Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html

by taraharris • 15 years ago

136 51 15 years ago

www-formal.stanford.edu

zeteo7• 15 years ago

What a refreshing and extensive analysis, based on research and hard numbers. You might not agree with John McCarthy, but at least he brings up clear, verifiable points of discussion. It's too bad that strident alarmism will always out-shout the more reasoned approaches to what is, fundamentally, a very important problem.

pjscott• 15 years ago

He's also provided my all-time favorite quote about how to think productively about the environment: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

cabalamat• 15 years ago

This is true over a very wide range of public policies.

cdavid• 15 years ago

This is mostly a gimmick, though, because other people who uses arithmetic as he says manage to go to near opposite conclusions. His website is written such as his conclusions are claimed to logicallly follow the data, at least that's how I read it, and I think this is slightly disingeneous. For example, David Mc Kay and his website/book(http://www.withouthotair.com/) are mostly based on data in a similar fashion, and his consequences are radically different.

froggy• 15 years ago

Great article, but it might be more complete with a mention of the rising acidity of the oceans and how as the ph drops, many of the shelled animals at the bottom of the ocean food chain who depend on their shells for protection will not be able to form shells (the acidity eats away at the calcium carbonate) making a whole category of the food chain susceptible to extinction.

I appreciate the optimism in this article that humans are "on the right path", but the bottom line is humans have already caused a major disruption to the biosphere via carbon emissions, and the carbon emissions are still increasing which will have an effect of ocean life, thus humans.

I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives while living in balance with nature", rather than "We can expand the human species to 20 billion - let's do it!"

zeteo7• 15 years ago

>>I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives while living in balance with nature"<<

Nature is inherently unbalanced:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature#Counter-argum...

For instance, the biosphere has managed to royally mess itself up at least once:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth#During_the_froze... for some of the effects)

lloeki• 15 years ago

There's quite a difference between an unmonitored event and shooting oneself in the foot. We're a technologically capable, conscious, foreseeing species; things having happened back when we were not are not an excuse to behave today as mere beholders, or worse, as levers of the system instability.

bellaire3• 15 years ago

Aside from semantic arguments about what "balance" means, it's true that nature is a state of constant change.

When people talk about sustainability, they're acknowledging that humans can have an impact on nature, or more to the point, on our ability to sustain our own species. It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"... it'll simply be drastically different.

So, given that we can be agents of change in nature, it's not unreasonable to consider not only whether we can simply survive as a species, but whether we can or should show restraint with respect to the effects we have on the rest of the natural world.

McCarthy seems to be of the opinion that efforts thus far have been not just ineffective, but actually harmful to ourselves. That is to say, we're better off allowing progress to happen naturally without "artificially" trying to mitigate it. Others would appear to disagree, or at least still consider the pursuit of sustainability, in the popular sense, worthwhile.

brc2• 15 years ago

rising acidity = lessening alkalinity. Let's be more precise and use more benign statements.

The Ocean Acidification scare falls directly under the types of scares this article talks about. It is unproven, untested and not subject to high levels of certainty. Talk of changing the entire ocean pH fails to cover the fact that there is no one set pH level for all the oceans as whole.

Further to that, shellfish and crustaceans are a pretty ancient life form, and have existed throughout many different levels of atmospheric co2.

All I'm saying is that the article advises a data-driven approach to these matters, and the data on the ocean decreasing pH theory is still full of a lot of 'maybe, possibly and if' disclaimers.

asnyder• 15 years ago

While it may be out of scope, it would be nice to see how he would address the increasing level of automation and its factors on classes, labor, wealth, and population.

johngalt• 15 years ago

I think Bastiat beat him to it.

ximeng• 15 years ago

21901 hits since 1995 - little over 1000 hits a year. Let's see the HN effect now. [One hour later - 22797, a little way off 900 in an hour.]

---

Reocities link for the rebuttal linked at the bottom of the article.

http://www.reocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/2265/no_prog.htm

ehsanul• 15 years ago

Also would be interesting to see how HN points are correlated to page views.

zeteo7• 15 years ago

He has a second counter that shows 350,000+ visits, but there's no explanation for the discrepancy.

jackfoxy• 15 years ago

In the tradition of the late Julian Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon This will make John McCarthy reviled in some fashionable circles. I wonder if he speaks with Stanford Prof. Paul Ehrlich.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

Although I come from a very different economic and social perspective, I can appreciate the effort that went into this page, regardless. There seems to be some good information here, no matter if you agree completely with his perspective.

Luyt• 15 years ago

That's how web pages were back in 1991, and how they should look again in the future: just plain raw content and links, no frills and graphic fluff.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

why?

the readability of many modern pages is considerably improved over plain text.

spicycat• 15 years ago

The readability of the page is supposed to be the responsibility of the browser, not the page.

mquander2• 15 years ago

Oh, is that so? Last I checked, people frequently install browser plugins just to turn modern pages back into single-column plain text pages.

pnathan• 15 years ago

My Readability plugin and I disagree with you.

gregoryf• 15 years ago

Yes! Some more color or graphics are okay, but just the minimal, please thank you.

rsaarelm• 15 years ago

I'd be all for a CSS-less minimal page style except for the fact that it comes with no margins and produces unreadably long lines on my browser window that's full-screen most of the time.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

I basically agree with the analysis, that technology makes human material progress potentially sustainable well beyond our current numbers.

Our biggest challenges are social and economic ones. First and foremost, is to push against the tides of conservatism on both the left and the right, which see sustainability as either a matter of "going back" or as unworthy of a goal at all.

brc2• 15 years ago

Or, as he points, out, idealogical threats are the largest threats to humans. People blindly following idealogies and ignoring data is the most likely thing to cause large-scale deaths.

spot• 15 years ago

Or to put it more simply, humans are the greatest threat to humans. Always have been. When people talk about evolution, they usually use the example of running away from a lion or some such. But it's much more likely you were running away from another person.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

all these human progress discussions imply, or bounded by, one hypothesis - there will exist only one species of humans. Is divergence of the species into 2 or more is such an unprobable event?

jerf2• 15 years ago

No, no they really aren't. There is essentially no dependence on "humans" in that discussion. "Intelligent species" can be substituted with no loss or even substantial change in meaning. The point is that an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. Bringing up your point would just open a distracting side discussion not terribly relevant to the author's point.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable.

that would be bad. No need to evolve in any cardinal way. Only needed changes would be minor adjustments to fit humans most comfortably into the tecnological civilization cradle. Just like dinosaurs who evolved to fit most comfortably into their Earth dominating niche ... until the meteor stroke, super vulcanos erupted , etc...

Anyway, i don't agree that technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. The civilization has already established its exponential nature. Good thing about exponentially increasing speed is quickly hitting whatever natural limits are there, and that induces need for change. Yes, in many cases we naturally prognose (McCarty incl.) the response to be a new improved technology. Yet, artificially limiting human species response to a need for change only to technological type of responses seems ... artificial.

DaniFong• 15 years ago

I feel like any such discussion must address the fact that, globally, phytoplankton has declined by 40% in the past century. That's 40% of the base of the food pyramid for all ocean life. That's 20% of the plant life in the world, and accounts for 20% of the oxygen we breathe. Whatever is causing it, something significant is happening to the ecosystems of earth.

http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers-total/Boyce_etal...

sseefried3• 15 years ago

I have read through these pages. Undoubtedly many of the things he states, particularly with respect to how long nuclear energy could supply us, are correct but only under the assumption that we don't continue to increase our usage of energy. It's hard to see how that assumption holds in a world that is continually growing its economies. Exponential functions grow very fast. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY)

You may then counter that a decoupling of economic growth from its material and energy underpinnings is possible. This has yet to be effectively proven. We have only seen partial decoupling so far. For more information on this see the writings of Tim Jackson in his book Prosperity without Growth.

I also urge you to download this spreadsheet (from the BP website) showing the growth in usage of fossil fuels (http://tinyurl.com/2yhx7d). We may find alternatives to these but if we do, we will have to bring the alternatives online at roughly the same level to supply our societies with the energy they now require to function. This is no easy feat. It's good know, quantitatively, just what's required.

sseefried3• 15 years ago

I'd also be interested to see what the people of HN think about this essay I wrote about long term energy needs:

http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/22-june-2008.html

wazoox2• 15 years ago

Looks interesting. You should submit it on its own. In fact combined with The prof. Bartlett videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY) it makes quite a good usage of arithmetic to counter McCarthy point of view.

mtviewdave• 15 years ago

A compelling article when it was written, and I think many of his potential solutions to problem have promise. But the article really suffers from not having been revised in the intervening years. For example, the view of oil is very '90s: everything will be fine until oil stops coming out of the ground, and then we'll have a crisis. But oil won't stop coming out of the ground for decades, so we have plenty of time to deal with it.

But the idea behind peak oil is that even a relatively small decline in oil can lead to drastic increases in prices, which would have devastating effects on the world economy. Peak oil isn't even addressed in McCarthy's writing, as far as I can tell.

Related is agriculture: McCarthy portrays it as an issue of water and arable land. But it's also an issue of fertilizer, and fertilizer production is dependent upon petroleum. So if we have a drastic spike in petroleum prices, that will lead to a drastic spike in fertilizer costs, which would lead to a drastic spike in food costs. See Egypt for an example of what happens when that occurs.

Finally, the Ehrlich/Simon bet. Again, compelling at the time, but the bet ended in 1990. 21 years ago. That's hardly a compelling statement on the state of the world in 2011. What would the result of that bet been had it been replayed from 2000 to 2010? From looking at this: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/ it looks like all 5 metals in the bet have risen in price over the last decade.

EDIT: I found one reference to peak oil on the Hydrogen page, but it's given no serious analysis.

wmf• 15 years ago

For a more detailed analysis, see Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re-litigating_t.ht...

wazoox2• 15 years ago

I remember reading through these pages back when I learned about McCarthy, probably 10 years ago or so. I think he's a born optimist, like I'm a born pessimist. He fails to mention fresh water shortages around the world, too. And a couple of other huge pending problems of the sort. I'd like to see convincing information that we are not currently in overshoot...

Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability

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