Live data from Hacker News

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

dana11235.medium.com

361–370 of 520 posts

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but "peak whale" and "peak oil" are naturally self-correcting in a free-market, because as the resources become scarce their prices goes up hence leading to technological incentives to find alternative sources. This would also apply to topsoil erosion. However this isn't the case with carbon emissions for example, unless we had some financial feedback loop (e.g. some carbon tax).

> [Limited resources are] naturally self-correcting in a free-market, because as the resources become scarce their prices goes up hence leading to technological incentives to find alternative sources.

You say that as though it's a theorem. It's not. It's perhaps reasonable when discussing small perturbations of resources, but it's not a magical phenomena that will "just work" in a free market (assuming one even exists) at any scale.

The globe itself is finite and we have only finite time to make corrections to diminishing resources like oil. No one knows how long it will take to adapt, or what the human cost will be on the way to arriving at that adaptation. To make matters far worse, we have global warming to contend with and that's still subject to political whims and not even a concern yet for the "free market".

If you must take "the free market" as axiomatic truth, then consider also that the free market may "decide" that human extinction is the "optimal" outcome regardless of what monopolists and oligarchs say.

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

#362
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resul…

> I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow. That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed. Much of technology we don't really need, and even more so for most technology we consume (of course, you can't convince tech workers for that, as their salary, and hobbies, are based on the stuff). It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us a…

> That's difficult, as technology is here mostly because of greed.

I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. History is littered with civilizations that were on top, got complacent, and were swallowed by up to that point irrelevant tiny neighbours. They all had the wealth, the power, the tech. They didn't have the tolerance for short term pain for greater future gains anymore. So they stood there watching how they went down, slowly but surely . And talking a lot. I would not be surprised if future historian…

History is not littered with civilizations that got universal computation and computers to execute them. Again there is no certainty in life, but to say that this civilization is not very different than others before it is in my view ahistorial.

> History is not littered with civilizations that got universal computation and computers to execute them.

All countries have this now. How's this relevant to the point that less complacent countries will eclipse more complacent ones?

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. History is littered with civilizations that were on top, got complacent, and were swallowed by up to that point irrelevant tiny neighbours. They all had the wealth, the power, the tech. They didn't have the tolerance for short term pain for greater future gains anymore. So they stood there watching how they went down, slowly but surely . And talking a lot. I would not be surprised if future historian…

History is not littered with civilizations that got universal computation and computers to execute them. Again there is no certainty in life, but to say that this civilization is not very different than others before it is in my view ahistorial.

All civilizations are very different than others before. I am not convinced that universal computation is enough of a game changer to make us different enough. Older civs each had access to tech the ones before hadn't. The one constant is human behaviour.

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

#365
post #241

Everyone: We were wrong about peak oil! Models aren't always right! Me: Couldn't our models be wrong in the wrong direction? Is the burden of proof to do nothing until it's scientifically definitive for societal collapse? Or is the burden to intervene until it's definitive that there is no risk of societal collapse (even if our models underestimate).

But interventions can also cause societal collapse. If you don’t know what you are doing don’t do anything since action can be worse than inaction.

That just seems like a generally bad advice. It's true that we can't know everything but we usually kinda know something and from that we can act.

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

#366
post #347
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe that everyone deciding to eat something different is "fixing" the food scarcity problem in the same way that desalinization (ignoring all other issues with it as we assumed technology improved to solve them also) "fixes" water scarcity: if everyone is told tomorrow "all water will safely come from desal" we might breath a collective sigh of relief... "starting tomorrow, all food will be replaced by s…

>if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive. EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our…

It also mostly assumes that the undeveloped world won't eat the developed world.

Societal collapse in for example India or Brazil would make things awkward real fast for a large chunk of the world

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

#367
post #230

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 resul…

I feel like greed is what drives technological progress and that you can not have the one without the other

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

#368
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content. The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end o…

What part or version of the Austrian school? Mostly I hear of people who subscribe to anarcho-capitalism, which I think is a pretty terrifying view, and I've never understood how people get there. It reminds me of a lot of theory papers you see in the likes of the Journal of Finance where they start by saying, "This is how x works (given this large list of constraints or ignoring this large list of variables)" which…

Anarcho-capitalist here, ask me anything.

There are two general approaches that lead me there: the utilitarian and the ethical.

The utilitarian approach: I see lots of government interventions that, while allegedly well-meant, end up causing more harm than good. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff for a couple of examples of clearly economically counterproductive policies that governments nevertheless engage in again and again; lots more are less clear but just as bad. Some of these are due to special interests somehow convincing the government, or voters, that the policy is net beneficial or virtuous or something, when it actually enriches the special interests at the expense of others. Some terrible policies are just due to naivete or lack of caring—and those who suffer from the policies not being a sufficiently well-organized political force to stop it. Others have more complicated explanations.

The common thread I see is, these are policies imposed by force on nonconsenting people. (The "social contract" theory is a rationalization that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. When a person opposes a policy and votes against it, and then 60% of the other inhabitants vote in favor of it, you can't meaningfully claim that the person has "consented" to the policy; that's not how contracts work. It's even less tenable when the votes are for politicians, who make decisions years later on issues that didn't exist at the time the votes were cast.) When those policies cause suffering to some people, it doesn't matter—they can't do anything about it, so the policy remains. Well, occasionally the suffering group is better at politics than whoever created the policy, but often they're not.

A question is, if these policies are so good, why do they have to be imposed by force? After all, if, for example, a policy would benefit three people by $100 worth and harm someone else for $50 worth, one could arrange for the three to each give, say, $30 to the fourth person, and then it would be +$70 for each of the three and +$40 for the fourth—i.e. it's net positive to everyone, and then it could be done voluntarily. (It might not happen in practice due to transaction costs, or if someone else holds out for a better deal, but one would expect something like it to happen eventually.) Every net-positive policy could be implemented voluntarily. The only policies that absolutely require force are those that are net-negative. Sounds like an excellent heuristic for policies to forbid. Only allow policies that are voluntarily agreed to by everyone involved.

Transaction costs are not zero (although technology tends to reduce them), and there are some things where a force-based approach looks simpler and more workable. And there are certainly hard problems—how to fund public goods and what to do when someone doesn't want to pay, how to have a stable society with multiple competing private police forces. Various people have proposed solutions; I suspect that at least some of them could be made to work tolerably well, and I think experimentation plus further technological development will make some of them clearly better than state-based alternatives.

I wouldn't advocate tearing down every government in the world today to switch to anarcho-capitalism. I do think it's a goal they should all approach, and that many of the paths in that direction (i.e. reducing government interventions) are obviously net-positive. (There do exist some policy kludges to make other policies less harmful, and if you canceled the kludges but kept the original harmful policies, you could be net-negative; you do have to be somewhat intelligent about it.) Some problems might not have anarcho-capitalist solutions that could be implemented today; some might never have them, I can't rule out the possibility. But I suspect it can be done; and anyway, if we only manage to cancel 95% of harmful government interventions and conclude we can't remove the last 5%, that'll still be a great achievement.

The ethical approach is this: The non-aggression principle. Physical force is immoral unless it is used to defend against or punish the aggressive use of force. You do need a concept of property and a notion of what counts as "force", but that's basically it; I think an ethical system has to be a Schelling point, which everyone might agree to without needing to communicate let alone negotiate, and I haven't encountered anything else nearly as good as this one. Anyway, it follows that all government interventions either involve aggressive force, and are thus immoral, or else they could be implemented by private parties.

Now, ethics aren't necessarily to be obeyed absolutely. Pretty much any ethical system will tell you that murder is wrong. But you can imagine scenarios where, say, someone with godlike foresight perceiving what Hitler was going to turn into when Hitler was still a child, and deciding to kill him first. (Somewhat more realistic are trolley problems and organ donor problems. Also genuinely realistic is a whistleblower engaging in stealing, lying, and possibly worse behaviors to exfiltrate the data. If the data is important enough, how far do you go?) My take is, the law must forbid such things—the law must be ethical—but individuals might rationally decide to step outside the law in extreme circumstances. When they do, they should bear in mind that (a) they now have no right to complain when good people use force to stop or punish them, and (b) ethical violations generally have bad second-order effects ("So, does that mean the guy with five healthy organs should expect the doctor to try to murder him, and therefore he should incapacitate the doctor first and skip town?"); but it's not impossible to conclude that breaking the law is still the best approach.

So, it's possible that a grossly unethical legal system—one which routinely violates the non-aggression principle—is the best choice in a tough situation. (Earth is a tough situation.) But there'd better be a damn good reason for each violation—which I expect there usually isn't. The violations should be scrutinized, and unjustified ones should be eliminated, as quickly as possible. We probably won't eliminate everything—any more than we can bring the murder rate to zero (and the most salient proposed societies with zero crime are dystopias)—but, again, every step in that direction is a good one, so let's go as far as possible.

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

#369
post #227
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because nuclear depends on a lot of cultural and societal factors to be safe. As Asimov once said:

> The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Nuclear can be safe but look at the failures of the USSR on Chernobyl to see how it depends completely on a country's culture and willingness to pay for this safety. Or even Fukushima, in a country very risk-averse and rich, corners were still cut even with the responsible engineer calling out that the sea walls were too low.

Should we trust governments around the world that each single one of them will keep their nuclear power plants safe for the foreseeable future until we can move away from it (let's say 50-100 years)?

I'm on the camp that no, we can't.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part is our greed to procreate, take out 3/4 of humanity and climate change is solved

And you think the people in the 3/4th are going to let you do that? Because I'm guessing that the 3/4th doesn't include you and your loved ones.

PC probably meant "by not making more children", not the thing you assumed.
Post reply on HN