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[Eagleon]

Angle, I love the idea of Agora for a lot of reasons, but I'm kind of thinking the exact opposite here, I think people need millions of small arguments conversations in order to change their minds about anything. Most people will respect talking heads as far as it doesn't inconvenience them. When it comes to changing their own habits they turn to people right next to them to figure out what actions they should take. It's why I hate celebrity and tabloid science, why I hate the paywall preventing people from actually reading the damn science, why universal education and critical thinking is so damned important, and why I cringe/get a little nasty when I see academics turn the way of misanthropy, scientism, and elitism.

People like to be told what to think about things that don't concern their careers, and that's mostly fine, but if you have a small population that goes to the watered down pop-sci sensationalist style of reporting science - and I will happily include environmental science as the worst, most hateful offender of the batch right next to psychology - you multiply the bullshit when they start talking to their friends, family, complete strangers with authority. Journalism is not a good way to educate.

Re: Soylent... I'm a little distrustful because of the monoculture to produce it that it might create if we were to start taking the stuff as meals regularly. I also love cooking so it would drive me nuts if the cost of actual food went up because of lack of demand. There's a certain amount of mental stimulation we get from eating that might be bad to cut out, but I can't say for sure how dramatic the effects might be to just eat one thing other than that I know it's a punishment in some prisons. I'm also not a nutritionist, but I lean a little towards thinking that we might not know everything about nutrition yet, and taking it over actual food might be premature and a health risk. When people have been taking it regularly for their whole adult lives, I might consider it if I were in a situation where it would make sense, but I'll pass for right now.

[Angle]

Angle, I love the idea of Agora for a lot of reasons, but I'm kind of thinking the exact opposite here, I think people need millions of small arguments conversations in order to change their minds about anything. Most people will respect talking heads as far as it doesn't inconvenience them. When it comes to changing their own habits they turn to people right next to them to figure out what actions they should take. It's why I hate celebrity and tabloid science, why I hate the paywall preventing people from actually reading the damn science, why universal education and critical thinking is so damned important, and why I cringe/get a little nasty when I see academics turn the way of misanthropy, scientism, and elitism.

People like to be told what to think about things that don't concern their careers, and that's mostly fine, but if you have a small population that goes to the watered down pop-sci sensationalist style of reporting science - and I will happily include environmental science as the worst, most hateful offender of the batch right next to psychology - you multiply the bullshit when they start talking to their friends, family, complete strangers with authority. Journalism is not a good way to educate.

Well, the idea here is that you can substitute one big discussion for all of the small ones, and that this one big one will be able to cover all of the relevant topics and distribute the knowledge to everyone who participates. Then people will be persuaded purely by the arguments they read, and it won't matter who these arguments come from.

Re: Soylent... I'm a little distrustful because of the monoculture to produce it that it might create if we were to start taking the stuff as meals regularly. I also love cooking so it would drive me nuts if the cost of actual food went up because of lack of demand. There's a certain amount of mental stimulation we get from eating that might be bad to cut out, but I can't say for sure how dramatic the effects might be to just eat one thing other than that I know it's a punishment in some prisons. I'm also not a nutritionist, but I lean a little towards thinking that we might not know everything about nutrition yet, and taking it over actual food might be premature and a health risk. When people have been taking it regularly for their whole adult lives, I might consider it if I were in a situation where it would make sense, but I'll pass for right now.

Yeah, those are relevant concerns, and there are various ways we could address them. Mainly, though, I'd only recommend people taking this stuff as 50% of their diet, at most. That should still result in 1-2 normal meals a day, which will probably be the most interesting ones to cook and eat anyway. That also means that if there is some relevant nutrition we missed in the soylent recipe, you'll still probably get enough of it from the rest of your meal. This should drop the cost of regular food, if anything, due to the decreased demand.

[zchris13]

The chans don't have any kind of post ranking, and as you said, they don't have visualisation. So there are yet things to be done

Post ranking encourages powerusers like reddit has, and is a generally bad idea.

[Magistrum]

Post ranking encourages powerusers like reddit has, and is a generally bad idea.

*Shit-posting Intensifies!

[Angle]

*Shit-posting Intensifies!

?

[wobbly]

By the by N2O isn't a carbon gas.

What's your point? Ozone (O₃) isn't a carbon gas either. Still a greenhouse gas. As is N₂O & a bunch of other stuff without Carbon.

[redwallzyl]

two seconds of googling. the greenhouse gasses are:

Water vapor (H2O)
Carbon dioxide (CO2)Methane (CH4)
Nitrous oxide (N2O)
Ozone (O3)
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)

[Eagle_eye]

Anything that absorbs IR better than air- which includes pretty much any carbon compound- will contribute to the greenhouse effect. Those are just a few big ones.

[Frumple]

Well, if it makes you feel any better, the trend is looking like we're going to see an ice-free arctic by... 2020, I think it was. Something like 2035 at the latest. We've almost certainly got under a decade before we see it, and pretty much dead certain under two barring something really gorram odd happening. Been dropping an average of ~440 km³ per year since '79 or so, and we've got around 3.4k km³ left.

Dunno about the antarctic, though.

Still. Only a small handful more years until we get to just flat out find out. Isn't it terrifying exciting?

[Reelya]

Sea ice and permafrost also hold an absolutely mind-numbing amount of methane. At a few degrees higher average global temperatures, ocean methane starts bubbling up faster and faster. Millions of tons of it.

[Angle]

Isn't that already happening? I know I read somewhere about methane plumes in the ocean, and then there are those holes in siberia...

[Baffler]

Well, if it makes you feel any better, the trend is looking like we're going to see an ice-free arctic by... 2020, I think it was. Something like 2035 at the latest. We've almost certainly got under a decade before we see it, and pretty much dead certain under two barring something really gorram odd happening. Been dropping an average of ~440 km³ per year since '79 or so, and we've got around 3.4k km³ left.

Dunno about the antarctic, though.

Still. Only a small handful more years until we get to just flat out find out. Isn't it terrifying exciting?

It'll be ice free during the summer (except for the Canadian Arctic Islands, where it's apparently so hard packed it'll take several more decades to catch up) by mid-century at least. Current estimates say 2030's at the earliest, but definitely mostly there by 2050 if current trends continue. The Antarctic is interesting, because even though the Southern Ocean is warming the Antarctic ice is actually increasing in area. The reason is a mystery to me.

[Reelya]

https://www.skepticalscience.com/increasing-Antarctic-Southern-sea-ice-intermediate.htm

If the Southern Ocean is warming, why is sea ice increasing? There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). A side-effect is a strengthening of the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007).

[Cthulhu]

Captain Planet stuff isn't what gets me going, short of scouring the planet with radiation (and even then really) the biosphere can regenerate.  The uptick in violence and hostility, rise of far right groups and anti-modernism, conflicts that'll only intensify as the ecological issues tighten resources until we're watching state after state tear itself apart.  That's people stuff and I'm a people so that's what concerns me the most.

But then again maybe the special folks at LessWrong are more right and we'll reach the singularity (which is definitely not just standard Christian eschatology repackaged, heavens no) and magic technology will fix everything.

[Angle]

That's why I think that one of the things we really need to work on is our collective moral understanding. We could solve all of the world's problems today, with our existing technology, if we would just stop being stupid jerks. But of course, unless something changes, we won't stop being stupid jerks, so obviously we need to change something.

As for the singularity, that understanding is somewhat flawed, but it's not properly wrong. Our tech is increasing exponentially, and it does have the potential to change everything. You're feeling the beginning tremors of it already.