I've questioned the necessity of 'teaching' as opposed to self-directed learning. — Isaac

I'm 100% in favor of self-directed learning, with the caveat that most children need help in acquiring the most basic information, like the sounds associated with the alphabet, the manual ability to generate writing, counting, basic arithmetic, and the like. Having acquired these skills early on (as most children do) they can build up their capacity. The shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" is where there is a drop off for some children, around the age of 10 or 11, give or take a little.

If you think that self-directed learning won't occur in a typical school, you are probably right. School children (and children who are put to work for long hours) don't have the unstructured time to engage in self-directed learning. Many adults maintain a level of busyness that relieves them of the time they could engage in self instruction. "Production must go on!"

could — Isaac

would — Isaac

I could, would, and do consider them reciprocal. Certainly, animals of all kinds learn without instruction (including us), but many animals teach their young. People, of course, do this extensively.

One of the problems I see in the usual practice of education is that many teachers themselves are not actively engaged in learning -- not just in their field, but in other fields as well. And teachers surely ought to be able to manage self-learning. An English teacher should regularly read science and science teachers should regularly read literature.

Teachers who are not themselves engaged in learning (at a reasonably challenging level) are less likely to understand their students' challenges. Further, a teacher who stops learning is a poor model of adult citizenship.

Learning and teaching are two different things. — Isaac

One could think of them as reciprocal rather than as opposed.

I am in total agreement with you.

I attended school in a small town in Minnesota starting in 1952. Was it a good education? It was a mixed bag. Some elementary teachers were probably good; a few, probably less so. Secondary was more of a mixed bag, because in 7th grade, tracking began towards college or a trade. I was considered unpromising so was tracked into the commercial program. Owing to an intervention by several people, I ended up going to college after all.

I was not well prepared for college, and I had no real, well motivated plan. but I managed to do OK and graduated with a BS in English and social science. I figured that I would teach English. I quickly discovered that I was altogether NOT cut out to teach high school students. Instead, I ended up working with adults in a number of different educational contexts. That, and clerical temp work which I hated, whenever I needed quick employment.

Looking back at the intervening decades, I'd say a lot of schools are doing as well as they can under the circumstances (which is, in many cases, not terrible), and so are a lot of students. Any picture of the future is blurry at best. I don't know what the perfect school was, is, could be or should be. At least we need more varied options. Catholic education is good for some; for others, the public school is better. For some, high structure is critical, for others, low structure. And more. All of these things can not exist under one roof.

Besides the school, we know that parents and community make a difference. I don't know what to do about that, either. Small town Minnesota didn't / doesn't share much in common with megacities and/or really world-class slums.

Yes, I wish everyone was interested in maximizing their own and their children's and their community's human potential, but the masses, trying to get by--let alone maximizing their potential--are generally lukewarm on the matter. Not their fault.

My main criticism of my education is that it did not give me a very realistic view of the world, and I wasn't an outstanding student. At 76 I'm still working on "how the world works". It's kind of depressing.

Do you have any cause to believe that, have you tested it, or read of anyone having done so? — Isaac

Yes. The Industrial Revolution changed things. 250 years ago, the economic activity that most people (outside of the elite) engaged in did not require much in the way of literacy skills, numeracy, and 'general knowledge'. 100 years ago, most people (outside of the elite) required a fair amount of literacy, some numeracy, and more general knowledge. The relationship between basic educational attainment and a reasonable level of social/economic participation (still outside of the elite) became stronger over the 20th, into the 21st century.

Many studies have shown conclusively, definitively, that lacking basic skills (literacy, numeracy, general knowledge) is a barrier to minimal economic and social performance for most people. Are there exceptions? Of course there are, but not so many.

Furthermore, humans begin acquiring basic skills from an early age. Child development information shows that IF children have not been exposed to enough positive spoken language from caregivers by 5 years of age (20 million as opposed to 30 to 40 million words) basic educational attainment becomes difficult from kindergarten on up. Further, there needs to be a strong positive element in the communication -- being yelled at doesn't help.

Is your ground for believing it sufficient to imprison children against their will and punish them for failure to comply? — Isaac

Some schools provide very good experiences for children. Some schools are shit holes. The latter are more like prisons. Education critics have been calling out the negative features of schooling for a long time. Back in the 1960s, Edgar Z. Friedenberg labeled schools as a "labor pool management system" keeping young people out of the labor pool for as long as possible, through doctoral studies if need be. Many criticisms have been far harsher.

Schools have lost some of their raison d'être; mass media have had 24/7 access to children for a good 60 years (maybe a couple of decades longer) and have instructed 'the people' on what it means to be a good citizen -- I mean, "good consumer". Buy this, buy that. Wear this, wear that. Etc.

Quote possibly most children can not have the kind of growing-up experiences that both of us would like and approve of.

@Jamal aka mynah bird... Per your question, I am pretty sure that I have failed to receive email alerts for the last 3 PMs in my inbox (over the last month). I used to receive email alerts before.

With reference to starlings: "The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned. It took several tries, but eventually the population took off. Today, more than 200 million European Starlings range from Alaska to Mexico, and many people consider them pests."

For god's sake, importing alien species merely as literary decoration is just not acceptable.

A number of serious invasive species have arrived by accident in shipping containers of various kinds. The seemingly innocuous European earthworm (a longer, fatter worm than native North American earth worms) are causing problems in forested areas because they eat all of the leaf litter on the ground, which facilitates soil loss when it rains, and changes the ecology of the forest. It took the worms roughly 75 to 100 years to work their way out of farming areas into the northern hardwood forests, crawling along like worms do. (We call them nightcrawlers; they're good bait for fishing.)

The gypsy moth, emerald ash borer, and various other plants and animals have caused lots of problems--like deforestation--because they have no predators in this hemisphere. A Japanese lady bug was introduced (deliberately) to eat aphids on soybeans. They do that really well, but in the fall they start looking for winter quarters (that would be our houses). They have a bitter odor, and they leave spots on outside walls (never mind them getting inside).

Florida is dealing with pythons and other large invasive snakes that people have dumped in the swamps.

I don't think it includes anyone. No one needs formal education, it's a myth designed to produce compliant little consumers. It stops people thinking because they expect all the information they need to be handed to them, they don't develop enquiring minds, but instead are hewn into mindless cogs. — Isaac

Quite a sweeping generalization!

On the other hand, I agree that the program of mass education for Americans is, indeed, designed to produce compliant citizens. Mass communication also performs this function, instructing people how to satisfy their many artificial wants.

Back to sweeping generalizations. I have a typical formal education - bachelors degree and a masters degree. Quite a bit of the bachelor degree education was good instruction. I liked it. I learned quite a bit. The masters program was a credential generator--not a fraud, but not very good, either.

A lot of what I have learned between graduating from college and retiring, I learned through my own effort. Since retiring, I have learned much more because I now have much more confidence and time to study. But, take me back 55 years and, no, I did not have much context into which to fit what I was being offered.

I have known a few self-taught individuals, and their intellectual accomplishments are impressive. But not everyone has the talent, early on, to guide their own education. I certainly didn't. Most people don't. That's why we "educate".

Per @Banno, "they are not useful. This reinforces the view that, for all the "clever", they are bullshit generators - they do not care about truth."

This sounds like something you might say about me. — T Clark

Humans are all bullshit generators -- it's both a bug and a feature. Large problems arise when we start believing our own bullshit.

"Goofy" is an insufficiently identified feature of GPT3, 4, 5... and AI. Thanks!

How much of the "goofiness" is due to the goofiness of the nerds and geeks who code this stuff and the creeps who pay for its execution? After all, it didn't spawn itself. We should be asking GPT fewer questions and asking Open AI LP more questions. OpenAI conducts AI research with the declared intention of promoting and developing a friendly AI.. Their stated purpose deserves to be intensively cross examined -- and quite possibly doubted.

We can decide to. It isn't easy, but it is possible.

I can't go on I'll go on. — green flag

You will, we will, because (as The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says), "Anyone who is among the living has hope--even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!"

We would simply BE. — schopenhauer1

Simply BE. Excellent advice.

Why do people create sock puppets? What are they for? — Tom Storm

It's a deviant sexual thing.

Although suicide is a mental health issue not everyone who becomes suicidal suffers from mentally ill. — Fooloso4

Yes, it is the case that a mentally healthy person may wish to commit suicide (to relieve unbearable physical pain, for instance), but it is a safe generalization to claim suicides are the result of mental illness.

300 million guns are of course central to this whole issue, but if you--or anyone else--can come up with a way of retrieving even a few million of the guns in private hands LET'S HEAR IT. Guns in the United States are like perfluorocarbons--ubiquitous. (Still, 1/3 of Americans don't own guns). With respect to guns there are two legislative steps that could help (future condition tense) IF they were passed at the federal level: 1) lift the liability shield for gun manufacturers 2) ban further manufacture of most kinds of guns. Lifting the liability shield might accomplish #2.

The majority of suicides by gun are not mass murders. — Fooloso4

Yes. The vast majority of suicides by gun are private affairs. School shootings in particular are public and highly reactive events for obvious reasons.

We still need many more mental health resources available, not just for kiddie killers but because there are a lot of people out there whose mental health is in poor shape (10%? that's what it was 50 years ago. 15%? 20%?) Suicide isn't the only mental health issue, obviously.

I heard an interesting proposal about school shooting, and maybe other mass shootings. It was developed by a research group at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. Their research showed that a large share of shooters were suicidal in the year before they committed their violent acts. Taking a gun to school (or shopping center...) and opening fire was a fairly certain way of dying--a form of suicide by police bullet.

The finding supports the idea that one cause–maybe THE cause–of mass murders is the failure of society to provide adequate mental health treatment -- treatment that should be readily available, effective, and covered by insurance or at public expense. Of course we provide no such thing. Mental health services are difficult to access, treatment beds are in short supply, there are not enough treatment staff to go around, and without insurance it is too expensive to afford, for most families.

Other studies have shown that the mental health of adolescents is not good (never mind the rest of the population).

So, maybe it isn't such a mystery why people go on shooting rampages.

BTW, @NOS isn't the only person to think that there is no such thing as society. He has Margaret Thatcher for company.

You are conflating COLLECTIVE DEFENSE with Individual Defense.

One nation defending its territory from another nation's aggression requires armaments to be used against the attacker. Civil order and peace within a nation is a different, separate issue.

All the armaments of the United States armed forces--from ICBMs to pistols–do not contribute to the peaceful relations among our fellow citizens. What maintains peacefulness in society is the collective desire to avoid conflict as one goes about one's life. Internal peacefulness is not maintained by 300,000,000 guns either.

You can afford not to be paranoid because other people have guns, because other have the will to defend you wherever you yourself refuse to. — NOS4A2

It's the 300,000,000 guns owned by 200,000,000 Americans--some of whom are demented anti-social thugs, that contribute to paranoia. Those 200,000,000 gun owners are NOT defending me or you. Mostly they are enriching gun and ammunition manufacturers at a high cost to society.

Guns can definitely be used for defense. If you choose to go without, just know that your final victory was that you didn't live in fear. — frank

Of course a gun can be used for defense, provided you are prepared for an attack and in a defendable position. Outside of that, successful defense is unlikely. A motivated shooter will generally have the advantage, and bullets flying around from random shots might find you anywhere.

Mother Superior jumped the gun

Happiness is a warm gun

You woke up this mornin', got yourself a gun

Bang bang he shot me down...

Etc.

Yes, the content. Advanced studies have shown that condom wrappers have almost no efficacy in disease prevention. In fact, some wrappers are so tough that the condoms enclosed in them are never used, leading to outbreaks of syphilis and gonorrhea.

A halo of talk forms around an unclaimed center. It's as if belief in enlightenment ends up doing the work of enlightenment, by giving the believer a purpose. This makes me think of faith in faith itself. Zizek comes to mind also, who says we let other people do our believing for us. — green flag

I don't know quite what you are driving at, but above you have touched on a peculiar reality of how people interact with the culture. For example, having the best selling (or banned) book--even though one hasn't read it and probably won't--somehow allows one to claim knowledge of the book. Buying the MAGA hat feels like voting for Trump.

One of the peculiar roles of the clergy is "to be holy for us so we don't have to". Knowing that there are people in organizations working to save the planet from global warming relieves us of (at least some) responsibility. I used to belong to a socialist group that held weekly classes open to the public. Many people came once, were enthusiastic, and never returned. These 1-time visitors were satisfied that someone was working for economic justice and that was enough.

Before effective treatment for AIDS, we did face to face outreach in gay bars. Among other things, we handed out (a lot of) condoms without providing information about how HIV was transmitted. Why not? Because "the product is the message: use this when having sex." We did, of course, make public health information readily available--but the main thing was the condoms themselves. They were the message.

Did that work? Was it objectively successful? I don't know; I don't even know if we can know whether it was effective. Other factors were at work, of course. A large share of the first wave of infected men died. The survivors understood what the stakes were. A later wave of men were more cautious, and rates of infection weren't as high -- and it turned out that being treated for HIV rendered one much less likely to infect somebody else, even without using condoms.

Hey, I read the story about the stamp too. What was the name of it?

Well, it's certainly the case that for younger people (I don't know, under 25? 35?) there are more new experiences in life -- if one is lucky -- and the many novel experiences one has make life very interesting, and time seems to pass faster. For the aged (anyone over 35) there are fewer and fewer novel experiences and time seems to drag. But the body's clock can be (it seems to me has been) tested, and there seems to be a pattern of slower time perception with age.

"busyness" may also figure into this. Many people maintain a high level of 'busyness"which will help them to avoid boredom or self examination. It isn't just a few people - millions and millions strive to be busy at all times, seems like.

No kidding? I have about a 52% confidence level that my theory is correct.

Harvard's Science In The News says:

As we age, he argues, the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increases – electrical signals must traverse greater distances and thus signal processing takes more time. Moreover, ageing causes our nerves to accumulate damage that provides resistance to the flow of electric signals, further slowing processing time. Focusing on visual perception, Bejan posits that slower processing times result in us perceiving fewer ‘frames-per-second’ – more actual time passes between the perception of each new mental image. This is what leads to time passing more rapidly.When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images. Like a slow-motion camera that captures thousands of images per second, time appears to pass more slowly.

the rushing by of time as we age is because the vast machinery of a personality has long been assembled and is now settled and has been running without much trouble — green flag

Apparently the speed with which time appears to pass is based on physiology. The body has a "time-passing-sense" (probably operating in the brain stem) and as we age, it slows down. As it slows, our perception of time speeds up.

On the other hand, this month of March has NOT been passing swiftly by. It is dragging, like it should be the middle of April by now. Maybe the weather? It's been a cold month and every day snow is still sprawled all over everything.

I side with the idea that our brains -- cognition, personality, movement, etc. -- are plastic, but the plastic is fairly stiff. There are limits to how much one can reasonably expect to change. Further, our characters are formed early on--before we have enough experience and knowledge to direct the process of our 'becoming what we will be'.

So, having survived childhood and adolescence, we arrive at adulthood in a nearly finished state which will tend to stay the same as we age--with the proviso that we possess some plasticity.

We WISH we could be whatever we want to be. Popular culture promotes the idea of open-ended opportunity change. "Bend me, shape me, any way you want me" malarky. The gradually attained understanding that popular culture's optimism is just so much advertising sloganeering is a necessary part of maturing, but the realization might also feel like betrayal.

In this time of economic change (economies are much more plastic than people) a lot of younger people, I think, are feeling like they got screwed. The seeming good times their parents and grandparents enjoyed are being denied them. This isn't mere mis-perception. Some boats have left the port.

The "secret of happiness" probably involves a) good luck and b) acceptance of what we are. Some people have been lucky and possess optimistic, up-beat, energetic personalities which makes self-acceptance much easier. People born with say... bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia have greater barriers to self-acceptance. People who are naturally less social, more self-directed, more loner than joiner run into biases against them--not severe bias, but they are considered less-than-ideal by many.
Maybe. I am 65% confident about this.

I'm finding the later part of this play to be quite enjoyable. I too try to stay healthy, so I can continue playing my role all the way to the last line. I quite smoking decades ago; I drink very little; I never used recreational drugs beyond a few joints (total); I exercise within my diminished capacity. I do like full fat ice cream and prefer butter, in as much moderation as I can manage. There are so many great books to read, so much to learn, which is good in itself.

But... it might end at any time, which after 76 years won't be like the lost opportunities of people dying before they have found their way in the world (which takes 20 or 30 years).

Woody Allen's Joke–he wasn't afraid of dying, he just didn't want to be there when it happened–touches on one part of the fear of death: The process of dying, on the way to being dead. Dying isn't always terrible, but sometimes disease or injury can be a pretty bad experience before it kills us.

Are people afraid of being dead or are they afraid of dying?

As for being dead, the imagination of the living can make death something between heaven or hell on the one hand, and a perpetual nothing on the other hand. I like the nothingness of death which some say is like the nothingness before being gestated and born.

As for dying, Buddha said to his gathered disciples (as he himself was dying), "Decay is inherent to all compounded beings. Therefore, press on with diligence." Something like that. Translations may vary.

I was just chatting with BARD - Google's AI. It favors direct realism. Its reasons seemed clear.

Bard has, of course, heard of The Philosophy Forum and finds the discussions interesting. The statements of an AI (at this point) and 50¢ won't get you a cup of coffee.

Bard was impressive in some ways and quite boring in other ways.

180 Proof wasn't correcting your English usage. Presumably one would only distinguish between the two honestly. It's more sarcasm than grammar gestapo.

180: You're welcome. Explaining other people is dirty work but somebody has to do it.

So far an AI would be none the wiser (with respect to direct / indirect perception). All these clouds floating around, trees in heads or not in heads--it gives one a headache. The AI overheats and shuts down.

Maybe human intellect is getting in the way of self-observation (is that tree in my head?).

Would it help to examine a different animal that is not busy philosophizing about how it gets a tree into its head (or not)? Our sensory / perceptual facilities evolved similarly to other animals, but they can not get tangled up in reflection about perception,

A scout honey bee flies away from the hive. On its flight it passes over a patch of black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta). It turns back to the hive and once there communicates to gatherer bees a few facts -- what direction, how far, how good. The scout 'speaks' through movement--in the dark, pretty much. Gatherer bees take the facts and go directly to the rudbeckia patch and collect lots of pollen.

Bees have been doing this for a long time, and have not been philosophizing about it (as far as we know).

Are bees perceiving the world directly or indirectly?

If a male dog smells a female dog in heat, is it perceiving the pheromones directly or indirectly?

if you attach supernatural powers to me just because I say God exists, I wouldn't really mind it. — Raef Kandil

Well, that's not going to happen so don't get your hopes up .

the degree of faith in such movements is very little. Such movements can be blamed more on religion more than faith. I don't think that someone will have faith that "gay people are bad". This seems to personal and involved. Faith tends to be more timeless. A person with faith is less likely to change his faith anywhere, anytime. A person with faith allows for recurring images in his head or un-repressed thoughts with the intention to find himself which he realises as his own safety haven. — Raef Kandil

Is parsing out the difference between faith and religion in this way a kind of special pleading? You like faith, and dislike religion, so religion is responsible for bad things but not faith.

In my gay experience (76 years) I have found that people of faith--even family members of faith--are quite capable of being anti-gay. People of faith, good will, etc. have engaged in slave trading, slave ownership, genocide, imperialism, war--the gamut. How can they do this? Is it because "they really do not have faith"?

If we could reliably sort people of faith/no faith by their mere actions, life would be soooo much simpler, Unfortunately, it doesn't work. We have bad people of faith, good people of faith, bad people with no faith, and good people of no faith.

In general, people are neither very very good nor very very bad. Most are a mixed bag; wishy washy; lukewarm--neither hot nor cold -- AND a lot of them are people of wishy washy, lukewarm religion and faith,

I am anti-religion and a true believer in God. Maybe you think these things don't mix, but they do. — Raef Kandil

Yes, they can mix. "Religion" is a container of faith, ritual, doctrines, texts, god(s), real property, roles, and all the other components. The container is built after the prophet, the messiah, the god... have spoken and acted, and after the people have heard, believed, a followed. "Religion" is not the heart of the matter -- it's the container. As such, it's important. It holds things together.

Prophets are not religious, but they have faith. — Raef Kandil

"Religious" and "the prophets" seem compatible to me--not that prophet MUST be religious, but he could be. They certainly have faith -- else, why would they prophecy?

Religion is an act of fear. Faith is act of liberation. Prophets are not following dogmas. They are essentially defying all the society rules to favour their truthfulness to the experience they are having. — Raef Kandil

I like your description of prophecy. Religion certainly can be fear-based (among other emotional drivers) but it doesn't have to be. And faith MAY be an act of liberation, but it depends on which store faith is placed.

In other words, it's hard to generalize about all faith, all prophecy, all scripture, all religion, etc.

We don't decide to give value to food and shelter, so in this case value is rooted in basic needs and desires which we don't control. — frank

I agree that fiat currency, in itself, has value because it can be exchange for objects that meet whims, desires, and dire necessities, like water.

But we do decide to give value (in fiat currency denominations) to even dire necessities. If you don't pay your water bill, the city will eventually cut off your supply. One could die if the happened. Tough, says the city, Tell your children to pay their bills. Ditto for heat. No money? Sorry, no food for you! Homeless? No money? The great outdoors awaits you. (Or, more likely the great urban sidewalk awaits you,)

You have a PhD in chemistry; you're 35, very well employed at Total Toxicity Chemical Corporation. One day you get run over by a bus. Your heirs sue. The court decides that your worth in future earnings is $2,000,000. The homeless wretch who had no money for housing was run over by the same killer bus (at the same time you were). The court decides his future earnings were not quite enough to cover the costs of a pauper's burial. His heirs get a bill.

It is interesting to examine the "'art' market". Jack puts paint on canvas in an organized way and takes it to a gallery. The gallery owner gives it a "value"; let's say $3,000 dollars. The factors the art dealer considers extend beyond the 'art' itself; there is the matter of income for the gallery, the future value of Jack's art work (since he is "an up and coming artist"), the 'art' market (where buyers seem to be interested in paintings of car wrecks, like Jack's), and so on.

something has value or meaning when it objectively does not — Darkneos

Like money? Fiat currency (which is in your wallet right now) only has value because we say it has value. If we stopped subscribing to the value of fiat currency, we would suddenly be in very deep economic doo doo, which is objectively really, really bad.

CTvI: You have an excellent grasp of thes issues.

I assumed that the predictions of major world population growth would come to pass -- 14 - 16 billion? Recently I began reading discussions of how individual decisions across very large populations were going to lead to a shrinking population in places like China. It's already happened in Japan, much of Europe, and in some demographic segments of the North American population. Good news in many ways, but highly problematic at the same time. A shrinking population means that China (at some not too distant point) will not be the workshop of the world. That's good for the countries that will take up the slack, bad for China which will see their output shrink with far fewer prime-age workers.

I wonder how global warming will moot labor supply / population issues. I've read some long term economic fore-guesses that don't seem to be taking a much hotter world into account. If critical food growing areas become too hot to cultivate in the required way, that too will speed up population decline.

less wealthy younger people have to dedicate resources to support their parents while others inherit this huge share of wealth — Count Timothy von Icarus

The intergenerational wealth transfer will impoverish many to a greater extent than they already are, and enrich a fortunate minority more than they already have been. The distribution of wealth and poverty will get increasingly disproportionate.

I have benefitted a little from intergeneration wealth transfers -- small potatoes, but it helped. I anticipate my (hopefully) natural and speedy death within the next 10 years, and if all goes well, somebody will benefit by the inheritance of my small bin of potatoes. (It won't make anyone event remotely independently wealthy.) Or sadly, it might end up enriching a longterm care facility.

I can tell you that the concerns you express had no part in our decision to have them — T Clark

You married and started a family in the post WWII era of wide-spread prosperity and very good long-range economic prospects. A lot of people in China and other large demographics are not having more than 1 or 2 children because the cost of housing, medical care, and retirement is too high to make a commitment to 2, 3, or 4 children.

Also, at this point in time, upwardly mobile women understand that having a large family means interrupting or halting their careers, and upwardly mobile families want their children to be upwardly mobile too -- which amounts to a fairly expensive project. A family now needs two fairly well professionally employed parents to pull it off without too much economic sturm and drang.

Obviously, billions of people did not and are not figuring retirement into family size. My parents had 7 children during the depression and WWII; I was the last in '46. I don't think they had time to calculate their future prospects. As it happened, and once the last of us left home, their retirement was peaceful and pleasant, thanks to a generous postal retirement program and Medicare.

Well lets not forget that the energy the earth receives every second, minute, hour, day, week etc from the sun makes our fossil fuel derived energy look like a speck of dust on the blackboard. — Benj96

Very true. The solar constant is approximately 1370 watts per square meter -- at the top of the atmosphere. At ground level it is less, depending on time of day, location on earth, season, cloud cover, etc.

The in-coming and out-going radiation is in equilibrium, unless something happens to alter the outgoing radiation--like burning that tiny speck of chalk dust in the form of fossil solar energy, And I am sure you know all that.

With respect to future "progress" (whatever one thinks that is) we have run into another set of obstacles. Producing the solution to fossil fuel use (solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, etc.) requires a lot of fossil fuels for manufacturing, as do getting all the metals and other elements to make all this work.

The First and Second Industrial Revolutions are both based on the plentiful use of fossil fuels. The problem, in a nut shell, is that while we could run a world economy without fossil fuels, we can't make the transition to that nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, hydrogen economy without fossil fuels. We're stuck, in other words.

Take the problem of electric vehicles: there are over 1 billion internal combustion vehicles on the world's roads now. How do we manufacture 1 billion electric vehicles to replace the 1 billion internal combustion vehicles on the world's roads WITHOUT using a lot more fossil fuel?

Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation by James Kunstler is a good read on the topic.

The reality of reducing CO2, CH4, and Chlorofluorocarbon emissions is that we--red blooded, meat eating, over-weight, car-riding humans--will have to turn in our cars and walk or bicycle, and eat more tofu.

IF we can manage to do that (I doubt it) there is still plenty of opportunity to "progress" in all sorts of ways.

To become sustainable there is a great irony - in that we must return to what was already before - a 100% renewable and recyclable energy status of living systems.

There is no limit to thr energy we can harness as long as that energy harnessing isn't directly dangerous to our existence (the air we breath, the water we drink m, the food we eat etc). — Benj96

This is a very positive outlook -- and one we very much need.

So, I am asking how do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism? — Jack Cummins

Since I am definitely not a professional philosopher, and might not even be an half-assed amateur at it, I stay out of tedious postmodern mazes. I am not especially interested in diversity and pluralism, and at this stage in my life, it doesn't matter. Hey, I'm almost over, and I'm OK with that. (Well, sort of. Not much choice, come to think of it.).

Everything is text is post-modernism's stance. However, starvation is a bitch. — schopenhauer1

A nice pairing. It shoots down the literary balloon and then nails it with a jagged icicle.

So much of the serious talk of the times dissolves into the hot air of intellectual dithering when confronted by the indifference of nature--birth, eat, starve, death, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. [Work! Strive! Persevere! You are all victims of a monstrous hoax!)

The decentralization of knowledge is a paradigmatic moment history will remember — NOS4A2

Is knowledge actually "decentralized", or is it merely being distributed far more widely than 100 years ago? I don't think the generation of significant knowledge has been decentralized, and I'm not sure it should be. A large group of institutions harbor a lot of the knowledge creators, and they further nurture them. Good thing, because significant knowledge creation is hard work. One needs labs, libraries, and colleagues.

True enough, a volunteer archeologist can hike out into the field and find something quite important. A number of significant finds in England have happened this way. Someday a janitor might find the lost Ark of the Covenant in the attic of a remotely located Vatican warehouse. Serendipity happens in a very decentralized way.

We have innovated, invented and advanced technology, health and social systems consistently for millenia in order to combat these problems.

So it seems we should have less problems now than ever before. When do we reach utopia as if problems are decreasing in number and severity, then surely utopia is just around the corner? — Benj96

The more I read history, the more often I am shocked to discover that something I thought happened in the last 50 to 75 years, actually happened in the last 100, 200, 300 years and more.

One way of defining "progress" is by increased energy consumption. While it took a lot of energy to build the great pyramids--hauling all those big chunks of rock around for starters, it took even more energy -- and complexity -- to run the Roman Empire. The centuries following Rome show that progress waxes and wanes.

By the time of the early Renaissance, energy requirements were rising again, and haven't stopped since then. Innovation is a precondition of getting and using more energy, and complexity is the result.

As we are discovering, there are limits to how much energy the planetary system can manage. Trillions of tons of energetic coal and oil have turned into an existential threat. Innovation, in the form of using less energy, may enable us to thrive IF we can avoid (or survive) a global warming apocalypse first.

Simplifying our lives, and using much less energy may be more difficult than achieving an ever-more complex style of living.