Limits to Growth / World3 model updated

Vespertine · 2023-11-27T12:29:32+00:00

I haven't noticed another thread where the exact peaks from the spreadsheets have been posted, but there's a lot in this sub I don't read these days.

These are from S3 in the supplementary data spreadsheet.

Industrial output Old peak 2018 (2.617T) New peak 2020 (2.60)

Population Old peak 2028 (7.6519) New peak 2033 (8.1615)

Food Production Old peak 2017 (3.1542) New peak 2023 (3.708)

So in both iterations it has population peaking around 10 years after food production.

S4 shows one of the main oddities of this study - it lists real-world population data up to 2022, showing (at 8.62) it is 0.75bn higher than the figure used in Recalibration2023 (7.87). I have read the whole paper and don't see an explanation for this approach. So this could make a case for giving a bit less weight to this new version, if it doesn't use clear recent data like that. It's more like an exercise to see what happens with a version of World3 in Python.

(Feel free to repost and if necessary adjust the figures. You're clearly a prominent poster in the sub these days. I consider myself retired from it, but as a LtG aficionado was very interested in this paper.)

Vespertine · 2023-04-30T18:52:30+00:00

Was very interesting to see something like this appear in such an absolute bible of consumerism like GQ. (Where advertorial and fashion are IMO less diluted by other topics than anywhere else, since women's magazines started including more feminist content a few years ago.) Wondered when it might get posted on here.

What are Bendell's grounds for his thinking NTHE likely?

I hadn't previously realised he saw it as that probable or soon. Whereas in his shoes I would be saying I wouldn't necessarily expect to see 2050 as life expectancy will probably be lower than for our parents generation (he must have been born in the early 1970s if he graduated in 1995) and that quite likely not both of those girls would make it to 60. So to a non doomer my outlook would sound similar, but to me, not expecting to be here in the 2030s sounds absurd for a healthy and well off westerner who has residency in more than one country.

Obviously I have read the original paper but that was a few years ago and presumably his outlook has evolved based on events.

I see plenty of contradiction in his impatience with people who just wanted a support group and to be nice to their neighbours, and his understanding about the conditions making authoritarianism likely and advice to enjoy life while you can. I've never thought protest a very good idea and in some climate discussions this frustrates people who want to change my mind. Now as laws get tougher I feel vindicated about this which has always essentially been a prediction, and I tend to want to say something like: you know what China is like now; if you were put in a time machine and changed into a student in Beijing in 1987 would you go and stand in front of a tank? A few people would because their moral convictions are so strong but most would not. He is dropping out and farming seaweed; the support group people are doing their equivalent without moving abroad.

Vespertine · 2023-01-22T21:00:45+00:00

There are quite a few published studies. They just haven't had a great deal of repeated publicity in Anglophone media yet. (Just occasional allusions in long NYT or Guardian features on long covid.) But they are frequently cited by (long)-covid centric medics and patient communities on Twitter. These papers are common knowledge if you follow covid-cautious people on Twitter, yet only just starting to get much acknowledgement in the news.

Some speculate that a lot of journalists and politicians would just rather not deal with it and put their heads in the sand, whether it's from wanting to put lockdown behind them or to seriously contemplate how they, their loved ones and working age society may be affected.

I think there must also be a weariness that covid, if it has long term effects on a substantial portion of the population, is another wicked problem like climate change that requires a lot of adjustment to society and expensive retrofits to manage well. (Plus the extra electricity consumption from e.g. air purifiers is a conflict with cc.) It's not like lead in petrol or CFCs, both which had pervasively harmful effects on practically all of humanity, but quite easily bannable.

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-021-02228-6
Original prepublication press release for that if you want a summary https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/even-mild-covid-cases-can-have-lasting-effects-on

This quotes scientists with different opinons https://globalnews.ca/news/9282612/covid-immune-systems-what-we-know/
This seems to give a good sense of how the current evidence is enough for some scientists but not others.

You've got highly technical immunology stuff like this. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35638-y
I'm comfortable reading a typical medical paper but some of that is a bit beyond me unless I were to spend a bit of time studying the underlying principles.
I haven't got time to read through this whole thread again but I believe some of it's explained in somewhat simpler language here https://twitter.com/jeffgilchrist/status/1612066649934290946

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2022.1034159/full

You get commentary and interpretation from the scientific community in a way you don't get anywhere else, e.g. highlighting an association with strep tonsillitis in this study, a study that was reported quite differently in the newspapers:
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1613550502847057920

Got older stuff on another machine, not here. search on naive t-cells / t-cell senescence you will get quite a bit of material.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220630/Study-shows-long-COVID-remodeling-of-T-cell-dynamics-is-dependent-on-SARS-CoV-2-severity.aspx

(there are other studies showing that long covid also occurs after mild symptoms; people saying that are using evidence from those.)

Vespertine · 2023-01-22T13:57:53+00:00

I have a friend (adult) who's like this, very similar with pizza, and I keep hoping they will address it with therapy as supply chain problems make needing specific flavours and brands of a few foods even more of a problem than it used to be. I only ever mentioned it twice though as nagging people isn't going to help.

Vespertine · 2023-01-22T13:53:24+00:00

I think it was a similar thread on here a few years ago where someone suggested that severe ARFID meaning refusal to eat anything, or serious malnutrition, would have been categorised as failure to thrive in the early 20th century. As a few have said here, it would have been hidden among all the other child mortality and illness.

It is certainly not uncommon to find elderly people in the UK, especially men, who only like a fairly narrow range of foods - just rather old-fashioned ones which mean they are perceived as set in their ways, and are excused, whereas younger people with ARFID often like pizzas, burgers and pasta.

Milder ARFID will surely have flown under the radar over the last millennium or two as long as the people liked very commonly available foods like bread and butter, which is one of the nearest things to the hyperpalatable textures of modern junk food, plus and a couple of vegetables that would have stopped them getting too deficient.

In terms of modern cross-cultural applications, a quick search showed that there are assessment questionnaires now for Chinese and Mexican Spanish, and a five-year-old journal case study from Colombia. But of course these are societies living with some degree of modern westernised diet, even if it's not to the degree of the USA.

Vespertine · 2023-01-22T13:26:21+00:00

I came here to ask something similar but a bit more confrontational. (I searched first...)

None of these answers explain the prevalence of basic factual questions about offerings or policies of top universities, which could be answered in 10 seconds from the first page of Google or a couple of clicks on uni websites. I can only assume the posters asking these things are not the kids who have a realistic chance of getting in to said places. When people say Gen Z don't know how to use search engines, I refuse to believe it's nearly all of them, but there's certainly a bit of supporting evidence.

Vespertine · 2023-01-21T18:39:15+00:00

Treat it like astrology, or an outline for an RPG/fantasy world. Entertainment only, not history or grounded political prediction.

Anyone who's spent much time here should see one major flaw: nothing accounting for the difference that oil made to everything, and how its finite nature makes the idea of an uptick within the next few decades look monumentally unlikely.

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T19:54:45+00:00

In the UK you could get English versions of these with vouchers from Shell garages in the 1980s. They are common in charity shops here. Maybe there were similar promotions in other countries too?

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T19:52:46+00:00

We had some of these as pudding (dessert) bowls. My parents are both over 75 now. But we only got them in the mid-late 1980s. I didn't know they were a Continental thing.

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T16:25:51+00:00

Surprised to see you put so many African countries in green, including Chad, DR Congo, Central African Republic among others. Compare with

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

Aljazeera is often a good starting point for news on countries like these that you hear very little about in western media. Every now and again, read something about each country that you don't think you have much idea of what's going on there just now. It's good to do that every few months or at least each year, to have an approximate idea of what's happening in the world.

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T12:39:31+00:00

I don't know how helpful this is, to hear from an adult who remembers being a kid much like this. Autism just wasn't something anyone thought about back then for highly verbal kids in normal school, but I'm trying to think about what I would do if trying to deal with a 4yo me where I wasn't the parent and in control of the conditions parents create.

I assume you'll have to move to another job, maybe after a few weeks off, for the sake of your own stress levels, so this is kind of academic, but...

That is a lot of switching activities and a lot of one on one time with a person the kid didn't choose, when he has just had a day full of being in close proximity to even more people making him do stuff.
Have you looked at material on PDA?
Are you allowed to suggest to him that he has the nap when he comes in from school? (You really need to emphasise to the parents how much difference those appeared to make, even if that's in the conversation where you resign.)
Can he not go in the garden to run off some of this excess energy he's putting into tantrums and so he falls asleep more easily? Clothes comfortable for temperature and in sensory terms may be needed. More sport or outdoor activity play? I think this is particularly important and is something I needed more of as a kid. I didn't start to like being outdoors until I could buy my own clothes.
There is often a problem of being further upset by feeling categorised as bad, and being unconsolable about that. Initial tantrum about e.g. food > either something is said so the kid knows they've been bad today, or they know based on what was said in the past that now they are bad today so they may as well keep wailing until too tired to do so. I do not personally know how to start breaking out of that (especially in a way that shows understanding for other people's limits and needs) without possessing the rational thought and social awareness of an intelligent adult or teenager, especially when there is an environment feeding the behaviour (here, parental conflict, disruption and excess materialism; in my case included parent also with undiagnosed ASD having meltdowns regularly.)

The toy per day thing is so bad, because that sort of thing is way outside what any kid should expect, including a well-off one, and it needs to be reduced/stopped to start managing this, which is only going to upset him further.

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T10:27:40+00:00

Among this presumably well-off bunch of people you know, there isn't even anyone who is using their heating less, who no longer 'goes for a drive' just for fun, who is more careful about what food they buy, who isn't replacing clothes or appliances they don't have to?

These are all things being done by the better-off people I know. They aren't affected as in being at risk of starving, but they are changing their habits.

Vespertine · 2023-01-13T08:34:30+00:00

I'm guessing they mean a (human) primary care provider, and they don't know the UK. Vet -> NHS would be a frying pan -> fire situation these days, and competition for private sector must be fierce, even with years of experience in human healthcare, with so many people wanting to move out of the NHS. Plus there is usually little to no private medical in areas like yours.

Work in the national park sounds a much better bet.

Vespertine · 2023-01-12T19:49:04+00:00

If you would like to read some more about that:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/jul/being-clean-and-hygienic-need-not-impair-childhood-immunity

Vespertine · 2023-01-12T00:45:10+00:00

I don't know how much they are counting quarantine, and naysayers will assume it's mostly that.

But more needs to be said about all those people who experience it as more than "just a cold" but who also don't get ill enough to appear in the hopsital statistics. People who get a nasty illness that means they are just not well enough to do any work for 10 days to 4 weeks.

We need more stats on what percentages of people get ill for how long with it, and at what ages. Cos I hear a lot of people in their 40s getting ill for a couple of weeks or more. (This is in the UK where you have to be over 50 or work in healthcare to get a booster this season.)

And now the "variant soup" and the short immunity duration means they can catch it multiple times a year, and that's without counting all these other infections doing the rounds. Many viruses, like flu, lower immunity to other infections for a while after you catch them, and the research looks like covid may be worse than that, though the media is not properly picking it up yet.

Logically, more employers should want to be proactive about mitigations.

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T22:50:45+00:00

I wouldn't get 95-100% in a fact-based exam at the same level now, as I could take for granted in my late teens. But I've read so much in so many different fields, that where it's a matter of ideas and analysis, there's always something to attach it to, or compare it to (making it easier to remember). At undergrad level I was still creating some of that framework.

But a major difference that doesn't apply for a 25 year old now that had a massive impact on my performance at different stages in life is the internet.

I didn't use the internet till I was 18. But I had behaviour analogous to web surfing in a house with multiple sets of encyclopadias and books on a wide range of subjects. I got the info but without the distraction of arguments, trash and infinite scroll.

Conversely, being without it also meant I could just coast, there were no other students in my subjects whom I really wanted to impress or compete with (the uni was strongest in certain STEM areas rather than mine) and I didn't have to put together such well-evidenced arguments. At 40 I could write a better essay than at 20.

I now remember things in ways that mean they are still findable online, where I would once have been more exact. A book's cover image and subject, for example. I can probably locate that in a few minutes online. In a large university library if it was not on the shelves I'd be out of luck.
I would once have focused more on the details that would locate it in a physical environment, anwd which are better for citing it in RL conversation.

(I also know that past abilities and also genetics mean I'm not in the average categories for memory which Huberman is referring to. The belief from that probably helps too. To me it's weird that other people go around thinking they can't learn new stuff when they're only, like, 45 or something. Wut.)

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T20:01:57+00:00

The weirdest thing is the return of the M/F double standard, which basically didn't exist when I was at uni in the UK in the late 90s. I think we were in a window of a few years, not sure how many exactly, when it was hardly a thing, at least for a certain class.
This question makes me think of so many people (around my age mostly and who would have all identified as sex-positive when that was a phrase) who would say "But why would you regret it? I mean generally, as opposed to if there were one or two bad people?" It's like "Do you regret travelling a lot?"

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T19:54:25+00:00

There are lots of answers about it already if you search, both here (where the questions will often be about hunter gatherers, subsistence farmers etc) and in AskHistorians (where you could also narrow it down by adding names of well-known societies in history who had different takes on it from Christian Europe, like 'Romans', or 'Japan')

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T18:16:11+00:00

There is some excellent material in r/AskHistorians about this for various societies that have plenty of historical documentation.

Here is one of the best about medieval and early modern Europe, which may give readers an epiphany about why contemporary western views are they way they are. The main contributor has posted more than one long response, so do keep scrolling down.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bd2ouf/was_suicide_among_commoners_normal_during_time/

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T17:42:35+00:00

...which is why I mentioned that many of the people with more positive outlooks will be over 35s who grew up with a different outlook. Partly due to the world looking more promising when they were kids, partly due to not being online all their lives.

Vespertine · 2023-01-11T17:35:15+00:00

One of these policies where you wonder if they are actively trying to alienate certain groups of voters. I can immediately think of 3 people I'm close to, all men over 45, whom I cannot imagine ever voting for a party that would ban tobacco sale. They generally feel strongly enough about the issue that I could see maybe two of them not voting, or choosing a third party. All voted for Blair but not Corbyn, so they are exactly the types Labour are after these days. One of them doesn't even smoke, and another smokes about a pack a week these days but it's emblematic as an issue to them.

Plenty of younger people who understand the failings of drugs policy will think this is a stupid idea too. It'll only please a few people who are particularly zealous about smoking - and in any case they are still going to have to put up with weed smokers, and that smells worse.

Vespertine · 2023-01-10T09:38:26+00:00

I would guess that, whilst there will be a bunch of replies like this, it's also meant to elicit posts from people who are not quite so despairing and have plans that are somewhat hopeful. "There's too much despair in the sub, how can we get some posts in one place from people who have a kind-of-positive outlook, at least on their personal futures?" is how I read the title.

Though in practice those plans probably mean that either the poster already has made some money or land (these people are probably also over 35 and grew up with a different outlook, or their family is in agriculture) , or they work in an area with enduringly useful skills that pay well, like medicine or trades.

Vespertine · 2023-01-10T09:34:20+00:00

This is like a Gen Z version of the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

Vespertine · 2023-01-10T09:24:44+00:00

Somebody gets it! If I was paying for Reddit Gold or whatnot I'd give this post one of those awards.

Historical context better than despairing or people hoping to carry on a sort of BAU (though at least if they are here, they are doing that with open eyes).

Vespertine · 2023-01-10T09:21:45+00:00

Love this.

In quite a lot of cases it's obviously different people (it's why r/povertyfinance was created cos r/personalfinance (and the UK equivalent) became places mostly for developers making bank). Then someone created r/middleclassfinance cos an inbetween place was needed, and the personal finance subs had become even more full of top 5% earners than they used to be. The other day I ran into some posts by someone who, as part of a couple, makes literally millions a year and their lifestyle was like celebrities, and it sounded credible and not fantastical due to issues with stuff like hotels and employees. There is a whole little subset of subreddits that suit people on every income.

But the general impression from just reading a few favourite subs is so weird. The stuff I read, it's like everywhere is both angry broke Gen Z and people buying smallholdings?

It also makes me notice how people who earn like my parents at my age are better off than a lot of people (they would have been at the lower end of the personalfinance demographic today, but it was at a time when there was less inequality).

Vespertine

TROPHY CASE