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For example: with a completely straight face, the author constructs an "inverted hockey stick" from two data points on wild land mammal mass and predicts the complete extinction of wild land mammals in a matter of decades.
It seems like, after plotting a few hockey sticks, the author bought into his own conceit and started hallucinating them everywhere.
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A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.
> A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. It's also the initial part to a bell curve.
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Or will it be that people just don't find life worth living and stop having children? E.g. South Korea.
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
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue. Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly. If I cou…
Famous last words…
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Or will it be that people just don't find life worth living and stop having children? E.g. South Korea.
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
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).
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> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue. Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly. If I cou…
Giving up a access to modern medicine would probably be the biggest downside.
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Giving up a access to modern medicine would probably be the biggest downside.
Also indoor plumbing/showers/toilets, all the hygiene products we use everyday that cost us basically nothing, indoor lighting (everything done at night was by candlelight and candles were expensive). So much of modern life we take for granted, it all adds up to a very different quality of life experience.
Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.
> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.
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> 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…
What are you trying to achieve by pointing out one of the ways to construct an incorrect model of the passenger pigeon population?
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.
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A hockey stick is the initial part of an S-curve. A point to consider is that all complex systems are functions of multiple variables and more often than not, non-linear. A complete view of the past and the present is not a guarantee of the future. At best, it can be a guide for having cautious behavior.
Don't forget the infinite families of higher order polynomials that can have arbitrary shapes beyond the point the observed data ends.