4 ms·
It’s a nice idea, but evidence needed. We’re still plains apes underneath it all, and that has implications about our ability to plan long term, cooperate in gr
by Espressosaurus 1y ago
It’s a nice idea, but evidence needed. We’re still plains apes underneath it all, and that has implications about our ability to plan long term, cooperate in groups larger than 1000, and especially cooperate with groups that are not part of what we perceive to be our in-group.
As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years.
Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.
- ljlolel 1y agoMaybe after AI there won’t be need more than 1000 people on the planet
- dingnuts 1y agook settle down there Stalin
- ljlolel 1y ago… As in people are choosing not to have kids
- somenameforme 1y agoThis isn't how things work. Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely. So when certain groups stop having children, all they do is remove themselves from the gene pool while maximizing the 'genetic share' of those having many children whose children will also disproportionately often do similarly. This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like. It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
- citizenpaul 1y agoThats a nice summary of what I belive the "great filter" is as far as the fermi paradox.
- card_zero 1y agoYou don't inherit secularity. I mean you do, but children copying their parents is not the only way ideas spread. Otherwise secularity would never have spread in the first place. (That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
- somenameforme 1y agoOf course it's not the only way ideas spread but it is the most relevant. Parents' religion (and many other values) are, by a very wide margin, the most predictive traits for determining what those traits will be in their children. This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.' Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
- card_zero 1y agoIt's not the most relevant. The enlightenment spread secularity. Books spread secularity. Childless hermits can write those. Come to think of it, religions spread through childless hermits writing books, too.
- somenameforme 1y agoYes, it literally is, and this isn't ambiguous. You can find a zillion studies contrasting the religion of people to those of their parents. For instance here [1] is an overview from Pew. 84% of adults who were raised in e.g. a completely Protestant home are Protestants themselves. That strong of a correlation simply doesn't leave room anything else to significantly matter. If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-between-childhood-religious-upbringing-and-current-religious-identity/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
- echelon 1y agoWhich 1000? Who chooses? (Not us, I assume.) I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots. That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
- exe34 1y agoI think crashing world economy and starvation will do it just fine. I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
- DecoySalamander 1y agoThere is no need for any amount or people on the planet, or any other kind of animal for that matter. "Need" is the wrong category to apply to anyone's existence.
- energy123 1y agoWe are a nasty, self-centered species on a biological level. You can patch that with prosperity and culture, but these things are impermanent and subject to regression, so it's not a durable solution. The only durable solution is altering the biology, but that itself is not without significant risk.
- ljlolel 1y agoBiology works itself out
- aw1621107 1y agoNot necessarily, depending on how broad a view of "biology" you're talking. For example, take the many, many, many species that have gone extinct over time. Their biology sure didn't seem to have "work[ed] itself out".
- ljlolel 1y agoNo more reason to care for a species than for an individual sacrificing itself for the group population
- aw1621107 1y agoHence "depending on how broad a view of "biology" you're talking". In any case, by "biology" you're referring to the biosphere? If so, the (potential) risk is that "biology work[ing] itself out" may involve working humans out of the picture as well.