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I respect your individual right to this attitude, but consider that the wonders you enjoy today are sustained by a population of a particular size. As populations contract, the number of places that support the activities and adventures you want to have will necessarily contract as well. Imagine a campfire, throughout the night you'll have to move the dwindling coals closer together if you can't add more wood.

So, on an individual basis, this "alone and my way" approach is valid, but if adopted at scale it begins to look parasitic.

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The opposite side, consider the fact that overpopulation leads to the inability to access the activities and adventures a person may want to enjoy. Imagine a campfire, throughout the night you'll have to move the dwindling coals closer together because the forest has been stripped clear and there's no more wood to add.

In this world, the parasitic nature of individuals on the environment robs it of its bounty.

In the original, the analogy was that the fire and wood represented the economic capacity of humanity and the population, respectively. Your rebuttal doesn’t make sense.

A dwindling population also has lesser impact on the environment. Ironically, with your example a smaller population would also mean you have fewer people to compete with in finding a camp site and gathering firewood. In terms of long-term health of humanity on Earth a shrinking population is not necessarily a bad thing.

I don’t think you understood the analogy either, but I’ll try to address your point.

Yes, fewer people means less human-generated impact on the environment. It follows that zero people minimizes the impact of humans on the environment. I don’t think that’s the direction you have in mind, or at least I hope not.

Let’s assume that you want a balance between the number of people on the planet and the carrying capacity of the planet, inclusive of all of the negative externalities caused by humans. Moreover, you probably want to build in some buffer so that people with disabilities or with varying lifestyles and ideologies that lead them to not reproduce can still exist in this world without causing populations to collapse utterly.

So what percent does that look like to you? Do the people of this world, intent on maintaining your ideal equilibrium, have compassion for 5% of their fellows who can’t or won’t reproduce? 20%? 99%? And why not one more?

What is the proper ratio between the members of society responsible for supporting the ongoing existence of the species and those who do not shoulder that responsibility?

Does that help you understand why I said that there is some threshold beyond which it seems parasitic to only take the benefits of a healthy population?

I'm not asserting that there's any correct number of children people shoot have - quite the opposite I'm respecting the choices people are currently making. I don't see any issue with that choice, I'd be indifferent if the population were expanding.

I can turn and flip this same question on its head. Why not 95% or 90% as much as whatever you think is the stable population mark. Why not 50% or 20%? This is not eugenics, this is people voluntarily choosing not to have kids. On what grounds are we justified in asserting that the "correct' number of children is higher than what people are choosing?

Since you raised concerns about the climate, I'm going to assume you agree with the concept that when people exploit the environment (e.g. nickel mines) it takes a long time for the environment to recover (thousands or millions of years). The environment is a resource for humanity since we need it to survive and it has a particular regeneration rate.

Similarly, humans need the production of humanity to survive, let's call that the cultural resource. People who want to do activities and have adventures and travel to see things exploit this cultural resource to do so -- literally, in a second law of thermodynamics sense. Now, this cultural resource takes time to recover just like the climate, but unlike the climate the mechanism of regeneration is people. People create technologies, art, places, activities, adventures, medicine, and provide all sorts of goods and services. By doing so, they regenerate this shared cultural resource.

Now, again, the population itself is a resource with a regeneration rate. However, people themselves exploit this resource primarily through their own birth and death, and themselves are the mechanism of regeneration through sexual reproduction.

I assume that none of this is a surprise to you, but only that you might not think of them in this way of being resources and having regeneration mechanisms.

Consider then that if you don't want the environmental resource to be exhausted (vs unrestricted free market capitalism) and you don't want the human population resource to be exhausted (vs death cults) but you also want to allow the free exploitation of the cultural resource (vs totalitarianism or the historical results of communism), then you need the people that opt-out of the population regeneration mechanic -- having and raising children -- to disproportionally contribute the maintenance of this mechanic and be happy to do so.

If enough folks opt-out (because reasons) and are unwilling to help families ("alone and my way"), then that is demonstrably parasitic and exactly equal to voting for the collapse of the population.

So let's talk about a 99% rate of defection (opting out). If you begin with a stable population in generation 1 and want a stable population in generation 2, then this population is demanding that the 1% of the gen 1 population regenerate themselves to create gen 2. This is tantamount to reproductive slavery. It gets even worse if those defectors are also unwilling to disproportionally support the population raising children. It will be a literal hell for those people. They would form a underclass worse than in the Handmaid's Tale. Literally farmed.

So, at a 99% defect rate, it is objectively true that defectors, individually and collectively, are parasites of the environment, the culture, and humanity.

At a 5% defect rate, it's probably tolerable. At 20%, one out of five, it's probably already unsustainable.

The bottom line is that we all need to share the burden of having and raising children.

So Japanese, South Koreans, and Italians are living in the Handmaid's Tale? They're being "literally farmed"? SK has a birth rate of 0.8, less than half the replacement rate. The rate of "defectors" is well above to 20% unsustainable figure you claim. You're making some very wild statements about something plenty of developed countries are already experiencing.

Back here in reality, humans have not needed significant labor to survive since the industrial revolution. Shrinking populations put strain on economies as there's less labor force participation, and it stresses financial systems as pensions and social security systems have to cope with fewer workers supporting more retirees. But it's not an apocalypse, automation eases labor strains and more taxes to fund retirement programs. Again, shrinking populations is something countries are already experiencing and it's not destroying countries.

You’re not reading and are reacting emotionally. I said farming happens when the 99% need the 1% to do all reproduction. If you want me to take your response seriously, I’d appreciate an apology.

Nobody owes you an apology because your argument is fundamentally flawed.

You say the 99% need the 1% to do reproduction, but do they really? The 99%, by opting out of having children, have clocked out on the very premise of the question of population stability. They either don't care insofar as procreation, or won't mind seeing humanity as a species go extinct.

The only ones who "want a stable population" (your words) are the 1% who do have children. The 1% who do have children will maintain humanity onwards while the 99% who didn't will eventually clock out of this plane of existence to no concern of the 1%. It's a self-solving problem, the world will always be inherited by those who outbreed the rest.

I'm going to include a response to your other post[1] since I can't be bothered to reply twice and it's related to this one:

What you're doing is implying people have arbitrary obligations and quotas to society and humanity, and guilt tripping the people who refuse to oblige those arbitrary obligations and quotas.

Nobody owes anyone anything coming into this world. Nobody is obliged to have children or otherwise continue humanity as a species. Nobody is obliged to marry someone.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36329392

Sigh.

I was setting up an argument to show how impossible it was for either everyone to have children -- we need to be compassionate for the disabled and tolerant of those who make lifestyle choices -- or for only a fractional part of the population to bear the responsibility for having children in order to motivate the point that there is some value between ~5% and ~95% of people that opt out where their collective decisions have become parasitic even though they each have the individual right do make that decision.

I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand. It seems like a simple, straightforward application of statistics of groups. I'd love to learn why you keep choosing to interpret it as an attack on the individual.

EDIT: > They either don't care insofar as procreation, or won't mind seeing humanity as a species go extinct.

The person I was responding to excluded extinction as a possibility that they considered valid. Obviously, if you individually want humanity to die off and want to consume its cultural outputs without contributing until you yourself die off, you're welcome to do so. Seems rather sad though.

The fact you are trying to guilt trip me, in spite of supposed respect for differing opinions, demonstrates my point that most human relations are bullshit.

I've got better things to do and see with my limited time than deal with that, let alone on a permanent basis like in a marriage.

Whatever you do as an individual is none of my business.

As to human relations, this is a public forum where messages are published publicly for everyone to read. My response to your post was not a reply to you, it was an opportunity to examine the impacts of the ideology you proclaim at scale. You feeling bad because it was observed that this ideology has extremely negative consequences at scale is not a guilt trip. Do whatever you want.

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