If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts.
I really enjoyed Factfulness and in general enjoy his work and talks. But I would recommend also reading some of the criticism it received. Some really interesting discussions came from the publishing of that book
A great paper [1] (published by Linköping University) criticizes the book's unbalanced optimism and bias:
"Factfulness actually employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth. A policy based on the simplistic worldview presented in Factfulness could have serious consequences."
But wasn't one of Roslings main points that we should strive to make Africa wealthy so that they get fewer kids? (Because the richer the country, the less kids are born) So basically his whole point was that he wanted to stop this unsustainable population growth in Africa.
Also improving access to contraceptives and fighting potential taboo surrounding it. PSI is one charity whose purpose is to improve access to healthcare services including that.
Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number.
For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'.
But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.
If we're talking the general state of the world...
The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then.
I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
> The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action.
Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
I’m always skeptical of economic models of the present let alone the future. Past performance is not indicative of future results and all economic models have very poor prediction performance over longer terms because of this. Black swan events completely eclipse and wipe out any growth that was sustained over the longer term.
If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it).
The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.
Life was much better for those in Europe who survived the black death. They lived longer, healthier lives. They were paid more due to labour shortages. By nearly every measure their lives were better off than those who lived before the plague. That is small comfort to those who suffered and died during the plague.
We're in a similar boat. The winners (survivors) of the climate change disaster will be better off. But if we're to be good Rawlsians [1] then we shouldn't assume that we will be among the survivors.
The black death is a bad analogy. At the time, population was at the upper limit that could be sustained with the technology of the time. If a farmer wanted a larger harvest, they would need to farm a larger area, denying its use to others, thus causing them to starve. Conversely, the large number of deaths directly increased the resources available to everyone else. It was a zero-sum game, with one person's loss being the other's gain, and vice versa.
We no longer live in that world. Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth. This is very much not zero-sum. If a farmer who used to till the fields by hand switches to using a tractor, they're feeding many more people than they harm with the tractor's greenhouse gas emissions.
> Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth.
I presume this is highly dependent on which 100M people are killed.
I was talking about the difference between (world resources)/(world population) and (world resources)/(world population - 100 million).
Of course if you personally kill a very rich person and take their stuff, that might be a life-changing event for you, but unlike during the black death, the average person's income is not significantly derived from dead people's stuff.
100M deaths may make sense if we're ignoring the extreme likelihood of a third world war caused by climate. But given what we know of the history of resource depletions, and the fact that some of countries which will be first affected will be India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which have minor skirmishes even today and two of which are armed with nuclear weapons, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that such a low number is going to prove anywhere near accurate.
I don't see how they could be better off than us in any of the following dimensions, or the ones you mention, and likely many more:
* Health/medical technology and access
* Abundance and variety of food
* Education
* Life expectancy
* Quality (in terms of health) of life
* Child mortality
Looking at life expectancy alone, I'd be surprised if their life expectancy was higher (is this what you had in mind? https://sc.edu/uofsc/announcements/2014/05_sharondewitte_bla...). Certainly some individuals would live longer lives than some individuals, but I wouldn't expect the life expectancy to be higher, nor would I expect the quality of health of that life to be better.
In some ways I could imagine they'd be better -- e.g., amount of land they could own. If you have some data or information about their life quality, I would be interested in seeing it.
Regarding Rawls' veil, I did say, and do think, that we should be ensuring that everyone gets brought along. For someone who isn't convinced about that, the veil may be a good thought experiment to help them along.
You're missing their point. They're not comparing those who survived the black death to us, but to the people who lived before the black death struck.
Similarly, the people who will survive the coming climate catastrophes may well live better lives than we do today, and thus some future Economist may well claim that it all turned out OK in the end. But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming.
Action on climate change is very slow, but happening. Climate change is not going to be even remotely as close to as bad as you appear to think it will be.
Those numbers are assuming only natural causes. Under current scenarios, there is basically a guarantee of a hot war between nuclear powers at least in South Asia.
> "The world has been getting better, and continues to get better."
Perhaps the tiny surface of the world you interact with now has more conveniences than before, but that is very distant from a reality where things are getting better.
Your perception depends on taking many factors for granted, not acknowledging we depend on multiple concurrent progress traps.
If you go to the supermarket and the shelves are empty, if there's no water running through your pipes, if there's no power coming from your outlets, if there's no internet connectivity, and so on, your reality bubble will be popped.
Overusing topsoil, overusing fresh water, killing all the pollinators, pumping aquifers dry, overfishing, using fossil fuels, having pollution festivals like halloween, air travel for trivial reasons, etc. We live our lives thinking the natural world will adapt to our stupid wasteful lifestyle which gets more wasteful every day. But that won't do. Everyone will have to adapt and have a lifestyle that is more sustainable, and that lifestyle will be very different to the one we have now.
Every society is 3 meals away from revolution, and that revolution is coming in our lifetimes when we finish ruining the planet for ourselves. Terraforming mars won't do shit for the political instability that will unfold as a consequence of failed harvests, water exhaustion, topsoil death, etc. War for the resources that are left is inevitable as resources become scarce.
Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
> Perhaps the tiny surface of the world you interact with now has more conveniences than before, but that is very distant from a reality where things are getting better.
> Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
Who isn't acknowledging problems? My optimism doesn't mean I think there aren't serious, present, and pressing problems (I do!). These problems must be identified, and we must take action to resolve them. I'm just optimistic that we will continue to do so, as we always have. I believe in doing the work involved, and my optimism makes me think it's worth putting in the effort, that it's worth doing the hard yards.
But we are very visibly NOT doing what needs to be done, particularly in the effort to stop climate change. The world's largest polluter per capita by far is actively opposed to virtually any measures which could stop climate change, and it's using its vast influence to more or less indirectly convince others not to do so. Europeans are also patting their backs for how green they are, while still mostly producing more CO2 per capita than China and India combined.
> The world has been getting better, and continues to get better
...and as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing (and the standard of living of this population has also on average improved), which leads to more CO2 emissions, a higher consumption of finite natural resources etc. etc. Now there are two possible theories:
(1) things will continue to get better, if any problems will come up along the way we will surely be able to solve them.
(2) we are accelerating towards a brick wall which we can't see yet, but when we see it it will be too late to avoid the crash.
>as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing
At first yes, but not recently, now the opposite is true, if anything. We haven't had exponential growth since the 60s and are currently headed towards a steady state population because of improved standards of living. Turns out health and properity leads to smaller families.
We do still have significant growth, but that is largely because we're filling out the older demographics in many countries, the birth rate is largely under control already, and once the current generations spread through we'll be in a stead state (around 11 billion). In fact, there's no way to _stop_ this growth now, short of killing or sterilising people, since the birthrate is already under control, we're just waiting for the last exponential generations to get old.
Long term, we probably should encourage (slightly) sub-2 children per family to let the total population shrink, but that will take a long time (unless something disasterous happens)
The world went through an ice-age while humans were alive and struggling. The world may be warming because of humans, but we have the ability with technology to adapt.
I assume when people are concerned about the future, they are concerned about the prospective quality of life specifically for themselves and their descendants.
No one is claiming humanity will go extinct. But during that ice age there were probably less than 100k living in the whole world. With technology and our current spread, we won't go so low, but a planet 3-4 degrees hotter is nowhere near able to sustain 7B people. Not to mention the terrible migration and resource wars we'll see as hundreds of millions if not billions of people have to leave places where temperatures routinely rise over livable standards.
Couldn’t disagree harder on every single count. Humanity will adapt. We could sustain 10x population (70 billion) with the correct technology - the vast majority of land on earth is totally empty. There will be no resource wars and no migration. You are thinking delusionally.
>Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether.
Immense strides have been made, but I feel it is dangerous to take a too rosy outlook until the job is done. Complacency has always been the biggest threat to solving the climate crisis. On the other hand climate apathy and fatalism are also real, and equally dangerous.
The best source for the amount of warming we are heading for is the yearly UNEP emissions gap report, which takes all the national commitments and calculates global outcomes. With the currently planned measures we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If the countries that have promised a net-zero strategy actually implement one we are headed for 2.2 degrees. Realistically there is at present no path to less than 2 degrees of warming without major political upheaval or technological revolution and we are probably heading for 2.5 degrees of warming. Even at 2 degrees the consequences are severe. We are looking at a near-total loss of coral reefs and one fifth of insect species, 40% of humanity will become exposed to extreme heat waves, many coastal areas will need to be abandoned displacing hundreds of millions of people. The effects get disproportionately worse when temperatures exceed 2 degrees of warming. So, the situation is not hopeless, but without further action we are still locked into some pretty bad outcomes, and we need to keep the pressure on with all governments to take further steps.
> While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcome
This is only perhaps true if you project the current progress into the future as if this is a foregone conclusion. That is dangerously wrong - most of what has been done to combat global warming is the table stakes, the things that its easy to do and should have either been done decades ago, or are simple economic shifts (transitioning some coal power to wind and solar).
But reaching net 0 emissions is going to be extremely hard, much harder than halving our past emissions. And we have to do that in the next 30-40 years to avoid 2 degrees of warming, which is already catastrophic.
To get to net 0, we would have to replace virtually all transportation in the world with BEVs (cars are easy to replace, planes, trucks and cargo ships almost impossible, and definitely not in 30 years).
We will need to produce at least twice as much electricity as today while closing virtually all coal and gas power plants (but we don't have anywhere near enough energy storage to run the whole grid off renewables, nor is there any realistic chance to do so in the next 30 years).
And finally, we will have to close down the vast majority of industrial animal farming pursuits, which supply much of the world's food.
There is no real chance that the current rate of improvement will lead anywhere close to curtailing emissions enough to avoid 2-3 degrees of warming. Plus, the appetite for these changes may well sour as the bigger impact ones will come to pass.
>But this fact – that it is possible to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies – is something that everyone should know.
Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about.
I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.
A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.
This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).
Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.
We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation.
A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.
I think the point missing is that food that get wasted could not arrive where it is needed before getting rot. Letting aside the expenses to do that. The problem is not that we waste food, as it would not solve starvation, the problem is that in those places where people has no food, there is no production.
"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal
"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve
"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action
While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress
In 2017 when that article was last updated, yeah sure. Not sure you can make that declaration in 2022. The combination of record poverty caused by Covid lockdowns and food supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine has put millions of people worldwide in famine conditions: https://www.reuters.com/world/world-faces-unprecedented-glob...
Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.
FWIW, China has a very long history of famines. Twentieth century wasn't an outlier - although in the West it's been heavily publicised for propaganda reasons.
It was the worst famine - and, arguably, period - in the history of the world:
- tens of millions died due to starvation from central planning issues (variously causing: a plague of locusts; Mao wanting to save face so refused foreign aid and maintained being a net exporter of food while people were starving; diverting people away from agriculture to metal production to meet the five year plan)
- millions died from government beatings/torturings to death, and suicide due to hopelessness and government destruction of cultural traditions in the name of centrally planned progress
Now one might say that there may have been even more harmful centrally planned economies, i.e. the USSR and Nazi Germany, but at best any of the candidates is competing to be only the third worst disaster in the history of the world.
Also I find it curious that among the possible causes you forgot to mention World War 2. What would you say if someone omitted that when explaining fifties in Europe?
I would think that's normal, because WW2 was 1939-1945, and even though it was waged there it didn't include events that would be considered a direct cause of millions starving in Europe. Which is why they didn't.
If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).
My impression from[0] is most places have long histories of fammines, without practical contraceptives, we're all moties and one or two bad harvesta from a Having a Bad Time.
Topsoil is soil with microorganisms, worms and insects in it. You cannot grow food on sterile soil.
Topsoil takes a long time to form, and very short time to be consumed.
We are using topsoil at a higher rate than it is replenished. The rate at which we use topsoil increases over time.
We are very wasteful with our use of topsoil. We discard ugly vegetables, or vegetables outside certain arbitrary parameters despite them being perfectly edible, or simply to keep prices down.
The reality is: over time, that statement is false. Topsoil is dying, and so are we.
We're learning to grow food in ways that increases the amount and fertility of topsoil, so it's not a foregone conclusion. E.g. Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc. Check out the transformation of the Loess Plateau in China. It was rendered into a wasteland by bad farming practices and then re-vegetated and revitalized:
http://eempc.org/lessons-of-the-loess-plateau/
At scale? Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? What about making it work in places going dry?
Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.
Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.
Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially.
Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years.
> Can this be implemented globally in a few decades?
That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could probably turn things around, go from destruction to regeneration, within three decades. It would be unprecedented but I don't see any intrinsic physical reasons that we couldn't do it.
The revitalization of the Loess Plateau took less than three decades, and as a side-effect it now produces all the material needed to repeat the process in a new place.
> What about making it work in places going dry?
Yes. Not only can we do this in places going dry, we can convert desert to (productive food) forest where ever we need it. E.g. "Greening the Desert" https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ project in Jordan. People are using ecological principles all over the world to regenerate large areas.
> Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.
We can transform the deserts into paradise. The rains will fall. (I'm going to stop now before I start quoting passages from "Dune") ;)
> Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.
Water projects are far cheaper and easier than making bullets. Check out the video I linked above.
I mean education is also a (potentially) exponential process, in the sense that e.g. one literate person can teach many others to read, who can then teach even more people.
Certainly some people will need resources as well as training to get started in their area, but we can afford to do that.
We have like 50 years to come up with a scalable solution to the problem of how to grow enough food for a growing population on dying topsoil[1] while having less fresh water[2], and while overfishing most species to extinction.
That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.
Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run. Dude, wake up, billions of people do not even have toilets and you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?
That's not going to happen. But what is going to happen is the same people picking up guns and fighting each other to death over topsoil and water.
We're on the same side you and I, you're "preaching to the choir." But I'm telling you, things are not as dark as they seem! We're learning and applying that learning.
I know about topsoil degradation and erosion, but it's something we're learning to prevent. E.g. Gabe Brown's "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
He increases his topsoil volume and fertility year-on-year, and his farm is more profitable!
Population growth seems like it's leveling off all on it's own, mostly as women get more education and wealth and have fewer children per capita. Japan has already started contracting in population, eh?
Water is going to be a problem in many areas, but again, people are learning and applying ecological principles to regenerate wastelands. Did you check out the Greening the Desert project?
> That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.
The clathrate gun hypothesis is scary, I know, it's kept me up at night. But since there's nothing to do about it beyond just fixing things anyway, the solution to that is the same as the solution to everything else: learn to live in harmony with nature. And it seems like the danger might not be a great as we originally feared. I hope so!
> Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run.
Well, you're mentioning it to me and I'm not doing that.
Permaculture (just to talk about something I have some experience with) is easy to learn, easy to teach, fun and profitable to practice, and doesn't require "Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run."
> billions of people do not even have toilets
All they need is Eisenia fetida. They eat poop and poop soil. It's that simple.
> you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?
Well I didn't say that did I? What I said, and I believe it, is that we have all the information and technology we need already to fix our environmental problems, and that the limiting factor is social (getting the word out) rather than technological (we don't have to e.g. invent fusion first.)
That's my thesis.
I'm not talking about "futuristic shit", except that ecology could be considered futuristic? It's a young science anyway. What I'm talking about is applying ecological principles to solve our basic human needs (the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, eh?)
It will probably take more than a "zero dollar budget" (where did you get that from?) But again, ecological regeneration is the default condition of life. It literally is solar-powered self-improving nanotechnology, eh?
You can start anywhere, with next to nothing, and increase biomass and diversity and fertility. I took some sandy soil, added some wood chips that some chickens had pooped in and a few potatoes, and now there's a lively potato patch where before there was a bit of bare dirt. Zero initial budget.
But yeah, if we "lean into it" with money and resources and people then we can accelerate the healing.
Well, this is clearly not the way corporations see it.
The way corporation executives see it is: "I am going to get a nice bonus this quarter by boosting profits and whatever happens next is the next guy's problem. By the time anything becomes a problem I'll be partying in my superyacht."
And this is the way many problems are treated as well.
There is more nutritious food than before, and there is more toxic/unhealthy/processed food than before.
What's changed is the ratio between the two, but the absolute level per capita of both is higher, which is great for anyone who is discerning and self-controlled enough to avoid the toxic stuff.
I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.
Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't.
People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away.
I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done.
A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive.
In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years.
As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing.
My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.
> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.
The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago.
Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.
Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.
> Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.
Not buying that in the slightest.
Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present?
Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.
None of these technologies fundamentally improve anyone's life, and they are all incremental.
Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight).
Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium.
International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing.
And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies.
And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?
Since creating rockets capable of reaching the moon we've sent rovers to Mars and launched space telescopes capable of analyzing other galaxies billions of LY away. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a smaller advancement than the former?
I absolutely reject the premise that the we should only consider inventions that single-handedly revolutionize the world. A lot of these so-called incremental rounding errors add up to significant sums.
No one is saying that the last 50 years have not been good for progress, or that these discoveries do not have value.
But to claim that they amount to more progress than all of the rest of human history combined is objectively wrong, especially given the amazing advances of the 50-70 years preceding them (1900-1969), which did fundamentally revolutionize human knowledge and form the scientific advances that all subsequent progress is based on, from planes to rockets and from QM to fusion reactors today.
Landing on Mars is fundamentally similar to landing on the Moon - slightly easier in some ways (no humans, some atmosphere), slightly harder in others (much farther away, so need more energy; much slower comms, so impossible to manually correct anything). Launching a space telescope is easier than either, as you don't have to land.
The robotics wasn't there to create the rover, so the mission wouldn't have made sense, but the technology that allowed NASA to land on the moon wpuld have allowed them to land something on Mars as well.
Honestly, a better counter would have been the gravitational wave detector, the kind of precision we have achieved in measurement is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment was also quite impressive for its time, though a good few orders of magnitude less precise.
You hand-waved away the advancements in robotics like it was nothing. You ignored the significant technological advancements behind the space telescopes, focusing instead on the relatively mundane transportation method. What's up with that?
I was comparing apples to apples - spaceflight to spaceflight, like the GP did (first rocket VS reusable rocket boosters).
For the space telescope, the first ones became operational in 1962, and the fundamental principles are the same. The advancements are wonderful, but they are iteration, not some paradigm shift.
Robotics is probably the most impressive of the three, though again, some of the basics of these systems and algorithms date back to the first AI explosion of the 1950s and 60s.
To emphasize again: the point isn't to piss on the extraordinary work of the scientists and engineers working in the last 50 years on these technologies. It is to recognize that the work of the pioneers of these fields from the 40s to the 60s is even more awe inspiring.
Reusable rocket boosters are cool but if you compare their impact with for example manned flight and the invention of airplanes, I think you will find that the latter have been more important for human progress.
> The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.
Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.
More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?
And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.
Relativity and quantum mechanics have been paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world. They were immediately recognized as such.
A discovery of equal impact today would be the unification of those two. The Higgs boson doesn't even come close to the importance of the Schrodinger equation, and neither does QCD even.
Similarly, imaging a black hole is nowhere near close to the discovery of general relativity, which fundamentally and almost immediately changed how we interpret celestial mechanics.
Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.
But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.
> Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.
> But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.
The first working transistor was in 1947. Your person "well versed in the state of the art of technology and science" in 1950 might know about them. Having 10 billion of them on one substrate working together is still revolutionary, though - something the person in 1950 probably wouldn't expect and certainly couldn't envision the effects of.
Edison produced his first electric light bulb in 1879. Your person from 1890 would know about them, and would recognize lighting in 1950. They wouldn't recognize LEDs, though, or even florescent tubes.
Bell's telephone worked in 1876. Your person in 1890 would know it, and would recognize communications in 1950. Neither they nor the person from 1950 would recognize cell phones in peoples' pockets.
Your person from 1950 would know about computers as stand-alone behemoths in data centers. The internet is not something they would understand; computers didn't talk to each other in 1950.
It's amazing how many people don't get that these three things can, and are, true at the same time.
Yes, things are so much better: child mortality keeps falling, people in extreme poverty have (slowly) fallen, wars are less frequent.
Yes, things are awful: climate catastrophe is incoming, income inequality is pushing gilded age levels, democracy has been backsliding for the past 20 years, there are more slaves today that at any point in history.
Yes, things can be better: we have not reached the end-stage in political and economic development, and we will move to something better than neoliberal capitalism, we can tackle climate change with massive concerted action.
Is there a consensus on this organization (givewell.org)?
I donate to French organizations I know and see their work directly, but have no experience with international ones such as this one.
I would be most interested in ones that provide education capacities to girls but the one from the post concentrates on health related ones (which is of course great as well)
Give Well is a research organisation that publishes reports on the effectiveness of charities.
They do select a 'Top 9' of best charities for a range of issues, and also run a 'donation index' where you can allow your donation to be distributed to the top charities (purportedly without a fee being taken).
I've heard of Give Well being mentioned on various Stats podcasts (e.g. the BBC's More or Less) and Our World in Data is very reputable.
In my corner of the world/philanthropy discussion, I'd consider GiveWell one of the most well-known organizations and with a reputation of high quality, thorough research. In terms of charity evaluators who focus on the impact per dollar spent, I'd have a hard time thinking of anyone comparable.
Regarding what type of programs GiveWell currently recommends, they do evaluate a wide range of types of programs. For instance, here is a page on their website summarizing some of their work on education: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ed.... However, with the facts as they exist in the world today, their analysis is that for a given amount of funding, more good can be done with certain specific health interventions.
I think Givewell is excellent if your goal is to donate to charities that have been vetted for maximum impact (measured in terms of cost-effectiveness of dollars donated to saving lives) but if you are looking for a charity in a specific sector outside of one they have judged, they're not the best for that. But if you're a founder by chance, founderspledge.com supports people in figuring out where to donate based on their interests (and also publishes some of their research).
The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.
> The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.
Instead of getting cause and effect backwards over and over again maybe one should think that the reverse is true instead?
It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else.
What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group?
In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics.
From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around.
What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.
There is a severe lack of competent and inspiring leadership. With no clear vision for the future people become trapped in pointless political squabbles.
My wife. My kids. My siblings. My cousins. My parents. My dog. Coffee. Bourbon. Ice cream. Scrambled eggs. The smell of baking bread. The smell of fresh rain. A walk on a sunny day. Sex. A really satisfying crap. Movies. People watching. A funny joke. A bad joke. Puns. A good story well told. The stars at night. The sound of cicadas. A hawk screeching overhead. The beach. The mountains. A friendly smile. A hug from a friend. A hug from a stranger. Jitters at the start of a marathon. Elation at the end of a marathon. A symphony orchestra. That guy playing guitar at the John Lennon garden in Central Park.
But yes, competent and inspiring leadership is good too.
Because he's a weird insecure psychopathic man-child.
Don't give him enough gratitude? Eternal suffering. Break one of the weird rules he apparently really cares about (but then allows his most trusted disciples to break)? Eternal suffering. Succumb to the biological drivers that are inherently within us? Yep, more eternal suffering.
The statements are true. Period.
There's no need to imagine a place where all three overlap, they are already true. Specially since the last one is just a possibility.
It's too selfish for humans to say world is better. Is the world only for humans? Does it belong to us only?
Every other species is in terrible condition than before or they got extinction.
And the better is not going to last. All the progress is because of extreme fossil fuel usage. The effect has started to show, to be honest it's going to get much worse in coming decades.
It's like a person falling from a building says life was never so exiting while going down each floor, even just before hitting the ground.
While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields.
This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have accountability for the people responsible and genuine changes.
I want our future to be one that respects the biosphere and all species, not just one. It's not just altruistic either - we've lost so much already, and people don't even know.
Yes, "the world is better" should ideally include the impacts of today's decisions, not just today's direct response to previous factors.
But the example of childhood death statistics doesn't include any analysis of how today's actions are setting up future childhood safety issues regarding plastics, climate change, overfishing, water shortages, etc.
Exactly. The article claims that the world is "better" because we have improved child mortality rates. They state (correctly) that the improvement is a consequence of alleviating poverty and improving material living conditions. But how did we DO that? Did we just put our heads down and chant "economic growth for everyone"?!
No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities.
Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.
I’ve often thought that if you drew a line with the witch burning dark ages at one end, and a society where everyone can achieve their true potential at the other end, we’re somewhere close to the halfway point now. Massive progress made, massive progress still to be made. So yeah I’d agree with all three statements.
To be pedantic, the peak time period for witch-burning was in the Early Modern period (15th-17th century), not the Dark Ages (5th-10th century)[1].
In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence.
I have a hard time believing the fundamental problem is the world is "culture".
After Covid-19 and a personal battle with Toxoplasmosis, I think people need a reminder of the unforgiving brutality of nature and evolution.
The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(probably via hormones) in human brains.
No one talks about this, and I only found out because this parasite was giving me polycystic ovary syndrome! It's all an absolute nitemare, and a great awakening about how these parasites violate our bodies and minds.
I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.
>I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.
I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.
This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness.
It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative.
I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well.
Thank you. It's very good to have the affirmation of a fellow straight, rich, white man that everything is hunky-dory. We can just take everybody a standard deviation or two off from the median, and just chop those tails off, neat as pie.
Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadHis TED talks are masterpieces as well.
Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.
"Factfulness actually employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth. A policy based on the simplistic worldview presented in Factfulness could have serious consequences."
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...
Or am I misremembering?
https://upgrader.gapminder.org/
I was surprised at how the world is doing.
For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'.
But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.
The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then.
I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action.
Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it).
The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.
We're in a similar boat. The winners (survivors) of the climate change disaster will be better off. But if we're to be good Rawlsians [1] then we shouldn't assume that we will be among the survivors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
We no longer live in that world. Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth. This is very much not zero-sum. If a farmer who used to till the fields by hand switches to using a tractor, they're feeding many more people than they harm with the tractor's greenhouse gas emissions.
I presume this is highly dependent on which 100M people are killed.
Of course if you personally kill a very rich person and take their stuff, that might be a life-changing event for you, but unlike during the black death, the average person's income is not significantly derived from dead people's stuff.
* Health/medical technology and access
* Abundance and variety of food
* Education
* Life expectancy
* Quality (in terms of health) of life
* Child mortality
Looking at life expectancy alone, I'd be surprised if their life expectancy was higher (is this what you had in mind? https://sc.edu/uofsc/announcements/2014/05_sharondewitte_bla...). Certainly some individuals would live longer lives than some individuals, but I wouldn't expect the life expectancy to be higher, nor would I expect the quality of health of that life to be better.
In some ways I could imagine they'd be better -- e.g., amount of land they could own. If you have some data or information about their life quality, I would be interested in seeing it.
Regarding Rawls' veil, I did say, and do think, that we should be ensuring that everyone gets brought along. For someone who isn't convinced about that, the veil may be a good thought experiment to help them along.
Similarly, the people who will survive the coming climate catastrophes may well live better lives than we do today, and thus some future Economist may well claim that it all turned out OK in the end. But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming.
...that number is not even remotely plausible. Where did you get billions from?
Example: 250,000 extra deaths estimated between 2030 and 2050. That means an extra 5 million deaths in that period (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...).
Another: 83 million extra deaths by 2100, and I suspect that's under the more pessimistic scenario (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dishashetty/2021/07/30/climate-...)
Action on climate change is very slow, but happening. Climate change is not going to be even remotely as close to as bad as you appear to think it will be.
Perhaps the tiny surface of the world you interact with now has more conveniences than before, but that is very distant from a reality where things are getting better.
Your perception depends on taking many factors for granted, not acknowledging we depend on multiple concurrent progress traps.
If you go to the supermarket and the shelves are empty, if there's no water running through your pipes, if there's no power coming from your outlets, if there's no internet connectivity, and so on, your reality bubble will be popped.
Overusing topsoil, overusing fresh water, killing all the pollinators, pumping aquifers dry, overfishing, using fossil fuels, having pollution festivals like halloween, air travel for trivial reasons, etc. We live our lives thinking the natural world will adapt to our stupid wasteful lifestyle which gets more wasteful every day. But that won't do. Everyone will have to adapt and have a lifestyle that is more sustainable, and that lifestyle will be very different to the one we have now.
Every society is 3 meals away from revolution, and that revolution is coming in our lifetimes when we finish ruining the planet for ourselves. Terraforming mars won't do shit for the political instability that will unfold as a consequence of failed harvests, water exhaustion, topsoil death, etc. War for the resources that are left is inevitable as resources become scarce.
Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
By MANY measures, the world has been getting gradually better for just about everyone: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit.... When we look at the facts globally, there is a clear and obvious trajectory.
> Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
Who isn't acknowledging problems? My optimism doesn't mean I think there aren't serious, present, and pressing problems (I do!). These problems must be identified, and we must take action to resolve them. I'm just optimistic that we will continue to do so, as we always have. I believe in doing the work involved, and my optimism makes me think it's worth putting in the effort, that it's worth doing the hard yards.
Our solution has always been to migrate to the next place that has resources. But soon there will be no such place.
...and as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing (and the standard of living of this population has also on average improved), which leads to more CO2 emissions, a higher consumption of finite natural resources etc. etc. Now there are two possible theories:
(1) things will continue to get better, if any problems will come up along the way we will surely be able to solve them.
(2) we are accelerating towards a brick wall which we can't see yet, but when we see it it will be too late to avoid the crash.
At first yes, but not recently, now the opposite is true, if anything. We haven't had exponential growth since the 60s and are currently headed towards a steady state population because of improved standards of living. Turns out health and properity leads to smaller families.
We do still have significant growth, but that is largely because we're filling out the older demographics in many countries, the birth rate is largely under control already, and once the current generations spread through we'll be in a stead state (around 11 billion). In fact, there's no way to _stop_ this growth now, short of killing or sterilising people, since the birthrate is already under control, we're just waiting for the last exponential generations to get old.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
Long term, we probably should encourage (slightly) sub-2 children per family to let the total population shrink, but that will take a long time (unless something disasterous happens)
https://www.science.org/content/article/experts-be-damned-wo...
https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity
While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether.
At least, according to Kurzgesagt.
https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
The best source for the amount of warming we are heading for is the yearly UNEP emissions gap report, which takes all the national commitments and calculates global outcomes. With the currently planned measures we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If the countries that have promised a net-zero strategy actually implement one we are headed for 2.2 degrees. Realistically there is at present no path to less than 2 degrees of warming without major political upheaval or technological revolution and we are probably heading for 2.5 degrees of warming. Even at 2 degrees the consequences are severe. We are looking at a near-total loss of coral reefs and one fifth of insect species, 40% of humanity will become exposed to extreme heat waves, many coastal areas will need to be abandoned displacing hundreds of millions of people. The effects get disproportionately worse when temperatures exceed 2 degrees of warming. So, the situation is not hopeless, but without further action we are still locked into some pretty bad outcomes, and we need to keep the pressure on with all governments to take further steps.
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuy1DaQzWI
This is only perhaps true if you project the current progress into the future as if this is a foregone conclusion. That is dangerously wrong - most of what has been done to combat global warming is the table stakes, the things that its easy to do and should have either been done decades ago, or are simple economic shifts (transitioning some coal power to wind and solar).
But reaching net 0 emissions is going to be extremely hard, much harder than halving our past emissions. And we have to do that in the next 30-40 years to avoid 2 degrees of warming, which is already catastrophic.
To get to net 0, we would have to replace virtually all transportation in the world with BEVs (cars are easy to replace, planes, trucks and cargo ships almost impossible, and definitely not in 30 years).
We will need to produce at least twice as much electricity as today while closing virtually all coal and gas power plants (but we don't have anywhere near enough energy storage to run the whole grid off renewables, nor is there any realistic chance to do so in the next 30 years).
And finally, we will have to close down the vast majority of industrial animal farming pursuits, which supply much of the world's food.
There is no real chance that the current rate of improvement will lead anywhere close to curtailing emissions enough to avoid 2-3 degrees of warming. Plus, the appetite for these changes may well sour as the bigger impact ones will come to pass.
Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about.
I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.
A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.
Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare.
https://ourworldindata.org/famines
A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.
From a sibling comment by imtrigued:
> Almost a billion are still going hungry.
"The world is awful"
And then from your parent comment:
> Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare
"The world is better"
And finally your comment:
> it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve
"The world can be much better"
These three are all true, and I suspect each person already knew all three. It's just that each person chose to focus on a separate aspect.
"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal
"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve
"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action
While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress
The situation in 2022 is not good, it will take time to see exactly how bad.
Famine correlates very closely with war -- if our recent period of relative global peace comes to an end it will probably return with a vengeance.
Which is arguably just a different form of malnutrition, somewhat less deadly, but more of a chronic burden on the patient and the society.
Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.
- tens of millions died due to starvation from central planning issues (variously causing: a plague of locusts; Mao wanting to save face so refused foreign aid and maintained being a net exporter of food while people were starving; diverting people away from agriculture to metal production to meet the five year plan)
- millions died from government beatings/torturings to death, and suicide due to hopelessness and government destruction of cultural traditions in the name of centrally planned progress
Now one might say that there may have been even more harmful centrally planned economies, i.e. the USSR and Nazi Germany, but at best any of the candidates is competing to be only the third worst disaster in the history of the world.
Also I find it curious that among the possible causes you forgot to mention World War 2. What would you say if someone omitted that when explaining fifties in Europe?
If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).
[0]https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...
We grow food on topsoil.
Topsoil is soil with microorganisms, worms and insects in it. You cannot grow food on sterile soil.
Topsoil takes a long time to form, and very short time to be consumed.
We are using topsoil at a higher rate than it is replenished. The rate at which we use topsoil increases over time.
We are very wasteful with our use of topsoil. We discard ugly vegetables, or vegetables outside certain arbitrary parameters despite them being perfectly edible, or simply to keep prices down.
The reality is: over time, that statement is false. Topsoil is dying, and so are we.
Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.
Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.
Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially.
Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years.
> Can this be implemented globally in a few decades?
That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could probably turn things around, go from destruction to regeneration, within three decades. It would be unprecedented but I don't see any intrinsic physical reasons that we couldn't do it.
The revitalization of the Loess Plateau took less than three decades, and as a side-effect it now produces all the material needed to repeat the process in a new place.
> What about making it work in places going dry?
Yes. Not only can we do this in places going dry, we can convert desert to (productive food) forest where ever we need it. E.g. "Greening the Desert" https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ project in Jordan. People are using ecological principles all over the world to regenerate large areas.
> Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this.
It's a huge problem, it's true. But progress is being made. E.g. check out the projects described in "India's Water Revolution" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE
We can transform the deserts into paradise. The rains will fall. (I'm going to stop now before I start quoting passages from "Dune") ;)
> Rifles and ammunition are cheaper than new water infrastructure so war over water will take place everywhere before water conservation technology is deployed.
Water projects are far cheaper and easier than making bullets. Check out the video I linked above.
It requires training people that do not have the resources to acquire training.
I mean education is also a (potentially) exponential process, in the sense that e.g. one literate person can teach many others to read, who can then teach even more people.
Certainly some people will need resources as well as training to get started in their area, but we can afford to do that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJhpoYwAqFA
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q
That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.
Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run. Dude, wake up, billions of people do not even have toilets and you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?
That's not going to happen. But what is going to happen is the same people picking up guns and fighting each other to death over topsoil and water.
I know about topsoil degradation and erosion, but it's something we're learning to prevent. E.g. Gabe Brown's "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A He increases his topsoil volume and fertility year-on-year, and his farm is more profitable!
Population growth seems like it's leveling off all on it's own, mostly as women get more education and wealth and have fewer children per capita. Japan has already started contracting in population, eh?
Water is going to be a problem in many areas, but again, people are learning and applying ecological principles to regenerate wastelands. Did you check out the Greening the Desert project?
> That is not considering worse scenarios like arctic frozen methane melting and releasing a lethal load of methane into the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...
The clathrate gun hypothesis is scary, I know, it's kept me up at night. But since there's nothing to do about it beyond just fixing things anyway, the solution to that is the same as the solution to everything else: learn to live in harmony with nature. And it seems like the danger might not be a great as we originally feared. I hope so!
> Each time you mention the subject, people talk about some obscure, prototype program somewhere that requires Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run.
Well, you're mentioning it to me and I'm not doing that.
Permaculture (just to talk about something I have some experience with) is easy to learn, easy to teach, fun and profitable to practice, and doesn't require "Ivy League engineers and millions of dollars to run."
> billions of people do not even have toilets
All they need is Eisenia fetida. They eat poop and poop soil. It's that simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermicompost
> you think in less than 50 years they will be doing futuristic shit on a zero dollar budget?
Well I didn't say that did I? What I said, and I believe it, is that we have all the information and technology we need already to fix our environmental problems, and that the limiting factor is social (getting the word out) rather than technological (we don't have to e.g. invent fusion first.)
That's my thesis.
I'm not talking about "futuristic shit", except that ecology could be considered futuristic? It's a young science anyway. What I'm talking about is applying ecological principles to solve our basic human needs (the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, eh?)
It will probably take more than a "zero dollar budget" (where did you get that from?) But again, ecological regeneration is the default condition of life. It literally is solar-powered self-improving nanotechnology, eh?
You can start anywhere, with next to nothing, and increase biomass and diversity and fertility. I took some sandy soil, added some wood chips that some chickens had pooped in and a few potatoes, and now there's a lively potato patch where before there was a bit of bare dirt. Zero initial budget.
But yeah, if we "lean into it" with money and resources and people then we can accelerate the healing.
Come...
The way corporation executives see it is: "I am going to get a nice bonus this quarter by boosting profits and whatever happens next is the next guy's problem. By the time anything becomes a problem I'll be partying in my superyacht."
And this is the way many problems are treated as well.
In re: corporations, I noticed that the first video you linked to is from CNBC and the second is from USA TODAY, both large corporations.
What's changed is the ratio between the two, but the absolute level per capita of both is higher, which is great for anyone who is discerning and self-controlled enough to avoid the toxic stuff.
A city full of horse manure wasn't all that healthy, either.
Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't.
People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away.
I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done.
A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive.
In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years.
As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing.
My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.
The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago.
Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.
Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.
Not buying that in the slightest.
Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present?
Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.
Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight).
Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium.
International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing.
And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies.
And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?
But to claim that they amount to more progress than all of the rest of human history combined is objectively wrong, especially given the amazing advances of the 50-70 years preceding them (1900-1969), which did fundamentally revolutionize human knowledge and form the scientific advances that all subsequent progress is based on, from planes to rockets and from QM to fusion reactors today.
The robotics wasn't there to create the rover, so the mission wouldn't have made sense, but the technology that allowed NASA to land on the moon wpuld have allowed them to land something on Mars as well.
Honestly, a better counter would have been the gravitational wave detector, the kind of precision we have achieved in measurement is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment was also quite impressive for its time, though a good few orders of magnitude less precise.
For the space telescope, the first ones became operational in 1962, and the fundamental principles are the same. The advancements are wonderful, but they are iteration, not some paradigm shift.
Robotics is probably the most impressive of the three, though again, some of the basics of these systems and algorithms date back to the first AI explosion of the 1950s and 60s.
To emphasize again: the point isn't to piss on the extraordinary work of the scientists and engineers working in the last 50 years on these technologies. It is to recognize that the work of the pioneers of these fields from the 40s to the 60s is even more awe inspiring.
Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.
More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?
And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.
A discovery of equal impact today would be the unification of those two. The Higgs boson doesn't even come close to the importance of the Schrodinger equation, and neither does QCD even.
Similarly, imaging a black hole is nowhere near close to the discovery of general relativity, which fundamentally and almost immediately changed how we interpret celestial mechanics.
Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.
But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.
> But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.
The first working transistor was in 1947. Your person "well versed in the state of the art of technology and science" in 1950 might know about them. Having 10 billion of them on one substrate working together is still revolutionary, though - something the person in 1950 probably wouldn't expect and certainly couldn't envision the effects of.
Edison produced his first electric light bulb in 1879. Your person from 1890 would know about them, and would recognize lighting in 1950. They wouldn't recognize LEDs, though, or even florescent tubes.
Bell's telephone worked in 1876. Your person in 1890 would know it, and would recognize communications in 1950. Neither they nor the person from 1950 would recognize cell phones in peoples' pockets.
Your person from 1950 would know about computers as stand-alone behemoths in data centers. The internet is not something they would understand; computers didn't talk to each other in 1950.
And so on.
Yes, things are so much better: child mortality keeps falling, people in extreme poverty have (slowly) fallen, wars are less frequent.
Yes, things are awful: climate catastrophe is incoming, income inequality is pushing gilded age levels, democracy has been backsliding for the past 20 years, there are more slaves today that at any point in history.
Yes, things can be better: we have not reached the end-stage in political and economic development, and we will move to something better than neoliberal capitalism, we can tackle climate change with massive concerted action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist
I donate to French organizations I know and see their work directly, but have no experience with international ones such as this one.
I would be most interested in ones that provide education capacities to girls but the one from the post concentrates on health related ones (which is of course great as well)
They do select a 'Top 9' of best charities for a range of issues, and also run a 'donation index' where you can allow your donation to be distributed to the top charities (purportedly without a fee being taken).
I've heard of Give Well being mentioned on various Stats podcasts (e.g. the BBC's More or Less) and Our World in Data is very reputable.
Regarding what type of programs GiveWell currently recommends, they do evaluate a wide range of types of programs. For instance, here is a page on their website summarizing some of their work on education: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ed.... However, with the facts as they exist in the world today, their analysis is that for a given amount of funding, more good can be done with certain specific health interventions.
Is there a reason you're spelling it that way?
It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else.
What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group?
In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics.
From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around.
What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.
A centrally planned economy has the worst track record in history. It definitely won't be the solution.
What makes life worth living for you?
But yes, competent and inspiring leadership is good too.
Don't give him enough gratitude? Eternal suffering. Break one of the weird rules he apparently really cares about (but then allows his most trusted disciples to break)? Eternal suffering. Succumb to the biological drivers that are inherently within us? Yep, more eternal suffering.
I would say you can't make this stuff up, but...
It's not a lack of leaders that's the issue today, it's a lack of gratitude
Every other species is in terrible condition than before or they got extinction.
And the better is not going to last. All the progress is because of extreme fossil fuel usage. The effect has started to show, to be honest it's going to get much worse in coming decades.
It's like a person falling from a building says life was never so exiting while going down each floor, even just before hitting the ground.
While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields.
This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have accountability for the people responsible and genuine changes.
I want our future to be one that respects the biosphere and all species, not just one. It's not just altruistic either - we've lost so much already, and people don't even know.
Then it's factored in to the "is the world better for humans" category
But the example of childhood death statistics doesn't include any analysis of how today's actions are setting up future childhood safety issues regarding plastics, climate change, overfishing, water shortages, etc.
No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities.
Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.
In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt
The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(probably via hormones) in human brains.
No one talks about this, and I only found out because this parasite was giving me polycystic ovary syndrome! It's all an absolute nitemare, and a great awakening about how these parasites violate our bodies and minds.
I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.
I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.
It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
[0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...
Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!