The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

The book [factfulness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness) is precisely about this. They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. The authors are Swedish, so they talk first hand about Sweden, and their experiences how drastically Sweden changed in the last 2 generations is amazing

They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative.

It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people.

I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah.

Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.

As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?

The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally.

It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.

You're so wrong that you could hardly be any more wrong.

Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input.

Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr...

Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.

Degrowth is murder is not an argument.

Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.

You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.

Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.

That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.

We can hardly call that a victory.

read the article I linked to

The fall in CO2 emissions in advanced economies is also seen while considering consumption-based metrics, meaning that the fall in emissions in these regions is not merely a result of offshoring of manufacturing.

From you own quote: not merely. So it is in part responsible.

And I can also point to many dozens of article that agree with my statement.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are completely correct, that doesn't change anything about deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing and many other issues that have not been addressed.

All of these issues have nothing to do with CO2. So my original point stands. You are focusing on the CO2 part when OP was talking about resource depletion in the first place.

You can choose to bury your head in the sand and think that everything is fine, but that doesn't make it true.

On that note, considering that you did not address the point in my original comment, I can honestly say that you are arguing in bad faith and I don't have time for that so feel free to not respond.

Yeah I also find it hard to argue with such dishonesty, inability/unwillingness to look at statistics, and intellectual retardation.

Deforestation isn't an issue in advanced economies, e.g. in Europe. See OurWorldInData

Soil depletion? What's that? Plants don't need soil to grow, plants need nutrients (and can easily grow in water or even air!). We've been supplying nutrients artificially for more than a century now (see Haber-Bosch process). I'm sure we can continue doing so, just better with newer technology.

Netherlands is a tiny country, one of the worlds top food producers and exporters, and one quarter of its land is reclaimed (used to be the sea). It's not a problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

> Each acre in the greenhouse yields as much lettuce as 10 outdoor acres and cuts the need for chemicals by 97 percent.

Over-fishing might be a problem, but we're solving it rapidly with aquaculture (farming of aquatic organisms). China is the other problem, e.g. they're fishing illegally in international waters off Argentina, probably will need to be reined in by international armed forces.

https://ourworldindata.org/fish-and-overfishing

Resources aren't a problem, peak oil is getting further and further away (because of fracking, new technologies, and new oil fields), and we're finding more and more other useful resources. With the advent of "too cheap to meter during daytime" solar power, we'll have more energy to extract/refine/recycle resources from other places as well (desalination, uranium from seawater, CO2-free steel, artificial (non-fossil) hydrogen and methane etc.).

Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Bottom line is, degrowth "green" propagandists are wrong, have always been wrong ("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL), and will continue to be wrong. Believe in our high-tech post-scarcity increasingly-moral free-market-capitalist civilization.

("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL)

They're largely gone already.

And speaking of LOLing at failed predictions, do you know how many decades ago "too cheap to meter" electricity you've mentioned has been promised?

Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Of course. With wishful thinking, anything is possible.

To sum up, technology will magically fix all the mess that growth and technology has created. Anything as long as we can have our cake and eat it too, and never make any sacrifice.

Even Alcubierre engines, so we can go and fetch resources from the Galaxy!

Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

I believe that’s where we at for most topics, we just tend to avoid places where exclamations get more attention than reason.

For some people growth is more like a religion, than something one can rationally examine that has tradeoffs.

And the religion even comes with miracles, where for any given problem caused by growth throwing more growth into it will fix it, usually by handwaving about non existing technologies that will "surely" arrive, or existing technologies that never proved themselves beyond toy scale.

And, as we can see from the "degrowth is murder" the religion comes with ethical deadly sins and fire-and-brimstone too.

Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.

That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.

I have used objective reasoning to conclude that degrowth is murder. Now I'm passionately opposing it. Same with Nazism, Communism, Decolonization, Hamas, etc.

How do you define murder ?

children dying because you don't produce enough food to feed them. people dying because your economy cannot support high technology required to make advanced drugs. old people freezing to death because you don't produce enough energy to heat their homes

this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!

Yeah, right, but gppp’s degrowth means “not producing more humans than needed followed by food reduction”, not “starving the excess to death”. You’re seeing what isn’t there (and are all over the place in general, which makes it hard to reason).

Again, these emotive arguments: Children dying, sick people dying, old people dying.

None of that is actually murder. I don't think it's great, but it's not murder. However, I do wonder on your position on abortion? And preventative and responsible birth control? Would you count any of that as murder?

(There are plenty of fascist dictatorships and corrupt regiemes you could go for, but you pick "communism"?)

Pretty sure it's a logical fallacy to group the current argument with widely agreed and totally unrelated bads.

How is degrowth murder? Is it murder if the entire planets worth of women aren't constantly pregnant because not embracing any and all potential for human life is murder?

Are you trying to say that saying only a % of people can have children is murder in regards to those that don't get to? Aren't we already doing this by imposing financial circumstances/classes on people rather than evenly distributing wealth as much as possible?

Do you have children? How do you propose to convince or force others not to have children without devolving into something that could reasonably be called “eco-fascism”?

Pretty easy really - promote social programs that lift the standard of living and promote easy access to quality education.

You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates.

Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.

How is that easy to accomplish nationally let alone globally? What if there’s places that buck the trend, or don’t want to incentivize low birth rates in this way?

It's easier than devolving into literal facism which was the first bar you set.

It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare.

Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking.

Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.

They got there by getting us to the point we’re at now, by burning fossil fuels and offloading many of their social ills to other regions. By all means, let’s improve education and get more money in people’s pockets. But degrowth is much more likely to be accomplished through fascism than by raising the standard of living globally in a way that preserves regional independence.

I agree that only an overwhelmingly powerful state apparatus could tear people away from their fast food and cat videos. And cars. And heat.

‘You will own nothing and you will be happy. For the good of the planet, of course.’

Taxes, sanctions, globalization. The idea, as I understand it, is that instead of using old fascism with boots and shootings, you just use new fascism with “economic realities” which basically do the same through starvation and homelessness. It works in the west, all you have to do is to give free youtube and tv to everyone in less developed regions, so they’d want that lifestyle badly.

How do we get people to do anything? Violence.

Unfortunately in our flesh and blood world as much as we have a dalliance with forming a society it still all comes down to violence at the end of the day. We hate it, but it's true.

Keep in mind my definition of violence is expansive, not only drawing blood but I would count imprisoning someone (who has broken laws) against their will as (a necessary) violence.

Came here to promote Hans Rosling's work, highly recommend taking a look at it for how global stats improve across the board over time.

People have having less children than replacement levels in all the developed countries. Probably all that is needed for the same to happen in Africa and the like is similar development.

Why would they need to be convinced or forced? Birth rates are declining around the world, in almost every culture. Having fewer children appears to be a choice that people are happy to make for themselves.

this will happen. when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. UN predicted the largest number of population is 12 billion in future thirty years, then population start to diminish.

when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids.

People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills.

I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.

Uh, poor people have way more kids:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Uh, poor people have way more kids:

Not in a wealthy country like the US they aren't.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

Poor people get the burdens of a rich economy (ex: increasingly complex living) but have far fewer resources to offset them.

The graph you linked directly contradicts your comment.

when society rich enough, the only way can let people want more kids is offer economic help. so this is not a pure linear relationship.

Which in itself is a good argument to raise the standard of living from the bottom upwards .. below some ceiling of per capita consumption that exceeds current planet capacity to endure.

We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans

Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff?

With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

(https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...)

With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.

only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.

This is generally true for primary production like agriculture, however, agriculture is something less than 5% of our effort, and for the majority of our economy we have the opposite effect where economies of scale enable much greater efficiency - i.e. more or better goods/services for the same amount of labor - than it could be possible with a much smaller population.

That economy of scale comes from a few billion people. A large fraction of the world's population neither contributes to it nor benefits much from it.

Housing, infrastructure, and energy would all be in huge surplus.

The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels.

I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer?

It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation.

Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?

Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology.

Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?

That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse.

But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils.

Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture

It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water.

Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.

Malthus had plenty of scientific evidence as well! What he didn’t have was fertilizer and tractors.

Fertilizer and tractors both contributed enormously to devastaing the biodiversity of the planet. The question is not whether we can sustain a larger population, but whether we can sustain a population as large as currently exists - while maintaining any semblance of a natural world. Over a long enough time line both questions almost certainly do in fact merge. But it's equally possible to conceive of a medium term future with nature utterly devastated and humanity clinging on in increasingly baroque ways to a dying rock.

It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels...

That seems unlikely, given that total fertility in wealthy countries is well below "replacement" (2.1 children per woman). Reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, could only be approaching replacement if the sex ratio is massively skewed in favour of girls.

1. UN chart of TFR for "more developed regions": https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Observe the assumed but never yet seen floor to fertility rate.

Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)

There are different kinds of growth. The one needed for the above is growth in GDP which doesn't necessarily need growth in number of people, amount of energy used etc.

Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though).

I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).

So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.

I think it's certainly true with a fixed population size that technology helps us gain efficiency.

I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc

We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary

The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things.

Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.

... or we could just build more nuclear plants and harness practically free energy, without getting weird about who's having babies

Nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar or wind.

It's not just about energy, how do you store electricity ? How do you extract the materials ?

Birth rate is already declining everywhere. The declining death rate is what causes population growth.

Stage 2-3:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

The only thing, that appears hard to grasp is the already declining birth rate for africa since quite some time (go google it). It would be much more effective for fascists to argue for a higher mortality rate but that would be too cruel for the main stream.

To end constructively: What we need is better wealth distribution for even better health care to accelerate this process. You need to understand that better living standards helps us platoe. Maybe advocate for that.

The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally.

Our planet could easily support +10 billion people. Its also a matter of wealth distibution. You know that "4 planets consumption rate" stuff for US citizens? This turns the responsibitly from the fertile poor to the rich consumers without any social darwinism. I would say, only focusing on the poor and not the rich to hinder wealth distribution justifies the insult of an eco-fascist.

The problem here is, that right-wingers stop their train of thought at "too much people" and "look at birth rate" ("another thought process finished successfully"), which your comment was all about, but ignore their own role in defining that upper bound and their consumption. It is comfortably to their way of life arguing against fertility rates, which wont effect them as much as wealth distribution would do to actually lower it.

You could also cut the poor from resources which would revert the demograpgic transition into high death and ferrility rates. Also a solution...

That consumption would drop precipitously if we stopped upgrading/replacing working things. Wouldn't help support a growth economy as much, however.

Why not focus on reengineering our political and economic systems and their inefficient built in contradictions, like optimizing for consumption?

Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.

It's not really extra physical goods that are the issue (e.g. that arm chair made from farmed wood going to landfill), it's the pollution required to create them or the improper disposal of them.

Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue.

As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.

I hope you will lead by example and not have any children?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

The birth rate is coming down rather rapidly to the point where this will be a large problem for you when you’re in your golden years. Won’t that be ironic!

You have degrowth. Because degrowth is frankly, a disgusting ideology.

Not until our infatuation with constant growth is confronted. Currently all major economies focus on growth(GPD), and any sign of slowdown is essentially a doomsday scenario. We have gotten massive efficiency gains in almost all labor intensive work, and while this means more goods and services can be pumped out to increase global wealth, it also means a rapid degradation of the environment.

As someone who wholeheartedly agrees with this statement, I do wonder why this mentality is so prevalent. Is it just a consequence of natural selection? Those who want to grow and compete will inevitably dominate those who do not, and so propagate more?

Yeah this question is a good one to chew on. I think ultimately humans are pretty good followers, and in my relatively short life time, I have not seen much in the way of good leadership at the global level. So we just end up following incompetent power hungry people around into their own interests(which is usually money and power).

All true. As a sidenote, in the Midwest rural area I grew up in there has been an extreme amount of growth in the past few years, with just about every big tech name buying land in the area and building data centers and plants, getting decades and hundreds of millions in tax breaks in the process. Once beautiful farmland and forests have been decimated in the process.

Local county politicians haven't really taken the lead, leaving townships to fend for themselves, in which it seems no-one has an idea what they are doing and constantly on their heels. There are many concerns over the environment and where the water is coming from. Stuff like this is going down with township trustees: https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/20...

There is a lot of whining and complaining from residents, but they all gladly accept the check when the players knock on their door with that Silicon Valley money. I think the obsession with growth is ingrained in American life at this point and inevitable. I don't blame the companies for finding cheap land, water, and tax breaks. And I don't blame landowners for taking money. At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in. However, it doesn't make the decimation of forests and farmland any less sad, and this is the part that really bothers me about the whole thing.

I'm sure it's probably been shared here many times, but this is one of my favorite quotes from Tolstoy about the ideal life, which it seems is becoming a little harder to obtain the more this growth philosophy plays out.

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbour — such is my idea of happiness.”

At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in.

This really is a big crux of capitalism, there is simply no room for society to take a breather and enjoy life unless one is lucky enough to make it to retirement, and even more lucky to make it there in health. No room to reflect on new technology and inventions and decide whether we are on the right track, as a society. But chaos is inherent to big groups, so I'm not saying there is a different way forward on a planet with 8 billion people.

how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment?

It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it.

That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output.

Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct).

There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years).

Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.

that's the end of the world as we know it

Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.

My take is that environment will become lot more variable and we will just have to deal with it. Living in some areas will be worse than now and in others better. And we might need to move some things a bit, which is likely expensive but not life ending.

We have already seen quite a few lives ended during mass migrations, and there will be plenty more.

This is badly informed doomerism.

China installed 125GW of wind/solar power in 2022 alone, and their power sectors CO2 output is projected to decrease (!!) starting in 2025 [1].

You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia

I know that many people don't like to hear this, but this is just absolving yourself from blame and it's despicable.

Yes the Asian continent emits more CO2 than North America-- about 10 times more people live there, what do you expect?!

What you conveniently gloss over is that the US does ABSOLUTELY NOT "lead by example"-- CO2/capita is the absolut WORST worldwide except for some superrich petrostates (~15 tons/year/person, compared to ~8 for EU/China and <3 for India).

Fact is that ANY contribution you make as US citizen is highly likely to be MORE effective (in terms of CO2/year saved) than anything a Chinese or Indian citizen could do, AND also likely to demand LESS from you (because an American family just has to leave the second car at home more often to save a ton of CO2, and Indian family has to turn off heating during winter to achieve the equivalent, basically).

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-an...

By moving manufacturing off world.

Maybe biodiversity is shrinking, but the book has examples of environmental conservation efforts that have improved biodiversity in the case of tigers in India, to give one example. I strongly believe that when humans are doing better, the life around them will too. We are now more humane than ever. S Korea is banning dog meat, we have banned ivory production, rhinos are being protected in Africa.

You are cheery picking a few examples without looking at the whole picture. The Amazon forest is still being decimated, we are still over-fishing the oceans, and that's just for starters.

Let's not even talk about healthy soil depletion and what comes with that problem.

Insects are disappearing at an ever faster rate and they are at the base of many food chains.

Are there some things that are better now? Sure but you are looking at the tree and you missed the entire forest.

"S Korea is banning dog meat"

Why is that a good thing, when the normal meat factories are bad as always? Because dogs have more rights to be treated nice, because they are considered cute, unlike pigs who are way more intelligent?

I live in the South West of Western Australia, in a bio-diversity hotspot.

I look South, and I see bush-land, a relatively small postage stamp sized block. I've counted about 23 separate species of orchids, and a huge variety of plants, and birds. One of the species of orchids is basically a sex-lure for wasps, and is absolutely fascinating.

I look North, East and West and I see farm-land as far as the eye can see (aside from another very small "reserve" to the NE). It's just paddocks for animals, and the diversity is "cattle" and "Sheep", and the various grasses which they eat. Very f absolutely fascinating.ew birds (not many trees), much less variety and diversity. And no orchids.

That's where food comes from, and it starts with a bulldozer, it relies on fossil-fuels (including the fertiliser) to keep producing. And we're still growing.

Banning ivory and protecting Rhino's is basically palliative care at this point.

It’s interesting how quickly an argument for “factfulness” morphs into cherry-picking data points as soon as the facts are unfavorable. Turns out that facts aren’t bestsellers or at least not memorable ones that everyone wants to read and share. Optimistic narratives are — they fit a human need in a time when on many fronts that matter realism and cynicism are predominantly one and the same.

Biodiversity will come roaring back once humanity is gone. To the rest of life on our planet there is no difference to the damage done by a meteor or by humans. It’s not like an endangered owl is sitting around thinking about what counts as an external, life-threatening force!

Yay?

If you really care about the planet then you don’t really need to worry!

The condition of the planet affects our living, you can't really juste shurg it off

Theoretical question - if no humans existed, what is the “value” of nature?

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it.

Nature has value because we exist. It wasn't as important to us for a while (and still isn't) but hopefully in the future it will become more and more important to people.

Nature also has value in that it is almost irreplaceable. If humans are around long enough that we see our entire planet destroyed, we live in space; in order to replace/get a new "nature" it would take billions of years of waiting and exactly the right conditions, which may not even be reproduceable.

And even then you get a different nature; if we want the same ecosystem we have now, then it is truly priceless, truly irreplaceable.

On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past.

Some things are worse, some things are better.

For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years.

Worldwide, deforestation is on the decline for the past 20 years.

For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years.

In large part through exporting our staggering manufacturing demands to poorer parts of the globe such that the localized effects of pollution happen there instead.

biodiversity is collapsing

This is not the conclusion of the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie. As with many things, things are not so simple/binary.

The consensus is clearly 100 to 1000 of the background extinction rate, and that biomass is decreasing in wide range of categories (like mammals, insects, fishes, plants, etc). How they refuted that? Are there more and more diverse bacterias, and the rate of how diverse they become increased 100 fold?

I think it’s important to remember that the future isn’t known to us. People will fixate on one scenario or another, forgetting that there are others. Our ability to forecast is limited.

Studying the recent past or the deep past gives us some perspective on how things have changed before. Making analogies might help us think of more scenarios, but it’s not so good for ruling things out.

You can find all our data, visualizations, and writing related to biodiversity on this page. It aims to provide context on how biodiversity has changed in the past; the state of wildlife today; and how we can use this knowledge to build a future path where humans and other species can thrive on our shared planet.

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity

The winner takes it all, until nothings left for him.

Everyone reading Factfulness should also take a look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...

I've always regarded this book as being blatant neoliberal propaganda.

Can you name a couple examples of blatant neoliberal propaganda in the book? Who is the propaganda being perpetrated on behalf of? Who is funding it? If it doesn’t have these latter elements, you might want to consider the possibility that it is simply a work that you disagree with.

I don't need to defend a personal opinion if I don't want to. I believe the book is an 'everything is fine' meme in book format, pandering to the current oligarchy who's arguing that everything is going in the right direction and direct action is unnecessary. Other people replying to the same comment have articulated it better than I did. Whenever a book like this comes along and the real capitalists start reviewing and recommending it, it triggers my bullshit sensors.

You might want to consider the possibility that it is simply an opinion that you disagree with and move on.

Ostensibly, we participate in this forum to discuss things. I thought it was provocative to call this book propaganda so I thought I'd probe a little. When you tell someone they are reading propaganda, one of the unsaid things you are doing is implying that people are being duped, and that you somehow come from a higher place and have the real answers. So yeah - you are going to get questions. So maybe don't throw the term around in a public forum if you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting.

Everything is propaganda. This forum, for example, is full of techno-utopian/libertarian/accelerationist propaganda. Reading propaganda doesn't make you duped or stupid or whatever.

you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting

I'm sorry you feel insulted, that's mainly on you, this was not my intention. I suggest you reflect on why you feel insulted when an internet stranger calls a book (which you did not write) as propaganda.

If everything is propaganda, then the word is meaningless.

I don't feel insulted, I pointed out you were being insulting.

Symbols aside, dissemination of biased, misinformative, and arguably harmful information is not necessarily done with Ill intent.

What is a summary of the criticism? Is the data wrong or in some way misrepresented? It seems like the author doesn't like the attention Hans received.

From the wiki page

Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, has questioned the authors' claims and suggested that Rosling's own thinking shows a bias towards Pollyannaism. Particularly, Berggren criticized the authors for understating the importance of the European migrant crisis, the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene, and continued global population growth. Furthermore, Berggren remarks that "Factfulness includes many graphs of 'bad things in decline' and 'good things on the rise' but not a single graph of problematic phenomena that are on the rise." It "employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth." Berggren raises concerns that the simplistic worldview this book offers could have serious consequences.

What's wrong with being neoliberal, and what makes the book propaganda? Do you disagree with the factual claims?

The problem with the world improving in an irrefutable way on average is that this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism. The world became better due to science, technology, various policies, cultural changes, etc. and will only improve if these are continued. It is not always clear what brought improvement and whether that sort of improvement will keep scaling. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I don't like it when people say the system is great, don't change anything, don't complain, and in a few more generations we'll all be fine.

The problem with "fight the status quo" people is that they tend to demand more authoritarianism and centralization to fight something that isn't that bad. Authoritarianism tend to lead to worse outcomes and hurt progress, things progress faster with liberal ideals than authoritarian ideals.

There’s nothing about a “fight the status quo” mentality that inherently favors authoritarianism and it’s not helpful to claim otherwise.

That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.

I think this is true generally for anyone seeking power, whether they’re a soon-to-be dictator or a democratically elected politician

In particular, I find that "fight the status quo" people want to change some external "system" more than the individual people (ie., themselves). It is easier to blame and demand change of external entities, while being comfortably numb about oneself and one's way of living. For example, see this article by the political professor Eric Kaufmann: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13268

If by "centralization" you mean giving more power to central entities that can intervene to fight local abuses and coordinate policies, I don't see a path were we can do without it.

We're in this situation in no small part because big enough companies can just buy their way when facing local entities, and the only recourse that is working is to ask a higher up regulator to intervene. Weakening the regulation entities makes it basically impossible to have anything done.

some variants of 'fight the status quo' are explicitly opposing the centralization of power and the too big to fail entities in non-authoritarian societies.

Focusing on the bad is natural and makes sense because that’s what can be improved, but I feel like your mental health will be better if you focus on the bad when it’s productive and you can do something about it, and at other times realise that things aren’t that bad

Yep, its a very bizarre argument that we should focus on the good as if there will be some terminal state where things get better of and only if we believe.

There is no end, it's tradeoffs all the way down. And the good things that are happening are hard won victories from people not accepting the status quo.

> this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism

So, should we stick to lies about world becoming worse to not become complacent?

It is a highly politicized approach to the truth. The truth must be kept out of reach of political thinking. We need to keep our optimism at levels based on facts, not on our political goals. We need to stick to the truth based on empirical data even if it is not aligned with our political goals. At least if world wants to become much better.

I hate the way politicians argue their points. They ignore anything good about their opponents and anything bad about their own ideas. And maybe this is the reason why our world is not great.

> I don't like it when people say the system is great

I don't think anyone saying that. But from the other hand, our system is much better then it might be, and we'd better remember that, because if it wasn't, if we were in a local minimum, then we could change it in any direction to make it better. We need to remember that we are not at a minimum or a maximum, we need to think carefully about gradients before deciding were to move. So maybe we should say that our world is great, to not break it, to not make it worse?

the improvement isn't even.

It seems obvious, but even that little bit of nuance escapes far too many people, most especially those whose livelihood is to talk about it.

You make me wonder if this isn't the marketing/sales vs dev/ops misalignment.

Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system.

But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond.

My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix.

And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.

I run into this all the time w/ engineers I work with.

I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys.

He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time.

What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities.

Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.

This is an important factoid - if you ask a mechanic for a vehicle recommendation you might not get the most reliable - but the easiest and cheapest to work on when it does break.

And yet this narrative ("They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way") falls exactly into the trap pointed out by the link in this story: "Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems that are real today."

(Even though I agree this narrative is mostly correct)

Well, the world is improving, but it can be better. That's the message of the book. It's very optimistic and you should read it.

An even better book recommendation (if you like the article) is "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet" by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie is head of research for ourworldindata.org; the book grew very directly out of the linked article.

Ritchie credits a lecture by Hans Rosling (one of the authors of Factfulness) in the forward for being what turned her from a pessimistic biology student into the person that writes a book like this.

A common criticism of the linked article is that "sure child mortality is going down, but what about X". Where X is climate change, species decline, quality of life, et cetera. The book addresses most "X"'s.

Not sure if this is the same lecture that Ritchie cites, but for anyone who hasn't seen this one by Rosling, it's worth a watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...

They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable

For whom? Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Saying that the world is getting better overall requires judgement of how much you value different things.

Some things are improving, some things are getting worse.

Are there any global measures that are worse than they were a century ago? Or are you just saying that progress is uneven, with some areas seeing local setbacks despite the overall global gains?

There is still the specter of nuclear war…that side of the equation has gotten worse.

Surely you've heard of the Cold War?

I read "factfulness", really opened my eyes!

I honestly don't trust the stats, and this kind of analysis and "blame on politicians for lying and focusing on negatives" does not convince me. Especially with all the ensuing gaslighting that happens in response to valid criticisms.

One of my favorite books. Changed my whole worldview (and I already had a positive world view before reading).

I've recommended this book to people probably 1,000 times.

FYI, Max Roser has mentioned several times that the book inspired him to create our world in data.

improving in an irrefutable way

The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative.

At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light.

An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend.

My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context

I think we can't really take such a basic view on such a complex topic. Sure, for the average person the world is objectively getting better every day, only if you compare to what the average person has and had, not the potential of what they could have.

It does not take into account magnitude, diversity and lost potential of betterment. For example the fact that billionaires will soon be trillionaires, such a new concept that apparently Firefox spellcheck knows what a billionaire is, but not a trillionaire.

It doesn't matter if we pay the average person 1 cent more each year and claim that their life is better for that 1 cent when a small percentage of people are getting 1000 dollars extra each year - sure the average person's life is technically better than the year before, but it has the potential to be even better.

Money is just a simple example by the way, doesn't take into account wanton ecosystem destruction by hyper corporates, the fact that we still get into stupid fucking wars (Russia, ie things haven't gotten better bc war never changes, apparently).

tbh Sweden feels like an outlier to me. Recently visited and it struck me as the most functional society I’ve encountered thus far. Even the demographics are healthier than much of rest of Europe especially compared to other rich nations.

That’s not to say the overall thesis is wrong but I suspect slight rose tinted glasses at play

Two more books in this vein are Fewer, Richer, Greener by Siegel and Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler

The world is awful. Millions of children die each year.

The world is much better. Even though children die, we don't have nearly as many as we used to.

The world can be much better. Most of these child deaths are preventable.

This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic. It feels like people just want to stay stuck but as the author says "to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better."

Being too dismissive of certain concerns is just as bad as being too pessimistic.

Usually when people are complaining about crime in a city they literally do not know the facts. That's very different from "things are factually better than they've ever been, but we can and should do much better."

The two groups that talk about crime are more or less equal in their self-delusion. The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.

Mind you there are plenty of people who are fairly reasonable who you don't see talking about these things publicly much, usually because the people who respond are so very obnoxious.

You have people denying reality vs. people exaggerating it, neither really have very good information.

I have personally experienced both. I left a formerly nicer neighborhood that took a turn to avoid robberies and too frequent gun shots for downtown where I feel much safer... and manage to offend both sides when I mention this.

FWIW: per SF's statistics, both violent and property crime rates are at 10+ year lows in every category:

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...

I'm not how you get a "both sides" argument from that data, but OK. We're in the same phase of this debate that we are with inflation: there was a burst of signal, driven largely by the pandemic and related causes, it receeded, but argumentation is still informed by feelings and not current state.

(Edit: and the amount of argumentation below trying to refute this one link WITHOUT ALTERNATIVE SUPPORTING EVIDENCE is pretty much proof that this isn't a fight about facts.)

Statistics from the police is the least accurate way to measure minor crimes, those stats mostly tracks how active the police is and not how much crime there is.

Or do you believe that Denmark and Sweden has the most cases of thefts in the world? These stats has nothing to do with how much theft is actually happening.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/theft/

Are there better numbers? It seems like these track existing conventional wisdom about the recent crime burst, no? You're just trying to throw out the last 2 years showing a decline? Is that really a reasonable argument?

Obviously yes, there's an apples/oranges problem with comparing data sets collected in different countries under different law enforcement regimes, etc...

But between e.g. 2022 and 2017 in San Francisco specifically? I don't see the argument.

(Also important to note that while "Larceny" might be plausibly related to police ignoring crime, other things like "Murder" are very much not if you aren't accusing the police of hiding bodies. And violent crime shows the same trend.)

We should be careful about the "it's the best we got" phase of the argument. It usually doesn't add information, but pushes the convo as though it does. Presenting numbers is additive, questioning those numbers relevancy can be additive. Of course the "best we got" might not be good enough to make a call.

In this argument, the sides are something like crime is down, crime is up, and don't have enough info. Roughly speaking, you're arguing for the first over the second whereas the responder is arguing for not enough info.

Even in situations where maybe you have to make a decision and don't have great data, if you don't feel great about the best info you have, then it might be better to use something else like the wisdom or gut instinct of the team or what's cheapest or what you're most able to walk back later. Data tends to make us lazy about digging deeper, it's okay when the data is good, but worse no data when it's not so relevant.

There are probably better numbers somewhere. Likely several sets worth. One of the things that makes SF's numbers especially thorny is that SFPD engages in a daily campaign to deter reporting crime.

This makes the official numbers known unreliable, but also means there's lots of room to debate how much more reliable any alternative set of numbers might be.

It is much more likely that the police changed a bit on how they report things than that the population at large changed. The real changes gets lost in the noise of police reporting changes. Police reporting changes not just via bureaucratic decisions but also the feelings of the police force in general because it is the people at the bottom that decides what to report, which is very fickle and can change quickly with reasons like "we catch thieves but they just get released, so we stopped caring".

Covid likely changed crime rates, yes, but it likely changed police reporting rates much more. That goes for all kinds of events. Saying crime is down since police reporting is down is like saying that kids learn more today since they get better grades today than 10 years ago.

Edit: You get much better numbers by asking people if they have been robbed lately, or asking stores how much gets stolen.

"Are there better numbers?" is not a question that justifies trusting bad numbers. If the best numbers you have are known to be unreliable, using them just because you don't have better ones is not justified.

Let's say the real amount per year for the last 10 years is [100, 110, 120, 130, 140], and you have numbers that show [90, 89, 88, 87, 86]. Those numbers are much better than [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It would still be absolutely wrong to use them to figure out the trend.

If you know your source of data is bad, you must throw it out, even if it's the best one you have. If our data is bad, we just don't know.

Statistics from the police is the least accurate way to measure minor crimes, those stats mostly tracks how active the police is and not how much crime there is.

Bullshit. You're applying census logic to crime statistics to sow FUD. The census doesn't count people who hide from the government. That does not mean we cannot trust census data, just that it isn't flawless.

It's a count of crimes reported by citizens. You can drill down further to see which ones stuck through to arrests and convictions. This is the closest to actual data we're ever going to come in measuring a concept like "crime."

The problem is that the stats tell a wildly different story than what progressives want to hear, so they move to discredit the police and their data with academic vagaries like "overpolicing." Let's examine that.

Police supposedly overpatrol black communities. Besides Wayne Williams and the DC snipers, can you name any black serial killers?

Something like 35% of all serial killings in America are committed by black males (4-5 victims each, and this does not include gang shootings!). The implication is that if police "overpoliced" white areas in the same way, there would be a similar rise in body count from white perpetrators. White communities should be knee-deep in their dead by this logic, yet I don't see anybody complaining about all the corpses in the streets. The act of policing does not "generate" murder victims. Black men just kill a lot of people and it's an uncomfortable truth.

Domestic violence is the other big lie we swallow. Men stopped beating their wives, so women invented new reasons to claim victimhood. Now just yelling at them is reframed as assault in the social sphere, and we're presented no end of excuses for why "rape" can't be reported to the police. It's not spousal rape anymore, it's more-vague "consent violation." Adhering to agreements that are subject to arbitrary change is impossible and unenforceable, but if you run afoul of it, they run to social media telling "their" truth (which is notably distinct from "the" truth). Nobody asks your side or gives you a fair hearing. They immediately isolate you from friends and family and sever your means of financial support. This is literally vigilante domestic violence against men, committed by the "victims," in plain sight, with public support. Believing women (or anybody else) without evidence is the flag of a fool. Police report or it didn't happen.

Here's the truth: the argument of overpolicing was applicable only to property crime, but through sophistry the left reframes it to look like it applies to all crime, the stats are faulty and all cops are bastards. Every bit of this is exaggeration for political effect.

It would not surprise me in the least if Denmark or Sweden did in fact have the highest rates of property theft. You have pickpockets, high density, and are welcoming of refugees and gypsies. I trust the stats. I don't trust you.

It would not surprise me in the least if Denmark or Sweden did in fact have the highest rates of property theft. You have pickpockets, high density, and are welcoming of refugees and gypsies. I trust the stats. I don't trust you.

You really think they have 5 times more theft than Poland or 15 times more than Mexico? The total numbers doesn't make sense, countries are all over the place regardless of their situation or stability.

Also that data is from 2003, it is before Sweden had taken in a significant amount of new immigrants. There were no security anywhere because it wasn't needed, and shops didn't close due to excessive theft. How can that be worse than a country where stores has to put products behind bars and put security guards to protect themselves, and still sometimes have to close due to the issues?

Hard science people tend to worship data and dismiss anecdotes, but a situation where the data is incomplete/incorrect (for whatever reason) and anecdotes which point in a different direction are, in fact, correct, is perfectly plausible. For example, the former Soviet Bloc was unmatched in its ability to produce impressive statistics of various achievements, but the real living standard of the people would strike you in the face the moment you would see it. Which is why the secret police often restricted free movement of Western visitors.

SF is pretty bad. A few weeks ago, Czech TV reporters were robbed at a gunpoint in broad daylight [0]. Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in Prague, Warsaw or even war-torn, PTSD-heavy Kyiv. It rather corresponds to South African standards of safety. IDK if you can explain it away with positively sounding statistics, but as Feynman says, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

If a culture war coded topic like crime is being discussed and tribal loyalty kicks in, I can imagine people simply ignoring anything that goes contrary to their position and rallying to the flag.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/czech-journalists-cover...

FWIW, with more guns than people, the USA is the most armed country in the world. It follows that being robbed at gunpoint isn't something that is frequent in a country where there's only 1 gun per 40 people. The same people arguing about violent crime in the USA could do themselves a huge favor by being open to more gun control, but by and large, they are against it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Does the pattern of armed robberies at daylight correlate with the pattern of gun ownership across the US, or no?

If not, the causality may be a lot more complicated. People don't turn into gangsters just by owning more guns. As you mention, USA is the most armed country in the world, which means that Latin American countries have, theoretically, fewer guns than the US. But they have a lot more gang violence, so much more that LatAm cities fill the "top 50 violent cities in the world" category, with barely any representants from the Old World (AFAIK only Johannesburg is up to par).

The same people arguing about violent crime in the USA could do themselves a huge favor by being open to more gun control, but by and large, they are against it.

Oh, there are multiple reasons for gun violence in the US (in decreasing importance from easy access to guns). Replace "gun control" with anything that might reduce it and this statement is still probably true.

I could just as easily list off several countries that have strict gun control and at the same time also violent crime rates (including those with guns) that are far worse than general levels in the U.S. gun control by itself isn't the problem when it comes to violence. Other, largely social and political factors are much more important, but that's not a neat ideological talking point so it gets ignored more often.

I wonder what Feynman and Robert Trivers (not a hard science person at all) would make of each other.

Just about every category in your chart shows a reversal from a downward trend before 2019 into an upward trend from 2019 onward. The precipitous and unusual drop at the end of the axis reflects a lack of data.

Just about every kind of crime is up in Portland as well over 2018 numbers, with homicides almost quadrupling 3 years later.

The “both sides” should be considered, because Portland isn’t a war-zone like the far right would portray it as, but it’s significantly worse than it used to be with no reversal in sight. There are worse places to live in the US today, but I’m not off-base for wanting safety and local quality of life to improve rather than decline when compared to previous years.

And sure, the next thing to blame is the pandemic recovery. We all faced drastic changes over the last few years, but objectively some of our cities (like Portland where I live) are not recovering as well or at all compared to national trends.

And as for Portland, most of our deteriorating trends started before the pandemic. 2020-2022 just accelerated their trajectories.

Just about every category in your chart shows a reversal from a downward trend before 2019 into an upward trend from 2019 onward

Literally every category in that chart shows a reduction in crime over the last year. You're inventing a "trend" by extrapolating a line straight across an outlier (the covid pandemic). No one would look at that data and say crime is getting worse. You'd say crime got worse and is now back at baseline.

What does the sentence after the one you quoted say? I forgot.

A line graph showing a precipitous drop in the most recent time bucket available is a red flag that you shouldn’t trust that data point.

Why? It's not a real time measurement, they're just adding up the crimes from the 2023 data. Do you expect the 2023 numbers to be revised? Was that true for earlier years? Seems unlikely.

I like SF, and it's violent crime rate isn't too bad.

But, c'mon, you can't point to property crime and say "this isn't a fight about facts" when it's the 4th highest property crime per capita city in the entire country in a country that already has high crime for the developed world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Many jobs and retailers have left SF. It's not surprising that statistics got "better". Also the police will have had a lot of pressure on them to make the statistics better, they're not to be trusted to publish good statistics.

I could find lists of store closures and numbers of jobs gone, but instead one data point: whole foods closing an enormous store after only one year.

https://abc7.com/whole-foods-san-francisco-store-closing-wor...

That either means what they say: crime was a huge problem, or they're covering for bad sales: people have left.

And the world isn't just SF. Locally I've been in line at a coffee shop twice this year while somebody stole something from the grab and go case and ran... there aren't any more grab and go cases or merchandise at several coffee shops. It wasn't long ago that I could go to the local target and buy things off shelves instead of waiting for someone to open the case with a key.

The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem

I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, doing this. I think it is important to note the mainstream, because we do have tons of elected officials and mainstream cable news talking heads making the "warzone" argument (and deliberately mischaracterizing any attempts at police or justice system reform).

I know many people personally who do it in conversations with me. Locally we have a county attorney who ran and won on, essentially, a platform to not prosecute crimes. She's done such a bad job that in a few egregious cases the state attorney general took cases over.

It has gotten to the point where there are liberal-talking-point topics that I just don't address with good friends in the same way you avoid anything political with the slightly unhinged conservative uncle.

I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, who is talking about crime and criminals in a way that seems like they are actually interested in making the situation better.

I have yet to see a politician who has ran on "not prosecuting crime" and winning. It's a batshit crazy mega unpopular opinion that we should not prosecute crime so I'm shocked you are so close to someone who was able to succeed on that.

Can you share who this person is so I can look up what they ran on?

Mary Moriarty, Hennepin County Attorney

Of course she said she'd be tough vaguely on violent crime, then but then what she actually meant which was

"In addition to prosecution and incarceration in appropriate cases, Mary’s approach to community safety will include:

* Offering restorative justice practices as an option for victims.

* Advocating for community-based alternatives to incarceration in appropriate cases, including supporting these alternatives at the legislature and pushing for increased funding.

* Partnering with schools, families, and others to ensure children who commit crimes have options with structure and support to help them succeed. Closely coordinating with community corrections officials to improve the quality and effectiveness of supervision."

One of the most egregious cases involved two teenagers who were paid to kill a young mother, they broke down her door and shot her to death in the middle of the night. Moriarty offered them a plea deal for less than 2 years in juvenile detention.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/walz-intervenes-assigns-...

Yep. It’s like this for lots of other subjects. From war to paper straws.

Not saying whether it is wrong or right, but: it is often people trying to move the Overton window, or people getting manipulated by window movers.

The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.

Some left wing folks will agree you should be afraid but only if you're female/black etc because men/white people might attack you. But they'll insist if you're a white man then you're protected from crime by "privilege".

Which is interesting because statistically men are much more often victims of violent crime.

The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem and the right-wing folks insist such and such a place is a warzone and anyone who goes there should be afraid.

This is contextual and is misleading without it.

But it does accurately represent the ineptitude of the left and why it always loses in these situations. Here's how it goes:

Problem: Society has people that are poor and mentally challenged. Both turn to drugs to cope. Drugs are illegal, increased demand increases criminality. Drug use exacerbates poverty, homelessness. Society becomes full of drug users committing petty crimes, and drug dealers perpetuating major crimes to contribute to supply. Not to mention addicts dying in the streets from overdoses.

All of this in general make cities undesirable and less safe.

RIGHT-WING Solution: LET'S GET TOUGH ON CRIME.

Drug dealers get arrested. Drug users get arrested.

For a little while the streets are cleaner and safer, and everyone is happy. But the root cause hasn't been addressed, so the same problems just return.

LEFT-WING Solution: Drug use is a symptom not a root cause. And criminality is inherent to drug trade because drugs are illegal. If we legalize or decriminalize drugs we reduce the criminal element. If we give people safe injection sites they don't have to die from overdoses. And if we fund social programs we can get people out of poverty, off the streets, and into housing.

PROBLEM 1: All of this is a lot harder than sending a dozen cops into a tent city and arresting a dozen homeless people.

PROBLEM 2: Even if carried out PERFECTLY, there becomes an intermediate step where homeless people are seen being given funds or housing from the government which makes poor-but-not-homeless, and even middle-class people get mad saying "I work so hard, how come this person who is clearly a loser is getting all these handouts? This makes people petty and the right wing seize on it.

PROBLEM 3: Going soft on drug use means in the short term you have people using drugs more openly, but not being arrested for it. This makes people grossed out and the right wing seize on it.

Before you know it and before any meaningful improvements have been made, you have right wing candidates screaming that all of the problems of society are because the left is too soft, and we need to get tougher. And they usually succeed and they usually win. Because the best the left wing can do is point to statistics that show fewer homeless people are dying of poverty or drug overdoses, and the truth is most humans in society just don't care. So they deny and minimize.

The reality is that out of sight out of mind, most gentle moderate even somewhat progressive people would be just as happy if homeless people "disappeared". They don't want to think about what that means. So they vote left when they feel guilty, and right when they're annoyed.

The left-wing folks aggressively deny there is any sort of problem

I have to admit, I don't think I've heard any left-wing folks saying that at all.

Arguing about "facts" and statistics, when it is literally impossible to report basic crimes like robbery to police is pointless!

What do you mean it's literally impossible to report robberies to the police?

If you report a minor robbery to the police in any large American city and you aren't a public figure, there is functionally a 0% chance of them following up on it much less solving it. The only benefit for reporting is if you plan to make an insurance claim. If not, there is no point to reporting a minor robbery to the police.

Robberies and property crimes are hugely underreported in official statistics because the first time you try to report one you realize that it makes a bad situation worse by wasting your time after the event. That is what they're talking about.

If you report a minor robbery to the police in any large American city and you aren't a public figure, there is functionally a 0% chance of them following up on it much less solving it.

I have known people that had stolen things returned because the police found the items while investigating/arresting the thief for other crimes. It seems foolish to not bother with filing a report just because they aren't actively investigating every report they receive.

Other benefits of reporting it, other than insurance, is that it makes these kinds of statistics more accurate, and that in the unlikely event that they "accidentally" solve the case, it'll be easier for you to get your stuff back. The latter can happen if they arrest someone for some other reason and find what appears to be a bunch of stolen property or something. It's not likely, but it seems like it'd still be worth reporting the crime.

But you make a good point that a lackluster police response does lower the incidence of reporting crimes, effectively doctoring crime statistics. You'd have to evaluate whether this trend has increased or decreased relative to historical periods when factoring that into any comparison, though.

Police stop taking reports of crimes they will not pursue or won't be prosecuted.

There is no "fact" saying how much crime is occurring, only a snapshot of how many reports were accepted and filed by the police.

They just refuse to take report, with some bullshit excuse. Like under $950 it is misdemeanor..

Everything in shop is locked up, but crime is down!

When people say crime is getting out of hand, while it's actually decreasing, they are just wrong and ignorant.

That's a bit reductive. It can be true that globally (or in some superset) crime has decreased while in some local context it remains the same or has become concentrated (e.g. worse for people in that context).

This whole article and commentary around it has also highlighted another issue for me: It's hard to have nuanced conversations about complex problems that can be simplified or generalized to something causes a difference in perception about what actual problems *are*.

When people say crime is getting out of hand, while it's actually decreasing in the context they mean it, they are just wrong and ignorant.

This is common bias. People consistently think that crime is getting worse.

So there are people out there, not in this thread, who are wrong when they say things that are incorrect?

In many metro areas crime is higher than it was before COVID. Sure the levels may be decreasing below the 2020 peak levels, but relative to 2019 or earlier its oftentimes still higher.

Most crime goes unreported.I think blanket statements this are just wrong and ignorant.

And it was also unreported before. It isn’t a new phenomenon. Do you like it better with “The reported crime rate has been decreased over a long enough period”?

Many many interesting points of information are lost when averages are taken. Averages can lie. If some working class people objectively feel their lives have worsened from crime, it's "progressives" in particular who need to be listening even if some of the facts appear to be wrong. It's quite possible critical theorists and sociologists and various experts are missing some important variance.

You can blame the media. And social media included.

Does "it's actually decreasing" mean "it's decreasing on average in the US" or "it's decreasing on average in every county in the US"?

When people say crime is getting out of hand, while it's actually decreasing, all it means is that apparently the trends of average rate of crime doesn't match the trends of the particular types of crime or the location that actually impacts their group.

I wish the world was much butter. It would be more tasty.

Yes but deaths due to coronary heart disease would increase.

The moon is much cheese.

Ha! I didn't catch that. Thanks

This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic.

Most people voicing "concern" are saying "crime is increasing" and usually blaming either current politicians and/or progressive policies for the "increase". It's almost always accompanied by either a "vote for me" or some screed on how we have "gone soft on crime".

Crime rates are a prime battlefield for culture wars.

The fact that talk about crime rates is usually an attack on progressive policies usually means progressives usually also respond in an ACKSHUALLY manner followed by a wall of anarchist crime theory which must account for all (not just some) of any disparity, because if it does not then you have stabbed your own side in the back.

Whatever you think about Elizier Yudowsky, I think he hit this one right on the nail.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...

What's interesting to me is conservative political parties that are defunding the police, court systems and prisons while noisily passing legislation that impose harsher penalties for crimes. Meaningless penalties because the criminals aren't prosecuted due to a lack of resources.

Crime is obviously down over the decades, which is very important, but I think it would be silly to deny there was a major uptick in murders in 2020.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/us-murder-violent-crime-rat...

There are obviously lots of reasons for this having nothing to do with crime policy, such as the economic shock of covid. That being said, I don't think its true at all it is straightforwardly settled how to reduce crime.

Pretty much all people I have read on this suggest penalizing gun possession crimes more would decrease the violent crime rate. It's part of the reason murder rate in places like NY is relatively low. That said, prosecuting more people for probation violations or gun possessions is a a policy that cuts against both conservative ideology (because they are pro gun) and progressive ideology (because it will require a larger prison population that will be disproportionately minority)

Millions of children die each year - this could be prevented simply by not making them - but somehow this view is not understood on HN at all.

This world is awful and will be awful, so don't force others to become its new victims.

Millions of potential intelligent beings that never get a chance to see the universe - I see that as a very sad thing.

We have a natural drive to procreate. It's hard to resist that drive when the other option is "die alone"

There is a selection bias driving the conversation itself. The people most likely to voice a criticism about a given subject are the people who are most engaged with that subject.

Engagement itself is diverse. It can be driven by genuine interest, and it can be generated by political narrative.

What is most important is the criticism itself. Is it valuable? To whom? The more people there are voicing criticisms, the more difficult it is to answer these questions.

The usefulness of democracy is that we can coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.

The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.

The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.

Despite classes in civics and debating at some good schools we are mostly given no training on how to do this as kids.

Instead we are raised by "Hollywood diplomacy", which is deeply confrontational and revolves around vengeance and gun fights.

Polarisation isn't just in the "environment" but in the lack of tools we are given to work with.

There are actually long-form studies in things like Peace Studies (Columbia, George Washington Uni, Kroc Institute, Nottingham Uni in UK)

I spent some time with graduate of a peace studies programme, which I initially mocked. But she introduced me to all kinds of ideas like those of Habermas and Discourse Theory.

Most serious [fn] programmes on negotiation and diplomacy touch on this.

How we get ordinary folk to take on board more of that is challenging but urgent. Sadly most of "western" life has conflict escalation built in as a value.

EDIT: added some links for the curious [0,1]

[fn] There's plenty of crappy MBA business type "how to get what you want" type programmes - I am absolutely not talking about those!

[0] https://iep.utm.edu/habermas/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality

Polarization is also an emergent effect of first-past-the-post voting.

We don't need every participant in democracy to be an expert in diplomacy. We just need a system that incentivizes genuine engagement and compromise.

> It feels like people just want to stay stuck

They don't necessarily want to stay stuck, but they generally don't want to put in the hard work to see change through. More likely, as you point out, people would rather talk about it. That requires way less effort.

But what can you do with that? If not the "ACKSHUALLY" response, then it's just going to be:

* "The crime is bad in this city."

* "Yeah, I agree. So, um... did you hear about Taylor Swift?"

Either way, it's just an acknowledgement of something having been said. There is nothing actionable.

The counter-argument to "crime is too high" isn't "that can't be improved", it's "you're looking at the wrong thing, and to target 'crime' in certain ways actually makes the world worse".

This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic. It feels like people just want to stay stuck but as the author says "to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better."

I don't think people "want to stay stuck". I think it is simply the state of our polarized polity, and the mistrustful, zero-sum approach to discourse that it breeds. Even a plain factual statement feels like it's signaling some political allegiance or pushing some agenda, and that feels threatening. I'm not placing myself above this phenomenon, either. Your choice of example fact – something about 'crime in a city' – feels like a right-wing shibboleth (and after all, even if there are objective facts, the particular facts we recognize as salient, the narrative patterns of fact that we use to make political arguments, are of course driven by our values and political allegiances). Maybe I'm off-base about your example, but really my point is that it feels that way, so discussions of politics feel scary, even when they stick to matters of putatively objective fact. Apologies for shoehorning in the Israel/Palestine issue, but I thought this piece[1] was eloquent on (something like) this phenomenon:

[...]if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another. Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions. This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October.

Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative. They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power. And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy.

[1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/

From my perspective, global warming is the overriding problem, because time is running out to stop it. Maybe time has already run out, and it's too late to prevent the terrible consequences.

In terms of other social problems, the world has gotten better in many respects, and it could continue to get better over time... given unlimited time. I'm just not sure that we have unlimited time. Wrecking our own ecosystem makes it very difficult to make progress on anything else, and the consequences of wrecking our ecosystem will only aggravate our other problems. That's why I'm overall pessimistic.

time has already run out, and it's too late to prevent the terrible consequences.

Climate change is not a binary. We can choose how many terrible consequences it will have. It'll never be too late to prevent some terrible consequences.

It's not a continuum either. There are tipping points: think of the ice sheets all melting, the sea levels rising to the point where the coasts of continents are swamped. Moreover, continually adding energy to the system makes it more chaotic, engendering abrupt and unpredictable shifts. We can't necessarily "choose" the consequences in some kind of orderly manner, as if from a menu.

rising to the point where the coasts of continents are swamped

Then it’s not a coast, it’s underwater. The coast has moved. That’s fine, they always do. People will need to move to accommodate that. That’s also fine, they always do.

Also worth noting the sea level is actually falling relative to land level in many areas, especially towards the poles. What we’re most likely to see is mass migration into previously frozen/underwater areas towards the poles.

The coast has moved. That’s fine, they always do.

Define "always", relative to, say, recorded human history.

People will need to move to accommodate that. That’s also fine, they always do.

Oh yeah, no problem. Please tell the billion or so people who live in coastal areas that it's totally fine.

What we’re most likely to see is mass migration into previously frozen/underwater areas towards the poles.

Because the land and infrastructure there is surely fantastic. I suppose those people don't need, you know, food or water, for example? But ignoring the geological and ecological problems for the moment, consider the political problems. We're already driving ourselves crazy over a relatively small amount of immigration, and you're saying it's fine that a billion or two people are going to move—or at least try to move—into different countries? I'm guessing they won't be welcomed with open arms.

Define "always", relative to, say, recorded human history.

Every second of every day, month, year, etc. they are constantly shifting.

The political problems will sort themselves out (literally people problems), and the infrastructure will be built to accommodate the changing demographics. People move, people build. This is basic stuff.

Every second of every day, month, year, etc. they are constantly shifting.

People who lives on the coasts don't have to move every second of every day, month, year, etc., due to the coasts moving. In fact, the people almost never have to move due to the coasts moving.

literally people problems

Climate change is a people problem. As George Carlin joked, "There's nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"

This is basic stuff.

No, your comments are oversimplistic and perfunctory.

In fact, the people almost never have to move due to the coasts moving.

You're misinformed. It's very common in places with hurricanes, for instance.

your comments are oversimplistic and perfunctory.

Your entire argument is based on the idea that humans can't move and build, or at least that doing so is "hard". When in fact putting in the hard work to move and build has been the cornerstone of human civilization for as long as human civilization has existed. It's a very conservative view that strangely seems to be held only by liberals: "the way things were is the best way they can possibly be, all this change is no good, we have to go back to the good old days!". With of course nothing real to justify it.

You inverted Chronological Snobbery, but it's still just as much as fallacy.

You're misinformed. It's very common in places with hurricanes, for instance.

No, I'm not misinformed. A good friend of mine was misplaced by Hurricane Katrina—though the problem was that he lost his job as a result of the hurricane rather than losing his home. But it's not actually very common. Places with hurricanes include, for example, a very large part of the United States, almost the entire area along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Now tell me how many tens of millions of people have moved out of the area entirely due to hurricanes. The population of the areas threatened by hurricanes is still massive. (It should be noted that after a temporary drop, the population of New Orleans has bounced back to previous levels now after Katrina.)

Your entire argument is based on the idea that humans can't move and build, or at least that doing so is "hard".

You're completely ignoring the scale of the problem. When you talk about "humans", without a number, it's a misleading way of putting it. Again, several billion people on Earth are living in the danger zone. This is a much larger problem than any immigration or refugee crisis that currently exists or has ever existed.

When in fact putting in the hard work to move and build has been the cornerstone of human civilization for as long as human civilization has existed.

Actually, no, if we were willing to put in the hard work, then we could have avoided global warming catastophe altogether. Instead, we largely ignored the problem and did nothing to stop it.

You seem to believe this will be some all at once mass migration of billions of people. That is not the case. In fact, the migration has already started, and will continue to progress at the rate possible. The system is working.

And “avoided the climate catastrophe” is funny. Y’all would just find some different model to fast forward far beyond its applicable domain and range, then doomsay about that. Consider: what would these chronically anxious folks be doing right now if they didn’t have this to worry about? Nature abhors a vacuum, something else would fill the place.

Considering all the far more severe, far more real, things every ancestor you’ve ever had would have been worrying about, we’re doing pretty well. Shame so many people’s despressive anxiety can’t accept that.

In fact, the migration has already started, and will continue to progress at the rate possible. The system is working.

Citation needed.

I just explained how the population of New Orleans has actually rebounded after Hurricane Katrina, and you're claiming, absurdly, that the migration away from coastal areas all over the world has already started.

chronically anxious folks

despressive anxiety

This is baseless nonsense, armchair psychology at its worst.

You're looking at far too small a window. The population in New Orleans peaked decades ago. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23082/new-orleans/populat...

This is baseless nonsense, armchair psychology at its worst.

I presume you consider your method of "take a million climate models, extrapolate them out decades beyond what we have any knowledge of, discard all the ones that aren't alarming, be alarmed at the remainder" is based armchair climatology?

You're looking at far too small a window. The population in New Orleans peaked decades ago.

The point about New Orleans was to refute your argument about Hurricanes. The population is now higher than it was before Katrina, and it's still growing.

If you arbitrarily choose the peak population year, then it's currently 5% lower than the peak year, but again, the population is now growing not shrinking, and it's as high now as it was back in 1975, an even wider window than you selected.

In any case, you've conveniently avoided my request for a citation that the world population is moving away from the coasts.

I presume you consider your method

More baseless nonsense. I'm done here. I've already wasted too much time on your junk comments.

We also have options that are unpopular/seem bad right now but may not in the future, like solar geoengineering via releasing specific compounds into the atmospheric.

Something like that could also likely be achieved, or at least put into motion, by a single desperate nation.

Was this supposed to make me feel better? The options "seem bad" in the same way that volcanic eruptions seem bad; i.e., they are actually bad.

A single deperate nation could also put into motion a nuclear war.

Maybe time has already run out, and it's too late to prevent the terrible consequences.

My point is that there are options for the future. Even if they are not palatable ones. It's not as cut and dry as global warming has already started, it is too late to fix it or mitigate it, and we are all fucked no mater what.

My point is that there are options for the future. Even if they are not palatable ones.

You really need to elaborate about the "not palatable" aspect. What I've heard are only extremely dubious and unproven ideas with possible consequences as bad or worse than the current consequences. You make it sound like the problem is just public acceptance, but that's not the real problem with the so-called "options". There are no magic beans here.

When one looks at the history of human interventions in ecosystems, one cannot be optimistic. Whether it’s about defending against invasive species or restoring ecosystems to their “original state,” our limited understanding of complex ecosystems inevitably leads to interventions with negative side effects.

Global warming is a result of the set point of the system going up more than cumulative addition of energy.

The sun absolutely blasts the planet with energy and the planet radiates away most of it. Global warming is shifting the amount of energy in the system when those things are in balance.

On a 10,000 year time scale, Earth’s climate was insanely more stable before permanent ice caps formed for the first time 3 million years ago

With that kind of tomorrowist mindset it'll be too late. We need to make changes and we need to make them yesterday.

I wrote "we can choose how many terrible consequences we'll have". Do you think that I would choose "as many as possible"?

Lately it really seems like that's indeed the answer of those that we've entrusted to make our decisions for us. If it's never too late, then we never have to stop making profit from ecosystem destruction.

Lately it really seems that everybody is saying "It's too late, we're screwed, so let's not do anything and party like it's 1999".

This is a misdiagnosis. Lamenting that it's too late is the complete opposite of partying like it's 1999. We're not having fun. It's the climate change denialists who are partying like it's 1999, pretending that nothing has changed, that there's not a problem, and that we don't need to do anything. They're the ones who are complacent.

By the way, the lyrics of the song 1999 were very much tongue-in-cheek. Prince had a political streak, he had not given up on caring, and he wrote a number of other political songs, such as "Ronnie Talk to Russia", "Annie Christian", "Free", "America", and "Pop Life".

I reflected your comment back to you for a reason.

Any argument that starts with "It seems like you're saying" is a bad argument.

The climate change denialists are hiding behind both of our arguments.

I reflected your comment back to you for a reason.

That wasn't my comment.

Saying "it's not too late to do something" is more likely to effect change than saying "it's too late, climate change already happened, we're all fucked, good bye." I think you agree with GP here.

By definition, there's a deadline for preventing something from happening. We're already in an extinction cycle, extinctions are happening at a rate of 100 to 1000 times the natural rate.

And as for absolutes, total extinction of large mammals comes to mind as a consequence after which humanity can't really do anything.

There is no conceivable future in which white-tailed deer become extinct in the next few centuries. We will probably lose some of the less resilient species, though.

I think the possible outcomes of climate change (especially if we continue on our current trend) are unthinkably catastrophic, at worst including the potential deaths of a significant percentage of humanity. But there's still an enormous gap between that and "total extinction of large mammals". I don't think that's anywhere near a realistic consequence of climate change.

When humanity is still here in 2124 I wonder if there will be a Church of Climate Change that still prophesies the inevitable doomsday.

Define "still here".

If the population goes through a Toba-esque bottleneck due to climate-change-imposed breadbasket failures and there's no free energy (oil) left to bootstrap the world back to complexity similar to today, then is that "still here"?

Does "A Canticle For Leibowitz" qualify as "still here"?

Arguments like these do a lot to make so many people roll their eyes at the real dangers of climate change that exist. There isn't a bit of concrete evidence nor serious predictions (not even by the IPCC) that claim climate change will be so bad in the next cnetury as to create a Toba type die-off (which by the way was, if it even affected humanity that severely since this is still heavily debated, caused by massive global cooling instead of warming). Get a grip on the real risks and work from there. Why rabidly lean towards an apocalyptic stance except out of a morbid fetishism that many humans have always had to end of the world predictions?

Have you considered reading the Christian eschatology Wikipedia page? It's easier to go to the source than reinventing it, you can recycle the Latin phrases too - win-win.

When humanity is still here in 2124

That's an extremely low bar. Especially when the submission title is talking about the world being "much better".

The inability to solve global warming is itself the result of a small number of wealthy and powerful groups having outsized influence and these groups operating in a fashion so short sighted that they cannot sacrifice their interests to solve the problem.

The inability to solve global warming is itself the result of billions of poor and middle-class people wanting to consume more energy (sometimes indirectly) in order to improve their quality of life. All else being equal, most regular people worldwide would prefer to live in a large private house filled with high-quality manufactured goods, eat a lot of meat, and drive a large comfortable private car. You can argue that this is irrational or unhealthy or that no one really needs so much stuff, but good luck convincing people that they should vote to voluntarily reduce their standard of living in furtherance of somewhat nebulous global goals.

It's also the result of large numbers of people continuing to support an illusory political system that sustains this status quo.

As I see it, the wealthy play a non trivial role in the marketing of the "superiority" of this system, and rare is the person who can seriously consider whether it may(!) objectively be one of the primary root causes, despite the role it plays in setting rules, distributing "information", etc.

This is what shielded first world upper class tell themselves to not feel guilty, and at the same time to make sure that no actual change threatening the status quo that keeps them well fed happens too fast.

You never hear someone struggling to pay rent or to buy groceries tell you "God bless we have it so much better than 150 years ago". Guess why?

People who believe that the world is doomed no matter what don't spend any effort making the world better.

People who believe the world is great as it is don't spend any effort making the world better.

Only people who believe that the world should be better, AND that it is possible to make it better expend effort to make it better.

tangential to your point, and this seems trite, but the hippies were right after all. People need to imagine again. The ability to see a thing, in your minds eye, from all angles, without it having to be fully formed, without it having to be realized. Once you can imagine again, the future looks bright.

Pay close attention to the guardrails of imagination.

If you imagine too hard, you'll get push back in the form of, "every time we've tried something different, it's been a disaster." Beyond not having an imagination, there are those out there that seek to actively quell imagination. It's literally beyond their reality.

Only people who believe that the world should be better, AND that it is possible to make it better expend effort to make it better.

I agree, but saying the world is much better than in the past while it still has all the same basic problems (wars, hunger, preventable diseases, poverty, exploitation, etc) sounds to me just like privileged people patting themselves in the back. In the meantime, children die under bombs and starving.

It sounds like you read a different article than I did. The first line of the article: "The world is awful". Does that sound like people patting themselves on the back?

You sound like you are just talking about things you have read about and not experienced.

The happiest I have ever been is when was broke, struggling to pay rent and would buy bread and cheese at the grocery store.

I can remember at that time the pure joy of finding a piece of shit lamp at the thrift store for $3. I wouldn't even think to go to a thrift store now let alone want to buy this lamp. If you are buying bread and cheese instead of going hungry then a hamburger and fries at Wendys is like a 5 star restaurant. You know what feels amazing? Having no clue how to pay the rent and then you figure out a way to pay it.

I mean you are so obviously projecting the upper class life you have lived. Typical shithead.

you are so obviously projecting the upper class life you have lived. Typical shithead.

I've never had an upper class life, quite the opposite. What's a shithead? You mean someone privileged like you are now?

You know what feels amazing? Having no clue how to pay the rent and then you figure out a way to pay it.

LOL if it feels amazing why don't you donate most of what you got and go back to worrying about the rent? No?

You clearly have never struggled financially. I still have anxiety about making it to the end of the month even now that I don't need to worry about it. It absolutely sucks and makes all your life worse.

I've never heard anyone who's actually struggled spout the nonsense you have.

I've never had an upper class life, quite the opposite. What's a shithead? You mean someone privileged like you are now?

Notice how they always accuse others of what they themselves are.

But there has been significant change in the status quo in the last 150 years...

Having electricity in ones house wasnt even common until the 1890s. Racism was common, if not the default.

Having electricity in ones house wasnt even common until the 1890s.

Does that make a better lifer? Maybe maybe not. Life is about more than what toys you have. There are many negatives about modern life that we didn't have and pointing at how much tech crap you can now afford does not offset that.

Racism was common, if not the default.

It still is, just not always targeted at the same people.

100% of children would die. The world was awful, is awful and continue to be awful. We bring sentient beings to life to only subject them to the inevitable death.

What a silly thought. I'll take my 40? 60? 80? 100? years of life over an eternity of nothingness any day of the week, thanks.

The world sucks? Maybe so. It also contains food, love, music, children, laughter, grandparents, trees, cats, and just fuckin' pathos, man.

Try not to waste it!

You'll have an eternity of nothingness regardless of how many years of life you get. Perhaps you don't want only an eternity of nothingness.

As for the pathos, I've a hard time believing it compensates for even a billionth of say, the suffering of an abused child. There's no doubt that it would have better (impersonally, as Derek Parfit used that word) if the world didn't exist. But now that you're here, might as well enjoy it, but perpetuating it doesn't seem wise.

no doubt that it would have been better if the world didn't exist

I strongly doubt this, for what little that's worth.

Better by what metric? Better for whom?

Better by what metric? Better for whom?

From Derek Parfit's On What Matters, chapter 126 (Has It All Been Worth It?):

If someone dies a slow and painful death, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended earlier. The last part of this person’s life was worse than nothing, or in itself bad. We can reach similar conclusions about the whole of someone’s life. If someone’s life contains much prolonged suffering, and nothing or little that is good, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended just after it started. Things may be in one way different if we suppose instead that this person’s life had never even started. Perhaps we could not claim that this alternative would have been better for this person. But when we ask which alternative would have been impersonally better, there is little difference between these two comparisons. Since it would have been better if this person’s life had stopped just after it started, it would also have been better if this person’s life had never started. In other words, it would have been impersonally better if this wretched person had never existed. And since such claims make sense when applied to one person, they also make sense when applied to all conscious beings, or to the whole of reality.

Parfit thinks it was/is worth it, given the good things in life, and using future improvements in QoL as one of the arguments.

I don't. What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood? It would be very difficult to justify the creation of a world given that tradeoff, but people are much hesitant to accept that it is unjustified now that it already exists.

I am wildly uneducated on this topic, but I don't know if the concept of "impersonally better" makes sense when extended as far as "it would be impersonally better if none of this ever existed." I guess I can buy that "impersonally better" might be intelligible if there is some subjective experience to ... experience it, but in a universe with no consciousness how could we say any state of affairs is better than another?

As for this question:

What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood?

I'm not really in the business of doing these sorts of utilitarian calculations, and I think this back-and-forth is a great example of why I don't think they lead anywhere useful. But it seems to me that you could make the same argument as Parfit above in reverse.

If someone led an essentially perfect life for 100 years, filled with all the things we all agree make life good, but then was subjected to 30 seconds of torture and then murdered, that's still a good life on net, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a serious argument that those 30 seconds of intense suffering at the end are terrible enough to make that life not having been worth living.

So, by the same kind of induction that Parfit does above, it seems you could contrive a situation where the vast amount of universal conscious flourishing being experienced by, let's say, quadrillions or consciousnesses would "outweigh" the suffering of however many millions of apes it took to get there.

And even in the particular case of a horribly murdered child, is it universally true that no life ending in that manner could have been worth the suffering at the end? If a child lives ten wonderful years with loving parents, doing all the best things a child can do, but then dies horribly, can we be sure that life wasn't worth living? That it would be better on net had it never happened?

I'm not sure, and like I said, I don't typically go in for arguments that work on this basis. I'll admit that's probably partially because they feel distasteful, but I think there's also an intuition worth examining that those types of arguments don't really work, that they miss something critical about subjective experience when we try to sum up all the goods and bads of a life into some metric that can assign that life into a bucket of "worth living" or "not worth living."

tl;dr - I'm not convinced, and I'm happy I exist.

no doubt that it would have been better if the world didn't exist

That's incredibly boring though.

Good for you. But remember, not all brains are wired the same. Mine certainly isn't, and I'm not alone in this. The things you've listed, they just don't outweigh the pain of life and the inevitability of death for me. Nothing in life does.

You might feel it's your place to say things like "don't waste your life" or "seek therapy", assuming I haven't tried or don't know about these options. For a long time, I envied people like you, those who wake up every day with a reason, thinking there was something wrong with me. But the truth is, I was just born this way.

So, unless you can magically ensure that any life you bring into this world won't be burdened with a brain predisposed to unending existential suffering, I'd argue that you're not seeing the full picture.

No, not all children die while being a child.

Antinatalism (the philosophy that having kids is immoral) has nothing to do with life expectancy.

Super helpful, have a great day

The part of 4.4% children worldwide die vs. in the European Union 0.47% of all children die forgets to mention that the EU has much, much fewer children (comparatively speaking, as in children per women) compared to the places where child mortality rate is still (comparatively) high, i.e. places like Central and East Africa.

Which is to say that were we to really want to make Africa reach European levels of (lower) child mortality that would also mean that the same Africa will start have much fewer children, at the same levels Europe is right now, which, adding it all up, means that we will end up having fewer children as a whole (for our entire planet, that is). Which means that this policy of trying to make the world "better" would end up actually making it worst, that is it will make us (the human species) have (much) fewer children in the future.

This sort of utilitarian calculus isn’t even believed by utilitarians. Simply having more people doesn’t make the world better (or worse.)

This comment reminds me of the Robert Silverberg novel “The World Inside” where the world is dominated by a belief that reproduction is the highest good.

Simply having more people doesn’t make the world better

That's literally what the original post says, that we should have more children alive (by less of them dying). I tried explaining how trying to have less children die will make us have fewer (alive) children as a whole.

I have also not mentioned anything about utilitarianism, I was following Max Roser's logic on this (I personally find that a Northern guy like Roser writing about what Africa should do about its children is pretty colonialist, but that's not relevant to this post).

Having fewer children globally would make the world a better place. Less people with better quality of life is better than more with much worse quality of life.

California cut PMR and IMR over the last two decades. By that time, the state had already hit the demographic decline.

Just can recommend this great talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78

Amount of kids is strongly linked to child mortality and access to health care access.

Birth rates in Africa are already on their slow journey to decline. At the very least they’re dropping. Maybe we can expect a similar trajectory to India that reduced its birth rate from 6 to below replacement rate of 1.9 in about 20 years.

The world will end in a technologically enabled autocracy, with private robot armies controlled by the elites that enslave humanity and cull the population.

Democracy will be obsolete soon once mass media and social media can manipulate people at will, via AI agents of misinformation.

Technology augments individuals and given sufficient augmentation, the power of one individual will be larger than the power of millions. This is already the case economically and politically, and that will soon be the case militarily.

I think that may be a key point. People (a large percentage of people) can be manipulated at the flick of a switch due to advancements in technology and science. Therefore democracy as an ideal must of died sometime around 2014

When was the last time "the people" were actually in charge?

I think "democracy" died in ancient Greece, along with its actual meaning.

The only modern interpretation that is consistent with the original meaning is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Any "dictatorship of the proletariat" ended up as oligarchy very quickly.

Like the mess after the French revolution?

that's some mind you have

seeing into the future like that

Finally, someone who sees the writing on the wall and isn't afraid to positive thinking themselves out of it.

Clearly, a world where thousands of tragedies happen every single day is awful.

Here I will take the heartless position and say that it is not clear to me that this statement is true. I certainly agree that it's a tragedy for the people involved. But if 4.4% of children dying before age 15 means that the world is an awful place, at what point would that stop being true? 2.2%? 1E-10%? I don't think the world is an awful place, I think it's a good place, getting better in some ways, with a long way to go in many others.

Consider how the western world reacted when the harsh version of Mother Nature visited their lands temporarily during COVID...a few percentages sure seemed to be a big deal then. Luckily now that things are back to normal and people are thinking "rationally", we can once again see that it is not.

This was not a universally held position, so I don't see how it helps as a parallel in this case.

In video games and sports, perfection of gameplay is often the difference between winning and losing, perhaps the same is true of the real world.

This doesn't just apply to covid - the reality is that a lot of global human suffering is being generated to prop up firstworld lifestyles, and the beneficiaries of that status quo have both material and psychological reasons for closing their eyes to it.

People have a much easier time with telling themselves "sometimes suffering just happens and can't be helped" when the suffering is inflicted on strangers who are far away. The party can continue when you convince yourself there is no child in the cobalt mine, only cool new smartphone features.

I agree, the statement is just poorly written. A qualifier like "awful" is only ever in relation to something else.

Statement 3 (the world can be much better) is essentially a better formulation. 4.4% is awful in relation to 0.47%, which is possible.

The world is not awful. The world just is.

It's just humans create environment they don't understand and can't handle, and it takes them a lot of time and effort to even somehow organise it on a small piece of a land. And then it ruins, and then they construct it again, and cetera.

I mean, if you're rejecting that humans assign values to things around them, then nothing is anything.

Well, humans love too much assigning values to things around them, randomly-emotionally, and these values tell more about flaws of humans cognition, not the things itself.

Say, one of cases of judgement about about "world" is something like "world became a better place" usually feels like a person thinks that some fundamental constants has changed, and changed irreversibly. So before humans managed to enslave and kill each other but now magically stopped. Slavery no more, democracy! And then putin starts a full-scale invalion on Ukraine, it's exception. And when exception turns into rule everyone forgets about their misprediction and postrationalises the new agenda (it was obvious that it's going to happen), it looks funny.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

Tao Te Ching 29, Stephen Mitchell

Do you want to improve the world?

I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.

It can’t be improved.

If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

I think you can improve yourself. Is that the same as improving the world?

I mean, if you are a worm then you see the world through worm's eyes.

Then, if you become a butterfly, you see the world through butterfly's eyes.

So the world is transformed for the better. Right?

Here's my take

You are part of the world. You change and improve and also decay and die. These things are natural, they do not need to be forced. Sometimes forcing something makes it happen faster, but oftentimes its like forcing taking a shit: you just end up more constipated.

Here's the principal: be able to wait until the right action arises on it's own. Perform the action and step away.

You are a human, a complex biological organism. Actions are part of your nature. Let your emotions and actions happen with serenity and grace. There is nothing to gain by forcing them except to create your own constipation.

Watch out for Chapter 1 though. ;)

The TTC is very crafty, almost like it's testing you to see if you're paying attention.

how is this article dated 2018 using statistics dated 2021?

At the bottom of the article: "This is a revised and updated version published in February 2023." (I agree that this should be near the top, next to the publication date, to make it much clearer).

Ah so it does, thank you!

These are contradictory statements because they are politically loaded. The "things are alright, and are getting better, but we can do even better" party doesn't energize people, and no one wants to be that party, even if it accurately describes things.

I'm looking forward to the TAAAAGBBWCDEB Party rallies:

  — What do we want?
  — Gradual change!
  — When do we want it?
  — In due course!

I appreciate the local approach to referenda. A referendum can be brought "solve X with Y!", but the government then has a chance to say, "we agree that X is a problem, but we think it'd be more effectively addressed via Z". Then we all vote for either Y, or Z, or (the most popular response) "X ain't so broke; don't fix it"

Fun fact: Our World in Data is a YC funded non-profit

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/our-world-in-data

too late to edit, but you can read about their 2019 experiences at YC here:

https://ourworldindata.org/owid-at-ycombinator

When people focus on the positives, they aren't doing so to negate the negatives. They are doing so because many people are just factually wrong about things, like saying life was better in the 50s or something, which is just objectively false. One of the best ways to strive forward is optimism of the future and optimism about how far we've come; looking and longing for the past is not a great way to move forward or solve problems. That's one thing I didn't care about the opening statement. Sort of missed that point.

'Better life' or 'worse life' is always subjective, there is no way to objectively quantify what makes one life 'better' than another. You could list every objective measure imaginable (life expectancy, education, access to opportunity, etc.) and you would not be close to capturing or defining 'a better life'. Human satisfaction is largely a felt quality, an emotion that transcends data points.

Optimism is currently being used to fuel false political narratives. Any article on the topic can't help but feel political given the circumstances. Not just left vs. right, but capitalism vs. socialism, rich vs. poor, majority vs. minority. 'Things are better now then they ever have been' is an argument used in all those arenas. It's not am objective argument in any of them, it's a rhetorical device that advocates for the status quo.

We shouldn't be optimistic or pessimistic about the future, we should be both.

Demagogues on the right, left, and along every axis make a living by shining a light on one of these and leaving others in darkness. We buy it because it's easy to pick a side when you're only looking at one angle, and easy feels better.

The people who can see that we've got room for improvement without poo-pooing the gains that we've made are the best sort of people. Sadly that's the center and the center has a hard time keeping hold of most people's minds.

I would argue that the center has a hard time keeping hold of the loudest people's minds. Most people are closer to the center then social media would have you believe.

I wonder how my children will live in this much better world where the climate is collapsing, a global war is looming, the spectre of unemployment due to automation is everywhere, surveillance will soon be unescapable with every person having a personal llm agent checking them, inequality soaring and so on. Eh who cares, my genes tell me they must move forward so uhh sucks for my kids I guess

Your ancestors lived during the great depression, both world wars, the middle ages, et cetera. Surely many of them must have been pessimistic about the future, yet they all had kids...

eliminate all corrupted beuaro rats, kings, specific war starters, lethal extremists, with the protocol being a well rounded thought out basis. a nuke button not for them to use but to wipe these types off the map....

lethal extremists

wipe these types off the map

yeah... I agree with some of the sentiment but some self -awareness is also good. perhaps we should learn to love the lethal extremist inside us.

As an aside to this, I am reminded of paraconsistent logic systems [1] and three valued logic [2].

One quote I like from the three valued logic system, referencing Charles Sanders Peirce, states:

Peirce soundly rejected the idea all propositions must be either true or false; boundary-propositions, he writes, are "at the limit between P and not P."

I also recall reading some description of Buddhist or Advaita Vedanta where logical systems that rejected the law of non-contradiction were explored. I can't find the exact reference, but I recall it was related to the Two Truths doctrine which leads me to believe it was explored by Nagarjuna.

At any rate, the idea that two contradictory things can be true simultaneously is a very interesting area to explore.

Edit: To add to the link list: Dialetheism [4] is the view that there are statements that are both true and false

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism

Young people are more optimistic than older people, but they often lose their optimism as they grow up. They face more problems and challenges in the world, and they become more cynical and pessimistic. This is a tragedy, because we need optimistic people to make positive changes in the world. That is why we recommend reading more from very young people who are making a difference in the world. They are the voice of the new generation, and they have a lot to teach us about optimism and hope. If you are curious to learn more,check out this link where we did a visual analyze of some of their inspiring stories. https://twitter.com/sustaincia/status/1657354485877059584?t=...

Our World in Data is a thinktank touting the same old progressivist agenda that's keeping us from solving climate change through degrowth.

Case in point, they've released a blog post saying that carbon dioxide pollution is beginning to decouple from GDP growth, which is only weakly happening in a handful of countries with lots of alternative energy sources, and this is only because they haven't accounted all pollution due to consumption.

The only optimists these days are humanists. Environmentalists generally think the planet is kind of screwed.

A lot of awful things happen because some people think they can fix "the world". We can fix ourselves one by one, not all at once.

Solving the Malaria and vitamin A deficiency is noble, I suppose, but only addresses the underlying condition of death.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

One day we’ll collectively realize how damaging constant access to “news” (in the modern day, engagement-optimized despair/outrage/fear porn) is on our mental health. Until then we’ll never be able to square the circle of how things can be so bad while our actual immediate lives are perfectly fine

Every point is a growth point, every point was a growth point.

"Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better"

- Laurie Anderson, "Language Is a Virus from Outer Space"

Good article. I agree with the sentiment. It is easy to be pessimistic, and it is dangerous to be complacent. Recognizing that progress is occurring should motivate future actions, whereas believing the world is inevitably getting worse, or that it will get better on its own, can lead one to give up or withdraw from the world.

I caveat this praise with my now instinctive skepticism of all of these EA projects coming out of Oxford. It feels like an overfunded set of charities.

I do recommend David Byrne's Reasons to be Cheerful https://reasonstobecheerful.world/ a project that 'aims to inspire us all to be curious about how the world can be better, and to ask ourselves how we can be part of that change'.

More children = More slaves

Do not fall into the capitalistic rethoric.

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32173146 - July 2022 (121 comments)

But what about that ragebait headline I read the other day? Clearly the entire system must be burnt to the ground.

It is bad because I have a loan. It was worse because I had no money. It can be better because I could repay the loans. ... It is going to be a disaster but let my grandchildren worry about it.

The world on big measures is going better than it has. I am constantly annoyed there are too many in power slowing process to actually do better. If we all wanted it to be better to avoid preventable deaths and disability we could make progress a lot faster than we do.

(2023)

It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible.

I'll disagree with all of that. Awful, better, and improving are all measured differently, however these observations will push, pull, and merge with other observations. Quality of life is not so clean that we can dismiss any part of it as trivial.