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bokov comments on Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch - Less Wrong
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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?