4 ms·

Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einsti

by erklik 4y ago

Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc. I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not the end. No other species can grow it's population exponentially. True. However, we aren't any other species (that we know of at least). The planet can support far more people, it truly can, and more so, the rest of space awaits. We can spread further and further. Is it really good to wish for a reduction of our species? of the only life we know that can truly observe and appreciate the beauty of creation?

Jensson 4y ago
> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  > I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more? One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    And all that innovation happened thanks to the population living a good life with excess of resources. The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all, making more people who live in poverty wont add any innovation. And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
    - joshuahedlund 4y ago
      > The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
  - oldsecondhand 4y ago
    So they make $3 a day instead of $2? Still not enough to create future Einsteins.
    - joshuahedlund 4y ago
      How about $2 to $6 in just the last 40 years. Give it a couple generations with rising incomes, lower birth rates, higher literacy, lower child malnutrition, and you’ll see more Einsteins. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?country=OWID_WRL~ESP~KOR~MDG https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?count...
  - birksherty 4y ago
- erklik 4y ago
  > More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing. I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives. If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8? More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing. I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better. As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on. The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Population growth doesn't create nuclear plants, well educated people who don't have to worry about their daily needs creates nuclear plants. Our current infrastructure only supports X billion people to not live in poverty, every person you add over that X will be a miserable and thus unproductive life that still costs resources. Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
- Balgair 4y ago
  > I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc. The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures. Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay. There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well. All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain. [0] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/ [1] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1 https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1 [2] https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling [3] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > More people means less energy and resources per person though Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more. You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada. That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
- stefl14 4y ago
  > More people means less energy and resources per person though Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it. The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%). All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.
birksherty 4y ago
That's a very selfish view. More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Watch Earthling to see only one part of human needs. All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.
- erklik 4y ago
  > That's a very selfish view. Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay. > More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic. More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite". That's what i mean. Resources and Energy are practically infinite when you look at it on a long term scale. I simply don't think, it's a good idea to advocate for humanity to simply reduce and fizzle out. No. Why should we? We should advance life forward. That does not mean in the same way as before. We can do better. But advocating for the reduction of humanity, of life, is wrong in my opinion. After all, there is no other life we know of out there like us. Why stop?
  - luke2m 4y ago
    >More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite". That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.
    - erklik 4y ago
      and they were right? Resources are practically infinite on a universal scale. We just keep progressing and we will get there. Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down. Oil is not, but oil is energy, and energy is also practically infinite as long as we do it cleanly, and we have the capability to do so that today.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
We have enough brains. We don't invest in ~80% of the brains we have on this planet.
akudha 4y ago
more energy to achieve things What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one). On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically). We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today?" Exactly. The trouble is that those who weren't there to experience the freedom we had as kids and the resilisence and self confidence it instilled and developed in us simply don't understand. It's a tragedy really.
JaceLightning 4y ago
That's illogical thinking: should we increase our population by a factor of 10? To get 10x the Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci's? By a factor of 100? 1000? There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come. I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.

by erklik 4y ago

Jensson 4y ago

> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to invest in every person and their ideas. I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more?

joshuahedlund 4y ago
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. If we could give them a good life, sure add more people, but we can't even give the population of earth a good life today so why add more? One of the most stunning and under appreciated facts about the last two centuries is that, no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing.
- Jensson 4y ago
  And all that innovation happened thanks to the population living a good life with excess of resources. The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all, making more people who live in poverty wont add any innovation. And even worse, if you add people until most has to live a life on the brink of starvation again that could stop innovation from ever happening again in the future, our current time is an historical anomaly and there is no guarantee that we can ever get back here if we screw up and get everyone back to a state of misery. There are only so many ways we can improve food production, we found a lot of them the past 200 years and that led to a ton of innovations since people no longer had to worry about starvation. But all of that will quickly revert if you can no longer buy food at a supermarket, since there is simply not enough food to feed every American, some will have to starve to death.
  - joshuahedlund 4y ago
    > The people who lived in poverty didn't create much innovation at all But as their incomes tripled and their children survived childhood, their birthdates dropped and their surviving children are better educated and less malnourished. This has been happening almost everywhere in the world, and is why world population will peak in a couple decades without mass starvation.
- oldsecondhand 4y ago
  So they make $3 a day instead of $2? Still not enough to create future Einsteins.
  - joshuahedlund 4y ago
    How about $2 to $6 in just the last 40 years. Give it a couple generations with rising incomes, lower birth rates, higher literacy, lower child malnutrition, and you’ll see more Einsteins. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?country=OWID_WRL~ESP~KOR~MDG https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?count...
- birksherty 4y ago
erklik 4y ago
> More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. I mean .... why? Why are we assuming that more people aren't working to create more energy, more resources? The Earth can feed, and provide far more energy than we currently are using. Pump out nuclear reactors for every town and we will have enough energy for 10 times the people. Granted, it's not as easy as saying that but my point is that energy is not finite, and resources are far more that we are currently not utilizing. I don't imagine more people will be living with the same resources. After all, the growth to nearly 8 billion resulted in most people's quality of life rising and poverty decreasing. This is a fact. A cold hard fact, that nearly everyone on an absolute level has gotten better lives. If we can do that for 8 billion, why can't we for another 8? More so, increased population results in different, new problems and solving those problems results in us further progressing, not regressing. I guess, I just don't like thinking of this as the end of history. We can grow and grow, and grow. I don't wish for humanity to simply fizzle out. We've done pretty well till now, let's keep going. We can do better. As far as we know, we're the only species in the universe, in the whole wide universe that can truly appreciate the beauty of the universe. That can observe. Catalogue. Create Art. Sing songs and so on. The vast wide massive universe. It deserves to be seen. It deserves to be documented. To be explored. We need to live, and grow far more than now to do that.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Population growth doesn't create nuclear plants, well educated people who don't have to worry about their daily needs creates nuclear plants. Our current infrastructure only supports X billion people to not live in poverty, every person you add over that X will be a miserable and thus unproductive life that still costs resources. Sure I believe the earth can support 10 billion people who doesn't live in poverty, but that would require a lot of infrastructure that we don't yet have. Adding people before you can ensure they don't have to live a life of misery will just hurt progress, for progress it is better to have 100 people who live a good life than 1000 people who live near starvation, so the fastest way to get to 10 billion people living a well life is not to first add 10 billion people who have to live in misery.
Balgair 4y ago
> I don't see the benefit of adding another billion people who have to live a life in poverty. Fortunately, we've made huge strides in this area in the last few decades. Global poverty is at an all time low and is decreasing. The same is true for food, female empowerment, family sizes, suicide, plastics, etc. The world, really actually is getting better on a lot of major measures. Yes, there are big challenges ahead. But as a species, we're honestly doing okay, maybe even better than okay. There's a lot of data backing all this enthusiasm up. I'd link to a few papers, but GapMinder[0] is the best place I've seen where all the data is collated and searchable. They have great graphing interactives too [1]. GapMinder is an effort by the late-great Hans Rosling. You may remember his as that Swedish doctor from the TED talks [2]. I'd suggest any HN readers to dive into the site and see. They have a great little quiz[3] to help you renormalize yourself to current data as well. All hope is not lost! Things really are going to be okay-ish. Not the same, but not terrible. Our work is not in vain. [0] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/ [1] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1 https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v1 [2] https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling [3] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> More people means less energy and resources per person though Does it? It does if we're at the level of cutting wood to feed our individual fireplaces, and there's only so much wood around. But we don't live in that world any more. You need a large number of people to be able to manufacture giant windmills in... Texas, I think? Installed in Wyoming, with generators built in Switzerland. Combined with solar panels built in China. This is to replace oil from North Dakota, drilled with equipment manufactured in Texas, piped to whereever. And that's replacing coal dug in Wyoming, hauled hundreds of miles by locomotives built in Pennsylvania or Texas or Mexico or Canada. That takes people. It takes a lot of people, connected to each other, to give us a world where we're not just competing for who can chop down more of the few remaining local trees.
stefl14 4y ago
> More people means less energy and resources per person though Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it. The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%). All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.

birksherty 4y ago

That's a very selfish view. More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Watch Earthling to see only one part of human needs. All the advances are due to exploitation all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.

erklik 4y ago
> That's a very selfish view. Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay. > More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic. More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite". That's what i mean. Resources and Energy are practically infinite when you look at it on a long term scale. I simply don't think, it's a good idea to advocate for humanity to simply reduce and fizzle out. No. Why should we? We should advance life forward. That does not mean in the same way as before. We can do better. But advocating for the reduction of humanity, of life, is wrong in my opinion. After all, there is no other life we know of out there like us. Why stop?
- luke2m 4y ago
  >More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite". That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.
  - erklik 4y ago
    and they were right? Resources are practically infinite on a universal scale. We just keep progressing and we will get there. Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down. Oil is not, but oil is energy, and energy is also practically infinite as long as we do it cleanly, and we have the capability to do so that today.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

We have enough brains. We don't invest in ~80% of the brains we have on this planet.

akudha 4y ago

more energy to achieve things What things though? It is mostly materialistic, isn't it? We are more comfortable than ever. We can talk to a person on the other side of the planet anytime we want. Yet, we don't know our neighbors. More people are lonely, more people are single etc. We live longer today, yet my generation seems less happy than my parents' generation. When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today? We can't even be sure kids are safe in schools (though this particular problem is just American one). On one side, we are relentlessly moving ahead, mostly materialistic. Fantastic communication tools, medical equipment etc. On the other side, people are obese, unhappy, unhealthy (mentally and physically). We can't even a significant portion of the people accept that climate change issues are real and maybe slightly alter their lifestyle (eat less meat, less dairy, use less plastic...). How are you proposing to achieve any kind of cooperation between people when the population keeps going up?

hilbert42 4y ago
"When I was a 10 year old, I played outside all day. Can you imagine letting your 10 year old by himself, outside the house, all day today?" Exactly. The trouble is that those who weren't there to experience the freedom we had as kids and the resilisence and self confidence it instilled and developed in us simply don't understand. It's a tragedy really.

JaceLightning 4y ago

That's illogical thinking: should we increase our population by a factor of 10? To get 10x the Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci's? By a factor of 100? 1000? There will always be smart people and brilliant artists. If we reduce population, they will just come at a slower rate, which is fine. Will just make them more special when they do come. I hate people and definitely would love to see fewer of them.