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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”

#371

Post by tomcooks »

99_00 wrote: post #227
rewgs wrote: 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 something that is certainly, but slowly and progressively dangerous is much better than something usually very safe but then catastrophic

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

#372

Post by fogihujy »

mellavora wrote: post #359
fogihujy wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's imagine a hypothetical crisis, say a building on fire. You can save your own child/spouse/relative or you can save a complete stranger. You will succeed in saving any of them, but not both. Most people will chose child/spouse/relative without thinking twice and doing so is quite natural. Not everyone agree on that though, and would argue that the potential benefit the stranger could be to society should be take…

Clearly, people will prefer their own in-group. I think, however, you just made the parent poster's point. People will often prefer their own in-group to themselves. Thus, it depends on how one defines the in-group, and one's own interests. Looking at Coldtea's earlier comment: >It's either pushed to us by greed, or given to us as a substitute for things we'd rather have (no friends, but here are games you can buy),…

Definitely. I was agreeing with the parent post, while adding a semi-sarcastic reply about everyone having to agree before things start moving.

Community-building might be a possible solution, but how do you pull people away from their screens and get them out on the streets to make new connections and then turn that into a positive force that actually makes a different?

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

#374

Post by throwaway0a5e »

saurik wrote: post #334
belorn wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currently discard or do not cultivate because it not what we traditionally see as food and because there is no cost incentive to encourage a change in culture. Changes can however occur given the right triggers, like how large portion of Europe went over to potatoes d…

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…

Imagine the uproar if you tried to build a nuclear powered desalination plant on Long Island.

That's basically what you're alluding to with the seaweed and food thing.

Cultural and ideological hangups will go right out the window in a hurry when there's a real crisis and a culturally incompatible solution. People aren't gonna let things truly go to shit over something as trivial as what they eat or where their water comes from.

The primary danger in the first world as I see it is from the moneyed and empowered people F-ing it over for large enough other groups to cause probems. Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way. They'd probably figure it out eventually but with how unequal our society is I'm not gonna bet money on eventually happening before the shooting starts.

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

#375

Post by rbanffy »

boredtofears wrote: post #324
headmelted wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? Even if there were an event that wiped out 75% of people, it kicks the can down the road at most 30 years due to a baby boom. Refusing to solve the real problem is what got us in to this mess. It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.

> It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means. Individuals aren't really responsible for the mass amounts of pollutants put into the atmosphere the same way corporations are. In order for the human population to "live within it's means" at an impactful scale it would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn…

> would require a change of capitalist philosophy that quite obviously isn't going to change anytime soon.

Capitalism won’t go without a fight.

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

#376

Post by bmy78 »

notjes wrote: post #99
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…

Someone once said: If you are a teen and you aren't a lefty, you have no heart. And if you are in your 30'S and you are still a lefty, you have no brain. Many travel along those lines. And in analogy to this, I am very optimistic about the future, because the resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite. There is no peak oil. There is no peak food. There is no peak climate. There is no water…

No.

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

#377

Post by chiefalchemist »

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 not counting on a magic bullet that concerning, it's the overconfidence we understand all the variables in the system(s). That is, we act as if there are no significant unknowns. Unprecedented, global scale, and unknowns all go hand in hand.

Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation?

Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.

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

#378

Post by rbanffy »

adrianN wrote: post #242
retrac wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The "a technological solution" crowd isn't looking for something that requires lots of money to roll out, like renewable energy.

If you count the externalities of nuclear (eventually having to abandon a city every hundred years or so), gas (some pollution, catastrophic climate change), and coal (pollution, catastrophic climate change), wind and solar look really cheap. Hydro can also be useful by creating reservoirs of fresh water for managing drought cycles.

The biggest issue is that we don’t monetize the externalities in the current state.

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

#379

Post by emteycz »

wongarsu wrote: post #239
emteycz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Source? A quick google search would suggest that around 70% of Americans agree that climate change is real. That's way too low, but still a solid majority. According to an UN poll, 65% of Americans and 64% of the world think that climate change is a global emergency [1]. In every questioned country, a majority said it's a global emergency. 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/27/un-globa...

Did these UN polls consider that people holding these views might not answer to UN polls? I encourage you to try looking for how these questions were answered in polls done by local researchers. At least in Europe, the ratios are the other way around all around the eastern half. In my own country, less than 30% believe climate change is a risk, and even less believe it's caused and/or resolvable by humans - I'm surprised the UN polls say otherwise as not even the EU dares to claim these amounts of approval. Perhaps the UN asked for "any climate change whatsoever" as opposed to "human-driven climate change" - a significant difference...

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

#380

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

WanderPanda wrote: post #367
swman wrote: 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 feel like greed is what drives technological progress and that you can not have the one without the other

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he put forth the idea that the only reason humans even have civilization is because of sociopaths. We're apparently wired to function in a community of 30-50 where everyone depends on everyone else for survival so, he reasons, larger groups of people require perverse systems control. Sociopaths, having no empathy and seeking to use people for their own gain, seized power and conquered other tribes and imposed such perverse systems in order to exert their influence over a larger populace and land area. Only now, having lived for many many generations in one kind of civilization or another, people know nothing but the perverse system and think of it as natural and even good.

There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?

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