It's not so much about angelic and demonic, it's about incentives. Imagine you're a company, and you pay your employees like crap. Should you pay them more? That would be nice, they would be happier, but it would cost a lot of money off the bottom line. Your competitors also pay like crap, so they're not particularly resentful of you. Also your competitors are using the money saved from crap pay to spend more on ads or something. It's going to be hard to keep up if you just try to pay them more. So, you continue the crappiness as it is.

What if your competitor is in the same boat? They also aren't too thrilled about how crappy they pay their employees, but are also worried about you, and how you will undercut them if they pay more. You find out most of the industry is like you. But nobody is going to make the first move in improving working conditions, unless you had a guarantee that everyone will do it. That sort of higher level agreement usually comes from government, who has the power to enforce such things.

So it's not about angels and demons, but about solving a nonlocal optimization problem. When the government gets involved you just have to make sure the people are well informed to understand the bottlenecks of the system. They clearly are not, so maybe we should try to do a better job of that.

It's not as simple as carbon tax => more poor people => more deaths. It shifts the stable point in the economy somewhere else, and provides market incentives to drive the costs down on clean energy sources. In the absence of those incentives, there's more than enough money to be made doing nothing about it. Sure, if one guy figures it out he will be rich, but honestly it will probably take a Manhattan project to figure it out, which is not going to happen spontaneously. Finally with any level of humane safety net, we mitigate the effects of poverty.

Let the first part stand on its own. In my own personal opinion, what if we could give every last person on earth the greatest generation ever, and then we go extinct right after? Is that really preferable to some discomfort now, but the ultimate propagation of our species? It seems like a lot of people really think so, and I can't say they can't have that opinion, but it sounds pretty disappointing to me. Put another way, nobody's inner child would light up at that thought.

I know this worldview has fierce defenders. I was once one of them. And it's painful to admit, but it's wrong.

Saying the economy can self sustain with everyone doing greedy optimization, is too good to be true. And it is. The economy is not simple enough for that. The entire field of economics can back this up, but for an easily digestible example, see the prisoner's dilemma, which can explain a ton of things, from poor working conditions to the failure of big banks.

Yes, those countries are not "socialist". That's the big lie of the Right right there. The "left" in the USA wants Social Democracy, which is not socialism. It's regulated capitalism with a safety net. It's more than just the nordic countries we look to. Most of the developed world does a better job regulating and providing safety net benefits than us. Things like universal health care would actually promote business. One reason why I didn't choose to work in a startup was the lack of decent health insurance.

Not providing safety net benefits is callous -- who are you to say they are lazy? Some are harder working than us educated. You don't know how hard someone is trying, and don't seem very bothered to find out, because it is inconvenient to the libertarian worldview. But it's more than callous, it's ignoring a basic fact of reality. The harder you have to work just to break even, the harder it is to save even a penny -- the harder it is to break out of the cycle. This is why inequality gets worse over time. Literally the point of money is to create options -- and more options are more ways to create more money. So the less of it you have, nonlinearly the harder it is to get ahead. Sure there are exceptions and wonderful examples -- but not enough, and certainly not as many as there are who probably deserve better.

For most cases, I think it is. I learned programming with C++, so it was a little rough at first, but when concepts clicked, it seemed like an unstoppable force. You could write any code exactly how you wanted it to run, and had all kinds of features where you could essentially create your own language within C++ specifically for your project. As I've grown up I've learned that's not always a good thing though.

My career took me into more research and prototyping of ideas, and there I realized in 99% of cases, worrying about memory and speed at the level that C++ can provide over its counterparts, was always less productive than running more experiments or trying a different algorithm. The underlying library calls from Python are often written in C++ -- but the drivers and top level design never needed to be. I also have become less tolerant now when I see a new machine learning package written in C++ on Github. Most times it's a real pain getting it to compile with millions of dependencies, and run with the as-advertised performance. And if you want to modify them, there's usually a steeper learning curve.

That said I still don't really like Python's lack of typing, but it's what everyone in my field uses now. Maybe one day we can switch to F#

Why don't we mitigate climate change with both nuclear AND renewables? Enough of the camps that want it all one way or the other. We have to hedge our bets anyway.

I will go toe to toe with you on bird law, and we'll see who comes out on top.

I was thinking more about this one: https://xkcd.com/1046/

I think you're getting at that there is a sense of experience that goes beyond matter. Yet I believe a brain is just a computer of some sort. These two views are not mutually exclusive, they are reconciled by the ramblings of this whoever posted this -- the sense of experience probably just permeates all matter. Individual particles don't have the computational power to actually form conclusions or thoughts, but put enough of them together to simulate consciousness, and it won't be a simulation.

Particles having consciousness, or maybe just 'experience', is something I've thought about for a while, and I think it can fit. You're exactly right about emergent phenomena -- I think a brain fully operates as a computer, and I think it is a given that we will be able to one day create intelligent machines, or simulate a human. Will it have 'real' consciousness? Could it potentially lack that notion of 'experience'. Is it a homunculus, or a real entity? What separates its operation from the human brain? I think the answer is -- nothing! But we humans definitely 'experience' the world, we are not just simulations. So the remaining logical conclusion is -- everything has 'experience'. All particles, sure, why not. If we are simulations, then simulations are real!

I know it sounds crazy, especially since I really don't know how to define what I mean by 'experience'. It's just that feeling that you have that... well, you are actually this person whose brain you are in. The brain's not just 'doing its own thing.' Or maybe it IS doing its own thing, but you can still feel it. You don't feel the computer program running though, or even your neighbor getting his mail, so who knows what they experience or don't.

Anyway, again, if I sound completely nuts just forget it all, none of this crap matters, but have some fun once in a while is all I ask

But what about the other sources that present evidence, that have been around for a decade? If you are serious about learning about climate change, take a look at http://skepticalscience.com/ where they discuss other possible sources of the changes and mitigating factors. (spoiler so as not to be misleading: only CO2 seems to be effective at explaining the trend)

All I'm saying is the evidence and arguments are out there. Please look, instead of requiring each new news article on the subject to be everything.

It's kind of disingenuous to require scientific precision from journalism. That's not its role. It's for promoting awareness. The actual arguments and data have been around a while. If you are serious about learning more, I highly recommend http://skepticalscience.com/

Yes, I think you do, heh. It might be interesting, but one sentence is not much to go on.

I'll jump in to say I was also one of those who got sucked in -- but later realized it was a mistake.

It's easy to buy into it if you're in a good place in life. In my case I was young, had a full-ride to university, and was doing well in CS. Wasn't worried about getting stuck in a dead end job. At least, not then.

The book does some grandiose hero worship, really romanticizes the whole concept, and to be fair, can be appealing in the backdrop of other novels which make use of deeply flawed characters or antiheroes. It makes theoretical arguments that have some soundness, in simple cases. But it extrapolates wildly, and the dangerous aspect of it is, it's hard (at least it was for me) to spot where it goes off the deep end.

I think the subtle aspect is the notion that absolute freedom in the economic sense, for individuals, does not correspond to maximizing the actual freedom people will enjoy in a society. There are simple counterexamples from game theory, like the prisoner's dilemma, that demonstrate this. And like in a poker game, everyone betting freely against one another, will inevitably lead to one player holding all of the chips. In CS terms, the greedy solution is not optimal. Of course there's a lot more to it than that, but that's a quick summary.

What the book gets right, but should not be necessarily extrapolated so much -- is the position on altruism. Altruism as the concept we all know and love, is good, but only if it's a long-term or enlightened view of self interest. They are one and the same. There are occasional people who get hung up and think that they are not really good people because being altruistic does eventually come back to benefit them. Well, fear not! That's the whole point! Don't be guilty about it anymore! This extends to the whole concept of environmentalism too -- our concern with protecting the environment is important because we live in it, and don't want to go extinct as a species. It should not be that we feel so bad about the planet that we want to go extinct to save it. Thankfully, that is NOT what environmentalism is about for most people, though I hear that straw man quite a bit.

I write all of this taking into account what another poster said -- not to make it sound like a forbidden fruit. Read it, but understand there's a reason why modern economic thought and philosophy doesn't think it's profound. And don't be a raging a-hole like OP says -- one of the bad traits I most regret having during my time, was an intense belittling of the social sciences and humanities. It turns out those people are smart, too.

That's been my experience. I was Republican/Libertarian when I was young. Making 20K while going to school, debt free, knowing my salary would only increase when I graduate, the sky was the limit. So of course, I believed in rugged individualism, that all I needed was to be left alone, and I'd be so comfortable and happy. People who had problems must have just given up too easily, etc. In my 30s I got married and had kids, and the whole picture changed. Then it was a struggle to meet all of the responsibilities - financially and otherwise, and I could finally see how easy it is to lose leverage and get stuck. I could feel how the free market pushes you to make terrible decisions.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Bostrom. It makes some pretty good arguments, and examines them from multiple angles.

The Witcher Series, by Sapkowski. Haven't watched Game of Thrones but I think it's the same genre. Interesting world building.