Uh huh. Thanks for the practical suggestion.
You realize we’re all going to die then, right? No more human race. Maybe that’s ok with you. I have a child.
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“Some people will probably die, maybe a lot” is really about the scientific consensus on the consequences of unabated climate change.
Could humans go extinct? As the cleverest animals on the planet, my money is on us pulling through. But, sure, could happen.
Far from a definite, though.
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So ecology cannot support humans at all, despite having done so for millions of years? I would say that the evidence is to the contrary. 4-5 thousand years of human stewardship has been a drop in the chronological bucket, and it arguably has created more problems than it solved.
So do I. But it would be naive and impractical to suppose that I could favor their survival over that of the biosphere at large, since they are a subset of it. Explaining away the interdependencies makes it all seem more convenient, but doesn’t suggest viable outcomes.
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My point is that saying “ecology will fix it” is not directed towards a solution to minimize death.
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You realize that the biosphere and living conditions (temperature, fresh water) aren’t the same as they were millions of years ago? You realize that we have something like 7 billion people and they aren’t going to be able to be hunter gatherers, even if the biosphere was in a pristine state?
You’re making a knowingly dishonest argument. I expect better.
My actual point is that surviving this may require organization and planning in a centralized fashion, not a bunch of anarchist squatters sponging off of the available industrial infrastructure.
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I get that my “you ought to cooperate in single iteration prisoner’s dilemma” position is unorthodox (avant-garde?) but I put a numbered syllogism in my post explaining what I thought was wrong with the case for defection. I don’t know what more I could have done.
You should have just agreed that the other party was right!
Not only they “aren’t the same”, they never have been. Likewise, they weren’t the same millions of years before that, either.
There is an alarming overpopulation of humans. But knowing that they might not all survive is hardly equivalent to extinction. Is it the end of the world when caribou, rabbits, and other species overpopulate? And even worse, humans know that they reproduce in unsustainable numbers - yet choose to do it anyway. Personally, I tend to be more sympathetic to those who unaware of their folly, than those who press ahead regardless.
Couldn’t it even have been a form of coercion? Creating an ever larger population of producers and consumers for a booming industrial economy might create lock-in. What a coincidence that there seems to be no way of removing the parasite without killing the host organism…
You deserve better! But, I am sorry, asserting that my views and opinions must be dishonest simply because you don’t agree with them seems like an obvious rhetorical device.
It may, but I think this runs contrary to how both ecology and species survival actually work. But I am always willing to consider that I may be in error here. But what evidence I have seen to the contrary so far has looked a lot like (a naive approximation of) self-serving bias. Also, it might simply be unthinking attachment to hope to survive “at all cost”. Don’t practical humans try to formulate comprehensive risk analyses?
This seems like an attempt at conflating my larger ecological views with how I personally deal with some aspects of local contemporary human systems. My point with the latter was that it is a way of not paying into a moribund coercive system. Also, living off the waste of a decadent culture is efficient, but never a long-term solution. Why I mentioned it is because of the masses of people who cry that they have no choice but to live a certain way, to demonstrate that there are other options, although they are difficult. When people feel that they are acting without choice, they tend to lose their sense of and drive for personal and civic responsibility.
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Saying stupid or impractical things that you know to be stupid or impractical seems like an obvious rhetorical device as well. I’m assuming you don’t simply want 99% of humanity to die but, hey, I could be wrong and you may want billions of dead people.
I know it is insulting to say but I guess I misjudged how informed and intelligent you were. I won’t in the future if you were really making an honest argument and not playing rhetorical games. I have a term I’ve used in the past, “apocalypse fetishists,” for folks that cheer on the death of billions as being wonderful and ok. Of course, they never include themselves or their families in those deaths…
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Then you’re adopting a 1930’s model. It might, or it might not work. My opinion is that it would not.
That’s certainly one way to tar it. Another way to describe it might be “letting everyone come up with their own solutions in a free market is what got us here.”
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This forum has developed an excellent self-referential multithread.
@popobawa4u, I’m with you. I have zero interesting in minimizing death because that’s obviously impossible; everyone will die (assuming we choose to accept that ego-subjective metaphor for the termination of individual sequential experience of the universe). I’m more interested in minimizing suffering, and maximizing universal happiness. Oppressing others in order to assuage my personal fears does not seem like a worthwhile effort, and violates the categorical imperative, and is likely to increase the sum total of suffering in the cosmos. I would rather increase this particular world’s happiness by attacking my own fears instead. 
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If the alternative is letting the best and the brightest make the decisions for all of us, I would respond that all of human history shows that the best and the brightest don’t last long in political power.
They soon get displaced by the merely self-serving and bureaucratic (largely the case in the United States) or the downright corrupt and ruthless.
My Almost Perfect State would be well aware of the likelihood that crooks and sociopaths will gravitate toward power, and be structured to minimize their potential to do harm.
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That isn’t a wrong point.
That’s an extremely tricky balancing act. Power is always up for grabs, whether it’s governments, organized crime, or just popular and well regarded people with respected opinions. At least, though, I agree that this is an important goal.
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The only thing I find insulting about it is that you resort to making personal remarks instead of backing up your own views, which you only hint at behind a veil of presumed “common sense”. You don’t offend my position, since what you present is basically to say “Come off it!”
ETA
You slippery editor! I always need to leave a few minutes for your posts to finalize.
My ecological views, and doubts of human primacy in the control of the planet are sincere. I like rhetorical games because I think they are nearly universal with people - even many who deny that they are consciously playing them. But that is beside the point here.
I think that the scale and scope of such suffering would be a tragedy of inconceivable proportions. I definitely don’t want for it to happen. But the pragmatist in me who looks at life on Earth in general terms also admits that overpopulation has always resulted in vast suffering, and has no reason to assume that humans are any different. Would it be more compassionate to put such a collapse off for a time, to have only greater numbers of people endure yet worse conditions? That would be the status quo, and I don’t relish the thought.
A matter of personal and political philosophy might also involve considering what life without agency might even mean. If I am kept alive as a resource by others, but not able to decide how to live, to have any meaningful goals and values, do I really have a life, in anything but a gross biological sense? The more people there are, the less they seem able to do, due to the imposes infrastructure of survival for its own sake. It also creates an easy foundation for exploitation of people by others. Sure, some benevolent dictatorship/committee which selflessly would fix the planetary ecology and make increasing billions of humans comfortable sounds nice, but I do not consider it a probable occurrence. Achieving this somehow would need to be sustainable also.
Why not? Is there any objective metric of why one person’s life would be more crucial than that of another? Again, it sound to me like self-serving bias. “I am special because I am ME!” Billions of people seem to not realize that every other person can just as easily the same thing about themselves also! There is no pressing reason why it should matter if who dies is me, or someone else.
My experiences suggest that such a huge upheaval as is needed would be considered catastrophic, in any case. It’s a trauma for the planet and humanity alike. But it’s probably not the end of either.
I think my advice is optimistic. Don’t allow yourself to be roped into systems which demonstrably don’t work as advertised! Perhaps it is axiomatic and simplistic to the point of being glib, but I think it bears reminding. The more systems we have to choose from, the greater the chances of some prevailing.
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@albill, Did you know that the Popo Bawa looks like this?
I’d advise keeping a piece of meat that you can throw in the opposite direction that you are running, and wear lots of bug spray and carry a can of hornet spray. Seriously, watch out for this guy. He’s looking at you funny.
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Luckily, his depth perception is dreadful.
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What depth he lacks in vision, he makes up for with teeth and stench.
Yes, unfortunately I do tend to revise and edit in the first five or so minutes after I post.
I think my primary problem with you here on the site, as I’ve expressed before, is that you use some convoluted reasoning for things that you don’t explain very well and which you (it seems) think is obvious to other folks. You’ve complained within the last few days about how people always misunderstand what you’re saying and I pointed out that the common thread there is you, not those people. I meant that in a neutral light.
In other words, I simply have no idea how you’re rationally building any sort of real argument at times that isn’t a complete put-on because the way you say and try to “explain” things makes it seem like you’re either engaged in an odd form of debate for its own sake or are an alien AI communicating via a computer. You’ve said in the past that you enjoy the latter impression but it certainly doesn’t enhance the clarity of your arguments.
I think of myself as a fairly practical person, if a bit of a hothead. If the “solution” or “acceptable result” to a problem is the horrid and painful death of billions of people, I don’t think it is acceptable and that we should work to find another solution that doesn’t involve that. I regularly encounter people who are actually eager for the extinction of the human race and admit it but have not, for some reason, put their words into action by starting with themselves. It is a bit of a meme in some circle that humanity deserves to die and should die. I certainly don’t feel that way though we can argue about how we should live and how many of us there should be. Plenty of people have argued that the planet can easily support 10 billion people. It just can’t do it with how we live now and there is no turning back the clock to hunter gatherer or simple agrarian existence because of our current numbers and the existing environmental degradation. In all likelihood, billions of us will die in the next century but we could work to avoid that.
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