A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
@inthehands Because effective altruism is a scam by the ruling class, and you can't effectively charge rents on the sun as easily as you can on oil.
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
@inthehands truly enlightening as to their true motives and understanding of the world. There is a massive amount of, as yet unharnessed, solar energy hitting us all the time and on geologic time that flux wont appreciably change. Solar panels from 25 years ago are showing incredible longevity and efficiency-retention. Fossil fuels kill throughout the entire cycle of using them and are broiling the planet. You want there to be future humans you can maximize fitness/happiness/whatever for? It’s pretty clear what they should be excited about if they actually cared about their stated values.
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@inthehands Because effective altruism is a scam by the ruling class, and you can't effectively charge rents on the sun as easily as you can on oil.
@miss_rodent
I mean, yes, the question was…if not rhetorical, at least highly leading -
@inthehands truly enlightening as to their true motives and understanding of the world. There is a massive amount of, as yet unharnessed, solar energy hitting us all the time and on geologic time that flux wont appreciably change. Solar panels from 25 years ago are showing incredible longevity and efficiency-retention. Fossil fuels kill throughout the entire cycle of using them and are broiling the planet. You want there to be future humans you can maximize fitness/happiness/whatever for? It’s pretty clear what they should be excited about if they actually cared about their stated values.
@inthehands in How Infrastructure Works, @debcha makes the pitch that we could power everything with solar and have plenty of headroom.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
@inthehands Solar never ceases to make absolute fools of analysts, because it's a completely alien concept to them: you create a durable thing and it shoots out a firehose of money with no further inputs required. Their analysis is usually full of "solar will increase as part of the mix" as if it's just another option, which may wane depending on politics, stockpiling etc. But this is *sunlight* we're talking about.
So it gets to the point where even Texas energy companies are 100% in.
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
@inthehands We're much closer to the theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell than to the theoretical maximum amount of computation given the existing energy in the solar system. That's the bottom line. And there are ways of taking it even further than that.
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RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116109430224379547
A fun thing to think about: Where are all the Singularity people with solar?
There’s this whole pseudoscientific subculture organized around the one epistemological premise of “lines that go up will go up forever,” when in reality trends change and curves level off. And now here’s this one thing where people keep stubbornly predicting that it will level off and in fact the line (on a log scale) •has• kept going up far more consistently than predicted…. So why aren’t all the Effective Altruism people saying stuff like “In the future solar cells will save trillions of lives, so it doesn’t matter how many oil executives we kill in the present?”
@inthehands It WILL level off, when all power is solar or otherwise renewable.
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@inthehands in How Infrastructure Works, @debcha makes the pitch that we could power everything with solar and have plenty of headroom.
@inthehands @c0dec0dec0de And this is exactly what I am excited about, in line with my values — that everyone in the world (not just the global north) has the energy they need to thrive, that we decouple energy generation from moving atoms around (ie extraction and pollution), and that we use renewable energy to create truly sustainable, circular materials flows for everything we use. This is it, the whole ballgame. Everything else is just accounting.
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@inthehands in How Infrastructure Works, @debcha makes the pitch that we could power everything with solar and have plenty of headroom.
@inthehands @c0dec0dec0de [and of course I think that we should have no oil executives in the same way I think we should have no billionaires or coal miners — they should all get the support they need to be rehabilitated and retrained to transition into new opportunities, since their previous roles have been made obsolete by new technologies and/or regulation]
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R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topic
