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The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

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Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#101

Post by nickersonm »

jwarden wrote: post #97

This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness. It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment…

I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well.

[0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#102

Post by throwaway6734 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #56

There is a severe lack of competent and inspiring leadership. With no clear vision for the future people become trapped in pointless political squabbles. What makes life worth living for you?

Passing the blessing of life that my parents gave to me onto my children.

It's not a lack of leaders that's the issue today, it's a lack of gratitude

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#104

Post by 29athrowaway »

carapace wrote: post #100
29athrowaway wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At scale? Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? What about making it work in places going dry? Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this. Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology…

> At scale? Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially. Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years. > Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could…

Well, that won't do. You are not thinking at scale.

It requires training people that do not have the resources to acquire training.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#105

Post by arbitrary_name »

epsteinisntdead wrote: post #98
agensaequivocum wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing God's will.

Why can't God take care of that himself?

Because he's a weird insecure psychopathic man-child.

Don't give him enough gratitude? Eternal suffering. Break one of the weird rules he apparently really cares about (but then allows his most trusted disciples to break)? Eternal suffering. Succumb to the biological drivers that are inherently within us? Yep, more eternal suffering.

I would say you can't make this stuff up, but...

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#106

Post by carapace »

29athrowaway wrote: post #104
carapace wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At scale? Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially. Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years. > Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could…

Well, that won't do. You are not thinking at scale. It requires training people that do not have the resources to acquire training.

Could you elaborate a little?

I mean education is also a (potentially) exponential process, in the sense that e.g. one literate person can teach many others to read, who can then teach even more people.

Certainly some people will need resources as well as training to get started in their area, but we can afford to do that.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#107

Post by 29athrowaway »

carapace wrote: post #106
29athrowaway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that won't do. You are not thinking at scale. It requires training people that do not have the resources to acquire training.

Could you elaborate a little? I mean education is also a (potentially) exponential process, in the sense that e.g. one literate person can teach many others to read, who can then teach even more people. Certainly some people will need resources as well as training to get started in their area, but we can afford to do that.

We have like 50 years to come up with a scalable solution to the problem of how to grow enough food for a growing population on dying topsoil[1] while having less fresh water[2], and while overfishing most species to extinction.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJhpoYwAqFA

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q

That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.

Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run. Dude, wake up, billions of people do not even have toilets and you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?

That's not going to happen. But what is going to happen is the same people picking up guns and fighting each other to death over topsoil and water.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#108

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tsimionescu wrote: post #54
jillesvangurp wrote: post #20

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out…

> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the…

> The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.

More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?

And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#109

Post by AnimalMuppet »

darth_avocado wrote: post #8

> The world is awful. The world is much better. A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than bef…

> We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

A city full of horse manure wasn't all that healthy, either.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#110

Post by Balgair »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #3

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts. His TED talks are masterpieces as well.

Here's a quick quiz from his team on how you understand your world:

https://upgrader.gapminder.org/

I was surprised at how the world is doing.

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