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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 misunderst

by 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.

by jevgeni 11y ago

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.