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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#431

Post by masterphilo »

hawkice wrote: post #106
masterphilo wrote: post #99

Great read, and a close call! Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising. What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this…

It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless? Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would…

You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.

What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#432

Post by tialaramex »

wutbrodo wrote: post #423
tialaramex wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more than most developed countries Basically this article is about someone's exercise to persuade themselves a lie is true. Keep squinting, keep finding ways to tilt the numbers, until, like a word you've read over and over they become nonsense and then pronounce yourself satisfied that you've proved Up is Down and Black is White. Congratulations I guess, to Kirkegaard? A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M to…

> A Wall Street firm sends an exec on a $10M tour of Europe for "wellness" and that's now welfare expenditure, but there's tax charged on the food an unemployed steel worker in Liverpool buys so his unemployment cheque doesn't really count as welfare after all. Does this comment have a point, beyond lurid and ill-thought-out analogies? Notice that even your contrived example isn't self-consistent: the only way the st…

I'm not really imagining any "motivation" beyond the intellectual exercise of proving America spends lots of money on things it actually doesn't spend money on, by squinting until the whole world is blurry.

Economists would like everything to be dollars, because that means you can plug numbers into a spreadsheet and get answers that work. Centuries of this not working haven't dissuaded them and I don't expect my rant to change that.

People who actually think we should care about population welfare do not try to squint at the dollar figures like this paper, you'll see them looking at policies qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and this way you don't need to draw a dozen charts to come to the apparently startling revelation that the US is a wealthy country in which money is being stolen from the poor to be wasted by the rich and this is a bad idea.

Sometimes this sort of work will be excused on the rationale that it will guide political decision making. This is an error perhaps everywhere and certainly in the US. A Republican is not going to read this paper and say "Aha! My policies were mistaken, I can actually have better impact by reducing tax breaks on the wealthy and directing the increased income to the poorest". They're going to glance at it, conclude it does not support the policies they wish to enact and so it's irrelevant.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#433

Post by cryptica »

blt wrote: post #130
cryptica wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is complete BS. In our unequal society, some people have 100s of potential partners waiting in line for them while for others, they will never get a single chance in their entire lifetimes. Same with career opportunities. Either you're rich and have more opportunities every single day than you can possibly fathom or you don't have a single good opportunity in your entire lifetime. What's more tragic about it is…

Your statements are extreme. There may be some subcultures and bits of society that behave like this, but it is far from universal. Please take a break from your current forums/podcasts/youtube/etc.

What I'm saying is based on first hand experience not being sedated by video games and other mindless entertainment which normally serves as a cheap substitute to real meaningful life experiences which seem to have vanished from most regular people's lives.

An unfathomable number of people alive today have totally pointless lives because all the good stuff has been taken out and substituted with cheap thrills.

It's no coincidence that rich people have many friends and experience a lot of positive emotions in their lives. I guarantee you that poor people experience very few positive emotions and they don't have a choice. The glass ceiling is unbreakable.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#434

Post by natmaka »

prepend wrote: post #344
natmaka wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants. Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such. If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it…

> I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants. Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated. I agree though that total nuclear war would be way wors…

Which non-modern tribal war ended in genocide or mass destruction?

AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.

Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.

The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#435

Post by yesenadam »

graeme wrote: post #307
jessaustin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"

Any money is in selling bombs that are used , so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes, and you can very by stock exchange listings. This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction. https://en.m.w…

Thank you, am reading his Strategy in the Missile Age, which is surprisingly a very enjoyable read. Brodie was evidently a cultured guy and a good writer. There's quite a bit of history and philosophy, and the first 2 pages are entirely about Paradise Lost!

PDF: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/...

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#437

Post by yesenadam »

graeme wrote: post #373
yesenadam wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any money is in selling bombs that are used , so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapon... "The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in…

The US govt spends 7.3 trillion dollars per year. So that’s about 0.5% of spending. As a fraction of US GDP it’s about 0.17%. It’s tiny. The claim I was arguing against was this: > the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society You can’t control society with 0.17% of US GDP! Note also that most of that spending does not flow to arms contractors so the actual figure is less. The bulk is spend on the defe…

Well, it seems a bit pointless debating whether billions of dollars is not much/tiny or a lot.

>> the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society

> You can’t control society with 0.17% of US GDP!

That doesn't seem fair. The companies involved are involved in a lot more than nuclear weapons, as I guess you know. (see my last 2 links)

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#438

Post by prepend »

natmaka wrote: post #434
prepend wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants. Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated. I agree though that total nuclear war would be way wors…

Which non-modern tribal war ended in genocide or mass destruction? AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease. Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.…

There are multiple theories for what killed Neanderthals [0] but violence by Homo Sapiens seems the most supported by the fossil record. It would be hard for climate change and disease to wipe out an entire species, especially since there was interbreeding with homo sapiens so if a disease was so virulent to span the entire half of the world with Neanderthals it would affect homo sapiens as well.

I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.

I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.

This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].

There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_warfare

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#439

Post by prepend »

adamcstephens wrote: post #364
prepend wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for replying, I’ll check out this book and learn about how it’s measuring poverty. The concept seems about inequality though, that is different (although important) than poverty. This quote mixes the two concepts “ Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day.” and doesn’t provid…

Right, the book overall is about global inequality, but he definitely addresses the defined poverty thresholds. These thresholds are used by the wealthier countries to claim an improvement in people’s lives, while they’re gaming the numbers to show a decrease in poverty. Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally…

> Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.

This is not the method described in the world bank web site. I don’t think the intent is to boil down to a single measure.

Tracking data globally is really challenging, so a consistent and meaningful measure is required to even have a hope of a perspective across countries. It’s useful in eradicating poverty to both measure progress or failure as well as to prioritize investment for areas of greatest need.

This also isn’t the only measure of poverty as there’s many others and there’s quite a bit of literature in global health on other measures as well.

That being said, I think there is room for improvement both in developing more useful metrics as well as improving accuracy of measures.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#440

Post by Talanes »

jstanley wrote: post #265
Talanes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does using one over the other cause an actual change in information though? Not just sticking out as the wrong one if you know the proper distinction, but actually conveying different information? The comparison that follows is the important part, the abbreviation is a part of grammatical dressing that provides some flow and framing.

But "i.e." doesn't lead to a "comparison", it leads to a restating of the same thing. Take a look at a car (i.e. an automobile). Take a look at a car (e.g. a Nissan). Do you see the difference?

I would still see the difference if you switched the e.g. and i.e. without batting an eye though.
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