China to begin two-child policy • Hacker News Board

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#431

Post by dyeje » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

Idontagree wrote: post #171

dyeje wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you read up on the carrying capacity of Earth.

How is it that we're on a technology forum and people continually insist that we've achieved the maximum rate of advancement? Also we most certainly do not spend all of our resources advancing areas of technology that would sustain more people, for instance I think there could easily be more research put into food growth/production/sustainability and perhaps things like housing development than are currently being do…

I didn't insist anything. I simply suggested reading about carrying capacity. It's a relevant topic to population control, and it could broaden his understanding of the issue.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#432

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 6:49 AM UTC

throwaway_789 wrote: post #427

TeMPOraL wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that this cluster of comments is discussing "licensing" the fundamental right of humans to reproduce is in itself a triumph of dystopian rhetoric. We're discussing limits on reproduction because this "fundamental right" is most likely going to fuck up the planet. Don't confuse basic capability with a "right". > Also, excluding Nazis from arguments against eugenics is like excluding Bolsheviks from argument…

> reproduction ... is most likely going to fuck up the planet Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination. We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our…

> Malthusian fallacy

You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.

> We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time.

You say that like you had any proof for it. Taken at face value, Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".

> What does that even mean?

It means: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

> The fact that the same people who fight for esoteric rights of privacy and free speech disproportionately flip their semantic switch to cast the most fundamental human right in scare quotes is difficult to fathom.

I don't flip any switch because I personally don't fight for privacy. I see the current levels of it as a historical anomaly, and generally something we need to outgrow as a society in order to progress.

> We throw the entire concept out because it is intellectually rancid. The taboo is justified. We should not touch eugenics, just like we should not touch proposals for disenfranchising women or chattel slavery.

No, this is dangerously irrational way of thinking. A hundred years ago you would taboo women voting. Two hundred years earlier you would taboo the concept of freedom of black men. What you're doing is just selectively tabooing your cherished belief out of fear your rejection may be wrong. If the belief is valid, it can stand on its own strength, it does not need protection from being discussed.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#433

Post by fsloth » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 7:08 AM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #303

fsloth wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are trivializing thousands of years of history with this. China is ... china. They use the same alphabet they used when egyptians used hieroglyphs. The sensibilities of the chinese population are not about a people being dominated by a marxist tyranny. It's china being ruled as it has always been ruled - the dynasties have come and gone but the dynamics of government - and the cultural sensibilities which…

> the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.

'Immoral coercion' makes it sound like a quick graft. I suggest it's more fruitful to compare countrys policies with the histories of government within the same region rather than other countries in different cultural regions. If you want to moralize this method makes it far easier to pinpoint the really bad apples.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#434

Post by iofj » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 7:11 AM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #154

iofj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is much more what will happen to the world's numbers before the population numbers decline (IF indeed EVERY ethnic groups starts reducing numbers. God help us all if there is one that doesn't) Numbers of fanatically religious people will double, relatively speaking. Mostly Catholics and Muslims. This is under the assumption that the current rates of conversions remain roughly the same. Trouble is, p…

Actually atheism is on the rise (or rather, religiosity is on the decline, yes worldwide, too), and urbanisation has been and still is on the rise (recently passing the 50/50 line, with now the majority of people living in cities), and no, rural populations don't impose their culture on cities, rather they seem to get integrated or even further, assimilated by the city culture. As for an increase in non-white populat…

Maybe I should clarify, I am not worried about the change as such, but rather the social unrest that seems inevitable given the change.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#435

Post by chii » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 8:04 AM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #230

lostInTheWoods3 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a billion more potential farmers yes, but land and water are finite resources

The quantity of the available resources is not nearly as much of a problem as the allocation. Subsistence farmers are not as productive on the same plot of land as industrialized commodity farmers. We have more than enough land and water to feed everyone, but the (simplified) problem is that when one person does all the farming for the whole world, nobody else can afford to trade for any of it from them.

Surely the farmer needs clothing. So he will trade with the sole cloth maker. Surely the club maker needs threads and dyes, so she will trade with the due maker and the thread spinner... And ad infinitum.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#436

Post by vlehto » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 8:50 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #420

vlehto wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. Then again population of a country is able to change it's mind. Just before WWI lot's of European intelligentsia favored communism. Same happened before WWII with fascism. It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. And something else will come after it. For any given moment, it's even probable that majority of some countr…

>"Royalists" have been a phenomena everywhere. As has barefaced lying to the populace about their own dislike for democracy. It seems particularly common in Egypt where the idea that "the people just aren't ready for Democracy yet like they are in the west" is commonplace among the country's elite. >It is still completely possible that spread of democracy is just multinational fashion trend. Nobody's ever voted democ…

If I would find a country where people voted out democracy, you would probably just say the election was rigged.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#437

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 11:14 AM UTC

throwaway_789 wrote: post #423

Dylan16807 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what exactly you replied to, but the entire category of 'eugenics' should not be tainted forever. Heritably curing the cystic fibrosis gene with an injection? That's eugenics.

No, eugenics really should be tainted forever. Cystic fibrosis can be heritably cured without eugenics, e.g. hopefully within a few decades via gene editing something like CRISPR. Let us not use specious arguments about curing rare Mendelian diseases as a Trojan horse to usher eugenics back into mainstream acceptability. As a sibling comment notes, eugenics is conventionally understood to be gene selection via people…

So you're okay with gene editing. Are you okay with editing a bunch of genes, as long as anyone is allowed to have a child that's still fundamentally a mix between them and their partner?

Because I'm pretty sure that would satisfy 90% of the historical proponents of eugenics, even if you refuse to call it such.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#438

Post by jenscow » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 12:52 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #332

emergentcypher wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot more at play in the middle east than "they never really wanted it". As I wrote elsewhere, it's hard enough in a vacuum to overthrow a dictatorship and start a free and functional democracy. It's even harder when there are a multitude of foreign powers interfering in your country preventing this from happening. Democracy is failing in the middle east because there are a lot of powerful people and nation…

> And finally, how does anybody know "what they really want" unless you ask the entire country in a free and fair manner? This is the big fallacy behind "the people prefer the lesser evil of dictatorship." You can't say that. You don't have a clue what the people prefer. This is the whole point: if the people want a dictatorship, give them a free, fair, democratic vote and let them choose dictatorship. It's not even…

> Trying to speed it up with tanks and guns is just crazy.

No, that's dictating.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#439

Post by throwaway_789 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #432

throwaway_789 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reproduction ... is most likely going to fuck up the planet Malthusian fallacy. The idea of a "population bomb" has been indoctrinated into the modern mind of certain political orthodoxies since the late 1960's. It has yet to pass, because it is wrong. The jeremiads of Malthus and Ehrlich are myopic and dangerously lacking in imagination. We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our…

> Malthusian fallacy You're doing this again. Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it. > We will engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, and thrive -- all with a human population that monotonically grows over long periods of time. You say that like you…

> Malthus was wrong with his prediction, but he wasn't wrong with noticing obvious limits to growth. It takes special effort to consciously stop noticing it.

Malthus premised his hypothesis on an assertion that there were obvious limits to growth. Both the premise of obvious limits to growth and the conclusion of catastrophic resource scarcity due to population growth were wrong.

Our food supply is an obvious limit to population growth like an unlocked door is an obvious limit to leaving a room. Yes, if you do nothing, then you will be limited. That should not instill hand-wringing, existential dread.

> Malthus sounds much more probable than your "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it".

History has proven Malthus and his modern incarnation Ehrlich to be wrong time and time again, which doesn't bode well for that probability of yours.

Again, "don't worry, future generations will somehow fix it" is a strawman. Pithy, but vapid. Firstly, I said we will engineer ways to overcome limitations. Our current generation is, and will continue to, engineer ways to feed ourselves, generate potable water, control our climate, clean our air, thrive, and grow our population.

Do I have proof that the engineers of future generations won't all squander their life and do nothing more than optimize sales funnels and click-through-rates? No. But I think it is much more probable that our society will continue to produce some engineers that have not only the talent but the focus we need to break through our current brittle limitations to population growth -- just like their parents, grandparents, and every generation before them did.

Re: China to begin two-child policy

#440

Post by Retric » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

lotharbot wrote: post #425

Retric wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top of the curve is unstable. A new plant virus destroys a major crop and suddenly billions starve.

Every part of the curve faces that sort of instability. The number of crops actually growing isn't particularly higher than the number needed to sustain the population, and we can't just spin up enough food for billions of people even if we do have plenty of land to do it on. With humanity, "carrying capacity" is unlikely to be food-limited.

The large number of overweight Americans is a huge pool of excess food and takes a lot of extra daily calories to maintain. As is the large number of livestock being produced and all that corn ethanol etc.

The top of the curve removes that as we can't pay for the inefficiency's of livestock or the extra daily calories to be overweight and feed 50+ billion people.