5 ms·

> Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I have some bad news: * The problem isn't pollut

by lutusp 13y ago

> Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I have some bad news: * The problem isn't pollution and CO2 release, at last not directly. The problem is the number of people doing the polluting and CO2 releasing. * A solution would be to have a smaller worldwide birthrate. Easy to say. * But any solution to the above point is very likely to collide with equality and fair play, as well as crashing into the "Population Paradox". * The Population Paradox goes like this -- someone delivers a reasoned appeal to have fewer children, in the name of human survival and that of the earth. It's perfectly worded, and delivered to a huge audience. * Sensitive, intelligent, compassionate listeners resolve to have fewer children. * Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don't -- they will have the usual number of children. * That's the Population Paradox in a nutshell: because of evolution, over time people become less sensitive to the damage they cause. And history proves that political "solutions" aren't solutions at all, but disasters. I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection. EDIT: People, do try to avoid downvoting posts that are truthful but upsetting, solely on the ground that they're upsetting.

nostromo 13y ago
This stuck with me from Marvin Minsky's TED talk: > Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be? http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_human_mind.html http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_hum...
- lutusp 13y ago
  > [Marvin Minsky:] "I think it [world population] should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million." If only people were rational. But population doesn't follow rationality, it follows the Logistic function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function The Logistic function's left-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too few organisms to support a larger growth rate. The Logistic function's right-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too many starving organisms to support a larger growth rate. Welcome to natural selection. :)
revscat 13y ago
> I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection. I'm not even sure that we are in disagreement. Reducing the birth rate would be one (admittedly important) prong in a multi-prong approach. But given current environmental realities, reducing the birthrate, even drastically, would not have the desired impact on current CO2 levels. Also, given humanity's energetic sexuality I do not think such a goal is realistic in practice, at least not enough to prevent apocalypse, and certainly not in the time frame required.
- lutusp 13y ago
  Sadly, all your points are true and germane. All I can add is that I speak to many people who try to argue that reducing CO2 emission is the problem, not the size of the population doing the emitting.
indefatigable 13y ago
Someone laments the fact that we're all doomed and wants to upend the social order, then someone else replies with a casual implication that population control would be an effective remedy. What a surprise.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > then someone else replies with a casual implication that population control would be an effective remedy. I hope you aren't talking about me. Population growth is the problem, but there is no solution, at least not one that civilized people would or should accept. Maybe you should read my first post again. I don't wave my hands at population as though control is an easily applied remedy -- I state it as an insoluble problem.
  - indefatigable 13y ago
    OK that's good to hear. But read about the history of eugenics if you'd like to know how other people might misinterpret your argument.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > ... read about the history of eugenics if you'd like to know how other people might misinterpret your argument. In the above post I did explicitly point out that there are no political solutions to the population problem -- I called them disasters, and eugenics is certainly on the list of all-time political disasters. The reason is simple -- nature is smarter than us. When evolution works, when nature produces something remarkable, it's not because we're smart, it's because nature is. We're faced with a problem that's easy to state and impossible to solve. Virtually anything we can think to try would make the problem worse. We've proven that with our total mishandling of the antibiotic issue. We now know what can go wrong, we have the required information, but we don't seem to be able to craft an effective remedy. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...
      - 13y ago
Mithaldu 13y ago
Please watch this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... In it Hans Rosling explains how something simple as making people able to use a washing machine to clean their clothes, will ultimately reduce population growth. This is because the knock-on effects of that are that women are more able to educate themselves, more able to keep their kids alive as a result of education and thus the family has no need to reproduce massively. The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality. This doesn't take the Population Paradox into account. I'm not saying such measures shouldn't be pursued. To do otherwise would be to abandon democratic principles and the uncontroversial advantages of education. But it won't make any difference. When medical researchers discovered antibiotics, they believed that marked the end of bacterial infectious diseases. But that was not to be -- natural selection reacted to these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of bacteria that proved resistant to antibiotics, and we now face bacterial strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies (MRSA, tuberculosis and others). In the same way, natural selection will react by these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of people that prove resistant to education and gender equality, and we will face human strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies. In case anyone thinks this is some kind of veiled racist rant, I personally think the resistant strain will turn out to be white people of European descent. The reason? We can and do rationalize anything to ourselves -- for example, that environmental projects will save either us or the planet, in the face of uncontrolled population growth. See, in the Population Paradox, it's not the people who get it that are the problem -- it's the people who don't, who can't, get it. And history proves that there's no political solution that doesn't turn out to be much worse than the problem itself. "We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution http://arachnoid.com/evolution

by lutusp 13y ago

nostromo 13y ago

This stuck with me from Marvin Minsky's TED talk: > Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be? http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_human_mind.html http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_hum...

lutusp 13y ago
> [Marvin Minsky:] "I think it [world population] should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million." If only people were rational. But population doesn't follow rationality, it follows the Logistic function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function The Logistic function's left-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too few organisms to support a larger growth rate. The Logistic function's right-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too many starving organisms to support a larger growth rate. Welcome to natural selection. :)

revscat 13y ago

> I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection. I'm not even sure that we are in disagreement. Reducing the birth rate would be one (admittedly important) prong in a multi-prong approach. But given current environmental realities, reducing the birthrate, even drastically, would not have the desired impact on current CO2 levels. Also, given humanity's energetic sexuality I do not think such a goal is realistic in practice, at least not enough to prevent apocalypse, and certainly not in the time frame required.

lutusp 13y ago
Sadly, all your points are true and germane. All I can add is that I speak to many people who try to argue that reducing CO2 emission is the problem, not the size of the population doing the emitting.

indefatigable 13y ago

Someone laments the fact that we're all doomed and wants to upend the social order, then someone else replies with a casual implication that population control would be an effective remedy. What a surprise.

lutusp 13y ago
> then someone else replies with a casual implication that population control would be an effective remedy. I hope you aren't talking about me. Population growth is the problem, but there is no solution, at least not one that civilized people would or should accept. Maybe you should read my first post again. I don't wave my hands at population as though control is an easily applied remedy -- I state it as an insoluble problem.
- indefatigable 13y ago
  OK that's good to hear. But read about the history of eugenics if you'd like to know how other people might misinterpret your argument.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > ... read about the history of eugenics if you'd like to know how other people might misinterpret your argument. In the above post I did explicitly point out that there are no political solutions to the population problem -- I called them disasters, and eugenics is certainly on the list of all-time political disasters. The reason is simple -- nature is smarter than us. When evolution works, when nature produces something remarkable, it's not because we're smart, it's because nature is. We're faced with a problem that's easy to state and impossible to solve. Virtually anything we can think to try would make the problem worse. We've proven that with our total mishandling of the antibiotic issue. We now know what can go wrong, we have the required information, but we don't seem to be able to craft an effective remedy. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...
    - 13y ago

Mithaldu 13y ago

Please watch this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... In it Hans Rosling explains how something simple as making people able to use a washing machine to clean their clothes, will ultimately reduce population growth. This is because the knock-on effects of that are that women are more able to educate themselves, more able to keep their kids alive as a result of education and thus the family has no need to reproduce massively. The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality.

lutusp 13y ago
> The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality. This doesn't take the Population Paradox into account. I'm not saying such measures shouldn't be pursued. To do otherwise would be to abandon democratic principles and the uncontroversial advantages of education. But it won't make any difference. When medical researchers discovered antibiotics, they believed that marked the end of bacterial infectious diseases. But that was not to be -- natural selection reacted to these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of bacteria that proved resistant to antibiotics, and we now face bacterial strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies (MRSA, tuberculosis and others). In the same way, natural selection will react by these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of people that prove resistant to education and gender equality, and we will face human strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies. In case anyone thinks this is some kind of veiled racist rant, I personally think the resistant strain will turn out to be white people of European descent. The reason? We can and do rationalize anything to ourselves -- for example, that environmental projects will save either us or the planet, in the face of uncontrolled population growth. See, in the Population Paradox, it's not the people who get it that are the problem -- it's the people who don't, who can't, get it. And history proves that there's no political solution that doesn't turn out to be much worse than the problem itself. "We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution http://arachnoid.com/evolution