generativenoise

People in general don't seem to look at how much "productive" population you need in the real economy to support a given population. Things look pretty fine by those metrics and if the AI claims are to believed about to rapidly get even better. How to motivate and compensate that small number of people in the real economy that supports human welfare is a different question.

Also people appear to be blind to the real material limits that really start to be pushed by large populations. You could end up making life materially worse by trying to "fix" the demographics by adding more humans.

It is only "human readable" since our tooling is so bad and the lowest common denominator tooling we have can dump out a sequence of bytes as ascii/utf-8 text somewhat reliably.

One can imagine a world where the lowest common denominator format being a richer structured binary format where every system has tooling to work with it out of the box and that would be considered human readable.

It would seem you are still just thinking about the human controlled portions of the ecosystem and not including all the energy used to drive to water cycle etc.

We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.

Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.

I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.

From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.

The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.

I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.

That is such a good line. Another important note is the time horizon of that error function is often quite short.

I made no judgement about the quality of processed food or where the different options rank in terms access to calories and nutrition, or what is actually feasible. It was simply about how changes can become mildly to severely obligate to certain populations in our economic system.

They are wrong however. To take the food example, the existence of processed food production creates artifacts like food deserts. If you are privileged these things don't effect you as much as you get more agency.

Just the existence of quick to eat and prepare foods are going to put limits on how long you are going to be given for lunch and dinner. Even if you wanted to prepare fresh food, the system is going to make it difficult since it becomes an unsupported activity in terms of time allowances and market access.

To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.

Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.

So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.

Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.

To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.

Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).

Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.

I think the better rebuttal to that is the existence of many other species that have been around much longer without what we loosely call intelligence.

I think the better take away from the evidence is that humans are really limited and have heuristics that are really exploitable. At large scales that can lead to some pretty counterproductive behavior.

The interesting thing is that some of those same heuristics can be really adaptive at smaller scales. So the question is where is the balance and what sort of systems lead to better global behavior.

I don't think your example of living on other planets is correct (at least as homo sapiens, seeding lifeforms and maybe even intelligent life is another thing), but I think it is in the right direction of that there is so much more that is achievable but we don't have the social co-ordination to approach it in a way that is much better that a random-walk.

Large scale co-ordination and sense making of actual reality is hard.

The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.

It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.

Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.

A large portion humanity seem incapable of embracing uncertainty and nuance and are over eager to embrace whoever is willing to peddle certainty and simplicity.

As long as that is true it seem naive to believe that nuanced institutions can exist as dominant entities in human societies.

I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.

We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.

In the limit that might be fine, the problem is the amount of damage caused in the meantime and the constraints that puts on future trajectories.

Your first statement is terrible logic when it comes to trying to create more globally correct system dynamics. It may seem more fair but it basically creates the lossy liability mentioned by another commenter. Especially since you are creating a one way ratchet where the share in upside disproportionately to the downside.

Yes, maybe you want to include some scaling function so larger shareholders that should have more agency bear more liability. But then you are likely going to get games played to on paper to dilute shareholdings though shell companies. Unless big transparent voting blocks are directly needed for their purposes.

The problem with your second statement is that is seems to be unclear who the relevant people actually are most of the time and we just end up with fall guys. Especially when it is the environment dominating individual agency where in effect you could swap all the people and get the same outcome most of the time.

Would be nice to fix the performance reviews so we don't end up in a arms race of creating bloat until it becomes so unproductive it kills the host.

Over-fitting proxy measures is one of the scourges of modernity.

The only silver lining is if it becomes so wide spread and easy it loses the value of seeming sophisticated and thorough.

It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention.

The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.

Because they couldn't reach a consensus with their governance mechanisms. There were people feeding and encouraging the bears. I guess they could have shot all the bears. Eliminating all the bears because a sensible consensus can't be reached seems like a gross failure of humanity to coexist with the natural (uncontrolled) world.

There may be no grand objects to be found, but that does not mean there isn't much to find. The thing that we will find is more knowledge about those societies.

The interesting complication in that distinction is radiation mutation breeding which we have been using for nearly 100 years. An accelerated "natural" mutation mechanism?

I think that main alarming aspects of GMOs are the business models it enables more than direct risks.

Though there are ecosystem risks, we don't seem to weight those risks heavily with any of our land use and ecosystem modification so I find it hard to hold them against GMOs specifically.

Since the popular narrative completely ignores population for the most part in the: impact = population * pollution/intensity rate per person relationship. Since no one want to discuss active limits and we would rather have limits as second order effects of other policies. Calling out a comment for just mentioning growing population is a bit weird.

Since world fertility seems to be dropping, it is unlikely to dominate in the future. Therefore, your summation of what we should be focusing on would be more correct. This hasn't always been true and it is still and important factor to keep in mind.

You just literally stated that people can be too poor to buy food on the primary market so they have to set up a secondary market in order to get food.

I probably should have been more clear in my statement and put "farmers" instead of "you". It wasn't really a statement about food but about market access and participants ability to signal demand.

You second statement is just boringly stupid.

You are being just as dogmatically blind.

While there is truth is what you say about simply redistributing money is going to directly get people the goods and services required since that is not directly production.

It does have second order effect of changing the weighting of what society produces. If people are too poor to afford food why would you bother to grow it.

Taxing should be about keeping winner take all effects in reasonable check to keep markets actually functional for a good proportion of the participants.

I agree that they are unlikely to become viable policy, but environmentally imposed degrowth will become increasingly real. Natural physical constraints are tightening and are already imposing into manufactured reality. Hitting the physical bounds hard and having to deal with that is looking more likely since human ecological footprint (population x resource intensiveness) is unlikely to drop fast enough to avoid them.

It is an interesting game we are playing as a civilisation since without people skilled at making our material environment the quality of life we enjoy will most likely drop.

We seem to have structured things in a way where what is individually optimal and desired is very opposed to what we need at larger scales. It does seem like the system is maintained only by inertia at this stage.

Yes we have made great progress with maternal and basic health, these are really great and represent real meaningful knowledge and capability gains. However, there are other health trends that are not looking very promising at the moment that take a bit of the shine off.

Poverty has some very definitional issues with the chosen metrics and I am hesitant to actually draw any conclusions on if it has brought net positive human fulfillment.

In any case the whole system is a pretty precarious place at the moment with rapidly closing windows to maintain stability, and if we don't those "stunning achievements" are going not going to persist in a meaningful way.

I find the assumptions of the economic analysis I have seem pretty dubious. They assume way too much linearity and fungibility in the system that just doesn't appear to be there.

We are just going to keep kicking the pendulum until it transitions out of its nice linear region.

Your understanding of the physics is so bad I don't know where to start. Though for a first step where do you think that energy you extract from the water to turn it into ice goes?

If you want to use ice cubes they have to either be made in space, or you have to get extremely good radiative cooling to space.

There have been plenty of solutions proposed but the most favourable "solution" that has mostly been chosen is to make it the futures problem to figure out how to adapt.

Hrmmm, maybe I did not the best analogy to try and elucidate the difficulty of judging an action till you have reached an equilibrium state. Since it is quite predictable with a pretty concrete outcome under most conditions.

I think there are definitely meaningful levels of "doomed", but that really depends on what you value. If what you value is I can live by the ocean without being beaten to death by huge storms maybe that is a bit more on the doomed scale.

It more is that we are forcing the system to change, we somewhat have a say in how much/how fast/how unpredictable we would like that to be. Also keeping in mind with some systems the more we push the system from equilibrium the less controllable it is.