4 ms·
> every subgroup will also have to hit peak child Not really, because subgroup membership is flexible: people can enter and leave a subgroup. But even ignoring
by bloak 9y ago
> every subgroup will also have to hit peak child
Not really, because subgroup membership is flexible: people can enter and leave a subgroup. But even ignoring that objection, calculating that the Amish will eventually outnumber everyone else is a crazy bad extrapolation, whereas predictions of world population are based on much more modest and justified extrapolations.
If you took some old population data you could perhaps extrapolate that Shakers were destined to increase exponentially, but what happened to them? I'd say that the destiny of a single religious group is typically a short-term and local phenomenon that doesn't much affect the long-term development of world population.
- lacker 9y agoI don’t claim that the Amish will eventually outnumber everyone else. I merely claim that for the global population to hit peak child, every subgroup has to hit peak child. That is a very mathematically sound statement. To me it seems intuitively unlikely that every subgroup will exhibit the same trend. What I expect in practice is not that the Amish will outnumber everyone else, but that over time many different subgroups that are expanding their population will continue growing, and thus world population will continue to grow.
- bloak 9y agoYour "mathematically sound" statement seems obviously false, which probably means I'm misunderstanding it. Perhaps you should state it more formally.
- lacker 9y agoClaim: In order for the overall population to hit a maximum number of children, every subgroup within it must also hit a maximum number of children. Proof: Assume the opposite, that there is a subgroup S that never hits a maximum amount of children, but the overall population has a maximum amount of children X. Since S does not hit a maximum amount of children, S at some point has more than X children. This contradicts the initial assumption. QED
- bloak 9y agoOh, that's boring. It's almost as boring as saying that the number of any countable physical thing must reach a maximum because it is bounded by the mass of the universe divided by the mass of an electron, or something equally tedious. I don't think we're gaining any insight here.