Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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It's also possible to be for social progress, but also think the world is over-populated. In fact if a person generally worries about the future of humanity, I would not be surprised to see a strong correlation between those two attitudes.

A fertility rate of 1.7 isn't the same as 'not reproducing' and doesn't imply 'going extinct'. You can't just extrapolate a trend at any given moment indefinitely. Otherwise if you pick a moment of rising population you'll extrapolate up to infinity or if you pick a moment of falling population you'll extrapolate to zero. Reality doesn't work like that. Arguably it's just a trend towards right-sizing the population.

Globally fertility rates have been falling for many decades. It's hardly surprising that the poorest countries are among the last to see fertility rates decline the most, but as income and education rates in those regions rise, their fertility rates will also fall.

As a for secularization, which you seem to conflate with social progress, counting 'Muslims' and 'Christians' isn't a simple exercise. Counting everyone born to Muslim parents as Muslim doesn't make any more sense than counting everyone who gives presents at Christmas as Christian. In fact attendances at Mosques and actual participation in religious activities is in decline across most of the Muslim world. In Europe most 'Muslims' do not pray every day. Egypt is a good proxy for trends in the Muslim world due to it's cultural influence. There are steep declines in religious practice and support for imposing Sharia Law has more than halved over the last decade.

"A fertility rate of 1.7 isn't the same as 'not reproducing' and doesn't imply 'going extinct'. You can't just extrapolate a trend at any given moment indefinitely."

Apart from that, if you speak of group A going extinct and group B not, you are implicitly defining them as separate species. I don't think that's an accurate description of the present nor a plausible description of the future.

Right, it’s really hard to talk about this subject without running into bigotry, accidentally or on purpose. Almost all the distinctions in the GP comment are not inherent and can (and will) change during a single human lifetime—like religiosity or whether one lives in a “developed nation.”

In the long run, all nations are developed nations, and then what will we use to draw distinctions between human beings? I’m sure folks will think of something.

You don't really need to look. Culture, race, will do fine.

The very use of the term "developed nation" surfaces a priori bigotry. It's a dogwhistle word for "becoming westernized" or "joining Christendom".

It just goes to show.

Are you from a “developing nation?”

Is it? A big chunk of the "developing world" is (generally) Christian—pretty much all of the Americas, big chunks of Africa. The Philippines. Russia and some of the former Soviet bloc states. Meanwhile everyone agrees Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the "developed" states and I don't think it's fair to characterize them as Christian.

I prefer to just shorthand this as "OECD" versus "non-OECD" which manages to just about cover all the states everyone actually means when they use "Western" (including tons of countries that aren't Western at all) or "developed", though the latter's a decent enough term IMO. "Western" is especially silly, of course, for a bunch of reasons, including that pretty much all the "original" Western states were themselves at some point "Westernized"—rolled over by Generic European-ish Capitalist "Culture", erasing most of what was there before, and absorbing and exporting those elements that could be sold to others (those parts becoming "Western")

"Meanwhile everyone agrees Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the "developed" states and I don't think it's fair to characterize them as Christian."

This is just a nitpick as I agree with your overall point, but South Korea isn't agreed by everyone to be a developed country. In fact, they are right on the cusp as evidenced by the fact that some investment funds consider them developing and some consider them developed.

I almost think there should be a classification for the US, Japan, and the UK, and another for "everyone else". If you look at the number of medium to smallish companies that have access to public stock markets, there is a huge difference between those three countries and everywhere else. Something is fundamentally different about their economies. And I've never read where someone declares this a mystery worthy of investigation and tries to explain it.

> if you speak of group A going extinct and group B not, you are implicitly defining them as separate species

I don't see how this follows. I've definitely been in biology classes where we discussed different groups of rats in this way and we never considered them separate species just because they were different groups.

Well, did those groups of rats interbreed or not?

That's really not relevant. Groups of rats can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, that's what makes them the same species.

> Counting everyone born to Muslim parents as Muslim doesn't make any more sense

That is, in fact, exactly how it’s defined within that religion. Also, using Egypt as an example is deeply ironic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZIqdrFeFBk

Why ironic? To this day the Hijab is not required in Egypt.

Why should someone not in a religion care how that religion defines things? I'm not quite clear what you're trying to say here.

You need to be aware of how the religion defines things because that definition has teeth for people actually living in those countries. The punishment for leaving (apostasy) is generally death. A third of people in the country where I’m from believe that really should be the punishment. (And it’s one of the “moderate” ones—in Egypt it’s about 2/3.) It’s a self-perpetuating system, which goes to the soundness of OP’s counting methodology above.

In Egypt, the rate of wearing some form of veil went from almost zero in the middle of the 20th century to 90% today. For the most part, that trend is enforced through various degrees of social coercion.

Social coercion goes both ways

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44411333

In those countries there is a big divide between the liberal elite, which tends to be more secular, and everyone else. But any “coercion” caused by classist attitudes pales to the coercion on the other side. To put that article in context for our American readers: it’s like someone writing an article about how someone from rural Georgia went to Atlanta and someone mocked their accent. Except it’s written against the backdrop of the state passing the heartbeat abortion law.

On another note, when does influence become coercion? Is it only when it results in choices that the forces of global hegemony disagree with? Too many people are convinced that decision to wear a hijab can not be an authentically free one. It's very patronising.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/06/do-non-musl...

Wow, it's almost as if Muslim women have a variety of opinions on the subject.

>A third of people in the country where I’m from believe that really should be the punishment. //

It's not just apostasy that's considered punishable by death though, "encouraging it" is too, AIUI. So what proportion of those people are just scared that their objection to death penalties will be considered to be support for apostasy and so they'll die. I mean who would answer "no" if there's any possibility that it might lead to your death or even just the persecution of you and your family?

"There's no compulsion in Islam" every Islam supporter online tells me.

I don't see how this is relevant to the point. So Islamic law says that these people who are increasingly not praying, not attending mosque and don't support Sharia law and to the point don't believe apostates should be killed, are still Muslims.

So what? Why should I care? What point are you trying to make?

World isn't overpopulated. I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

    >You can't just extrapolate a trend at any given moment indefinitely.

I assume the model probably looks at chances that offspring of Muslim parents share parents religion.

    > fertility rate of 1.7 isn't the same as 'not reproducing' and doesn't imply 'going extinct'.

When you have countries with median age 40+, you know their health care and other systems are also struggling. The lower your fertility the older your society, the older your society, the lower your fertility. Can't attract immigrants? You are fucked basically.

My main concern with overpopulation isn't how many people the world could support as a maximum, I'm sure it's very high, it's how many it can support without dramatically degrading the environment.

An ageing population has negative consequences, sure, we'll just have to manage them. Allowing the population to increase indefinitely isn't a solution though, it's just kicking the can down the road until you do hit a hard limit, and then you're in _real_ trouble.

All the good land is now dedicated to farming. What's left is the stuff that is hard to grow on; too rocky, too cold, too north for any light, too dry.

It turns out the oceans are the opposite of robust, for how large they are.

The economy of N. America depends on building cheap housing, to attract more immigrants, so they can work building housing, to sell to new immigrants. I have nothing against immigrants. Just pointing out how the economy really works, despite what a small handful of people in a booming (but slowing) tech sector feel about what drives the economy - it's the housing market.

That's a humongous assertion about the US economy and not at all in line with the data. Construction is only 4.0% of the GDP, and the lump of finance and real estate (renting, reselling mixed in with the entire stock market) is 20%.

>The economy of N. America depends on building cheap housing, to attract more immigrants, so they can work building housing, to sell to new immigrants.

As described, that would fall into the 4%.

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-industry

The housing market is not really what drives the economy. It is where a massive amount of credit has been funnelled in the last few decades, though. We do need to change how our macro-economy functions, but unfortunately politicians and most of the economists advising them are oblivious to the critical role that credit plays.

> I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

We have around 7 billion people now. At the current growth rate of about 1%/yr the biomass of human beings will exceed the current weight of the planet Earth around the year 7200.

Not long after that this hypothetical growing humanity would collapse into a black hole under its own weight.

It'll already be quite cramped in the year 5400 with 1% growth. We'll have 5 people for every square meter of the surface of Earth (we have 510.1 trillion m^2). That's about the density near the front-row of a standing concert.

So you agree, no hard limits?

it's a joke people.

Placing the people isn’t the problem. Feeding them is.

>World isn't overpopulated. I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

Yes there most certainly is a hard limit on how many people this plant can support. We have increased it, and continue to increase that limit with technology at a faster rate than reproduction but there are social trends that are seeing that progress rolled back.

Anti-GMO, Organic, and several other social trends in food production means the amount of land, water, and other supplied needed to a feed a person is growing not reducing. With out Advanced Farming, pesticides, GMO Crops and other advancements we would have exceeded the planets ability to provide long ago.

Now that there is a strong incentive to produce organic non gmo food, technologies will be developed to increase crop yield given those constraints (in addition to existing permissible technologies in organic farming such as drip irrigation, tractors and: https://interestingengineering.com/video/this-flamethrowing-...). Sure, yields would always be higher if gmo and chemical pesticides were allowed, but in the long run we can still expect yields to increase.

GMO is not just about increasing yields but also getting crops to grow in wider more diverse climates, something we may very well need with Global Warming

Take for example the Semi-dwarf wheat that has been claimed to save billions of people and makes up pretty much all wheat grown today.

This adversion of GMO is not based in science but rather F.U.D. I find it amusing that many people that are Anti-GMO are also very very concerned with Climate Change, and laugh a people that question climate change for being "anti-science" then then spread all kinds of lies and misinformation about GMO...

> I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

Humans through our metabolic process generate waste heat and Earth can only radiate so much so that does put a hard cap, albeit one much higher than people generally image, but a cap nonetheless. If we assume only the heat generated by our metabolic process that puts the limit over 250 trillion[0] but if we account for energy for food and industrial purposes that puts the limit closer to 10 trillion[1].

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19441/what...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

The world is overpopulated. Humans have already eliminated as many species as other great extinction events. Our industrial activity has changed the Earth climate. There is very little wilderness left anywhere. The forests are getting clear cut and eliminated. We have exceeded the Earth's capacity to support us already and there is no end in sight, unfortunately. Humans are the disease and unless we learn to live sustainably (as opposed to infinite expansion), the life is going to get worse for every subsequent generation and we are toast in the end.

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