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Preston’s Paradox
- hoseja 4y agoThe "paradox" is the incredible, insane 20-th century population explosion.
- jimhefferon 4y agoInteresting and new to me, at least. There is no place I can see to give feedback. Perhaps the author reads HN? > how many children they have ever born Surely "borne"?
- ziddoap 4y agoIn regards to children, as in giving birth, "born" is correct. >Both born and borne are forms of bear. Born is commonly used with the sense of bear meaning "to give birth." Borne is used in reference to carrying something (physically or figuratively) [...] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-difference-usage-spelling https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/borne-vs-born-...
- gweinberg 4y ago'and, occasionally, in the "give birth to" sense.' Odd choice of words to elide.
- zuminator 4y agoGP has a valid point. "Borne" is the customary construction for the active past participle. Look at the very last example in your own link. It's a subtle point, really just amounts to the fact that with "have" and "had," borne is the typical collocation, as contrasted with "have been" and "had been," where born is normally used.
- ev7 4y ago“Birthed” might be the correct version.
- smegsicle 4y agoidk if its 'more correct' but it seems to read more clearly
- ars 4y agoIn American English "born" means given birth to, while "borne" means physically carry something (possibly a child, but not necessarily).
- readthenotes1 4y agoParadox, or just pointing out human inability to multiply?
- SamBam 4y agoNot really a paradox, but also not intuitive. If the average number of offspring were 3, and also every woman had exactly 3 children, then mandating that every woman has one fewer children than her mother would stabilize the population in one generation, and wipe it out shortly after. The "paradox" happens because of the skewed distribution of family sizes.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swframe2 4y agoI wonder if there is a more important paradox "wealthy people trying to increase their wealth will influence government laws so extremely selfishly that the world will suffer a catastrophic event that drastically lowers human population."
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoI missed the part where the paradox was explained. If every woman goes from having 3 children to 2, why did the rate go up?
- Strilanc 4y agoSuppose there's 1 woman who had 10 kids, and everyone else had 3. Everyone then has max kids according to the "1 fewer than mother" rule. After 5 generations that 1 woman has 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5 = 151200 descendants that will each have 4 kids. Everyone else went extinct several decades ago. So the average number of children per woman increased from 3 to 4.
- Supermancho 4y ago> Everyone then has max kids according to the "1 fewer than mother" rule. 1 fewer is not the rule. The rule is "every woman has to have fewer children than her mother" There will be some whose mother had 10 then the daughter had 1. This narrative implies that every woman is having as many kids as possible all the time, which is both unrealistic and misleading by statistics. With a narrative sample size of one, the story is indicating that the number of people inevitably increased because of the rule rather than explaining this is an edge case paradox.
- cryptonector 4y agoYeah, but TFA then shows a graph of 1-fewer-than-mother.
- Supermancho 4y agoThat's the point. It's making an implicit assumption by graphing the maxima rather than demonstrating the range, making the paradox seem more likely than it is.
- cryptonector 4y agoBut after 10 generations they all go extinct.
- umvi 4y agoSo the average shifts slightly up in the short term because of whales, but the population still will trend to zero in the long term. Not really a paradox, just a slightly unexpected short term statistical anomaly.
- underwater 4y agoI don't know if "whales" is the right metaphor in this situation.
- gweinberg 4y agoI think it's actually pretty well known that with a stable population there are always a lot more people with fewer kids than their parents have than there are people with more kids. After all, a decent fraction of people never have any kids at all, but everyone's parents had to have at least one.
- ffhhj 4y agoMaybe the king should have said "1 less factorial number than the mother".
- daxfohl 4y agoSide note is that if the rule is to have exactly the same number of kids as your mom, then the average asymptotically approaches the woman of the first generation who has the most kids. So the king did better than nothing.
- redavni 4y agoTo the young people here. Ignore the last line in the article. You should never ever allow statistics at this level impact your decision to start a family. If you are intelligent enough to be reading an article about statistics on the Internet, please reproduce.
- toolz 4y agoI don't have any good answers here, but it would seem that a negative consequence of welfare for lower income classes would have them disproportionately incentivized to have children (as their welfare would represent a much higher % of their total income). With this being the case I have to imagine that's a large contributing factor to associating large families with lower income and thus it loses the former advantage of large families being a high status indicator and thus higher income (and presumably higher intelligence/ better adjusted) families were responsible for a larger percentage of the population. I have no idea what a humane incentive would look like, but I do wonder if we could find one if giving higher income families more incentive to reproduce relative to lower income families (or more directly I'd want to incentivize higher intelligence and better adjusted families, I just don't know how to measure that so I use income class to differentiate). Presuming in all of this, that it isn't controversial to want intelligent and adjusted people to be responsible for the lions share of genetic makeup of future generations.
- whatshisface 4y agoWell, I guess eugenics is back... It was a nice 100 years. Scary "Idiocracy" figures aside, this discussion is incomplete without the incel statistics. The data is relatively conclusive that anyone below a certain threshold has no chance of getting a date. I think you will find that all the eugenics you could possibly want is already happening, the "program" is being administered by everybody, and the social norms that permit it are unimpeachable.
- lr4444lr 4y agoIt has little to nothing to do with genes. You want a productive working class that produces more than it consumes to support the people who - for whatever reason - do not.
- bo1024 4y agoThere is an extremely important difference between "every woman has fewer children than her mother" and "on average a woman has fewer children than her mother". You can see that in the first scenario the human race dies out in about 12 generations as the maximum possible number of children any woman can have decreases by 1 each generation. The second scenario is easily compatible with sustained long-term population growth. For example each woman initially has four kids, two of whom are childless and two of whom have four kids, etc. This doubles the population each generation but on average a woman has half as many children as her mother (two fewer).
- dmurray 4y agoIt doubled in the first generation (one woman and presumably one man produced four kids) In the following generation, the population didn't increase. Four people and their four partners collectively produced eight kids.
- bo1024 4y agoAh, great catch. I keep forgetting about sexual reproduction. To correct the point while keeping the math easy, make it 8 kids each, half of whom have 8 kids and half none, etc. Then each couple contributes on average to two couples in the next generation, etc.
- smegsicle 4y ago> I keep forgetting about sexual reproduction a problem all too common in these fields
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago> Preston concludes, “Those who exhibit the most traditional behavior with respect to marriage and women’s roles will always be overrepresented as parents of the next generation, and a perpetual disaffiliation from their model by offspring is required in order to avert an increase in traditionalism for the population as a whole.” This has huge political implications.
- pixl97 4y agoThis is why most religions are actually fertility cults of one type or another. Disobey the fertility cult and you get the Onan treatment. Also this explains why many religions staying power. "Have lots of kids and teach them your religion".
- renewiltord 4y agoAh, if a^i_t is the number of children in the t'th generation in the i'th 'matrilineal line': a^i_t = 0.5 * k^i_t * a^i_{t-1} * (k^i_t - 1) Fertility rate has a quadratic relationship with number of kids per woman, since half the kids will be women capable of kids themselves. Whatever, my superscripts are fucked, but the idea is that the relationship being quadratic means high-birth women are going to be much more influential than low-birth women and so linear measures of central tendency don't capture that. Cool.
- nojs 4y ago> Starting from this distribution, what would happen if every woman had the same number of children as her mother? A woman with 1 child would have only one grandchild; a woman with 2 children would have 4 grandchildren; a woman with 3 children would have 9 grandchildren, and so on. In the next generation, there would be more big families and fewer small families. I don’t think this is correct, because not all children are female. Under this scenario a woman with one child would have either one or zero grandchildren, a women with 2 children would have 0, 2 or 4 grandchildren, etc. I guess the point the article is making (that the average number of kids needs to decrease to keep the population from exploding) still stands.