Douglas_Knight comments on Non-Malthusian Scenarios - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Wei_Dai 26 September 2009 02:44AM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 26 September 2009 05:03:58AM 1 point [-]

I'd add:

Superstimuli - New technology creates activities that are so enjoyable that most people just don't bother having children, or don't want to have many children.

Default birth control - all individuals (of at least one gender) are implanted with effective birth control at birth/onset of puberty. It's easy to turn off, and anyone who wants to turn it off can, but you can't conceive without taking making an affirmative decision to do so. This could lower birthrates enough to hit replacement.

Nudges - like default birth control, but through other mechanisms. Rules and policies are put in place that gently discourage fertility (or gently discourage high fertility) without coercively preventing it. Tax incentives and the structure of social support fall under this category. This impairs high-fertility memes (as they are more expensive to execute) and thus lowers fertility.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 26 September 2009 08:27:02PM *  4 points [-]

These are answers to a different question: how could a singleton limit population? More precisely, they're answers to the question of what a singleton could do now, since in the long run, people would evolve around any particular mechanism that doesn't wipe them out, so the singleton would have to adapt.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 27 September 2009 08:53:57AM 0 points [-]

This assumes high genetic heredity of fertility decisions. Binary fertility does seem largely like it has a strong genetic component, but once it's there, the decision to have two children versus six children seems to be influence overwhelmingly by non-genetic factors. Once industrialization took root, fertility fell quite heavily. Since there would be rather strong selective pressures favoring "have more kids when resources are available," this suggests that such an impulse, if genetic, is very easily outweighed by other factors.

If it's memetic rather than genetic, the argument requires extraordinary stability, for which I see little evidence.