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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

We’re inundated with folks screaming about danger and hyping up fear from every angle - everything from economic collapse, to stock market crashes, to apocalyptic visions from every angle about climate, etc.

And what most people, especially younger folks, don’t realize is that it’s AlWAYS been this way. And most of the time, when something does blow up, there wasn’t a clear or unambiguous difference between the thing that blew up, and all the things everyone was screaming about that did not.

It’s natural that people are going to tune out and not take it super seriously, especially people who have given up on doing the deep research to have an informed opinion on the constant stream of new topics everyone is worried about. Which is a problem when it legitimately is a serious problem.

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Yes, it's the boy who cried wolf on a planet wide scale. But it just so happens that this planet is the only planet we've got and we're doing a piss-poor job of stewardship. Regardless of alarmists that much at least should be obvious to anybody with a normal IQ and up. But it's so convenient to ignore it all and get on with the hunt for that extra buck.

There is something geniuinely unique about this time and place: we're at the middle-end of the greatest golden age in human history. And what we did was give each other a break. Professors gave their students breaks, and judges gave lawyers breaks, parents gave their kids breaks, editors give their journalists breaks, and so on. And what has resulted is a profound erosion of accountability, integrity, and self-restraint, to the point where many people believe that these are masochistic or at least self-destructive qualities. You know, for losers.

My point is that you're not wrong, but it's not just that people are choosing to hunt an extra buck. It's that they've turned their back on the very idea of self-restraint, or the possibility of idealistic, positive leadership from government. It's not a choice because they don't know about any option other than consumerism.

And those of us that whinge about it tend to be engineering types, disgusted by politics; and yet the solution really is political: you've got to learn that system, get control of the narrative, allocate the vast resources of government to the right things, and somehow inspire people to be more thoughtful, conscientious, and less cynical and selfish when it comes to getting things done for society and government in general. And it's a change that, if enough people believe in it, it will happen.

Good points.

> change that, if enough people believe in it, it will happen

I've heard that speech before somewhere...

I’m not sure how your comment relates to my earlier comment exactly.

One thing to point out however - EVERY time is a (genuinely!) unique time, and for those in it, there is always the press of things to be concerned about, or tackle things or avoid things or whatever. Our current challenges are definitely unique, but the existential threat of Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War was no less a unique, serious, and pressing matter for those living it than anything going on today. And it could have been an apocalypse. It just happened not to be.

Same with being in Europe pretty much anytime over the last couple hundred years (longer?) with constant wars, disease, plagues, etc.

It’s important to recognize, because it can help give perspective and balance to what can otherwise be a profoundly easy to manipulate state of mind.

Would it make sense to sell all your assets, move the middle of nowhere, and live in a bomb shelter in the 70’s? Well the Soviets didn’t nuke the US, so no, clearly you would have been an idiot. If they had, then you would clearly have been a genius with incredible foresight.

In the end, we do what we can based on the best of our ability to understand the world and our options. Because fundamentally a lot of these things integrate with other people and societies, this also means they influence decisions others make, and can result in huge shifts - or resistance to shifts - and sometimes really unexpected or bizarre behavior.

One thing that may be happening for instance with a lot of the discussions today is people getting overwhelmed and defaulting to their ‘overwhelmed’ state - and not being aware of it.

For instance, common overwhelmed behavior includes running away/avoidance (this isn’t happening), fighting (fuck you, you can’t tell me what to do), or freezing (just ignoring things or locking up).

These can easily escalate over time to full on and very persistent delusion, and the threat to someone if someone starts to challenge their delusion is very real - and they need to defend it.

Trying to deal with someone in this state by treating the way they are acting at face value (oh, this guy is anti mask so I’ll give him facts!) often not only doesn’t work, but causes more resistance because it isn’t really about the mask or the facts.

They are in a messed up emotional place, and doing the best they can to try to keep themselves feeling safe. It just so happens that they picked something that is dangerous to others and there is some facts that could ACTUALLY keep them safer. But they can’t handle that, right now. And trying to tell them that is likely to just make them feel unsafe talking to you, because you’re essentially trying to rip away their safety blanket AND make them feel dumb.

When people feel unsafe around someone, they either avoid them, fight them, don’t do anything and try to pretend they don’t exist.

It’s a hard problem.

You're right about people being fundamentally driven by the need for emotional safety. That safety comes from confidence, which itself can either come from study and training, or delusion. Delusional confidence leading to a feeling of personal safety is not problem that gets a lot of attention, because it's understandable and to criticize it seems like it lacks empathy. But I'd argue that letting it slide is just like when parents let their kids do anything they want, without boundaries. It's not nice, or empathic, or loving: it's a cop-out, it's easy, and worst of all, it harms the child. Structure, with limits, boundaries, expectations, is good and healthy for kids (and for adults).

I find myself comforted by the fact that, in some ways, the spasm toward fascism and ignorant belief is a cry for help, a demand to be held accountable, a plaintive request to be corrected. They don't actually hate elitism, they just hate the elites we have. (Well, except for one, paradoxically).

It's not necessarily obvious. Planetary weather is a chaotic system and even for somewhat stable phenomenon like the gulf stream it's not a question of if it will collapse but when. Humans are likely speeding up the collapse but it will eventually happen regardless.

If I had to choose between technological progress and stewardship, I'd pick technological progress because that's our only real chance at long-term survival. We should really attempt to do both and better align the hunt for that extra buck with both tech progress and stewardship (ahem carbon tax) rather than demonizing it.

The number of dimensions along which we are destroying the habitat we depend on is staggering. Deforestation (killing off one of the most efficient carbon sinks, causing soil erosion, changing the albedo, habitat destruction, change in water management), CO2 emissions, methane emissions, a ridiculously high per-capita energy budget in the western world where the only cap is how much money you are willing to spend, killing off numerous species and so on. We are bad stewards. All of these are optional.

Technology can help to sustain life in space, I'm sure it will enable us to sustain life here on earth. But for how many, and with what quality of life?

The number of dimensions we have improved life for humans in an environment which have always been hostile not only to humans but to the 99.9999% of all species ever existed it wiped out is quite a lot more staggering.

Nature didn't give us a safe and friendly environment we made unsafe, it gave us a hostile and dangerous environment we have made safe by using technology to impact the planet to better suit us.

All impacts have externalities but I take those any day over just waiting for some catastrophe to happen whether meteors, super vulcanos or any other real threat that is out there lurking.

Technology is the sole reason we are 8 billion people on this planet and still are most better fed than 2 billion people were 150 years ago.

Living on this planet IS life in space and we are luckily constantly improving our ability to cope.

All solutions create new problems but these problems are better problems to have.

In the short term, sure. But what if this is a local maximum which accidentally cut off all viable future branches? A bit of caution when making these irreversible decisions would go a long way.

Wiping out the rest of the planet to give us a safe habitat may have been a giant mistake, monocultures tend to end bad.

we are not wiping out the rest of the planet, we are manipulating it into better serving us through thd use of technology. We are potentially able to deal with ex. astroid impact which no other species is able to, in my book that counts for way more.

> we are not wiping out the rest of the planet, we are manipulating it into better serving us through thd use of technology.

Right. Let's say we're not going to agree on this and leave it at that.

sure

> Deforestation

It's not that clear-cut: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more...

Number of trees is a bad metric, you need to know the amount of area available for gas exchange, which takes a long time to build up after a clearcut and 'old growth' forest is a complete ecosystem, something which a young planted forest can only aspire to become one day.

And that's before we get into the hardwood vs softwood differences in growth speed.

If you’re trying to sequester carbon, fast (new) growth and softwood is the way to go correct?

In the short term: yes, but it is rather less dense than hardwood so you'll end up with a lot more acreage.

Poplar/Maple/Oak/Pine are all good options, with the slow growers storing the carbon for the longest time, and even when not harvested they won't rot nearly as fast (rot is best looked at as slow burning in this context).

And then not to harvest them until they die of 'natural causes', hopefully not a forest fire.

If you're trying to sequester carbon, you need to lock up that carbon somewhere - and cutting it down and putting it somewhere it will stay intact the longest seems like the best bet? A house, or a building for instance.

If it is in a forest long term (same trees), sequestration flat lines after awhile no? I'm not saying I don't like trees - far from it, I own 90 acres of timberland! I'm pointing out that pulling carbon from the atmosphere as fast as possible vs a pretty piece of old growth timber are two different goals with different tradeoffs.

> one of the most efficient carbon sinks

I thought forests tended to be pretty much neutral once they get old enough for trees to start dying and decomposing.

There are quite a few species that produce wood that won't decompose nearly as fast as it grew, and we are a good 100 years away from reaching that limit for newly planted forests.

But how fast do they pull carbon from the atmosphere over that time?

If you take some fast growing trees, harvest them just as the curve starts to slow, put that wood to use somewhere it won't rot, and plant new trees that also fast grow - seems like you'd pull out more in aggregate?

Personally I'm more of a fan of the geo-weathering type sequestration plans, but if if we have a target, might as well optimize for it?

People naturally have a survivorship bias.

Thomas Ligotti has this great quote about why people, most people, are Optimistic (specifically with existence), that this is all okay, and nothing will go wrong, and that when things do go wrong, it'll be okay in the end

    “The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who 
    can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For 
    optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential 
    computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic. 
    Whether a pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a 
    knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is 
    immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about 
    hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy 
    to observe. But this problem can be solved only by 
    establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that 
    would enable us in principle to say which is more 
    desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight 
    case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of 
    human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying 
    to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When 
    they do argue for the desirability of human life it is 
    only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even 
    though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that 
    desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared 
    policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal 
    instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an 
    articulated body of thought. It is the default condition 
    of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our 
    minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would 
    explain why at any given time there are more cannibals 
    than philosophical pessimists.”

favorited that... thanks

:) you're welcome!

It has not always been that way. Who were the anti-vax superstars of 1918? And what were the ad-targeting capabilities of newspapers back then?

It's been this way before, it just ebbs and flows with each new technology wave as we collectively learn how to deal with misinformation.

For example, when radio was being first pioneered, there were people like John Brinkley who would use it to sell quack goat testicle treatments for erectile dysfunction. He became so popular that he ran for office and eventually moved to the Mexican border to avoid the government shutting down his radio towers.

The internet is kind of like early radio, or other means of communication today. Yes, it's more scalable, but we're still socially figuring out how to trust it, one harmful misinformation campaign at a time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley

That would be the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Franci...

Mrs. E.C. Harrington was the leading name to be looked at. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q91q53r

Oh, they were there. And during the black plague years too (the rat lickers). The difference is they didn't have a social media megaphone to induce a large number of susceptible people with their seductive tunes. "Listen to us and you can continue to live like you always did". It's a variation on that theme with the man not being able to understand a thing if his salary depends on it.

They were in government at the time: https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censo...

It has not always been this way. This is completely new territory for us.

Up until about 1900 nature was in control. Now, humans and domestic livestock are nearly all the land animals that exist. [1] [2]

Climate change is bad--very bad--but its main effect is going to be on other risks. Global thermonuclear war (which is also new in civilization terms) remains the biggest risk (probability x cost). Climate change ratchets up the probability of GTW.

1. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.h...

2. Graphical representation: https://xkcd.com/1338/

We’ve had empirical measure of industry related climate change since the 1860s hidden away by industry, who continued to be confirm through private research over and over.

If our math models can predict the Higgs decades before it’s experimentally discovered, why is a math model from the 70s confirming society will implode in the 2040s any less reliable? Same correct order of operations. Reconfirmed recently by better trained experts.

Unfortunately your “always been this” way is problematic nowadays since humans weren’t always capable of annihilating themselves. A whole lot of their imagined scenarios rightly were bullshit. Previous generations left behind rock and stone buildings, some sludge at worst.

We’re leaving behind an industrial mess and a melted planet.

Now is a very different point in time.

Earth will go on with or without us. If the answer is shrug it off, well that won’t work as a majority get anxious. Nihilism risks social stability and solution seeking. If a bunch of people aren’t going to care, why support society? Let’s all just go tribal now.

> Previous generations left behind rock and stone buildings, some sludge at worst.

I don't see why we should ignore the deforestation or hunting to extinction that previous generations imposed on the planet.

Compared to what we've done in the last 50 years they were rank amateurs.

They were pretty thorough at wiping out entire classes of large land animals in North America (and probably everywhere else but Africa and parts of India), at least if the theories hold.

The iron age required a lot of wood.

The iron age was a long time ago, America had not been 'discovered' yet.

Just two pictures to give you an idea of what has been lost:

https://i.pinimg.com/550x/73/62/26/736226b8437e6ce9eb1bab42e...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7a4mTiIIAEsESF?format=jpg

Multiply by a few million or so...

England used to be covered in dense forests of oak and other trees. It got almost completely deforested to build ships, among other things, and many of the areas never grew back. And that is what we know from detailed records. Many of the other changes there are no records. We don’t know full details of how extensive the megafauna was in the America’s before humans showed up, and how extensive and intentional was the hunting to extinction of them was. But it definitely happened and at huge scale for a long time.

We have evidence of wide scale changes made by humans long before written records existed. We also now have better records, so it’s easier to point to this one here done by this person, instead of only picking up what is visible in the fossil record (which is by it’s nature spotty and incomplete). But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

>And most of the time, when something does blow up, there wasn’t a clear or unambiguous difference between the thing that blew up, and all the things everyone was screaming about that did not.

History is not a linear function of progress. Conditions can and do get worse for people, sometimes for generations into the future. The stunning progress of the industrial revolution is the anomaly, not the norm.

We're in a car that's breaking down and we're hoping it will be cheaper to fix later if we ignore it now. We're seeing once-in-a-century weather events every few years. Sea level rise is currently impacting coastal communities. It's not going to go away if we ignore it and hope things get better in the future, we have to work on these things now. We've been refusing to make incremental changes for decades, so the only option left is drastic changes, and they're not going to get easier the longer we wait.

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