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Surely it's naive optimism that's brain rotting. What you call cynicism here looks merely like an accurate assessment of reality.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

sanderjd 3y ago
No, I got it right the first time: it's cynicism that rots brains. Cynicism sounds smart, but pretty much never is. Both optimism and skepticism are good. But cynicism is bad. The comment I replied to was cynicism rather than skepticism.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    No they weren't. The vaccines were incredibly successful, saving millions of lives, and have been constantly pilloried by "the most cynical or outright conspiratorial people", to this day. The thing those people are usually most credited with being right about - the "lab leak theory" - is also not something they have ever been proven right about. It was indeed very wrong to shut down all discussion and debate about that theory, because there was - and still is - insufficient evidence either way. But that was something that many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd said at the time. Indeed, one of the reasons it was such a giant mistake to discredit the perfectly reasonable "we don't have enough evidence to say whether lab leak or animal-borne is more likely" folks is that it lumped them in with the cynical-and-outright-conspiratorial crowd that was, and still is, incorrectly convinced that there is compelling evidence that it was a lab leak. The truth is that nobody outside the party leaders in China will ever know the answer to this. But the completely sure lab leak people are just as wrong as the completely sure animal-borne people; it's just very uncertain. This is actually an excellent demonstration of the difference between cynicism and skepticism. The cynical people were just as wrong about everything as anyone in the un-skeptical mainstream.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      You're retconning the idea that "many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd" talked about the lab leak theory, which isn't the case. Anyone who raised it was marked as being in that crowd regardless of what they said or who they were. I remember all this very clearly, the idea that this one was somehow different is just wrong. Everyone who talked about that was dumped into the "dangerous people who must be censored and suppressed" bucket, right up until one day overnight the US government's position suddenly flipped, at which point there had supposedly always been lots of open discussion. Just total coincidence that the DRASTIC guys who blew it open all had to be anonymous. Other things that were dismissed as cynical expert-bashing that they were later proven right about: 1. They will develop a vaccine and force us to take it using some sort of unforgeable marker (predicted in 2020, debunked as conspiracy theory, proven true <2 years later) 2. Masks work (debunked by experts Jan/Feb/March 2020) 3. Masks don't work (debunked by experts after that) 4. "Crush the curve" won't last two weeks, it will go on for much longer (predicted April 2020, proven true months later). 5. The virus can spread on long range air currents via aerosols so masks/lockdowns/mass testing won't impact case numbers (debunked Feb/Mar 2020, proven true shortly after by the Diamond Princess, denied for years after). 6. The vaccines will turn out to need more than 2 doses (predicted early 2021, debunked, proven true <6 months later). 7. The vaccines won't work even with more than two doses (predicted early 2021), which is of course correct because they were introduced with the claim they were 95% effective against infection which is obviously nowhere even close to true even if you believe the later claims about savings lives. 8. Bill Gates will get rich off the vaccines (tin foil hat garbage until it was true) 9. The vaccines won't really be as safe as they claim (predicted 2020, many severe side effects like heart damage and diabetes are now recognized as being real by the medical community after previously being denied). And we could go on. COVID was an absolute shit-show of credentialed "experts" being proven wrong, over and over, by random people on the internet. The pattern was that the most maximally cynical people were always right. For example, in 2020 I didn't believe that governments would force vaccines on people. I thought all the jabbering about qr codes or quantum dots was tinfoil stuff. More fool me: the conspiracy theorists were right and just a year later I was being forced to constantly show qr codes to be allowed to go anywhere or do anything. And I got lucky, I wasn't forced to take it via my job.
- otterley 3y ago
  My skepticism (call it cynicism if you like; it doesn’t bother me) is borne of nearly 50 years watching history repeat itself and people chasing fads. I’m all for technology, but it’s not a solution to every problem. If you think technology is the best solution to restoring our earth’s balance, make your case. I think the $10T or whatever outlandish figure that proponents of carbon-recapture technology plan to spend would be better spent on a land trust on which native plants would be cultivated. $10T will buy an enormous amount of land upon which billions of trees can grow.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Growing trees on land trusts (and land trusts in general) is a great idea. It's also not in any way mutually exclusive with developing carbon capture technology. If it were actually $10T in public funds that people are proposing to develop carbon capture technology (it isn't, but it is irrelevant whether or not it is), then I would certainly vote in favor of another $10T to buy land and plant trees. Money really isn't the relevant constraint here. The constraints to carbon capture are, in my view, the same as any other climate technology: public and private will, land availability, and energy. That's in order of most to least intractable. The global economy could easily absorb $20T of public funding for the DAC + billions of trees plan from now to 2050, if there were the political will for it. But of course, there isn't. But if there were, the constraint would then be the trade-off between land use to plant the trees vs. solar arrays for the energy to power the DAC machines. But one really nice thing about DAC is that it may not have much constraint with respect to location, so it may be possible to put it in places with plentiful energy that can't easily be used in other ways. (This is not true of land for billions of trees.) But the will thing really is the biggest constraint, and it's why I'm an "all of the above" advocate. There are lots of great solutions to this problem that you can wishcraft about executing if you were the unchallenged emperor of the world, but there is no path to an authoritarian global hegemon who uses their power to plant billions of trees. And even if there were, frankly I think global authoritarianism would be a worse outcome for humanity (and the environment) than our current climate change trajectory. So there's no point daydreaming about some perfect "if we would only do this one thing!" solution and getting all frustrated and cynical about how it isn't going to happen because people are too selfish or stupid or whatever. That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. The solution to this will be a cobbled together coalition of a bunch of different stuff - both policy and technology - that people and governments are willing to do. And you may retort, as many do, "no, that won't be the solution, there just won't be a solution, we're doomed!". And you may be right about that. And I may even have joined the cynical doomer contingent, if it weren't for all the herculean effort at invention over the last half a century having already put us on a much better trajectory than anyone thought we would be on at this point. We're not so far off from being able to beat this thing, we have almost all the technology we need, and a ton of people interested in attacking the problem from different angles both for selfless, but importantly also now for selfish reasons. It will be good if wealthy and well-run oil companies begin to see a bigger upside in carbon-negative technologies rather than carbon positive ones. Very annoying from a karma / spite perspective, but good from a solving-the-problem perspective. I don't disagree at all that billions of trees would be an excellent "technology" for this, but it's just naive to put all your eggs in that one not-gonna-happen basket, and it's childish to throw up your hands in frustration that it isn't going to happen and become cynical about other technologies.

Surely it's naive optimism that's brain rotting. What you call cynicism here looks merely like an accurate assessment of reality.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

Surely it's naive optimism that's brain rotting. What you call cynicism here looks merely like an accurate assessment of reality.

sanderjd 3y ago

No, I got it right the first time: it's cynicism that rots brains. Cynicism sounds smart, but pretty much never is. Both optimism and skepticism are good. But cynicism is bad. The comment I replied to was cynicism rather than skepticism.

nvm0n2 3y ago
[flagged]
- sanderjd 3y ago
  No they weren't. The vaccines were incredibly successful, saving millions of lives, and have been constantly pilloried by "the most cynical or outright conspiratorial people", to this day. The thing those people are usually most credited with being right about - the "lab leak theory" - is also not something they have ever been proven right about. It was indeed very wrong to shut down all discussion and debate about that theory, because there was - and still is - insufficient evidence either way. But that was something that many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd said at the time. Indeed, one of the reasons it was such a giant mistake to discredit the perfectly reasonable "we don't have enough evidence to say whether lab leak or animal-borne is more likely" folks is that it lumped them in with the cynical-and-outright-conspiratorial crowd that was, and still is, incorrectly convinced that there is compelling evidence that it was a lab leak. The truth is that nobody outside the party leaders in China will ever know the answer to this. But the completely sure lab leak people are just as wrong as the completely sure animal-borne people; it's just very uncertain. This is actually an excellent demonstration of the difference between cynicism and skepticism. The cynical people were just as wrong about everything as anyone in the un-skeptical mainstream.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    You're retconning the idea that "many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd" talked about the lab leak theory, which isn't the case. Anyone who raised it was marked as being in that crowd regardless of what they said or who they were. I remember all this very clearly, the idea that this one was somehow different is just wrong. Everyone who talked about that was dumped into the "dangerous people who must be censored and suppressed" bucket, right up until one day overnight the US government's position suddenly flipped, at which point there had supposedly always been lots of open discussion. Just total coincidence that the DRASTIC guys who blew it open all had to be anonymous. Other things that were dismissed as cynical expert-bashing that they were later proven right about: 1. They will develop a vaccine and force us to take it using some sort of unforgeable marker (predicted in 2020, debunked as conspiracy theory, proven true <2 years later) 2. Masks work (debunked by experts Jan/Feb/March 2020) 3. Masks don't work (debunked by experts after that) 4. "Crush the curve" won't last two weeks, it will go on for much longer (predicted April 2020, proven true months later). 5. The virus can spread on long range air currents via aerosols so masks/lockdowns/mass testing won't impact case numbers (debunked Feb/Mar 2020, proven true shortly after by the Diamond Princess, denied for years after). 6. The vaccines will turn out to need more than 2 doses (predicted early 2021, debunked, proven true <6 months later). 7. The vaccines won't work even with more than two doses (predicted early 2021), which is of course correct because they were introduced with the claim they were 95% effective against infection which is obviously nowhere even close to true even if you believe the later claims about savings lives. 8. Bill Gates will get rich off the vaccines (tin foil hat garbage until it was true) 9. The vaccines won't really be as safe as they claim (predicted 2020, many severe side effects like heart damage and diabetes are now recognized as being real by the medical community after previously being denied). And we could go on. COVID was an absolute shit-show of credentialed "experts" being proven wrong, over and over, by random people on the internet. The pattern was that the most maximally cynical people were always right. For example, in 2020 I didn't believe that governments would force vaccines on people. I thought all the jabbering about qr codes or quantum dots was tinfoil stuff. More fool me: the conspiracy theorists were right and just a year later I was being forced to constantly show qr codes to be allowed to go anywhere or do anything. And I got lucky, I wasn't forced to take it via my job.
otterley 3y ago
My skepticism (call it cynicism if you like; it doesn’t bother me) is borne of nearly 50 years watching history repeat itself and people chasing fads. I’m all for technology, but it’s not a solution to every problem. If you think technology is the best solution to restoring our earth’s balance, make your case. I think the $10T or whatever outlandish figure that proponents of carbon-recapture technology plan to spend would be better spent on a land trust on which native plants would be cultivated. $10T will buy an enormous amount of land upon which billions of trees can grow.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Growing trees on land trusts (and land trusts in general) is a great idea. It's also not in any way mutually exclusive with developing carbon capture technology. If it were actually $10T in public funds that people are proposing to develop carbon capture technology (it isn't, but it is irrelevant whether or not it is), then I would certainly vote in favor of another $10T to buy land and plant trees. Money really isn't the relevant constraint here. The constraints to carbon capture are, in my view, the same as any other climate technology: public and private will, land availability, and energy. That's in order of most to least intractable. The global economy could easily absorb $20T of public funding for the DAC + billions of trees plan from now to 2050, if there were the political will for it. But of course, there isn't. But if there were, the constraint would then be the trade-off between land use to plant the trees vs. solar arrays for the energy to power the DAC machines. But one really nice thing about DAC is that it may not have much constraint with respect to location, so it may be possible to put it in places with plentiful energy that can't easily be used in other ways. (This is not true of land for billions of trees.) But the will thing really is the biggest constraint, and it's why I'm an "all of the above" advocate. There are lots of great solutions to this problem that you can wishcraft about executing if you were the unchallenged emperor of the world, but there is no path to an authoritarian global hegemon who uses their power to plant billions of trees. And even if there were, frankly I think global authoritarianism would be a worse outcome for humanity (and the environment) than our current climate change trajectory. So there's no point daydreaming about some perfect "if we would only do this one thing!" solution and getting all frustrated and cynical about how it isn't going to happen because people are too selfish or stupid or whatever. That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. The solution to this will be a cobbled together coalition of a bunch of different stuff - both policy and technology - that people and governments are willing to do. And you may retort, as many do, "no, that won't be the solution, there just won't be a solution, we're doomed!". And you may be right about that. And I may even have joined the cynical doomer contingent, if it weren't for all the herculean effort at invention over the last half a century having already put us on a much better trajectory than anyone thought we would be on at this point. We're not so far off from being able to beat this thing, we have almost all the technology we need, and a ton of people interested in attacking the problem from different angles both for selfless, but importantly also now for selfish reasons. It will be good if wealthy and well-run oil companies begin to see a bigger upside in carbon-negative technologies rather than carbon positive ones. Very annoying from a karma / spite perspective, but good from a solving-the-problem perspective. I don't disagree at all that billions of trees would be an excellent "technology" for this, but it's just naive to put all your eggs in that one not-gonna-happen basket, and it's childish to throw up your hands in frustration that it isn't going to happen and become cynical about other technologies.