Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[rjm]

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=24763

[glynor]

That was well written.

I have to say, though...  I disagree with the central premise that:

We seem to have entered a death spiral with little likelihood of pulling out. Our society has become so degraded and our populace so apathetic and willfully ignorant, that I think we are too far gone to recover.

People say stuff like that all the time (things are going downhill in the Modern Era), with very little actual evidence to back it up.  Honestly, if you look through history, there have ALWAYS been people who have said that.  Just before the Civil War, it was the Irish Immigrants that were coming to America to steal our jobs and ruin our culture.  Before them, it was the Italians.  In fact, you can often spot fallacies like that a mile away with a simple test:  Do people believe that something is so obvious on its face that you don't NEED to produce evidence to back it up.  If so, then there is a good chance that the situation is NOT so simple.

But... On to my point.  I find that people who ascribe to this "Modern Era is Rubbish" viewpoint, often use very skewed or narrow views of the past as their point of reference.  In other words: Modern society is more decadent than when, exactly?

More decadent than Roman Civilization?  Come on, you can't be serious.  More decadent than the middle-ages when average peasant lifespans were in the 30's and indiscriminate killing over perceived insults was the norm?  Mmmm, hmmm... How about pre-Industrial America?  Well, maybe, so long as you don't count the way we treated the native population.  Or blacks.  Or women.  Or anyone who wasn't an aristocrat.  America's "Wild West" and Civil War era?  Sure, just don't look behind the curtain at the brothels, or the slaves, or the eight-year-olds working in factories with no protection for 18 hours per day, or the poor people starving to death during the repeated depressions and famines and plagues that swept the nation.  Okay... How about something closer?  The era that most of these pundits seem to be referring to... The 1950s in America.

Yeah.... That Leave It To Beaver view of America you just pictured in your head?  It didn't exist.  Or, maybe, it sort-of did, but only for a very small segment of the population.

There were PLENTY of people in America who never lived in that place you're thinking about.  Way more people DIDN'T experience Leave It To Beaver than those who did.  It was LEGAL for men to rape their wives in the 1950s.  Black schoolchildren were bombed and hanged with no police retribution (often with the participation of the local police).  There were millions of ultra-poor people in the rural west who were still devastated by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, who didn't know where their next meal was coming from, and with no way to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".  And what was it like to be gay in 1953 in America?  Not to mention the rest of the world... Stalin was busy killing 40 million Russians in the 1950s, and we didn't do a thing to stop him.

But don't pay any attention to any of that.

Everything is going downhill.  Nevermind all of the progress we've made in so many places.

[rjm]

Very nice response.

I agree that humans have been seriously flawed from the get go. I'm personally frustrated by the fact that we now have sufficient data to know that our species is in serious overshoot on many fronts (debt, energy, and climate being the most pressing) yet the majority chooses to ignore the evidence. In fact, the majority aggressively denies the evidence. In the past we could power through blunders with cheap abundant fossil energy. Ain't gonna happen this time.

[JimH]

Very nice response.

I agree that humans have been seriously flawed from the get go. I'm personally frustrated by the fact that we now have sufficient data to know that our species is in serious overshoot on many fronts (debt, energy, and climate being the most pressing) yet the majority chooses to ignore the evidence. In fact, the majority aggressively denies the evidence. In the past we could power through blunders with cheap abundant fossil energy. Ain't gonna happen this time.

True, but something unexpected may happen.  We're good at that.

I tend to agree that humans are ridiculously dominant on the planet.  It this dominance makes us vulnerable for something like a world wide pandemic.

Population is a huge problem.

So is campaign financing.

[MrC]

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0670022950/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320975154&sr=8-1

[rjm]

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0670022950/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320975154&sr=8-1

Pinker is right. Our politicians up here in Canada make a big deal about crime and making the streets safer. When in fact crime is a minor problem. Few leaders talk about the important issues, perhaps because no one would vote for them if they did.

My reading of history suggests people tend to be nice and peaceful when their wealth is sufficient and the future promises more. Conversely, people tend to be nasty and violent when they are declining in wealth and the future offers no hope.

We face a hundred or more years of declining wealth with little or no hope of improvement. If people do not understand what is causing this things are going to get really ugly. Things might get ugly regardless, but at least if people understand the culprit is geology and physics, not the Chinese, then we stand a chance of civility.

[KingSparta]

>> like a world wide pandemic
bill gates has given allot of money into preserving seeds, people don't think about it but some crops could be in jeopardy in the future.

>> Population is a huge problem
agreed, unfortunately I can't select who can be euthanized, I have a few favorites (like my old lying out his ass boss).

[DarkPenguin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKwdtNdWDb0

[glynor]

True, but something unexpected may happen.  We're good at that.

I completely agree.  Humanity is a crafty and amazingly adaptable species.  That precisely why we were able to so utterly dominate the entire surface of the planet, and do it (on an evolutionary time scale) in an unbelievably short period of time:

We, as a species, are very good at dealing with new and unexpected situations, climates, and environmental conditions.

We are better at it than anything else mother nature has ever created.  The only other living things that are close are probably grasses and cockroaches.

My reading of history suggests people tend to be nice and peaceful when their wealth is sufficient and the future promises more. Conversely, people tend to be nasty and violent when they are declining in wealth and the future offers no hope.

We face a hundred or more years of declining wealth with little or no hope of improvement. If people do not understand what is causing this things are going to get really ugly. Things might get ugly regardless, but at least if people understand the culprit is geology and physics, not the Chinese, then we stand a chance of civility.

What we aren't necessarily that good at, however, is predicting the future.

He was talking about predictions of the future of the cell phone industry, but I really think this fantastic piece by Horace Dediu applies to a LOT more than just that one narrow field:

It’s a great misfortune that we don’t have data about the future. It makes it hard to tell what’s going to happen.

It’s even harder because although sometimes we have data about the past, the past and the future don’t always look the same.

Clearly that’s what makes predictions about mobile computing platforms tricky. Nothing that has happened recently had been predicted by those who had tried to do so in the past.

The difficulty is compounded if trying to forecast in the long term like 4 or 5 years ahead. The tendency is to extrapolate what has been happening to date.

It’s tempting to project whatever trends one sees into the future. The problem is that some trends are more visible than others.

...

Given this knowledge, the pattern or trend that I see more than any other is that the future will be dramatically different than the past. This invalidates any forecast which assumes otherwise, including all those above.

Read the whole thing, it isn't much longer.  I just cut out the example he gives about how the mobile device market has been upended by the entrance of iOS and Android, so all old predictions were completely bogus, just like the current extrapolations are... But it makes a great point about disruption.

The future is, by definition, subject to disruptive forces that we cannot possibly comprehend.  If you asked someone in the 1950s to give us a guess about what the major threats America would face just 20 or 30 years in the future, their predictions would have likely been completely off base, because they would be created through the lens of their present conditions.

The best way... Some would say the only way, to predict the future accurately, is to go out and make it.

[MrC]

I predict Glynor will have more to say soon...

[rjm]

I'm not claiming we can predict exactly what will happen when. I am claiming that when it comes to energy we can predict trends and the general implications of those trends. For example, given global debt levels and energy's constraint on our ability to grow, I can say with certainty that we will be poorer soon, but I cannot say if that will occur through inflation, deflation, taxation, reduced government services, or war; nor can I say exactly when.

A very common mistake is to confuse technology with energy. Technology is mostly a flattering word for innovative new ways to consume non-renewable resources, especially energy. Cell phones are cool but they burn electricity, they don't make it. Coal makes electricity.

[glynor]

I predict Glynor will have more to say soon...

You win 12 Internets.

I'm not claiming we can predict exactly what will happen when. I am claiming that when it comes to energy we can predict trends and the general implications of those trends. For example, given global debt levels and energy's constraint on our ability to grow, I can say with certainty that we will be poorer soon, but I cannot say if that will occur through inflation, deflation, taxation, reduced government services, or war; nor can I say exactly when.

A very common mistake is to confuse technology with energy. Technology is mostly a flattering word for innovative new ways to consume non-renewable resources, especially energy. Cell phones are cool but they burn electricity, they don't make it. Coal makes electricity.

Energy is a perfect example.  This assumes that our current trend of using primarily fossil fuels in big, industrial, centralized power generation plants will continue ad infinitum into the future.  There is energy all around us.  The Universe is literally made out of stored energy.  We just have to figure out how to access a new source cheaply, efficiently, and without screwing up the planet in the process.

I can say with certainty that we eventually will solve that problem, either because we decide to, or because we are forced.  I strongly suspect that energy production will be the next major disruptive technological force we see in our lifetimes.  The question is, who is going to do it, and when.

Whomever does, gets to win the next century, like America won the last one.

[rjm]

I've invested years studying these issues. I have relevant education. I know more on this topic than 99.99% of the population yet if I can't convince my parents or my brother or my wife on the gravity of the situation, I'm certainly not going to change Glynor's mind, or anyone else's mind. God help us. Our society needs science based decision making and I see no way of getting there.

[glynor]

I was going to let this go (and I should be in bed), and I'm getting lost on exactly what issues we're discussing, but...  I have to just say this for the record.

I do believe that we are barreling towards an environmental catastrophe of nearly unimaginable proportions.
And, if we don't do something to stop it, we could be looking at a Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event scale disaster.
And, I think we will probably wait until we are forced to try to stop it, which is too bad because it will just cause much more misery than it needs to.

But, I think the signs in the next 20 years will become so blatant, and difficult (and perhaps more importantly, expensive) to deal with that we will indeed try.  We will also discover that it is already much worse than we think it is, and there will be hell to pay in some quarters for that.  In the end, though, I think we will avert a real, unstoppable catastrophe.  But, I suspect, even if we do end up with a geological era-ending disaster, that humanity (of all species) will find a way to survive and thrive.

We can survive on the surface of the moon, and at the bottom of the ocean, and in the Sahara, and in Antarctica.  This too, shall pass.

PS. If I was king, I'd start tearing down all the coal-fired power plants immediately and start building Nuclear plants (and any other viable energy producing technology available) in their place.  Nuclear power is not perfect, but it does produce very concentrated, and relatively small, waste.  And expecting us to even reduce, much less halve, our energy consumption (rather than continue our current curve) is a pipe-dream.

I'd also wear a ring, and never hurt my people.  Because that's what Deaner was talking about.  

[KingSparta]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKwdtNdWDb0

very funny guy.

[rjm]

If I was king, I'd start tearing down all the coal-fired power plants immediately and start building Nuclear plants (and any other viable energy producing technology available) in their place.  Nuclear power is not perfect, but it does produce very concentrated, and relatively small, waste.  And expecting us to even reduce, much less halve, our energy consumption (rather than continue our current curve) is a pipe-dream.

This is a deep topic. I could write a book on this one paragraph but I'll try to be brief.

1) If you want to try to maintain our current lifestyle, nuclear is our only hope. It still might not be enough because the first energy shortage will be liquid fuels and nuclear does little to help this in the short term.

2) If you want to stabilize CO2 and maintain our lifestyle you need to build a nuclear power plant every 2 days. If you want to reduce CO2, which we really need to do to be safe, then you have to do more. The US has not built a single nuclear plant in 20+ years, let alone 1 every 2 weeks or so for their share of the requirement.

3) Nuclear can be reasonably safe if we have sufficient surplus wealth in society to maintain it. I am becoming concerned about safety in a scenario where we are broke.

4) We are now entering what is known as the "energy trap" which will likely make it impossible to build out alternate energy on a large scale. The energy trap is the intersection of wealth, energy, and politics. Wealth is proportional to net energy consumed. Net energy available to us is falling due to exhaustion of the cheap and easy to get stuff, plus the fact that people in exporting countries are getting wealthier and therefore have more babies and use more energy which leaves less available to export. As wealth falls it will become increasingly difficult to maintain services people expect like defense, social security, and health care. To build out alternate energy sources we will need a lot of money. This money must come from further cuts to core services which may be politically impossible to sustain. Imagine a big energy project that will start to bear fruit in 10 years and everyone unhappy today with cuts to social security and health care. At the next election in 2-4 years some candidate will surely promise to cut the energy investment which will bring immediate relief to the suffering. The impact of the cut to energy won't be noticed for 10 years and by then the energy trap may be so severe that nothing can be done to arrest the decline.

You might ask how come I assume government investment is required in the above scenario? As fossil energy becomes more expensive alternate energy should become more attractive and thus we should expect a thriving green private industry with no need for government involvement. Nope. Layered on top of the energy trap is the problem of receding horizons. All big scale energy projects require lots of material and fossil energy to build. As fossil energy costs rise, alternate energy costs will also rise. The jury is still out on this issue but it may turn out that most alternate energy projects will never be profitable enough to proceed without government subsidies. There is some solid physics behind this dilemma but I won't explain it here.

But wait, there's more. Most of the capital we think we have to invest in things like alternate energy is going to vaporize soon as the global debt bubble unwinds. Our money is backed by debt and debt needs growth to be paid back. But falling net energy makes growth impossible so debt defaults and we become poorer.

There's lots more, like the problematic relationship between energy, societal complexity, and resilience; and the really problematic relationship between fossil energy and food, but that's enough for now.