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Ephemeralization

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Re: Ephemeralization

#51

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #47

Most of the technology I work on wouldn’t be worth doing if the global population hadn’t grown 10x in the last century or so. You need a large mass of people willing to pitch in a penny for an improvement to their lives with expensive technology than a smaller number of enthusiasts. This brings economies of scale and suddenly 1000 things that wouldn’t be worth doing make a new thing that wasn’t predicted. The neo-mal…

Is Malthusianism even believed anymore? The recent statistics I see show the world population slowing down greatly. From what I understand, America and most of the developed world needs more reproduction and immigration if they hope to sustain their economic growth. China raised the one child rule and no one took the bait, citing the same reasons everyone else does- having kids is really expensive and the future of the world with regard to climate change and environmental concerns, etc. is quite shaky.

Re: Ephemeralization

#52

Post by canadaduane »

sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

I think this may explain part of why people tend to think of companies as "efficient" and governments as "wasteful": companies have more leeway to choose their metrics and externalize the unmeasured things.

Re: Ephemeralization

#53

Post by aaron695 »

sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

> the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities.

This is fiction.

Not a single example is given anywhere in this thread.

But people believe it. And that is from the Environmental Industrial Complex that earns trillions of $ each year keeping suckers in despair.

There are externalities, there are unmeasured externalities and it's a big word (13 letters) so people like using it. Your law will work, just like Jevons paradox which is also fake and almost constantly misused because no one using it outside academia (and also in) understands it.

I would suggest you also name it paradox, that allows people to feel extra clever thinking the future sucks.

Re: Ephemeralization

#54

Post by Jensson »

canadaduane wrote: post #52
sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

I think this may explain part of why people tend to think of companies as "efficient" and governments as "wasteful": companies have more leeway to choose their metrics and externalize the unmeasured things.

If you think government agencies doesn't externalize costs then I have bad news for you! If we look at how communism went in practice then you'd see that those agencies were much better at externalizing costs than western companies. As long as they could optimize for the target measure they were fine and could blame everyone else when things didn't work.

People think of governments as wasteful since governments never seem to manage long supply chains well. They can run services like roads, electricity, school, healthcare etc that are simple as long as all the necessary tools and materials are supplied by the private sector. They seemingly can't run stuff like medicine manufacturing, heavy machinery engineering etc.

Re: Ephemeralization

#55

Post by shlurpy »

sfink wrote: post #14
Twisol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The theoretical energy expended to move an object is zero. The theoretical energy expended to keep an object moving is zero. The theoretical energy transferred to the object to get it moving is deeply non-zero, even as the energy transferred from the object to get it to stop moving is also nonzero. If you have a finite energy budget, even under theoretical conditions, you can only have a finite number of objects mo…

The theoretical energy expended to move an object tends toward zero, without limit, as the allowed time increases. Which is almost the same thing. (Allowing it to take 12 billion years to move an inch is rather useless, but that's the same issue with the ephemeralization argument in general: it ignores all other measures of "cost".)

There is a hard limit. If you want to get somewhere, you have to get there before the expansion of the universe moves it away forever. Our accessible universe is constantly shrinking. It's a natural law that places firm discontinuities on optimization.

This may seem silly, but microcontroller shrinking is running into a similar problem with quantum noose, which is by far the closer boundary.

The accelerating expantion of the universe also importantly bounds availible time, which makes the specific equation governing how fast optimization can be achieved relevant. For example, if the cost of increasing intelligence is sufficiently exponential past a certain point, a true singularity may never come. And if it's more like busy beaver then exponential then it may be impossible for it to ever get very far indeed.

Re: Ephemeralization

#56

Post by thundergolfer »

missedthecue wrote: post #23

This is what I always point to when people say capitalism is unsustainable because it supposedly "requires infinite growth in a closed system." It doesn't require that, it only requires endless incremental improvements in efficiency, which is perfectly possible, given that even just the tiniest incremental improvement on a massive problem can result in huge productivity gains. A great example is farming. We produce m…

> In 2020, a meta-analysis of 180 scientific studies notes that there is "No evidence of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability" and that "in the absence of robust evidence, the goal of decoupling rests partly on faith". [1]

Economic growth without ecological collapse is currently capitalist fantasy and wish-casting.

No one sensible is arguing that efficiencies can't be found. They're pointing you at the very real crisis that we have no idea how to decouple economic growth from environmental resource consumption such that environmental disaster is averted.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-economic_decoupling#Lack_o...

Re: Ephemeralization

#57

Post by Jensson »

Copying and transporting data is a great example of this. That used to be extremely expensive, but today it is all but free. Today you can in seconds copy the equivalent of all books stored in the world 100 years ago and send it to the other side of the world, and the amount of money that cost you is less than a seconds worth of work.

Re: Ephemeralization

#58

Post by aaron695 »

Outside of the minds of the lower class who think economists don't understand limiting functions, when did Buckminster Fuller say "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing"?

I find it hard to believe he'd say such a quote.

You can read Nine Chains to the Moon here - https://archive.org/details/ninechainstomoon00full

Another thrilling EPHEMERALIZATION has been the development of the treatment of syphilis. From complete failure, syphilis therapy has progressed through meager but scientifically promising stages of complicated malarial infection compounded with 606 (neosalvarsan) to approximately certain success in simple electrical energy control, “sandwiching" 606, a chemical energy constituent, with electrically induced special cuitous and dangerous empirical trail blazing. The dramatic life- long tenuous and ultimately successful pursuit of this "miracle" by Wagner-Juareg is inspirational. The ephemeralization in this case was neither of space nor weight but thermal, i.e., a TIME- ENERGY progression of the "chronergeticosm." It is of more than casual interest to note that every one of the ephemeralization trends, whether in measuring or medicine, eventually hits the electrical stage wherein Einstein's formula, with “E” for energy, which can stand also for electricity, becomes the most simple symbol of the unity toward which the relative progression on the other side of the equation (mass) A corollary to the ephemeralizing-toward-pure-energy proingly, throughout industry-which simply translates science into bread and butter for people-is that the more abstract the means of accomplishment the more specific the results: Efficiency=doing more with less....EFFICIENCY EPHEMERALIZES.

Re: Ephemeralization

#59

Post by nvmd »

Would you look at that. Turns out there's a word to describe the utopia high level language programmers use to justify the bloated software they use and produce.

Re: Ephemeralization

#60

Post by thristian »

canadaduane wrote: post #52
sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

I think this may explain part of why people tend to think of companies as "efficient" and governments as "wasteful": companies have more leeway to choose their metrics and externalize the unmeasured things.

More simply, companies can solve 80% of the problem, while governments have to solve 100% of the problem (i.e. supporting people in wheelchairs in remote local communities without smart-phones), which requires vastly more effort.
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