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Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

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Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no" The child doesn't, though, and, if you'll excuse my frankness, I think the abortion affects his/her future the most out of all the parties involved.

If you'll excuse my frankness, at the point of screening it's much more an idea of a child, than an actual he/she.

I see what you're saying, and appreciate you sharing that perspective.

We could say that before conception, everyone agrees there is no child, and at birth, everyone agrees there is a child, so there is maybe a "spectrum" between "idea of a child" and "an actual he/she".

Your use of the wording "much more" sort of supports this "probability distribution function" idea of what a child is, and it seems like a helpful philosophical framing of this difficult and important question.

What I would say, though, is that if society is going to pick a point along that spectrum to base policy decisions on, then there is an imbalance between the risks of placing that point too early versus too late.

Too early means that some women's decisions will be unreasonably restricted, whereas too late means that some human being's lives will be unreasonably terminated.

The philosophically humble thing to do under such uncertainty would therefore be to err on the side of an earlier point, and in fact the earliest point possible, lest future generations look back on us like the slave owners or eugenicists of previous centuries.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose we were in 1890 discussing how we need to get rid of horse manure in our cities and there were a hot debate on how this "horseless carriage" thing is highly experimental and threatens the livelihood of a whole supply chain around horses. As it turns out, you can get rid of manure and it does in fact make a lot of people poorer, but in the end it enables a lot more prosperity for future generations.

The big difference here is that horses were nearly exclusively used for transportation. Fossil fuels currently provide something like 80% of all the energy used. So if you want your analogy to be accurate then you'd have to be back in 1890 saying "Ok, we're going to get rid of horses AND fossil fuels". Personally, I do think that burning oil derivatives is a waste and I would like to see it replaced where possible wi…

So we should pay now to have nuclear power in the future? Impossible, this lowers our prosperity! /s

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#253
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is people thinking, "myself and everyone I could ever have the notion of caring about, and everyone they could ever have a notion of caring about" is the same thing as infinity. The universe is so goddamned big that it's hard to fathom how long it would take us to actually ruin the entire thing, or at least the parts that aren't flying away from us at faster than the speed of light. But 5% annual…

If people what to have more than two children that it is absolutely impossible.

If 'people' have more than 2 then yes. If my N siblings collectively have 2N kids then we are at break-even.

As effort for return goes, defending people for not having children may be one of the most effective acts of environmentalism someone can engage in.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#254
post #66

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That's a problem with this article, and too many like it. OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one. Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy…

>Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting. Steinert has a product line that uses XRF to sort different alloys in mixed aluminum scrap: https://youtu.be/td8IDt2ke1E?t=96

Nice.

An air-jet sorting machine controlled by X-ray spectrometers. That's impressive. No robotic arms required. Apparently, already cost-effective. Mixed metal recycling can now achieve very high recovery rates.

Air-jet sorters with vision systems have been around for decades, usually for agricultural products. Throughput is huge and cost is low. It's possible to sort individual rice grains.[1] Most vegetables in US supermarkets today have been through an automatic sorter.

So now this has made it to metals.

[1] https://www.sgsorter.com/rice-color-sorter/

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, they could be a high-end export-driven economy, as there were lots of wealthy (by global standards) consumers. They've now built out the bureaucratic and practical infrastructure of building where they sell at scale. They also had time to test out various central bank/financial/strategic policies to figure out what worked. With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into…

I don't think any of this opportunity was enabled by Japan's population demographics at all. Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, are notable exporters of secondary and tertiary products.

It wasn't enabled by Japan's demographics, it was enabled by the world's demographics relative to Japan. Japan has had to deal with a mass-aging demography in a relatively friendly global environment. They've had the latitude to experiment and develop various approaches.

Germany, South Korea, and others are going to hit the same problem in a much more hostile global economic environment, as most of the wealthy global consumers are going to simply disappear. At present they're woefully unprepared to deal with any of it.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#256
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We mostly don't use rare earths to make renewable energy at all. Solar panels and lithium batteries don't have any rare earths in them. Most wind turbines do: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... but Amory Lovins argues that the advantage of doing so is small or even nonexistent: https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...

The turbines of ENERCON don't need "rare-earths", because of their ring generator https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/

Of course you don't need rare earths to build electrical wind turbines; the Europa paper I linked above explains that even today 25% of wind turbines are rare-earth-free, and people have been building large-scale electrical generators for 156 years even though rare earth magnets were only invented about 50 years ago.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of this opportunity was enabled by Japan's population demographics at all. Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, are notable exporters of secondary and tertiary products.

It wasn't enabled by Japan's demographics, it was enabled by the world's demographics relative to Japan. Japan has had to deal with a mass-aging demography in a relatively friendly global environment. They've had the latitude to experiment and develop various approaches. Germany, South Korea, and others are going to hit the same problem in a much more hostile global economic environment, as most of the wealthy global…

I don't think so. As I said, those other countries didn't have the same relative demographics as Japan. This just sounds like a fringe theory that isn't really borne out by evidence.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way. (This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we hav…

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answ…

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answ…

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose . And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful").

Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide.

Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose . And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to…

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness".

That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift).

Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".

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