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More people means more geniuses who can help fix what's wrong.
by chromaton 5y ago
More people means more geniuses who can help fix what's wrong.
- realreality 5y agoWe don’t need more geniuses. We need take power away from psychopaths who run the world.
- chromaton 5y agoYou can have both.
- svieira 5y agoWho will build the systems that are psychopath-resistant if not for people who have seen things as they are meant to be?
- realreality 5y agoIndigenous people learned how to deal with psychopaths. Our culture lacks the safeguards against greed and antisocial behavior. In fact, we encourage those disorders, for the sake of “progress”. https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-th...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- folli 5y agoIn the same vein: more idiots that screw up everything.
- chromaton 5y agoWe've been generally on positive trend.
- throwaway316943 5y agoProductivity of geniuses seems to exceed the ability of idiots to screw things up so far.
- zelphirkalt 5y agoNot sure if this is a serious statement. More people most of all means more people who can and necessarily will break things, which are very hard to repair. Like climate stuff. The chance of having some super geniuses, that we would otherwise have missed out on, who then repair a broken climate is ... vanishingly small.
- chromaton 5y agoI understand that you're pessimistic about this, but overall the human condition has gotten better as the population has grown.
- beforeolives 5y agoMight be more accurate to say that population has grown since living conditions have gotten better.
- chromaton 5y agoMaybe. Can you provide an example?
- PaulHoule 5y agoActually there is a "demographic transition" in which, midway through, people suddenly realize that they don't need so many farmers and they don't have room in the city for them. In Europe they fired the ovens for these people. In the Middle East and Africa they are still fighting that war.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoThe Nazi death camps were because the cities didn't have room for the displaced farmers?!? That's certainly the most... um, "creatively original" historical revisionism I've read in a very long time.
- 5y ago
- mc32 5y agoConversely fewer people means fewer problems to solve... We have emission targets to return to year 2000 or year 1980s levels. We can have similar targets for pops: 1900s or 1960s, before we had fast doublings of populations, obviously through natural reduction rather than forced.
- chromaton 5y agoMaybe. Problems on a global scale would be divided up among fewer people, which would mean that each person would bear a greater burden.
- petermcneeley 5y agoI really question your fractional population 'genius' model.
- chromaton 5y agoCan you provide a counterexample, hypothesis, or anything concrete?
- petermcneeley 5y agohttps://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... (note of course I dont agree with everything said here)
- chromaton 5y agoOf course we must also build an environment where everyone can flourish. Not mutually exclusive.
- petermcneeley 5y agoYa but what im saying is that in the future you could a population way smaller with way more 'genius' or just general smart people. The datapoint I linked to above would be completely impossible in a %P genius model.
- chromaton 5y agoYes, having a smarter population is likely a good thing and almost certainly possible.
- Voloskaya 5y agoThere is a much better way to have more geniuses: Increased access to education worldwide. 10% of adults worldwide still can't read (probably around 500M people), and 60% did not go further than secondary education. This has the big advantage of not just increasing the raw number of "geniuses" but also the ratio of geniuses.
- chromaton 5y agoThis is also good. And also having more of a network effect for people to interact and cooperate helps as well.