Arghh it's that site with the "Yes I love humans" / "No I'm not human" popup obscuring the screen after a few seconds again. It's kind of cute, but my natural response to that is back button. I don't know what it's trying to say. Can't be just me it puts off like that. What a shame, it seemed like a fascinating article.
My favorite is when they just dump the URL to the history endlessly so you can never go far enough back. I see this on a surprising number of otherwise reputable sites, and then I immediately leave the site and set my browser to blacklist it.
I believe all genetically possible humans should be brought into existence.
If we imagine the set of all genetic combinations that result in something that could be conceivably thought of as “human,” only an infinitesimal fraction of humans will ever be born through traditional sexual recombination. To be born is to win a lottery with astronomically long odds.
As biotechnology advances, we will be able to conceive and grow humans using completely artificial means (eg artificial wombs). Do we, the relatively tiny population of humans who have had the luck to be born, have a duty to the much more vast population of “genetically possible humans” to bring them into existence?
I think we do if we ever reach a post-scarcity society.
Three obvious problems: genetic mutations that would make a life unbearable, the phenomenon of twins, and the astronomical number of resulting humans.
I’m sure we’ll be able to identify extremely negative mutations and either fix them or abandon those genomes. The issue of twins means we’re not generating every possible human mind, but creating a reasonable sampling of that space (we observe twins have very similar life outcomes). To the last problem, I have no solution, I’m just assuming the Universe is spatially infinite with an even distribution of matter and energy.
BTW, it might be simpler to just simulate these humans, but I’m still extremely uncertain as to what extent a human in a computer = a human in meat-space.
That's a philosophy, not a fact. Individuals and organizations define things by all sorts of criteria. eg temporally, consensus and differentiation are just a few. It's not as simple as "we all agree this zebra is a human".
And yet if your philosophy contends that zebras are humans you're either nuts or are getting off on an argument of semantics that is clearly adjacent to the issue everyone is trying discuss.
Disagree. Change the genes enough, a human becomes a chimpanzee (and not very many genes either). Or change more, and you have a pig.
So is a pig that started with human genes, still human? Of course not. What about a human that started from pig genes? Hm.
That's what I mean, by being defined by existing humans. Because that's all we really have to go by.
You add wings to a person, lots of folks would be happy to call it a new kind of being. Some would argue its non-human. The proposal is to add disease resistance or other blood factors or cellular machinery, which are invisible and not obvious. But isn't it similar to adding wings?
"All humans that are possible" has to include the pig-human, and the winged-human, and so on. Clear to me, they are non-human.
It’s a very fascinating idea for sure. But why? Is is because you want to give every possible combination a chance to prove itself, or are you hoping for extremely high performing individuals that would be impossible to find otherwise?
> Do we, the relatively tiny population of humans who have had the luck to be born, have a duty to the much more vast population of “genetically possible humans” to bring them into existence?
Nope.
Not even a little.
Why would you think we would? Is one of the possibilities Hitler with laser eyes? I would argue that we have a responsibility to PREVENT that particular person from being brought into existence.
Would that not be some astronomically large number of humans? Trillions or even more? DNA is huge and there are a lot of different combinations that would vaguely resemble Homo sapiens.
I feel like this concept hinges upon the assumption that genetics determine a person, which is not true. In my opinion, it's more important to raise people in all kinds of environments than to have every genetic individual in existence. Two genetically different individuals raised in an identical situation would likely behave similarly.
This. Even if you could conceivably account for every feasible epigenetic difference possible in every conceivable genetically distinct human, I'm not sure what the point is. Twins are still different people with different experiences and personalities even if they are nearly genetically (and epigenetically - at least at first) identical. I feel like the spirit of OPs post is humans in a post scarcity society have a duty to bring into existence every feasible distinct human experience. But this is impossible because DNA and even epigenetics does not encompass all that makes a person unique and distinct.
The bigger more pressing question is: How much value is in uniqueness and is it diminishing?
See, to maximize uniqueness you would institute crazy eugenic policies to combat sexual selection, random culling (literally euthanized at random) in addition to randomizing wealth and power. (Sortition.) Conceivably this would result in a somewhat unstable society, but perhaps workable.
This is the first time I’ve read the argument that it is our moral duty to give existence to all the humans in the set that is all possible DNA permutations that encode human beings, and I have to thank you for that.
Might make for a good scifi story.
You need a catchy slogan, like “enumerate all humans!”
Even if we are to exclude silent genes and debilitating illnesses and obvious critical defects from that set, it's still very likely more humans than would fit on Earth. (Which has some 100 billion carrying capacity.)
And a lot of them would be essentially twins.
As weird as that sounds in practice, the idea of doing it in simulation sounds very similar to the idea of "orphanogenesis" in Diaspora. Though most new "people" are formed by mixing the traits of existing individuals, every once in a while the society will create a new person by randomly mixing some traits and keeping track of the resulting genotype. The person so-formed is called an orphan in the book. Awesome hard sci-fi idea...
I'm surprised more people aren't saying this is incredibly dumb. Because it is incredibly dumb. Genes do not have intrinsic value, wants or moral standing. Making maximal humans is plausible worldview (not one I agree with), but humanizing more genes is like saying all lines of code deserve to run.
It's like you've backed into the concept of a soul and decided a string of nucelotides was it.
> “Then two technologies were introduced that changed these Maya’s lives and, ultimately, their population: a gas-powered water pump and two gas-powered maize grinders.
[..]
By 2003, women who started reproducing in the 1970s had eight to 12 children.”
Gotta wonder if the women thought that was progress, or not.
The fact that they tend to love their own children (which is not a specifically female or motherly trait?) has little to do with whether the life they want for themselves is one of caring for 12 of them.
That's horribly reductive and I imagine that if some of these women had the choice or even knew better, would have dedicated their own lives to something other than child rearing.
Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no children at all.
You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in Canada.
it was a blessing because you had more help. Children could work the farm, help hunt, household chores, etc. When you're a subsistence farmer, getting more help is critical to feeding the family.
Now, children can't be brought to the worksite or office, so the blessing is less helpful.
This article seems to leave out critical "common knowledge": There are so many humans because birth rates tend to decline after child mortality rates go down. The article also seems to not address the detail of whether or not this group had access to birth control of some sort so as to engineer a decline in birth rates.
Are we entering a new phase in human existence? The close knit tribe that thrived with cooperation is definitely in its death throes right now, at least in the developed world. Is it possible for us to cooperate on a global scale though, or are we still too primitive, our consciousness too weak to comprehend our place in such a massive system.
> The close knit tribe that thrived with cooperation is definitely in its death throes right now
Is it? I think there are a lot of social systems that are being tested at the moment, some are failing. There are many developed countries that are improving their cooperation in the current crisis - I'm in one - Australia, there are others that have seemed to come together, and others that have failed abysmally. No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and regroup, maybe some won't. I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.
Australia is no different to any other western country, stop making it as if it is some beacon of cooperation just because it had less corona cases, it is not even relevant.
> I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.
You're obviously referring to the US during the pandemic of 1968-1969, which - as everyone knows - ended the United States forever, because things were so bad in tandem with the severe civil chaos occurring at the time (which was worse than anything going on now in multiple ways). The US never recovered; its superpower status, its wealth and power all vanished from there. Oh wait, that didn't happen at all.
I'm in the US, the future looks great, if you can see beyond the tip of your nose. Historically the US always improves thanks to the types of challenges that are going on now, rather than getting worse. In my short lifetime I've lived through several occasions of: 'things are so bad, this is the end of the US' type over-drama (which is farcical).
The US is radically more resilient than people outside of the US will ever understand. It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.
What surprises me is observing the foreign/outside estimation of what it takes to essentially break a nation. I'm surprised the rest of the world is so fragile, they're mentally projecting their own low breaking points onto the US in the criticism.
Indeed, thats what I meant by "No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and regroup, maybe some won't", but I can see how some people who are bunkered down get disheartened. I do wonder though if a system that values the lives of its citizens so poorly should be doing a bit of reflecting, though I admire the positive attitude. I also wonder if maybe we're getting it backwards, from a purely darwinian point of view, a damn the torpedoes full steam ahead attitude probably pays in the long run, though it is nicer to live where not every decision is life and death.
I would ask that you reconsider your worldview. Its quite natural to speculate on the demise of the Superpower, because by its nature it is the Country that gets a lot of attention. This doesn't mean that a majority of the non-US peoples are actively rooting for its demise (maybe they are? Its an assertion that needs to be validated, perhaps with polls).
> It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.
History has shown us that nearly every civilization that flourished and prospered also managed to vanish over a really short period of time. Societies are a lot more fragile than you would believe. American success is not based on some jingoistic manifest destiny; it is a country that has managed to get its fundamentals right. However, even the best prepared civilization can collapse in short order; its happened before, and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.
I look back to the 50's in the US (and most western countries I believe) - a time when science and education were respected and educating and housing the citizenry was the goal. As a result of this and other events the booms of the 70's occurred.
There seems to be a reversal of this - science is actively disregarded by a large part of the population, education is not respected, a large and growing part of the population is disenfranchised and so on. These are not good portents imho.
People have been crying wolf about the destruction of the US for a long time. But recently, when the President wanted to use the military on protestors, and was told no, it seemed like more than just the obvious, more than a recapitulation of the past. If they said yes, and then a state of emergency was declared, it sounds like a stereotypical way to go right to an excuse for suspending elections. I didn't really expect that people would let him do it, but it really seems like he would if he could. It's so pat.
As much as people have cried wolf over the last decade plus (maybe more, I don't recall) about whether there would be normal elections, I feel like now we have a discrete point in time where the (un)willingness of the volunteer military to do unconstitutional things is all that remains; the people and other institutions are no longer in control of our fate.
You can say, oh, we're fine, the military still has integrity. But it's a volunteer military that's become a distinct class; if they're the only bulwark, then we're very close to a military dictatorship. At best, it could be like in certain countries where they serve as a check on bad civilian governance.
So, I can still hope/think that this President as dictator is alarmism, but I can't say that if it is crying wolf, it is making me more confident the US will go on and on. He can end his term as an ineffectual wanna-be despot, but he's probing and outlining the weak points - how someone smarter and more respected and sympathetic can deal the final blow to the system. Someone said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
What recent events make me think of is the point Richard Feynman made about the O-rings in the Challenger investigation:
"To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If a 1,000-pound truck drove across the bridge and a crack appeared in a beam, even just a third of the way through a beam, the safety factor is now zero: The bridge is defective, there was no safety factor at all even though the bridge did not actually collapse."
So yes, people were saying the same things in the 1970s. And they were wrong. But things always seem worse for good reason, and eventually, some day, things do fundamentally change. When things crack, but don't break completely, it is not necessarily a sign everything is fine.
Covid doesn't seem in itself like an existential threat to the US in particular, but any time it seems like people are denying reality that worries me, honestly scares me, and certainly it's been over a month that global daily cases are reaching new heights, while financial markets and the media seem detached and focused on reopening. Maybe we need to stay the course; maybe Mnuchin and many others are right that there's no going back, but the sense that people are imposing their wishes on reality, as though it is reality which will be forced to bend, feels like a bad premonition to me. I hate the idea of daring fate, of putting the all-powerful to the test.
This sounds both accurate and very depressing. The frightening aspect for me personally is that even if the current President loses the election and leaves office peacefully, he has transformed his party, perhaps permanently. Its not just him, its been happening for a while. But the country cannot be governed by a single party; it needs both parties to function. If one of them refuses to accept reality and scientific facts, I doubt that the country can continue to function, even if the people holding majority are qualified and sensible.
This was incredibly clear during the Obama Administration. Not sure what kind of inane cultural wars will consume the next one.
Taking a look at some other "social systems that are being tested at the moment", I don't think your claim that Australia is "coming together" in comparison to other "developed countries" is correct. Some examples:
* Brisbane's "Boundary St" still exists, name unchanged [0].
* Story from less than 1 hour ago: 4 month-old baby of indigenous women dies while mother is in police custody [1].
* PM calls Australian BLM protests "completely unacceptable"[2], urges people not to attend[3], while "think[ing] to [himself] how wonderful a country Australia is" [4].
* The mounting spread of COVID-19 conspiracies, including the "Wake Up Australia" campaign [5].
* Australia participating in spying on its citizens [6], passing anti-encryption laws [7].
There's always disputes, but no ones dying or being thrown out of their homes, people are being looked after. I have been amazed at the compassion being shown by the political class on both sides. iirc there was a lot of extra care taken in the NT for indigenous people because they seem extra susceptible to covid 19 just as a counter example. I didn't know that about boundary st - assumed it was just a boundary, seems it should be changed.
Its great this conversation has started, like most I'm unaware of these problems, and its good to get them out in the air, if the fix is renaming a street - then who cares, rename the street.
> There's always disputes, but no ones dying or being thrown out of their homes, people are being looked after.
This is an underrated point; I think your larger message, that cooperation isn't dying, is likely true. I think I have the tendency to focus on the problems that are growing (or continue to exist) without noticing areas where there is progress and my comment was a reflection of that. And I agree that it is good that we have started to have these conversations.
But I also think there is something to be said for the point the OP was making: human systems simply don't function as well at scale. Or stated more precisely: humans are better at being prosocial in smaller groups than they are in bigger groups. There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case (see for example [0], [1], [2], [3]). As we scale our society to be more and more global, I think we are going to need to reckon with this at some point.
[2] Not having enough interaction between individuals to encourage reciprocity and cause feelings of guilt (or shame) when an individual is muddying the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
They are indeed significant points. I feel a lot of government success comes from trust, as in all interactions, if you can't trust your government then things go bad, then they just become people trying to take stuff from you.
Maybe there is some limit where there's too many people for that to occur. I feel one of the necessary conditions is the population needs a cohesive belief system (at least in certain areas). For example, if you have a large population that doesn't believe in science but in the invisible hand of god, and a large population that is scientific humanist then I don't think any system will cope with that - there is very little common ground. If everyone is educated and believes in a rational universe then it makes things a lot easier.
I know this is off topic, but: There are too many of us. If we can't override our survival instinct to multiply (and consume) uncontrollably, then we are at risk of making ourselves extinct. Then there will be none of us.
Expensive housing and expensive college go a long way when combined with decreasing disposable income, stress, and career ambitions. It's almost like we're one global organism responding to our own environmental pressure.
Probably not none of us, but when the system collapses due to lack of resources the number of humans will drastically fall as well. Kind of like how a forest fire doesn't just immediately disappear when all for he trees are burned, there remain embers burning for days or weeks after.
"It was calculated already in the 1960s by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford, that the agricultural productivity, even at that time, would be more than sufficient to feed 45 billion people globally."[1]
Granted, there's much more to sustaining humans than just food, but come on let's apply some engineering to the problem first before giving up.
There's another, better reference but it escapes me at the moment- something calculating that with various engineering techniques applied to the planet, 100 billion people shouldn't be an issue.
Edit: Wow has it been 15-17 years already? Good seeing you.
[1] Agricultural productivity in relation to population, 1963
That may be eventually true, but we're much further from that point than you might think.
The U.S. alone wastes about 141 trillion calories worth of food. It comes out to around 1250 calories per capita.
Feeding the world is a logistics problem right now, not a production problem. And we also have the space for all 7 billion humans with room to spare. I think right now, there's enough for everybody to have about 4 acres.
Pure caloric need may be a non-issue but I don't think it's sustainable for every living human to have a first world lifestyle barring many tech improvements.
It's seems preferable to have a lower stable population where everyone has a very high standard of living and a low aggregate environmental impact.
A flat cap of two children per person would halt and slowly reduce the population without killing anyone or being unfair to specific groups.
What is "high standard of living" anyway? How many yachts and airplanes is it? How many cars? Other modes of transportation? Average kilograms of stuff owned and used per person? Living space? How long you have to travel to work or how far? How much do you strictly have to work to live at that level, if linear scaling would be sufficient? How much energy, thermal and electrical is used to sustain and separately embodied in production of your stuff? Etc.
Once we define the threshold of high standard of living, we can optimize for it. This is literally when we say "nearly nobody can live as opulent as this" and can condemn waste. Feel free to pick say 90th percentile or something.
There isn’t really any reason a first world lifestyle isn’t sustainable for everyone. France emits half the carbon per person and has a great standard. Similarly, higher lifestyle is tied to fewer children, and therefore less carbon emissions.
If there was one thing that we could do to increase sustainability, it would be to Increase quality of life as fast as possible
That may be true, but this mindset is one of the catalysts for the eugenics movement. Combine that mindset with incredible wealth and a "messiah complex", and we're in for a horrifying future. Probably better to look for ways for a growing population to thrive on the earth, rather than admit defeat to overpopulation.
If we don’t cap out at some reasonable population, it seems to me we’ll lose basically all of the natural world long before the Earth can no longer support us through industrial agriculture and technology. I don’t like that trade-off.
The eugenics thing is doubtful; what exactly is the mechanism that ties eugenics to population controls? There are myriad ethical ways to control population. For example, just make all countries advanced and the people will choose to have fewer children, as is happening already now.
Given the timescales that humans operate on, it would be incredibly strange for us to reproduce into extinction. As far as direct effects, an unmitigated exponential growth trend would eventually result in widespread famine and other resource restrictions leading to a population-limiting amount of death. Not extinction, but not much fun either.
Long term accumulating issues that become unrecoverable past a tipping point could be a source of extinction (e.g. extreme worst case climate change). Here, yes, exponential growth could hasten extinction in a world where people weren't trying to stop the catastrophe, but...
1. Empirically, we're not on an exponential curve or anything close to it. Many developed countries would be in population decline without immigration.
2. Generally, the best solution to problems of efficiency or long term threats is improved technology, not reducing population. In the concrete case of climate change, cutting emissions per capita by >50% is both achievable and clearly superior to the Thanos approach.
3. More people can produce a more interesting universe to live in. Imagine a solar system colonized with 10 trillion humans: provided we build the requisite efficient infrastructure to unfetter human creativity, we would have the capacity to produce over a thousand times as many isekai animes.
I appreciate your immaculate grammar. :) There's not many people - at least outside HN - who write Internet comments of such good writing quality. From one technical writer to possibly another, thanks. :)
And I appreciate your optimism. Not sure if it's been done much, but more honest analysis - that isn't biased by human emotions like hope of survival - on the history of the natural world and all evolution across all organisms from the beginning until now, analysing which behaviours result in which outcomes in terms of species extinction and resources sustainability, would be appreciated. No one wants to hear bad news, but we have to take its possibility seriously.
The conclusion appears to be, technology frees up time so women can have more kids, older children help raise younger ones so it scales, and grandparents and the village help too so larger-scale cooperation scales more.
I guess I'm struggling to see what's novel about this. It seems awfully well-established that as food supply goes up because of better technology, populations explode (e.g. twentieth-century Africa) like happens with literally any species anywhere.
The theory I hadn’t heard before was the theory that human children uniquely help with the raising children process when compared to other complex species, and this helped make the population boom faster than it would have been otherwise. An interesting thought at least.
The article's goal was to understand what set early humans apart from their closely related species, not simply to understand why modern human populations have exploded in the last couple of centuries. The answer to that seems to be that inter-generational co-operation in early human societies are what set them apart, enabled specialization and allowed the development of technology that frees up time, which led to more pop, and so on.
Perhaps these facts are not novel? I'm not sure how much of this is generally understood. Personally it seemed an interesting read. My education consisted of listing eras of human evolution (hunter gatherer, farmer, stone age etc), without much info on what human society looked like in the hunter gatherer stage. So this was novel to me at least.
The first one is an attribute of homo sapiens, but not other, extinct, humans like neanderthal. Spearthrowing appears to be an adaptation that is unique to our kind of human. Sportsball fans everywhere rejoice!
"Evidence-based debates around the origins of thrusting and throwing spear use in human evolution have typically focused on hominin skeletal evidence. Proposals that features of the upper limbs of different species of Homo indicate that throwing only comes into play with H. sapiens23,35 are hampered by multiple issues. These include small sample sizes, human variation in populations36, evidence that humeral robusticity and shape may not correlate with strains in weapon use37, and a lack of clarity whether any single activity contributes to or offsets bone remodeling or robusticity36,38,39. Others argue for an earlier emergence of throwing, showing that features necessary for accurate and powerful throwing are evidenced in H. erectus fossils40–42. A recent find of an early Neanderthal dating to MIS 7 from Tourville-la-Rivière shows skeletal trauma consistent with repeated throwing, supporting the hypothesis that they were capable and frequent throwers43."
Interesting, I don't have a specific source as I have read about it for years and it was definitely discussed in my wife's physical anthro courses in her recently completely anthro degree.
And I seem to remember this in a display the Museum of Natural History in NY. Neanderthal using speers at close range, but not able to throw an atlatl or speer.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadLead web dev: <examining logs> "We need to hijack the back button."
If we imagine the set of all genetic combinations that result in something that could be conceivably thought of as “human,” only an infinitesimal fraction of humans will ever be born through traditional sexual recombination. To be born is to win a lottery with astronomically long odds.
As biotechnology advances, we will be able to conceive and grow humans using completely artificial means (eg artificial wombs). Do we, the relatively tiny population of humans who have had the luck to be born, have a duty to the much more vast population of “genetically possible humans” to bring them into existence?
I think we do if we ever reach a post-scarcity society.
Three obvious problems: genetic mutations that would make a life unbearable, the phenomenon of twins, and the astronomical number of resulting humans.
I’m sure we’ll be able to identify extremely negative mutations and either fix them or abandon those genomes. The issue of twins means we’re not generating every possible human mind, but creating a reasonable sampling of that space (we observe twins have very similar life outcomes). To the last problem, I have no solution, I’m just assuming the Universe is spatially infinite with an even distribution of matter and energy.
BTW, it might be simpler to just simulate these humans, but I’m still extremely uncertain as to what extent a human in a computer = a human in meat-space.
That's a philosophy, not a fact. Individuals and organizations define things by all sorts of criteria. eg temporally, consensus and differentiation are just a few. It's not as simple as "we all agree this zebra is a human".
Why are people so hung up on definition of human rather than more critical things we don't understand, such as consciousness and intelligence?
Perhaps they're afraid to be put in the non-human box, and non-human is to be removed or exploited? (Also, inhumane. For once properly built word.)
History has shown repeatedly narrow definitions of humanity in action. It ends in a bloodbath of some kind.
So is a pig that started with human genes, still human? Of course not. What about a human that started from pig genes? Hm.
That's what I mean, by being defined by existing humans. Because that's all we really have to go by.
You add wings to a person, lots of folks would be happy to call it a new kind of being. Some would argue its non-human. The proposal is to add disease resistance or other blood factors or cellular machinery, which are invisible and not obvious. But isn't it similar to adding wings?
"All humans that are possible" has to include the pig-human, and the winged-human, and so on. Clear to me, they are non-human.
Nope.
Not even a little.
Why would you think we would? Is one of the possibilities Hitler with laser eyes? I would argue that we have a responsibility to PREVENT that particular person from being brought into existence.
I feel like this concept hinges upon the assumption that genetics determine a person, which is not true. In my opinion, it's more important to raise people in all kinds of environments than to have every genetic individual in existence. Two genetically different individuals raised in an identical situation would likely behave similarly.
See, to maximize uniqueness you would institute crazy eugenic policies to combat sexual selection, random culling (literally euthanized at random) in addition to randomizing wealth and power. (Sortition.) Conceivably this would result in a somewhat unstable society, but perhaps workable.
Fun sci-fi setting.
We? Who's we?
And what do you mean by "extremely negative mutations"? Who are the curators of humanity who gets to decide that?
What if the engineered people you consider to be "extremely neagtive" don't want to be "fixed"?
Might make for a good scifi story.
You need a catchy slogan, like “enumerate all humans!”
will the resulting eugenics wars [0] be simulated [1] as well?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_wars
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
That would have to be a very careful choice. Otherwise, sound the Godwin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)#Plot_summary
It's like you've backed into the concept of a soul and decided a string of nucelotides was it.
Gotta wonder if the women thought that was progress, or not.
It's not like women don't tend to love children...
Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no children at all.
You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in Canada.
A very different situation than pondering one's bloodline.
2003 is antiquity?
Is it? I think there are a lot of social systems that are being tested at the moment, some are failing. There are many developed countries that are improving their cooperation in the current crisis - I'm in one - Australia, there are others that have seemed to come together, and others that have failed abysmally. No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and regroup, maybe some won't. I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.
You're obviously referring to the US during the pandemic of 1968-1969, which - as everyone knows - ended the United States forever, because things were so bad in tandem with the severe civil chaos occurring at the time (which was worse than anything going on now in multiple ways). The US never recovered; its superpower status, its wealth and power all vanished from there. Oh wait, that didn't happen at all.
I'm in the US, the future looks great, if you can see beyond the tip of your nose. Historically the US always improves thanks to the types of challenges that are going on now, rather than getting worse. In my short lifetime I've lived through several occasions of: 'things are so bad, this is the end of the US' type over-drama (which is farcical).
The US is radically more resilient than people outside of the US will ever understand. It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.
What surprises me is observing the foreign/outside estimation of what it takes to essentially break a nation. I'm surprised the rest of the world is so fragile, they're mentally projecting their own low breaking points onto the US in the criticism.
> It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.
History has shown us that nearly every civilization that flourished and prospered also managed to vanish over a really short period of time. Societies are a lot more fragile than you would believe. American success is not based on some jingoistic manifest destiny; it is a country that has managed to get its fundamentals right. However, even the best prepared civilization can collapse in short order; its happened before, and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.
There seems to be a reversal of this - science is actively disregarded by a large part of the population, education is not respected, a large and growing part of the population is disenfranchised and so on. These are not good portents imho.
As much as people have cried wolf over the last decade plus (maybe more, I don't recall) about whether there would be normal elections, I feel like now we have a discrete point in time where the (un)willingness of the volunteer military to do unconstitutional things is all that remains; the people and other institutions are no longer in control of our fate.
You can say, oh, we're fine, the military still has integrity. But it's a volunteer military that's become a distinct class; if they're the only bulwark, then we're very close to a military dictatorship. At best, it could be like in certain countries where they serve as a check on bad civilian governance.
So, I can still hope/think that this President as dictator is alarmism, but I can't say that if it is crying wolf, it is making me more confident the US will go on and on. He can end his term as an ineffectual wanna-be despot, but he's probing and outlining the weak points - how someone smarter and more respected and sympathetic can deal the final blow to the system. Someone said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
What recent events make me think of is the point Richard Feynman made about the O-rings in the Challenger investigation:
"To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If a 1,000-pound truck drove across the bridge and a crack appeared in a beam, even just a third of the way through a beam, the safety factor is now zero: The bridge is defective, there was no safety factor at all even though the bridge did not actually collapse."
So yes, people were saying the same things in the 1970s. And they were wrong. But things always seem worse for good reason, and eventually, some day, things do fundamentally change. When things crack, but don't break completely, it is not necessarily a sign everything is fine.
Covid doesn't seem in itself like an existential threat to the US in particular, but any time it seems like people are denying reality that worries me, honestly scares me, and certainly it's been over a month that global daily cases are reaching new heights, while financial markets and the media seem detached and focused on reopening. Maybe we need to stay the course; maybe Mnuchin and many others are right that there's no going back, but the sense that people are imposing their wishes on reality, as though it is reality which will be forced to bend, feels like a bad premonition to me. I hate the idea of daring fate, of putting the all-powerful to the test.
This was incredibly clear during the Obama Administration. Not sure what kind of inane cultural wars will consume the next one.
* Brisbane's "Boundary St" still exists, name unchanged [0].
* Story from less than 1 hour ago: 4 month-old baby of indigenous women dies while mother is in police custody [1].
* PM calls Australian BLM protests "completely unacceptable"[2], urges people not to attend[3], while "think[ing] to [himself] how wonderful a country Australia is" [4].
* The mounting spread of COVID-19 conspiracies, including the "Wake Up Australia" campaign [5].
* Australia participating in spying on its citizens [6], passing anti-encryption laws [7].
[0] https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/calls-for-brisba...
[1] https://www.news.com.au/national/northern-territory/fourmont...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/black-lives-matter-pr...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-05/pm-tells-people-not-t...
[4] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/quoting-a-meme-scott-morrison-sa...
[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/asio-briefing-warns-f...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
[7] https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...
Its great this conversation has started, like most I'm unaware of these problems, and its good to get them out in the air, if the fix is renaming a street - then who cares, rename the street.
This is an underrated point; I think your larger message, that cooperation isn't dying, is likely true. I think I have the tendency to focus on the problems that are growing (or continue to exist) without noticing areas where there is progress and my comment was a reflection of that. And I agree that it is good that we have started to have these conversations.
But I also think there is something to be said for the point the OP was making: human systems simply don't function as well at scale. Or stated more precisely: humans are better at being prosocial in smaller groups than they are in bigger groups. There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case (see for example [0], [1], [2], [3]). As we scale our society to be more and more global, I think we are going to need to reckon with this at some point.
[0] Not having enough interactions for tit-for-tat to function as a strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...)
[1] Inability of humans to hit the requirements for a sense of community in very large social networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_community#Membership)
[2] Not having enough interaction between individuals to encourage reciprocity and cause feelings of guilt (or shame) when an individual is muddying the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Maybe there is some limit where there's too many people for that to occur. I feel one of the necessary conditions is the population needs a cohesive belief system (at least in certain areas). For example, if you have a large population that doesn't believe in science but in the invisible hand of god, and a large population that is scientific humanist then I don't think any system will cope with that - there is very little common ground. If everyone is educated and believes in a rational universe then it makes things a lot easier.
Granted, there's much more to sustaining humans than just food, but come on let's apply some engineering to the problem first before giving up.
There's another, better reference but it escapes me at the moment- something calculating that with various engineering techniques applied to the planet, 100 billion people shouldn't be an issue.
Edit: Wow has it been 15-17 years already? Good seeing you.
[1] Agricultural productivity in relation to population, 1963
The U.S. alone wastes about 141 trillion calories worth of food. It comes out to around 1250 calories per capita.
Feeding the world is a logistics problem right now, not a production problem. And we also have the space for all 7 billion humans with room to spare. I think right now, there's enough for everybody to have about 4 acres.
It's seems preferable to have a lower stable population where everyone has a very high standard of living and a low aggregate environmental impact.
A flat cap of two children per person would halt and slowly reduce the population without killing anyone or being unfair to specific groups.
Once we define the threshold of high standard of living, we can optimize for it. This is literally when we say "nearly nobody can live as opulent as this" and can condemn waste. Feel free to pick say 90th percentile or something.
If there was one thing that we could do to increase sustainability, it would be to Increase quality of life as fast as possible
The eugenics thing is doubtful; what exactly is the mechanism that ties eugenics to population controls? There are myriad ethical ways to control population. For example, just make all countries advanced and the people will choose to have fewer children, as is happening already now.
Long term accumulating issues that become unrecoverable past a tipping point could be a source of extinction (e.g. extreme worst case climate change). Here, yes, exponential growth could hasten extinction in a world where people weren't trying to stop the catastrophe, but...
1. Empirically, we're not on an exponential curve or anything close to it. Many developed countries would be in population decline without immigration.
2. Generally, the best solution to problems of efficiency or long term threats is improved technology, not reducing population. In the concrete case of climate change, cutting emissions per capita by >50% is both achievable and clearly superior to the Thanos approach.
3. More people can produce a more interesting universe to live in. Imagine a solar system colonized with 10 trillion humans: provided we build the requisite efficient infrastructure to unfetter human creativity, we would have the capacity to produce over a thousand times as many isekai animes.
And I appreciate your optimism. Not sure if it's been done much, but more honest analysis - that isn't biased by human emotions like hope of survival - on the history of the natural world and all evolution across all organisms from the beginning until now, analysing which behaviours result in which outcomes in terms of species extinction and resources sustainability, would be appreciated. No one wants to hear bad news, but we have to take its possibility seriously.
I guess I'm struggling to see what's novel about this. It seems awfully well-established that as food supply goes up because of better technology, populations explode (e.g. twentieth-century Africa) like happens with literally any species anywhere.
Perhaps these facts are not novel? I'm not sure how much of this is generally understood. Personally it seemed an interesting read. My education consisted of listing eras of human evolution (hunter gatherer, farmer, stone age etc), without much info on what human society looked like in the hunter gatherer stage. So this was novel to me at least.
For example
Humans can throw good.
Humans can run very long.
Humans won't usually kill each other when put together in great masses.
"Evidence-based debates around the origins of thrusting and throwing spear use in human evolution have typically focused on hominin skeletal evidence. Proposals that features of the upper limbs of different species of Homo indicate that throwing only comes into play with H. sapiens23,35 are hampered by multiple issues. These include small sample sizes, human variation in populations36, evidence that humeral robusticity and shape may not correlate with strains in weapon use37, and a lack of clarity whether any single activity contributes to or offsets bone remodeling or robusticity36,38,39. Others argue for an earlier emergence of throwing, showing that features necessary for accurate and powerful throwing are evidenced in H. erectus fossils40–42. A recent find of an early Neanderthal dating to MIS 7 from Tourville-la-Rivière shows skeletal trauma consistent with repeated throwing, supporting the hypothesis that they were capable and frequent throwers43."
And I seem to remember this in a display the Museum of Natural History in NY. Neanderthal using speers at close range, but not able to throw an atlatl or speer.
Sounds like people (and I) have been wrong!