Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

These are all good points, and as noted, relevant points that virtually everyone either dismisses as irrelevant (as in, relevant to politics/international-conflicts and/or future technology, but that's a different department) or else just runs away from because it makes their brain hurt to think about it.

But here's some twists on these points, and some (partial) fallacies in the fallacies.

Ignoring global climate change:

Some people still cling to the (misguided, I think) hope that global climate change is not a reality, and is just a bunch of nonsense trumped-up (pun intended) by business owners that don't want to pay their share of the cost to attempt to fix the problem. Others (my brother included, a source of many discussions) think it's real, but not at all human-caused, rather just a natural phenomenon (say, just like the ice ages) so that we should just let nature take its course, and sit by and watch it happen. I've seen the lecture with proof (and I wish I had the Powerpoint slides) by the climatologists/geologists, and I can tell you that climate change (hotter some places, colder other places, dryer some places, wetter other places) is a real thing that is scientifically proven, and at least partially caused by human's use of inefficient transportation, fossil fuels to heat and power the transportation, human's raising animals to eat (yes, I'm talking cow farts here, a huge problem somewhat akin to the 1800s NYC problem of too much horse shit), and insufficient use of nuclear energy along with too-slow switching to other green energies.

So even if humans are only partly to blame, and natural sunspot cycles are the cause of the other half, one would think that still, humans would almost unanimously want to take steps to remediate the problem, rather than sitting idly by and watch the polar ice caps melt and oceans rise to flood NYC and Boston and D.C. and LA and all of Florida. Of course, places like China may not give a crap, since Beijing is 100-200 feet in elevation, and only southeast suburbs would flood. Maybe that's why China continues to be the worst polluter and contributor to global climate change, most notably via harvesting and burning lots of coal to accomplish its own conversion from a backwards country to a modern technological country (I think I heard that one new coal burning plant comes on line per day over there).

Of course, all this doesn't mean that the Paris accords are a good idea - as I agree that it is largely a scam to let places like China continue to be the worst polluters while America pays what amounts to war reparations for past pollution that we've already committed. Sure, let's fix the problem in America as fast as we can (and we largely are, as pointed out, via new technology being invented and coming online). So yes, we're seemingly ignoring the effects of technology to counter the problem. However, at the same time, the worst polluters of the world seemingly have no desire, or maybe no incentive to use the available technology to the benefit of the entire earth. Maybe the do-gooder Paris accords idea is for the rich countries to give the poor countries money to help them get their shit in order. But realistically, they'll just accept the cash and keep on polluting. So the real problem is, we must force the world's worst polluters (both countries and businesses) to get with the program, and stop or at least drastically slash their carbon footprint.

Ignoring war:

Yes, that's a factor that nobody's really considering, that indeed may bring a partial self-correction to the problem before it reaches a critical "turning point" at which the anticipated negative effects cannot be stopped. I'll take the UN study at its word that this turning point may happen sooner rather than later. Does that mean we should hurry up and have a global war? Well, that sounds like a solution that might be worse than the problem.

Nevertheless, who knows? - that very well might happen. Maybe China will steal one to many territories in the South China Sea from the Philippines and other regional countries, and the U.S. and allies might feel obligated to take military steps to stop Chinese colonialism in its tracks - and that might lead to an all-out war in which enough people die to slow down the advancing problem of global climate change just enough to keep NYC and LA et al from becoming the next Venice(s) of the world. But even if that type of war does come about, the motivation for going to war with China might have more to do with punishing China for (at some time in the future) submerging NYC and Boston and LA and Florida, than whether or not some American Navy ships are allowed to navigate freely in the South China Sea. Trump is already (justifiably) bitching to China about stealing our technology. Why are we not also bitching to them about flooding our major cities (eventually)? Maybe we should give them some modern American eco-friendly energy technology in return for their banning future coal-fired power plants (and retrofitting existing ones with scrubbers).

The (partial) fallacy in Fallacy #2 in climate change story: Technology

Technology will definitely help, but only if every country uses it. And the U.S. will through natural economic reasons, but many/most other countries won't. If not, maybe we need to force other countries to use the available technology. [See possible global war, above.] I'm not sure if the Singularity will actually help or not - maybe it might. But two things are relevant. One, the Singularity will not occur (if indeed it does occur) as soon as some people think. The projected date of 2030 noted in this blog (and supported by discussion at http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... 151228.htm) is probably way too optimistic/soon. Some of the projected accomplishments at projected dates in that article have not happened, even though the dates have come and gone. Singularity-caliber artificial cognitive capabilities require Hard-AI - and that is just that - extremely hard to do. Maybe we've recently sped up the progress in that direction a little bit by using novel approaches such as deep learning, but it's still really really difficult to achieve. There have been many AI Winters of disillusionment in AI in the past, and I predict another one approaching soon, when businesses realize that the AI hype is, well, over-hyped.

And I don't have a better date for projected achievement of Hard-AI, leading to a possible Singularity. I haven't read Ray Kurzweil's book on the "Singularity." I should have - it's on my future reading list - since my field of specialization is AI. But for now, let's just say that maybe Ray's guestimated date of Singularity is probably also overly optimistic. Yet, that may come some day. And there are lots of moral issues associated with prominence of autonomous thinking robots.

But if that does happen, that might ultimately accomplish (more nicely) the reduction in carbon-polluting people on this planet that is needed to avert an ecological calamity. The idea is that maybe instead of striving for 3-4 kids, future parents might settle for 1-2 kids plus 2 robot playmates and/or servants. It's a remote possibility, but let's at least consider it to be something that is semi-feasible. If that did happen, the extra robots would be more power efficient than the kids they substitute for - so less energy, less fossil fuels, less NYC flooding, etc. Also, that may break what is claimed to be the "Malthus Effect" that for any species (most notably humans) to survive, the population growth rate must be greater than the food supply growth rate (thus causing a problem, obviously, also leading quite naturally to wars and human kill-offs that bring the system back into balance). I recently took a class on population growth in which we studied Malthus in the original, and I believe that (sadly) Malthus was right-on in many of his conclusions. However Malthus did not consider either robots or the recent "green revolution" in farming efficiency, and so that part of Malthus' theory is not 100% true anymore. Robots and/or robotic farm instruments can take the place of the required humans to feed the world. Already, drones and satellite pictures are used in farming AI applications to farm more efficiently with exactly the right amount of water and no more pesticides than are needed. So Malthusian exponential growth in Earth population no longer has to be inevitable. The down-side though, is that number of children (to bear) is largely influenced by local/regional social tradition. And that takes up to 100 years to change. Some formerly impoverished parts of the world tend to have 8 kids just because they think 4 of them will die of starvation, and the parents want at least 4 left over to take care of them in their old age. But already, with more efficient "green technology" food production plus better (largely UN sponsored) medical treatment, these people are still bearing 8 kids, but all 8 survive - so we get hyper-exponential population growth (like Malthus on steroids). It takes generations for this knowledge to sink in (in somewhat of a manner that Generational Dynamics might have something to say about). The result is: population will get exponentially ever higher, before it begins to taper off, and possibly reduce.

I hate to say it, but the interim solution to that may well end up being more wars as well. The news seems to be bad - no good quick solutions, just lots of wars.

The (partial) Fallacy in Fallacy #1 in climate change story: Ignoring war

As pointed out elsewhere, the U.S. and others are getting better (via advanced AI and robot and drone technologies) at fighting wars using technology as the biggest warfighter, in addition to (a smaller number of) soldiers. Thus, in the future, wars might be decided by who has the best and smartest and most well-armed robots, rather than whose soldiers win the battle. It's the soldiers' robots that will win the battle. Thus, the number of human casualties may go down in future wars (decades from now - this is not an immediate thing). But then, if that becomes the case, then giant wars may no longer have the self-correcting features of making giant reductions in populations, that we would normally expect. True, if nuclear weapons get deployed on a large scale, then all bets may be off on this conjecture. Still, it might seem that World War III (if, god forbid, it might happen) might not eliminate 25% to 50% of the Earth population, after all. It might *only* eliminate 10% of the population. Enough to be a giant disaster, for sure, but not enough to be the self-correcting adjustment (downward) on population, such as to resolve the impending doom that is global climate change. So the (seemingly) inevitable wars may not be as big of an effect on restraining global climate change as one might suspect (if one even considered it, which, as pointed out, most don't).

So what is to be done? (Rhetorically speaking), should we adopt a world-wide ban on fighting wars using robots, just so that when such wars do come, they will kill off enough humans to correct the global climate-change disaster? I doubt that would go over too well in the next (Paris, or wherever) climate conference. It's probably as dumb an idea as the U.S. paying money to China, and other countries, as a bribe to get them to pollute less.

James Howard Kunstler wrote a book called Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. He argues that technology will probably not be able to save us. (Well, at least not let us maintain our technologically advanced society.) I don't know what to believe. His main argument seems to be that energy supplies that technology needs is running out. Therefore, modern society is doomed. We had best buy mules and started learning how to grow food. A mule and machine gun with a lot of ammo...

zzazz wrote: > Let's see,
> who knows AI better than all the AI scientists,
> and knows economics better than all the economists,
> and knows foreign policy better than all the diplomats,
> and knows programming better than all the programmers,
> and knows history better than all the historians,
> and knows climate science better than all the climate scientists,
> and besides all that is pals with Steve Bannon?

You left one out:
"and is more philosophical than all the philosophers"

Read the following article:

** Guess what? British politicians and journalists are just as ignorant as Americans
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... m#e070114b

John wrote: > When I began this project, shortly after 9/11, it was simply to
> try to figure out what's going on in the world. I've had many
> shocks and surprises in the 5+ years since then, but probably no
> more shocking than the realization that I now know more about the
> history and current events about the world than do 99.9% of the
> politicians, analysts, journalists, pundits and others in
> Washington. This is a reflection on how much work I've done, but
> it's even more a reflection of the sheer arrogance and stupidity
> that pervades Washington.

> It's also worth pointing out that these politicians, journalists
> and others always get things wrong. They make predictions that
> are no more than sheer guesswork, and their predictions produce no
> better results than flipping a coin. They get one prediction
> after another wrong, but that doesn't stop them from making more
> wrong predictions, and then asserting that they actually know more
> about what's going to happen than anyone else does. They know
> nothing, as their record shows.

You know, zzazz, I'm always amazed by how children your age
glorify stupidity. I've seen this over and over in the last 15
years. The way it seems to work is as follows:

• You hate your father.
• Therefore, you hate your father's generation
• Therefore, you become contemptuous of your father's generation
• But then you're horrified to discover that people in your father's
  generation have a great deal more wisdom and knowledge
  than you have.
• Therefore, you become contemptuous of wisdom and knowledge
• Therefore, you glorify stupidity
• Therefore, you create one disaster after another -- the
  financial crisis, the Healthcare.gov disaster,
  World War III, etc.

Also, see the occasional postings from Higgenbotham in the
Financial Topics thread on Generation-X disasters.

I prefer the Taleb, precautionary approach.
Climate models and precautionary measures
Joseph Norman†, Rupert Read§, Yaneer Bar-Yam†, Nassim Nicholas Taleb ⇤
†New England Complex Systems Institute, §School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, ⇤School of
Engineering, New York University
Forthcoming in Issues in Science and Technology
F
THE POLICY DEBATE with respect to anthropogenic
climate-change typically revolves around the accuracy
of models. Those who contend that models make
accurate predictions argue for specific policies to stem
the foreseen damaging effects; those who doubt their
accuracy cite a lack of reliable evidence of harm to
warrant policy action.
These two alternatives are not exhaustive. One can
sidestep the "skepticism" of those who question existing
climate-models, by framing risk in the most straightforward
possible terms, at the global scale. That is, we
should ask "what would the correct policy be if we had
no reliable models?"
We have only one planet. This fact radically constrains
the kinds of risks that are appropriate to take at a large
scale. Even a risk with a very low probability becomes
unacceptable when it affects all of us – there is no
reversing mistakes of that magnitude.
Without any precise models, we can still reason that
polluting or altering our environment significantly could
put us in uncharted territory, with no statistical trackrecord
and potentially large consequences. It is at the
core of both scientific decision making and ancestral
wisdom to take seriously absence of evidence when
the consequences of an action can be large. And it is
standard textbook decision theory that a policy should
depend at least as much on uncertainty concerning the
adverse consequences as it does on the known effects.
Further, it has been shown that in any system fraught
with opacity, harm is in the dose rather than in the nature
of the offending substance: it increases nonlinearly
to the quantities at stake. Everything fragile has such
property. While some amount of pollution is inevitable,
high quantities of any pollutant put us at a rapidly
increasing risk of destabilizing the climate, a system that
is integral to the biosphere. Ergo, we should build down
CO2 emissions, even regardless of what climate-models
tell us.
This leads to the following asymmetry in climate
policy. The scale of the effect must be demonstrated to
be large enough to have impact. Once this is shown, and
it has been, the burden of proof of absence of harm is
on those who would deny it.
It is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system,
as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model
predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures.
Push a complex system too far and it will not come
back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines
the case for taking seriously the ’climate crisis’ that
scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth.
Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution,
uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even
constitute it.

As to the "ecological change" situation:
*) Don't waste stuff.
*) Don't waste money.
*) Clean up your own messes.
*) If someone doesn't clean up their own messes, figure out a way to motivate them to do so.
*) ..something else about some other aspect of what to do about "ecological weirdness".

As to the "generational friction" situation:
*) Lose the whole idea of being resentful at anything for anything.
*) Dig through whatever is necessary to find accurate history.
*) Converse and learn to understand, and not to DOMINATE.
*) Extend your memory as far as possible.
*) Learn to dodge, as there is no way to actually stop that which generationally must happen.
*) Learn from and teach your family the above points, to preserve the "mana" of your line.

Aloha a me nā mahalo īa ʻoukou. <shaka nui!>

shoshin wrote: > I prefer the Taleb, precautionary approach. Climate models and
> precautionary measures Joseph Norman†, Rupert Read§, Yaneer
> Bar-Yam†, Nassim Nicholas Taleb ⇤ †New England Complex Systems
> Institute, §School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia,
> ⇤School of Engineering, New York University Forthcoming in Issues
> in Science and Technology ...

> We have only one planet. This fact radically constrains the kinds
> of risks that are appropriate to take at a large scale. Even a
> risk with a very low probability becomes unacceptable when it
> affects all of us – there is no reversing mistakes of that
> magnitude.

This is part of the fallacious game that climate change politicians
play. Christian evangelists say that the consequences of going to
hell are unacceptable, so you have to believe in Jesus Christ.

The probability of world war is demonstrably very high, as I described
in my article, since massive world wars or regional wars have occurred
on every continent and every region in every century. And yet,
climate change politicians never even consider that, because all they
really want is money for their pet projects. It's all a very cynical
game.

shoshin wrote: > Without any precise models, we can still reason that polluting or
> altering our environment significantly could put us in uncharted
> territory, with no statistical trackrecord and potentially large
> consequences.

And what about world war? Always purposely evading the real issue, in
order to get money for their favorite projects. These climate change
scientist politicians are either idiots or liars, probably the latter.
The rest of that paragraph is complete bullsh-t.

This kind of garbage makes me angry because it's so completely
fraudulent, and it's framed in pseudo-scientific language designed to
fool millennials who barely know how to read, as measured by the
decades falling SAT scores. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who
are stupid enough to advocate Socialism when they can see from
Venezuela what happens, are also stupid enough to believe the climate
change politicians, and this is the kind of stupidity that the climate
change politicians target with their fraud. These climate change
politicians know that anyone stupid enough to advocate Socialism is
also stupid enough to believe their nonsense.

I was listening to the BBC yesterday, and I heard an interview
with someone from Duke Energy, a North Carolina electric power
company. The lady claimed that they're investing billions in
renewable energy, and their use of renewable energy grew by
20% in 2017.

https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/d ... new-report

Compare what Duke Energy is doing to what the idiot woman I quoted in
my article who said that everyone in the world has to stop eating
meat. These people are sickening.

This is the point I was making about new technology developments.
Companies around the world are developing new technologies to reduce
carbon emissions, without the benefit of the climate change treaty.
The climate change models don't take into account what Duke Energy and
millions of other companies around the world are doing, and that's
another reason why those models are fraudulent.


Here are articles where I wrote about technology and climate change:


** 23-Sep-14 World View -- Horse manure and climate change
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e140923


** 22-Sep-14 World View -- New climate change circus in progress
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e140922

John wrote: > Yesterday, I wrote that there's a historical precedent for the
> climate change debate, that predicts we'll all be underwater in a
> few decades. That historical precedent was the horse manure
> debate of over a century ago, that predicted that we'd all be
> under horse manure within a few decades.

> A couple of web site readers have requested further information.
> Here's a summary:

• The world's first international urban planning conference was
  held in New York City in 1898. The major topic that dominated the
  conference was not housing, land use, economic development or
  infrastructure. It was horse manure.
• Horse manure was causing all sorts of problems -- urine, flies,
  congestion, carcasses, traffic accidents, and widespread cruelty to
  horses.
• A horse produces between 7 and 15 kilos of manure daily. In New
  York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200
  metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and
  disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a liter of urine
  per day, which also ended up on the streets.
• The 1898 conference ended in three days instead of the scheduled
  ten days, because delegates could not agree on any solution. (This
  would be similar to the big climate change conference in 2009 in
  Copenhagen.)
• The crisis was resolved quickly with new technology: the
  automobile. By 1912 there were more cars than horses on the road in
  New York City. By 1920, the problem had all but
  disappeared.

> During my lifetime, I've seen any number of hysterical environment
> disaster predictions. My favorite was the prediction in 1970 by
> far left-wing Ramparts Magazine that predicted that the oceans
> were becoming so polluted that by 1980 the world's oceans would be
> covered by a layer of algae. It didn't happen.

> Like the horse manure crisis, the climate change crisis will be
> solved by new technologies that today are barely foreseen. These
> will include things like intelligent computers that will perform
> cleanup tasks that humans can't perform and microbiology
> technologies that will convert excess carbon dioxide back to
> harmless materials. Thousands of research labs around the world
> are motivated to identify such technologies, because any company
> finding one will patent it and make billions of dollars. No
> further motivation is needed.

Companies like Duke Energy will solve the carbon emissions problem in
the same way that automobile companies solved the horse manure
problem.

So,.. you're saying horse shit is horse shit whether it's 1898 or 2018?

..yeah,.. I can get behind that.


And in my "list" of things it's wise to do, as regards "eco weirdness", I did forget one, which is:

*) Don't poop where you eat and/or sleep.

John confuses horse shit (local catastrophe) with ecosystem collapse (systemic catastrophe). But that's ok, our lord and savior technology will redeem us....or something....

shoshin wrote: > John confuses horse shit (local catastrophe) with ecosystem
> collapse (systemic catastrophe). But that's ok, our lord and
> savior technology will redeem us....or something....

You could say that climate change is local because it only affects a
few islands in the Pacific.

The horse manure problem was far from local. It affected every large
and medium size city in the world.

How "local" would it be today if all those cars on the streets of
Cambridge were horses or horse-driven buggies? Horse manure was a
huge world problem, and was fixed by technology because it had to be,
not because of some international horse manure treaty.

shoshin wrote: > John confuses horse shit (local catastrophe) with ecosystem
> collapse (systemic catastrophe). But that's ok, our lord and
> savior technology will redeem us....or something....

Addendum to previous posting:

If the automobile hadn't come along to solve the horse manure
environmental problem, then the government of the People's Republic of
Cambridge would demand that each day you have to go out and clean up
the horse manure in front of your house, just as you have to shovel
the snow in front of your house when it snows.