Yet another Hacker News

39 points YeGoblynQueenne 1 hour ago 50 comments

hn9zmdcaou 1 hour ago | parent

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.

rcxdude 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

david-gpu 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

binlog 1 hour ago | parent

Relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/605/

bemtevi 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

kakacik 44 minutes ago | parent

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

bemtevi 43 minutes ago | parent

I do think so, but like you said, messily.

watwut 40 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Ekaros 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

boelboel 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

gpvos 13 minutes ago | parent

It looks like both the climate and biodiversity will be a lot worse than now (with appropriate great migrations). Not sure what is able to compensate for that. Although indeed humans appear able to adjust to any kind of environment.

MrLeap 2 minutes ago | parent

AI agent diversity will be on the upswing, so we've got that going for us. We'll also be more insulated from the climate by virtue of all of our bodies being lashed together into a machine and flesh lattice controlled by the executive overmind.

What remains of humanity will be safely cocooned inside the biomechanical membrane between the hotter outside world and whatever temperature the compute prefers. The perspiration of its leviathan breaths and a circulatory system that pumps coolant will ensure the temperature differential.

weichi 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

233mhz 22 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

bemtevi 7 minutes ago | parent

Capitalism means we can only take actions that benefit individuals in the short term (so, arms race). And the large population means inertia in that incorrect direction.

satvikpendem 23 minutes ago | parent

This is a Western view not necessarily seen in Asia, such as China which does seem to be solving their problems just fine.

xienze 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

bemtevi 8 minutes ago | parent

Seriously? China is one of the top polluters and it's a horrible country to live in. No one is solving climate change. The problem is worse than ever. None of the serious problems are being solved. Only made worse.

lenerdenator 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

satvikpendem 25 minutes ago | parent

That's where robots come in. They replace the missing labor.

233mhz 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

api 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

orangedog 28 minutes ago | parent

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?

DaSHacka 15 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

api 9 minutes ago | parent

I'm not saying there's zero problems. I specifically called out doomerism.

South Korea's birth rate is indeed dangerously low and threatens their economy. If they cared they could do something about their extreme workaholism and cost of living.

As far as immigration destroying the culture: it depends on the rate. A healthy but limited rate of immigration revitalizes cultures, but it's pretty clear that sudden mass immigration is dangerous and causes a lot of problems and backlash.

Speaking of fixing problems... if our billionaire class who seem so worked up about birth rates wanted to do something about it they could also address the most frequently cited problems preventing young families from forming. Like housing prices.

If we really get into a situation where dangerously low birth rates are threatening the economy and social stability, the boring solution is to do what we do for other goods and services that the free market isn't adequately providing: directly subsidize it. Pay people to have kids. The easy way would be a payment or tax rebate to married couples with 0 children to have one child. But that's the boring solution that doesn't involve massive reactionary cultural transformations, so the right-wing "problemists" won't like it.

PowerElectronix 41 minutes ago | parent

"The great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy, but extrapolation"

misko77 25 minutes ago | parent

Unrelated, but I do like to place my trust in internet strangers - is Ignition! a read you'd recommend?

daoboy 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

dgellow 28 minutes ago | parent

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

satvikpendem 25 minutes ago | parent

You got whiplash over the speed of...a few decades? Malthusian theory had been proven wrong and people have known this since last century.

slibhb 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

boelboel 9 minutes ago | parent

I think for most millenials it's an excuse not really the actual reason they don't want/get kids (although i think there's a few actual believers).

clark_dent 8 minutes ago | parent

Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet, or because they can't afford the time and resources to adequately raise them.

I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.

glenstein 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

notnaut 22 minutes ago | parent

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!!

dsizzle 16 minutes ago | parent

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

lapcat 10 minutes ago | parent

> It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.

You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.

Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.

From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.

thewhitetulip 5 minutes ago | parent

Exactly!! During my childhood I used to be terrified if population explosion

Now that I have a kid, there is doom over population shrinkage

Sadly this will be used by propagandaists to doubt scientists

GuB-42 4 minutes ago | parent

That's the thing with exponentials, they are very hard to predict. We know that in general, exponential growth is unsustainable, and there has to be an inflection point, but where? It is usually difficult to know until the last moment, and even a small difference in time on where you predict the inflection point is can make a massive difference.

Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.

cubefox 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

glenstein 17 minutes ago | parent

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!

l3x4ur1n 4 minutes ago | parent

Oh no, 21.12.2012 all over again

ddoolin 19 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like we could use a psychohistory expert.

somewhereoutth 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

Tyr42 8 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

DemocracyFTW2 11 minutes ago | parent

the planet will be devoid of people on Tuesday, 5 May 3108

Der letzte macht das Licht aus.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 7 minutes ago | parent

What light? You're in Germany, it's illegal to use electricity for environmental reasons since 2050.