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niceguyanon comments on Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch - Less Wrong
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Have you watch this video and does it change any of your views? Hans Rosling makes the claim that world population will top out at around 10 billion, by simply continuing to do what we do now, educate people and let them have access to birth control.
It's not automatically given that the zero-to-negative population growth among post-industrial societies will be sufficient to mitigate the fact that the number of resources they use per capita can be an order of magnitude higher than pre-service economy societies.
Although I do agree that it does seem like getting everyone wealthy enough to snap out of high-birth-rate-mode as fast as possible is probably the best non-coercive solution for minimizing this sort of risk. (Which is actually part of the reason I speculate that effective altruism might be better placed in global intervention than in science research, though I remain uncertain)
Yes, I have. In my opinion ten billion is too close to overshoot and even 7 billion is too close. Especially if it is accompanied by increased per-capita demand for resources, which it has been so far. If we're going to rely mainly on the population term of the equation, I think we need to shrink down to about 4 billion before we're back in the safe zone.
Why? We could just half our resource consumption.
There a good reason why magic numbers aren't popular among rationalists. Reducing complex system where you can turn multiple variables to single numbers doesn't help you to understand them.
If you believe we can freely choose to do so on a global basis as a preventative measure, you are far more of an optimist than I am.
If you believe that things will get bad enough that we will be forced to do so, you might be more of a pessimist than I am.
Yes, if you're tempted to use magic numbers you should just use unknowns with clearly stated support ranges and get a general result. I would rather have this discussion at the level of "let f(m,t) be the fraction of earth's maximum capacity 'm' we can exploit at technology level 't' , let k(x) be the technology level at year 'x', and let p(x) be population at year 'x'. What properties must f(m,t), k(x), and p(x) have to insure that p(x) - f(m,t) > 0 for all x > today()?"
I'm plugging in magic numbers because otherwise I'll be misunderstood even worse. Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Compared to freely choose to cut population numbers in half or even further, I think the problem of resource usage seems easier. It's still a hard problem.
But maybe we don't even have to cut energy consumption that much. Solar energy seem to get cheaper by 50% every 7 years. Batteries also seem to improve well.
The problem with the magic numbers in that case is that the resulting theory doesn't tell us very much about the utility of reducing human population by 5%. I wrote more about another issues in other posts.
For the most part, my emphasis is not on limiting population directly. I do believe that charitable efforts have the responsibility to mitigate the risk of a demographic trap in the areas they serve. But I think getting anybody who matters to listen is a lost cause.
My emphasis is on being conscious of the fact that the reason we're still alive and prospering is that we are continuously buying ourselves more time with technology and use this insight to motivate greater investment in research and development. This seems like an easier sell.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation accounts for a good share of charity spending. They started by being very focused on the issue of reducing population.
They spent millions on the issue and have seen the empiric effects of their projects. To the extend that they don't listen anymore to the kind of arguments that you are making is that they updated in face of empiric evidence.
So, curious: am I getting downvoted here because I triggered your "ugh" field? Brought up something you don't like to think about?
Because in some of my posts I've been kind of snippy, but I can't find a single way in which I'm violating the rules of rational constructive discourse in the above post.
This is not because I care about my score. It's because usually I understand what I did to earn an up-vote or down-vote. Here I'm genuinely curious what specific behavior you could possibly be trying to discourage? I mean, it couldn't possible be simple disagreement with you, because this is LessWrong. So enlighten me-- maybe it's a behavior I'll want to minimize too once I'm aware of it.
You're asserting a highly nonobvious result (seven billion looks fine from here) as though it were obvious fact.
Thanks, fixed.
You make big claims with no backup.
Not sure if you were addressing me particularly but in case you did, I didn't downvote you. I actually found your claim, that 4 billion is back in the safe zone, to be thought provoking because that idea is novel to me personally, so thanks for that, but I don't have an opinion on it yet.
Notice that, after doing my homework and seeing that the range of estimates of carrying capacity were in the range of 4-16 billion with a median of 10 billion, I revised my own estimate upward from 2 billion. Although, being at carrying capacity doesn't sound particularly safe either, just safer.
he can't really notice it since you edited it away
Treating numbers that people with obvious biases pulled out of their ass as credible. Seriously, look at the history of carrying capacity estimates, they're always just above (or just below) whatever the current population happens to be.
Right. What's disturbing is that people who don't share these biases don't respond with estimates of their own. They respond with "too negligible to matter".
So, what would be a rational way to update based on both the detailed numbers provided by sources biased toward believing that overpopulation is a threat and on vague numbers provided by sources biased against believing that overpopulation is a threat?
What do you think the nature of each of these biases might be? Perhaps that might shed some light on how to correct for them.
By the way, how is this any different from half a century of predictions that AI is just around the corner?
Malthus will be counting the machines too.
Human numbers may decline during a memetic takeover, but machine numbers probably won't.
the 10 billion topout is a very close-in result. Based on population distribution right now, a top at 10 followed by at least a little decline is baked in.
However, this says NOTHING about the population and its growth or shrinkage rate 100 years from now. The population distribution used to predict that population hasn't been born yet.