= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tetronian comments on Life is Good, More Life is Better - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (54)
The overpopulation argument doesn't make sense at all. Imagine a hypothetical world in which aging has been conquered, there are no terminal diseases, and life is safer and more peaceful than it is in our world. Eventually, this world's population would get too high, and the populace would have to decide what to do: Should the government impose a one-child rule? Should some of the population be shipped out into the cosmos? Should we let the price of food rise until the market resolves the issue? One thing is clear: the option "let's kill everyone over 80" would not even be on the table, because it's so barbaric that no one would give it much consideration. Furthermore, the policy doesn't even solve the population problem—the growth rate would still be roughly exponential, and the population at a given generation would only be decreased by a constant factor.
The point is this: if we had never heard of death, we would not take it on as a way of stabilizing the population.
I honestly can't see the difference between doing that and "let's kill arbitrary group #27". Or is the market going to provide some third alternative other than not feed the people with the least money?
I meant "some people would have to live with a lower food supply in the short term but food production will be strongly incentivized in the long term." Unfortunately, now that I think about it, "let's kill arbitrary group #27" might actually look more attractive in that situation.
If production levels of food can still be increased at a linear cost then we haven't come anywhere close to "population too high".
I agree, and that's why "let's kill people" actually does make more sense in that situation. My original "market prices" argument was bad.
That's probably true within a group, but I'm not so convinced that we wouldn't come up with death as a way to resolve arguments with other people.
Though, given that people would know that they could live forever, I imagine that they'd try really hard to find alternatives. I think the main input to whether or not things turn violent is how quickly resources run out after people notice that it's a problem.
The argument is more like this: would the world be a better place if we didn't stop death and everyone is reasonably happy, or if everyone is still alive, but on the brink of starvation because we don't have enough food or other resources.
It's basically a case of which is better, 7 billion people living decently, or 70 billion people living miserably.
Of course, this is all assuming we don't find new solutions to these problems with the extra manpower.
False dilemma. What about 7 billion living decently except their procreation is regulated? You pose it as for the role of population stabiliser the only alternative to death from old age is death from starvation.
What would the causes of death be? Accidents and war are the main things I can think of, assuming diseases are completely cured. Would people only be able to have a child if somebody else dies? (Not that it's necessarily a bad thing; I'm trying to understand how controlled procreation would work.)
Elimination of aging doesn't mean elimination of diseases. Even without diseases, motor vehicle accidents make cca. 2% of all deaths. Present average lifespan is cca. 80 years, which means 1/80 of the population dies each year, 1 person of each 4,000 dies each year due to motor vehicle accidents. That leads to expected lifespan about 4,000 years and population is in equilibrium if people have children in average once in 4,000 years.
How exactly would the reagulation work isn't something we can reasonably expect to know in advance. Elimination of aging would most probably be a gradual process during which human institutions will adopt. Whatever will be the final state, it's very improbable that it would be the starvation scenario.
It's unlikely that a general cure for disease will come about as a result of cracking aging; some of the more outlandish possible solutions (i.e. direct intervention by medical nanotech) might qualify, but those require such advanced technology that it probably doesn't make sense to talk about them in conjunction with conventional Malthusian constraints. In any case, the accident rate isn't that low, and birth rates appear to correlate negatively with lifespan and standard of living; I haven't actually done the math, but the constraints on the problem seem to suggest a steady state well before Malthusian catastrophe, even in the absence of regulation.
Evidence suggests that we probably won't have to worry about it. As standards of living increase - particularly education for women - birth rates fall. More reading: demographic transition.