I completely agree. In Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success, he shows that the amount of knowledge possessed by a society is proportional to the number of people in that society. Dwindling population leads to dwindling technology and dwindling quality of life.
Those who advocate for population decline are unwittingly advocating for the disappearance of the knowledge, experience and frankly wisdom that is required to keep the comfortable life that they take for granted going.
Keeping all that knowledge in books is not enough. Otherwise our long years in education would be unnecessary. Knowing how to apply knowledge is its own form of knowledge.
Most knowledge is useless. Many people have heads filled with sport results and entertainment trivia. 50 years ago, people used to fix their own cars and make their own clothes.
I kind of agree that most knowledge is useless, but the utility of knowledge and experience that people accrue is probably distributed like a bell curve, which means you can’t just have more of the good knowledge without also accruing lots of useless knowledge. In addition, very often stuff that seems totally useless turns out to be very useful; you can’t always tell which is which.
I completely agree. In Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success, he shows that the amount of knowledge possessed by a society is proportional to the number of people in that society. Dwindling population leads to dwindling technology and dwindling quality of life.
Those who advocate for population decline are unwittingly advocating for the disappearance of the knowledge, experience and frankly wisdom that is required to keep the comfortable life that they take for granted going.
Keeping all that knowledge in books is not enough. Otherwise our long years in education would be unnecessary. Knowing how to apply knowledge is its own form of knowledge.
Most knowledge is useless. Many people have heads filled with sport results and entertainment trivia. 50 years ago, people used to fix their own cars and make their own clothes.
I kind of agree that most knowledge is useless, but the utility of knowledge and experience that people accrue is probably distributed like a bell curve, which means you can’t just have more of the good knowledge without also accruing lots of useless knowledge. In addition, very often stuff that seems totally useless turns out to be very useful; you can’t always tell which is which.
I assume it isn’t always like a bell curve, because smaller and poorer societies can’t afford the deadweight of useless knowledge.
I get the idea you’re pointing at but in point of fact, people mostly purchased their clothes in 1974 :P