3 ms·

Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a lim

Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?

jtbayly 1y ago
Or human ingenuity solves the problem because of the economic and other incentives that build up. None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > fear-mongering I mean, "bad things will happen if we don't fix the thing" is not fearmongering if, after the thing is fixed, bad things don't happen.
  - jtbayly 1y ago
    I'm talking about the declarations of inevitable disaster. Malthus was just wrong.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  Were people "fear-mongering" when they said we should probably update the 2digit date storage during 1999? Like, sometimes people say there will be an issue and then people actually take action to fix it before we all die.
lotsofpulp 1y ago
How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain. But also, merely surviving is not the problem trying to be avoided. It’s all the decrease in quality of life on the way to adapting to the scarcity of the resource (which very well could mean thinning the herd) that is the issue.
- m0llusk 1y ago
  There is some really good analysis of this. In particular Geoffrey West's recent book--he also has a bunch of videos on YouTube summarizing key points.
gretch 1y ago
“Most of the time” isn’t really the bar here. That’s like me saying “most of the time the warehouse won’t catch on fire” or “most of the time the plane won’t crash”. For disaster scenarios, we benefit from extreme caution. Arguably we haven’t done enough of this, if you look at e.g. global climate change. We may yet be able to avert a huge disaster, but even if you just look at the local damage like intensified tropical storms, or wildfires, that’s quite a big deal.

jtbayly 1y ago

Or human ingenuity solves the problem because of the economic and other incentives that build up. None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.

rsynnott 1y ago
> fear-mongering I mean, "bad things will happen if we don't fix the thing" is not fearmongering if, after the thing is fixed, bad things don't happen.
- jtbayly 1y ago
  I'm talking about the declarations of inevitable disaster. Malthus was just wrong.
wredcoll 1y ago
Were people "fear-mongering" when they said we should probably update the 2digit date storage during 1999? Like, sometimes people say there will be an issue and then people actually take action to fix it before we all die.

lotsofpulp 1y ago

How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain. But also, merely surviving is not the problem trying to be avoided. It’s all the decrease in quality of life on the way to adapting to the scarcity of the resource (which very well could mean thinning the herd) that is the issue.

m0llusk 1y ago
There is some really good analysis of this. In particular Geoffrey West's recent book--he also has a bunch of videos on YouTube summarizing key points.

gretch 1y ago

“Most of the time” isn’t really the bar here. That’s like me saying “most of the time the warehouse won’t catch on fire” or “most of the time the plane won’t crash”. For disaster scenarios, we benefit from extreme caution. Arguably we haven’t done enough of this, if you look at e.g. global climate change. We may yet be able to avert a huge disaster, but even if you just look at the local damage like intensified tropical storms, or wildfires, that’s quite a big deal.