Debt Rattle Jul 7 2014: Overshoot Loop

 

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  • #13896

    Russell Lee Fun with fountain at 4th of July picnic, Vale, OR July 1941 There is not one single person I’ve learned more from than Jay Hanson, back wh
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle Jul 7 2014: Overshoot Loop]

    #13898
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    You guys are crazy and I’d absolutely love to take this on if only I had time.

    Verrazano smelled the cedars 100 leagues out? New Jersey was the “Garden State” of resources? Really? Yes, really. There are reports going back the Vikings about the shores being black with seals and the rivers choked with fish. And it’s not exaggeration: they actually, provably were.

    And guess what? People lived there. It wasn’t empty, it wasn’t abandoned, it was filled with humans from sea to shining sea. Humans on every mile from New Jersey to Catalinas Islands. So…your point is, humans destroy habitat until they all die off? Or are you entirely neglecting that it was insane, rapacious EUROPEANS who destroyed the New World once they had destroyed the old. Because those are very different statements, different perspectives.

    Don’t give me this “human density was low” or “Agriculture blah blah” either: it was the HUMANS living there who MADE it a paradise. Whites only THOUGHT it was abandoned because they were too blitheringly stupid to see that it takes generations of tremendous knowledge and care to create the abundance they saw. Timed burnings to create the maximum berry and nut growth, careful fishing only in season by tradition, harvesting rare, slow-growing plant colonies to insure their maximum diversity and survival. It was their garden, a HUMAN garden, specifically created wholesale by human design that caused the luxurious abundance Hudson and the other idiots thought was accidental. Want proof? Go look at your “virgin” forest, unaffected by man. It chokes itself, plant diversity and animal populations decline until there is darkness only a few species can tolerate.

    But surely, this was due to hunter-gather lifestyles. Wrong. Ohio mound people, Iroquois and Cherokee lived in towns larger, more advanced, and more prosperous than, say, Scotland in 1770. Somehow they didn’t overrun their environment.

    But this was due to lack of tools: given the chance, all humans will destroy themselves. Wrong. As I stated the other day, by Sullivan’s March in the Revolutionary War, the Iroquois had wide possession of axes, pots, firearms for over 150-200 years. That is, they’d had white tools for as long as the United States has been a country. Yet the environmental destruction–outside of the beaver runs and rival tribes–was pretty much a zero. They were living what was basically in “white” towns of log cabins, dooryard gardens, 1,000 acre fields, without the scorched-earth policy this author takes for granted. Perhaps they were not human? …Much has been made of THAT point.

    Surely the population was savage, life was “nasty, brutish, and short” and infant mortality from privation kept the population down. Wrong. Living standards and quality of life were so high Natives kidnapped by whites ran back as soon as they could while whites–particularly women– refused to return to their people. Birth control and planned families were well-known, population was kept –voluntarily– below overshoot. Impossible? Inhuman? What history have you been studying to come to these conclusions, my friend? World history? Or just a limited part of that history?

    The data here is hand-picked to support his evolutionary conclusion. Tell me: how on earth could we possibly know that 20% of humans were killed in war? Are you kidding me about the number of Stone Age bodies we can deduce that from? And considering it’s a male-exclusive job, you’re telling me 40% of men died in war? Okay, so compare to known accounts of the inter-Indian wars: an Iroquois war party of 20 men walk for 2 months—one way– to go attack the Cherokee. They eventually engage and 1 or 2 guys die. A year. This was not uncommon in the stasis period after whites but before the Holocaust, all across North America. By our standards, that’s not even a war, that’s like the number of swimming accidents. How on earth do we get from known iron age accounts–like Scottish Highlands, Viking raids, Indian war parties–to 20-40% human deaths from war?

    Point: this is definitively, absolutely, overwhelmingly NOT human behavior. This is YOUR cultural behavior. From a specific culture that spread out like army ants, destroying all before it. For 10,000 years, even through most of the age of agriculture, there was nothing really like it. It’s only this ONE human pattern that requires war, ONE human pattern that creates this devastation, and ONE area this comes from. Africa, Australia, North and South America, heck, mostly even China and Japan, you don’t get this scorched-earth, survival-of-the-fittest stuff. Even in Europe before the Babylonian system comes out of Greece and Rome you don’t see it.

    So don’t make it a human thing. It’s not. It’s a learned, societal, cultural thing. It’s a human-transmitted suicidal insanity. And unfortunately, we’re right here in the middle of it, in the middle of the time it’s run out of other people to kill and other resources to plunder. Nevertheless, it is emphatically NOT human behavior. It’s learned behavior, it can change, and it’s a CHOICE we’re making.

    So stop making it. We have the template. Use it. Stop.

    Point? This author sees nothing but blackness in the human heart and for the human future. That is an illusion that will cause him to make erroneous choices. Those choices have consequences. Without hope, sometimes desperate, murderous, suicidal ones. Perhaps he feels that it is fatalistically inevitable that he will have to kill his neighbors or his neighbor’s children to survive. I couldn’t say. And so it would be instead of working together with them for our prosperity. Haven’t we had enough of that, enough war, enough of lies? Stop. Let’s focus on the good things, the things people can do so they have no excuses not to do what is good, what is pure, what is right. Think on these things. And stop doing evil. Stop.

    #13900
    Professorlocknload
    Participant

    If one could only put a “timeline” through the endless loop, not depicting it like a clock face, and are we at 12 o’clock, or say 3:45? Or maybe 16:30 on a 24 hour clock? Round and round like “Groundhog Day.”

    Circular vs. Linear?

    Problem>Solution>Problem…. Rather than, New Problem>New Solution etc.

    Sometime in the not too distant future, the cogs will be found to be humming right along, using hardly a drop of oil. Just as modes of transportation today are moving along now with nary a single bale of hay.

    When the time is right, and the old way becomes uncomfortable enough, a new solution will appear. This is only a chuck hole on a Linear path into the unknown.

    Not saying we won’t go through periods of Luddite domination, like now, delaying progress. But not many textiles are hand woven these days, in spite of a clique of radicals who certainly had all the answers, attempting to seize control of the power of the State to try and prove their misconceptions were’t mistaken.

    Final thought. Spent the day yesterday on the blue Pacific in a small boat. Swell was running around 10 feet at 12 seconds. I thought to myself, how effortlessly this water lifts and drops this 2 tons of mass. And it does so every 12 seconds. Imagine the cyclical power generated by all the swells over two thirds of the worlds surface? Now imagine the more ‘secular’ power generated by the tides lifting and lowering all this by 5 or 6 feet, twice a day?

    Therein lies a New Solution, as soon as we inevitably escape the “geological-time-split-second-that-is oil-formation-and-consumption” loop. Just a matter of refining some logistics.

    Gonna happen, like it or not.

    Speed up, step aside, but get the hell out of the way.

    #13902
    rapier
    Participant

    Cultural or social behavior is human behavior because human are social. How we act and organize as groups with hierarchies is universal.

    Pre European invasion North America was stone age,pre technical, no mathematics, no written word, and perhaps would have remained such for thousands of more years, in theory. In practice the stone age ended in places and technical societies then wiped out most tribal ones easily. Human genetics determined the ability to harness energy and technology but did not guarantee those would happen. When they did happen human social organizational determined they would sweep stone age cultures aside.

    Now in such a short summary there are probably books full of semantic quibbles to be had and maybe the whole genetic thing in the article is over reach as is the idea of any sort of determinism. Who can however quibble with the human will to power and those who have it rise to power within groups and nations. Especially now as the modern business corporation has risen as the new dominant human organizational model and it has moved from strength to more strength and the organization man has rendered the individual marginal,at best. The genetic/cultural thing is interesting but beside the point functionally.

    #13903

    Hi Ilargi

    What an important topic this is! I think it’s key to whether humankind will go through a population bottleneck due to collapse of resources. That would include a lot of human suffering as well as environmental degradation.

    What I take as the most important factor in human group competion and also in resource pressure is population size within groups.

    Groups more likely to succeed will be bigger groups who have maximised their reproduction by using resources at an unsustainable rate just as Hansen has suggested above. Lots of ethnic and religious groups encourage birth rates above replacement and I think that that is part of the reason they are successful (i.e. They are groups that are around today).

    A theoretical solution to overshoot is to limit population growth to less than replacement levels and to use less energy per capita. This may not be possible to do by persuasion. It has been tried by coersion in order to prevent overshoot (one child policy in China).

    The reasons that it might not be possible to persuade populations to multilaterally stop breeding is that groups which would not abide by a central agreement would gain by it. Also, maximum breeding is codified into some religions as something God wants you do, so some people would find such a suggestion at odds with their religious imperative.

    If it is important to bring down fertility to replacement levels in general, and I think (as a humanist intersted in minimising suffering) that it is, then some strategies might be:

    * Reduce religiousity in society (or at least the parts that affect family size)
    * Better living conditions – they tend to bring down family sizes (eventually)
    * Decouple finance from growth of population – Don’t encourage pop. growth to solve economic problems
    * Reduce ability to move resources – Groups can’t take each other’s resources if they can’t access them – that means reversing globalisation and the reducing the ability to accumulate wealth.
    * Empower women in general and birth control in particular. I believe (I need to research it) that if given more equal power, women often choose to limit the number of children they have. Isn’t Bill Gates interested in this one?

    I think these things might help reduce the effect of the Maximum Power Principle in human civilisation.

    If it all sounds a bit high and mighty, prescriptive and centralised, then I don’t know what to say. I don’t like thinking this way, I believe in decentralised systems really, but this is IMO the very biggest problem human civilisation had and we dam well need to discuss it fully. It’s a long emergency.

    I don’t mind for being flamed for these forthright prescriptions, we need to discuss it as a species.

    Carbon

    #13904
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Good article. I’ll have to mull it over some more before I comment. I’m still thinking about yesterday’s articles.

    Re Stephen Roach: “Over the past decade, Chinese subsidiaries of Western multinationals accounted for more than 60% of the cumulative rise in China’s exports.

    In other words, the export miracle was sparked not by state-sponsored Chinese companies but by offshore efficiency solutions crafted in the West. This led to the economic equivalent of a personal identity crisis: Who is China — them or us?”

    Why, it is “us”, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. It’s always “us”. China would never have developed like they did (in such a short amount of time) without a great deal of help from their friends in the West. The corporations got what they wanted, and the Chinese Party elite got something too: filthy rich. A match made in Heaven! Both sold their own countries out; opposite ends of the same snake.

    Perhaps the corporate gravy train is ending? China goes after pharmaceutical company for bribes and corruption:

    “IT READS like a plot from white-collar crime fiction. New twists in the corruption saga enveloping GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) keep adding to the British drug giant’s troubles in China.”

    https://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/07/corporate-corruption-china

    #13905
    Raleigh
    Participant

    “The world’s major central banks are returning to a more opaque and artful approach to policymaking, ending a crisis-era experiment with explicit promises that they found risked their credibility and did not substitute for action.”

    Artful, like the Artful Dodger, picking your pockets without you even knowing. More opaque? What a surprise!

    “Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of” – Bill Moyers

    #13906
    alan2102
    Participant

    Dr Diablo: Outstanding reply to this “human nature” bilge — bilge that, I am ashamed to say, took ME in at one time, also. Like Ilargi, I took “a month off” (more, actually) 15 years ago to read dieoff.com and related stuff, and was most impressed. But the difference between me and the average dieoff.com maven (including Hanson himself) was that I did not stop reading and thinking and, of greatest import, I did not stop exposing myself to new and challenging ideas, including ESPECIALLY ideas that ran contrary to the ones that I had accepted as probably (or even “certainly”) correct. As I result I came to understand that the Hansonian view of most things, though offering some (rather meager) value, is dreadfully narrow, often misleading, often outright false, and at times downright evil in effect.

    Ilargi: “[Hanson’s] talent is that he has the right kind of unrelenting curiosity, needed to dig deep into the reasons we put ourselves where we do (it’s hardwired). This curiosity made put together the best library of information on ourselves and the world we live in that one can ever hope to find”. This says a great deal about the quality of your thinking and level of your research. It is shockingly ignorant and foolish to call Hanson’s narrow, prejudicial little collection of nihilistic, neo-Malthusian, vulgar Darwinistic and laughably genetic deterministic screeds “the best library of information on ourselves and the world we live in that one can ever hope to find”. Or, if that is the best library in the world, then we live in hell on a retarded earth.

    #13908

    Hi Alan

    What did you learn in the 15 years since reading dioff.com? You don’t make that clear. I really want him to be wrong! I didn’t quite get what I needed from Dr Diablo’s post.

    Carbon

    #13909
    alan2102
    Participant

    Rapier: “Who can however quibble with the human will to power and those who have it rise to power within groups and nations.”

    I don’t think anyone quibbles with the existence within humans of something characterizable as a “will to power”; but that is not the issue. The issue is a will to power *uber alles*, or without any competing or checking values or tendencies, and ruthlessness. Add to that a social/cultural environment that gives outsize rewards to such brazen “will to power” type behavior, and that metes out punishments large and small to the meek. But all of that kind of stuff escapes the radar of guys Hanson. Too complex for them, I would wager. No clear-cut answers.

    An amusing thing is that even when Hanson is (partially or slightly) right, he does not understand HOW he is right. For example, there really is a ruthless and will-to-power-uber-alles personality type — the psychopath — which is to some extent genetically determined, or for which there is at least genetic predisposition, in about 5% of the population. Hanson seems to think this personality type, or important elements of it, is characteristic of ALL HUMANS, which is preposterous. It is about 5% of humans. What to do about it is a serious matter which should be the subject of wide discussion. Too bad Hanson was/is not smart or aware enough to be part of that discussion. Psychopathy is a very serious issue and it is indeed responsible for much of the abuse and mayhem, on all levels, that Hanson (as well as many others) decries.

    Because 5% of humans are affected with this does not mean we have to give up on humanity, as the misanthrope Hanson would have us do, any more than a schizophrenia rate of 3% or an OCD rate of 6% would suggest that we give up on humanity. Rather, it means that we have a serious collective social problem that requires deliberation and appropriate, sensitive action.

    Hanson is just an ignorant old fool, and is probably by now becoming demented. Fortunately, he has a very tiny audience and thus has little impact. Otherwise I would be more concerned.

    #13911
    John Day
    Participant

    Dr Diablo, Carbon waste life form, alan2012, and Ilargi,

    “Where’s the flaw?”.
    Initial assumptions always have to be scrutinized.
    Comments point to diversity, which is not addressed in the essay.
    North America had been ravaged by disease, with massive population loss, when many Europeans arrived; South America, too. “Clovis Civilization” did have advanced agriculture, and the early waves of humans to the Americas also did kill off the large land mammals that had not evolved along with humans, and were unwary.
    There are implications for learning as a culture(s) over time.
    The argument about the high reproduction and aggressive strategy winning out is a “yang” argument. It goes together with patriarchy, patriarchal-god religions, and males controlling both female fertility and the decisions regarding aggression/war.
    If history contains long periods of both yang (male) and yin (female) social organizations, there is a certain recognition-bias evidenced here for the periods where yin is overrun by yang.
    We do know that when women control their own reproduction, birth rates fall to or below replacement, in modern societies. Could something like this have been the case in pre-Columbian American societies? “Yes”, of course, it could. Looking at the traditions of menstrual houses, where women spent their menstrual periods together, gives a clue. Women who live together tend to coordinate their cycles. If they spend time separate from men, there is a powerful organizing principle at work in the yin realm. We need to look at the development of female traits, not merely male traits.
    Male bias alert in this essay!
    The “prophet” and “follower” are interesting postulates, but don’t necessarily really look at the myriad of human dispersal patterns. The Polynesian expansion cast out people in boats when population exceeded the carrying capacity of an archipelago. Skills of finding land by the flight of birds, movement of waves, and reading stars, as well as fat stores and upper body strength for rowing were paramount. There are biases for intelligence(s), strength, fat stores, and physical endurance in pioneers.
    We should not get stuck on “prophet” and “follower”. There are so many variants in hard times, and so many cults get killed-off, so there is negative selection there (David Koresh, Branch Davidians exemplify).
    I suspect that periods of cooperation and competition amplify, and even develop through building successful trait-complexes, a wide variety of wiring templates that we can be born with.
    Vastly important here is that these templates are FLUID. We develop our brains as growing and branching patterns, based on how we interact with our environments as children. More complex “enriched” environments create more branching and complexity.
    Fear and pain can make very powerful pathways in a brain, edging out complexity to favor simple survival against threat.
    Anger and fear acutely drop IQ by 30 points. Complexities dissolve, replaced by simple drives to action.
    You may have experienced such immediate clarity. I have. It gets all messed up later, as complications of actions arise.
    Those of us who visit this site have already self-selected for complexity of analysis. We are in a certain 5% of population who have that constitution.
    One trait that we value, which is not addressed in the essay, is the drive to precognition as a survival advantage.
    It seems that precognition can involve many different individual abilities, and certainly groups of them would help much more, if they reached a critical mass in the brain, able to drive actions by complex reasoning and inspiration, as opposed to brainstem-level drives to dominate through sex, violence and control of people, animals and resources.
    At particular points in history, where population booms are followed by sharp “selection event” contractions, we must accept that the selection process will bring the kind of complexity that makes simple analysis fail, much as bond and equity markets fail to respond to fundamental analysis. There are too many variables at work. Simplified analysis is incorrect analysis. Seeing what happens is the final arbiter.
    I vote for more power to yin traits of networking and consensus, insight, and prescience.
    I see so much in life among real human groups, and half of it in this analysis.

    #13912
    alan2102
    Participant

    Carbon: You can start with “human nature”, and Hanson’s pathetically impoverished view of it. All you really have to do is read widely on the subject, outside the walled garden of dieoff.com. Nothing special.

    I learned a LOT from following discussions for the better part of 10 years on energyresources, evolutionary-psychology, and other yahoo groups, in which a lot of very smart people participated. I saved hundreds of notable posts, and followed up on hundreds of references to articles and books. I have scores of disk files stuffed with material. I suppose some day maybe I will try to organize it all into a coherent intellectual journey/litany or something that might be helpful to others. Very long story short: past about 2007 or so it dawned on me (blockhead that I am; it should have happened much earlier) that Hansonism was largely a crock of shit, although a crock of shit with a few minor bits and pieces of value, here and there.

    There are numerous angles to this whole story. We’re talking about core philosophical principles, philosophy of science and epistemology; evolutionary and general psychology; anthropology and human history (including much that is debatable); demographics, and demographics vis a vis agricultural and other technology and energy resources; human culture and social psychology; technology; and more! A comprehensive answer to your question would be impossible without writing a book.

    Just one thing I will quickly mention: I followed Hanson’s initially quite alarming warnings about alternative energy sources and their (claimed) hopeless inadequacy in the face of peak oil. What appeared in 1999 to be convincing arguments of his now appear outright laughable. He is being disproven by events on a yearly basis, and with dramatically accelerating speed. TAE has of course swallowed the Hansonian (and Big Oil-ian) anti-alternative-energy koolaid. But if there were ever a time to back off from that position and shut the fuck up about it, it is right now! The next few years will be decisive, as on the current trajectory alternative energies will be doing exactly what Hanson said was impossible: powering, in some contexts, with minimal or possibly even no fossil inputs, their own production. Of course it will take a while for “some contexts” to become “most contexts”. What would you expect? You can’t turn the Queen Mary around inside of one mile. Fossil fuel-based infrastructure has had a one-century head start; it might take 10-20 years to get things reversed. Anyway, events are racing ahead and leaving the naysayers in increasingly dense fogs of dust. It should be fun to watch this unfold.

    In closing, I’ll leave you with a portion of one post to energyresources from Larry Crowell, a physicist. It was a response to Jay, and a good post, which set me to thinking. It was posts like these, combined with other reading, and thinking, that led me to conclude that Emperor Jay was wearing no clothes, so to say. And btw this post was just approaching matters from ONE angle; there are several others. For example, it became evident that Jay’s thinking as regards “human nature” and Darwinism was to a large extent just a re-hash of late 19th-century bullshit, long discredited, but recently resurrected by a small circle of reactionaries who more or less wanted to believe certain stuff for political reasons (or so it would seem). The whole thing just stinks, as you will learn as you plumb deeper.

    Anyway, here’s Larry, on another angle:

    clipped from: https://groups.yahoo.com/group/EnergyResources

    Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 14:12:24 -0600
    From: “L. B. Crowell” <lcrowell@swcp.com>
    Subject: RE: Re: Jay’s question on the Fed

    […snip…]

    I am suspicious of ideas that attempt to reduce human behavior, societies, and how we should manage ourselves to some strict set of putative scientific rules, or statements trumpeted as such. Such ideas have been promulgated before and they are invariably judged later as complete pseudoscientific rubbish. The ideologies of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were based on ideas that at the time were regarded as the pinnacle of scientific understanding of humanity. Needless to say both of these systems were the height of ghastliness. To be honest over the past couple of years I have seen much of your thinking on these matters as having evolved into a latter day form of the same crap that has been stated before.

    Science is really a very restrictive subject that deals with either basic foundations of reality or the universe, or it is concerned with a particular subject that is amenable to experimentation. An example of the first is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and an example of the second is the interaction of a transposon that codes for a tyrosine kinase in some chromosomal region. I can look out on a nice spring day and see a thunderhead cloud building up and say, yes the phase transistion of water vapor to liquid is producing latent heat that is the driving power for building up this cloud. I can say many things, but I also admit that what I see is so complex as to utterly befuddle any predictive capacity. Look at the flow of a small river and see the splashes, eddies, and how water falls over rocks. I can say, Ahh yes the Navier-Stokes equation tells me that there is a continuity of flow,” but I also have to be honest and admit there is utterly no general predictive hydrodynamic theory for how this stream is flowing. And yet nature is such that this stream flows exactly how it should.

    Frankly I think for anyone to say they have some scientific understanding for human behavior and societies with the predictive capacity you claim, along with the bones of other such wags from the past, is the height of arrogance. To be honest human beings are simply too complex to make the sort of concrete statements that you make. You tend to use terms such as “algorithm” in describing the trajectory of human events, which is to suggest that the outcome of the human condition is determined according to some finite set of rules. The problem is that the universe actually does not work that way. For instance, the outcome of all possible quantum measurements results in a set of symbol strings that are not reducible to some set of data compressions rules, and so this problem can’t be reduced to any finite set of axioms a’la Turing’s halting problem and Godel’s theorems on the incompleteness of axiomatic systems. If this is the case with all possible outcomes for a simple “spin up-down” quantum system, then how in the devil can anybody say they have some comprehensive set of rules for human behavior?

    The universe has an entropy of about 10^{100}GeV/K, and this means that the cosmological horizon has permitted a vast number of combinations or combinatorial probabilities. Take a look at the Shannon-Khinchin theorem for information theory and entropy. We are one of those outcomes, and in some sense we are the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Infinite Improbability Drive. So here we are, vastly complex on this even more vastly complex planet, and the whole thing came about through a near infinitesimal probability. Stephen Jay Gould stated something similar about “rewinding” the clock of evolution and how that would in priciple lead to vastly different outcomes. To say that one has some predictive theory on where all of this is going is the zenith of complete absurdism.

    Lawrence B. Crowell

    #13913

    Wow, such well thought out replies to my post and others,
    I am going to talk to you separately;

    John: It’s good to see calm analysis which is perhaps more detached from value judgement than mine is.

    I’d like to think of myself as a yin type of a man, I value empathy, support and co-operation and I am not afraid of complexity or ambiguity, so thinking like Hanson (Let me spell his name right this time) isn’t my primary mode.

    I am just trying to think of mechanisms which might play out another way then sawtooth population growth and all of it’s attached suffering and environmental damage which result from applying the maximum Power Principle to competing groups of humans.

    I can see that you are saying that the way things play out in a complex world is hard to predict with incomplete models (all models of the open systems are incomplete of course).

    For example, I can’t quite explain why the population growth has slowed to zero in most of the western hemisphere. It’s a sign that I might be unduly pessimistic, but the people in this area could be outcompeted by another growing group and the population competition would return and cause the dieoff.

    Maybe the growth stall in multiple groups in the western hemisphere represents a phase change in human thinking which will move to other groups, most people want to live like the Western hemisphere after all. I just can’t see it right now. It’s that MPP as a principle hold across most competing species in nature that makes me disbelieve that we can avoid it ultimately.

    Please note that I am not holding up the western hemisphere as a model of correct living in any way, just that it currently isn’t, for whatever reason, a fast growing population

    You have me thinking!

    Carbon

    #13914

    Alan, first post (to Rapier)

    I don’t like the ad-hominems towards Hanson, I think they detract from your argument, but I have said some pretty harsh things on this forum about people who you would call psychopaths because I have gotten angry and exasperated.

    The 5% psychopaths: If your most dangerous 5% get in positions where they can force debt based collapse and servitude on others, and bend the resources of society to their own narrow will, then they have a disproportionate effect on the directon of society compared to the rest.
    It’s like the Maximum Power Principle operating in monetary terms within a society. They outcompete competitors and make them financially extinct, which could in the future translate to actually dead for some people. So they matter more than 5% in practice.

    Carbon

    #13915

    Hi Alan (post to me)

    I think Alt energy has come a very long way in the past few years. I care a lot about it and drove about locally for years in home made electric cars, mainly to make a point that it could be done. (I got to drive Nicole to a talk in one of them)
    My electricity provider uses part of the money I give them to fund wind power, which I approve of, even though currently they may need to be backed by fossil fuels. I hope that the same infrastructure may be backed by energy stores or “negawatts” (i.e. energy savings, demand side pricing etc.)

    Still, I believe that Ilargi found an ariticle recently that said that China had used as much cement in 2 years as the USA has historically. That kind of profligacy, misallocated resources and unwarranted growth dwarfs all Alt. energy efforts by a super wide margin. We are burning more coal than ever. Whether you believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming or not, the pollution and resource destruction is bigger than ever. We are peeing in the wind until the direction of growth changes.

    So I am not as sanguine as you or L.B.Crowell are about our prospects.

    IMO It’s all down to whether we crash financially, and how we do, not efficiency gains or Alt. energy

    Carbon

    #13916

    I haven’t given up on humanity at all, that’s why I am here arguing. I just want to talk about what we are up against. (That all sounds very yang doesn’t it)

    Carbon

    #13917
    Charles Alban
    Participant

    pretty depressing. but all is not lost. we can behave more responsibly. we had a system that endured for millenia. it was the worldwide vedic system. the whole world spoke sanskrit and followed the same religious philosophy. all this was wiped out by the christians, and the muslims. but fortunately we still have a lot of the information contained within the voluminous vedic literature. if sufficient scholars take the time to become conversant with the material and interpret it in a way that modern people can use, we can save the day.
    it means a completely non-materialistic way of life, and a properly ordered society with learned priests and properly trained administrators who put their service to the people above their self-interest. this is the well-ordered, prosperous and peaceful society the romans encountered when they invaded the british isles, administered by the druidic priests and the well-trained warrior kings. it’s really just a matter of proper training and education.
    also a return to a tribal, clan-type lifestyle where groups of people undertake to take care of themselves, without being reliant on governments, similar to the Amish in modern times. the Romans had a legal structure called a “gens,” which was in effect a legal tribe. a group of 100 people, nominally related but not necessarily, shared the same last name, and were responsible for their own internal affairs, like diety worship, education of their children, and so on. the concept of gay marriage could be extended to include say 100 people, all legally “married” to each other and mutually self-responsible.

    #13924
    Raleigh
    Participant

    Carbon – “The 5% psychopaths: If your most dangerous 5% get in positions where they can force debt based collapse and servitude on others, and bend the resources of society to their own narrow will, then they have a disproportionate effect on the directon of society compared to the rest.
    It’s like the Maximum Power Principle operating in monetary terms within a society. They outcompete competitors and make them financially extinct, which could in the future translate to actually dead for some people. So they matter more than 5% in practice.”

    And if they have a very good propaganda arm (media) and an advanced military/surveillance machine on their side, they matter 100%. They dictate the play. You don’t set up these things if you’re not a little paranoid about losing your power. We all notice the rope getting tighter and tighter.

    You might say, “Well, that’s not everybody,” but would that be correct? Nature will always seek balance, and sometimes that balance is 75/25 or 90/10. From my observations of families, organizations, societies, it is seldom happy, happy fair. There are almost always dominant players. Psychopaths understand more than others the “motivations” people have: oh, this person is dependent, this one has a fear of failure, this one wants to be seen as intelligent, passive, etc. That is why they get to the top: they see what we don’t even see about ourselves.

    How many benevolent leaders have there really been? If you come from a family with a benevolent leader, you are one lucky son of a gun. In small groups, when the actual survival of the group depends on everybody pitching in, when resources are plentiful, I can see it succeeding. There is a common goal: survival.

    You never know what you really want until you know what you don’t want. Maybe psychopaths were put on earth to open our eyes to what we “could” have, but I don’t think the majority of the population will see this until they feel a great amount of pain.

    It will take pain to open their eyes, and then, if there happens to be a benevolent leader who survives the attacks he will surely encounter and can lead, maybe there is a chance for us. What psychopaths want (power/control) will have to be removed from society, and spirituality take its place. Watch the churches fill up when that happens.

    #13929
    Diogenes Shrugged
    Participant

    So many misconceptions and faulty rationales both in the article and in the comments that I’m overwhelmed trying to decide where to begin complaining. All the generalizations about mankind, collective action, re-education, “us” and “we” make me feel as if I’ve been witness to a bunch of seventh-graders brainstorming a path to Communist utopia.

    Let’s add 2 plus 2 together, shall we?

    The reason why mankind fucks up everything he touches is described in less than one minute here between 9:15 and 10:10:

    To paraphrase Mr. Binney, it is the struggle for money to build EMPIRE that provides the central objective behind collectives themselves. Think about that, because it’s not just true for the NSA. It’s true for all collectives, including corporations, religions, unions and media.

    You already personally belong to a collective that’s well along in its plans to solve all the world’s problems you speak of. You know, the one described in fifteen seconds between 1:45 and 2:00:

    So rejoice! Your collective has the situation well in hand! All the esoteric sociological, philosophical, economic and pseudo-scientific problems you’re contemplating will soon be solved. The solution? The same solution every major EMPIRE eventually resorts to – – in four minutes between 32:00 and 36:00 here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDEwYlNbnhk

    It might not resemble your favorite pipe-dream solution, but it’s broadly the solution that’s GOING to be implemented. Think you can change that now? Not a chance in hell.

    US Police Have Killed Over 5,000 Civilians Since 9/11

    Finally, climate isn’t the problem, but if it concerns you, carbon dioxide levels will begin falling soon after the coming wars, genocides and die-offs. You can patriotically speed the whole process along by turning in your guns, ratting on your neighbors and family members, and being on time for your appointed vaccinations, chip implant and interview.

    Two plus two equals four. For obvious reasons, power positions in empires always end up being occupied by liars, thieves and monsters. I hope that helps.

    #13931
    Diogenes Shrugged
    Participant

    Sorry. Very frustrating. The links worked for me, but not in practice here. The top two videos in my comment above are shown below for cut-and-paste, if anybody’s interested. Omit the dashes before the www.

    —–www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AOQLEM5eNY&index=4&list=UUhZRoC9bMegevAxFmee1oSA

    —–www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONS9Aj6HLBw&list=UUhZRoC9bMegevAxFmee1oSA

    #13935
    John Day
    Participant

    @Carbon Waste Life Form,
    Thanks for the kind remarks.

    @Raleigh
    ,
    It’s hard to model sociopaths without looking at the whole game-change that happened when hunter gatherers were overrun with hierachical societies with priests and generals.
    Those priests, generals and psychopaths may be seen as the “free-riders” in the essay, and they make the farmers and artisans work harder, generally whipping them through fear and the “alienation of labor from capital”, where workers focus on one job, creating one of the many things they need to live , and rely on the system set up by free-riders for the rest of their needs.
    Sociopaths didn’t exist as a subspecies or separate breed in hunter-gatherer groups, where everybody was versatile and multi-talented. They are specialists. Their numbers are poorly represented in expansions, and they try to avoid collapses like the plague, because they cannot survive without free-riding.
    Ordinary workers can be taught to live under sociopathic rules, as we now see in this late stage of the Kondratiev Wave we are in, approaching collapse, from lost productivity, and increased free-rider drag.
    Be versatile. Be cooperative. Be fair. Be networked. Grow a garden. Ride a bike, and think about your lot without utility services. It’s a lot, but I think we approach another “selection event”.
    Be prescient, friends!

    #13936
    alan2102
    Participant

    Carbon: “If your most dangerous 5% get in positions where they can force debt based collapse and servitude on others, and bend the resources of society to their own narrow will, then they have a disproportionate effect on the directon of society compared to the rest.”

    I agree! And this is what has happened. And it could UNhappen. We’re not powerless. We’re just being told we are powerless. The important thing to remember is that the culprits can be identified; it is not “in our [i.e. ALL OF OUR] genes”, as Hanson would have it.

    And btw, insulting people is not ad hominem unless it is used entirely in lieu of argument. Ad hominem is the spewing of insults, exclusively, unaccompanied by any argument.

    #13937
    alan2102
    Participant

    Carbon: “I believe that Ilargi found an ariticle recently that said that China had used as much cement in 2 years as the USA has historically. That kind of profligacy, misallocated resources and unwarranted growth dwarfs all Alt. energy efforts by a super wide margin.”

    Why is it “profligacy”? Why is it “misallocated” and “unwarranted”? I mean, maybe it is, but what evidence or argument do you have for those ideas? If you don’t have an argument, then your statements are as though ad hominem (though in this case not “to the man” but “to the investment” — “ad investmentum”? 🙂 )

    It is worth mentioning that concrete is for the most part a one-off expenditure. It is true that China has used enormous quantities of concrete in recent years. It is also true that they will not need to use more than a small fraction of that same quantity over the next century (or actually forever). Why? Because concrete lasts a LONG TIME. The same thing happened in the U.S. Huge quantities of concrete were used during the robust infrastructure and other buildout years, but then it fell off steeply and will never have to be repeated at that level, just much smaller amounts for maintenance.

    Further, the building spree in China has a very sound long-term economic basis. The Chinese are, wisely, looking to invest in real assets and divest themselves of intrinsically risky and indeed certain-to-decline or collapse paper assets, particularly dollar-denominated ones. Hence they are rapidly and massively accumulating gold, silver and various strategic metals/materials and their sources, and building out infrastructure and residential and industrial facilities at an incredible rate. These things are very sound investments in the future, especially relative to the inherently unstable and in fact doomed paper bullshit peddled by the Western shysters. The entire ridiculous bloated paper/derivative/debt-bubble/etc. “economy” of the world could collapse tomorrow, and the Chinese would still have all that physical stuff with which to rebuild. It would not be easy, of course. NOTHING would be easy under those conditions. But physical economy is physical economy; it does not just disappear, the way electronic “assets” disappear (in the blink of an eye).

    By the way, I’m not defending everything that the Chinese have done. They’ve been guilty of excesses, certainly. Some of their development could be described as “misallocation”, no doubt. (How could it be otherwise in that overall context, really?) But that word would have to be used judiciously, with respect to SPECIFIC developments or aspects of specific developments, not just a general characterization of the whole of what they’ve done.

    Carbon: “So I am not as sanguine as you or L.B.Crowell are about our prospects.”

    I don’t know that Larry and I are “sanguine”. But we are, appropriately, UNSURE, quite unlike Emperor Hanson.

    ……………………….

    Diogenes: Alex Jones! I love that guy. And I’m sure the Bilderbergers are going to take my guns away and stuff my ass into a railroad car bound for the FEMA deathcamps any day now, so it really doesn’t matter anymore.

    #13947
    Raleigh
    Participant

    John Day – very interesting re hunter/gatherers and sociopaths, also priests/generals/sociopaths being the “free-riders”. Thanks for your advice re being versatile.

    #13948
    E. Swanson
    Participant

    I followed Jay Hanson when he was posting his thoughts on sci.environment, starting back in 1996. I still have about 60 posts which I archived before he moved most of his writings to his web site. I like to think I contributed to the evolution of his thinking, as I has already found “The Limits to Growth” and other later ecological writings, such as Howard Odum, as well as the concepts of Net Energy form work after the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo.

    From a physics point of view, “power” is the rate of use of energy. That definition may well apply to the use of the word “power” in a political context in that the group which can deliver the energy at a point at the greatest rate will prevail against others which can not. Before the rise of the industrial west, most energy was taken from the natural environment thru crop production and animals which could be fed by plants, which meant that the more land which one controlled, the greater the supply of energy available in the form of food, which thus allowed one to deliver more “power” to maintain one’s status. All that changed with the discovery of ways to recover and utilize fossil fuels, so that now one nation can exert power levels which will exterminate entire cities in one blow from half a world away.

    But, we don’t “make” energy, we can only convert it from one form to another and all such conversions necessarily result in less energy out than that which was initially available. As the fossil fuels become harder to recover from the Earth, the net energy available will decline even faster. As the fossil fuels are ultimately finite, there will come a time when there won’t be enough to satisfy the basic needs of humanity and the economic growth which depends on ever more resources will stop and then enter decline. We now appear to be at the point at which geology is telling us that the Age of Oil is rapidly drawing to a close and the cheap oil is already gone. One interesting aspect of the situation was revealed in the latest IPCC report, which claimed that half of humanity’s CO2 addition to the atmosphere since 1750 has occurred (roughly) over the past 40 years or so, i.e., since the OPEC Embargo.

    What ever the future brings, it’s going to happen rather quickly and our social organizations may well fail to cope with the changes, especially given the typical inertia in any organization. Worse, there are those who will actively oppose any attempts to solve the foundational problems, such as those in the Climate Change Denialist camp. All the commentary in addition to that which Jay provided just drives me deeper into thinking that die-off is inevitable. I do not, however, expect that this will be a global affair, but that certain nations will fail catastrophically because they are closest to the edge from an ecological point of view. The turmoil in the Middle East may be a symptom, with Egypt becoming an oil importing nation or Syria and Iraq, with the newly proclaimed Islamic State . A failure of the monsoon could push India and/or Pakistan over the edge into chaos and dog-eat-dog killing. A nuclear war between those two nations might also kill the rest of us thru the resulting Nuclear Winter.

    Time for my occasional beer and popcorn break…

    #13969
    alan2102
    Participant

    minor further note:

    Carbon: “I can’t quite explain why the population growth has slowed to zero in most of the western hemisphere.”

    Or, I presume, why it is slowing rapidly everywhere else, too, except subsaharan Africa and a few other places? You’ll note that this is the opposite of what the neomalthusian/peakists maintain; to wit, that plenitude (of food and everything else) gives rise to rapid population growth which, in turn, rapidly overruns resources, resulting in mass starvation, dieoff, etc. The opposite is happening: relative plenitude is giving rise to drastically falling fertility, and with that, falling rate of population growth (which will plateau and probably go negative in about 30 years on the current trajectory). Oh well. The Malthusians might get something right one of these days, after being consistently wrong for two centuries and running.

    And, as I’ve pointed out in detail elsewhere, it does not require Western levels of plenitude (like income of $50,000/year) for this effect. More like $5,000/year. The demographic transition has taken place in huge populations like China and (mostly) India at what are still rather miserably-low per capita GDPs, by Western standards. In other words, it is not necessary to make people filthy rich, like in the U.S., for this wonderful effect on fertility and population to take place; it is only necessary to bring people out of dirt poverty.

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