It is only "human readable" since our tooling is so bad and the lowest common denominator tooling we have can dump out a sequence of bytes as ascii/utf-8 text somewhat reliably.
One can imagine a world where the lowest common denominator format being a richer structured binary format where every system has tooling to work with it out of the box and that would be considered human readable.
We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.
Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.
I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.
It would seem you are still just thinking about the human controlled portions of the ecosystem and not including all the energy used to drive to water cycle etc.
From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.
The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.
I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.
They are wrong however. To take the food example, the existence of processed food production creates artifacts like food deserts. If you are privileged these things don't effect you as much as you get more agency.
Just the existence of quick to eat and prepare foods are going to put limits on how long you are going to be given for lunch and dinner. Even if you wanted to prepare fresh food, the system is going to make it difficult since it becomes an unsupported activity in terms of time allowances and market access.
I made no judgement about the quality of processed food or where the different options rank in terms access to calories and nutrition, or what is actually feasible. It was simply about how changes can become mildly to severely obligate to certain populations in our economic system.
To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.
Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.
So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.
Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.
To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.
Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).
Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.
I think the better rebuttal to that is the existence of many other species that have been around much longer without what we loosely call intelligence.
I think the better take away from the evidence is that humans are really limited and have heuristics that are really exploitable. At large scales that can lead to some pretty counterproductive behavior.
The interesting thing is that some of those same heuristics can be really adaptive at smaller scales. So the question is where is the balance and what sort of systems lead to better global behavior.
I don't think your example of living on other planets is correct (at least as homo sapiens, seeding lifeforms and maybe even intelligent life is another thing), but I think it is in the right direction of that there is so much more that is achievable but we don't have the social co-ordination to approach it in a way that is much better that a random-walk.
Large scale co-ordination and sense making of actual reality is hard.
Requires good stories/music/dance/mysticism. And rituals. And modernized pastoral care.
This is why religions have survived the fall of kings, empires and nations. When system starts collapsing under the weight of its ever building contradictions, they allow for stabilization, repair and continuity.
But with the arrival of the printing press and then the internet info tsunami, those older stories and rituals (which act as sync mechanism for large groups over different time frames - daily-weekly-yearly touch points) start loosing influence. This is happening without a good story/sync replacement (see Philosopher Charles Taylor's The Secular Age).
So look to HBO/Netflix/Pixar or the WWE. One is interactive almost real time narrative/emotion resonance/ritual engineering and the other is a deeper slower process. Those are the kind of spaces where potential breakthroughs will come from. Not the totally clueless science or tech world.
The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.
It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.
Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
A large portion humanity seem incapable of embracing uncertainty and nuance and are over eager to embrace whoever is willing to peddle certainty and simplicity.
As long as that is true it seem naive to believe that nuanced institutions can exist as dominant entities in human societies.
This is true, but it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge, and Covid was pretty bad in this regard, because in absence of actual knowledge, hard recommendations were being issued to people.
Saying sincerely "we are not yet sure if Covid spreads by touching surfaces" etc. would have gone a long way.
I am not even touching the dirty topic of "practise societal distancing unless you go to an anti-racist demonstration, because racism is worse than Covid". That alone probably sunk the levels of trust for a generation in the US, especially among people right of the center. Politicizing science is suicidal.
Back to normal uncertainty. It was the same with various dietary recommendations. Older people remember several major overhauls thereof (are eggs fine or not, and in which amount?), and again, these were presented with a level of certainty that does not correspond to the actual - somewhat fuzzy - state of nutritional science.
You can only do this so long before unleashing an epidemics of distrust.
> This is true, but it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge, and Covid was pretty bad in this regard
After my SO got her first COVID vaccine she lost her period. It had been rock steady for many, many years and suddenly gone and hadn't come back for a few months. She had a GP appointment, and I accompanied her as I often do as my SO struggles with recalling important details.
My SO told the GP about her missing period, and the GP quickly tried to reassure her it wasn't something to worry about and it would come back soon enough.
Well, I had just read published studies about this and knew the medical establishment had no idea why the vaccine caused a lot of women to lose their period.
So I challenged the GP and asked if she knew what the mechanism was that caused my SO to no longer have her period, and of course she didn't know.
"Well, if you don't know the mechanism, how can you say it's fine this time?", I asked sincerely.
She admitted she was just going off what usually happens when women lose their periods, which can happen due to various kinds of stress. I wondered why it was so difficult to lead with that, instead of confidently stating it would be fine.
My SO did eventually get her period back, but to this day, almost 5 years later, it's still highly unregular.
> it is also true that "official" communication often tends to project level of certainty that just does not correspond to the actual level of knowledge
IMHO, "short term uncertainty" > "long term distrust".
I don't like the "common people are too stupid to be told the truth" attitude (which includes uncertainities).
It is both too smug to work, and unworkable in today's networked world, where those same people will notice really fast that someone is treating them like idiots, and react with resentment and loss of trust.
Absolutely agree. I think of children as "people who don't know a lot right now". But really, we're all children to some extent. Children are always honed to look for inconsistencies, and if those inconsistencies aren't addressed, distrust builds up. "You said I can't be on my phone too long, so how come you're doing it?" Distrust leads to irrational judgements, often in a broad-brush pendulum swing towards the opposite position. Trust is built up painstakingly and organically. Distrust tears it all down instantly. As long as "the masses" (to which all of us, to some extent, belong) exhibit this asymmetry between trust and distrust, for the people who want to speak truly, the key is consistency. Never be (perceived as) the boy who cried wolf.
The common person can be told the truth. The common people, plural, cannot.
That’s what most authorities believe and there is good reason to believe it.
People in groups are irrational and tribal in ways people are not if you speak to them one on one. We don’t scale well, cognitively speaking. A whole bunch of “game of telephone” distortions happen and a bunch of legacy instincts from when we were little squirrel looking things take over.
If you look at how militaries operate it’s basically a giant set of procedures and customs designed to suppress all that shit and allow people in groups to behave somewhat more rationally. At least for a while, or in a limited domain. It kind of works. But we don’t want all of society to operate like that because it also suppresses art, invention, experience, play, etc.
The tribal parts of our nature can also be soothed by having trust in a good clan chief who is handling things. Those people can say things like "we dont know but we're working on it" because people trust them (requires integrity). Since that is almost non-existant (certainly during covid) we only get the worst parts.
I believe we can do fairly well in addressing people in groups. People are irrational, but the probability distribution of "things we say" against "what people will think and do" can be modulated for the better. The bigger issue, I think, is that the authorities can't be trusted. In what world will you find even 100 people who will agree to hold truth, justice, blah blah in high regard, and actually execute on those words? Corruption in the leaders exacerbates the illness of irrationality in the people.
> It wouldn't have, uncertainty creates general panic as well, that soon turns into disarray of chaotic recommendations among the masses.
A disarray of chaotic recommendations from on high is preferable, I guess?
I especially enjoyed viewing the early covid health department stickers later on. While masks were mandatory, there were health department stickers everywhere from a couple months earlier telling us that they were unhelpful.
I know nuance is hard, but it is entirely understandable that many people have distrust in authority when the message seemed to be high confidence do A(t) and A(t) was often contradictory to A(t-1). At that point, people pick the A(t) that had the advice they like.
When there were things like tell people masks are ineffective because they actually are effective but in limited supply, that also breeds distrust. I don't know how you solve that one, other than having a functional pandemic response logistics chain, and I don't think we ever had that; we did some supply warehousing after SARS but without a process to refresh the stock, it was not effective for COVID. I suspect there's no effort to build that up again, but I'd love to be wrong; my impressions are that the US healthcare and disease control ecosystem has not learned anything from COVID, again, I hope I'm wrong. Maybe acceptance of mRNA based vaccination and some amount of deployment of genetic identification of infection from patients.
"It would create panic" is a crutch that causes more destruction than it purportedly prevents. If you treat people like children, they behave like children.
It’s why leaders often speak in certainties. X is bad, Y is good type messaging.
It’s also why some people gravitate towards overly-confident narcissists. They feel a sense of comfort when someone seems to have all the answers, even if they don’t.
A large portion of people use "nuance" as a self-serving euphemism for their own lies or corruption, and explicitly call for no nuance when demanding conformity.
"Nuance" is an elite get out of jail free card: You're just too dense to understand how I was fundamentally right about everything when I was wrong in exactly the way you said I was wrong. The fact that I agree with you now is because there's finally enough evidence. Actually, it's a sign of your stupidity that you were "right" before. You should actually be grateful that I've come to agree with you; it shows how flexible and open to new information I am, and how lucky you were.
One can imagine a world where the lowest common denominator format being a richer structured binary format where every system has tooling to work with it out of the box and that would be considered human readable.