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OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure that "may not kill literally everyone immediately" is cause for optimism about the future either... People die. It's going to be something either way. As long as we don't all die, I'm optimistic, because life is better now than it has ever been.
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Jul 12, 2018 17:13
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Assuming you aren't dead.
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Jul 12, 2018 17:45
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Life is actually pretty drat good if you're rich, white, male, and live in one of the nicer European countries
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Jul 12, 2018 19:50
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Pochoclo posted:Life is actually pretty drat good if you're rich, white, male, and live in one of the nicer European countries Life is pretty good if you're rich regardless of skin colour or country my man.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:45
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A fair few people cast the present as host of the greatest outrages for ideological reasons but there's little traction for this argument in actual material measurements or otherwise. This is not a defense or advocation of capitalism or how technology has been applied, it's simple observation that the system has produced a better world by most measurements. There are reasons to be anxious and skeptical about the future, primarily climate change, but also social relations and birth rate collapses, workers losing income and power, but it's pretty questionable whether these really warrant pessimism in great magnitude.
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Jul 13, 2018 01:56
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TheNakedFantastic posted:birth rate collapses This is one issue that always confuses me and I would like some more information on it: isn't moderate depopulation at this point in time a good thing? Or at least a stricter management of births?
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Jul 13, 2018 07:29
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necroid posted:This is one issue that always confuses me and I would like some more information on it: isn't moderate depopulation at this point in time a good thing? Or at least a stricter management of births? Really it's a problem for the retiree:worker ratio, but maybe robots will save us.
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Jul 13, 2018 07:31
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"Is it worthwhile to assume any sort of cultural/social/moral evolution is possible and indeed like" seems like the core of the question, and the answer is probably yes. Insofar as people do not work towards things they regard as impossible, it probably is not worthwhile to be a pessimist!
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Jul 13, 2018 07:43
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Cicero posted:Really it's a problem for the retiree:worker ratio, but maybe robots will save us. Isn't this the same as saying that we can't reduce our population because we have an obligation towards people alive right now that outweighs our obligations towards future people? Isn't this a self-sustaining loop of unsustainability? Also yes, probably increasing automation is going to make it a more pressing issue in the coming years.
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Jul 13, 2018 08:06
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necroid posted:Isn't this the same as saying that we can't reduce our population because we have an obligation towards people alive right now that outweighs our obligations towards future people? Isn't this a self-sustaining loop of unsustainability? quote:Also yes, probably increasing automation is going to make it a more pressing issue in the coming years.
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Jul 13, 2018 09:11
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necroid posted:This is one issue that always confuses me and I would like some more information on it: isn't moderate depopulation at this point in time a good thing? Or at least a stricter management of births? Overpopulation is bullshit and a honeypot.
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Jul 13, 2018 21:49
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I mean, no, a lot of the problems with the climate are primarily a problem of population because a shitload of people need the things we destroy the climate to create and transitioning to alternate methods of providing them is quite technically challenging and politically very difficult to get support for. If we had fewer people the climate would be much easier to manage, and voluntarily not having children is an excellent way to contribute to that. The issue is when people start constructing elaborate fantasies about who needs to die and how expediently they need to be wiped out.
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Jul 13, 2018 22:59
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LeoMarr posted:Overpopulation is bullshit and a honeypot. Can you elaborate? I am aware that the biggest issue regarding perceived overpopulation is the distribution of wealth and food, together with the confusing distribution of super-high density areas. Wouldn't it be better though if sustainable policies targeting food production and environment conservation went hand in hand with a more prudent management of current and future births? OwlFancier posted:If we had fewer people the climate would be much easier to manage, and voluntarily not having children is an excellent way to contribute to that. From what I've read the current trend in Europe is that of lower birth rates, which is mostly offset by the influx of non-EU citizens. What's the trend in the US? Also yes, the problem with this kind of talk is that there's always someone who interprets it as a cue to list all the people they'd gladly kill if they were in charge. Joke's on them because we're all going to die sooner or later. Sometimes I feel like a sperg because I honestly don't mind talking about this stuff objectively, since I feel like the value of individual lives (including my own) pales in comparison to that of the whole. This obviously doesn't mean that I want half of the world's population to kill themselves, it means I'd love to see the effects of more people evaluating the future impact of far-reaching choices like having kids before they take those choices.
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Jul 13, 2018 23:55
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I suppose you can argue that population control in ways other than "turn into a rich western country and have your population decline itself" is probably a complete nonstarter because the other ways introduce a shitload of direct problems and/or are just genocide. But on an individual level I certainly think it is an objective good to just... not have kids, for shitloads of reasons but undeniably you are removing at least one whole human's worth of consumption from a future where consumption might actually be quite difficult to guarantee for a lot of people, and you're doing it without hurting anyone, so it's quite hard to object to. It is certainly possible that the planet could host a lot more people but whether it can do so in the long term given the problems that human resource consumption is already causing... I genuinely don't know. So I would be hesitant to suggest that the planet can sustain as many people as we can put on it when human action can create delayed and potentially very serious problems for its habitability. It's not really a good outcome if the population level grows and then climate change causes famines and displacement and kills a shitload of them, that's senseless. If you're very callous I suppose you might see that as a self regulating environment and thus argue that it is impossible for humans to truly "overpopulate" but I'd still call it loving terrible. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 00:14
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OwlFancier posted:I suppose you can argue that population control in ways other than "turn into a rich western country and have your population decline itself" is probably a complete nonstarter because the other ways introduce a shitload of direct problems and/or are just genocide. Actually, if you're the entirety of my wife's/my family, you're literally murdering that kid who could have grown up to be someone. Why, yes, I do live in the south. How did you know?
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Jul 14, 2018 00:19
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Actually, if you're the entirety of my wife's/my family, you're literally murdering that kid who could have grown up to be someone. Alright, difficult for people who aren't completely loving insane, insane people can argue a lot of things.
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Jul 14, 2018 00:21
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Half of the population of the South in the US, maybe more.
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Jul 14, 2018 00:31
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OwlFancier posted:Probably the one before the nuclear war or climate change induced worldwide crop failure or both. Yeah, the primary issue with the "but this is the best time to be alive ever!" nonsense is that the modern socio-economic/geopolitical landscape now operates on extreme Quidditch rules: running up the score on human rights, clean energy, and less wars will have amounted to jack poo poo once the Golden Snitch of runaway climate change and/or nuclear holocaust is grabbed. Maybe also if some sci-fi silliness like a global sterility plague like Children of Men happens, but that's of course super unlikely especially compared to the first two scenarios. Point is, if we get "blown back to the stone age", we're probably not ever going to be able to get back anywhere near the current industrial-digital golden age we currently enjoy, simply because the resources we needed to get here won't exist anymore because we exhausted most of them the first go round. Thus, humanity won't die out, but will instead limp along in a permanent lovely pre-industrial feudal state until the planet literally becomes incapable of sustaining human life in the far, far future. I suppose you could take comfort in that idea, but that level of eternal inescapable suffering makes me believe "out with a bang" total extinction would be the kinder outcome of the collapse, personally.
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Jul 14, 2018 00:58
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Well, used up as in "mined out and piled all over the surface of the planet in the form of consumer products" so those aren't going away. Fuel sources could be tricky yes, but those are sort of self reinforcing our dependence on them, oil was plentiful so we developed liquid fuel propulsion, we were refining a lot of oil so we started using oil products everywhere, oil products were cheap and plentiful and effective and drove increased reliance on oil to fuel the economies built around their production and consumption etc. There's not a great deal that they do that you absolutely can't do other ways and indeed, that we didn't do other ways before their widespread adoption, paper, glass, and ceramic packaging instead of plastics etc. We just don't use them any more because plastic is cheap and available. You take fossil fuel availability out of the mix and what you probably get is actually just a different path of development. Industrialization is kicked off by the invention of the steam engine which has its founding principles in ancient greek aeopile and utilizes still-common elements of metalworking, water, and a fuel source, and which you could conceivably run on charcoal or biofuels or, even, basic atomic power, and there would be large supplies of refined nuclear fuels left over after a nuclear war that much is absolutely certain, and a Curian understanding of radioactivity would probably develop a lot faster as well owing to the necessity of living around fallout, and there is so much metallurgy in our modern lives that any budding engineer would have a wide variety of sources to study, a lot harder to lose the secret of damascus steel when half the ruined world is built out of it. If a nuclear war didn't render the planet absolutely uninhabitable and just destroyed a lot of knowledge and killed a lot of people then it's not unreasonable to think humans could develop again given the resources we have and which could be reacquired from the remains, but it's bad because it'd still kill a shitload of people. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 01:29
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I find it darkly amusing the longer we go without ending our global civilization, the worse we actually make it if we really do end up pushing the button, simply because we're more and more extracting (and wasting) finite resources, and entrusting more and more of our hard copy knowledge to increasingly fragile and short-lived mediums that require increasingly specialized and sophisticated tools to even read as time goes on. Icarus seems more and more apt with each passing year.
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Jul 14, 2018 01:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:
This is using $1.25 a day as the threshold for "poor" (how was this not immediately obvious when you linked the image?) edit: It practically makes sense to define "poor" as the point at which someone cannot reliably afford necessities, like food, shelter, healthcare, childcare (etc) + some modest level of savings/recreational spending. The specific dollar-translated amount for this will obviously vary depending on region, but the vast majority of human beings do not meet this standard and are unlikely to at any point in the foreseeable future. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 04:17
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Thus, humanity won't die out, but will instead limp along in a permanent lovely pre-industrial feudal state until the planet literally becomes incapable of sustaining human life in the far, far future. Our planet has enough time in it before it becomes impossible for life to exist that the entire oil reserves of the planet we've used can replenish like five times over in that time, and what are currently fishes or whatever can evolve into land dwelling things with huge brains to repeat our mistakes. There's no way humanity will exist that long, but all this can definitely happen again no matter what we do to the planet. In fact looking at the stats some more something on the complexity level of humans could evolve from bacteria existing currently while the planet is still habitable. Nurge fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 07:42
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Ytlaya posted:This is using $1.25 a day as the threshold for "poor" It's PPP adjusted international dollars, so it's a little reductive to say it's just $1.25 without explaining that further (i.e. it takes prices into account and is more highly correlated to how many of their necessities like food and shelter they can afford rather than just saying X U.S. dollars). It is for sure measuring extreme poverty, so passing the bar for this graph certainly doesn't mean you can afford decent healthcare, food, and certainly not savings and recreational spending. Regardless, by any measure of poverty you can think of, we are improving, albeit not as dramatically as we have reduced extreme poverty. Here's the graph at $3.10 international dollars a day:  Here's a breakdown of incomes in non-rich countries over time:  I don't think anyone is claiming that poverty is solved or anything, but people in general are better off than they have been at any point in history we have reliable data for. Edit: Sorry, that first graph is crap. You can go to https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty to see the source data. Basically the trend for > $3.10 a day matches $1.90 a day, it's simpler to see on the map, but the graph only lets you cherry pick countries. enki42 fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 12:52
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Ytlaya posted:This is using $1.25 a day as the threshold for "poor" Okay. Definite poverty a way you feel comfortable. Is the persentage of humans living like that increasing our decreasing. The number hungry/homeless/sick seem to be decreasing by every metric over the last 200 years.
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Jul 15, 2018 14:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Okay. Definite poverty a way you feel comfortable. Is the persentage of humans living like that increasing our decreasing. The number hungry/homeless/sick seem to be decreasing by every metric over the last 200 years. I mean I'm with you on the general idea that the world is slowly getting better, but those examples just invite posting ToryPolicyResultsGraphs.png.
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Sep 6, 2018 20:54
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Yeah, the primary issue with the "but this is the best time to be alive ever!" nonsense is that the modern socio-economic/geopolitical landscape now operates on extreme Quidditch rules: running up the score on human rights, clean energy, and less wars will have amounted to jack poo poo once the Golden Snitch of runaway climate change and/or nuclear holocaust is grabbed. Maybe also if some sci-fi silliness like a global sterility plague like Children of Men happens, but that's of course super unlikely especially compared to the first two scenarios. Ok, I'll bite, what resources are you referring to that would prevent modern industrial civilization from reforming out of the ashes of this one.
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Sep 7, 2018 03:40
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enki42 posted:Regardless, by any measure of poverty you can think of, we are improving, albeit not as dramatically as we have reduced extreme poverty. Yeah, but a lot (if not virtually all) of this can just be attributed to advancements in technology/medicine (or the very mixed "benefit" of capitalists profiting through exporting labor to the countries where it costs the least, which is a source of "improvement" that can't continue indefinitely). The point is that it isn't a reason to be optimistic, because it doesn't make any sense to extrapolate a small improvement from "super super poor" to merely "super poor" to "therefore we're on the trajectory to a future that could in any way be defined as good for most people."
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Sep 7, 2018 05:00
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like 99% of what people experience in their day to day life is ego-vomit bullshit that's largely disconnected from the physical, objective reality of matter in the universe you create your own world, why not create the happiest one you can?
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Sep 7, 2018 05:03
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, but a lot (if not virtually all) of this can just be attributed to advancements in technology/medicine As opposed to what?
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Sep 7, 2018 05:08
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:As opposed to what? Being economically uplifted or whatever (basically what I had in parenthesis immediately after that). It depends whether you're talking about money or material conditions I guess, since globalization is likely responsible for average increase in earnings (though that's likely to only continue until capital runs out of places they can export labor for cheaper). The more important point is the thing I said after that (that these improvements largely represent low-hanging fruit and not a sign of some trend that will continue until a majority of people have a decent quality of life).
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Sep 7, 2018 05:11
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The Dipshit posted:Ok, I'll bite, what resources are you referring to that would prevent modern industrial civilization from reforming out of the ashes of this one. People have an extreme boner for fossil fuels, years of propaganda rotted their brain and can not imagine civilization existing without them. Like fax machines pre-date the use of fossil fuels but people are absolutely convinced a civilization without coal is a civilization of primitive huts and all human achievement requires oil.
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Sep 7, 2018 05:20
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like fax machines pre-date the use of fossil fuels
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Sep 7, 2018 09:01
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I'm trying to figure out in what world the telephone was invented before the steam engine.
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Sep 7, 2018 09:02
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Apparently the first telefax service does predate the telephone:Wikipedia posted:Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received British patent 9745 on May 27, 1843 for his "Electric Printing Telegraph".
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Sep 7, 2018 09:07
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:People have an extreme boner for fossil fuels, years of propaganda rotted their brain and can not imagine civilization existing without them. We also have far, far more fossil fuels to burn than we have climate to annihilate for human habitation.
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Sep 7, 2018 14:13
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Isn't the argument from the OP's book a Pascal Wager's-esque argument for optimism? It's better to believe that there's hope for the future even if, objective, everything is 100% hosed in every possible aspect because you can't possibly be certain about that so you might as well hope and enact a better future. I think the case for optimism, or at least, active participation in creating an optimistic future is as close to a no-brainer as it gets. Things have gotten wildly better for sapient beings as a whole over the past 10000 years, but progress is a myth and we're only going to get to a better tomorrow if we drag it ourselves kicking and screaming.
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Sep 7, 2018 20:47
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Though you're wagering that against the alternative which is sustained suffering for much longer.
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Sep 7, 2018 20:51
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What are my winnings if I wager on pessimism instead? I'd like to know all the payout possibilities before committing to my bet.
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Sep 7, 2018 20:55
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Kerning Chameleon posted:What are my winnings if I wager on pessimism instead? I'd like to know all the payout possibilities before committing to my bet. Fuckall besides some "I told you so" poo poo. Presumably you join in D&D because you want to discuss an idea. So... answer my question? OOCC does not speak for you I assume.
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Sep 7, 2018 22:00
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Ytlaya posted:Being economically uplifted or whatever (basically what I had in parenthesis immediately after that). It depends whether you're talking about money or material conditions I guess, since globalization is likely responsible for average increase in earnings (though that's likely to only continue until capital runs out of places they can export labor for cheaper). If you could provide a quantifiable definition of “economically uplifted” as this would make addressing your argument easier. It sometimes seems like a lot of people itt speak in terms of some kind of mystical concept of advancement. If you have faith in the idea that humanity is fallen and has degenerated since Adam, and approaching a well deserved rapture, of course economic arguments will have no sway. There’s not much point arguing about faith, if you mean something specific about earthly problems then it’s worth talking. edit: I would also dispute that technological change has been the primary driver of "economic uplift" over than last several decades. It wasn't some technological leap that caused the proportion of Indians with toilets to practically double over the last five years. It doesn't require any new technology to put in a well pump in an African town, so that locals don't have to spend two hours a day fetching water. Or training a midwife in proper sanitation. These are the real radical changes that are uplifting society. The primary driver of change is just applying things we already know how to do well somewhere where they haven't been applied before. And mostly people don't go back once you apply these things. Once people in a place have a road, they will maintain it. When people understand the mechanisms causing soil degradation, they will act collectively to enforce best practices. The fact is there's a whole lot of low hanging fruit still out there. We could spend our whole lives just trying to address one, making steady improvements, and taking those trends to their conclusion will represent a massive improvement in billions of lives, even if by your arbitrary criteria it still doesn't make their lives "decent". Squalid fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 7, 2018 23:54
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