Correct.

There are patterns that an intelligent lay person can learn to recognize in the climate literature. A lot of bad arguments are placed in articles by non-idiots for the purpose of pandering to either grant reviewers or journal editors.

I believe that. Maybe a better way of saying what I intended:

1. There are idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.
2. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.
3. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are not recognizable as such by non-experts.

The amount of effort required to identify wrong arguments probably goes up an order of magnitude with each class. I'd put what you discussed in class #2.

We'd have to agree on terms, which would be hard. But "ending" is a high bar, so probably not.

As best I can tell the issue is complex enough that a person can pick and choose data and argumentation to make whatever case they want to make (theory under-determined by data, as per Quine), and even aside from that metaphysical limit, only a true expert has the sophistication to detect bullshit arguments made by non-idiots, yet in contemporary culture nobody who's not an expert cares what experts think.

This same dynamic is an annoyance in my area of science, which is two orders of magnitude less complicated and three orders less contentious than climate science. So basically there is no hope. (See above wrt learned helplessness.)

The truth of the matter and the motives of the people involved have no necessary connection.

That's for fucking sure.

The poorest have much more pressing and solvable problems like diseases that can be healed, hunger, and general societal development.

I think that's true, but I don't take it as evidence for anything about the topic -- the poorest have the least ability to worry about a future that's not threatening them in the moment.

The reality is that even if the whole world followed the guidance of the UN's study on climate change it would not be enough.

That's probably another vector of the learned helplessness. At this point either some tech hail mary saves the day, or future people will just deal with the cataclysm because there's no other choice. Doesn't seem like there's anything to gain doing anything about it now, unless you're working on the tech hail mary part.

That's what I think is most likely true. I have strong priors that we're in a "cigarettes don't cause cancer" and "all of these crushing body collisions don't cause adverse health effects" type of situation.

My less sinister take: it's a coordination problem of epic proportions, perhaps the hardest one in the history of the world, and the people who get the most fucked from it have the least power. So learned helplessness sets in, same as everywhere.

Whatever the elites are doing -- whoever you consider "the elites" to be -- is downstream of that.

I just listened to Billy Joel's original and like 3 covers of this song. Dunno whether to thank you or curse you.

That last part depends on whether this is an inherent feature of modernity or if it’s a fiat induced high time-preference pathology.

I don't even think the culprit is modernity, except insofar as modernity has made vastly largely swathes of humans prosperous, post-scarcity for the "real" scarcities. But given the prevalence of the anomie throughout history -- of the wealthy, and wealthy civilizations, unhappy in similar ways -- I think the data tells a compelling story.

Hopefully I'm wrong, though.

An issue that I think is foundational is that these things are dynamic. Even w/ a sophisticated mechanism to attribute the wealth from living closely to a bunch of friends who care about you and who you care about -- which is economically illegible but practically about the most important thing there is -- there's still the issue of adaptation, wherein the felt value of this source of wealth dissipates over time. You don't feel it nearly as much when you've had it for a year, vs when you've been starved for it. No seasoning like hunger, etc.

To my mind, this is reason for both optimism and pessimism. Optimism bc most of what ails anyone (or any modestly functioning civilization) is amenable to treatment for zero dollars; pessimism bc the prospect of people introducing these cycles into their lives is negligible.

Put another way, it doesn't matter how "wealthy" we get by the usual way of reckoning such things, nobody will feel better about it, and btc doesn't fix this.

What definition would you propose?

I've found that being present and listening attentively to someone is bafflingly powerful; in fact, there's basically an entire psychotherapeutic school built on that idea.

You probably did her more good than a week's worth of whatever the halfway house accomplished, and that's not even knocking on the institutions of halfway houses.

Ah. You might have guessed that I'm prone to guilt, but in this case I'm not, bc anyone who resonated with that post has something in their heart that they need to attend to.

I wish you success on your quest. Hope to keep seeing you around.

Two giant text files in org mode -- one for transient daily thoughts, one as a permanent store of concepts of lasting importance. Have some other auxilliary stuff, but they pale in comparison and account for 5% of my mental cycles, or less.

It sounds awesome! I bet whoever does something like that would walk away with some crazy perspective in all kinds of ways.

Oh dang! :(

Why did the non-economic arguments not make sense to you?

I expressed it badly: I've seen economic arguments that it's hard to get started on a family by most of the standard definitions (have a house, some economic security) and how that would cause perverse effects is easy enough to understand. The other class of arguments tend to range over much larger territory, and I didn't know which things you were talking about, but now I do thanks to your elaborated answer.

It makes it really frustrating to find someone who doesn’t think you’re a bad person because of X, as if only X matters.

I wish I was still in the game because I'm v curious about this. It seems like everybody is feeling this same thing, no? Nobody likes what it's doing to them. Which seems like something you could unite over. Like, if your profile called it out. "I'm looking to connect w/ someone and not get lost in these stupid labels and tribalisms and all that." But maybe that's naiive.

I can say, not from online dating but from life, even from SN, which is kind of a hostile environment for this kind of thing, which makes it a good example: putting yourself out there, earnestly, makes you a target for stupid bullshit, but there's always people who are hungry for real interaction, and they respond. It's always happened, to such a degree that it seems corny: put yourself out there, be real, have positive regard for people by default, and people matching that description turn up in all sorts of places.

Again, not denying your own experience. Dating is its own weird game. I wish I could play still, just to see what it's like now. Although from what you're reporting, maybe it would erode one of my handful of comforting beliefs about the world :(

Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.

The distinction isn't as obvious to me -- or to most people, apparently -- as it is to you. Which is not itself a problem.

The problem would be if you think you've performed some devastating praxeological smackdown, which you have not. However, it wouldn't be my problem, so I'm content to let it alone.

We should pay close attention to this because if we think they're fighting Bitcoin now... we're delusional.

It would be nice if more people understood this.

yes, he thinks his generation is mostly fucked (ha!) when it comes to dating.

Why? "Dating" is overbroad, so maybe that's what I'm confused about. Do you mean:

• getting married
• having a family
• being in a stable long-term relationship
• something else

I've read some Gen-Z stuff on the topic but it's never made a ton of sense to me, since the arguments have generally been non-economic ones, so I'd be interested in your perspective.

The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process

Have you been through an adoptive process? It's quite expensive. Significant amounts of money change hands before a baby ends up as the legal child of the adoptive parents. You don't have to like surrogacy, but the arguments you're making seem pretty tenuous to me.

I'm curious if you have similar feelings about broad swathes of the economy where people in dire circumstances take shitty jobs that nobody in less dire circumstances would ever take. For instance, there's quite the cottage industry in third-world countries paying people to adjudicate terrible videos of animals being tortured for fun, and the like. The psychological costs of this job are substantial, but presumably people in those circumstances think it's less bad than the alternative. Is this fine, or not fine?