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bokov comments on Blind Spot: Malthusian Crunch - Less Wrong
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Oh, by the way, I thought of a few practical benefits I can hope to achieve with this discussion:
Next time some someone who has read enough of this post wanders into a debate about global warming or deforestation or whatever, they will be armed with a constructive alternative to the standard green vs blue talking points.
Conversely, you can find here arguments for full-steam-ahead technological progress that luddites won't be expecting because it follows directly from some of their favorite "we're all doomed" arguments. I even suspect the reason I'm getting such a drubbing here is because I'm being mistaken for a Greenpeace-er.
If I'm right that most environmental and a fair number of political/economic/social problems are sequelae of overpopulation, that would be very useful to know, because it would focus efforts on the root cause instead of mistaking the overwhelming array of symptoms for independent problems. A unified theory of doom and gloom, if you will.
...edit: one more
What reason do you have to make that suspection? You make it clear that you think environmentalists are wrong.
The closest I've come to GUAT is general incompetence as the root cause. Tracing the cause of incompetence brings up... Incompetence. I figure if it's recursive, it's probably something we definitely need to focus on. If there's a more severely recursive cause, I've yet to discover it.
What is GUAT?
Grand Unified Armageddon Theory. :p "What will be the root cause of the end of the world?"
We're all incompetent compared to the theoretical limits of competence permitted by our current brain architecture. But with a smaller population, the stakes are lower for whatever blunders we do commit (up to a point, of course-- there is obviously such a thing as a dangerously low population, but not even Wrongians would claim that we're close to that boundary).
So, what is the first tier of secondary causes after the root cause of incompetence?
It varies widely, but that is the nature of opinion.