I don't think that subjective and objective are particularly useful terms. At what point does objective light reflecting from an object become a subjective interpretation of that object's properties? The whole dichotomy has way too much baggage to be useful. It paints a picture of a person standing apart from the world and passively contemplating the 'raw data' of their senses, whereas reality builds emergent structures out of itself within circumscribed developmental environments. The felt roughness of sandpaper does nothing to destroy its grain; we are of the world as much as we are in it.

↪fdrake I think the section you have underlined actually mitigates against your argument, don’t you? — Wayfarer

Oh no, I think it makes the point than an observer need not be human quite nicely. The next bolded bit, which leads on from it, extends the logic to every physical process. IE - a physical process can 'observe' another one, and a human doesn't have to mediate between them.

This ties back into my demand for you to describe what necessary role humans play in the formation of the ionic bond in sodium chloride - the only right answer is none at all.

Instruments take measurements, but only humans are observers, which is why Niels Bohr would say things like 'nothing exists until it is measured'. — Wayfarer

In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal (of nature as an inert 'objective' substrate - me) has been even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts. For instance, we can say that a photographic plate has been blackened, or that cloud droplets have formed. But we can say nothing about the atoms themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features. The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality. — Bohr, Remarks after the Solvay Conference

'Does the moon continue to exist if we're not looking at it?' — Wayfarer

Yes, it was an analogy to express suspicion about the physical intuition underlying particles existing in superposition. Einstein saw quantum mechanics as more of a mathematical trick than a physical theory, and was notoriously hostile to it in public. It's actually intended to be a reductio as absurdum to the idea that reality depends upon an observer; achieved by equating the notion of an observer with that of a human. Einstein thought that nature worked deterministically everywhere.

Bohr; who had a more relational view and a higher opinion of the physicality of the wavefunction; eventually was vindicated, and he famously said:

Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

Note, not just the experimental apparatus humans make, but systems; like the composite system of a sodium atom and a nearby chlorine atom, jointly constraining and driving the location of the outer orbital electron of the sodium atom to join the outer orbital of the chlorine atom, thereby making a compound with properties neither atom had by itself.

Nature is suffused with interaction top to bottom, labs and their measurements are a relatively novel mode of interaction for it.

But you're not seeing why there is a controversy about this issue. You're simply adopting, or assuming, the perspective of scientific realism, without showing any indication that you understand what exactly about the discoveries of 20th c physics threw this into question. — Wayfarer

Tell me why people are required for the natural formation of salt (which requires quantum mechanical effects due to the ionic bond). Specifically tell me why a person needs to have something to do with the electron orbiting around the sodium atom in its outer orbital to make it donate that electron to the chlorine atom, filling its outer orbital. Where are the people involved? Why are people needed for the formation of ionic bonds? What role do we play in the formation of ionic bonds in compounds that existed long before the first human?

This is the issue at the heart of the 'observer problem'. — Wayfarer

Except 'observation' has been occurring since before humans existed, all a 'measurement' is (AFAIK) is a mapping from a superposition of eigenstates of a quantum operator to a single eigenstate of a quantum operator. In that framework, an observable is just a (Hermitian) linear operator on quantum states. None of these objects are people, and none of them have to occur due to an experimental measurement.

Reality happens outside of the lab too.

Presumably quantum phenomena were happening long before there were people.

People gonna keep thinking quantum observers are people.

I think life happened to all of we intrepid learners.

Finally a picture of what's going on:



For the sake of actually moving on in the reading group, I'm going to stop trying to get the math down precisely. The picture here gives the broad-strokes steps Riemann uses to define the curvature in 2§2. 2§3 is much more qualitative - expressing the 'donut is a coffee cup' and 'boundary of a cylinder is a plane' notions in topology.

I'm glad to hear it. The current pope does not read God that way at least, and I certainly don't think He's concerned about His fanbase particularly, such that being a fan makes you non-wicked. In the light of world-wide Catholic sex scandals, that is surely untenable? — unenlightened

I'm sure there are people that think it's tenable. I don't.

I don't really want to get into a discussion of contemporary religious practice, all the use I see in prayers and theology here is to try and get at the sense of reverence we might need to cultivate towards disaster, and the problems associated with it. I may as well have used the Face of Glory Hindu myth.

Will respond better tomorrow or Sunday.

Can you expand on this at all? Is that really their distinction - the believer and the wicked? — unenlightened

They probably don't have it nowadays, seeing the devil and hell as more symbolic/discursive/institutional or allegorical as is usual for most people. It's there in there prayer though, 'woe to those who die in mortal sin!', and they are an old Catholic offshoot.

It seems to me that the death of the nonbeliever is less relished now than it was.

I lived with a Franciscan nun for just over a year. Unsurprisingly, we argued a lot. Typically about theodicy, the Franciscans have an interesting take on it. They emphasise seeing nature as a moment of the divine.

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you; through those who endure sickness and trial. Happy those who endure in peace, for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them. — Canticle of the Sun and Moon, St. Francis

The prayer is saturated with appreciation of life, but when it comes to death; the only thing which is glorious about it is the continuation of life into the eternal. If you read it closely, you'll find that despite the prayer being aimed at evoking sublimity of nature it actually describes nature in broadly utilitarian terms. Giving sustenance, light, food and so on. The utility of death is only grasped with reference to the afterlife in Heaven and comes with an inbuilt threat for the wicked.

But all nature is a moment of the divine, from the stillbirth to the earthquake. One wonders why St. Francis of Assisi would rather us not see the just hand of God in the slaughter and misery of the believer as well as the wicked. We just don't have the stomach to speak of appreciation for death by starvation in the same breath as the transcendent beauty of a waterfall or sunrise.

Perhaps the only way to appreciate disaster is sorrow. The loving hand of God guides the rapist as well as the mother, the earthquake and the builder; for Him there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane, for nature makes no such distinction for itself.

I've got 1.8k of the damn things, I should probably post less.

I've got a maths degree and a good chunk of it was self taught due to course structure. Currently doing a PhD in it too, and I've been employed as a research assistant in applied statistics a couple of times. /CV :)

A citable resource on philosophy in general is the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Descartes' Discourse on Method broadly concerns epistemology (as far as I know anyway), or the study of knowledge itself. Questions like 'how can we know anything without being certain of it?' or analysis of and responses to the Münchausen Trilemma are some introductory topics in it.

2 + 2 can equal 0,1,2,3 or 4 in modular arithmetic. If each 2 has the dimension of decibel sound measurements, the total number of decibels is 5ish. Whether 2+2=4 depends on the context. But if you supply the context 'the natural number 2 + the natural number 2 is the natural number 4 in the usual systems of arithmetic', it is definitely true.

If everything is inconsequential, so is the fact that it is.

To those suggesting that meaning can be understood in terms of 'brain states'. I think Descartes' quotation is a succinct refutation of the possibility (all the more impressive, as it was written in 1633.) — Wayfarer

I'm not familiar enough with how you think to know why you think a distinction between organic and machine has a structural symmetry to the distinction between meaningful activity and meaningless activity. Do you see the fact that brain states are actually states of an organism - and only organic things can have brain states - as undermining that structural symmetry? If not, why not?

To whom are you addressing the quote and what's its purpose?

You have a way with words. I doubt I could've put it like that. — S

Blame @Pierre-Normand.

Ancient texts were introduced to show the faults of idealism with regards to linguistic meaning. The idealists have predictably failed to come up with a reasonable response to this. — S

And you have some kind of information transfer/encoding approach to the meaning of the words on the Rosetta stone. We could work out what they meant because there was a meaning to be worked out; rooted in the information content of causal chains of language use connecting their ancient word use with our modern translation?

I don't remember Fooloso as being a conspiracy theorist, he had appeared to me to be just saying that it existed on both sides when I previously read him using the same examples in the same topic. Perhaps he agrees with you that the modern extreme left is benign? Doesn't seem like he said that though and it wouldn't matter if he did. — Judaka

I figured when you brought in the history of the extreme left to the discussion on political correctness, you had in mind figures like Stalin and Mao and Trotsky or the Naxalites or whatever. I saw this as a red herring, as even the supposed left which is besties with political correctness isn't Stalinist or Maoist or Trotskyist and the last one's too busy painting towns red with police blood to care about whether we say black or brown. If you look at the supposed characteristics of people who love political correctness, you'll find they're white working-middle class liberal weenies. — fdrake

I have definitively demonstrated sympathies for leftist extremism and related terrorism, going so far as to condemn it. I have so thoroughly committed myself to the idea that it is benign that I gave an example of a contemporary communist party painting the streets with the blood of cops.

I take it we agree that Foolos' post is basically correct. This extends to left and right - the left feels antsy with any colour word, and academics who misunderstand the relationship between sex and gender, say, are castigated for their opinion. The white nationalist extreme right rebranded plans for genocide of non-whites to 'ethnic replacement', they became the 'identitarian movement' and seek to stop 'white genocide'. Everyone has to rebrand when the way they speak becomes a PR nightmare.

I'm interested in asking the further question; who benefits from the function of political correctness in public discourse? Is it the people who intentionally co-opted it as part of a rhetoric of scaremongering exaggeration, or is it the target of that rhetoric? The answer's pretty clear to me, given that it's the same rhetorical structure that's rooted in the initial cooption of the term.

When is meaning? — Mww

But... but why is dog?

What about the Rosetta stone? Big fucking thing with scribblings on it dug out of the earth.

Did the words have meaning before they were discovered again? Have they had meaning since they were written in the same way? What about when it was unknown and forgotten in the earth?

I've been trying to follow the discussion but I lost the thread. Will someone help me get back on track?

Perhaps this is surprising but I do have basic reading skills. @Fooloso4' excellent post, though it's more a series of interlinking references, makes the following points:

(1) Political correctness' power, at least in campus, is massively overstated. It is disproportionately written about, and in an exaggerated form, given the frequency and severity of its occurrence.
(1a) you can infer from this that all the talk about the left trying to destroy free speech on campuses is
noise. This links into point (2)
(2) Both the left and right utilise political correctness (as an aside, in the context of campus discussions, it should be called de-platforming). The left does it marginally more frequently, the right does it less but much more effectively.
(3) There is a historical component to the post, going back to the origins of the term 'political correctness' in leftist circles as, ironically, a mantra against dogmatism and sacred cows. The second stage of this historical component is that the right cottoned onto the left's use of the term, strategically (or stupidly) misinterpreted it to have its opposite meaning ('comrade, you must be politically correct!' as a command rather than the satirisation of a command), then used it to transform hysteria about the left into a new context of discussion. Political correctness as a term was strategically co-opted in media and politics by their journalists and researchers to be rebranded as a censorial scourge of a free society and its speech.

Flash forward to today, and we have alarm that campuses are dominated by Marxists saying that you will be fired if you say that women always have breasts and that right pundits despite being more effective at deplatforming are the aggregate victims of it. So despite that the right are more effective at it; partially due to their followings' threatening behaviours and partially due to left speakers not being part time internet trolls, they are the victims of a (becoming increasingly violent) left attempting to deplatform them. Just to be clear, I repeat, the right and centrists are considered the aggregate victims of deplatforming behaviour despite the left generally being much less effective at it - and the followings of right pundits do have a habit of sending threats to people who speak out against them publicly.

The narrative paints a situation of an authoritarian left censoring speech, despite the right being better at censoring speech and more violent when they do it. We should expect all parties involved in political/ideological conflicts to use deplatforming, it's stupid not to try and shut your opponents up within the confines of the law - just the right has a little tiny eensy weensy habit of threatening to kill and rape people they disagree with, which, y'know, is a pretty big incentive to shut the fuck up.

Who benefits from this narrative of victimisation? What political agents have their influence minimised through it, and what political agents stand to gain the most from all this idiotic mental ping-pong?

What's your stake in all this anyway? — Judaka

My stake in it? Honestly, I think society was better in the times of ancient Sumeria. When people started suggesting that sexual pleasure was something to be had in private, they (or we as I like to think) started shouting out that political correctness had gone mad! Communal brides were, of course, natural and an excellent way to integrate migrant women into our communities. How couldn't the heathens see it, they were suppressing the norms of liberty that hold our very society together! While I would die for their right to speak their stupid reactionary opinions, I would never live in a world where they won. So I killed myself some time in 3900BC as a protest, but unfortunately I never got to see if it made any difference.

So you were being serious, you're a moron. If you came here telling me the extreme right are just "chaps who care about their ethnic identity" I would have lambasted you the same way I did when you came and talked about the modern extreme left like they're no big deal. So don't talk to me like I'm some kind of extreme right apologist because I point out you have an extremely imbalanced perspective. — Judaka

Yeah no worries. It's a shame that you missed me expressing disapproval of a contemporary communist movement killing loads of people. I don't know how I could possibly have thought that communism and the extreme left are always harmless. I guess I know better now!

Actually, I'll also point out that's an absurd characterisation of the extreme right as well. — Judaka

That's ok, absurd caricatures satirise themselves.

I've had this chat with Fooloso in other forums and it's important to realise that it occurs from both sides but only because people wrongly believe it doesn't. Acting as though the extreme left is benign is absolutely ridiculous, do you perhaps know nothing about history at all? Clearly, you haven't been paying attention to the present either. — Judaka

Yes, I know nothing about history and pay no attention to the news. Discard everything I say.

That's a great post, thank you. Rule of thumb: the extreme left will call you a prick and interrupt your shows, the extreme right will do the same then threaten to rape you and kill your family.

Headlines now: Medical doctor treats tape worm infection using experimental Buddhist surgery. Worms still there, attachment to body gone.

Alas, fdrake stole my thunder while I did a quick google. — unenlightened

No worries, I had to edit the post 47 times for it to be coherent. You can be the lightning.

Has anyone actually heard of a vocal proponent of political correctness, that isn't just some wackjob on Tumblr, saying: 'I believe that no one should say anything offensive to anyone. And moreover, that if you say something offensive it should be punished with law and ostracism'?

I've seen waaay more exaggerated critical discussions of political correctness and literally only one citation, ever, for a defence of it - which isn't even an impassioned defence. It was just 'political correctness is an often clumsy negotiation towards a more formally inclusive language... when I was a boy the teacher in my primary school called our one black student 'the black spot' - things are better now'.

I'll be worried about the implications of people in power advocating political correctness when I see any sufficiently strong examples. The people who have to invoke such airy-fairy language are usually politicians, or other media sensitive authority figures, obfuscating. And who can blame them, they are just trying to void avoid the media which storms whenever someone says something that can be reasonably construed (as in avoiding slander or libel litigation) as racist or a sexist.

My view on the topic is that it's a content generation tool for two reactionary poles of reactionary media in a stupid reactionary dance about shit that ultimately means nothing. Political analysis should not be clickbait.

I'm only quoting you because you're the only one talking about the topic. I don't mean to accuse you, and I'm not really even addressing you more than the rest of the world, and mostly myself. — unenlightened

I'm quite happy to be accused.

To a large extent, I'm trying on a perspective. As if, we are at the end of something, that might be civilisation, or humanity, or a particular scientistic ideology, as if we (I) realise too late or almost too late that all this (unspecified but sort of understood) is already dead. So that most of our conversations should they survive will look to 'them' like the religious arguments of the scholastics, complex, futile dated, irrelevant. I'm not committed to anything more than an obituary of failed philosophies in all this. — unenlightened

This makes more sense to me now, thank you for the clarification. It's an interesting topic to think through.

There must be a mathematics of control systems, but it probably involves strange attractors and does my head in. — unenlightened

Something really amazing about how weather prediction models work is that we actually understand the forces that drive the climate pretty well at this point, we're in a position to make very accurate short term predictions. How error is sometimes evaluated in these models, apparently, is that the models are re-run lots of times and the variety of the results informs, say, the probability of raining tomorrow, of attaining a certain temperature and so on. But, the perturbations to the initial parameters in their models that they use to study their modelling error are actually very close the machine precision for their giant supercomputers. As in, a change in an observation of temperature by 10^-16, 10^-32 or 10^-64 degrees; which is about the same proportion (or much smaller for the last two) of a meter to an atomic nucleus; can quite rapidly result in huge differences in expected behaviour under the model.

I think this suggests that actually modelling the climate with incredible precision is actually wrongheaded when trying to think in the long term; we shouldn't be thinking about % impacts on wheat yields in the long term. For long term planning, we should be trying to curtail exposure - how much is at risk and what are its effects. Rather than counting human lives saved by a policy or precisely how much starvation will occur, I believe it makes more sense to try and create systems of political economy that are less sensitive to perturbation; ones with broader comfort zones and more levers to pull to keep things within that zone. I doubt it is possible to design a social system in the aggregate which actually likes the disorder associated with its necessities, or at least I find it inconceivable. Humans are fragile, and we shouldn't ideally have political-economic structures that allow highly correlated failure over all their components. Such organisation makes the extremes that will eventually come lethal, rather than 'just' a huge setback.

A game I take to have profound philosophical significance, but which is usually shuffled off to the social sections of the forum. — Banno

Yes. It does nicely show that a (system of) rule( s ) can be followed regardless of whatever mutations they may later develop. Though playing the game is mostly disregarding others' stated rules just to posit your own, which is where the fun is in the game when no one is taking it so seriously.

Though saying that some things can only be shown is still saying things, gesturing towards them is still saying things - as if words could not show -, 'going out to look', so to speak, can still inspire good writing and precise description.

Relegating things to the background isn't a universal acid for philosophical problems; if anything the widespread application of the strategy displays a deaf ear for the 'grammar' of the problems thus consigned to the dustbin. There's no need to throw away the well posed questions and relevant/topical analysis of them along with the mistakes.

Edit: though, this would derail the thread if we pursued it. If you can be bothered the discussion might be worth another thread.

It's ironic really the scientific and rational education I have been subjected to in this thread in defence of the culture of mass destruction and extinction. As though it is all made up, or if not made up, then unimportant, or if important, easily fixable, or if not fixable, a price worth paying, or if not worth paying... — unenlightened

What gave you the impression that I was defending it? I appreciate that you are attempting to give me a revelation through rhetoric; I see technology, learning and social organisation strategies being jointly necessary for humanity's welfare - being essential to its development and maintenance. My reading of your posts is that you also posit humanity's welfare as a necessary metric for the same things, but emphasise the suspicions that purely technological interventions will never set the world aright for us again.

You seem to read my veneration of technology and the progress that its successful application can bring as a paradoxical ideal to hold. In one breath it values humanity's survival in the world we all inhabit and share the consequences of, in another it commands the environment of this world to become uninhabitable for us. I imagine that you see my beliefs above as an ideological corpuscle that cannot be separated from the current existential risks the meddling I value so highly has created.

This is a fair point, and I should have emphasised that seeing humanity's welfare as a yardstick for valuation of our collective action must not also treat nature as something exogenous; either as an unmovable reserve of our resources or as a largely antagonistic set of constraints to be overcome. I agree that holding either of these two views, or selling an ideology that requires either, is decidedly suboptimal for humanity's continued development.

However, the emphasis you are placing on seeing nature as neither reserve nor enemy is fully consistent with a perspective that sees both as detrimental to human welfare, while still using human welfare as a system of valuation for our collective actions and attitudes towards nature. In essence, you are selling a promise to improve our chances of survival and development by stopping the rape of nature. I agree with this, it is a useful rhetorical strategy to make nature our beloved codependent whore instead.

But of course, I'm exaggerating the difference I see in our positions, I'm fairly sure that we actually agree on most things but disagree over what ideological framework to use to renegotiate our relationship with nature. You're not being a mystic, you're being a different flavour of sustainability management technician.

Edit: I appreciate your link to the Guinea Worm project, it is always nice to be reminded that human progress does not require firing lasers at everything.

I think this is Deeply Shallow. As if nature is not our mother and sustainer. As if we are not the product of nature. It's odd, because this is the trope one more often finds coming from the other side - humans are natural, therefore motor cars are natural. Well indeed, and extinctions are natural. But then nature is not cruel or kind and nothing is better or worse than any other. — unenlightened

I don't think it's a sin to believe that technology gives us the opportunity to live better lives. I'm very grateful that when I get ill I can go to a doctor, that we can clean stuff to reduce disease spread, but what I'm most grateful for is the kind of thinking and tinkering that leads to such cumulative betterment. Lives are longer now than ever, so I'll remain optimistic that there is a place for scalpels, microscopes, soap and antibiotics in Eden, and that there's no place in it for cholera and tuberculosis.

Technology allows us to hack nature; literally, technology is a giant machete. We attack our mother with a machete and then accuse her of cruelty. We need to change our mindset at this archetypal level in order to begin to understand what is happening or we will literally go to our self-manufactured extinction still complaining about 'cruel nature'. Technology is the problem. Perhaps technology can be the solution too, but it will take a deep identity change in the hand that wields it. — unenlightened

Instrumental rationality gets a bad rep; insofar as it sees nature as just collectable resources, I'm with you in criticising that ideology's deleterious effects. Insofar as people treat large systemic problems like climate change as problems to be worked at within our current political-economic framework with little effort or fundamental organisational change required to solve them, I'm with you in criticising it again.

Humans are historical creatures, we work with tools, we have language; all skill takes to develop incrementally is the tradition allowed by our historicity and the novelty created through our projects. Of course, continued history is required for such development, and that requires we're not all dead. So we have choices to make. Political structures and systems of resource management which facilitate adaptation are technologies in the broad sense. They are simultaneously tools we (and by we I currently mean our betters) choose to use and environments we (the meek) inhabit; I wish we would tinker with our institutions and maybe even our sociality itself with as much passion as the urgency of our situation might require.

Perhaps it's too late, and all we can hope for is that the rot of our civilisation fuels the monied accumulation of resources which destroys the next one. Looting crumbling buildings for precious metals on the new frontier.

And to the moderators: this is actually on topic, and if you don't understand that, it's because, as you've been doing throughout the whole thread, you're skimming the conversation and jumping to incorrect conclusions. So quit fucking picking on me. — frank

No no, I think you're putting more effort into your posts in this thread now, and they seem broadly on topic and well considered to me. Though, I am a kind god.

Have some airy brain farts.

I don't have any practical skills, so the 'adaptation agenda' in the paper made me want to think about failure points in production and distribution, and what would exacerbate the effects of those failures. An energy crisis maybe could be postponed for a while by switching to nuclear fuel, though the radioactive materials would run out eventually - I find it difficult to imagine a globalised world that doesn't require lots of energy production for its technology. I find such a world desirable to maintain, as the failure to treat the world as our commons seems to me a big factor in why we're unable to address climate change effectively. In an ideal scenario, we have a civilisation that spans the stars, and I believe we need a sufficiently robust (or anti-fragile if you like Taleb) political/economic system to take us there; technology makes nature less cruel to us, it would be a shame if the only viable means for humans to obtain eternity involved having a non-technological, low energy consumptive, highly localised political economy.

Food shortage? There'd probably be need of rationing at some point, which might be an opportunity to undermine the central(ising) role money plays in organising global production if rationing was widespread; though me focussing on this is more about personal ideology than assessments of facts. It is broadly in line with the paper you linked's (very brief and buzzwordy) account of how our political economy makes us unable to address aggregate problems.

Overpopulation and crowding could create localised resource shortages even if production could still provide enough for all to live with basic needs me over a broader geographic area; crowding due to fleeing collapse or shortage is likely to make all the other problems more likely to occur and worse when they do.

Everything's a matter of degree and it's really difficult to get a handle on the aggregate effects of climate change even if we have very precise measurements/models of what changes are driving the effects - Jensen's inequality is a bitch.