First, I would be careful using the argument “models that did not work in the past won’t work in the future”.
My exact argument is that if a particular type of model can’t accurately retrodict the past without overfitting then you should update against it when making predictions about the future. I didn’t make an absolutist claim such as “models that didn’t work in the past won’t work in the future”, just that the fact that they didn’t work in the past is an update against them.
Places like Bangladesh or India would be clearly better off with a (much) smaller population and there might be places where it could be better having more people available.
A specific country like Bangladesh would of course be better off per person if it were less populated, but that’s just because they are able to trade with the rest of the world and their current level of population is adapted to those conditions. You can’t compare the optimal level of population when you can interact with the outside world with the optimal level when you can’t; they are quite different.
I think this conversation is not fruitful so I’ll stop it here unless you can come up with specific object-level predictions about e.g. the next 10 years that we would disagree about.
My exact argument is that if a particular type of model can’t accurately retrodict the past without overfitting then you should update against it when making predictions about the future. I didn’t make an absolutist claim such as “models that didn’t work in the past won’t work in the future”, just that the fact that they didn’t work in the past is an update against them.
A specific country like Bangladesh would of course be better off per person if it were less populated, but that’s just because they are able to trade with the rest of the world and their current level of population is adapted to those conditions. You can’t compare the optimal level of population when you can interact with the outside world with the optimal level when you can’t; they are quite different.
I think this conversation is not fruitful so I’ll stop it here unless you can come up with specific object-level predictions about e.g. the next 10 years that we would disagree about.