Basically all studies say that Capitalism is killing us.
My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
211–220 of 520 posts
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely. Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.
Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
I think you are right. I guess it depends on specificity of predictions. In one white paper I called some of the current trends of 2021 ( granted, I personally believed they were relatively apparent, but I did have some arguments over my assumptions ).
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
> Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right. Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether. Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?
Perhaps the uncouth voting on HN is a further sign of impending societal collapse.
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 i…
I never accepted the premise of that book as being universally true. Societies have collapsed for reasons other then resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other then resource scarcity. I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything. My guess? The professional political/priestly/mid-level manager class gaining self serving control and…
> Societies have collapsed for reasons other than resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other than resource scarcity.
This is a bit moot, considering that resource scarcity is a very, very good reason for societal collapse, as well as potential a root cause of other reasons you cite for societal collapse, and resource scarcity is exactly what we are beginning to experience.
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#215Earlier 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.
Virus / bacteria outbreaks have been common throughout history. They come quickly and often enough. About 3 or 4 come every 100 years. So you can expect one every 30 years.
Our last 4:
"Spanish Flu" in 1918-1919 "Asian Flu" in 1957-1958 "Hong Kong Flu" in 1968-1969 "Swine Flu" (H1N1) in 2009-2010
History teaches us to bet on viruses happening at anytime. Climate change deaths will be much slowier
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy. Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008. It seem…
This is like how peak wheat has not been truly debunked because we now have GMO wheat and novel agricultural practices.
Your answer makes no sense. There is no peak wheat, it's not a non-renewable resource.
The difference between peak oil and shale oil is the EROI which is very bad (between 1 and 2) compared to conventional (20 to 50). This would make it absolutely useless as an energy source, except we also get free Nat. gas out of it.
Once the EROI on all our fossil energy sources gets below 1 we won't be able to use any, despite some of it still being in the ground.
A better analogy than peak wheat would be: this is like peak fish except we now have better bottom trawling fishing nets, and electric pulse fishing to be able to get the last remaining fish out there.
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#217I 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'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of
Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#218According 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 t…
That's also trivial. Continuous growth of anything tangible in a finite system will eventually hit constraints of that system.
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.
> Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right. Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether. Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?
[deleted]
Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy. Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008. It seem…
This is like how peak wheat has not been truly debunked because we now have GMO wheat and novel agricultural practices.
Except if it was way more expensive than before.