In places that article is dismissive where it doesn't need to be, since so many of its points are strong. There are different approaches to solar and fusion for example that aren't included, instead arguing that horses are the answer! We'll all die before those solutions are adopted. I am sure of that.
Marcus ________________________________ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> Sent: Friday, January 21, 2022 2:00 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics Some of the condensations in this thread, as causal interpretations of social dynamics, are real gems. They are much more interesting as claims than the endlessly recycled platitudes that seem to be all I am seeing in punditry. I have wondered about sending the following to the list, but this is probably a good thread in which to do it: https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html The claims are about important things. They say that the sustainability rhetoric is so riddled with pie in the sky that it is not clear that an analysis of what we can actually do would even support goal-setting along the lines that are currently practiced. For certain apps built on the libraries of sustainability, like the rhetoric of Green New Deal, the most-central aspiration (not curtailing population and energy consumption, and just replacing their sources) may actually be impossible in the sense that perpetual motion machines are impossible. The other important factor is that we don’t get the dodge “but in the long run”, because the claim is that in a relatively short run we are all dead (or at least a great many of us, and the rest have greatly reduced options for what to do about anything). The important thing about the article (I know the author Rees) is that it tries to back up its claims with analysis where possible. Some of the citations I consider a bit dodgy, but others are probably sound. That does _not_ mean I am claiming the conclusions of the paper are right. I haven’t done any shred of the work it would take me to backfill that tree of citations and take responsibility for deciding which of them I understand to be right. It is also important (to me, for my own reasons) to say that I do not mean _any_ blame for hypocrisy or bad faith toward a lot of the serious sustainability people, or even the GND advocates. They work partly in a realm of human persuasion, and they are trying not to let the perfect undermine doing _something_ that might be good, or at least a little better. I don’t know how many of the GND rhetoricians even have a detailed understanding of our current situation, and among those (if there are any), how many would agree that it is as bad as Rees asserts. There might be some, who would still do what persuasion they can because they don’t have ideas for what might be more helpful. I should also add that there is a lot not covered in this particular paper, where I have listened to claims of large unavoidable cascading failures. Climate change leading to failure of Himalayan snowpacks that are the headwaters of rivers that supply drinking water, sanitation, irrigation, and hydropower to something like 1/4 of the world’s population, through infrastructure that has been built over a century, and can’t simply be moved or replaced. That stops working and people start moving, and then all the stresses we already see around migration get amplified to much higher levels. etc. Those, too, I have not tried to either evaluate or get sources I can trust blindly. But if they are real, they belong in view as well. Finally, I want to distance myself a bit from the affect and some overall impression in this piece, or by these authors. I have no interest in whether something is heterodox or any other kind of dox. The misanthropy that comes through in their scornful delivery in places, but also their claim that there are “graceful” exits with so little as 1-child policies, are to me departures (understandable, but still departures) from the thing that makes the article valuable, which is the substance of its claims about what exists and what can be assembled into systems. I think one can keep the claims as important questions and let the other stuff go its own ways. Anyway, more than I know how to chew on, Eric On Jan 21, 2022, at 11:47 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote: Well, except that this solipsism betrays a profound similarity between the cheerful billionaire exploiter and the unfixable deplorables. It's almost psychotically self-centered. I can imagine a slow, corrupting process where I would if I could, as well. But that transformation would have to be complete closure to prevent any light of empathy or sympathy from peeking in and popping the boil. I suppose people like Gates are more interesting than Musk, shambling about extruding money according to an opaque template ... less transparently ideological than Musk's profiteering. All philanthropy smacks of this sort of thing, though, Effective Altruism being the worst of the bunch. Power corrupts. It's not a lesson the non-powerful can actually learn, though. So it's a good thing to keep around a nicely scaled gradation of the super rich and the destitute poor, with some walkability up and down the scale. That way we can, as a collective, re-learn the lesson that power corrupts on a steady basis. The assumption of equality prevents that lesson from being re-learned. The absurdity of philanthropy and poverty are "collateral damage" in service of the latent trait, spoken as a well-off white man born into a racist patriarchy, anyway. On 1/21/22 08:31, Marcus Daniels wrote: If anything, Musk is suspicious because he is not overtly apocalyptic. Some criticisms of Don’t Look Up were along the lines that it fails to try to persuade a change of course in favor of being condescending. That was the whole point of the movie: Comic relief among the reasonable who must suffer those who are just unfixable. Musk is amusing because he is cheerful going about his billionaire life as it all comes crashing down. Doing what he can to profit from insane energy policy of the last several generations and making what contingency plans he can. I certainly would if I could. On Jan 21, 2022, at 7:48 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote: This video essay concludes with the same point: The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y Perhaps a better title would have been "Muskian Futurism is Eschatological". But there's some deeper stuff there in the middle of the video about the appeal of geezers like Sanders to "the youth", perhaps dovetailing with our prior discussion of the [opt|pess]imism vs hope-despair plane. The mistake the Muskians seem to make is conflating Musk's "apocalyptic help the rich survive the end times capitalism" with the good old fashioned future orientation of classic science fiction ... and, perhaps, even the optimistic glossing of the present by authors like Steven Pinker. While Pinker seems to be a hypnotized neoliberal cultist, his views still retain some sense of "shared values" in the Enlightenment, where something, vague as it is, like equality founds the whole perspective. Egalitarian utopias like Star Trek were, it seemed to me, standard fare for classic sci-fi. Gibson, Blade Runner, et al turned that dark and brought us (perhaps correlated with the rise of Hell and Brimstone Christianity) to Muskianism. But this is all just from my nostalgizing as a dying white man. It would be interesting to see a disinterested historian present the plectic arcs. On 1/20/22 14:33, glen wrote: Even if there are multiple paths to nearly equivalent optima, each unit (human, hospital, corporation, state) has to share some values with the others in order for the the optima to be commensurate. -- glen Theorem 3. There exists a double master function. .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . 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