This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The outside view is sufficient to dispose of this line of thought. Those arguments have been made since the dawn of man. Your predecessors were all wrong, so why would you be right? What’s changed? A theory that fails at predicting the past cannot pretend to predict the future.
EROI has been dropping for a long time, the energy sources are always further away and require more capital, yet gdp per capita has grown steadily. How do you now go from EROI dropping to collapse?
That’s just the meat. In detail, doomers arguments are very weak. One common trick is to extrapolate what it would take to make a single source 100% of energy consumption, and dismiss that as obviously impossible (although I’d dispute even that, it’s a failure of imagination, basically ‘wow that’s a big number, I can’t comprehend it’), as you have done with nuclear and coal.
Uranium proven reserves are based on current consumption, they increase with demand like the others. And compared to gas and oil, they’re generally accepted to last longer at current consumption. And so what if coal cannot power planes? You need to prove that not only is every single alternative nonviable, but all of them combined. So don’t just prove each can’t do 100%, you need each of them at less than 1%.
The need to defeat all those reasonable alternative leaves doomers with scattershot, limited and muddled arguments. "Hydro can't scale. Solar has low EROI and uses rare metals. Wind creates too much blade waste. Nuclear may run out at some point if massively utilized, etc" . And if as you admit, coal can power humanity, but global warming will do us in, what good was the EROI argument?
More options
Context Copy link