Ok, very well. Iâm not sure itâs reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topicâbut changing requires efforts and time, and itâs not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
In an ideal world weâd look for everything by ourselves, but in reality we just donât have time to dig into everything.But this links to motivation thatâs the topic of the other response.
Ok, very well. Iâm not sure itâs reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topicâbut changing requires efforts and time, and itâs not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
I donât expect everyone to do it. I expect more than zero people to do it.
Or, if it is zero people, then I expect people to acknowledge a serious, urgent problem, and to appreciate me pointing it out, and to stop assuming their group/âside is right about things which no one on in their group/âside (including themselves) will take responsibility for the correctness of.
Skimming and other ways of reducing reading can work well and Iâve been interested in them for a long time. Getting better at reading helps too (Iâve read over 400,000 words in a day, so 10,000 doesnât seem like such a daunting journey to me). But ignoring arguments, when no one on your side has identified any error, is problematic. So I suggest people should often reply to the first error (if no one else already did that in a way you find acceptable). That makes progress possible in ways that silence doesnât.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that youâve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing. At that point there are ways for problem solving and progress to happen, e.g. the author (or anyone who agrees with him) could give a counter-argument, a rewrite, or a summary (particularly if you identify a specific area of interest â then they could summarize just the part you care about).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
Itâs particularly important to do this with stuff which criticizes your ideas â which claims youâre wrong about something important and impactful â so itâs highly relevant to you.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that youâve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing.
This is a good point -I just think that most people are not even aware that this is an option (admitting you didnât read everything but still want to engage isnât obivous in our way of doing things).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
I read your post on long articlesâit provides some really useful insights, so thanks for that. I still think it could be a bit more attractive to readers (summary, bullet points, more titles and sections, bolding, exemples, maybe 3 minutes shorter), but it was worth reading. The fact you said âdonât stop reading unless you spotted an errorâ helped too ^^
Attracting readers is a different activity than truth seeking. Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not. If I avoid errors that anyone knows about, then Iâve done a great job. A rational forum should be able to notice that, value it and engage with it, without me doing anything extra to get attention.
Truth seeking and attracting typical readers are different skills. People usually arenât great at both. A community that emphasizes and rewards attracting will tend to get issues wrong and alienate rational people.
I got to a major, motivating point (âa bias where long criticism is frequently ignoredâ) in the third sentence. If someone is unable to recognize that as something to care about, or gets bored before getting that far, then I donât think theyâre the right audience for me. They could also find out about âMethod: Reply to the First Important Errorâ by reading the bullet point outline.
I read far worse writing all the time. Itâs not a big deal. Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc. They should also pick up on less prominent quality signals like clarity.
Any time I spend on polishing means less writing and research. I write or edit daily. I used to edit/âpolish less and publish more, and I still think that might have been better. There are tradeoffs. I now have a few hundred thousand unpublished words awaiting editing, including over 30,000 words in EA-related drafts since I started posting here.
Iâm also more concerned with attracting especially smart, knowledgeable, high-effort readers than attracting a large number of readers. Put another way, the things youâre asking for are not how I decide what articles or authors to read.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback. I intentionally added some summary to some articles recently, which I viewed as similar to an abstract from an academic paper. Iâm not necessarily against that kind of thing, but I do have concerns to take into account.
I must admit that I am trying to aim for a different approach: writing stuff adapted to human psychology.
I donât go from postulates like âArticles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or notâ or âReaders should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.â It would be very nice if people were to do that. But our brains, although they can learn that to some extent with the good educational methods and the right incentives, just didnât really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I donât expect people to do that.
Reading text which is long, abstract, dry, remote from our daily environments, and with no direct human interactions, is possible, but this is akin to swimming against the flow: if thereâs a good reason to do that, I will, but it will be much harder. And I need to know what I can get out of itâwith a serious probability.
I guess thatâs one reason people tend to ignore what science says: itâs boring. It has a âreader-deterring styleâ as one paper puts it.
I really recommend this paper by Ugo Bardi that explicits why that contributes to the decline of science:
The human mind has limits. So, how to make a mass of concepts available outside the specific fields that produced them? One option is to make them âmind-sizedâ. It implies breaking down complex ideas into sub-units that can be easily digested.
Science is, after all, a human enterprise and it has to be understood in human terms, otherwise it becomes a baroque accumulation of decorative items. [...]
Scientific production and communication cannot be seen as separate tasks: they are one and the same thing.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures. Metaphores. Examples. Bullet points and bolding. Thereâs a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easilyâand itâs useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think youâre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donât know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate and (boring!?) scholarship like mine. That is one of many topics where Iâd have some things to say if people changed their debate methodology, scholarly standards, etc. (I already tried debating this topic and many others in the past, but I found that it didnât work well enough and I identified issues like debate methodology as the root cause of various failures.)
I also agree with and already (try to) do some of what you say. I have lots of material breaking things into smaller parts and making it easier to learn. But there are difficulties, e.g. when the parts are small then the value from each one individually (usually) becomes small too. To get a big result people have to learn many small parts and combine them, which can be hard and require persistence and project management. Youâre not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which itâs harder to find answers for.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures.
Iâm personally not a very visual thinker and Iâm good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist. If you had said that the majority of people like pictures, then I could have agreed with you. Itâs not that big a deal â Iâm used to ignoring comments that assume I donât exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. Iâm not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
I think youâre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donât know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate
Iâm actually interested in thatâif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iâd be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iâll use it.
Iâm personally not a very visual thinker and Iâm good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist.
Ok, I didnât mean that everybody is like that, I was making a generalization. Sorry you took it that way. What I had in mind was that when you see something hapening in front of you it sticks much better than reading about it.
Iâm actually interested in thatâif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iâd be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iâll use it.
I have already tried telling people about evolutionary psychology and many other topics that they are interested in.
I determined that it mostly doesnât work due to incorrect debate methodology, lack of intellectual skills (e.g. tree-making skills or any alternative to accomplish the same organizational purposes), too-low intellectual standards (like being dismissive of âsmallâ errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims youâre losing to in debate), poor project management, getting emotional, lack of background knowledge, lack of willingness to get new background knowledge mid-discussion, unwillingness to proceed in small, organized steps, imprecision, etc.
Hence Iâve focused on topics with priority which I believe are basically necessary prerequisite issues before dealing with the other stuff productively.
In other words, I determined that standard, widespread, common sense norms for rationality and debate are inadequate to reach true conclusions about evolutionary psychology, AGI, animal welfare, capitalism, what charity interventions should be pursued, and so on. The meta and methodological issues need to be dealt with first. And peopleâs disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias â itâs part of the problem.
So I donât want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I donât think it will work well due to those other issues. I donât think you will discuss such a complex, hard issue in a way that will actually lead to a correct conclusion, even if that requires e.g. reading books and practicing skills as part of the process (which I suspect it would require). Like youâll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then Iâll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue weâll need a whole sub-discussion where you engage with Popper in a way capable of reaching an accurate conclusion. That will lead to some alternatives like you could read and study Popper, or you could review the literature for Popper critics who already did that who you could endorse, or you could argue that Popper is actually irrelevant, or there are other options but none are particularly easy. And there can be many layers of sub-issues, like most people should significantly improve their reading skills before itâs reasonable to try to read a lot of complex literature and expect to find the truth (rather than doing it more for practice), and people should improve their grammar skills before expecting to write clear enough statements in debates, and people should improve their math and logic skills before expecting to actually get much right in debates, and people should improve their introspection skills before expecting to make reasonably unbiased claims in debates (and also so they can more accurately monitor when theyâre defensive or emotional).
I tried, many times, starting with an object level issue, discussing it until a few errors happened, and then trying to pivot the discussion to the issues which caused and/âor prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate wonât work and will be full of errors, etc. I found basically that no one ever wanted to pivot to the meta topic. Having a few errors pointed out did not open their eyes to a bigger picture problem. One of the typical responses is doing a quick, superficial âfixâ for each error and then wanting to move on without thinking about root causes, what process caused the error, what other errors the same process would cause, etc.
Sorry you took it that way.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youâre speaking to. Itâs a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because itâs a common pattern that youâve heard a lot, and you donât realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because youâll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe itâs an accident here because I didnât get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesnât fit well. Itâs also an inaccurate sentence since I didnât take it that way. I said how it reads. I spoke directly about interpretations rather than simply having one interpretation I took for granted and replied based on. I showed awareness that it could be read, interpreted or intended in multiple ways. I was helpfully letting you know about a problem rather than being offended.
I feel like we are starting to hit a dead-end here, which is a pity since I really want to learn stuff.
The problem is :
I am interested in learning concrete stuff to improve the way I think about the world
You point out that methodology and better norms for rationality and debate are necessary to get a productive conversation (which I can agree with, to some extent)
Except I have no way of knowing that your conclusions are better than mine. Itâs entirely possible that yours are betterâyou spent a lot of time on this. But I just donât have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless Iâve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show donât tell problem: youâve told me youâve got better conclusions (which is possible). But youâve not shown me that. I need to see that from experience.
I may be motivated to spend some time on improving rationality norms, and change my conclusions. But not without a (little) debate on some concrete stuff that would help understand that I can improve.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weâre starting to hit limits to growth ? We could do that in the other post you pointed to.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youâre speaking to.
True. It was a mistake on my part. Itâs just that the sentence âIâm used to ignoring comments that assume I donât existâ felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
Itâs not very rational. I shouldnât have done that, youâre right.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weâre starting to hit limits to growth ?
OK, as a kind of demonstration, I will try engaging about this some, and I will even skip over asking about why this issue is an important priority compared to alternative issues.
First question: What thinkers/âideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that theyâre wrong?
First, most of what Iâm saying challenges deeply what is usually said about energy, resources or the economy.
So the ideas that disagree with me are the established consensus, which is why Iâm already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
Weâve heard about it earlier and didnât ârun outâ
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
Weâll just adapt
So in my post I tried my best to adress these points by explaining why ecological economists and other experts on energy and resources think they wonât solve the problem (and Iâm in the process of writing a post more focused on adressing explicited these counter-arguments).
I also read some more advanced arguments against what these experts said (debates with Richard Heinberg, articles criticizing Jean-Marc Jancovici). But each time Iâve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didnât adress the core points of the report).
Iâm not aware of any major thinker that is fluent on the topic of energy and its relationship with the economy, and optimistic on the topic. However, the one that was the most knowledgeable about this that I found was Dave Denkenberger, director of ALLFED, and we had a lot of exchanges, where he put some solid criticism against what I said. For some of what I wrote, I had to change my mind. For some other stuff, I had to check the litterature and I found limits that he didnât take into account (like on investment). This was interesting (and we still do not agree, which I find weird). But I tried my best to find reviewers that could criticize what I said.
Ok, very well. Iâm not sure itâs reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topicâbut changing requires efforts and time, and itâs not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
In an ideal world weâd look for everything by ourselves, but in reality we just donât have time to dig into everything.But this links to motivation thatâs the topic of the other response.
On a related note, have you read that post ? It may be interesting: https://ââwww.cold-takes.com/ââhonesty-about-reading/ââ
I donât expect everyone to do it. I expect more than zero people to do it.
Or, if it is zero people, then I expect people to acknowledge a serious, urgent problem, and to appreciate me pointing it out, and to stop assuming their group/âside is right about things which no one on in their group/âside (including themselves) will take responsibility for the correctness of.
Skimming and other ways of reducing reading can work well and Iâve been interested in them for a long time. Getting better at reading helps too (Iâve read over 400,000 words in a day, so 10,000 doesnât seem like such a daunting journey to me). But ignoring arguments, when no one on your side has identified any error, is problematic. So I suggest people should often reply to the first error (if no one else already did that in a way you find acceptable). That makes progress possible in ways that silence doesnât.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that youâve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing. At that point there are ways for problem solving and progress to happen, e.g. the author (or anyone who agrees with him) could give a counter-argument, a rewrite, or a summary (particularly if you identify a specific area of interest â then they could summarize just the part you care about).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââposts/ââiBXdjXR9cwur8qpwc/ââcritically-engaging-with-long-articles
Itâs particularly important to do this with stuff which criticizes your ideas â which claims youâre wrong about something important and impactful â so itâs highly relevant to you.
This is a good point -I just think that most people are not even aware that this is an option (admitting you didnât read everything but still want to engage isnât obivous in our way of doing things).
I read your post on long articlesâit provides some really useful insights, so thanks for that. I still think it could be a bit more attractive to readers (summary, bullet points, more titles and sections, bolding, exemples, maybe 3 minutes shorter), but it was worth reading. The fact you said âdonât stop reading unless you spotted an errorâ helped too ^^
Attracting readers is a different activity than truth seeking. Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not. If I avoid errors that anyone knows about, then Iâve done a great job. A rational forum should be able to notice that, value it and engage with it, without me doing anything extra to get attention.
Truth seeking and attracting typical readers are different skills. People usually arenât great at both. A community that emphasizes and rewards attracting will tend to get issues wrong and alienate rational people.
I got to a major, motivating point (âa bias where long criticism is frequently ignoredâ) in the third sentence. If someone is unable to recognize that as something to care about, or gets bored before getting that far, then I donât think theyâre the right audience for me. They could also find out about âMethod: Reply to the First Important Errorâ by reading the bullet point outline.
I read far worse writing all the time. Itâs not a big deal. Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc. They should also pick up on less prominent quality signals like clarity.
Any time I spend on polishing means less writing and research. I write or edit daily. I used to edit/âpolish less and publish more, and I still think that might have been better. There are tradeoffs. I now have a few hundred thousand unpublished words awaiting editing, including over 30,000 words in EA-related drafts since I started posting here.
Iâm also more concerned with attracting especially smart, knowledgeable, high-effort readers than attracting a large number of readers. Put another way, the things youâre asking for are not how I decide what articles or authors to read.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback. I intentionally added some summary to some articles recently, which I viewed as similar to an abstract from an academic paper. Iâm not necessarily against that kind of thing, but I do have concerns to take into account.
Oh, ok. I understand better your approach.
I must admit that I am trying to aim for a different approach: writing stuff adapted to human psychology.
I donât go from postulates like âArticles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or notâ or âReaders should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.â It would be very nice if people were to do that. But our brains, although they can learn that to some extent with the good educational methods and the right incentives, just didnât really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I donât expect people to do that.
Reading text which is long, abstract, dry, remote from our daily environments, and with no direct human interactions, is possible, but this is akin to swimming against the flow: if thereâs a good reason to do that, I will, but it will be much harder. And I need to know what I can get out of itâwith a serious probability.
I guess thatâs one reason people tend to ignore what science says: itâs boring. It has a âreader-deterring styleâ as one paper puts it.
I really recommend this paper by Ugo Bardi that explicits why that contributes to the decline of science:
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures. Metaphores. Examples. Bullet points and bolding. Thereâs a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easilyâand itâs useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think youâre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donât know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate and (boring!?) scholarship like mine. That is one of many topics where Iâd have some things to say if people changed their debate methodology, scholarly standards, etc. (I already tried debating this topic and many others in the past, but I found that it didnât work well enough and I identified issues like debate methodology as the root cause of various failures.)
I also agree with and already (try to) do some of what you say. I have lots of material breaking things into smaller parts and making it easier to learn. But there are difficulties, e.g. when the parts are small then the value from each one individually (usually) becomes small too. To get a big result people have to learn many small parts and combine them, which can be hard and require persistence and project management. Youâre not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which itâs harder to find answers for.
Iâm personally not a very visual thinker and Iâm good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist. If you had said that the majority of people like pictures, then I could have agreed with you. Itâs not that big a deal â Iâm used to ignoring comments that assume I donât exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. Iâm not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
Iâm actually interested in thatâif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iâd be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iâll use it.
Ok, I didnât mean that everybody is like that, I was making a generalization. Sorry you took it that way. What I had in mind was that when you see something hapening in front of you it sticks much better than reading about it.
I have already tried telling people about evolutionary psychology and many other topics that they are interested in.
I determined that it mostly doesnât work due to incorrect debate methodology, lack of intellectual skills (e.g. tree-making skills or any alternative to accomplish the same organizational purposes), too-low intellectual standards (like being dismissive of âsmallâ errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims youâre losing to in debate), poor project management, getting emotional, lack of background knowledge, lack of willingness to get new background knowledge mid-discussion, unwillingness to proceed in small, organized steps, imprecision, etc.
Hence Iâve focused on topics with priority which I believe are basically necessary prerequisite issues before dealing with the other stuff productively.
In other words, I determined that standard, widespread, common sense norms for rationality and debate are inadequate to reach true conclusions about evolutionary psychology, AGI, animal welfare, capitalism, what charity interventions should be pursued, and so on. The meta and methodological issues need to be dealt with first. And peopleâs disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias â itâs part of the problem.
So I donât want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I donât think it will work well due to those other issues. I donât think you will discuss such a complex, hard issue in a way that will actually lead to a correct conclusion, even if that requires e.g. reading books and practicing skills as part of the process (which I suspect it would require). Like youâll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then Iâll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue weâll need a whole sub-discussion where you engage with Popper in a way capable of reaching an accurate conclusion. That will lead to some alternatives like you could read and study Popper, or you could review the literature for Popper critics who already did that who you could endorse, or you could argue that Popper is actually irrelevant, or there are other options but none are particularly easy. And there can be many layers of sub-issues, like most people should significantly improve their reading skills before itâs reasonable to try to read a lot of complex literature and expect to find the truth (rather than doing it more for practice), and people should improve their grammar skills before expecting to write clear enough statements in debates, and people should improve their math and logic skills before expecting to actually get much right in debates, and people should improve their introspection skills before expecting to make reasonably unbiased claims in debates (and also so they can more accurately monitor when theyâre defensive or emotional).
I tried, many times, starting with an object level issue, discussing it until a few errors happened, and then trying to pivot the discussion to the issues which caused and/âor prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate wonât work and will be full of errors, etc. I found basically that no one ever wanted to pivot to the meta topic. Having a few errors pointed out did not open their eyes to a bigger picture problem. One of the typical responses is doing a quick, superficial âfixâ for each error and then wanting to move on without thinking about root causes, what process caused the error, what other errors the same process would cause, etc.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youâre speaking to. Itâs a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because itâs a common pattern that youâve heard a lot, and you donât realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because youâll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe itâs an accident here because I didnât get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesnât fit well. Itâs also an inaccurate sentence since I didnât take it that way. I said how it reads. I spoke directly about interpretations rather than simply having one interpretation I took for granted and replied based on. I showed awareness that it could be read, interpreted or intended in multiple ways. I was helpfully letting you know about a problem rather than being offended.
I feel like we are starting to hit a dead-end here, which is a pity since I really want to learn stuff.
The problem is :
I am interested in learning concrete stuff to improve the way I think about the world
You point out that methodology and better norms for rationality and debate are necessary to get a productive conversation (which I can agree with, to some extent)
Except I have no way of knowing that your conclusions are better than mine. Itâs entirely possible that yours are betterâyou spent a lot of time on this. But I just donât have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless Iâve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show donât tell problem: youâve told me youâve got better conclusions (which is possible). But youâve not shown me that. I need to see that from experience.
I may be motivated to spend some time on improving rationality norms, and change my conclusions. But not without a (little) debate on some concrete stuff that would help understand that I can improve.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weâre starting to hit limits to growth ? We could do that in the other post you pointed to.
True. It was a mistake on my part. Itâs just that the sentence âIâm used to ignoring comments that assume I donât existâ felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
Itâs not very rational. I shouldnât have done that, youâre right.
OK, as a kind of demonstration, I will try engaging about this some, and I will even skip over asking about why this issue is an important priority compared to alternative issues.
First question: What thinkers/âideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that theyâre wrong?
Ok, interesting question.
First, most of what Iâm saying challenges deeply what is usually said about energy, resources or the economy.
So the ideas that disagree with me are the established consensus, which is why Iâm already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
Weâve heard about it earlier and didnât ârun outâ
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
Weâll just adapt
So in my post I tried my best to adress these points by explaining why ecological economists and other experts on energy and resources think they wonât solve the problem (and Iâm in the process of writing a post more focused on adressing explicited these counter-arguments).
I also read some more advanced arguments against what these experts said (debates with Richard Heinberg, articles criticizing Jean-Marc Jancovici). But each time Iâve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didnât adress the core points of the report).
Iâm not aware of any major thinker that is fluent on the topic of energy and its relationship with the economy, and optimistic on the topic. However, the one that was the most knowledgeable about this that I found was Dave Denkenberger, director of ALLFED, and we had a lot of exchanges, where he put some solid criticism against what I said. For some of what I wrote, I had to change my mind. For some other stuff, I had to check the litterature and I found limits that he didnât take into account (like on investment). This was interesting (and we still do not agree, which I find weird). But I tried my best to find reviewers that could criticize what I said.