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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”

#131

Post by triceratops »

mercy_dude wrote: post #113
yongjik wrote: post #45

> 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…

I am a huge fan of Nassim Taleb and his book Fooled By Randomness really impacted the way I look at a lot of doom and gloom scenarios. His notion of fat tailed events/tail risks along with survivors confirmation bias is a central theme of many of the risks he describes. So as an example, if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over clima…

> if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at.

Firstly, why would someone laugh? Pandemics with a 100k death toll are a fairly regular occurrence, even in modern society. OTOH if you said 1M + most of the world under some form of home quarantine, lockdown or travel restrictions for well over a year, that would have been laughed at.

Second, it's hard to attribute deaths to climate change directly. Natural disasters kill people every year. Who can say with absolute certainty that the death toll in this or that incident would have been lower if not for climate change?

Third, on a longer timescale climate change absolutely has the potential to kill more people than Covid.

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

#132

Post by foxylad »

notjes wrote: post #99
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…

> resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite

Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them.

I'll give you peak oil: our ingenuity is already finding viable alternative energy solutions. But climate change is going to destabilise so much more - food, water, land, security - that I'm pessimistic that our civilisation will last more than a few generations.

So far we've only discovered more positive feedback (e.g. methane from melting Siberia), when we desperately need strong negative feedback. A bit like Covid, where everyone assumed the ingenious new vaccines would get us back to normal in a couple of months, but mutations, politics and social dynamics mean we're still very much on the back foot.

But hey, I'm 60 and still a lefty so obviously no brain and just a bullshit doomer :) But do grab a copy of Collapse, there are a lot of "whoa!" insights and it's a fascinating read.

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

#133

Post by triceratops »

notjes wrote: post #99
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…

The world doesn't have to end for climate change to be bad. It could simply immerse hundreds of millions in absolute misery, for reasons they had no control over. For example, by causing large-scale sea-level rises in Bangladesh or widespread drought in the Indian subcontinent.

The follow-on effects of the resulting refugee crisis are hard to predict, but likely won't be pretty.

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

#134

Post by neolog »

maCDzP wrote: post #123
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…

I had never heard of Neo-Malthusianism but I realize that I ascribe to this school of thought. What ideas made you change your view?

Large populations have lots of interactions, which is good for innovation and commerce.

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

#135

Post by marcosdumay »

XorNot wrote: post #103
yosito wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they are suggesting is that humans will adapt to the changing environment as we have done over tens of thousands of years of evolution.

"Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay". Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.

And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine.

And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse.

Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.

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

#137

Post by dundarious »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #84
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…

It’s probably better for the thread to avoid any specific modern political collapse theory. For example, I think it’s nutty to say that the attempted coup in the US had any chance of collapsing civilization. But I can’t really say that without sounding insulting, so my “flamewar territory” alarms are starting to go off. And that makes me a sad panda HN user. Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t…

Your original argument was much more dismissive:

> 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.

Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable.

> Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.

There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.

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

#138

Post by schiffern »

twobitshifter wrote: post #126
Isamu wrote: post #102

Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases? It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever. [edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by…

I have heard soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough. There’s also the possibility of drought and loss of pollinators.

> soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough

It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683

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

#139

Post by vharuck »

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.

All models are wrong. But some are also useful.

Don't be surprised when a screwdriver isn't useful as a hammer.

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