> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact.
And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct.
It is beyond shameful how Westerners misallocate the blame for pollution, using misleading statistics. India has ~17% of the world's population. That it only produces 7% of global emissions means it is contributing far, far, far less than whatever country you possibly come from in relative terms, so at that point you are besmirching it solely for the crime of having a larger population than your country.
China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
Climate change doesn't divvy impact based on per capita usage.
And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.
The Chinese government invested ~$1 trillion in clean energy in 2025, while the Chinese economy had a further ~$2 trillion in growth surrounding EVs, batteries, and solar. You talk about "no incentive to change", but things are actively changing. What more would you like China to do, in concrete terms? Stop manufacturing for the West, even though that will, as aforementioned, likely result in a net increase in emissions when Western countries resume their substantially worse per-capita manufacturing for themselves? Or perhaps you would like China to cull its population by half for you? I'm interested in hearing your proposal.
Personaly I would like to see China invest less in renewables and more in nuclear power. If France could replace its coal power plants with nuclear power plants in 1970s, 1980s then China should be capable to do it.
China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.
"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental
relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale
ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with
the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."
I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.
That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.
Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.
Out of these two, only EU and US are showing reluctance to change quickly. Both China and India depend heavily on imported fossil fuels and for them solar is as much of a sovereignty issues as it is pollution, and then climate.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
> So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time.
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest.
But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
What is the conversion efficiency for electricity + C02 + H20 -> ethanol/hydrocarbons?
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
There is so much coal. There is at least 130 years worth at current consumption levels. And despite what everyone says about renewables and green energy and etc, world use still hit a high in 2024. We aren't going to run out of (coal at least) for a long time--and usage is still going up!
Also, China and India are both doubling down on coal after the Iran Crisis as their Coal Gasification [0] strategies [1] were made for this kind of supply chain risk in mind.
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
There was the sense that tech and the internet would change human systems. Information wants to be free and all that. The individual power granted by tech would lead to individual liberty. Traditional power structures would crumble when faced with this.
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
It's all feels though. If you stare into the void, the apocalypse is coming. OTOH, bringing an AI assistant to every person in the world to make their lives better, is one perspective to take. It's all a matter of framing.
> These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
Not just that but the whole "shaping the future whether you like it or not" push.
In the 90s, building the computing future meant figuring out a user need and building a product that fit that need. Now, there is this idea that technology companies are just building their idea of what the future should be, minus any product imperative, minus input from customers or the public, and then it's up to us to "get on board" and adopt it. The cart is driving the horse.
It's frustrating that it's hard to know what's going to be good quality.
I bought a base layer years ago that basically fell apart after 1 month. It was like it was made of tissue paper. I bought a different one that has been AWESOME and has lasted 4 years so far with no signs of wear.
I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary. These were very smart people who were fooled.
In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.
> I remember when Elon came up with the hyper loop idea and everybody I worked with at the time thought it was revolutionary.
When I first saw it, my thoughts were 1) it can't possibly be that cheap, and 2) the turning radius!
It's not that it can't be done. It's that it would probably cost like the very expensive Chūō Shinkansen maglev, which really does work. And has all those necessary things Musk hand-waved, such as emergency access shafts in case there's trouble deep under a mountain, cross-tunnel connections for emergencies, fire suppression...
Anyone who assumes they won't be fooled is setting themselves up for disaster.
The biggest of Musk's warning signs, for me, was the hype. Hype can drown out valid criticism. When the hype is big enough, valid criticism ends up being drowned out by rage based, critical rhetoric that's in a screaming match with proponents.
(The worst part about being hype averse is that I can end up averse to legitimately exciting things.)
It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology
I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.
I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.
Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.
He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.
Space-X's success is due to Gwynne Shotwell, who really is a rocket scientist.
Musk didn't originate Tesla's car concept. He did, however, promote into a large scale business. That's the real achievement.
Promotion isn't enough, though. I heard Shai Agassi of Better Place speak once. That was the Israeli guy with the car battery swap startup. He was really good looking, a great speaker, and his 10x growth per year business plan was utter bullshit. Better Place went bust. It wasn't a totally unworkable idea; there are successful battery swap operations in China. But he spent time and money schmoozing with heads of state and setting up demo centers in multiple countries, while not delivering much.
(More fundamental problem: battery swapping is a bet against fast charging and battery progress, which appears to be a losing bet.)
In general, people who focus on the many things he got wrong or lied about, will all at least admit that he got a few things right.
But the people who focus on his successes always seem to downplay, blame-shift and defend when it comes to his negative side. They'll never admit he was wrong about anything. It's the same worship / cult of personality that affects politics too.
Definitely not. The companies that were prototyping it all went bankrupt. The "Vegas Loop" is just a tunnel with Tesla car traffic in it and I don't even think they're fully self driving! Very very underwhelming. Not even remotely close to the "NY to DC in 29 minutes" which he promised.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
Personal responsibility is important. But at the same time, we don't let people open up a heroin shop and then claim it's your personal responsibility to not buy it and use it. We don't put slot machines in schools but tell kids that they need self-control to not get addicted to gambling.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
but then again, vehicle miles travelled per-capita has been mostly increasing in the US since as far back as 1975. There could be a lot of confounding factors. Like astronomical housing prices in urban areas forcing people live very far away and incur more VMT at a faster rate than WFH decreases VMT. I'm no expert here, I'm just spitballing.
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a hot potato issue. I think a lot of people who don't play ball on dealing with climate change aren't deniers, they just want the next guy to have to do the work. It's very, very hard to sell to anyone, "this is going to be incredibly costly and painful for you and you won't enjoy any of the benefits. Your grandkids might."
Agreed. I care enough about it to sell my car, stop buying stuff I don't need, give up most meat, and live in a small energy efficient house.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
It's too bad that countries only consider things like this to address a crisis in fuel costs. Why not enact measures like this to curb the pollution and CO2? I guess it says a lot about what humanity truly values.
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
Optimizing performance management and labor cost controls is more important to those making these decisions than climate change. Misaligned incentives.
Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields. Those living outside "the West" will far and away be the most adversely affected. Reducing CO2 emissions is an urgent global priority.
>Global climate change will make much of the world barely habitable, and devastate crop yields
There's no empirical basis for that statement, the people behind it have been making similar apocalyptic predictions for decades that never materialized, their models have no predictive power.
Most high-quality climate models have been if anything overly conservative in their predictions and things have been going at a much accelerated rate. So which doomsday models can you point to that have not materialized?
Mollusks in the ocean are producing shells slower because of the increase in carbonic acid. Nighttime temperatures are observably higher in the tropics.
You're say things that even climate denialists aren't claiming are true.
No it doesn't. That economoic activity when done from home, raises their local neighborhoods now where mom and pop businesses can thrive instead of competing in a costly rental market based on scarcity.
Ah yes, because economics and resource allocation are already perfectly optimal and balanced, and it is against the physical laws of the universe to raise quality of life via any other methodology
You can’t collapse countries and humans down to four sentences and conclude that’s what they value. Do you want to analyze the problem or throw quips at the wall?
Once you get over the hump and develop a certain amount of cardiovascular fitness, it stops being unpleasant and stressful.
The real problem is that most people don't feel like this is true. It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer.
I run an average of 6 days per week for the past 10+ years. At this point running is just about the easiest thing I do, it doesn't take any mental fortitude at all to do it. It wasn't always that way though, I used to dread it.
> It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer
I don't think people need to suffer through 6 months just to start enjoy running.
Yes when beginning running you suck (and also prone to injury); you basically have no zone 1-2 since your'e so out of shape, your zone 2 is basically a fast walk. So for newbies who train like that all runs become a zone 3 or even 4 - when you're totally new to running. No surprise they many time
a) hate it
b) get injured
I advise newbies to walk and run and try to keep HR very very controllable until you build up fitness. That should be both more fun and also more sustainable injury wise.
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.
Where do you live that this is not possible?
(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2
Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
It’s illegal to drink in public in Washington state [1]. I believe this is the case in most places in the United States. Las Vegas is a notable exception.
Can't tell if you're being earnest or pedantic (if earnest, I grew up in a poorer neighborhood than HN so maybe I'm just more familiar with the solution. The Wire has a scene that'll explain it better than I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9MamysCfQ)
I don’t see how either of those are relevant. The question is where you can legally drink in public. The answer is very few places in the United States. People break laws all the time.
Illinois sells liquor in grocery stores but not after 2am. Or maybe it was a local ordinance. The town next to me was 1am then you couldn’t buy liquor at the 24 hour grocer. So not just bars.
> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.
> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted.
(I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won).
If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left.
In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted.
It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes.
It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.
> okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted")..
But he actually is correct. Use the same term to describe the effects of ingesting biologically active chemicals and the effects of emotionally engaging activity -- which in this case mostly consists of exposure to information -- absolutely is disingenuous equivocation. People in this very thread are comparing Instagram with ingestion of alcohol or tobacco products, and that absolutely is a prevarication.
It's not unreasonable to observe the course of these debates, and suspect that the people invoking the language of addiction are doing so as a pretext for treating what is actually a cultural issue instead as a medical one, so as to falsely appeal to empirical certainty to answer questions that actually demand normative debate.
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
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