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My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

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Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#41

Post by dane-pgp »

XorNot wrote: post #22
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).

> but it hasn't happened yet

To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:

> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#43

Post by titzer »

thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political instability over the Trump years and that insane media atmosphere, and collapse has basically gone mainstream.

At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times.

Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone.

Buckle up!

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#44

Post by pfdietz »

I remember someone took one of those global models and noticed all the equations were time reversible. So they asked "what does the model 'predict' the past looked like?"

And it turned out the model predicted the world population was infinite sometime in the 1800s. :)

I have very little faith in any of these models.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#45

Post by yongjik »

> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ...

This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020 or later.

I.e., the fact that these models start to diverge around "now" doesn't mean we're nearing some ominous inflection point - it's just a consequence of "hindsight is 20/20."

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#46

Post by XorNot »

cletus wrote: post #31

So two things spring to mind with this and any doom scenario or predictions: 1. People tend to exaggerate such doom. The reasons for this vary. A lot of the time it's unknowing. It could be as simple as assuming a constant function will remain constant beyond normal boundaries. Or that a dynamic function will continue forever. Or it's sometimes disingenuous (eg to promote a particular agenda or simply to gain more at…

> 2. It's not clear to me that this is entirely man-made (eg higher Solar output). Of course, this may not even matter one way or the other as we still have to deal with the results;

Then you should read more widely, because we have been in a sustained period of decreasing solar activity for the last decade[1]. This trend will actually end and become a contributor again some time around 2030. This will be bad, because warming has continued unabated in the mean time and the increased contribution will last for decades.

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-wa...

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#47

Post by bawolff »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #11
thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

Maybe,but i think that can go both ways - bad things really do happen, often due to causes that are easily predictable with hind sight. I feel like assuming that the world cant end is just as unrealistic as always assuming the world will definitely end due to issue of the day (i mean "end" in a metaphorical way)

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#48

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #23
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

> But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable. And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least sl…

[deleted]

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#49

Post by CommieBobDole »

XorNot wrote: post #22
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).

Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually.

The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.

And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#50

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Swizec wrote: post #7
thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization". But it's not that bad! Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall. Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what,…

It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain.

At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach.

(Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)

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