Replying to myself: This got me thinking about what exactly I mean by status quo, I don't think it's quite as obvious as it seems at first glance. One importa

Replying to myself: This got me thinking about what exactly I mean by status quo, I don't think it's quite as obvious as it seems at first glance. One important distinction is status-quo as a goal, vs status-quo as a solution. Status quo as a goal often makes sense - when the current state of affairs isn't that bad and it would be easy for things to get worse, keeping things the same is a good thing. Solutions however rarely make sense, because solutions operate in a changing environment, and keeping doing the same thing is basically pretending you're maintaining the status quo, when you're actually yielding different results. To use atmospheric CO2 as an example, status quo atmospheric CO2 would be a remarkable achievement. Status quo energy generation obviously fails to achieve that, because the baseline amount of atmospheric CO2 keeps going up. Another thing to ask is status quo of "what", status quo of atmospheric CO2 would be remarkable, status quo of change in atmospheric CO2 over time wouldn't solve the crisis, though it would be a great improvement over what we have right now. IIRC status quo of the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 over time (i.e. how fast the rate at which we output it changes over time) is about what we currently maintain. It follows that status quo of the third derivative would be a major step backwards. I think the conclusion I've been coming to over the last few years, is that "status quo of quantities that aren't rates is usually a good default for a goal". For atmospheric CO2 it would be a remarkable achievement. For geopolitical tensions is europe, it's not quite ideal, but we don't actually have a war and I'd be pretty happy if it stayed that way. For diseases, I mean, we aren't all dying, and so on and so forth. That doesn't mean it's always the right goal. If we're in the middle of a major war, we should be seeking a new status quo where we aren't in a war. Given that the new mRNA HIV vaccine actually works the goal should change to "reduce HIV" rather than "maintain the status quo" since that's now possible. It's just that status quo is a starting point for a goal and deviations from it should probably be supported by a solid argument for "we can do better" or "we can't even do that well".