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joker
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joker
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 Sun Apr 13, 2014 6:03 pm |
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| MadCapLaughs wrote: | | your call for continuing our population explosion |
What now? Can you point me to where I called for continuing the explosion? I don't recall making such a call. I do recall sharing projections of growth and an eventual plateau (global population, that is), and dismissed throttling US legal immigration control as not meaningful either way WRT our environmental picture (even illegal immigration is not the dominant factor in US population growth, though if you review the discussion I believe you'll see that I agree with measures to stem the flow), while noting a benefit of this immigration. Making such a call was certainly not my intent, in any case.
By "rhetorical shortcut," I mean using ambiguous and somewhat inflammatory labels instead of, for instance, making clear both what statement or statements you are responding to as well as what specific issues you see with them. I do fall into the same trap for sure, but it never improves the nature of effective and/or persuasive discussion (aka rhetoric).
FWIW my most recent statement of attitude toward the ability of technology to both solve as well as create some problems is very much my strongly held view. I believe it is consistent with what I've written in this thread but perhaps I've misled via my own shortcut.
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RumiDude
Marmota olympus
Joined: 26 Jul 2009
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RumiDude
Marmota olympus
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Sun Apr 13, 2014 7:22 pm |
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Probably too many pets.
Rumi
"This is my Indian summer ... I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all."
"This is my Indian summer ... I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all."
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MadCapLaughs
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| joker wrote: | | dismissed throttling US legal immigration control as not meaningful either way WRT our environmental picture |
This is what I was referring to . . . though I think we must have been talking past one another there: I was referring to illegal immigration mainly, as it is many times the level of legal immigration.
Anyway, you dismissed immigration restrictions because one of them might invent something to solve our environmental problems. THAT is what I jumped on.
Saying that you called for "continuing our population explosion" was probably overstating things a bit. 
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Klapton
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Klapton
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Tue Apr 15, 2014 6:55 pm |
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My ex-wife made my contribution to population control.
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joker
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joker
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Mon Apr 21, 2014 2:03 pm |
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| MadCapLaughs wrote: | | This is what I was referring to . . . though I think we must have been talking past one another there: I was referring to illegal immigration mainly, as it is many times the level of legal immigration. Anyway, you dismissed immigration restrictions because one of them might invent something to solve our environmental problems. THAT is what I jumped on. |
Yeah, we clarified the legal/illegal bit. I noted that I am not opposed to trying to stem the flow of illegal immigrants (and noted that we have 4 million births/year in the US, and about 800K illegal immigrants/year, and about 200K legal immigrants, all per the Census Bureau - it seems important to keep this all in perspective). That was in a set of posts a page or so after this post, which I assume is where you got the notion that I "dismissed immigration restrictions" based on the notion that an immigrant might invent something that solves our problems.
| joker wrote: | | We in fact have pretty strict immigration limits. Far from "uncontrolled." I'd go so far as to say "controlled enough that this is not nearly in the second or third wave of things I'd go after in order to protect the US environment." In fact, it may well be some highly motivated immigrants who invent some of the key technologies that help us reduce our footprints and restore damaged environments, so the net environmental impact in our little zone of the earth may be positive. |
Note that I did not in any way dismiss immigration restrictions - I merely referred to their existence. And to be clear, I would not justify legal immigration based merely on the chance that one of them might invent something that helps reduce our footprints (which, at least in my mind, does not nearly "solve our problems," though it may help with some of them), though it is definitely a possibility given the profile of some of the folks who immigrate legally (often highly educated, more willing to take on the sort of risks involved in things like research as well as bringing new technologies to market); this is just one possible benefit of our legal immigration. And, tugging at some other strands of this thread, immigration may also help at least a small bit with some of the "lack of trust between the tribes" issues mentioned earlier, which, when taken on a global scale, may help enable some degree of international cooperation on environmental issues.
E.g. see this article. Excerpt:
| Quote: | | The finding corroborates an influential new view of early human origins advanced by Bernard Chapais, a primatologist at the University of Montreal, in his book “Primeval Kinship” (2008). Dr. Chapais showed how a simple development, the emergence of a pair bond between male and female, would have allowed people to recognize their relatives, something chimps can do only to a limited extent. When family members dispersed to other bands, they would be recognized and neighboring bands would cooperate instead of fighting to the death as chimp groups do.
<snip>
The new data on early human social structure furnishes the context in which two distinctive human behaviors emerged, those of cooperation and social learning, Dr. Hill said. A male chimp may know in his lifetime just 12 other males, all from his own group. But a hunter-gatherer, because of cooperation between bands, may interact with a thousand individuals in his tribe. Because humans are unusually adept at social learning, including copying useful activities from others, a large social network is particularly effective at spreading and accumulating knowledge.
Knowledge can in fact be lost by hunter-gatherers if a social network gets too small. One group of the Ache people of Paraguay, cut off from its home territory, had lost use of fire when first contacted. Tasmanians apparently forgot various fishing techniques after rising sea levels broke their contact with the Australian mainland 10,000 years ago.
Dr. Chapais said that the new findings “validate and enrich” the model of human social evolution proposed in his book. “If you take the promiscuity that is the main feature of chimp society, and replace it with pair bonding, you get many of the most important features of human society,” he said.
Recognition of relatives promoted cooperation between neighboring bands, in his view, allowing people to move freely from one to another. Both sons and daughters could disperse from the home group, unlike chimp society, where only females can disperse. But this cooperation did not mean that everything was peaceful. The bands were just components of tribes, between which warfare may have been intense. “Males could remain as competitive and xenophobic as before at the between-tribe level,” Dr. Chapais writes. |
Or this article, with an excerpt:
| Quote: | | The interactions among hunter-gatherers resemble those of other networks, where there are individual nodes (in this case, small groups) and where the majority of interactions between the nodes are local ones, with the frequency of interactions dropping off as a function of distance. Mathematicians have shown that when the ratios among short-, middle-, and long-distance interactions are optimal, networks are robust: they are dominated by highly cooperative clusters of local interactions, but they also retain the potential for less frequent, long-distance communication and coordination.
Optimizing the fission-fusion interactions of hunter-gatherer networks is easy: cooperate within the band; schedule frequent joint hunts with the next band over; have occasional hunts with bands somewhat farther out; have a legend of a single shared hunt with a mythic band at the end of the earth. Optimizing the fission-fusion interactions in contemporary human networks is vastly harder, but the principles are the same.
In exploring these subjects, one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active -- aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented "subliminally," which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.
More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.
<snip>
Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, "No, it is beyond our nature," knows too little about primates, including ourselves. |
It strikes me as being a good thing to support various ways of gaining more familiarity between peoples from across the world, and of ensuring that people in one country see part of themselves in any other country.
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
Joined: 12 Aug 2004
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Location: Cleaning up the dogma. |
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
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Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:23 pm |
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| contour5 wrote: | | How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth
A Documentary from the BBC with David Attenborough. Well worth watching. |
A good article and three good vids (4-10 mins each).
| Quote: | | Africa's ancient hunter gatherers struggle for survival
Northern Tanzania (CNN) -- One could classify the Hadza people as a throwback. Numbering a mere 1,300, they represent one of the last communities of hunter-gatherers in the world. Their language -- which includes click consonants -- is unrelated to any other on Earth, and is possibly one of the oldest spoken languages in existence... An ancient way of life... |
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/18/world/africa/africas-ancient-hunter-gatherers-hadza/index.html?iref=allsearch
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
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MadCapLaughs
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Sad. The knowledge that is lost is when indigenous people disappear is terrible to contemplate. Their story is the same as every other hunter-gatherer society: displaced by agriculture and pastoralism. Perhaps they might even be considered lucky, since modern sensibility probably prevents them from being slaughtered outright for their land. Instead, they will be slowly crowded out.
Has anyone read Small is Beautiful? I heard a segment about it on NPR tonight. Sounds like a very relevant text for several of the topics of this thread. It was portrayed as a sort of hybrid economic/philosophical/ecological text that critiques the idea of bigger is better, more is better, and our dependence upon perpetual growth. Sounds interesting. It is old, though. Written in the '70s.
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
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Location: Cleaning up the dogma. |
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
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Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:45 pm |
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| MadCapLaughs wrote: | | Sad. The knowledge that is lost is when indigenous people disappear is terrible to contemplate. Their story is the same as every other hunter-gatherer society: displaced by agriculture and pastoralism. Perhaps they might even be considered lucky, since modern sensibility probably prevents them from being slaughtered outright for their land. Instead, they will be slowly crowded out. |
Yes. The one tribal member who is university educated and doing his best to defend the tribe's well being will sadly only delay the inevitable, though I'm still in favor of his work. The tribe is now essentially like Native Americans on a reservation -- due to agrilculture and surrounding population growth, the natural ebb and flow of flora and fauna is gone forever -- and the days are numbered for their way of life.
True stewards of the land. They only hunt with bows and arrows, and don't use traps or snares to prevent harming other wildlife populations. They don't chop down trees for their shelters. They only use grass huts. They are happy and want to stay on the land because it provides a simple way of life.
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
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Klapton
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Klapton
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Fri Apr 25, 2014 2:27 am |
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To those who admire primitive living, by all means, go ahead and show us how wonderful it is. You can come borrow my computer after your first winter and tell us all how it went for you.
My question to those who say the planet is overpopulated and something must be done about it is this:
What is your plan to remedy the situation? What is your final solution to the overpopulation question?
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joker
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joker
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Fri Apr 25, 2014 10:39 am |
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| Klapton wrote: | | My question to those who say the planet is overpopulated and something must be done about it is this:What is your plan to remedy the situation? What is your final solution to the overpopulation question? |
This is an excellent question. I think Will came up with the closest thing to an answer here - increased education for both sexes around the world. However, I believe that this is a bit of an assumption that's baked into the projections of population leveling at 9B later this century (up from about 7B now).
MCL - I read that book long ago. Fuzzy memory at best, but IIRC he raises and begs some good questions about what we really value and how it is and isn't baked into our current system. FWIW, there have been very recent efforts to think through things like how to arrive at a better national yardstick than GDP (e.g. see this debate). This is why I keep harping on Pigovian taxes as well, which are one way of factoring in broader "costs" into transactions, essentially a way of better reflecting "what matters to us" in the marketplace. Here's another brief summary of the book.
For those who romantically view hunter-gatherer societies and see them as being more appealing than our crazed modern world, read this article. I have the book it mentions on my near term reading list. I guess I'm willing to make some of the trades that have been involved to not be worrying whether or not I'm going to be the 1 in 7 that is murdered by a fellow species member (or whether I'm going to need to murder a fellow species member to avoid this fate). Yes, it's a people-centric view; if we hadn't increased the carrying capacity of the planet, including but not limited to figuring out how to gain some security at the cost of submitting to state coercion (a tricky balance to be sure, as recent times demonstrate!), we would likely not be seeing the large species die-off of the current era. Yet I'm afraid I'm still not willing to trade that for the 1-in-7 concern...
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
Joined: 12 Aug 2004
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Location: Cleaning up the dogma. |
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Blue Dome
Now with Retsyn
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Fri Apr 25, 2014 6:46 pm |
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The opposite of the Hadza: Dubai. I can't imagine a more disgusting place.
| Quote: | | 5 Reasons Why Dubai Is Crumbling
To most people, Dubai represents everything we’ve been told our whole lives that we should want – wealth, exorbitance, sun, sand, water, tall buildings, opulence, luxury and beauty. Technically the city shouldn’t really even exist, what with it being constructed in the middle of the desert and all, but it’s a living testament to the persistence and creativity of our fair species – that we can achieve anything if we put our minds to it.
5. Slave Labor – Hundreds of thousands of workers live in slave-like conditions...
4. Heavy debt – There is no such thing as ‘bankruptcy'...
3. Servant class – There is a women’s hostel filled with escaped maids...
2. Hydration – There is no naturally occurring usable water in the city. Anywhere... The Tiger Woods Golf Course requires four million gallons of water per day – that’s right, per day – just to keep it from going brown and disappearing...
1. Economics – The national debt is as much as the GDP... |
Link to article
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.”
— Harry S. Truman
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MadCapLaughs
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That article reminds me of Ozymandias . . .
Joker, this quote from that Pinker review you linked to . . .
| Quote: | | The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. |
. . . is utter hogwash. Sorry, that silly bit of ethnocentrism has been discarded by the vast majority of anthropologists and ethnologists. The leap of logic here is astounding: reduction in "violence" means you are better off. First, how are they defining violence? The state authorities forcing passive acquiescence on the population is itself a sort of violence. Next, there are quite a few other measures of a good life than less violence. You can lock yourself in a box and be absolutely free from violence, yet I would not say you were "better off." I know: a review article is only a broad overview, but let's just say I'm highly skeptical.
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joker
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joker
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Sat Apr 26, 2014 7:51 am |
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Well, in the article he discussed the trades (at least some, he did not discuss environmental trades in the article but he DID discuss submission to coercion by the hierarchy, which started even pre agriculture) people have made for the far lower threat of death at the hands of another human. The data clearly support the notion that this threat is far lower than it used to be, with a fairly consistent decline over time. You may not like that this has happened but this observation is hardly hogwash.
I suppose it is fair, however, to question the "better off" part. Some may prefer the 1 in 7 risk of murder to what was traded for.
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MadCapLaughs
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| joker wrote: | | You may not like that this has happened |
Must you resort to such underhanded insults? This is much like your repeated accusations of "rhetorical shortcuts." Subtly insulting others' emotional investment and/or powers of logic is quite obnoxious.
Besides, if you reread my response, I did not question the actual data like you imply I did. I questioned the interpretation and the values implicit in that interpretation. But now that you mention it: let me question the actual data! I don't need to tell you that basing such a broad measure of "violence" on the interpretation of skeletons we have found is incredibly fraught with subjectivity and uncertainty.
Further: how do we define "violence at the hands of other humans"? Do we count the 7 million people who die every year due to air pollution? How about the victims of the cancer epidemic caused by our unregulated chemical experimentation? Latest estimates predict men now have a 1-in-2 chance of contracting cancer! How about those that starve to death due to our civilization's ballooning population, uneven distribution of resources, and so forth? Those that die from unclean water, unhealthy food, and so and so on . . . We can justifiably say this is all violence inflicted upon us by our civilization.
While we're at it, does it count as violence when our living conditions and life styles are so f### up that they have produced any number of alarming mental disorders and assorted diseases of the soul (i.e. various psychoses and neuroses, obsessions, depressions, anxieties, and so forth)?
And I haven't even gotten into the violence against all other species . . . we are, after all, in the middle of the sixth great extinction event.
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joker
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joker
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Sat Apr 26, 2014 11:11 am |
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I'm sorry that I've annoyed you with my language. Frankly found it quite a noxious to be being flat out repeatedly told I'm a "technological utopian" despite repeated clarifications by me about my take on technology but we all have our own reactions to the way things are framed in these discussions (I stand by my take that this label was an inaccurate shortcut). That sure came across as an insult in the context of how you've used the term - I may be over-reading but I picked up a strong sense of disdain particularly in your first use with me. Since this clearly bugged you, I'll try harder to avoid making observations about you and instead keep my observations to the topic itself - I realize that this is one way of increasing the possibility of having a constructive discussion rather than one that degrades into is/isn't/is/isn't/you-jerk type discussion. Thanks for letting me know that this bugged you. I can relate. However, I do think that in these discussions we're going to question each other's logic - you've done it with me and vice versa. I look forward to this aspect of these discussion. I'm sorry if my doing so with you comes across as disrespectful. FWIW you've done a good job of challenging me to think more deeply about a bunch of issues related to this thread, and I appreciate that.
If you re-read my post carefully, I think you'll see that I parsed out two possible aspects of what you may have been calling "hogwash" - the data, or the value judgment in terms of what constitutes being "better off." Given that you said that the portion you quoted was "utter hogwash" it was tough to tell whether you were referring to the "better off" phrasing, the claim of reduced violence, or both, so I tried to not to attribute either claim to you. But I should have been more careful in how I approached teasing that apart, and could have more explicitly asked for clarification.
As for the data on violence, well, clearly it is subject to interpretation and potential error. However, I'd suggest that guessing at what the lifestyles were like for these folks is subject to even greater interpretation. I'm eager to read Pinker's book - from what I've read of it he provides very strong evidence for decreasing direct violence over time, even if one may quibble on the exact #s.
WRT your other comments about negative impacts caused by modern life, as I noted, some may not like the deal they've gotten in terms of reduced chance of being murdered (and the associated chance of having to murder to avoid being murdered) - you bring up just some of the things that have gotten worse in the deal (though the psychological disorder notion strikes me as pure speculation - how can we know about folks from the paleo era, and even making comparisons to modern HG societies is fraught with confounding variables; even tracking this in the modern era is confounded by issues around identifying and reporting such "disorders"). The fact of the matter is that life expectancies are higher now, which suggests something about the overall net (and as noted upthread not all 80 year olds are pooping their pants in a nursing home). I don't think it's going to be terribly fruitful for us to try to debate which is more nasty and bruitish. I see some pretty big problems either way - my point in referring to the article about Pinker's book was simply to raise a skeptical eyebrow about a supposed golden era for humans in H-G times.
There is no question, however, that the last bunch of decades has been pretty bad for species diversity, etc. I'll admit that I'm not sure I'd offer myself up on the altar in order to have avoided this situation, however. Not a comfortable thing to note, but that's my honest take. Survival is a pretty strong animal impulse!
I'm much more interested in thinking about how to improve our lot going forward, and I don't see a reasonable way to attempt to reduce population. So I think it comes down to thinking through potentially practical ways to reduce the per-person environmental impacts.
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