For starters, he lays the blame on "not wanting to invest the effort" in self education. This is patently wrong. The more supportable reason is that cost of education is very high, both in time and in monetary measures. Since he claims to be a professional scientist, has he taken the time to accurately evaluate just how much of his own personal finances he has invested in reaching that point? How many thousands of dollars did it take him to get his doctorate? (Did he factor in the amount of money his folks invested in keeping him clothed, housed, and fed while he did his post-grad work?) Did he rationally evaluate that against the actual standard median income of the typical American? How can he so blandly lay the fault at "lack of will", or "lack of effort", when the cost of entry is lightyears out of most people's reach, and even for his own, if it were not for the equivalent of privileged birth to put it there? (EG, people who are born to parents who have lots of money are able to attend schooling at this level, where those who are not, cannot.)
Of course not, he did not, and likely will not, or can not.
The amount my folks invested is maybe $15. Full ride scholarship, and the fact that science grad students have their tuition paid by their department along with a stipend, mean that most of my parents' investment toward sending me to college went toward the bus fare to get me there. I know you won't believe that (and can not, and will not, and etc. bias bias bias) and it doesn't matter, but it is true.
And come to think of it, I paid them back for that.
Here's the thing, though, weird: that can be free for you, too. You don't need academic journal articles to get the theoretical background to be able to read academic journal articles. Most of what the average person needs is at their library or on the Internet, although sorting through the garbage and lies-to-children is going to be rough. It's just going to take forever, thus why I said "willing and able" above. I'm more than willing to concede that there are levels of economic disadvantage where you can't afford even free learning for a host of reasons, be it because someone else is paying for it or because it's actually free, and yes, that does suck, but it sucks as part of a much bigger problem -- and trying to fix it by just handing you papers for free isn't going to give you the means to fully understand them, because nothing's going to give you that without time lots of people can't afford to spend even if you wanted to. Sad, yes, but we can't get what we deserve.
That's the thing about debates like this. The individually disturbing facts are out, mostly, in plain view. You can read them on the NASA site and so on. The underlying mechanisms that explain why those facts are disturbing in a detailed enough way to meaningfully estimate how bad they are generally are not, at least not at the level of detail you need -- and even if they were, plugging the data into them requires an understanding of statistics and informatics and just the bare ability to read scientific writing (which is field-specific) that's not contained in the papers themselves or even linked to them in any discoverable way.
And then, in this particular case, the underlying question "are we doomed?" depends on "can we fix this?" as well as "how bad is it?", and that's a much broader question, because then we have to delve into the underpinnings of our entire industrial base and ask what we can do, what it will require, and how fast we can implement it -- and that's really densely connected. You may be familiar with the
bon mot "Scientists dream. Engineers do." It's not entirely accurate, especially in fields where they overlap, but it does reflect how, particularly in the current deluge of pilot studies, even an unreasonably large number of scientific papers can't give you a full picture of what scales to the levels we need it to given the capabilities we already have. It's the difference between describing "how a car works" and being able to design an automobile engine, except now we need the engine to be carbon-neutral even in manufacture.
And here's the real kicker: there isn't a kind of wrong you can be that won't seem right at first glance. If your statistical analysis is wrong, you still get whatever metadata you wanted out at the end of it, and there's no little flag saying it isn't real. If you misunderstand a paper, the author isn't going to climb out of your monitor and say "well, actually" unless you actually cross paths with them. There are countless ways for intelligent, well-meaning people to end up entirely wrong for reasons that aren't their fault but that they can't detect and we can't correct. The best way to try to limit the wrongness is comprehensive, time-consuming, frankly awful levels of education, combined with a paranoiac obsession with checking each other's work. Trying to do the latter without the former just takes up a lot of everyone's time.
I'm not here to call anyone stupid, let alone everyone but me; I've been more blunt than I should have been, but still, not my intention.
You all are not stupid, and I'm not some exceptional super-genius. What you are is underinformed, despite your best efforts, and there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. Actually getting to the point where you could look at the cutting edge of the dozens of fields that have some impact on our ability to survive our own industrial mismanagement and fully and confidently arrive at a provably accurate understanding of the state of things is way more than a full-time job. It's a full-time job for many, many people working in concert. One of the obstacles between garage researchers and doing that job is that most of what you want to read is paywalled or only accessible through specific networks of people; there's a lot of things we just kind of know but never bothered to publish, particularly negative data, and while it's technically unpublished and therefore can't be shared it's sort of seeped into the knowledge base over time. Now, however much I benefit from that all being the case, yes, in a perfect world you'd be able to read anything you like. This world is far from perfect, and you can't, and letting anyone who wants to read anything they want would have wide-ranging negative impacts on our ability to actually do science absent way more sweeping changes in the economics of science.
Given what you can see, the world looks doomed. Not arguing that. That sucks, and is depressing, and the more you look into it the more depressed you get, because you get more convinced it's doomed the more times you read it. The point at which things start looking up is buried so deeply in so many places that unless you're paid in part to look for it you probably can't afford to go find it all. I've tried to work around that before, and the bits that are only kind of buried look impossible or irrelevant and so people quite rightly don't believe them. And, again,
that is all terrible, but it's part and parcel of an even more terrible thing and can't be changed on its own. So, given all that, why get even more entrenched in your depression by reviewing all the facts you can already see, particularly since there's not much you can do that you don't already know you can do? If there were something the average person could do that would really meaningfully impact the impending death of the planet (and wasn't, you know, fatal or expensive) I'd be screaming it from the rooftops. Wouldn't you? That would be wonderful and well worth the professional consequences. But there isn't yet. The world just isn't set up to where the majority of people can make those kinds of choices, in part because the capability to fix things without a titanic budget is still being developed. I'm not going to ask people to do something like go vegan when meat is the only protein source they can afford, however much energy and water it takes to feed a cow.
So relax. You can run the numbers all you want, but the encouraging ones are deliberately hidden from you (in ways I can't fix), and in any event there's not much you can feasibly do as an individual to make things better or worse. So just breathe, be calm, recycle if it makes you feel better, and don't get trapped in the kind of echo chamber that happens when a bunch of people stare at the same frightening data and get utterly convinced of that. I can't show you enough things to convince you of the slightly encouraging state of things at a level I'd accept personally, and if I have to ask you to take things on faith, it may as well be me, and I may as well give up. Which is what I did, awkwardly and way more insultingly than I should have, because this is a debate I'm far tired of watching people have without all the facts in their possession and it generally devolves into worse than nothing. I get that it's partly to cope with feeling helpless, but counting us out while we're still working like hell to stay in is just depressing, and then everyone decides who to blame for it and it just devolves into people bashing folks they don't like. There's enough of that out there.
And incidentally, weird, if I have a chip on my shoulder,
folks like you blatantly ignoring mathematical reality because you want to sound intellectual helped put it there. You can be wrong about more stuff faster than I can ever hope to correct.
Whew. Long post. I look forward to the smarmy tl;dr and shitty reaction images and so forth. Have fun!
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Topic: Impending Doom Thread (Read 7946 times)