Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

dana11235.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 520 posts

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

#221

Post by ximeng »

dvt wrote: post #176
yongjik wrote: post #83

Earlier 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.?

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#222

Post by asdff »

falcolas wrote: post #17
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…

A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years. Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions. Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

I remember not being able to buy milk last year. It felt like a war was going on.

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

#223

Post by rewgs »

pksebben wrote: post #168
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…

it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.

Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage.

The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find?

And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows...

And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond?

I could go on.

That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.

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

#224

Post by krrrh »

xxpor wrote: post #183
webinvest wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

US Supreme Court. And there's a very good chance the entire world look different if Gore won. There may have not been a 9/11, for one. There would have certainly not been an Iraq war.

We’ll never know for sure, but this seems like revisionist history and motivated reasoning. Gore and his advisors supported regime change in Iraq when he was in office and intelligence failures didn’t suddenly start in early 2001, nor were they restricted to the United States.[0]

It’s possible that the tone around climate change would have been different under a Gore administration, but the entire composition of Congress would also have looked different after the mid-terms in response to a Democratic president making sweeping changes to the economy (as it was republicans already controlled the Senate for half of Bush’s time in office, and the house for three quarters). The fiscal conservatism of 90s republicans may have stayed intact instead of accepting large deficits as they did under Bush.

The feature and bug of the US system of democracy is that radical change is hard to do and disagreements can’t be steamrolled over. Sometimes the right person can have an enormous effect on the course of history (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), but it’s unlikely Gore was one of those people.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-al-gore-wo...

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

#226

Post by asdff »

iammisc wrote: post #115
minikites wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization The Bronze Age Collapse is pretty close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

The key word is 'pretty close'. Firstly, if what I read is correct, it only impacted the mediterranean basin, whereas bronze age civilizations existed in China, India, and the Americas as well. As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece. That's…

Globally today we are much more connected than the Mediterranean basin was back then. We are so interdependent on global stability now that any major local crisis has impacts everywhere.

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

#227

Post by 99_00 »

rewgs wrote: post #223
pksebben wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.

Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage. The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find? And the fact that we'll be d…

Why isn't nuclear power the answer to climate change and energy shortage?

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

#228

Post by puchatek »

xxpor wrote: post #183
webinvest wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

US Supreme Court. And there's a very good chance the entire world look different if Gore won. There may have not been a 9/11, for one. There would have certainly not been an Iraq war.

It takes a while to plan and execute something like 9/11. This is not one guy with an IED in Kabul. The pilots got their licences for that specific purpose. That alone takes months.

Bush became president in January 2001. You think Al Qaeda was like "oh no, Gore lost? Let's proceed with that airplane plan" right there and then? Like they even remotely care if it's a dem or Rep.

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

#229

Post by swman »

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…

Love your comment because honestly I didn’t understand anything you said at first. However I’m now on Wikipedia and trying to understand it. Thanks!

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

#230

Post by swman »

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 think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow.

Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people.

I’m not sure how we can solve that.

Post reply on HN