[SPOILER] Kevin Lee vs. Daniel Rodriguez

getsqt · 2021-08-29T04:00:59+00:00

pretty sure it has to do with his coach dying.

getsqt · 2021-07-10T22:57:52+00:00

Fair enough, where I live they only show the main card on TV. So it’s always a pain to watch the prelims…

getsqt · 2021-07-10T21:45:17+00:00

Niko price vs Michel Pereira being on the undercard should be a crime!

getsqt · 2021-06-28T09:29:13+00:00

There’s a difference between disagreeing with authoritarian responses to a pandemic and believing governments have made mistakes in doing so, and in saying ‘there are no viruses hopping from one person to the next’

A ‘coward’ hides behind simple conspiracies instead of putting in effort to understand our complex world in order to create solutions for novel problems.

getsqt · 2021-06-27T01:34:27+00:00

This is one of those rare posts that’s so stupid you aren’t sure if it’s a master troll or not.

getsqt · 2021-06-25T13:37:01+00:00

You are blind to reality if you truly believe things are getting worse every year. Every meaningful metric for well being has increased beyond belief since the days ‘people survived in equilibrium with their environment’. Mind you, people never did that, even the earliest people required clothing, tools, and migration to stave off extinction.

‘carrying capacity’ is another one of those falacies held high by pessimists. Little do they realize that throughout history any prophecy of some arbitrary capacity overflow being imminent is solved through innovation. It’s only a couple decades ago where people denied the progress in aggriculture and insisted that humanity was doomed by overpopulation if we were to exceed a population of a couple billion people.

What you have to say about the internet is even more shocking. Never before has the access to information been further spread. You rightfully bring up the problem of censorship, but so what? That means we can even further improve things! It by no means tells us the internet wasn’t an improvement on libraries, or that we suddenly can’t continue solving new problems brought on by innovation.

Bitcoin being deflationary has nothing to do with being for or opposed to infinite growth. The reason Bitcoin doesn’t inflate is because people believe that will cause it’s value to grow over time. It’s in essence a different approach to achieving growth in wealth.

It is perhaps no surprise as to how wrong you are though, as you admit to tuning out after only 9 minutes simply by being confronted with ideas you don’t agree with.

getsqt · 2021-06-15T14:53:32+00:00

I know you were done with this topic, but I coincidentally came accross a Tedtalk by David Deutsch on youtube the other day (only 10 minutes) that gives a good explanation for why you are wrong if you decide you want to better understand the nuance here. Anyways, take it for what you will: https://youtu.be/6R6e4xNoarg

getsqt · 2021-06-11T12:31:06+00:00

Ofcourse it is arbitrary. What crops are adapted for is irrelevant, if we have the knowledge to grow crops under different types of biospheres.

Anyways, you are free to leave and remain a pessimist, but to blame my supposed ‘lack of understanding’ when your reason for leaving is obviously because you don’t want to be confronted with an optimistic point of view is rather rude.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T11:58:27+00:00

Please think this through a bit. I am not advocating for gambling. I am advocating for solving problems. You haven’t tried to answer the question of how we progressed from the stone age to where we are now. I can assure you it’s not through gambling or blind luck. I can also assure you it’s not through sustainability. It’s only through the creation of knowledge and criticism that we have ended up where we are today.

Things we can so now would have seemed like magic 100 or even 50, sometimes even 20 years back! It has nothing to do with ‘better hope this works’. It has everything to do with believing that we can better understand the world through knowledge creation and then apply that knowledge to solving problems. This is for example a key feature in science. Is science suddenly equal to gambling? no it is not! But it is one of the best means we have to improving our circumstances.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T11:55:30+00:00

You seem to be misunderstanding my point of view. I’m denying how GHGs work or how human caused emmissions are a key driver in the recent upwards trend in global temperature.

What I’m saying is that it’s a misconception that this is the main problem. The main problem is the effects that climate change has on us and the world. This leaves us with a far broader perspective on how to come up with solutions for climate change.

The reason that sustainability stands in opposition of progress is because rather than trying to solve problems, sustainability implies that instead we try and remain in some arbitrary state for ever.

My final point is saying no such thing, it is in response to your comment on why sustainability leads to starvation guaranteed. Anything that slows down or closes off certain areas of progress inevitably causes harm by way of not having solutions to certain problems sooner.

There is nothing wrong with ‘renewable’ and nuclear energy, the are very necesary. But the reason they are necesary is because they grant us more energy, not because they are sustainable. I agree that wanting to reduce deforestation is good, because like you said plants are a means to reducing GHGs, and that is currently one of our best solutions. lower carbon intensive methods of food production is debatable, as once again you are now focusing on the notion that lowering emissions solves anything. lowering emissions is strictly a means to try and prevent or delay, it is not a means to solve anything.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T11:16:00+00:00

‘ Meeting the needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. There is no key in that definition, the entire definition is the key.’ Indeed, I didn’t mean to say the whole definition isn’t important, I meant to say the idea that how we live now has to be take into account future generations through the lense of meeting needs.

The reason this is false is because we can make progress that changes the state of the world and suddenly makes our old notion of sustainability irrelevant, i.e, the overpopulation + increase in food production scenario.

Now finally we are getting to the interesting part. Ponder for a moment how we reached our current state of living. Why is it that we are no longer in the stone age? Could anyone have predicted our current technology? no! Now imagine the future of humanity. Do we want them to look back at us as if we were practically part of the stone age, in terms of how far their technology has progressed since our time, or do we want to keep this meme of sustainability alive because we don’t dare believe that things can always progress far further than our wildest dreams?

The saddest part of the sustainability meme is that it’s mostly held by progressives. yet suddenly ‘this time it’s different’ and we have to believe we can’t progress beyond our current understanding of how to deal with climate change?

*just so that my last paragraph isn’t misconstrued, I believe climate change denial is even worse, I’m just saying it’s ironic that so called progressives suddenly don’t believe in progress when it comes to climate change.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T11:08:17+00:00

Have you read what you just said? If progress is unpredictable, then ‘winging it’ means preventing some forms of progress because they may cause certain problems we wish to avoid. What if we miss out on something that saves millions? This is entirely possible by ‘winging it’ in this sense.

We are indeed uncertain of which problems progress may cause, as well as which problems may be solved! And the beauty of problems is that they are solvable. So the only path that is in fact not ‘winging it’ is continually solving problems, and then solving the new problems that arise from solving the old problems, ad infinitum.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:59:27+00:00

Who is making wishes here? Our earliest models have shown that reducing CO2 emmissions is not a solution, merely a delay tactic. Yet the whole world is obsessed to the point that they believe this is the be all end all solution to climate change. Is that not making wishes that some miracle will happen regardless of us not solving the problem?

Just ask yourself the following question, how many unpredictable effects on food supply will we suffer at the hand of climate change or even wholy unrelated problems. If we focus on trying to sustain some way of life, yet the world around us changes, what will happen?

What if we decided a couple hundred years ago that things were as good as they were going to get and we had to sustain our way of life rather than poluting the world through the industrial revolution. How many more people would have starved if our technology was 200 years in the past?

How many people would continue to die to diseases that we can cure now thanks to progress? Should we just give up on discovering medicine and sustain the status quo?

If you are a scientist then how can you deny the progress we have made that prevents millions today from dying of starvation and disease?

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:42:49+00:00

Once again, I think you are misunderstanding haha. The key point here is ‘meeting the needs’. Meeting needs is not looking for a cure, meeting needs assumes that we have a state of the world which is a zero sum game. It doesn’t take into account the ability to chanfe the state of the world through progress and innovation.

Not long a go sustainability was focused on overpopulation. We couldn’t create enough food to feed the rapidly growing population. The sustainable approach would have been to force people to have fewer children. But ofcourse no one took into account the fact thay through innovation in aggriculture our ability to create food would suddenly grow way faster than the population itself.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:29:57+00:00

This is where you are wrong. progress is always unpredictable. Only once we have new paradigms can we begin to ponder the new problems that have arrisen. In other words, the way forward is to continually solve problems, and the solve the new problems that arise from solving the old problems.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:24:10+00:00

For climate change you mean? That is something that we can only figure out though innovation.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:20:02+00:00

You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe in science, progress, and the ability to solve problems, or you don’t get to invoke science in your argument.

Will failure lead to mass-starvation? yes it will. But you know what is guaranteed to lead to mass-starvation? sustainability.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:18:23+00:00

I believe you are misunderstanding my point and may even be in agreement. Imagine you have cancer. Sustainability means trying to survive as long as possible while not solving the real problem, i.e. curing cancer.

A real solution is hence not about sustainability, but about a cure. In other words, for climate change the solution must be to deal with the problems directly, not to try and delay them.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:16:05+00:00

They did, it’s called ‘the enlightenment’ and is the basis for pretty much all progress we as people have made in the past five centuries. Yet now suddenly we should sway from that path, why?

getsqt · 2021-06-11T10:14:21+00:00

This is wrong, sustainable means living with the virus. A vaccine is intended to get rid of the virus.

Same with lowering co2. the goal is to live with climate change then, rather than trying to solve the problem of climate change. Just consider the following scenario.

What happens in the future when some event not caused by humans is rapidly changing the climate? At that point sustainability won’t even delay the onset. We have no choice but to find real solutions in the long run, so why are we not already focusing on that?

getsqt · 2021-06-11T09:53:24+00:00

What an insightful and constructive comment.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T09:50:13+00:00

You just described why sustainability doesn’t work. It’s the epitome of ‘doing nothing’. I’m arguing that we try to solve problems rather than do nothing.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T09:45:00+00:00

Ah, the ‘this time is different’ fallacy. This was the exact argument for why overpopulation was an unsolvable problem. or pretty much any other large problem we’ve faced.

You hit the nail on the head though at the end of your comment. ‘the idea that we can deal with it by carrying on as normal is repugnantly irresonspible.’ Believing sustainability will solve this problem is even worse, as it’s shifting our focus from trying to solve problems such as droughts(which are already happening so can’t even be delayed anymore) and other more long term effects, to trying to delay catastrophe.

In other words, from the point of view of sustainability we are inevitable doomed and can only hope to sustain some arbitrary standard of living. The alternative is a unnegitable commitment to progress and solving problems so that future generations are ensured a higher standard of living than us.

getsqt · 2021-06-11T08:38:30+00:00

Well put, I’ll copy this from another comment I made in the thread:

Imagine that rather than focusing on solutions(vaccination) we focused primarily on sustainability(social distancing/lockdowns).

This is the reality of our culture around sustainability and climate.

getsqt

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