The population hysteria from the 60s was proven wrong a long time ago but it's still pretty influential. E.g. it's not uncommon for millenials to talk about not wanting children because of overpopulation.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
Well I wouldn't both-sides this one. 2020s population forecasting is better than 1960s forcasting, the latter was repudiated and the former is correctly modeling basically everything. Demographic decline really is happening and has reasonably well understood mechanisms.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
I think a lot of the difference is due to different groups/lead figures/experts focusing on different concerns, e.g. people like Paul Ehrlich and environmental groups focused on ecological sustainability vs people like Elon Musk and governments focused on economic sustainability
Fear mongering / doomsaying has been a popular human tendency for as long as we have been able to record our interactions.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
It’s more that we constantly extrapolate what experts are doing to the real world without taking in account the actual details. A research team comes up with a model that has some specific biases, parameters, etc. it yields some results. The result is then taken completely out of context and applied to a messy dynamic real world situation we don’t even have reliable metrics for. Then it just becomes a fight over narratives
With a top heavy population pyramid, more resources have to be diverted to caring for the elderly, therefore less for raising the young - a self reinforcing mechanism.
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
The real "doomsday" is the fact that we no longer have the population growth to sustain the increases that markets demand while simultaneously not alienating the ever-loving hell out of the labor and customers that capital depend upon for those increases. It's already leading to socio-economic and political problems.
idk if I'm not naive enough or too naive but I fail to see how you can expect such a simplistic solution to just solve all the problems mentioned knowing the first, second, third, &co order effects
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
I think we're already at a doomsday for population. The inertia of such a large world running on capitalism means we can't do anything about our problems any more, so I feel the bullet has been effectively fired. We're just watching it in slow motion.
You're making the mistake of not looking down the road far enough. "China's developing rapidly and has all these cool EVs, looks like smooth sailing til the end of time for them!" Their male/female imbalance and TFR < 1 are absolutely massive looming issues. Maybe they'll advance to the "robots do everything and no one ever has to work" end-game and then those things won't really matter, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalism", but the only reason the world's population is so large is that critical technologies like steel, cement, and nitrogen-based fertilizers have been deployed widely. Free markets and the profit motive have been critical drivers of this wide deployment. There are problems with these industries being so strongly profit-motivated, but it seems difficult to figure out what to do about those problems while maintaining current populations levels and material prosperity.
Yet it will somehow work out. Not ideally, thats just not humane way, in fact probably quite messily, but folks in few decades will look back on whats just another period of history. Some ups, some downs, some mild and some a bit extreme, and thats about it. Moving on, next batch of challenges ahead
Although I think there's a good chance that this will happen there's no reason to assume that we'll be better or at most slightly worse in the future just because that's all we've experienced in (recent) human history, it's a sort of survivorship bias.
Things will stabilise somewhere. Not sure at what population level and what technological level. But I am sure at some point they start to rise again. It won't be downward trend to zero for forever.
The article assumes the original 1960 paper by von Foerster was a serious prediction. It wasn't. It was a joking example showing that fitting hyperbolic growth models do data leads to an absurd singularity, an infinite population in finite time. A much better write-up on it is Scott Alexander's "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled": https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
Scott's conclusion (written in 2019, a year before GPT-3 was published) is perhaps more interesting today than it was then:
> In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.
> But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.
> If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity.
> Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens.
Great link, thanks. In a pretty remarkable coincidence, the post you linked, which itself is from seven years ago, considers a prediction from over 60 years ago of an anticipated doomsday, and that doomsday date just so happens to be a few weeks from today:
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Spent a few years doing population projections for regional planning and the thing that always got lost was how sensitive the long run numbers are to small fertility and migration assumptions.
Exponentials, let alone super-exponentials, will tend to do that. As the article notes, the biggest issue is assuming that the system you're modelling doesn't have any negative feedback loops that would stabilise it.
The same is true of investment and retirement calculations. Little differences in the estimation of an exponent will compound to huge differences in the long run.
I’m as skeptical of underpopulation doomerism as I was about the previous overpopulation panic.
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
How is South Korea's very low birth rate about not having enough of the "right" people? Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
> Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.
I've got whiplash from the speed at which we've jumped from overpopulation doomsday to demographic degrowth doomsday.
It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
You got whiplash over the speed of...a few decades? Malthusian theory had been proven wrong and people have known this since last century.
The population hysteria from the 60s was proven wrong a long time ago but it's still pretty influential. E.g. it's not uncommon for millenials to talk about not wanting children because of overpopulation.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
Well I wouldn't both-sides this one. 2020s population forecasting is better than 1960s forcasting, the latter was repudiated and the former is correctly modeling basically everything. Demographic decline really is happening and has reasonably well understood mechanisms.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
I think a lot of the difference is due to different groups/lead figures/experts focusing on different concerns, e.g. people like Paul Ehrlich and environmental groups focused on ecological sustainability vs people like Elon Musk and governments focused on economic sustainability
Fear mongering / doomsaying has been a popular human tendency for as long as we have been able to record our interactions.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
It’s more that we constantly extrapolate what experts are doing to the real world without taking in account the actual details. A research team comes up with a model that has some specific biases, parameters, etc. it yields some results. The result is then taken completely out of context and applied to a messy dynamic real world situation we don’t even have reliable metrics for. Then it just becomes a fight over narratives
Sounds like we could use a psychohistory expert.
With a top heavy population pyramid, more resources have to be diverted to caring for the elderly, therefore less for raising the young - a self reinforcing mechanism.
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
The real "doomsday" is the fact that we no longer have the population growth to sustain the increases that markets demand while simultaneously not alienating the ever-loving hell out of the labor and customers that capital depend upon for those increases. It's already leading to socio-economic and political problems.
That's where robots come in. They replace the missing labor.
idk if I'm not naive enough or too naive but I fail to see how you can expect such a simplistic solution to just solve all the problems mentioned knowing the first, second, third, &co order effects
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
I think we're already at a doomsday for population. The inertia of such a large world running on capitalism means we can't do anything about our problems any more, so I feel the bullet has been effectively fired. We're just watching it in slow motion.
This is a Western view not necessarily seen in Asia, such as China which does seem to be solving their problems just fine.
You're making the mistake of not looking down the road far enough. "China's developing rapidly and has all these cool EVs, looks like smooth sailing til the end of time for them!" Their male/female imbalance and TFR < 1 are absolutely massive looming issues. Maybe they'll advance to the "robots do everything and no one ever has to work" end-game and then those things won't really matter, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalism", but the only reason the world's population is so large is that critical technologies like steel, cement, and nitrogen-based fertilizers have been deployed widely. Free markets and the profit motive have been critical drivers of this wide deployment. There are problems with these industries being so strongly profit-motivated, but it seems difficult to figure out what to do about those problems while maintaining current populations levels and material prosperity.
> it seems difficult to figure out what to do about those problems while maintaining current populations levels and material prosperity.
Pretty sure that's the point of the comment you're replying to.
Yet it will somehow work out. Not ideally, thats just not humane way, in fact probably quite messily, but folks in few decades will look back on whats just another period of history. Some ups, some downs, some mild and some a bit extreme, and thats about it. Moving on, next batch of challenges ahead
Although I think there's a good chance that this will happen there's no reason to assume that we'll be better or at most slightly worse in the future just because that's all we've experienced in (recent) human history, it's a sort of survivorship bias.
Things will stabilise somewhere. Not sure at what population level and what technological level. But I am sure at some point they start to rise again. It won't be downward trend to zero for forever.
I do think so, but like you said, messily.
> folks in few decades will look back on whats just another period of history
I mean, of course. I also worry about French Revolution and WWII less then people who had to live it.
The article assumes the original 1960 paper by von Foerster was a serious prediction. It wasn't. It was a joking example showing that fitting hyperbolic growth models do data leads to an absurd singularity, an infinite population in finite time. A much better write-up on it is Scott Alexander's "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled": https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
Scott's conclusion (written in 2019, a year before GPT-3 was published) is perhaps more interesting today than it was then:
> In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.
> But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.
> If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity.
> Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens.
By the way, here is the (short) original 1960 article: https://www.bioinfo.rpi.edu/bystrc/courses/biol4961/Doomsday...
Great link, thanks. In a pretty remarkable coincidence, the post you linked, which itself is from seven years ago, considers a prediction from over 60 years ago of an anticipated doomsday, and that doomsday date just so happens to be a few weeks from today:
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Set your calendars!
"The great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy, but extrapolation"
Unrelated, but I do like to place my trust in internet strangers - is Ignition! a read you'd recommend?
Relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/605/
Spent a few years doing population projections for regional planning and the thing that always got lost was how sensitive the long run numbers are to small fertility and migration assumptions.
Exponentials, let alone super-exponentials, will tend to do that. As the article notes, the biggest issue is assuming that the system you're modelling doesn't have any negative feedback loops that would stabilise it.
The same is true of investment and retirement calculations. Little differences in the estimation of an exponent will compound to huge differences in the long run.
I’m as skeptical of underpopulation doomerism as I was about the previous overpopulation panic.
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
How is South Korea's very low birth rate about not having enough of the "right" people? Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
> Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture. The issue is happening everywhere, how is it racist?
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.