I have wondered sometimes whether having more computer programmers in Congress would be useful. When I consider the U.S. Code, my immediate impulse is to _refactor_! It's far, far too complicated for anyone to understand even what the body of law is intended to do with respect to a given subject, much less comprehend the second and third order effects. Unfortunately, these kinds of projects are incredibly difficult to undertake when writing computer code even when everyone involved knows what they're doing, agrees on the goal and is acting in good faith. The additional complications of writing English words that bureaucrats have to interpret & implement and citizens have to comprehend, or debating genuine disagreements in good faith about the best approach, or dealing with actors who are deliberately trying to make obscure changes that benefit a motivated special interest or who just want to wreck the whole project... well, it makes this old-fashioned good government Hubert Humphrey liberal want to throw up my hands.
Is it possible to define a set of criteria for laws that are the equivalent of the question "Will this program compile?"
No, it is not possible. At least not in any meaningful sense. The law can be normalized, meaning that jargon and usage of terms become consistent, it can be written using the canons of construction (rules for parsing) in mind. But it can't be consistent, reliable, or fully legible, for the following reasons:
1) Code is just an abstraction of machine code, which is just an abstraction of a bounded set of physical operations. There are only so many hardware operations a computer can take, and if you define them you can define a set of abstractions that call those, and only those instructions.
2) Code (can be) made to eliminate ambiguity. Assuming well 2 well made compilers with this goal, the same high-level code can be expected to compile into identical binaries for a given hardware platform. With human language, this is not possible. Even with constructed languages that attempt to eliminate this, two people can interpret the same law in different ways.
3) Computing hardware is a relatively closed environment. Human behavior is not. There will always, always, always be new situations where.... its not just that 'oh, we didn't think of that' but its a 'this isn't even reflective of reality'. Consider all the laws on the books around brick-and-mortar restaurants which say 'you must have 1 bathroom per X patrons' and the job of the regulator or lawyer regulating/advising a hip new 0-seats-provided food truck.
Epistemic status - ~10 years experience as code monkey, ~10 years experience helping code monkeys and lawyers and regulators sing in perfect harmony aka avoid going to court against each other.
I have the former experience but not the latter. Thank you for lending it to me. I think you're right, but maybe we can cut out some of the grosser pathologies.
I think law and code are completely different things. Code tells the CPU what to do, it is purely prescriptive. But law isn't like that, because you can't tell The People what to do (although The People can tell any small scattered number of individual people what to do). Criminal law serves largely as just a giant warning billboard on which we write down all the Things we agree are Bad and what we will do to those who do Bad Things, in the hopes that it will give people inclined to do them second thoughts. All the rest I think can be reasonably described as a giant complicated contract agreement between interest groups on how money will flow between them. Law is rewritten as needed, when the power of various interest groups changes, or what they want changes. But I think in the main law is purely descriptive -- it says what we expect to happen, and why, and what we (as a collective) will do when some hard-of-hearing or stupid person violates the collective agreement.
Put it this way: can you imagine the passing or success of *any* law which purported to compel *almost everybody* to do something they don't want to do, object to, find wrong? I can't. But that tells you right there that law is not, and cannot, be proscriptive.
This book review wasn't by Scott, it was by an anonymous ACX reader:
> It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions
which I, as a native Russian speaker, support. It is an accurate quote from "The Brothers Karamazov", but it is unclear to me whether misquotation is actually referring to some additional interpretation, not the phrase itself.
Thanks for this. Yes, I was also confused whether this meant misinterpreted or mistranslated. I speak Russian and have read Brothers Karamazov in the original and agree that the translation above is an accurate one.
I always wonder how concerned to be about the degrowth arguments of the Prophets of Doom. They seem unlikely to persuade anyone who's not already wealthy, but I wouldn't put it past developed nations to try sabotaging global development or dramatically reducing global populations through war and famine - after all, you can justify any atrocity if you convince yourself that the alternative is human extinction.
If it was just the wealthy abstaining from kids.. well, they already do that on a statistical level. The problem is that gosh darn it, it always seems to lead to forced sterilizations and liquidations of those other people. This is not a modern, capitalistic, or western phenomenon, as its been happening for centuries, under various sociopolitical regimes, all over the globe.
The perpetual annoyance of the Malthusians is the fact that personally having 0-2 children doesn't prevent other people from growing the population, therefore coercive measures are required - for the good of the poor, of course!
What for? So far as I know, there are almost zero First World nations that have a fertility at replacement or above. In the CIA Factbook I find only Israel (2.57 children/woman/lifetime), France (2.04), and maybe Iceland (1.96). The developed countries are committing demographic suicide, so either (1) the population will shrink or (2) those cultures won't be around to bitch about whatever *does* happen in a world dominated by sub-Saharan Africans, Southeast Asians, and Orthodox Jews.
"A tall, lanky Norwegian-American broiling under the Mexican sun, seeds from a dozen countries in his blistered hands, just trying to do the right damn thing."
I suppose that's the irony of the contrast - Borlaug really doing it the old-fashioned, agrarian pastoral idyll way, where you cross the strains and plant the resultant seeds and see what is going to happen, and try try again.
There's a strain of Jeffersonian agrarianism in Berry's thought that I always have to be careful to account for when reading him because we're just not going back to that world of smallholders whose economic independence forms the basis of republican virtue, but yes, his writing is vital in understanding where we're at and where we're going.
> On June 3, 1979, Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."[18]
Reading the article, I'm a little sympathetic. He admits to being personally unable to judge the danger of nuclear power, but having ample reason to distrust the US government's assurances that it was safe (which, tbh: fair). But he really is just against electricity and people using it (on the margin), which seems extremely bad and unconvincing. Given the choice between coal and nuclear, he says: "how about neither?".
Which meant, of course, coal plants and the resulting millions dead. (Yes, millions, air pollution is actually quite bad! I wish I had a QALY figure instead, but deaths is what I was able to find.)
I think this is my main gripe with the anti-human strain of environmentalism, actually; something like a focus on purity instead of comparisons or mechanisms or differential development.
If we had an air pollution tax that were fairly applied to coal and nuclear, and required nuclear plants to carry insurance for the risk of meltdowns, then nuclear would beat coal and everyone would be safer and the people who had decided to insure the nuclear plants would have made lots of money by correctly betting on progress. But in part because of the holism, I think most prophets are suspicious of "and then we'll collect a tax on released particulates"--how will particulates be measured? How will the tax be priced? Will it make it through a corrupt Congress in a way that actually changes the behavior of people who don't want their behavior changed?
But this of course means that higher scrutiny is applied where it's possible, which is disproportionately new things, ruling out specifically this sort of wizardly progress. See vapes being banned when cigarettes are not, despite vapes being clearly better for health. (Even if not perfect for health, I think the prophets are missing that people *get something* out of vaping, and so a society with slightly more sickness but lots more stimulants is a better off society! And actually the trade looks something more like 'more stimulants and more health'.)
I am not nearly the radical that Berry is for sure, and I'm definitely pro-Nuclear. That said it seems Berry spent a lot of energy protesting Coal plants as well, so he doesn't have the anti-Nuclear-but-lets-simultaneously-ignore-the-status-quo myopia you sometimes see in anti-Nuclear advocates. You don't need to pull up the QALY figures for me, I did my master's thesis on a comparative energy study project and it indelibly cemented in my mind the unique awfulness of Coal.
All in all I mostly want to see what there is to learn from the strongest arguments of someone like Berry, even if I think they're wrong on certain things (even big ones). The full-steam-ahead crowd often gets very high on its own supply and thinks all problems can be solved by technology and it's not clear to me that all problems ultimately can be.
Yeah; I think it is not obvious that all problems that are caused by technology could also be solved by technology. (Trivial example: suppose you could actually make a dangerous black hole with something like the LHC; you probably can't unmake it as easily. With things like AGI, you have to get it right before you deploy it, and so on.)
But I don't think Berry gets points for spending equal hours protesting coal and nuclear, because those hours hurt nuclear much more. [We stopped building nuclear plants; we didn't stop building coal plants.] My complaint is that Berry and similar people viewed this as 'partial success', instead of putting us in a 'worst of both worlds' situation. [This assumes that a 1970s environmentalist would, forced to choose a way to produce 200 GW for the US, pick the nuclear plants instead of the coal plants; if they would pick the coal instead, then I can't claim they're making the 'opportunity cost' mistake.]
But I do think that looking back at the last 50 years of wizards and prophets, it feels like almost all of the gains have come from wizardry, and the net effect of prophets have been pretty clearly negative? Like, when it comes to the problem of climate change, I think the prophets get some points for yelling about it, and lose at least 10x that many points for blocking construction of nuclear plants, and get roughly none of the points for the increasing adoption of solar. [This is a little controversial because I think prophets were behind subsidies for solar production, but my understanding is that the decrease is price is primarily due to wizards making semiconductor manufacturing better in general, rather than specialization for solar in particular; maybe actually they get something like 20% of the credit here?]
Similarly, when it came to COVID... I dunno, the wizards solved this one in like two days, and then the rest of the system fucked it up, and (from my vantage point at least) that feels mostly because of the prophets instead of because of different wizards doing different things. [It's not like the wizards are the ones saying "let's improve the equity of vaccine distribution" instead of "let's make more vaccines"!]
Honestly trying to assign points to either side is my entire problem with the "wizards vs prophets" formulation. We need to be worried about negative externalities, climate change, and the ongoing extinction crisis, AND we need to figure out innovative solutions that provide prosperity for everyone.
I think the balance between prophets and wizards get the points (could be even within one person). Both are doing their part in balancing the other.
If I imagine a world without wizards there would be obviously no technology and we would still live like in the stone age: definitely a harder live, but perhaps not less happy in average.
In a world without prophets warning from bad potentials piling up, civilization would be like a lottery, with everyone doing what thy think helps but often causing big harm if the get risks, side effects or complex systems wrong.
Just to stick with your example: without prophets perhaps there would be many more nuclear plants, but without so many warning, they would be by far not as save as they are now. Concerning COVID there wold be much less preparations for pandemics and much less medical research. You would have to be a real wizard to catch up with the spreading desease without this strong foundation.
A few interesting examples of unbalanced wizards projects gone too far and caused great harm are covered by Adam Curtis in the 90ies:
This fails to incentivize capturing the carbon when the fuel is combusted, which is the easiest time to do it. [Turns out, for a lot of fuels, it makes sense to dig it up, burn it, filter out the generated CO2, and then store the CO2 back in the mine you got it from (or similar secured hole in the ground). I hear this is actually net energy / dollars, and so makes sense to take advantage of as long as that's true.]
Sorry, posted too quickly; I mention carbon but actually you want to filter out all of the particulates (the other things are worse), and how you combust it determines how much gunk would end up in the air, it's cheaper to filter smokestacks than the whole atmosphere, etc.
No matter what primary energy you use, the best is still the energy you don't need because you don't waste it. So it is crucial to give incentives to optimize for efficiency and effectiveness instead of economic growth and financial profits.
I think the best way is to tax the primary resources so everyone wants to get as much out of it as possible.
The point isn't to pick synfuels and nuclear as the winner, the point is to get the most good for the least cost! If it turns out that pollutant-captured fossil fuels are the winner once the externalities are internalized, why not use them?
Part of me feels the emphasis on Vogt's misanthropy was a cheap shot by the book author. But then again, I can't deny that misanthropy has been a major feature of the Prophets overall.
Berry perhaps belongs to a fourth current, which we might as well call the Druids.
Yeah, I agree. Perhaps the author can be excused because Vogt is an important historical figure, but I think he's an easy target to knock down. Another extreme I've seen occasionally is trotting out Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and it's Future" to represent environmentalism when we have plenty of non-unabombers to pick from.
I disagree with Berry on certain issues but I find a lot of his writing compelling and its certainly reframed my thinking in many ways.
Using someone like Berry also removes the "unlikable bourgeoise" versus "salt of the earth farmer" comparison.
Oh good. I was looking for suggestions for 'better' prophets, (I'm more a wizard and know few prophets.. Rachel Carson, E.O Wilson, David Attenborough?)
This whole concept of "prophets" appears to be very contrived. Most conservationists and environmentalists do not hate humankind and are not opposed to technological progress. I studied conservation history and never even heard of this Vogt guy. The important figures in U.S. conservation history were people like George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, then Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and then Rachel Carson. None of these people could be called a prophet in the sense of this apparently contrived book, except for John Muir.
If you are looking for a better perspective from the point of view of conservationists, I suggest the classic A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.
There's the literal (now ex-)archdruid, John Michael Greer, which I guess would be classified here as a "prophet", but whose writings keep insisting that both the "cornucopians" and the "doomers" are wrong, here's a good recent example examining the story of peak oil :
For "Air"/Climate Change, I think a key point is that nuclear power should have solved climate change decades ago, but "prophets" killed it with false concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste.
I'm confused/sad about why "prophet" thinking is so popular and powerful given its repeated failures. A big risk IMO is that as we make everything more legible and centralized "prophets" will take over and stifle future progress (e.g. as you say in the post, maybe Borlaug would get crushed by regulators today)
I agree wholeheartedly. Nuclear could have solved it then, and could drastically mitigate it now, but the legacy of the prophets of old and their followers today prevent it from happening.
While I'm not in the anti-nuclear camp per se, I believe nuclear power is more expensive than gas (source: wikipedia), so an unconstrained market (i.e. one in which climate change was not taken into account) would still have favoured gas. Current nuclear projects in Europe seem expensive and behind schedule. So it seems likely that the market would still have favoured the "dash to gas" even without the popular opposition to nuclear generation.
I think this is one of those questions that will simply have to be answered in practice: if it can stand on its own feet, eventually some government will give in and let it.
It’s been like 50 years since we developed nuclear power, so the question has already been answered. Works fine in France, OK in some other places, but can’t really survive politics. Hopefully solar and wind goes better, I guess.
My understanding, though, is that the French nuclear industry is entirely reliant on subsidies from the French government for its existence, and has never turned an actual profit. Is that not the case?
This article has a lot of information on the French nuclear power industry. One relevant piece of info is that France deliberately decided to focus on nuclear power in the 1970s due in part to the oil price shock. A relevant quote:
"France's nuclear power program cost some FF 400 billion in 1993 currency*, excluding interest during construction. Half of this was self-financed by EdF, 8% (FF 32 billion) was invested by the state but discounted in 1981, and 42% (FF 168 billion) was financed by commercial loans."
So it looks like France invested in about 8% of the total cost of plant construction, the rest being market forces.
I think it depends a lot on whether the industry could survive without the subsidies. If so, then the subsidies probably won't hurt too much. If not, then that suggests its existence is a net negative for society and that there's a lot of resources going into propping it up that would be better put to some better use elsewhere.
My gut reaction to this is that I want nuclear power plants to be well regulated! But I don't know how much regulations exist, nor what level of regulation I would consider reasonable.
In addition to regulation, there are simple economies of scale at work. The US has thirty times more gas plants than nuclear, and this has led to it becoming better at gas than nuclear.
The article linked below gives a fairly thorough overview of the argument that nuclear power is kept artificially expensive due to government regulation.
Relevant quote:
"The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can‘t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.
Why is nuclear expensive? I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore.)
Why are the construction costs high? Well, they weren‘t always high. Through the 1950s and ‘60s, costs were declining rapidly. A law of economics says that costs in an industry tend to follow a power law as a function of production volume: that is, every time production doubles, costs fall by a constant percent (typically 10 to 25%). This function is called the experience curve or the learning curve. Nuclear followed the learning curve up until about 1970, when it inverted and costs started rising
....
This chart also shows that South Korea and India were still building cheaply into the 2000s. Elsewhere in the text, Devanney mentions that Korea, as late as 2013, was able to build for about $2.50/W.
The standard story about nuclear costs is that radiation is dangerous, and therefore safety is expensive. The book argues that this is wrong: nuclear can be made safe and cheap. It should be 3 c/kWh—cheaper than coal."
Well maybe not solve but help. My son wanted to study nuclear engineering, I told him only if he wanted to move to France. There is an unreasonable fear of nuclear anything, even among those trained in science. I don't know how to change that (the fear) except through education... and since even 'those trained in science' don't trust science so much anymore, it feels like a catch-22.
If you want a serious answer, I suggest magical thinking is always more popular than rationality in small part because it's more optimistic -- if we all clap our hands really sincerely, Tinkerbell *will* live, in defiance of the gloomy rationalists -- but in even larger part because our mental limitations as a species.
The evidence rather suggests we are not born with areas of the brain that can cope adequately with very complex events that happen over timespans comparable to or longer than our lifetime -- with one notable exception: we *are* born with an area of our brain exquisitely tuned to comprehend and manipulate complex *social* interactions between ourselves. We're a social species, essentially all our success going right back to the veldt required superb social integration and manipulation, so we have giant areas of the brain optimized to do that very well. We grasp the intentions and feelings of others brilliantly, and generally even the dumbest of us, who can barely learn to spell and add numbers, can manipulate social situations with a skill that would make R. Daneel Olivaw (metallic) green with envy.
But what that means is that our brain maps *all* complex problems onto some kind of social problem, because that's the only mechanism it has that might work. If all you have is a hammer et cetera.
And with respect to *social* problems, magical thinking actually works. One person with very, very passionate convictions can succeed (socially) as much as a lukewarm majority. Sincerity matters, things turn out better if people have good will and are nice, and because it ends up making everybody happy, et cetera -- all the usual "reasons" for things to be true that mark magical thinking from rationality.
Is "wizard" more or less magical thinking than "prophet"? "Wizard" seems more like magical thinking - "we don't need to actually solve our problems; technology will save us" - and yet it's proven more reliable.
This isn't the case for opposition to nuclear energy specifically, but in general Prophet ideas are popular because they're what ordinary people can use.
Most people in these comments are talking about what "we" should do, as though we were the government. A government can easily fund research and subsidize infrastructure, but if it tries to make individual citizens consume less or limit their reproduction it risks despotism. So "we" should steer clear of Prophets, and pay attention to the Wizards.
Any individual, though, is in the opposite situation. Consuming less is easy. Advancing science is hard, especially if you aren't a scientist. Not everyone can become a C4 photosynthesis researcher or even be on the business side of clean energy--even if you have the necessary intelligence and aren't committed to another career, it will take time to reach a place of responsibility. (You can donate money, if you have some to spare--but maybe you want to donate to Givewell's top charities instead.) But almost anyone, any time, can become a vegetarian, start recycling, or choose to drive and fly less frequently.
Now that you're not a government or business, there's not much reason for you to even notice the Wizards. On the other hand, the Prophets don't look like potential tyrants anymore: they're just people giving advice.
That doesn't explain the anti-nuclear thing, of course. A lot of the people I'm counting with the Prophets are pro-nuclear, and they don't necessarily hate GMOs either. But people who live more simply for purely environmental reasons naturally mix with people who dislike modernity and new technology in general (and also people who are Prophets about more plausible threats, e.g. fertilizer runoff). So poorly grounded anti-Wizard ideas have spread across the whole subculture, aided by the fact that they superficially resemble the more defensible boycotts and self-restrictions that most people started with.
Incidentally, I'd bet on Borlaug against the regulators even today. He fought _hard_ against a lot of official opposition for his whole career, and mostly won. (Though the point stands that he shouldn't have had to!)
Totally fair. Most people (I don't have a good guess as to the exact figure, but >95% wouldn't be a shock) figure that Mann's Wizards will fix any problem before it becomes a danger to human civilization, or doubt it but refuse to think more about the issue. In that sense, Wizard ideas are much, much more popular and easier to live by. But among people actively concerned about the environment, I think it's easier to get into an over-Prophetic subculture than an over-Wizardly one for the reasons laid out above: namely, that the good Prophet ideas are easier to make part of your lifestyle than the good Wizard ones.
In my view it's simple risk management: the wore the possible disaster, the more effort you have to take to make this disaster extremely unlikely.
This is how our emotional risk management works and this is how engineers should plan their technology. This makes nuclear so expensive. The many regulations are just because the state and society don't trust some commercial actors to always voluntarily spend as much resources on safety as the risk demands.
Haven't you been even slightly concerned by Fukushima, the subsequent stories about how the Japanese had skimped on the safety of reactor vessels, then the subsequent failures (and corruption) of the French and Japanese steel industry to produce nuclear pieces that conform to the specifications ?
Small but important detail: crossing different strains of wheat to obtain an improved strain is not the same as GMO. Crossing is more natural in the sense that it can occur naturally by cross pollination by insects. Then humans got into the act as well. Hence the huge variety of plant cultivars available in any garden centre. GMO goes beyond this, making it even possible, for example, to insert pesticides into crop plants, which disastrously affect more insects (like bees!) than the targeted pests, and which stock and/or humans then consume. Not healthy! This type of practice has given GMO a bad name.
There is no scientific consensus that I am aware of that GMO's have been a substantial factor in colony collapse disorder. Do you have a citation that I could read arguing otherwise? Thanks!
Specifically, food crops are genetically modified to tolerate the application of neonicotinoids (a leading candidate for the primary cause of colony collapse disorder), 2,4-D, & glyphosate, which has been one of the main use cases for GMO techniques. My objection is not to genetic engineering per se, but how it is used to perpetuate an industrial model of agriculture that's in a Red Queen dynamic. The tools are rarely problems in and of themselves, it's how we humies use them.
Bt corn is another instance where I believe these genetic engineering techniques have been misused. I remember reading about the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin in my dad's organic gardening catalogs growing up, a tremendously useful pesticide for rootworms. It's highly effective in a narrow window of time but does not persist in the soil. Bt corn, however, continuously produces this toxin, changing the selective pressure against European corn borer and other rootworms from occasional to continuous.
Now Monsanto & Syngenta are aware of how species respond to a continuous evolutionary pressure, so they prescribe a "high dose-refuge" technique in planting, where some fields are planted with non-Bt corn in rotation to try and forestall evolution of resistance. Perhaps this is sufficient, but it's hard for me to imagine the continuous presence of a pesticide will not engender resistance in the past relatively quickly on general evolutionary principles. What would cause the populations of rootworms in the refuge fields to start drifting back toward the pre-Bt corn equilibrium? If that happens, then what are farmers who use Bt toxin as an occasional pesticide to do?
Chemical pesticides, for which GMO insertion are a substitute, also affect all insects that feed on it, and since spraying is a lot less targeted, they result in a lot more pesticide on things other than the food plant.
Mystery OP - You are finding the lack of balance in book because Mann assiduously avoids making it into a horse race where the author must, in the name of neutrality, agree that both sides have valid points.
Sometimes, it really is the case that one side revolutionizes the human experience to the point of slaying one of the horsemen of the apocalypses, and the other side is objectively pro-death.
I admit, happily, that I am not neutral on this. My father, uncles, aunt, and grandfather are all avowed wizards - civil engineers and enviro engineers. They are, or were, long haired, hippy-type, pinko (cis hetero people) (I was born in a VW van). I grew up immersed in this debate. I've heard the best arguments from both sides to the point where I could repeat them like Happy Birthday and The Apostle's Creed. One sides solution is always life, and the question is always how to make it work. One is always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it.
When two people consider to have a child and chose not to? No. My aunt, a Catholic nun, thinks I'm wrong about this, and I don't have any well-formulated philosophical reason to come to this answer. It just feels right.
When two people otherwise would but are prevented via hard pressure (eg forced sterilization a la the early 20th century America) yes, and I don't think its close.
When two people otherwise would have a child, but have been pressured into not doing so by a third party wielding soft power (eg moral suasion applied to Americans in the late 20th century America or the foreign aid bribes given to so-called 3rd world countries if and only if they implement population control measures on behalf of the 1st world aid givers) usually, but not always. I see that more like a politician or executive having sex with a subordinate. Maybe its done with 100% informed consent, but usually not.
Or are you talking about the trend where increased wealth seems to cause reduced birthrate? In that case, yes. And if I knew what caused it, I could pass moral judgement on it. Since I don't, I just try to be a natalist and practice what I preach.
And since I'm going on, being pro-death is valid in certain situations. I have a living will with instructions to pull the plug under certain scenarios. Aborting a fetus with a disorder dooming them to a short, painful life is both pro-death and potentially the most merciful act.
How about a bribe of a snall lifetime income offered to a woman (not a government) to stop after zero, one, two, or three children (decreasing amounts)? Do you see a moral problem? Have we decreased her options or increased them?
Yes. I see that just like an executive "offering" to take his secretary on a personal vacation, setting an envelope of cash on the table, and expecting sex. After all, that increases the secretary's options, but most people see it as a moral problem.
The downside to the Secretary saying no is obvious.
What is the downside to the African woman saying No to the guaranteed income and having as many children as she wishes? (Other than poor health and hungry children.)
You're purchasing the life of her future children. It belongs in the same moral universality class as taking an option on her future childrens' labor, i.e. slavery. Most people find slavery abhorrent *even if* one can make an objectively true utilitarian John Calhoun argument that under the right framework individual slaves would be better off. Whatever the reasons for that are -- insert some mush about the ineffable liberty of the human spirit -- they are the same reasons we recoil from the idea of buying someone out of their fertility.*
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* Or more precisely, why we would find it deeply repugnant if applied to ourselves, although we might rationalize it away for some of the untouchables of the world (as indeed some of Vogt's eugenicist friends did).
> Or are you talking about the trend where increased wealth seems to cause reduced birthrate? In that case, yes. And if I knew what caused it, I could pass moral judgement on it. Since I don't, I just try to be a natalist and practice what I preach.
That trend is often referred to as demographic transition. You are likening that to death?
If demographic transition is inevitable and permanently lowers fertility below replacement, it *is* death for Homo sapiens. Mathematical law does not permit a population with nonzero death rate and sub-replacement fertility to survive indefinitely.
(Even at a civilisational fertility rate of 1, though, this will take a few hundred years.)
As the natural world is reatored to it's former glory and people's lives become increasingly incredible, I cannot imagine that people would not want to have children.
The goal of 2.1 children per family would be well understood by the one billion rich educated persons of the year 2300.
I mean, you started this by asking whether reduced human fertility would be equivalent to death. If it's permanent and goes below replacement, my answer is yes due to the resulting extinction of mankind.
It's not impossible that sub-replacement fertility could reverse at some point, but it hardly seems obvious that it will either.
Even though I find myself on the side of the Wizards more often than not, this kind of glib dismissal of the opposition always leaves me wondering if I've really grappled with the strongest version of their argument.
Two good places to start would be Wendel Berry as referenced elsewhere and whomever you think provides the best arguments for the precautionary principal, as intentional interventions have the potential to have catastrophic unintended consequences and we only have 1 earth. The Mystery OP references average utility, which is similar to what some Jesuits get at when they talk about environmentalism, using words like dignity instead. They don't usually use the language of utilitarianism, but get at the same idea. And they might turn off someone with a negative reaction to religious thinkers.
I think those are better places to look than the various mathematical or economic models like peak oil or The Population Bomb.
I've read many of those, and I am a strong critic of peak oil and The Population Bomb myself, I just find it a bit curious where you seem to have characterized the so-called "Prophets" viewpoint *categorically* as: "always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it"
"Always" is an incredibly high bar to apply to an individual, let alone a group.
Fair point. I probably got out over my skis here more than I should have. Thank you for the polite correction when I didn't demonstrate the same charity to others.
"...the precautionary principal, as intentional interventions have the potential to have catastrophic unintended consequences..." During COVID I think the precautionary principle was interpreted as the opposite of this.
As best I can tell, the precautionary principle is incoherent. If you do develop nuclear power, there is some probability that something terrible will happen as a result, a nuclear accident or a nuclear war. If you don't develop nuclear power, there is some probability that something terrible will happen as a result, severe global warming due to fossil fuel being the only adequate power source.
Following out the precautionary principle, both doing it and not doing it are forbidden.
>>... borrow from his predecessors’ racist-tinged doom-heralding and expand on it by chastising all humans, rich and poor, white and non-white alike. According to Mann, Vogt argues that "consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity." Crucial to this is the concept of "carrying capacity" – the idea that the earth has a fixed capacity to support human and animal life.<<
>>Though Borlaug didn’t tend to wax philosophical like Vogt did, I think if he were to comment on the idea of carrying capacity, he would describe it as a fluid equilibrium that can be turned into a virtuous circle: find ways to feed more people, and their increased productivity pulls them and their countrymen out of poverty, increasing both quality of life and growth potential. The key is not to limit the number of people, but to not let the people starve and fall into ruin. To Borlaug, the earth is not a finite planet-sized fish tank, because humans aren’t fish; we can understand and engineer our way out of problems that a salmon fry can’t, and it’s our responsibility to use the tools at hand for the benefit of all.<<
Count me as a Prophet, though I would never argue against the Green Revolution or the goal of eliminating hunger.
So the Earth is an aquarium and humans can out innovate and out engineer every other species on the planet. Lots of humans, hooray! And not much of anything else.
That's not a future I applaud.
Fortunately there is a solution: fewer people. A lot fewer in fact. About a billion.
“The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth.” by Peter Rodes Robinson
In an abstract sense, I agree that it could be better to have fewer humans on the planet, both for our own benefit and for the benefit of the other species on it. But if the goal is protecting the environment, it seems unlikely that just waiting until 2300 for gradual population decline to occur is going to give you the world you want, although in theory the faster we develop the faster birth rates will fall.
Unfortunately, all methods of rapidly achieving fewer people involve either catastrophe or atrocity, so I'm very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning.
I'm not advocating anything, I just think it's important to consider the means, which you're pretty vague on in that post. I suspect your most controversial proposal would be government policy to encourage childlessness? Unless this is just something that's going to happen anyway? Personally I think it's more important to focus on how much the population as a whole consumes, there's a massive difference between the environmental impact of 1 billion Americans and 1 billion Kenyans.
However, I worry that some people will want to achieve the same goal but will be less patient than you. 180 years is a long timescale, some people don't think the planet even has that long.
I emphasise that I'm not accusing you of anything, but any argument that could be used to justify the murder of 6 billion people gives me pause. Obviously that's not something anyone's proposing right now, but based on the history of the world so far, it seems worryingly plausible in a future with severe climate change. Most wealthy nations have a history of conquest and mass murder, usually backed by high moral claims about doing what's best for the world (or at least for their nation). One of the main reasons I think we need to address climate change now, through investment in technology like nuclear power and renewables, is to prevent the environmental movement from remembering that they used to get on really well with fascists. Nothing against environmentalists, I just think there's still a minority expressing Vogt's very anti-human sentiments, and those ideas could definitely catch on if there were large numbers of climate refugees.
If we stay on the Wizard path long enough, we can terraform the moon into a giant nature preserve, complete with ressurrected species that are long since extinct. If we go with the Prophets long enough, then we'll be back to slash and burn agriculture and killing every pest species before it easts the crops. Rich people can afford to care about animals, subsistence people can't.
I think that it's possible with the right technology and resources. I think if we continue to grow in both categories then at a future point it will be possible. The only question then is whether we would want to do it. We'd need some kind of artificial magnetic shield against solar wind and the like, an atmosphere, water. Admittingly the moon's low gravity might make it unsuitable for housing some species (I'm not sure how a tree would grow in Moon gravity, it would probably look pretty odd). The overall point is certainly something I believe: the more technology and resources we have (and I consider human beings a resource in this case) the more things we can accomplish, and if we value nature and animals (which we clearly do) then we're more likely to make a good home for them with more power than with less.
The point in question is how many of them will go extinct on the way to that journey and what is the best way to get there. It's not necessarily clear that pushing as fast as possible (a slight caricature of the so called "wizard" position) is the way.
You are definitely right, orbital habitats would be superior to the moon for nature preserves. And Earth would be superior to either. If I was really trying hard to come up with a high tech futuristic solution then I'd probably build an artificial continent somewhere in the Pacific for my preserve.
FLWAB: Do you see a problem with reducing the human population to one billion persons living in fairly dense walkable towns connected by hyperloops and leaving the rest of the planet to nature?
Yes. It's primarily in the word "reducing." Who is doing the reducing, and how? And why can't the human race grow? I like people. I think animals and nature and such is primarily valuable because people value it.
I mean, if you turn Mercury into a ringworld and put a trillion humans on it, perhaps it will make sense to only have a billion humans living on Earth, or to turn it mostly into a nature preserve / tourist attraction. But why cut down on the number of humans before them?
Like, in my way of looking at things, humans are net useful. Is that not true in your way of looking at things?
Sure. Your assumption that these little towns would be idyllic technologically-sophisticated places, instead of resembling the English semi-feudal countryside the last time the world had 1 billion people (in 1800) seems at best optimistic, certainly an assumption that should be closely examined.
I suggest only 1 in 100,000 or so of the population (give or take) is actually productive, and the entirety of human progress, sane social structures, and technological innovation rests of them. Everyone else is more or less a follower, who will not screw things up *if* regularly shown a better way.
That means for the purposes of assessing the wealth and quality of human civilization, you just count the number of those core people. With 6 billion people we have 60,000 of them, which is a lot of brains solving problems and making things better. With 1 billion of them, we have 1/6 as many, which means things will not get better as fast. It may even be that things get *worse* because we still have a lot of natural follower types who can screw things up.
The number of highly useful people may not even scale monotonically with population, because they tend to support each other -- e.g. assortative mating, or the well-known tendency of science to go faster when there is more collaboration. So maybe with 6 billion people we have 60,000 really useful core people, and with 1 billion we have only 500 because a bunch of *potentially* useful people lacked the mutual support needed to realize their potential.
> complete with ressurrected species that are long since extinct
Sorry but this is incredibly far-fetched. Even with DNA there is key biological information that is lost by not having an extant species. And even with an extant critter, when its divorced from its original habitat (e.g. raised in captivity) it loses all of the learned ability passed down from its ancestors.
When some things are lost they are truly lost forever.
"Hah", he says donning his wizard cape for battle. (ref: The Incredibles)
What if the way off this planet, is to raise the ~10 billion out of poverty, find
the ~1000 super genus's* (my spelling sucks.) we need, and fund them properly. (Properly is doing a lot of work there.) And humans spread through the solar system and to the stars. (The dream of sci fi.) And it takes 100 years.
So maybe 1 billion and 100 super geniuses, and it takes 1,000 years. It's the same number of humans*years. But if both were possible outcomes, I'd vote for more people... I mean we already have them? :^)
Seriously, I'd like us to be better stewards of the Earth and spread across the stars.
How about 1 billion very well educated humans living in a natural paradise as opposed to 10-20 billions of wretched specimens living in a superfund site. I would not want the latter ideal to spread across the galaxy.
OK I'm just spinning a tale where making geniuses is important, which I think is more about lucky genes and numbers and less about education... though of course that's important. Maybe we disagree genes smarts?
I think Peter's point is say... look at Ancient Greece or Rome. There were plenty of geniuses we've heard from those times. BUT, they were exclusively from the upper classes, who had leisure time to fulfill that genius instead of toiling as laborers or slaves.
How many of the underclasses had all the necessary genetic wherewithal to be geniuses, but we never heard from them because they spent all their time in subsistence? The same argument applies today, and this dovetails with the Progress & Poverty review from a few weeks ago:
> This is a pretty bold claim: namely, that the resilience of poverty, oppression, and inequality in the face of advancing economic development is not some embarrassing accident we'll eventually get around to fixing, it's an inescapable consequence of our socioeconomic system.
"Imagine a planet just like ours, but with only 100,000 people on it. Let this group comprise the assembled best experts from every field, and let them be fully devoted to cooperating for the benefit of all. How good would their lives be, all by themselves on an uncrowded planet? You may be imagining a paradise, each person enjoying a life of luxury on their own huge estate in the midst of unspoiled nature.
“Experts not being able to talk about problems they’re solving because of security protocols” is a good description of what happened to science in the USSR. The relatively free intellectual cross-pollination that happened between fields and projects in places like Bell Labs, IAS and of course Silicon Valley was fundamental to their impact. I think creeping corporatization and Balkanization of specialties might pose their own risks to that kind of intellectual environment.
Neat review. I'm guessing the Earth will, however, run out of fossil fuels one day (even if "run out" here means "it doesn't make economic/energetic sense to extract").
I guess the real argument is that we'll never "run out" because by the time we need it, we'll have found an alternative. The fear is that we won't find alternatives in time and everything will come crashing down. The former seems more likely, climate change seems to be the main limit on our consumption of fossil fuels.
Reading Georgescu-Roegen has convinced me that there are particular qualitative aspects of fossil fuels which will be very hard for us to replicate in a high-energy solar-based economy. I'd really like to be wrong about that and hydrogen might yet replicate some of those key characteristics. When I look at the past 200 years, it seems to me that much of the economic development that we humies commonly attribute to our own cleverness actually stems from the ability to blow through millions of years' worth of stored solar energy in a very profligate manner.
On the one hand, I want to say you are wrong by saying "No way, every time we get in trouble, we just harness a more dense energy source." But on the other hand, we have harnessed a more dense energy source that's not really solar energy, and have just let it sit on the sidewalk like a $20 while we poison people with continued coal emissions and tell people to huddle in the dark when it gets colder than is common.
One potential solution is to use solar/nuclear energy to synthesise hydrocarbons - it's possible and could even be carbon neutral/negative (if you don't intend to burn them and want them for plastics ect.), it's just not economically viable right now.
It blows my mind that in the US we are shutting down smoothly operating nuclear power plants and incurring decades of decommissioning costs because by some formula this "saves money".
Not necessarily. What do people say when we consider whether we'll ever run out of copper, say? They say: well, probably not, because as the natural ores become scarcer, the relative cost of recycling or substituting becomes attractive, and demand for the virgin stuff declines to meet supply. *Eventually* we might end up in a situation where the entire amount of copper plausibely recoverable from the crust *has* been recovered, and just endlessly circulates through the economy, with the only truly consumed commodity being energy.
Can this happen with hydrocarbons? Sure. Green plants recycle them all the time: CO2 + H2O -> hydrocarbons. The entire ecological carbon cycle is an endless loop of hydrocarbon -> combustion -> CO2 -> photosynthesis -> hydrocarbon. No reason at all we can't duplicate that, if necessary.
So maybe someday all of the carbon in the atmosphere and hydrosphere is in circulation, and passes ultimately through human machines (as well as through animals and plants), and the only truly consumed commodity is energy.
"We can recycle X" is not a full rebuttal of "we will run out of X". It rebuts "we will suffer catastrophe from lack of X", but does not rebut "we will face hard resource constraints on X". If there are N kilograms of carbon on Earth, any project or set of simultaneous projects which requires >N kilograms of carbon (e.g. a population of 1 sextillion humans) is impossible, regardless of recycling.
(This argument also applies to the reachable-without-FTL universe, which is finite and of a size fillable by exponential growth; FTL would potentially allow access to the universe entire, which may be large enough for this to be a non-issue ("infinite" would do the trick, of course, but 3^^^^3 would kick the ball beyond many end-of-the-universe scenarios).)
I am exceptionally skeptical that such human-mitigated circulation/recirculation will occur. I think the big constraint here is hitting a level of tech (practical fusion, AI, whatever) which enables another population/development "overshoot" before the present "overshoot" (I don't have a better word for this phenomenon) becomes unsustainable (through maintenance, upkeep, whatever).
Yes, it's a typical peak oil strawman. See here for a recent historical review of the issue and criticism of both the "wizard" and "prophet" extremes, with also a summary of what the noughties peak oilers got right and wrong :
I thought this was a good review, but one place I would differ from the author (not the reviewer, necessarily) is I really don't like the Manichaen oppositional framing of "Wizards" vs "Prophets"
In my view what *KIND* of Wizard and what *KIND* of Prophet you are matters as much or more than what broad camp you're in. We really DO need more advanced engineering/science and we really DO need more people willing to warn us about the cliff we're about to walk over. I think these two groupings obscures more than it illuminates.
I saw the division more in their differing approaches: is technological progress the problem, or the solution? Realistically we all think it's both, but different people emphasise one side or the other.
(This is an oversimplification and the direction of progress is also important, but I think the Wizard mindset is to speed up the good technologies while the Prophet mindset is to stop the bad ones)
My problem with the framing is that it invites you to pick a side and gloss over the details -- "Power through our problems with tech and progress, or worry about unintended consequences and the damage to the ecosystem?"
I just personally think the way forward has to be a synthesis, and teamsmanship is a barrier to that kind of thinking. I think purely "all progress must halt" anti-human environmentalism is unlikely to achieve its own goals under even the best circumstances, and I think climate change has proven that "full steam ahead" progress-boosterism is an existential threat to the human race.
Arguing about what team we're on just seems like it works against encouraging us to sit down -- humbly -- and genuinely asking, "How do we solve this problem without creating a whole bunch of new problems, and also maybe we don't know as much as we think we do given that systems are incredibly complex?"
I think that the author did not set out to advocate for the Manichean framing, but to document one that he saw already existed. Mann wrote the excellent 1491 and the pretty-good 1493, which didn't have that framing.
Good point, this reminds me of a G. K. Chesterton criticism of political debates: We spend too much time debating the question "Progress: Yes or No?" and working out what side we're on, and far too little time thinking about what we want to progress toward. I suspect that's where the more productive discussions occur, and I agree that synthesis and humility is what we need more of.
Yeah? If so I've definitely misread this entire thing; my first impression was that the "Wizards" had more in common with the "High Modernists", to lean on another overly vague category familiar to ACX readers.
Was it meant to be portrayed as the opposite-way-round, that the "Prophets", coded as Malthusians, are supposed to be the out-of-touch ivory tower calculators?
Oh, I don't know if the author had that in mind or now; I've never read the book. I'm more just trying to steelman the author's viewpoint, because I think picking out these two currents actually is useful, as long as you don't make a good/evil dichotomy of them.
The thing that stands out for me is that while the Wizards are right in the short run, the Prophets will be right in the long run. The real question is the time-scale involved.
The Wizards’ insistence that there will always be a way to delay the inevitable is as much a fallacy as the Prophets’ insistence that THIS time is the Big One(tm). I see your Zeno’s Paradox and raise you Jevon’s Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater overall consumption.
The real limit on consumption is price: as it costs more to consume, whether because of resource scarcity or pollution, people will consume less. The one upside is that between improved technology and reduction of the externalities from consumption, we might still end up ahead in terms of overall well-being from where we were in the past.
Jevons is the big enchilada here, thank you for bringing it up. There is very little slack in a capitalist economy for not doing something if it is profitable, i.e. where is the global incentive for restraint?
The question is, how long is the long run? 1,000 years, or 1 billion? The universe is huge, and full of resources we've yet to tap. Even the stars can theoretically be mined.
True. I think the big problem I have with the Wizards is that they don't really seem to have a contingency plan: what do we do when the well of techo-fixes finally runs dry? Every time that gets brought up, the only answer seems to be: "Well, that won't happen any time soon, so let's not worry about it yet."
It think while that's true, its a bit of an isolated demand for rigor. If you ask a Prophet, "What do we do when people want to have more kids, or more stuff?" generally their answer is "They won't." In the Eugenics past it was "We won't let them", that that answer has soured with time. I'm painting with a broad brush here of course, but my point is that the Prophets seem to have a perfect solution that will work forever either.
No, I agree with you on that. The Prophets have a really dark side.
My own answer to the question you asked — and I'm not sure what camp this puts me in — is "Fine, as long as they internalize the costs to themselves." There probably is no good solution to (eventual) overpopulation: all the options on the table right now are awful. But for the demand for "more stuff," a Pigovian or Coasian approach, along with dropping energy subsidies, would potentially do some real good.
On the other hand, I'm quite soured on massive public investment into techo-fixes that turn out more often than not to be boondoggles, such as ethanol.
I am mostly in the wizard camp. But it is troubling for the wizard ethos that birth rates are falling voluntarily worldwide, and the main driver of this is education. Education and voluntary choices are not bad things. There is something to the prophets' argument, as long as people choose it willingly, and for themselves.
I don't think that's troubling, I'd see it as encouraging! Ever since Malthus, the argument against improving people's quality of life was that they'd just have more children and negate the gains, the fact that improved quality of life seems to result in fewer children is a big pro on the side of more progress.
The Prophet says starving African hordes will overrun the planet (definite racist overtones), the Wizard says that once the magic of economic development gives them a decent quality of living, they'll settle down in the suburbs with <2 children and the "problem" will solve itself.
I don't personally worry about population decline, aging population could have its difficulties but eventually the descendants of people who want to have children will outnumber the people who don't.
Population is only one of the two major factors in humanity's overall ecological footprint, though. What can put an upper bound on per capita consumption? I like eating meat. I probably shouldn't eat it but I do. I definitely shouldn't forbid another from doing so, that's between her and her gods.
I've got to go as well, but my parting thought is that environmental protection / restoration is a consumption good. As a region gets wealthier, their environment gets a lot healthier too. The richest cities in the world are pretty smog free, while poorer cities are not. Green space is returning in the US so fast that wildlife is encroaching on cities (a serious problem!). Things like the various prairie reserves in the midwest could never be done if the US was living much closer to starvation.
Wealthy people have a preference for clean ecologies (probably everyone does), and the resources to make it happen. Less wealthy people see a huge return on destroying their environment, then once they become more wealthy they start to clean it up again. I look forward to Chinese cities as smog-free as LA is now.
Our ecology can be preserved using the only truly renewable resource - human avarice. As long as clean ecologies are desirable, and people can pay for them, they will.
Consumption is a harder issue to address, but since de-growth basically proposes that we maintain current levels of poverty indefinitely (since realistically cutting emissions in developed nations will only do so much), I think the only acceptable solution (morally and practically) is to develop more sustainable ways to produce stuff. And maybe get people to care more about stuff that doesn't damage the environment as much, although I agree with the gnome that "sustainability" is somewhat of a luxury good - you only care about it when you have enough money to afford anything other than the cheapest.
It definitely does, but if we have the right technology then it can be done without destroying the planet. Since the only alternatives that seem plausible to me are giving up entirely and accepting whatever warming happens, or recolonising Africa to prevent them from developing, and those both seem like disasters, there's a lot riding on us getting renewables and energy storage cheaper than coal. Progress is being made on solar, the main problem is that it doesn't work in the dark, but it seems plausible that technology will make fossil fuels less appealing in the future.
I am dubious that allowing warming to happen is a disaster. I don't think it is even clear that it is on net a bad thing. Warming has both positive and negative effects, and it's only by ignoring the positive and making implausibly high estimates of the negative that one concludes that the net effect is obviously negative and large.
For support for that unfashionable position see past posts on my blog:
I agree, these choices have to be voluntary, we need only look at Mao's One Child policy to realize that the attempt to impose restraint on others will always be both a crime and a mistake, _pace_ Talleyrand.
It's hard for me to imagine a culture capable of incentivizing us to restrain our biological impulse to exploit every available resource, which was a pretty damn good evolutionary strategy up until we discovered fossil fuels, that wouldn't violate the fundamental moral principle that each human should be free to choose how she or he lives as long as her or his choices don't harm another. Solving collective action problems through voluntary co-operation may be an impossible problem because only a few need to defect for the arrangement to break down. I hope it's possible and we should continue to work for that universal autonomy not least because it's morally just in itself.
> I agree, these choices have to be voluntary, we need only look at Mao's One Child policy to realize that the attempt to impose restraint on others will always be both a crime and a mistake,
Little known fact: the fertility rate in Taiwan (with no childbirth policy) is lower than in China. (Mostly Han Chinese in both locations.)
I think it's worth noting that when it comes to global warming, there are policy approaches that could be considered "Wizard vs Prophet neutral" -- like, impose CO2 taxes, and then to what extent doing so results in Wizardry vs to what extent it results in Prophecy (?) is up to the market!
Interesting to hear the conflict between total and average utilitarianism in this context. The classic objection to total utilitarianism is the Repugnant Conclusion, which is a very Malthusian Argument - if population growth continues as total utilitarians would encourage, eventually we'll reach the point at which everyone has lives barely worth living due to resource constraints.
Of course, average utilitarianism has it's own repugnant conclusions, for example the idea that you can make the world a better place by eliminating people with below average welfare.
I lean towards the total view since I stubbornly insist that life is worth living, but I'm personally of the opinion that people should have the number of children they want to have - the lazy preference utilitarian solution! Declining birth-rates suggest that overpopulation is not really worth worrying about, and I'm optimistic that we'll eventually invent our way out of our current environmental problems.
That's not even average utilitarianism's worst problem. It holds that if everyone in the world is miserable and wants to die, you should create more people so long as they will be slightly less miserable than average.
That may not actually be as much of a problem as you think it is, if you repeat the process long enough I think you'll eventually create happy people?
Anyway, I worry more about the implications of theories regarding the elimination of people than about the creation of people, simply because in the real world creating people is much more difficult than destroying them (two people and nine months vs a bullet and a couple of minutes to bleed out). I think total views do better at valuing individual human lives than average views, although there are obviously contrived situations in which a total utilitarian would do horrible things for the greater good.
Still, population ethics is a mess, I take the easy way out and just say we should respect the preferences of people currently alive, which fortunately include not destroying the environment (and also a bunch of other conflicting things, but resolving that is a separate issue).
Average utilitarianism endorses creating miserable people even if you stipulate that it will never lead to happy people. Given the choice between a world of100 people being tortured seven days a week, or a world of 100 people being tortured seven days a week plus 1,000,000 people being tortured only six days a week, average utilitarianism picks the latter every time. This seems like a serious problem.
I mean, this only crops up in choices where the total and average happiness is negative.
(Also, remember that the utility of the zero-pop state (average happiness 0/0) can be defined however you want. If you define it as zero, then in all and only those cases where such choices could happen, "blow up the world" dominates.)
Completely off-topic to your point, but this thought experiment poses for me an interesting measurement problem: how would we *know* if literally everyone in the world is miserable? Does misery have some absolute scale or at least definition to which we could appeal? What if (as seems not unlikely to the student of human group psychology) misery is actually felt by individuals on a relative basis? (As in: everyone else in this shtetl lives in a squalid mud hut and has to take a dump in the corner when it's raining outside at night. I, on the other hand, live in a damp drafty castle with mosquitoes that buzz around all night and no running water BUT I have a chamberpot into which I can poo at night, and some lackey takes it away in the morning -- lucky, happy me!)
Were that the case, then the average utility of the entire world is pretty much by definition zero, neither "happy" nor "miserable," and we need to come up with some different metric for utilitarian aspirations.
I question whether misery is entirely relative. Happiness/fulfilment or the lack thereof does involve some reference to other people and how well they're doing relative to me (at least at metrics I care about), but misery seems to be more about not having your basic biological and social needs met. If I'm starving, in pain or grieving a lost loved one, the fact that other people have it worse provides very limited comfort - in fact, the reminder of that fact may even make me feel worse.
I'd rather be in a community in which everyone had indoor plumbing than one in which I was the only one, although that's perhaps selfish since in the latter scenario I'd still be able to smell everyone else shit.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
I disagree strongly. Could we have done better? Yes. But plagues have been a problem for humanity for all of known history, and for all of known history we really only had one way of solving it: hunker down and wait for it to pass. Let it kill all the people it was going to kill, and then the survivors can move on. The Spanish Flu happened just 100 years ago, a blink of an eye historically, and we did basically the same thing. We tried to help people with medicine, which did some good, but mostly we just waited it out, all three waves of it, just like humanity has done with every plague in history. They came up with a vaccine, which failed miserably because we still didn't know what we were doing. I want to make that clear: the best minds we had worked on solving the problem, huge amounts of money and resources were diverted to creating and distributing a vaccine, and the vaccine just plain didn't work because we had identified the wrong pathogen as the culprit. And so about 50,000,000 die wordwide. What could you do?
COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it. And it will probably be the first worldwide plague to be stopped not by waiting it out but by vaccinating: in other words, because we did something about it. Could we have done it faster, and better? Yes, definitely. 100%. But it's still a remarkable achievement and I can't see it as anything other than a slam dunk win for the Wizards.
We are a learning species, and while we didn't do as good as we could we did much better than we have previously in terms of saving lives. And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around.
I agree with all of the above, but as a counterpoint:
There is increasing evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic could have originated as a lab leak from the Wuhan institute of virology as a side effect of gain-of-function research. If that proves to be the case (and even in other scenarios where it originated naturally but its pandemic status is owed to modern hyperglobalization), it will be a slam dunk for the cautionary cries of the "Prophets."
I think you would have to argue not only that COVID-19 started in a lab, but also that it *could not have* started naturally. That's the only way the Frankenstein ("messing around with things Man Was Not Meant To Know") argument makes sense. Because if it was easily possible for COVID-19 to get started naturally, through bats and pangolins knocking boots in some genetic sense, then the fact that this one *happened* to start in a lab is kind of neither here nor there, kind of like the fact that it started in China instead of India. Putting a complete stop to Dr. Frankenstein's work wouldn't change the odds of it happening again at all (and of course if Dr. Frankenstein is discovering useful things about *fighting* viruses while he's creating evil killer viruses, there's the argument that it might make things *worse* to forbid his midnight meddling).
The main issue is that it wouldn't have started as often, and wouldn't have been nearly as dangerous for humans (see SARS in comparison) if the scientists that have been screaming for years about the dangers of this research and the lack of checks and balances have been listened to.
"And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around."
I strongly doubt it. If COVID has proven anything, it is that governments are incapable of learning.
"COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it."
No; there were prior ones.
IMO COVID was a miserable, inexcusable failure on the part of most governments.
I think that is a good point. It would not have been *hard* for medieval Europe to do the simple experiments that would prove that Y. pestis was carried by fleas and rats, and it would then not be super duper hard for them to undertake radical rodent-control measures that at the least would tremendously reduce the number of people who had to die.
Why they did *not* do this is an interesting question, and rather suggests that the limitation on fighting disease effectively is not technological -- that the Prophets are right that the main problem is social, or social psychological. In short, we may be "lucky" this time not so much because science came up with a vaccine, but because *socially* we already understood vaccines, already (mostly) believed they would work, and therefore hurried that work along and then took advantage of it.
Rats were not essential to the Black Death (human fleas and lice could spread it too, not to mention direct transmission from pneumonic patients, and current research suggests these were more important than rats to the second pandemic). Killing rats would have had only a minor protective effect (wiping out fleas and lice in the human population would probably have sufficed to drop R below 1, but I'm not sure that the 1300s world had the capacity to do that).
I'm not sure about this alleged revealed preference for maximising *total* utility. It seems to me that the default position people instinctively default to is "maximise the total utility among people *already living*", while resolutely not taking potential future people into account. Else, you end up in Repugnant Conclusion territory.
This is distinct both from Vogt's position (where decreasing the population is an acceptable way to increase the average utility) and from what you allege to be the default position (where increasing the population is a desirable way to increase the total utility), and I think is necessary to avoid reaching weird, counterfactual results like the Repugnant Conclusion. The number of actually, objectively living minds who can experience happiness or not should be taken as a given; it is not a variable to be itself fiddled with in either direction.
I get the impression that the Wizard and Prophet positions aren't grounded in different forms of utilitarianism: they're grounded in different predictions of what kind of world Wizardry will create. The Wizard builds toward a large and happy population, but the Prophet thinks that a large population can't be happy.
This is part of the story, but I think the Wizards would still think that as long as it is happy, the population also being large is an additional good unto itself. It would be another thing if they simply went "we have a large population and there's no humane way to slow down growth, so let's make this large population happy"; but it certainly *sounds* like they think that all else being equal, Growth Is Good.
I think you're on to something, though I don't think preference for population size is intrinsic to either position: many Prophets don't seem to care much about human wellbeing at all, and many Wizards prefer smaller populations where each person can enjoy a larger slice of the pie.
Hmm, the wizard builds towards their dream. That might have little to do with the rest of world. And the prophet is there to warn of danger. My humble thinking is we need more wizards, and less prophets in the environmental movement. Let's make plastic that burns cleanly at the end of life. (plastic is a small fraction of total hydrocarbons burned and better burned than in the water, oceans.)
Plastic that burns cleanly would still mostly end up unburnt in landfills. I'd prefer plastic that rots. (Of course we don't want it to rot while we're using it, but wood tends to not have that problem except as construction material.)
Yeah I think the amount of CO2 in plastic, compared to the oil and gas we burn is not that much. 1%? The plastic filling rivers, streams, oceans is... much worse than 1% more CO2 to me.
We already have "plastic" (= polymers) that rot: that's exactly what cellulose is, the main constituent of cotton and other plant fibers. I think the main reason we don't use it is just that we have to source it from nature already made, which is kind of like finding your plastics by digging them out of the trash, cleaning them up, and recycling them. Expensive and not very adaptable. But if we could polymerize glucose as easily and cheaply ane flexibly as we can styrene, it might be a different world. Cellulose can make very flexible fibers (e.g. cotton) as well as very sturdy materials (wood).
There's also a case for contingency. Up until fairly recently natural gas wasn't a very valuable byproduct of petroleum extraction, which means the starting material for vinyl polymers (e.g. ethylene and styrene) were really, really cheap.
I'm a little puzzled by the penultimate sentence. Of the top 7 by mass plastic resins produced, 3 are pure hydrocarbons (PP, LDPE and HDPE) and one (PET) is just has some extra O atoms. These will all burn to CO2 and H2O at a moderately high temperature. Granted, the PPA and polyurethane need much higher temperatures to avoid noxious N compounds, and the PVC needs to have the Cl captured, but I think that's just a question of good incinerator design. I'm not entirely sure why people don't burn plastics now, but I don't think the problem is chemistry. It might be more that it's difficult to separate plastics from other things in the waste stream -- my impression is that most successful recycling relies on fast, reliable, and economical ways to separate materials, e.g. with metals you can just heat everything up to 1500C and collect what doesn't go up in flames.
Yeah, sorry this is mostly a pipe dream of mine. Seeing plastic as a stop over point one the way from oil/ gas to fuel, so all plastic would be burned.
AIUI recycling is a joke in the US. All that is really recycled is metal and paper. Glass and plastic has little value unless sorted, which is expensive to do.
I think the only objections to that very reasonable argument is that most people think it's a good thing to bring more people into the world - why else would they keep doing it? There's also the argument that we should be concerned about the long term future, and while that kind of longtermism is most popular in EA spaces, I think a lot of people have at least a little concern for future generations, at least if they believe their current actions will have a negative effect on people that aren't yet born.
It's still the sanest approach to population ethics, I personally just factor in our desire to have children and a future for them into the utility of people currently alive. It's the only way to explain both my desire to have a future for the human race, and my disinterest in the exact number of people in the future (anywhere within a sustainable range is fine with me). I guess in theory this breaks down if I just convince everyone that the future's going to be OK, but eventually people will realise that's a lie so it seems like a pretty stupid way to game utility.
I mean, I think desire to individually have children doesn't need to be equated to a moral preference for people everywhere to have children. (Unless you're Immanuel Kant, of course.) I want children because I think the experience of raising them will, on balance, be nice, and also because I have a personal and quite selfish interest in having a legacy. Moral preferences regarding the existence of one more human *per se* doesn't really enter into it. Bring me a magic button that will bring an additional human being into existence somewhere in Japan, whom I will never meet, and I have no particular desire to press it.
I really should go eat lunch and get back to work, but thank you for this review. I've meant to read this book for a while now and this has pushed me to do so. I consider myself in the Prophet camp, just because it's much harder to engineer the technology of how we humies organize ourselves compared to the technology of how we make useful things from nature's resources, but I've always admired Borlaug ever since I learned of him. I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch.
" I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch."
The net result so far has been to increase global per capita real income by about an order of magnitude, two or three times that (a factor of 20 or 30, not two or three more orders of magnitude) in the developed world. How is that consistent with the view you just expressed?
Money is a proxy for the resources humans consume. It does not call those resources into existence. To the extent that current consumption destroys capacity for future production, those increases in real income cannot be sustained. Jevons Paradox states that technological improvement which allows more efficient production of a given good tends to lead to greater consumption of that good. Your saying, "Look at how much income has gone up and how much more people are consuming", is not contradictory to Jevons at all; in fact, it's not really even responsive to the point.
Certainly, poor people all over the world should be consuming more. Our concern must always be both for keeping humanity's overall ecological footprint within the bounds of what the Earth can sustainably produce as well as the equitable distribution of resources to all of humanity within those bounds. Much of the Prophet perspective has been bound up in eugenicist ideas claiming that some portion of humanity shouldn't ever have existed in the first place, which is fundamentally immoral, a sentence no human should ever feel the privilege to pass on another.
If humanity's going to find a path to a sustainable future, which involves both negative population growth and restraint in per capita consumption from our current position, those have to be changes in behavior that people embrace voluntarily. The state's role should be limited to trying to internalize the externalities through taxation and let individuals interacting in markets figure out the best response once we're fully accounting for all the costs.
I tend to doubt that any culture can find this path, which involves a substantial redirection of basic biological impulses (this, incidentally, is my answer to Fermi's paradox; conscious lifeforms which discover a reserve of solar energy tend to make themselves extinct in short order after figuring out how to transmit radio waves), and remain humane, but we have to try. Exploiting every available resource to the fullest extent possible was a good evolutionary strategy up until about 250 years ago when Newcomen invented his steam engine and made coal mining practical. I just can't accept the Wizard perspective that we'll always be able to find a substitute once we hit a resource limit, though it would be wonderful if that can keep going. On evolutionary time scales, we humies haven't been at this high-energy lifestyle very long, which is why Sagan's Cosmic Calendar is one of the best cultural symbols created over the past 50 years. At some point (barring FTL travel, and if the Vulcans are out there I suspect they're going to want to see that we've got our mind right about exponential growth before forming an alliance) we're going to have to figure out how to take our foot off the accelerator or human civilization will end.
I don't see a mention of biodiversity loss, or of the loss of habitat for a wide range of wildlife. The rapid increase in human population and living standards are leading to increasing amounts of the planet being used for agriculture (or other human uses), which in turn is causing an increasing number of extinctions. Currently, wizards don't seem to be averting this problem, and once an existing biome or species is lost, it is pretty much unrecoverable. (There may be edge cases where recovery is possible but not on the scale that extinction is happening).
This may be a matter of what people value. Some people value "nature" (for want of a better word) and want to preserve it. Others see it primarily as a source of raw materials for human wealth. Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity.
On reading the review, I'm sceptical about the framing of the book - why choose these positions? Why choose these representatives of those positions?
I'm not sure about the world as whole but...from 1992 to 2012 farmland in the United States decreased by 31 million acres. Forest land in the US has also remained stable for the last 100 years, despite increasing population and consumption. This appears to due to agricultural land becoming much more productive per acre, which means we need less of it. I would call that a win for the Wizards: more population, with better living conditions, with less farmland.
At a local level, yes (where USA = local), but at a global level, the problem is continuing. You could argue that the solution is to apply the same techniques the USA has used more widely, and that might work (subject to local conditions elsewhere), but there's a wider point in that people have to recognise that there is a problem in the first place, and be sufficiently motivated to do something about it. Technical fixes only work when people recognise the problem that needs fixed, which in turn depends on assigning a value to what needs preserved.
A patch of woods in a local suburban park is not the same as an unfragmented old growth forest. The species composition, down to the microbes in the soil, is quite different. So while forest land may have been stable, healthy old growth forests are mostly gone. Moreover, the farmland is not disappearing because agricultural land is becoming more productive, but because development is encroaching on farmland (as shown in your posted link).
Thank you for this comment. This is a beautiful sentence:
"Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity."
I feel the same way. As I mentioned in another comment, the framing of this book is very contrived. It's not humanity lovers vs. humanity haters, it's a clash of one set of human values with another set of human values.
I recall Mann doing a pretty good ob of presenting the Prophet argument. I am also biased towards the Wizardry approach, but I remember coming out of the book thinking it was more reasonable than before. For example, there might be ways to consume less without greatly reducing our quality of life, but getting there is a behavioral issue. Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
> Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
Isn't a big chunk of this problem a zoning issue and city design issue? It doesn't matter whether people want to live in more-walkable and car-free environments, if cities are mostly zoned with distinct residential and commercial areas.
At least in America, it seems that currently, most "walkable" areas basically boil down to "the downtown of major cities", where a two-bedroom apartment might cost as much in rent as the mortgage of a four-bedroom house in the suburbs.
Yes, and that's mostly not an engineering problem. We know how to make cities that are easier to get around without a car--there are lots of them in Europe, Japan, etc. Zoning laws, parking minimums, subsidized public parking, height restrictions, general vetocracy, "affordable unit" minimums, non-toll roads, etc. are demanded by (generally) the middle and upper class public who like living in suburbs.
People think neighborhoods with apartments in them are unsuitable for families, and they have families, so they use the available levers of municipal government to keep apartments out. It’s a bottoms-up, democratic thing.
I'll feast in the watery halls of Valhalla with Vogt when the hubris of Wizard types inevitably dooms the world and sends the majority of humankind, pest of the world, to the afterlife. Then I'll know the ecosystems will evolve and keep living after getting rid of us.
Just as an organism is rationally more valuable than a single cell within it or a certain species of bacteria in its gut fauna, an ecosystem is more valuable then any individual animal or any single species. Thus trying to keep as many human beings alive as possible is as meaningless as trying to keep as many pandas alive as possible without them being a part of an ecosystem but a panda breeding institute or whatever.
Although I know this isn't a very popular kind of thought here, trying to explain this brought me an insta-ban from the dc server :)
Are you at all bothered by the fact that a series of predictions along your lines have been made over the past century+, and so far have all turned out to be false?
What sort of predictions are you talking about? It seems Emrah Dincer is referring to loss of biodiversity. Predictions about species extinctions have sadly proven too true.
If you're talking about the Malthusian arguments etc, I of course know that and I also know that humankind maybe will be able to support 1000x times the population now. I'm talking about the cost of it in terms of how many ecosystems we'll destroy and that not being worth it. Also the experience of the median human will be worse but that's whole another discussion.
The prediction about for example the coral reef ecosystems dying and the speed of their dying etc are all proving true.
I find the argument "America’s Next Top Model makes fun of it" an unconvincing way of doing cost-benefit analysis of organic farming. I'm not a farmer myself (my garden is definitely a hobby, meaning that on net it's a money sink), nor a student of agriculture; my current beliefs around this are strongly influenced by reading Drawdown (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143130447). The impression I got from it was that artificial fertilizer did in fact have the potential to destroy soil ecosystems (not necessarily everywhere), and that effective organic alternatives existed that harnessed increased understanding of said soil ecosystems. (Again, not necessarily everywhere. For the purposes of Drawdown it is sufficient that the following claim be true: "in some not-exceptionally-rare circumstances, organic techniques will be both more productive than synthetic fertilizer and more effective at carbon sequestration.") The book presents this as an increase in our understanding of soil ecosystem, so insofar as any basic science is Wizardry this might still be in camp Wizard, but it doesn't escape the derisory label of "organic". Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?
To be fair, the "America's Next Top Model makes fun of it" argument wasn't against organic farming in particular, but against widespread cultural acceptance of an all organically farmed diet.
That's fair. However, even if the strawman "all synthetic fertilizer use is literally the devil" is worthy of being mocked on America's Next Top Model, the somewhat more nuanced position "synthetic fertilizer is destroying a bunch of soil ecosystems in which organic methods will work and be productive" seems both Prophetic and actually validated by current understanding (again, for at least some soil ecosystems). I imagine it's less snappy as a campaign slogan, and historically this could be two different waves of organic farming that are basically indistinguishable from a consumer standpoint -- any history-of-agriculture nerds out here willing to comment?
I used to sell fertilizer for a living, so I have some degree of knowledge. Soil systems contain a certain amount of various elements and organic matter, plus microbes. Our understanding of how these systems interact, and how roots play a role, is incomplete.
To grow something, the soil needs enough of each element in an available (usually, this means soluble) form for the plant to pick up. Plants will incorporate these soil minerals into their tissue, and they need different amounts of each - think Redfield ratio. Thus, for a given annual crop, each year you are taking a lot of N, some P, and smaller amounts of K, Ca, Zn, Cu, etc etc out of the ground.
The natural replenishment rate isn't going to supply enough of each of these to support an industrial crop each year (or even a preindustrial crop, it turns out - hence fallowing, crop rotation, cyclical agriculture, etc pre-1900). So you have to add stuff. The natural soil stocks of most nutrients are large enough that you will rarely be limited by S, Mg, or the other less-needed elements, but you're depleting a lot of N and P each year, especially N, and you have to replace that all the time.
So industrial fertilizer is mostly N, sometimes all N, and rarely includes more than N, P, and K. If you want other nutrients replenished in your soil, you have to do that separately. Hence, years of farming can deplete other elements and make soil unproductive. This is usually pretty easy to fix: figure out which element(s) you are missing, and dump a bunch on the field.
But the system is complicated immensely when you consider another soil element, perhaps the most important: carbon. Plants don't make tissue from soil carbon (usually, I think) but the soil carbon is crucial for the health of soil microbes and roots. It helps improve soil stability, water holding capacity, and other properties. Plus, the microbes play important roles in transforming nutrients into soluble forms that plants can easily pick up.
Soil carbon isn't *necessarily* depleted by industrial agriculture, but it often is. Plowing allows the soil carbon to oxidize to CO2 and leave the soil, and the deeper the furrow the more carbon you lose. Erosion plays a role as well.
Soil carbon can be managed, but historical techniques didn't really take it into account. Today, its importance is better understood. Winter cover cropping, plowing chaff under, no-till techniques, and direct replenishment via compost or biosolids all support an increasing stock of soil carbon. Many of these are part of organic farming, but all can be adopted by conventional farmers (and often increase conventional yields when they do).
So in short: if you use only synthetic N and P for years, don't have a cover crop, and plow 8" furrows every spring, you will eventually run into soil health problems as your soil carbon depletes. Organic farmers won't do this and will therefore avoid these problems. But it is completely possible for conventional farmers to do it as well, and many do.
And to be clear: there are other issues with organic farming re: pesticides, herbicides, etc. And organic farming has some stupid restrictions, like blanket bans on biosolids. And cost is crucial, since at the end of the day the number of people you feed depends on that more than anything else. So whether it is appropriate to be derisive of organic farming or not isn't determined only by soil health / soil carbon management.
So what in hearing is: adding nutrients to the soil doesn't directly do damage, but makes it possible to mask soil depletion; whereas with organic farming, if your soil is producing, it's probably healthy, if you're using amendments you might need to do more checking to be sure of that. Separately, the exact mix of regulations collected under the heading "organic" may or may not be an improvement. Thank you for explaining!
This article provides an example of the complex natures of issues of soil quality and land management, which you may find interesting. Note that the basic premise here (no-till != organic) doesn't necessarily apply to all soil types and all cover crops. It's possible to manage soil well, or manage it badly, whether certified organic or completely conventional.
There's also the fact that riverine ecosystems can be ruined by runoff from fertiliser that came out of the backside of a cow just as easily as by fertiliser that came from the Haber-Bosch process.
>C4 photosynthesis (a more efficient way for plants to distinguish between hydrogen and carbon dioxide, requiring less water and nitrogen for the same yield).
"Hydrogen" in the above sentence should actually be "oxygen". But yes, the C4 rice project is very cool!
Also, a fun note: I once took a class in Borlaug Hall at the University of Minnesota.
If Vogt's life began in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, then he would have been mighty old by the time he connected with the nascent environmental movement in the 1930s. Actually he was born in 1902, so you mean "turn of the 20th century."
The right classic companion book to read to this is John McPhee, "Encounters with the Archdruid."
Also, I am 60% confident that this is the review Scott was 60% confident would win when he made his predictions. Which is of course not the same as saying *I* am 60% (or for that matter 36%) confident that it will win!
>Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save).
I don't think this counts as a failure of Wizards due to complexity. If I remember correctly, people like Zvi and even *Matt Yglesias* were predicting that trying for "equity" would be worse for everyone than simple distribution based on something like age or whether you were near the clinic when vaccines started expiring. The CDC wasn't actually optimizing to distribute vaccines such that all people reaped the most benefits distributed fairly; they were optimizing to *look like* they were distributing vaccines equitably; and that's why they failed.
I think the major takeaway from the government's mismanagement of covid wasn't that increasing complexity is too hard for Wizards. It's that increasing complexity is too hard for *governments*.
I find it more than a little weird if this book (written in 2019 according to Amazon), or at least the reviewer, never mentions the importance of the global demographic transition for the likely future fate of humankind. It is highly relevant if one wants to estimate the odds of the Wizards versus Prophets scenario.
The global demographic transition is the tendency that ferility is falling everywhere (following in the footsteps of the global fall in mortality). More than 70 of the 193 countries in the world are already below 2.1 children per woman. Including Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Tunis, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, and of course the whole of Europe - if official statistics, and gapminder.org, can be approximately trusted:
..moreover, the tendency is downward everywhere. In the last decades fertility reduction has been particularly dramatic in the Middle East and India.
Apart from Afghanistan, Tadjikistan and sub-Saharan Africa, the world is fast approaching below-reproduction levels everywhere (and even in these countries, fertility is falling).
This bodes well for humankind, since it increases the odds that we can maintain or increase per capita consumption levels without risking an all-out banana-flies-in-the-bottle scenario.
The go-to book in this regard is Tim Dyson (2010): "Population and Development: The Demographic Transition". Dyson's book is a bit old by now (there are newer books and a ton of articles), but it still provides the most comprehensive discussion of the economic, social and cultural changes that take place in the wake of the transition. Despite its excruciatingly boring title (which has prevented a wide readership), this book is on par with Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in its scope.
Granted, this may seem peripheral to the theme in the book being review'ed here; but any discussion of the likely future of the world (will we crash or will we be fine) that neglects to discuss the demographic transition, misses the main engine driving global changes - including environmental changes.
). This suggests that the Malthusian problem will take care of itself.
I wouldn't be dismissing Malthusian issues altogether, we'll only manage to avoid them if we're able to keep a minimal level of prosperity and women education for long enough.
The pattern of the demographic transition is characterized by hierarchical diffusion.
This means that highly educated women belonging to the majority ethnic group living in urban areas is the first within-country group to reduce their fertility.
Over time, their fertility behavior speads to lower educated, rural, and ethnic minority women.
The hierarchical diffusion-pattern is well documented by historical data from "Western" countries. As good-quality data is now coming in from other countries, it turns out that the same pattern characterizes latecomers to the demographic transition as well.
Hierarchical diffusion is a main driver of the transition, as you comment also suggests: female education is one of the keys. Urbanization is another.
As an illustration, check out this fairly recent study of the changing fertility pattern within Nigeria (the most populous country in Africa): Spatial patterns and determinants of fertility levels among women of childbearing age in Nigeria, by Oluwayemisi O Alaba, Olusanya E Olubusoye & JO Olaomi. To cite this article: Oluwayemisi O Alaba, Olusanya E Olubusoye & JO Olaomi (2017) Spatial patterns and determinants of fertility levels among women of childbearing age in Nigeria, South African Family Practice, 59:4, 143-147, DOI: 10.1080/20786190.2017.1292693.
"It wasn’t just red states or populist leaders or microchip truthers that were guilty; everyone in every country, state, and Holy See didn’t adopt masks, close the borders, roll out tests, or vaccinate quickly and effectively enough, and the blood of 2 million people and counting (not to mention the global loss of jobs, social activities, educational quality, and basic human connection) is on our hands."
Can anyone point me to a fair examination of the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of masking to prevent covid? Most of what I see is either observations based on arbitrary-endpoint graphs (e.g. "as you can see, cases increased/decreased after [country or state] started/ended its masks mandate!") or arguments based on anecdote or arguments based on lack of RCT confirmation of effectiveness. None of these is particularly satisfying.....
There is a CDC study that attempts to do that, but I don't have the URL. They looked at county level data, and their claim was that, on average, a month or two after a mask mandate went in the rate of growth of infections went down.
The problem is that putting in a mask mandate is not a random event. It's easy enough to come up with reasons why the same thing that would, on average, make a mask mandate more likely would also, on average, make a decrease in the growth rate of infection a month or two later more likely. If infections start going up, a mask mandate is more likely to happen. Reversion to the mean would then give you the later decrease, as would individuals becoming more careful due to the perception of more infections.
Scott Alexander had a piece in SSC early on that looked at pre-Covid evidence and concluded that wearing a mask probably made you a little less likely to get infected, significantly less likely to infect others. I have seen nothing better than that.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
The Wizards did roll up their sleeves and create solutions to the problem. Then the Bureaucrats walked into the room, threw half their projects in the garbage and locked the other half away for a year. Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs.
Don't blame the Wizards man, they did their part, and it could have been enough.
"Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs."
In the book, Mann goes to great lengths to show that Borlog had to fight, lie, and work around bureaucrats to end the famine in India. So, yeah samey samey.
If he had to deal with a modern IRB, he never would have been able to do what he did.
I'm sympathetic to this take but if you want to own the Wizard position in a deep way I think you need to treat bureaucracy, politics, and social organization as endogenous to the problem, not this separate sphere that's no longer their problem once a technical solution pops out of the lab. I think the most sophisticated Prophet take is "in theory, technology might continue to solve problems as it creates them, but in practice it will get harder and harder to successfully implement technological fixes in increasingly complex societies--so situations in which technical solutions could have been enough but we couldn't get our shit together should be exactly what we expect to see."
Yes, this is key. Part of Borlaug's genius was in overcoming or getting around official resistance--that's part of successful wizardry. A good idea by itself isn't enough.
(Prophets need to face this criticism, too. Sure, we could make the world better for future humans by accepting a lower living standard in this way or that. But it's not a solution unless people will actually do it.)
Absolutely. I used to be very much in the "Back to the Land" camp until I actually started reading about the 70s communes and the idealistic teenagers sneaking into town to guiltily eat a hamburger every few days. As "Bob" says, "Don't just eat that hamburger, eat the hell out of it!"
I recently read this as well. The passage that stuck in my mind (which I can’t find at the moment) was about the effects of the green revolution in India - in states where land ownership was highly concentrated, the green revolution boosted yields for landlords and led to mass evictions and migration to urban slums, whereas in states where, for historical reasons land ownership was more evenly distributed, the high yielding varieties boosted incomes for subsistence farmers. Though I am typically wizard-sympathetic, I think the profound interaction between technology and politics/power tends to be a blind spot in wizard thinking. Recent farmer protests in India show the legacy of the green revolution is hardly settled. I think the land issue here also ties in nicely to the Henry George review.
One (probably unconscious) sleight of hand that happens in the "Wizards have managed to provide enough food and water for increasing populations" arguments is an "any edible food == any edible food" equivalence. Something I've come to realize more and more is that in order to be able to provide for larger and larger populations, we've had to push the land (and water sources) to its limits, and that has clear significant effects on the quality of the product. Replacing two nourishing juicy carrots that taste great, with six just-about-edible ones that managed to grow in poor soil optimized to look good on the shelf, is treated blindly as a threefold increase in food production with no concern for the value lost in other ways.
More food to prevent hunger is certainly good, but at some point the loss in quality becomes significant enough to also be an important factor - at least enough to start considering, are seven lives lived at 65% well-being more desirable than four lives lived with 90% well-being? This blindness to quality and richness and long-term consequences seems pervasive among Wizardkind - and experiencing and understanding this loss has moved me from being largely on the Wizard side to a slight preference for the Prophetic position.
This was great and I really appreciate the reevaluation of the central conflict between Wizard and Prophet that the reviewer went through as a result of COVID-19 and the fallout over the last year. Even so... I wonder if this is because it's a topic I know a fair bit about already, maybe I'm less enthused about reading about it. The Galen biography and Georgism analysis, OTOH, were almost totally novel for me, at least what I thought I knew turned out to be a lot less than I actually did when the original texts were illuminated.
I'm going to break the tie in my personal rankings at last because over the last few weeks I've occasionally thought 'By George!' and it's made me chuckle. I don't know if the voting system is decided yet but I'd like to cast my vote for some sort of ranked choice. Personally, I'd be satisfied if any of the top 5 (so far) we're winners. And no shade on Order Without Law or Why Buddhism is True, I just didn't connect with the topic and/or reviewer's style as much as the others.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
My conclusion from the COVID charley-foxtrot is that the Prophets, so to speak, are utterly useless. They may be 100% right on the ultimate root or our problems -- our social psychological nature, and our habits of social intercourse -- but the historical evidence is that these things are 100% proof against any lasting change brought about by the direst social force, let alone such sunny mild methods as rational persuasion.
If there's a particle of difference between the attitudes and inclinations of the 21st century American Facebooker during COVID and the 14th century English peasant when the Black Death arrived, I have yet to see it. The main reason we haven't gotten to the point of putting all the cats or Jews to the stake as a burnt offering, or dosing ourselves with mercury, garlic, and/or leeches, is because our Wizards managed to produce a magic potion (vaccine) in jig time (and secondarily because COVID isn't anywhere near the lethality of Y. pestis).
Wizardy can't solve all our problems, without doubt. But maybe it can solve all the problems that actually have solutions accessible to human beings. Perhaps the remaining problems are as intractable to us as the problem of the killer asteroid was to the dinosaurs.
This whole review is premised on the idea that what we care about is human beings, but much of what the Prophets are worried about is the natural world which is totally overlooked.
You think the fish are fine? Are the rainforests fine? Even the insects might be suffering catastrophic declines right now.
If all you care about is human well being sure, the Wizards look alright. But if you expand your scope to the natural world it is clear something is very very wrong, has been for a long time, and we are not fixing it.
This seems like the most political, ingroup-y review so far-- not necessarily a bad thing but not my preference. I lean toward the Wizard outlook as well but I don't feel the review effectively steelmans Prophets; one can point out that innovation faces increasing (x-)risks and diminishing returns while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production. Despite its obvious sympathies and some tangents toward the end, though, the review was effective at presenting the book's arguments and major claims, so props for that.
"while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production."
I don't understand this. The point of producing things is so that someone can consume them.
By any objective measure I can think of, human life has been getting better for at least the past century and a half, so population has not absorbed the new production. The estimate of economic historians is that global average real income is about ten times what it was through most of the past — twenty to thirty times in the developed world.
I agree that the new production has increased utility, income, etc., but that's not the point I take the Prophets to be making. Their concern is more along the lines of production being unsustainable, i.e. it risks depleting crucial resources or causing catastrophic damage, which would presumably decrease total utility in the longer term.
My point is this: imagine the Wizards and Prophets could make a grand bargain. The Wizards get support to e.g. increase food production efficiency by 6x, as long as food *consumption* only increases by 3x and the remaining factor of 2 goes toward e.g. environmentalist goals like reducing water usage and not farming in the Amazon. If it were possible to make political deals like that-- support for technological solutions in return for preservation getting a "cut" of them-- it seems like everyone would go home happy.
But in real life no such bargain gets made. All of the 6x improvement goes toward consumption, and resource usage doesn't decrease. In fact it probably increases, because something something marginal product. That leads to the Prophets seeing technological improvements *in themselves* as a driver of unsustainability, which is unfortunate from a coordination perspective.
I don't think this fully proves the Prophets' case, but it does suggest that the calculus is more complicated than "technology can consistently find an answer to resource shortages" (which is what I took the review to be saying).
Tangential, but I also have a tattoo of the muted post horn from Crying of Lot 49. I didn’t realize when I got it there are tons of other people with the same idea, and we together make up a kind of secret society who speak to each other in code, similar to the one in the book that the symbol represents.
Contra the reviewer Borlaug also believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
I Borlaug believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
Borlaug is a much more eminent figure than Vogt in their respective movements, so this book is also a real profile raiser for Vogt. Iowans would put Borlaug on the currency. Environmentalists would put Carson and Muir, not Vogt, on their Mount Rushmore.
I thought the reviewer was wrong in characterizing "wizards" as wanting unending population growth. You can be a wizard and even be in favor of gradually reducing human population.
"Each of these contain multitudes of factors that no single human on earth, not even the Normanest of Borlaugs, could keep straight in his or her head and 'fix' with a single quick hack like a better strain of wheat."
I think it's worth emphasizing over and over again that Ugur Sahin, Hamilton Bennett, and all the others did do basically this for the coronavirus itself. With the accumulated effort and science of decades behind them, we got two extremely effective extremely safe vaccines in mid-January 2020. For both the BioNTech and Moderna teams, it only took a couple days. As the CEO of Moderna said, "this is not a complicated virus" — at least, not for Wizards like them.
Production and distribution, meanwhile, were mainly just limited by money. (When something has positive externalities, by default in a free market the creators don't make enough profit and not enough of the thing gets produced.)
The hard part, the part the actually took so long and is related to the increased complexity of the modern world and its modern problems, was getting approval from the FDA, EMA, etc. (Note that *testing the safety and efficacy* isn't the hard part; the regulatory agencies just don't happen to like the fastest ways to test safety and efficacy. It's specifically getting the approval.)
I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, but I think also I wasn't clear because it sounds like you're agreeing with what I meant to say. What I meant was that literally all the governments had to do was spend much more money early on on vaccine factories and other parts of the supply chain. That would have been easy. The vaccine companies were limited by money; the government could have provided it.
Thanks, this is clearer indeed. (Also we could have stopped the virus outright a year ago if the Western governments had taken it seriously and had implemented Asia-style lockdowns.)
Errr... humankind is not going to get wiped out by COVID-22 or whatever, and this pandemic proves it. Governments will just lock down, or force everyone to take tests all the time, or force everyone to wear hazmat suits all the time to keep food production and distribution going.
A Chinese-style four-week hard lockdown is likely to stamp out almost any disease, provided enforcement is adequate. A sufficiently horrible plague should provide all the necessary incentive.
Also, hazmat suits aren't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
I think the Wizards can get us through for food, water, energy and most human desires that can be accommodated through markets. Where we are headed for doom is through our massive depletion of the diversity and abundance of wildlife and ecosystems. Maybe this won't lead to our material impoverishment, but it will surely cause us to be sadder and less fulfilled than we would otherwise be. It seems to me that this is not what we would choose, we just haven't found a good way to protect global public goods. I would readily pay say 10% of my incoming to bring into being arrangements that protected biodiversity across the world, others would offer 20%, 5% or 1% and it would be enough if used well. As the reviewer points out, the Wizard and Prophet construct is least successful when applied to climate change. I would argue that it is even less useful for the related issue of biodiversity. Still an excellent book though.
"If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. "
You are confusing "we have not made things as much better as we would like them to be" with "things are getting worse." Over the past thirty years, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty has dropped by a factor of four. Go back a few more decades and it has fallen from a large majority of the world's population to a small minority.
In order for "economic stagnation" to drag down average utility, the growth rate of per capita real income would have to be negative. Aside from briefly due to Covid, it isn't and hasn't been.
There are problems in the modern world, but they are largely due to the prophets. The Covid vaccine took two days to develop, most of a year to get approved, because the FDA et. al. were applying standards of proof wildly excessive when the cost of delay is hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of lives. That wasn't the work of Wizards — as you point out in imagining Borlaug's problem facing a modern regulatory regime.
Great review. The last part helps me crystalize an idea.
'If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity.'
While "engineering" and making everyone smarter could help, I think there are some easy gains to be made here. My model looks like this: rent seekers constantly infiltrate society and tries to find a safe niche to extract rent. (Rent seeking is sometimes unconscious and in good faith.) Humans seem to be biased towards rent-seekers in many context (this made sense in the ancestral environment). Rent seeking can be greatly reduced if we make decision-makers suffer the consequences of their actions. The problem with e.g. the FDA is that the organization isn't designed to get feedback on its actions. Markets and (functioning) democracy are two mechanisms to provide this feedback.
This is a bad EILI5 of rationalist-ish economists like Robin Hanson, but I thought it was missing from the discussion in the review.
This was really off-putting. (Really surprisingly, given what a great reads the other reviews so far have been.)
The whole Wizard-Prophet dichotomy is so obviously forced and misleading that I came away with an impression of two dangerous extremes. One trying to contrast itself with the other to make itself look better, but, in the end, only making itself look dishonest.
Clearly, Borlaug was a great person and we need more Borlaugs. (How few people disagree, though?) But I'm not associating Wizardry with Borlaug now, I'm associating it with irresponsible ideologues high on high modernism, who use Borlaug as a fig leaf for, eg., their absurd beliefs about inexhaustability of fossil fuels and support for harmful, wasteful scams like fracking.
I am hopeful for scientific progress, because it's demonstrated great results and potential. I also value and wish to preserve the nature, because it's demonstrably important for our livehood, a sophisticated, efficient machinery on its own, valuable and (so far, at our current level of understanding) irreplaceable in its sheer diversity of lifeforms and ecosystems. Those two beliefs are neither contradictory nor in conflict. Rather, they come from the same core values of truth ad reason, values which, I feel, conflict with any simplistic ossified heuristic, unquestioning trust or mistrust of civilization alike.
Characterizing COVID as an example of the failure of Wizardry seems completely wrong. It's an example of the failures that occur when you allow Prophets to regulate Wizards.
If we had decided to authorize vaccines after Phase 2 trials, we could have had a vaccine starting in July 2020 instead of November 2020. If we had decided to do challenge trials, we probably could have had a vaccine starting in March or April 2020. The same regulatory Prophets still haven't approved AstraZeneca or Novavax and decided to ruin public confidence in vaccines by pausing J&J because it might have caused as much damage as a single minute of the pandemic.
You can see this elsewhere too. The US could have had a majority of our electricity produced without carbon dioxide since the 1970s. Instead, we decided to make a nuclear regulatory agency that is paid based on the amount of time they spend reviewing a project.
Really glad this book was included in the review contest. It puts terms (and a lot more detail) behind concepts that I had vague thoughts about, but couldn't have expressed well. I'm very much in the "Wizard" side of things and the best way I had to describe this to date was the question "Would you rather live 500 years in the future or 500 years in the past?" to which I consider the future to be the clear correct answer. This review definitely motivated me to read it. Thanks anonymous reviewer!
Curiosity is certainly a contributing factor to me picking the future, but this is far from universal among the general population. My reasoning is primarily that the future has a high probability of being better and could be better by a shockingly large degree given continued exponential growth.
In my observation (limited N count though), many people either focus on things they think will be worse in the future (heavy overlap with "prophet" mindset in my interpretation) or prefer the past as a known quantity relative to the uncertainty of the distant future.
A couple of minor points, and a larger one that needs further explanation:
There is a statue of Borlaug, and it's in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Congress building (sponsored by Iowa).
There is also a Hall of Laureates of the World Food Prize (a quite beautiful building) in Des Moines, Iowa. Its purpose is to honor the recipients of the annual World Food Prize, but it unavoidably has the air of a Monument to Normal Borlaug (who founded the World Food Prize).
More deeply, there was a tremendous worry about a "world population explosion" in the 1960s. In fact, it was the expectable Malthusian consequence of the various improvements in food supply (including Borlaug's) after WW II; fewer people were starving to death. But after that time, the world population growth rate started slowing. (The book "The Population Bomb" was published within a few years of the time of the peak growth rate.) What changed things appears to be urbanization. Peasant farmers have lots of children, both for the obvious biological reasons and the fact that they're profitable. (I've read that peasant children are cash-flow positive by age three and net profitable by age five. Certainly, farmers' children were valuable workers in pre-mechanization Iowa farming.) Conversely, for townspeople, children are an expense, and they tend to have a lot less of them, less than the replacement rate -- although this transition in behavior seems to take a generation or two after immigration to the city to be established.
The result of this is that the higher the ratio of townspeople to peasant farmers, the lower the possible population growth rate, and if the ratio is high enough, the population ceases growing. That ratio is the same as the number of other people a single farmer can feed, i.e., the productivity of farming.
So the increased productivity that Borlaug created stopped people from starving in the short run, but also helped to get us to the point that we are freed from being at equilibrium at the Malthusian limit.
What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
> What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
Hunter-gatherer children don't do much useful work, but hunter-gatherers still have enough to grow their population. Maybe the difference between their fertility and that of townspeople is the quality of the birth control they use?
You seem to be on the side of the Wizards, and the book clearly is too, but at the end you fall into doomism and mark yourself out as really wishing to be on the side of the Prophets. Systems are not getting too complex to ever hope to get things right, it is instead that we tackle ever more complex problems as our capabilities rise.
Climate change failure is a result of a lack of action rather than a lack of knowing what to do. It is a systems failure of politics only. For the most part I blame the left here, for giving in to doomism and failing to come up with a compelling (or really any) ideology that the general public could buy into.
1. There ought to be a 90 foot tall bronze statue of Normal Borlaug. Buck naked. Riding a horse or holding up a lamp to the heavens or such shit.
2. I understand that Norman Borlaug's views of Wizards vs. Prophets were more "nuanced" than are sometimes reported. He didn't believe that technology would always eventually come up with solutions (yay, Science!), that there was no limit to the number of people that the earth or the universe could practically hold, but rather, that:
a. Third World Poverty is most often romanticized by people who don't have to live it and have no real experience of it; and
I further note that Paul Ehrlich is still held up as an expert on population growth and resource scarcity, even though none of his predictions have come to pass.
In spite of being pretty Wizardy, as I suspect most commenters here are, I get a lot out of the articles from Low Tech Magazine, which has a pretty extreme Prophet-tilt: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
> Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.
I live on the east coast, and we have extremely strict conservation rules for wetlands (as well as a lot of bird conservation measures, including a number of no-humans-allowed bird sanctuaries on islands near me). Having no direct knowledge about dovekies in particular, I'd naturally interpret their current status as an indication that changes to how we treat wetlands successfully saved many species, rather than an indication that they were never in danger to begin with. After all, dumping pesticides in swamps is *currently* unthinkable and vaguely disgusting to people around here, and a lot must have changed for it to have been business as usual only a century ago.
I absolutely adore this review - but I am cautious of the Engineer archetype that people say is being missed:
"A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs."
Call me a conflict theorist, but all of these types in the modern day have reduced themselves to Prophetry or beholden to them see - people taking Greta Thunberg seriously at the UN. It's not merely that she's a climate change alarmist, she's the exact sort of "we need to adopt social controls of my design to prevent growth and human production in order to save the planet" type of alarmist that is extremely commonly Prophetic. Not only that, but if you're going to accept such activist claims - Greta Thunberg is not exactly the scion of well-argued and thought-out climate policy (consider: she left China out of her climate lawsuits).
I am not saying this is necessarily The Route of All Things, but we have empirical evidence that organizations that *allow* Prophets will eventually be run by them.
Ah! That's who Tom Lehrer was singing about in "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". I figured it probably wasn't the "Autobahn Society", I just couldn't hear it any other way.
Drip irrigation should be in wizards column, no? Also vaccines provided they continue to work against future variants are arguably the singular wizard solution to covid that we couldn't overcome otherwise due to social constraints, I'd say
GDP-energy decoupling seems historically marginal and extremely difficult, so unless nuclear fusion energy enters mass production in the next half-century, I would give Air AND Fire to the Prophets... (it only takes one to risk wrecking civilization as we know it)
I love this book and I love this review, though I don't agree with everything in either. For one thing, I suspect that both the book and the review are a little unfair to both Vogt and Borlaug.
After reading the book a couple years ago I got hold of a copy of Vogt's manifesto (Road to Survival) and was a little surprised that most of that book is devoted to concerns about food production. That doesn't seem like misanthropy to me (though I suppose it's possible that Vogt's true motivations were more misanthropic and he merely focused on food production because he thought that argument would be more palatable to readers).
Meanwhile, Borlaug was actually a strong advocate for population control. Even talked about it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Out here in the country it's symbiotic, we put out bird feeders 'cause we like to see the birds around. Nesting boxes are the same thing.
Yup, I agree. (swallows and blue birds battle for my boxes.) I don't have a problem encouraging some plants and animals and discouraging others.
I have wondered sometimes whether having more computer programmers in Congress would be useful. When I consider the U.S. Code, my immediate impulse is to _refactor_! It's far, far too complicated for anyone to understand even what the body of law is intended to do with respect to a given subject, much less comprehend the second and third order effects. Unfortunately, these kinds of projects are incredibly difficult to undertake when writing computer code even when everyone involved knows what they're doing, agrees on the goal and is acting in good faith. The additional complications of writing English words that bureaucrats have to interpret & implement and citizens have to comprehend, or debating genuine disagreements in good faith about the best approach, or dealing with actors who are deliberately trying to make obscure changes that benefit a motivated special interest or who just want to wreck the whole project... well, it makes this old-fashioned good government Hubert Humphrey liberal want to throw up my hands.
Is it possible to define a set of criteria for laws that are the equivalent of the question "Will this program compile?"
No, it is not possible. At least not in any meaningful sense. The law can be normalized, meaning that jargon and usage of terms become consistent, it can be written using the canons of construction (rules for parsing) in mind. But it can't be consistent, reliable, or fully legible, for the following reasons:
1) Code is just an abstraction of machine code, which is just an abstraction of a bounded set of physical operations. There are only so many hardware operations a computer can take, and if you define them you can define a set of abstractions that call those, and only those instructions.
2) Code (can be) made to eliminate ambiguity. Assuming well 2 well made compilers with this goal, the same high-level code can be expected to compile into identical binaries for a given hardware platform. With human language, this is not possible. Even with constructed languages that attempt to eliminate this, two people can interpret the same law in different ways.
3) Computing hardware is a relatively closed environment. Human behavior is not. There will always, always, always be new situations where.... its not just that 'oh, we didn't think of that' but its a 'this isn't even reflective of reality'. Consider all the laws on the books around brick-and-mortar restaurants which say 'you must have 1 bathroom per X patrons' and the job of the regulator or lawyer regulating/advising a hip new 0-seats-provided food truck.
Epistemic status - ~10 years experience as code monkey, ~10 years experience helping code monkeys and lawyers and regulators sing in perfect harmony aka avoid going to court against each other.
I have the former experience but not the latter. Thank you for lending it to me. I think you're right, but maybe we can cut out some of the grosser pathologies.
Oh absolutely. There are so many areas to improve. I don't think you could make a more arcane and complex system if you sat down and tried.
Many more young people would be a good start.
The complexity of the law is the point -- it's to make it harder for people to understand so they're less agentic.
I think law and code are completely different things. Code tells the CPU what to do, it is purely prescriptive. But law isn't like that, because you can't tell The People what to do (although The People can tell any small scattered number of individual people what to do). Criminal law serves largely as just a giant warning billboard on which we write down all the Things we agree are Bad and what we will do to those who do Bad Things, in the hopes that it will give people inclined to do them second thoughts. All the rest I think can be reasonably described as a giant complicated contract agreement between interest groups on how money will flow between them. Law is rewritten as needed, when the power of various interest groups changes, or what they want changes. But I think in the main law is purely descriptive -- it says what we expect to happen, and why, and what we (as a collective) will do when some hard-of-hearing or stupid person violates the collective agreement.
Put it this way: can you imagine the passing or success of *any* law which purported to compel *almost everybody* to do something they don't want to do, object to, find wrong? I can't. But that tells you right there that law is not, and cannot, be proscriptive.
I was going to review this book but never got around to it! Glad someone did and looking forward to reading it.
Scott - why do you say that 'Everything is permitted' is misquoted by Sartre?
This book review wasn't by Scott, it was by an anonymous ACX reader:
> It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions
Oh my bad - well then does anyone / the anonymous reader know why that line from Doestoevsky is said to be misquoted here? Thanks!
I'd like to know too. Also, the link on that section goes to a "missing page" error.
There is some discussion here: https://infidels.org/library/modern/andrei_volkov/dostoevsky.html
which I, as a native Russian speaker, support. It is an accurate quote from "The Brothers Karamazov", but it is unclear to me whether misquotation is actually referring to some additional interpretation, not the phrase itself.
Thanks for this. Yes, I was also confused whether this meant misinterpreted or mistranslated. I speak Russian and have read Brothers Karamazov in the original and agree that the translation above is an accurate one.
my guess is that he meant to link this seeing as it redirects to an abc url
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616
Thanks for this. The assertion that the line is mistranslated is definitely false...not sure how a body of thought has appeared around this.
Clearly, because the original quote comes from Al'Mualim :-)
I always wonder how concerned to be about the degrowth arguments of the Prophets of Doom. They seem unlikely to persuade anyone who's not already wealthy, but I wouldn't put it past developed nations to try sabotaging global development or dramatically reducing global populations through war and famine - after all, you can justify any atrocity if you convince yourself that the alternative is human extinction.
If it was just the wealthy abstaining from kids.. well, they already do that on a statistical level. The problem is that gosh darn it, it always seems to lead to forced sterilizations and liquidations of those other people. This is not a modern, capitalistic, or western phenomenon, as its been happening for centuries, under various sociopolitical regimes, all over the globe.
The perpetual annoyance of the Malthusians is the fact that personally having 0-2 children doesn't prevent other people from growing the population, therefore coercive measures are required - for the good of the poor, of course!
What for? So far as I know, there are almost zero First World nations that have a fertility at replacement or above. In the CIA Factbook I find only Israel (2.57 children/woman/lifetime), France (2.04), and maybe Iceland (1.96). The developed countries are committing demographic suicide, so either (1) the population will shrink or (2) those cultures won't be around to bitch about whatever *does* happen in a world dominated by sub-Saharan Africans, Southeast Asians, and Orthodox Jews.
And mormons and amish!
World Bank says French birthrate is only 1.88 per woman as of 2018.
"A tall, lanky Norwegian-American broiling under the Mexican sun, seeds from a dozen countries in his blistered hands, just trying to do the right damn thing."
I suppose that's the irony of the contrast - Borlaug really doing it the old-fashioned, agrarian pastoral idyll way, where you cross the strains and plant the resultant seeds and see what is going to happen, and try try again.
Now I really wonder what the book had been like if instead of Vogt, the author had picked say, Wendell Berry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry
Which would be what you would roughly get if you took Norman Borlaug and made him a Prophet instead of a Wizard
There's a strain of Jeffersonian agrarianism in Berry's thought that I always have to be careful to account for when reading him because we're just not going back to that world of smallholders whose economic independence forms the basis of republican virtue, but yes, his writing is vital in understanding where we're at and where we're going.
> On June 3, 1979, Berry engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana. He describes "this nearly eventless event" and expands upon his reasons for it in the essay "The Reactor and the Garden."[18]
Reading the article, I'm a little sympathetic. He admits to being personally unable to judge the danger of nuclear power, but having ample reason to distrust the US government's assurances that it was safe (which, tbh: fair). But he really is just against electricity and people using it (on the margin), which seems extremely bad and unconvincing. Given the choice between coal and nuclear, he says: "how about neither?".
Which meant, of course, coal plants and the resulting millions dead. (Yes, millions, air pollution is actually quite bad! I wish I had a QALY figure instead, but deaths is what I was able to find.)
I think this is my main gripe with the anti-human strain of environmentalism, actually; something like a focus on purity instead of comparisons or mechanisms or differential development.
If we had an air pollution tax that were fairly applied to coal and nuclear, and required nuclear plants to carry insurance for the risk of meltdowns, then nuclear would beat coal and everyone would be safer and the people who had decided to insure the nuclear plants would have made lots of money by correctly betting on progress. But in part because of the holism, I think most prophets are suspicious of "and then we'll collect a tax on released particulates"--how will particulates be measured? How will the tax be priced? Will it make it through a corrupt Congress in a way that actually changes the behavior of people who don't want their behavior changed?
But this of course means that higher scrutiny is applied where it's possible, which is disproportionately new things, ruling out specifically this sort of wizardly progress. See vapes being banned when cigarettes are not, despite vapes being clearly better for health. (Even if not perfect for health, I think the prophets are missing that people *get something* out of vaping, and so a society with slightly more sickness but lots more stimulants is a better off society! And actually the trade looks something more like 'more stimulants and more health'.)
I am not nearly the radical that Berry is for sure, and I'm definitely pro-Nuclear. That said it seems Berry spent a lot of energy protesting Coal plants as well, so he doesn't have the anti-Nuclear-but-lets-simultaneously-ignore-the-status-quo myopia you sometimes see in anti-Nuclear advocates. You don't need to pull up the QALY figures for me, I did my master's thesis on a comparative energy study project and it indelibly cemented in my mind the unique awfulness of Coal.
All in all I mostly want to see what there is to learn from the strongest arguments of someone like Berry, even if I think they're wrong on certain things (even big ones). The full-steam-ahead crowd often gets very high on its own supply and thinks all problems can be solved by technology and it's not clear to me that all problems ultimately can be.
Yeah; I think it is not obvious that all problems that are caused by technology could also be solved by technology. (Trivial example: suppose you could actually make a dangerous black hole with something like the LHC; you probably can't unmake it as easily. With things like AGI, you have to get it right before you deploy it, and so on.)
But I don't think Berry gets points for spending equal hours protesting coal and nuclear, because those hours hurt nuclear much more. [We stopped building nuclear plants; we didn't stop building coal plants.] My complaint is that Berry and similar people viewed this as 'partial success', instead of putting us in a 'worst of both worlds' situation. [This assumes that a 1970s environmentalist would, forced to choose a way to produce 200 GW for the US, pick the nuclear plants instead of the coal plants; if they would pick the coal instead, then I can't claim they're making the 'opportunity cost' mistake.]
But I do think that looking back at the last 50 years of wizards and prophets, it feels like almost all of the gains have come from wizardry, and the net effect of prophets have been pretty clearly negative? Like, when it comes to the problem of climate change, I think the prophets get some points for yelling about it, and lose at least 10x that many points for blocking construction of nuclear plants, and get roughly none of the points for the increasing adoption of solar. [This is a little controversial because I think prophets were behind subsidies for solar production, but my understanding is that the decrease is price is primarily due to wizards making semiconductor manufacturing better in general, rather than specialization for solar in particular; maybe actually they get something like 20% of the credit here?]
Similarly, when it came to COVID... I dunno, the wizards solved this one in like two days, and then the rest of the system fucked it up, and (from my vantage point at least) that feels mostly because of the prophets instead of because of different wizards doing different things. [It's not like the wizards are the ones saying "let's improve the equity of vaccine distribution" instead of "let's make more vaccines"!]
Honestly trying to assign points to either side is my entire problem with the "wizards vs prophets" formulation. We need to be worried about negative externalities, climate change, and the ongoing extinction crisis, AND we need to figure out innovative solutions that provide prosperity for everyone.
As I recall the prophets were saying we need to take Covid-19 very seriously.
https://link.medium.com/gNnxeGpdTfb
I think the balance between prophets and wizards get the points (could be even within one person). Both are doing their part in balancing the other.
If I imagine a world without wizards there would be obviously no technology and we would still live like in the stone age: definitely a harder live, but perhaps not less happy in average.
In a world without prophets warning from bad potentials piling up, civilization would be like a lottery, with everyone doing what thy think helps but often causing big harm if the get risks, side effects or complex systems wrong.
Just to stick with your example: without prophets perhaps there would be many more nuclear plants, but without so many warning, they would be by far not as save as they are now. Concerning COVID there wold be much less preparations for pandemics and much less medical research. You would have to be a real wizard to catch up with the spreading desease without this strong foundation.
A few interesting examples of unbalanced wizards projects gone too far and caused great harm are covered by Adam Curtis in the 90ies:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfxlxQqW6YZuA1Xt-qinptNJysiXWTgAr
> collect a tax on released particulates
I prefer a carbon tax which is applied when the (already measured) fossil fuel leaves the ground.
This fails to incentivize capturing the carbon when the fuel is combusted, which is the easiest time to do it. [Turns out, for a lot of fuels, it makes sense to dig it up, burn it, filter out the generated CO2, and then store the CO2 back in the mine you got it from (or similar secured hole in the ground). I hear this is actually net energy / dollars, and so makes sense to take advantage of as long as that's true.]
Sorry, posted too quickly; I mention carbon but actually you want to filter out all of the particulates (the other things are worse), and how you combust it determines how much gunk would end up in the air, it's cheaper to filter smokestacks than the whole atmosphere, etc.
er, just replace "particulates" with "pollution". What I'd give for an edit button ;)
No matter what primary energy you use, the best is still the energy you don't need because you don't waste it. So it is crucial to give incentives to optimize for efficiency and effectiveness instead of economic growth and financial profits.
I think the best way is to tax the primary resources so everyone wants to get as much out of it as possible.
A carbon tax makes fossil fuels more expensive. That means synfuels made from captured CO2 and nuclear energy can compete better.
This is aside from measuring pollutants in the smokestack.
The point isn't to pick synfuels and nuclear as the winner, the point is to get the most good for the least cost! If it turns out that pollutant-captured fossil fuels are the winner once the externalities are internalized, why not use them?
Carbon taxes, pollution taxes, carbon taxes, pollution taxes, carbon taxes, pollution taxes, ...
Did I mention carbon taxes?
Part of me feels the emphasis on Vogt's misanthropy was a cheap shot by the book author. But then again, I can't deny that misanthropy has been a major feature of the Prophets overall.
Berry perhaps belongs to a fourth current, which we might as well call the Druids.
Yeah, I agree. Perhaps the author can be excused because Vogt is an important historical figure, but I think he's an easy target to knock down. Another extreme I've seen occasionally is trotting out Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and it's Future" to represent environmentalism when we have plenty of non-unabombers to pick from.
I disagree with Berry on certain issues but I find a lot of his writing compelling and its certainly reframed my thinking in many ways.
Using someone like Berry also removes the "unlikable bourgeoise" versus "salt of the earth farmer" comparison.
Oh good. I was looking for suggestions for 'better' prophets, (I'm more a wizard and know few prophets.. Rachel Carson, E.O Wilson, David Attenborough?)
Sounds interesting! Added to my list
This whole concept of "prophets" appears to be very contrived. Most conservationists and environmentalists do not hate humankind and are not opposed to technological progress. I studied conservation history and never even heard of this Vogt guy. The important figures in U.S. conservation history were people like George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, then Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and then Rachel Carson. None of these people could be called a prophet in the sense of this apparently contrived book, except for John Muir.
If you are looking for a better perspective from the point of view of conservationists, I suggest the classic A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.
There's the literal (now ex-)archdruid, John Michael Greer, which I guess would be classified here as a "prophet", but whose writings keep insisting that both the "cornucopians" and the "doomers" are wrong, here's a good recent example examining the story of peak oil :
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
See here for his old blog that was much more (directly) dedicated to these issues than his current one :
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/
For "Air"/Climate Change, I think a key point is that nuclear power should have solved climate change decades ago, but "prophets" killed it with false concerns about radiation, meltdowns, and waste.
I'm confused/sad about why "prophet" thinking is so popular and powerful given its repeated failures. A big risk IMO is that as we make everything more legible and centralized "prophets" will take over and stifle future progress (e.g. as you say in the post, maybe Borlaug would get crushed by regulators today)
I agree wholeheartedly. Nuclear could have solved it then, and could drastically mitigate it now, but the legacy of the prophets of old and their followers today prevent it from happening.
While I'm not in the anti-nuclear camp per se, I believe nuclear power is more expensive than gas (source: wikipedia), so an unconstrained market (i.e. one in which climate change was not taken into account) would still have favoured gas. Current nuclear projects in Europe seem expensive and behind schedule. So it seems likely that the market would still have favoured the "dash to gas" even without the popular opposition to nuclear generation.
My understanding is that the reason nuclear is so expensive is crippling regulation caused by popular opposition
I think this is one of those questions that will simply have to be answered in practice: if it can stand on its own feet, eventually some government will give in and let it.
It’s been like 50 years since we developed nuclear power, so the question has already been answered. Works fine in France, OK in some other places, but can’t really survive politics. Hopefully solar and wind goes better, I guess.
My understanding, though, is that the French nuclear industry is entirely reliant on subsidies from the French government for its existence, and has never turned an actual profit. Is that not the case?
I don’t know, sorry. And it seems hard to google for. (Eg electricity in France is relatively cheap, but maybe that’s just because of subsidies?)
This article has a lot of information on the French nuclear power industry. One relevant piece of info is that France deliberately decided to focus on nuclear power in the 1970s due in part to the oil price shock. A relevant quote:
"France's nuclear power program cost some FF 400 billion in 1993 currency*, excluding interest during construction. Half of this was self-financed by EdF, 8% (FF 32 billion) was invested by the state but discounted in 1981, and 42% (FF 168 billion) was financed by commercial loans."
So it looks like France invested in about 8% of the total cost of plant construction, the rest being market forces.
If some government subsidies enables cheap, carbon-free electrical power, I don't see the problem.
I think it depends a lot on whether the industry could survive without the subsidies. If so, then the subsidies probably won't hurt too much. If not, then that suggests its existence is a net negative for society and that there's a lot of resources going into propping it up that would be better put to some better use elsewhere.
What is wrong with perpetual government subsidies which enable cheap carbon-free energy?
Understand that I believe that once small modular nuclear power plants get rolling, no subsidies will be necessary. But assume the contrary:
The only way to deliver cheap carbon-free electricity to the populace is modest perpetual government subsidies. Fine. Just do it.
My gut reaction to this is that I want nuclear power plants to be well regulated! But I don't know how much regulations exist, nor what level of regulation I would consider reasonable.
There’s a striking graph most of the way down https://rootsofprogress.org/where-is-my-flying-car showing costs of nuclear over time. You can really see the regulation kicking in just after 1980.
Great link. Thanks.
"Apocalypse Never (My Utopian Vision)"
https://link.medium.com/TwDtjmAO2bb
In addition to regulation, there are simple economies of scale at work. The US has thirty times more gas plants than nuclear, and this has led to it becoming better at gas than nuclear.
The article linked below gives a fairly thorough overview of the argument that nuclear power is kept artificially expensive due to government regulation.
Relevant quote:
"The proximal cause of nuclear‘s flop is that it is expensive. In most places, it can‘t compete with fossil fuels. Natural gas can provide electricity at 7–8 cents/kWh; coal at 5 c/kWh.
Why is nuclear expensive? I‘m a little fuzzy on the economic model, but the answer seems to be that it‘s in design and construction costs for the plants themselves. If you can build a nuclear plant for around $2.50/W, you can sell electricity cheaply, at 3.5–4 c/kWh. But costs in the US are around 2–3x that. (Or they were—costs are so high now that we don‘t even build plants anymore.)
Why are the construction costs high? Well, they weren‘t always high. Through the 1950s and ‘60s, costs were declining rapidly. A law of economics says that costs in an industry tend to follow a power law as a function of production volume: that is, every time production doubles, costs fall by a constant percent (typically 10 to 25%). This function is called the experience curve or the learning curve. Nuclear followed the learning curve up until about 1970, when it inverted and costs started rising
....
This chart also shows that South Korea and India were still building cheaply into the 2000s. Elsewhere in the text, Devanney mentions that Korea, as late as 2013, was able to build for about $2.50/W.
The standard story about nuclear costs is that radiation is dangerous, and therefore safety is expensive. The book argues that this is wrong: nuclear can be made safe and cheap. It should be 3 c/kWh—cheaper than coal."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThvvCE2HsLohJYd7b/why-has-nuclear-power-been-a-flop
Well said.
Well maybe not solve but help. My son wanted to study nuclear engineering, I told him only if he wanted to move to France. There is an unreasonable fear of nuclear anything, even among those trained in science. I don't know how to change that (the fear) except through education... and since even 'those trained in science' don't trust science so much anymore, it feels like a catch-22.
If you want a serious answer, I suggest magical thinking is always more popular than rationality in small part because it's more optimistic -- if we all clap our hands really sincerely, Tinkerbell *will* live, in defiance of the gloomy rationalists -- but in even larger part because our mental limitations as a species.
The evidence rather suggests we are not born with areas of the brain that can cope adequately with very complex events that happen over timespans comparable to or longer than our lifetime -- with one notable exception: we *are* born with an area of our brain exquisitely tuned to comprehend and manipulate complex *social* interactions between ourselves. We're a social species, essentially all our success going right back to the veldt required superb social integration and manipulation, so we have giant areas of the brain optimized to do that very well. We grasp the intentions and feelings of others brilliantly, and generally even the dumbest of us, who can barely learn to spell and add numbers, can manipulate social situations with a skill that would make R. Daneel Olivaw (metallic) green with envy.
But what that means is that our brain maps *all* complex problems onto some kind of social problem, because that's the only mechanism it has that might work. If all you have is a hammer et cetera.
And with respect to *social* problems, magical thinking actually works. One person with very, very passionate convictions can succeed (socially) as much as a lukewarm majority. Sincerity matters, things turn out better if people have good will and are nice, and because it ends up making everybody happy, et cetera -- all the usual "reasons" for things to be true that mark magical thinking from rationality.
Is "wizard" more or less magical thinking than "prophet"? "Wizard" seems more like magical thinking - "we don't need to actually solve our problems; technology will save us" - and yet it's proven more reliable.
This isn't the case for opposition to nuclear energy specifically, but in general Prophet ideas are popular because they're what ordinary people can use.
Most people in these comments are talking about what "we" should do, as though we were the government. A government can easily fund research and subsidize infrastructure, but if it tries to make individual citizens consume less or limit their reproduction it risks despotism. So "we" should steer clear of Prophets, and pay attention to the Wizards.
Any individual, though, is in the opposite situation. Consuming less is easy. Advancing science is hard, especially if you aren't a scientist. Not everyone can become a C4 photosynthesis researcher or even be on the business side of clean energy--even if you have the necessary intelligence and aren't committed to another career, it will take time to reach a place of responsibility. (You can donate money, if you have some to spare--but maybe you want to donate to Givewell's top charities instead.) But almost anyone, any time, can become a vegetarian, start recycling, or choose to drive and fly less frequently.
Now that you're not a government or business, there's not much reason for you to even notice the Wizards. On the other hand, the Prophets don't look like potential tyrants anymore: they're just people giving advice.
That doesn't explain the anti-nuclear thing, of course. A lot of the people I'm counting with the Prophets are pro-nuclear, and they don't necessarily hate GMOs either. But people who live more simply for purely environmental reasons naturally mix with people who dislike modernity and new technology in general (and also people who are Prophets about more plausible threats, e.g. fertilizer runoff). So poorly grounded anti-Wizard ideas have spread across the whole subculture, aided by the fact that they superficially resemble the more defensible boycotts and self-restrictions that most people started with.
Incidentally, I'd bet on Borlaug against the regulators even today. He fought _hard_ against a lot of official opposition for his whole career, and mostly won. (Though the point stands that he shouldn't have had to!)
That's an interesting point; the strength of wizards (that it requires relatively few people / low effort) is maybe a political weakness.
Alternatively, hoping for the technology to solve the issue and doing nothing is easy, while willingly reducing consumption is hard.
Totally fair. Most people (I don't have a good guess as to the exact figure, but >95% wouldn't be a shock) figure that Mann's Wizards will fix any problem before it becomes a danger to human civilization, or doubt it but refuse to think more about the issue. In that sense, Wizard ideas are much, much more popular and easier to live by. But among people actively concerned about the environment, I think it's easier to get into an over-Prophetic subculture than an over-Wizardly one for the reasons laid out above: namely, that the good Prophet ideas are easier to make part of your lifestyle than the good Wizard ones.
In my view it's simple risk management: the wore the possible disaster, the more effort you have to take to make this disaster extremely unlikely.
This is how our emotional risk management works and this is how engineers should plan their technology. This makes nuclear so expensive. The many regulations are just because the state and society don't trust some commercial actors to always voluntarily spend as much resources on safety as the risk demands.
Haven't you been even slightly concerned by Fukushima, the subsequent stories about how the Japanese had skimped on the safety of reactor vessels, then the subsequent failures (and corruption) of the French and Japanese steel industry to produce nuclear pieces that conform to the specifications ?
Small but important detail: crossing different strains of wheat to obtain an improved strain is not the same as GMO. Crossing is more natural in the sense that it can occur naturally by cross pollination by insects. Then humans got into the act as well. Hence the huge variety of plant cultivars available in any garden centre. GMO goes beyond this, making it even possible, for example, to insert pesticides into crop plants, which disastrously affect more insects (like bees!) than the targeted pests, and which stock and/or humans then consume. Not healthy! This type of practice has given GMO a bad name.
There is no scientific consensus that I am aware of that GMO's have been a substantial factor in colony collapse disorder. Do you have a citation that I could read arguing otherwise? Thanks!
I am not referring to colony collapse disorder, but simply the fact that the food plant contains pesticide that effects all insects that feed on it.
Specifically, food crops are genetically modified to tolerate the application of neonicotinoids (a leading candidate for the primary cause of colony collapse disorder), 2,4-D, & glyphosate, which has been one of the main use cases for GMO techniques. My objection is not to genetic engineering per se, but how it is used to perpetuate an industrial model of agriculture that's in a Red Queen dynamic. The tools are rarely problems in and of themselves, it's how we humies use them.
Bt corn is another instance where I believe these genetic engineering techniques have been misused. I remember reading about the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin in my dad's organic gardening catalogs growing up, a tremendously useful pesticide for rootworms. It's highly effective in a narrow window of time but does not persist in the soil. Bt corn, however, continuously produces this toxin, changing the selective pressure against European corn borer and other rootworms from occasional to continuous.
Now Monsanto & Syngenta are aware of how species respond to a continuous evolutionary pressure, so they prescribe a "high dose-refuge" technique in planting, where some fields are planted with non-Bt corn in rotation to try and forestall evolution of resistance. Perhaps this is sufficient, but it's hard for me to imagine the continuous presence of a pesticide will not engender resistance in the past relatively quickly on general evolutionary principles. What would cause the populations of rootworms in the refuge fields to start drifting back toward the pre-Bt corn equilibrium? If that happens, then what are farmers who use Bt toxin as an occasional pesticide to do?
https://www.cornpest.ca/ccpc-en/index.cfm/bt-corn/resistance-development/resistance-in-ecb/
Thank you for the thoughts and the link.
I totally agree!
Chemical pesticides, for which GMO insertion are a substitute, also affect all insects that feed on it, and since spraying is a lot less targeted, they result in a lot more pesticide on things other than the food plant.
Mystery OP - You are finding the lack of balance in book because Mann assiduously avoids making it into a horse race where the author must, in the name of neutrality, agree that both sides have valid points.
Sometimes, it really is the case that one side revolutionizes the human experience to the point of slaying one of the horsemen of the apocalypses, and the other side is objectively pro-death.
I admit, happily, that I am not neutral on this. My father, uncles, aunt, and grandfather are all avowed wizards - civil engineers and enviro engineers. They are, or were, long haired, hippy-type, pinko (cis hetero people) (I was born in a VW van). I grew up immersed in this debate. I've heard the best arguments from both sides to the point where I could repeat them like Happy Birthday and The Apostle's Creed. One sides solution is always life, and the question is always how to make it work. One is always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it.
> One is always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it.
Do you consider reduced human fertility to be equivalent to death?
When two people consider to have a child and chose not to? No. My aunt, a Catholic nun, thinks I'm wrong about this, and I don't have any well-formulated philosophical reason to come to this answer. It just feels right.
When two people otherwise would but are prevented via hard pressure (eg forced sterilization a la the early 20th century America) yes, and I don't think its close.
When two people otherwise would have a child, but have been pressured into not doing so by a third party wielding soft power (eg moral suasion applied to Americans in the late 20th century America or the foreign aid bribes given to so-called 3rd world countries if and only if they implement population control measures on behalf of the 1st world aid givers) usually, but not always. I see that more like a politician or executive having sex with a subordinate. Maybe its done with 100% informed consent, but usually not.
Or are you talking about the trend where increased wealth seems to cause reduced birthrate? In that case, yes. And if I knew what caused it, I could pass moral judgement on it. Since I don't, I just try to be a natalist and practice what I preach.
And since I'm going on, being pro-death is valid in certain situations. I have a living will with instructions to pull the plug under certain scenarios. Aborting a fetus with a disorder dooming them to a short, painful life is both pro-death and potentially the most merciful act.
How about a bribe of a snall lifetime income offered to a woman (not a government) to stop after zero, one, two, or three children (decreasing amounts)? Do you see a moral problem? Have we decreased her options or increased them?
Yes. I see that just like an executive "offering" to take his secretary on a personal vacation, setting an envelope of cash on the table, and expecting sex. After all, that increases the secretary's options, but most people see it as a moral problem.
The downside to the Secretary saying no is obvious.
What is the downside to the African woman saying No to the guaranteed income and having as many children as she wishes? (Other than poor health and hungry children.)
You're purchasing the life of her future children. It belongs in the same moral universality class as taking an option on her future childrens' labor, i.e. slavery. Most people find slavery abhorrent *even if* one can make an objectively true utilitarian John Calhoun argument that under the right framework individual slaves would be better off. Whatever the reasons for that are -- insert some mush about the ineffable liberty of the human spirit -- they are the same reasons we recoil from the idea of buying someone out of their fertility.*
--------------
* Or more precisely, why we would find it deeply repugnant if applied to ourselves, although we might rationalize it away for some of the untouchables of the world (as indeed some of Vogt's eugenicist friends did).
I assume that if someone offered you $100,000 to get a vasectomy, that you would react as if your very moral existence was a danger.
> Or are you talking about the trend where increased wealth seems to cause reduced birthrate? In that case, yes. And if I knew what caused it, I could pass moral judgement on it. Since I don't, I just try to be a natalist and practice what I preach.
That trend is often referred to as demographic transition. You are likening that to death?
If demographic transition is inevitable and permanently lowers fertility below replacement, it *is* death for Homo sapiens. Mathematical law does not permit a population with nonzero death rate and sub-replacement fertility to survive indefinitely.
(Even at a civilisational fertility rate of 1, though, this will take a few hundred years.)
As the natural world is reatored to it's former glory and people's lives become increasingly incredible, I cannot imagine that people would not want to have children.
The goal of 2.1 children per family would be well understood by the one billion rich educated persons of the year 2300.
I did use an "if" clause for a reason.
I mean, you started this by asking whether reduced human fertility would be equivalent to death. If it's permanent and goes below replacement, my answer is yes due to the resulting extinction of mankind.
It's not impossible that sub-replacement fertility could reverse at some point, but it hardly seems obvious that it will either.
Even though I find myself on the side of the Wizards more often than not, this kind of glib dismissal of the opposition always leaves me wondering if I've really grappled with the strongest version of their argument.
Two good places to start would be Wendel Berry as referenced elsewhere and whomever you think provides the best arguments for the precautionary principal, as intentional interventions have the potential to have catastrophic unintended consequences and we only have 1 earth. The Mystery OP references average utility, which is similar to what some Jesuits get at when they talk about environmentalism, using words like dignity instead. They don't usually use the language of utilitarianism, but get at the same idea. And they might turn off someone with a negative reaction to religious thinkers.
I think those are better places to look than the various mathematical or economic models like peak oil or The Population Bomb.
I've read many of those, and I am a strong critic of peak oil and The Population Bomb myself, I just find it a bit curious where you seem to have characterized the so-called "Prophets" viewpoint *categorically* as: "always death, and the question is how do we convince people to embrace it"
"Always" is an incredibly high bar to apply to an individual, let alone a group.
Fair point. I probably got out over my skis here more than I should have. Thank you for the polite correction when I didn't demonstrate the same charity to others.
No sweat, I assure you I'm far more disagreeable on a regular basis, and I've already learned some stuff from your comments throughout this thread!
"...the precautionary principal, as intentional interventions have the potential to have catastrophic unintended consequences..." During COVID I think the precautionary principle was interpreted as the opposite of this.
As best I can tell, the precautionary principle is incoherent. If you do develop nuclear power, there is some probability that something terrible will happen as a result, a nuclear accident or a nuclear war. If you don't develop nuclear power, there is some probability that something terrible will happen as a result, severe global warming due to fossil fuel being the only adequate power source.
Following out the precautionary principle, both doing it and not doing it are forbidden.
Bingo!
>>... borrow from his predecessors’ racist-tinged doom-heralding and expand on it by chastising all humans, rich and poor, white and non-white alike. According to Mann, Vogt argues that "consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity." Crucial to this is the concept of "carrying capacity" – the idea that the earth has a fixed capacity to support human and animal life.<<
>>Though Borlaug didn’t tend to wax philosophical like Vogt did, I think if he were to comment on the idea of carrying capacity, he would describe it as a fluid equilibrium that can be turned into a virtuous circle: find ways to feed more people, and their increased productivity pulls them and their countrymen out of poverty, increasing both quality of life and growth potential. The key is not to limit the number of people, but to not let the people starve and fall into ruin. To Borlaug, the earth is not a finite planet-sized fish tank, because humans aren’t fish; we can understand and engineer our way out of problems that a salmon fry can’t, and it’s our responsibility to use the tools at hand for the benefit of all.<<
Count me as a Prophet, though I would never argue against the Green Revolution or the goal of eliminating hunger.
So the Earth is an aquarium and humans can out innovate and out engineer every other species on the planet. Lots of humans, hooray! And not much of anything else.
That's not a future I applaud.
Fortunately there is a solution: fewer people. A lot fewer in fact. About a billion.
“The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth.” by Peter Rodes Robinson
https://link.medium.com/u1ILr0lUcab
In an abstract sense, I agree that it could be better to have fewer humans on the planet, both for our own benefit and for the benefit of the other species on it. But if the goal is protecting the environment, it seems unlikely that just waiting until 2300 for gradual population decline to occur is going to give you the world you want, although in theory the faster we develop the faster birth rates will fall.
Unfortunately, all methods of rapidly achieving fewer people involve either catastrophe or atrocity, so I'm very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning.
I'm not in favor of catastrophe or atrocity. I'm advocating gradual reduction of human population for 180 years.
What are you advocating?
I'm not advocating anything, I just think it's important to consider the means, which you're pretty vague on in that post. I suspect your most controversial proposal would be government policy to encourage childlessness? Unless this is just something that's going to happen anyway? Personally I think it's more important to focus on how much the population as a whole consumes, there's a massive difference between the environmental impact of 1 billion Americans and 1 billion Kenyans.
However, I worry that some people will want to achieve the same goal but will be less patient than you. 180 years is a long timescale, some people don't think the planet even has that long.
I emphasise that I'm not accusing you of anything, but any argument that could be used to justify the murder of 6 billion people gives me pause. Obviously that's not something anyone's proposing right now, but based on the history of the world so far, it seems worryingly plausible in a future with severe climate change. Most wealthy nations have a history of conquest and mass murder, usually backed by high moral claims about doing what's best for the world (or at least for their nation). One of the main reasons I think we need to address climate change now, through investment in technology like nuclear power and renewables, is to prevent the environmental movement from remembering that they used to get on really well with fascists. Nothing against environmentalists, I just think there's still a minority expressing Vogt's very anti-human sentiments, and those ideas could definitely catch on if there were large numbers of climate refugees.
> I'm not advocating anything,
I find it more useful when criticizing a concept to offer an alternative. If there is no alternative, than I see no point in the debate.
> massive difference between the environmental impact of 1 billion Americans and 1 billion Kenyans.
Again if you are not advocating anything, I'm don't see what point you are making.
> any argument that could be used to justify the murder of 6 billion people gives me pause.
Agreed. What argument did you have in mind?
If we stay on the Wizard path long enough, we can terraform the moon into a giant nature preserve, complete with ressurrected species that are long since extinct. If we go with the Prophets long enough, then we'll be back to slash and burn agriculture and killing every pest species before it easts the crops. Rich people can afford to care about animals, subsistence people can't.
> terraform the moon into a giant nature preserve
Do you actually believe this?
I think that it's possible with the right technology and resources. I think if we continue to grow in both categories then at a future point it will be possible. The only question then is whether we would want to do it. We'd need some kind of artificial magnetic shield against solar wind and the like, an atmosphere, water. Admittingly the moon's low gravity might make it unsuitable for housing some species (I'm not sure how a tree would grow in Moon gravity, it would probably look pretty odd). The overall point is certainly something I believe: the more technology and resources we have (and I consider human beings a resource in this case) the more things we can accomplish, and if we value nature and animals (which we clearly do) then we're more likely to make a good home for them with more power than with less.
The point in question is how many of them will go extinct on the way to that journey and what is the best way to get there. It's not necessarily clear that pushing as fast as possible (a slight caricature of the so called "wizard" position) is the way.
Not clear to me why one would put this on the moon instead of orbital habitats (or zoos here on Earth or w/e).
You are definitely right, orbital habitats would be superior to the moon for nature preserves. And Earth would be superior to either. If I was really trying hard to come up with a high tech futuristic solution then I'd probably build an artificial continent somewhere in the Pacific for my preserve.
FLWAB: Do you see a problem with reducing the human population to one billion persons living in fairly dense walkable towns connected by hyperloops and leaving the rest of the planet to nature?
Yes. It's primarily in the word "reducing." Who is doing the reducing, and how? And why can't the human race grow? I like people. I think animals and nature and such is primarily valuable because people value it.
China will begin shrinking within a decade. Do you see that as a problem?
I mean, if you turn Mercury into a ringworld and put a trillion humans on it, perhaps it will make sense to only have a billion humans living on Earth, or to turn it mostly into a nature preserve / tourist attraction. But why cut down on the number of humans before them?
Like, in my way of looking at things, humans are net useful. Is that not true in your way of looking at things?
Put as many people as you want in space habitats. One trillion, one quadrillion, no problem. Plenty of room in the galaxy.
But no more than one billion on Earth.
Sure. Your assumption that these little towns would be idyllic technologically-sophisticated places, instead of resembling the English semi-feudal countryside the last time the world had 1 billion people (in 1800) seems at best optimistic, certainly an assumption that should be closely examined.
I suggest only 1 in 100,000 or so of the population (give or take) is actually productive, and the entirety of human progress, sane social structures, and technological innovation rests of them. Everyone else is more or less a follower, who will not screw things up *if* regularly shown a better way.
That means for the purposes of assessing the wealth and quality of human civilization, you just count the number of those core people. With 6 billion people we have 60,000 of them, which is a lot of brains solving problems and making things better. With 1 billion of them, we have 1/6 as many, which means things will not get better as fast. It may even be that things get *worse* because we still have a lot of natural follower types who can screw things up.
The number of highly useful people may not even scale monotonically with population, because they tend to support each other -- e.g. assortative mating, or the well-known tendency of science to go faster when there is more collaboration. So maybe with 6 billion people we have 60,000 really useful core people, and with 1 billion we have only 500 because a bunch of *potentially* useful people lacked the mutual support needed to realize their potential.
Your logic makes my head spin. Have a nice evening.
> complete with ressurrected species that are long since extinct
Sorry but this is incredibly far-fetched. Even with DNA there is key biological information that is lost by not having an extant species. And even with an extant critter, when its divorced from its original habitat (e.g. raised in captivity) it loses all of the learned ability passed down from its ancestors.
When some things are lost they are truly lost forever.
DNA preservation is Plan B, not the preference.
"Hah", he says donning his wizard cape for battle. (ref: The Incredibles)
What if the way off this planet, is to raise the ~10 billion out of poverty, find
the ~1000 super genus's* (my spelling sucks.) we need, and fund them properly. (Properly is doing a lot of work there.) And humans spread through the solar system and to the stars. (The dream of sci fi.) And it takes 100 years.
So maybe 1 billion and 100 super geniuses, and it takes 1,000 years. It's the same number of humans*years. But if both were possible outcomes, I'd vote for more people... I mean we already have them? :^)
Seriously, I'd like us to be better stewards of the Earth and spread across the stars.
How about 1 billion very well educated humans living in a natural paradise as opposed to 10-20 billions of wretched specimens living in a superfund site. I would not want the latter ideal to spread across the galaxy.
OK I'm just spinning a tale where making geniuses is important, which I think is more about lucky genes and numbers and less about education... though of course that's important. Maybe we disagree genes smarts?
I think Peter's point is say... look at Ancient Greece or Rome. There were plenty of geniuses we've heard from those times. BUT, they were exclusively from the upper classes, who had leisure time to fulfill that genius instead of toiling as laborers or slaves.
How many of the underclasses had all the necessary genetic wherewithal to be geniuses, but we never heard from them because they spent all their time in subsistence? The same argument applies today, and this dovetails with the Progress & Poverty review from a few weeks ago:
> This is a pretty bold claim: namely, that the resilience of poverty, oppression, and inequality in the face of advancing economic development is not some embarrassing accident we'll eventually get around to fixing, it's an inescapable consequence of our socioeconomic system.
Precisely.
My point is in the context of scientific advancement, an uneducated genius is indistinguishable from a moron.
Educate one billion persons VERY WELL and you will have ten-thousand geniuses.
"Imagine a planet just like ours, but with only 100,000 people on it. Let this group comprise the assembled best experts from every field, and let them be fully devoted to cooperating for the benefit of all. How good would their lives be, all by themselves on an uncrowded planet? You may be imagining a paradise, each person enjoying a life of luxury on their own huge estate in the midst of unspoiled nature.
I’m imagining a world without pencils."
https://putanumonit.com/2018/02/08/antiantinatalism/
Do antiantinatalists have any concern for other species?
“Experts not being able to talk about problems they’re solving because of security protocols” is a good description of what happened to science in the USSR. The relatively free intellectual cross-pollination that happened between fields and projects in places like Bell Labs, IAS and of course Silicon Valley was fundamental to their impact. I think creeping corporatization and Balkanization of specialties might pose their own risks to that kind of intellectual environment.
Neat review. I'm guessing the Earth will, however, run out of fossil fuels one day (even if "run out" here means "it doesn't make economic/energetic sense to extract").
I guess the real argument is that we'll never "run out" because by the time we need it, we'll have found an alternative. The fear is that we won't find alternatives in time and everything will come crashing down. The former seems more likely, climate change seems to be the main limit on our consumption of fossil fuels.
Reading Georgescu-Roegen has convinced me that there are particular qualitative aspects of fossil fuels which will be very hard for us to replicate in a high-energy solar-based economy. I'd really like to be wrong about that and hydrogen might yet replicate some of those key characteristics. When I look at the past 200 years, it seems to me that much of the economic development that we humies commonly attribute to our own cleverness actually stems from the ability to blow through millions of years' worth of stored solar energy in a very profligate manner.
On the one hand, I want to say you are wrong by saying "No way, every time we get in trouble, we just harness a more dense energy source." But on the other hand, we have harnessed a more dense energy source that's not really solar energy, and have just let it sit on the sidewalk like a $20 while we poison people with continued coal emissions and tell people to huddle in the dark when it gets colder than is common.
One potential solution is to use solar/nuclear energy to synthesise hydrocarbons - it's possible and could even be carbon neutral/negative (if you don't intend to burn them and want them for plastics ect.), it's just not economically viable right now.
Unless you are opposed to taxation in principle, carbon taxes make a lot of choices "economically viable".
> let it sit on the sidewalk like a $20
It blows my mind that in the US we are shutting down smoothly operating nuclear power plants and incurring decades of decommissioning costs because by some formula this "saves money".
The price will rise till it does make economic sense. (I bet there is oil under Antarctica.)
Or the price will fall til it doesn't make sense to call it 'running out' that we don't bother extracting what's left.
Not necessarily. What do people say when we consider whether we'll ever run out of copper, say? They say: well, probably not, because as the natural ores become scarcer, the relative cost of recycling or substituting becomes attractive, and demand for the virgin stuff declines to meet supply. *Eventually* we might end up in a situation where the entire amount of copper plausibely recoverable from the crust *has* been recovered, and just endlessly circulates through the economy, with the only truly consumed commodity being energy.
Can this happen with hydrocarbons? Sure. Green plants recycle them all the time: CO2 + H2O -> hydrocarbons. The entire ecological carbon cycle is an endless loop of hydrocarbon -> combustion -> CO2 -> photosynthesis -> hydrocarbon. No reason at all we can't duplicate that, if necessary.
So maybe someday all of the carbon in the atmosphere and hydrosphere is in circulation, and passes ultimately through human machines (as well as through animals and plants), and the only truly consumed commodity is energy.
"We can recycle X" is not a full rebuttal of "we will run out of X". It rebuts "we will suffer catastrophe from lack of X", but does not rebut "we will face hard resource constraints on X". If there are N kilograms of carbon on Earth, any project or set of simultaneous projects which requires >N kilograms of carbon (e.g. a population of 1 sextillion humans) is impossible, regardless of recycling.
(This argument also applies to the reachable-without-FTL universe, which is finite and of a size fillable by exponential growth; FTL would potentially allow access to the universe entire, which may be large enough for this to be a non-issue ("infinite" would do the trick, of course, but 3^^^^3 would kick the ball beyond many end-of-the-universe scenarios).)
I am exceptionally skeptical that such human-mitigated circulation/recirculation will occur. I think the big constraint here is hitting a level of tech (practical fusion, AI, whatever) which enables another population/development "overshoot" before the present "overshoot" (I don't have a better word for this phenomenon) becomes unsustainable (through maintenance, upkeep, whatever).
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Yes, it's a typical peak oil strawman. See here for a recent historical review of the issue and criticism of both the "wizard" and "prophet" extremes, with also a summary of what the noughties peak oilers got right and wrong :
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
I thought this was a good review, but one place I would differ from the author (not the reviewer, necessarily) is I really don't like the Manichaen oppositional framing of "Wizards" vs "Prophets"
In my view what *KIND* of Wizard and what *KIND* of Prophet you are matters as much or more than what broad camp you're in. We really DO need more advanced engineering/science and we really DO need more people willing to warn us about the cliff we're about to walk over. I think these two groupings obscures more than it illuminates.
I saw the division more in their differing approaches: is technological progress the problem, or the solution? Realistically we all think it's both, but different people emphasise one side or the other.
(This is an oversimplification and the direction of progress is also important, but I think the Wizard mindset is to speed up the good technologies while the Prophet mindset is to stop the bad ones)
My problem with the framing is that it invites you to pick a side and gloss over the details -- "Power through our problems with tech and progress, or worry about unintended consequences and the damage to the ecosystem?"
I just personally think the way forward has to be a synthesis, and teamsmanship is a barrier to that kind of thinking. I think purely "all progress must halt" anti-human environmentalism is unlikely to achieve its own goals under even the best circumstances, and I think climate change has proven that "full steam ahead" progress-boosterism is an existential threat to the human race.
Arguing about what team we're on just seems like it works against encouraging us to sit down -- humbly -- and genuinely asking, "How do we solve this problem without creating a whole bunch of new problems, and also maybe we don't know as much as we think we do given that systems are incredibly complex?"
I think that the author did not set out to advocate for the Manichean framing, but to document one that he saw already existed. Mann wrote the excellent 1491 and the pretty-good 1493, which didn't have that framing.
Good to know, I'll definitely agree that the framing certainly has existed in popular discourse for a long time and it's fair game to comment on that.
Good point, this reminds me of a G. K. Chesterton criticism of political debates: We spend too much time debating the question "Progress: Yes or No?" and working out what side we're on, and far too little time thinking about what we want to progress toward. I suspect that's where the more productive discussions occur, and I agree that synthesis and humility is what we need more of.
Yeah, you might get a different flavo4 if your wizard was Oppenheimer
I think it works better if you think of the Wizards and Prophets as only two currents in environmentalism, albeit the two dominant currents.
Yeah? If so I've definitely misread this entire thing; my first impression was that the "Wizards" had more in common with the "High Modernists", to lean on another overly vague category familiar to ACX readers.
Was it meant to be portrayed as the opposite-way-round, that the "Prophets", coded as Malthusians, are supposed to be the out-of-touch ivory tower calculators?
Oh, I don't know if the author had that in mind or now; I've never read the book. I'm more just trying to steelman the author's viewpoint, because I think picking out these two currents actually is useful, as long as you don't make a good/evil dichotomy of them.
That's a useful way to think of it!
political compass style grid with Prophet-Wizard on one axis, what should be on the other axis?
Correct URL:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616
The thing that stands out for me is that while the Wizards are right in the short run, the Prophets will be right in the long run. The real question is the time-scale involved.
The Wizards’ insistence that there will always be a way to delay the inevitable is as much a fallacy as the Prophets’ insistence that THIS time is the Big One(tm). I see your Zeno’s Paradox and raise you Jevon’s Paradox: greater efficiency leads to greater overall consumption.
The real limit on consumption is price: as it costs more to consume, whether because of resource scarcity or pollution, people will consume less. The one upside is that between improved technology and reduction of the externalities from consumption, we might still end up ahead in terms of overall well-being from where we were in the past.
Jevons is the big enchilada here, thank you for bringing it up. There is very little slack in a capitalist economy for not doing something if it is profitable, i.e. where is the global incentive for restraint?
The question is, how long is the long run? 1,000 years, or 1 billion? The universe is huge, and full of resources we've yet to tap. Even the stars can theoretically be mined.
True. I think the big problem I have with the Wizards is that they don't really seem to have a contingency plan: what do we do when the well of techo-fixes finally runs dry? Every time that gets brought up, the only answer seems to be: "Well, that won't happen any time soon, so let's not worry about it yet."
It think while that's true, its a bit of an isolated demand for rigor. If you ask a Prophet, "What do we do when people want to have more kids, or more stuff?" generally their answer is "They won't." In the Eugenics past it was "We won't let them", that that answer has soured with time. I'm painting with a broad brush here of course, but my point is that the Prophets seem to have a perfect solution that will work forever either.
No, I agree with you on that. The Prophets have a really dark side.
My own answer to the question you asked — and I'm not sure what camp this puts me in — is "Fine, as long as they internalize the costs to themselves." There probably is no good solution to (eventual) overpopulation: all the options on the table right now are awful. But for the demand for "more stuff," a Pigovian or Coasian approach, along with dropping energy subsidies, would potentially do some real good.
On the other hand, I'm quite soured on massive public investment into techo-fixes that turn out more often than not to be boondoggles, such as ethanol.
I am mostly in the wizard camp. But it is troubling for the wizard ethos that birth rates are falling voluntarily worldwide, and the main driver of this is education. Education and voluntary choices are not bad things. There is something to the prophets' argument, as long as people choose it willingly, and for themselves.
I don't think that's troubling, I'd see it as encouraging! Ever since Malthus, the argument against improving people's quality of life was that they'd just have more children and negate the gains, the fact that improved quality of life seems to result in fewer children is a big pro on the side of more progress.
The Prophet says starving African hordes will overrun the planet (definite racist overtones), the Wizard says that once the magic of economic development gives them a decent quality of living, they'll settle down in the suburbs with <2 children and the "problem" will solve itself.
I don't personally worry about population decline, aging population could have its difficulties but eventually the descendants of people who want to have children will outnumber the people who don't.
Population is only one of the two major factors in humanity's overall ecological footprint, though. What can put an upper bound on per capita consumption? I like eating meat. I probably shouldn't eat it but I do. I definitely shouldn't forbid another from doing so, that's between her and her gods.
I've got to go as well, but my parting thought is that environmental protection / restoration is a consumption good. As a region gets wealthier, their environment gets a lot healthier too. The richest cities in the world are pretty smog free, while poorer cities are not. Green space is returning in the US so fast that wildlife is encroaching on cities (a serious problem!). Things like the various prairie reserves in the midwest could never be done if the US was living much closer to starvation.
Wealthy people have a preference for clean ecologies (probably everyone does), and the resources to make it happen. Less wealthy people see a huge return on destroying their environment, then once they become more wealthy they start to clean it up again. I look forward to Chinese cities as smog-free as LA is now.
Our ecology can be preserved using the only truly renewable resource - human avarice. As long as clean ecologies are desirable, and people can pay for them, they will.
Consumption is a harder issue to address, but since de-growth basically proposes that we maintain current levels of poverty indefinitely (since realistically cutting emissions in developed nations will only do so much), I think the only acceptable solution (morally and practically) is to develop more sustainable ways to produce stuff. And maybe get people to care more about stuff that doesn't damage the environment as much, although I agree with the gnome that "sustainability" is somewhat of a luxury good - you only care about it when you have enough money to afford anything other than the cheapest.
Doesn't decreasing poverty mean increasing consumption? (This is a question, not a retort.)
It definitely does, but if we have the right technology then it can be done without destroying the planet. Since the only alternatives that seem plausible to me are giving up entirely and accepting whatever warming happens, or recolonising Africa to prevent them from developing, and those both seem like disasters, there's a lot riding on us getting renewables and energy storage cheaper than coal. Progress is being made on solar, the main problem is that it doesn't work in the dark, but it seems plausible that technology will make fossil fuels less appealing in the future.
I am dubious that allowing warming to happen is a disaster. I don't think it is even clear that it is on net a bad thing. Warming has both positive and negative effects, and it's only by ignoring the positive and making implausibly high estimates of the negative that one concludes that the net effect is obviously negative and large.
For support for that unfashionable position see past posts on my blog:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=warming
You're assuming that we can't do better on the inequality issues ?
I agree, these choices have to be voluntary, we need only look at Mao's One Child policy to realize that the attempt to impose restraint on others will always be both a crime and a mistake, _pace_ Talleyrand.
It's hard for me to imagine a culture capable of incentivizing us to restrain our biological impulse to exploit every available resource, which was a pretty damn good evolutionary strategy up until we discovered fossil fuels, that wouldn't violate the fundamental moral principle that each human should be free to choose how she or he lives as long as her or his choices don't harm another. Solving collective action problems through voluntary co-operation may be an impossible problem because only a few need to defect for the arrangement to break down. I hope it's possible and we should continue to work for that universal autonomy not least because it's morally just in itself.
> I agree, these choices have to be voluntary, we need only look at Mao's One Child policy to realize that the attempt to impose restraint on others will always be both a crime and a mistake,
Little known fact: the fertility rate in Taiwan (with no childbirth policy) is lower than in China. (Mostly Han Chinese in both locations.)
Which Talleyrand quote would that be ?
"Attempt to impose restraint on others" includes almost every law and government action...
I don't think that the general Wizard ethos holds population growth as *the point* but rather that if it's happening it can be supported.
I think it's worth noting that when it comes to global warming, there are policy approaches that could be considered "Wizard vs Prophet neutral" -- like, impose CO2 taxes, and then to what extent doing so results in Wizardry vs to what extent it results in Prophecy (?) is up to the market!
Yes.
Interesting to hear the conflict between total and average utilitarianism in this context. The classic objection to total utilitarianism is the Repugnant Conclusion, which is a very Malthusian Argument - if population growth continues as total utilitarians would encourage, eventually we'll reach the point at which everyone has lives barely worth living due to resource constraints.
Of course, average utilitarianism has it's own repugnant conclusions, for example the idea that you can make the world a better place by eliminating people with below average welfare.
I lean towards the total view since I stubbornly insist that life is worth living, but I'm personally of the opinion that people should have the number of children they want to have - the lazy preference utilitarian solution! Declining birth-rates suggest that overpopulation is not really worth worrying about, and I'm optimistic that we'll eventually invent our way out of our current environmental problems.
That's not even average utilitarianism's worst problem. It holds that if everyone in the world is miserable and wants to die, you should create more people so long as they will be slightly less miserable than average.
That may not actually be as much of a problem as you think it is, if you repeat the process long enough I think you'll eventually create happy people?
Anyway, I worry more about the implications of theories regarding the elimination of people than about the creation of people, simply because in the real world creating people is much more difficult than destroying them (two people and nine months vs a bullet and a couple of minutes to bleed out). I think total views do better at valuing individual human lives than average views, although there are obviously contrived situations in which a total utilitarian would do horrible things for the greater good.
Still, population ethics is a mess, I take the easy way out and just say we should respect the preferences of people currently alive, which fortunately include not destroying the environment (and also a bunch of other conflicting things, but resolving that is a separate issue).
Average utilitarianism endorses creating miserable people even if you stipulate that it will never lead to happy people. Given the choice between a world of100 people being tortured seven days a week, or a world of 100 people being tortured seven days a week plus 1,000,000 people being tortured only six days a week, average utilitarianism picks the latter every time. This seems like a serious problem.
I mean, this only crops up in choices where the total and average happiness is negative.
(Also, remember that the utility of the zero-pop state (average happiness 0/0) can be defined however you want. If you define it as zero, then in all and only those cases where such choices could happen, "blow up the world" dominates.)
Completely off-topic to your point, but this thought experiment poses for me an interesting measurement problem: how would we *know* if literally everyone in the world is miserable? Does misery have some absolute scale or at least definition to which we could appeal? What if (as seems not unlikely to the student of human group psychology) misery is actually felt by individuals on a relative basis? (As in: everyone else in this shtetl lives in a squalid mud hut and has to take a dump in the corner when it's raining outside at night. I, on the other hand, live in a damp drafty castle with mosquitoes that buzz around all night and no running water BUT I have a chamberpot into which I can poo at night, and some lackey takes it away in the morning -- lucky, happy me!)
Were that the case, then the average utility of the entire world is pretty much by definition zero, neither "happy" nor "miserable," and we need to come up with some different metric for utilitarian aspirations.
That is, what
I question whether misery is entirely relative. Happiness/fulfilment or the lack thereof does involve some reference to other people and how well they're doing relative to me (at least at metrics I care about), but misery seems to be more about not having your basic biological and social needs met. If I'm starving, in pain or grieving a lost loved one, the fact that other people have it worse provides very limited comfort - in fact, the reminder of that fact may even make me feel worse.
I'd rather be in a community in which everyone had indoor plumbing than one in which I was the only one, although that's perhaps selfish since in the latter scenario I'd still be able to smell everyone else shit.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
I disagree strongly. Could we have done better? Yes. But plagues have been a problem for humanity for all of known history, and for all of known history we really only had one way of solving it: hunker down and wait for it to pass. Let it kill all the people it was going to kill, and then the survivors can move on. The Spanish Flu happened just 100 years ago, a blink of an eye historically, and we did basically the same thing. We tried to help people with medicine, which did some good, but mostly we just waited it out, all three waves of it, just like humanity has done with every plague in history. They came up with a vaccine, which failed miserably because we still didn't know what we were doing. I want to make that clear: the best minds we had worked on solving the problem, huge amounts of money and resources were diverted to creating and distributing a vaccine, and the vaccine just plain didn't work because we had identified the wrong pathogen as the culprit. And so about 50,000,000 die wordwide. What could you do?
COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it. And it will probably be the first worldwide plague to be stopped not by waiting it out but by vaccinating: in other words, because we did something about it. Could we have done it faster, and better? Yes, definitely. 100%. But it's still a remarkable achievement and I can't see it as anything other than a slam dunk win for the Wizards.
We are a learning species, and while we didn't do as good as we could we did much better than we have previously in terms of saving lives. And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around.
I agree with all of the above, but as a counterpoint:
There is increasing evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic could have originated as a lab leak from the Wuhan institute of virology as a side effect of gain-of-function research. If that proves to be the case (and even in other scenarios where it originated naturally but its pandemic status is owed to modern hyperglobalization), it will be a slam dunk for the cautionary cries of the "Prophets."
I think you would have to argue not only that COVID-19 started in a lab, but also that it *could not have* started naturally. That's the only way the Frankenstein ("messing around with things Man Was Not Meant To Know") argument makes sense. Because if it was easily possible for COVID-19 to get started naturally, through bats and pangolins knocking boots in some genetic sense, then the fact that this one *happened* to start in a lab is kind of neither here nor there, kind of like the fact that it started in China instead of India. Putting a complete stop to Dr. Frankenstein's work wouldn't change the odds of it happening again at all (and of course if Dr. Frankenstein is discovering useful things about *fighting* viruses while he's creating evil killer viruses, there's the argument that it might make things *worse* to forbid his midnight meddling).
The main issue is that it wouldn't have started as often, and wouldn't have been nearly as dangerous for humans (see SARS in comparison) if the scientists that have been screaming for years about the dangers of this research and the lack of checks and balances have been listened to.
China did pretty well with a 'hard' lock down. Of course not possible in US.
"And I think we'll do much better for the next plague, because the Wizards of their day will be able to look back on the mistakes we made this time around."
I strongly doubt it. If COVID has proven anything, it is that governments are incapable of learning.
"COVID-19 is arguably the first plague we have faced where we actually have the tools and knowledge to do something about it."
No; there were prior ones.
IMO COVID was a miserable, inexcusable failure on the part of most governments.
I think that is a good point. It would not have been *hard* for medieval Europe to do the simple experiments that would prove that Y. pestis was carried by fleas and rats, and it would then not be super duper hard for them to undertake radical rodent-control measures that at the least would tremendously reduce the number of people who had to die.
Why they did *not* do this is an interesting question, and rather suggests that the limitation on fighting disease effectively is not technological -- that the Prophets are right that the main problem is social, or social psychological. In short, we may be "lucky" this time not so much because science came up with a vaccine, but because *socially* we already understood vaccines, already (mostly) believed they would work, and therefore hurried that work along and then took advantage of it.
Rats were not essential to the Black Death (human fleas and lice could spread it too, not to mention direct transmission from pneumonic patients, and current research suggests these were more important than rats to the second pandemic). Killing rats would have had only a minor protective effect (wiping out fleas and lice in the human population would probably have sufficed to drop R below 1, but I'm not sure that the 1300s world had the capacity to do that).
I'm not sure about this alleged revealed preference for maximising *total* utility. It seems to me that the default position people instinctively default to is "maximise the total utility among people *already living*", while resolutely not taking potential future people into account. Else, you end up in Repugnant Conclusion territory.
This is distinct both from Vogt's position (where decreasing the population is an acceptable way to increase the average utility) and from what you allege to be the default position (where increasing the population is a desirable way to increase the total utility), and I think is necessary to avoid reaching weird, counterfactual results like the Repugnant Conclusion. The number of actually, objectively living minds who can experience happiness or not should be taken as a given; it is not a variable to be itself fiddled with in either direction.
I get the impression that the Wizard and Prophet positions aren't grounded in different forms of utilitarianism: they're grounded in different predictions of what kind of world Wizardry will create. The Wizard builds toward a large and happy population, but the Prophet thinks that a large population can't be happy.
This is part of the story, but I think the Wizards would still think that as long as it is happy, the population also being large is an additional good unto itself. It would be another thing if they simply went "we have a large population and there's no humane way to slow down growth, so let's make this large population happy"; but it certainly *sounds* like they think that all else being equal, Growth Is Good.
I think you're on to something, though I don't think preference for population size is intrinsic to either position: many Prophets don't seem to care much about human wellbeing at all, and many Wizards prefer smaller populations where each person can enjoy a larger slice of the pie.
Hmm, the wizard builds towards their dream. That might have little to do with the rest of world. And the prophet is there to warn of danger. My humble thinking is we need more wizards, and less prophets in the environmental movement. Let's make plastic that burns cleanly at the end of life. (plastic is a small fraction of total hydrocarbons burned and better burned than in the water, oceans.)
Plastic that burns cleanly would still mostly end up unburnt in landfills. I'd prefer plastic that rots. (Of course we don't want it to rot while we're using it, but wood tends to not have that problem except as construction material.)
Technically, burying plastic in landfills will release less CO2 than making plastic that rots. Burying it is actually a pretty good solution.
Yeah I think the amount of CO2 in plastic, compared to the oil and gas we burn is not that much. 1%? The plastic filling rivers, streams, oceans is... much worse than 1% more CO2 to me.
Well, I'm dreaming that if it was burnable we'd separate it out and use it to heat water or something. Decomposing is fine, but harder to do maybe.
We already have "plastic" (= polymers) that rot: that's exactly what cellulose is, the main constituent of cotton and other plant fibers. I think the main reason we don't use it is just that we have to source it from nature already made, which is kind of like finding your plastics by digging them out of the trash, cleaning them up, and recycling them. Expensive and not very adaptable. But if we could polymerize glucose as easily and cheaply ane flexibly as we can styrene, it might be a different world. Cellulose can make very flexible fibers (e.g. cotton) as well as very sturdy materials (wood).
There's also a case for contingency. Up until fairly recently natural gas wasn't a very valuable byproduct of petroleum extraction, which means the starting material for vinyl polymers (e.g. ethylene and styrene) were really, really cheap.
I'm a little puzzled by the penultimate sentence. Of the top 7 by mass plastic resins produced, 3 are pure hydrocarbons (PP, LDPE and HDPE) and one (PET) is just has some extra O atoms. These will all burn to CO2 and H2O at a moderately high temperature. Granted, the PPA and polyurethane need much higher temperatures to avoid noxious N compounds, and the PVC needs to have the Cl captured, but I think that's just a question of good incinerator design. I'm not entirely sure why people don't burn plastics now, but I don't think the problem is chemistry. It might be more that it's difficult to separate plastics from other things in the waste stream -- my impression is that most successful recycling relies on fast, reliable, and economical ways to separate materials, e.g. with metals you can just heat everything up to 1500C and collect what doesn't go up in flames.
Yeah, sorry this is mostly a pipe dream of mine. Seeing plastic as a stop over point one the way from oil/ gas to fuel, so all plastic would be burned.
AIUI recycling is a joke in the US. All that is really recycled is metal and paper. Glass and plastic has little value unless sorted, which is expensive to do.
I think the only objections to that very reasonable argument is that most people think it's a good thing to bring more people into the world - why else would they keep doing it? There's also the argument that we should be concerned about the long term future, and while that kind of longtermism is most popular in EA spaces, I think a lot of people have at least a little concern for future generations, at least if they believe their current actions will have a negative effect on people that aren't yet born.
It's still the sanest approach to population ethics, I personally just factor in our desire to have children and a future for them into the utility of people currently alive. It's the only way to explain both my desire to have a future for the human race, and my disinterest in the exact number of people in the future (anywhere within a sustainable range is fine with me). I guess in theory this breaks down if I just convince everyone that the future's going to be OK, but eventually people will realise that's a lie so it seems like a pretty stupid way to game utility.
I mean, I think desire to individually have children doesn't need to be equated to a moral preference for people everywhere to have children. (Unless you're Immanuel Kant, of course.) I want children because I think the experience of raising them will, on balance, be nice, and also because I have a personal and quite selfish interest in having a legacy. Moral preferences regarding the existence of one more human *per se* doesn't really enter into it. Bring me a magic button that will bring an additional human being into existence somewhere in Japan, whom I will never meet, and I have no particular desire to press it.
I really should go eat lunch and get back to work, but thank you for this review. I've meant to read this book for a while now and this has pushed me to do so. I consider myself in the Prophet camp, just because it's much harder to engineer the technology of how we humies organize ourselves compared to the technology of how we make useful things from nature's resources, but I've always admired Borlaug ever since I learned of him. I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch.
" I hope humanity can find a way to break the back of Jevons Paradox so that the advances in efficiency that people like him have created or discovered can redound to our common benefit, instead of simply speeding up the treadmill another notch."
The net result so far has been to increase global per capita real income by about an order of magnitude, two or three times that (a factor of 20 or 30, not two or three more orders of magnitude) in the developed world. How is that consistent with the view you just expressed?
Money is a proxy for the resources humans consume. It does not call those resources into existence. To the extent that current consumption destroys capacity for future production, those increases in real income cannot be sustained. Jevons Paradox states that technological improvement which allows more efficient production of a given good tends to lead to greater consumption of that good. Your saying, "Look at how much income has gone up and how much more people are consuming", is not contradictory to Jevons at all; in fact, it's not really even responsive to the point.
Certainly, poor people all over the world should be consuming more. Our concern must always be both for keeping humanity's overall ecological footprint within the bounds of what the Earth can sustainably produce as well as the equitable distribution of resources to all of humanity within those bounds. Much of the Prophet perspective has been bound up in eugenicist ideas claiming that some portion of humanity shouldn't ever have existed in the first place, which is fundamentally immoral, a sentence no human should ever feel the privilege to pass on another.
If humanity's going to find a path to a sustainable future, which involves both negative population growth and restraint in per capita consumption from our current position, those have to be changes in behavior that people embrace voluntarily. The state's role should be limited to trying to internalize the externalities through taxation and let individuals interacting in markets figure out the best response once we're fully accounting for all the costs.
I tend to doubt that any culture can find this path, which involves a substantial redirection of basic biological impulses (this, incidentally, is my answer to Fermi's paradox; conscious lifeforms which discover a reserve of solar energy tend to make themselves extinct in short order after figuring out how to transmit radio waves), and remain humane, but we have to try. Exploiting every available resource to the fullest extent possible was a good evolutionary strategy up until about 250 years ago when Newcomen invented his steam engine and made coal mining practical. I just can't accept the Wizard perspective that we'll always be able to find a substitute once we hit a resource limit, though it would be wonderful if that can keep going. On evolutionary time scales, we humies haven't been at this high-energy lifestyle very long, which is why Sagan's Cosmic Calendar is one of the best cultural symbols created over the past 50 years. At some point (barring FTL travel, and if the Vulcans are out there I suspect they're going to want to see that we've got our mind right about exponential growth before forming an alliance) we're going to have to figure out how to take our foot off the accelerator or human civilization will end.
I don't see a mention of biodiversity loss, or of the loss of habitat for a wide range of wildlife. The rapid increase in human population and living standards are leading to increasing amounts of the planet being used for agriculture (or other human uses), which in turn is causing an increasing number of extinctions. Currently, wizards don't seem to be averting this problem, and once an existing biome or species is lost, it is pretty much unrecoverable. (There may be edge cases where recovery is possible but not on the scale that extinction is happening).
This may be a matter of what people value. Some people value "nature" (for want of a better word) and want to preserve it. Others see it primarily as a source of raw materials for human wealth. Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity.
On reading the review, I'm sceptical about the framing of the book - why choose these positions? Why choose these representatives of those positions?
I'm not sure about the world as whole but...from 1992 to 2012 farmland in the United States decreased by 31 million acres. Forest land in the US has also remained stable for the last 100 years, despite increasing population and consumption. This appears to due to agricultural land becoming much more productive per acre, which means we need less of it. I would call that a win for the Wizards: more population, with better living conditions, with less farmland.
https://givingcompass.org/article/u-s-farmland-is-rapidly-decreasing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
Andrew MacAfee's book, More from Less, argues that this is a broad trend across many different kinds of natural resources, IIRC.
At a local level, yes (where USA = local), but at a global level, the problem is continuing. You could argue that the solution is to apply the same techniques the USA has used more widely, and that might work (subject to local conditions elsewhere), but there's a wider point in that people have to recognise that there is a problem in the first place, and be sufficiently motivated to do something about it. Technical fixes only work when people recognise the problem that needs fixed, which in turn depends on assigning a value to what needs preserved.
A patch of woods in a local suburban park is not the same as an unfragmented old growth forest. The species composition, down to the microbes in the soil, is quite different. So while forest land may have been stable, healthy old growth forests are mostly gone. Moreover, the farmland is not disappearing because agricultural land is becoming more productive, but because development is encroaching on farmland (as shown in your posted link).
You cannot look at a single county in a globalized world : during the same time period a lot of mining and industry was transferred from USA to China.
Thank you for this comment. This is a beautiful sentence:
"Most people who I know do value "nature", even if they are wizards; but wizards don't get to make the rules about what is valued by humanity as a whole, and currently humanity as a whole clearly puts more value on using land for our own benefit than on preserving the existing biodiversity."
I feel the same way. As I mentioned in another comment, the framing of this book is very contrived. It's not humanity lovers vs. humanity haters, it's a clash of one set of human values with another set of human values.
I recall Mann doing a pretty good ob of presenting the Prophet argument. I am also biased towards the Wizardry approach, but I remember coming out of the book thinking it was more reasonable than before. For example, there might be ways to consume less without greatly reducing our quality of life, but getting there is a behavioral issue. Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
> Getting people to no longer think of huge lawns and car-dependent suburbs as being the only way to raise a family is not primarily a technical problem; it's largely one of attitude.
Isn't a big chunk of this problem a zoning issue and city design issue? It doesn't matter whether people want to live in more-walkable and car-free environments, if cities are mostly zoned with distinct residential and commercial areas.
At least in America, it seems that currently, most "walkable" areas basically boil down to "the downtown of major cities", where a two-bedroom apartment might cost as much in rent as the mortgage of a four-bedroom house in the suburbs.
Yes, and that's mostly not an engineering problem. We know how to make cities that are easier to get around without a car--there are lots of them in Europe, Japan, etc. Zoning laws, parking minimums, subsidized public parking, height restrictions, general vetocracy, "affordable unit" minimums, non-toll roads, etc. are demanded by (generally) the middle and upper class public who like living in suburbs.
People think neighborhoods with apartments in them are unsuitable for families, and they have families, so they use the available levers of municipal government to keep apartments out. It’s a bottoms-up, democratic thing.
I'll feast in the watery halls of Valhalla with Vogt when the hubris of Wizard types inevitably dooms the world and sends the majority of humankind, pest of the world, to the afterlife. Then I'll know the ecosystems will evolve and keep living after getting rid of us.
Just as an organism is rationally more valuable than a single cell within it or a certain species of bacteria in its gut fauna, an ecosystem is more valuable then any individual animal or any single species. Thus trying to keep as many human beings alive as possible is as meaningless as trying to keep as many pandas alive as possible without them being a part of an ecosystem but a panda breeding institute or whatever.
Although I know this isn't a very popular kind of thought here, trying to explain this brought me an insta-ban from the dc server :)
Are you at all bothered by the fact that a series of predictions along your lines have been made over the past century+, and so far have all turned out to be false?
What sort of predictions are you talking about? It seems Emrah Dincer is referring to loss of biodiversity. Predictions about species extinctions have sadly proven too true.
Without this reply I would've doubted my English and thought I wasn't able to make my point clear, thanks :)
If you're talking about the Malthusian arguments etc, I of course know that and I also know that humankind maybe will be able to support 1000x times the population now. I'm talking about the cost of it in terms of how many ecosystems we'll destroy and that not being worth it. Also the experience of the median human will be worse but that's whole another discussion.
The prediction about for example the coral reef ecosystems dying and the speed of their dying etc are all proving true.
I find the argument "America’s Next Top Model makes fun of it" an unconvincing way of doing cost-benefit analysis of organic farming. I'm not a farmer myself (my garden is definitely a hobby, meaning that on net it's a money sink), nor a student of agriculture; my current beliefs around this are strongly influenced by reading Drawdown (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143130447). The impression I got from it was that artificial fertilizer did in fact have the potential to destroy soil ecosystems (not necessarily everywhere), and that effective organic alternatives existed that harnessed increased understanding of said soil ecosystems. (Again, not necessarily everywhere. For the purposes of Drawdown it is sufficient that the following claim be true: "in some not-exceptionally-rare circumstances, organic techniques will be both more productive than synthetic fertilizer and more effective at carbon sequestration.") The book presents this as an increase in our understanding of soil ecosystem, so insofar as any basic science is Wizardry this might still be in camp Wizard, but it doesn't escape the derisory label of "organic". Can someone more knowledgeable comment on this?
To be fair, the "America's Next Top Model makes fun of it" argument wasn't against organic farming in particular, but against widespread cultural acceptance of an all organically farmed diet.
That's fair. However, even if the strawman "all synthetic fertilizer use is literally the devil" is worthy of being mocked on America's Next Top Model, the somewhat more nuanced position "synthetic fertilizer is destroying a bunch of soil ecosystems in which organic methods will work and be productive" seems both Prophetic and actually validated by current understanding (again, for at least some soil ecosystems). I imagine it's less snappy as a campaign slogan, and historically this could be two different waves of organic farming that are basically indistinguishable from a consumer standpoint -- any history-of-agriculture nerds out here willing to comment?
I used to sell fertilizer for a living, so I have some degree of knowledge. Soil systems contain a certain amount of various elements and organic matter, plus microbes. Our understanding of how these systems interact, and how roots play a role, is incomplete.
To grow something, the soil needs enough of each element in an available (usually, this means soluble) form for the plant to pick up. Plants will incorporate these soil minerals into their tissue, and they need different amounts of each - think Redfield ratio. Thus, for a given annual crop, each year you are taking a lot of N, some P, and smaller amounts of K, Ca, Zn, Cu, etc etc out of the ground.
The natural replenishment rate isn't going to supply enough of each of these to support an industrial crop each year (or even a preindustrial crop, it turns out - hence fallowing, crop rotation, cyclical agriculture, etc pre-1900). So you have to add stuff. The natural soil stocks of most nutrients are large enough that you will rarely be limited by S, Mg, or the other less-needed elements, but you're depleting a lot of N and P each year, especially N, and you have to replace that all the time.
So industrial fertilizer is mostly N, sometimes all N, and rarely includes more than N, P, and K. If you want other nutrients replenished in your soil, you have to do that separately. Hence, years of farming can deplete other elements and make soil unproductive. This is usually pretty easy to fix: figure out which element(s) you are missing, and dump a bunch on the field.
But the system is complicated immensely when you consider another soil element, perhaps the most important: carbon. Plants don't make tissue from soil carbon (usually, I think) but the soil carbon is crucial for the health of soil microbes and roots. It helps improve soil stability, water holding capacity, and other properties. Plus, the microbes play important roles in transforming nutrients into soluble forms that plants can easily pick up.
Soil carbon isn't *necessarily* depleted by industrial agriculture, but it often is. Plowing allows the soil carbon to oxidize to CO2 and leave the soil, and the deeper the furrow the more carbon you lose. Erosion plays a role as well.
Soil carbon can be managed, but historical techniques didn't really take it into account. Today, its importance is better understood. Winter cover cropping, plowing chaff under, no-till techniques, and direct replenishment via compost or biosolids all support an increasing stock of soil carbon. Many of these are part of organic farming, but all can be adopted by conventional farmers (and often increase conventional yields when they do).
So in short: if you use only synthetic N and P for years, don't have a cover crop, and plow 8" furrows every spring, you will eventually run into soil health problems as your soil carbon depletes. Organic farmers won't do this and will therefore avoid these problems. But it is completely possible for conventional farmers to do it as well, and many do.
And to be clear: there are other issues with organic farming re: pesticides, herbicides, etc. And organic farming has some stupid restrictions, like blanket bans on biosolids. And cost is crucial, since at the end of the day the number of people you feed depends on that more than anything else. So whether it is appropriate to be derisive of organic farming or not isn't determined only by soil health / soil carbon management.
So what in hearing is: adding nutrients to the soil doesn't directly do damage, but makes it possible to mask soil depletion; whereas with organic farming, if your soil is producing, it's probably healthy, if you're using amendments you might need to do more checking to be sure of that. Separately, the exact mix of regulations collected under the heading "organic" may or may not be an improvement. Thank you for explaining!
This article provides an example of the complex natures of issues of soil quality and land management, which you may find interesting. Note that the basic premise here (no-till != organic) doesn't necessarily apply to all soil types and all cover crops. It's possible to manage soil well, or manage it badly, whether certified organic or completely conventional.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/989984124/a-giant-organic-farm-faces-criticism-that-its-harming-the-environment
There's also the fact that riverine ecosystems can be ruined by runoff from fertiliser that came out of the backside of a cow just as easily as by fertiliser that came from the Haber-Bosch process.
>C4 photosynthesis (a more efficient way for plants to distinguish between hydrogen and carbon dioxide, requiring less water and nitrogen for the same yield).
"Hydrogen" in the above sentence should actually be "oxygen". But yes, the C4 rice project is very cool!
Also, a fun note: I once took a class in Borlaug Hall at the University of Minnesota.
Am I the only one that read that and imagined using microdoses of plastic explosives to juice plants' photosynthesizing capabilities?
Like, "Brawndo C4: It's got way more than electrolytes!"
If Vogt's life began in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, then he would have been mighty old by the time he connected with the nascent environmental movement in the 1930s. Actually he was born in 1902, so you mean "turn of the 20th century."
Nuclear power is "dirty"? Actually, it is probably the cleanest source known to man, and is/should be getting cleaner.
The right classic companion book to read to this is John McPhee, "Encounters with the Archdruid."
Also, I am 60% confident that this is the review Scott was 60% confident would win when he made his predictions. Which is of course not the same as saying *I* am 60% (or for that matter 36%) confident that it will win!
I hope this isn't the book review that wins. I will be quite disappointed.
>Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save).
I don't think this counts as a failure of Wizards due to complexity. If I remember correctly, people like Zvi and even *Matt Yglesias* were predicting that trying for "equity" would be worse for everyone than simple distribution based on something like age or whether you were near the clinic when vaccines started expiring. The CDC wasn't actually optimizing to distribute vaccines such that all people reaped the most benefits distributed fairly; they were optimizing to *look like* they were distributing vaccines equitably; and that's why they failed.
I think the major takeaway from the government's mismanagement of covid wasn't that increasing complexity is too hard for Wizards. It's that increasing complexity is too hard for *governments*.
I find it more than a little weird if this book (written in 2019 according to Amazon), or at least the reviewer, never mentions the importance of the global demographic transition for the likely future fate of humankind. It is highly relevant if one wants to estimate the odds of the Wizards versus Prophets scenario.
The global demographic transition is the tendency that ferility is falling everywhere (following in the footsteps of the global fall in mortality). More than 70 of the 193 countries in the world are already below 2.1 children per woman. Including Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Tunis, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, and of course the whole of Europe - if official statistics, and gapminder.org, can be approximately trusted:
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encoding$y$data$concept=children_per_woman_total_fertility&space@=country&=time;;&scale$domain:null&zoomed:null;;;;;;&chart-type=bubbles&url=v1
..moreover, the tendency is downward everywhere. In the last decades fertility reduction has been particularly dramatic in the Middle East and India.
Apart from Afghanistan, Tadjikistan and sub-Saharan Africa, the world is fast approaching below-reproduction levels everywhere (and even in these countries, fertility is falling).
This bodes well for humankind, since it increases the odds that we can maintain or increase per capita consumption levels without risking an all-out banana-flies-in-the-bottle scenario.
The go-to book in this regard is Tim Dyson (2010): "Population and Development: The Demographic Transition". Dyson's book is a bit old by now (there are newer books and a ton of articles), but it still provides the most comprehensive discussion of the economic, social and cultural changes that take place in the wake of the transition. Despite its excruciatingly boring title (which has prevented a wide readership), this book is on par with Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in its scope.
Granted, this may seem peripheral to the theme in the book being review'ed here; but any discussion of the likely future of the world (will we crash or will we be fine) that neglects to discuss the demographic transition, misses the main engine driving global changes - including environmental changes.
). This suggests that the Malthusian problem will take care of itself.
Thanks, I had thought that this actually stopped being the case in Africa, but it looks like it's just that they are starting from very high levels :
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$filter$dimensions$country$world_4region$/$in@=africa;;;;;;&encoding$y$data$concept=children_per_woman_total_fertility&space@=country&=time;;&scale$type:null;;&frame$scale$range@:0&:732.4833297729492;;;;;;;&chart-type=linechart&url=v1
I wouldn't be dismissing Malthusian issues altogether, we'll only manage to avoid them if we're able to keep a minimal level of prosperity and women education for long enough.
The pattern of the demographic transition is characterized by hierarchical diffusion.
This means that highly educated women belonging to the majority ethnic group living in urban areas is the first within-country group to reduce their fertility.
Over time, their fertility behavior speads to lower educated, rural, and ethnic minority women.
The hierarchical diffusion-pattern is well documented by historical data from "Western" countries. As good-quality data is now coming in from other countries, it turns out that the same pattern characterizes latecomers to the demographic transition as well.
Hierarchical diffusion is a main driver of the transition, as you comment also suggests: female education is one of the keys. Urbanization is another.
As an illustration, check out this fairly recent study of the changing fertility pattern within Nigeria (the most populous country in Africa): Spatial patterns and determinants of fertility levels among women of childbearing age in Nigeria, by Oluwayemisi O Alaba, Olusanya E Olubusoye & JO Olaomi. To cite this article: Oluwayemisi O Alaba, Olusanya E Olubusoye & JO Olaomi (2017) Spatial patterns and determinants of fertility levels among women of childbearing age in Nigeria, South African Family Practice, 59:4, 143-147, DOI: 10.1080/20786190.2017.1292693.
"It wasn’t just red states or populist leaders or microchip truthers that were guilty; everyone in every country, state, and Holy See didn’t adopt masks, close the borders, roll out tests, or vaccinate quickly and effectively enough, and the blood of 2 million people and counting (not to mention the global loss of jobs, social activities, educational quality, and basic human connection) is on our hands."
Can anyone point me to a fair examination of the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of masking to prevent covid? Most of what I see is either observations based on arbitrary-endpoint graphs (e.g. "as you can see, cases increased/decreased after [country or state] started/ended its masks mandate!") or arguments based on anecdote or arguments based on lack of RCT confirmation of effectiveness. None of these is particularly satisfying.....
There is a CDC study that attempts to do that, but I don't have the URL. They looked at county level data, and their claim was that, on average, a month or two after a mask mandate went in the rate of growth of infections went down.
The problem is that putting in a mask mandate is not a random event. It's easy enough to come up with reasons why the same thing that would, on average, make a mask mandate more likely would also, on average, make a decrease in the growth rate of infection a month or two later more likely. If infections start going up, a mask mandate is more likely to happen. Reversion to the mean would then give you the later decrease, as would individuals becoming more careful due to the perception of more infections.
Scott Alexander had a piece in SSC early on that looked at pre-Covid evidence and concluded that wearing a mask probably made you a little less likely to get infected, significantly less likely to infect others. I have seen nothing better than that.
"According to hard Wizardry, all that increased productivity and human capital should have made it easier for us to roll up our sleeves and nip this thing in the bud; instead, we all collectively shat the bed. "
The Wizards did roll up their sleeves and create solutions to the problem. Then the Bureaucrats walked into the room, threw half their projects in the garbage and locked the other half away for a year. Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs.
Don't blame the Wizards man, they did their part, and it could have been enough.
"Finally, we all collectively looked at what the Bureaucrats had done and decided that not only were we not going to hang them, we would let them keep their jobs."
In the book, Mann goes to great lengths to show that Borlog had to fight, lie, and work around bureaucrats to end the famine in India. So, yeah samey samey.
If he had to deal with a modern IRB, he never would have been able to do what he did.
I'm sympathetic to this take but if you want to own the Wizard position in a deep way I think you need to treat bureaucracy, politics, and social organization as endogenous to the problem, not this separate sphere that's no longer their problem once a technical solution pops out of the lab. I think the most sophisticated Prophet take is "in theory, technology might continue to solve problems as it creates them, but in practice it will get harder and harder to successfully implement technological fixes in increasingly complex societies--so situations in which technical solutions could have been enough but we couldn't get our shit together should be exactly what we expect to see."
Yes, this is key. Part of Borlaug's genius was in overcoming or getting around official resistance--that's part of successful wizardry. A good idea by itself isn't enough.
(Prophets need to face this criticism, too. Sure, we could make the world better for future humans by accepting a lower living standard in this way or that. But it's not a solution unless people will actually do it.)
Strongly agree that the criticism cuts both ways.
Absolutely. I used to be very much in the "Back to the Land" camp until I actually started reading about the 70s communes and the idealistic teenagers sneaking into town to guiltily eat a hamburger every few days. As "Bob" says, "Don't just eat that hamburger, eat the hell out of it!"
I recently read this as well. The passage that stuck in my mind (which I can’t find at the moment) was about the effects of the green revolution in India - in states where land ownership was highly concentrated, the green revolution boosted yields for landlords and led to mass evictions and migration to urban slums, whereas in states where, for historical reasons land ownership was more evenly distributed, the high yielding varieties boosted incomes for subsistence farmers. Though I am typically wizard-sympathetic, I think the profound interaction between technology and politics/power tends to be a blind spot in wizard thinking. Recent farmer protests in India show the legacy of the green revolution is hardly settled. I think the land issue here also ties in nicely to the Henry George review.
Please let me know if you find the passage! This has piqued my curiosity.
Unfortunately passed my copy on to a friend. But here is some research on related topics:
Land reform improved crop yields in West Bengal: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338744?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
British controlled and 'landlord' controlled areas in India have fewer public goods:
https://economics.mit.edu/files/512
Much thanks!
One (probably unconscious) sleight of hand that happens in the "Wizards have managed to provide enough food and water for increasing populations" arguments is an "any edible food == any edible food" equivalence. Something I've come to realize more and more is that in order to be able to provide for larger and larger populations, we've had to push the land (and water sources) to its limits, and that has clear significant effects on the quality of the product. Replacing two nourishing juicy carrots that taste great, with six just-about-edible ones that managed to grow in poor soil optimized to look good on the shelf, is treated blindly as a threefold increase in food production with no concern for the value lost in other ways.
More food to prevent hunger is certainly good, but at some point the loss in quality becomes significant enough to also be an important factor - at least enough to start considering, are seven lives lived at 65% well-being more desirable than four lives lived with 90% well-being? This blindness to quality and richness and long-term consequences seems pervasive among Wizardkind - and experiencing and understanding this loss has moved me from being largely on the Wizard side to a slight preference for the Prophetic position.
This was great and I really appreciate the reevaluation of the central conflict between Wizard and Prophet that the reviewer went through as a result of COVID-19 and the fallout over the last year. Even so... I wonder if this is because it's a topic I know a fair bit about already, maybe I'm less enthused about reading about it. The Galen biography and Georgism analysis, OTOH, were almost totally novel for me, at least what I thought I knew turned out to be a lot less than I actually did when the original texts were illuminated.
I'm going to break the tie in my personal rankings at last because over the last few weeks I've occasionally thought 'By George!' and it's made me chuckle. I don't know if the voting system is decided yet but I'd like to cast my vote for some sort of ranked choice. Personally, I'd be satisfied if any of the top 5 (so far) we're winners. And no shade on Order Without Law or Why Buddhism is True, I just didn't connect with the topic and/or reviewer's style as much as the others.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty
2nd On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd The Wizard and the Prophet
4th Double Fold
5th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
6th Order Without Law
7th Why Buddhism is True
My conclusion from the COVID charley-foxtrot is that the Prophets, so to speak, are utterly useless. They may be 100% right on the ultimate root or our problems -- our social psychological nature, and our habits of social intercourse -- but the historical evidence is that these things are 100% proof against any lasting change brought about by the direst social force, let alone such sunny mild methods as rational persuasion.
If there's a particle of difference between the attitudes and inclinations of the 21st century American Facebooker during COVID and the 14th century English peasant when the Black Death arrived, I have yet to see it. The main reason we haven't gotten to the point of putting all the cats or Jews to the stake as a burnt offering, or dosing ourselves with mercury, garlic, and/or leeches, is because our Wizards managed to produce a magic potion (vaccine) in jig time (and secondarily because COVID isn't anywhere near the lethality of Y. pestis).
Wizardy can't solve all our problems, without doubt. But maybe it can solve all the problems that actually have solutions accessible to human beings. Perhaps the remaining problems are as intractable to us as the problem of the killer asteroid was to the dinosaurs.
In the end, though, isn't the influence of militarists and politicians more important than either?
You know, Fighters and Thieves. ;)
This whole review is premised on the idea that what we care about is human beings, but much of what the Prophets are worried about is the natural world which is totally overlooked.
You think the fish are fine? Are the rainforests fine? Even the insects might be suffering catastrophic declines right now.
If all you care about is human well being sure, the Wizards look alright. But if you expand your scope to the natural world it is clear something is very very wrong, has been for a long time, and we are not fixing it.
Brief review-of-the-review:
This seems like the most political, ingroup-y review so far-- not necessarily a bad thing but not my preference. I lean toward the Wizard outlook as well but I don't feel the review effectively steelmans Prophets; one can point out that innovation faces increasing (x-)risks and diminishing returns while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production. Despite its obvious sympathies and some tangents toward the end, though, the review was effective at presenting the book's arguments and major claims, so props for that.
"while consumption and population tend to quickly absorb the new production."
I don't understand this. The point of producing things is so that someone can consume them.
By any objective measure I can think of, human life has been getting better for at least the past century and a half, so population has not absorbed the new production. The estimate of economic historians is that global average real income is about ten times what it was through most of the past — twenty to thirty times in the developed world.
I agree that the new production has increased utility, income, etc., but that's not the point I take the Prophets to be making. Their concern is more along the lines of production being unsustainable, i.e. it risks depleting crucial resources or causing catastrophic damage, which would presumably decrease total utility in the longer term.
My point is this: imagine the Wizards and Prophets could make a grand bargain. The Wizards get support to e.g. increase food production efficiency by 6x, as long as food *consumption* only increases by 3x and the remaining factor of 2 goes toward e.g. environmentalist goals like reducing water usage and not farming in the Amazon. If it were possible to make political deals like that-- support for technological solutions in return for preservation getting a "cut" of them-- it seems like everyone would go home happy.
But in real life no such bargain gets made. All of the 6x improvement goes toward consumption, and resource usage doesn't decrease. In fact it probably increases, because something something marginal product. That leads to the Prophets seeing technological improvements *in themselves* as a driver of unsustainability, which is unfortunate from a coordination perspective.
I don't think this fully proves the Prophets' case, but it does suggest that the calculus is more complicated than "technology can consistently find an answer to resource shortages" (which is what I took the review to be saying).
The "complex" diagram is too low res to tell what it is, is there a link to a larger version?
It looks like the human metabolic pathways. http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
Tangential, but I also have a tattoo of the muted post horn from Crying of Lot 49. I didn’t realize when I got it there are tons of other people with the same idea, and we together make up a kind of secret society who speak to each other in code, similar to the one in the book that the symbol represents.
Contra the reviewer Borlaug also believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
I Borlaug believed in carrying capacity and said so in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort."
And he was criticized throughout his late life for this.
Borlaug is a much more eminent figure than Vogt in their respective movements, so this book is also a real profile raiser for Vogt. Iowans would put Borlaug on the currency. Environmentalists would put Carson and Muir, not Vogt, on their Mount Rushmore.
I thought the reviewer was wrong in characterizing "wizards" as wanting unending population growth. You can be a wizard and even be in favor of gradually reducing human population.
"Each of these contain multitudes of factors that no single human on earth, not even the Normanest of Borlaugs, could keep straight in his or her head and 'fix' with a single quick hack like a better strain of wheat."
I think it's worth emphasizing over and over again that Ugur Sahin, Hamilton Bennett, and all the others did do basically this for the coronavirus itself. With the accumulated effort and science of decades behind them, we got two extremely effective extremely safe vaccines in mid-January 2020. For both the BioNTech and Moderna teams, it only took a couple days. As the CEO of Moderna said, "this is not a complicated virus" — at least, not for Wizards like them.
Production and distribution, meanwhile, were mainly just limited by money. (When something has positive externalities, by default in a free market the creators don't make enough profit and not enough of the thing gets produced.)
The hard part, the part the actually took so long and is related to the increased complexity of the modern world and its modern problems, was getting approval from the FDA, EMA, etc. (Note that *testing the safety and efficacy* isn't the hard part; the regulatory agencies just don't happen to like the fastest ways to test safety and efficacy. It's specifically getting the approval.)
____
(Also, formatting note, the "everything is permitted" link is broken and should point to https://www.abc.net.au/religion/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/10100616 instead.)
Money has no wealth, it's just a signal. "Limited by money" is not a viable criticism when we're talking about the level of Nation-States.
I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, but I think also I wasn't clear because it sounds like you're agreeing with what I meant to say. What I meant was that literally all the governments had to do was spend much more money early on on vaccine factories and other parts of the supply chain. That would have been easy. The vaccine companies were limited by money; the government could have provided it.
Thanks, this is clearer indeed. (Also we could have stopped the virus outright a year ago if the Western governments had taken it seriously and had implemented Asia-style lockdowns.)
Errr... humankind is not going to get wiped out by COVID-22 or whatever, and this pandemic proves it. Governments will just lock down, or force everyone to take tests all the time, or force everyone to wear hazmat suits all the time to keep food production and distribution going.
A Chinese-style four-week hard lockdown is likely to stamp out almost any disease, provided enforcement is adequate. A sufficiently horrible plague should provide all the necessary incentive.
Also, hazmat suits aren't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
I think the Wizards can get us through for food, water, energy and most human desires that can be accommodated through markets. Where we are headed for doom is through our massive depletion of the diversity and abundance of wildlife and ecosystems. Maybe this won't lead to our material impoverishment, but it will surely cause us to be sadder and less fulfilled than we would otherwise be. It seems to me that this is not what we would choose, we just haven't found a good way to protect global public goods. I would readily pay say 10% of my incoming to bring into being arrangements that protected biodiversity across the world, others would offer 20%, 5% or 1% and it would be enough if used well. As the reviewer points out, the Wizard and Prophet construct is least successful when applied to climate change. I would argue that it is even less useful for the related issue of biodiversity. Still an excellent book though.
While it's not a panacea, we always have the option of paying more attention to what we consume.
"If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. "
You are confusing "we have not made things as much better as we would like them to be" with "things are getting worse." Over the past thirty years, the fraction of the world's population in extreme poverty has dropped by a factor of four. Go back a few more decades and it has fallen from a large majority of the world's population to a small minority.
In order for "economic stagnation" to drag down average utility, the growth rate of per capita real income would have to be negative. Aside from briefly due to Covid, it isn't and hasn't been.
There are problems in the modern world, but they are largely due to the prophets. The Covid vaccine took two days to develop, most of a year to get approved, because the FDA et. al. were applying standards of proof wildly excessive when the cost of delay is hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of lives. That wasn't the work of Wizards — as you point out in imagining Borlaug's problem facing a modern regulatory regime.
Great review. The last part helps me crystalize an idea.
'If you look around, you’ll see lots of other COVID-like problems out there that are quietly but inexorably claiming lives and dragging down average utility worldwide – poverty, homelessness, economic stagnation – that Wizards haven’t found good solutions for. I don’t think it’s from a lack of trying; I think we may have hit a carrying capacity limit on our ability to deal with complexity.'
While "engineering" and making everyone smarter could help, I think there are some easy gains to be made here. My model looks like this: rent seekers constantly infiltrate society and tries to find a safe niche to extract rent. (Rent seeking is sometimes unconscious and in good faith.) Humans seem to be biased towards rent-seekers in many context (this made sense in the ancestral environment). Rent seeking can be greatly reduced if we make decision-makers suffer the consequences of their actions. The problem with e.g. the FDA is that the organization isn't designed to get feedback on its actions. Markets and (functioning) democracy are two mechanisms to provide this feedback.
This is a bad EILI5 of rationalist-ish economists like Robin Hanson, but I thought it was missing from the discussion in the review.
This was really off-putting. (Really surprisingly, given what a great reads the other reviews so far have been.)
The whole Wizard-Prophet dichotomy is so obviously forced and misleading that I came away with an impression of two dangerous extremes. One trying to contrast itself with the other to make itself look better, but, in the end, only making itself look dishonest.
Clearly, Borlaug was a great person and we need more Borlaugs. (How few people disagree, though?) But I'm not associating Wizardry with Borlaug now, I'm associating it with irresponsible ideologues high on high modernism, who use Borlaug as a fig leaf for, eg., their absurd beliefs about inexhaustability of fossil fuels and support for harmful, wasteful scams like fracking.
I am hopeful for scientific progress, because it's demonstrated great results and potential. I also value and wish to preserve the nature, because it's demonstrably important for our livehood, a sophisticated, efficient machinery on its own, valuable and (so far, at our current level of understanding) irreplaceable in its sheer diversity of lifeforms and ecosystems. Those two beliefs are neither contradictory nor in conflict. Rather, they come from the same core values of truth ad reason, values which, I feel, conflict with any simplistic ossified heuristic, unquestioning trust or mistrust of civilization alike.
Characterizing COVID as an example of the failure of Wizardry seems completely wrong. It's an example of the failures that occur when you allow Prophets to regulate Wizards.
If we had decided to authorize vaccines after Phase 2 trials, we could have had a vaccine starting in July 2020 instead of November 2020. If we had decided to do challenge trials, we probably could have had a vaccine starting in March or April 2020. The same regulatory Prophets still haven't approved AstraZeneca or Novavax and decided to ruin public confidence in vaccines by pausing J&J because it might have caused as much damage as a single minute of the pandemic.
You can see this elsewhere too. The US could have had a majority of our electricity produced without carbon dioxide since the 1970s. Instead, we decided to make a nuclear regulatory agency that is paid based on the amount of time they spend reviewing a project.
Wizardry doesn't work if the Prophets forbid it.
Really glad this book was included in the review contest. It puts terms (and a lot more detail) behind concepts that I had vague thoughts about, but couldn't have expressed well. I'm very much in the "Wizard" side of things and the best way I had to describe this to date was the question "Would you rather live 500 years in the future or 500 years in the past?" to which I consider the future to be the clear correct answer. This review definitely motivated me to read it. Thanks anonymous reviewer!
Wouldn't curiosity make us overwhelmingly pick the future ?
Curiosity is certainly a contributing factor to me picking the future, but this is far from universal among the general population. My reasoning is primarily that the future has a high probability of being better and could be better by a shockingly large degree given continued exponential growth.
In my observation (limited N count though), many people either focus on things they think will be worse in the future (heavy overlap with "prophet" mindset in my interpretation) or prefer the past as a known quantity relative to the uncertainty of the distant future.
A couple of minor points, and a larger one that needs further explanation:
There is a statue of Borlaug, and it's in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Congress building (sponsored by Iowa).
There is also a Hall of Laureates of the World Food Prize (a quite beautiful building) in Des Moines, Iowa. Its purpose is to honor the recipients of the annual World Food Prize, but it unavoidably has the air of a Monument to Normal Borlaug (who founded the World Food Prize).
More deeply, there was a tremendous worry about a "world population explosion" in the 1960s. In fact, it was the expectable Malthusian consequence of the various improvements in food supply (including Borlaug's) after WW II; fewer people were starving to death. But after that time, the world population growth rate started slowing. (The book "The Population Bomb" was published within a few years of the time of the peak growth rate.) What changed things appears to be urbanization. Peasant farmers have lots of children, both for the obvious biological reasons and the fact that they're profitable. (I've read that peasant children are cash-flow positive by age three and net profitable by age five. Certainly, farmers' children were valuable workers in pre-mechanization Iowa farming.) Conversely, for townspeople, children are an expense, and they tend to have a lot less of them, less than the replacement rate -- although this transition in behavior seems to take a generation or two after immigration to the city to be established.
The result of this is that the higher the ratio of townspeople to peasant farmers, the lower the possible population growth rate, and if the ratio is high enough, the population ceases growing. That ratio is the same as the number of other people a single farmer can feed, i.e., the productivity of farming.
So the increased productivity that Borlaug created stopped people from starving in the short run, but also helped to get us to the point that we are freed from being at equilibrium at the Malthusian limit.
What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
> What remains to be explained is why townspeople, after a few generations of adaptation to that environment, don't produce unlimited children due to ordinary evolutionary pressures.
Hunter-gatherer children don't do much useful work, but hunter-gatherers still have enough to grow their population. Maybe the difference between their fertility and that of townspeople is the quality of the birth control they use?
You don't think that women education was a big deal for the demographic transition ?
Norman Borlaug was the greatest man of the 20th century, and it ain't even close.
Clearly the worst book review so far.
You seem to be on the side of the Wizards, and the book clearly is too, but at the end you fall into doomism and mark yourself out as really wishing to be on the side of the Prophets. Systems are not getting too complex to ever hope to get things right, it is instead that we tackle ever more complex problems as our capabilities rise.
Climate change failure is a result of a lack of action rather than a lack of knowing what to do. It is a systems failure of politics only. For the most part I blame the left here, for giving in to doomism and failing to come up with a compelling (or really any) ideology that the general public could buy into.
1. There ought to be a 90 foot tall bronze statue of Normal Borlaug. Buck naked. Riding a horse or holding up a lamp to the heavens or such shit.
2. I understand that Norman Borlaug's views of Wizards vs. Prophets were more "nuanced" than are sometimes reported. He didn't believe that technology would always eventually come up with solutions (yay, Science!), that there was no limit to the number of people that the earth or the universe could practically hold, but rather, that:
a. Third World Poverty is most often romanticized by people who don't have to live it and have no real experience of it; and
b. Technology buys humanity time.
https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/04/norman-borlaug-legacy-documentary/
I further note that Paul Ehrlich is still held up as an expert on population growth and resource scarcity, even though none of his predictions have come to pass.
In spite of being pretty Wizardy, as I suspect most commenters here are, I get a lot out of the articles from Low Tech Magazine, which has a pretty extreme Prophet-tilt: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
> Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.
I live on the east coast, and we have extremely strict conservation rules for wetlands (as well as a lot of bird conservation measures, including a number of no-humans-allowed bird sanctuaries on islands near me). Having no direct knowledge about dovekies in particular, I'd naturally interpret their current status as an indication that changes to how we treat wetlands successfully saved many species, rather than an indication that they were never in danger to begin with. After all, dumping pesticides in swamps is *currently* unthinkable and vaguely disgusting to people around here, and a lot must have changed for it to have been business as usual only a century ago.
I absolutely adore this review - but I am cautious of the Engineer archetype that people say is being missed:
"A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs."
Call me a conflict theorist, but all of these types in the modern day have reduced themselves to Prophetry or beholden to them see - people taking Greta Thunberg seriously at the UN. It's not merely that she's a climate change alarmist, she's the exact sort of "we need to adopt social controls of my design to prevent growth and human production in order to save the planet" type of alarmist that is extremely commonly Prophetic. Not only that, but if you're going to accept such activist claims - Greta Thunberg is not exactly the scion of well-argued and thought-out climate policy (consider: she left China out of her climate lawsuits).
I am not saying this is necessarily The Route of All Things, but we have empirical evidence that organizations that *allow* Prophets will eventually be run by them.
> Audubon Society
Ah! That's who Tom Lehrer was singing about in "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". I figured it probably wasn't the "Autobahn Society", I just couldn't hear it any other way.
Penn and Teller once declared Norman Borlaug to be the greatest human being that ever lived.
https://youtu.be/9RD2Gigny8I
Drip irrigation should be in wizards column, no? Also vaccines provided they continue to work against future variants are arguably the singular wizard solution to covid that we couldn't overcome otherwise due to social constraints, I'd say
Prophets of the past were unable to predict how far the planet's ressources could be stretched.
Still, there is a finite pool of resources, and as we draw further into it it takes more and more energy to extract the oil.
The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of oil has gone down from >100 pre-1940 to 23 in the 1970s and 8 in 2005 (http://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2004.05.023)
GDP-energy decoupling seems historically marginal and extremely difficult, so unless nuclear fusion energy enters mass production in the next half-century, I would give Air AND Fire to the Prophets... (it only takes one to risk wrecking civilization as we know it)
I love this book and I love this review, though I don't agree with everything in either. For one thing, I suspect that both the book and the review are a little unfair to both Vogt and Borlaug.
After reading the book a couple years ago I got hold of a copy of Vogt's manifesto (Road to Survival) and was a little surprised that most of that book is devoted to concerns about food production. That doesn't seem like misanthropy to me (though I suppose it's possible that Vogt's true motivations were more misanthropic and he merely focused on food production because he thought that argument would be more palatable to readers).
Meanwhile, Borlaug was actually a strong advocate for population control. Even talked about it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.