Debate pervert

  • 5 Posts
  • 80 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • The reality is, we just don’t know. I feel confident in saying it will get bad enough to kill food crops on a massive scale and a bunch of people will starve to death. How many is “a bunch”? I don’t know. Maybe billions. Maybe less.

    But how bad it really could get, on the bad side, with as many tipping points as could exist, I think it’s impossible to say until it happens. Big changes in the earth’s climate have historically been big. The whole thing was a snowball for like 100 million years. Sometimes the ice caps melt and everything dies. Actually as I understand it, the pretty consistent answer for what happens when a big climate change happens is “almost everything dies” and then the survivors slowly adapt to the new reality. But it definitely wouldn’t be survivable for any kind of civilization (even just on pure food availability grounds) in a lot of the realistic scenarios.











  • It’s honestly most akin to an AI model over optimizing for the trained outcome even when it turns out it was misaligned from the good outcome we wanted.

    They certainly don’t want their grandchildren to inhabit a barely-livable hellscape instead of the paradise world they were born into, but they’ve been optimizing for money for so long that it’s baked in now, and it’s so so easy to just say, well it’s probably not a big deal, or I don’t think the science is really all that dire in its predictions, or oh well someone else will probably figure it out. And so, every year, we keep setting records for “production”.


  • Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the removeding taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.




  • That one looks right to me (or, “right” meaning consistently using period LEB) - it’s a little hard to compare because of the difference in granularity but it shows about a 20-year drop for WW2 which is what I would expect.

    I edited my comment above; I think what’s happening is that the OP article is mixing different metrics for different parts of the chart. I think this one you’re sending is consistently using period LEB which is why the size of the dips is different.


  • I am suspicious of this

    So Russia’s death rate was pretty much unchanged from 1930 to 1935 to 1945, and then things got way better in 1950?

    Maybe I could see, they are counting only Russia (not the USSR), so the holomodor is largely absent from 1930, and then Russia advances in living standards meant that there was a huge underlying boost that masked the unprecedented deaths during WW2, and then after WW2 the apparent life expectancy shot up because a lot of the vulnerable or old people were already dead. But I don’t buy it. Idk what’s going on with their data, but China looks fine and Russia looks simply wrong; it is missing some big dips that it should have.

    Edit: Hm, I guess there is a 6-year divot in 1932… I guess I just expected the Holomodor to show up bigger and less spread out over surrounding years. But yeah maybe it is showing up.

    Edit 2: Okay, I looked more and I am confident that this isn’t exactly right. It says “the remaining average lifespan for a hypothetical group of people, if they experienced the same age-specific death rates throughout the rest of their lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year.” There’s no possible way that extrapolating out the death rates people were experiencing in the middle of a famine or war would lead to these gentle dips and small divots.

    I suspect that by combining data from different sources, they wound up using cohort LEB for the distant past and period LEB for the more recent past. That would explain why e.g. the dip in Russian life expectancy because of the Ukraine war shows as the same size as the dip for WW2. If they were doing the calculations the same for both, the WW2 dip would take away half the chart or more. So maybe it’s not really wrong per se but just mismatching their metrics in a way that makes it hard to draw anything of precision from the chart beyond “things getting better”.