uv-depression

22 minuten geledendiscuss

You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.

uv-depression

54 minuten geledendiscuss

You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).

That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.

You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.

uv-depression

1 uur geledendiscuss

What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.

An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.

uv-depression

2 uur geledendiscuss

If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.

uv-depression

2 uur geledendiscuss

But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy. Nobody would dispute that they've become smaller. Do you believe that food can become arbitrarily cheap relative to total wealth? Or steel, or silicon? In other words, can the food you eat require an arbitrarily small portion of your income? And looking at nation-states only is an accounting trick; the economy is global.

You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.

uv-depression

3 uur geledendiscuss

You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.

uv-depression

3 uur geledendiscuss

To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?

I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)

uv-depression

4 maanden geledendiscuss

But it objectively makes cities worse. People love visiting Europe in part because they don't do this to nearly the same extent (obviously this varies by country/city). People aren't entitled to not having their opinions be proven wrong, nor are they entitled to ignore negative externalities (pollution, noise, danger, unpleasant city centres, and so on).

> are reasonably happy with the status quo.

They're not, except for the having a car part. Road maintenance, especially in the suburbs, is hideously expensive and is falling further and further behind. Cars are the least efficient mode of transit, so traffic gets worse and worse. "Just one more lane" always makes it worse (induced demand), but that's the only solution being tried. The only way to make traffic better is to get significant numbers of people to switch to other modes, and you're simply not going to do that with "incremental improvements" because the status quo is so abysmal for anything other than a car. Cars themselves are horribly expensive and yet are required in most US cities; most are in effect paying a tax to car companies to participate in society.

> being told they are wrong for liking their car.

Who said this?

uv-depression

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Americans will vehemently deny this, but you're absolutely right. Decades of car industry propaganda has convinced people that the ability to drive anywhere is true freedom, and they can't see that the freedom not to need a car (all the time) is better for everyone; cities are quieter, more comfortable, and less polluted with fewer cars (no, electric cars don't fix this). It leads to other absurdities, like US cities frequently having parking minimums for bars. That's insane!

There's also the classic problem of people wildly misinterpreting statements and getting mad about it. You can say "we should design cities not centred around cars" and people will hear "I'm going to make it illegal for you to own a car". Or my favourite exchange, "Let's improve public transit" followed by "but public transit is bad for me, I can't take it".

uv-depression

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent

I see no evidence of this, just a lot of people claiming it (very loudly, for the most part).

> that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon

The word probably is doing a lot of work here.

> The usual constraints of physical law still apply

There are knowledge constraints, too. I can't build a quark matter processor without understanding quark matter to a vastly higher level than we do now. I can't do that without experiments on quark matter, I can't do experiments without access to a lot of energy, material, land, &c, that need to be assembled. There are a huge number of very difficult and time-consuming instrumental goals on the path to fundamentally better compute.

> A separate point: there's also deductive exploration (pure math) as distinct from empirical exploration (physics), which is not bounded by any physical constraints except for those that bound computation itself.

Sure, but physics requires math that is definitionally applied, not pure, and engineering requires physics.

uv-depression

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine

The only thing you could do in a "digital space" (a.k.a. on a computer) is a simulation. Simulations are extremely useful and help significantly with designing and choosing experiments, but they cannot _replace_ real experiments.

> Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.

And my point is that there's no good reason to think this is possible and many to think it isn't.

> it's more of a fun sci-fi idea

It's being presented as extremely serious possibility by people who stand to gain a _lot_ of money if other people think it's serious... that's the point of the linked post. Unfortunately, these AI boosters make it very difficult to discuss these ideas, even in a fun sci-fi way, without aggravating the social harms those people are causing.

uv-depression

5 maanden geledendiscuss

> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds

It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

> My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way

Does nuance mean agreeing to your framing of a situation? If so, I guess not. That's not what it means to me.

> a naive idealist

Insults aren't helping your case.

> associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.

What are the effects you're referring to here?

> Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work.

Here's a pattern I see: American-owned propaganda networks take over Canadian news and trying to drum up racist sentiment and lots of people falling for it.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Is that what I said?

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

How else am I to interpret someone seeing a group of people working low wage jobs and concluding that everyone from their country is a bad influence?

> will only drive people towards right-wing extremists

The right talks a big game about personal responsibility, but somehow their worst beliefs are always someone else's fault. Funny, that.

> naturally become associated

Now see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's _not_ natural or inevitable.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

> Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment [ justification for said sentiment ]

Wild sequence of sentences.

> is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.

Citation very much needed.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

> A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.

So we just let racists determine national policy now? I wonder how that's working out in the US.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Leaving aside the fact that this is a single picture of a chart with no source provided (or sample size, or methodology)... that's eighth on that chart, not fifth, and just says "immigration" with no further detail.

uv-depression

6 maanden geledendiscuss

> collectively our greatest fear

Citation very much needed. This sounds like _your_ concern that you're trying to launder through projecting onto the rest of the country.

uv-depression

9 maanden geledendiscuss

Yeah, and all of that's already true right now because messages are stored on those users' devices already. You'll be heartbroken to hear that those users can also take a screenshot of your disappearing messages and send it to anyone. There are fundamental limitations to what a messaging app can protect you from.

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