you think this trend is happening, but if you're willing to accept the trend as it stands then we can probably find common ground.
We're past the sustainable carraying capacity because we have already brought about mass extinction events, irreversible destruction of habitat and environment with our existing population (and it even started when the population was far lower, it's just that it's been accelerating). I have the counter example. There is no "model".
Also it's strange you accuse me of being a spectacularly wrong doomer when you were just now spouting easily disproven doomsaying about genocides. Maybe tone down the ad hominems a little at least while you're sitting in your glass house.
> We're past the sustainable carraying capacity because we have already brought about mass extinction events, irreversible destruction of habitat and environment with our existing population
People drove megafauna extinct before they invented the wheel. Great Britain lost most of its forest, irreversibly (for at least next few millennia), before Romans arrived. Romans, in turn, demolished half of Europe worth of forests to support iron production. Taking that argument seriously it means that "the sustainable carrying capacity" is way below what we had in 300 BCE.
Alternatively, it just suggests that there is no inherent carrying capacity, it's always of function of technology. As technology changes, the carrying capacity increases. Thankfully, our technology improves faster than ever before in the last few centuries and continues to accelerate. This suggests your core assumption is likely to become obsolete in not too distant future, even if it isn't now.
> Taking that argument seriously it means that "the sustainable carrying capacity" is way below what we had in 300 BCE.
No it doesn't, because I'm not saying there's one carrying capacity that's somehow inherent to earth.
Of course it's related to technology and lifestyles and our environmental impact. What made you think I was trying to say otherwise?
Clearly if we got all our energy from burning wood and food from hunting and gathering, we couldn't even support 1% of our population without massive unsustainable habitat destruction. And yes in the past there have been many unsustainable societies that we might like to have changed but that's done now we are dealing with what's in front of us.
And with our current environmental impact, the current population is not sustainable. Maybe technology and societies will change enough in future that it could sustainably support today's levels of population, but that's irrelevant. That doesn't help the 53% of grassland birds in North America being wiped out in the past 50 years.
populations are naturally in slight decline on their own
Yeah, by maybe 10-20% generation over generation. If your target population is 5% of today, and your strategy is to use the natural population decline of Western countries, you aren't getting to those levels for a good 15-25 generations. 400-700 years or so.
> Yeah, by maybe 10-20% generation over generation.
So my counter-example disproves the absurd claim that any population limitation or reduction requires or devolves into genocide.
> If your target population is 5% of today, and your strategy is to use the natural population decline of Western countries, you aren't getting to those levels for a good 15-25 generations. 400-700 years or so.
I'll assume that math works out for those stated assumptions. So what's the point?
The point is probably that, if you believe the biosphere is in crisis NOW, then waiting hundreds of years for human populations to decline is not a solution.
There's an odd disconnect in the comments you've been making where you identify this problem of overpopulation, but seem extremely reticent to describe what you think should be done about this problem you've identified. Maybe I've missed it, and I plan to continue reading the thread to see if that's the case, but if I haven't, let me ask you directly: what, if anything, should be done about human overpopulation?
And if your answer is "nothing, I'm just pointing out it exists" then... well, thanks for contributing, I guess?
> The point is probably that, if you believe the biosphere is in crisis NOW, then waiting hundreds of years for human populations to decline is not a solution.
I didn't say that waiting for western countries to decline to 5% of their populations was solution. Hope that cleared things up for you.
> There's an odd disconnect in the comments you've been making where you identify this problem of overpopulation, but seem extremely reticent to describe what you think should be done about this problem you've identified. Maybe I've missed it, and I plan to continue reading the thread to see if that's the case, but if I haven't, let me ask you directly: what, if anything, should be done about human overpopulation?
What's really odd is that you think an observation is verboten if it does not come with any solutions! Very strange. I don't think your question is the big gotcha you're hoping for though. In general, policies should be geared toward limiting population growth or reducing it, which as I said then makes all other environmental efforts proportionately less difficult.
Most of the highest consuming countries have naturally declining populations, so one thing would be to leave those alone rather than institute growth policies. Another would be to invest in education, healthcare, and other quality of life measures in other countries which are shown to reduce population growth over time. Another one would be to end global environmental and trade agreements which incentivize countries to boost population and limit quality of life with per-capita concessions. For a few examples.
> I didn't say that waiting for western countries to decline to 5% of their populations was solution.
I suppose not, though what you say later in this comment is remarkably close:
> Most of the highest consuming countries have naturally declining populations, so one thing would be to leave those alone rather than institute growth policies.
Moving on:
> What's really odd is that you think an observation is verboten if it does not come with any solutions!
Well, all right, you kinda got me there - I do, in fact, believe that observing a problem without suggesting solutions is not particularly helpful in most cases. "Verboten" is too strong a word, though - one should be as free to make pointless remarks as productive ones in a public forum such as this.
And, for what it's worth, I didn't intend my question as a "gotcha" - I appreciate that you actually answered it. Broadly, I agree with you: taking advantage of demographic transition through eg. better education seems like a good tactic, as does avoiding policies that tend to boost consumption.
Unfortunately, since anti-growth policies are antithetical to our current economic order (again, broadly speaking) I'm stuck on what combination of influences would actually synergize to make these changes possible and/or more rapid. Fortunately, I suspect at least one important transition is happening now, in the minds of the people of the world (the wealthy nations particularly) deciding they do not need as much as they are used to having access to.
To be as transparent as possible about why I care about this matter, the perspective on the destruction of the biosphere that I've internalized is that it has gone so far that mass human casualties are likely in my lifetime, and moreover that this will be how I personally die - either directly via environmental effects (heatstroke? fire? flood? famine?) or from the social breakdowns that will multiply as the foundation of our society crumbles away. I consider this outcome existentially bad and want to avoid it, to say the least.
Given this, I very urgently desire solutions that DON'T take 500 years to work, because if those are all we can come up with, then we might as well not bother: this civilization of ours is doomed sooner rather than later.
> Given this, I very urgently desire solutions that DON'T take 500 years to work, because if those are all we can come up with, then we might as well not bother: this civilization of ours is doomed sooner rather than later.
You keep coming back to that, but it's a strawman. I did not say that is the solution. My hypothetical 5% was just to say that so many difficult problems would suddenly become easy ones.
There is no one solution, there won't be a mere handful of solutions. There will be (and are) many many efforts and they won't "solve" it, they will make some things better and make others less bad. So anything will help, anything is better than nothing. Reducing population growth from 20% to 10% by 2030 means we only have to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions by 45% per capita instead of 50% per capita to achieve the same result (to make up some numbers). That's a huge win. And not only does that benefit apply to greenhouse gas emissions, it applies to practically all environmental problems.
With the Earth's being consumed at unsustainable levels, genocide and suffering are an inevitability. It's just a question of who is going to do it to who.
> I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably
Irrationality is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Well, people get wildly irrational at me when I suggest that the only viable option here is for people to migrate from Earth into orbit. Space constraints will go away, because in 3-dimensional space everyone can live in as large of a house as they want but remain in a fast commute to urban centers of space cities. There are plenty of materials available on the moon to build whatever we want with. This can, of course, leave the focus on Earth to shift to biosphere remediation.
After we take full intentional control of the planet's climate and shift 99% of human land use to the project, then I expect it will still be 100 years or more before we get back to pre-industrial natural productivity. This won't happen on its own, I'm assuming we put a large amount of artificial accelerators into to the process. It won't be the same as before humans, but we could quickly get back to the same megafauna numbers as before. Rough equivalents to pre-industrial ecosystems will eventually work out the missing niches.
I suspect part of the reason people have a strong response to your suggestion is that it's patently impractical, and thus easy to pick apart.
To offer one small critique: you suggest that we first need "people to migrate from Earth into orbit," THEN "take full intentional control of the planet's climate" - surely if we have the ability to fully control Earth's climate, we don't need everyone in orbit?
And, since we have to develop the technologies necessary to implement your plan anyway, wouldn't it be easier to just figure out how to remediate the biosphere directly, instead of figuring out how to get everyone into orbit, THEN figure out full planetary climate control, THEN artificially-accelerated natural productivity restoration?
Your comment doesn't add up. I need to ask more questions to triage what your positions are. Let's start with the fairly basic premise that virtually all of us agree on:
1. Current human impact on the planet is unsustainable
Now add these premises:
2. As developing world changes, our impact gets worse
3. As our own standards of living increase, our impact gets worse
Your vision of the Earth doesn't have space migration as part of our path to sustainability. Because of this, you're fighting increasing demands while at the same time needing to reduce total impact dramatically. Say that the equation is:
Impact = (number of people) x (quality of life) x (efficiency)
You can reject either (2) or (3) or both at the cost of some human harm. Most pro-tech people tend to not reject either of these, but you might be an exception. Because of that, you have 2 increasing factors, because you don't have control over the number of people are we're locked into growth for 50 years or something demographically, even with birth rates quickly falling below replacement (which they haven't yet).
There's only 1 factor left in your toolbox - efficiency. We live better but at a lower impact to the planet. Agreed, that's great, but because of (1) and (2) we already have high expectations of this factor. On top of that, we need truly dramatic total reductions in total impact. So if we need 2x improvement (which is probably underestimating) to stay level, then we need maybe 8x or 16x to get where we need to be so that the Earth is moderately healthy. That would be great, but this is magical unicorn-ish thinking. Is this what you're counting on? I want to know.
We can control Earth's climate today by Sulfur geoengineering, which I'm worried that we will not start until it's too late, and even more worried that it may not be globally coordinated which would be disastrous. This is just a band aid, we still need to virtually eliminate Carbon emissions on a time scale we're not prepared for. As long as we are here, then climate intervention will be done for us (our own selfish needs), not for the health of the biosphere.
It sounds like you agree that population levels on Earth are unsustainable and reducing them would help to preserve the environment.
Now certainly you can see why your ideas may be a little harder to accept as the scientific fact that human activity at even much smaller levels as today's population has caused terrible environmental destruction, extinction, etc., and with a lot more room to disagree, but so long as you approach the conversations humbly and with a willingness to consider differing opinions as you would have people consider your opinion I sympathize. Some people just react irrationally.
I think because it's not practical yet. I'm not sure if it ever would be, but if SpaceX gets starship right it brings us one big step closer to that. Also I think most people would prefer to remain on Earth. But moving some kinds of industry to space could be useful. Asteroids contain an abundance of elements that are difficult to extract here on Earth. If much of the demand for them was also in space due to heavy industry there, that might make it viable. Having heavy industry in space like that could really open up orbit and the solar system to us.
It is also just general reading comprehension, as the post begins with what appears to be a fairly accurate summary of the study:
>Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.
and then makes recommendations about tinting windows and cats. One does not imply the other.
All of which also mirrors stuff like plastic recycling and water pollution. Individual actions are so incredibly dwarfed by industrial actions that it's almost pointless. We need legislation, not feel-good individual ethics.
Seems more complicated - industrial actions, technology, and personal preferences have intertwined roles.
The most effective thing we could do would be to tax beef (and other meats on a sliding scale), because this would decrease the acreage needed per person. People would howl because they like meat, consumers would also just absorb a lot of the tax instead of actually changing behavior. They'll break out arguments about inequality and social justice (but in truth they like the taste).
Vertical factory-like farms seem very promising to me. These will only target certain groups of foods, which tend to be very leafy and healthy. Government policies can play a big role in advancing this tech because economics are challenging and it needs some more scale to drive the cycle to further cost reduction.
I'm sure that direct farm incentives to reduce pesticide use could help. But there's a reason they're used, and there needs to be a game-plan that doesn't assume the farmer will make massive capital investment into the alternatives.
Brilliant, thank you for that effort, especially the direct link to the PDF. A third of the bird population gone in the 50 years since 1970. As he says in Blood Diamond, "Will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? ..." The future is here and the future bites.
> Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.
But I don't think the numbers in the article make sense together.
> wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by 29 percent—or a total net loss of around three billion birds—since 1970.
> between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.)
> pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone.
So ... the total decline over 50 years (~3B) is approximately the same as the annual deaths from cats and windows at somewhere between a quarter and a third of all birds? I think this is one of those cases where uncritically accepting estimates from independent sources who used different methods produces an incoherent picture.
The article and numbers are right, it’s just not clearly worded.
I had this same question a couple years back when I read this stat, so I messaged the Cornell Lab Ornithology and one of their reps explained how these numbers make sense.
“We start with a population of breeding adult birds at the beginning of the year. They breed, and multiply, and then the population is "spent" throughout the year on deaths such as window strikes, pesticide poisoning, and cat kills. If the population could keep up with these deaths, we would see a net loss of zero. Unfortunately, instead, we are seeing less and less breeding adult birds at the beginning of each year.
So when we say "we've lost 2.9 Billion birds," what we really mean is, "We've seen a net loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since the 1970's." Back in the 1970's, the breeding season started with about 13 billion adult birds. This year, we had about 10 billion. Throughout the year, they multiply to about 40 billion before they die back. Of that 40 billion, cats kill 2.5 billion.”
I think the honest answer is that we just don't have nearly as much surety around these numbers as you might expect.
I went looking for data on actual bird populations, and I get wildly different estimates.
The 3 billion number comes from the following source (as far as I can tell):
"
Critical data were contributed by citizen-science participants in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, North American Breeding Bird Survey, and other bird-monitoring initiatives. The Partners in Flight Avian Conservation Assessment Database was a critical source for the data.
" - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/
And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter.
They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.
We have a group like this, which feeds a couple dozen feral cats on "Kitty Cat Lane." Of course there is science behind the insanity -- toxoplasmosis infections from the cats they love.
'Neuter and Release' programs are common, supported and sanctioned by animal shelters, usually local vets provide their services for free, and the point is to provide basic medical for the animals while at the same time trying to control excess populations.
Calling them 'Nutty cat lady vigilantes' would be like calling people 100 years ago providing shelter for abused women 'Marriage Wreckers'.
Enough with the petty, denigrating attacks people helping mostly harmless animals, which is a generally good thing. These rescuers/helpers run 'neuter and release' programs and are keen on having population control, not increasing the number of rogue cats.
Mostly harmless to you... What a strange thing to call what is effectively an apex suburban predator that is known to kill for fun with no intention of eating.
What's nonsense about it? These aren't raccoons digging through people's trash and scavenging, they hunt wildlife for food and are protected from everything that would hunt them in return, even getting food and water and potentially shelter in the worst months.
Feral cats should be euthanized from a distance. Ask any infectious disease doc about cat bites. And think twice about feral kittens being all innocent, their teeth are like hypodermic needles, and can inject shit into joints. You can lose life and limb from kitty cat bites. These are not cool animals.
Our door cats have existed for millennia. Pesticides have not. I don’t think outdoor cats are the problem. Pesticides have killed most of the bug biomass in the last several decades and now birds are being affected.
I cannot understand why DDT is forbidden, but 10000x more powerful insecticides are not forbidden. WTF? Birds are dropping from the sky in Spring, because they have nothing to eat, because bugs are gone while seeds are not ready yet.
Also, air pollution makes them weak. Birds are much more sensitive to air pollution and CO2 level, because they breathe at much higher rate while they have much lower mass than land animals.
Its a solid point. I'm not sure what the average ownership of cats are, but I would imagine every 3rd or 4th person in my friendship network to own one.
I would imagine at least over 100 million cats in north America to which most owners probably let them outside to hunt wild life.
Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again.
Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds.
Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.
Would that even be beneficial? If the problem is that there are fewer insects and therefore the birds have less food, then cats suppressing the bird population might have a positive impact on insects, which the birds eat. That might be good for birds too in the long run.
Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad.
Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.
> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
> "So we can believe the big ones?"
> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
(Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett)
> Until human society stops serving abstractions […]
Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought.
I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost.
> As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever.
Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.
>Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of
I'm appalled that such a quote could be used to support such an argument. Grandparent, and Pratchett's Death, agree that humans and human society are supposed to support humans. Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope -- and the biosphere itself that serves as backdrop, stage, and audience all in one.
Whether unintentionally or otherwise, the parent is missing the point. The grandparent doesn't argue against abstraction itself, but the reification of corporations as people, the conflation of the stock market as barometer of the economy, and enablers of all this in ostensibly benevolent governments.
If one chose the read the rest of the fucking book, one would see that it's all about fighting against those who would use human frailties -- like greed, and desperation, and the smallness of our own perspective -- to trick humans into destroying that which makes life worth living. Of course, it's all couched in the supernatural trappings of the Discworld, but as Prachett points out in several Discworld book intros, the Disc is a "world and mirror of worlds". On Earth, the antagonistic Auditors have names and addresses...
> humans and human society are supposed to support humans
And it is the same thing I am talking about. Abstraction is humans’ way to streamline the process of maintaining the society. Money was created as an abstraction of a reward for one’s labor. Then atop of it more abstractions were built. Existence of stocks and markets is orthogonal to how to maintain a livable environment. In other case communism would do a better job at not starving people to death.
> Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope
Give me an example of a society/culture, that cared more about the environment than the ones currently existing. Former societies/cultures were much smaller in scope and headcount to care about such things. Deforestation was a thing during the time of ancient Romans[0], the idea that a species can go extinct (at lest in European-centric culture) started to take roots during 19th century[1]. According to the Wikipedia, Thomas Jefferson was against a notion that species can go extinct (my point is: it wasn’t simply some fringe group’s dogma). Compare this with The South Sea Bubble[2], which was in 18th century.
In short, my argument is: the abstract ideas like “valuation” and “wealth creation” were there well before any coherent idea about taking care of the environment as a finite and common resource was widely accepted.
That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways.
Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of both ends forward, rather than regressing to the one-sided way.
The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy.
The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
Maximizing GDP doesn’t need to be the primary goal to as you say guide policies. There are plenty of policies aimed to increase economic growth as measured by GDP.
Economists however are on all sides of this issue, it isn’t some monolithic field where everyone agrees on even basic ideas.
What economists are on the side that GDP is a perfect measure that precisely captures the increase in well-being? I have never heard of one. If you look at the IMF website you will find a nuanced explanation of what GDP is and is not. For example, it states that
> It is also important to understand what GDP cannot tell us. GDP is not a measure of the overall standard of living or well-being of a country. Although changes in the output of goods and services per person (GDP per capita) are often used as a measure of whether the average citizen in a country is better or worse off, it does not capture things that may be deemed important to general well-being.
Tirades that when economists calculate GDP the human society is serving "abstractions" or the devil over the "real" and God is just fearmongering.
Again your taking things to unreasonable extremes, plenty of economists think GDP is good enough to be useful. Which means it’s informing their decisions or it wouldn’t be useful.
You can’t say measure X is useful, and it’s flaws are well known therefore it’s flaws are irrelevant. If it’s useful then it’s flaws are part of any decision made using it.
>plenty of economists think GDP is good enough to be useful. Which means it’s informing their decisions or it wouldn’t be useful
Yeah, that's precisely my point. It's informing their decisions.
>You can’t say measure X is useful, and it’s flaws are well known therefore it’s flaws are irrelevant. If it’s useful then it’s flaws are part of any decision made using it.
Measure X is useful, its flaws are well known therefore people who use it account for its flaws during the decision making process.
Within the context of a Model. Models that don’t capture the very large scale effects are useless and therefore not worth talking about. What’s left is models that used to capture large scale effects and all the smaller effects that where never captured by the model.
This sounds more like an argument for systems design. You can easily build models and meta-models that help navigate various scopes. For example the concept of the long tail is by definition a widely-scoped way of gaining leverage in a situation where smaller details are important.
Traffic control systems, computer hardware design...these all incorporate the same combinations of depth and breadth of thinking. I think it's wise to keep an open mind and ask whether it's really necessary to exclude a given model or entire set of them.
It’s not a question of excluding the model, it’s a question of the feedback loop where the model is used to both inform your decisions and validate they where correct.
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
> it’s a question of the feedback loop where the model is used to both inform your decisions and validate they where correct.
Who exactly are we criticizing for doing this? Seems a bit like a straw man argument tbh. I'm not even sure how that relates to the more general concept raised above, of a single model of reality being reliable.
Direct observation exists alongside models. You may not be able to correctly interpret that observation, but it is still a form of knowledge.
This is true even if what’s being observed is by a simulated entity, the observation exists outside of it’s internal models and is indirectly related to things in the underlying reality. Ie, physical states of various bits of physical RAM.
None of these philosophers old works need to be given any weight and working with you to decipher your personal beliefs is not my problem.
The abstractions of physics and biology provide the evidence necessary given the context.
Perhaps sit and ruminate as you wish. Those dead men have no capture of my perception. Paulo Freire said we have no obligation to import the jargon and implied behavior of our captors; I won’t submit to Christian rule; why rich mens dollars? The political capture of our economic behavior is a cudgel I’m tired of being bashed with, and the measurable effects are where I’ll put my effort.
If you prefer to equivocate them away with deference to endless semantic recitation, that’s fine, because I know that means you won’t be in the “real” way. You’ll be here proselytizing others just how none of the effort is going how it should.
"homelessness", "pollution" and "healthy" are abstractions that try to capture in single concept a myriad of different realities, and most of us won't have similar concrete representation of what's behind them. This of course becomes an issue real fast because because solving "homelessness" for instance requires separating all these different cases in their own buckets and coming with appropriate solutions to all of them.
Also money is as real as the food you buy with it, the electricity that comes if you keep paying your bills and the factories you buy with them.
> it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost
Unfortunately so. As far as I am aware, there are no political movements in any Western country focused entirely on reality and the consequences of reality. We have become enamored, as a society, with abstract ideas and are sacrificing reality on an altar to our delusions.
We have to start by acknowledging that externalities exist and tell the free-market-is-magic people to shut-up and acknowledge that the market doesn't automatically take care of everything.
Though population of birds in theory is a measurable real thing -- and money really is an abstraction. Without humans it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, birds would probably exist much better without us.
> the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it
To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry.
We're messing up a lot. And we can do much better. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. When we focus on something, we get it done, massively better so than at any prior point in human history.
What's also true is that some things simply can't be done. If a species goes extinct, it's over (Jurassic Park fantasies nonwithstanding). It's not like they will respawn if we fix the ecosystem, the damage is permanent.
If we get too far into climate change, it won't get undone in time, no matter what crazy geoengineering efforts we undertake.
In between there's a window where we can act. That is closing.
> In between there's a window where we can act. That is closing.
If we is taken as individuals, then sure we can do tiny bits and pieces. But it will take global systematic changes that start with the elite individuals to invoke such changes. And those that try will acquire many enemies and challenges that fight for the status quo.
Well, there's a lot to quibble about in this rosy portrayal of the COVID clusterfuck, particularly anti-rationality's rearing of anti-Science conspiracy theories and "hesitancy"--but I won't.
> When we focus on something, we get it done
Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
We are focusing on it plenty enough. The timeframes for serious climate change are measured in half-a-centuries, remember how much changed in the last decade? Solar got massively cheaper, it became possible to convince countries to reduce their carbon emissions purely through political pressure, billions get spent on energy and sustainability R&D. Hell, even nuclear is quickly losing it stigma after Europe haven't had much wind for a few weeks! We are getting there, regardless of alarmist "we have two years to fix everything or the planet is uninhabitable" nonsense.
I do remember how much changed in the last decade. A very nice decline in solar power cost. But you know what? That didn't solve any problems. Emissions kept rising at an exponential rate, meaning the problem not only kept getting worse, it got worse at a faster rate. Adding solar capacity replaced no fossil fuel capacity. We're using more fossil fuels than ever. We are still on exponential growth. So the next decades look bad. And those half-century bad predictions? They wouldn't be nearly as bad if we didn't continue exponential growth--that literally means no GDP growth, something no politician or public policy advocate will even talk about. Growth is making the problem worse, yet it is literally the only strategy that any one can think of to make life better in any way. Exponential growth of something. We've lost our collective minds, TBH. Like trying to grow a watermelon in a lightbulb. Exponential growth busts this planet's capacity, every time.
Whose emissions? Western emissions (yes, including carbon embodied in imported goods) are falling for a decade both in Europe and in the US [1], both per capita and total. Sure, there are six more billion people on the planet that can't afford cutting edge grids and loads of renewables and nuclear just yet, but that's a temporary issue, the efficiencies of scale will take care of that.
That "exponential growth" is mostly about taking people out of poverty. Not nearly enough people in the West realise just how dire the average level of wealth is on this planet, which means any "degrowth" rhetoric is just outright misanthropical, and what's worse self-defeating. We still need to produce loads of stuff, and it will be produced regardless of what "enlightened" Westerners imagine about acceptable quality of life, unless you want to literally bomb India or Bangladesh for burning fossils.
Besides, I just don't see why do you imagine some sort of fundamental cutoff existing and being roughly at where we are. Humanity managed to grow from several tens thousands of nomads to soon ten billion people, most probably stabilising somewhere close to that number; why the cutoff was not overshot earlier? If it increased over time, what stops it from increasing any further?
> which means any "degrowth" rhetoric is just outright misanthropical
Sorry, I will absolutely challenge "misanthropic" being used here. To suggest that we modern humans could not live as our ancestors did--that is, fulfilling, local, simpler lives with less technology and vastly less energy usage is a subtle assertion that the modern way of living is the only moral one. Which is just, anthropologically, vapid elitism and completely ignorant of human existence over millenia. (I challenge you to live a decade as an ancient philosopher in ancient Greece's height and come back to your 9-to-5 job). This "misanthropic" word comes laden with an implicit accusation that we'd force disease and poverty on people when in fact the only thing that forces disease and poverty on people is exactly overpopulation and broken political and economic systems which are ironically exactly the thing supposedly producing this great wealth.
Oh, we moderns have figured out exactly the right way to hold the world, alright. Rampant consumerism and overconsumption. Yep, the most moral system.
To argue that we need degrowth is not to argue that we need be sick and poor. Hell, the richest person 200 years ago was neither sick nor poor, but was incapable of living a high-carbon lifestyle despite utter luxury. Our entire modern system runs on unsustainable levels of energy consumption and is inextricably wedded to fossil fuels. We live like little kings because we burn the Earth's hidden energy reserves to do it.
> could not live as our ancestors did--that is, fulfilling, local, simpler lives
That's a fallacy. What's more, you personally can have it right now (bar slaves, which I'll come back to in a sec), yet you somehow choose to have hot and/or potable water, electricity, AC, heating, Internet, vaccines, mass produced food and so on. There is nothing stopping you from emigrating to Albania and moving to a small village there, cutting your electricity supply.
> completely ignorant of human existence over millenia
> an ancient philosopher in ancient Greece's height
I can't believe you chose an example of 1% elite in a society built on slavery in the most hospitable place on this planet as an example of "how our ancestors lived". A tiny society that was constantly threatened by wars, diseases, and starvation, is morally repugnant for modern people, and had stable periods shorter than modern states'. If anything, you are making an argument for me with that comparison.
> the only thing that forces disease and poverty on people is exactly overpopulation and broken political and economic systems
Here, the real misanthropy of your views rears its head where you mention "overpopulation". There will be 10 billion people on this planet unless you kill literally billions of people and sterilise billions more. The natural barriers for population growth back in BC times were famine, war, and disease; why do you think there is "overpopulation" now if not for the lack of those three? And it seems that you'd prefer for those three to return, which is definitely misanthropical.
> Rampant consumerism and overconsumption
Again, you're focusing on your own little bubble of 1 person in 7. Go to Bangladesh or rural India and talk about "overconsumption" and "fulfilling simpler life" there. There are lots of reasons why people run into crowded cities and sweatshops from their "simple" rural lives. I imagine it can be quite hard to understand those reasons when you only see life in the US.
> Our entire modern system runs on unsustainable levels of energy consumption
And this is the main premise of this entire worldview. It's also objectively false, we already have countries on this planet taking most of their electricity from non-fossil sources, i.e. France or Norway. Besides, you seem to forget that those "simple" societies deforested most of Europe to burn the wood as an energy source, and we transitioned from that to fossils which is arguably an improvement. I don't see any fundamental, unsurmountable reason why we can't transition again, now from fossils to nuclear and renewables.
Indeed. It's also just that people don't remember the issues of the yesterday, they just disappear without much reflection.
Remember ozone layer hole? Acid rains? Leaded petrol? Asbestos causing lung cancers? All sorted out when we realised they are problematic. Not immediately, not without some foot dragging and screaming, but sorted.
We are great at solving problems. We just take a bit of time and convincing to get going.
Just a reminder, but we solved, err, almost none of those things. The ozone layer hole has just barely stabilized, and might recover by 2075, acid rain was never a scientific concept, but a media scare, but leaded petrol did absolutely contaminate the air and water and that lead is still out there, so is most of the asbestos, we just let it be for the most part, as it is really expensive to deal with--I know, I have some in my house.
It's a matter of perspective. Do we solve large problems? Not really. Do we forget about large problems and/or declare victory? A lot. We only have so much attention span.
The ozone hole stabilising and recovering while we don't emit PFCs anymore is solving the issue. Acid rain is so real it has its own big Wiki article [0] and was solved through sulfur emission controls. Leaded petrol use stopped, asbestos is either phased out or has strict protocols for working with it rendering it harmless. Being "really expensive to deal with" is solving the problem, because the expense if the expense of making it safe.
You just moved the goalposts in every example. I'm not sure why would you do that, what's the underlying narrative you have in mind.
Thanks for the link, I didn't realize acid rain was as widespread a problem as it appears to be....which actually reinforces my point, in that the emissions that give rise to acid rain haven't stopped, they've just been reduced.
I haven't moved any goalposts on anything, it's just different standards. When someone says "I've solved problem X" one would assume that X is no longer a problem. That's the common assumption. All of the problems you mentioned and I commented on are still problems. The ozone hole is still a major problem that kills people and is affecting our planet. We project it will be closed, but it ain't closed. (And there have been flare-ups of CFC emissions). It's also a problem then once solved (when both of us are dead probably), will require constant vigilance against.
Your post came off as very rosy, like all these problems are solved and are in the past. Not the case.
I wouldn't be that optimistic. A lot of these problems the developed world "solved" by offshoring production to countries with looser environmental regulations.
And it's not like our new technologies don't bring about new problems. E.g. pesticide use and microplastics everywhere.
I actually believe that a small percentage of people want to climb the hierarchy. Based on books I've read, finding meaning in their work, either locally (how it helps the company) or globally (how does my work serve human welfare), is far more important for most people.
It's sad that our society is organized so that people who find meaningful work are stiffed by our society (teacher salaries, for example).
Seeking power is probably a miswant anyways. I think what many people desire is the social stability that it presents, something that is probably more easily achieved via volunteer work.
I don’t. I think it has very deep evolutionary roots: more status / power has historically translated into better access to resources, especially in times of scarcity.
But I agree it’s a miswant. In modern society nobody has much power over anybody (compared to how it was in ancient/evolutionary time). I think of it as a primitive drive that can lead some of us astray, like the sex drive can make some preoccupied with pornography.
I also think good managers should have a healthy distance to their desire for power. If they don’t they can waste a lot of company money on scratching that itch endlessly.
I believe that the proper response to this is to limit the percentage of hospital wards that can be devoted to COVID 19 cases, as the main effect of low vaccination rates is that the hospitals get too full.
And suddenly, I'm not worried anymore, unlike now where the regional hospitals are massively backed up or closed due to low vaccination rates.
My compassion is completely fatigued. All I can think about now is getting back to the gym when my youngest is fully vaccinated.
> limit the percentage of hospital wards that can be devoted to COVID 19 cases
That's really not going to fly from a political, legal, or medical ethics standpoint. Like, just letting the unvaccinated die and shielding the health system would be an option if societies worked completely differently than they actually do, but given how societies actually are, this is simply not an option.
> Why learn something in depth when it can just be looked up?
And the answer is that you can't daydream about something or think about it deeply unless that information is easily pulled up from your memory. Daydreaming, out the "default mode" of the brain organizes and helps is too understand information. If I had taken the care to study and memorize information regarding, well, everything in school, via a tool like Anki, I would have a lot more information that I could use to connect disparate ideas together. The brain can't do this to the full extent possible unless that information is memorized.
That being said, it's important to know that memorization has a cost in time. The time for a single data point is low, but 20-30k data points in Anki is a serious time commitment.
If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking"
> If it's important to you, memorize. The benefits are huge, and it will help too ward off mental declines later in life.
I slightly disagree. I do agree that the end goal of having the information memorized is important, but drilling flashcards never worked for me. What makes information stick is drilling practice problems that touch on the knowledge to be memorized until it's established. It's more useful for recognizing when those facts will be relevant, too, compared to having a memory silo of 10,000 stored facts.
Anki and similar systems can be used for practice problems, not just "read card" or "read card, say the reverse side, check if correct". There are some add-ons for math that actually generate problems, or you can construct the cards in a way that they promote use and not mere recall. "Io {parlare} con mia moglie" can be one of many such cards that prompt you to conjugate, or set the article, or properly determine the plural. Or can be combined with reading comprehension or listening comprehension scenarios (play or show some sentences, follow on with questions about what was heard or read).
You should see your memory as a library of functions, not a database of facts. Facts helps you answer test questions, library functions is how you solve problems.
Every piece of knowledge has things you can do with it, things that relates to it etc, understanding how to work with the knowledge is the important part to learn and what you don't really learn by just looking it up on the internet. Basically you build interfaces and connects them and create a large structure of things you can do and apply to all sorts of things.
One of the most sure fire ways to accomplish nothing is too judge yourself based on your accomplishments. The other leading cause of procrastination, according to modern learning research, is too give up when frustrated... The belief that things should come easy.
If you stop judging yourself on your accomplishments, then you can grow without goals, with just experimentation and whimsy. I guarantee that was the mindset when roller coaster tycoon was created.
To help, accept that wealth is based more on luck (were your parents rich when they banged?) than any kind of skill. The vast majority of wealthy people did not work for it, and probably will never have to work at all.
Also, just living day to day in a society that wants you to judge yourself on accomplishment is hard. Dump these ideas, meditate, calm, and then grow.
Edit: I'm going to add another thing about labels, specifically when people call someone else "creative", and how harmful it is. Instead, label actions. Sometimes I do a creative thing, but that doesn't make me creative. Sometimes I do something cruel, or yell. They doesn't make me mean or cruel... That's the fundamental attribution error.
I recommend seeing a counselor to help you with these negative thoughts.
When you say "fixed", I assume you mean that the traumatized brain is returned to a state where a person can learn and experience positive emotions. In most cases, I would argue that it's probable, yes, but I'm not an expert in this area, though I spend a lot of time trying to understand abuse (to remove it from my own language and actions) and trauma (so that I can help my children recover from it).
It is my very slightly educated opinion that given a place of psychological, emotional, and physical safety, it is possible to train a person to gain resilience. I will also say that places that meet these criteria are rare in the United States, at a minimum. Our society is highly competitive and attacks people who do poorly, even though that's largely assigned at random, or is based on already existing/trained resilience, which is not well taught in most schools in the US, at least not to the extent that it needs to be. Emotional intelligence is the primary toolkit for dealing with these kinds of issues, and it can't just be taught as a one-and-done. It is something that requires constant practice, similar to sports or music preparation.
I would even go as far as to suggest that the entire media system, for all that it does well, strongly encourages reductions in emotional intelligence. Advertising is designed to get us to relate to emotions like pride (buy a brand new vehicle to be your own person!) or fear. Facebook pushes anger at us regularly. The fundamental attribution error is so rife and abusive in our society that now we identify ourselves almost completely via the categories and labels that are tossed around so lazily, inducing category error, outgroup bias, and a whole slew of cognitive errors that reduce emotional regulation and empathy, key tools in maintaining a healthy mental state.
Given all this working against us, on the other side there needs to be understanding that safety isn't enough. Abusive language is incredibly common in the US (I don't have insight to what the media really looks like in most of Europe, or Asia). There are positive actions that can be taken to help people around you to heal, and to heal your own mind if you are concerned about hieghtened anxiety or depression, but they probably require counseling (hard to access and expensive), meditation and or pharmacology.
I would recommend understanding NVC (Non-violent communication) as a strictly non-abusive method of communicating with others, understanding abusive language patterns (name-calling, dismissing, condescension, etc.) which are easily found online, and also reading books like "Trauma and young children: Teaching Strategies to support and empower" by the NAEYC. The understanding of trauma, how subjective it is, and how often it is associated with thinking patterns and how to modify them, is key in helping people recover from trauma.
As a side note: I have had to do a lot of counseling because the 750k dead in the US from Covid caused me a lot of secondary trauma. I have a tendency to think in the empathetic, and updating from empathy to compassion freed up a lot of room for new ways of thinking. However, I have access to the necessary health care. People who are under intense pressure (month-to-month pay, homelessness, bullying, etc.) will not be experiencing what is called "toxic stress", which alters the brain and practically eliminates the ability to build good connections in the prefrontal cortex.
I guess what I'm saying is it can be done, if we reorganize society for mental health, or if you have the money.
It seems to me that the only good personal knowledge management system is a self-testing tool, like Anki. When going through your daily tests, completed questions can have links to the source of the information. If you find yourself interested in studying the material again, you can follow the link, or retest using decks that you can build on the fly based on the tags of the question that caught your interest.
Personally, I just link to the original material that I found, instead of a personal note system. When I write notes, I write them by hand and regularly throw away binders of material. The handwriting was the important part, fully reinforced by constant self-testing.
The reason that this is so difficult, though, for technology, is the rate of change and how much technological bifurcation exists. Each company that I might go to will have their own stack of similar technologies with the same goals. How many languages do I actually want to know all the details of? Probably one. The ability to think as a programmer (or server administrator, network administrator, container system engineer, etc.) is the important part. Otherwise, I can learn the details of any utility on the fly as needed. It will stick with practice, and doesn't require the same level of personal knowledge management.
Learning a language, or things that don't change much (STEM subjects, for example), can benefit from the use of such a system.