| Friendship ended with Fascist Hacker News, now Primitivist Hacker News is my best friend /s >It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here? Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes. The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern. This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again. >The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns. Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions. >Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not. You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest. >The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time. Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites. [0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years [1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense [2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing. |
Having worked with solar for a long while, I am always trying to tame people expectations of it. I think that and most renewables are awesome but we are trying to make them match the societal paradigm of fossil fuels and I think that is a fools errand.
We are going to go to a green energy grid eventually (fossil fuels are limited) and it will mostly likely have a lower total energy per capita than what we have today. Combine this with technology innovations, personal reductions in demand and the end result won't be so bad. It isn't going to be a dystopia but I don't think we will be living the same level of today's abundance.