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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Not that I disagree with everything, but 8 billions argument seems misplaced to me. Why should a life style support that many, if valid?

Logistic map (aka uncontrolled growth of population or overpopulation) is basically the fundamental source of suffering for all living things. Instead of planning for food, nature just overproduces demand and lets the weak starve to death and the average to just starve.

Rather than asking how it would support billions, we should ask how we are planning to not suffer in these numbers. Haven’t heard it regarding our current life style. Everyone tells us to reproduce more and pay more and more astronomic bills and loans, that’s it.

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> Why should a life style support that many, if valid?

Personally, I would say a lifestyle that isn't just a thought experiment should answer one of

  A) How do you support the current population of the planet like this?
  B) How do you humanely reduce the population over time if you can't?

Obviously still value in thought experiments, but if you're talking about real life, ignoring those two questions gets a bit euthanasia/genocide-y pretty easily. "Every human being alive today not existing" should probably not pass the lifestyle test suite, right?

Most people in the world can’t work high-income jobs or live in nice single-family houses in pleasant spacious places. It seems like the rubric you are proposing would ban people who are able to enjoy these privileges from thinking about how they can improve their own lifestyles. Regression to mean is not my objective for myself or my family. That said, I certainly believe we should do what we can to improve the lot for most people, but it is simply not realistic to imagine that the only valid ways of life are those which can scale to the whole global population.

The world’s a very big place with a hugely diverse set of possible “valid” lifestyles (and limited ability to influence their reality). So what’s the big deal with proposing that maybe for some people a return to the land or to subsistence is a legitimate option?

We clearly don’t support anything now, so this argument seems to be in the same category of wishful thinking. These questions could be asked if the current system passed the tests. People already have 0-1 kids. They gather in packs to live in cardboard boxes with nominal utilities.

A system with free agents is very prone to painting itself into a corner, it’s unstable by design. One of the issues that we have is that on the brink of catastrophe we are still asking ourselves whether the less carastrophic measures are ethical. But times of “we do what we want” end with the last decent square mile allocated for crops and housing.

We’re at such hard physical limits for the first time, so it will take a couple of world wars to figure out new rules, I guess.

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