Zero Contradictions
The author starts by stating that resource abundance leads to population growth but then quickly moves to why the human population isn’t growing despite this abundance.
It’s not accurate to say that the author said that the human population is growing. He said that the human population is “still growing today, by roughly 80 million people per year.” He also linked to an essay that talks about this. He also believes that growth can and will go back up without population control and/or major disaster(s).
The author starts by stating that resource abundance leads to population growth but then quickly moves to why the human population isn’t growing despite this abundance. Wouldn’t it be worth exploring what “abundance” means for modern humans? Could there be some form of scarcity at play?
He wrote a sequel to this essay. Basically, the answer is that birth control has been impeding population growth. That’s why it’s possible that humans currently live with abundant food and amenities, while the population has
I’ve always found it puzzling why researchers, when discussing abundance in the context of fertility, focus only on the first two or three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If we stick to this framework, shouldn’t we also consider, even if controversial, the fascinating “Universe 25” experiment by John B. Calhoun? It suggests that abundance (in a closed system) leads to societal collapse.
Maybe, but I don’t think we should trust the claimed results of Calhoun’s experiment(s). His Mouse Utopia experiments have never been replicated by anyone other than himself, and I see no reasons to believe that abundance would lead to collapse, especially if abundance persists and consistently outpaces the population and its growth.
This leaves two questions unresolved for me: What exactly is abundance?
We could say that abundance is a high quantity of resources, relative to a given population. It’s a fuzzy number, not an exact number.
And can we confidently say it influences fertility in only one (positive) direction?
I argued in sections 5.3 to 5.6 of my Population Dynamics FAQs that abundance always leads to higher fertility. That would still be the case too, if it weren’t for the widespread existence of effective birth control, as addressed in sections 5.8 to 5.12.
I’ve always been baffled by the fact that, despite governments constantly lamenting declining birth rates, there’s a near-universal shortage of childcare facilities.
Yeah, I think that’s a problem too, but probably not among the main barriers to increasing birth rates, as addressed in section 7 and its subsections of those FAQs.
p.s. I don’t want to dive too deeply into Lacanian abyss, but just as a gentle prompt for reflection: Can there be abundance if you lack a sense of lack?
Hmm, I think so. I think that the concept of abundance and the corresponding patterns in reality are independent of how we define words.
Yeah, and people are abundant in birth control. It really is that simple.
Floor space
Floor space may be more preferable for having children, but if you’re implying that high population densities lower fertility rates, then that’s incorrect.
spare time
Yes, that’s a major limiting factor among responsible adults who want to procreate. But it’s not the ultimate limiting factor. Once again, it’s birth control.
nearby relatives are all important
It’s not really clear how that’s connected to the fertility crisis, unless you’re implying that extended families can sometimes help raise more children, which is often true. But nearby relatives still don’t affect fertility nearly as much as birth control.
It’s also possible to achieve nationalization of land while compensating current landowners. Under Silvio Gesell’s proposal, public ownership of land should be accomplished by making the government purchase all land from current landowners through a massive amount of government land bonds, which would be paid over in 20 years by leasing the land through a system of competitive bidding for leases. This would achieve many of the intended effects of Georgism.
I’ve written more about this topic here: https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/georgism-crash-course#freiland
This post is a link post that links to the TheWaywardAxolotl. I figured that more people would read the essay if the text was displayed directly on LessWrong, so I copied the text from the blog post and pasted it into the LessWrong post. The author has said that he doesn’t mind people doing this as long as they include a link back to his blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one on this forum who shares content that I didn’t write myself. It’s pretty normal to do that on social media.
There’s no way for anyone to know that you didn’t write the essay unless they already know that your username isn’t an alias of the writer.
My user profile has a link to zerocontradictions.net, which is clearly my website. That URL is shown when anybody hovers over my username on this site. This link post links to the TheWaywardAxolotl, which is clearly a different website. The username on that blog is also displayed as “Blithering Genius”, not “Zero Contradictions”. There is nothing on Blithering Genius’s blog to suggest that I own it, so it’s weird that Purple fire is jumping to the assumption that I wrote the essay.
making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who “I” refers to.
Yes, that’s how the essay appears on TheWaywardAxolotl, which is clearly not my blog. It’s also how it appears on this LessWrong post, since I copied the text into the post. “I” and “we” are used throughout the essay, so it’s not easy to edit out the first-person language. But since you insist, I edited the post to include a disclaimer at the top that I didn’t write the essay and I’ll do that in the future as well.
let alone that you don’t endorse it
I agree with the essay, but I’m also open-minded, so I shared it to see what other people would say about it, because it’s possible that some people have knowledge and thoughts that I hadn’t thought about. I think that purple fire made some interesting criticisms which might be right, so I told him/her that he/she should post them on the author’s blog if he/she wants the author to read them.
Purple fire accused me of having an arrogant tone and he/she is assuming that I’m the one who wrote the essay. Neither of those assumptions are true, and I was simply pointing that out.
There’s nothing wrong with posting an essay to see what other people think about it. I never claimed to be an expert on economics.
you adopted such an arrogant tone
I didn’t write this post. I’m just sharing it. If you want the author to read your comments, then you should post them on his blog.
Thanks for commenting. However, he also wrote in the same paragraph:
There are no written records of it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, or something like that.
He wrote “or something like that”, so I think that allows some variation of two (main) groups fighting each other in a war. He gave his reasoning for why individuals would team into larger groups in the previous paragraph, but I will agree that it’s mostly speculative how many warring groups there were. Regardless, I’m convinced that the island’s environmental degradation and population collapse were both most likely caused by overpopulation.
This seems like a story that’s unsupported by any evidence, and no better than fiction.
Not at all. It’s just a description of the island’s population over time, followed by a logical conclusion of what most likely happened when the ecosystem becomes overpopulated. Without sufficient famine, disease, or predation to cull the population back below the carrying capacity, and without new crops, technologies, or resources to satisfy the population, the inevitable outcome is conflict over resources. Which sentences are “unsupported” in your opinion?
The ecocide hypothesis is not a minority position either. There is criticism against it, but we also know that there’s a strong and general humanist academic bias to oppose it in general.
It wouldn’t really be “each against all”, but “small (usually family) coalitions against some of the other small-ish coalitions”.
I think this is pedantic, but I understand what you meant. Parents would compete against other parents to feed their starving children, and siblings may compete against their siblings to some extent and others for care and resources. Coalitions could form to attack other coalitions, but the possibility of defection or betrayal effectively turns the competition for survival into each against all.
He’s referring to biological value, as it’s defined in: “What is value?”. Biological value is not the same as the type of value that you’re thinking of. It’s distinct from the other types of value. Biological value claims are truth claims, unlike other types of value claims. A claim about biological value, such as “cutting down the tree is bad for the tree” or “overdosing on fentanyl is bad for you” is a truth judgment, not a value judgment. I could want to cut down the tree, and still understand that it is bad for the tree to be cut down.
Not only weren’t organisms created to reproduce.
Organisms are designed to reproduce. If organisms weren’t designed to reproduce, then they won’t reproduce, they will have no descendants, and organisms will stop existing altogether.
Organisms just do what they do. They exist because certain structures tend to reproduce themselves, and those structures can occur naturally.
Yes, exactly.
It’s dangerous to do even that.
No, it isn’t. It’s impossible to describe biology without using normative language, since biology is intrinsically teleological. I don’t understand why this is a stumbling block. We always use normative language when talking about biology. Normative language is often used descriptively, as in “this soil is good/optimal for pine trees”. Or “smoking is bad for one’s health and fertility”. Disease is “dis”-”ease”. Disorder is “dis”-”order”. There is no way to talk about biology without using normative terms.
Evolution selects forms based on their effects. Thus, the effects explain the form. But it’s not just the effects. Certain effects, which might not even be probable, explain the form. Those effects are the telos. The telos explains the form.
You have to be careful to remember that the word “purpose” there is a metaphor.
I really don’t understand what your issue is. He said “biological purpose”, not purpose in general. The author understands that biological purpose is not the same thing as subjective purpose. These two types of purpose are clearly different concepts, and I see no conceptual mess. There is no ambiguity here.
You misunderstand that paragraph. I’m friends with the author, and he doesn’t believe in objective morality, nor does he believe that it’s “morally correct” to reproduce. Replicating a genome implies reproduction (unless it’s the genome is being artificially created through cloning), but reproduction doesn’t necessarily imply replicating a genome. For example, if you reproduce with someone who has very different genetics (i.e. someone from a different race), then half of the offspring’s genome would be quite different from your genome, compared to if you reproduced with someone from the same race as you.
He does believe that organism’s biological purpose is to reproduce, but that doesn’t mean that he believes that organisms should reproduce. It’s up to the organism whether it reproduces or not. As he said at the beginning of the paragraph: “I do not believe there is a correct number of children to have”. From that statement, it’s implied that he doesn’t think it’s “incorrect” to have no children at all, so I don’t understand why you concluded that he thinks that it’s “morally correct” to reproduce.
“An organism’s biological purpose is simply to reproduce” is a truth claim, not a value claim. The only value claim that he stated in that paragraph was “I do not believe there is a correct number of children to have”.
Could you please explain why “biological purpose” points to a conceptual mess?
Was there anything in particular that you specifically disagree with Van Allen on, either in my summary or the first (free) chapter of his book? I shared the link that you sent me with him on Discord, and he told me that he’s seen it before. He also said that the link that you sent still doesn’t specify the structure in enough detail, as far as he can see, and that it doesn’t really matter.
Like, I noticed that O’Neill proposed: 1. retrieving the cylinder materials from the Moon and 2. setting up either a Rotary Pellet Launcher or a Transport Linear Accelerator for retrieving materials from the Moon to make the construction cheaper. I agree that he didn’t address this possibility in the book, but I don’t fully understand your criticism regarding the steel structure math.
You might be more knowledgeable on this topic than I am, so I’m also wondering if you know of any sources where O’Neill gave a more specific description of what he was thinking about? For example, I’m trying to figure out what O’Neill proposed for the thickness of the original cylinder hull. I can’t find it on Wikipedia or in the link that you sent me, and I think this is a huge deal because the exact dimension of the hull thickness can greatly change the amount of materials that are required for building the cylinder.
The square/cube isn’t really relevant to the O’Neill cylinder itself, but it is relevant when considering what kinds of space infrastructure could be created to launch the cylinder or its components into space. I agree with the reasoning that he stated in the book regarding this topic.
I think he’s right about the maximum length of steel cables at Earth surface gravity. Granted, space would have much weaker gravity, so assembling an O’Neil cylinder in space and having it never land on any planets could make this a non-issue.
Also, the bullet points are my attempt to summarize what he wrote. They’re not what he actually wrote. But the first chapter of Van Allen’s book is free to read on Amazon as a sample if you’d like, and it includes everything that I was trying to summarize.
Anyway, thank you for sharing the link.
I don’t believe that gene-editing is a viable solution to preventing dysgenics for the entire population.
Unregulated reproduction has the potential to harm others, so it’s reasonable to regulate it.
The Race FAQs has lots of high-quality information on genetic group differences: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race
I don’t support the past eugenics or forced sterilizations that you’ve mentioned. However, I still support eugenics. I argue that reproduction licenses would protect human rights: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/eugenics#human-rights
This is a great idea. I’ve brainstormed and compiled a list of additional ideas that could also help raise fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#boosting-western-fertility
This is honestly some of the best feedback that I’ve received on this site, so thank you for your comment. I edited the introduction and I clarified what I meant by “redundant” research.
I once tried to quantify the validity of academic research, but I gave up on trying that. I talk more about this in my reply to Seth Herd.
I didn’t come up with the title for the essay, but I re-titled this LW post, so thank you for your suggestion. In hindsight, I’ll agree that my comment came off as condescending to some extent, so I edited that as well. I just haven’t been in the best mood when I post on this site since I’ve gotten used to people giving me downvotes, disagreeing with my comments, and sometimes sending condescending comments into my inbox, though that doesn’t justify me being condescending to others. Regardless of the essay’s title, the essay’s contents raise serious questions about whether academia is intellectually honest.
I’ve thought about expanding my sequel essay even further to more precisely quantify and evaluate the research in each academic field, but I ended up not doing this since it would probably take me a week or longer to further detail everything. Another problem was that even if I finished it, people could always say that I failed to evaluate this or that, since there are tens of thousands of papers out there. Another issue is that not everybody agrees on what counts as “fake”, as I mentioned in the sequel essay. So even if someone quantified all academic research as best as they can, it’s not possible for them to make an overall assessment that a majority of people would agree with.
For these reasons, I don’t think it’s productive to quantify whether most academic research is true or false or high-quality or low-quality, which would explain why the author didn’t do so. I think it’s more productive to analyze how academia and the academic research process work and what kind of output such a system is likely to produce. From everything that I’ve seen across a multitude of fields, my overall impression is that most academic research tends to be low-quality. Blithering Genius’s analysis and my own analysis both conclude that that’s probably the case for most academic research.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment and reading your thoughts.
The bigger issue is that not everybody agrees on what’s true or false. I did my best to address these considerations in greater depth in my sequel essay: https://zerocontradictions.net/epistemology/academia-critique
Regardless, the point of the essay is that the overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. Ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all these ongoing issues. I could expand it even further, but it would probably take me a week to do so, when I have more important priorities.
Yeah, motivations that are already near universally advocated by modern Western culture, like avoiding teenage pregnancies, avoiding STDs (encourages condom usage), a culture where having lots of children has lower social status, a culture that advertises career advancement and high socioeconomic mobility (at the cost of having fewer children), avoiding overpopulation, etc.
The bottom line is none of the things that you seem to have implied (i.e. density, time, and families) could hold a candle to the power of birth control. Population growth never would’ve slowed down if birth control didn’t start getting mass-produced, more efficient, and more affordable. That really shouldn’t be hard to understand.
As I already wrote in the FAQs, there are other factors that affect fertility rates as well, but it’s naive that most people never think about nor consider the importance of birth control. I’ve never seen a LessWronger with a decent understanding of population dynamics, probably because there are close to none.