It was an interesting read anyways. The answer should be obvious...
"The very fact that his book exists, he wrote, is the equivalent of tossing his cards face down on the table: If society had in fact collapsed, there would be no books, self-published or not. “So let me just admit that I was wrong,” he wrote. “But ... not by much. And not totally.” "
That's such a silly way of measuring the answer. Books existed in the Middle Ages (e.g. Dark Ages, yes people will say we don't call it that anymore but still). Tech could have regressed our society in manifold ways and destroyed and rotted away many many institutions and there would still be books.
They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
I'm pretty sure you could destroy a lot of the fabric of modern society and still have a publishing house and a printing company able to produce a few thousand copies of a book.
Thousands of copies of a book is something quaint in our great grandfather's days. The distribution mechanisms are what make it eyeroll worthy.
Really whenever you hear anyone talk about "the fabric of society" they are full of shit. Just like how theater, jazz, rock music, heavy metal, rap, interracial marriage, women voting, and gay marriage destroyed the fabric of society. Those ample precedents of being complete bullshit aside it is a stack of abstractions with no measures. It sounds like it means something but it doesn't - it is just mouth noises to manipulate your emotions.
> They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
They're not in the science game. They're in the selling content game. In that, all three (let's not forget the person writing the article) appear to have succeeded, gaining exposure (and payment for the article writer) thanks to the bet, regardless of rigor.
One could perhaps forsee more books and articles forthcoming as a result of this bet?
Orthagonal and nitpick. I couldn't parse the "e.g., Dark Ages" part until I realised what you may have meant is "i.e., Dark Ages". I read "e.g.," as "for example" and "i.e.," as "that is".
The "Dark Ages" usually refers to a subset of the Middle Ages, the earlier part, so "for example" worked for me and I only stopped and realized that ie was meant after reading your comment.
This is one of those stupid things about English that make life for pupils harder for no reason. In most languages the abbreviation is straightforward and based on the actual language. (Also spelling bees don't exist in most other places). Entire classes of error possibilities are just made up for no good reason in English.
As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part.
I'm curious what distinction you are reading into it. I'm sure that as a native learner I was more apt to just take mental shortcuts rather than resolve these ambiguities.
I assumed "for example" follows a collection/set as opposed to "that is" which is a 1-1 mapping. Sibling comment clarified it for me on why "for example" makes sense in this context.
> As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part.
As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF?
“That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz.) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-derived abbreviation) leads into an example intended to illustrate the broader category which precedes it.
They are not equivalent, nor are they “skip over phrases”.
Where does using one over the other cause an actual change in information though? Not just sticking out as the wrong one if you know the proper distinction, but actually conveying different information? The comparison that follows is the important part, the abbreviation is a part of grammatical dressing that provides some flow and framing.
Always, if used correctly. i.e. = in other words, e.g. = for example. Surely, as a native English speaker, you can see the huge difference? One is definitive, the other is presenting one or more examples.
How so? Because I'm not going to assume that you are calling HackerNews the same as technology in any reading of the sentence, purely from context. So what other shifted meaning can be had from the swap?
No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
> Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
Sure, but descriptivism isn't “words lose all distinct meaning if occasionally someone mixes them up” or nothing would mean anything.
> No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used? People don't know which is which, they often don't car,e and they pick one.
Prescriptivist "what should eg mean in this sentence?"
Descriptivist "what does Bob mean when he uses eg in this sentence?"
> Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used?
No, it's not.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “that is” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “for example”.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “for example” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “that is”.
Neither group (not the one with the dominant understanding nor the one with the minority understanding) uses the terms interchangeably, they both use them with distinct meanings.
The existence of some confusion of meaning and minority usages resulting from that does not eliminate all distinction in meaning, even from a descriptivist standpoint.
It's true that “X means Y” is usually a simplification of a distribution to a modal value, but that's also widely recognized and, from a descriptivist standpoint, already incorporated into the meaning of the phrase.
I agree that Sale should have paid the bet and claimed that he was a bit "early" about when the destruction would come.
In 1995 a person could have bought a US Treasury zero coupon bond for about $130 maturing in 25 years for . . . $1000. No other purchase would have been necessary to cover the bet. Relatively cheap insurance, I think.
The stakes were so extreme that it _is_ pretty easy to answer. Sure, there have been economic cycles, but the bet was whether the dollar is _worthless_ -- we are so far from it the Fed still can't reliably meet their inflation targets. A rebellion of the rich against the monied? Surely you're joking. And while global warming marches on, the 'significant number of environmental collapses' haven't happened, and we know we aren't close because I'm not sure even one environment has collapsed (damage ain't the same as collapse, folks).
It wasn't close. It isn't hard to tell that it wasn't close. Let's not give this doomsayer more credit than he's earned -- and he was completely wrong.
Like metrics wise it did, but you're not counting the massive loss of life and the vast disenchantment in the world after (which is admittedly hard to measure).
Millions of people were ethnically cleansed, that's not worth any kind of material progress. If you are trying to say we progressed materially in spite of ethnic cleansing, you don't understand that eliminating large swaths of the population will obviously result in material benefit to those who remain...
Agree. I think social technology has been an unmitigated disaster. I appreciate the engineering technology that has improved our infrastructure and environment. Air is cleaner, pollution is lower, food is plentiful. Cars and almost all other machinery are more efficient and more reliable. Medicine is better; things that used to be death sentences are either managable or more treatable. But compared to the 1980s, I'd take the social environment then vs now without blinking.
Say theoretically everything was the same in this timeline EXCEPT there is no reddit, facebook, twitter, or 4chan.
QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.
Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?
That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.
I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.
You don't need social media or high tech to attack and dismantle democracy, to exert racist police brutality, to mishandle a pandemic, or to flock together and storm a government building like the US Capitol. All of this happened in world history before, with less advanced technology, a century or even longer ago.
What was the actual importance of QAnon? Just a newsreel skevomorphism, an entity easy to defeat as it was easy to setup. Pretty much irrelevant, disenfranchised people still exist. QAnon and other crazy but promoted ideas have served as smokescreens hiding actual problems and at some point people will take their shot at going against some actual structural issues. No easy way out and who knows when that tipping point is but 2100 sounds very optimistic for those structures hold.
On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.
are airplanes tech? can a virus spread around the world easily without planes, trains, and automobiles?
Can people be super dependent on a financial system if it weren't digital?
Even government—people had more freedom under a low-tech monarchy than a high-tech democracy. Can't enforce too many laws when law enforcement doesn't have vehicles or phones.
You must be quite young. 2020 is a minor blip on the huge ups and downs over the past 2 centuries.
The only way I could fathom "society collapsing" is if I felt the interactions you see on the internet were an accurate reflection of society at large. It's not - not even close.
It's definitely impacted some more than others. There's now an entire class of men who can no longer have romantic relationships because they've been cast out of the dating market as technology altered dating dynamics not in their favor. For these men, their world, their society is destroyed.
Definitely becoming a major issue now. I think they're generally gross and it's obvious why they're single, but there has to be an underlying reason for the trend.
It's a form of self-harm. They seek it out. It exists for many of the same reasons as other forms of self-harm. Trying to pin down a specific cause is probably not the best approach as it's likely pretty specific to individual men.
I think the prevalence of social media (Not just dating apps) has somewhat shafted average men since now women have far more access to (EDIT: highly) desirable men.
The world continuously becoming more sexually liberal also means that women are more likely to pursue these men, and so average men are looked down upon moreso than before.
I'm sure plenty of people have seen the Tinder/Bumble studies where men rated women around 50/50 attractive/unattractive, whereas women rated men 20/80. I believe this is a result of the above, and a lot more nuanced aspects of the change in culture over the last say, 30-40 years.
I'm in an older group. It feels like much of the same.
In my grade school all of the girls had a crush on one or two guys even the less pretty ones. No one had a chance. High school was similiar. Going to rock concerts changed that as I started to meet girls with similiar interests. Going to a concert would automatically give me a leg up because we were now part of a social circle. Later on in life I would go to a karoke bar and just the act of showing up a few times on the same day for a few weeks puts you in a social circle with others who do the same.
I don't know if things have changed all that much aside from the amount of people online. I use to meet girls from bbses / the early social media sites. The differences is they were smaller and you felt like part of a social circle.
Today I would advise to try to go to social meetups like photography in the park groups.. try to join a smaller group.
In the end the girls from my elementary school grew up and married. Everyone married similiar to them. If they are overweight so are there husbands. If they were an 8 their husbands would be an 8. If they are a 4 their husbands are a 4. They general look like each other.
My guess is the girls from your primary school will end up with someone similiar to them and so will you.
My other point of view is the opposite will happen.
Men will find happiness in porn, paid sex and virtual sexual experiences and will find that women can't live up to those experiences and men will not be satified with regular women.
An average women's sexual peak is later in life and they will not be as satified with virtual sex in the same way.
There will be a need for younger men from an older women group that could bridge the divide.
If you are young and want casual sex go on courage life not tinder for better results.
There's defiantly not someone for everyone. In China and India there are millions of more men than women and countless articles about the "left over" men.
It's a common belief among America's hikikomori who attempt to explain all of life through the lens of sexual contact or romantic intimacy. It's some sort of pop sociology that is highly appealing to these people for no real reason.
I'm not sure exactly what you're hinting at, but I think you should take a cold, hard look at yourself and the expectations you place on your potential partners. Do you imagine them as actual human beings with their own thoughts, aspirations, preferences, goals? What does such a person have to gain (emotionally / socially) by choosing YOU in particular for a partner?
In all relationships, romantic or not, personality is everything. Do you try to be a positive person, or do you complain every time something doesn't go your way? An attractive personality and some self-confidence can go a long way in making you attractive to others, even if you haven't been particularly advantaged by your genes.
If you're talking about the dynamics around bars, hookups, and dating apps, you know that's not the only way to meet people, right? I think some of the strongest relationships come out of shared interest in a hobby / skill / career. Join hobby groups etc (not with the intention of finding a partner -- that will be weird and creepy -- but remain open to the idea that you might bump into someone along the way that really aligns with you)
This is complete BS. In our unequal society, some people have 100s of potential partners waiting in line for them while for others, they will never get a single chance in their entire lifetimes. Same with career opportunities. Either you're rich and have more opportunities every single day than you can possibly fathom or you don't have a single good opportunity in your entire lifetime.
What's more tragic about it is that it has increasingly little to do with merit or hard work and increasingly more to do with dumb luck. It's all social networking; but that's totally random. People are only selecting friends and partners based on capital these days, not based on any other meaningful characteristic. People are just appendages to the capital... Capital is the agent. People are replaceable.
Your statements are extreme. There may be some subcultures and bits of society that behave like this, but it is far from universal. Please take a break from your current forums/podcasts/youtube/etc.
What I'm saying is based on first hand experience not being sedated by video games and other mindless entertainment which normally serves as a cheap substitute to real meaningful life experiences which
seem to have vanished from most regular people's lives.
An unfathomable number of people alive today have totally pointless lives because all the good stuff has been taken out and substituted with cheap thrills.
It's no coincidence that rich people have many friends and experience a lot of positive emotions in their lives. I guarantee you that poor people experience very few positive emotions and they don't have a choice. The glass ceiling is unbreakable.
I think people who use dating apps tend to focus on superficial features like physical attractiveness or (the appearance of) wealth / status. People will judge you based on their first impression, rather than taking time to know you more deeply as a person.
So, I think for someone who doesn't want to play "the dating game", yes, an effective dating strategy is to accept that they won't be able to easily find a partner in the short-term. Instead, a strategy of self-improvement combined with leading a more social life (via hobby groups etc) in which one regularly meets new people is a great way for them to eventually bump into someone they vibe with really well.
I think many people who are desperate for a partner are also unhappy in other aspects of their life -- joining non-romantic social groups centered around a common interest is a great cure for loneliness, until the right person comes along.
What do you think accounts for this change? Seems pretty plausible to me that it has something to do with technology. Perhaps it has something to do with dating apps, perhaps young men are substituting porn for real intimacy, perhaps some combination. Either way, doesn't seem like a good change. And by the pigeonhole principle, if more women are having sex than men, it must be the case that some men are sleeping with multiple women (modulo homosexuality and young women sleeping with older guys).
(I don't think "you just need to be a better partner" moralizing has much explanatory power, it's a lecture that can be delivered in any time or place to any gender and doesn't speak to underlying trends.)
Could the explanation be as simple as the economy? Younger people are less likely to have a career and more likely to live with their parents since 2008, both of these are not known to be turn-ons.
Not strictly related, but longbets.org promotes a similar idea. Most famously, it played host to the "million-dollar bet" between Warren Buffet and Protege Partners that the S&P 500 would outperform a portfolio. I believe this bet was made a year before it was established, however.
Tech made life better for some people and worse for others. All I can say is that it seems to have made my life and the life of all my relatives and friends worse and it seems to have made my enemies' lives better.
For reference; I'm an altruist, open source developer and value creator. My enemies are greedy psychopaths and zero-sum value capturers.
Reading the 3 categories the judge put together, I'd have to say that the win does go to Sales.
Economic Collapse: Kelly, the "economy" is doing just fine if you're in an upper percentile. For most people the economy is not working for them.
Global Environmental Disaster: Sales, many signs point to more chaotic and worse environmental conditions to come.
The War Between Rich and Poor: Much like question one this one is occurring, and it's getting worse not better. Economic inequality has increased and the trend is increasing.
Sale is correct on many points, his timeline just isn't accurate.
The problem with the broad trend prediction format is you wind-up with binaries and predicting a 1 or a 0 is easy.
Economy - "Good or bad"
Environment - "Good or bad"
Wealth distribution - "Good or bad".
If you're betting, someone has to get 2 or more out of 3. But that could be anyone, including complete idiots. So this doesn't by itself tell you anything.
Most of the "bad" would be vaguely "left" positions but they could vary from the left of the NYT to any number of extreme positions as well as including general pessimists.
The environment getting worse is a matter of fact, not ideology. You can argue in bad faith about the meaning of the word 'worse' if you want, trying to claim it's too subjective, but I think we all have roughly the same idea of 'worse' and know that that's what the environment is getting.
>For most people the economy is not working for them.
For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago.
In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding.
Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well.
So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to mean at the very minimum more than 50%) "the economy is not working for them." Which people are these? How do they compare for income or assets or access to things to their ancestors?
The median wage gives you a picture that is closer to the real value than just anecdotes. For most people on Earth, there has been a great increase in living standards. It just so happens that much of it took place outside of the West.
My bad. In any case, the principle still stands. Looking up some stats I get a figure of 0.17% of the population being homeless. A tragedy to be sure, but a tiny fraction of the whole. In other words, it makes more sense to look at the median wage than what you see in a given city as a single individual going on about their day, if your goal is to get a feel for the situation.
The recent spike in homelessness, the health insurance coverage gap, rising economic inequality, we are facing many major urgent crises. But there is a severe lack of imagination to suggest that our problems as a society or species can't or haven't been far, far worse.
A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.
Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.
Those are not economic problems. They are structural problems. People have decided to build their cities all at once and expect them to never change. They have convinced themselves that incremental progress will not or should not happen and that any problems can be solved by running away from them.
A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.
Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.
US homeless population has been steadily dropping for decades, likely even longer if you dig for data. Here's recent numbers [1]. It's also an outlier on the condition of how a person in the US is faring. Taking that as evidence for how people live overall is as reasonable as pointing to the top 0.1% and claiming all is well. Neither gives as accurate a picture as a median.
The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.
if a bet does not have objective conditions, then it's not really a bet but rather an opinion or hunch. So just split the money evenly and call it a day
A comment I made on this when it was posted a few days ago:
I am surprised that this was regarded as a close decision. I guess a lot depends on wording, but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question, I wonder if they're just saying that to be diplomatic.
Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty, but one way to think about it, is that it can get so much worse than it currently is. And it seems like the predictions being wagered over were pointing to the "so much worse". I think the same holds for the environment, and for the proposed war between rich and poor.
I get the temptation to treat those as close, because there's tensions that you could imagine leading to some worst case scenarios. And so one might want to acknowledge the tension, and you want to put that acknowledgment into some sort of partial credit. But I think that way of thinking gets all confused and hair splitty, and comes from a place of thinking everything's a trick question, and not wanting to be perceived as overlooking nuances.
Anyhow, credit to all parties involved for formalizing their discussion and getting a bet out of it. I think those kinds of conversations are valuable, and I think it helps to get people thinking about what it takes for beliefs to be true over the long run.
It was close, in 2008. It was frighteningly close. Not before or since, but yeah, I'll give them "close" on that one. ("Worse than 1930" was part of the criterion. We didn't come close to that in terms of the final outcome, but we were, I think, within a very few days of getting there.)
Here was one of the predictions in the words of one of the participants in the bet:
>“The first [measurement] would be an economic collapse. The dollar would be worthless, the yen would be worthless, the mark would be worthless—the dislocation we saw in the Depression of 1930, magnified many times over.
The dollar is not worthless and not close to worthless. There's no reasonable interpretation of that outcome, or of reality, where the dollar becoming worthless was "close" to an accurate prediction. I truly, honestly don't know how to reason with someone who is going to dispute that.
Another prediction was that we would be in an active global military conflict between rich and poor nations. Also not close.
Another prediction was "Africa, from the Sahara to South Africa, becomes unlivable."
If words actually mean things, none of these were close.
First: Those weren't the words of the bet, per the article. The actual words of the measure of collapse, per the article were:
> an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
Now, you sound like you have a source other than the article, and the article sounds like it might be a paraphrase. But it's kind of hard for me to judge without knowing what your source is.
But, using the wording from the article: Were we close to the first of those in 2008? When Lehman collapsed, if there hadn't been intervention the dominoes would have continued to fall. How far would they have continued to fall? Hard to tell now, but at the time it looked like they were just going to keep falling...
I don't know if this changes anything but I think the actual bet is described by the line
>I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe—a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won't even be close. I'll bet on my optimism.
It seems like in the actual terms of the bet Kelly paraphrases Sale. That is how I would read it sans an actual signed legal document. But then again I'm not a lawyer or anyone versed in gambling etiquette and protocol.
> I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to...a global currency collapse
Why would anyone take this bet? If you're right, then $1000 USD probably won't be worth very much after the "global currency collapse", so you'd basically be saying "I'll give you $1000 in 2020 if it's worth anything"
Good point. I would guess, since it's all moot from the perspective of the person making those predictions, the whole exercise is just a theatric flourish, meant to communicate in a more or less performative way.
The other (perfectly plausible) answer is that the part of one's brain that believes the claim, and the part of ones' brain that believes in the power of bets and value of money that make bets interesting, are brain regions that haven't reconciled with one another.
To Kevin Kelly, today, $1000 is barely worth anything anyway. So he also stands to gain nothing. (And, indeed, he didn't even want the money, but asked for it to be sent to charity.)
So ask yourself the question again. Why would two public intellectuals make a public bet, when neither stands to gain any monetary benefit from it? My goodness, it's a mystery.
Sale says (1) all of Africa south of the Sahara will be uninhabitable, and Kelly paraphrases that as (2) "environmental disasters of some significant size".
It would seem to be against the spirit and intention of the bet, in any plausible reading, to grant Sale a win on the grounds that (2) comes true but not (1), when (1) was attempting to paraphrase (2).
How can there even be ‘significant warfare between rich and poor’? Some kind of communist revolution? By definition the poor don’t have the resources to significantly attack the rich.
IMO, it is the memes which will do it. Have you seen the one about capitalism teetering on an ivory tower, unable to to continue growing after moving away from extractivism and hopelessly trying to exert itself into a knowledge based economy? It's a real tickler.
I really don't think that 2008 was ever close to anything like "Worse than 1930". For example Europe handled the financial crisis in an almost completely farcical way and didn't suffer anything close to the economic problems of 1930's America. There was never a moment where the US or any other important financial center was at risk of a real bank run of any significance.
>“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Great quote! Gradually and unknowingly you approach a tipping point until some factor pushes you over the edge like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back".
I believe Sale was/is broadly right. Some of Nassim Taleb's ideas also play into this viz. our inability to predict the future and the catastrophic effect of non-linear and "black swan" events. It is not "Technology" that is the problem but our stewardship of it. We simply are not taking a holistic system view of it which is absolutely necessary when our system (i.e. our planet) is "closed".
Jacques Ellul also has a lot to say on the effects of Technology on Society.
I think the following factors, broadly speaking; will be our (i.e. Civilization as we know it today) downfall;
* Environmental Disaster as a consequence of rampant consumerism. The planet simply cannot sustain it. Our current "Renewables/Recyclables/Carbon Credit etc." policies are a joke. We have forgotten that our planet is a closed system with finite resources.
* Our "Baser" Instincts - We will always subvert any and all technological advances towards the pursuit of power, wealth, and greed and exclude "others" (i.e. those not belonging to our group) thus increasing the "inequalities" in our society.
* Non-linear "catastrophic" effects of many of our social systems - As Nassim Taleb points out in his books, many of our systems are non-linear in their effects and inherently fragile. Thus our ability to predict the long-term future is non-existent.
* The rise of mono-culture biological and social systems. Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units eg. Madagascar/Australia vs. Asia/Europe, small self-sustaining villages/kingdoms bartering amongst themselves vs. megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a "common currency". This makes the entire system fragile to local shocks.
* Adaptation and Evolution of other species against our measures towards controlling them eg. "Superbugs".
> Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units
No, it did not. Evolution does what it does, things that are good enough at surviving survive. For instance, multicellular organisms, and in particular large animals, are "megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a 'common currency'". Fragility is a more nuanced topic too, large coupled systems are vulnerable to internal problems, but they can also withstand external forces that would kill the equivalently populous "loosely coupled federation". All in all, evolution is probably not the best thing to draw lessons about organization from, because a) any system of organization you can think of is likely already effectively used in some organisms, somewhere, and b) evolution doesn't care about well-being of individual cells, but we care about the well-being of individual humans. That last constraint means we can't just do thing the way evolution does, which is throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West and North America). I feel Sale is incredibly naive in thinking agrarian or subsistence based societies were the pinnacle of human comfort. Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in? A very reductive and simplistic way of thinking, ala 'Lets go back to the good ol days where the world made sense to me...' It's ridiculous.
I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.
Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.
If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.
> I was under the impression that in a distant past tribal wars ceased at the first blood, serious wound or at worse first victim, and didn't induce a major risk for non-combattants.
Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated.
I agree though that total nuclear war would be way worse than all the tribal wars in history. Although, interestingly, it seems like threat of nuclear war has prevented lots of wars. There have been no wars between major powers since nuclear wars. Maybe the closest was the Korean War, but China wasn’t a nuclear power back then.
Which non-modern tribal war ended in genocide or mass destruction?
AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.
Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.
The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).
There are multiple theories for what killed Neanderthals [0] but violence by Homo Sapiens seems the most supported by the fossil record. It would be hard for climate change and disease to wipe out an entire species, especially since there was interbreeding with homo sapiens so if a disease was so virulent to span the entire half of the world with Neanderthals it would affect homo sapiens as well.
I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.
I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.
This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].
There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).
It's not that simple. Sure "the good old days" wasn't that good, but that doesn't mean he was completely wrong.
>We have made untold advances in the medical sciences
Out of reach of a lot of humanity and for those that can access it it is not without risks (just look at the medical devices debacle in the US). It also isn't as good as we often seem to believe. For example the US is number 7 in Deaths by heart attack but it is still double the amount of deaths as number 1[0].
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Acording to EIA[1] "The share of U.S. total energy consumption that originated from fossil fuels has fallen from its peak of 94% in 1966 to 80% in 2018". 80% is not "divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels". It will be at least ten years before we see another 10% down in the US.
>we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Yet human rights, press freedom and economic freedom are all on a downswing in the US[2][3][4].
I feel like equally as many people rejected Pinker because it violated their priors.
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other -- I guess my prior is that I am skeptical of broad narratives one way or the other and I think Pinker is prone to facile generalizations -- but most of the rebuttals I've seen to Pinker seem offended by the idea of progress, rather than taking his arguments seriously.
Regarding energy: the trend in PV is an exponential with a roughly 2.25 year doubling time, and while I make no claims about how long that exponential will continue for, that trend would reach about 10-17 TW by 2030 if continued.
The US is just one country and we're talking about the future of humanity as a whole. Here in the UK we've eliminated more than half our carbon emissions from energy generation, and generally the US is lagging far behind a lot of other countries. Covid aside, economic and health improvement trends globally have been incredibly positive. Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. That doesn't look much like a collapse to me.
>Since 1995 about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty
That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above it. The world population grew by 1.6 billion between 1990 and 2010 according to the UN. So on one side we have the "one billion have been lifted out of extreme poverty" but on the other we have "1.6 billion more humans" with the greatest growth in poverty stricken countries like Nigeria. I don't know the numbers but I don't believe that the "about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty" is the whole truth since AFAIK the amount in extreme poverty have grown.
EDIT:
Looking up the numbers it hasn't "grown" but "extreme poverty" is seen as "statically less than 1.9 international dollars per day". Is it a lift to $3 or $30? $3 is still living in squalor and destitution if you ask most people in the West I'm sure. IMO extreme poverty haven't declined outside statistics.
And I think you’re underestimating the marginal utility of going from $1.90 to $3 — both would suck for someone with a baseline of Western expenses, but it is the difference between a literal hand-to-mouth life of subsistence farming in a shack, versus a family that all works being able to collectively afford to rent a basic concrete flat with terrible plumbing on an unpaved street (citation: my ex took me to Nairobi a few years ago, we met one of her local friends, the friend’s flat was about $800/year to rent, $800/year is the increased income from two people going from $1.9 to $3 per day).
This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.
You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.
It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.
I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).
Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.
You're right to call that out. There are one billion fewer people in extreme poverty now than there were then. A bit over 500 million compared to over 1.5 billion, even taking into account the increase in the worlds population. Most of this increase has been in Asia where hundreds of millions of people have risen into the urban middle class. Industrial wages in China have increased almost 10x in the last 2 decades, and industrial employment has ballooned.
The situation in Africa isn't so good, but has substantially improved. Of course the cost of this has been stagnant wage growth and anaemic employment in the developed world, as hundreds of thousands of people in China and South East Asia joined the global labour pool.
Back breaking labour, very long working hours, poor health care and for the most part, endentured servitude to those who own the land/mills/factories you toil away in?
All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.
Oh and this
we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping).
Not now, not ever. Not possible.
Your own link puts the EROI of renewables in the same range as conventional oil (wind slightly better, PV slightly worse), and way better than shale or sand oil.
And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.
>All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society
I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.
For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.
As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.
I think you have missed the point. Please see my response to "lamontcg" in this thread for some rebuttal.
Note that it is not just Sale (though of course he is quite extremist in his views) who has pointed to the deleterious effects of our Technology, Social systems etc. which may lead to "Collapse" of our Civilization; you also have Nassim Taleb, Jacques Ellul, Michael Ruppert espousing similar arguments in different contexts.
All that you mention are "local effects" having their own unforeseen long-term negatives, due to self-limiting feedback loops, for example (without making any moral/judgemental/ethical calls);
>global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades
Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
>untold advances in the medical sciences
True but the other side is also adapting itself to work around our efforts eg; "Superbugs". We also don't know what the long-term effects of genetic engineering would be. There is also the problem that advanced medicine leads to longer lives and thus more pressure on social safety nets and healthcare.
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Wishful thinking; we have a long way to go and given our propensity for short-term fixes we may very well run out of time.
>when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Awareness does not necessarily lead to Usage/Implementation.
The above is not to say that "good old days" were "very good" and we should blindly roll back our scientific and technological use. On the contrary just like we have realized that Atomic warfare is unlike anything ever experienced by mankind and hence has to be prevented and dealt with in a whole different way than we have ever handled our "differences", so should our use of Science/Technology towards the betterment of our Societies, Other Species, Natural Resources and ultimately the whole Planet.
> Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
Taken globally, and looking at purchasing power. Things have been massively improving for the very poorest. Because developing countries are doing just that, developing.
Inequality and poverty are two distinct things. Poverty is having lack of access to things you need. Inequality is becoming a big issue, and poverty is far from being solved. There certainly are opportunities to solve both problems. But the depth of poverty for a lot of humans has lessened the last few years, and that is undeniably a good thing.
> The global poverty line has been on steady decline
That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
> If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
This seems surprising to me. What do you think is the best source for me to learn about this metric? I found a lot of info on the methodology behind $1.9/day [0] but couldn’t find much by looking for the $7.50/day mark and how it has changed over time.
I found this guardian article referencing $7.4/day [1] but the link they give to Peter Edward on an ethical poverty line doesn’t work. When I search for Edward’s concept I find papers from him [2] but they seem to reference $2/day.
Edit: I was able to find a gapminder analysis [3]. They break income into four groups, less than $2, less than $8, less than $32, more. The shift in poverty is still positive so I’m not sure what measure is being used to show 1B more under $7.5/day. This may be due to demographic trends where that group is growing faster. It is important to consider the overall proportion, not just absolute number, as well as the alternative of where they would have been (ie, a billion under $7.50 is better than a billion under $1.9).
But it’s hard to discuss without source data and methods.
The author addresses this question, along with how the UN has continually shifted the goal posts to reinforce the narrative that poverty has been reduced.
Thanks for replying, I’ll check out this book and learn about how it’s measuring poverty. The concept seems about inequality though, that is different (although important) than poverty.
This quote mixes the two concepts “ Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day.” and doesn’t provide context on whether the percent of the worlds population living in less than $5/day is better or worse than in 1960.
Right, the book overall is about global inequality, but he definitely addresses the defined poverty thresholds. These thresholds are used by the wealthier countries to claim an improvement in people’s lives, while they’re gaming the numbers to show a decrease in poverty.
Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
> Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
This is not the method described in the world bank web site. I don’t think the intent is to boil down to a single measure.
Tracking data globally is really challenging, so a consistent and meaningful measure is required to even have a hope of a perspective across countries. It’s useful in eradicating poverty to both measure progress or failure as well as to prioritize investment for areas of greatest need.
This also isn’t the only measure of poverty as there’s many others and there’s quite a bit of literature in global health on other measures as well.
That being said, I think there is room for improvement both in developing more useful metrics as well as improving accuracy of measures.
Would I rather prefer the society of 1995 or of 2020 ? That is a very simple question for me. I do not find it very close.
If I your were in India which was a deep socialist state in 1980s and 1995 just when the seeds of 1992 reforms were sowed, it was a complete shithole compared to the India of 2020 even with COVID.
Likewise China, I first went in 2001 and it's a different country in terms of most people's every day lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty into comfortable livelihoods and I personally know some of them. There's still a long way to go, but it's incredible how far it's already come.
Future is not for us to see and when it comes to predicting future of nations and societies we are especially pretty bad. Having said that sustainability is a first world problem. There is no point sustaining anything if 80% of your population is malnourished, availability of food per capita and clothes per capita is less than what is needed for sustenance of life where thousands of children die of polio and thousands more disabled.
I would rather live in an unsustainable India of 2020 than in sustainable India of 1985.
Debt is not really much of a problem for India as debt of gdp ratio is pretty low. Debt is not a problem in terms of sustainability either, when the proverbial shit hits the fan the country might go into massive recession but even in the worst of worst cases and even with terrible politicians at help recessions don't last very long. But the gain upto that point are all real. (India has over 50M more young and healthy people purely because the country has eliminated Polio and dozen other diseases that were common 40 years ago).
Rising population and rapid urbanization would require India to manage its forests, water and other resources better and India is not equipped to do so because of government control of key industries and bad policies. But we can hope things will change for better as a more competent government is at helm.
>but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question,
He did not think the currency issue was close at all, "Not much contest here" and granted that one unequivocally to Kelly.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
As for war between rich and poor, I think it should be judged compared to historical examples. Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no. Occupy came and went. The global economy recovered ok from the crisis in 2008 by historical standards. Advanced technology is already solving the pandemic for us, and we should be back to normal economically within a few years. Only 4 years ago a Billionair won a US election on a platform of cutting taxes for the rich, which he did. If there's a war going on between rich and poor, I'm not seeing it.
>He did not think the currency issue was close at all,
Thank you for catching that, I stand corrected with respect to the judging of the economy. It's interesting that there are commenters here taking issue with my point disputing that, when it turns out not even the judge, Bill Patrick, felt that question was close! People will really debate anything.
As you point out, Bill did, however, remark that the other questions were close, and asserted that Kirk was not merely close, but correct(!) on the other two questions. I am surprised about that, for reasons more or less along the lines you mention.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
And this is what scares me. From my point of view, we are already well into multiple major environmental disasters. I wonder how much worse it has to get before more people realise that.
> Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no.
I’d argue the drivers for the war are already here, but the only reason the war isn’t class based is the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them. They’ve successfully driven in dividing lines such as race and religion to distract us as the plunder to their hearts content.
I feel there's also an element of the divide of power between both parties being greater too. For example, the police force - which generally supports the status quo of the powerful - is far more able to control and suppress uprisings than in the past. This lends itself to providing a higher barrier to the poor pushing back, and thus necessitates those drivers (such as blatantly separate outcomes before the law, higher wealth inequality, etc.) to become stronger than in the past before conflict eventuates.
I mean it sort of relates to the 2nd amendment idea that private citizens at home with firearms can overthrow a tyrannical government if need be. When it was minutemen vs foot soldiers that was a drastically different equation to now when it's AR-15s vs a military-industrial apparatus with drone strikes, tanks and automated mass surveillance.
The way I see it the bet was about the statement that the drivers for the war were already there in 1995 and that it would actually materialize in the 25 years before 2020 - which it (IMHO obviously) has not. The struggle is still there, but a society-shattering escalation of the conflict has not happened (yet?).
The observation that "the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them" seems like a reasonable tactic for the society (or the rich) to prevent such a war from occurring, and this might plausibly succeed for a prolonged time in the future - as you say, "successfully driven in dividing lines" that are long-lasting. I see Kirkpatrick Sale's position as essentially claiming that the tensions are stronger than the societal bonds that favor status quo and centralization, that these tensions can cause a society to collapse - and the last 25 years have shown the opposite, that an increase in these tensions is still tolerable and does not lead to a collapse.
Yeah, the bet and judgment are both unreasonably favorable to Sale, to an absurd degree.
He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
The first part of the bet is a good one: the dollar -- the world's reserve currency -- becoming worthless is something that makes sense as a part of society collapsing, and more importantly, it's fairly objective to judge. The other two are far more ambiguous.
>He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
Yeah, this is exactly the thing I'm stuck on when I go over these responses. I feel like people really aren't grasping the difference in scale between (a) 2008 financial crisis was pretty bad and (b) dollar becoming "worthless".
People are talking as if those two things are close, or taking up the tone of cautionary finger wagging and saying "well, you know he wasn't too far off" and going off to say this or that about a given poverty statistic.
My best theory as to what's going on here is that people are just cannibalizing the question and using it as a digression into various world problems in ways that don't clearly connect back to the wording of the question.
You’re not taking into account that Kelly bet that it wouldn’t even be close to Sale’s vision. That massively evens the odds, because we aren’t so far from his vision, and most people would agree that the world (or the west at least) is much more going downwards than upwards
It may not have destroyed society (yet), but it seems clear to me that what began as a way to make life simpler and more efficient and to solve previously unsolvable problems has morphed into a dystopia of surveillance capitalism and dark patterns.
The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.
But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.
I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.
What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?
Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.
The world has undoubtedly changed but mostly for the better. Digital technology, however, is still in its infancy. Many users are brand new to the internet in the last ten years. I have learned to pace my time on the internet, but this is after 25 years of practice and burning out on the novelty of it. We are all figuring out that new does not mean progress.
Case in point: I recently started back with the DVD side of Netflix. This is what I remembered being so awesome: find a good movie list, add it to your queue, pop envelopes in the mailbox when you're done.
It is 1000% better than endless scrolling on 5 different streaming services. I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I avoided the whole smart-home fad because there's nothing wrong with physical controls and buttons that have been developed over generations of human interaction. That's why I'm waiting for a good built-in-the-USA electric instead of buying a chassis with a touchscreen.
But someone else may hate controls and love touchscreens -- cool. The market lets us pick and choose.
If we can continue to reign in the inequality and environmental impacts produced by technology, use the incredible wealth we have as societies to finally end poverty, and continue to make progress against injustice, the future is incredibly bright.
>I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I don't get why you wouldn't be able to do this on a streaming service, unless the catalogue is somehow worse. The DVD part sounds like a superfluous and cumbersome extra layer
I think in many ways yes. A local island that now has been turned into residential units, still has some old buildings from the 1920s. Including a dance hall. Its abandoned now. But the scale and grandeur of the place, has played on my imagination. What it was like to be in there with a thousand other people on a weekend just out dancing. No internet, or TV. I've also seen some street photos from NY from that time period. Everyone looks so trim and upright, well dressed and civilized. Its like tech added 30-50 lbs of fat on the average person. And replaced actual social interaction, with poor substitutes of facebook, twitter, youtube and TV.
It may be the case that socio-economic issues have worsened those things, not technology. And that we are not fully leveraging technology in order to improve lives.
I don't know if thats alway the case. People used to have liaisons, read books, play music together, go to church, play card games, garden, ride horses, and so on. Often surrounded by friend and family. Just seems like the quality of the average moment was better back then. The experience more authentic and often more social and more dangerous.
For example if you liked to go out and play poker in a local bar in the 1920s. It Required actual poker skills,
but also good banter, and had an element of danger to it. Seems like your brain neurones would be firing, just to keep up with the banter at the table while you downed whiskey trying not to lose too much money.
Now so many people stay at home, watch some TV or watch some porn, fall asleep and go to work the next day. And things are safe, virtual and fake.
Technology has made movies possible, I love movies. But I value the experience of reading a book differently. Its a much richer and deeper experience. And technology made it very cheap now with things like kindles. But still I think there's been a decline in the amount of people reading books. Even though I think society would be enriched from more people reading books. Its now the average person has easier lazier entertainment to occupy them.
The anxiety from modernity hits different today. We are bombarded with the most realistic forms of imagery ever in human history. What was once a black and white picture in a magazine is now a video in HD.
50-60 years ago you weren't constantly bombarding yourself with people who have more than you. Today, people go on instagram and see the rich living the dreams they'll never be able to attain, despite being told they could do anything in school and by their parents. People watch porn which shows insanely attractive people doing any fantasy imaginable, with no effort on their part.
Their regular lives will never compare with that, they get depressed and anxious seeing how they are nowhere near these people. And then this leads to anger and eventually populism, and it'll eventually lead to war.
There can't be war because the next World War would most likely make us extinct. We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
That's a pretty confident position to take. Really war could be all around us. If climate change continues unabated, large swaths of the earth will no longer be able to produce food. Hot temperatures will cause mass migration (we're already seeing this, see Syria). Billions of people, unable to be fed - desperation - war.
> We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
People in the US literally refuse to wear masks to protect others around them. Do you really think this is possible?
I am very confident in my views because I'm going all-in on them with all my time and my money. That means making sure that I have the best position possible on the subject, which means lots of reading and research. If I was not certain about this path, I would just have fun and live a simply free life. But I will work towards this instead.
But yes, large positive paradigm shifts are possible. They are also necessary, and we must begin the work. To decentralize production of goods/services as much as possible, to make food and energy plentiful and free for all, etc. We will accomplish these goals and more.
There are plenty of people having real experiences today. In absolute numbers, there are probably more of them than in the period you describe, since the population has ballooned. The life you want is out there.
Plus you are ignoring all the bad parts. Don't want to be a stay at home wife and be bored out of your mind? Too bad. Wrong tone or sexual preference? Whoops. Don't want to get black lung or mind numbing-factory work? Better luck next time.
There is a selection bias at work. Only notable people are portrayed in media, for the most part. But the past is filled with atrociously empty and broken lives.
That is what happens when you see reality instead of carefully selected cheery lies.
You didn't see the mentally disabled in the basement, the arrest of wounded veterans under "ugly" laws justified by maternal impression theory an utterly moronic misreading of biblical miracles as implying what the mother sees influnces form of the child. Except there is a major derth of livestock how to's in the bible and a lot more focus on miracles.
Sale was (and still is) cheering for a collapse? And yet he spent the time writing books. If the collapse had happened, he would have spent the time subsistence farming. I doubt that 25 years of that would make him happy that a collapse happened.
Be careful what you wish for. You may not like it as much as you think you will...
Things are better and worse. It is probably impossible to calculate the net difference, but I'd highlight things like the legalization of gay marriage, the decline in violent crime, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as improvements. I don't discount the better toys either.
I thought this was going to be about a different Wired article written to address another Luddite's predictions from around 25 years ago.. That one seems to be more accurate
I can't get people I am close with to even consider engaging in conversations about firmly held beliefs they have if I even remotely present myself as possibly holding a different opinion.
Understand that this is the norm. And understand that when you present differing opinions without being asked, you’re acting selfishly — you’re not doing it because you care about them, you’re doing it for yourself.
Ultimately it depends what you want out of your personal relationships. I’ve found people who are willing to talk. But I haven’t found people who genuinely change their mind about deeply held beliefs without a lot of patient — emphasis on patient — conversations over a long period of time. And sometimes I’m the one who changes their mind.
So I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied if you feel you must be able to change your group’s minds about social issues. A group is its own form of entity. If you don’t identify with your group, find another one. They exist. But if you don’t identify with your associates, that’s a hard problem which won’t go away.
It helps to accept that you care about them more than what they believe, and leave it at that.
That's not what I am saying at all. I mean for the sake of conversation and discussion, asking to even explain a belief, for understanding. Sometimes even the question is seemed as a threat. I didn't say I want to change anyone's mind. Wanting to have a discussion about important topics with loved ones isn't an instant trip down selfishness lane. I see what you are saying, but you jumped the gun a little bit.
It's not really anything new: Most people generally don't want to entertain ideas highly contrary to their own. Enshrined in the the old adage that you should never discuss religion or politics in some circumstances. Thanksgiving dinners have been getting ruined for decades by it. The rate of that happening has very likely increased though.
Wanting to have a discussion about important topics with loved ones isn't an instant trip down selfishness lane.
Are you sure?
I don’t know. It helped me to view it as “yes, this is selfish. They’re more important to me than the topic.”
The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Another way to phrase it: why care so much what they think? If they don’t explain themselves, then they probably don’t care whether you agree.
To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
> The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Perhaps. But the interpretation is still not immediately "selfishness" for me. You are not there to please them and make them feel good. But how does that immediately become "selfish"?
> To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Yes, that is a good introspective question, that one maybe should ask oneself.
However, if anything that could somehow be interpreted as "wanting something for oneself" is considered selfish, then we can shut down all our media right now and stop talking to everyone else. You can always claim "You did this or that conversation only to feel good about yourself! So Selfish!"
So I am asking: What is your definition of selfishness?
> Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
You care about the topic, they don't want to talk about it for whatever reason. You are trying to get them to do something they don't like, because _you_ like it.
But that is an assumption right there. Perhaps it is simply an important topic in the context of the moment. It doesn't have to mean one personally likes the topic. There can be a necessity, that one has to discuss this topic.
Most people you'd disagree with generally have a point, if you get past the quick-release talking points. If one tries to have a genuine conversation, it might be surprising to many how much common ground can be found.
I think I get your question now. Honestly, there is an art to it, and you can't always just come out and ask. It exposes that you care more about the information than you do about the person. Maybe bring it up gently the next time it comes up in context. Or, when it's just the two of you, ask if you can bring up a potentially sensitive question with no judgement involved, just to learn.
Same. I want to start a club of people like us. At a library with a coffee shop and bar included. Bunch of us philosophical peeps chillin and talking shit but nobody gets mad. I would love such a paradise.
I don't get how 4chan related to the conversation. My main desire is to find people that are truth seekers. Question what we know and investigate. I don't find that curiousity in most people. How that is related to 4chan is lost on me.
I think the poster means the anonymous, no upvote aspect. Seriously, I’ve been on quite a few different styles of message board and discussion quality is noticeably better when you can’t get any other queues about how “right” an post is except for its content. Depending on the subject, some of the not-pol/b boards can actually be quite nice.
I'm reminded of the stereotypical personality alignment matrix common to role playing games, with lawful and chatic matched to good and evil. Each of to need to strive to sit in the middle, true neutral. In this position one can recognize echo chambers are all around us and one must hop from to the another to gain understanding and sympathy. This would be easy if we mandated the teaching of cognitive and logical fallacies. However, I fear that the powers that be (wealthy, political leaders, and attention grabbing algorithms) intentionally use these against us. Sophistry has long been a weapon of politicians against the plebs and each other. I am at loss on how all of us can transition to a more enlightened state, a state where we don't build walls between us, but recognise the selfishishness and primal fears that lead us against each other. We all suffer from cognitive limitations and fallacies and none of us really know what is the 'correct' opinion on anything. I think if we can agree we all share the same limited stupidity that's the right step go forward.
We have to make choices, often complicated ones, so just the concept of recognizing our limitations doesn't really help. Or rather it does not change the basic fact that we have to live artfully and figure things out with very little information to guide us even in the best of cases. True neutral is not far from evil in a highly contrasted world where work has to be done.
I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all. Facebook et al are still largely echo chambers, where we see what we have cultivated ourselves to see. Sure, recommendation algorithms show us external things once in a while, but by and large you can cultivate what you see on social media.
The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks. How you "can't avoid politics, because everything is political". Ravelry, which is a crocheting website, went mad with us-vs-them discussions. Why?
The fault is mainly with legacy media, because they had the credibility and prestige of their history, plus the consistency of their output (daily, weekly, whatever), which they used to spoonfeed poison to large parts of society. How others are "unlike us", and that "they're evil", and oh by the way, "vote for our candidate" who is the some storybook hero we need.
The "two-minutes-of-hate" has come largely from legacy media, and they are responsible for the schisms present right now.
>I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all.
>The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks.
Everything you've outlined above is entirely the result of technology and the incentive structures that have been pursued in its "advancement".
Tech didn't force anyone or any org to act maliciously. Either one chooses to uphold their own values every day, or they sway with the wind regardless of consequence, but either way the choice was theirs. If it was so easy to convince the so-called fourth estate to drop truth-seeking and fair coverage for clickbait, then it wasn't a core value to them in the first place.
Instead of blaming technology, why can't we blame capitalism? Capitalism obviously incentives both parties (big tech and the media) to compete for eyeballs and drive content to the bottom to make money. I don't think anybody is so nieve enough to believe that these companies have society's interests at heart. Their very existence is to make money.
As a counterpoint, I've seen lots of people become more accepting because of the way the internet connects people. If you lived in a rural place before, you likely had very little interaction with minority groups outside of how they were portrayed in media. Now it's possible to interact with all kinds of people and recognize them as people instead of stereotypes.
I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major communication breakdowns, but I think on the whole it's a positive development.
One consumes information online, that information causes introspection and a better perspective of one's identity.
Usually it's not one specific event but a bombardment of information that over time, hopefully gives someone more perspective and their place in the world.
On the other hand, it closes some people off and causes the echo chamber. Cuts both ways.
Can you share some articles or studies that demonstrate the increasing openness? (I hope it’s true that it cuts both ways, but would like to see more data/research).
I don't know. I can see it going both ways, but I think that modern technology has reduced introspection for many people. In the news today, it's all about sound bites and hyperbolic headlines. I thing the intellectual attributes of news sources has declined. I thought I saw a study or thread on HN supporting the claim, but now I can't find it.
News is very polarizing by design. Just like with social media, news profits more off of driving polarization. So they frame everything to drive traffic and viewers.
Well on more anonymous platforms like HN or Reddit it probably doesn't happen that much, but on youtube, instagram, twitter, etc usually identity is no secret.
This is just more of my opinion, but generally the people I know that get caught up in bad echo chambers would have done so without the internet. The Alex Jones fans are just a new iteration of Rush Limbaugh fans, albeit more extreme. I think it's possible for otherwise reasonable people to get caught up in something like that, but they can also get out with time and more life experience.
This reads like a technocrat's hopeful vision of the Internet in the early 1990s. Sure, in theory it's true, but we all know in reality that that's not how the majority of humanity is using the Internet.
I think that the bet is a bit simplistic in its scope and parameters. Society isnt going to collapse in one fell swoop unless nuclear war kills us all. If things just disintegrate and collapse, there will be a long protracted period where people slowly die and or suffer. I dont even think that any one person can fully grasp how a population of 7 billion + people can collapse accurately. I think that social media and twitter owns the lions share of our current divided society, but I dont necessarily call that "tech". Its one aspect of tech. And for every twitter dumpster fire there is huge medical advances/vaccines/50 metrics that show that now is the best time to be alive. I certainly love living in the now, and hope that we can figure out how to navigate this new territory we live in...
Tech always provides the tools for destruction but it is those who seek power and wealth with no set limit are those who employ those tools. Greed is worse than fear.
Without ending up on an FBI watchlist, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Sales and "Uncle Ted" were on the right track about technology inevitably leading toward psychic isolation and environmental devastation, that corporations are finding ways to turn each human interaction into a commodity, that we're well beyond carrying capacity for the planet and have likely screwed up the ecology for the next million years or so. Just suppose ...
What solution do we have? I'm pretty sure that even before homo sapiens came on the scene, Neanderthals and even earlier versions of humanity thought about labor-saving devices. They dreamed of not dying from little infections, of not dying in childbirth, of spears that went a little further, of furs that were warmer, of fires that would not need tending. Are we not more or less doomed by our rejection of physical misery and the power of our imagination to simply recreate it all?
More interestingly, imagine a human society which selects a place to stop and then also has to enforce it, both internally and against any other societies which might have a different idea of where to stop (boy that gunpowder sure is a nifty idea). You would need a one world government with some kind of technological edge over those ruled ...
My comment really doesn't even do your comment justice, but... It really made me think about that scene from the Matrix where Agent Smith described humans as a cancer. There are just so many possible perspectives on it all.
For a fictional exploration of the "doomed to recreate it all" phenomena, there's a nice novel called "Canticle for Leibowitz" where post-nuclear-armageddon scientists are in part blamed for the nuclear war and knowledge is explicitly culturally rejected... but then slowly crawls back into the picture.
Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.
What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.
It wasn't close! Is there anyone who thinks we live in a society that almost had a socialist revolution? Where's the eco-collapse (not just damage, collapse, and multiple collapses as well -- this guy was basically saying there'd be no outdoors)? We can barely hit a 2% inflation target and you're saying dollars are close to worthless?
Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.
Not OP, but we are a far cry from a techno utopia. We really had two opposing world views, one where technology would help us achieve a better life, another where it would contribute to us falling off a precipice. Neither won. On the plus side we have a world where global poverty is falling and more people are developing middle class life styles, we have amazing technology like gene editing, incredible computational ability, and entertainment options. However, this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster, has us in the middle of a mass extinction, and has enriched a very small number of people.
You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.
> this same technology has pushed us dangerous close to climate disaster
This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).
> has enriched a very small number of people
This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.
This isn't just "gee, technology sure comes with tradeoffs." It was literally claiming the dollar to be worthless, a global class war, and for most of the continent of Africa to be uninhabitable. It was claiming all three would happen.
I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!
There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.
This seems like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. A close call would be something like, economic collapse reducing paper money to be worthless as a consequence of the global socialist revolution, but global warming only melted the icecaps and flooded major parts of the world while leaving most places just slightly warmer. Two out of three.
The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".
You're right - it definitely wasn't close by the metrics of the bet itself, but to me, it was close enough to a degree that I found hard not to emphasize.
What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?
“ But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy” - from the FA. While certainly modernity and technological progress has negative impact on certain parts of the human population (being in part blamed for societal isolation etc) , for the majority of human population technological advances has been a great leveler and a blessing. Over the last decade this has raised billions of people out of property line and in general increased the health and lifespan of most of the population. Even advanced societies like us have benefitted from it , though there is some negative effect. But to lobby for dialing back technological progress for the entire humanity - it is a very symptom of inequality that has been the result of industrial revolution and previous history and the privilege that certain societies enjoyed over others. We need to use technology itself to level the playing field , ensure wellness and happiness for everyone. What Sale and his fans need is not less technology but more looking inside - spiritual journey. But they have no right to demand policies to reverse technological progress for rest of the humanity.
>but Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy,
It is generally men who talk about how great the subsistence economy was. For women, a subsistence economy was hellish. There was no reliable birth control, maternal/infant mortality was high, everything depended on physical strength which gave men an advantage due to their larger size and higher musculature on average, and the system demanded lots of children, so women spent much of their lives pregnant and/or caring for small children. Many of these cultures (see Papua New Guinea for example) have huge amounts of violence against women.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] thread"The very fact that his book exists, he wrote, is the equivalent of tossing his cards face down on the table: If society had in fact collapsed, there would be no books, self-published or not. “So let me just admit that I was wrong,” he wrote. “But ... not by much. And not totally.” "
They should have a measure by which to mark this bet's conclusion. Arguments can be made for both sides.
There would not be a new book printed about this topic if society had regressed as you described.
Really whenever you hear anyone talk about "the fabric of society" they are full of shit. Just like how theater, jazz, rock music, heavy metal, rap, interracial marriage, women voting, and gay marriage destroyed the fabric of society. Those ample precedents of being complete bullshit aside it is a stack of abstractions with no measures. It sounds like it means something but it doesn't - it is just mouth noises to manipulate your emotions.
They're not in the science game. They're in the selling content game. In that, all three (let's not forget the person writing the article) appear to have succeeded, gaining exposure (and payment for the article writer) thanks to the bet, regardless of rigor.
One could perhaps forsee more books and articles forthcoming as a result of this bet?
(English is not my first language)
This is one of those stupid things about English that make life for pupils harder for no reason. In most languages the abbreviation is straightforward and based on the actual language. (Also spelling bees don't exist in most other places). Entire classes of error possibilities are just made up for no good reason in English.
(also, it's orthogonal, not orthagonal)
I'm curious what distinction you are reading into it. I'm sure that as a native learner I was more apt to just take mental shortcuts rather than resolve these ambiguities.
I assumed "for example" follows a collection/set as opposed to "that is" which is a 1-1 mapping. Sibling comment clarified it for me on why "for example" makes sense in this context.
As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF?
“That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz.) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-derived abbreviation) leads into an example intended to illustrate the broader category which precedes it.
They are not equivalent, nor are they “skip over phrases”.
Totally different meaning if you replace i.e. with e.g.
The first is saying “HackerNews” is the same as “my daily updates on technology” .
The second (replacing “i.e.” with “e.g.”) is saying “HackerNews” is an example—one item in a broader collection—of “my daily updates on technology”.
Take a look at a car (i.e. an automobile).
Take a look at a car (e.g. a Nissan).
Do you see the difference?
They are often used as equivalents. Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
No, they are often (though very, very far from most often) used in reverse because people forget which is which. Even in that case they have very distinct intended meanings, and are not equivalents.
> Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.
Sure, but descriptivism isn't “words lose all distinct meaning if occasionally someone mixes them up” or nothing would mean anything.
Isn't this just another way of saying they're equivalent as used? People don't know which is which, they often don't car,e and they pick one.
Prescriptivist "what should eg mean in this sentence?"
Descriptivist "what does Bob mean when he uses eg in this sentence?"
No, it's not.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “that is” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “for example”.
One is used a vast majority of the time to mean “for example” and occasionally, by different people, to mean “that is”.
Neither group (not the one with the dominant understanding nor the one with the minority understanding) uses the terms interchangeably, they both use them with distinct meanings.
The existence of some confusion of meaning and minority usages resulting from that does not eliminate all distinction in meaning, even from a descriptivist standpoint.
It's true that “X means Y” is usually a simplification of a distribution to a modal value, but that's also widely recognized and, from a descriptivist standpoint, already incorporated into the meaning of the phrase.
That's what each means, correct.
> (English is not my first language)
That's okay, it's not the first language of id est and exempli gratia, either.
In 1995 a person could have bought a US Treasury zero coupon bond for about $130 maturing in 25 years for . . . $1000. No other purchase would have been necessary to cover the bet. Relatively cheap insurance, I think.
It wasn't close. It isn't hard to tell that it wasn't close. Let's not give this doomsayer more credit than he's earned -- and he was completely wrong.
Like metrics wise it did, but you're not counting the massive loss of life and the vast disenchantment in the world after (which is admittedly hard to measure).
Millions of people were ethnically cleansed, that's not worth any kind of material progress. If you are trying to say we progressed materially in spite of ethnic cleansing, you don't understand that eliminating large swaths of the population will obviously result in material benefit to those who remain...
2020 was the closest I’ve come to feeling that society was collapsing.
Biology can only do so much if we ignore it.
Rich screw poor. Poor want to strike back.
In theory everyone could be happy. It's just that there is a lack of willingness for it to happen.
QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.
Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?
That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.
I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.
On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.
Can people be super dependent on a financial system if it weren't digital?
Even government—people had more freedom under a low-tech monarchy than a high-tech democracy. Can't enforce too many laws when law enforcement doesn't have vehicles or phones.
The only way I could fathom "society collapsing" is if I felt the interactions you see on the internet were an accurate reflection of society at large. It's not - not even close.
Are you speaking about the average looking male group who can't get tinder hookups?
Definitely becoming a major issue now. I think they're generally gross and it's obvious why they're single, but there has to be an underlying reason for the trend.
The world continuously becoming more sexually liberal also means that women are more likely to pursue these men, and so average men are looked down upon moreso than before.
I'm sure plenty of people have seen the Tinder/Bumble studies where men rated women around 50/50 attractive/unattractive, whereas women rated men 20/80. I believe this is a result of the above, and a lot more nuanced aspects of the change in culture over the last say, 30-40 years.
In my grade school all of the girls had a crush on one or two guys even the less pretty ones. No one had a chance. High school was similiar. Going to rock concerts changed that as I started to meet girls with similiar interests. Going to a concert would automatically give me a leg up because we were now part of a social circle. Later on in life I would go to a karoke bar and just the act of showing up a few times on the same day for a few weeks puts you in a social circle with others who do the same.
I don't know if things have changed all that much aside from the amount of people online. I use to meet girls from bbses / the early social media sites. The differences is they were smaller and you felt like part of a social circle.
Today I would advise to try to go to social meetups like photography in the park groups.. try to join a smaller group.
In the end the girls from my elementary school grew up and married. Everyone married similiar to them. If they are overweight so are there husbands. If they were an 8 their husbands would be an 8. If they are a 4 their husbands are a 4. They general look like each other.
My guess is the girls from your primary school will end up with someone similiar to them and so will you.
Men will find happiness in porn, paid sex and virtual sexual experiences and will find that women can't live up to those experiences and men will not be satified with regular women.
An average women's sexual peak is later in life and they will not be as satified with virtual sex in the same way.
There will be a need for younger men from an older women group that could bridge the divide.
If you are young and want casual sex go on courage life not tinder for better results.
Unless we’re talking about polygamy or China’s one child policy. Those definitely create a lot of single men with no hope.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170213-why-millions-o...
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/china-now-335-million-men-women...
The median number of lifetime sexual partners for men and women is fairly steady over the last twenty years: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlif...
It's a laziness trap, but it has become a lifestyle for some. I don't agree with it, but it exists.
In all relationships, romantic or not, personality is everything. Do you try to be a positive person, or do you complain every time something doesn't go your way? An attractive personality and some self-confidence can go a long way in making you attractive to others, even if you haven't been particularly advantaged by your genes.
If you're talking about the dynamics around bars, hookups, and dating apps, you know that's not the only way to meet people, right? I think some of the strongest relationships come out of shared interest in a hobby / skill / career. Join hobby groups etc (not with the intention of finding a partner -- that will be weird and creepy -- but remain open to the idea that you might bump into someone along the way that really aligns with you)
What's more tragic about it is that it has increasingly little to do with merit or hard work and increasingly more to do with dumb luck. It's all social networking; but that's totally random. People are only selecting friends and partners based on capital these days, not based on any other meaningful characteristic. People are just appendages to the capital... Capital is the agent. People are replaceable.
You can thank the reserve banks for that.
An unfathomable number of people alive today have totally pointless lives because all the good stuff has been taken out and substituted with cheap thrills.
It's no coincidence that rich people have many friends and experience a lot of positive emotions in their lives. I guarantee you that poor people experience very few positive emotions and they don't have a choice. The glass ceiling is unbreakable.
This is pretty condescending!
So, I think for someone who doesn't want to play "the dating game", yes, an effective dating strategy is to accept that they won't be able to easily find a partner in the short-term. Instead, a strategy of self-improvement combined with leading a more social life (via hobby groups etc) in which one regularly meets new people is a great way for them to eventually bump into someone they vibe with really well.
I think many people who are desperate for a partner are also unhappy in other aspects of their life -- joining non-romantic social groups centered around a common interest is a great cure for loneliness, until the right person comes along.
https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1111607604348805120
What do you think accounts for this change? Seems pretty plausible to me that it has something to do with technology. Perhaps it has something to do with dating apps, perhaps young men are substituting porn for real intimacy, perhaps some combination. Either way, doesn't seem like a good change. And by the pigeonhole principle, if more women are having sex than men, it must be the case that some men are sleeping with multiple women (modulo homosexuality and young women sleeping with older guys).
(I don't think "you just need to be a better partner" moralizing has much explanatory power, it's a lecture that can be delivered in any time or place to any gender and doesn't speak to underlying trends.)
Let it go, guys. He's gone, isn't he?
And of Trump's supposed attack on democracy, that's how you'd characterize it if you were interested in the corrupt status quo.
For reference; I'm an altruist, open source developer and value creator. My enemies are greedy psychopaths and zero-sum value capturers.
Sale is correct on many points, his timeline just isn't accurate.
Economy - "Good or bad"
Environment - "Good or bad"
Wealth distribution - "Good or bad".
If you're betting, someone has to get 2 or more out of 3. But that could be anyone, including complete idiots. So this doesn't by itself tell you anything.
Most of the "bad" would be vaguely "left" positions but they could vary from the left of the NYT to any number of extreme positions as well as including general pessimists.
So at this level, "could be anything".
For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago.
In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding.
Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well.
So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to mean at the very minimum more than 50%) "the economy is not working for them." Which people are these? How do they compare for income or assets or access to things to their ancestors?
Have you been outside in any major city recently? There is a homeless crisis that is truly shocking going on around all of us.
A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.
Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.
A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.
Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.
The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
I am surprised that this was regarded as a close decision. I guess a lot depends on wording, but when one person is predicting the dollar will be worthless, and the person in the role of judge claims that given global economic uncertainty, it's a "close" question, I wonder if they're just saying that to be diplomatic.
Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty, but one way to think about it, is that it can get so much worse than it currently is. And it seems like the predictions being wagered over were pointing to the "so much worse". I think the same holds for the environment, and for the proposed war between rich and poor.
I get the temptation to treat those as close, because there's tensions that you could imagine leading to some worst case scenarios. And so one might want to acknowledge the tension, and you want to put that acknowledgment into some sort of partial credit. But I think that way of thinking gets all confused and hair splitty, and comes from a place of thinking everything's a trick question, and not wanting to be perceived as overlooking nuances.
Anyhow, credit to all parties involved for formalizing their discussion and getting a bet out of it. I think those kinds of conversations are valuable, and I think it helps to get people thinking about what it takes for beliefs to be true over the long run.
>“The first [measurement] would be an economic collapse. The dollar would be worthless, the yen would be worthless, the mark would be worthless—the dislocation we saw in the Depression of 1930, magnified many times over.
The dollar is not worthless and not close to worthless. There's no reasonable interpretation of that outcome, or of reality, where the dollar becoming worthless was "close" to an accurate prediction. I truly, honestly don't know how to reason with someone who is going to dispute that.
Another prediction was that we would be in an active global military conflict between rich and poor nations. Also not close.
Another prediction was "Africa, from the Sahara to South Africa, becomes unlivable."
If words actually mean things, none of these were close.
> an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
Now, you sound like you have a source other than the article, and the article sounds like it might be a paraphrase. But it's kind of hard for me to judge without knowing what your source is.
But, using the wording from the article: Were we close to the first of those in 2008? When Lehman collapsed, if there hadn't been intervention the dominoes would have continued to fall. How far would they have continued to fall? Hard to tell now, but at the time it looked like they were just going to keep falling...
Yes, they were the words of the bet.
https://www.wired.com/1995/06/saleskelly/
>I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe—a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won't even be close. I'll bet on my optimism.
It seems like in the actual terms of the bet Kelly paraphrases Sale. That is how I would read it sans an actual signed legal document. But then again I'm not a lawyer or anyone versed in gambling etiquette and protocol.
Why would anyone take this bet? If you're right, then $1000 USD probably won't be worth very much after the "global currency collapse", so you'd basically be saying "I'll give you $1000 in 2020 if it's worth anything"
The other (perfectly plausible) answer is that the part of one's brain that believes the claim, and the part of ones' brain that believes in the power of bets and value of money that make bets interesting, are brain regions that haven't reconciled with one another.
So ask yourself the question again. Why would two public intellectuals make a public bet, when neither stands to gain any monetary benefit from it? My goodness, it's a mystery.
It would seem to be against the spirit and intention of the bet, in any plausible reading, to grant Sale a win on the grounds that (2) comes true but not (1), when (1) was attempting to paraphrase (2).
In US terms it seems clear that financial support in excess of that available in 2009 onwards will be provided.
Vaccines are being delivered and economic activity will increase as the fear of COVID-19 subsides.
Is this based on political gridlock after the next set of US midterms? Something not COVID-19 related?
Massive change due to tech is always just waiting to happen. Here's to hoping it just changes society without destroying it.
Great quote! Gradually and unknowingly you approach a tipping point until some factor pushes you over the edge like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back".
I believe Sale was/is broadly right. Some of Nassim Taleb's ideas also play into this viz. our inability to predict the future and the catastrophic effect of non-linear and "black swan" events. It is not "Technology" that is the problem but our stewardship of it. We simply are not taking a holistic system view of it which is absolutely necessary when our system (i.e. our planet) is "closed".
I don't know what that is going to look like though so I'm not taking any concrete bets. I certainly don't know what comes after.
I think the following factors, broadly speaking; will be our (i.e. Civilization as we know it today) downfall;
> Evolution has always proceeded as a loosely coupled federation of highly cohesive units
No, it did not. Evolution does what it does, things that are good enough at surviving survive. For instance, multicellular organisms, and in particular large animals, are "megapolises with huge populations and pegged to a 'common currency'". Fragility is a more nuanced topic too, large coupled systems are vulnerable to internal problems, but they can also withstand external forces that would kill the equivalently populous "loosely coupled federation". All in all, evolution is probably not the best thing to draw lessons about organization from, because a) any system of organization you can think of is likely already effectively used in some organisms, somewhere, and b) evolution doesn't care about well-being of individual cells, but we care about the well-being of individual humans. That last constraint means we can't just do thing the way evolution does, which is throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Modern politics and weaponry changed transmuted tribal wars into contemporary wars, some with systematic massive massacres and such.
If true it may mean that most 'classic' tribal wars were way less damaging than WW1 or WW2. In any case it seems hard to imagine how even some extreme tribal war may be more damaging than a total nuclear war.
Not sure where this comes from. Tribal wars frequently ended in genocide, mass destruction, etc. The book Sapiens covers some of the evidence for how Neanderthals were exterminated.
I agree though that total nuclear war would be way worse than all the tribal wars in history. Although, interestingly, it seems like threat of nuclear war has prevented lots of wars. There have been no wars between major powers since nuclear wars. Maybe the closest was the Korean War, but China wasn’t a nuclear power back then.
AFAIK Neanderthals went extinct due to climatic change and disease.
Moreover tribes are everywhere defined by a complex and dynamic system of relationships. Neanderthals where another human species, or at least subspecies, and as far as I understand we cannot be sure that such relationships were established or even possible with another human species.
The threat of nuclear war ("MAD") may have prevented wars between major powers, but it didn't prevent many proxy wars, some of them quite destructive, and assuming that the net effect was positive is only an opinion (probably not shared by many in Africa and Asia).
I’m not sure there are any modern tribal wars. I’m not sure I’d consider Rwanda a tribal war, but it was tribes fighting.
I was thinking more about pre-historic tribal warfare. Or at least pre-bronze age before Egypt, Indus, Greece, etc. The tribes in the Amazon, Africa, Papua New Guinea [1] frequently had wars of extinction that eliminated their opposing tribe.
This kind of brutal warfare seems in our genes as even other primate have these genocidal wars where entire communities are wiped out [2].
There were certainly many proxy wars and lots of death, so I don’t think MAD means absolute peace. But it did stop world war 3 (while almost starting it quite a few times) and it’s most likely the reason why there haven’t been any large wars with casualties that existed prior to MAD (ww2,ww1,sino-japanese,Napoleon).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemic_warfare
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
>We have made untold advances in the medical sciences
Out of reach of a lot of humanity and for those that can access it it is not without risks (just look at the medical devices debacle in the US). It also isn't as good as we often seem to believe. For example the US is number 7 in Deaths by heart attack but it is still double the amount of deaths as number 1[0].
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Acording to EIA[1] "The share of U.S. total energy consumption that originated from fossil fuels has fallen from its peak of 94% in 1966 to 80% in 2018". 80% is not "divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels". It will be at least ten years before we see another 10% down in the US.
>we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Yet human rights, press freedom and economic freedom are all on a downswing in the US[2][3][4].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
1: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41353
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
4: https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights
Too many folks gulped Pinker’s nonsense without further inspection because it suited their priors.
I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other -- I guess my prior is that I am skeptical of broad narratives one way or the other and I think Pinker is prone to facile generalizations -- but most of the rebuttals I've seen to Pinker seem offended by the idea of progress, rather than taking his arguments seriously.
That is a great soundbite for the news but is it actually as great as it sounds? If we take it as fact that "one billion humans have been lifted out of extreme poverty" what about how many are in extreme poverty? Note that how many is outside extreme poverty doesn't say anything about the amount in extreme poverty, just that more are now above it. The world population grew by 1.6 billion between 1990 and 2010 according to the UN. So on one side we have the "one billion have been lifted out of extreme poverty" but on the other we have "1.6 billion more humans" with the greatest growth in poverty stricken countries like Nigeria. I don't know the numbers but I don't believe that the "about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty" is the whole truth since AFAIK the amount in extreme poverty have grown.
EDIT: Looking up the numbers it hasn't "grown" but "extreme poverty" is seen as "statically less than 1.9 international dollars per day". Is it a lift to $3 or $30? $3 is still living in squalor and destitution if you ask most people in the West I'm sure. IMO extreme poverty haven't declined outside statistics.
From: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality
And I think you’re underestimating the marginal utility of going from $1.90 to $3 — both would suck for someone with a baseline of Western expenses, but it is the difference between a literal hand-to-mouth life of subsistence farming in a shack, versus a family that all works being able to collectively afford to rent a basic concrete flat with terrible plumbing on an unpaved street (citation: my ex took me to Nairobi a few years ago, we met one of her local friends, the friend’s flat was about $800/year to rent, $800/year is the increased income from two people going from $1.9 to $3 per day).
This is a simple and knowable answer. And it doesn’t change the facts the sound bite is based on. Extreme poverty is lower now as a percentage. There are fewer born into extreme poverty now, etc.
You can also pick other cutoffs and they are improving as well. Obviously the goal is to raise people higher than $3/day, but this is just an existing measure that’s getting better.
It’s frustrating to me when people nitpick unimportant details as if they were significant.
I don’t think anyone who established the extreme poverty cutoff thinks that it is the end goal, or that $3/day is as good as $30/day. So everyone agrees that 10x is better. But there are measures for extreme poverty because it’s a problem and needs to be addressed differently to get people from $.01/day to $3/day differently than interventions for $3 to $30 (and $30 to $100).
Pinker’s book, Angels of our Better Nature, goes into this quite a bit. And there’s a lot of global health primary sources to also help answer your questions.
The situation in Africa isn't so good, but has substantially improved. Of course the cost of this has been stagnant wage growth and anaemic employment in the developed world, as hundreds of thousands of people in China and South East Asia joined the global labour pool.
All of these things are more true now than they were in the average subsistence based society. Amazon warehouse workers have a worse deal than serfs, and a much much worse deal than hunter gatherers.
Oh and this
we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Isn't just wrong, it's laughable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
If you want a really long read - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civi...
The tl;dr is that renewables cannot provide equivalent levels of surplus energy to fossil fuels, cannot offer the same reliability as fossil fuels, cannot perform the same functions as fossil fuels (e.g. shipping). Not now, not ever. Not possible.
...if you’re a well compensated tech worker having gourmet lunch delivered by benefit-less contractors paid slave wages.
And of course you can make liquid fuels by cracking water and then doing chemistry to add carbon (which can be from atmospheric CO2). This is what Musk has planned for Mars, the process is from 1897: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
Further chemistry can turn that into long chain hydrocarbons, from what I remember of school.
Conventional oil reserves are declining so this article merely proves that renewables are superior.
I don't think that's accurate at all. For one, we no longer have prevalence of childhood leukemia that we used to have. You could run down a long list of similar examples related to health.
For another, we have robust labor standards in most of the world which we didn't didn't used to have. Warehouse workers do indeed have appalling work conditions measured by modern standards, and we should be incensed by those. But I think any serious consideration of what, say, dust bowl Texas was like prior to rural electrification, or what an experience of hunter-gatherer life would be like for a person who actually wanted to go out and try it, I think it would be nuts to say such conditions are preferable.
As others have mentioned, your own link to EROI doesn't appear to make the point that you think it does.
Could you back this claim up? I don’t find it at all plausible.
Note that it is not just Sale (though of course he is quite extremist in his views) who has pointed to the deleterious effects of our Technology, Social systems etc. which may lead to "Collapse" of our Civilization; you also have Nassim Taleb, Jacques Ellul, Michael Ruppert espousing similar arguments in different contexts.
All that you mention are "local effects" having their own unforeseen long-term negatives, due to self-limiting feedback loops, for example (without making any moral/judgemental/ethical calls);
>global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades
Debatable and for a certain definition of "poverty". Inequality has only been increasing and if i am unable to afford stuff even though i make more today then i did a few years ago, that is not "alleviation of poverty". Even if we accept your argument we now have the problem of increased middle class population leading to rampant consumerism and pressure on both social and natural resources.
>untold advances in the medical sciences
True but the other side is also adapting itself to work around our efforts eg; "Superbugs". We also don't know what the long-term effects of genetic engineering would be. There is also the problem that advanced medicine leads to longer lives and thus more pressure on social safety nets and healthcare.
>we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels
Wishful thinking; we have a long way to go and given our propensity for short-term fixes we may very well run out of time.
>when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights
Awareness does not necessarily lead to Usage/Implementation.
The above is not to say that "good old days" were "very good" and we should blindly roll back our scientific and technological use. On the contrary just like we have realized that Atomic warfare is unlike anything ever experienced by mankind and hence has to be prevented and dealt with in a whole different way than we have ever handled our "differences", so should our use of Science/Technology towards the betterment of our Societies, Other Species, Natural Resources and ultimately the whole Planet.
Taken globally, and looking at purchasing power. Things have been massively improving for the very poorest. Because developing countries are doing just that, developing.
Inequality and poverty are two distinct things. Poverty is having lack of access to things you need. Inequality is becoming a big issue, and poverty is far from being solved. There certainly are opportunities to solve both problems. But the depth of poverty for a lot of humans has lessened the last few years, and that is undeniably a good thing.
> The global poverty line has been on steady decline
That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
What does 50% mortality mean here?
This seems surprising to me. What do you think is the best source for me to learn about this metric? I found a lot of info on the methodology behind $1.9/day [0] but couldn’t find much by looking for the $7.50/day mark and how it has changed over time.
I found this guardian article referencing $7.4/day [1] but the link they give to Peter Edward on an ethical poverty line doesn’t work. When I search for Edward’s concept I find papers from him [2] but they seem to reference $2/day.
Edit: I was able to find a gapminder analysis [3]. They break income into four groups, less than $2, less than $8, less than $32, more. The shift in poverty is still positive so I’m not sure what measure is being used to show 1B more under $7.5/day. This may be due to demographic trends where that group is growing faster. It is important to consider the overall proportion, not just absolute number, as well as the alternative of where they would have been (ie, a billion under $7.50 is better than a billion under $1.9).
But it’s hard to discuss without source data and methods.
[0] http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/methodology.aspx [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/014365905004327... [3] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2020;;&ch...
The author addresses this question, along with how the UN has continually shifted the goal posts to reinforce the narrative that poverty has been reduced.
This quote mixes the two concepts “ Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day.” and doesn’t provide context on whether the percent of the worlds population living in less than $5/day is better or worse than in 1960.
Trying to boil down a very diverse global population, which may or may not even be paid, into a single $/day seems a bit ridiculous to me personally.
This is not the method described in the world bank web site. I don’t think the intent is to boil down to a single measure.
Tracking data globally is really challenging, so a consistent and meaningful measure is required to even have a hope of a perspective across countries. It’s useful in eradicating poverty to both measure progress or failure as well as to prioritize investment for areas of greatest need.
This also isn’t the only measure of poverty as there’s many others and there’s quite a bit of literature in global health on other measures as well.
That being said, I think there is room for improvement both in developing more useful metrics as well as improving accuracy of measures.
If I your were in India which was a deep socialist state in 1980s and 1995 just when the seeds of 1992 reforms were sowed, it was a complete shithole compared to the India of 2020 even with COVID.
I would rather live in an unsustainable India of 2020 than in sustainable India of 1985.
Debt is not really much of a problem for India as debt of gdp ratio is pretty low. Debt is not a problem in terms of sustainability either, when the proverbial shit hits the fan the country might go into massive recession but even in the worst of worst cases and even with terrible politicians at help recessions don't last very long. But the gain upto that point are all real. (India has over 50M more young and healthy people purely because the country has eliminated Polio and dozen other diseases that were common 40 years ago).
Rising population and rapid urbanization would require India to manage its forests, water and other resources better and India is not equipped to do so because of government control of key industries and bad policies. But we can hope things will change for better as a more competent government is at helm.
He did not think the currency issue was close at all, "Not much contest here" and granted that one unequivocally to Kelly.
On the others I don't agree with Patrick at all. On environment we are quite possibly heading towards a disaster, but it's still very far off. I doubt we'll even be in a situation to unequivocally call this one for Sale even in another 25 years. Maybe in 50, sure, but the bet was about the conditions in 2020, not 2045 or 2070.
As for war between rich and poor, I think it should be judged compared to historical examples. Are we in a higher level of conflict between rich and poor now than in the past? I'd say no. Occupy came and went. The global economy recovered ok from the crisis in 2008 by historical standards. Advanced technology is already solving the pandemic for us, and we should be back to normal economically within a few years. Only 4 years ago a Billionair won a US election on a platform of cutting taxes for the rich, which he did. If there's a war going on between rich and poor, I'm not seeing it.
Thank you for catching that, I stand corrected with respect to the judging of the economy. It's interesting that there are commenters here taking issue with my point disputing that, when it turns out not even the judge, Bill Patrick, felt that question was close! People will really debate anything.
As you point out, Bill did, however, remark that the other questions were close, and asserted that Kirk was not merely close, but correct(!) on the other two questions. I am surprised about that, for reasons more or less along the lines you mention.
And this is what scares me. From my point of view, we are already well into multiple major environmental disasters. I wonder how much worse it has to get before more people realise that.
I’d argue the drivers for the war are already here, but the only reason the war isn’t class based is the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them. They’ve successfully driven in dividing lines such as race and religion to distract us as the plunder to their hearts content.
I mean it sort of relates to the 2nd amendment idea that private citizens at home with firearms can overthrow a tyrannical government if need be. When it was minutemen vs foot soldiers that was a drastically different equation to now when it's AR-15s vs a military-industrial apparatus with drone strikes, tanks and automated mass surveillance.
The observation that "the rich and powerful have convinced the lower classes to attack each other instead of them" seems like a reasonable tactic for the society (or the rich) to prevent such a war from occurring, and this might plausibly succeed for a prolonged time in the future - as you say, "successfully driven in dividing lines" that are long-lasting. I see Kirkpatrick Sale's position as essentially claiming that the tensions are stronger than the societal bonds that favor status quo and centralization, that these tensions can cause a society to collapse - and the last 25 years have shown the opposite, that an increase in these tensions is still tolerable and does not lead to a collapse.
He predicted society's "collapse", that by now we'd be living in small bands. Global warming steadily making the worse a crappier place is an awful thing, to be sure, but we're nowhere near collapse, at least not at the moment.
The first part of the bet is a good one: the dollar -- the world's reserve currency -- becoming worthless is something that makes sense as a part of society collapsing, and more importantly, it's fairly objective to judge. The other two are far more ambiguous.
Yeah, this is exactly the thing I'm stuck on when I go over these responses. I feel like people really aren't grasping the difference in scale between (a) 2008 financial crisis was pretty bad and (b) dollar becoming "worthless".
People are talking as if those two things are close, or taking up the tone of cautionary finger wagging and saying "well, you know he wasn't too far off" and going off to say this or that about a given poverty statistic.
My best theory as to what's going on here is that people are just cannibalizing the question and using it as a digression into various world problems in ways that don't clearly connect back to the wording of the question.
The promise of tech was that we could bend it to our will to do what we want. Instead, over the last decade, we have aimed these tools at ourselves in order for companies to extract as much value from humans as possible. Then again, maybe that was the thing we were trying to do all along anyway.
But I find myself here in 2021, 15 years into an engineering career, looking at the amount of effort I have to spend just to get my devices to work for me and not let my life be absorbed by whatever company I decide to interact with.
I have to lock down my browsers, run pi-hole and out-bound application firewalls, use email forwarding services to mask my address, check my credit reports on a regular basis because a dozen of the services I have used have been breached. Change and manage passwords and TOTP tokens. I have to opt-out of mailing lists, set up burner accounts, answer phone calls as to why I tried to place an order online behind a VPN and how that was suspicious and my order is being cancelled. My car is on its last legs and I cringe at the prospect of even looking at a newer model-year vehicle, because it will almost certainly be connected to the internet and try and extract as much information about me, and the devices I interface with it, to be sold to who knows where.
What was wrong purchasing media and curating your own collection? How did we get from "Rip. Mix. Burn" to "Spotify wins patent to surveil users’ emotions to recommend music"? Why does my HP printer require an account to scan documents locally? Why does my f*king Philips S7000 razor need a smartphone app to change its sensitivity settings? Why does my goddamn fridge have an operating system?
Was it worth it? It seems the thing technology helps me do the most these days is avoid all the terrible things about technology.
Case in point: I recently started back with the DVD side of Netflix. This is what I remembered being so awesome: find a good movie list, add it to your queue, pop envelopes in the mailbox when you're done.
It is 1000% better than endless scrolling on 5 different streaming services. I think about what I want to watch twice a month, and when I have time, I don't have to deal with any ads or worry about a spotty night on a cable modem.
I avoided the whole smart-home fad because there's nothing wrong with physical controls and buttons that have been developed over generations of human interaction. That's why I'm waiting for a good built-in-the-USA electric instead of buying a chassis with a touchscreen.
But someone else may hate controls and love touchscreens -- cool. The market lets us pick and choose.
If we can continue to reign in the inequality and environmental impacts produced by technology, use the incredible wealth we have as societies to finally end poverty, and continue to make progress against injustice, the future is incredibly bright.
I don't get why you wouldn't be able to do this on a streaming service, unless the catalogue is somehow worse. The DVD part sounds like a superfluous and cumbersome extra layer
For example if you liked to go out and play poker in a local bar in the 1920s. It Required actual poker skills, but also good banter, and had an element of danger to it. Seems like your brain neurones would be firing, just to keep up with the banter at the table while you downed whiskey trying not to lose too much money.
Now so many people stay at home, watch some TV or watch some porn, fall asleep and go to work the next day. And things are safe, virtual and fake.
Technology has made movies possible, I love movies. But I value the experience of reading a book differently. Its a much richer and deeper experience. And technology made it very cheap now with things like kindles. But still I think there's been a decline in the amount of people reading books. Even though I think society would be enriched from more people reading books. Its now the average person has easier lazier entertainment to occupy them.
50-60 years ago you weren't constantly bombarding yourself with people who have more than you. Today, people go on instagram and see the rich living the dreams they'll never be able to attain, despite being told they could do anything in school and by their parents. People watch porn which shows insanely attractive people doing any fantasy imaginable, with no effort on their part.
Their regular lives will never compare with that, they get depressed and anxious seeing how they are nowhere near these people. And then this leads to anger and eventually populism, and it'll eventually lead to war.
> We need another approach, one that puts us on a path to prosperity and sustained growth as a species. Everyone could have an amazing life, we really just need people to work on improving distribution of goods/services.
People in the US literally refuse to wear masks to protect others around them. Do you really think this is possible?
But yes, large positive paradigm shifts are possible. They are also necessary, and we must begin the work. To decentralize production of goods/services as much as possible, to make food and energy plentiful and free for all, etc. We will accomplish these goals and more.
Plus you are ignoring all the bad parts. Don't want to be a stay at home wife and be bored out of your mind? Too bad. Wrong tone or sexual preference? Whoops. Don't want to get black lung or mind numbing-factory work? Better luck next time.
There is a selection bias at work. Only notable people are portrayed in media, for the most part. But the past is filled with atrociously empty and broken lives.
These are claims made with nothing to back them up. I think you've just watched too many movies.
You didn't see the mentally disabled in the basement, the arrest of wounded veterans under "ugly" laws justified by maternal impression theory an utterly moronic misreading of biblical miracles as implying what the mother sees influnces form of the child. Except there is a major derth of livestock how to's in the bible and a lot more focus on miracles.
Lies deserve destruction.
Be careful what you wish for. You may not like it as much as you think you will...
Things are better and worse. It is probably impossible to calculate the net difference, but I'd highlight things like the legalization of gay marriage, the decline in violent crime, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as improvements. I don't discount the better toys either.
Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.
Ultimately it depends what you want out of your personal relationships. I’ve found people who are willing to talk. But I haven’t found people who genuinely change their mind about deeply held beliefs without a lot of patient — emphasis on patient — conversations over a long period of time. And sometimes I’m the one who changes their mind.
So I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied if you feel you must be able to change your group’s minds about social issues. A group is its own form of entity. If you don’t identify with your group, find another one. They exist. But if you don’t identify with your associates, that’s a hard problem which won’t go away.
It helps to accept that you care about them more than what they believe, and leave it at that.
Are you sure?
I don’t know. It helped me to view it as “yes, this is selfish. They’re more important to me than the topic.”
The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Another way to phrase it: why care so much what they think? If they don’t explain themselves, then they probably don’t care whether you agree.
To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Looking at the things you wrote:
> They’re more important to me than the topic.
Why does it mean one is selfish, when _a topic_ (not oneself) is more important to oneself than that other person?
> The reason they’re talking is to feel good with themselves (as we all are). But asking someone to explain a tricky subject throws that off, doesn’t it?
Perhaps. But the interpretation is still not immediately "selfishness" for me. You are not there to please them and make them feel good. But how does that immediately become "selfish"?
> To reframe the question a bit, what do you feel you would get out of it if they explained their belief structure to you? (Explain your belief about this, ha.)
Yes, that is a good introspective question, that one maybe should ask oneself.
However, if anything that could somehow be interpreted as "wanting something for oneself" is considered selfish, then we can shut down all our media right now and stop talking to everyone else. You can always claim "You did this or that conversation only to feel good about yourself! So Selfish!"
So I am asking: What is your definition of selfishness?
You care about the topic, they don't want to talk about it for whatever reason. You are trying to get them to do something they don't like, because _you_ like it.
As stubborn as you think those people are, they have a good case for arguing that you are just as stubborn if not more so.
By genuinely adopting this viewpoint, not only will you likely have a more productive discussion, but you may reconsider some of your own priors.
edit: Probably better after Covid.
Says the person with a true neutral alignment.
The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks. How you "can't avoid politics, because everything is political". Ravelry, which is a crocheting website, went mad with us-vs-them discussions. Why?
The fault is mainly with legacy media, because they had the credibility and prestige of their history, plus the consistency of their output (daily, weekly, whatever), which they used to spoonfeed poison to large parts of society. How others are "unlike us", and that "they're evil", and oh by the way, "vote for our candidate" who is the some storybook hero we need.
The "two-minutes-of-hate" has come largely from legacy media, and they are responsible for the schisms present right now.
>The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides "getting them" (whichever group that may be) over informing, and in the process dehumanising large swathes of people for clicks.
Everything you've outlined above is entirely the result of technology and the incentive structures that have been pursued in its "advancement".
I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major communication breakdowns, but I think on the whole it's a positive development.
Usually it's not one specific event but a bombardment of information that over time, hopefully gives someone more perspective and their place in the world.
On the other hand, it closes some people off and causes the echo chamber. Cuts both ways.
almost certainly is
This is just more of my opinion, but generally the people I know that get caught up in bad echo chambers would have done so without the internet. The Alex Jones fans are just a new iteration of Rush Limbaugh fans, albeit more extreme. I think it's possible for otherwise reasonable people to get caught up in something like that, but they can also get out with time and more life experience.
And how precisely does any of these parties benefit from said interaction?
Doesn't sound anything like my bubble, my city or my country. (Not the USA)
I have heard that bleak description before, just never experienced it.
What solution do we have? I'm pretty sure that even before homo sapiens came on the scene, Neanderthals and even earlier versions of humanity thought about labor-saving devices. They dreamed of not dying from little infections, of not dying in childbirth, of spears that went a little further, of furs that were warmer, of fires that would not need tending. Are we not more or less doomed by our rejection of physical misery and the power of our imagination to simply recreate it all?
More interestingly, imagine a human society which selects a place to stop and then also has to enforce it, both internally and against any other societies which might have a different idea of where to stop (boy that gunpowder sure is a nifty idea). You would need a one world government with some kind of technological edge over those ruled ...
Like other people mentioned, the fact that Sale's predictions were even remotely close to what we're experiencing today should be hair-raising.
What I took from Sale's argument was that "Technology" is not an absolute good, and without a framework of life on which most people on this planet can adopt to guide our use of tech, it will be the end. Hopefully, it will only be the end of this current iteration of civilization.
Edit: The guy was saying all of civilization would collapse and the survivors would start over from nothing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see multiple comments saying this was a close call.
You could evaluate this bet on the technical measures, and that was probably prudent, but at the full picture, the situation looks very mixed.
This problem is much older than the last 25 years of tech. Arguably tech gave us better climate models and power generation (and the potential for much more).
> has enriched a very small number of people
This has been the default for thousands of years. The amount of wealth owned by an average “regular” person today is unimaginable by even the standards of 200 years ago.
I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!
There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.
The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".
What struck me most was that all of the foundations for the kind of collapse he was describing - economic (income inequality) as well as environmental - became much more obvious after the COVID pandemic hit. So while he wasn't right that 2020 will be the end of civilization, does that really mean that our civilization (in this case, the West) isn't heading in that direction?
It is generally men who talk about how great the subsistence economy was. For women, a subsistence economy was hellish. There was no reliable birth control, maternal/infant mortality was high, everything depended on physical strength which gave men an advantage due to their larger size and higher musculature on average, and the system demanded lots of children, so women spent much of their lives pregnant and/or caring for small children. Many of these cultures (see Papua New Guinea for example) have huge amounts of violence against women.