Better matching to other people. A bigger world gives you a greater chance to find the perfect partner for you: the best co-founder for your business, the best lyricist for your songs, the best partner in marriage.
I’m skeptical of this; “better matching” implies “better ability to find”. But just increasing the size of the population does not imply a better chance to find the best matches, given that it also increases the number of non-matches proportionally. And I think it’s already the case that the ability to find the people is a much bigger bottleneck than just their existence.
It’s also worth noting that as the population grows, so does the number of competitors. Maybe a 100x bigger population would have 100x the lyricists, but it may also have 100x the people wanting to hire those lyricists for themselves.
(Similar points also apply to the other “better matching” items.)
Software/internet gives us much better ability to find.
Re competitors, the idea is that we’re not all competing for a single prize; we’re being sorted into niches. If there is 1 songwriter and 1 lyricist, they kind of have to work together. If there are 100 of each, then they can match with each other according to style and taste. That’s not 100x competition, it’s just much better matching.
The past few decades have recorded a steep decline in people’s circle of friends and a growing number of people who don’t have any friends whatsoever. The number of Americans who claim to have “no close friends at all” across all age groups now stands at around 12% as per the Survey Center on American Life.
The percentage of people who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled in the past 30 years, according to the Survey Center on American Life.1
It’s been known that friendlessness is more common for men, but it is nonetheless affecting everyone. The general change since 1990 is illustrated below.
Taken from “Adrift: America in 100 Charts” (2022), pg. 223. As a detail, note the drastic drop of people with 10+ friends, now a small minority.
Although these studies are more general estimates of the entire population, it looks worse when we focus exclusively on generations that are more digitally native. When polling exclusively American millennials, a pre-pandemic 2019 YouGov poll found 22%have “zero friends” and 30% had “no best friends.” For those born between 1997 to 2012 (Generation Z), there has been no widespread, credible study done yet on this question — but if you’re adjacent to internet spaces, you already intuitively grasp that these same online catalysts are deepening for the next generation.
I’m skeptical of this; “better matching” implies “better ability to find”. But just increasing the size of the population does not imply a better chance to find the best matches, given that it also increases the number of non-matches proportionally. And I think it’s already the case that the ability to find the people is a much bigger bottleneck than just their existence.
It’s also worth noting that as the population grows, so does the number of competitors. Maybe a 100x bigger population would have 100x the lyricists, but it may also have 100x the people wanting to hire those lyricists for themselves.
(Similar points also apply to the other “better matching” items.)
Software/internet gives us much better ability to find.
Re competitors, the idea is that we’re not all competing for a single prize; we’re being sorted into niches. If there is 1 songwriter and 1 lyricist, they kind of have to work together. If there are 100 of each, then they can match with each other according to style and taste. That’s not 100x competition, it’s just much better matching.
And yet...