Hmmm, fair. I guess I wasn’t good enough in starting the convo to get it going beyond AI slop. Thanks for the feedback!

I engaged with this post because I was hoping to hear people’s thoughts on what was written. But apparently the only thing on offer is complaints about AI, and explanations about how it’s the ultimate purity test. If you commit the sin of using an AI generated image, everything about you is useless. The world is black and white.

I get it. It’s exhausting. There are plenty of things that I enjoy that are being ruined by AI. I personally will never use it. I see all kinds of ways that it is making the world worse. But it is also frustrating that I am an actual human who is curious and wanting to learn, and can’t get past “AI bad”. So I’m taking the lesson to stop banging my head against this wall. Peace out.

I asked the same thing about a different theuaob article that was recently posted, and it was indeed a reaction to the AI images. One person said they assume anyone who uses AI is an idiot, which doesn’t seem to be the case here at all. I get it, but I also think we can have the nuance to move past that when interesting ideas are being shared. But I guess it’s not impossible that down votes will get the author to change their ways, and then people will be open to listening?

Ah, OK. I can’t stand the AI slop either, but that’s a pretty blunt use of critical thinking skills regarding the validity of what is written. Is anyone interested in talking about what is being said? I think there’s some intriguing stuff there–especially the part where the current US administration is being dismissed as idiots, and the deeper motivations are consequently being ignored. (also, I used an em dash but have never used AI to write or create anything, ever. I love the em dash. And there might come a time when we actually won’t be able to distinguish LLM use and legit writing, so will we dismiss everything then? I don’t mean that in a snarky way. I legit wonder about how we are going navigate the world. Maybe the only indirect communication we’ll be able to trust is smoke signals)

I don’t understand why this is getting down votes. Do people not agree with what is being said, or do they not like what they are hearing?

“When a hungry tiger steps out of the brush, you don’t debate whether the tiger is acting out of poor policy choices or a misunderstanding of institutional etiquette. You are forced to deal with a thermodynamic reality that doesn’t negotiate with your balance sheet. The tiger isn’t beyond the horizon, it’s in the room.”

I understood that to mean no political/societal opposition, not that we don’t also have our current physical reality to factor in. Sure, in a scenario of unlimited resources we can wave a magic wand and pluck up anything we’d need that is physically possible. But in our real world there aren’t sufficient electric vehicles to replace all the transport and agricultural ICE vehicles that are currently needed And our electricity grids aren’t able to operate independently of fossil fuels to provide enough power, even to produce the missing EVs. If we shift to a permaculture system of growing food, we’d need 10x the amount of land on earth, without taking into account the quality of the land. And if we took all of the nitrogen that the earth naturally produces, we’d be 50% short of what we’d need for the current population. We really want to underplay how much fossil fuels do for us. So saying there are electric vehicles, therefore problem solved, without taking into consideration the actual real world logistics, seems like make believe to me. In which case, I’m not sure what the point of this exercise is.

As Huskerx said, your ‘step one’ would mean the death of a massive amount of people. We can’t feed anywhere close to 8+ billion without using fossil fuels. Since we’re talking about facing the truth to get to real solutions, we can’t gloss over that.

But that’s not what the article you linked said, so where are you getting 2050 from? The study says if CO2 continues to increase at the same current rate, we would be at the top end of the healthy max bicarbonate level by 2076. Do you have extra info that connects what is said in the article to 2050?

Your comment is interesting to me. This isn’t really a place where ‘waste of time’ articles are posted. And you’ve taken the time to wag your finger at OP, and look at the credentials of the website, but not look at the article itself. I’m not saying that to criticize, rather it makes me think about biases (that I have been looking at in myself).

We are in a world with overwhelming amounts of information, so that kind of vetting can make sense. But it also seems like a kind of information absolutism, where someone who believes in aliens can’t be right about anything. The flip side being that someone with <insert credentials> must be right about everything, even when it’s a topic outside of their expertise. And the actual information seems peripheral to the trust in the source. OP found this through a source they trust, and I’m not saying that is a bad thing. I guess I’m just trying to strip away my own biases and use critical thinking with a more open mind.

The author doesn’t make a living from negativity. As it says in the article, they work in the public sector (as a complex systems analyst), and their substack is free. Unless you think being a complex systems analyst is an inherently negative career?

Instead of saying that they have financial incentives to be disingenuous, I suggest discussing whether or not what is said has merit and relevance.