That's the thing with exponentials, they are very hard to predict. We know that in general, exponential growth is unsustainable, and there has to be an inflection point, but where? It is usually difficult to know until the last moment, and even a small difference in time on where you predict the inflection point is can make a massive difference.
Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
> Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
Who could have thunk just two months after videos of people dropping dead in Wuhan and after the virus spread Worldwide? The reason people were avoiding Chinatown must have been racism. The Science(aka the Government) is always right.
Well I wouldn't both-sides this one. 2020s population forecasting is better than 1960s forecasting, the latter was repudiated and the former is correctly modeling basically everything. Demographic decline really is happening and has reasonably well understood mechanisms.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
2020s population forecasting has less than a decade's worth of record to go by, trying to say anything substantial about it risks falling into the same trap the article discusses.
The main thrust of the article (as I understood it) is historical context and how human processes can change given circumstance. So basically: demographic decline will be happening and well-understood until these circumstances no longer persist.
Hard disagree, population forecasting is more rigorous now but the data stretches back to the origin of civilization, and it's more than a binary of having or not having data, it's having stronger and more predictive methodologies. The biggest risk is the false equivalence between predictions from 60 years ago and now.
It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."
Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.
I'm not suggesting that current data modelling is no better than it was 60 years ago (it surely is), what I'm saying is that we have 60+ years of predictive record for the latter and 6 for the former, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
To use your analogy: let's rather not get too complacent about figuring out the world isn't flat and risk placing all future bets on it being round.
The population hysteria from the 60s was proven wrong a long time ago but it's still pretty influential. E.g. it's not uncommon for millenials to talk about not wanting children because of overpopulation.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
Even if there's a lot of scientific evidence, statistical proof etc. it's sort of surprising to me that when chatting with people all over the world (in dense cities and also in non-dense areas) how often I hear the sentiment that "there are too many people" and get the sense that they do mean that there's too many people in the world (not just within the surrounding 5-10km which might actually be true).
This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)
I guess I don't understand what's supposedly been proven wrong?
There seem to be real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form, and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact.
I guess what's "surprising" is that birth rates are responding to the pressures I'm alluding to? Rather than just continuing runaway exponential expansion?
I think people are talking about two different things. The initial panic was that agriculture could not scale to population growth, and millions would starve. That part turned out to be quite seriously wrong, the reason people starve is that they have really crappy governments.
The idea that a growing population has quite serious effects on the natural environment hasn't been proven wrong. Trying to get the entirety of the third world up to first world living conditions is putting a serious strain on natural systems. Having a lower population would probably help with that problem.
The current panic around falling populations seems to have two drivers: economic systems that are built as essentially a ponzi scheme, like many retirement plans including social security, and a pretty racist idea that we need to have a lot more white babies to keep brown people from taking over.
> real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form
There are two different groups I think. One is not having kids because of environmental issues, but I think there's a larger group not having kids because of systemic societal issues that make it hard to have kids. (sometimes it's the same group but not always)
So part of what I was pointing out is that when people say "we need less people" they aren't implying "wow, I'm glad the population is shrinking" they're really saying, "less people need to be born in the future"- which probably isn't true.
> and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact
Also, it's not obvious, since, with the exception of China, no one actually meant to do this. It might actually lead to a lot of human misery, the same as climate change might do, so it's not clear that having less people in this specific way is a net good- for example countries like Japan completely collapsing in on themselves and going extinct. I think what you meant by smaller population was just have the same exact society but thinned out, but that's not what this next chapter of degrowth looks like. The boomers who insist on their full pensions at 60 are pretty much killing the youngest generation and leaving them with nothing, and to a certain extent everyone is being rational actors- there's no reasonable way out of the problem.
Predictions made in the 60s suggested that the planet couldn't support more than about a billion people, that continued population growth would lead to worldwide famines, and that extremely harsh policies of population control were essential to avoid the worst of mass death. The predictions were not "well, there is some point where this becomes a problem." The predictions were "mass starvation on the order of many hundreds of millions just around the corner."
They don't make a decision. They get influenced by media, then they internalize the reasons provided, then they create a belief + memory that they independently arrived at the conclusion logically, from their deeply-held principles.
The next 50 years will cause all industrial countries to face an irregular demographic profile, weighted toward the elderly. The median age in China is almost 41, while the US is reaching 39. In the US, the elderly (65+) will be almost 1 in 4 of the population ~2050. In contrast, boomers were 37% of the US population at their height (elderly were ~9.5%).
There is no underpopulation hysteria.
However, the math around demographics is settled.
> Robotics and AI will transform elder care as well as the workforce.
Or not. Incentives are confronting it.
It is very likely that one day productive members of society just decide that it is not very advantageous for them to provide for more numerous old people, and that it is them, who holds the power and have ability to decide what to do. So f.ck democracy, f.ck elders, let them enjoy the world they have created. Sociopolitical environment probably will have way grater affect on an elder care than AI and Robotics.
> "Anything we can do, we can afford".
Exactly. And the elders can do nothing. I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
> It is very likely that one day productive members of society just decide that it is not very advantageous for them to provide for more numerous old people
It is unlikely because productive people tend also to have some amount of foresight. Enough to know that they will also be old one day.
> I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
> productive people tend also to have some amount of foresight
Guess what they will see with that foresight when there are several times more old people who take away most of their earned through sweat and blood resources?
What, what will they see? "That's going to be me one day", or "we need to reorganize this so that I die in poverty"?
But take away sounds unfair, and if you're talking about fairness, then fair enough. I can't argue with fairness, until you reveal what the idea is in detail.
Oh, but I'm not thinking this through: there are of course fewer young people, and if they started reproducing a lot then they'd get to neglect the elders now and be looked after when they're older. Perhaps that's the plan. I guess that explains "the world they have created" too: they didn't create enough young people, you mean.
You mean, young people hold the power? Or young people will decide that they hold the power? Well whoever holds the power, I hope they agree that we all have rights.
> f.ck elders
Specifically what form of f.cking? Do you just mean "don't subsidise their care through tax?"
> let them enjoy the world they have created
You mean the world with lots of elders? They created this how, by deliberately being born?
> the elders can do nothing. I mean they can use their amount and vote, but it will only intensify the process
Their "amount", their money? Or their population size, relevant to voting, I guess that's what you mean. Both sound quite influential unless you want to make them non-people for being old. Now admittedly old people are ugly and smelly and boringly slow, but that last shortcoming can be mitigated by exoskeletons and hard drugs, and then they're going to hunt you down and scrag you, that's my prediction. It's as good as any other prediction floating around in this subject area.
Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet, or because they can't afford the time and resources to adequately raise them.
I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.
I'm a millennial and I really really like this planet. It's my favorite one. My kids are going to like it here too someday, I hope.
My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.
gen x here, and my observation is that millenials tend to let there back brain say whatever the 'expected' response is,as having had it barked at them from birth makes it effortless, and then going back to bieng cagey,mildly subversive, and somewhat ferral in there actual lives.
point of order : there is NO trade off in getting what you want.
As a general rule they won't talk about overpopulation being a problem because they know that the population will likely peak within their children's lifetimes.
They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.
yes, this is the thing I'm not quite getting from the "malthus was proven wrong" argument. Yes, technology increased food production, but that doesn't mean there isn't a carrying capacity to the earth. We have overfished. Fisheries are in decline all over. I guess you could say "no problem, we'll have lab created or grown fish and it will be fine" ok, maybe. But it's not going to be the same and the oceans won't be the same.
What I don't get from all of the demographic collapse hand-wringing: Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic? Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic? Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.
One commonly perceived problem is the increase not just in the fraction of the population that is retired, but how long they will remain retired if provided with adequate care, or (more bluntly) how long it takes them to die compared to previous generations. Here in Germany the social system was established when most people died within two-three years of retirement age. Today they can expect to live for more than fifteen years, thanks in part to more expensive health care (cardiac arrest used to be effectively lethal, if not immediately then through subsequent arrests, now it's generally survivable with expensive care). The current retirees are entitled to this, having paid into the system, but current workers can look upon their own increasing contributions and the overall maths and feel uneasy that though paying more they may receive less.
The retirement age is now slowly being raised, and given time the system may level, but in the meantime "issues" will indeed present.
Raising the retirement age is one thing, but finding work for those retirees is another. Ageism is rampant (and especially in tech). Maybe that becomes less of an issue when more of the population is older, but I don't think we're there yet.
The issues might go away sooner than that, because I imagine - naively? - that a society full of old people would put lots of effort into reducing the problems of being old.
Having declined, the population might increase again, and decline again, but with fewer issues the more practice we have. Stability sounds unlikely.
> Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.
I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?
Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.
The problems you are expecting from demographic free fall aren't going to happen for generations, and at any point during that time people could decide to start having more babies.
I'm not sure it's that easy. There are a lot of people who aren't able to work as they get older for medical reasons. And there's a lot of ageism that keeps older people out of the job market. Maybe that ageism lessens as the population ages, but we're not there yet.
That usually doesn't go super well [1]. Are you good with delaying your retirement 24 months for the greater good? If so, do you think that your fellow citizens would be?
Conversely, I think a lot of people would like to delay retirement and continue working, but they can't because they got let go after they were deemed to be "too old". It's a pretty common occurrence for people in their 60s. And then since your options aren't great you may as well be retired.
> > Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic?
Because we've built an economic system based on the idea that you must, at all costs, grow. Stable success is insufficient and will be seen as failure.
And then we spent many decades programming people to believe this is the only thing that can possible work.
Nothing natural about this at all, it is just the result of the cult of capitalism.
Have we, though? Governments rely on economic growth to fund their plans. That means economic activity has to grow, which means ... something ultimately rather unclear about what people around at the time consider wealth to be. It doesn't mean "everybody into the spawning pools and get busy".
> Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet
They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.
As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.
You also have to believe that population growth is fully exponential. But in practice it looks more like a logistic curve, and the factors that slow it down are a lot less dramatic than resource starvation or violence.
You do not have to believe population growth is fully exponential for it to be a valid conclusion. You just have to have human population grow faster than agricultural capacity, which it was.
Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.
Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.
As long as I keep hearing about the need for reducing meat consumption and supply chain slack (food waste), I'm inclined to think Malthus was right despite the limit turning out to be soil capacity rather than labour capacity.
And because of this, many will starve as a result of oil shocks from the disruption and chaos in the gulf region. We solved the trolley problem by throwing a magic lever that puts five descendants of the original person a ways down the tracks.
I mean insofar as the idea is about contemplating those mechanisms in the abstract, sure. But insofar as they were predictive or an attempt at a descriptive characterization of where populations would actually go, clearly it didn't hold. And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
> And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.
That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.
What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.
I agree he wasn't able to anticipate technological changes or the impact they would have, but the response to that isn't to simply insist his theory is literally still true just because he tried his best. I'm not suggesting he could or should have done that, but I don't have to have that expectation to nevertheless note, correctly, that it's not a model of the population dynamics we actually see.
I mean, by proven wrong that's what I mean. I'm not talking about the theoretical mathematics but the real world application of theory in which case, yes, Malthus was proven wrong.
I wouldn't say proven or disproven, as much as it became no longer applicable.
The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.
It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.
He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen. That's wrong enough to be called "wrong", no matter how reasonable his reasoning was at the time.
And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential. Agriculture wasn't linear. It wasn't even in his day. There was improvement in per-person output since, say, the 1400s, and more since, say, 2000 BC. There was a technological component even then.
So population wasn't exponential, agriculture wasn't linear, and what he said would happen didn't happen. How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
> He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen.
Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.
The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.
> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential
You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.
> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?
Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."
Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.
It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?
Doomsday scenarios specifically are a distinct mind trap for Christianity-affiliated cultures, which is very visible in US specifically from the media they produce. It's a very appealing narrative.
Us "numbers" people consistently fail to take basic human nature into account. Evidence of that, is everywhere; most obviously, in industrial/UX design.
Human nature is raw chaos. I have friends in the fashion industry, and that is an industry where human nature can cost (or make) a company millions of dollars. People that are good at understanding human nature, do well.
It doesn't respond well to number-crunching, though.
Also, as animal populations sometimes demonstrate, fertility can be a function of crowding. Pack a lot of critters together, and they tend to produce fewer new critters. Maybe the same thing happens to us.
It takes an uncommon breadth of perspective and depth of intellectual humility to contradict evidence it is your job to collect and interpret.
Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.
What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?
I think a lot of the difference is due to different groups/lead figures/experts focusing on different concerns, e.g. people like Paul Ehrlich and environmental groups focused on ecological sustainability vs people like Elon Musk and governments focused on economic sustainability
immigration slips the state controlled school system, which is less than ideal for keeping a cultural consensus. maybe better with more diversity, maybe not
It’s more that we constantly extrapolate what experts are doing to the real world without taking in account the actual details. A research team comes up with a model that has some specific biases, parameters, etc. it yields some results. The result is then taken completely out of context and applied to a messy dynamic real world situation we don’t even have reliable metrics for. Then it just becomes a fight over narratives
Fear mongering / doomsaying has been a popular human tendency for as long as we have been able to record our interactions.
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
It is sad because this is how science is meant to work, but propagandists will use it as evidence to dismiss it as some sort of liberal conspiracy. This is what the commenter you're replying to means by "doubt".
Science uses models to make falsifiable explanations and predictions. That these predictions are falsifiable and can be rejected, superseded or require fixing is how it's supposed to work, not an indictment against them.
> It is sad because this is how science is meant to work
No, it is not meant to work that way.
The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors, and if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
> The situation were formed by pretty predictable and easy to model factors
If what you claim were true, "pretty predictable and easy to model factors", it would have been modeled easily in a way that worked accurately to predict the future. Just the fact that this didn't happen should tell you it wasn't all that easy.
> if the science have failed even with that, how can we right now trust it with the things that are obviously way harder to predict?
What alternative to science and the scientific method do you propose?
> It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.
Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.
From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.
I've asked my students whether they still want to learn maths even if there will be a machine that will answer any question instantly and they will be homeless. They said yes.
(To my credit, I have warned them since more than a year ago that we will reach this point.)
But are any of them going to be able to do any significant amount of studying maths without being homeless?
Why not? Maths studying correlates with high intellect, high intellect correlates with competitiveness in the job market. So their chances of finding a job that would allow to have much of free time (for doing math) without being homeless are pretty good.
your students are crazy (neutral term); no one should learn maths if the condition is that they will be homeless and exposed to the elements. the will to subvert the hierarchy of needs is commendable
> what problems do these people reorient towards after this?
The same problem almost every person on earth is going to have to reorient to in the next decade, which is: how do we eat and stay housed when we have no real economic value?
This is weird. Long before this, those few benefiting from the whole thing should consider the number of hungry “every person on earth” is too high for bunkers and islands to be of any real protection.
To some extent this was discussed in the article, and in a way I think their goal is actually the same as it was: become the first human to understand something.
It's just that we lost one of the important ways to demonstrate understanding.
They will continue to prove theorems and make discoveries, except now they will have AI to help them so hopefully progress will be faster. At the same time, new challenges will open up, for example how do you verify what the AI is doing and how do you explain it.
Math isn't about collecting random theorems, progress in math is about gaining understanding of new systems, and the theorems are guideposts to aid in that understanding.
You can prove 1000 theorems and not really increase any understanding about a subject, but gain knowledge of 1000 random facts. For example, I can write down some complicated equation and ask you "does this have a solution in the integers"? And if you do a maze of very complex and tedious algebra to show that there is a solution, you would have proved a theorem, but you would not have done much to move math forward at all.
On the other hand, if you introduce some completely new technique, say you take my equation and turn that into an algebraic surface, and then you count some special curves that live on this surface using geometric ideas, and then you show that if the number of such curves is odd, there must be a solution in the integers, and in this specific case, it is odd, so there is a solution -- well, then you have really pushed math forward and people will celebrate your proof, even though no one really cares if the equation I wrote down has a solution in the integers.
For example, there is a long history of failed attempts to prove Fermat's last theorem driving algebra and number theory forward by introducing the concept of ideals, for example, and this concept ended up much more important than whether Fermat's theorem is true or false, which is not too much more than a piece of trivia.
Or for example, the recent proof of the Poincare conjecture relies on the machinery of the Ricci flow introduced by Richard Hamilton, who then applied it to solve a number of open problems, but Perelman was able to take it even more forward to solve Poincare. So Ricci flow was massively important machinery.
For this reason, we celebrate people like Gromov, who didn't really prove that many theorems but introduced amazing machinery -- for example, the h-principle, or Gromov Compactness -- these were ideas and math is about the ideas. The ideas are then applied, using laws of logic, to form theorems.
So mathematicians will need to mine these proofs to see if there are any new techniques - new machinery - being introduced, or if the AI just used the existing machinery more efficiently. Here too, we are just looking at AI as a form of search, which it is really good at, since there are so many thousands of papers and so many ideas, that there might be a connection between two areas that lead to a solution and the human mathematician, not knowing all known results, can't make that connection. In the future, we may wonder how anyone did math without AI, much like we would wonder how anyone can be a writer without access to a dictionary or reference work. Is the AI just searching through a catalogue of known ideas and connecting them or is the AI coming up with genuinely new stuff like Ricci flow or the h-principle?
What is interesting is seeing whether we can get AI to actually discover new machinery for us. That would be huge.
And then we need to find efficient ways to detect these ideas and describe them.
Really this is very exciting and opens up whole new workstreams for mathematicians.
They may need to raise their game and reorientate if they haven’t already to a greater understanding of programming to augment their mathematical ability.
This is all well outside my area of expertise, but my impression is that Michael Levin's work with bioelectricity is on the cusp of #6 Somatic limb regeneration.
Everyone interested in biology and intelligence should look up Michaels work, it is amazing because he's ignored a lot of assumptions that are held by the community and come up with new and interesting tests.
Also his work on algorithmic intelligence in cells and the mathematical foundation of intelligence will change many fields, including AI, if it can be empirically tested.
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
I'm on my last Samsung for this reason. Just way too much bloatware, need to agree to a new privacy policy once a week, and every time it updates I find a few new apps on my phone I didn't want.
Gonna hold out for the Motorola/Graphene phone though. One of the models is supposed to be a flagship foldable.
imo just get a pixel. unlockable bootloader and almost guaranteed support from pretty much every major privacy-related android fork. and many of them are building support for the titan chip if they dont have it already
I also have a Samsung phone besides a Pixel with GrapheneOS and I just ripped out Gemini, most of Bixby, etc. using UAD-ng. It's very clean now, but I still have all the customizability of OneUI, Good Lock, etc.
Unless you really have a large ethical problem with paying for any google product, I'd just recommend to get one of the previous-gen pixel devices. They are a lot cheaper than the Motorola smartphone coming out.
I despise vague and quasi-anonymous attacks like this. "Trust me, online person, I, a random netizen, have made a moral judgment and you should have complete faith in it."
Google summarizes the controversy thus, from Wikipedia:
"John Derbyshire is an American journalist and political commentator. He was one of the last paleoconservatives at the National Review, until he was fired in 2012 for writing an article for Taki's Magazine that was widely described as racist. Since 2012 he has written for white nationalist website VDARE. Wikipedia
Is it not obvious? Replace “fairly despicable” with “white nationalist” instead of whatever anyone might imagine could make a mathematician despicable?
It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
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