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I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons.

I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.

jraby3 4y ago
I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap. I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them. All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care. I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
- pigsty 4y ago
  That example is one reason why legislation is necessary. There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
  - dublin 4y ago
    Aristo! Aristo! A la lanterne!
- swarnie 4y ago
  I've got to a similar conclusion as you but with a very different outcome. It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught. Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally. Sorry, never nice doing a pre-7am nihilism dump.
  - jraby3 4y ago
    I think individuals can help but not so much by conservation. More in trying to affect policy change at local or national political agencies.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Apathy guarantees failure. "All it takes for evil men to succeed..." and all.
- wjnc 4y ago
  Dehydration is more of a risk to you than the environmental risks you marginally save on others. Still I applaud the effort since the economists view is too restricted. Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Stainless steel containers are often lined with plastic, since people don't like the metallic taste that the steel imparts.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      In general there is nothing wrong with long-life plastic products. Plastic is a really useful and important material when used appropriately! It's the insane amount waste and environmental pollution that single-use plastic generates that is the problem.
      - jraby3 4y ago
        Exactly. What I always tell vendors when I get a strange look after refusing their plastic bag is that we use it for 5 minutes but it stays in the environment for 1000 years.
        bluGill 4y ago
        They make plastics that biodegrade in a few years. Supposedly even in a landfill they degrade (I've seen this debated, I'm not qualified to figure out who is right). However they are more expensive and so rarely used except when someone wants to make a point about being green.
      - citrin_ru 4y ago
        Nothing wrong unless it is used to store food or water and contains some BPA-like compound (AFAIK it includes most plastic produces nowadays even so called BPA-free).
- tintor 4y ago
  There are reusable metal water bottles. Don't be thirsty.
- standardUser 4y ago
  Nothing government regulations with decent enforcement couldn't stop. We just need to elect governments that pass those regulations. The thing is, the majority of voters in most societies don't want those regulations.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. If USA chooses to tax all externalities perfectly, both our production capacity and consumption will be a tiny sliver of its current quantities. By GHG alone we'd lose 80% of our economy, but that doesn't take into account the potential cost of removing dioxin and PFAS from our groundwater, remediating lithium mines, cleaning our air of fly ash, preventing any toxic chemical leaks, making our rivers and lakes and ponds drinkable again, etc. I believe that would reduce us to about 1% of our current GDP. Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force. Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's. Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
    - oblio 4y ago
      > Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. Perfect is the enemy of good. The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing. It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction. Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
    - 4y ago
- Reason077 4y ago
  > "This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days" Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible. In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
  - smilekzs 4y ago
    For me, there's always a metallic residual taste in my water whenever I use a stainless steel bottle. Got tired and returned to using normal mugs.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Which brand(s) did you use? I use Contigo, Stanley, Alaaddin and (old) Starbucks tumblers and bottles, and they leave no taste in the water.
    - bushbaba 4y ago
      Many of the metal water bottles come with a plastic liner to avoid the metallic taste
      - atombender 4y ago
        Some also come with a non-stick (Teflon-type) coating. Zojirushi makes incredibly nice vacuum-insulated bottle [1] that unfortunately has a non-stick liner. The inside of the bottle is super easy to clean, but the chemicals used in the manufacturing are awful. [1] https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17&pid=328 https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17...
        jankeymeulen 4y ago
        Good you mention a teflon-type coating in a discussion about 'forever chemicals'.
- wirrbel 4y ago
  I recently mail-ordered rice, and because I wanted to buy two different styles I did not opt for the 3kg (like 6 lbs) bag but 2 packs of 1.8kg. Turns out 1.8kg were packed in 3 bags of 600g, so now I have 6 bags at 600g rice, that on first glance look like they are paper, but its actually plastic coated paper. Its really hard to avoid at times. As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying. Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand). However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
  - jonasdegendt 4y ago
    Most bottled mineral water is just filtered tap water with some different minerals added to give it flavor.
    - Gud 4y ago
      Tap water is vastly different depending on where it is sourced. In my experience, most countries have pretty bad tap water.
      - HPsquared 4y ago
        After a few rounds of filtration it's all going to be the same.
      - Reason077 4y ago
        But if you carefully filter and re-mineralise it before bottling, you can turn it into more or less the same product anywhere.
        Gud 4y ago
        Not really talking about bottling- in Scandinavia their tap water is better than most bottled water.
- beezlewax 4y ago
  You can carry a water bottle in a small backpack or if you're in a city with fountains use them. Or buy water that comes in cartons though I'm not sure it's easy to find these or if they're actually plastic free.
  - jraby3 4y ago
    I realize that. It’s definitely a choice since I like to travel light and walk a lot.
    - cyxxon 4y ago
      I have used the Stash bottle from Hydrapak [1] for a few years now, that one is the definition of light, and very versatile. The interesting thing is that the opening fits the filter by Katadin made for their BeFree bottles [2], so you could even take that on hikes where you are not entirely sure of the water quality (filters particles and bacteria, but not viruses). I actually carry and use this combo, not related to the companies. [1] https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stash-750-ml https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stas... [2] https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane-Filter-Cartridge~p6745 https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane...
  - asenkyr 4y ago
    Water (or any other liquid) packed in cartons is mostly just green washing. Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
- mrpopo 4y ago
  You need to stop thinking about bringing your own footprint ever closer to zero, you must also stop thinking that doing so is a powerful revolutionary act, and join or create organized groups vowing to bring about social change. Be it in your family, your neighbourhood or your municipality. Forget shorter showers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Yes, unfortunately the core item that more hardcore evangelists for topic XYZ seem to be unable to grasp, maybe due to being too close/deep in the subject. If I had a NFT every time somebody on HN stated 'we need to abandon cars, or abandon plastics altogether' and similar, I would be drowning in a lot of useless tokens. The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks. Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
    - Retric 4y ago
      The secret is to aim for lesser goals. Don’t try to get rid of all plastics just aim to reduce some specific kind of single use plastic etc. Setup an organization to ban cars in the central core of your city. The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
      - oblio 4y ago
        Plus if you can somehow get the numbers, everything is a 80-20 deal. 80% of the bang can be gotten for 20% of the buck. I'm reasonably sure Coca Cola and co should be the biggest targets in the anti-plastic campaign.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Why try and minimise single use plastic? That's oil going straight back into the ground (landfill) rather than being refined into petrol and burnt! Single use plastic is way better than recycled plastic at slowing global warming.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    A lot of it doesn’t just go into the ground. It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean where it pollutes beaches, and gets ground down into micro-plastic particles which poison sea life. Still more gets incinerated, creating local air pollution and contributing to carbon emissions.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      If you're putting single use plastic in a non-recycling bin in the developed world its pretty much guaranteed to go to landfill, not the sea. More so than putting it in a recycling bin where they might transport it on a ship to China.
      - Reason077 4y ago
        In many (most?) European cities the non-recycling bin will go to an incinerator, not landfill. China banned the import of waste in 2018. But other countries do still import it.
      - DocTomoe 4y ago
        Welcome to the developed world (in my case: Germany), where recycling is enforced by ordinances and/or contracts with your waste removal organisation, which will check if you did so properly, and refuse to take your refuse away if they think you have not recycled properly enough.
    - dtgriscom 4y ago
      > It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Single use plastics literally don't matter if they end up in landfill. The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China. Plastic in a landfill is fine, it's a no-op: oil comes out of the ground, does not get burned into CO2 in the atmosphere and then will go and sit in the ground for several thousand years (or more likely, we'll dig it all back up once energy is cheap enough that it can depolymerized and reused).
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    You wrote: <<The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China.>> I tried to Google about it but found nothing. Where did you learn about it?
    - XorNot 4y ago
      I misremembered - it's 10 rivers, 8 of which are in Asia: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 Summarised in this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
- bboygravity 4y ago
  The amount of plastic ending up in oceans/nature from "The Western world" is not very significant relative to the total. There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
  - w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
    Where does it end then ? Burned in the air ? I don't know if it is worse or better, I have no data about it. But I suppose it's neither neutral. Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together... For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors). And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering. Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide. In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps. Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal. The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    The Western wolds is comitting massive fraud and has you fooled too. In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed. Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I had a similar discussion with friends who said they were going to stop flying completely. To me all you are really doing there is reducing the cost at the margin by reducing the demand by a tiny amount.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  You really shouldn’t do this. You are risking your health by becoming dehydrated. I’m not sure your avoidance of plastic at all costs even makes sense on any level.
  - dublin 4y ago
    Funny how Europeans and others aren't constantly "hydrating" (in fact, they tell me they think Americans are silly for carrying water bottles around), yet they never suffer any effects of dehydration. (Most European meals are served with only single-digit ounces of liquid.) You really don't need to drink very much, and in fact drinking large quantities can produce some bad effects by demineralizing the body (magnesium in particular, but many others too), especially over the long term...
  - jraby3 4y ago
    I monitor my urine color and how I feel. If I feel bad I’ll grab a glass of water or even buy a plastic bottle, but that happens maybe once a year. I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke. Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
- dmd 4y ago
  About 20 years ago, I made a mistake at work which I later calculated put an extra 8500 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (It had to do with the delay/routing of a cargo ship.) There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
  - saint_fiasco 4y ago
    You just have to keep working and do a better job from that point on. If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.
  - elevaet 4y ago
    That's in the range of 10x the CO2 an average human will produce in their lifetime. If you could find a way to get 20 people to cut their emissions in half, or 200 people to reduce it by 5%, or 1000 people by 1%, you could balance out your CO2 ledger :) Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
    - cj 4y ago
      (Controversial comment warning) one way to save more than your lifetime’s worth of CO2 is to not have children. By not having children, you’re not just saving the CO2 output of the child itself, but the entire lineage that could have resulted from that single child. Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
      - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
        I’ve thought about this. I think it really depends on whether we need more climate-minded voters in the future. If we do then those susceptible to this message are exactly the wrong ones to hear it.
        4y ago
- bilsbie 4y ago
  I would try not to worry too much though. It becomes a sickness at some point. Check out Scott Adam’s law of slow moving disasters if you want some optimism.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Doesn't look like much of a 'law' to me. His optimism ignores some fundamental facts, like living in a (nearly) closed system. So there must be a point at which oil production will decline because our usage far outstrips it's production. Humans are trying to adapt yet I don't think extraction from shale, fracking, and giant super buildings in the desert are going to solve the fundamental issues around sustainability.
    - bilsbie 4y ago
      He’s not saying to ignore problems. Rather that we tend to fix things just in time once the problem becomes very apparent. Y2K is the best example. Fixing the ozone hole would be another one.
  - jraby3 4y ago
    I really don’t worry too much. I’m lucky to be surrounded by the tech seen in Israel and just see so many innovative ideas and solutions to various problems on a daily basis. It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
- latexr 4y ago
  > I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
  - jraby3 4y ago
    I end up using the bags I get (from food delivery, shopping for fruits etc) as garbage bags or dog poop bags. So I reuse the ones I have. But they still last 1000 years in our environment to save me a minimal amount of convenience.
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    I love thin grocery store plastic bags, and reuse each one dozens of times. But my local government (small Massachusetts city) banned them, so now grocery stores have to use paper (much less reusable) or extra-thick bags (more bulky, less flexible, don't last significantly longer). It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  Please, please, please stay hidrated! As a person on their 3rd round of kidney stones - please drink more water!
silisili 4y ago
It's hard to solve in our system, which implicitly encourages it to happen. In a non capitalistic, small enough community it isn't a worry. The real problem I think is how to scale that thinking to a world population.
worldsayshi 4y ago
Calculate the hidden cost. Slap a proportional tax on the products that cause the cost. Then split the tax income evenly to the population. Is it really that hard or are we making it hard?
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit! Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits. We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
    - adrianN 4y ago
      I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem. [1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/1410/publikationen/2020-12-21_methodenkonvention_3_1_kostensaetze.pdf https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...
      - worldsayshi 4y ago
        Dictatorships are still a problem too. But it's not because we don't know what the alternative looks like. Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Look out mother mature in general. It is brutal. Can we socially evolve like the Vulcans?
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote. Totalitarian regimes might succeed, though.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life. We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more “evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.
EastLondonCoder 4y ago
Is it really that hard though? On the top of my mind I can come up with several success stories of solving tragedy of the commons type of problems. For example: Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
- amelius 4y ago
  The solution isn't difficult. It is getting everyone to agree on that solution that is difficult.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    Or is most of the difficulty in trying to convince people who've read articles about "the tragic of the commons" and think that's the natural state of the world that they're wrong?
stuaxo 4y ago
We should remember that the original tragedy of the commons didn't happen, the idea was based on false assumptions around how greedy people are. We could start by looking at how people managed systems sustainably including the original commons. https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
- oblio 4y ago
  Your article doesn't say what you're saying. Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen. It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise. And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
  - tim333 4y ago
    I live in Britain where the original commons were located and have yet to see a tragic one. The idea may apply to things like overfishing.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      Do you think the overfishing situation will get better/worse/same after Brexit?
      - tim333 4y ago
        No idea to be honest.
      - Xelynega 4y ago
        That's a question that's nearly irrelevant to determining if overfishing is because of a tradgedy of the commons. If post-brexit overfishing numbers increase, what evidence is there that the increase is due to individual greed and not a government policy?
titzer 4y ago
Earth's ecosystems have evolved biodiversity for exactly this reason: to recycle the waste products of life forms at all levels. They've gotten really good at this. There is still geologic evidence of this having gone way, way out of control, like vast limestone deposits, coal, and fossil fuels. Those were the unrecyclable byproducts of the day. Who knows what plastic will look like in the geologic record, but at this point they look destined to be a fine dust that will give future (non-human, likely) geologists a perfect marker of the Holocene.
- oblio 4y ago
  Life optimizes for the most efficient resource usage. Those deposits were not an efficient source of energy. But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>. If it doesn't, it just leaves it alone.
nwienert 4y ago
Japan
hoseja 4y ago
It's only hard if you care about individual rights. Otherwise your multicellular self is a good example of a solution.
goodpoint 4y ago
> Tragedy of the Commons ... one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe. No, it's not at all. It's a problem that humans encountered for millennia and solved successfully again and again. That's what organized society is for.
fghjkewur 4y ago
the funny thing about your comment is that it is only a hard problem because you were fooled on the premise. the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy. so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
marssaxman 4y ago
The idea of the "tragedy of the commons" is an ahistorical myth, promulgated quite recently by a racist, eugenicist, nationalist fearmonger: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t... History offers many examples of human communities successfully managing their common resources, over generations.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Those communities are usually around Dunbar's number, 100-300 people, or organized around such. It's easier if you know the people you live with.
- tomrod 4y ago
  This article is both an illuminating critique of the author but also an ad hominem to the argument. Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing). It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources. Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    > It's true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed". Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
  - marssaxman 4y ago
ambientenv 4y ago
"I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe" ... and yet solve it we must. I feel it will begin with a new enlightenment which will be thrust upon us as our survival becomes increasingly threatened and that will manifest in a rewriting of our core values and a redefinition of wealth more in line with and reverence for the natural world.
guerrilla 4y ago
Are you familiar with the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, who won it for debunking the so-called Tragedy of the Commons in general and specifying where it applies in particular?
vt85 4y ago
[dead]
einpoklum 4y ago
There was, and is, no tragedy of the commons. It is an a-historical thought experiment by pro-capitalist writers. The commons work well enough, and are managed collectively. Want to read the high-brow argument? Try: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.

jraby3 4y ago

I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap. I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them. All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care. I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.

pigsty 4y ago
That example is one reason why legislation is necessary. There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
- dublin 4y ago
  Aristo! Aristo! A la lanterne!
swarnie 4y ago
I've got to a similar conclusion as you but with a very different outcome. It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught. Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally. Sorry, never nice doing a pre-7am nihilism dump.
- jraby3 4y ago
  I think individuals can help but not so much by conservation. More in trying to affect policy change at local or national political agencies.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Apathy guarantees failure. "All it takes for evil men to succeed..." and all.
wjnc 4y ago
Dehydration is more of a risk to you than the environmental risks you marginally save on others. Still I applaud the effort since the economists view is too restricted. Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Stainless steel containers are often lined with plastic, since people don't like the metallic taste that the steel imparts.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    In general there is nothing wrong with long-life plastic products. Plastic is a really useful and important material when used appropriately! It's the insane amount waste and environmental pollution that single-use plastic generates that is the problem.
    - jraby3 4y ago
      Exactly. What I always tell vendors when I get a strange look after refusing their plastic bag is that we use it for 5 minutes but it stays in the environment for 1000 years.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        They make plastics that biodegrade in a few years. Supposedly even in a landfill they degrade (I've seen this debated, I'm not qualified to figure out who is right). However they are more expensive and so rarely used except when someone wants to make a point about being green.
    - citrin_ru 4y ago
      Nothing wrong unless it is used to store food or water and contains some BPA-like compound (AFAIK it includes most plastic produces nowadays even so called BPA-free).
tintor 4y ago
There are reusable metal water bottles. Don't be thirsty.
standardUser 4y ago
Nothing government regulations with decent enforcement couldn't stop. We just need to elect governments that pass those regulations. The thing is, the majority of voters in most societies don't want those regulations.
- runnerup 4y ago
  Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. If USA chooses to tax all externalities perfectly, both our production capacity and consumption will be a tiny sliver of its current quantities. By GHG alone we'd lose 80% of our economy, but that doesn't take into account the potential cost of removing dioxin and PFAS from our groundwater, remediating lithium mines, cleaning our air of fly ash, preventing any toxic chemical leaks, making our rivers and lakes and ponds drinkable again, etc. I believe that would reduce us to about 1% of our current GDP. Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force. Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's. Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
  - oblio 4y ago
    > Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. Perfect is the enemy of good. The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing. It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction. Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
  - 4y ago
Reason077 4y ago
> "This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days" Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible. In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
- smilekzs 4y ago
  For me, there's always a metallic residual taste in my water whenever I use a stainless steel bottle. Got tired and returned to using normal mugs.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Which brand(s) did you use? I use Contigo, Stanley, Alaaddin and (old) Starbucks tumblers and bottles, and they leave no taste in the water.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Many of the metal water bottles come with a plastic liner to avoid the metallic taste
    - atombender 4y ago
      Some also come with a non-stick (Teflon-type) coating. Zojirushi makes incredibly nice vacuum-insulated bottle [1] that unfortunately has a non-stick liner. The inside of the bottle is super easy to clean, but the chemicals used in the manufacturing are awful. [1] https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17&pid=328 https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17...
      - jankeymeulen 4y ago
        Good you mention a teflon-type coating in a discussion about 'forever chemicals'.
wirrbel 4y ago
I recently mail-ordered rice, and because I wanted to buy two different styles I did not opt for the 3kg (like 6 lbs) bag but 2 packs of 1.8kg. Turns out 1.8kg were packed in 3 bags of 600g, so now I have 6 bags at 600g rice, that on first glance look like they are paper, but its actually plastic coated paper. Its really hard to avoid at times. As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying. Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand). However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  Most bottled mineral water is just filtered tap water with some different minerals added to give it flavor.
  - Gud 4y ago
    Tap water is vastly different depending on where it is sourced. In my experience, most countries have pretty bad tap water.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      After a few rounds of filtration it's all going to be the same.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      But if you carefully filter and re-mineralise it before bottling, you can turn it into more or less the same product anywhere.
      - Gud 4y ago
        Not really talking about bottling- in Scandinavia their tap water is better than most bottled water.
beezlewax 4y ago
You can carry a water bottle in a small backpack or if you're in a city with fountains use them. Or buy water that comes in cartons though I'm not sure it's easy to find these or if they're actually plastic free.
- jraby3 4y ago
  I realize that. It’s definitely a choice since I like to travel light and walk a lot.
  - cyxxon 4y ago
    I have used the Stash bottle from Hydrapak [1] for a few years now, that one is the definition of light, and very versatile. The interesting thing is that the opening fits the filter by Katadin made for their BeFree bottles [2], so you could even take that on hikes where you are not entirely sure of the water quality (filters particles and bacteria, but not viruses). I actually carry and use this combo, not related to the companies. [1] https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stash-750-ml https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stas... [2] https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane-Filter-Cartridge~p6745 https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane...
- asenkyr 4y ago
  Water (or any other liquid) packed in cartons is mostly just green washing. Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
mrpopo 4y ago
You need to stop thinking about bringing your own footprint ever closer to zero, you must also stop thinking that doing so is a powerful revolutionary act, and join or create organized groups vowing to bring about social change. Be it in your family, your neighbourhood or your municipality. Forget shorter showers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Yes, unfortunately the core item that more hardcore evangelists for topic XYZ seem to be unable to grasp, maybe due to being too close/deep in the subject. If I had a NFT every time somebody on HN stated 'we need to abandon cars, or abandon plastics altogether' and similar, I would be drowning in a lot of useless tokens. The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks. Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The secret is to aim for lesser goals. Don’t try to get rid of all plastics just aim to reduce some specific kind of single use plastic etc. Setup an organization to ban cars in the central core of your city. The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Plus if you can somehow get the numbers, everything is a 80-20 deal. 80% of the bang can be gotten for 20% of the buck. I'm reasonably sure Coca Cola and co should be the biggest targets in the anti-plastic campaign.
concordDance 4y ago
Why try and minimise single use plastic? That's oil going straight back into the ground (landfill) rather than being refined into petrol and burnt! Single use plastic is way better than recycled plastic at slowing global warming.
- Reason077 4y ago
  A lot of it doesn’t just go into the ground. It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean where it pollutes beaches, and gets ground down into micro-plastic particles which poison sea life. Still more gets incinerated, creating local air pollution and contributing to carbon emissions.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    If you're putting single use plastic in a non-recycling bin in the developed world its pretty much guaranteed to go to landfill, not the sea. More so than putting it in a recycling bin where they might transport it on a ship to China.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      In many (most?) European cities the non-recycling bin will go to an incinerator, not landfill. China banned the import of waste in 2018. But other countries do still import it.
    - DocTomoe 4y ago
      Welcome to the developed world (in my case: Germany), where recycling is enforced by ordinances and/or contracts with your waste removal organisation, which will check if you did so properly, and refuse to take your refuse away if they think you have not recycled properly enough.
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    > It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
XorNot 4y ago
Single use plastics literally don't matter if they end up in landfill. The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China. Plastic in a landfill is fine, it's a no-op: oil comes out of the ground, does not get burned into CO2 in the atmosphere and then will go and sit in the ground for several thousand years (or more likely, we'll dig it all back up once energy is cheap enough that it can depolymerized and reused).
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  You wrote: <<The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China.>> I tried to Google about it but found nothing. Where did you learn about it?
  - XorNot 4y ago
    I misremembered - it's 10 rivers, 8 of which are in Asia: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 Summarised in this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
bboygravity 4y ago
The amount of plastic ending up in oceans/nature from "The Western world" is not very significant relative to the total. There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
  Where does it end then ? Burned in the air ? I don't know if it is worse or better, I have no data about it. But I suppose it's neither neutral. Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together... For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors). And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering. Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide. In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps. Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal. The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  The Western wolds is comitting massive fraud and has you fooled too. In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed. Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
I had a similar discussion with friends who said they were going to stop flying completely. To me all you are really doing there is reducing the cost at the margin by reducing the demand by a tiny amount.
Mistletoe 4y ago
You really shouldn’t do this. You are risking your health by becoming dehydrated. I’m not sure your avoidance of plastic at all costs even makes sense on any level.
- dublin 4y ago
  Funny how Europeans and others aren't constantly "hydrating" (in fact, they tell me they think Americans are silly for carrying water bottles around), yet they never suffer any effects of dehydration. (Most European meals are served with only single-digit ounces of liquid.) You really don't need to drink very much, and in fact drinking large quantities can produce some bad effects by demineralizing the body (magnesium in particular, but many others too), especially over the long term...
- jraby3 4y ago
  I monitor my urine color and how I feel. If I feel bad I’ll grab a glass of water or even buy a plastic bottle, but that happens maybe once a year. I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke. Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
dmd 4y ago
About 20 years ago, I made a mistake at work which I later calculated put an extra 8500 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (It had to do with the delay/routing of a cargo ship.) There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
- saint_fiasco 4y ago
  You just have to keep working and do a better job from that point on. If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.
- elevaet 4y ago
  That's in the range of 10x the CO2 an average human will produce in their lifetime. If you could find a way to get 20 people to cut their emissions in half, or 200 people to reduce it by 5%, or 1000 people by 1%, you could balance out your CO2 ledger :) Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
  - cj 4y ago
    (Controversial comment warning) one way to save more than your lifetime’s worth of CO2 is to not have children. By not having children, you’re not just saving the CO2 output of the child itself, but the entire lineage that could have resulted from that single child. Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
    - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
      I’ve thought about this. I think it really depends on whether we need more climate-minded voters in the future. If we do then those susceptible to this message are exactly the wrong ones to hear it.
      - 4y ago
bilsbie 4y ago
I would try not to worry too much though. It becomes a sickness at some point. Check out Scott Adam’s law of slow moving disasters if you want some optimism.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Doesn't look like much of a 'law' to me. His optimism ignores some fundamental facts, like living in a (nearly) closed system. So there must be a point at which oil production will decline because our usage far outstrips it's production. Humans are trying to adapt yet I don't think extraction from shale, fracking, and giant super buildings in the desert are going to solve the fundamental issues around sustainability.
  - bilsbie 4y ago
    He’s not saying to ignore problems. Rather that we tend to fix things just in time once the problem becomes very apparent. Y2K is the best example. Fixing the ozone hole would be another one.
- jraby3 4y ago
  I really don’t worry too much. I’m lucky to be surrounded by the tech seen in Israel and just see so many innovative ideas and solutions to various problems on a daily basis. It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
latexr 4y ago
> I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
- jraby3 4y ago
  I end up using the bags I get (from food delivery, shopping for fruits etc) as garbage bags or dog poop bags. So I reuse the ones I have. But they still last 1000 years in our environment to save me a minimal amount of convenience.
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  I love thin grocery store plastic bags, and reuse each one dozens of times. But my local government (small Massachusetts city) banned them, so now grocery stores have to use paper (much less reusable) or extra-thick bags (more bulky, less flexible, don't last significantly longer). It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
int0x2e 4y ago
Please, please, please stay hidrated! As a person on their 3rd round of kidney stones - please drink more water!

silisili 4y ago

It's hard to solve in our system, which implicitly encourages it to happen. In a non capitalistic, small enough community it isn't a worry. The real problem I think is how to scale that thinking to a world population.

worldsayshi 4y ago

Calculate the hidden cost. Slap a proportional tax on the products that cause the cost. Then split the tax income evenly to the population. Is it really that hard or are we making it hard?

worldsayshi 4y ago
I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.
adrianN 4y ago
Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit! Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits. We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem. [1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/1410/publikationen/2020-12-21_methodenkonvention_3_1_kostensaetze.pdf https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...
    - worldsayshi 4y ago
      Dictatorships are still a problem too. But it's not because we don't know what the alternative looks like. Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Look out mother mature in general. It is brutal. Can we socially evolve like the Vulcans?

2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote. Totalitarian regimes might succeed, though.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life. We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more “evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.

EastLondonCoder 4y ago

Is it really that hard though? On the top of my mind I can come up with several success stories of solving tragedy of the commons type of problems. For example: Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect

amelius 4y ago
The solution isn't difficult. It is getting everyone to agree on that solution that is difficult.
- Xelynega 4y ago
  Or is most of the difficulty in trying to convince people who've read articles about "the tragic of the commons" and think that's the natural state of the world that they're wrong?

stuaxo 4y ago

We should remember that the original tragedy of the commons didn't happen, the idea was based on false assumptions around how greedy people are. We could start by looking at how people managed systems sustainably including the original commons. https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

oblio 4y ago
Your article doesn't say what you're saying. Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen. It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise. And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
- tim333 4y ago
  I live in Britain where the original commons were located and have yet to see a tragic one. The idea may apply to things like overfishing.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Do you think the overfishing situation will get better/worse/same after Brexit?
    - tim333 4y ago
      No idea to be honest.
    - Xelynega 4y ago
      That's a question that's nearly irrelevant to determining if overfishing is because of a tradgedy of the commons. If post-brexit overfishing numbers increase, what evidence is there that the increase is due to individual greed and not a government policy?

titzer 4y ago

Earth's ecosystems have evolved biodiversity for exactly this reason: to recycle the waste products of life forms at all levels. They've gotten really good at this. There is still geologic evidence of this having gone way, way out of control, like vast limestone deposits, coal, and fossil fuels. Those were the unrecyclable byproducts of the day. Who knows what plastic will look like in the geologic record, but at this point they look destined to be a fine dust that will give future (non-human, likely) geologists a perfect marker of the Holocene.

oblio 4y ago
Life optimizes for the most efficient resource usage. Those deposits were not an efficient source of energy. But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>. If it doesn't, it just leaves it alone.

nwienert 4y ago

Japan

hoseja 4y ago

It's only hard if you care about individual rights. Otherwise your multicellular self is a good example of a solution.

goodpoint 4y ago

> Tragedy of the Commons ... one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe. No, it's not at all. It's a problem that humans encountered for millennia and solved successfully again and again. That's what organized society is for.

fghjkewur 4y ago

the funny thing about your comment is that it is only a hard problem because you were fooled on the premise. the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy. so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.

marssaxman 4y ago

The idea of the "tragedy of the commons" is an ahistorical myth, promulgated quite recently by a racist, eugenicist, nationalist fearmonger: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t... History offers many examples of human communities successfully managing their common resources, over generations.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Those communities are usually around Dunbar's number, 100-300 people, or organized around such. It's easier if you know the people you live with.
tomrod 4y ago
This article is both an illuminating critique of the author but also an ad hominem to the argument. Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing). It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources. Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
- Xelynega 4y ago
  > It's true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed". Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
- marssaxman 4y ago

ambientenv 4y ago

"I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe" ... and yet solve it we must. I feel it will begin with a new enlightenment which will be thrust upon us as our survival becomes increasingly threatened and that will manifest in a rewriting of our core values and a redefinition of wealth more in line with and reverence for the natural world.

guerrilla 4y ago

Are you familiar with the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, who won it for debunking the so-called Tragedy of the Commons in general and specifying where it applies in particular?

vt85 4y ago

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einpoklum 4y ago

There was, and is, no tragedy of the commons. It is an a-historical thought experiment by pro-capitalist writers. The commons work well enough, and are managed collectively. Want to read the high-brow argument? Try: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.