[cbs]

Malthusian thought always strikes me as a comfortable little tautology to live in. It seems like it could be a neat way to contextualize one's efforts to delay the onset of, and diminish the impact of inevitable catastrophe. But I only ever see it being used to shit on ideas that on first glance would appear to accelerate the inevitable. Which in and of itself is bit odd. It may be a bit cold to see it this way, but if you're already resigned to that theory, what do you give a damn when the catastrophes happen?

[krie]

I think it's interesting to discuss it here, the zenith of technocopian optimism and futurism. There's a host of intelligent people frequenting Hacker News, but few have any idea what sort of trouble we are in. No conscious thought at all about the value chain that's involved for them to fill up their car in the awesome Bay area with amazing people doing fantastic work to "change" the world. Why aren't you guys picking up on these things? You are SMART, so WHY aren't you?

[moe]

Many people work on these things (renewable energy, electric cars, education, you name it) and many more donate to such causes when they can't or don't want to get involved directly. We also vote for political parties that we hope may improve things.

What are you doing other than posting "WE ARE DOOMED!!1" to seemingly every HN thread you come across?

[conjecTech]

Every generation claims this, yet life continues to become cheaper and more comfortable. Where is the economic evidence for what you are talking about?

[cbs]

Its priorities dude, most people aren't in it to "change" the world, they're in it to get filthy fucking rich in a way that lets them feel OK with themselves at the end of the day. We're on a website run by a venture capitalist to talk about tech. All the nonsense about being super smart, the futurism, and having any grasp on the world is simple puffery.

And the people here who do have meaningful discussion on topics other than tech sure don't do it here. I know, I live outside the cities encompassed by startup nonsense and work in medical research.

[krie]

I get it. Still annoying that I'm reduced to a simple "Malthusian" for espousing that resource depletion is a problem that's insurmountably difficult to "solve".

[cbs]

You just stated that it was difficult to solve and didn't say anything more, which I think is one of the problems most people have when talking with Malthusians.

For people who even vaguely know what they're talking about chances are pretty good they're aware of that the problems and hard and are still trying to make progress. Showing up and espousing that idea doesn't add anything to the conversation other than maybe suggesting your priorities are different than theirs (but that too can be articulated better).

I can compare it to talking to a libertarian, or alternatively someone who doesn't think anything matters but profit. All of their ideas are very sound within the realms of the overarching theory they subscribe to. That's all well and good, and sometimes makes for good conversation but they don't bother to extend their ideas to the current state of reality which exists outside of the already ideal conditions those philosophies provides.

Don't want to be reduced to "a simple Malthusian"? Make a post that says more than simply reiterating a watered down version of his thesis.