"The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."The jokes, they write themselves.
I think that's a bit unfair. It's possible to believe that an unceasing increase in global population has worrying implications without buying into the idea that the solution is forced abortion and sterilising the "undesirables".I can respect that someone might have specific concerns about a resource supply. But it seems like every time such concerns are brought up, a bunch of hardcore Malthusians are driven out of the woodwork, and they ignore the resource supply problem and say that overpopulation is the real issue. Then we're treated to another round of “we need a billion fewer people,” “famines are Mother Earth reasserting herself,” and “human beings are like cancer cells.”
I would propose to you that a human population (on Earth) of 10 trillion would be problematically high. I think any reasonable person would agree.Now see, I just don't think we're on the road to ten trillion people. Practically all demographic projections say that we've already passed an inflection point, that the world population is going to either steady-out or peak within the next 100 years. That changes the situation: Instead of having to ask what population we want to suport, we instead are challenged to support the few billions we will eventually end up with. And that's a challenge I think we can easily meet.
All we're doing when we talk about overpopulation is trying to fiddle with the dialsWhen “fiddling with the dials” means eugenics, forced abortion, and denial of disaster relief, I take offense.
The idea that the number of people will just magically level out in some way that doesn't hurt ... I mean, what?Population growth has slowed throughout the world, and in many countries the population is shrinking. And if you look at the countries with negative growth, there isn't exactly mass disruption and panic in the streets. People have just been having fewer children. This all meshes with the prediction that population will peak out.
The one-child policy is the population control policy of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It restricts urban couples to only one child, while allowing additional children in several cases, including twins, rural couples, ethnic minorities, and couples who are both only children themselves. In 2007, according to a spokesperson of the Committee on the One-Child Policy, approximately 35.9% of China's population was subject to a one-child restriction.posted by benito.strauss at 12:23 PM on January 22
As insightful as many of the responses are, however, none of the EDGE big thinkers mentions an even bigger problem, the failure of many – especially among big thinkers and policy makers - to accept that risk perception is not the purely intellectual objective ‘rational’ process we’d like it to be. We know from decades of research that risk perception – how we worry – is a mix of facts and feelings, reason and gut reaction, intellect and instinct. We know it, but many still refuse to accept it.posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:15 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
That’s something to worry about, because getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. Only with such acceptance can we then begin to apply our rich understanding of how that system actually operates to the task of “worrying better”. So here’s a worry to add to those raised by the EDGE thinkers. We need to worry about the intellectual arrogance that denies the truth of how cognition about risk really works.
Another theme throughout the collection is what Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson called “metaworry”: the question of whether we are psychologically and politically constituted to worry about what we most need to worry about.posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:16 AM on January 25
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posted by j03 at 3:26 AM on January 22 [9 favorites]