My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse” • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by wussboy » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

schimmy_changa wrote: post #51

dane-pgp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!) The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, n…

I hear you, and I regret that the Environmental movement feels the need to ratchet everything up to a catastrophe. But surely if “peak” means anything it means that we used to grow, now we contract, and therefore peak oil has already occurred.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

wussboy wrote: post #88

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly. It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this. As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't…

Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by wussboy » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #43

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…

But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding the truth, unfortunately. This is The genius of the scientific method is that it automatically does not trust itself.

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

#94

Post by pfdietz » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #69

pfdietz wrote: post #44

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.

The beauty of open mathematical models is you can show your work. So show your work. Link? Study? Paper?

This was decades ago, I don't have the reference, and it would be on paper not the net anyway. I THINK it may have been in this book:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Models_of_Doom/neaRvwEA...

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

#95

Post by longwick » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #34

premium-gecko wrote: post #6

The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth : "In searching for…

As a human, I have a hard time finding common cause with people who consider humanity to be the enemy. I mean, even if you say human nature is a problem, I might agree, depending on the specifics. But humanity itself? Well, if you think I'm your enemy, then maybe I'm your enemy.

That’s just semantics, it means the same thing.

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

#96

Post by jandrese » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #20

> In many ways, this scenario is even gloomier than BAU, and many say that it predicts the dire outcome of allowing climate change to go unchecked. But if they are using the same World3 model, created in 1972, with a single variable representing "pollution", then surely it's just a coincidence if the effects of climate change end up modelled correctly. The climate is a non-linear system, and there certainly weren't g…

I thought that "pollution" chart showing it dropping off sharply in all scenarios (due either to clean technology or societal collapse) were unlikely. If you are counting CO2 as pollution (and you should) then it's very hard to get it back out of the air, especially in a short timeframe. So in all cases the pollution line ends up in a steady state at roughly wherever society either weaned itself from fossil fuels or collapsed.

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

#97

Post by notJim » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:20 AM UTC

wussboy wrote: post #88

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly. It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this. As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't…

Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?

Sure, of course. But suppose you're standing on the precipice of WW2 or the Black Plague and you can clearly see them coming, even if there's some uncertainty about when, and what exactly will happen. Wouldn't you try to prevent them?

Historically, people always have, and sometimes they've succeeded. The Cuban Missile Crisis is maybe a good example of this. During that era, there was a widespread feeling that we were dangerously close to nuclear war. Surely that sense of danger was a critical part of the reason cooler heads prevailed in the end.

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

#98

Post by School-Cotton » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:20 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

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…

A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly. It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this. As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't…

> there was an attempted coup in the US

No there wasn’t. A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. All actual institutions behaved according to the law.

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

#99

Post by notjes » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

chestertn wrote: post #60

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting…

Someone once said: If you are a teen and you aren't a lefty, you have no heart. And if you are in your 30'S and you are still a lefty, you have no brain. Many travel along those lines.

And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite. There is no peak oil. There is no peak food. There is no peak climate. There is no water. It's all bullshit doomer porn.

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

#100

Post by elihu » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

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…

Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises.

We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.