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Comment by totony | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too

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Your argument is "we don't want more old people because I disagree with them ideologically." Shoddy at best.

If you re-read the post, that's actually not his argument.

He's saying that the older someone is the more their ideology defines them, which is itself probably inaccurate. And he says that that "could be a problem."

Right, but that's different than saying he doesn't like old people because he disagrees with them.

He's arguing about ideological stagnation. That's bad regardless of just about what the ideology is and whether you agree with the particular.

To quote Max Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." That's as true of anything as it is of science.

That's not it. The problem is that individuals have cognitive biases. People rarely change their minds. As a society, this is offset by a slow, regular replacement of its members.

If you end that cycle of renewal, the rate at which our society reacts to change and adopts new ideas would significantly slow.

That's a problem regardless of how well the society aligns with my ideals.

People's brains change as they age. There are definite differences between the way older people and younger people think. This isn't a generalization about old people having bad politics, but rather a comment on the tendency of people's minds to be harder to change over time.

Personally, I think one of the biggest challenges to transitioning to a low-birthrate, ultra-long-lived society is that a constant influx of young blood seems to be a necessary engine for new ideas and progress. There's a combination of not knowing better[1] and not having as much to lose that makes young people more willing to take big risks and push for more egalitarian societies over time. Left to their own devices, accumulation of wealth and status tend to ossify people's belief systems and reduce their incentives to throw everything out and start over.

[1] by this I mean not having the same accumulated beliefs about what is best. Sometimes those beliefs turn out to be unfounded, and you discover that by challenging them.

I completely agree. There is no way to keep our population in check. After all, it is the natural life cycle. Order would be unbalanced.

Limited resources will always keep population in check. When population growth outstrips available resources, war (or some other catastrophic event that reduces population, eg. famine, drought, disease, etc.) is inevitable.

>Limited resources will always keep population in check.

Actually, the opposite is true to a degree. Limited resources increases the birth rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

That refers more to individual behavior. What I mean is that, simply, if the world runs out of food, people will die until the population reaches a level that can be supported by the available resources. I don't see how any other outcome is possible. This happens on a smaller scale in areas where food distribution is problematic.

The only way around this is advances in technology that improve food production/distribution, but if this were to occur, then population would no longer outstrip resources and a new balance would be reached.

Raising the standard of living does the trick quite well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

And the reasonable way of controlling the population is killing about 150000 people per day, many of them in quite unpleasant ways?

>>You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity.

Last time I checked space is pretty huge, we could move there.

And if you live long enough, you might not need a biological body to survive.

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