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Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

Civilization isn't definitely going to collapse in the near future. And no, we shouldn't tell people it is, even if it were highly probable, for the simple reason that it would likely make the remaining time people have immeasurably worse.

And calling your entire blog 'collapse musings' suggests 100% crankdom.

Frankly, this is dumb.

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Well, a lot of this comes down to shades of grey.

The modern world is built on an impressive rube goldberg machine of supply chain dependencies and cheap oil. Yes green energy appears to be able to beat natural gas turbine, but we're careening towards 9 billion people.

In particular, we don't warehouse anything anymore. Everything is just-in-time production, and a minor disruption like COVID (which on the scale of 20th century historical events like world war I+II, or earlier pandemics like the black death, is chump change) caused major supply chain disruptions.

I wouldn't dismiss the problems outlined in the blog, just the certainty of the presentation and the binary thinking.

There are two real dangers: first is the combination of species extinctions and rapid climate change collapsing the entire biosphere. The second is an old and forgotten one: nuclear armageddon.

I'm under no (or few) polyannish illusions about the challenges we face. but the blog post is ridiculous, and worse, positively harmful death-cultism.

So how do you compare the impact COVID would have had on a less capable society?

There are lots of non-extinction level events that could cause high-level collapse via knock on effects. E.g., long term water issues in the American west, or if the Glen Canyon Dam were ever attacked, you would likely see the largest east ever mass migration in America away from the American Southwest in a week or two, followed by a catastrophic famine.

A more positive take here is that we are likely to see a transformation of industrial civilization. And that transformation must necessarily involve an expansion off the earth toward space-based industrial development. As Gerard O’Neill said, the surface of the earth is not a suitable environment for an expanding industrial civilization.

Some of our descendants will live in closed-loop habitats with around 50 gigatons of biosphere per occupant. But this will only happen if we prepare for the transition and engage in some long-term thinking.

Unless you have a science-backed point by point refutation of the many challenges to come, your comment is simply an empty assertion.

I would suggest just looking in detail at a couple of the proposed ends of civilization. If the author had one really good one, they should have presented that one fully to make a compelling argument. Of the ones I looked at, I wasn’t convinced.

A long list of vague gestures toward the end of the world is only convincing to people who are already on the author’s side.

I am of the opinion that it will not be the end of the world, but a transformation. Read literally ANY scientific literature on climate change and you will see that there is reason to believe major changes are afoot.

glad someone else got here before me to say the same.

I think this might fall into a kind of Cynicism (I am not sure)

I would suggest watching this video as opposite opinion/thinking material.

Is Dr. Peterson Hopeful for the Future?

https://youtu.be/G9Ojo_n5-VQ

About Cynicism, see Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs (4K)

https://youtu.be/WEP5ubPMGDU?t=180

Are you going to just issue a proclamation without so much as corroborate it with 1/20th the amount of legitimate facts that article supports its case with?

And we should take you at your word because youre more pedigreed? or enjoy more clout in the HN-sphere?

Is that it? Is that what this site has come down to? Ha!

I think that people should have the right to express themselves subjectively about something without having to submit a paper. Facts aren't the only thing people talk about, and the feeling that the article might suggest cannot be forced or denied by them.

They should have the right to express themselves freely but people need to understand that the bar to do so is so much lower than “submitting a paper” as you say.

Therefore any uninformed, emotional crackpot can submit a rant with no proof, no evidence, no citations, with no credentials so it’s not even an appeal to authority, at best it’s an appeal to emotion and or intellectual laziness.

I grant you the freedom to express yourself freely, and in return you grant me the freedom to call your low-effort rant garbage. Its a two way street.

But "no proof, no evidence, no citations, low-effort, rants, etc." do not mean 'no sense'. And the posting is clearly making sense. The claim "that civilization will collapse" is not an evident truth, so the contrary might be said, without further support. Apparently, the article did not have the necessary persuasive power.

Yes, but no one is interested in talking about the author's feelings. The response is to the authors conclusions, which are wrong. Just as it's eminently appropriate for the author to be able to express themselves sujectively, it's equally so for us to call it bullshit.

I really have to admit - I don't feel threatened by the author or by criticism of the author. I believe, like many others here, that this text actually doesn't deserve much attention. It's clearly apocalyptic. But it's interesting how the internet medium can compel you to engage in debate.

Yeah, so I don't have a problem with a personal blog where a person posts about what interest them. I just don't see a good reason for it to be at the top of HN.

Yes, I see that there are certain demands here. I'm new here and I thought this site was actually free. But I guess I need to adjust my expectations. I think that if you want to expect a certain standard of conversation, then you either have to make the page private or have discussions with real people in person, ideally with your friends. But as soon as you go public and demand that people adapt to your own content standards, then you distort the discourse on a very deep and fundamental level. You can neither educate people to be elitists, nor does the desire for it justify the karma evaluations that you automatically have to subject yourself to.

I think you could view HN as a fishing pond and fish selected voices privately to another private platform if you are really serious about high quality content.

The conversation in the blog post presumes a certain shared understanding of the facts. When you push a conversation out of a context of shared assumptions or understandings, then you are going to have to expect push back. I don't think that says anything bad about HN here. All you are getting is feedback on what a large segment of people think. In some alternative world they may have agreed with those background beliefs, and then the pushback would not have occurred (or it might have pointed in another direction).

If the article had approached its central question--whether to tell people or not--by first saying something like "suppose that we knew the civilization is going to collapse in the next ten years, the question arises: should we tell people?", it could have avoided more of the pushback it received.

> The response is to the authors conclusions, which are wrong.

How have you come to the conclusion that the author's conclusions are wrong?

Many in this thread have rightly pointed out that the author is speaking of the future which can't be know with certainty. Are you telling issue with the level of certainty the author seems to have, or do you fished with the argument of impending doom?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

It's the future the great thing about it is that we don't know what will happen. You can either dig a bunker but it won't help you with the general anxiety you feel. You will just have the anxiety in the bunker.

I think the blog post is written quite oddly, in a way that makes it hard to engage with in good faith. The central question is: “Should we tell people that civilization is doomed.” It is on a page called collapsemusings, the audience apparently believes that civilization is doomed already, this doesn’t seem to be a point in contention for the intended audience.

Despite this, it runs through a big list of supposedly civilization-killing effects. These are’t really linked together, it is just problem after problem, joined by phrases along the lines of “if that doesn’t get us, this next thing will.” This makes it very hard to respond to. The author also doesn’t make a concrete link between many of these bad things and the end of civilization. I can show an example, but it is just one in a list.

> Pollution and habitat destruction are mutilating the tree of life. Once the insects are mostly gone and the topsoil is mostly dead, we will no longer have the ability to grow food on a mass scale, and it will be game over for modern civilization. But it gets even worse…

The article linked the “mostly dead” claim is:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farm...

It includes dire news like:

> Amid growing concerns about topsoil loss, no-till and cover crops are becoming more popular, according to the 2017 US Census of Agriculture. Forty per cent of US cropland is grown on no-till farms, up from 32% in 2012.

> Though still not widely adopted, cover crops are becoming more popular with farmers, too, particularly in the country’s corn belt. Nationwide, farmers planted cover crops on 15m acres, a 50% increase from five years earlier.

Oh wait no, actually the article says this is a problem but solutions are starting to emerge on the market (already, as of 4 years ago). And, would this actually threaten civilization itself? We have a lot of extra food in the Americas, and lots of food waste…

But that’s just one suggestion of many. Maybe one is actually compelling. The list is too long for a mildly interested outsider to research each one in detail. This is a failure on the part of the blog post, assuming the intended audience is people who don’t buy into the premise already—and if not, why list the possible causes in the first place?. Just start with “assume for the sake of argument that civilization is doomed.”

Yes. This.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) was pretty apocalyptic, and caused by a combination of drought and bad farming practices. It's clear things can go badly. On the other hand, we've adapted and learned since then. I'm enthusiastic about the potential for AI and robotics to make farming more humane and less environmentally destructive while still keeping yields high (e.g. no till, with targeted use of pesticides and fertilizers).

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