My Happy Thoughts on Christmas Eve
i am pretty confident that everything is going to trash and we are all doomed.
Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism
ok, so steven pinker (in his book and in response to critics like Nassim Taleb) denies that his thesis about the world getting more peaceful up to this point in history (which is questionable anyway, because of his distorted picture of the uncertain period of pre-history, because of the way he treats wwi and wwii (and the way he compares them to ancient events like the An Lushan Revolution) and underplays survivorship bias because he ignores the terrifying nuclear near misses), but he has just shared this Vox article, which clearly, by means of use of the PRESENT CONTINUOUS tense, does imply something about the future - that things are set to continue. No, there is no good reason to think that things are set to continue. This is the inductive fallacy writ large! BlaCk SWANS MATE. TIHS IS BULLSHIT!
1 min · 
You will die, and it may very well be much sooner than you think. Who
knows if you will be struck down by cancer early, or be involved in some
horrible accident (like a car crash)?
The earth is a finite system and at some point our ability to improve agricultural
yield by means of technological advances will come to an *abrupt* end, because
no technological advance can *erase* the damage we've already done to the
biosphere (more specifically, to soil fertility, to the cleanness of the
atmosphere, to biodiversity and so on). Progress in finite systems follows a
sigmoid, not an exponential, curve. We will never be able to feed everyone on
earth, and it is probably the case that the number of people we can feed will
flatline, even as the absolute number of people continues to grow. One
certainly cannot use past examples of failed predictions of ecological crisis
(such as the dire sixties prophecies) to declare that "'Malthusians' are
wrong!" The earth is not infinite!!!
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