161–170 of 520 posts
We need a cabal of Billionaires to get it into their head that the world is ending unless they do something drastic. That will save us. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a...
The scary thing is that many billionaires are wealthy enough to pull it off.
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…
> 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.
Here's a list:
* Breaking into congress
* Carrying flags representing a rival (dead) government
* While wearing tactical gear, some carrying blunt objects, handcuffs, mace
* Stealing computers and documents
* Searching for congresspeople
* Killing a police officer, beating others
Not to mention they were doing it while Congress was meant to be counting electoral votes.
What else do you need to make it a coup attempt? Is competence a requirement?
I'd put money on BAU2 over CT any day of the week.
> 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…
At least people are retrofitting buildings in CA to prepare for the San Andreas.
This is nothing compared to the real big one:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...
On top of this, there are usually two Cascade Range eruptions a century. We've had 0 so far in the 21st. Could Rainier go?
A new virus isn't any less likely to occur tomorrow just because covid emerged. Expect another in your great-grandchild's lifetime, or sooner.
20% of USA children are obese and +75% of USA adults are overweight/obese. Expect heart disease complications (and death from diseases that take advantage of it as a comorbidity) to be more common. Yet people refuse to acknowledge what they're doing to themselves.
Expect plastic to be a collective hangover for our species in the near future.
Nothing lasts forever, and the past 100 years is just a single lifetime for some tortoises. We swirl and float in a chaotic world with the collective memory of a goldfish, and our conversations revolve around fears of interpersonal violence.
I wish we could be frank and seek an honest understanding of ourselves, our world, and its risks, but I've made my peace (I'm only a human as well). May we live in boring times, and roll with the changes!
Just read the original paper. This synopsis mostly just reiterates what the original paper says and concurs. I personally don't think we're going to see any collapse as drastic as the models predict. People have been predicting collapse forever, but either way, this article doesn't add much to the paper itself.
But people have been right many, many times about other societies collapsing. All groups collapse, it's just a matter of time. Our ability to create existential threats is extremely new in historical terms. We have very little evidence for how they will be managed, but so far the indications are mostly terrible.
Imagine if the majority was simply paralyzed by this fear of change that fuels all the "collapse" theories.
Everything is constantly changing and we all die, get over it.
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 believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. A systems theory approach is an opposite of a reductionist approach. From Wikipedia ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Complex_system ) : > The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradig…
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/4615/whats-th...
The World3 model of the MIT study is just a set of 149 differential-algebraic equations [1]. The output of the model (population, industrial output, etc.) is mathematically a composition of simpler parts. They are saying that the earth is a very complex system but these four or five variables can be explained by these bunch of equations that represent basic processes. To me, that is reductionism.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147466701...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily there are many models that show divergence from the norm many years ago and continue to show stable and accurate predictions. Like the IPCC reports, and well, most climate CO2 models. Now it's less about determining if divergence is occuring and more about the slope of the divergence. Will we have societal collapse at 2 degrees or 3 degrees warming seems speculative but the general consensus is that it'll be…
I’ve lost hope in politics, I’m buying a sturdy helmet and hoping for the best.
The situation around global warming would be a lot different if the environmentalist Al Gore hadn’t lost to conservative George Bush. The election hinged on a narrow Florida Supreme Court decision of 5-4 over the votes and controversial butterfly ballots. Based on that decision, Bush won the USA presidential election by only 537 votes. The 3rd party spoiler effect from the Green Party was also to blame since Florida isn’t yet advanced enough to have ranked-choice voting.
I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot…
I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot…
We need a cabal of Billionaires to get it into their head that the world is ending unless they do something drastic. That will save us. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a...
I remember reading that Peter Thiel bought land in New Zealand as a huge against a societal collapse that he predicted and/or was attempting to hasten. The scary thing is that many billionaires are wealthy enough to pull it off.