Maybe this is because of scarcity.. if existing algos are applied on top of infinitely generated entertainment then perhaps we'll see something even more addictive than YouTube.
Let's posit that modern society is not really well suited for the true primate nature of humans. If participating in society is the benchmark, then almost all of us are disabled.
As Scott Alexander opens his essay:
>The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.
When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".
Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.
The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.
I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.
The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.
Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.
You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.
The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.
I'm not claiming we need indefinite growth or really even care about the hypothetical traps - that was a response to the parent and the history of the green revolution.
"Unsustainable" isn't about matching rates; I mean we are washing away the topsoil, polluting the ocean, and releasing greenhouse gases (via fertilizer production from fossil fuels) that cause widespread climate change -- things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible.
Yes you can imagine an amount of degrowth that allows us to keep using these technologies without as much broad negative impact, but that doesn't seem as likely. Or even necessary, if we get our act together on clean energy and "regenerative" agriculture.
Wealthy societies can change their practices rather than seeking maximum short term efficiency that’s ultimately the solution not any one set of practices.
Regenerative agriculture doesn’t produces nearly as much food from the same resources so that’s only an option if you’ve escaped the trap.
Similarly there’s plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere genetic engineering is a viable solution as long as you’re willing to take a slight hit to productivity as plants need energy to use atmospheric nitrogen.
Alternatively we can spend more energy to capture atmospheric nitrogen, but again only if we can avoid maximize output while minimizing inputs. And so fort across every issue you’re talking about.
> things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible
You can continue to do all of those things across geological timeframes. Industrial agriculture doesn’t need healthy oceans, natural topsoil, or current levels of CO2. Carbon capture to produce chemical feedstocks or even fuels isn’t an efficient process, but it’s a proven technology. If batteries weren’t an option for example, we wouldn’t just give up.
In what way does that counter the claim it's ham fisted? Modern agriculture is a solution to malthusian traps because of its scale, not its precision. Shifting from small scale, artisanal farming to large, standardized operations was one of the key components of massively increasing food production.
Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
Sounds similar to my problem. At some point my Microsoft account was linked with an old startup email as a backup. I've updated it to fully remove it and set my gmail as primary. Yet I am still receiving subscription/billing emails to that old address, which fortunately is being forwarded. The UI simply does not reflect reality.
When I contact Support I tell them the whole problem at the start. Then eventually an agent comes on and asks me a dumb question. If I don't respond quickly enough they close the chat and the whole process restarts.
There is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon age.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
Yeah, so many people like to point at specific inventions and ask why it wasn't done sooner or such, but 99% of the time it was because of a lack of material science that made production near impossible.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
I think it is a little more nuanced than that. Bret Devereaux wrote about steam engines[1] in Roman Empire, and the conclusion is there was no economic stimuli to kickstart steam engine. For the first half-century (or so) of steam engines they were atmospheric steam engines and they sucked (in a very literal way: they sprayed cold water into a cylinder to condense water vapor to create a (sort of) vacuum that will suck a piston into a cylinder). I don't believe that these steam engines required especially good steel. I think the biggest issue was corrosion due to a contact with water, but there was no need to keep really high pressures.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
I agree with the sentiment in the sense that technology doesn't scale when you're like that Australian guy making everything from one-use mud and sticks. Some of it does but not a lot of it.
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
To summarize a bit glibly, you're saying to be a good parent. Which of course is awesome, and it is important for people like yourself to explain how to do that using the available tools, etc.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
It's good you are so self aware and can accept your situation to find a level of contentment.
No partner is perfect so being in a relationship requires evaluating tradeoffs and deciding where you can compromise compared to your ideal. To do otherwise or expect someone (or yourself) to change is unfair to them. Unfortunately sometimes we think we can deal with something but ultimately can't - that's part of the self discovery and vulnerability/heartbreak of relationships (because we can of course be on the receiving end too). Really you have to be willing to embrace a person's flaws and take long term joy in doing so, and also have gratitude for them doing the same.
So if you know all that's not really for you, then good move on your part.
Another complication / nuance is that, of course you should be serving and supporting your partner (and vice versa)! Its part of what makes relationships rewarding. They're not always 50/50 in all aspects.
The trick, as you say, is to know when that is crossing into something unfair. When it goes beyond something like who does the dishes or makes the most money into supporting the other person's core identity. Or when it becomes unsustainable / exhausting for other person. Identifying these issues can be difficult. It requires both partners to be in touch with their feelings and able to communicate openly.
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