Overpopulation

[Callum Todd]

The overpopulation debate has occasionally briefly arisen on here in other threads but not to my knowledge been discussed more thoroughly. Those interested might enjoy this long article on BBC Future.

[Gavin Chipper]

Yeah, that is long. I would say that there are too many humans, and especially if you don't purely look at it from a human perspective. Our continued encroachment is not great for other life on this planet. But also if you're continually pushing the boundaries of how many people the planet can sustain, then you have a big problem if there's some sort of disaster that reduces the habitable space on the planet. Something like climate change maybe.

But if you start enforcing laws like China to reduce numbers, that's not great either. From the article:

One factor with a well-documented role in slowing down this rate of growth is the education of women, which has the side-effect of increasing the average age at which they give birth. "Over time, women get access to education, they have positions outside the family, jobs, all of those that compete with childbearing," says Ezeh.

However, Ezeh is keen to emphasise the merits of education independent from their impact on population size – it's one of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. This gets to the heart of one modern view on population engineering – policies should be implemented for the benefit of society, and if they happen to lead to beneficial demographic changes, that's just a bonus.

Also in this post I linked to this where statisitican Hans Rosling reckons we've already reached peak child. So continued population growth might end of its own accord in any case.

[Marc Meakin]

Yeah, that is long. I would say that there are too many humans, and especially if you don't purely look at it from a human perspective. Our continued encroachment is not great for other life on this planet. But also if you're continually pushing the boundaries of how many people the planet can sustain, then you have a big problem if there's some sort of disaster that reduces the habitable space on the planet. Something like climate change maybe.

But if you start enforcing laws like China to reduce numbers, that's not great either. From the article:

One factor with a well-documented role in slowing down this rate of growth is the education of women, which has the side-effect of increasing the average age at which they give birth. "Over time, women get access to education, they have positions outside the family, jobs, all of those that compete with childbearing," says Ezeh.

However, Ezeh is keen to emphasise the merits of education independent from their impact on population size – it's one of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals. This gets to the heart of one modern view on population engineering – policies should be implemented for the benefit of society, and if they happen to lead to beneficial demographic changes, that's just a bonus.

Also in this post I linked to this where statisitican Hans Rosling reckons we've already reached peak child. So continued population growth might end of its own accord in any case.

Now turning everyone veggie may be an ask too far but you can tax the hell out of anyone having more than one child.
Or take more draconian measures like outlawing the Catholic Church

[L'oisleatch McGraw]

and especially if you don't purely look at it from a human perspective.

Oh good God, not again! #tedium.

"Let's look at this from the cow's perspective;
Now let us consider the aardvark's stance;
Mustn't neglect the considered opinion of the noble steed;
Or that of the humble barnacle;
It would be rude to eschew the view of the tiny acorn, or indeed that of the mighty oak..."

Gevin, do you know is there any Ent in your ancestry?

[Gavin Chipper]

and especially if you don't purely look at it from a human perspective.

Oh good God, not again! #tedium.

It's pretty much an unavoidable part of the discussion when we're talking about humans taking over all of the living space on the planet.

"Let's look at this from the cow's perspective;
Now let us consider the aardvark's stance;
Mustn't neglect the considered opinion of the noble steed;
Or that of the humble barnacle;
It would be rude to eschew the view of the tiny acorn, or indeed that of the mighty oak..."

Gevin, do you know is there any Ent in your ancestry?

Is there any Troll in your ancestry?

[Marc Meakin]

As massive as the population is, shoulder to shoulder everyone can fit into Los Angeles

[Peter Mabey]

As massive as the population is, shoulder to shoulder everyone can fit into Los Angeles

... but can they stand on Zanzibar?

[Adam Gillard]

and especially if you don't purely look at it from a human perspective.

Oh good God, not again! #tedium.

It's pretty much an unavoidable part of the discussion when we're talking about humans taking over all of the living space on the planet.

"Let's look at this from the cow's perspective;
Now let us consider the aardvark's stance;
Mustn't neglect the considered opinion of the noble steed;
Or that of the humble barnacle;
It would be rude to eschew the view of the tiny acorn, or indeed that of the mighty oak..."

Gevin, do you know is there any Ent in your ancestry?

Is there any Troll in your ancestry?

He walked into that one, but well played. However, ANCESTRY = SCARY ENT. Coincidence? Likely.

[L'oisleatch McGraw]

Is there any Troll in your ancestry?

I prefer feisty Gevin to tedious Gevin!
Great comeback!

[Marc Meakin]

Is there any Troll in your ancestry?

I prefer feisty Gevin to tedious Gevin!
Great comeback!

Technically, an incorrect response as there literally isn't any trolls in YOUR ANCESTRY.
though I can see ARSE does that count

[Josh Hurst]

This topic fascinates me. Strap yourselves in!

As I see it, demographics and over/underpopulation can be boiled down to something like "What is the optimal number of humans required for all humans to be able to have a net-positive existence, both now and into the future?". Basically, how does Project Humanity (or even better, Project Sentience) flourish, despite itself?

If we are to broadly summarise the aim of Project Humanity, I’d say something like “create the best time possible, for as long as possible, for as many sentient beings as possible (i.e., “maximise utility”), whilst also not causing avoidable suffering”, would suffice. So how the hell do we do that?!

One thing we should be clear of at the outset is that, almost by definition, there is no “value” without sentience. In the absence of sentience, there is no such thing as “good” or “bad”, it is just physical processes begetting chemical processes that MAY beget biological processes in the form of plants or other non-sentient organisms (e.g. bivalves). In this situation, without any agent of experience it is just physics giving rise to a bunch of “inconsequential stuff”. A “mighty oak” in and of itself has no value. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so no beholder, no beauty! Therefore, above everything else, when we think about overpopulation we have to look at it through the lens of how it relates to preserving and elevating sentience. The importance of biology here is that, as far as we can tell, it is both the substrate and fuel for sentience. So, luckily, any efforts that promote the preservation of non-sentient biology are giving us a good chance of preserving and elevating sentient biology.

Back to the matter at hand! As the article touches on, the pure human numbers game is mainly an issue in terms of how we manage/produce/distribute/consume whatever resources are needed for survival and flourishing. That being said, we can’t just ignore the pure human-numbers side of the equation, so I’ll touch briefly on that.

When we address the numbers issue, we naturally steer clear of any “solution” that resembles anything the least bit genocidal – that should be a no-brainer. What is on the table when it comes to numbers, however, is helping/promoting the work done by organizations such as Population Services International. Although these types of efforts can produce a similar outcome to genocidal efforts (or other bad things such as wars or natural disasters) in terms of affecting overall human numbers, the means of getting there are consistent with our broad goal outlined above and not opposed to it, as genocide would be. In this regard, the process and journey trumps the outcome and this seems to be something that people easily forget when talking about billions of unidentifiable potential victims (e.g., regarding journey to goal, if my goal is to be the best footballer in the land, the method should be to train my ass off with proven methods, not to irreparably maim everyone who’s a better footballer than me).

So, let’s move to resources! First and foremost, clean air, fresh water and abundant nutritious food are the ultimate pre-requisites for determining whether, as a baseline, we are overpopulated or not. If we screw these up, everything is risked and nothing else matters. Housing/space etc comes after that. What good is a spacious dwelling if you’ve nothing to eat, drink or can’t breathe clean air…? While we obviously need to be working on all aspects of human well-being simultaneously, we need to really nail the futureproofing of our air/water/food supplies first in order to position ourselves for what is to come…

Therefore, we need to know what are the biggest threats to the sustainability of these systems: What practices use too much water? What practices use too much land? What practices affect our air quality? What practices jeopardise our health in the short term (diabetes, stroke risk, cancer risk, etc.) and long term (antibiotic resistance and pandemic risk)? How can we modify these practices to be better, and to support humans/sentience in a way that is consistent with our broad goal? I’ll touch on it, but I can’t be exhaustive, at some point we each need to figure it out ourselves.

One thing that has emerged quite clearly is that we are overpopulated in terms of what we consume and what we have to do in order to produce it. We are not just talking about keeping 8 billion humans fed and watered, we are talking 8 billion humans plus the continual production of ~ 80 billion land animals and 1-3 trillion marine animals per annum to support those 8 billion. In fact, if we are overpopulated with Humans, it is the Europeans, Americans and Australians that are the worst offenders, not the places we think of as being the most populated or the most rampant reproducers!

Regardless, having to support this many animals in order to satisfy us places huge unnecessary strain on our land (in particular our soils, which should pretty much be viewed as a non-renewable resource), the quality of our water (also think about eutrophication here), and obviously the balance between what gases the land/ocean can absorb vs what is being put out. The result is the initiation of positive feedback loops which are not conducive to us achieving the overall goal of Project Humanity, as outlined above. If we can change this broken food system slowly through consumer demand then many of the issues relating to human overpopulation would go away, or at the very least be less severe. Of course, I’m well aware that I’m trivialising the matter somewhat and would never expect a seismic shift in this space. I’m also being careful to not frame this as an animal suffering/animal rights issue, which is important and related, but essentially a separate discussion.

So, where do we ultimately see Project Humanity heading, or where do we want it to head? We need to plan this journey. As I see it, barring any apocalyptic event that is completely out of our control, if we manage things well from here then the maximum natural conclusion of humanity is to be engulfed by a rather big ball of flames that we call The Sun in about 7 or 8 billion years. Armed with this knowledge, what path do we choose to take to avoid this from happening (presumably we don’t want to set our descendants up for this happening to them)? There are two extreme end-member paths and a bunch of possible paths in-between…

Firstly, there is the extremely pessimistic and ambition-lacking end-member, which I would term the “managed foreclose of humanity”. In philosophical circles (authors like David Benatar), proponents of this path call it the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” (VHEM).

The VHEM essentially asserts that there is a vast asymmetry between suffering and pleasure, and that existence is biased towards suffering, and we should therefore cease human reproduction and fizzle out to nothing (NOT to be confused with suicide/euthanasia etc). If this philosophy were taken up en masse it would be a bizarre situation where we didn't have to plan for the future at all. Our goals would be flipped on their heads! Personally, and this is where I am being emotionally driven and not necessarily logical in my thinking, every fibre of my being wants to not accept this philosophy. It stinks. It's the least ambitious thing that we as a species can be aiming for, to foreclose humanity, to potentially cause value as we know it to cease. As far as we can tell, sentient life on Earth is the only observable thing on a cosmic scale that matters. VHEM aims to at least put paid to the largest fraction of possible value that exists, which leads me to the other end member scenario (where I'm sure I'll lose some if not all of you if I haven't already)…

Philosophers like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill are long-termists whose views essentially lead us to pursuing some Star Trek-esque future (i.e., leave Earth and spread out, colonize other places and utilize their resources, do this before the Sun makes Earth entirely uninhabitable). This is a common conclusion of the “Effective Altruism” (EA) movement, which Ord and MacAskill are big players in. Typically, EA-types usually end up promoting provably effective Global Health and Poverty Reduction interventions (see “GiveWell” for a list of causes you can support), as well as having a high % of proponents who are vegan, and who think about ways to prevent the foreclosure of humanity from any number of “Existential Risks”.

Regarding Existential Risks, this might be a good place to drop in the potential for animal agriculture to create a pandemic with the correct mix of; delayed symptoms, transmissibility and lethality such that it REALLY threatens the long term survival/potential of humanity. Factory farms account for >99% and >95% of all meat consumed in USA and UK respectively. They are a ticking time bomb and we have gotten lucky so far that everything that’s emerged from the mismanagement of our relationship with animals has not had this lethal combo. And how does this relate to overpopulation (aside from the land-use issue of growing crops to feed animals instead of eating them directly ourselves)? Well, more people demanding meat to be produced cheaply means more and more animals existing in these conditions, and more chance for a bad pathogen to develop and cross-over into the human population.

Back to our possible paths - what about the ones between the ultra-pessimistic and the ultra-optimistic? Personally, I think they lack conviction and would equate to just bumbling along and seeing what happens. I can’t be sure whether our current state means we are overpopulated in relation to these possible trajectories, but I imagine we are given how we currently produce, manage and consume the basic resources needed for survival.

So, back to the question - are we overpopulated? Well, it really depends where we see ourselves heading. If we aim for the extreme pessimism of the VHEM and flip our goals on their heads, it really doesn’t matter and we can do as we please safe in the knowledge that we are foreclosing humanity and all potential future suffering (albeit at the expense of anything good)…

If, on the other hand, we want to manage ourselves well enough (barring apocalypse) such that we would otherwise be engulfed by the sun, then we can get to the point where we are knowledgeable and capable enough to Star Trek across the Universe, and potentially maximise value and “what matters” for untold number of human generations. If this is the path we aim to tread (and yes, I do think we should be aiming to set our descendants up for this), then I do fear that we are currently overpopulated. We may currently be causing damage that ends up being so irreparable that we can never realise our ambitions or potential. It’s like having all these hopes and dreams for your kids and then seeing them ruin themselves with drugs such that they can never become what they might’ve been. Diminished potential is a crying shame. No parent would want this for their child so why would we be indifferent to it on a much grander scale? We need to set ourselves up for success for when we may be capable of Star Trekking, because right now this is just science fiction and is a million miles away from our current challenges, both domestically and internationally.

The good news is, if we want to orient towards the optimistic trajectory, there are concrete things we can do personally that nudge us in that direction (with the focus on importance, tractability and neglectedness):
- Support organizations like PSI
- Support effective climate change charities
- Support Animal Welfare causes
- Don’t fuel demand for something that, in all likelihood, is expediting the foreclosure of humanity (i.e. animal agriculture/factory farming).

Happy to chat directly about any of the above (with the exception of persistently dishonest actors), but I probably won't be interested in a drawn out debate on here.

Cheers

[Callum Todd]

Beautiful stuff Josh. I strapped myself in and thoroughly enjoyed the ride!

Couple of tangents on your points:

- I love the stuff about value and beauty being in the eye of the beholder. This is part of what I was trying to express in another thread recently but gave up and abandoned my post as I couldn't articulate it. There's a lot to think about in terms of the role of beauty in sentient experience.

- If anyone is put off by the seemingly extreme natures of 'VHEM' and 'Star Trekism' then I don't think what we're faced with is a binary choice between those two plans; there are intermediate strategies that are less extreme, as you alluded to. Personally I think we should work towards increased quality of experience for sentient beings by first focusing on what we are doing now that is harming sentient beings by ow, or damaging the environment in which they must live (now or in the [near] future). That's why climate action is so important. Plus that other thing that you touched on that also relates to climate change, but I've already mentioned that a few other threads here so I'll shut up about it on this one.

- Support effective climate change charities

Nominate Cool Earth for this one. They're great.

[Gavin Chipper]

Some interesting stuff in this thread.

One thing we should be clear of at the outset is that, almost by definition, there is no “value” without sentience. In the absence of sentience, there is no such thing as “good” or “bad”, it is just physical processes begetting chemical processes that MAY beget biological processes in the form of plants or other non-sentient organisms (e.g. bivalves). In this situation, without any agent of experience it is just physics giving rise to a bunch of “inconsequential stuff”. A “mighty oak” in and of itself has no value. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so no beholder, no beauty! Therefore, above everything else, when we think about overpopulation we have to look at it through the lens of how it relates to preserving and elevating sentience. The importance of biology here is that, as far as we can tell, it is both the substrate and fuel for sentience. So, luckily, any efforts that promote the preservation of non-sentient biology are giving us a good chance of preserving and elevating sentient biology.

As Callum alluded to, this was touched on in the animal abuse thread. We were discussing species extinction (white rhinos) and whether it mattered beyond our own sentimental attachment to the species. According to the above logic it would not (as long as it doesn't have knock-on effects and wreck the general ecosystem ). I'll quote from myself in that thread:

I think it's the more philosophical reasons that make people more inclined to save an animal from an endangered species, especially if the species is endangered because of human actions. It's all related to the view that we shouldn't be "messing with nature", and it looks really bad if we've made a species go extinct.

You could argue from a suffering/pleasure perspective, the best thing to do is to put all animals into futuristic zoos where their needs are all catered for (futuristic because I'm unclear exactly how all animals fare in current zoos), and have no wild animals, but I think most people would view this as an abomination against all that is good.

And of course, you could go further and just say you should wire up everyone's brains into some pleasure system and we never have to worry about anything again.

So these are all reasons why perhaps taking a wider philosophical approach rather than a pure utilitarian or indeed hedonistic one might have some merit.

If value is simply what sentient beings value, then arguably just wiring up our brains as above would be the way to go. Imagine if in the future we were exploring space and found a planet that once had biological life but now only has a giant computer purely simulating pleasure sensations over a massive scale. Nothing more will be achieved by the life on this planet, other than maximising "utility". Would we think that was the way forward or completely degenerate? Without appealing to some higher aesthetic ideal rather than our mere pleasures, what argument is there against it?

The “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” (VHEM) also seems degenerate and lacking ambition, but in a way they are opposite ends of the spectrum. In any case, I'm not convinced that existence is biased towards suffering over pleasure and I'm not inclined to think that VHEM is the way forward.

[Gavin Chipper]

So, back to the question - are we overpopulated? Well, it really depends where we see ourselves heading. If we aim for the extreme pessimism of the VHEM and flip our goals on their heads, it really doesn’t matter and we can do as we please safe in the knowledge that we are foreclosing humanity and all potential future suffering (albeit at the expense of anything good)…

Presumably in the VHEM case, suffering still matters, and we'd want to end humanity by not reproducing but still keeping already-existing people in a pleasurable existence until they die. So if we are over-populated, this could lead to disasters down the line that could cause a lot of suffering.

[Josh Hurst]

So, back to the question - are we overpopulated? Well, it really depends where we see ourselves heading. If we aim for the extreme pessimism of the VHEM and flip our goals on their heads, it really doesn’t matter and we can do as we please safe in the knowledge that we are foreclosing humanity and all potential future suffering (albeit at the expense of anything good)…

Presumably in the VHEM case, suffering still matters, and we'd want to end humanity by not reproducing but still keeping already-existing people in a pleasurable existence until they die. So if we are over-populated, this could lead to disasters down the line that could cause a lot of suffering.

Yes. I did mischaracterize their position somewhat there.

[Josh Hurst]

I think it's the more philosophical reasons that make people more inclined to save an animal from an endangered species, especially if the species is endangered because of human actions. It's all related to the view that we shouldn't be "messing with nature", and it looks really bad if we've made a species go extinct.

You could argue from a suffering/pleasure perspective, the best thing to do is to put all animals into futuristic zoos where their needs are all catered for (futuristic because I'm unclear exactly how all animals fare in current zoos), and have no wild animals, but I think most people would view this as an abomination against all that is good.

And of course, you could go further and just say you should wire up everyone's brains into some pleasure system and we never have to worry about anything again.

So these are all reasons why perhaps taking a wider philosophical approach rather than a pure utilitarian or indeed hedonistic one might have some merit.

If value is simply what sentient beings value, then arguably just wiring up our brains as above would be the way to go. Imagine if in the future we were exploring space and found a planet that once had biological life but now only has a giant computer purely simulating pleasure sensations over a massive scale. Nothing more will be achieved by the life on this planet, other than maximising "utility". Would we think that was the way forward or completely degenerate? Without appealing to some higher aesthetic ideal rather than our mere pleasures, what argument is there against it?

The “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” (VHEM) also seems degenerate and lacking ambition, but in a way they are opposite ends of the spectrum. In any case, I'm not convinced that existence is biased towards suffering over pleasure and I'm not inclined to think that VHEM is the way forward.

Regardless of what "value" actually is (whether it is what sentient beings value or something akin to that), it cannot exist without sentience, that was my main point (the point about appreciating aesthetics may have been taken out of context). I'm close to 100% in my conviction here, unless of course the value of the absence of all suffering trumps everything else, in which case a state of zero sentience is the most valuable state achievable... but that is an insanely bizarre conclusion and not one for which I would ever advocate.

Without sentience, inconsequential stuff just happens due to physics running it's course. Cosmically, if there are regions of the Universe that we can never interact with due to the laws of physics, regardless of the time span, they are morally irrelevant to us as our physical spheres will never cross (even if the likelihood is that there are sentient beings there too!). As far as we have been able to observe, we are everything that matters, and with this in mind our aim should be to preserve and elevate this only tangible concrete example of value that we have.

I am on the fence about whether, should we get there technologically, we should be wiring ourselves up for a non-stop pleasure simulation. My intuitions say no, but I don't have a good argument. I guess in order to get there we would still need to ensure we don't foreclose humanity, which brings us back to what we are doing in the here and now and whether it's sustainable with our long term goals, whatever they are or end up being.

Regarding your example of how we react to stumbling upon a planet on which biological sentience has been wiped out in favour of a pleasure simulating machine (if that is what you were getting at, wasn't 100% clear on the situation you were painting), I would say this is degenerate for sure. Again, that's intuitions speaking mostly, and we are getting away from the current situation on Planet Earth, but interesting discussion nonetheless for the philosophically inclined.

And in case I wasn't clear earlier, I agree with your conclusion on VHEM.

In terms of recognising the pressures that population and resource consumption have on Earth, I again invite people to engage with some of the effective organizations we have already spoken about. One which I didn't mention which I am involved in is The Hunger Project. They have a pretty good model of training locals to take ownership of their own production, focusing on empowering women in communities where traditionally the role of women has been very much secondary to the males. There's a host of positive flow on effects, such as; families growing enough so that they actually have a surplus to sell, and they then don't feel the pressure to sell their teenage girls into a life of sexual servitude. The girls are then healthy, stay in school longer, receive a proper education and can realize their ambitions independent of any man they would've been sold to. Birth rates go down, slowly the demographics of the region change, thus breaking the cycle of poverty, dependence and unsustainable population growth. Programmes like this across the developing world are a key part in getting us to where we need to be and we can all play a part if we choose to.

[Gavin Chipper]

I am on the fence about whether, should we get there technologically, we should be wiring ourselves up for a non-stop pleasure simulation. My intuitions say no, but I don't have a good argument. I guess in order to get there we would still need to ensure we don't foreclose humanity, which brings us back to what we are doing in the here and now and whether it's sustainable with our long term goals, whatever they are or end up being.

Regarding your example of how we react to stumbling upon a planet on which biological sentience has been wiped out in favour of a pleasure simulating machine (if that is what you were getting at, wasn't 100% clear on the situation you were painting), I would say this is degenerate for sure. Again, that's intuitions speaking mostly, and we are getting away from the current situation on Planet Earth, but interesting discussion nonetheless for the philosophically inclined.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I mean, it could still be the biological individuals that have then been uploaded to the computer, rather than being systematically wiped out and replaced with completely different individuals. But then we get into the philosophy of personal identity. And of course none of this is anything to do with overpopulation really!