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All of lumpypot's Comments + Replies

Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP
lumpypot30

In "How Life Imitates Chess", Garry Kasparov wrote:

Every person has to find the right balance between confidence and correction, but my rule of thumb is, lose as often as you can take it. Playing in the open section and going 0-9 every time is going to crush your spirit long before you get good enough to make a decent score. Unless you have a superhuman ego, or totally lack one, a constant stream of negativity will leave you too depressed and antagonized to make the necessary changes.

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The U.S. is becoming less stable
lumpypot10

I'm glad to see one commenter has already mentioned George Friedman – I got a lot of reassurance from this podcast interview in April 2020, and by reading his book "The Storm Before The Calm".

Just hearing someone articulate a plausible-sounding theory for why the current instability is expected/predictable makes it a lot easier for me to imagine different futures, even if I don't agree with all of Friedman's premises.

Bonus points to Friedman for writing his theories down in ~2019, just before the notable instabilities started.

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Perpetually Declining Population?
lumpypot121

I take issue with the authors here:

Won't the Amish or some other high-fertility, perhaps religious, sub-population expand to be as many as we need? For several reasons, no.

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First, fertility in a high-fertility sub-group would have to be high enough (certainly above two, for example). We've already seen above that the "high fertility" of high fertility subgroups has been declining over the decades. High fertility used to mean 6 children per woman. Now it means 2.5. Before long, it may mean 1.8. Second, the children of high-fertility parents would have t

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3Viliam
Thanks for the information! I was thinking in a similar direction: Just like the Amish culture has emerged from the standard population, a new "Amish-like" culture may emerge again, or perhaps a new "super-Amish" culture may emerge from the Amish. There is no law of nature saying that there will be exactly one Amish-like culture ever, and once its fertility declines, it is all over. And generally, I think that the exponential curve drives people to hysterical predictions, because it ends with a disaster either way -- exponent > 1 means we overpopulate and starve to death, but exponent < 1 means we go extinct, and exponent = 1 (with infinitely many decimal places) is statistically unlikely. So by that logic we are doomed no matter what happens.