What makes you think most LessWrongers have thought about it to a degree to which the issue can be considered in the process of being solved?
I haven’t used the word solved in the post you quote. That word misses the point. Nobody claims that the issue of climate change is solved.
The question is whether it’s useful to model the issues like climate change in a way that centers around caring capacity and ignores politics.
It looks like a if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail issue. Yes, you can model the worlds problems that way, but that model isn’t very productive.
If you think about population amounts it makes sense to mentally separate different countries and continents.
Let’s say you start in the US. As an engineer you see a clear solution. We should increase the amount of abortion that happen in the US to get near to the carrying capacity.
If you try to push that policy you will see that you run into problems that are highly political.
The abortion debate is at the moment about the sacred value of life against the sacred value of woman’s control over their own body. If you come into that debate and say that you want more abortions because it has utility to keep US population down, you are not helping.
You have to remember that the US is a country where a good portion waits for the second coming of Christ and thinks that the bible says that they should procreate as much as possible.
Political issues like that make reducing population growth a very different issue than getting more telescopes to detect potentially dangerous asteroids or cooling down yellowstone by building a giant lake on top of it.
It makes sense to use an engineering lense to talk about asteroids because there no significant political group that considers watching asteroids with telescopes to be immoral. With yellowstone you might get some people who think that you are harming endangered spezies that live in that area, but those are people with whom you can argue directly they aren’t as politically powerful as anti-abortion Christians.
Another way to approach population growth is to approach Africa. Deciding as US or European that there should be less Africans has issues with neocolonism. That produces political problems.
It also turns out that that increasing wealth seems to be a good way to reduce the amount of children that a woman gets. That insights caused Bill Gates to focus his philantropic efforts in a way where he says things like:
The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.
You might find that GiveWell’s highest recommended charity is about malaria bed nets. Health care for the third world. Again that’s a point where we can make different arguments to encourage people to spend money on African bed nets. Saving a life for 2000$ seems to be a good argument to convince people.
GiveWell style altruistic altruism is an alternative to approaching Africa to “What can we do to reduce African population as effectively as possible”.
I think that population is an area that obvious enough that I would expect smart people on lesswrong and the effective altruism community to not be ignorant about the topic.
If you want to get a good feel for the data about population growth I would also recommend you to play a bit around with Gapminder(Press play to see how the child per woman ratio changed over the last 60 years.
I think that population is an area that obvious enough that I would expect smart people on lesswrong and the effective altruism community to not be ignorant about the topic.
Why? It seems like your comment was intended for someone asking a different question than the one I’m asking. I’m not asking for arguments and reasoning you can come up with that are population/resource usage related, but rather why you think a moderate portion of LessWrong and the effective altruism community have put sufficient thought into it that it no longer needs to be discussed in contexts like LessWrong. I had though it was obvious that that was the point I was questioning, and so would be the focus of any question I asked in response of your response, but it seems it was not as obvious as I thought it was.
Basically: Why do you think population growth is an “obvious” issue?
I haven’t used the word solved in the post you quote. That word misses the point. Nobody claims that the issue of climate change is solved.
The question is whether it’s useful to model the issues like climate change in a way that centers around caring capacity and ignores politics.
It looks like a if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail issue. Yes, you can model the worlds problems that way, but that model isn’t very productive.
If you think about population amounts it makes sense to mentally separate different countries and continents.
Let’s say you start in the US. As an engineer you see a clear solution. We should increase the amount of abortion that happen in the US to get near to the carrying capacity. If you try to push that policy you will see that you run into problems that are highly political.
The abortion debate is at the moment about the sacred value of life against the sacred value of woman’s control over their own body. If you come into that debate and say that you want more abortions because it has utility to keep US population down, you are not helping.
You have to remember that the US is a country where a good portion waits for the second coming of Christ and thinks that the bible says that they should procreate as much as possible.
Political issues like that make reducing population growth a very different issue than getting more telescopes to detect potentially dangerous asteroids or cooling down yellowstone by building a giant lake on top of it.
It makes sense to use an engineering lense to talk about asteroids because there no significant political group that considers watching asteroids with telescopes to be immoral. With yellowstone you might get some people who think that you are harming endangered spezies that live in that area, but those are people with whom you can argue directly they aren’t as politically powerful as anti-abortion Christians.
Another way to approach population growth is to approach Africa. Deciding as US or European that there should be less Africans has issues with neocolonism. That produces political problems.
It also turns out that that increasing wealth seems to be a good way to reduce the amount of children that a woman gets. That insights caused Bill Gates to focus his philantropic efforts in a way where he says things like:
You might find that GiveWell’s highest recommended charity is about malaria bed nets. Health care for the third world. Again that’s a point where we can make different arguments to encourage people to spend money on African bed nets. Saving a life for 2000$ seems to be a good argument to convince people.
GiveWell style altruistic altruism is an alternative to approaching Africa to “What can we do to reduce African population as effectively as possible”.
I think that population is an area that obvious enough that I would expect smart people on lesswrong and the effective altruism community to not be ignorant about the topic.
If you want to get a good feel for the data about population growth I would also recommend you to play a bit around with Gapminder(Press play to see how the child per woman ratio changed over the last 60 years.
Why? It seems like your comment was intended for someone asking a different question than the one I’m asking. I’m not asking for arguments and reasoning you can come up with that are population/resource usage related, but rather why you think a moderate portion of LessWrong and the effective altruism community have put sufficient thought into it that it no longer needs to be discussed in contexts like LessWrong. I had though it was obvious that that was the point I was questioning, and so would be the focus of any question I asked in response of your response, but it seems it was not as obvious as I thought it was.
Basically: Why do you think population growth is an “obvious” issue?