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Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

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Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#21

Post by legostormtroopr »

krageon wrote: post #12
adammarples wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and as I read it I saw a guy called anonymous armadillo writing a section on how falling birth rates are due to the MeToo movement. Is this all just crowd sourced random guesswork with no evidence?

The subject attracts armchair nazis, sadly. Collaborative editing is not a good format for those types of things.

How do you conculde that "criticism of #MeToo" is akin to "Nazis"? This just cheapens and dilutes the impact of the word and your argument.

Nazis had/have a specific, violent ideology. Criticism of a hashtag-activism movement, has nothing to do with it.

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#22

Post by idlehand »

jdmoreira wrote: post #19
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #5

"Demographic Apocalypse", Jeez. I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cit…

I really hope our civilization can go from 7 billion people to 1 billion without a total collapse. Unfortunately we might not be ready. Will we be able to keep our technological level? Our current understanding of math, physics and nature? That requires quite a lot of people to transmit and learn. It certainly is theoretically possible but in practice? It's exponential. This has the potential to creep on us really so…

The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#23

Post by Dracophoenix »

ajvs wrote: post #18
atemerev wrote: post #17

Birth rates for humans are self-regulating, like with any other animal population. We are nearing the point of saturation of how many people the current environment can bear. Good. If there will be some mass extinction, or new resources available, birth rates will increase accordingly. No need for intervention here.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#24

Post by cuteboy19 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #15
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #5

"Demographic Apocalypse", Jeez. I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cit…

Addendum Quote "The economic systems of virtually all developed countries are predicated on an assumption of constant growth"—I'm with you that shrinking societies will be facing a wholly new set of societal problems. However an economic system that is predicated on constant growth will necessarily fail at some point in the future because physics. We as a species have to find ways to prevent that from happening. To k…

>However an economic system that is predicated on constant growth will necessarily fail at some point in the future because physics.

Nonsense. And the audacity to add "because physics" at the end. Newton himself proved this wrong.

1+ 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125....

Is this sequence constant growing? Yes. Is this sequence infinitely increasing? Yes. Does this sum up to a finite value? Also yes!

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#25

Post by zaptheimpaler »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #5

"Demographic Apocalypse", Jeez. I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cit…

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice...

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#26

Post by mpclark »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #21
krageon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subject attracts armchair nazis, sadly. Collaborative editing is not a good format for those types of things.

How do you conculde that "criticism of #MeToo" is akin to "Nazis"? This just cheapens and dilutes the impact of the word and your argument. Nazis had/have a specific, violent ideology. Criticism of a hashtag-activism movement, has nothing to do with it.

nazis != Nazis

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#27

Post by oneoff786 »

nootropicat wrote: post #13

Outside of high-tech solutions (external wombs, anti-aging) there's one social: a totalitarian country forcing women to have kids. The only country I could see it happening is China. In the absence of one of the three solutions, technological civilization will peak this century. It's not poverty or culture that leads to not having kids, it's industrialization. Any culture that automates agriculture to a sufficient le…

What about a strong democratic country that simply pays people to have kids

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#28

Post by seoaeu »

atemerev wrote: post #17

Birth rates for humans are self-regulating, like with any other animal population. We are nearing the point of saturation of how many people the current environment can bear. Good. If there will be some mass extinction, or new resources available, birth rates will increase accordingly. No need for intervention here.

If you consider massive amounts of suffering and death caused by resource shortages to be “good” then we have very different values systems

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#29

Post by catchclose8919 »

Varyag wrote: post #9
qualudeheart wrote: post #6

Where we’re going (AGI land) we won’t need humans.

There have been quite a few posts on here about how AGI is still really far away. I wouldn't put all your hopes on our machine descendant species appearing this century. Nevertheless this is touched on in the linked document; indeed there's an entire section on it.

It's... unpredictably far away! We suck so bad at estimating these kinds of things, that whether it's tomorrow or 500 years from now, I'm convinced we'll be totally surprised, unprepared, and our nor even sincere effort to stear things down a good path (eg. OpenAI and such...) will be either worthless or detrimental!

We should simply pursue "organic growth" eg. grow as much people as we can care for and educate properly. Unfortunately our elites seem really hell bent of keeping the social landscape hyperconpetitive so the resources we have don't really get distributed... and as a consequence of course (rational) pople have fewer children! Also there's an intellectual war fought on "traditional values" that enabled stuff like extended famimlies to exist and make child rearing at least bearable by sharing the load of caring for the nasty little critters.

Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply

#30

Post by ckrapu »

My sense was that this interpretation of work on the “behavioral sink” is quite off. I think most reasonable biologists and ecologists would agree that density-dependent stress tends to cause the pathologies of the type that are described in Calhoun’s work.

The fact that there are occasional sparse zones in the pen is relevant insofar as it usually implied strong individuals excluding access to those parts of the pen; it’s not a very strong argument against crowding as a chief mechanism for the sink.

That said, there is probably something interesting going on right now with regard to density and abnormal behavior - I’m just not sure that falling birth rates will exacerbate that.

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