21–30 of 143 posts
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.
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 cou…
You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
Some of these graphs are pretty silly. The downward hockey stocks are extrapolating based on two data points, and the shape of the curve is just not at all plausible.
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?
The trickier problem seems more to be: what happens when the hockey sticks flatline? When China’s population stops growing, will its economy also stagnate? What happens then?
I look forward to reading more of this blog, though, because it does at least appear sincere, and so can sharpen reasoning. And a more general point of his could be abstracted as being that we’re being whipsawed by so many curves, and no doubt several others not discussed, that even if reality isn’t so pessimistic as he lays out, it might still be less than “fun”.
> 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…
If you want to do some detailed analysis to find actual problems, you are welcome. But the article is pure sensationalism.
I don’t know much about forests but it seems incorrect that at any point in time 55% of land mass was covered by forests.
I don’t know much about forests but it seems incorrect that at any point in time 55% of land mass was covered by forests.
Doubt you’ll see a downward hockey stick in that case.
What makes a wild mammal more special than a domestic one?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 cou…
> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots. You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
Don’t plot the amount of wild mammalian biomass, plot the amount of totally mammalian biomass. Doubt you’ll see a downward hockey stick in that case. What makes a wild mammal more special than a domestic one?