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We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
- ceejayoz 14y agoWhy does the graph only go back to 2006?
- fr0sty 14y agoUN Food and Agriculture Organization website: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/ http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesind...
- dhx 14y agoFor data going back to 1990 see [1] and [2]. In figure 2, the paper [3] tries to fit the data to an exponential curve starting at 2004. The longer term data at [2] does not appear to support this fit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots#1990s_-_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots#1990s_-_2000 [2] http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/ http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesind... [3] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf
- tocomment 14y agoI've been wondering. Every time we have major droughts does that cause more irrigation infrastructure to be built? So do we become more resistent to drought each time we hit one? I'd imagine farms also adapt by planting more drought resistant crops in the future.
- graeme 14y agoIrrigation water has to come from somewhere. In most areas the renewable aquifers are already tapped above refill rates, and the fossil aquifers are a fragile source, as they will run out. Saline conversion plants are one option, but much more expensive than rain. More droughts will obviously lead to more drought adaptation, but the effectiveness of the adaptation isn't automatic. I imagine they will encourage more efficient irrigation techniques though.
- Tichy 14y agoI must admit, this doesn't quite sound like rocket science. When food prices soar, the likelihood for riots goes up. Who would have thought?
- kvnn 14y agoWhat is your point? There are many things we can predict intuitively, but thats all we can do until someone puts in the time and effort to use the scientific method. Once someone puts in this time, we can see why there is a cause, and how to affect it or learn from it. For instance, the real reason people are rioting when food prices go up is that, in those parts of the world, the people spend 80% of their money on food. Without knowing that, you could make all sorts of predictions about why people in Syria are rioting while people in the U.S. are playing Fifa.
- Tichy 14y agoCome on, was this really the first time somebody correlated hunger with riots? Also, I appreciate the scientific method, but it is not true that we can not know things without it. For example the people who go rioting because they are hungry know that they go rioting because they are hungry. Over time, lots of people have rioted because they were hungry, and the knowledge has slowly attritioned into the public body of knowledge...
- alphadogg 14y agoSo, a more erudite-looking version of "The end of the world is nigh!" The funny thing is people use to wear billboards for this. Now we have edgy, hispter-coded websites for it. :) Also, HN has featured links over time to some creative entrepreneurs with novel agricultural ideas. So, nigh or not? To sum: correlation is not causation.
- rickmode 14y agoI wonder how much of this is over-fitting. When I see statistical predictions like this I always wonder about the over-fitting problem.
- Peroni 14y agoUsually I would agree 100%. This stuff reeks of scaremongering however given the source you would have to assume that the Complex Systems Institute wouldn't allow themselves to be susceptible to overfitting.
- majorapps 14y agoPeer-reviewed science is built on anonymous reviewing so that assumptions like this are not an issue. Look at the data, not the publisher.
- lambersley 14y agoWell said. Is the data suggesting causation or correlation?
- samwilliams 14y agoRepost [1]. The other thread has some interesting comments too. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503104 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503104
- scrrr 14y agoThe [1] is a little bit too much, no? First, it's just one URL, secondly, it's right there. Or is this a convention when posting on HN?
- sp332 14y agoIt's not a strong convention but it's used fairly often. It makes the text more readable.
- samwilliams 14y agoI had a pretty long debate with myself about that before posting. What I concluded was that I probably should use the [1] as I wanted to say something else afterwards and it is nicer not to have to extract the URL from a block of text (I personally believe). Had I only wanted to note that it was a repost I would have just put the URL in.
- gambiting 14y agoI think the main problem is, that there is simply too many people in the world. Of course it's very politically incorrect to say so, every politician will say that we need to increase our birth rates,not decrease them. But honestly,if we reduced the population to around 1-2 billion, we could all afford to live like we do today, with all our consumerism, fossil-fuel burning and so on. 7 billion people just cannot sustain that kind of lifestyle, not on this planet.
- aychedee 14y agoWell, you could kill yourself. If you think that's the moral solution to this problem.
- mcantelon 14y agoThat's like suggesting that if someone has a problem with something in society not being adequately funded by the government that they should contribute their life savings to it.
- randallsquared 14y agoIndeed. Be the change you want to see, and all that...
- hosh 14y agoI used to say that too. However, I could not get over this part: are you volunteering to be one of the 1-2 billion in the die-off so that rest of humanity can survive with this current lifestyle? Barring people who are already suicidal, I doubt anyone would want to volunteer. This is a hard problem, well beyond the concerns of political correctness.
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- kvnn 14y agoHe didn't say anything about a die-off. He said we need to decrease birth rates.
- cs702 14y agoAny analysis of this kind is by necessity an oversimplification of complex reality, but I have lived, traveled, and done business in several 'developing' countries, and this makes a LOT of sense to me. In my experience, when most adults in a country can earn a living and feed their children, people don't take to the streets. These findings by complex systems theorists also remind me of a powerful map I saw in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" fame) -- a map showing that the areas around the planet which are currently suffering from the most political, institutional, and even societal breakdown also happen to be those that have suffered the most ecological damage, such that self-sustaining agriculture is not a viable option for them in the immediate future.
- mhb 14y agoThe claim that ...we maintain a global food system perennially subject to ... exploitation from speculators... and the link they provide which doesn't support that does not enhance the credibility of this article.
- paulsutter 14y agoIt seems the article is predicting riots on global television (which recently happened), not global riots (a scary thought never experienced in history). The riots we see on television are about camera work and a vocal minority. The news doesn't try to represent reality. They take any anecdote they can find and do everything they can to turn it into riveting television. On TV San Francisco appeared to be destroyed in the 1989 earthquake. I lived in Cupertino. It didn't seem a big deal till power came on in the morning, and we saw the news. Wow! A major disaster! I drove north to see the devastation. When I arrived in San Francisco, 99.99% of the city was completely normal. Quick, what percentage of the population of NYC participated in Occupy Wall Street?
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- swombat 14y agoThe riots in London were a (criminal) minority being blown out of proportion. I didn't even realise there were riots going on until a couple of days into it. From the looks of the videos, it seems the problem was not "riots", it was the police standing back and not interfering when they should just have arrested the looters.
- bunderbunder 14y agoReminds me of Fox News's "coverage" of last year's protests in Madison, Wisconsin. They kept showing shots of unruly crowds in which you could alternately see palm trees and Chicago landmarks in the background.
- mainevent 14y agoLiving in Clapham Junction, an area that was severely affected, during the London riots in 2011 I would say the opposite was true. Whilst many parts of the city were being trashed, the news struggled to keep up. It was much worse and widespread than they were able to depict. Video I took at the end of my street whilst a local shop was torched: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4n7uCeV5nU&feature=plcp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4n7uCeV5nU&feature=plcp FWIW, earthquakes are different to riots. I did the same as you in Christchurch, New Zealand recently after the earthquake there and would agree, the majority of the city was untouched with the epicentre being destroyed.
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- anonimo 14y agoI'm very skeptical of the validity of this study. The graph shows no riots at all between 2008 and 2012. E.g. there are no data points in the graph for the riots related to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. They resulted in more than 100 deaths! [1] In 2011, from the top of my head, there were riots in the UK, the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots in Canada [2], and anti-government riots in Thai. In my country, Brazil, football hooliganism is rampant, there are at least a few riots a year. In short, they must be using a very arbitrary definition of "riot", that just so happens to coincide with their theory. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoo... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot
- chaostheory 14y agoWhile the information is sparse, I think it's good that articles with this theme get posted on HN a little more often. With few exceptions most of the startups and projects that I see (including my own) do little to address more important problems like this one. It's good to be reminded of that every now and then.