3 ms·

> To paint a caricature: they almost seem to say "We had 100 people and 50 ingots of iron and we produced 200 forks and 30 novels. If we'd have 50 people and 25

> To paint a caricature: they almost seem to say "We had 100 people and 50 ingots of iron and we produced 200 forks and 30 novels. If we'd have 50 people and 25 ingots of iron, we'd only produce 100 forks and 15 novels." Which is retarded. If you want to beat a strawman, be my guest. You can even get to call it retarded, it wont care. But to follow with your example. If you start with 100 people + 50 ingots of iron -> 200 forks + 30 novels. Then you cut your inputs by half: 1. If you want the magic fairy of science to come and sprinkle its progress dust on the ingots so you can keep the same production as before... I am going be calling you something much more offensive than 'retarded'. Most people around here have firts hand experience of how that kind of paralogic results at the end (ahem, Deathmarch). 2. If you value forks badly enough, you might get to produce maybe 120, not the 100 expected, but neither the 200 demanded. You will be able to do this by cutting on the novel writers and put them to figure out better fork designs and more efficient manufacturing projects. You will end up with like 3 novels instead of the expected 15, but probably 10 out of those were going to be crap anyways, so you did not miss much. The best creatives just have to go and express their creativity regardless of financial gain. 3. If you want to push your luck and build 150+ forks, you will succeed in the short term, but then you will face a fork crisis a few years down the road. You cannot apply infinite brain power to make infinitely better physical stuff. If you have only so much iron ore, and you try to make too many forks out of it, the material will be spread too thin and it will break under tenssion. Now your overworked 99 fork makers (1 recognized novellist, 2 moonlighting authors) will have to design a second process to refurbish the broken, low-quality forks, diverting valuable time and resources from making brand new forks. So, do not dismiss those theories out of hand. You don't have to agree 100% with what they say, but give'em the benefit of doubt and analyse them before making any judgements. The issue with the crowd that hangs around this "finite growth" thing is another matter. I think they do a diservice to the theories they claim to support by crying "Wolf! Wolf!" like in the old fable.

jevgeni 11y ago
Is the strawman the only argument fallacy people on the Internet know? I will not try to out-strawman your strawman, but I will just say, that you've misunderstood my example. You are still focusing on the material output and treating immaterial work as secondary. I was saying, that the total output of the economy is both from physical production and knowledge work. In fact, most of the "first world's" recent growth was knowledge work. Thinking that it grows and shrinks proportionally with only tentatively related inputs is wrong. And secondly, sustainable exponential growth in a finite world is impossible in the long term. This is undebatable. However, we just might push the long term far enough for it to be irrelevant.
- crpatino 11y ago
  > You are still focusing on the material output and treating immaterial work as secondary. This is the core of the argument. I am not misunderstanding anything. There are 3 kinds of stuff (for lack of a better term) in the universe: matter, energy and information. Your argument is that because we have infinitely more information, limits to matter and energy are pointless. My argument is that, while it is possible to apply information to enhance the matter and energy processes that support our lifes and our lifestyles, there are hard limits on how far we can push this. This is a matter of mathematical certainty. The curve is a negative exponential. Once you have made a physical process twice as efficient, you've already consumed half of the (upper bound of) potential gains. Surely the multiplier can keep growing an growing to infinity, but the hard savings will be marginal the more efficiency you apply to the process. A second point, which I have not raised so far, is that information itself is subject to the limits of marginal returns. The amount of data that we have keeps growing and growing, but if we lack the processing power to organize it (and I am talking about weat-were here, our computers are not smart enough yet), paradoxically, our capacity to extract any useful application of that data diminishes. There is a name for irrelevant data, noise, and if you mix it with your useful data, you will have to waste processing power to sort it out back. Merely adding population does not fix this problem. You have to increase the percentage of population that receives high quality education in order to begin surmounting this problem. That means diverting young people from other useful tasks and pursuits and shelther them for year or decades while they learn in a nurturing yet challenging environment.

jevgeni 11y ago

Is the strawman the only argument fallacy people on the Internet know? I will not try to out-strawman your strawman, but I will just say, that you've misunderstood my example. You are still focusing on the material output and treating immaterial work as secondary. I was saying, that the total output of the economy is both from physical production and knowledge work. In fact, most of the "first world's" recent growth was knowledge work. Thinking that it grows and shrinks proportionally with only tentatively related inputs is wrong. And secondly, sustainable exponential growth in a finite world is impossible in the long term. This is undebatable. However, we just might push the long term far enough for it to be irrelevant.

crpatino 11y ago
> You are still focusing on the material output and treating immaterial work as secondary. This is the core of the argument. I am not misunderstanding anything. There are 3 kinds of stuff (for lack of a better term) in the universe: matter, energy and information. Your argument is that because we have infinitely more information, limits to matter and energy are pointless. My argument is that, while it is possible to apply information to enhance the matter and energy processes that support our lifes and our lifestyles, there are hard limits on how far we can push this. This is a matter of mathematical certainty. The curve is a negative exponential. Once you have made a physical process twice as efficient, you've already consumed half of the (upper bound of) potential gains. Surely the multiplier can keep growing an growing to infinity, but the hard savings will be marginal the more efficiency you apply to the process. A second point, which I have not raised so far, is that information itself is subject to the limits of marginal returns. The amount of data that we have keeps growing and growing, but if we lack the processing power to organize it (and I am talking about weat-were here, our computers are not smart enough yet), paradoxically, our capacity to extract any useful application of that data diminishes. There is a name for irrelevant data, noise, and if you mix it with your useful data, you will have to waste processing power to sort it out back. Merely adding population does not fix this problem. You have to increase the percentage of population that receives high quality education in order to begin surmounting this problem. That means diverting young people from other useful tasks and pursuits and shelther them for year or decades while they learn in a nurturing yet challenging environment.