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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”

#461

Post by ksaj »

coldtea wrote: post #349
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…

> The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability That's not fixing, that's a band aid, and an ugly one at that. "Let's just eat worms, algae, problem fixed".

Just yesterday my partner brought home some seaweed so we could have sushi this weekend.

But I do agree with you on this "ah well, we'll just..." sunshiny outlook we keep hearing.

This year they've really been pushing edible "tree shrimp" cicadas. This is the first time I've heard that they were edible, and suddenly I'm hearing about it several times a week.

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

#462

Post by karen_account »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #384
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…

The Netherlands is a net exporter of food and it does this by producing what people want to eat. See https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-does-the-netherlands-exp... Why should we have to change what we eat? Surely taking that choice away takes away part of what we are, reduces our autonomy. Why switch to seaweed when we can already produce what we already know we want?

Someone trying to tell you what to do, Karen?

Not on my watch.

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

#463

Post by ksaj »

coldtea wrote: post #408
evgen wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based I am sure you would tell us how much Americans hate tofu and that this was just another ugly band-aid. Food is trivial to fix and is barely a small step below clothing choices when it comes to things that are driven almost entirely by culture and fashion. My children regularly request food like sushi and spring rolls that I was ridiculed for eat…

> And if we suggested ten years ago that your burgers would be plant-based Ten years ago? I'll still say it now and in 50 years.

That's all fine if you want a 100% processed food diet. Some of us want to eat less-processed food than that, and save the "treat" foods for treat times.

In Toronto there is a decades-long established vegan restaurant called Buddha's Vegetarian Restaurant. They make a lot of mock meat products that are as realistic as the Impossible Burger, by layering and preparing things in such a way that they end up resembling meat fiber. You can easily fool yourself into thinking you are eating pulled pork there, for example.

So realistic vegetarian/vegan meat products have actually been around quite a while. Just not in the mainstream.

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

#464

Post by cjohnson318 »

evgen wrote: post #329
tobr wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s reasonable to assume there will be various kinds of game-changing new technologies, but it’s not a given that it will provide usable solutions to the specific problems we need to solve.

At the time these studies were being created the idea that PV solar would be cost-effective and that battery tech would progress to the point where it provided a viable path to grid-scale energy storage was deep into 'magic bullet' territory. There are a long list of technologies that have already started to bend the curve on several of those trend lines and the idea that we are simply done creating solutions seems u…

PV solar and battery technology are approaching the "diminishing returns" territory, if they're not already there. Battery energy density had been improving at about 5-8% over the last 100 years, but I don't think anyone seriously expects that to continue.

IMHO, unfathomably short sighted is expecting the rate of technological progress over the last hundred years to be matched by the next 100 years. We went from the Wright Brothers in 1903, to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, but by 2035 we'll still be using rockets similar to those we used in 1969.

The 20th C was a very unique time in history, I don't think humanity will experience something like that again for... many centuries.

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

#465

Post by marcosdumay »

XorNot wrote: post #142
marcosdumay wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine. And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse. Anyway, the conclusion is that we should…

It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do? Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do? Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do? "Adapt" means quite…

> It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do?

Move. Our difficulty to move is a new phenomenon and isn't created by any of the variables on those simulations.

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

#466

Post by simonh »

harimau777 wrote: post #399
simonh wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those are good ones because they're definable in ways that we can probably come to a consensus on. The problem is the term greed is often used in a pejorative way as a proxy for success. If you work hard and achieve a lot and that comes with financial rewards, you are greedy by definition. Add in some snark about how the work hard part doesn't count somehow, and that's the modern critique of capitalism. Oh, a…

I think that the issue is when the financial rewards are dramatically greater than how much harder someone could conceivably be working. A billionaire could conceivably work much harder than the median person. However, they don't work 8000 times harder ($1 billion divided by the median net worth in America of $122k).

The thing is nobody gets to build a fortune in the billions from saving up their salary. The principal way to do it is through ownership and control of a company. So what's the alternative to private individuals founding companies, finding ways to provide valuable goods and services, employ lots of people and grow successful businesses. Is that something we want to discourage? I think we all benefit from having hard working, innovative people creating, leading and running big companies. Or even from investors deploying capital so that it grows companies and expands beneficial economic activities.

part from my first job working for the government here in the UK all my other jobs have been for companies founded and run by private individuals. They've helped me put food on my table and clothes on my children.

On the other hand I do agree that when it comes to inheritance, rent seeking, financial manipulation, etc there's a lot to do to close loopholes and create a more equitable system. There is a good argument to be made that the main reasons inequality has risen are not good ones. I do not see those as fundamentally flaws in capitalism, they're certainly flaws but you get abuses in any economic system. They're not fundamental. The Netherlands is definitely a capitalist society, but they also have a wealth tax for example. There are good arguments for land value taxes, which some countries use to good effect. There are plenty of tools available to us.

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

#467

Post by Xplune13 »

choeger wrote: post #259
Xplune13 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but basing a prediction model on the assumption that "technology will fix things, and someone will save us" is bad in my opinion.

Huh? Solar power generation at scale is exactly such a thing. Wind power, too. Also hydroponics are a thing at the industrial scale now as is desalination of seawater. These are not magic bullets but they do fix a lot of things.

because we know how solar, wind works and that is "reality". Basing a model on some imaginary future technology that we don't know is possible or not shouldn't happen in my opinion. It is one thing to think or create different models with possible future technologies taken into it and other to be certain about that happening based on that imaginary technology.

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

#468

Post by cjohnson318 »

naasking wrote: post #437
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…

> 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. Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years). Water shortages are a non-is…

Regarding vertical farms in cities. You generally need about 1 acre of farm land per (American) person per year. A vertical farm can squeeze about 5 acres of horizontal farm land into one acre of vertical farm land. If NYC (proper) has 8.4M residents, then you need about 1.7M acres of vertical farms. For reference, NYC (proper) is about 200K acres right now. (The NYC metro area has 20M residents over 8.5M acres.) It's doable, but it will require an enormous expenditure in infrastructure, so good luck.

Water shortage is totally an issue in the American West. When you build a development you need to prove that there is enough water for your development for the next 100 years before the city will authorize you for tap. This is becoming a real challenge for developers in Phoenix and other areas.

Climate change is already effecting where people live, and it will likely get worse. Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.

The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.

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

#469

Post by cjohnson318 »

native_samples wrote: post #304
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.

OK, I'll do so. To put it brutally it's because on Hacker News and probably your social circle, there are too many people whose social status and income depends on being clever, or at least the perception of being clever. This leads us to seriously over-index on things that look like science or data analysis, without even being able to see alternatives that in my experience easily occur to the less (over?) educated.…

Things always seem fine until they aren't, and then they're real bad.

Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of, so we tend to be very interested in avoiding difficult situations. This is why people are so interested in avoiding climate change, rather than waiting for more real-time data about how much climate change actually sucks so they can update their Bayesian priors and "avoid climate change when it happens again."

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

#470

Post by pksebben »

YouCanDoBetter wrote: post #164
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…

>For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb. At least people are retrofitting buildings in CA to prepare for the San Andreas. This is nothing compared to the real big one: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-b…

thanks for the article, it was a great read. I wonder what new research on the cascadia subduction zone had happened since 2015 when it was published - and what changes in the forecasts might have to be made post-COVID-19, given new data on disaster preparedness.
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