[hashxyz]

What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good? What if having kids is actually a great thing for them and for the world? These are reasonable ideas if you don’t just spend your time doomscrolling on twitter all day.

People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.

[aplanas]

> What if you actually can’t predict the future and climate change is actually good?

Is this how rational people react, or is some spiritual response talking from fear?

How can be the depletion of biodiversity, the increase of temperatures and the disappearance of ecosystems that we need to survive "good"?

As a community we do no have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we have science and technology and the predictions from there are clear: it is not good for us, and it is not good for the current species.

The far future, the very far one -- sure -- the are good chances that new ecosystems will appear adapted to the new environments, but those will not be "nice" for our current expectations.

A doing-nothing-and-hoping-for-the-best strategy is a guarantee for massive wars, hunger and suffering, as happen many times in the past (but never in a scale of 7.000.000 population)

[hashxyz]

Your entire framing of the world is engineered by pessimistic news articles which only tell a small part of the story.

Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.

The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.

There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.

[kaba0]

What an absolutely bullshit take, honestly I have a hard time reasonably reacting to it, it is so dumb.

We can’t predict the future down to a point, but we can make good, large-scale predictions with good accuracy — global average temperatures will increase and by every prediction, that will have catastrophic results. Period. That’s not some doomer news, that is reality. We can’t predict how individual countries will react, but that is not the question.

[hashxyz]

I’m sorry man but based on the stuff I’ve worked on and the situations I’ve seen, it just seems more plausible to me that the scientific enterprise tasked with scaring the shit out of everyone is not sampling and unbiased distribution.

[kaba0]

What scientific enterprise? You do realize there are plenty of countries/institutions with widely different monetary/political incentives that finance absolutely separate groups to do research?

So unless you believe in some Secret Government that controls everything, it is just a completely naive take that has no basis in reality. We can’t even coordinate a single country’s various, independent incentives even in very authoritative governments — and you believe that every study made is financed with the same incentives? If not, you can surely list reputable studies that call out the fake research, right?

[hashxyz]

> you can surely list reputable studies

Dude neither of us have ever read a scientific study about climate change. We are both going on bullshit we read online and related to experiences we had in corporate land. Maybe I read more right-leaning stuff so I have a more counter opinion. Don’t pretend any of us are fact checking the magical climate science, we aren’t.

The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity. And after thinking about it for a while, it seems plausible to me that we cannot know the scientific prescriptions we see in negative climate coverage with nearly the definitiveness that they claim.

And it also seems plausible that a lot of people gradually managed to form a doom and gloom committee to find doom and gloom in a noisy world where there aren’t that many definitive answers.

[defrost]

> To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible.

Sure.

But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change.

Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.

[hashxyz]

I agree with your last statement, although it is describing a very simple interaction and I don’t feel certain that we are observing that in action yet. I also don’t know if there are counter-balancing interactions that we aren’t aware of yet.

If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.

Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).

[defrost]

If it takes > 100 years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to put us in a state of extreme peril then yes, it will at least * take another 100+ years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to reverse out of that position.

If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.

* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.

> Technology is for solving problems.

It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.

[hashxyz]

> I would suggest that we can do better by not going there

The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

[kaba0]

Who recommends turning off capitalism?

But un-restricted capitalism is literally the stereotypical paper clip AI. It will seek out maximal profit at every cost. As per the very Adam Smith, it only works well in small, welll-regulated markets. Let the government do its job, and capitalism its own.

[hashxyz]

> Who recommends turning off capitalism

The article is about degrowth.

The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.

[kaba0]

> It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving

That time is now, and it has failed.

But it is crystal clear that we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at the (imo small) price of personal luxury — even if some new technical advantage can solve the problem, we should stop at least speeding towards the cliff, and try to break as much as possible.

You are forgetting just how much bigger the planet is then us.

[hashxyz]

> That time is now

We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.

> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury

It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.