To whom it may concern:
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
(After the critical success of part II, and the strong box office sales of part III in spite of mixed reviews, will part IV finally see the June Open Thread jump the shark?)
Good points. Still I feel that basing the crux of the argument on information processing is valid, unless the other concerns you mention interfere with it at some point. Is that what you're saying?
Good observation about infant mortality; there should be an opposite metric of "% of centenarians", which would be a better measure in this context.
%Centenarians might not be a good metric given that one will get an increasing fraction of those as birth rates decline. For the US, going by the data here and here, I get a total of 1.4 10^-4 for the fraction of the US pop that is over 100 in 1990, and a result of 1.7 10^-4 in 2000. But I'm not sure how accurate this data is. For example, in the first of the two links they throw out the 1970 census data as given a clearly too high number. One needs a lot more data points to see if this curve looks exponential (obviously two isn't enough), but the linked ... (read more)