The Times of India published an interesting article explaining the 2025 Economics Nobel Prize:
"We're a planet of six billion ninnies living in a civilisation built by a few thousand savants," Scott Adams once said — and beneath the Dibert creator's misanthropy is a disarmingly accurate description of how the modern world works. Most of us don't invent, build, or discover anything of world-changing importance. We live inside systems we didn't design, using tools we don't understand, and benefitting daily from the work of people whose names we'll never know. And yet, we're quick to criticise those same systems — science, technology, capitalism — that lifted us from the brink of subsistence to a level of prosperity our ancestors couldn't imagine.
[...] For most of recorded history, humanity went nowhere fast. A peasant in medieval Europe lived much the same life as a farmer in ancient Mesopotamia. Empires rose and fell, plagues came and went, and the occasional invention — a plough here, a printing press there — might briefly improve life. But those improvements rarely built on one another. Progress was sporadic and short-lived. The line of human prosperity was basically flat.
This year's Nobel laureates — Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt — offer complementary answers to that question. Together, their work explains why humanity's growth engine roared to life — and what keeps it running today.
Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, argues that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about machines — it was about knowledge. Before the 18th century, most human innovation was based on know-how: practical skills, techniques, and tricks. People knew how to do things but not why they worked. Without that deeper understanding, invention couldn't build on itself. Progress happened in bursts but couldn't compound.
The Enlightenment changed that. Science and technology stopped being separate worlds and started reinforcing each other. Scientific discoveries explained why things worked, which allowed engineers to design better tools and machines. Those tools, in turn, raised new scientific questions. Mokyr calls this cycle "useful knowledge" — a feedback loop between theory and practice that transformed invention from a series of lucky accidents into a self-sustaining system.
But knowledge alone wasn't enough. It needed skilled people to turn ideas into reality — artisans, mechanics, and engineers — and it needed societies willing to embrace disruption. Britain was uniquely placed for this. It had a pool of skilled craftsmen and institutions flexible enough to allow new industries to rise, even when they destroyed old ones. Where older systems punished change, Britain began to reward it — and progress exploded.
If Mokyr explains how growth begins, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt explain how it continues. Their core idea is creative destruction — Joseph Schumpeter's famous term for capitalism's brutal but productive cycle. In a dynamic economy, new technologies don't complement the old; they replace them. A company invents a better product, dethrones the market leader, and is itself dethroned by the next innovator. Industries collapse, jobs disappear, and new ones emerge.
Beneath the smooth line of GDP growth lies this constant churn — a storm of destruction that fuels creation. It's not a flaw; it's the engine. The promise of profit drives firms to innovate, knowing they'll eventually be replaced. The fear of obsolescence drives them to run faster. And the result is relentless progress.
Creative destruction is not without pain. It produces winners and losers. It can move too quickly — wasting resources on marginal improvements — or too slowly, when monopolies choke competition. But without it, economies stagnate. Aghion and Howitt's work helps explain how societies can manage that balance: encouraging innovation without letting it spiral out of control.
The core lesson from this year's Nobel is deceptively simple: sustained prosperity isn't natural. It's engineered. It depends on the marriage of science and technology, on societies that embrace change rather than fear it, and on markets that reward innovation while punishing complacency. It's why we complain about slow Wi-Fi instead of famine. It's why we debate the ethics of artificial intelligence instead of the inevitability of plague. And it's why most of us have never known the grinding poverty, insecurity, and vulnerability that were once the default condition of human life.
Yet this system is fragile. It can be undone by monopolies, political short-sightedness, or cultural resistance to change. It can be slowed by hostility to science, censorship, or the temptation to cling to the familiar. If that happens, the line flattens again. Stagnation returns. And the miracle of modernity — the miracle we take for granted — begins to fade.
Scott Adams was right: civilisation is the work of a few thousand savants. But those savants are not lone geniuses; they are products of a system built over centuries — a system that turns knowledge into invention, invention into industry, and industry into prosperity. Our job is not to sneer at it but to sustain it. Because Cousin Greg, for all his awkwardness, is the reason we're here. And without him — without economics — the story of how eight plus billion ninnies ended up living in a civilisation of unimaginable abundance would make no sense at all.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, @03:10PM (3 children)
When I read:
> How Science, Understanding, and Capitalism Super-Charged Human Growth
I was expecting to read about how tall people are these days (compared to previous centuries).
Tfa is much more interesting, thanks to the submitter and editor for a thought provoking article.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 17, @05:51PM
>I was expecting to read about how tall people are these days (compared to previous centuries).
Same.
>Creative destruction is not without pain. It produces winners and losers.
It's evolution, of a different kind of species.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 17, @11:12PM (1 child)
Tall? What about wide?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, @11:43PM
Never mind the width, feel the quality. (Trump steaks slogan)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, @06:38PM (39 children)
How else can you control and enslave 8 billion ninnies? Only by putting the fear of god into their heathen souls.
And now, the decline in believers is what is causing the resulting decline in civil society around the globe
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 17, @09:48PM
indeed. Been a while since we had a good old fashioned Inquisition.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Friday October 17, @11:19PM
What a lack of imagination.
Crop destruction? Greed? Keeping up with Johneses? KGB? Drugs (alcohol included)?
The "freedom" of gig economy?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 18, @01:11AM (36 children)
In the early Roman Empire science was more advanced than more people suspect. Dr. Richard Carrier carefully researched and published two books on the subject. I haven't read the books, but his youtube videos are very informative. Carrier also describes why the Roman Empire science was largely lost, and my recollection emphasizes 2 reasons: crushing financial debt burden from a long war made maintaining the knowledge unaffordable, and Christians weren't interested (!!!!!) in the benefits of science.
If the last point seems unbelievable, you have to understand that Christian belief was much different than mainstream Christianity today. It was literally a death cult, with believers expecting Christ's return to cause the end of mankind any day now. People expecting to die really soon had no incentive to do a lot of work to make their lives better: goodbye maintenance and advancement of science.
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @09:52AM (34 children)
The Death Cult of Christianism is very much back in fashion now thanks to Peter Thiel [theconversation.com]. This is the logical and predicted end result of the far-right backlash against Islamofascism. I'll say it again, "I told you so."
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday October 18, @11:07AM (22 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @12:04PM (10 children)
There's a sort of cult-like following of rich dudes the world over. "I respect him because he's made so much money. " It's a dangerous way of not thinking.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Captival on Saturday October 18, @03:27PM (3 children)
Yes, if there's one thing we need to be afraid of, it's hard-working successful people.
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @03:30PM (2 children)
What's the correlation between hard work and financial success?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @08:50PM (1 child)
Your hard work goes to their financial success
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @09:05PM
Thanks, I knew someone would come to my rescue.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 18, @03:28PM (1 child)
It's dangerous for them. Rich dudes are a high nutrition food source and there's always been plenty of schemes for feeding off of them. Even if Thiel is a sincere kook, he's probably surrounded by parasites. To give a historical example, Henry Ford bought into some weird ideologies (including Nazism) and all it did was lose money. For example, he built a society called Fordlandia [wikipedia.org] (huge rubber tree plantation/city) built around Ford's ideals and business ideas. He lost $20 million on the venture (which would be equivalent to over $300 million today). It failed hard in six years.
As you can guess, I don't take such people or beliefs seriously. They're in the process of being milked.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @12:03PM
The motivation for Fordlandia was to break the monopoly on rubber that existed in the 1920s. Ford wasn't the only one who tried, Harvey Firestone also took a crack at this problem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_Natural_Rubber_Company [wikipedia.org]
Natural rubber is still an important commodity, and there was a lot of subterfuge involved over a hundred years ago, for example sneaking rubber plants (or seeds, forgot details) out of the Brazilian rainforest was illegal. At the same time, the Brazilians (indigenous peoples) were not very inclined to do this work. The big money searched equatorial regions around the globe looking for other suitable locations for growing and with local labor that could be convinced or coerced into doing the labor intensive sap harvesting.
(Score: 4, Funny) by sgleysti on Saturday October 18, @04:48PM (3 children)
Such an amazing way to express this concept. I'm going to steal this phrase; I run into non-thinking a fair amount at work.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @04:51PM (2 children)
Please spread it far and wide!
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @12:08PM (1 child)
When I work with students who are building things for academic engineering competitions, I usually say, "Do your own thinking." Often their tendency is to copy what they see others doing which more or less guarantees that you won't win. Copying usually means that you won't fully understand why you have chosen a particular design, and if you don't do your own thinking, then you won't be able to defend it for the experts that judge the quality of the design(s).
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday October 20, @08:57PM
Yes, but there's a problem. When people are young and enthusiastic and fond of doing all of their own thinking, they often end up reinventing the wheel, which they should have just re-used. They do so much of their own thinking that they never get anything finished. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Then you start reusing stuff. Then you realise that a lot of the stuff for re-using is garbage and you might as well re-invent it yourself simpler from scratch. Then you find you're old and tired and need to retire but there are too many years of pension contributions still to make and you have to at least try to keep up with some of the ludicrous fads. I must learn Python one of these days. It's all the rage. Everyone is trying very hard to use it. One of them might discover the secret if they keep trying. Then there's C++ and Rust. Don't get me started on C++ and Rust...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @06:22PM (7 children)
No, he's a dangerous man that is given too much power.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 19, @03:12PM (6 children)
All people are dangerous with too much power (pretty much by definition, right?). But what makes this a case of too much power rather than a case of blowhard?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @06:26PM (5 children)
His access to and distribution of government databases and his influence over the government itself. Nobody did an adequate background check on him. But, this is what people voted for.. nothing I can do... so by all means, go nuts
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20, @12:11AM (4 children)
They don't publicize adequate background checks. Good chance he's actually gone through some adequate background checks given his career and we just won't hear about it.
And really what sort of security check does one need before one can rant about Antichrist Greta?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20, @12:41AM (3 children)
I didn't know she was on the president's payroll. And I didn't know you were so scared of her. That's interesting
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20, @12:55AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21, @02:17PM (1 child)
:-) Well, since you're the one here ranting about her, I guess we'll have to send an investigator out to your place.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 21, @02:50PM
I'm not. Earlier in the thread, turgid had linked [soylentnews.org] to a story [theconversation.com] about Peter Thiel titled "Peter Thiel thinks Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist. What actually is the Antichrist?" That is the actual ranting in question and why I brought up "Antichrist Greta".
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @07:57PM (2 children)
so is elon, but in that case you've volunteered many unpaid hours doing his public relations work for him.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 19, @03:19PM (1 child)
That's because I share some opinions with him especially in the space sector. It's not rocket science how people who agree will state that agreement? Is there some reason why you seem to think that was worth mentioning? Perhaps we are supposed to disagree with every single rich dude opinion out there no matter how sensible?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @05:10PM
🥴
some advice: if elon offers you a drink, politely decline.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday October 18, @11:22AM
While we've moved on to better systems, tit for tat as implemented by Hammurabi was an enormous innovation in law because it introduced proportionality. Eye for an eye doesn't leave the whole world blind because it would only happen when someone blinded someone - which isn't that often, even counting accidents. The missing piece here is that only the culprit is held responsible - rather than punishing people who just happen to be associated or related to the culprit.
So in a situation where X blinded Y, instead of "Let's do justice by grabbing several members of X's clan and blinding them deliberately", a third party (the judge and enforcers of law) would just blind X reducing the potential for clan warfare and the number of blind people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 18, @06:50PM (9 children)
Jehovah's Witnesses "live for today" because the rapture is expected "any day now."
Sister in law is a JW, cost her her marriage and solidly alienated her from her older son, the younger one (who was about 5 instead of about 10 when she converted) sort of tolerates her, but definitely isn't attending the Kingdom Hall since he moved out.
They definitely make some interesting choices, most seem to favor modest short term happiness while remaining oblivious to the long term negative consequences that inevitably follow just a year or two in the future.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @07:06PM (4 children)
There are support groups for people who have been Jehovah's Witnesses. I try not to engage in religious discussion with them, but the last ones who came to the door I did admit to being an atheist. They had travelled about 60 miles on dangerous icy roads. We agreed that there was too much war and pain in the world and that people from all over need to see each others all as humans.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @08:46PM (1 child)
You did invite them in for mushy peas and fried Mars bars, right?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @09:04PM
I think the atheist bit put them off but I would have given them tea or coffee and biscuits.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 18, @09:01PM (1 child)
>There are support groups for people who have been Jehovah's Witnesses.
Any in Florida? Do they have "Watchtower"-like pamphlets that I can hand to my sister in law?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @12:16PM
A good friend lived in small town Virginia, near his uni. It was an area heavily proselytized by all sorts of religious groups, he had JW, Moonies, you name it, at his door several times a week.
Eventually he started to collect the pamphlets from each group. Then when the next group showed up, he pretended to be already converted to some other faith and used the pamphlets to proselytize right back.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @10:31PM (3 children)
If you're an atheist you might also live for today and for yourself and not "humanity" as a whole.
The main thing is how much hope you have for the future.
For example, if you're living in a country where there's not much hope for you in the next year or month even, you're not going to invest in anything long term.
What some religions provide in such scenarios is an irrational hope so people still invest their time and resources into doing certain stuff despite the future seeming bleak. Nevermind the present difficulties, you will be rewarded in heaven, etc etc.
Does atheism provide people such a hope? If it doesn't that could be a reason why religion out-competed atheism in the bad old days, which were often quite bad. It's probably wrong to just assume God will take care of your kids and keep popping them out, but in the long run, the ones producing kids are the ones who'd still be producing kids generations later; whereas if you being a responsible rational and ethical person don't have any kids due to the future not looking good, there'd be fewer people like you in the future...
Also, the placebo effect is real and quite significant[1]. Many religious people have easier access to it. Pray and the pain will go away (20% of the time YMMV). What are atheists gonna do to access the placebo effect? So another competitive advantage of religion?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/rising-placebo-effect [science.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday October 19, @10:24AM (2 children)
My personal view is that there's no afterlife, no Heaven, no Hell, no reward and no punishment. This is what we have right here. Therefore we need to stick together and help each other out to make this life the absolute best it can be for as many of us as possible. The malignant narcissist/sociopath view would be different. It would be to take as much as possible for one's self by whatever means available regardless of the cost to anyone else. Fortunately these people are a small percentage of the population. Some of them purport to support religions in order to exercise control of people who genuinely believe. Joe Stalin (Joe, Man of Steel) first trained as a priest but then realised he could control and exploit more people by becoming a Communist dictator, for example.
Anyway, who wants to live in a world where the majority are ruthlessly exploited and miserable?
I need to do that journal entry. By the way, a couple of years ago I did the British Humanist Association's quiz on their website and I scored 100%. It turns out I'm a Humanist. I haven't joined. I don't do organised religion.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @12:24PM (1 child)
> It turns out I'm a Humanist. I haven't joined. I don't do organised religion.
Yea!! Good to read both these things.
Here's a tag line you might use, at least in non-confrontational situations:
"post-theological"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201102/on-being-post-theological [psychologytoday.com]
As I've posted a few times here, my parents didn't take me to any sort of organized religion. As a kid I was ignorant of the power of the church/temple/etc and to some extent was outcast from most of my grade school peers. One story -- a childhood friend asked me if I was agnostic or atheist and tried to explain the difference to me. My answer at the time was "neither" -- and when I came across the link above I finally realized that it was a good answer.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 19, @07:49PM
I'm sure an Evangelical Christian will be along any minute now to explain to me how I'm really a Devil-worshipper.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 18, @10:57AM
Consider the first one: "crushing financial debt burden". That's of the Roman state. If there had been private support for Roman Empire-era science, then there would be an alternative that would keep the maintaining the knowledge affordable.
As to the Christian religion, what other religion did better? My view is that no religion had an explicit interest in science except perhaps a few knowledge-specific deities like Thoth.
I think the real reason is that there wasn't strong infrastructure for science in the first place. For example, the steam engine was discovered on multiple occasions (documented twice [wikipedia.org] in existing ancient European sources according to Wikipedia), but not exploited until the 1700s. Christianity wouldn't have been a factor since these discoveries were made on or before the 1st century AD.
There wasn't the massive education systems that started to form in the Renaissance. There wasn't organized documentation of scientific work. And most important, there wasn't the constructive feedback between scientific discovery and economic exploitation of those discoveries which drives modern science without the need for state-level patronage.
By the time Christian belief had the power to affect scientific progress several centuries later, it had moved well beyond that starting phase and those alleged beliefs. Keep in mind that it became the official religion of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire. The rulers wouldn't have accepted a "death cult". But they would have accepted a religion that stamped out potential threats to the ruling order. Same for its acceptance throughout Europe.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @12:23AM
Stop promoting captialist's self-interests by calling this not even Ig-Nobel prize that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @03:45AM
All that "Industrial revolution" is impossible if people can't get fed.
For an Industrial Revolution you need 1 farmer to feed many more non-farmers.
So before that you need an Agricultural Revolution. A better plow and harness from China helps...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/how-did-china-s-culture-and-development-create-its-huge-population.html [slate.com]
https://howardsuer.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/how-the-chinese-plow-changed-the-world/ [wordpress.com]
Education can also help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education#Europe_overview [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dame_school [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @09:46AM (48 children)
For most of recorded history, humanity went nowhere fast. A peasant in medieval Europe lived much the same life as a farmer in ancient Mesopotamia. Empires rose and fell, plagues came and went, and the occasional invention — a plough here, a printing press there — might briefly improve life. But those improvements rarely built on one another. Progress was sporadic and short-lived. The line of human prosperity was basically flat.
For ordinary people, peasants, who were serfs and effectively tied to a particular piece of land and a particular employer (lord) for life, the Great Plague was a liberating factor for those who survived.
In the true spirit of Capitalism there was now a shortage of supply and so prices went up. That shortage was of human labour. So many people died as a result of the plague that lords now couldn't be guaranteed of having their land farmed and an income generated. Peasants no longer had to be content with whatever pittance they were offered for their labour. They could now choose an employer who would pay better and many did.
It's the simple law of Supply and Demand.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 18, @11:01AM (43 children)
While true, it misses an important point. Peasants make more peasants. In the absence of progress, population growth would result in a swing back to the employer of human labor as supply increased relative to demand. The game changer was technology that made human labor vastly more valuable.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @12:02PM (42 children)
A funny thing happens when you let women have an education. They produce fewer babies. They learn about contraception and birth control. They have careers. They live longer. There's a good reason the Alt-Wrong are anti-education and anti-enlightenment in general.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 18, @06:57PM (41 children)
>women have an education. They produce fewer babies. They learn about contraception and birth control. They have careers.
My college educated mother had a 45 year career as a teacher, not because she was educated and wanted a career, but because the cost of having a decent home in a decent neighborhood with decent cars to drive to decent stores didn't work on a single teacher salary (my father's), so... they both worked.
She also was far more in favor of having children than my father was, even with her education and career.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday October 18, @07:07PM (1 child)
And I would have loved it if I'd married a rich woman and I could have spent all my time at home drinking beer, playing guitar and playing with my PeeCee.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 18, @09:04PM
Both of my parents' parents were also dual income households, but in their generation (born circa 1915) the dual income household was rare, and somewhat un-necessary. A "real man" could get a job that paid more than enough to build a new home in the suburb and buy a new Ford sedan every 3 years (because they turned to shit after two...)
Part of our economic problem was location: Florida. Land of the rich retirees who are too stingy to let go of a single red cent they aren't forced to.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday October 18, @09:14PM (38 children)
One contrary anecdote doesn't stop data..
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/11A9B/production/_113374327_global_fertility_rates_july2020_640-nc.png.webp [bbci.co.uk]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 18, @09:38PM (37 children)
The data is the data but all underlying assumptions are that: ass u mptions.
My life, and the life of people around me, strongly suggests that the falling birth rates are not as much due to women's education as they are due to women's inability to meet their desired standard of living with more children / without a job.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday October 19, @04:09PM (36 children)
"My ignorance is better than your knowledge." Sorry, but I take data any day over wildly misinterpreted personal experiences.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 19, @10:28PM (35 children)
A major failing I have noticed with AI is that it tends to believe what it reads, leading to problems when the source material was less than forthcoming about suitability (and lack thereof) of tools for purposes.
A major failing I have noticed with khallow is that it tends to believe what it reads when what it reads agrees with its prejudices and established world view. Luckily khallow is not empowered to make as many important decisions as AI already is.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20, @12:06AM (34 children)
"I have noticed" is the key flaw with that. Notice this stuff differently and it's no long my fault. Again, "My ignorance is better than your knowledge." is not a serious argument. Do reality differently.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 20, @02:41AM (33 children)
You may be missing the point: "your knowledge" is a big act of faith and assumptions on your part. You are trusting not only the data presented, the collectors of that data, but also their analysis. At many levels in that chain, thumbs are on the scale coloring the perception of the masses to serve the owners of the thumbs.
Nobody on this planet has the capacity to collect all that data firsthand. Few have the means to make reliable and accurate assessments of its veracity.
Sleep tight with "your knowledge," I'm sure it makes you feel better.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20, @05:22AM (32 children)
We already know how to handle data and use it to generate genuine evidence. We don't have the same process for subjective personal dogma masquerading as life experience.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 20, @12:09PM (31 children)
>We already know how to handle data and use it to generate genuine evidence
You don't even know who "we" really is.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 20, @02:17PM (30 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 20, @10:09PM (29 children)
> I don't fully know who uses things like the scientific method or analyzes data. That's irrelevant.
When you don't vet your sources, you don't know their methods, or motives.
>We have data on billions of people over many decades
And "we" can read correlations in the portions of that data that merit trust. The data doesn't tell you causations, billions of measly personal anecdotes are the real causations.
> Yet you've come up with some remarkably weaselly and highly subjective excuses for why we should ignore the knowledge we've acquired.
Again with the royal we. How's your global perspective out there in Moosefucker ID?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 21, @03:44AM (28 children)
I can't say for MostCynical whether he did said vetting. But I did. This isn't a single source claim and a lot of the sources are way more dependable than a JoeMerchant is. There are multiple estimates of population out there and they all show the slowing of population growth as advertised.
In other words, you have nothing. At some point, we need to use our brains on that data or anything could be true. Remember you're talking about imaginary vetting problems. You're nowhere near accepting the rational consequences of that data.
You're not the only person on the internet.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 21, @02:43PM (27 children)
And that I agree with, slowing but continued growth on a global scale. On a national, state, county, and neighborhood scale, from my perspective, growth isn't even slowing that much.
In other words, you have nothing. I disagree with your brains. You may think your brains are better than my brains, I definitely think that mine are better than yours.
Tell me again how the coral reefs dying off is no big deal...
The internet is very different from ground truth, personal observation, measly anecdotes. I trust those anecdotes more than some words on a glowing screen.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 21, @10:54PM (26 children)
So what? Your perception is not global and probably not even getting the nuances of growth in your scope.
So you still have nothing, but had to say it anyway.
You have yet to show [soylentnews.org] coral reefs are relevant or dying! From that link:
What changed since? Or is this going to be yet another sad example just in this thread of the JoeMerchant behavior that ignores evidence?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 21, @11:12PM (25 children)
>What changed since?
Based on the latest research through late 2025, global coral reefs are in a state of severe crisis, having recently passed a climate tipping point. The fourth worldwide mass bleaching event, first confirmed by NOAA in April 2024, is ongoing and has impacted a record 84.4% of the world's reef area.
Global status
Widespread crisis: According to an October 2025 report led by the Global Systems Institute, coral reefs have officially passed their first climate tipping point, with warming pushing them beyond their capacity to recover.
Mass bleaching event: The current global bleaching event, which began in 2023, is the largest ever recorded. Between January 2023 and September 2025, it impacted 84.4% of the world's coral reef area across at least 83 countries and territories. This surpasses the previous record set during the 2014-2017 event, which affected 68.2% of reefs.
Species extinction risk: A November 2024 reassessment for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species reported that 44% of warm-water, reef-building coral species are now at risk of extinction, an increase from 33% in 2008.
Vulnerability to heat: The crisis has intensified because global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5°C threshold in 2024, pushing warm-water corals past their thermal limits.
Overall loss: Between 2009 and 2019, the world lost approximately 14% of its coral, a figure expected to climb to 90% by 2030.
Regional impact reports
Great Barrier Reef (GBR): After a severe bleaching event in early 2024, the GBR experienced a sharp and widespread decline in coral cover.
An August 2025 report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) noted significant coral mortality and recorded the largest annual declines in coral cover in the northern and southern regions in 39 years of monitoring.
While coral cover remained near long-term averages in many areas, the AIMS report highlighted an "elevated disturbance environment," with shorter recovery intervals between disturbances.
Disturbances in 2024 included a mass bleaching event with the largest spatial footprint ever recorded on the GBR, as well as two tropical cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks.
Mesoamerican Reef: The 2024 Mesoamerican Reef Report Card revealed mixed results. While overall health remains a concern, with 62% of monitored sites still in poor or critical condition, some sites in fair and good condition showed improvement.
However, the 2023 bleaching event was the most severe on record for the region, reducing coral cover and causing high mortality, with mortality continuing after the report concluded.
In a positive sign, management efforts led to a 40% increase in commercial fish biomass and a 30% increase in herbivorous fish biomass.
Caribbean: In the Caribbean, coral mortality was extremely high following the severe 2023 and 2024 bleaching events. Reports indicate that very little coral remains on many reefs in the region.
Western Indian Ocean (WIO): A report released by CORDIO East Africa in early 2024 documented severe thermal stress in the WIO, leading to widespread bleaching and mortality.
Research and conservation efforts
Resilience research: A key focus of current research and conservation is resilience-based management (RBM), which aims to identify and prioritize management actions that help reefs withstand and recover from disturbances.
Funding and policy: The urgency of the coral crisis was highlighted at the COP16 and COP29 conferences. However, significant funding gaps remain.
Reef restoration techniques:
Biorock technology: This method, which applies low-voltage electricity to steel structures to accelerate coral growth, is being explored in places like Jamaica, the Grenadines, and the Maldives. It has shown some success in promoting the growth and stress resistance of surviving coral, and has even been used to regenerate sand beaches.
Transplantation: In an effort to save endangered species, scientists transported hundreds of endangered corals from Florida to the Texas Gulf Coast in September 2024 for research and restoration.
Monitoring advancements: In 2025, NOAA Coral Reef Watch updated its bleaching alert products to include new alert levels (1-5), providing greater precision in assessing heat stress.
Global monitoring: The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) continues its work, with a new global report expected in 2026. A November 2024 webinar was held to support data contributors for the upcoming report.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 22, @02:39AM (23 children)
Show that the alleged lost coral is actually lost. Last time this came up, it turns out the losses were exaggerated.
All this continues to ignore the problems I brought up earlier, such as pollution, silting, overfishing, etc. For example, I see the NOAA continues to use [noaa.gov] a map of water temperatures when it talks about coral bleaching - instead of a map of coral bleaching.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 22, @02:41PM (22 children)
Pick all the rotten cherries you like, 2019 was around the time you were claiming that coral bleaching was an insignificant phenomenon due to local pollution issues.
Focus on the results from 2024 and 2025 - how's that trending since 2019? I smell bugpaste for breakfast in 2050.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @01:44AM (21 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 23, @03:16AM (20 children)
Since 2019, the core understanding of coral bleaching has evolved to reflect an accelerated crisis marked by record-breaking global bleaching events and significant advancements in science and conservation technology. Research has moved from simply documenting bleaching to exploring the mechanisms of coral resilience and developing new intervention strategies.
The escalating crisis: Bleaching intensifies and spreads
Fourth global bleaching event. From 2023 to 2025, the world has been undergoing its fourth global bleaching event, the largest on record. In this period, 84.4% of the world's coral reefs have experienced bleaching-level heat stress, compared to 68.2% during the previous event from 2014–2017.
Record heat stress. In response to escalating ocean temperatures, bleaching alert systems have added new levels to better reflect the increased risk of mass coral mortality. In 2024, the southern Great Barrier Reef experienced its highest recorded heat stress levels, leading to substantial coral loss.
Expanding to deeper and colder reefs. Bleaching is now affecting areas previously thought to be safe. Researchers found the deepest known evidence of bleaching below 90 meters in the Indian Ocean, affecting reefs that were once considered resilient to warming waters.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @04:28AM (19 children)
Here's a typical example of the problem. Bleaching-level heat stress can be due to climate change. It can also be due to pollution, silting, overfishing, and the other things that are widespread in oceans today and cause coral bleaching events, directly and indirectly. And let's revisit this obnoxious claim:
How are we going to lose 76% more coral in a decade? What's the mechanism?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 23, @11:48AM (10 children)
We have the usual derailment of JoeMerchant extreme assertions. It's not 2030. It's not 90%. And it's not "expected" (note the phrase "may occur" as well as the lack of consideration of how much coral decrease would happen anyway even if the 1.5 C limit were somehow achieved - remember heat stress is not the only cause of coral bleaching and heat stress would occur anyway even in the absence of global warming altogether).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 23, @12:42PM (2 children)
>We have the usual derailment of JoeMerchant extreme assertions.
I'm not the one making the assertions, just repeating what I read - same as you on population topics. And what I read on corals tracks 100% with my personal observations around the Caribbean.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 24, @04:58AM (1 child)
When you type things like:
Am I corrupting your typing fingers with my mental failwaves and forcing you to type false claims? No, you made the assertion.
We already know your personal observations are garbage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 24, @06:21PM
>When you type things like:
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you would recognize a copy-paste job... though I do approve the material and trust the source more than what you type.
>the world lost approximately 14% of its coral, a figure expected to climb to 90% by 2030.
2030 is five years off, we're likely to have another major bleaching event between now and then, and the current bleaching event has impacted 84% of the world's reefs. Some begin significant recovery after the initial bleaching, many do not (data I have seen on that aspect are tremendously variable). The real problem is: if you can regrow to 1.2x in five years, but you keep getting knocked back to 0.4x every five years, that's past the tipping point, you're going to dwindle to where coral reefs are to the oceans what lions and tigers are becoming to the land, with more in captivity than in the wild.
Wekhallow already knows your personal observations are garbage.And that's your perspective, you have my pity.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 24, @02:36AM (6 children)
Florida’s coral reef has lost two species that help limit hurricane damage | Vox https://share.google/iy68jUz9FsCRZjkIW [share.google]
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 24, @05:17AM (5 children)
And you have yet to discuss what nailed those species, staghorn and elkhorn corals. There are multiple diseases wiping out coral in the Caribbean. Both staghorn and elkhorn coral (which are closely related) are susceptible to white band disease [wikipedia.org]. It is thought that disease is spread by ship ballast water. Consider this blurb:
Warm water increases the spread of these diseases so they would spread more with global warming and thermal heat stress, but the key point above is that these two species were already massively reduced in population before the alleged problems of recent climate change became a factor.
This is another example of the tendency to blame existing non-climate problems on climate change.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 24, @06:24PM (4 children)
>This is another example of the tendency to blame existing non-climate problems on climate change.
Welp, when you're eating bug paste in the nursing home, just continue to blame those other problems that climate change pushed over the tipping point.
Nothing happens in isolation, not even contemporary polar bears crossing vast new stretches of open water...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 25, @04:18AM (3 children)
There are ways to be more truth-seeking in your lifetime than fantasizing about being right before we die of old age.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 25, @07:56PM (2 children)
>There are ways to be more truth-seeking in your lifetime than fantasizing about being right before we die of old age.
Yes, there certainly are.
Ever talk to a MAGA hat wearer in a nursing home? They seem not to have the slightest concept that there is anything in life other than fantasizing about being right.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @01:40AM (1 child)
Yes. Sounds like they better hurry.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 26, @02:46PM
This is why the church says it is never too late to be redeemed.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 23, @12:40PM (7 children)
> Bleaching-level heat stress can be due to climate change. It can also be due to pollution, silting, overfishing, and the other things that are widespread in oceans today
Ever been in the ocean?
Land based pollution, natural and manmade, "settles out" within a few miles of shore. Silts settle, chemicals / nutrients break down in the sun, get metabolized by the plankton, and settle to the bottom as well. By 10 miles offshore the character of surface water is completely different offshore compared with what you see on beaches and in near-shore boating. That settling of land based pollution and silt continues all the way to the bottom, relatively close to shore in most places. The oceans are big.
Overfishing is a huge issue, but much more so for the fish than for corals. The majority of the global fishing fleet doesn't drag destructive nets along coral reefs - not so much out of respect for the reef and the fish it provides for them to harvest, but because the reefs bite back, destroying nets and other gear that gets too close to them.
>>And let's revisit this obnoxious claim:
>Overall loss: Between 2009 and 2019, the world lost approximately 14% of its coral, a figure expected to climb to 90% by 2030.
Not my claim, that comes from those scientists you respect so much when they say what you want to hear.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 24, @05:23AM (6 children)
Contrary to your assertion we have a variety of pollution [qld.gov.au] (nutrients, silting/sediment, and pesticides) impacting the Great Barrier Reef from more than a few miles away.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 24, @06:29PM (5 children)
>Contrary to your assertion we have a variety of pollution [qld.gov.au] (nutrients, silting/sediment, and pesticides) impacting the Great Barrier Reef from more than a few miles away.
Silt more than a few miles offshore is not, and never has been, my assertion... that would be the Australian government, and it really sounds more like points you were making while I was pointing out that much of the Great Barrier Reef is (well, soon to be was) far too far offshore to be significantly impacted by land based pollution sources.
There are some things that make it farther - microchains of styrofoam for one, when a styrofoam cup breaks down in the ocean it eventually becomes literally billions of microscopic floating bits, bits significant enough for micro plankton to interact with - they mostly take advantage of the floaty bits to stay up in the sunlight - which is good for the micro plankton, but also a significant change in the overall ecosystem, basically yet another uncontrolled experiment of modern industry with unpredictable net outcome. In the final analysis, it may be the floaty bits of broken down styrofoam that save us all, but more likely they're just going to muck up the status quo and put a lot of other things in stress they didn't used to have.
I like the holocene, too bad we're working so hard to end it.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @02:10AM (4 children)
So what in your life's experiences and perceptions makes you more of an expert on pollution in the Great Barrier Reef than the people who are paid by the Australian government to study the problem?
According to my AI assistant, there have been 34 geological epochs like the Holocene. Only one of them is still around. Geological epochs come and go. And it remains common sense to treat the substantial geological changes of our presence as a new epoch (perhaps including the Holocene as the official start of that new epoch - humans were causing substantial changes back then too).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 26, @03:27PM (3 children)
>So what in your life's experiences and perceptions makes you more of an expert on pollution in the Great Barrier Reef than the people who are paid by the Australian government to study the problem?
We can start with once removed accounts from friends and acquaintances who have dived both the near shore and offshore reefs. Enhance that with video documentaries produced for profit in the entertainment industry, yes, they're sensationalist and biased, but they also show snapshots of actual observations.
My experience with video documentary producers includes working extensively with a small time producer who did a series of year long projects with various subjects, one being following the Grateful Dead around and doing extensive interview / documentary in the parking lot scene - the year before Gerry Garcia died. He does provide a reasonably unbiased picture, the kind of perspective you would get from being there yourself, but it only takes a couple of hours in your living room instead of months of travel. Sure, it's less complete, but proportionally much more efficient.
> there have been 34 geological epochs like the Holocene. Only one of them is still around. Geological epochs come and go.
Being an intelligent and capable species, I would prefer to "keep the thermostat in a comfortable range" instead of cranking it up hotter than comfortable just to funnel some party money to a few old guys for their last hurrah decades of life.
We have the power to change the climate, we are demonstrating that right now. What we lack is the collective will to use that power to benefit the most people.
Anyway, on the government side, I don't have experience with Australian government, but from what I do think I know it seems very similar to our own. I do have many deep experiences with studies funded by our federal and state governments, as well as private industry, and a clear pattern emerges from those experiences. "Scientific" studies funded by anybody have their funding contingent upon expected results. Some academics "fund their own" out of tiny little departmental budgets, but they get thrashed in the literature as "too small to be relied upon." The big authoritative studies take big funding which is carefully alotted based on the agendae of the funders. Our politicians are somewhat beholden to their constituency, but much more beholden to their lobbyist-donors who enable them to be elected by that constituency. Without the donors' funding, the politicians lose their edge in the elections - they can't make it on policy decisions and popular appeal alone, not against a better funded opponent. Our common knife-edge contests feels like the kind of tension that investment bankers like to put on the companies they invest in, letting them teeter on the edge of viability until the investors can demand near total control due to the criticality of their investments to keep the business viable. So... how does this filter down to a NICHD SIDS study on the efficacy of infant apnea monitors? The "powers that be" were funding the study to kill infant apnea monitors as a standard of care, the insurance industry wanted them gone - too expensive. So, a study was funded that was designed, from the outset, to show the monitors as conclusively ineffective. I got injected into the process working for a company making an alternate infant apnea monitoring technology that actually is effective. The researchers getting the grant had enough clout to steer the study to include our technology, but the funders behind the grant had enough sway to ensure that the study including our technology was "too small for statistical significance." The study was big enough to smear the other tech far enough to get it dropped by insurance as a coverable expense, but not big enough to establish our (even more expensive) tech as effective. This pattern of conditional funding based on predicted outcome has repeated dozens of times over the decades.
So, you can't believe either one, they're both biased, they're both going to show you what benefits the people with vested interests - in the case of the entertainment focused information: what sells? In the case of "big science" it's what benefits the people funding the science. But you can trust "the pictures" to some extent, they're usually not fabricated - more often just cherry picked to one degree or another. You can corroborate information from disparate sources, and ultimately you can trust your own senses.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @07:46PM (2 children)
And now that I spent thirty seconds reading your tragic tale, I'm fully qualified by my life experiences to declare it bunk.
Somewhat warmer is more comfortable for most of the Earth's land area which lies in the northern hemisphere away from the equator, just saying. And more CO2 for plants to grow. A better reason would be that there's no natural stopping point for human generation of CO2 and the rate of change is pretty fast by geological standards.
As to the "last hurrah of life" a key problem with climate change advocacy is its complete lack of understanding of why CO2 is generated. It's generated in a vast amount of productive activity supporting 8+ billion people and make better lives for them. Until that gets addressed seriously (rather than merely assume it'll resolve itself), we will have problems with getting those 8+ billion people to go along with the program.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 26, @08:23PM (1 child)
>And now that I spent thirty seconds reading your tragic tale
That I spent more than 30 years living, so... thanks for your knee jerk reaction.
>Somewhat warmer is more comfortable for most of the Earth's land area
Somewhat warmer, like 2C average, will be rather devastating to large tracts of the most populated land on Earth. It also has a nasty habit of releasing heavy "transient challenges" that may give us +20C for a few centuries - release of methane stores is a big one, there are others and I'm sure there are a few we won't even realize as a possibility until they start happening. Earth is big, and our deep understanding of it all is quite small by comparison.
> It's generated in a vast amount of productive activity supporting 8+ billion people and make better lives for them.
And when you ask those 8+ billion people whether or not they want to melt Greenland, well over 4+ billion of them say HELL NO, and a remaining 3+ billion sort of shrug their shoulders in apathy or ignorance. The fierce advocates for fossil fuels are small in numbers and mostly getting a big financial benefit from their continued use.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @08:48PM
As I already noted, my life experiences make me very qualified to do that.
We're pretty close to that already and the devastation is lacking.
Or even bigger, more exciting numbers. Too bad there's no evidence that this is something we should worry about.
How about ask them if we should stop their progress to better lives, full stop? I bet Greenland will look nice without all that ice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 26, @03:11AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 18, @10:39PM (3 children)
I'm sure China had large populations and large plagues as well, they had better agricultural productivity than Europe for centuries. They had clever people, gunpowder, cannons, education, steel, etc. But they didn't have a practical steam engine that could actually do work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#Early_experiments [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 19, @10:29AM (2 children)
Imagine where we'd be today if the Ancient Greeks or Romans had invented a useful steam engine. I mean, the Greeks had the Apothecary Mechanism, which was very advanced indeed. With the right sort of philosophy, they'd have got there. There was too much of this Aristotle nonsense, though.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Sunday October 19, @03:22PM (1 child)
And not enough of the Archimedes nonsense, amirite?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 19, @05:20PM
and along with that, not so much Apothecary System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apothecaries%27_system [wikipedia.org] (English weights & measures)
and more Antikythera mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [wikipedia.org] (astronomy calculator)