Optimism is for children.
The attitude you want to cultivate is meliorism. Start with realism and then progress to meliorism.
Read Thomas Hardy's poetry. He'll help you understand.
I Choose Optimism
91–100 of 222 posts
Re: I Choose Optimism
#92It's hard to be an optimist when it looks like the years we're living in right now are the same future historians will argue about when deciding whether WW3 "actually began" in 2022.
future historians will argue about when deciding whether climate change "actually began" in 2022.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The author is living in a middle/upper class suburbian bubble. Bigger and bigger houses that consume more and more resources is a problem, not a sign of progress. It is a glaring sign of the consumerism and resource depletion that is fueling the crisis we're in. There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living.
> There is no amount of renewable energy that will make "average homes are 2,657 square feet and have air conditioning" a sustainable way of living. Why not? Do you think it's impossible for energy to become 'to cheap to meter'?
We're not remotely close to being there yet, and there isn't even a clear path. So we should not act like a miraculous technological invention is gonna fall from the sky and save us.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares. Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with. All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming th…
> How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.
While there is a vast amount of resources below us, the CO2 above us that's causing us so much trouble would form a layer of just 3.8mm (0.15 inch) of dry ice if it was all deposited on Earth's surface as a solid.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there hypothetically was a magical source of near infinite renewable energy that could be harnessed without negative side effects, would you be ok with 2600+ sqft homes and air conditioning? Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht. > What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's sub…
> TL;DR the famous book "Limits to Growth" was very prescient and it mostly hit the mark. Didn't he get pretty much everything wrong? Like embarrassing wrong even messing up, or intentionally misunderstanding, basic economic theories?
You're probably referring to another book as this one's main author is a she.
The book makes a point of how you can't predict the future. Instead it enumerates a bunch of shapes the future could take given various sets of assumptions. Some of the shapes look decent but require a lot of things to go right in the meantime.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever. Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406
Solar energy is the cheapest form of energy we have. Storage is a bit more expensive, but judging from the amount of metals the video proposes they want to go all-in on battery storage, whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium, precisely because the amount of resources it needs are much smaller.
Hydrogen would also help with re-using all the ICE cars we have (and will continue to have) on the roads.
Definitely not a panacaea, and super-inefficient, but that's OK if we're just using it for storage/transportation.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#97In analyzing political pieces (especially one so concerned with The Enlightenment), it's important to go deeper than content. What moved someone to put so much effort into this thought specifically? Nietzsche, critic of enlightenment, would ask: "which kind of will-to-power is expressed here?" Steven Pinker is popular among accomplished people, and there's no conspiracy about this: rational optimism just gets that cr…
This comment is a text book case of projection. Everything written above is 100% true of the comment itself. Critical but without substance. Looks down their nose but not realizing they are lying on their back and actually lookup UP. The original article and Pinker are quite clear: there are HUGE problems to be solved. Theirs is not a philosophy of complacency, but of hard work. REAL hard work that can actually SUCCE…
> Pinker are quite clear: there are HUGE problems to be solved
That's... not the impression I get from reading Pinker. On the contrary, he has an infuriating habit of presenting "x is getting better" shortly after bashing a straw man version of the groups working hardest to make x better. Everyone from civil rights activists to software developers who worked on on the Millennium Bug were, in Pinker's eyes, committing the cardinal sin of Availability Bias rather than focusing on all those nice comforting trend lines pointing in the right direction.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares. Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with. All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming th…
> How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.
Millions of years of what? We have maybe a few hundred years of helium if we’re generous with our assumptions and we’re literally squirting that into balloons and letting it float away into the atmosphere and off into space. It’s literally an unrecoverable loss.
This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#99It’s great to recognise what we’ve achieved as a species. And maybe the arc of history has historically bent towards justice. What’s different about this moment in time versus any other in human history is that we face not one but two known existential risks. Climate change is the sort of knotty long-term vs short-term, private vs public, incentives problem that we as a species excel at fucking up. In addition to tha…
It was the same with the last cold war. They were convinced over population would destroy the earth and Russia and America would start throwing Nukes around.
Unfortunately, the worst days of the cold war were appreciably less likely than we are now to immolate all of mankind. In 1963, the two nations capable of global annihilation were run by “company men” who acted with caution and tons of input from myriad experts who knew the real cost of global war all too well. Those bureaucrats understood that their rash act would end their “life at the top” in a heartbeat, even if they survived nuclear armageddon. But today's strongmen/ dictators who control nuclear weapons have shown far less cluefulness or concern than their forebears for the very plausible dangers of committing a single stupid blunder that could end life on Earth. Hard to be upbeat given that, regardless of appeals to rational technical optimism.
Re: I Choose Optimism
#100American homes in 1950 averaged 983 square feet; by 2014, the size had nearly tripled to 2,657 square feet. Today, 91 percent of our homes are air-conditioned. This is not actually a good thing. This is actually a problem.
If you just mean from a resource / climate change point of view then that's fine but it's a totally different point than personal happiness, optimism etc...
I've had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and studied housing issues. It's a problem because a lack of small residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods is de facto tearing apart our social safety net.