Post #1387633

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• @kentpitman@climatejustice.social 2026-04-06 23:10

  @vnikolov "The fragility of human civilization seems to increase." I think that's a key insight. I think that we think we're getting smarter. And so that makes us more confident. That's a problem. There are a number of structural ways in which we can see that it is not something we can rely on. One is that it's plain to anyone with scientific training that although we as a society have a number of people who are very smart, society as a whole is not behaving in a smart way. We have individuals that understand that war is bad or that we must have a sustainable environment, but society as a whole does not yet understand that and perhaps never will. One reason that society does not reason well is that it is obsessed with the short-term, because there is a way for those of us at the individual abstraction level to profit at the expense of the society as a collective. Fundamentally, there is a difference between an individual being prepared and a society being prepared. Although, ironically, the individuals that think themselves prepared probably or not. And the ones smart enough to know what that means, probably do not have the financial means to execute on it. But there's also a less well understood issue, or at least less talked about, which is that every scientific advance winds the spring a little tighter. You see this in airplane accidents for example. Because if you can fit 600 people on a plane instead of 500, then mostly people move around more efficiently but occasionally there's a bigger accident as measured by numbers of deaths than there would be with fewer people on a plane. And we feed more people per unit area of farmland now, which is great except that if that unit area of farmland gets wiped out by storms or disease, it's a bigger deal than it used to be. All the "smart", high leverage things we do increase our risk because risk is not something the capitalist markets care about. They mostly see risk avoidance as short-term inefficiency and would like to remove it.

  Open ##1387634