HN Reader

I have always been kind of hyper aware of <everything>. My wife and I only dated for 6 months before we got married in sept 2019 (second marriage for both of us, we knew what we each wanted). But I definitely felt a bit awkward telling her about what I thought was coming with covid in late dec 2019. She was a bit suspect at first but polite and just went along with it because we were newlyweds and she loved me and gave me the benefit of the doubt. Holy shit, most everything went how I said it was going to at least through June 2020. AFAICT, she's still convinced I'm from the future.

Failed to grasp what collapse data this article applies to. There is for sure a certain amount on individuals that will be able to sense structural changes if they happen to be in the right place at the right time and they have access to the right data and a set of mental models to do so. However there is a random factor at play for all the things that need to be right. There are no seers, only lucky seers.

A simpler framework with just as much explanatory power is just depression. If you spend a lot of time depressed you will "predict nine of the last five recessions" but with everything. You will have seen every bad event coming, along with a lot of bad events that didn't end up coming.

Chalmers Johnson, Jared Diamond, Strauss-Howe, George Carlin, Mike Judge, ...

Some want a self-fulfilling prophecy, some talk about doom to sell their wares, others are subject matter experts in leading indicator critical fields, still others read a whole lot of history, further more remember semi-objective differences between different time periods, some profit from the status quo even/especially if it's unsustainable, and finally others require the status quo to survive (suffering from the Upton Sinclair "effect") and so suffer from cognitive dissonance keeping them from believing anything different is even possible.

"Collapse" is also a binary, focal apocalyptic memetic contagion that doesn't model reality that ebbs and flows, advances and retreats, suddenly and gradually, and mostly discontinuously. While "collapse" can appear to have happened with perfect hindsight over a long time span, it wasn't fate or essential.. but it happened. The "collapse" of the Roman Republic^H^H^HEmpire took centuries; although Rome's "billionaire" Marcus Licinius Crassus helped do away with social programs and destroy democracy.

Civilizational doom isn't a foregone conclusion unless people really want it, allow it, or cannot organize political power in time to intervene successfully. Although our species' growth inflection "point" roughly changed around 1962, technology has irregularly but overall generally increased productivity especially food production.

Instead of allowing toddlers to play with fire, across the globe we need to maximize stability with competent public administration leadership to work on real problems:

- Redistribute excessively concentrated treasure and significantly increase corporate tax rates

- Prevent corrupt relationships between wealth and government

- Invest in the future: people, children, community, (reasonable) commerce, infrastructure, art, education, preservation, sensible regulations like using the precautionary principle

- Peaceful but cautiously defensively-prepared international relations

- Address existential threats like the climate change emergency

Just a tiny fraction of greedy, careless people appear to be standing in the way of our survival and thriving; the other half of it is convincing enough people that a problem is happening.