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Death by hockey sticks

dothemath.ucsd.edu

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Re: Death by hockey sticks

#11

Post by glennonymous »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #7
credit_guy wrote: post #4

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..

Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment options on demand? Indoor plumbing, for God’s sake?

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#12

Post by xwdv »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #7
credit_guy wrote: post #4

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..

The Lords and Kings had plenty of entertainment. Entertainment did not begin with the invention of smartphones.

In fact I would say their entertainment was far better and more wholesome than what we have today. Imagine going on hunts in lush untouched wilderness, or watching men fight to the death in an arena, or slithering off to your harem of beautiful women and having your way with whichever ones you fancy that day.

Indeed, I would say the best lifestyle would be a combination of this and our advanced medical techniques that allow us to live longer and more comfortable lives.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#13

Post by sacrosancty »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #9

I hope this is overly pessimistic and under-analyzed. For example, the human population hockey stick graph doesn't show the dramatic drop in birth rates experienced by developed countries. We are on track to reach a global population maximum. And is the author too zealous in drawing hockey stick curves over any 2 or 3 data points? Is deforestation still accelerating? Any chance extinctions will decelerate?

Hockey sticks usually end up being S-shaped curves. The author is just doom-screaming because we're currently in the rapid change phases of lots of them but hasn't shown on any of the graphs the point where disaster will occur. What's the critical rate of extinctions that would end global economic growth before most of the world has western quality of life? He has no clue! So his worries are just emotional and based on misleading graphs.

One of the graphs (forest cover) is extrapolated into the future and shown to be zero. He could instead have shown in plateauing if he wanted to tell a different story.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#14

Post by IntrepidWorm »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

> Here’s a proposed rubric for deciding what things in life are “good” and what things are “bad.” If its plotted curve is a hockey stick pointing up in the present system, it’s probably a bad thing. I would guess that the number of professors is also going up like a hockey stick and I am sure the amount of documents published on the Internet is going up like a hockey stick. According to the author’s rubric, the world…

Witicism aside, im not sure your critique holds any water. Runaway growth in any context is something to pay close attention to. In fairness, the superset of examples chosen is not objective (nor could it be, practically) - plenty of datasets could be made to show aspects of life increasing or decreasing linearly, or quadratically, or with some weird quasi-sinusoidal period.

That doesn't take away from the impact the chosen data has. It's not that all life follows a hockey stick curve in time - its simply that we're in the process of beating the planet to death with a few of them.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#15

Post by jahewson »

glennonymous wrote: post #11
Firmwarrior wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..

Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment optio…

Hey, the Romans had central heating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocaust

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#16

Post by credit_guy »

guenthert wrote: post #5
credit_guy wrote: post #4

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.

But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources.

For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process.

Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#17

Post by mxkopy »

credit_guy wrote: post #4

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue.

Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly.

If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era I would do so in a heartbeat. I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots, a good social circle, access to whatever resources I needed, plenty of time to do things I want - a lot of the population doesn't have these things, and modernity doesn't give them to you.

Re: Death by hockey sticks

#18

Post by sbuttgereit »

Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCfPQLVzus4) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-).

When looking at these sorts of things, surely such "hockey sticks" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture.

(P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)

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