Science as a Brief Candle in the Dark

[Bomb#20]

I think bilby is misled.

I have not heard anything about Malthus being 'wrong'. Indeed, I understand his theory still underlies much of population sciences. I believe Aldo Leopold applied it in his studies of animal populations. Successfully. And, IIRC, Malthus postulates that no matter what factor acts to increase available resources, including technology, the population will expand to meet that increase until the point of mere subsistence is once again attained....

I think bilby suffers from Micawberian delusions.

It's not a matter of what you've heard about -- if you haven't read it, read it. It's very well reasoned. And it's wrong, because his argument implicitly takes for granted that contraception is hard, a perfectly sensible thing to take for granted when he wrote it. But contraception isn't hard any more. (Of course it is still hard for animal populations.)

I don't know any demographers who take Malthus seriously. They usually believe that the basis of their work should be empirical evidence, not the ramblings of a Victorian armchair social scientist who wanted an legitimate sounding excuse to kill Irishmen. The overpopulation hysteria is pseudoscience.

I take it you haven't read Malthus either. It isn't rambling, and it isn't an argument for killing Irishmen. It's an argument for why communism can't work.

 

[Politesse]

I think bilby is misled.

I have not heard anything about Malthus being 'wrong'. Indeed, I understand his theory still underlies much of population sciences. I believe Aldo Leopold applied it in his studies of animal populations. Successfully. And, IIRC, Malthus postulates that no matter what factor acts to increase available resources, including technology, the population will expand to meet that increase until the point of mere subsistence is once again attained....

I think bilby suffers from Micawberian delusions.

It's not a matter of what you've heard about -- if you haven't read it, read it. It's very well reasoned. And it's wrong, because his argument implicitly takes for granted that contraception is hard, a perfectly sensible thing to take for granted when he wrote it. But contraception isn't hard any more. (Of course it is still hard for animal populations.)

I don't know any demographers who take Malthus seriously. They usually believe that the basis of their work should be empirical evidence, not the ramblings of a Victorian armchair social scientist who wanted an legitimate sounding excuse to kill Irishmen. The overpopulation hysteria is pseudoscience.

I take it you haven't read Malthus either. It isn't rambling, and it isn't an argument for killing Irishmen. It's an argument for why communism can't work.

Malthus' murderous involvement in the Irish famine is a matter of historical fact.

 

[steve_bank]

A new report from the UN says that while over the last few decades global poverty has been declining, food availability is starting to become a problem again due to climate change.

India is at or near maxing out water supplies. The University Of Washington predicts due to decreasing snowpacks the Columbia River will be dtawing down. It provides water for Washington and Oregon agriculture.

A govt study says La will be running out of drinking water in 30-40 years. The Colorado River is almost totally consumed. Even without drought Ca agriculture is in trouble.

Our midwest aquifers are drawing down. Govt projections are we will become a net food importer than exporter.

Population growth can not be ignored. Dismissing population issues is like climate change deniers.

So how would reducing population solve any of those actual, factually real problems? I grew up in the central valley of California, and can assure you with great certainty from personal experience that our water shortage problems here are critical... and have nothing to do with poor people drinking too much tap water.

View attachment 17627View attachment 17628

What science has done is temporarily taken us out of any natural checks and balances. Population will grow as will any organism unchecked until energy=food is exausted.

Predator and prey. As prey increases due to say good weather and plants, predators can support more offspring until prey diminishes, and then predator diminishes. A dynamic balance.

From what I read of local Puget Sound history when large numbers of white settlers arrived in the region the Native Americans had a pretty good life.

Some lived in wood structures using utensils to eat. Plenty of fresh water, timber, game, and sea life. They lived in proportion to the resources. Along came large numbers of settlers and destroyed the balance. Forests were denuded.

We are seeing the beginning of climate change that will have major effects on future humans.

There is another risk out there. Mass commercial agribusiness has reduced biodiversity making crops more sucsptiple to potential disease.

We are culturally unable and ideologically unable in the USA to deal with emerging problems. Some is the majority mix of Christianity and politics. From Genesis god gave the Earth to humans to be consumed. Part of it is greed, profit over environment. Part of itn is a lack of a general common philosophy based on reason and logical analysis.

Starting in primary education and with video imagery we are conditioned to be consumer bots not thinking individuals. IMO the west is unsustainable. Trump is quickening the process. You listen to economists on cable. National debt is accelerating and tax revenues despites cuts are not rising.

The next bubble collapse may be catastrophic. The last financial collapse was teetering on catastrophic. Big auto inclusing all area affected accounts for a large part of the economy. If it had faikled end of story.

Us humans are collectively sheep like and dumb as rocks. Science does not equal wisdom.

 

[Bomb#20]

I take it you haven't read Malthus either. It isn't rambling, and it isn't an argument for killing Irishmen. It's an argument for why communism can't work.

Malthus' murderous involvement in the Irish famine is a matter of historical fact.

The famine that happened eleven years after Malthus died?

 

[fromderinside]

Whoa-ah. Did somebody blow out the candle? I believe Malthus was instrumental in enacting British laws which resulted in failure to help the Irish with such as wheat when potatoes failed.

 

[Politesse]

I take it you haven't read Malthus either. It isn't rambling, and it isn't an argument for killing Irishmen. It's an argument for why communism can't work.

Malthus' murderous involvement in the Irish famine is a matter of historical fact.

The famine that happened eleven years after Malthus died?

Yes, that one. Read some books, it was no coincidence that the British government responded as it did.

- - - Updated - - -

From what I read of local Puget Sound history when large numbers of white settlers arrived in the region the Native Americans had a pretty good life.

Some lived in wood structures using utensils to eat. Plenty of fresh water, timber, game, and sea life. They lived in proportion to the resources. Along came large numbers of settlers and destroyed the balance. Forests were denuded.

Thus handily disproving Malthus' hypothesis, considering how long they had been there without a sudden, exponential increase in population resulting in a British-style utter destruction of the landscape.

I quite agree with all of the problems you cite in your remaining post; our approach to living on this planet is perilously maladaptive, no matter how many or how few of us there are. There could be only 1000 surviving residents of California, and collectivizing ownership of land under the monopolistic rule of three or four mostly unregulated agricultural conglomerates would still be a terrible idea. No one would starve in the immediate sense, I suppose, but the destruction of the ecological system would still make life harder for the thousand lucky residents eventually.

 

[Bomb#20]

Whoa-ah. Did somebody blow out the candle? I believe Malthus was instrumental in enacting British laws which resulted in failure to help the Irish with such as wheat when potatoes failed.

Which laws did Britain need to enact in order to fail to help the Irish? Was there a "Britain must help the Irish." law on the books that Malthus got repealed?

Malthus' murderous involvement in the Irish famine is a matter of historical fact.

The famine that happened eleven years after Malthus died?

Yes, that one. Read some books, it was no coincidence that the British government responded as it did.

These would be books that say either Britain responded as it did because 47 years earlier an academic wanted to kill Irishmen, or else it was just a coincidence that 47 years after his essay that didn't advocate killing Irishmen came out, the British government went right on screwing over the Irish the same as it had been doing for the previous 200 years? You appear to be engaging in a false dilemma fallacy.

The Irish died because the English stole their land.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/20/historybooks.famine

...
Lytton believed in free trade. He did nothing to check the huge hikes in grain prices, Economic "modernization" led household and village reserves to be transferred to central depots using recently built railroads. Much was exported to England, where there had been poor harvests. Telegraph technology allowed prices to be centrally co-ordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns. Relief funds were scanty because Lytton was eager to finance military campaigns in Afghanistan. Conditions in emergency camps were so terrible that some peasants preferred to go to jail. A few, starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism. This was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature's response to Indian over-breeding.
...

 

[fromderinside]

Which laws did Britain need to enact in order to fail to help the Irish? Was there a "Britain must help the Irish." law on the books that Malthus got repealed?

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml

What, then, were the ideologies that held the British political élite and the middle classes in their grip, and largely determined the decisions not to adopt the possible relief measures outlined above? There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of 'moralism'.

Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.

The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September 1847 after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs' cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration. The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate.

Slam dunk!

 

[rousseau]

What are we talking about again?

 

[rousseau]

..snip..

Without dealing with the substance of your post I'll just note that my above post was left deliberately vague.

Historically, we're working on malthusian cycles where technology progresses due to population pressures. For the most part, this is never done with sustainability in mind, but instead usually to react to the current environment to improve immediate survival conditions for profit. During the enlightenment era the rise of science happened in reaction to how shitty everything was. But a side effect of science was that we became so overwhelmingly good at extracting energy from our environment that a kind of energy bonanza happened.

In some sense this was pretty much pre-determined to happen, so I don't think it's a blight on the character of humanity that it did. But on the other hand it just makes me laugh that we talk about the scientific revolution as 'progressive' when it may have catastrophic consequences on our future. In that light, it may not be a negative, and I'm definitely not saying we need to go back to a by-gone era, but I'm not sure 'progress' is the right word.

Malthus was wrong, and I think you are too

Population expansion followed technological advance, rather than drove it - as we became able to keep more people alive, humanity expanded to fill the new capability, not because of higher birthrates, but because the technologies reduced death rates.

In the 19th and particularly the 20th century, we became so good at keeping people alive that we were able to support massive population increases; But then something completely novel happened - women stopped having babies, because for the first time in human history, they had the choice to do so, the means to do so safely without denying the natural inclination of humans to fuck a lot, the expectation that having only one or two children would be sufficient to ensure the presence of adult children in her dotage, and the education to be more useful to themselves as humans than as baby-factories.

There is almost no plausible future scenario that would be more catastrophic for humanity than abandonment of technology; If we stop and try to hold in place, everything will go to shit. If we go back, everything will go to shit even faster. If we continue with current progress, then there is a small chance that everything will go to shit, but more likely, it won't.

The most plausible future for humanity is a stable population of 10 billion or so, living wealthy lives of high energy consumption, and high resource turnover*. There are a number of significant hurdles to overcome to get from here to there; but technology will play a very large role in getting us over those hurdles.

The only plausible way for us to fuck this up, is to try to stop technological progress due to a false and shortsighted idea that its minor (but obvious and worrying) problems outweigh its huge (and pervasive, but not obvious), benefits.

Imagine, if you would, talking a medieval merchant - a wealthy and educated man of his times - through a normal day in your life. He would spend the whole day with his jaw dragging the floor in astonishment at the wondrous things that you hardly even notice. Everything you do, eat, wear, live in, etc., is incredibly easy, luxurious, and spectacular, from his perspective. People adapt to the amazing so fast and so thoroughly that they no more notice the beneficial technologies that dominate every aspect of their life than a fish notices how wet everything is.

We evolved with an inherent tendency to be fearful of the novel, and distrusting of change. But the things we fear are rarely the real threats; And the things we take for granted are often far more strange and new than we realize. As long as we continue to (on average) prioritize fact over superstition, and thought and reason over appeals to nature, we will be just fine.



*Note that resources are not (and indeed, cannot be) consumed; With sufficient energy available, we can re-concentrate and recycle any resources we want, with the possible exception of Helium.

Now I've had a chance to fully ready this post.

These are valid points, but they don't address the central point which is: the arc of history is essentially inevitable. Technology wasn't a choice, it's just something that happens. In that light technology is neither good or bad, it's just part and parcel to our history. To call it 'progress' would ignore all of the shittiness, to call it 'evil' would ignore all of the good it's done. I argue it's neither, it just is.

You've taken my post and taken it in your own direction.

 

[rousseau]

A few maxims on epistemology, science, and religion:

- we cannot perceive that which we do not know
- so: before the rise of science, the material nature of the universe was largely unknowable
- so: religion/myth predominated
- so: knowledge of the universe, secularism, materialism, is contingent on modern science and similar
- so: all of us are only secular because secularism is now knowable

Science as a Brief Candle in the Dark

Are you sure you thought this through? If the so called material world is only accessible via the rise of Western-style science, and was "unknowable" in the absence of this paradigm, then that seems like a pretty serious argument against the claimed objectivity of science. You shouldn't need to belong to a philosophical school in order to perceive an objective fact.

Luckily, the weight of evidence is strongly against you. While they did not draw the same distinctions and boundaries around it that you do, all cultures that ever existed have been capable of perceiving, evaluating, and predicting the material universe. Science is awesome, but it is not the only way to approach the material, and I would challenge whether it is the sole property of secular societies at all. "Secular" is a term with only culture-specific historical meaning, and contested meaning at that. Science is a universally accessible paradigm that should work equally well regardless of personal prejudices.

That is true, but the North American indigenous ca 5000 B.C. were showing respect to animal spirits, while in the past few hundred years the advance of Western style science has meant absolutely incredible advances in our knowledge.

Point being that pre-scientific cultures were at about a 2, and post-scientific cultures are at about a 20.

If I was going to ask a person from either of those groups how the world worked.. I'd go with someone from a post-scientific culture. That's not about understanding toward the end of survival.. that's about understanding toward the end of transcendence.

 

[Politesse]

That is true, but the North American indigenous ca 5000 B.C. were showing respect to animal spirits, while in the past few hundred years the advance of Western style science has meant absolutely incredible advances in our knowledge.

And the swift, brutal destruction of an ecosystem that nearly a fifth of the modern world relies on for produce and fuel. Good thinking, that.

Me, I'd avoid making sweeping decisions based on what I believe to be a "superior" cultural model, and instead employ universally accessible reason to decide what is best, regardless of what culture the idea came from.

 

[rousseau]

That is true, but the North American indigenous ca 5000 B.C. were showing respect to animal spirits, while in the past few hundred years the advance of Western style science has meant absolutely incredible advances in our knowledge.

And the swift, brutal destruction of an ecosystem that nearly a fifth of the modern world relies on for produce and fuel. Good thinking, that.

Me, I'd avoid making sweeping decisions based on what I believe to be a "superior" cultural model, and instead employ universally accessible reason to decide what is best, regardless of what culture the idea came from.

You said the words 'superior' cultural model, not me.

I said post-scientific cultures are good at producing knowledge. Side effects aside, this thread is about knowing the universe.

 

[Lion IRC]

What?
All the really useful science was done well before the 17th century.
Fire, the wheel, buoyancy/boats, the lever, the inclined plane, algebra, agriculture...

And even into the 17th century all the really useful scientists were deeply theistic - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Confucians, Hindus...

Why am I not surprised that you disparage the value of every advance of the modern age?

Applauding one area of science isn't disparaging another.

On the other hand, Christianity is not more thoroughly disbelieved by atheist scientists than it is by Muslim, Jewish, Confucian or Hindu scientists. Your insane persistence in lumping together people who think your religion is all kinds of wrong, and declaring them to be supportive of your religious positions because they fall under the term 'theists', is not fooling anyone, except, perhaps, you.

They ARE all theists.
And if any one single tiny aspect of their religion is true, then your atheism is COMPLETELY false.

I don't know why you are trying to shoe-horn me into Christian Particularism.
I defend theism first, monotheism second, biblical monotheism third, 'mere Christianity' fourth, and lastly (very seldom if ever in a place like this) I will defend my own personal, fairly orthodox attempt at Christianity.

 

[bilby]

Applauding one area of science isn't disparaging another.

It's not; But that's not what you did. You said ALL the really useful science occurred before a given date. That's disparaging of any later science.

On the other hand, Christianity is not more thoroughly disbelieved by atheist scientists than it is by Muslim, Jewish, Confucian or Hindu scientists. Your insane persistence in lumping together people who think your religion is all kinds of wrong, and declaring them to be supportive of your religious positions because they fall under the term 'theists', is not fooling anyone, except, perhaps, you.

They ARE all theists.
And if any one single tiny aspect of their religion is true, then your atheism is COMPLETELY false.

Not so. There are lots of bits of religious belief that are compatible with atheism. Religion centres on theism, but is broader than that.

And of course, Christianity is no more compatible with the existence and divinity of Ganesh than atheism is.

I don't know why you are trying to shoe-horn me into Christian Particularism.
I defend theism first, monotheism second, biblical monotheism third, 'mere Christianity' fourth, and lastly (very seldom if ever in a place like this) I will defend my own personal, fairly orthodox attempt at Christianity.

I know; But you are clearly and demonstrably wrong to take that approach.

Your reasoning is fragmented, and bits of it are incompatible with other bits. That unavoidably leads to the logical conclusion that some or all of it is wrong.

 

[fromderinside]

Why is it that when one calls something a forest another disagrees because there are meadows in it. As an atheist I acknowledge and practice many habits religions forster. Doing unto others as I would have them do to me works for me.

 

[steve_bank]

Why is it that when one calls something a forest another disagrees because there are meadows in it. As an atheist I acknowledge and practice many habits religions forster. Doing unto others as I would have them do to me works for me.

One of the most profound insights on the forum. A lot said in an economy of words.

 

[Bomb#20]

. This was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature's response to Indian over-breeding.
...

So, the administrators' lack of interest in keeping Indians alive is evidence that Malthus wanted to kill Irishmen?

Suppose for the sake of argument that we can find believers in Darwinism who offered survival of the fittest as justification for committing genocide. Do you feel that would justify calling the Origin of Species the ramblings of a Victorian armchair zoological scientist who wanted a legitimate sounding excuse to kill Jews, Gypsies and the handicapped, and claiming Darwin's murderous involvement in the Holocaust is a matter of historical fact?

Whoa-ah. Did somebody blow out the candle? I believe Malthus was instrumental in enacting British laws which resulted in failure to help the Irish with such as wheat when potatoes failed.

Which laws did Britain need to enact in order to fail to help the Irish? Was there a "Britain must help the Irish." law on the books that Malthus got repealed?

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml

What, then, were the ideologies that held the British political élite and the middle classes in their grip, and largely determined the decisions not to adopt the possible relief measures outlined above?

"Largely determined"?!? Ideologies?!? How could the authors possibly know these ideologies "largely determined" decisions not to do anything? That's a claim that, but for the ideologies, the British would have voted to tax themselves to help out a bunch of foreigners. Why would anyone believe such a counterfactual hypothesis? What evidence is there that it wan't plain vanilla selfishness that inclined the British political elite and the middle classes not to tax themselves to help out a bunch of foreigners? Do you tithe yourself to pay for hunger relief in Burundi? Assuming you don't, does it take an ideology to "largely determine" your decision not to?

There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of 'moralism'.

Even if the ideology explanation were correct, I can't help noticing none of those are Malthus's fault.

Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.

Well, Malthus was no fan of laissez-faire.

The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September 1847 after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs' cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration. The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate.

Slam dunk!

Slam dunk for exactly what contention?

 

[fromderinside]

Slam dunk in the direction I indicated. Malthus wasn't so much anti-irish as he was misguided economically. He used that false ideology to advantage with Whigs enacting stifling policies for later disaster. When some listen to a concert others hear Rap and vica versa. Spirit of the times old fella spirit of the times.