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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”

#201

Post by nickcox »

webinvest wrote: post #167
nr2x wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lost hope in politics, I’m buying a sturdy helmet and hoping for the best.

Yeah I watched a cspan question and answer session and one dinosaur-aged Republican representative from West Palm Beach Florida sounded so backwards. He was saying that we shouldn’t transition to green energy because of all the coal miner jobs that will be displaced by green energy jobs. It seemed like he was just being difficult or corrupt because Florida doesn’t even have any coal mines or coal mining jobs! Also, i…

And not just the hanging chads, right? I don't think it's controversial, in hindsight, to say that Jeb Bush conspired with GW to steal the election. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/06/uselections200...

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

#202

Post by ipaddr »

webinvest wrote: post #167
nr2x wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lost hope in politics, I’m buying a sturdy helmet and hoping for the best.

Yeah I watched a cspan question and answer session and one dinosaur-aged Republican representative from West Palm Beach Florida sounded so backwards. He was saying that we shouldn’t transition to green energy because of all the coal miner jobs that will be displaced by green energy jobs. It seemed like he was just being difficult or corrupt because Florida doesn’t even have any coal mines or coal mining jobs! Also, i…

If Gore won there would be no global warming movie and the movement might not have taken off. Gore would have been to entangled in 911 make global warming a priority.

The green party not winning is the shame. Never blame a third party for a majority party not winning. If they caused Gore to lose hopefully he tries harder to win over 537 people next cycle.

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

#203

Post by emteycz »

mercy_dude wrote: post #118
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change What does that even mean?

It means if one was asked to bet on an event between 100k death from a virus outbreak and 100k death from climate change, one would place their bet largely on climate change. Even though we have been warned the hidden systemic risk of pandemic preparedness l.

You live in a bubble. The majority of people still deny climate change entirely.

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

#204

Post by logicchains »

bmitc wrote: post #179
cjohnson318 wrote: post #163

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 agree with you and made a similar comment when the article talking about the report was posted here. COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us". In the U.S., the general sentiment was that technology in the form of vaccines and entrepreneurship will rise to the occasion, so let's just ride it out until then. Well after more than a year of shit show after shit show and 6…

>COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us".

From a purely collectivist point of view, unchecked Covid only kills around 1% of the population and the vast majority are retired people, so it's not something society needed saving from as it has pretty much zero effect on humanity's long-term economic/technological progress.

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

#205

Post by asdff »

jandrese wrote: post #96
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…

Rather than burn coal to smelt steel beams, we could start opting for more timber frame construction and growing more trees, capturing carbon out of the air and turning it into housing.

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

#206

Post by gcanyon »

The article says that the various predictions are equally good fits because they don't diverge much by 2020. If in 1972 researchers came up with multiple models that all predicted pretty much the same thing over fifty years, but then wildly diverge over the subsequent fifty years, that alone is problematic.

Limits to Growth predicted we'd run out of oil by 1995, 2005, or at their most optimistic, 2022. Not peak oil -- out of oil. Similarly we were supposed to be out of gold by 2001 at the latest.

Food and services are both supposed to be peaking right now -- 2020 -- and going into rapid decline.

There was little reason to give credence to LtG even by the '80s, but by now it should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Scanning through the book, this line jumped out at me: "If on average 5% of the population dies each year..." then the average lifespan is 20 years and humanity is doomed. That's their point, but I don't think that's how they intended to make it. That's just careless. They also happily extrapolated exponential curves for population, per capita gdp, etc.

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

#207

Post by rualca »

triceratops wrote: post #131
mercy_dude wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

> Firstly, why would someone laugh?

Well, we see people and even political groups laughing at the idea of a virus outbreak that kills 100k even today, isn't it?

Now picture it without the benefit of hindsight.

Why did western society failed so hard at containing the virus when countries like South Korea were already leading by example at the start of Q1 2020.

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

#208

Post by mrpopo »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #196

According the the wiki article, world3 is too general to be realistic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 > But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by t…

Yes, world3 is meant as a simulation exercise that is sometimes taken too seriously. But even its critics consider that the conclusions of the model are valid. Here is the continuation of your quote:

> He does however consider continuous growth in world GDP a problem:

    Only the widespread scientific illiteracy and innumeracy—all you need to know in this case is how to execute the equation y=x*e^{rt} prevents most of the people from dismissing the idea of sustainable growth at healthy rates as an oxymoronic stupidity whose pursuit is, unfortunately, infinitely more tragic than comic. After all, even cancerous cells stop growing once they have destroyed the invaded tissues.[7]:338–339

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

#209

Post by maybelsyrup »

hogFeast wrote: post #145
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…

One thing that people underestimate with Malthusian thinking is that we live in a dynamic system. The amount of oil that is "out there" is connected to the oil price. Sometimes that supply effect of higher prices is limited (we are, potentially, seeing this with copper) but if you are projecting linear trends, you don't understand economics (and btw, this was the issue with the original Limits to Growth and almost al…

> population control isn't popular anymore

The IUD in my gf says otherwise. What forms of population control did you have in mind? (And where are you in the queue?)

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

#210

Post by iscrewyou »

s5300 wrote: post #143
alasdair_ wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My belief in disaster preparedness from the powers that be was severely shaken by the early to mid term response to covid in the US. I genuinely thought we’d handle a large scale disaster that had been prepared for forever much, much better than we did.

I think it was heavily dependent on the administration. To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted because you are telling the truth. Here are some links for reference: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Play...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-ou...

The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.

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