It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people.

I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah.

Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity

It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.

I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer?

It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation.

Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?

Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology.

Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse.

But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils.

> Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture

It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water.

> Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.

That seems unlikely, given that total fertility in wealthy countries is well below "replacement" (2.1 children per woman). Reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, could only be approaching replacement if the sex ratio is massively skewed in favour of girls.

1. UN chart of TFR for "more developed regions": https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Observe the assumed but never yet seen floor to fertility rate.

Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff?

With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

(https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...)

With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.

Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)

Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.

Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue.

As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.

Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.

You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.

Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.

That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.

We can hardly call that a victory.

> The fall in CO2 emissions in advanced economies is also seen while considering consumption-based metrics, meaning that the fall in emissions in these regions is not merely a result of offshoring of manufacturing.

And I can also point to many dozens of article that agree with my statement.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are completely correct, that doesn't change anything about deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing and many other issues that have not been addressed.

All of these issues have nothing to do with CO2. So my original point stands. You are focusing on the CO2 part when OP was talking about resource depletion in the first place.

You can choose to bury your head in the sand and think that everything is fine, but that doesn't make it true.

On that note, considering that you did not address the point in my original comment, I can honestly say that you are arguing in bad faith and I don't have time for that so feel free to not respond.

That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.

You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates.

Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.

It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare.

Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking.

Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.

Stage 2-3:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

The only thing, that appears hard to grasp is the already declining birth rate for africa since quite some time (go google it). It would be much more effective for fascists to argue for a higher mortality rate but that would be too cruel for the main stream.

To end constructively: What we need is better wealth distribution for even better health care to accelerate this process. You need to understand that better living standards helps us platoe. Maybe advocate for that.

> The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally.

Our planet could easily support +10 billion people. Its also a matter of wealth distibution. You know that "4 planets consumption rate" stuff for US citizens? This turns the responsibitly from the fertile poor to the rich consumers without any social darwinism. I would say, only focusing on the poor and not the rich to hinder wealth distribution justifies the insult of an eco-fascist.

The problem here is, that right-wingers stop their train of thought at "too much people" and "look at birth rate" ("another thought process finished successfully"), which your comment was all about, but ignore their own role in defining that upper bound and their consumption. It is comfortably to their way of life arguing against fertility rates, which wont effect them as much as wealth distribution would do to actually lower it.

You could also cut the poor from resources which would revert the demograpgic transition into high death and ferrility rates. Also a solution...

People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills.

I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it.

That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output.

Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct).

There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years).

Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.

China installed 125GW of wind/solar power in 2022 alone, and their power sectors CO2 output is projected to decrease (!!) starting in 2025 [1].

> You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia

I know that many people don't like to hear this, but this is just absolving yourself from blame and it's despicable.

Yes the Asian continent emits more CO2 than North America-- about 10 times more people live there, what do you expect?!

What you conveniently gloss over is that the US does ABSOLUTELY NOT "lead by example"-- CO2/capita is the absolut WORST worldwide except for some superrich petrostates (~15 tons/year/person, compared to ~8 for EU/China and

Fact is that ANY contribution you make as US citizen is highly likely to be MORE effective (in terms of CO2/year saved) than anything a Chinese or Indian citizen could do, AND also likely to demand LESS from you (because an American family just has to leave the second car at home more often to save a ton of CO2, and Indian family has to turn off heating during winter to achieve the equivalent, basically).

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-an...

Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.

I look South, and I see bush-land, a relatively small postage stamp sized block. I've counted about 23 separate species of orchids, and a huge variety of plants, and birds. One of the species of orchids is basically a sex-lure for wasps, and is absolutely fascinating.

I look North, East and West and I see farm-land as far as the eye can see (aside from another very small "reserve" to the NE). It's just paddocks for animals, and the diversity is "cattle" and "Sheep", and the various grasses which they eat. Very f absolutely fascinating.ew birds (not many trees), much less variety and diversity. And no orchids.

That's where food comes from, and it starts with a bulldozer, it relies on fossil-fuels (including the fertiliser) to keep producing. And we're still growing.

Banning ivory and protecting Rhino's is basically palliative care at this point.

Why is that a good thing, when the normal meat factories are bad as always? Because dogs have more rights to be treated nice, because they are considered cute, unlike pigs who are way more intelligent?

Let's not even talk about healthy soil depletion and what comes with that problem.

Insects are disappearing at an ever faster rate and they are at the base of many food chains.

Are there some things that are better now? Sure but you are looking at the tree and you missed the entire forest.

This is not the conclusion of the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie. As with many things, things are not so simple/binary.

Studying the recent past or the deep past gives us some perspective on how things have changed before. Making analogies might help us think of more scenarios, but it’s not so good for ruling things out.

Some things are worse, some things are better.

For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years.

Worldwide, deforestation is on the decline for the past 20 years.

In large part through exporting our staggering manufacturing demands to poorer parts of the globe such that the localized effects of pollution happen there instead.

Ritchie credits a lecture by Hans Rosling (one of the authors of Factfulness) in the forward for being what turned her from a pessimistic biology student into the person that writes a book like this.

A common criticism of the linked article is that "sure child mortality is going down, but what about X". Where X is climate change, species decline, quality of life, et cetera. The book addresses most "X"'s.

So, should we stick to lies about world becoming worse to not become complacent?

It is a highly politicized approach to the truth. The truth must be kept out of reach of political thinking. We need to keep our optimism at levels based on facts, not on our political goals. We need to stick to the truth based on empirical data even if it is not aligned with our political goals. At least if world wants to become much better.

I hate the way politicians argue their points. They ignore anything good about their opponents and anything bad about their own ideas. And maybe this is the reason why our world is not great.

> I don't like it when people say the system is great

I don't think anyone saying that. But from the other hand, our system is much better then it might be, and we'd better remember that, because if it wasn't, if we were in a local minimum, then we could change it in any direction to make it better. We need to remember that we are not at a minimum or a maximum, we need to think carefully about gradients before deciding were to move. So maybe we should say that our world is great, to not break it, to not make it worse?

That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.

We're in this situation in no small part because big enough companies can just buy their way when facing local entities, and the only recourse that is working is to ask a higher up regulator to intervene. Weakening the regulation entities makes it basically impossible to have anything done.

There is no end, it's tradeoffs all the way down. And the good things that are happening are hard won victories from people not accepting the status quo.

It seems obvious, but even that little bit of nuance escapes far too many people, most especially those whose livelihood is to talk about it.

Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system.

But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond.

My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix.

And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.

I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys.

He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time.

What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities.

Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.

For whom? Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Saying that the world is getting better overall requires judgement of how much you value different things.

Are there any global measures that are worse than they were a century ago? Or are you just saying that progress is uneven, with some areas seeing local setbacks despite the overall global gains?

I've recommended this book to people probably 1,000 times.

The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative.

At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light.

An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend.

My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context

(Even though I agree this narrative is mostly correct)

That’s not to say the overall thesis is wrong but I suspect slight rose tinted glasses at play

I've always regarded this book as being blatant neoliberal propaganda.

> Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, has questioned the authors' claims and suggested that Rosling's own thinking shows a bias towards Pollyannaism. Particularly, Berggren criticized the authors for understating the importance of the European migrant crisis, the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene, and continued global population growth. Furthermore, Berggren remarks that "Factfulness includes many graphs of 'bad things in decline' and 'good things on the rise' but not a single graph of problematic phenomena that are on the rise." It "employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth." Berggren raises concerns that the simplistic worldview this book offers could have serious consequences.

You might want to consider the possibility that it is simply an opinion that you disagree with and move on.

> you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting

I'm sorry you feel insulted, that's mainly on you, this was not my intention. I suggest you reflect on why you feel insulted when an internet stranger calls a book (which you did not write) as propaganda.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/our-world-in-data

https://ourworldindata.org/owid-at-ycombinator

I caveat this praise with my now instinctive skepticism of all of these EA projects coming out of Oxford. It feels like an overfunded set of charities.

Here I will take the heartless position and say that it is not clear to me that this statement is true. I certainly agree that it's a tragedy for the people involved. But if 4.4% of children dying before age 15 means that the world is an awful place, at what point would that stop being true? 2.2%? 1E-10%? I don't think the world is an awful place, I think it's a good place, getting better in some ways, with a long way to go in many others.

Statement 3 (the world can be much better) is essentially a better formulation. 4.4% is awful in relation to 0.47%, which is possible.

People have a much easier time with telling themselves "sometimes suffering just happens and can't be helped" when the suffering is inflicted on strangers who are far away. The party can continue when you convince yourself there is no child in the cobalt mine, only cool new smartphone features.

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32173146 - July 2022 (121 comments)

One quote I like from the three valued logic system, referencing Charles Sanders Peirce, states:

> Peirce soundly rejected the idea all propositions must be either true or false; boundary-propositions, he writes, are "at the limit between P and not P."

I also recall reading some description of Buddhist or Advaita Vedanta where logical systems that rejected the law of non-contradiction were explored. I can't find the exact reference, but I recall it was related to the Two Truths doctrine which leads me to believe it was explored by Nagarjuna.

At any rate, the idea that two contradictory things can be true simultaneously is a very interesting area to explore.

Edit: To add to the link list: Dialetheism [4] is the view that there are statements that are both true and false

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialetheism

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

In terms of other social problems, the world has gotten better in many respects, and it could continue to get better over time... given unlimited time. I'm just not sure that we have unlimited time. Wrecking our own ecosystem makes it very difficult to make progress on anything else, and the consequences of wrecking our ecosystem will only aggravate our other problems. That's why I'm overall pessimistic.

Climate change is not a binary. We can choose how many terrible consequences it will have. It'll never be too late to prevent some terrible consequences.

Something like that could also likely be achieved, or at least put into motion, by a single desperate nation.

A single deperate nation could also put into motion a nuclear war.

The sun absolutely blasts the planet with energy and the planet radiates away most of it. Global warming is shifting the amount of energy in the system when those things are in balance.

Then it’s not a coast, it’s underwater. The coast has moved. That’s fine, they always do. People will need to move to accommodate that. That’s also fine, they always do.

Also worth noting the sea level is actually falling relative to land level in many areas, especially towards the poles. What we’re most likely to see is mass migration into previously frozen/underwater areas towards the poles.

Define "always", relative to, say, recorded human history.

> People will need to move to accommodate that. That’s also fine, they always do.

Oh yeah, no problem. Please tell the billion or so people who live in coastal areas that it's totally fine.

> What we’re most likely to see is mass migration into previously frozen/underwater areas towards the poles.

Because the land and infrastructure there is surely fantastic. I suppose those people don't need, you know, food or water, for example? But ignoring the geological and ecological problems for the moment, consider the political problems. We're already driving ourselves crazy over a relatively small amount of immigration, and you're saying it's fine that a billion or two people are going to move—or at least try to move—into different countries? I'm guessing they won't be welcomed with open arms.

Every second of every day, month, year, etc. they are constantly shifting.

The political problems will sort themselves out (literally people problems), and the infrastructure will be built to accommodate the changing demographics. People move, people build. This is basic stuff.

People who lives on the coasts don't have to move every second of every day, month, year, etc., due to the coasts moving. In fact, the people almost never have to move due to the coasts moving.

> literally people problems

Climate change is a people problem. As George Carlin joked, "There's nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"

> This is basic stuff.

No, your comments are oversimplistic and perfunctory.

You're misinformed. It's very common in places with hurricanes, for instance.

> your comments are oversimplistic and perfunctory.

Your entire argument is based on the idea that humans can't move and build, or at least that doing so is "hard". When in fact putting in the hard work to move and build has been the cornerstone of human civilization for as long as human civilization has existed. It's a very conservative view that strangely seems to be held only by liberals: "the way things were is the best way they can possibly be, all this change is no good, we have to go back to the good old days!". With of course nothing real to justify it.

You inverted Chronological Snobbery, but it's still just as much as fallacy.

And as for absolutes, total extinction of large mammals comes to mind as a consequence after which humanity can't really do anything.

As I see it, the wealthy play a non trivial role in the marketing of the "superiority" of this system, and rare is the person who can seriously consider whether it may(!) objectively be one of the primary root causes, despite the role it plays in setting rules, distributing "information", etc.

If the population goes through a Toba-esque bottleneck due to climate-change-imposed breadbasket failures and there's no free energy (oil) left to bootstrap the world back to complexity similar to today, then is that "still here"?

Does "A Canticle For Leibowitz" qualify as "still here"?

That's an extremely low bar. Especially when the submission title is talking about the world being "much better".

  — What do we want?
  — Gradual change!
  — When do we want it?
  — In due course!

The world sucks? Maybe so. It also contains food, love, music, children, laughter, grandparents, trees, cats, and just fuckin' pathos, man.

Try not to waste it!

As for the pathos, I've a hard time believing it compensates for even a billionth of say, the suffering of an abused child. There's no doubt that it would have better (impersonally, as Derek Parfit used that word) if the world didn't exist. But now that you're here, might as well enjoy it, but perpetuating it doesn't seem wise.

I strongly doubt this, for what little that's worth.

Better by what metric? Better for whom?

From Derek Parfit's On What Matters, chapter 126 (Has It All Been Worth It?):

> If someone dies a slow and painful death, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended earlier. The last part of this person’s life was worse than nothing, or in itself bad. We can reach similar conclusions about the whole of someone’s life. If someone’s life contains much prolonged suffering, and nothing or little that is good, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended just after it started. Things may be in one way different if we suppose instead that this person’s life had never even started. Perhaps we could not claim that this alternative would have been better for this person. But when we ask which alternative would have been impersonally better, there is little difference between these two comparisons. Since it would have been better if this person’s life had stopped just after it started, it would also have been better if this person’s life had never started. In other words, it would have been impersonally better if this wretched person had never existed. And since such claims make sense when applied to one person, they also make sense when applied to all conscious beings, or to the whole of reality.

Parfit thinks it was/is worth it, given the good things in life, and using future improvements in QoL as one of the arguments.

I don't. What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood? It would be very difficult to justify the creation of a world given that tradeoff, but people are much hesitant to accept that it is unjustified now that it already exists.

As for this question:

> What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood?

I'm not really in the business of doing these sorts of utilitarian calculations, and I think this back-and-forth is a great example of why I don't think they lead anywhere useful. But it seems to me that you could make the same argument as Parfit above in reverse.

If someone led an essentially perfect life for 100 years, filled with all the things we all agree make life good, but then was subjected to 30 seconds of torture and then murdered, that's still a good life on net, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a serious argument that those 30 seconds of intense suffering at the end are terrible enough to make that life not having been worth living.

So, by the same kind of induction that Parfit does above, it seems you could contrive a situation where the vast amount of universal conscious flourishing being experienced by, let's say, quadrillions or consciousnesses would "outweigh" the suffering of however many millions of apes it took to get there.

And even in the particular case of a horribly murdered child, is it universally true that no life ending in that manner could have been worth the suffering at the end? If a child lives ten wonderful years with loving parents, doing all the best things a child can do, but then dies horribly, can we be sure that life wasn't worth living? That it would be better on net had it never happened?

I'm not sure, and like I said, I don't typically go in for arguments that work on this basis. I'll admit that's probably partially because they feel distasteful, but I think there's also an intuition worth examining that those types of arguments don't really work, that they miss something critical about subjective experience when we try to sum up all the goods and bads of a life into some metric that can assign that life into a bucket of "worth living" or "not worth living."

tl;dr - I'm not convinced, and I'm happy I exist.

That's incredibly boring though.

Antinatalism (the philosophy that having kids is immoral) has nothing to do with life expectancy.

The world is much better. Even though children die, we don't have nearly as many as we used to.

The world can be much better. Most of these child deaths are preventable.

This is how I view the world and it is why it upsets me when people voice concern about crime in a city or something like that and people respond with "ACKSHUALLY" followed by some sort of statistic. It feels like people just want to stay stuck but as the author says "to see that a better world is possible, we need to see that both are true at the same time: the world is awful, and the world is much better."

Being too dismissive of certain concerns is just as bad as being too pessimistic.

Most people voicing "concern" are saying "crime is increasing" and usually blaming either current politicians and/or progressive policies for the "increase". It's almost always accompanied by either a "vote for me" or some screed on how we have "gone soft on crime".

The fact that talk about crime rates is usually an attack on progressive policies usually means progressives usually also respond in an ACKSHUALLY manner followed by a wall of anarchist crime theory which must account for all (not just some) of any disparity, because if it does not then you have stabbed your own side in the back.

Whatever you think about Elizier Yudowsky, I think he hit this one right on the nail.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/28/us-murder-violent-crime-rat...

There are obviously lots of reasons for this having nothing to do with crime policy, such as the economic shock of covid. That being said, I don't think its true at all it is straightforwardly settled how to reduce crime.

Pretty much all people I have read on this suggest penalizing gun possession crimes more would decrease the violent crime rate. It's part of the reason murder rate in places like NY is relatively low. That said, prosecuting more people for probation violations or gun possessions is a a policy that cuts against both conservative ideology (because they are pro gun) and progressive ideology (because it will require a larger prison population that will be disproportionately minority)

Mind you there are plenty of people who are fairly reasonable who you don't see talking about these things publicly much, usually because the people who respond are so very obnoxious.

You have people denying reality vs. people exaggerating it, neither really have very good information.

I have personally experienced both. I left a formerly nicer neighborhood that took a turn to avoid robberies and too frequent gun shots for downtown where I feel much safer... and manage to offend both sides when I mention this.

Not saying whether it is wrong or right, but: it is often people trying to move the Overton window, or people getting manipulated by window movers.

I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, doing this. I think it is important to note the mainstream, because we do have tons of elected officials and mainstream cable news talking heads making the "warzone" argument (and deliberately mischaracterizing any attempts at police or justice system reform).

It has gotten to the point where there are liberal-talking-point topics that I just don't address with good friends in the same way you avoid anything political with the slightly unhinged conservative uncle.

I'm not familiar with anyone, at least in the mainstream of politics, who is talking about crime and criminals in a way that seems like they are actually interested in making the situation better.

This is contextual and is misleading without it.

But it does accurately represent the ineptitude of the left and why it always loses in these situations. Here's how it goes:

Problem: Society has people that are poor and mentally challenged. Both turn to drugs to cope. Drugs are illegal, increased demand increases criminality. Drug use exacerbates poverty, homelessness. Society becomes full of drug users committing petty crimes, and drug dealers perpetuating major crimes to contribute to supply. Not to mention addicts dying in the streets from overdoses.

All of this in general make cities undesirable and less safe.

RIGHT-WING Solution: LET'S GET TOUGH ON CRIME.

Drug dealers get arrested. Drug users get arrested.

For a little while the streets are cleaner and safer, and everyone is happy. But the root cause hasn't been addressed, so the same problems just return.

LEFT-WING Solution: Drug use is a symptom not a root cause. And criminality is inherent to drug trade because drugs are illegal. If we legalize or decriminalize drugs we reduce the criminal element. If we give people safe injection sites they don't have to die from overdoses. And if we fund social programs we can get people out of poverty, off the streets, and into housing.

PROBLEM 1: All of this is a lot harder than sending a dozen cops into a tent city and arresting a dozen homeless people.

PROBLEM 2: Even if carried out PERFECTLY, there becomes an intermediate step where homeless people are seen being given funds or housing from the government which makes poor-but-not-homeless, and even middle-class people get mad saying "I work so hard, how come this person who is clearly a loser is getting all these handouts? This makes people petty and the right wing seize on it.

PROBLEM 3: Going soft on drug use means in the short term you have people using drugs more openly, but not being arrested for it. This makes people grossed out and the right wing seize on it.

Before you know it and before any meaningful improvements have been made, you have right wing candidates screaming that all of the problems of society are because the left is too soft, and we need to get tougher. And they usually succeed and they usually win. Because the best the left wing can do is point to statistics that show fewer homeless people are dying of poverty or drug overdoses, and the truth is most humans in society just don't care. So they deny and minimize.

The reality is that out of sight out of mind, most gentle moderate even somewhat progressive people would be just as happy if homeless people "disappeared". They don't want to think about what that means. So they vote left when they feel guilty, and right when they're annoyed.

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...

I'm not how you get a "both sides" argument from that data, but OK. We're in the same phase of this debate that we are with inflation: there was a burst of signal, driven largely by the pandemic and related causes, it receeded, but argumentation is still informed by feelings and not current state.

(Edit: and the amount of argumentation below trying to refute this one link WITHOUT ALTERNATIVE SUPPORTING EVIDENCE is pretty much proof that this isn't a fight about facts.)

Or do you believe that Denmark and Sweden has the most cases of thefts in the world? These stats has nothing to do with how much theft is actually happening.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/theft/

Obviously yes, there's an apples/oranges problem with comparing data sets collected in different countries under different law enforcement regimes, etc...

But between e.g. 2022 and 2017 in San Francisco specifically? I don't see the argument.

(Also important to note that while "Larceny" might be plausibly related to police ignoring crime, other things like "Murder" are very much not if you aren't accusing the police of hiding bodies. And violent crime shows the same trend.)

Covid likely changed crime rates, yes, but it likely changed police reporting rates much more. That goes for all kinds of events. Saying crime is down since police reporting is down is like saying that kids learn more today since they get better grades today than 10 years ago.

Edit: You get much better numbers by asking people if they have been robbed lately, or asking stores how much gets stolen.

Let's say the real amount per year for the last 10 years is [100, 110, 120, 130, 140], and you have numbers that show [90, 89, 88, 87, 86]. Those numbers are much better than [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It would still be absolutely wrong to use them to figure out the trend.

If you know your source of data is bad, you must throw it out, even if it's the best one you have. If our data is bad, we just don't know.

In this argument, the sides are something like crime is down, crime is up, and don't have enough info. Roughly speaking, you're arguing for the first over the second whereas the responder is arguing for not enough info.

Even in situations where maybe you have to make a decision and don't have great data, if you don't feel great about the best info you have, then it might be better to use something else like the wisdom or gut instinct of the team or what's cheapest or what you're most able to walk back later. Data tends to make us lazy about digging deeper, it's okay when the data is good, but worse no data when it's not so relevant.

This makes the official numbers known unreliable, but also means there's lots of room to debate how much more reliable any alternative set of numbers might be.

You really think they have 5 times more theft than Poland or 15 times more than Mexico? The total numbers doesn't make sense, countries are all over the place regardless of their situation or stability.

Also that data is from 2003, it is before Sweden had taken in a significant amount of new immigrants. There were no security anywhere because it wasn't needed, and shops didn't close due to excessive theft. How can that be worse than a country where stores has to put products behind bars and put security guards to protect themselves, and still sometimes have to close due to the issues?

I could find lists of store closures and numbers of jobs gone, but instead one data point: whole foods closing an enormous store after only one year.

https://abc7.com/whole-foods-san-francisco-store-closing-wor...

That either means what they say: crime was a huge problem, or they're covering for bad sales: people have left.

And the world isn't just SF. Locally I've been in line at a coffee shop twice this year while somebody stole something from the grab and go case and ran... there aren't any more grab and go cases or merchandise at several coffee shops. It wasn't long ago that I could go to the local target and buy things off shelves instead of waiting for someone to open the case with a key.

SF is pretty bad. A few weeks ago, Czech TV reporters were robbed at a gunpoint in broad daylight [0]. Stuff like that simply doesn't happen in Prague, Warsaw or even war-torn, PTSD-heavy Kyiv. It rather corresponds to South African standards of safety. IDK if you can explain it away with positively sounding statistics, but as Feynman says, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

If a culture war coded topic like crime is being discussed and tribal loyalty kicks in, I can imagine people simply ignoring anything that goes contrary to their position and rallying to the flag.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/czech-journalists-cover...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

If not, the causality may be a lot more complicated. People don't turn into gangsters just by owning more guns. As you mention, USA is the most armed country in the world, which means that Latin American countries have, theoretically, fewer guns than the US. But they have a lot more gang violence, so much more that LatAm cities fill the "top 50 violent cities in the world" category, with barely any representants from the Old World (AFAIK only Johannesburg is up to par).

Just about every kind of crime is up in Portland as well over 2018 numbers, with homicides almost quadrupling 3 years later.

The “both sides” should be considered, because Portland isn’t a war-zone like the far right would portray it as, but it’s significantly worse than it used to be with no reversal in sight. There are worse places to live in the US today, but I’m not off-base for wanting safety and local quality of life to improve rather than decline when compared to previous years.

And sure, the next thing to blame is the pandemic recovery. We all faced drastic changes over the last few years, but objectively some of our cities (like Portland where I live) are not recovering as well or at all compared to national trends.

And as for Portland, most of our deteriorating trends started before the pandemic. 2020-2022 just accelerated their trajectories.

Literally every category in that chart shows a reduction in crime over the last year. You're inventing a "trend" by extrapolating a line straight across an outlier (the covid pandemic). No one would look at that data and say crime is getting worse. You'd say crime got worse and is now back at baseline.

A line graph showing a precipitous drop in the most recent time bucket available is a red flag that you shouldn’t trust that data point.

But, c'mon, you can't point to property crime and say "this isn't a fight about facts" when it's the 4th highest property crime per capita city in the entire country in a country that already has high crime for the developed world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Some left wing folks will agree you should be afraid but only if you're female/black etc because men/white people might attack you. But they'll insist if you're a white man then you're protected from crime by "privilege".

Which is interesting because statistically men are much more often victims of violent crime.

Robberies and property crimes are hugely underreported in official statistics because the first time you try to report one you realize that it makes a bad situation worse by wasting your time after the event. That is what they're talking about.

But you make a good point that a lackluster police response does lower the incidence of reporting crimes, effectively doctoring crime statistics. You'd have to evaluate whether this trend has increased or decreased relative to historical periods when factoring that into any comparison, though.

I have known people that had stolen things returned because the police found the items while investigating/arresting the thief for other crimes. It seems foolish to not bother with filing a report just because they aren't actively investigating every report they receive.

There is no "fact" saying how much crime is occurring, only a snapshot of how many reports were accepted and filed by the police.

Everything in shop is locked up, but crime is down!

This whole article and commentary around it has also highlighted another issue for me: It's hard to have nuanced conversations about complex problems that can be simplified or generalized to something causes a difference in perception about what actual problems *are*.

This is common bias. People consistently think that crime is getting worse.

Engagement itself is diverse. It can be driven by genuine interest, and it can be generated by political narrative.

What is most important is the criticism itself. Is it valuable? To whom? The more people there are voicing criticisms, the more difficult it is to answer these questions.

The usefulness of democracy is that we can coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.

The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them.

Despite classes in civics and debating at some good schools we are mostly given no training on how to do this as kids.

Instead we are raised by "Hollywood diplomacy", which is deeply confrontational and revolves around vengeance and gun fights.

Polarisation isn't just in the "environment" but in the lack of tools we are given to work with.

There are actually long-form studies in things like Peace Studies (Columbia, George Washington Uni, Kroc Institute, Nottingham Uni in UK)

I spent some time with graduate of a peace studies programme, which I initially mocked. But she introduced me to all kinds of ideas like those of Habermas and Discourse Theory.

Most serious [fn] programmes on negotiation and diplomacy touch on this.

How we get ordinary folk to take on board more of that is challenging but urgent. Sadly most of "western" life has conflict escalation built in as a value.

EDIT: added some links for the curious [0,1]

[fn] There's plenty of crappy MBA business type "how to get what you want" type programmes - I am absolutely not talking about those!

[0] https://iep.utm.edu/habermas/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality

We don't need every participant in democracy to be an expert in diplomacy. We just need a system that incentivizes genuine engagement and compromise.

I don't think people "want to stay stuck". I think it is simply the state of our polarized polity, and the mistrustful, zero-sum approach to discourse that it breeds. Even a plain factual statement feels like it's signaling some political allegiance or pushing some agenda, and that feels threatening. I'm not placing myself above this phenomenon, either. Your choice of example fact – something about 'crime in a city' – feels like a right-wing shibboleth (and after all, even if there are objective facts, the particular facts we recognize as salient, the narrative patterns of fact that we use to make political arguments, are of course driven by our values and political allegiances). Maybe I'm off-base about your example, but really my point is that it feels that way, so discussions of politics feel scary, even when they stick to matters of putatively objective fact. Apologies for shoehorning in the Israel/Palestine issue, but I thought this piece[1] was eloquent on (something like) this phenomenon:

> [...]if, as many feel at this moment, the recognition of one “side” comes at the expense of the other, the expression of empathy for one is the refusal of empathy for another. Many seem to feel that no hand is bare—that all hands are holding knives, pointing in opposite directions. This moment is characterized by a widespread conviction that recognition can only go in one direction: that any show of empathy toward Israelis is tantamount to supporting the oppression of Palestinians, and that any show of empathy toward Palestinians is tantamount to supporting the massacre on October.

> Those who subscribe to this dichotomy see attempts to recognize all suffering as disingenuous and manipulative. They sometimes complain that symmetrical empathy entails symmetrical judgment, symmetrical condemnation, or attribution of symmetrical power. And since they reject these equivalences, they reject the equivalence of empathy.

[1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-israel/

They don't necessarily want to stay stuck, but they generally don't want to put in the hard work to see change through. More likely, as you point out, people would rather talk about it. That requires way less effort.

But what can you do with that? If not the "ACKSHUALLY" response, then it's just going to be:

* "The crime is bad in this city."

* "Yeah, I agree. So, um... did you hear about Taylor Swift?"

Either way, it's just an acknowledgement of something having been said. There is nothing actionable.