5 ms·

Understand that the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships. (Or at least trying to illustrate complex relationships b

Understand that the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships. (Or at least trying to illustrate complex relationships based on what we know of them right now). There is very little we as an individual level can do about whether or not full scale technological advancement occurs enough to reach steady state of equilibrium on a global level. It’s very important cognitively to realistically assess your personal ability to influence or not influence a global phenomenon. Personally? I want to make sure my local community is strong. Even if no collapse occurs, a strong community is good. But if anything happens, a strong community is great. I do food coops (I buy a share of a farms crops ahead of the growing season, so the farmer shares the harvest with me. Sometimes I also pitch in to pack the shares for others in the coop!). I donate to community food availability(not just food kitchens but also paying way more for pay-what-you-can produce). I attend community events like cleanups, town halls, etc. Most of us in tech are lucky enough to be able to work from the neighborhoods where we live, and be able to step out for the occasional chore. We inherently have more time to directly benefit our neediest. Why not take advantage?

ahepp 3y ago
> the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships If it has no predictive power, why should it be taken seriously? I'm concerned about the environment and sustainability too, but that's the exact reason we can't afford to throw empiricism out the window the second things start looking a bit hairy.
- john-radio 3y ago
  A paper not containing predictions is not the same thing as its having no predictive power!
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    This paper makes a lot of predictions despite the lack of predictive power. Hence, it should not be taken seriously. Since the 1970's the group producing it has made a lot of very wrong predictions out of the hubristic belief that they can reduce everything about life to a simple system of differential equations.
  - ahepp 3y ago
    What? Maybe my brain isn't big enough to understand this, but I don't see how you could disentangle the two without getting into pedantry.
    - true_religion 3y ago
      Paper may say you can use this methodology with data beyond the scope of the paper to make a prediction. However it doesn’t actually do the work to predict anything. Kind of like the difference between theoretical math and applied math.
    - john-radio 3y ago
      Take a look, for example, at the timeline in https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/. It contains (almost) no prediction, but once you have internalized the information in it your own predictions on the climate topic are likely to become a lot more powerful because better informed.
- westcort 3y ago
  Unfortunately for all of us, the model does have very good predictive power despite its simplicity. Herrington et al in 2020 checked the 1972 model scenarios (there were 4 such scenarios as sensitivity analyses) against around 40 years of empirical data and the results were close to observed ground truth [0]. 0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1111%2Fjiec.13084&file=jiec13084-sup-0001-SuppMatS1.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...
  - Enginerrrd 3y ago
    I try not to be too harsh on here, but your interpretation of this analysis is unbelievably bad. It's absurdly easy to fit a logistic function to match the real-life logistic curve of some value of interest during the exponential phase of those functions. However... That means almost *NOTHING* with regard to the actual logistic portion which is the part people actually care about. There exist an infinite range of different logistic functions that can be made to match in the exponential portion and the majority of those functions contain almost zero information about the future logistic portion. The error between them is essentially unbounded. Calling that confirmation of predictive power is not misguided, it's just about as wrong as you can be.
    - westcort 3y ago
      This is not my analysis, and the first author, Gaya Herrington, explains the alignment between the model and empirical data here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpvc3i5j84 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpvc3i5j84 I also react with concern. Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up.
      - Enginerrrd 3y ago
        I know it's not your analysis. I said your interpretation of this analysis is flawed. You're misunderstanding that analysis to be confirmation of the predictive power of the model extrapolated into the logistic region. And you still are: >Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up. The key phrase there where your interpretation is flawed is: "are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses". That's so, so untrue. You simply cannot extrapolate logistic model parameters into the actual post-exponential-growth, logistic portion without seeing the actual logistic effects start to kick in. Those simply haven't been empirically verified here. And speaking of... the original model they are analyzing introduces limits on that exponential growth in a pretty arbitrary and artificial way, particularly when it comes to the pollution terms.... which, I'll add, this analysis shows is also the parameter they most over-estimated by a large amount even in the exponential portion.
Loquebantur 3y ago
You are engaging in self-delusion here. The point of these papers isn't to make precise predictions of "the day civilizational collapse occurs" nor does it merely "illustrate some complex relationships". It is to show every closed system, even only remotely resembling our own, is bound to end in overshoot&collapse unless you change central tenets of the driving economic paradigm. Namely abandon exponential growth for a steady (or oscillatory) state approach. Individuals aren't helpless bystanders either. As adults in a democracy, it isn't only your right but your responsibility to bring about the necessary change.
- lalaithion 3y ago
  We don’t live in a closed system though.
  - westcort 3y ago
    Looks pretty closed to me: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-on-the-good-earth https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-o... How many thousands of dollars does it cost to launch a kilogram of mass into orbit again? Out of orbit? Do we even have a closed system that can support a small group of people indefinitely to launch? Unfortunately, we do not yet have such a system outside of the earth itself.
    - jackcosgrove 3y ago
      Earth's biome gets most of its energy from the sun. I think that's what the GP was getting at.
      - js8 3y ago
        The physics definition of closed system allows exchange of energy. If neither matter nor energy can be exchanged, that's called an isolated system.
        3y ago

ahepp 3y ago

> the papers emphasize they are not predictions, but illustrating complex relationships If it has no predictive power, why should it be taken seriously? I'm concerned about the environment and sustainability too, but that's the exact reason we can't afford to throw empiricism out the window the second things start looking a bit hairy.

john-radio 3y ago
A paper not containing predictions is not the same thing as its having no predictive power!
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  This paper makes a lot of predictions despite the lack of predictive power. Hence, it should not be taken seriously. Since the 1970's the group producing it has made a lot of very wrong predictions out of the hubristic belief that they can reduce everything about life to a simple system of differential equations.
- ahepp 3y ago
  What? Maybe my brain isn't big enough to understand this, but I don't see how you could disentangle the two without getting into pedantry.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    Paper may say you can use this methodology with data beyond the scope of the paper to make a prediction. However it doesn’t actually do the work to predict anything. Kind of like the difference between theoretical math and applied math.
  - john-radio 3y ago
    Take a look, for example, at the timeline in https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/. It contains (almost) no prediction, but once you have internalized the information in it your own predictions on the climate topic are likely to become a lot more powerful because better informed.
westcort 3y ago
Unfortunately for all of us, the model does have very good predictive power despite its simplicity. Herrington et al in 2020 checked the 1972 model scenarios (there were 4 such scenarios as sensitivity analyses) against around 40 years of empirical data and the results were close to observed ground truth [0]. 0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1111%2Fjiec.13084&file=jiec13084-sup-0001-SuppMatS1.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?do...
- Enginerrrd 3y ago
  I try not to be too harsh on here, but your interpretation of this analysis is unbelievably bad. It's absurdly easy to fit a logistic function to match the real-life logistic curve of some value of interest during the exponential phase of those functions. However... That means almost *NOTHING* with regard to the actual logistic portion which is the part people actually care about. There exist an infinite range of different logistic functions that can be made to match in the exponential portion and the majority of those functions contain almost zero information about the future logistic portion. The error between them is essentially unbounded. Calling that confirmation of predictive power is not misguided, it's just about as wrong as you can be.
  - westcort 3y ago
    This is not my analysis, and the first author, Gaya Herrington, explains the alignment between the model and empirical data here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpvc3i5j84 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KJpvc3i5j84 I also react with concern. Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up.
    - Enginerrrd 3y ago
      I know it's not your analysis. I said your interpretation of this analysis is flawed. You're misunderstanding that analysis to be confirmation of the predictive power of the model extrapolated into the logistic region. And you still are: >Yes there are infinite curves, but there are limits to what is possible, so in actual fact there are not infinitely many possible futures here, and those futures are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses…and indeed have over more than 4 decades of follow up. The key phrase there where your interpretation is flawed is: "are likely to fall within the limits of the 4 sensitivity analyses". That's so, so untrue. You simply cannot extrapolate logistic model parameters into the actual post-exponential-growth, logistic portion without seeing the actual logistic effects start to kick in. Those simply haven't been empirically verified here. And speaking of... the original model they are analyzing introduces limits on that exponential growth in a pretty arbitrary and artificial way, particularly when it comes to the pollution terms.... which, I'll add, this analysis shows is also the parameter they most over-estimated by a large amount even in the exponential portion.

Loquebantur 3y ago

You are engaging in self-delusion here. The point of these papers isn't to make precise predictions of "the day civilizational collapse occurs" nor does it merely "illustrate some complex relationships". It is to show every closed system, even only remotely resembling our own, is bound to end in overshoot&collapse unless you change central tenets of the driving economic paradigm. Namely abandon exponential growth for a steady (or oscillatory) state approach. Individuals aren't helpless bystanders either. As adults in a democracy, it isn't only your right but your responsibility to bring about the necessary change.

lalaithion 3y ago
We don’t live in a closed system though.
- westcort 3y ago
  Looks pretty closed to me: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-on-the-good-earth https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144427/all-of-you-o... How many thousands of dollars does it cost to launch a kilogram of mass into orbit again? Out of orbit? Do we even have a closed system that can support a small group of people indefinitely to launch? Unfortunately, we do not yet have such a system outside of the earth itself.
  - jackcosgrove 3y ago
    Earth's biome gets most of its energy from the sun. I think that's what the GP was getting at.
    - js8 3y ago
      The physics definition of closed system allows exchange of energy. If neither matter nor energy can be exchanged, that's called an isolated system.
      - 3y ago