on efficiency increasing net consumption, this is called Jevon’s Paradox:
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This empirical optimism is also paradoxically irreverent toward the immutable attrition of complexity. Our creativity has limits, whatever they are just pick something. At the risk of sounding flippant, 200 years of “creative patching” is historically too small a window to say we can continue subverting this “law” with eternal vigilance (I’ve heard this described as “we are running out of tricks”). Maybe I’m oversimplifying when I say we would have to approach the limit of absolute foresight to achieve this, but I think there’s some truth to it. For example, I like these explanations of our rational limits, with regard to managing a complex society:
- CHOMSKY[1]: We have in our heads a certain set of possible intellectual structures. In the lucky event that some aspect of reality happens to have the character of one of these structures in our mind, then we have a science. And that doesn’t mean everything is ultimately going to fall within the domain of science. Quite the contrary… personally I believe that the nature of a decent society might fall outside scope of possible human science.
- ZIZEK[2]: Hegel says, the owl of Minerva only flies out in the dusk. [owl being the icon of wisdom] So philosophy can only grasp a social order when it’s already in its decay.
Particularly unsettling is our reaction to the blurriness of our creative boundaries—that we insist on walking blindly toward cliffs to find where they are. Optimism in uncertainty is great, but some projections cannot be certain until too late.
A final quote that might address your first points:
- OPHULS[3]: Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos—to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness...
Anyway, this debate is covered in the book The Wizard and The Prophet[4]. I think we can tell which schools we belong to.
[1]: https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=1748
[2]: https://youtu.be/lsWndfzuOc4?t=6703
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479243140
[4]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a...
Au contraire, it’s the belief that our system can continue like it’s doing that is the real hyperbole. Collapse is just baseline reality of civilizations.
- HISTORY: Collapse is a property of every civilization we’ve studied. These people were as smart if not smarter than us, working with societies smaller and simpler than ours.
- ECONOMY: The way money is created and managed today is an ongoing experiment that almost ended in 2008, and we are still on uncharted ground. We can only continue paying for debt by increasing consumption in the following year, yet our debt keeps increasing, by the ever-devaluation of our currency, requiring more production and consumption. No one is planning on an end to this model of growth.
- TECH: Most of our infrastructure is built under the incentive of increased efficiency and profit, not long-term robustness since profit has to be sacrificed to plan for contingencies like price fluctuations in supply. Short term tech outcompetes the long term, easy. Strong but fragile. And then there’s the incentivized inefficiencies from economies of scale: one calorie of food now requires ten calories of energy from our system to produce.
- COMPLEXITY: “More is different.” As everything becomes interconnected, things become entrenched into dynamics that become increasingly difficult to control and even reason about. Rational decision-making must always be filtered by the interests of the current system, thus there is a loss in agency in what we can do (read: incentives), and we are stuck trying to find creative solutions that must accept the framework of what may be a harmful system, often just making that system more effectively harmful.
- ENVIRONMENT: Some call it the sixth mass extinction. Whatever it is, the biosphere is changing dramatically. Soil is in a weird zombie state kept alive by oil. The basic line is that the value of life is diminished through the lens of our economy, as dead resources. So our model will continue bringing the real world into consistency with that deadness.
- MYTHS: When we live in a civilization that sanctifies all forms of advancement and improvement and growth, there is no fertile soil for the acceptance of limitation. We only have the vocabulary to label it pessimist. Thus, optimism becomes co-opted for the aspirations of a mythical techno-utopia beyond all conceivable boundary.
> Actually there was only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study; it lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as “traumatic.” Mostly the study consisted of interviews and filling out pencil-and-paper personality tests. The CIA was not involved.
> About 15 or 20 years ago a TV journalist named Chris Vlasto … looked up some of the other participants in the study and found that nothing had happened that was worth reporting in the media…
[1] https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2019/10/01/henry-murray-psycho...
This is a common myth that ignores a century of philosophical thought[1] on the subtle interplay between technology and behavior. Good parts and bad parts—often unintended—but certainly not neutral:
- Jacques Ellul insists that 'technique carries with it its own effects quite apart from how it is used... No matter how it is used, it has of itself a number of positive and negative consequences. This is not just a matter of intention'
- Don Ihde, the philosopher, has argued that particular tools unavoidably select, amplify and reduce aspects of experience in various ways
- Abbe Mowshowitz, a computer scientist, argues that 'tools insist on being used in particular ways'
- Neil Postman insists that 'the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another... we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are.'
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190215155149/http://visual-mem...
[1]:https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1134755140802633730
[2]:https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1119912012983803905
I really want to see a discussion of this here, to gauge if HN has doubts on this “myth of progress.”
> About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium’s ability to modify us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don’t think we have a good name for it yet.
> Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.”
He says that a bacterium or a sea cucumber doesn’t really think or have consciousness, but they exhibit tendencies that can be seen as behavioral desires. Similarly, the technium is a superorganism of ideas and artifacts which has entrenched itself into the global culture and economy, and that we have to understand it as separate from us so that we can discern its desires from our own. We cannot dial it back because that’s not what it wants, so we have to make sure we find a way to live in symbiosis with it.
You might be missing how expectations change after the introduction of a technology. I wouldn’t guess that people would be unhappy about not having cars before the car was even invented.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110203081223/http://blog.seatt...
A citation in your favor would be how net energy output only slowly declines as EROI plummets[1]. Slow decline is a general property of these types ”Seneca Cliffs”[2] present in collapse.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-03-12/the-real-energ...
[2] https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-o...
I saw someone reading this at a coffeeshop, it’s a new one:
[1] https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/tree/master/engines
[2] https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=HOWTO-Reverse_Engin...
I’d say I agree that human nature will play out differently when fitted into different systems—so much that I started thinking about the artificial component of our nature as separate:
human artifiture (ar-'TI-fi-ture) human nature refitted to and re-emergent from its own artificial systems
[1] https://anthroecologycom.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/human-natu...
How did the Polynesians find Tahiti? What did Aristotle write about in his lost book on economics? How did the Romans mix holographic glass at nano scales? How was the Amazon cultivated to have mostly edible plants? What was lost in the wake of every culture pillaged by the Mongols?
We’re advanced today because oil has given us the energy to build stuff. But we only know a sliver of the amazing things that have ever been learned.
> Zdog is a pseudo-3D Vector Art engine. You define your geometry using 3D splines and blobs, which render as 2D SVG shapes for any arbitrary perspective.
> For nerds—this simple translation is made possible by assuming an orthographic projection (where drawing 3D splines becomes trivially reducible to flat 2D splines—not so with perspective projection). More obvious, the occlusion-culling is achieved with a trivial drawing order or by hiding entire 2D primitives when appropriate.
> Let me insert one thing, which I'll bet you've noticed from talking to writers—is that most of the stuff that we think we're writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight out. You know, question and answer. In some sense, it probably can't be talked about directly, and that's why people make up stories about it.
Related, I was looking at multi-column CSS for magazine or newspaper typesetting. The controls on column-breaking were not well supported, making it very difficult to not end up with ugly typography. Would love to see improvements there as well.