3 ms·

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because y

by ouid 6y ago

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because you are failing to maintain it. Increasing the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a bad idea even if we have no conception of global warming.

Dylan16807 6y ago
We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant. So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.
- ouid 6y ago
  The irony of suggesting cleanup cost here, I just don't know. Cleaning up maintains the invariant. You have successfully put the intrinsic price tag on the externality. Well done.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Please don't deliberately interpret my comment to be the weakest form. Looking at what it would cost to clean up doesn't have to mean actually cleaning. But let's remove that part, because the important part is to look at actual harm. Especially because if you can't tell me the relationship between plastic levels and harm, and you can't tell me how much is too much, what if I decide we've already broken the invariant and there's no point in reducing any more? I only suggested looking at cleanup cost to get a better understanding of how to handle the harm. Not because we have a magic list of which things must be cleaned up and which things don't need to be. Because you'd need such a magic list. Otherwise how do we know that we don't need to blow up all our houses because they're violating an invariant, or something similarly crippling? What if Earth can only safely supply 10 million humans in the long term, for a fun possible invariant.
    - ouid 6y ago
      You cannot measure "actual" harm, because the system is dynamical. You wanted a definition of externality, I gave it to you. There's a function that gives you the upper bound on the cost of an externality, which for lack of a better term, we can call the clean up function. This is the cost of returning the system to its original state. You don't need a magic list, you need a way of demonstrating that certain actions are within the flight envelope of the environment, ie, there is some corrective force within the environment that maintains the invariant for you, and a policy of denying all actions that do not come with such a demonstration. The list can expand as scientific understanding expands, and we are allowed some leeway by the intrinsic stability of the system. If evolution could not absorb some unexpected perturbations, we wouldn't exist in the first place, but we should treat this as a finite resource, for which we do not have an amount. Evidence that we don't do this at all is just you being in denial about the terribleness of the human strategy. Imagine, for metaphor, that you are in some (solar powered) alien plane, and the pilot dies. You go into the cockpit, knowing that you just have to keep the plane flying. You make a mental note that all of the instruments on the panel are fixed, and the position of all of the controls. You decide that you want to fly faster so you fiddle around with the contrls until you can tell that the landscape is going underneath you faster than it was before. You note that some instrument on the panel is increasing. Do you A) ignore it, or B) return the controls to their original state?
      - R0b0t1 6y ago
        If you can't measure it how do you know it exists? That is at least half of my point, the other half being you can't assume a specific course of action is necessary and proper without demonstrating the harm actually occurred. That you think harm might occur is not enough, you need to show it has occurred (and can probably use proof of past harm to show that inevitable harm will occur). Your example is disingenuous because a cockpit instrument by definition monitors something you want to pay attention to. We can measure and record many things, most of which are probably irrelevant to many problems and their solutions.

by ouid 6y ago

Dylan16807 6y ago

We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant. So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.

ouid 6y ago
The irony of suggesting cleanup cost here, I just don't know. Cleaning up maintains the invariant. You have successfully put the intrinsic price tag on the externality. Well done.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Please don't deliberately interpret my comment to be the weakest form. Looking at what it would cost to clean up doesn't have to mean actually cleaning. But let's remove that part, because the important part is to look at actual harm. Especially because if you can't tell me the relationship between plastic levels and harm, and you can't tell me how much is too much, what if I decide we've already broken the invariant and there's no point in reducing any more? I only suggested looking at cleanup cost to get a better understanding of how to handle the harm. Not because we have a magic list of which things must be cleaned up and which things don't need to be. Because you'd need such a magic list. Otherwise how do we know that we don't need to blow up all our houses because they're violating an invariant, or something similarly crippling? What if Earth can only safely supply 10 million humans in the long term, for a fun possible invariant.
  - ouid 6y ago
    You cannot measure "actual" harm, because the system is dynamical. You wanted a definition of externality, I gave it to you. There's a function that gives you the upper bound on the cost of an externality, which for lack of a better term, we can call the clean up function. This is the cost of returning the system to its original state. You don't need a magic list, you need a way of demonstrating that certain actions are within the flight envelope of the environment, ie, there is some corrective force within the environment that maintains the invariant for you, and a policy of denying all actions that do not come with such a demonstration. The list can expand as scientific understanding expands, and we are allowed some leeway by the intrinsic stability of the system. If evolution could not absorb some unexpected perturbations, we wouldn't exist in the first place, but we should treat this as a finite resource, for which we do not have an amount. Evidence that we don't do this at all is just you being in denial about the terribleness of the human strategy. Imagine, for metaphor, that you are in some (solar powered) alien plane, and the pilot dies. You go into the cockpit, knowing that you just have to keep the plane flying. You make a mental note that all of the instruments on the panel are fixed, and the position of all of the controls. You decide that you want to fly faster so you fiddle around with the contrls until you can tell that the landscape is going underneath you faster than it was before. You note that some instrument on the panel is increasing. Do you A) ignore it, or B) return the controls to their original state?
    - R0b0t1 6y ago
      If you can't measure it how do you know it exists? That is at least half of my point, the other half being you can't assume a specific course of action is necessary and proper without demonstrating the harm actually occurred. That you think harm might occur is not enough, you need to show it has occurred (and can probably use proof of past harm to show that inevitable harm will occur). Your example is disingenuous because a cockpit instrument by definition monitors something you want to pay attention to. We can measure and record many things, most of which are probably irrelevant to many problems and their solutions.