A lot to learn from this video about explaining things:
- Know your stuff. It's obvious he's been over all of this hundreds of times.
- Figure out great analogies and other aids. Part 3: 5:20 he makes an analogy out of multiplying bacteria in a bottle that fill it in an hour to show us at what point of the exponential function you notice your in one. It's got two parts and is very effective. It allows him to say things like "5 minutes before the bottle is full."
- Introduce your aids gradually and keep using them. Make clever decisions about your aids and make sure they accumulate to a powerful toolset. After that analogy which all the time he introduces the analogy above he has:
- A trick for calculating doubling time 70/annual growth in %
- A graph
- A table
- An example (Boulder) that he keeps running scenarios on.
- The bacteria analogy
By the time he's 20-30 minutes into a lecture, this guy has a very powerful vocabulary built up. He can take something like oil consumption and examine it with you very quickly using these tools. The bacteria in a bottle analogy is a great example of this. Once he's explained it (kind of hard) and practised it once or twice, he can say "What time is it?" and immediately have his audience understand something relatively complex. .
Before people freak out about exponential growth, please consider John McCarthy's Slogan. (Yes, that John McCarthy; Lisp isn't the only thing he's done.)
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Huh. This guy is simply making the very basic point that politicians, economists and bankers selling us "growth" as a solution to unemployment, debt, etc are plainly lying. Growth (population, GDP, energy availability, etc) will stop at some point. An economy that relies entirely on growth to merely function is doomed to fail spectacularly at some point in time.
I agree that population growth cannot go on forever (although I consider doubling the current number quite likely). However I see no reason why energy availability can't keep growing for many many centuries to come. We aren't tapping the full potential of nuclear fission, to say nothing about fusion. Things like solar energy in all its variations is also a source we basically aren't using at all. Give us 50-100 years an we'll no doubt come up with some new source of energy we haven't even considered yet.
> However I see no reason why energy availability can't keep growing for many many centuries to come. We aren't tapping the full potential of nuclear fission, to say nothing about fusion.
Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years. Industrial nuclear fusion is decades away, probably a century.
From the 18th century onwards, we went from tapping ever better energy sources (denser, lighter): animal power, coal, oil. There aren't any better energy source than oil available now, or in the foreseeable future. At some point, we'll have to do with /less/.
> Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years.
That's a choice, one that we could change.
There are no technical or economic obstacles to building nuclear plants for far less money and in far less time that are just as safe (or safer) than what we have now. (France is an existence proof for much of the potential savings.)
There are, however, legal and political obstacles.
> Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years.
Define "we". Take a look at China's nuclear power program sometime; they've brought the cost of their CPR1000 plants down to where they're cheaper to build than coal plants of the same size, and they're well on their way to do the same for the more modern AP1000 reactor design. They've got a bunch of new nuclear plants under construction, with more on the way as they pick up momentum. We're talking about 10-15 large reactors coming on line every year, with the production rate increasing as they ramp up.
Also, they've got their first commercial-scale pebble-bed reactors being built right now. If I remember correctly, they're also looking at incorporating thorium into the fuel mix.
Also, they're working on 40% and 70% more powerful versions of the AP1000 that will not add much to the cost. Nuclear power in China is going to be seriously cheap.
Also, they're working on fast breeder reactors, which use uranium much more efficiently. They're building two BN-800 reactors, working together with Russia, since Russia has been profitably operating fast breeder reactors in the BN series for decades.
If you're only looking at the US and Europe, then sure, the Nuclear Renaissance is looking a little feeble. But the US and Europe are not the whole world.
This part of the long business cycle always produces a lot of arguments for austerity. So far they have always turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
"Nuclear fission is currently on decline."
Nuclear power, both fission and fusion, is currently in a renaissance and we appear to be laying the groundwork for the next stage of advances: gas- and metal-cooled reactors, superconductors, mechanical compression systems, reliable mode-locked lasers, dielectric wall and wake field particle accelerators, electronics that can do real-time gigahertz feedback, etc.
When the next long expansion gets into full swing, I predict that the nuclear logjam will break loose.
"There aren't any better energy source than oil available now, or in the foreseeable future."
There's a lot of solar power in space. A lot. And literal mountains of metal, richer than the best terrestrial ores and pre-smelted too. At some point technology will tip the profit margin positive on exploiting it.
> So far they have always turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
So far, there weren't 7 billions humans neither.
> Nuclear power, both fission and fusion, is currently in a renaissance
Absolutely not. This is GE and AREVA PR, but doesn't reflect the truth. We aren't building enough nuclear plants now to compensate for the future closing of the old ones. The numbers aren't even ramping up fast enough. As time goes by, there will be less and less active nuclear plants.
Fusion research is blooming, but it didn't make much progress, particularly compared to the huge effort (see ITER).
> There's a lot of solar power in space. A lot. And literal mountains of metal, richer than the best terrestrial ores and pre-smelted too. At some point technology will tip the profit margin positive on exploiting it.
This is science-fiction. I'm pretty close to say this is complete BS. "Space ore" simply can't happen unless you find the way to harvest the power from some magic ponies yet to discover.
I totally agree that we aren't building enough nuclear power plants, but that is purely for political reasons. The research is still happening and once there is a change in the political climate we'll be able to ramp up nuclear power over a few decades.
Also if we look back at the past 1000 (or even just 100) years of human history, we've been pretty good at discovering and harvesting 'magic ponies' of all shapes and sizes.
> we'll be able to ramp up nuclear power over a few decades.
Maybe if thorium comes on the radar.
> we've been pretty good at discovering and harvesting 'magic ponies' of all shapes and sizes.
Well, not that much. By the end of the roman republic, most of what made the industrial revolution possible was available, but it didn't happen until 18 centuries later.
While Thorium reactors are cool and all, they aren't necessary. It's not like we're about to run out of uranium any time soon. Hell, you can take your basic 1970's uranium reactor, incorporate everything we've learned about nuclear safety over the past 40 years, throw in some generic improvements to basic turbine technology and have a fully functional power plant that will do a splendid job for decades to come.
Here are some options. Forgive my brevity, but I'm tired of people simply asserting that there's no way of managing nuclear waste.
* Throw it away. Deep-sea subduction zones work nicely for this. Tremendously wasteful, though; that "waste" is valuable fuel.
* Recycle the waste to decrease its volume. This isn't a full solution, but it makes the waste cheaper to store for a while.
* Store the waste for a while, and later we can use it in breeder reactors or fusion/fission hybrids. There's so much useful U-238 in that slightly-used fuel. After this, the waste is pretty much dead.
The Antikythera mechanism (2 century BC) basically reset what we believed of science, mechanics and mathematical knowledge during antiquity. That, and some other things : Hero's Eolipyle, Nero's emerald monocle, Provence "industrial" mills... They had the ability, they lacked the will.
They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.
There's a strange parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. Took about a billion years before the simplest single-celled organism developed all the basic mechanisms/components, and then a few hundred million years from complex multicelled organisms, and finally a huge explosion in diversity in the last hundred million years. I wonder if evolution and technological progress plotted on the same relative logarithmic scale would overlay each other?
"We aren't building enough nuclear plants now to compensate for the future closing of the old ones."
Which is an intentional choice, arising from a combination of ennui, defeatism, and witch hunting. Those political movements seem to have run their course.
"Fusion research is blooming, but it didn't make much progress, particularly compared to the huge effort (see ITER)."
Most of the tokamak megaprojects were done to give academics a safe way to demonstrate activity. ITER is the plasma physics version of string theory. In my opinion, the real progress has come from small quiet projects involving vacuum physics and power electronics.
"'Space ore' simply can't happen unless you find the way to harvest the power from some magic ponies yet to discover."
It's metal, not ore. If you can lay your hands on asteroidal metal, you can turn it into useful articles with a blacksmith's forge. Fancy alloys and precious metals are more effort, but often easier than dealing with crappy terrestrial ores.
The magic pony is to cancel the failed Shuttle, yet another stagnant megaproject. And avoid replacing it with other doomed megaprojects. The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all. Once you can get above the atmosphere cheaply enough, the solar system is your oyster. (It's like Fed Ex. The capital investment to build Fed Ex is ludicrous, but once somebody has the balls to do it, entire industries rise up from nowhere to exploit it.)
> The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all.
Pipe dreaming. The barrier to space is the _tremendous_ amount of energy required to get anything to low-earth orbit, let alone getting raw material going back from Jupiter's vicinity. Even with 1000 times better technology (which won't arrive soon), your asteroid iron still will be costlier than platinum.
Nope. The energy cost is trivial. The cost of joules for a vacation to Europa is within upper middle class aspirations. It only costs so much because our lifters are hideously inefficient.
The reason rockets are so inefficient is that we don't know how to keep cracks from spreading through our structural materials, so we have to derate their strength by huge factors to get reliability. Nano- and micro-composite materials look like they will be able to vastly improve this situation (and indeed already are in the latest jetliners), and the rocket equation gives big big cost savings for weight savings. High strength materials are also good for rotovators and other semi-passive lifters.
Another big opportunity is to shift some of the propulsion to the ground. It should be straightforward to shine launch lasers up the tail of a standard rocket and reduce its propellant requirement by many percent, which the rocket equation then multiplies into a large cost savings. Exclusively laser launched vehicles are also possible but speculative at this point (they need visible light lasers to get range but those are still too inefficient). Most of the necessary technology exists or can easily be built. All we lack is the optimism to make the investment.
As for getting metal back, the asteroid belt is energetically close despite the distance. A small nuclear reactor and patience will do the job.
nuclear power could deliver far more energy per year than is used yearly now for thousands of years. Innovation makes energy more useful. When the potential for growth these two cause is exhausted there's scifi stuff; solar power from satellites around the sun; fusion; etc.
Dr. Albert A. Bartlett is fully cognizant of that point. He says in part 8 of that video:
"Except for the petroleum graphs, the things I tell you are
not predictions of the future. I am only reporting facts and
the results of some very simple arithmetic." (1:22)
He acknowledges the potential fallibility of his estimations. He goes on to say:
"Please you check the facts. Please check my arithmetic. if
you find errors, please let me know. But if you don't find
errors, I hope you take this very very seriously."
The video also makes the point that people are ignorant of the exponential function's effect, believing that constant growth is possible, when it clearly is not.
The Dr. also mentions that 0% growth is inevitable, so that is covered - but I had no idea it was called the logistic function, thanks.
In the context of population growth, the logistic function means that something has made it stop. He dealt with this is the second video - he says we'll get zero population growth one way or another, because exponential growth forever is impossible.
Around minute 7 of the second video (did you actually watch it?) he points out that many of the checks on population growth are generally considered bad things - war, famine, disease (the alternative being birth control). This is hardly a reason not to freak out.
many of the checks on population growth are generally considered bad things - war, famine, disease
The countries with the lowest population growth (e.g., Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan) are among those with the least war, famine, and disease. Something else is going on.
There were many other reasons listed, including low immigration, small families, contraception/abortion, abstinence and pollution.
This checks do apply do the countries you cited, but the list is still far from comprehensive. They are far better than war, famine and disease, but still regarded as bad things, which is the point.
The reason that the curve levels out for biological populations is that the rates at which members start starving to death or killing each-other increases to cancel out the birth-rate. That does seem to be of some concern.
It also works for inflation or other yearly recurring charges. Those small percentages add up quickly - at 3% inflation and 2% charges the value of your investment in today's dollars/euros will halve in 14 years. Yikes!
Few people can do logarithms in their heads - and those that can, usually do it using similar tricks. I realize that "doing math in your head" is well on the decline, but it is pretty essential for speedy approximations, which are what many decisions tend to be based on.
I've thought about his point that lowering the death rate makes the problem of population growth worse a lot, especially in the context of Africa and the like.
"Oh they're starving because they get almost no rain, so that land really shouldn't support anywhere near as many people as are there. Let's give them food aid."
10 years elapse, and say they're getting 7% per year growth thanks to food aid keeping them from starving, lack of contraception, etc.
"Oh, there's twice as many of them now, so they're starving despite our current food aid. Double the food aid!"
Repeat until you realize that you can't double the food aid forever.
"We" won't need to give "them" food aid forever, population growth levels off as wealth increases. Possibly the best thing that could be done for Africa is to end farm subsidies and argicultural tarrifs in the developed world.
Here is a great link to the farm subsidies recieved in Manhattan, it's odd how one never notices the wealth of family farms surrounding central park.
http://wildgreenyonder.wordpress.com/2007/10/
Though this is logically sound, the core issue remains. Are we to tell them a little starving and death now is good for you in the long run? I think it is extremely interesting to ponder where lines of morality lay on issues like this.
The first step to answering that question is to start thinking of Africa as a continent full of individuals rather than through terms like "us" and "them".
Most answers in the affirmative involve a lot of rationalization and dehumanization and in the modern world likely some kind of starvation default swap sold by a financial institution.
We're all individuals sharing this planet. We are not our government(s). (Unless you're a head of state, then maybe)
So if a vaccine for a deadly disease is not 100% safe then you wouldn't use it at all as actively killing 1% is worse than passively allowing 80% (say) to die?
When making considerations of the well being of whole populations one has to consider the whole population not the individual.
A decision to withhold food aid now might kill 10%, but supplying that food and buoying up the population until the next big crisis is likely to kill far more people and could push us beyond sustainability - there is a point at which renewable resources become to depleted to recover. Sure, one can consider that the Jones family will lose their daughter and so we have to send food but this leads us on and on to overpopulation.
I would provide access to the vaccine and individuals could choose whether they wanted to take it.
It actually doesn't lead us to overpopulation. Once wealth & education increases to a certain point cultures change and people have fewer children. Paul Ehrlich went over this in the 60s and then made the famous wager with Simon over resources. I think this Malthusian argument has been thoroughly debunked.
The best result for the well being of whole populations is generally achieved by each person in that population doing what is best for themselves.
I would provide access to the vaccine and individuals could choose whether they wanted to take it.
That actually is a really bad idea from a public health perspective. Generally you need well in excess of 50% of the population to be vaccinated before it starts to provide protection to non-vaccinated individuals.
Well, 1 thousand deaths now to achieve self sufficiency, or X deaths later, where x is likely much larger than 1 thousand.
Not to mention, why the fuck in this day and age is the west still responsible for African people eating? We have the technology, the entire country has been geographically analyzed for where maximum food can be produced, etc etc. It is not a geographical problem, it is a political and cultural problem.
It seems fairly obvious they can't sort out this problem, so whats the next move?
We can tell them where to grow food, and where not to. We have given them Billions of dollars in aid. What else can you do?
Of course, this is assuming foreign aid exists to achieve what it says it is trying to achieve....I can think of several groups of people that would like to keep Africa in the stone age for the time being.
However, this doesn't dismiss the responsibilities of the leaders and citizens of Africa. All the technology you need is available on eBay, how about some charismatic man rises up and convinces you to get your shit together?
The GNP and life expectancy of Africa is about as good as it was in the western world around 1930, that's not exactly stone-age, and the situation is steadily improving. They'll get there.
Possibly the best thing that could be done for humanity in the next hundred years is to solve the lack of empathy for individuals and groups of people we have not met. I think if you had some friends in Africa that would be affected by your solution, you would feel very differently.
I am not picking on you here--I think this is a failing in the way we're wired that some part of us (including me) can consider tragedy at that scale as a possible solution.
Possibly the best thing that could be done for humanity in the next hundred years is to solve the lack of empathy for individuals and groups of people we have not met
I assumed that was one of the roles of religions, but they seem to have a difficult time getting the idea to stick in the majority of their believers.
Do you seriously believe that subsidies of western farmers is helping people in Africa? What is the "tragedy as a possible solution" you are speaking of?
I read something that made sense to me which was that OP was objecting to subsidies to African countries--not subsidies for Western farmers. My objection makes no sense in the context of what OP actually said.
In the video explaining exponential growth it talked about how we would need to abandon many things we deem good in order to avoid over population. This video puts things in less grim terms by pointing out that increasing the average life expectancy reduces the number of children per women.
Yes, and I think it's very possible that our energy consumption continues to grow, despite the number of people on Earth stabilizes. What do you think?
The trick is realizing that the last 3 words of your third sentence are the most important part of your slightly offensive post. That, and education.
Starving a people until they can eat off of the barren land they inhabit is certainly one way of taking care of the problem. Educating them on the merits of contraceptives, and teaching them how to use their land to greater effect is another.
It's not as easy as giving them contraceptives. Culture and pragmatism both frequently encourage large families.
For example, farming families have major incentives to have large families so that the kids can help with the farming tasks. So you'll need a China-like child limit or some other way to incentivize them to actually use the contraception you provide.
That's why education is key as well. People who are well-educated have less children, on average. Look at the US, for example. So educate them, and enable them to become wealthy. Right now, they can't.
But that doesn't mean that a well educated farmer will have less children. He can be as educated as you like but unless he can increase productivity in some way (access to loans for equipment say, like through Fairtrade) then he still has as much work to do and still needs to provide the labour.
Suppose the education increase yields, unless we're on top of the trading practices then the value falls - everyone's yield has increased, if this means the market saturates he might make less money (perhaps none). If the market hasn't saturated he still needs more labour to gather the increased yield but gets the same income to share amongst the labourers - increasing the pressure to provide cheap labour by expanding his family.
In short the problem is more complex and IMO is not due to lack of education. What you're saying is that a poor agricultural labourer should sacrifice there own ability to earn more in order to stave off over-population - why is it down to them.
I'll go with the converse though. If you ensure that workers get a fair wage (Fairtrade again), one that can pay basic healthcare and education costs and ensure they have healthy food intake and a reasonable dwelling, then there is less pressure to reproduce (but possibly more opportunity to choose to? again it's complex).
Africa is not a barren land, much of Africa is perfect for farming. Much of Africa is not "perfect" for farming, but well good enough. However, if you have external nations bringing you food for free, why the hell would you go through the trouble to grow a crop, it's seriously hard work!
And, if you're in the part of Africa where growing crops is not feasible....move?
You realize that this isn't about renting a U-haul, right? It's about traveling, on foot or by public transportation, to somewhere where you don't own any land, don't speak the language, and don't know anyone. In other words, to become a refugee. There are plenty of people like that already, but they tend to move to the cities.
I'm not usually a fan of long talking-head videos but this was absolutely worthwhile. What's most chilling is the story of the bottle and the bacteria, and the realization that somehow finding a whole new planet would only tide us over for a couple more generations, after which we'd need two more....
There is no sustainable growth without sustainable decay. Makes you wonder about those financial systems based on economies with compounded interest -- exponential growth -- which are supposed to be resident on a finite planet.
The population bomb is kinda heading the other direction though. People moved to cities, where kids were a liability instead of an asset, life was exciting, and women had opportunities. Now birth rates in modernized countries are below the replacement rate (which causes exponential decay as impactful as exponential growth), which is largely made up through immigration.
In the limit case, birth rates in modernized countries are close to zero, and the entire population is comprised of newcomers from the places that are above the replacement rate. These countries could places for opportunity, not familyeither be like companies (where people work and live much of their lives but don't replenish themselves), or they could be like retirement homes.
But it's all considered in a vacuum. Even though the majority of the population don't understand the problem, this is ok. We have an economic system that benefits those who predict impending needs and place themselves in situations to provide for them.
Take a look at the green industry ramping up. In the not too distance future, I think most of us here expect oil replacement to be highly profitable.
I disagree with these doomsday predictions from pure arithmetic. It seems to me that the reverse is true - exponential "problems" provide the core drive for our economy. What drives the entire start-up industry? I'd say it's identifying profitable exponential growth scenarios and providing for them. To me, this explains how primarily capitalist countries tend toward stability, until them become strangled by ever increasing regulation (that's not to say I'm against regulation in general, but I think we need to be as proactive about removing it as we are about adding it [wow, I went off topic there]).
Yes, many people are working on solutions, but I think the point is that for green industry to succeed, growth in energy consumption has to actually stop, and preferably reverse. It's good to be clear about about the goal.
That's not a good goal. And besides not being good, it's also impossible if you are trying to avoid mass catastrophe.
Economic development directly correlates with energy use. To reduce energy use you would either need a massive depression, or for a lot of people to die.
But the news isn't all bad - nuclear power is both green, and sufficiently available to allow us to continue energy growth. So I would make that the goal.
In the short term, sudden changes in energy consumption are very disruptive. (For example, see gas prices and the auto industry last year.) But a longer-term, gradual shift towards less energy usage need not be.
No, to reduce energy use you'd need for people to take conservation seriously and to dramatically improve efficiency. Plenty of energy is wasted on inefficient cars, poor insulation, wasteful industrial processes, and so on.
To be clear, is this because green energy is (yet) incapable of satisfying our current needs, or purely because our ability to generate green energy is as finite as from oil?
Actually, what I meant to say is that fossil fuel consumption has to stop growing and preferably decline. But there are limits to green energy too. For a British take on this: http://www.withouthotair.com/
Note that he does say in the video that these are not predictions* , and that it's just arithmetic. He goes on to pretty much agree -- in a less specific sense -- with what you've said: "the consequences of the arithmetic will play a major role in shaping our future."
* Except for the petroleum graphs. Video 8/8 1:00-2:00ish.
I agree to some degree. I feel like this guy thinks he's playing sim-city and setting the population growth rate. Tell me he doesn't remind you of the domestic advisor!
But one thing I didn't like about the bacteria in the bottle story was that he conveniently switched to 100% growth for that example. And then made it sound like Boulder was in the same position "it's 11:59 in the Boulder valely" etc.
Well, he had just prior spent some time explaining how to convert any growth rate to 100% just by scaling the time axis. So when he says it's 11:59, he means it's 10 years (or whatever) to the end, if one were to assume constant growth.
I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html), which deals with very similar issues on an entirely larger scale.
The best illustration of the concept, imo, is that with sustained 1.3%/year world population growth, we'll reach a population density of 1 person per square meter of land in only 780 years.
In 50 years at 1.3% growth we'll basically double our population, and go from about 8000 m^2 per person to 4000 m^2 per person. After 780 years, the growth starts adding up, you can play with the numbers.
The population will increase by a factor of exp(.013780) = 25336.5
So we should be at roughly 25,336 meters / person currently. (But remember that plenty of that is more-or-less unlivable--Siberia and the like.)
In 50 years, the population will have increased by a factor of exp(.013 50) = 1.91554, so in the next 50 years population will roughly double, so that number will go down to about 13k meters/person.
Using data from the 2000 US Census, Manhattan, the United States' most dense city, had 25,836 people per square km or 0.025836 people per square meter.
At some point though there will be some kind of event to bring this down. Might be a population number or a resource usage spot, very unlikely to the world could remain at peace as certain countries loss large chunks of people to famines ect, people that have nothing to live for wouldn't want to go down without a fight.
People don't understand exponentials very well because human perception is scaled logarithmically. For example, both the apparent magnitude scale for celestial objects and the loudness scale for sounds (measured in decibels) are logarithmic.
Part of the problem is that the distant future to humans is never any further out than ~70 years - eg our lifespans.
Exponential resource waste, population growth, etc doesn't become a non-survivable event for a few more generations - at that point we may actually start to see realistic change.
Definitely worth watching the entire series, but for those looking to save time: the first video covers the main point and the subsequent videos in the series just reinforce its significance.
I think we actually do have a deep implicit understanding of the exponential function, and THAT may be our greatest shortcoming. We don't understand it precisely, and we don't intuitively relate to "4^x".
But we very intuitively get things like "really big changes will come from small things" And we rate highly getting a seemingly small increase in personal ability. This is why videos like this can capture our attention at all. It seems like a basic ability to recognize and reason approximately about exponential growth is required to do agriculture.
I think this is why we like RPG's and katamari damacy, and talking about peak oil.
I think that this mental flag also makes us extremely sensitive of people 'from the wrong tribe' being in our area.
In short, I think that we were surrounded by exponential functions in our ancestral environment, and developed an ability to recognize them and see them as very important, with out really knowing what they are.
I haven't gotten back into the habit of watching lectures in a while, but this was one of the best ones I've watched in a long time. Thought it was super cheesy at first, and didn't think I was going to keep watching, but it kept me rapt the entire time.
A note on the rest of the series: He spends the remaining time outlining some impending Malthusian catastrophe / peak oil scenario.
For a counterpoint, check out anything by Julian Simon.
Simon believed that there is more than simple arithmetic (as Bartlett calls it) when it comes to growth. You have to throw something like technology into the mix, which is difficult to predict.
The Simon-Erlich bet is a good, real-world illustration of their disagreements.
In part three he brilliantly draws a distinction between the objective sciences and others and subtly, if I'm understanding correctly, critiques a proponent of uncontrolled population grown by pointing out that the proponents degree from the same university is not a degree in "mathematics, in science, nor in engineering".
Feynman made explicit observations on this topic, quite critical ones, if I remember right.
Anyone find any good graphs about population growth? I asked wolframalpha and was pretty dissapointed, google found this article which I found interesting. Second graph in particular. Seems at 1000 and 1400 there were some drastic growth rate shifts.
I've always had this idea in my mind that the 'legendary failure rate of IT projects' is best explained in terms of an exponential increase in points of failure (or even just points of activity) when you deal with computer systems. Are there any famous papers that flesh out this idea? Anyone?
I'm curious what the average price of gall bladder surgery is now. In it his students project 25K by 2000, which we are obviously quite a way past. If you're uninsured, this amount sounds about right likely these days.
Great video. I'm on part 2 and I'll finish the rest in the morning.
More evidence that projecting trends without considering technical progress is bound to result the sort of overly pessimistic results that Malthus made famous.
For example, Dr. Bartlett's two-column view on population assumes that people will need some certain number of square feet of land. But why wouldn't we build up, ala NYC? Or settle the ocean (http://seasteading.org/)? Or colonize the stars? Or perhaps even transfer our consciousness to some more efficient representation?
Yes, exponential growth presents problems, but exponential progress in technology has the power to solve them. That's where we (and others like us) come in.
If you watch the video, you'll see why "find more land" isn't a sustainable solution. Ultimately, population growth just needs to stabilize at 0% to solve the running out of space problem (but not the running out of resources problem, which is where technology is more likely to help).
- Know your stuff. It's obvious he's been over all of this hundreds of times.
- Figure out great analogies and other aids. Part 3: 5:20 he makes an analogy out of multiplying bacteria in a bottle that fill it in an hour to show us at what point of the exponential function you notice your in one. It's got two parts and is very effective. It allows him to say things like "5 minutes before the bottle is full."
- Introduce your aids gradually and keep using them. Make clever decisions about your aids and make sure they accumulate to a powerful toolset. After that analogy which all the time he introduces the analogy above he has:
By the time he's 20-30 minutes into a lecture, this guy has a very powerful vocabulary built up. He can take something like oil consumption and examine it with you very quickly using these tools. The bacteria in a bottle analogy is a great example of this. Once he's explained it (kind of hard) and practised it once or twice, he can say "What time is it?" and immediately have his audience understand something relatively complex. .