Arithmetic, Population and Energy - FULL LENGTH

What Hacker News said

Strong rec shahar2k · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

[this video] "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.

Strong rec theossuary · 2023-07 · on “There’s a heatwave in the sea and scientists are worried”

Your point reminds me of my favorite guest lecture I've ever seen: [this video] About 2/3rds through makes the same point you do.

Recommends myshpa · 2023-07 · on “How, Mathematically, We’re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet”

> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored

Cites acqq · 2017-02 · on “To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics”

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" [this video]

Cites espeed · 2017-02 · on “Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]”

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett That's the thesis of Dr. Bartlett's famous lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy": [this video] Calculus is foundational for understanding our rapidly changing, data-driven world. It gives us the ability to see. You can apply calculus anytime you have a quantity that's changing over time, and you want to see where things are going, how things are changing, and when something is going to happen based on its rate of change -- e.g. stocks, startup growth metrics, how an idea is spreading, mass-market adoption, etc -- anytime you have time-series data and you want to see

Cites maerF0x0 · 2017-05 · on “China Can’t Sustain Its Debt-Fueled Binge, Moody’s Says”

All the fears around growth is from people not understanding the difference between absolute growth and relative growth. Which is better growth of 1000 or 3% ? the developed world cannot grow at high percentage points because they're so large. This video more or less shows the insanity of trying to grow at a fixed rate (say being an "emerging market" at 6% per year) for an indefinite timespan. [this video]

Cites Sacho · 2018-01 · on “The cost of games”

But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: [this video] transcript: [LINK] )

Cites acqq · 2019-07 · on “The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions”

I'd like to quote Al Bartlett: His thesis: " The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function " An example from the rest of the talk: "Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth : it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at