So, looking at shminux’ post above, you would suggest mandatory insemination of only some fertile females and reducing subsistence to slightly above the minimum acceptable caloric levels..?
I believe that deliberately increasing population growth is specifically the opposite direction of the one we should be aiming toward if we are to maximize any utility function that penalizes die-offs, at least as long as we are strictly confined to one planet. I was just more interested in the more general point shminux raised about repugnant conclusions and wanted to address that instead of the specifics of this particular repugnant conclusion.
I think the way to maximize the “human integral” is to find the rate of population change at which our chances surviving long enough and ramping up our technological capabilities fast enough to colonize the solar system. That, in turn, will be bounded from above by population growth rates that risk overshoot, civilizational collapse, and die-off and bounded from below by the critical mass necessary for optimum technological progress and the minimum viable population. My guess is that the first of these is the more proximal one.
At any rate, we have to have some better-than-nothing way of handling repugnant conclusions that doesn’t amount to doing nothing and waiting for someone else to come up with all the answers. I also think it’s important to distinguish between optima that are inherently repugnant versus optima that can be non-repugnant but we haven’t been able to think of a non-repugnant path to get from here to there.
I believe that deliberately increasing population growth is specifically the opposite direction of the one we should be aiming toward if we are to maximize any utility function that penalizes die-offs, at least as long as we are strictly confined to one planet. I was just more interested in the more general point shminux raised about repugnant conclusions and wanted to address that instead of the specifics of this particular repugnant conclusion.
I think the way to maximize the “human integral” is to find the rate of population change at which our chances surviving long enough and ramping up our technological capabilities fast enough to colonize the solar system. That, in turn, will be bounded from above by population growth rates that risk overshoot, civilizational collapse, and die-off and bounded from below by the critical mass necessary for optimum technological progress and the minimum viable population. My guess is that the first of these is the more proximal one.
At any rate, we have to have some better-than-nothing way of handling repugnant conclusions that doesn’t amount to doing nothing and waiting for someone else to come up with all the answers. I also think it’s important to distinguish between optima that are inherently repugnant versus optima that can be non-repugnant but we haven’t been able to think of a non-repugnant path to get from here to there.