2
points
Rescis
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- Several hundred million dollars at best gets you a mile of subway in an American city: https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
Experimentation with alternatives is desperately needed.
- 1 point
- 1 point
- My experience is mostly with epilepsy, but CBD at dosages of 25-100mg (varying on the intensity of the siezure) really does help better then any prescribed medication my partner has tried. It's not ridiculous to me that it's effect on other systems in your body we don't know much about could be significant.
I do agree though, regularily using 500-1000mg's a week gets expensive.
- To start, we are at 7.53 /billion/, not trillion.
Second, ever single time someone has said that overpopulation was going to be the end of us, they've been wrong. To quote Wikipedia, which go so far back as Ancient Carthage and Greece:
Concern about overpopulation is an ancient topic. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, when the population of the world was about 190 million (only 3–4% of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us.... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Before that, Plato, Aristotle and others broached the topic as well. [1]
Finally, to answer your question of "How can the world support so many of us?", I would like to point at that with every new person born, that is a new person thinking of scientific advancements that can be made, producing stuff for others, for their kids, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#History_o...
- Why do you say that?
Far more industry leading companies (much less companies as a whole) have rose and fall in power, changed their goals/products/management/etc in the past 5/15/50/etc years than governments. Turnover is far higher in corporation management positions than congresses and parliaments, and further, there is no law saying that I have to buy any specific good from a company, whereas I don't get a choice in which government I pay to build the the roads or police where I have established my life.
- This is outside of my normal area of expertise, but from what I gather, the total geothermal power output was around 14 GWH in 2017 [1], with an estimated maximum of 2TW possible worldwide if we develop every spot available [2].
It looks like the current estimates of baseline power lost through plate tectonics from the mantle are 35-47 TW, "from secular cooling, internal radioactivity, and core heatflow across its base" [3,4]. To bring these numbers into scale, there is approximately 173,000 TW of heat energy bombarding the earth [5]. I am not able to find estimates for the total thermal energy stored in all of the earth, as there is decent debate about what the inner 'layers' are made of; however, it seems doubtful that we are making a large impact even on localized regions with a max current output of 14 GW when compared to the 35 TW per year lost naturally.
[1] https://www.iea.org/topics/renewables/geothermal/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
[3] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016AGUFMDI52A..02D
[4] https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-is-stored-in-the-earth...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
- I feel like you're making two different points:
1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense)
2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die
To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers.
To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad.
I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.
- If reading about Wesley Crusher makes you and I function perceptibly worse, I would argue that doing so is the opposite of striving for perfection. We, as biologically limited beings, have to understand that perfection for robots is different than perfection for people, and that we need to optimize towards being the best possible human we can.
As an aside, I think one of the points of that article was the the parents were inflating a bunch of achievements.
- I feel comfortable equating problem solving with optimization, for while we are still living outside of a utopia, any beneficial system that less than perfectly efficient is causing suffering (from an opportunity cost perspective).
Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'.
I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")
- While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity.
Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.
- It's shrinking by your definition, growing by others (the poor of today are the middle class of history if you look at poverty levels, purchasing power, or class mobility).
Further, we are in a noticeable amount of ways not a free market. If I took my car engine (the free market) to a mechanic and said "It's not working after I just made a couple of random small changes to it", the mechanic would rightfully laugh me out the door because me just meddling with a complex system, even if its only a small amount, can have disastrous side effects.
- > Food exists and we have political problems, therefore food is part of the political problems we have today.
Senators are a very integral and powerful part of our current government, and have a far larger per pound effect than food on the politcal environment.
Your argument seems quite disingenuous.
Similar to how it would be the failure of the user/provider if someone thought it was too expensive to order food in, but the reason they thought that was they were looking at the cost of chartering a helicopter form the restaurant to their house.