37 ms·

Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over

by moosey 5y ago

Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions. Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared dreams, but meeting basic needs. This can already be seen in homelessness. How long before things like this means our planet can no longer manage pollution, or produce soil healthy enough to feed us? As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. One such consequence is the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it due to serving things that aren't real. I think that a million dead will be remembered with whimsy in the coming decades as not being so bad.

karaterobot 5y ago
Disagree with this. According to this article, birds aren't dying off because people choose the almighty dollar, they're dying because they smash into windows or are hunted by cats. The solution isn't to examine our relationship to abstractions versus reality, it's to put a screen on the window so the bird will notice it in time.
- cmurf 5y ago
  And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
  - digitaltrees 5y ago
    Our door cats have existed for millennia. Pesticides have not. I don’t think outdoor cats are the problem. Pesticides have killed most of the bug biomass in the last several decades and now birds are being affected.
    - drran 5y ago
      I cannot understand why DDT is forbidden, but 10000x more powerful insecticides are not forbidden. WTF? Birds are dropping from the sky in Spring, because they have nothing to eat, because bugs are gone while seeds are not ready yet. Also, air pollution makes them weak. Birds are much more sensitive to air pollution and CO2 level, because they breathe at much higher rate while they have much lower mass than land animals.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    I blame online communities for this. Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter. They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.
    - pirate787 5y ago
      We have a group like this, which feeds a couple dozen feral cats on "Kitty Cat Lane." Of course there is science behind the insanity -- toxoplasmosis infections from the cats they love.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        Our local Nextdoor exploded when some particularly nutty cat vigilante started stealing cats and spaying them. I think as society sprawls out and folks have fewer kids, this stuff gets escalated.
        jollybean 5y ago
        These comments are disturbingly out of touch. 'Neuter and Release' programs are common, supported and sanctioned by animal shelters, usually local vets provide their services for free, and the point is to provide basic medical for the animals while at the same time trying to control excess populations. Calling them 'Nutty cat lady vigilantes' would be like calling people 100 years ago providing shelter for abused women 'Marriage Wreckers'.
        Spooky23 5y ago
        This particular group of self-described activists were running a squeegee guy scam with cats. They were stealing pets and shaking down the owners for cash.
      - jollybean 5y ago
        Enough with the petty, denigrating attacks people helping mostly harmless animals, which is a generally good thing. These rescuers/helpers run 'neuter and release' programs and are keen on having population control, not increasing the number of rogue cats.
  - ostenning 5y ago
    Its a solid point. I'm not sure what the average ownership of cats are, but I would imagine every 3rd or 4th person in my friendship network to own one. I would imagine at least over 100 million cats in north America to which most owners probably let them outside to hunt wild life.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again. Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >including the cat But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.
    - arbitrary_name 5y ago
      I like birds, i like them alive. I would like your car to not go outside and catch birds.
  - simonsarris 5y ago
    That seems very silly. The concept of an indoor or outdoor cat didn't even exist until one hundred years ago. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C+indoor+cat&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Coutdoor%20cat%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cindoor%20cat%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C...
  - elihu 5y ago
    Would that even be beneficial? If the problem is that there are fewer insects and therefore the birds have less food, then cats suppressing the bird population might have a positive impact on insects, which the birds eat. That might be good for birds too in the long run. Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.
  - ca01an 5y ago
    Not sure what it is like in the US, but in the UK, the RSPB doesn't seem to think cats are a major cause of bird population decline https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/ https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-...
- swayvil 5y ago
  He didn't say money, he said like money.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  That's not what the original paper says. This is why you want to read the actual scientific paper and not the article about it. The researchers, in the article's text, state: > "Steep declines in North American birds parallel patterns of avian declines emerging globally (14, 15, 22, 24). In particular, depletion of native grassland bird populations in North America, driven by habitat loss and more toxic pesticide use in both breeding and wintering areas (25), mirrors loss of farmland birds throughout Europe and elsewhere (15). Even declines among introduced species match similar declines within these same species’ native ranges (26). Agricultural intensification and urbanization have been similarly linked to declines in insect diversity and biomass (27), with cascading impacts on birds and other consumers (24, 28, 29). Given that birds are one of the best monitored animal groups, birds may also represent the tip of the iceberg, indicating similar or greater losses in other taxonomic groups (28, 30)." This points to agricultural pesticides having impacts on insect populations, and additionally this mirrors where losses have been most extreme, in grasslands most impacted by agricultural activity: > "Across breeding biomes, grassland birds showed the largest magnitude of total population loss since 1970—more than 700 million breeding individuals across 31 species— and the largest proportional loss (53%); 74% of grassland species are declining. (Fig. 1 and Table 1)." I've made it a habit to always seek out the original paper instead of just reading the 'science journalism' take on it, for reasons like this. https://www.flatheadaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Rosenberg-et-al-Science-Sept-2019.pdf https://www.flatheadaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/R...
  - helmholtz 5y ago
    Brilliant, thank you for that effort, especially the direct link to the PDF. A third of the bird population gone in the 50 years since 1970. As he says in Blood Diamond, "Will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? ..." The future is here and the future bites.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    This illustrates why it's a terrible shame that the overpopulation topic has effectively been silenced and demonized in science conservationism and environmentalism. I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably, let alone a much larger one. They'll angrily insist that the earth's "carrying capacity" is 20, 50, 100 billion people! Or that countries should be looking to increase their populations, or that natural population stability and decline is a terrible thing. As though we have not _already_ caused (and are continuing to cause) a great extinction event almost entirely before any significant effects from greenhouse gas emissions have made an impact. Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do). The funny thing about that is, if our population was a very healthy, say, 5% of its current level, greenhouse gas emissions would be practically a non-issue too. The problem would literally be solved. Gradually moving toward cleaner and more renewable sources of course should and would happen, but while that was responsibly and efficiently changing, there would be no imminent climate catastrophe occurring. EDIT: It's happening again.
- abeppu 5y ago
  Actually, is that really what the article said? > Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor. But I don't think the numbers in the article make sense together. > wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by 29 percent—or a total net loss of around three billion birds—since 1970. > between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.) > pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone. So ... the total decline over 50 years (~3B) is approximately the same as the annual deaths from cats and windows at somewhere between a quarter and a third of all birds? I think this is one of those cases where uncritically accepting estimates from independent sources who used different methods produces an incoherent picture.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    I think the honest answer is that we just don't have nearly as much surety around these numbers as you might expect. I went looking for data on actual bird populations, and I get wildly different estimates. The 3 billion number comes from the following source (as far as I can tell): " Critical data were contributed by citizen-science participants in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, North American Breeding Bird Survey, and other bird-monitoring initiatives. The Partners in Flight Avian Conservation Assessment Database was a critical source for the data. " - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/ https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/ Nat Geo quotes " New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth. " - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-birds-are-there-in-the-world-science-estimates https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-... A lot of articles seem to quote the "at least 50 billion" line, probably based on the above numbers. Basically - I'd say we have no idea how many birds there really are. Take ALL numbers involved as wild guesses.
  - __s 5y ago
    Counting population based on deaths alone isn't accurate If the ecosystem is healthy, a dozen birds dying will make way for a dozen more to replace them
  - vertak 5y ago
themodelplumber 5y ago
That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways. Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of both ends forward, rather than regressing to the one-sided way.
- Retric 5y ago
  The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy. The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    There are a lot more differences than that. You are communicating a subjective model of reality, one model of many, many models.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 5y ago
      Within the context of a Model. Models that don’t capture the very large scale effects are useless and therefore not worth talking about. What’s left is models that used to capture large scale effects and all the smaller effects that where never captured by the model.
      - themodelplumber 5y ago
        This sounds more like an argument for systems design. You can easily build models and meta-models that help navigate various scopes. For example the concept of the long tail is by definition a widely-scoped way of gaining leverage in a situation where smaller details are important. Traffic control systems, computer hardware design...these all incorporate the same combinations of depth and breadth of thinking. I think it's wise to keep an open mind and ask whether it's really necessary to exclude a given model or entire set of them.
selestify 5y ago
But isn't the problem that these abstractions exist precisely to help coordinate real things? The economy (and by extension, to a limited degree, the stock market) directly influences a lot of real things and basic needs.
- mc32 5y ago
  Yes abstractions here are a distraction. People will consume whether they hunt, barter, trade or use fist money.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I think the problem is that there's lots of hidden costs or incorrect assumptions in much of the way society functions. We overestimate how rational people are, many costs get swept under the rug or ignored as "something for future people to deal with", certain costs are just hidden, we fail to account for corruption and fraud, and so forth and so on. It's not really that we use abstractions or models, it's that many or all of them are incorrect, and we proceed as if they're correct, even when we seem to know they're not. I don't think this is just limited to the environment. Sometimes I wonder if this is some defining feature of our age, rampant fraud or disingenuousness. Maybe it's always been this way, and maybe it doesn't matter.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Abstractions and models tend to get more correct over time. Sure sometimes we get off track or even go backwards, but if you look back at all of recorded human history our abstractions and models are generally a better fit to objective reality than ever before. You have an opportunity to help improve them further, if you choose to take it.
- sdenton4 5y ago
  The way we use money to coordinate activity is very selective: Money only solves problems when those with problems have money. This means that the environment and the poor are generally not served by capitalism.
- jwmhjwmh 5y ago
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry. We're messing up a lot. And we can do much better. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. When we focus on something, we get it done, massively better so than at any prior point in human history.
- titzer 5y ago
  Well, there's a lot to quibble about in this rosy portrayal of the COVID clusterfuck, particularly anti-rationality's rearing of anti-Science conspiracy theories and "hesitancy"--but I won't. > When we focus on something, we get it done Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
  - lambdadmitry 5y ago
    We are focusing on it plenty enough. The timeframes for serious climate change are measured in half-a-centuries, remember how much changed in the last decade? Solar got massively cheaper, it became possible to convince countries to reduce their carbon emissions purely through political pressure, billions get spent on energy and sustainability R&D. Hell, even nuclear is quickly losing it stigma after Europe haven't had much wind for a few weeks! We are getting there, regardless of alarmist "we have two years to fix everything or the planet is uninhabitable" nonsense.
    - titzer 5y ago
      I do remember how much changed in the last decade. A very nice decline in solar power cost. But you know what? That didn't solve any problems. Emissions kept rising at an exponential rate, meaning the problem not only kept getting worse, it got worse at a faster rate. Adding solar capacity replaced no fossil fuel capacity. We're using more fossil fuels than ever. We are still on exponential growth. So the next decades look bad. And those half-century bad predictions? They wouldn't be nearly as bad if we didn't continue exponential growth--that literally means no GDP growth, something no politician or public policy advocate will even talk about. Growth is making the problem worse, yet it is literally the only strategy that any one can think of to make life better in any way. Exponential growth of something. We've lost our collective minds, TBH. Like trying to grow a watermelon in a lightbulb. Exponential growth busts this planet's capacity, every time.
dbtc 5y ago
Interesting. I frame it as a problem of radical materialism’s ignorance of intangible importances: [love, beauty, god, consciousness, ...]
zip1234 5y ago
Tax/price the negative externalities.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  We have to start by acknowledging that externalities exist and tell the free-market-is-magic people to shut-up and acknowledge that the market doesn't automatically take care of everything.
nobody9999 5y ago
>Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. But birds aren't real![0] [0] https://birdsarentreal.com/ https://birdsarentreal.com/
refurb 5y ago
Money is real, it’s how we pay for medical care, welfare, etc.
makeitdouble 5y ago
This comment is really hard to parse. "homelessness", "pollution" and "healthy" are abstractions that try to capture in single concept a myriad of different realities, and most of us won't have similar concrete representation of what's behind them. This of course becomes an issue real fast because because solving "homelessness" for instance requires separating all these different cases in their own buckets and coming with appropriate solutions to all of them. Also money is as real as the food you buy with it, the electricity that comes if you keep paying your bills and the factories you buy with them.
rabuse 5y ago
Pretty much the premise of the movie Interstellar.
tengbretson 5y ago
I don't know if the "population of birds in north America" is a more or less abstract concept than money, but I'd bet they're similar.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Though population of birds in theory is a measurable real thing -- and money really is an abstraction. Without humans it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, birds would probably exist much better without us.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AussieWog93 5y ago
There have been massive ecological disasters in command economies too, the most famous being the locust plagues that resulted from Mao's Four Pests Campaign. Hell, before civilisation even existed you had humans wiping out megafauna right across the world. Regardless of what economic system we have, a technologically advanced culture that values hamburgers and Doritos over biodiversity will trample on nature to get what they want. (I'm not making the cynical argument that humans don't inherently care about the environment - in many Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, environmental damage was considered as great a sin as murder - just that you can't blame capitalism for wider humanity's lack of care or respect for the environment.)
- willob33 5y ago
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- moosey 5y ago
  A "command economy", or even "China", are still abstractions. Arguably, your points further prove mine.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Really? The whole point of a command economy is to have a central planning authority that oversees production of x tons of potatoes, y tons of steel and z T-34 tanks. They explicitly ignore abstract financial metrics like GDP and stock prices. They still ruined the environment. Unless you're arguing that the mere existence of abstract concepts somehow degrades the environment, I don't see how this proves your point.
    - moosey 5y ago
      My point is, what does it serve to build tanks? If the goal is to protect "our nation", then we are serving the abstractions. If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.
mkotowski 5y ago
> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" > YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. > "So we can believe the big ones?" > YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. (Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett) > Until human society stops serving abstractions […] Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought. I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost. > As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of I'm appalled that such a quote could be used to support such an argument. Grandparent, and Pratchett's Death, agree that humans and human society are supposed to support humans. Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope -- and the biosphere itself that serves as backdrop, stage, and audience all in one. Whether unintentionally or otherwise, the parent is missing the point. The grandparent doesn't argue against abstraction itself, but the reification of corporations as people, the conflation of the stock market as barometer of the economy, and enablers of all this in ostensibly benevolent governments. If one chose the read the rest of the fucking book, one would see that it's all about fighting against those who would use human frailties -- like greed, and desperation, and the smallness of our own perspective -- to trick humans into destroying that which makes life worth living. Of course, it's all couched in the supernatural trappings of the Discworld, but as Prachett points out in several Discworld book intros, the Disc is a "world and mirror of worlds". On Earth, the antagonistic Auditors have names and addresses...
tristor 5y ago
> it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost Unfortunately so. As far as I am aware, there are no political movements in any Western country focused entirely on reality and the consequences of reality. We have become enamored, as a society, with abstract ideas and are sacrificing reality on an altar to our delusions.

by moosey 5y ago

karaterobot 5y ago

Disagree with this. According to this article, birds aren't dying off because people choose the almighty dollar, they're dying because they smash into windows or are hunted by cats. The solution isn't to examine our relationship to abstractions versus reality, it's to put a screen on the window so the bird will notice it in time.

cmurf 5y ago
And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
- digitaltrees 5y ago
  Our door cats have existed for millennia. Pesticides have not. I don’t think outdoor cats are the problem. Pesticides have killed most of the bug biomass in the last several decades and now birds are being affected.
  - drran 5y ago
    I cannot understand why DDT is forbidden, but 10000x more powerful insecticides are not forbidden. WTF? Birds are dropping from the sky in Spring, because they have nothing to eat, because bugs are gone while seeds are not ready yet. Also, air pollution makes them weak. Birds are much more sensitive to air pollution and CO2 level, because they breathe at much higher rate while they have much lower mass than land animals.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  I blame online communities for this. Cat ladies are insane and organized now. In my city, there’s a group distributing shelters and placing them in various outdoor areas to keep feral cats alive over the winter. They are as nutty as the pigeon feeders, except the cats kill everything in sight.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    We have a group like this, which feeds a couple dozen feral cats on "Kitty Cat Lane." Of course there is science behind the insanity -- toxoplasmosis infections from the cats they love.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Our local Nextdoor exploded when some particularly nutty cat vigilante started stealing cats and spaying them. I think as society sprawls out and folks have fewer kids, this stuff gets escalated.
      - jollybean 5y ago
        These comments are disturbingly out of touch. 'Neuter and Release' programs are common, supported and sanctioned by animal shelters, usually local vets provide their services for free, and the point is to provide basic medical for the animals while at the same time trying to control excess populations. Calling them 'Nutty cat lady vigilantes' would be like calling people 100 years ago providing shelter for abused women 'Marriage Wreckers'.
        Spooky23 5y ago
        This particular group of self-described activists were running a squeegee guy scam with cats. They were stealing pets and shaking down the owners for cash.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      Enough with the petty, denigrating attacks people helping mostly harmless animals, which is a generally good thing. These rescuers/helpers run 'neuter and release' programs and are keen on having population control, not increasing the number of rogue cats.
- ostenning 5y ago
  Its a solid point. I'm not sure what the average ownership of cats are, but I would imagine every 3rd or 4th person in my friendship network to own one. I would imagine at least over 100 million cats in north America to which most owners probably let them outside to hunt wild life.
- lettergram 5y ago
  Bob cats, mountain lions, etc used to have the entire US as their range. I suspect the bird population boomed after we got rid of the cats (100-150 years ago). Now that we have house cats they’re dropping again. Boom-bust cycles for animals are common. I try to reflect what the natural order was 10,000 years ago and reflect. 20,000 years ago, there was an ice sheet over North America - ie no birds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Unless you're talking about the lynx (which mainly eats hares), the historic ranges of American cats barely overlap with LGM ice cover. It's not very relevant to this discussion.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  >including the cat But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.
  - arbitrary_name 5y ago
    I like birds, i like them alive. I would like your car to not go outside and catch birds.
- simonsarris 5y ago
  That seems very silly. The concept of an indoor or outdoor cat didn't even exist until one hundred years ago. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C+indoor+cat&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Coutdoor%20cat%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cindoor%20cat%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=outdoor+cat%2C...
- elihu 5y ago
  Would that even be beneficial? If the problem is that there are fewer insects and therefore the birds have less food, then cats suppressing the bird population might have a positive impact on insects, which the birds eat. That might be good for birds too in the long run. Predators are part of a feedback loop. That the predators in question are housecats makes it a somewhat unnatural feedback loop, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. Housecats are part of the food chain as well; they can be killed by cayotes and raccoons, and hawks might sometimes go after a small cat.
- ca01an 5y ago
  Not sure what it is like in the US, but in the UK, the RSPB doesn't seem to think cats are a major cause of bird population decline https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/ https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-...
swayvil 5y ago
He didn't say money, he said like money.
photochemsyn 5y ago
That's not what the original paper says. This is why you want to read the actual scientific paper and not the article about it. The researchers, in the article's text, state: > "Steep declines in North American birds parallel patterns of avian declines emerging globally (14, 15, 22, 24). In particular, depletion of native grassland bird populations in North America, driven by habitat loss and more toxic pesticide use in both breeding and wintering areas (25), mirrors loss of farmland birds throughout Europe and elsewhere (15). Even declines among introduced species match similar declines within these same species’ native ranges (26). Agricultural intensification and urbanization have been similarly linked to declines in insect diversity and biomass (27), with cascading impacts on birds and other consumers (24, 28, 29). Given that birds are one of the best monitored animal groups, birds may also represent the tip of the iceberg, indicating similar or greater losses in other taxonomic groups (28, 30)." This points to agricultural pesticides having impacts on insect populations, and additionally this mirrors where losses have been most extreme, in grasslands most impacted by agricultural activity: > "Across breeding biomes, grassland birds showed the largest magnitude of total population loss since 1970—more than 700 million breeding individuals across 31 species— and the largest proportional loss (53%); 74% of grassland species are declining. (Fig. 1 and Table 1)." I've made it a habit to always seek out the original paper instead of just reading the 'science journalism' take on it, for reasons like this. https://www.flatheadaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Rosenberg-et-al-Science-Sept-2019.pdf https://www.flatheadaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/R...
- helmholtz 5y ago
  Brilliant, thank you for that effort, especially the direct link to the PDF. A third of the bird population gone in the 50 years since 1970. As he says in Blood Diamond, "Will god ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? ..." The future is here and the future bites.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  This illustrates why it's a terrible shame that the overpopulation topic has effectively been silenced and demonized in science conservationism and environmentalism. I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably, let alone a much larger one. They'll angrily insist that the earth's "carrying capacity" is 20, 50, 100 billion people! Or that countries should be looking to increase their populations, or that natural population stability and decline is a terrible thing. As though we have not _already_ caused (and are continuing to cause) a great extinction event almost entirely before any significant effects from greenhouse gas emissions have made an impact. Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do). The funny thing about that is, if our population was a very healthy, say, 5% of its current level, greenhouse gas emissions would be practically a non-issue too. The problem would literally be solved. Gradually moving toward cleaner and more renewable sources of course should and would happen, but while that was responsibly and efficiently changing, there would be no imminent climate catastrophe occurring. EDIT: It's happening again.
abeppu 5y ago
Actually, is that really what the article said? > Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor. But I don't think the numbers in the article make sense together. > wild bird populations in the continental U.S. and Canada have declined by 29 percent—or a total net loss of around three billion birds—since 1970. > between 365 million and one billion birds die each year across the U.S. as a result of window strikes.) > pet felines kill some 2.6 billion birds annually in the U.S. alone. So ... the total decline over 50 years (~3B) is approximately the same as the annual deaths from cats and windows at somewhere between a quarter and a third of all birds? I think this is one of those cases where uncritically accepting estimates from independent sources who used different methods produces an incoherent picture.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  I think the honest answer is that we just don't have nearly as much surety around these numbers as you might expect. I went looking for data on actual bird populations, and I get wildly different estimates. The 3 billion number comes from the following source (as far as I can tell): " Critical data were contributed by citizen-science participants in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, North American Breeding Bird Survey, and other bird-monitoring initiatives. The Partners in Flight Avian Conservation Assessment Database was a critical source for the data. " - https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/ https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/ Nat Geo quotes " New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth. " - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-birds-are-there-in-the-world-science-estimates https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-... A lot of articles seem to quote the "at least 50 billion" line, probably based on the above numbers. Basically - I'd say we have no idea how many birds there really are. Take ALL numbers involved as wild guesses.
- __s 5y ago
  Counting population based on deaths alone isn't accurate If the ecosystem is healthy, a dozen birds dying will make way for a dozen more to replace them
- vertak 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago

That seems a bit of a dichotomous view on a complex web of interconnected "realities" and "abstractions", and I'm not sure if "real" is a great term for an opposite of an abstraction, which is also real in a lot of ways. Otherwise you are getting _very_ close to the N/S dichotomy in Jungian psychology and the Myers-Briggs type model :D and the growth idea there is transcendence of the dichotomy, bringing strengths of both ends forward, rather than regressing to the one-sided way.

Retric 5y ago
The difference between abstraction and reality is all the little details that get excluded from abstractions. Consider, people cooking at home are creating real value that doesn’t get captured in GDP, which means maximizing GDP may is not maximizing the actual economy. The difference is not so critical when people are starving, but the difference continues to grow until maximizing GDP starts harming the economy.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  There are a lot more differences than that. You are communicating a subjective model of reality, one model of many, many models.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - Retric 5y ago
    Within the context of a Model. Models that don’t capture the very large scale effects are useless and therefore not worth talking about. What’s left is models that used to capture large scale effects and all the smaller effects that where never captured by the model.
    - themodelplumber 5y ago
      This sounds more like an argument for systems design. You can easily build models and meta-models that help navigate various scopes. For example the concept of the long tail is by definition a widely-scoped way of gaining leverage in a situation where smaller details are important. Traffic control systems, computer hardware design...these all incorporate the same combinations of depth and breadth of thinking. I think it's wise to keep an open mind and ask whether it's really necessary to exclude a given model or entire set of them.

selestify 5y ago

But isn't the problem that these abstractions exist precisely to help coordinate real things? The economy (and by extension, to a limited degree, the stock market) directly influences a lot of real things and basic needs.

mc32 5y ago
Yes abstractions here are a distraction. People will consume whether they hunt, barter, trade or use fist money.
derbOac 5y ago
I think the problem is that there's lots of hidden costs or incorrect assumptions in much of the way society functions. We overestimate how rational people are, many costs get swept under the rug or ignored as "something for future people to deal with", certain costs are just hidden, we fail to account for corruption and fraud, and so forth and so on. It's not really that we use abstractions or models, it's that many or all of them are incorrect, and we proceed as if they're correct, even when we seem to know they're not. I don't think this is just limited to the environment. Sometimes I wonder if this is some defining feature of our age, rampant fraud or disingenuousness. Maybe it's always been this way, and maybe it doesn't matter.
- nradov 5y ago
  Abstractions and models tend to get more correct over time. Sure sometimes we get off track or even go backwards, but if you look back at all of recorded human history our abstractions and models are generally a better fit to objective reality than ever before. You have an opportunity to help improve them further, if you choose to take it.
sdenton4 5y ago
The way we use money to coordinate activity is very selective: Money only solves problems when those with problems have money. This means that the environment and the poor are generally not served by capitalism.
jwmhjwmh 5y ago

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> the pandemic and my society's inability to deal with it To put the doom and gloom in context, we had a novel virus go from virtually zero to pandemic in the course of a few months. Within weeks we had working treatments. Within a year, effective vaccines. Less than two years from first publication, and over 4 billion people have been inoculated. All within the systems of abstractions you decry. We're messing up a lot. And we can do much better. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. When we focus on something, we get it done, massively better so than at any prior point in human history.

titzer 5y ago
Well, there's a lot to quibble about in this rosy portrayal of the COVID clusterfuck, particularly anti-rationality's rearing of anti-Science conspiracy theories and "hesitancy"--but I won't. > When we focus on something, we get it done Yeah, great. Can we focus on not ruining this planet for the stock market? Climate change, deforestation and plastic pollution are seriously damaging the one planet in the known universe that can sustain human life.
- lambdadmitry 5y ago
  We are focusing on it plenty enough. The timeframes for serious climate change are measured in half-a-centuries, remember how much changed in the last decade? Solar got massively cheaper, it became possible to convince countries to reduce their carbon emissions purely through political pressure, billions get spent on energy and sustainability R&D. Hell, even nuclear is quickly losing it stigma after Europe haven't had much wind for a few weeks! We are getting there, regardless of alarmist "we have two years to fix everything or the planet is uninhabitable" nonsense.
  - titzer 5y ago
    I do remember how much changed in the last decade. A very nice decline in solar power cost. But you know what? That didn't solve any problems. Emissions kept rising at an exponential rate, meaning the problem not only kept getting worse, it got worse at a faster rate. Adding solar capacity replaced no fossil fuel capacity. We're using more fossil fuels than ever. We are still on exponential growth. So the next decades look bad. And those half-century bad predictions? They wouldn't be nearly as bad if we didn't continue exponential growth--that literally means no GDP growth, something no politician or public policy advocate will even talk about. Growth is making the problem worse, yet it is literally the only strategy that any one can think of to make life better in any way. Exponential growth of something. We've lost our collective minds, TBH. Like trying to grow a watermelon in a lightbulb. Exponential growth busts this planet's capacity, every time.

dbtc 5y ago

Interesting. I frame it as a problem of radical materialism’s ignorance of intangible importances: [love, beauty, god, consciousness, ...]

zip1234 5y ago

Tax/price the negative externalities.

quadrangle 5y ago
We have to start by acknowledging that externalities exist and tell the free-market-is-magic people to shut-up and acknowledge that the market doesn't automatically take care of everything.

nobody9999 5y ago

>Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. But birds aren't real![0] [0] https://birdsarentreal.com/ https://birdsarentreal.com/

refurb 5y ago

Money is real, it’s how we pay for medical care, welfare, etc.

makeitdouble 5y ago

This comment is really hard to parse. "homelessness", "pollution" and "healthy" are abstractions that try to capture in single concept a myriad of different realities, and most of us won't have similar concrete representation of what's behind them. This of course becomes an issue real fast because because solving "homelessness" for instance requires separating all these different cases in their own buckets and coming with appropriate solutions to all of them. Also money is as real as the food you buy with it, the electricity that comes if you keep paying your bills and the factories you buy with them.

rabuse 5y ago

Pretty much the premise of the movie Interstellar.

tengbretson 5y ago

I don't know if the "population of birds in north America" is a more or less abstract concept than money, but I'd bet they're similar.

hungryforcodes 5y ago
Though population of birds in theory is a measurable real thing -- and money really is an abstraction. Without humans it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, birds would probably exist much better without us.

deleted 5y ago

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AussieWog93 5y ago

There have been massive ecological disasters in command economies too, the most famous being the locust plagues that resulted from Mao's Four Pests Campaign. Hell, before civilisation even existed you had humans wiping out megafauna right across the world. Regardless of what economic system we have, a technologically advanced culture that values hamburgers and Doritos over biodiversity will trample on nature to get what they want. (I'm not making the cynical argument that humans don't inherently care about the environment - in many Australian Aboriginal cultures, for example, environmental damage was considered as great a sin as murder - just that you can't blame capitalism for wider humanity's lack of care or respect for the environment.)

willob33 5y ago
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moosey 5y ago
A "command economy", or even "China", are still abstractions. Arguably, your points further prove mine.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Really? The whole point of a command economy is to have a central planning authority that oversees production of x tons of potatoes, y tons of steel and z T-34 tanks. They explicitly ignore abstract financial metrics like GDP and stock prices. They still ruined the environment. Unless you're arguing that the mere existence of abstract concepts somehow degrades the environment, I don't see how this proves your point.
  - moosey 5y ago
    My point is, what does it serve to build tanks? If the goal is to protect "our nation", then we are serving the abstractions. If you take a "command economy" and tell it to feed the people of the world, restore natural areas, shelter people... Then the abstractions serves real things.

mkotowski 5y ago

> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" > YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. > "So we can believe the big ones?" > YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. (Death about belief and humanity, from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett) > Until human society stops serving abstractions […] Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of. No government to organize large scale actions, no incentive to share ideas, no way to exchange goods from places where there is overabundance to the places in need of those resources. Wanting to maintain a livable environment, too is nothing but an abstract thought. I would dare to claim that human society exists first and foremost thanks to our brains being able to abstract away some processes. Of course, it creates blind spots and shortcoming in the process, but they are in the end an acceptable cost. > As a believer in the concept of memetics, it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost, but the consequences will not be escaped forever. Is it? Seems to me that more and more people are starting to be more proactive in attempts at preserving the nature. Too late? Maybe. Time will show.

revolvingocelot 5y ago
>Without abstraction, there is no human society to speak of I'm appalled that such a quote could be used to support such an argument. Grandparent, and Pratchett's Death, agree that humans and human society are supposed to support humans. Grandparent maintains, quite correctly, that our current society is, in fact, tooled to support abstract concepts like "valuation" and "wealth creation" instead of things like clean nutritive food and safe affordable shelter and supportable realistic hope -- and the biosphere itself that serves as backdrop, stage, and audience all in one. Whether unintentionally or otherwise, the parent is missing the point. The grandparent doesn't argue against abstraction itself, but the reification of corporations as people, the conflation of the stock market as barometer of the economy, and enablers of all this in ostensibly benevolent governments. If one chose the read the rest of the fucking book, one would see that it's all about fighting against those who would use human frailties -- like greed, and desperation, and the smallness of our own perspective -- to trick humans into destroying that which makes life worth living. Of course, it's all couched in the supernatural trappings of the Discworld, but as Prachett points out in several Discworld book intros, the Disc is a "world and mirror of worlds". On Earth, the antagonistic Auditors have names and addresses...

tristor 5y ago

> it is clear that standing in defense of the real is a battle that is being lost Unfortunately so. As far as I am aware, there are no political movements in any Western country focused entirely on reality and the consequences of reality. We have become enamored, as a society, with abstract ideas and are sacrificing reality on an altar to our delusions.