This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yes, climate change poses absolutely no threat to humanity over the next 200 years at least.
I do sometimes wonder what, if anything, we owe to people hundreds or thousands of years in the future. If 100 billion people existed in the past, we might expect a median of 100 billion to exist in the future. Imagine a world 10,000 years in the future. Absent space travel, the world might essentially be a big trash heap. All the easily accessible oil, coal, and metals would be used up. So once technology was lost, there'd be no way to restart it. A few million people would live on the ruins of a vast civilization, like the Dark Age barbarians who turned Roman amphitheaters into quarries.
But that's not how it works, certainly not for metals. The Dark Age barbarians used amphitheaters as Quarries precisely because those were so easily accessible. They lost the technological sophistication to support the kind of a large-scale system to build Amphitheaters, but jump-starting civilization from a trash-heap is imo most likely easier, not harder, than doing so from scratch.
There are resources that genuinely get used up like fossil fuel, yes, but since these are to my knowledge all about energy-generation, I'm quite hopeful that this will take so long that we will have a near-endless list of alternative energy sources, even if those may be less efficient pound-for-pound.
Not 100 percent sure but I think we’ve already got pretty much all the oil that can be retrieved with 1900 level technology. It used to ooze from the ground.
Coal is the best bet for still being available post a new Dark Age.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Space travel, actually. We're burning up all these easily accessible ressources, at least let it not be to paint ourselves into a corner.
More options
Context Copy link
It's an interesting scenario. I think it'd be easier than one might think to restart civilization though. Hydro power provides 15% of world electricity and you can have a fairly large metallurgical industry from charcoal, as Brazil shows. The metals we dug up are mostly still at the top somewhere.
But best to avoid losing technology or space travel rather than planning for such a failed scenario. I think it's no good to do those labelling projects (as are conducted for nuclear waste) where anthropologists think about how to communicate to people about the dangers of buried nuclear waste without sharing a language. Effort should be spent to avoid such an end state, not to ameliorate a total abysmal failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link