Jandila comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong

72 Post author: gwern 29 July 2011 09:06PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (465)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 07:26:12PM 2 points [-]

As to resource warfare, it's a non-starter for most foragers. You walk away, or you strike an agreement about the use of lands. There are conflicts anyway, but they're infrequent -- the incentive isn't present to justify a bloody battle most of the time. And it doesn't come up as often as you think, either, because as I've stated, forager populations don't grow as quickly (they tend to stay around carrying capacity when different groups are summed over a given area) and indeed, devote active effort to keeping it that way, which supplements the tremendous passive biases in favor of slow growth.

Where it does come into prominence is with low-tech agriculturalists, pastoralists and horticulturalists. Those people have something to fight over (a stationary, vulnerable or scarce landbase, that rewards their effort with high population growth and gives incentive to expand or lock down an area for their exclusive use).

Comment author: jhuffman 18 August 2011 07:47:42PM -1 points [-]

So in a forager society, population growth is managed how, specifically? Abstinence?

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 08:11:27PM 1 point [-]

See my other reply, the long one, which goes into some detail answering that question.

Comment author: jhuffman 18 August 2011 08:16:03PM 0 points [-]

Sorry, I don't see where you do. Food preservation techniques, migratory habits, gathering crabs or berries doesn't tell me anything at all about how people avoided population growth.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2011 08:32:14PM 0 points [-]