Reddit reviews Future Babble: Why Pundits Are Hedgehogs and Foxes Know Best

The closest I can think of for a documentation of this is Future Babble by Dan Gardner. Future Babble is about the perils of prediction and the cognitive biases that get in the way of our reasoning about the future, focusing heavily on the neo-Malthusians or "doomsters" of the late 20th century. I think this is a book people who read SSC would love and I can summarize some of the history it documents:

In 1948 an ornithologist named William Vogt published a book called The Road to Survival, in which he predicted that environmental degradation and population growth would cause humanity to exceed Earth's carrying capacity, leading to imminent famines, population decline, and civilizational collapse. Vogt's book was not read very widely at the time, but it was read by some very important people, and his perspective has dominated environmentalism ever since. Vogt's ideas burst into the mainstream in 1968 with Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, which argued that populations were growing so quickly that they would soon outstrip our agricultural capacity, predicting widespread famines beginning in the 1970s. Ehrlich's book sold millions and was highly influential, and he successfully lobbied many third world government to implement involuntary sterilization programs. However, populations did not stop growing, but the famines never arrived. Agriculture caught up with the growing population, thanks in no small part to Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, which introduced new crop varieties and widespread fertilizer use to improve yields. This, however, did not convince Ehrlich, who simply moved the timetable for the inevitable famines forward.

Shortly after the publication of Ehrlich's book, a think tank called the Club of Rome produced the most systematic explication of these ideas to date, the Limits to Growth. Limits used the ideas of cybernetics and the emerging technology of computer simulation to argue project that, unless humanity worked together to limit population and economic growth, we were in for a doomsday scenario at the hands of resource depletion and pollution. Under even the rosiest scenario, gold would be completely used up by the end of the 20th century, oil soon after, and all other resources sometime towards the middle of the 21st century. But they also included a scenario which assumed resources were infinite, and found that the industrial growth this enabled would lead to spiraling pollution, with toxic chemicals polluting the environment so thoroughly that they would poison the land, making agriculture impossible. All of these scenarios led to what the Club called "overshoot and collapse": humanity would exceed Earth's carrying capacity, be unable to reproduce itself, and populations would collapse down to a low level.

The resource shortages projected in Limits never materialized, leading to it being mostly discredited by the 1990s, but one limit did seem to be approaching: Peak Oil. While the Population Bomb and Limits to Growth are less fresh in our minds, most people here are probably old enough to remember Peak Oil. It comes from M. King Hubbard's observations on the productivity of oil wells: production will ramp up, reach a peak, and then slide into decline, following the path of a bell curve. Hubbard noticed this trend applied not just to single wells, but to entire oil fields, and from there he projected this could apply to entire countries' oil production, and indeed world oil production as well. In the wake of the 70s oil crisis, Jimmy Carter had given a speech predicting the imminent exhaustion of oil reserves that had brought this idea into the mainstream, but it had been forgotten in the Reagan years where, despite declining domestic productivity, oil prices remained low. But by the early 2000s oil prices were on the rise again, provoking a panic, because Hubbard's projections had shown Peak Oil would arrive around this time. There was a rash of books and public commentary on the imminent Mad Max future this would induce, and even some of the heads of the oil majors were predicting that the age of oil was over. But it never happened. In response to rising prices oil companies began tapping reserves that were previously uneconomical, and deploying new technologies like fracking that allowed them to pump oil that had previously been unavailable. Oil prices plummeted after the 2008 crash and remained low on the back of these new sources of oil, and by 2018 US oil production had exceeded its previous 1970 peak, refuting Hubbard's hypothesis that national oil production followed a bell curve like that of a single well or field.

Doomsday scenarios don't pan out, but we keep making them. And the most infuriating thing is that, in the minds of those that make them, they're never refuted at all, and they get away with it. Paul Ehrlich is still around, still collecting accolades and prestigious appointments, and even though the famines he predicted are fifty years late he still argues they're imminent, with no detriment to his career. When you talk to people who believe in Limits to Growth, they argue that the fact the resource shortages never arrived is irrelevant: they point out that "overshoot and collapse" was projected to arrive only in the middle of the 21st century, and to the scenario that assumed resources were unlimited. I even saw an article in the Nation that claimed Limits "introduced the concept of anthropocentric climate change to a mass audience", which is just an outrageous lie. I've read it, and there's no mention of climate change or global warming at all. The collapse in the unlimited-resources scenario wasn't about carbon, it was about toxic chemicals rendering the Earth uninhabitable, and I don't know anyone who believes that's going to happen. As for the Peak Oil people, a lot of them think the new oil boom is an Indian summer and production will soon plummet anyway. But a lot of them are on to the next thing: EROEI/EROI, energy return on investment, which says that even if we don't actually deplete fossil fuels we'll still have economic collapse because it'll harder and more-energy intensive to extract them. And nothing can stop this, not a shift to renewables or nuclear, not even fusion power, nothing. Just like all of the previous failed apocalypses it's inevitable and imminent. These failed ideas never die, they're just tweaked and updated by ad-hoc reasoning.

But, while these doomsday scenarios are largely ignored, there's a very big one that's on everyone's mind: climate change. And even though I've very skeptical of doomsday scenarios, I have to concede that this one is more justified, better researched, and much scarier than any of the other ones I've mentioned here. But Garder's point isn't that bad, even terrible, things can never happen. It's just that we're terrible at predicting the future. He reports empirical research that demonstrates even experts are usually worse at prediction than flipping a coin, and identifies all sorts of cognitive biases that lead us astray. And with that in mind, we should probably be cautious about accepting the most exaggerated claims about how climate change is going to play out. It can be bad, even catastrophic, without being apocalyptic. And there's still ample reason to try and stop it even if it's not. Even if climate change isn't going to kill billions of people, I would still like to have coral reefs, the Everglades, and Bangladesh.

Anyway, check out the book. Probably the best explanation I've read of why people always think the world is about to end: it's inherent in their psychology, they usually don't know about all the old failed predictions, and even when they do they don't change their thinking.

Most people who predict things don't get them right, dummy.

Read a book. Start with this. https://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Pundits-Hedgehogs-Foxes/dp/0452297575

Mate, you're an idiot. You haven't had a single coherent thought since you've begun posting here. You flip-flop on issues and you find that exciting. I think you're young, naive, impressionable, and too optimistic. That's a solid recipe for wishful thinking.

But fuck, I'm human, I'm wrong most of the time.

We have no idea. No experts can predict the future. By all accounts it will be better than it once was but there are just too many variables to account for in order to give an accurate prediction.

Here's a book that talks about predictions and how they're silly. It's a really good read. http://www.amazon.com/Future-Babble-Pundits-Hedgehogs-Foxes/dp/0452297575