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What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic,

by blagie 5y ago

What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change (whether man-made, or from a volcano/asteroid/etc.), nukes, or what-not. Being resilient means: * Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains shouldn't be brittle. This has less economic impact than one might predict, since limiting the flow of some goods doesn't limit the flow of information, and the limits can be pretty mild. * Some level of excess capacity. Free market capitalism wants everything to be just-in-time and as close to 100% capacity as possible. Machines sitting around idle are bad. Resilience demands we can quickly reallocate resources in response to change. * Having some amount of stuff stockpiled, be that N95 masks or food. * Having something like FEMA or the military, only competent. * Proactively addressing potential threats. If something has a 5% chance of wiping out mankind or sending us back to the stone age, we should deal with it. We only get an expected 20 tries. I don't believe a lot of the climate change predictions. I don't think we have any idea as to what will happen; it's a chaotic system. Academic incentive structures don't support honest publications either. Things may turn out far better, worse, or most likely, just different than predicted, and reasonable people can disagree. I think if we can agree to aggressively and proactively deal with potential threats, though, exact estimates on odds of all of those outcomes don't matter so much. And if we can deal with those 5%-odds threats, the need for fear-mongering goes away.

noahtallen 5y ago
This is a fantastic point. I personally agree with the climate outlook, but also agree that most things end up being different in some way when they happen. (Could be better, could be worse.) Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You only get that kind of resilience when you have a political system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more than than its leaders. With a few debatable exceptions, that's not true of any country on Earth. And it's certainly not true of the planet as a whole. Which is the level at which it would need to operate to deal with planetary challenges.
- blagie 5y ago
  Then how do we get one? Our model democracy is a quarter millennium old, and showing signs of wear. How do we put in place a better system?
dahart 5y ago
So, you’re suggesting we should prepare for unlikely events, seems reasonable as a general thought. And at the same time armchair questioning the best science we have on climate change without any specific evidence, contributing to the very doubt that has already fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date. How are we to be resilient and prioritize preparedness when we can’t agree on the priorities? Certainly we can’t just ‘be prepared’ for anything that could possibly happen in anyone’s imagination, right? We do need to take a look at history and the current state of things and make some educated guesses as to which crisis might actually happen. We don’t have infinite amounts of money and resources and time, do we? Given your stated distrust of research, how exactly do you propose to be proactive? This isn’t a choice between 5% odds, pulling a number from thin air and framing it that way makes it seem like there are easy choices. What if the choices are closer to between six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds?
- blagie 5y ago
  The best science, in climate change, in COVID, and in many other areas, just isn't very good science. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare. We make decisions on limited evidence all the time -- in business, investments, and in war, there is a certain fog. I think where scientists went wrong -- and what contributed to doubt and fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date -- was exactly from the type of manipulation you described. In the nineties, scientists correctly believed we should do something about the climate, but to affect change, they politicized science. In the case of climate change, if you read right-wing media, they'll point to failed prediction after prediction expressed with great confidence 10 or 20 years ago, and use that to discount the whole concept of climate change. If that same data had been presented with confidence intervals -- and /real/ confidence intervals, not just based on statistical measurement error but on the possibility of models being wrong -- I think we'd actually be a lot further along. If the choices were "six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds", the risk would be 0.6%, and the case for acting wouldn't exist. As it is, I'd give perhaps 75% odds for the need to act on climate change. Precision is important. But no, a lot of possibilities aren't hard to model or a reason not to act. We assign probabilities, and give a distribution. We have major wars perhaps every 50-100 years in most parts of the world. Recent past has been stable, but we've had windows of stability. Pandemics are on the rise, due to growing population and more commute. We can come up with likely scenarios, and they all have a lot in common.

by blagie 5y ago

noahtallen 5y ago

This is a fantastic point. I personally agree with the climate outlook, but also agree that most things end up being different in some way when they happen. (Could be better, could be worse.) Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You only get that kind of resilience when you have a political system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more than than its leaders. With a few debatable exceptions, that's not true of any country on Earth. And it's certainly not true of the planet as a whole. Which is the level at which it would need to operate to deal with planetary challenges.

blagie 5y ago
Then how do we get one? Our model democracy is a quarter millennium old, and showing signs of wear. How do we put in place a better system?

dahart 5y ago

So, you’re suggesting we should prepare for unlikely events, seems reasonable as a general thought. And at the same time armchair questioning the best science we have on climate change without any specific evidence, contributing to the very doubt that has already fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date. How are we to be resilient and prioritize preparedness when we can’t agree on the priorities? Certainly we can’t just ‘be prepared’ for anything that could possibly happen in anyone’s imagination, right? We do need to take a look at history and the current state of things and make some educated guesses as to which crisis might actually happen. We don’t have infinite amounts of money and resources and time, do we? Given your stated distrust of research, how exactly do you propose to be proactive? This isn’t a choice between 5% odds, pulling a number from thin air and framing it that way makes it seem like there are easy choices. What if the choices are closer to between six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds?

blagie 5y ago
The best science, in climate change, in COVID, and in many other areas, just isn't very good science. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare. We make decisions on limited evidence all the time -- in business, investments, and in war, there is a certain fog. I think where scientists went wrong -- and what contributed to doubt and fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date -- was exactly from the type of manipulation you described. In the nineties, scientists correctly believed we should do something about the climate, but to affect change, they politicized science. In the case of climate change, if you read right-wing media, they'll point to failed prediction after prediction expressed with great confidence 10 or 20 years ago, and use that to discount the whole concept of climate change. If that same data had been presented with confidence intervals -- and /real/ confidence intervals, not just based on statistical measurement error but on the possibility of models being wrong -- I think we'd actually be a lot further along. If the choices were "six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds", the risk would be 0.6%, and the case for acting wouldn't exist. As it is, I'd give perhaps 75% odds for the need to act on climate change. Precision is important. But no, a lot of possibilities aren't hard to model or a reason not to act. We assign probabilities, and give a distribution. We have major wars perhaps every 50-100 years in most parts of the world. Recent past has been stable, but we've had windows of stability. Pandemics are on the rise, due to growing population and more commute. We can come up with likely scenarios, and they all have a lot in common.