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> Is that pressure illegitimate? imo, yes. saying there are "social instruments" just adds another ring around the kernel. more economically developed countr
by auvrw 11y ago
> Is that pressure illegitimate?
imo, yes. saying there are "social instruments" just adds another ring around the kernel.
more economically developed countries tend to have lower birth rates. could be causal?
funny this was posted around thanksgiving when many people in the united states -- both male and female, albeit in different forms and degrees -- will be feeling it.
- tptacek 11y agoIf it's causal, it's a problem with the system of economic development, because outside of Logan's Run, economically developed countries need to replace their populations in order to fund retirements --- not to mention drug discovery, ever-increasing Internet bandwidth, and new PS4 games. Pretty much the whole of western civilization is organized around and dependent on families having kids.
- idlewords 11y agoDrug discovery is an unfortunate example, as we've gotten steadily worse at it as our population has grown. It's odd that everyone believes we have developed a lot of miracle drugs in the last 30 years.
- tptacek 11y agoWe're discovering fewer, but not none. For instance, there are forms of leukemia that we have almost cured in the last 15 years. HIV seems like another good example.
- idlewords 11y agoHIV is the other good example. I'm pushing back against your argument that we need to make more people or we'll stop finding teh drugs. We were far better at finding them back when we had less than half the current population.
- tptacek 11y agoDo you really think there's a correlation between population and drug discovery effectiveness? I know part of the hypothesis here is that we generate huge amounts of data and not enough analysis, but analysis parallelizes too, right?
- idlewords 11y agoNo, I don't think there's any correlation. I'm poking a hole in a tangential part of your argument, in the finest tradition of message board pedantry. We used to search for drugs differently, it was about 80x more effective, and therefore we could make way fewer people and still come out ahead if we just switched back.
- tptacek 11y agoI admit that the drug discovery thing was unnecessary filigree for an argument that could have rested with "we need more children so that old people don't end up starving to death".
- idlewords 11y agoThat is a dark and satisfying way to put it. The elderly hunger for tender young flesh.
- tptacek 11y agoGod you are the worst.
- kasey_junk 11y agos/worst/best/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
- auvrw 11y ago> If it's causal, it's a problem with the system of economic development yep. i'm glad someone else said this. i deleted several sentences of rant about it from my previous post.