Arithmetic, Population and Energy - FULL LENGTH

[VIDEO] "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.

Your point reminds me of my favorite guest lecture I've ever seen: [VIDEO] About 2/3rds through makes the same point you do.

> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [VIDEO] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor – Paris, 2° & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" [VIDEO]

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett That's the thesis of Dr. Bartlett's famous lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy": [VIDEO] Calculus is foundational for understanding our rapidly changing, data-driven world. It gives us the ability to see. You can apply calculus anytime you have a quantity that's changing over time, and you want to see where things are going, how things are changing, and when something is going to happen based on its rate of change -- e.g. stocks, startup growth metrics, how an idea is spreading, mass-market adoption, etc -- anytime you have time-series data and you want to see what it means -- make sense out of it, and understand its implications. See [LINK] And Calculus gives you the ability to calculate how lifelong learning can impact your growth over time -- the significance it can have throughout your life/career -- and realize it's never too late to learn anything ;-) In the words of Prof John Ousterhout: "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [LINK]

All the fears around growth is from people not understanding the difference between absolute growth and relative growth. Which is better growth of 1000 or 3% ? the developed world cannot grow at high percentage points because they're so large. This video more or less shows the insanity of trying to grow at a fixed rate (say being an "emerging market" at 6% per year) for an indefinite timespan. [VIDEO]

But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: [VIDEO] transcript: [LINK] )

I'd like to quote Al Bartlett: His thesis: " The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function " An example from the rest of the talk: "Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth : it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute. And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1/8th; then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there’s a problem? " [VIDEO] [LINK]