AdamB wrote:For you maybe. I don't make my living randomly speculating.
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See above. I don't do popularity.
It's not random speculation or "popularity". You know how I jump down perma-doomers' throats for cherry-picking doom bloggers? The reason is that if all you do is go searching for people predicting doom, you're bound to find it.
What I'm talking about is what happens after you properly filter out the obvious quackery, when you limit the incoming news stream to the dreaded MSM that gets so much ridicule here (other than that Guardian article that keeps getting reposted every day).
When you observe that news stream, as I have done for many years, you'll start to feel a pattern. And that pattern is ever increasingly apocalyptic environment projections. It seems every day there's another increasingly pessimistic projection. I pick up these news articles without even trying, mind you, mostly from following science sites on Facebook.
That is in addition to the empirical reality of the shift in the weather that I have observed year-to-year in the Northeast.
So my lizard brain can feel the change with my own direct senses, and I can feel the shift in the news reporting.
That is in addition to having some degree of trust in well-regarded experts like Hansen and McKibben. While some of these people can be accused of being alarmist, all of them can't be. That's not the case with the peak-oil movement which was always a hodgepodge of academics mixed with quacks like Greer the "druid" and the suicidal Ruppert.
You can't be an expert in all things to have an opinion on them. You have to simply trust the experts. It's that lack of trust in experts in our demon haunted world that leads to denial on one end of the spectrum and exaggerated fast-crash doomerism on the other.
It's very difficult to walk the middle-path.
I think in your case you've become so amused by shooting fish in a barrel that you would rather extend your cornucopian viewpoint across all dimensions, whether it's warranted or not.
You just can't take the intellectual high road making those sorts of mental shortcuts. It's no different from the guy from Spain treating all bad conditions in his country as a direct result of peak-oil.
Point being that you should hold yourself up to the same rigorous standards that you do PStarr and Short.
AdamB wrote:Pointing out general idiocy can best be described as "routine entertainment" for lack of anything better to describe it.
Well, there comes a time when the smokescreen should clear and you should, ya know, stop bullshitting and lay your chips on the table.
As much as highlighting where I think certain doomers are wrong in their short-term predictions I do not lose sight of the legitimate issues that we're facing over the longer timescale, one that is no joke since if I don't face it, my offspring will. To do so would be to sort of clutch at ridicule as a cheap drug to prevent me from facing depressing data.
It's just that beyond acting as a mallet in the game of PStarr and Short whack-a-mole, what's the point of being here? What
else do you have to say?
In my case, what intrigues me is the idea that we could simultaneously keep walking our way towards the technological singularity AND an apocalyptic cliff. What I've learned since I first took the red pill (the original term, not the one co-opted by the alt-right) is that the world is far more complex than I realized. Most future predictions are monochromatic. Everyone across the globe is living like Mad Max or everyone's downloaded themselves into a computer. All of these visions are waaaay oversimplified. For instance,
every country has signed the Paris accord except for two countries: the US and
Syria. The world is swimming with contradictions like this.
I feel that whether we're on the cusp of a Malthusian die-off or not, we are definitely at an inflection point in human evolution. AI alone is poised to destroy capitalism as we know it by making huge swaths of people unemployable. Just that alone is going to usher in huge and probably painful changes. What happens if we really perfect quantum computing? What happens if we start geoengineering?
Should I simply stumble my way into the future or should I at least stay informed about all this?
It's fine for you to slap PStarr and Short by virtue of gas being cheap and likely to remain so for some time....but please don't casually shrug off serious topics like topsoil loss, ocean acidification, disruption of the jetstream and ocean circulation, etc...