I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life.
That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine.
And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand washed laundry for seven children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work.
My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this.
And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, "No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the button."
And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "Oh, fantastic! I want to see this! Give me a chair! Give me a chair! I want to see it," and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program.
She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.
Idea for a short story in which everyone has to take such a literacy test and is restricted to a lifestyle of only having the luxuries they understand.
It's about degrees of understanding, of course, but it should be mentioned that our lives will always be greatly enriched by the bizarre fact that we can use technologies we have no understanding of, and there is no such test. No one knows how a pencil is made. We float every day over an inscrutable river of magic maintained by a people we've never met.
I sometimes wonder if this is the reason advanced ancient technology is such a popular theme in contemporary fantasy media. All of the technology we interact with might as well be a product of some lost civilization, because we know that we will never meet most of the people who know how to make it all, if it breaks we can't fix it, and we know that their tradition is separate from ours and traced back centuries into the history of science and technology that we might never learn. If we did meet them, we know that we wouldn't have time to learn the whole craft from them. They are, in a sense, necessarily absent from our lives. We only see their artifacts.
Somehow, their artifacts keep working and abounding without them and that miracle is hard to get used to, so maybe we write stories about it, frame it in the most basally digestible anthropic terms, to help us to process it.
Agricultural practice is my Gell-Mann pet peeve. While it's true that fertilizer and pest control are currently central to large swaths of the commercial ag industry, this is not necessarily a case of pure necessity so much as local maxima— for many crops we could reduce dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by integrating livestock, multi-cropping land, etc. Some of them are also ecologically unsustainable as practiced and may eventually need to be replaced.
That said, this doesn't actually detract from the central point; I would very much like to live in a world where those questions are actually engaged with by the general populace as opposed to being defined by like, Whole Foods marketing copy and the US corn lobby.
This isn't critiquing the claim, though. Yes, there are alternatives that are available, but those alternatives - multi-cropping, integrating livestock, etc. are more labor intensive, and will produce less over the short term. And I'm very skeptical that the maximum is only local - have you found evidence that you can use land more efficiently, while keeping labor minimal, and produce more? Because if you did, there's a multi-billion dollar market for doing that. Does that make the alternatives useless, or bad ideas? Not at all, and I agree that changes are likely necessary for long-term stability - unless other technological advances obviate the need for them. But we can't pretend that staying at the maximum isn't effectively necessary.
That's fair, and I'm grumbling less as an ag scientist or policy person than as a layperson born and raised in the ag industry. It is my opinion that the commercial ag industry in my country both contains inadequacies and is a system of no free energy, to borrow from Inadequate Equilibria.
To elaborate, I observe the following facts:
A person I shared this article with made the following comments (edited for brevity):
It's true that a lot of people die prematurely due to indoor smoke. This is mainly because they cook on simple hearths that lack chimneys, as pictured [...]
However, there is a good chance a new American kitchen with a gas range is actually worse for indoor air quality that an old-fashioned wood stove, because bizarrely, American building codes don't require range hoods or exhaust fans in the kitchen.
Electric and gas heating have obviously had a massive impact on outdoor air quality, but that's not the argument the author makes for them [...] It's not so much that [old] fuels are dirty, it's that the smoke isn't dumped outdoors.
I'm sorry, but some of the themes in your list are not at all like the others;
For the points related to modern medicine, it's true that people should be a lot more informed about its benefits, and the current attitude of mistrust many have toward it is certainly doing a lot of damage.
I could also agree on the agricolture, since people are being systematically misinformed into thinking that some practices, that actually consume more resources, are better for their health and beneficial to the planet.
But for the other subjects, some people, which seem to be pretty few, wanting to tear down civilisation is nowhere near as much of a problem as a lot of people not knowing or caring enough about the harmful side effects of the industrial system.
No nation is even near the point of starting to discuss proposals like banning plastic for every possible usage, forbidding household appliances or outlawing cars for everyone, and people aren't really adopting these politics for themselves, save for the occasional environmentalist.
What instead it's happening is that people living in the first world are consuming a ridiculous pro-capita amount of resources, producing a terrifying amoun...
All the proposals I've seen from the main environmentalist factions were instead based on the Ipcc's reports, which the climate denial side promptly called misinformation.
That's not really true. Most of the public who's interested in the topic ignores the involved in the claims that the IPCC makes.
The enviromentalist factions also worked to increase carbon emissions by shutting down nuclear power plants that are currently the only technology that can provide 24/7-all-year electricity for an economical price (relying completely on solar and wind means outages).
Viticulturists beat phylloxera by grafting grapes to naturally resistant rootstock taken from American vine species that co-evolved with phylloxera. The phylloxera epidemic actually serves as an example of a case where pesticides are not effective, and the effective solution, now implemented in vineyards all over the world, is both inspired by ecological dynamics and more environmentally sustainable than pesticide use.
Ehn. Nobody really understands anything, we're just doing the best we can with various models of different complexity. Adam Smith's pin factory description in the 18th century has only gotten more representative of the actual complexity in the world and the impossibility of fully understanding all the tradeoffs involved in anything. Note also that anytime you frame something as "responsibility of every citizen", you're well into the political realm.
You can see the economy as a set of solutions to some problems, but you also need to see it as exacerbation of other problems. Chesterton's Fence is a good heuristic for tearing down fences, where it's probably OK to let it stand for awhile while you think about it. It's a crappy way to decide whether you should get off the tracks before you understand the motivation of the railroad company.
I suspect that if people really understood the cost to future people of the contortions we go through to support this many simultaneous humans in this level of luxury, we'd have to admit that we don't actually care about them very much. I sympathize with those who are saying "go back to the good old days" in terms of cutting the population back to a sustainable level (1850 was about 1.2B, and it's not clear even that was sparse/spartan enough to last more than a few millennia).
My master thesis treated the impacts of climate change, here are the sources I used for these claims:
Desertification: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/76618/2/SRCCL-Full-Report-Compiled-191128.pdf If you'd rather know precisely where to look for my claims, since it's a 874 pages long report, I'd suggest the Summary for Policy Maker part, from page 5 to 9, Chapter 1.2.1, from page 88 to page 91, and chapter 5 executive summary, pages 439-440.
The report also states that the way land and water are used for agriculture is part of the problem, it interacts with climate change making both issues worse.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/03_SROCC_SPM_FINAL.pdf For this I suggest reading the Summary for Policy Makers B, from page 17 to 28. B7 is the most relevant point for desertification, B8 for fish losing most of it's biomass and putting at risk food security.
These two:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/2/024007/pdf
A general counterargument would be that besides the need for X, there's a need for X containment.
So that can be our second lecture!
Promoted to curated: I think this post is creating a pointer to a good concept, and makes a good case for it's importance.
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it's definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.
That the food you eat is grown using synthetic fertilizers, and that this is needed for agricultural productivity, because all soil loses its fertility naturally over time if it is not deliberately replenished.
This claim doesn't make sense. If it were true, plants would not have survived to the present day.
Steelmanning (which I would say OP doesn't do a good job of...), I'll interpret this as: "we are technologically reliant on synthetic fertilizers to grow enough food to feed the current population". But in any case, there are harmful environm...
...In 1990, atrazine (LD50 in rats 672 to 3,000 mg/kg) and alachlor (930 mg/kg and 1350 mg/kg) were the two most common pesticides.
In 2008-2012, glyphosate (LD50 5,600 mg/kg) was by far the most common pesticide, with atrazine in a distant second place. From the report, 746 million pounds of pesticide were used on the high end of the range in 2012. Glyphosate was about 38% of that. Atrazine and metolachlor-s (LD50 1200 mg/kg to 2780 mg/kg in rats) were the 2nd and 3rd most common that year, accounting for around 16% of pesticide use.
But let's pretend like the average upper range LD50 of atrazine and alachlor was "average pesticide LD50" for 1990. That would be LD50 of 2175 mg/kg on the high end.
If the "average pesticide LD50" for 2012 was 38% the LD50 of glyphosate plus 62% the LD50 of the average upper range of atrazine and meolachlor-s, that would be an average LD50 of 3919 mg/kg.
That would mean that the "average pesticide LD50" seems to have improved by a factor of 2 over that time. Pesticides seem to have gotten dramatically less dangerous since 19
To many of the commentators here, I suggest a quick read: "Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil (in addition to all of hisn other more extensive books on the specific topic of energy).
If infant mortality was higher that'd be terrible, but I assume people would have more kids to compensate. Automobiles other than trucks don't help much; they enable rural settlements, but not many live there and they are disproportionally expensive. I bet they'd be a lot less populated w/o all the subsidy. Cars also may not last long with a carbon tax. And cars actively harm cities substantially.
Professionals in these fields don't know some of these either. And why should everyone else? I'd go the other way: Untangle policy from the masses.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I'll do my best to do the same.
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn't decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
That's really not clear to you?
Don't you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child's friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
Losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, in terms of long-term well-being. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319302204, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2910450/, and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9624-x
Yes, in the modern world, where babies are seen as precious, that is true. It clearly wasn't as big a deal when infant mortality was very high.
A good piece, there are few journo that could write such content. The UK has always had a problem with industry, preferring the arts most times. You could see that with the climate change act 2008, which annihilated heavy industry, exported companies, good jobs and it's CO2 elsewhere. The industrial revolution has had a bad press in the uk but it was the period that eventually liberated people, generated wealth and allowed the growth of the welfare state.
This post is the most inspiring thing that I've read in a while.
We haven't solved all problems, but holy shit have we come far.
Unfortunately, that's something our modern day luddites don't really understand... Especially the housework part, as it's often people living in comfortable, furnished housing who think this.
Sure, there IS an issue with plastic pollution and the massive reliance of humanity on cars, but abolishing their use to be "like in the good old days" would be catastrophic; instead, we should focus on finding industrial, modern solutions to these problems, like expanding recycling programs and infrastructure, and developing public transportation networks in cities and between villages and towns in the countryside.
If anyone feels like humoring me, I would actually take a bit of a response as to how washing machines are better than a basket in a river, other than river-rationing-issues (aqueducts? Pipes??)
By coincidence, my hot water heat recently broke. I expected the cold showers to be the worst part, but it was actually the difficulty cleaning dishes: grease, oil, and fat just wouldn't come off the dishes (or the scrubby doodle, for that matter), despite ample application of soap. Since most of my meals involve those things, I eventually resorted to cleaning what could be cleaned with running cold tap water & soap, and setting an electric kettle to boil to do a second pass to try to melt off the remnants.
It did take longer.
That list seems right. I've had discussions with people that the last few decades have been better than any other time and they disagree. And yet, when I asked them whether they would live in the past or now, they said "now". Go figure. I definitely want people to understand their world a bit better. As you say, educating people would reduce the chance of mobs overthrowing good systems. The other thing to notice is that good systems tend to reduce government influence, and thus the influence of uninformed voters. There's large parts of society where it's n...
While this was an informative post, I do not think that most people are totally unaware of the main thrust of the argument here. Most people understand we need electricity to live. I think the issue here is that there is not a recognition of the limitations and cons of industrial society. And they are many. While undoubtedly industrial civilization has produced great material benefit, it is debatable whether human beings are actually happier today than they were a century or a millennium ago.
Let's take one point, for example. Industrial civilization ...
Interesting. I like this post. You've certainly got the right audience for a good reception. Everyone likes to think about how much more they know than anyone else, myself included. It's tough to think about what will actually make the world a better place.
If you took a person and taught them all about modern medicine, agriculture, technology, and everything else except how it's put together, how would they think the world works? What would be different in that person's mind from the way the world is now?
In other words, what do you notice that you're confused by in the world today?
I think that's where we'll find the lies.
I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”
Industrial literacy is understanding…
When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.
This doesn’t require a deep or specialized knowledge. It only requires knowing the basics, the same way every citizen should know the outlines of history and the essentials of how government works.
Industrial literacy means understanding that the components of the global economy are not arbitrary. Each one is there for a reason—often a matter of life and death. The reasons are the immutable facts of what it takes to survive and prosper: the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and economics that govern our daily existence.
With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.
A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.
Let’s recognize the value of industrial literacy and commit to improving it—starting with ourselves.