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Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

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Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#121

Post by sesqu »

wazoox wrote: post #120
pjscott wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some options. Forgive my brevity, but I'm tired of people simply asserting that there's no way of managing nuclear waste. * Throw it away. Deep-sea subduction zones work nicely for this. Tremendously wasteful, though; that "waste" is valuable fuel. * Recycle the waste to decrease its volume. This isn't a full solution, but it makes the waste cheaper to store for a while. * Store the waste for a while, and la…

I'm tired of this toon and particularly of the general political atmosphere on HN (technology will solve all problems! yay!). If it's so easy to get rid of nuclear waste, why didn't we do it yet?

GP just said. Because getting rid of it would be stupid - the current approach is building long-term storage.

Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#122

Post by JoshCole »

Flow wrote: post #38
JoshCole wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the video explaining exponential growth it talked about how we would need to abandon many things we deem good in order to avoid over population. This video puts things in less grim terms by pointing out that increasing the average life expectancy reduces the number of children per women.

Yes, and I think it's very possible that our energy consumption continues to grow, despite the number of people on Earth stabilizes. What do you think?

Eventually it would have to stop growing, but I don't know if it will cease through foresight or catastrophe.

Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#123

Post by fburnaby »

mhartl wrote: post #37

Before people freak out about exponential growth, please consider John McCarthy's Slogan. (Yes, that John McCarthy; Lisp isn't the only thing he's done.) He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html Based on reactions to this video (among other things), I'd add Hartl's Counterpoint: Just because you're willing to do arithmetic doesn't mean you're n…

The reason that the curve levels out for biological populations is that the rates at which members start starving to death or killing each-other increases to cancel out the birth-rate. That does seem to be of some concern.

Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#124

Post by whughes »

wazoox wrote: post #120
pjscott wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some options. Forgive my brevity, but I'm tired of people simply asserting that there's no way of managing nuclear waste. * Throw it away. Deep-sea subduction zones work nicely for this. Tremendously wasteful, though; that "waste" is valuable fuel. * Recycle the waste to decrease its volume. This isn't a full solution, but it makes the waste cheaper to store for a while. * Store the waste for a while, and la…

I'm tired of this toon and particularly of the general political atmosphere on HN (technology will solve all problems! yay!). If it's so easy to get rid of nuclear waste, why didn't we do it yet?

So far, technology has solved all problems. What else is there?

Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#125

Post by whughes »

wazoox wrote: post #103
infinite8s wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except about 200 years of science and math starting from the end of the Renaissance Period.

The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.

They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.

Re: Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function

#126

Post by infinite8s »

whughes wrote: post #125
wazoox wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.

They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.

There's a strange parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. Took about a billion years before the simplest single-celled organism developed all the basic mechanisms/components, and then a few hundred million years from complex multicelled organisms, and finally a huge explosion in diversity in the last hundred million years. I wonder if evolution and technological progress plotted on the same relative logarithmic scale would overlay each other?
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