4 ms·

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is n

(It's a day ending in y, so here I go again...) It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Meanwhile, to consider a positive exponent case, there's a real question of what will actually cause the bend in the curve of human population. Will it be getting our collective shit together and slowing down? Or will it be a massive die-off after we've destroyed the ecosystems we depend on for things like air to breathe and water to grow our crops?

cornel_io 4y ago
Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources? No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite. Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.
- postkey 4y ago
  "The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union." https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/ https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...
  - cornel_io 4y ago
    What in the world does any of that have to do with birth rates and overpopulation, which is the only thing I mentioned? Are you just spamming a link and quote?
thrown_22 4y ago
Or will it be that people just don't find life worth living and stop having children? E.g. South Korea.
- mellavora 4y ago
  E.G. China. tang ping
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Nearly all developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level. The cluster of reasons for this effect is indeed almost certainly why population levels will level off
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Yes, but South Korea is leading the pack. Something unusual since they only industrialized in the 1970s and were poorer than North Korea until the 1980s.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd century as Asia is in the 21st). It’ll lead to a cratering of the working population unless we basically start to eliminate retirement (not desirable!) and enact a ton of pro-natalist policies now (in addition to as much immigration as possible). A thing people don’t understand is that the biggest resource limit is people. Population decline won’t mean abundance but the exact opposite as the dependency ratio shoots through the roof and will be incredibly stubborn to come down (as to try to reverse it with pro-natalist policies will actually make it significantly worse for a couple decades), especially as willing migrants dry up (yes, I realize how counter-narrative that is, but it’ll happen… in the latter part of this century, Africa will become sick of being the cheap labor source of aging Europe and Asia).
Archelaos 4y ago
> It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Sigmoid functions are defined over real input values (not integers). If you were to model the decline in (integer) numbers of passenger pigeons with reals, you would get a sigmoid function were the number at the end approximates, but never reaches zero.
- Trombone12 4y ago
  What are you trying to achieve by pointing out one of the ways to construct an incorrect model of the passenger pigeon population?
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    a) I did not construct the model. b) Using real numbers to reason about integer base values is not wrong per se. You just need to know how to interpret the result.

cornel_io 4y ago

Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources? No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite. Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.

postkey 4y ago
"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union." https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/ https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...
- cornel_io 4y ago
  What in the world does any of that have to do with birth rates and overpopulation, which is the only thing I mentioned? Are you just spamming a link and quote?

thrown_22 4y ago

Or will it be that people just don't find life worth living and stop having children? E.g. South Korea.

mellavora 4y ago
E.G. China. tang ping
wongarsu 4y ago
Nearly all developed countries have birth rates below the replacement level. The cluster of reasons for this effect is indeed almost certainly why population levels will level off
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Yes, but South Korea is leading the pack. Something unusual since they only industrialized in the 1970s and were poorer than North Korea until the 1980s.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  And basically none of those reasons are related to the two proposed (“getting our s%%% together” or actual die-offs, both kind of cartoonishly silly). It’s largely the availability of birth control, urbanization, and maybe also old-age safety nets. The whole world is on the way to doing this (Africa will, too, as they will develop… and, in a note of good news, probably become as economically powerful in the 22nd century as Asia is in the 21st). It’ll lead to a cratering of the working population unless we basically start to eliminate retirement (not desirable!) and enact a ton of pro-natalist policies now (in addition to as much immigration as possible). A thing people don’t understand is that the biggest resource limit is people. Population decline won’t mean abundance but the exact opposite as the dependency ratio shoots through the roof and will be incredibly stubborn to come down (as to try to reverse it with pro-natalist policies will actually make it significantly worse for a couple decades), especially as willing migrants dry up (yes, I realize how counter-narrative that is, but it’ll happen… in the latter part of this century, Africa will become sick of being the cheap labor source of aging Europe and Asia).

Archelaos 4y ago

> It depends on the sign of the exponent. Negative exponential growth, as we see in wild animal populations, is not guaranteed to turn into an S-curve. As the passenger pigeon would attest, were any of them left. Sigmoid functions are defined over real input values (not integers). If you were to model the decline in (integer) numbers of passenger pigeons with reals, you would get a sigmoid function were the number at the end approximates, but never reaches zero.

Trombone12 4y ago
What are you trying to achieve by pointing out one of the ways to construct an incorrect model of the passenger pigeon population?
- Archelaos 4y ago
  a) I did not construct the model. b) Using real numbers to reason about integer base values is not wrong per se. You just need to know how to interpret the result.