Taking a mournful break - no post this week

My father's death and upcoming funeral have made it impossible to focus on writing in the last week. He was an exceptional human being, and he will be sorely missed. I expect to post again on Sunday, March 26.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Communications breakdown: Can we even talk about our environmental and energy problems?

Conversations that seek genuine understanding by all sides ultimately require a common frame of reference. If we aren't talking about the same things, how can we understand one another? We usually refer to this as talking past one another. Sometimes this happens because we haven't taken the time to understand what our conversation partner is trying to say. We are distracted and focused on something else. Increasingly, our public discourse--that which we all see on the airwaves, on the internet and in print--is mere polemic in service of some political or economic interest. There is no genuine attempt to explore the issues, only to advance a particular view of them--often for pay as is the case with public relations agencies and also fake think tank academics who merely parrot the positions of their funders. We like to regard ourselves as living in an age of enlightenment. But enlightenment only occurs when we are intellectually honest. What intellectual honesty requires is the ...
Read more

Ruin is forever (revisited): Why your death isn't as bad as that of all humankind

It should be obvious that the death of an individual human being isn't as bad as the death of all humankind. But that's only true if you accept the following premise laid out by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his upcoming book, Skin in the Game : I have a finite shelf life; humanity should have an infinite duration. Or I am renewable, not humanity or the ecosystem. The quotation actually comes from a draft version of one chapter available here . The book is not yet out. But what does this mean in practical terms? The simple answer is that human societies should not engage in activities which risk destroying all of humanity. Nuclear war comes to mind. And, most, if not all, people recognize that a nuclear war would not only result in unthinkably large immediate casualties, but also might threaten all life on Earth with a years-long nuclear winter . But are we humans risking annihilation through other activities? Climate change comes to mind. But so do our perturbations of the nitroge...
Read more