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When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. We are extinguishing the prospect of the only intelligent life we know of in the unive

When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. We are extinguishing the prospect of the only intelligent life we know of in the universe by not caring for the environment, although one could argue that only a small fraction are sufficiently intelligent. The oligarchs of the world have more than enough money to fix all the climate issues, but since they derive their wealth from exploiting the climate, there is no hope for a fix from them.

redleggedfrog 7y ago
"...only intelligent life... Not sure we deserve that. Got to remember that huge, huge numbers of the population fully expect there to be some sort of Armageddon. That the earth might be on a run-away path to destruction is a good thing to them, as it brings them closer to their rapture.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  sure, but if their community internalizes a "coming Armageddon" and then also go about the daily efforts of life too, then how does that compare to those that "discover" a coming Armageddon and come unglued, rejecting many daily efforts of life and instead flipping out into dysfunctional behaviors (both on self and others). Maybe internalizing a shared story of "coming Armageddon" is some kind of a pressure release and that community overall adapts better through extreme circumstances over time. possible ?
lisper 7y ago
> When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. That's not the problem. The problem is that the meritocrats and the technocrats have failed to grasp the real problem. The real problem is that at the end of the day the dynamics of living systems are determined by Darwinian evolution, and Darwinian evolution has no foresight. It optimizes for solutions that reproduce well (relative to competitors) in the short term. So, for example, genes that build brains that have an instinctive revulsion against things like abortion and birth control will reproduce better than genes that build brains that think it's perfectly OK to choose not to have kids. As a result, the world becomes populated by the former sort of brain, along with all of the ancillary effects that building such brains has, such as having a resistance to certain kinds of objective facts, like the long-term consequences of overpopulation. The fact of the matter is that there is only one environmental problem here on earth, and that is an overabundance of humans. But saying that is taboo, even here on HN. I try to make this point here on occasion and every single time I do I am downvoted into oblivion, not because I'm wrong, but because the world is full of brains with an instinctive revulsion towards the idea that there are, or even could be, too many of us, because the genes that build that kind of brain reproduce better than the genes that build brains that think it's perfectly OK, even necessary, to have fewer people. This is a very hard problem to solve. It's not at all clear that it even has a solution. It could even be the answer to Fermi's paradox. I hope not, but it's starting to look like a real possibility.
- sgift 7y ago
  > The fact of the matter is that there is only one environmental problem here on earth, and that is an overabundance of humans. But saying that is taboo, even here on HN. Because it is wrong, or rather: Only correct if you say humans cannot change. The core problem is resource usage. Now, fewer people use fewer resources. So far, you are correct. But what also uses fewer resources is a different lifestyle. People in the west, and especially in the USA, use far more resources in their life than people living in other parts of the world. So, we only have an "overabundance of humans" if we don't change that. And that is more a matter of society than evolution.
  - lisper 7y ago
    > The core problem is resource usage No, it isn't. The core problem is exponential growth. The population today is double what it was just 50 years ago, so you could cut resource usage in half and all that would accomplish is taking us back to the problem as it stood in 1970 or so. It's true that this is a social issue, but even there the problem is very difficult. The entire world economy is built on the premise of eternal exponential growth in something with economic value. That is fundamentally unsustainable. At some point we will have to transition to at leasy polynomial growth, if not an actual steady-state solution. No one is even talking about that AFAICT.
    - carapace 7y ago
      Just to emphasize what lisper is saying, the core problem is exponential growth, even if we invent FTL spaceships, even if we invent warp drive, the core problem is still exponential growth. We could turn the Galaxy green† and still not have enough room. We could fill it with Ringworlds, with Dyson Spheres, and still not have enough room. The core problem is exponential growth. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 7y ago
titzer 7y ago
To be fair, this started pretty much with the either first stone axe or the first field of wheat. "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari is a great read. Where we are now, just about to go over the edge, is perhaps inevitable; it is actually the direct result of technology, as it has always been employed for greater environmental exploitation and leads to population increase. Growth.
war1025 7y ago
> only a small fraction are sufficiently intelligent Eugenics for the win...
dragonwriter 7y ago
But capitalism is meritocracy, so the capitalist oligarchy are meritocrats (and, likewise, capitalism is an empirical testing ground for functionality of ideas, so they are also technocrats, moreso than their ivory-tower challengers)...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said. (When you get down to it, almost everyone is a meritocrat, and almost everyone has a self-serving definition of “merit”.)
- JTbane 7y ago
  >But capitalism is meritocracy. That breaks down when you have inherited wealth.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    It breaks down, IMO, for any non-circular definition of merit any time you have unequal distribution of wealth, even if the unequal distribution itself is due to prior merit. Inheritance is a dramatic example, but not the whole problem. There's a reason I said “...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said.” I'm not actually endorsing the viewpoint as correct.
JTbane 7y ago
>When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. Well, if you want to implement that, you'd have to abandon democracy and follow the Chinese model of a one-party state. You cannot force people to vote for scientists, rather than demagogues. Technocrats would have to be appointed rather than elected.
beat 7y ago
We're not extinguishing the only intelligent life in the universe, because I don't think this is nearly enough to extinguish humanity. It will be sad and miserable for us, but we'll survive it. I firmly believe the last human will eat the last cockroach.
- the8472 7y ago
  Cockroaches are small. Note that most of the animal species that survive mass extinction are small. Also, ocean warming can trigger anoxic events which release hydrogen sulfide which can suffocate entire coastlines and also attack the ozone layer affecting life everywhere. The worst case feedback loops are nightmarish. And it would also be nice to avoid the not-even-worst case where civilization is reduced to some isolated enclaves clinging on with their bare lives.
graeme 7y ago
>The oligarchs of the world have more than enough money to fix all the climate issues, but since they derive their wealth from exploiting the climate, there is no hope for a fix from them. No they don’t. Money isn’t something you can turn into zero carbon infrastructure at the snap of a finger. We have a very large global population and carbon keeps it alive, and materially satisfied. Shut it off too fast, and people get dead and grumpy. Shut it off too slow, and our civilization collapses. We’re all part of the system, and the system is the problem. I think the best thing oligarchs could do is buy politicians to change the system to incentivize replacing carbon in a way that doesn’t make people dead or grumpy. Grumpy people vote out politicians with long term views for those who offer short term solutions.
- QuickToBan 7y ago
  Did you forget just how easily the oligarchs provided hundreds of millions in funding for the Notre Dame when it caught fire this year? It doesn't deserve that funding, but climate change does. The oligarchs splurge like there is no tomorrow.
  - graeme 7y ago
    ....hundreds of millions doesn't solve climate change. Mostly oligarchs invest their money in companies. So, they own shares. They could sell the shares to someone, and then they have money. So, suppose you had a net worth of $10 billion in shares. You now have the same in liquid wealth. How do you stop climate change? You seem to think it is easy to do with money, pieces of paper and ones and zeros in a bank account. What do they buy, off the shelf, that solves the problem, easy as that? You could perhaps buy rights in an oil field and then refuse to mine it. That would help. You could fund research into solar cells or invest into the market. Though investing money isn't what makes a venture successful: customers actually have to buy the resulting product. So how do you use your $10 billion to make people stop buying carbon? You seem to think it would be very, very easy. So tell us what practical step they could take, on their own without popular support. Simply by being an oligarch.
    - 7y ago
hindsightbias 7y ago
It wasnt more than a few generations ago that many of the best-and-brightest were all-in with eugenics. What extremes would todays generation consider to fix the problem?
daenz 7y ago
>When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. I'm curious to see how your sample size for that statement is anything other than 0. >The oligarchs of the world have more than enough money to fix all the climate issues, but since they derive their wealth from exploiting the climate, there is no hope for a fix from them. There's a huge disconnect here. The wealthy of the world do not have massive piles of cash sitting around with which they can use to change all of society to value the environment. The majority of their wealth is in assets...companies, properties, relationships etc. The value exists in those assets because of a huge underlying social structure that supports that value. You allude to it when you say "since they derive their wealth from X." That wealth is mobilized only through structures that permeate and are supported by most of human society. It's easy to point our fingers at wealthy people and blame them for not fixing the world, but the reality is that they are merely figureheads for the global trends of our collective decisions. You want the top of a pyramid to touch another point in the sky, because it is clearly the tallest and has reach, but you want it to do so without moving the entire supporting pyramid base. It's not going to happen. The change has to be grass roots, only then will the wealth of the world represent different collective decisions. The only alternative to grass roots change is authoritarianism...by forcing society to change through state sponsored violence. But at least here in America, you will find that that will not work out so well for you.

redleggedfrog 7y ago

"...only intelligent life... Not sure we deserve that. Got to remember that huge, huge numbers of the population fully expect there to be some sort of Armageddon. That the earth might be on a run-away path to destruction is a good thing to them, as it brings them closer to their rapture.

mistrial9 7y ago
sure, but if their community internalizes a "coming Armageddon" and then also go about the daily efforts of life too, then how does that compare to those that "discover" a coming Armageddon and come unglued, rejecting many daily efforts of life and instead flipping out into dysfunctional behaviors (both on self and others). Maybe internalizing a shared story of "coming Armageddon" is some kind of a pressure release and that community overall adapts better through extreme circumstances over time. possible ?

lisper 7y ago

> When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. That's not the problem. The problem is that the meritocrats and the technocrats have failed to grasp the real problem. The real problem is that at the end of the day the dynamics of living systems are determined by Darwinian evolution, and Darwinian evolution has no foresight. It optimizes for solutions that reproduce well (relative to competitors) in the short term. So, for example, genes that build brains that have an instinctive revulsion against things like abortion and birth control will reproduce better than genes that build brains that think it's perfectly OK to choose not to have kids. As a result, the world becomes populated by the former sort of brain, along with all of the ancillary effects that building such brains has, such as having a resistance to certain kinds of objective facts, like the long-term consequences of overpopulation. The fact of the matter is that there is only one environmental problem here on earth, and that is an overabundance of humans. But saying that is taboo, even here on HN. I try to make this point here on occasion and every single time I do I am downvoted into oblivion, not because I'm wrong, but because the world is full of brains with an instinctive revulsion towards the idea that there are, or even could be, too many of us, because the genes that build that kind of brain reproduce better than the genes that build brains that think it's perfectly OK, even necessary, to have fewer people. This is a very hard problem to solve. It's not at all clear that it even has a solution. It could even be the answer to Fermi's paradox. I hope not, but it's starting to look like a real possibility.

sgift 7y ago
> The fact of the matter is that there is only one environmental problem here on earth, and that is an overabundance of humans. But saying that is taboo, even here on HN. Because it is wrong, or rather: Only correct if you say humans cannot change. The core problem is resource usage. Now, fewer people use fewer resources. So far, you are correct. But what also uses fewer resources is a different lifestyle. People in the west, and especially in the USA, use far more resources in their life than people living in other parts of the world. So, we only have an "overabundance of humans" if we don't change that. And that is more a matter of society than evolution.
- lisper 7y ago
  > The core problem is resource usage No, it isn't. The core problem is exponential growth. The population today is double what it was just 50 years ago, so you could cut resource usage in half and all that would accomplish is taking us back to the problem as it stood in 1970 or so. It's true that this is a social issue, but even there the problem is very difficult. The entire world economy is built on the premise of eternal exponential growth in something with economic value. That is fundamentally unsustainable. At some point we will have to transition to at leasy polynomial growth, if not an actual steady-state solution. No one is even talking about that AFAICT.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Just to emphasize what lisper is saying, the core problem is exponential growth, even if we invent FTL spaceships, even if we invent warp drive, the core problem is still exponential growth. We could turn the Galaxy green† and still not have enough room. We could fill it with Ringworlds, with Dyson Spheres, and still not have enough room. The core problem is exponential growth. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
7y ago

titzer 7y ago

To be fair, this started pretty much with the either first stone axe or the first field of wheat. "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari is a great read. Where we are now, just about to go over the edge, is perhaps inevitable; it is actually the direct result of technology, as it has always been employed for greater environmental exploitation and leads to population increase. Growth.

war1025 7y ago

> only a small fraction are sufficiently intelligent Eugenics for the win...

dragonwriter 7y ago

But capitalism is meritocracy, so the capitalist oligarchy are meritocrats (and, likewise, capitalism is an empirical testing ground for functionality of ideas, so they are also technocrats, moreso than their ivory-tower challengers)...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said. (When you get down to it, almost everyone is a meritocrat, and almost everyone has a self-serving definition of “merit”.)

JTbane 7y ago
>But capitalism is meritocracy. That breaks down when you have inherited wealth.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  It breaks down, IMO, for any non-circular definition of merit any time you have unequal distribution of wealth, even if the unequal distribution itself is due to prior merit. Inheritance is a dramatic example, but not the whole problem. There's a reason I said “...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said.” I'm not actually endorsing the viewpoint as correct.

JTbane 7y ago

>When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. Well, if you want to implement that, you'd have to abandon democracy and follow the Chinese model of a one-party state. You cannot force people to vote for scientists, rather than demagogues. Technocrats would have to be appointed rather than elected.

beat 7y ago

We're not extinguishing the only intelligent life in the universe, because I don't think this is nearly enough to extinguish humanity. It will be sad and miserable for us, but we'll survive it. I firmly believe the last human will eat the last cockroach.

the8472 7y ago
Cockroaches are small. Note that most of the animal species that survive mass extinction are small. Also, ocean warming can trigger anoxic events which release hydrogen sulfide which can suffocate entire coastlines and also attack the ozone layer affecting life everywhere. The worst case feedback loops are nightmarish. And it would also be nice to avoid the not-even-worst case where civilization is reduced to some isolated enclaves clinging on with their bare lives.

graeme 7y ago

>The oligarchs of the world have more than enough money to fix all the climate issues, but since they derive their wealth from exploiting the climate, there is no hope for a fix from them. No they don’t. Money isn’t something you can turn into zero carbon infrastructure at the snap of a finger. We have a very large global population and carbon keeps it alive, and materially satisfied. Shut it off too fast, and people get dead and grumpy. Shut it off too slow, and our civilization collapses. We’re all part of the system, and the system is the problem. I think the best thing oligarchs could do is buy politicians to change the system to incentivize replacing carbon in a way that doesn’t make people dead or grumpy. Grumpy people vote out politicians with long term views for those who offer short term solutions.

QuickToBan 7y ago
Did you forget just how easily the oligarchs provided hundreds of millions in funding for the Notre Dame when it caught fire this year? It doesn't deserve that funding, but climate change does. The oligarchs splurge like there is no tomorrow.
- graeme 7y ago
  ....hundreds of millions doesn't solve climate change. Mostly oligarchs invest their money in companies. So, they own shares. They could sell the shares to someone, and then they have money. So, suppose you had a net worth of $10 billion in shares. You now have the same in liquid wealth. How do you stop climate change? You seem to think it is easy to do with money, pieces of paper and ones and zeros in a bank account. What do they buy, off the shelf, that solves the problem, easy as that? You could perhaps buy rights in an oil field and then refuse to mine it. That would help. You could fund research into solar cells or invest into the market. Though investing money isn't what makes a venture successful: customers actually have to buy the resulting product. So how do you use your $10 billion to make people stop buying carbon? You seem to think it would be very, very easy. So tell us what practical step they could take, on their own without popular support. Simply by being an oligarch.
  - 7y ago

hindsightbias 7y ago

It wasnt more than a few generations ago that many of the best-and-brightest were all-in with eugenics. What extremes would todays generation consider to fix the problem?

daenz 7y ago

>When meritocrats and technocrats fail to seize power, extinction ensues. I'm curious to see how your sample size for that statement is anything other than 0. >The oligarchs of the world have more than enough money to fix all the climate issues, but since they derive their wealth from exploiting the climate, there is no hope for a fix from them. There's a huge disconnect here. The wealthy of the world do not have massive piles of cash sitting around with which they can use to change all of society to value the environment. The majority of their wealth is in assets...companies, properties, relationships etc. The value exists in those assets because of a huge underlying social structure that supports that value. You allude to it when you say "since they derive their wealth from X." That wealth is mobilized only through structures that permeate and are supported by most of human society. It's easy to point our fingers at wealthy people and blame them for not fixing the world, but the reality is that they are merely figureheads for the global trends of our collective decisions. You want the top of a pyramid to touch another point in the sky, because it is clearly the tallest and has reach, but you want it to do so without moving the entire supporting pyramid base. It's not going to happen. The change has to be grass roots, only then will the wealth of the world represent different collective decisions. The only alternative to grass roots change is authoritarianism...by forcing society to change through state sponsored violence. But at least here in America, you will find that that will not work out so well for you.