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Continuous growth is cancer

christianheilmann.com

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Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#91

Post by grufus »

xupybd wrote: post #69
gruez wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even without questioning the capitalist obsession for infinite growth (despite finite resources and markets), Seeing how communist regimes aren't exactly practicing degrowth, I think it's more accurate to say it's a human obsession. >we should not have had the practice of hiring more than is essential to run the business. Who thought it was a good idea to make a success metric out of headcount? Ostensibly companies…

I think North Korea is doing a good job of limiting growth. Not as a determined goal of their communism but as a result of their corruption, totalitarian control and incompetence. Still credit where credit is due. They are not growing as fast as their capitalist brothers to the south.

Rather, the result of sanctions, i.e., the almost total absence of cross-border trade.

Historically it was through trade that societies/nations became successful, were growing, were eventually dominating. The early dominance of Europe was thanks to its long coastal lines, allowing to quickly connect to neighbors and thereby exchange goods, thus trade. The industrialization was kicked off in Great Britain, the culmination of extensive trade combined with the abundance of cheap energy (coal + steam engine). Which then took off in all of Europe, again trough trade.

If you artificially limit trade of a country, either externally because everybody hates you, or internally because you are crazy, then you automatically limit your development and thereby growth. Communism or not.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#92

Post by grufus »

kilgnad wrote: post #90
xupybd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think North Korea is doing a good job of limiting growth. Not as a determined goal of their communism but as a result of their corruption, totalitarian control and incompetence. Still credit where credit is due. They are not growing as fast as their capitalist brothers to the south.

The world will become a north Korea if unchecked growth continues unchecked. When cancer is growing the tumor is healthy and happy. It's when the tumor consumes all available resources and begins dying that it becomes a problem. We are currently in the growth phase of a tumor. The dying phase is for your children or your children's children. Or your children's children's children. We are not sure when it will happen,…

One should not confuse growth as in producing more and more stuff with growth as in progress.

Of course you can't produce more stuff ad infinitum. A balance to reach net-zero stuff is necessary to be sustainable.

But nothing prevents you from advancing technology ad infinitum. It can be sustainable to keep progressing. You just can't exhaust the resources around you, but you don't have to to keep progressing.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#93

Post by kaashif »

arcticbull wrote: post #23
roenxi wrote: post #7

I'd challenge the idea that this is unsustainable because of the specific system. Entropy and resource limits mean whatever we do is unsustainable under any system as far as we tell, both theoretically and in practical timespans. Nobody seems to have an argument for where the physical resources will come from, or how we deal with exponential population growth without just having regular famines (even worse than losin…

We don't have continuous exponential population growth. That's not to say that we won't exceed the limits of the biosphere at some point to meet our needs, but as a society becomes more developed the birth rate falls off massively. Just 60 years ago the US and Canada had a fertility rate of 4, meaning 4 children born to the average woman. In the US, it's now 1.64 and Canada is just 1.4 - well below the replacement ra…

The incentives here seem worrying. Developed countries must keep other countries undeveloped to maintain the flow of immigration.

If everyone develops, Europe and North America's power and share of global GDP will decrease significantly.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#95

Post by CatWChainsaw »

corbulo wrote: post #29

Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.

You think infinite growth with finite resources is possible? This should be good.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#96

Post by guiambros »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #87

From a 'conversation between a physicist and an economist' [0] discussing the limits of growth: Physicist: Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conven…

What a fascinating article; thanks for sharing. Much more interesting than the top one.

It gave me increased appreciation for living in the period of history we're all living. I already had a perception that the fast economic growth of the last few centuries was nothing more than a fleeting blip in the history of human race, but never thought about the physical constraints imposed by energy and thermodynamics.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#97

Post by dopeboy »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #95
corbulo wrote: post #29

Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.

You think infinite growth with finite resources is possible? This should be good.

What finite resources? We are the human species - we go where the resources are, which will involve colonizing other planets.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#98

Post by CatWChainsaw »

dopeboy wrote: post #97
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think infinite growth with finite resources is possible? This should be good.

What finite resources? We are the human species - we go where the resources are, which will involve colonizing other planets.

Uh-huh, okay.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#99

Post by waynesonfire »

luckylion wrote: post #75
ChatGTP wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say it another way, humans don't have any natural predators to keep populations in check? We do however seem to be developing a common conscience that seems to be headed in the right direction with regards to sustainability.

It doesn't need to be a predator, it can also be food. We certainly have food shortages and mass starvations. We've gotten a lot better at producing food, but it's not a solved problem at all, we've just moved the limit.

like adding more lanes to a freeway to alleviate congestion. doesn't work.

Re: Continuous growth is cancer

#100

Post by kilgnad »

roenxi wrote: post #44
kilgnad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Life looks a lot like cancer. Cancer looks a lot like life. "Being cancer" isn't a bad thing, cancer is only bad when it is a disease in humans. Otherwise it is the way of the world. We are surrounded by patterns that propagate themselves quickly. You lack holistic understanding of the science behind life and what cancer is. I will explain. And once I'm done, you should understand. First off most energy on earth com…

> For example you may have deer keeping the population of grass in check and wolves keeping the population of deer in check in such a way that no population ever gets out of control. Both populations can get completely out of control in a wildly chaotic dance with some pretty standard conditions. You might enjoy reading up on the logistic map [0]. True equilibrium is quite rare in nature, usually situations are chaot…

As an example programmers can understand, machine learning is a better model for this than a logistic map.

Natural selection is basically gradient descent with random walk as the "step" algorithm rather than back propagation. At each step, you randomly adjust the weights by a small amount. You do this with like 100 candidates and pick the best one that lowers the cost function the most. This is one generation, and you "selected" the best mutation that can proceed to the next generation of your learning algorithm. It's essentially an extremely accurate model of evolution.

When you let gradient descent run in-definitely the weights will eventually converge on a minimum in general. By "in general" I mean that these weights will only converge within the vicinity of the local minimum. Keeping the learning algorithm running with random walk... what you will find is that the algorithm travels randomly all around the minimum and stays within a certain "equilibrium zone." This is exactly what happens in biology. A more accurate example would be adversarial neural networks, when you have two networks competing. What you will find is that for adversial networks you ALSO get convergence within the vicinity of a local minimum.

The logistic map you present here is simply not an accurate model of evolution. I don't think an accurate model actually exists. The most accurate models are the algorithms we to do genetic programming and these models are simply simulations where we have a sort of "feel" for how the algorithm will converge. There is no closed form understanding of it. Our knowledge of these algorithms accurately reflects our knowledge of natural selection itself in the sense that you can't simply pull a random logistic map formula out of nowhere and claim it applies. It doesn't.

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