THE hinge of history? THE hinge of history was the Roman Empire (which spread a lot of the Greek ideas that the Romans admired).
There may be A hinge in the future that we are close to, sure.
Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
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Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream I think/hope it's possible by a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal. We not only have to stop all emissions to zero, but should probably start removing co2 from the atmosphere as well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-remov... https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-w... But th…
If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
Has Nature even been so forgiving?
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Keeping global warming below 2°C is a pipe dream I think/hope it's possible by a war-mobilization type of effort, where industries start working together for the goal. We not only have to stop all emissions to zero, but should probably start removing co2 from the atmosphere as well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/carbon-dioxide-remov... https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/wanna-limit-global-w... But th…
If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
Outside of the US and Brazil, I have been really impressed by the ability of people to come together and deal with a massive collective action problem.
If anything, it has shown that people have the capacity to pull together when they need to.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything I think the global pandemic has shown how unprepared we are to come together globally and utilize technology to solve hard problems. Maybe something good will come from all of this in that direction and we will learn from our mistakes.
Outside of the US and Brazil, I have been really impressed by the ability of people to come together and deal with a massive collective action problem. If anything, it has shown that people have the capacity to pull together when they need to.
> Outside of the US and Brazil
Have you seen how things are looking in the UK, France, and Spain right now?
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#45I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.
Covid isn't necessarily the primary concern but one crisis among many. Arguably most civilization collapses happened in times when there were too many crises at once, that individually could be handled but all at once or in close succession become overwhelming. A current example of this would be that with climate change we face increase in temperatures causing wildfires on the west coast, deadly heatwaves in the sout…
More people than ever before in human history live above the line of absolute poverty, today, right now, and this has been a continouos trend for many years so far. The middle class is only eroding insofar as you define things in some wacky ways. In terms of basic acquisitive power, quality of life, access to goods and services and general well-bieng, more people than ever and a larger percentage of the population than ever before live what in fairly recent history would be considered very much middle class or even upper middle class lives. I know it's fashionable to deride the modern world as fucked with poverty and misery (and ironically this is a thing most often done by comfortably middle class, educated people with plenty of access to good standards of living) but none of the basic data on how well our world's 8 billion people live right now actually supports this notion. Shifting goal posts endlessly also can slip into dishonesty.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#46I'll read the article in the morning. Apologies for pre-commenting.
I do not believe the world hinges on 2020. It is certain more than one nation is going through defining moments, but the world will survive it - as it will the coronavirus.
I do believe that the United States is at a tipping point unlike any moment in the past 50 years. Whether anyone likes it or not, we are the world's leading consumer and second leading producer (GDP). We have massive influence on foreign affairs, soft power, and the global environment.
Domestically, four more years of the current administration and its lack of rule of law will drive more people toward resistance. It will enable those who envy our president's unchecked power to emulate it at any level - the shamelessness, the gaslighting, and the bullying - so that our politics makes the 20th century look downright polite.
The decision to, or not to, participate in global efforts to reduce human impact on the environment could be a defining moment for the next few hundred years of human existence. So yeah, I think this is a huge moment for the US, and the world.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#47I was educated at my university that the hinge of history was actually World War I. Hundreds of millions died in horrific new waus, the world centralized around a pole of power, and basically the world has only been getting better since.
WW1 is a very good candidate. It created the Soviet Union and Hitler and pretty much all of history since.
It's also extra interesting, because if Gavrilo Princip hadn't randomly ran into the Archduke's car, history might have turned out very differently.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#48I haven't read the book, podcast, etc... But at a glance, i don't think I buy the "hingeyness" concept.
Stretching the analogy... A hinge matters because the door it hangs is flat. It "only" moves at the hinge. History is anything but flat. It can bend at any point and in any direction.
The 18th century gave us most of the political and economic institutions we have: nation states, republics, liberal democracy, maritime law, modern philosophy, limited liability companies and stock markets.
I don't think this means the 19th and 20th century were determined by those. The US/USSR standoff could have been something else entirely if the nuclear cold war had preceded WWII instead of succeeding it.
The "lever" is technology, and this just gets increasingly powerful as we go along.
The only way that, in retrospect, any century is a "hinge" is if in the following century, we have less powerful technology and ability to impact the world.
So, in a sense, hingeyness simply means "collapse." A century is a hinge inasmuch as it is enough of a collapse to destroy technology.
In any case, I think we are currently underestimating the threat of nuclear war. The threat has not really receded much, if at all, since it was at athe top of everyone's list of fears.
We're still likely to have mass death and ecodestruction appear out of a clear blue sky.
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#49Probably only true if we allow the “hinge” to be a process that spans several centuries, perhaps starting around 1800 with the beginnings of industrialization and gathering pace in the 20th century. If we look at the 21st century so far, it just hasn’t been... that interesting! Indeed some scholars of technological change (to take just one metric) actually think the pace of change has slowed. The 20th century gave us…
IMHO iPhone (or smartphones) are under valued. Yes, they do not give you more (like antibiotics give more life or nuclear more energy) but they absolutely help you to lose less time (e.g. navigation that helps you to avoid traffic jams and get lost in unknown place). That replicated in billions of people changes the world’s pace drastically.
To be clear, I’m not saying the iPhone isn’t useful or valuable. It just simply does not compare to the key technologies of the 20th century in terms of transforming the basic parameters of human life on earth.
My favorite example is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and producing synthetic fertilizer (invented 1910). Surely a far more “undervalued” technology than the iPhone! It enabled us to scale up global food production to feed at least an extra 3.5 billion people who otherwise would never have been born, or would have starved.[1] Antibiotics are another great example. Several hundred million lives saved.
With respect, I think this is in a different league from saving some people a little time waiting in traffic.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...
Re: Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?
#50I'm surprised none of the responses here are discussing climate change. Unlike other concerns, higher average global temps are baked in for centuries, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today (which, obviously, is not happening). I put in a "yes" vote for the hinge of history simple due to the fact that our inability to drastically restructure our economy today will severely negativity affect billions in…
Of all the things you need to be careful about on the net, predictions of climate doom are definitely one!
Know that doom predictions, being very emotionally appealing, travel around the world before science can get its shoes on.