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Comment by AlexB138 | Hacker News Reader

When I read things like this, I can't help but feel like we're approaching The Behavioral Sink. When I first read about John B. Calhoun's work, I thought it was interesting but sort of moved on. For some reason, it stuck in my mind though, and it rises to the surface often when I read news about the world.

For those who don't know, Calhoun's research was around the impact of population growth. He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming and stopped breeding once the population reached a certain size, even disregarding the wellbeing of the young that are born.

Obviously we're not in a situation as bad as all that, but it's an interesting light to view today's world in.

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We can level the human population off--and ultimately shrink it--long before that point, simply by growing the percentage of women with access to education, contraceptives, and equal legal rights.

We don't know what the "natural" human population is. By that, I mean the human population that would exist if every human had free choice of whether or not to have kids.

What we have now (globally) is still largely the "accidental" human population--the population we got because the pleasure of sex leads unexpectedly to reproduction.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, and I wouldn't trust most countries to enact it properly but...

I wish we had a "reverse-able sterilization at birth" method. It would be reversed at no cost to the individual, but if we could somehow set the default to "no kids", and give individuals the choice to turn it on, I think we would see a lot less of a population issue.

I'm not sure why "contraception by default from birth with free reversibility" would be an unpopular opinion. People who don't want kids would be happy, people who want kids but want control over timing would be happy, even people who want kids to be an unexpected gift would be happy...

I've spent a lot of time with religious people. Many of them think that our current birth-control methods are immoral. Many states in the US still have abstinence-only education.

Mostly because it has echoes of eugenics. I agree this would not only control growth but pause our use of natural resources and would allow people in poor countries to do better economically as resources would not have to be shared among a growing pop.

Alternatives to contraception, form a pop growth perspective are delayed reproduction (say at 35) or more same sex pairing.

At age 35? I know you were just throwing a number out, but at age 35, about 10% of women are completely infertile, and the odds of successfully conceiving are significantly decreased, meaning that even in that 90% who are fertile, they may not be able to get pregnant quickly enough to take advantage of their fertility before becoming infertile, even if they're ready to go and start reproducing right on their 35th birthday. And, on top of THAT, the rate of birth defects and chromosomal abnormalities dramatically increases after 35 (with another inflection point after roughly 40).

So, yes, while it would significantly decrease the population, you'd be dramatically increasing the number of people, mostly women, who simply aren't able to have children at all.

Could I have a credible source for these numbers?

There are tons of studies and data that can be found in many places (obviously, it's a fairly common topic of research) but here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility

They also have a table there, outlining the theoretical "percent of women who will fail to have a live birth" if they start trying to conceive at a certain age. Not the same thing as infertility -- they may be fertile, just unlucky up until the point that they're actually infertile. The numbers are a little all over the place, but for 35 year old women, it's somewhere between 13 and 22%

While not "at birth", there is a non-profit working on this for men: https://www.parsemusfoundation.org/projects/vasalgel/

That sounds absolutely monstrous.

How is giving people a better opportunity to make an informed decision monstrous?

The main issue here for me is, "who turns it back on", and in what circumstances will they/won't they do it?

People have a right to make their own reproductive choices, but there's a huge human, social, and economic cost when people have children at ill-advised points in their life (either too young, when sick, when poor), and it seems that relying on others to enable your reproductive rights is a hazard where the government or medical profession can remove that right from people.

I don't really consider this strictly eugenics, as it's not done with the same intention of improving the global genepool, but instead it attacks it from a more shortsighted and "pragmatic" (economic/social) point of view, but in any case it would be a horrible future.

I completely agree, that's why I said I wouldn't trust most countries to enact it properly. I think if done right it could be a good solution, I just don't think it would be a good solution. There's too much potential for abuse.

You could solve the moral issues by letting people just go get the birth control applied when they want to.

Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.

I think we should let people do that currently. My issue with the current way things are, though, is that the default is fertility. I know many people who had kids before they were ready, because it was unplanned. I'd argue that it's more moral to prevent unplanned pregnancies, but give people the choice to become fertile whenever they want.

> Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.

If you read my above comments: That's why, even though I wish we could implement it, I probably wouldn't support it if it was an available option. I don't trust any government to do it correctly.

The solution is actually really simple.

You sterilize at birth, and then once a child reaches the age of majority they are allowed to get it reversed at zero cost simply be requesting it be done.

This removes the moral hazard, and requires a positive action and conscious choice to have a child. At that point you can start making moral judgements and holding people accountable.

I don't think that sounds unreasonable at all. I think most people that dislike that do out of implementation concerns, not because they are actually opposed.

Well it doesn't matter before puberty, and access to long-term contraceptives like "the pill," depo-privera, diaphragms, IUDs, etc. starting at puberty can create the same effect of defaulting to no pregnancies (or at least extremely unlikely).

I would also like to emphasize the importance of accurate, timely sex education so kids learn how their bodies work and what their options are. The combination of contraceptives + education has had a dramatic effect in Colorado on teen pregnancies.

And although it's less of an issue in the U.S. and Europe, legal equality for women (right to own property, conduct a business, drive cars, hold political office, etc.) frees them from dependency on a husband.

Even the basics help: marital rape is not yet a crime in every country today. In fact it wasn't a crime in all 50 states until 1993!

My point here is that we don't need to imagine some sort of draconian program like universal reversible sterilization at birth. All we need to do is promote and make progress with the tools we already have. That can be just as effective, AND more moral as well.

It's clearly a good idea. I've long had the same idea, Heinlein had the same idea, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long works.

The mice utopia experiment.. There are a surprising amount of small parallels between it and some of our recent cultural phenomenon.

Interesting thought.

Would you mind elaborating? My great grandmother used to laugh at the moral majority's antics---she said that people have been complaining about the moral degeneration of society since she was a small child---in the 1890s.

"Newer generations born in the now dysfunctional mouse utopia became withdrawn, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating , drinking and sleeping. This generation, for all the emphasis they placed on grooming, would not reproduce. Moreover, these mice were noted to be unintelligent compared to previous generations."

Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.

Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.

Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.

This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.

Getting obese seems like the opposite of excessive grooming. Most of the tendencies you're talking about are not happening in the overpopulated areas. The selfie thing is hugely overblown, a lot of people may be self-absorbed, but what says that's new, and a lot of people are also depressed.

The mice thing is not a utopia, it's an extremely artificial situation that only fits a very banal and shallow definition of "utopia". And that is not and probably never will be a situation humans will find themselves in since it requires a third party to engineer. None of us right now are in a closed environment, and we're definitely not in a no scarcity situation, since people are still worried about holding a job. The NEET thing is, too, related to the whole job thing.

In what way are these situations at all related?

I think you're reading into the term "utopia" too much. The experiment was a utopia of the body perhaps where there are no biological needs that aren't satisfied with no external forces of nature acting to reduce population aside from the size of the habitat that the rats lived in - as you mention we do not live in a utopia as people do grow hungry and are lacking jobs.

It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.

I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.

As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

But do words not matter? The word "utopia" has a specific connotation in the minds of many people, and such experiments continue to drive the narrative that humans cannot be happy unless the conditions are bad.

> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.

I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to. Obesity is much higher in the US, by a wide margin, than, say, India, and India is definitely much more populated. I don't know if I really need to provide numbers for that.

The NEET issue could easily have been caused by bleak job prospects.

My point is, the rat experiment and the current situation don't seem to be even remotely related. Our population growth is not the same, and our population growth is very uneven. We have external forces acting to limit how people live still. There are just so many variables not accounted for that trying to find any connections is more dangerous than it is helpful.

It's an interesting point about India, but I'd say there is much more of a focus on getting enough food to survive there than in overpopulated first world cities - which is closer to the subject matter.

By no means do I think the situation we are in are comparable - nature does play a role for us unlike in the experiment and there are hardships for some.

But I think examining extreme overpopulation and it's effects on individuals is important - and is relative to a lesser degree to problems we have the potential to face, and may be facing in diluted forms in certain areas. Maybe not as much today, but who knows where we could be tomorrow.

The other glaring difference is the difference in behaviour between people and rodents - you can't draw conclusions and act upon them, but you can at least study the connections.

I wouldn't call that dangerous at all, I'd say it was dangerous to ignore.

> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations

What scope and scale are you looking at though? Because within first world countries such as the USA, psychological problems doesn't correlate much and obesity correlates negatively with population density. The problems you mention correlate much more with social and economic opportunities (or lack thereof) than population density itself.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3481194/

Thanks very much for the paper, I'm always more than happy to be proved wrong, I'll have a read.

I think calling that a utopia is quite a stretch. We humans still have some definitions to work out if we think that a utopia out of ignorance and lack of power is valid.

I also found his research intriguing! Here is a nice write-up for anyone unfamiliar: http://www.mostlyodd.com/death-by-utopia/

> He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming ...

You haven't mentioned the very important fact that the experiment was designed to be a mice "utopia" with everything mice could desire provided to them for free. (meaning: no effort needed)

In an environment where no effort is needed to survive and procreate it makes sense to me that the offspring will be less intelligent and less social over time as they do not need any of these social traits to survive.

We haven't reached human utopia yet but I believe the welfare state goes into that direction and will eventually produce similar results. (it already does in some respects - see birth rates in Western countries)

The next decades will be very interesting times (and possibly frightening) as we might see our civilisation first being dominated economically by others and likely also militarily after that. (and this wont be pretty for us, because hatred towards our culture is mainstream in most other cultures - and sadly also internally)

Or alternatively we will see chaotic internal revolutions that will undo this development.

But I doubt that we will see these changes happen in an ordered democratic way as the establishment will fight changes by all means imaginable. (it is obvious when seeing the medias bias)

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