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So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. But even taking that premiss as correct If you want more brain power you don't need more peop

So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. But even taking that premiss as correct If you want more brain power you don't need more people, you can simply treat the people that already exist better. Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. People who dont have enough money to survive, people who are in debt, spend so much mental energy just trying to survive. Calculating how much they can afford, how they can stretch their money. Its such a waste, when we could just provide them with the necessities they need to live a dignified life. And then we could see what they created. Sure some people make it out, but percentage wise they are the exception that proves the rule. Based on what we know about epidemiology, the impact of pollution, the impact of prenatal and early childhood stress. Just consider how those compound with years of poorly funded education in neighborhoods made unstable by the transience of poverty. Add in the school to prison pipeline (partially fueled by a rise in police officers in schools in response to school shootings) and (imo) inevitable substance abuse and think about how many brain cells have been destroyed. I dont think I'd be able to think deeply in those situations. If brains/ideas are our most important resource we are wasting them. On an almost unimaginable scale.

dredmorbius 4y ago
And yet, it seems that one of the first casualties of mass communications is intelligent thought. Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow. Simple aggregation does not work for brains. Message assessment and discrimination are expensive.
coldtea 4y ago
>So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy. It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...
bjornsing 4y ago
I agree. But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended. The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world. Or at least that’s how I increasingly see it.
- idoh 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on how avoiding competition is the root of much evil? It is plausible if you mean it as avoiding by stifling or suppressing it. On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers). The more we can not compete with each other, but rather support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Whenever the incumbent seeks to maintain their position by means other than performance - I think the reference is to e.g. large companies closing down, in an effort to keep revenue streams (think vendor locking, kickbacks, back room board deals, nepotism). There is certainly harm here, but I agree it's not all about competition - if the incumbent shares their knowledge and resources with others then, while revenue streams might go down for, more people will benefit and as a whole revenue streams will go up, or at least be distributed more fairly. In a zero sum world, companies either avoiding competition or sharing is a burden, in a non zero sum world it is not. I think ultimately the author is wrong - the idea that ideas can endlessly reap, it ignores the physical world - there are only so many available acres of land and goods at any given time. He dismisses Peak Oil, etc as a misunderstanding about the limits, but the reality is there are many limits, each one with different consequences as it is passed. Thinking the edge of the city is a block away and then discovering you were wrong is not proof that there is no edge to the city, but it does matter that you have to take a car versus walk a block - the limits are still there. Arguments about peak resources should focus on the average income pressure a citizen is facing, an infinite number of ideas does zip for you if your citizens are too poor or in debt to be able to purchase the fruits of your ideas. Unless you want to start giving away money at a steadily increasing rate...and that has never worked out.
libraryofbabel 4y ago
Yes. Stephen Jay Gould put this thought very well: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- moffkalast 4y ago
  On the other hand (outside of a handful of exceptions) major tech advances are usually made by multiple people at the same time that have access to a similar set of starting information, usually resulting in patent wars and other kinds of disagreements of who was first to figure out something by days or months. And that was already commonplace more than century ago. The bottom line is with nearly 8 billion people alive there is no such thing as an original thought anymore and everyone is replaceable. So as a consolation even if these people died and continue to die it may not matter much in the grand scheme of things.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    But not everyone can have every thought at the right time, and our thoughts compound on each other. Even if 9 women cant have a baby in one month, 8 billion minds working in parallel is still, to me, indisputably better than 1. The future is waiting for us to stop holding our collective selves back.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      How do you sort the output?
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      For sure, I suppose it mainly depends on how common an idea is. If it's something that one in a million people will figure out then there are 8000 redundant people alive for it to be discovered right now and it likely won't make a difference if our population was halved (or didn't have access to the prerequisite information to make the discovery). But there are likely to be ideas that are far rarer than that, and the more people there are the faster those can be discovered I suppose.
dustingetz 4y ago
future brainpower though and the value of helping poor people is really far out (multiple generations); capitalism can’t even see past the quarter. people are still too self interested, we’d all need to catch religion for it to work
sinenomine 4y ago
> Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. How much exactly? Do you have an estimate? A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion. Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding). What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it. People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye. 1. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/ 4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114 5. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-stratified?s=r https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-s...

dredmorbius 4y ago

And yet, it seems that one of the first casualties of mass communications is intelligent thought. Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow. Simple aggregation does not work for brains. Message assessment and discrimination are expensive.

coldtea 4y ago

>So I disagree with his argument that infinite growth is possible. People believing in "infinite growth" or even a scaled-down "sensible" version of it, are like people believing in perpetual motion machines, but with degrees and influence on policy. It's even more tragi-comical when they become even more commited to it as infrastructure, growth engines, society, etc. is crumbling all around them...

bjornsing 4y ago

I agree. But I’ve come to see that waste of brilliant brains less and less as an unfortunate outcome in a non-ideal world, and more and more as intended. The (western) world is full of mediocre yet privileged people who (consciously or subconsciously) do whatever they can to avoid competition. And this is the root of much evil in the world. Or at least that’s how I increasingly see it.

idoh 4y ago
Can you elaborate on how avoiding competition is the root of much evil? It is plausible if you mean it as avoiding by stifling or suppressing it. On the other hand, I believe that competition, broadly construed, is the root of evil (competition is for losers). The more we can not compete with each other, but rather support each other in our own personal endeavors, the better.
- smaudet 4y ago
  Whenever the incumbent seeks to maintain their position by means other than performance - I think the reference is to e.g. large companies closing down, in an effort to keep revenue streams (think vendor locking, kickbacks, back room board deals, nepotism). There is certainly harm here, but I agree it's not all about competition - if the incumbent shares their knowledge and resources with others then, while revenue streams might go down for, more people will benefit and as a whole revenue streams will go up, or at least be distributed more fairly. In a zero sum world, companies either avoiding competition or sharing is a burden, in a non zero sum world it is not. I think ultimately the author is wrong - the idea that ideas can endlessly reap, it ignores the physical world - there are only so many available acres of land and goods at any given time. He dismisses Peak Oil, etc as a misunderstanding about the limits, but the reality is there are many limits, each one with different consequences as it is passed. Thinking the edge of the city is a block away and then discovering you were wrong is not proof that there is no edge to the city, but it does matter that you have to take a car versus walk a block - the limits are still there. Arguments about peak resources should focus on the average income pressure a citizen is facing, an infinite number of ideas does zip for you if your citizens are too poor or in debt to be able to purchase the fruits of your ideas. Unless you want to start giving away money at a steadily increasing rate...and that has never worked out.

libraryofbabel 4y ago

Yes. Stephen Jay Gould put this thought very well: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

moffkalast 4y ago
On the other hand (outside of a handful of exceptions) major tech advances are usually made by multiple people at the same time that have access to a similar set of starting information, usually resulting in patent wars and other kinds of disagreements of who was first to figure out something by days or months. And that was already commonplace more than century ago. The bottom line is with nearly 8 billion people alive there is no such thing as an original thought anymore and everyone is replaceable. So as a consolation even if these people died and continue to die it may not matter much in the grand scheme of things.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  But not everyone can have every thought at the right time, and our thoughts compound on each other. Even if 9 women cant have a baby in one month, 8 billion minds working in parallel is still, to me, indisputably better than 1. The future is waiting for us to stop holding our collective selves back.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    How do you sort the output?
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    For sure, I suppose it mainly depends on how common an idea is. If it's something that one in a million people will figure out then there are 8000 redundant people alive for it to be discovered right now and it likely won't make a difference if our population was halved (or didn't have access to the prerequisite information to make the discovery). But there are likely to be ideas that are far rarer than that, and the more people there are the faster those can be discovered I suppose.

dustingetz 4y ago

future brainpower though and the value of helping poor people is really far out (multiple generations); capitalism can’t even see past the quarter. people are still too self interested, we’d all need to catch religion for it to work

sinenomine 4y ago

> Think of how much brain power is lost to poverty and inequality. How much exactly? Do you have an estimate? A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion. Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding). What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it. People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye. 1. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/ 4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114 5. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-stratified?s=r https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-s...