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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

#111

Post by azekai »

stuckinhell wrote: post #86

I have a hard time believing the fundamental problem is the world is "culture". After Covid-19 and a personal battle with Toxoplasmosis, I think people need a reminder of the unforgiving brutality of nature and evolution. The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(proba…

>I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.

I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.

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

#112

Post by polishdude20 »

Balgair wrote: post #110
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.

Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number.

For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'.

But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.

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

#113

Post by tsimionescu »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #94
tsimionescu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing their point. They're not comparing those who survived the black death to us, but to the people who lived before the black death struck. Similarly, the people who will survive the coming climate catastrophes may well live better lives than we do today, and thus some future Economist may well claim that it all turned out OK in the end. But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will lik…

> But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming. ...that number is not even remotely plausible. Where did you get billions from? Example: 250,000 extra deaths estimated between 2030 and 2050. That means an extra 5 million deaths in that period ( https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha... ). Another: 83 million extra deaths by 2100, and I su…

Those numbers are assuming only natural causes. Under current scenarios, there is basically a guarantee of a hot war between nuclear powers at least in South Asia.

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

#114

Post by tsimionescu »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #108
tsimionescu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Relativity and quantum mechanics have been paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world. They were immediately recognized as such.

A discovery of equal impact today would be the unification of those two. The Higgs boson doesn't even come close to the importance of the Schrodinger equation, and neither does QCD even.

Similarly, imaging a black hole is nowhere near close to the discovery of general relativity, which fundamentally and almost immediately changed how we interpret celestial mechanics.

Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.

But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.

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

#115

Post by carapace »

29athrowaway wrote: post #107
carapace wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

We're on the same side you and I, you're "preaching to the choir." But I'm telling you, things are not as dark as they seem! We're learning and applying that learning.

I know about topsoil degradation and erosion, but it's something we're learning to prevent. E.g. Gabe Brown's "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A He increases his topsoil volume and fertility year-on-year, and his farm is more profitable!

Population growth seems like it's leveling off all on it's own, mostly as women get more education and wealth and have fewer children per capita. Japan has already started contracting in population, eh?

Water is going to be a problem in many areas, but again, people are learning and applying ecological principles to regenerate wastelands. Did you check out the Greening the Desert project?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...

The clathrate gun hypothesis is scary, I know, it's kept me up at night. But since there's nothing to do about it beyond just fixing things anyway, the solution to that is the same as the solution to everything else: learn to live in harmony with nature. And it seems like the danger might not be a great as we originally feared. I hope so!

> 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.

Well, you're mentioning it to me and I'm not doing that.

Permaculture (just to talk about something I have some experience with) is easy to learn, easy to teach, fun and profitable to practice, and doesn't require "Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run."

> billions of people do not even have toilets

All they need is Eisenia fetida. They eat poop and poop soil. It's that simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost

> you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?

Well I didn't say that did I? What I said, and I believe it, is that we have all the information and technology we need already to fix our environmental problems, and that the limiting factor is social (getting the word out) rather than technological (we don't have to e.g. invent fusion first.)

That's my thesis.

I'm not talking about "futuristic shit", except that ecology could be considered futuristic? It's a young science anyway. What I'm talking about is applying ecological principles to solve our basic human needs (the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, eh?)

It will probably take more than a "zero dollar budget" (where did you get that from?) But again, ecological regeneration is the default condition of life. It literally is solar-powered self-improving nanotechnology, eh?

You can start anywhere, with next to nothing, and increase biomass and diversity and fertility. I took some sandy soil, added some wood chips that some chickens had pooped in and a few potatoes, and now there's a lively potato patch where before there was a bit of bare dirt. Zero initial budget.

But yeah, if we "lean into it" with money and resources and people then we can accelerate the healing.

Come, let's grow a beautiful future together for all humankind. I truly believe it's possible, and that the only thing holding us back is that we haven't fully realized it yet.

Cheers!

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

#116

Post by jfengel »

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…

Thank you. It's very good to have the affirmation of a fellow straight, rich, white man that everything is hunky-dory. We can just take everybody a standard deviation or two off from the median, and just chop those tails off, neat as pie.

Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!

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

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tsimionescu wrote: post #114
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Relativity and quantum mechanics have been paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world. They were immediately recognized as such. A discovery of equal impact today would be the unification of those two. The Higgs boson doesn't even come close to the importance of the Schrodinger equation, and neither does QCD even. Similarly, imaging a black hole is nowhere near close to the discovery of general relativity, whi…

> Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.

> But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.

The first working transistor was in 1947. Your person "well versed in the state of the art of technology and science" in 1950 might know about them. Having 10 billion of them on one substrate working together is still revolutionary, though - something the person in 1950 probably wouldn't expect and certainly couldn't envision the effects of.

Edison produced his first electric light bulb in 1879. Your person from 1890 would know about them, and would recognize lighting in 1950. They wouldn't recognize LEDs, though, or even florescent tubes.

Bell's telephone worked in 1876. Your person in 1890 would know it, and would recognize communications in 1950. Neither they nor the person from 1950 would recognize cell phones in peoples' pockets.

Your person from 1950 would know about computers as stand-alone behemoths in data centers. The internet is not something they would understand; computers didn't talk to each other in 1950.

And so on.

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

#118

Post by Nevermark »

slothtrop wrote: post #83
mandmandam wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you booing him; he's right. While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields. This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have acco…

> It's not just altruistic either Then it's factored in to the "is the world better for humans" category

Yes, "the world is better" should ideally include the impacts of today's decisions, not just today's direct response to previous factors.

But the example of childhood death statistics doesn't include any analysis of how today's actions are setting up future childhood safety issues regarding plastics, climate change, overfishing, water shortages, etc.

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

#119

Post by 29athrowaway »

carapace wrote: post #115
29athrowaway wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

We're on the same side you and I, you're "preaching to the choir." But I'm telling you, things are not as dark as they seem! We're learning and applying that learning. I know about topsoil degradation and erosion, but it's something we're learning to prevent. E.g. Gabe Brown's "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A He increas…

Well, this is clearly not the way corporations see it.

The way corporation executives see it is: "I am going to get a nice bonus this quarter by boosting profits and whatever happens next is the next guy's problem. By the time anything becomes a problem I'll be partying in my superyacht."

And this is the way many problems are treated as well.

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

#120

Post by TheCoelacanth »

fallingfrog wrote: post #81

I’ve often thought that if you drew a line with the witch burning dark ages at one end, and a society where everyone can achieve their true potential at the other end, we’re somewhere close to the halfway point now. Massive progress made, massive progress still to be made. So yeah I’d agree with all three statements.

To be pedantic, the peak time period for witch-burning was in the Early Modern period (15th-17th century), not the Dark Ages (5th-10th century)[1].

In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt

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