This is the most purblind, misguided editorial opinion I have read in weeks. It repeats an old saw often repeated by people who don't understand the Logistic function and its role is describing biological systems:
The Logistic function concisely describes the behavior of biological systems that don't have any control over their numbers, as humans most certainly do not.
At the left, the function's curve is nearly flat because there aren't enough living organisms to support a higher birth rate.
At the right, the functions's curve is nearly flat because mass starvation and death prevents a higher birth rate.
The Logistic function models a growing biological colony in a finite world, and it applies to any biological colony. For such a biological colony, eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death.
Does this model have any bearing on the human biological colony? Let me answer by saying as time passes, more and more accounts of mass death are met by less and less surprise or alarm among the world's population.
At Sandy Hook, a boy has a fight with his mother, so -- being a healthy young boy, possessed of normal instincts -- he kills her, then goes to a local school and kills as many people as he can possibly manage. The story makes national headlines for a few days, all those innocent children systematically killed by an amateur, acting on a whim. But that story evaporates, pushed out the public's consciousness by another story of mass death, and another.
By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"
The author of the linked editorial concludes his article by saying, "The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."
Both claims are likely, but with one important difference -- future populations will wonder what we were thinking, as we struggled to avoid considering the consequences of our own actions. As to "the environment will be what we make it", that is certainly true -- we will gradually tolerate more and more mass death, a process that has already begun.
At the next Sandy Hook mass killing, people will say, "Hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys. But this can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress."
Charles Lindbergh was arguably the most celebrated man of his time. From wikipedia:
"Within a year of his flight, a quarter of Americans (an estimated thirty million) personally saw Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis. Over the remainder of 1927 applications for pilot's licenses in the U.S. tripled, the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled, and U.S. Airline passengers grew between 1926 and 1929 by 3,000% from 5,782 to 173,405."
The Lindbergh kidnapping made headlines for years because of that celebrity status (and the sensationalism of the story and the trial), not because people back then were more sensitive to death.
As other people here have commented, the Lindburgh kidnapping happened 1932. What better argument can be made for that generation's forgetfulness about "mass death" (as you put it) than pointing out that WWII and its tens of millions of deaths happened after tens of millions died in WWI? If anything, we are much more vigilant now.
> By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"
There was more "mass death" in 1932 +/- 20 than 1993 +/- 20, in fact more than the world has ever seen and hopefully more than the world will ever see.
Also, all that needs to happen for death to balance birth is that mortality rates need to go up and birth rates need to go down, it doesn't mean that there needs to be some Malthusian die-off localized in space and time, nor does it need to involve people going crazy.
> it doesn't mean that there needs to be some Malthusian die-off localized in space and time ...
Yes, that's true, but that isn't an argument that it won't happen, only that it's needn't happen. Modern history is increasingly an account of population control by mass death.
> nor does it need to involve people going crazy.
Certainly not, and as time passes, more and more crazy behavior is rationalized as a creative adjustment to trying times. Sandy Hook. Columbine. Boys will be boys.
> I don't understand your argument that it's increasing when compared to WW1 and WW2.
That's not my argument, that's your argument, but it's perfectly valid as far as it goes.
Let me explain. When you perform a moving average, you can prove anything by choosing an unrealistically short averaging interval.
With respect to mass death, if the averaging interval is ten years, things seem to be getting better. If the interval is 100 years, things are much worse.
The same method is used by climate deniers -- a one-year averaging interval suggests that the climate is cooling. A ten-year interval shows that it's warming. They're both mathematically valid measures, but the future isn't a year long and it's not ten years long, so choosing short measurement intervals is intellectually dishonest.
I'm not saying that about you, only that the interval you chose isn't appropriate to the issue under discussion.
Pretty sure if the baby of a famous couple was kidnapped today, it would make headlines, and if there were ongoing elements it would be a recurring story for years. And random violent acts do often lead to reform. At the same time, evidence shows better status and education yields fewer births. You take your gloomy point too far.
> Pretty sure if the baby of a famous couple was kidnapped today, it would make headlines ...
The modern equivalent would be the kidnapping of a celebrity's child, by a stranger, for money. Such things happen every day now, but they don't become the focus of the world's attention. The Lindbergh kidnapping tells us something about the nature of the world before modern times.
> And random violent acts do often lead to reform.
Are you serious? Here is a list of school shootings from colonial times to the present:
The trend is obvious -- there's nothing resembling reform, and as time passes, the body counts keep going up. Why? The population has become too dense to meaningfully prevent instances of mass death by wacko. This problem can only get worse as population density increases.
> At the same time, evidence shows better status and education yields fewer births.
That's very true, there's no dispute about that. But because of natural selection, the low-birth-rate educated are replaced by the high-birth-rate uneducated, which changes nothing. Those who think that's too gloomy need only read the history of efforts to control bacterial resistance to antibiotics -- we know why this happens, and we have teams of scientists addressing the issue, but we don't seem to be able to do anything about it:
And remember, even though the cases number in the scores on this list, these are only the high-profile cases that saw news coverage for more than a few hours. Many more didn't make the list because the circumstances were't remarkable enough.
Well, no. That is a list of famous kidnappings, but I was asking for proof that children of celebrities are kidnapped on a regular basis. There's a difference.
You mention an event in 1932. Aren't you forgetting that several years later, millions of people were wiped out systematically and there were reports of it coming back and they were largely ignored. We have greater than ever communication of the world's problems and without the benefit of hindsight, it's impossible to tell if that's had any positive effect.
EDIT: it also sounds to me like you're conflating our media with our ability to self-reflect and learn as a society. That might not be the case
The child's parents were, a fact you seem to be ignoring in your analysis; I expect we'd see international headlines at the kidnapping of Michael Jackson's child or the kidnapping of the new son of the Duke of Cambridge.
So you honestly believe that if someone kidnapped the Duke of Cambridge's newborn son, it wouldn't be international news, because "it happens too often"?
I routinely get stories about single families in China who have had their kids kidnapped for organ theft, even if it's not all of them. I find it HIGHLY unlikely that an international celebrities child would be kidnapped without it being major news.
You're going to have to do better than bald assertion for me to be convinced of that.
Um, can you give any example of these "too common" events? Kidnapping is essentially nonexistent in the US today. And I'm really struggling to think of anybody as famous as Lindberg, but if somebody ever kidnapped for ransom the child of Angelina Jolie or Steve Jobs or Michael Jackson I think we'd have heard about it in the newspaper. Nobody would say "ho-hum, it's just another celebrity kidnapping story..."
I should have clarified, I meant kidnapping for money, like the Lindbergh situation. Taking a little kid and leaving a ransom note, hoping to get money from the parents. That almost never happens in the US today, in large part due to the Lindbergh kidnapping. The FBI mades that sort of kidnap an extremely high priority and got quite good at solving such cases, to the point that in the US - unlike many other countries - it is not in any way a sensible business opportunity.
(In Mexico, on the other hand, it is a major business opportunity.)
The vast majority of "missing kid" events you hear about are related to custody battles - the noncustodial parent runs off without permission of the court. There are also a few (though it's quite rare) events of the sort in that list - usually teenagers or adults abducted for sexual purposes.
> There are scores of kidnappings in this list, and it only covers ten years.
There are 26 kidnappings in that list, but nearly half weren't in the US - it includes events in Baghdad, Columbia, Spain, England, and various other places. The 15 events in the US in ten years establish that it happens at least 1.5 times a year in this country of 313 million people.
Meanwhile about 1,000 americans per year are struck by lightning and 100 of those are killed by it. So kidnapping even of all varieties is an exceedingly rare event that we are in all likelihood WAY too afraid of. (In the US, anyway)
Lindbergh was, though. Both before and after the kidnapping.
"In the coming days, Lindbergh became the most photographed, most filmed, and most famous living person on earth."
"On June 13, Lindbergh was greeted by over four million people at events honoring him in New York City."
"At the center stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists, emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary"
For anyone looking for this in my comment, I edited it out as it didn't add anything to the point I was making and I didn't want to come across as overly negative.
> The logistic model especially assumes that the carrying capacity is constant.
Yes, but the model easily accommodates scenarios in which more and more sustenance is squeezed out of the environment, which is the primary argument of the deniers. Finally, though, because big loaves of bread don't give birth to little rug-rat loaves of bread, the Logistic function predicts the same outcome -- mass birth balanced by mass death.
I'm not saying there's a solution to this problem -- there isn't -- only that people who deny that it's a problem are living in a fantasy.
I'm not saying there's a solution to this problem -- there isn't
It seems to me that you actually agree with the article's claim that the primary problem is social. You just don't agree with the article's claim that the problem can be solved; basically you don't think humans will be able to come to grips with the social changes that would be required to manage ourselves as a species responsibly. Is that a fair statement of your position?
> You just don't agree with the article's claim that the problem can be solved ...
That's correct. The article relies on a common logical error, to wit: catastrophe hasn't overtaken us yet, and that stands as evidence that it cannot ever happen, i.e. the past predicts the future.
It's one thing to accept that we can't solve population problems by pointing fingers at other people. But it's quite another to try to claim the problem doesn't exist at all.
> basically you don't think humans will be able to come to grips with the social changes that would be required to manage ourselves as a species responsibly.
It's a bit more complicated than that. In a mixed population of people who can grasp the nature of biological limits, and others who cannot, those who cannot eventually become the entire future population -- people congenitally indisposed to act intelligently. It's the inevitable outcome of natural selection.
That's an easy problem to state, but impossible to do anything about without abandoning all civilized standards of behavior. If we do nothing, mass death becomes the problem. If we try to "solve" the problem, fascist and eugenic political measures become the problem. That's not any kind of choice.
My point? This isn't a movie in which everything gets resolved in the third act. All our choices are bad ones, but the worst is to imagine the problem doesn't exist, as the author of the linked article tries to do.
In a mixed population of people who can grasp the nature of biological limits, and others who cannot, those who cannot eventually become the entire future population -- people congenitally indisposed to act intelligently. It's the inevitable outcome of natural selection.
Yes, I see you make this argument on your page on evolution that you linked to. The only possible flaw that I can see is that you say it is
impossible to do anything about without abandoning all civilized standards of behavior
I'm not saying I have a solution that doesn't require that; but I'm not sure that our only option is giving up on trying to find one. I.e., instead of "impossible" in the quote above I would put "extremely difficult". But I admit that's purely a matter of opinion on my part.
> I'm not sure that our only option is giving up on trying to find one.
No one is suggesting "giving up". In any case, it's not in the nature of science to give up on searching for solutions. But as things stand, there's no obvious solution.
> instead of "impossible" in the quote above I would put "extremely difficult".
My use of "impossible" was only with respect to measures that modify the behavior of individuals by force. That's impossible without abandoning civilized standards. I don't normally use the word "impossible" without good reason.
My use of "impossible" was only with respect to measures that modify the behavior of individuals by force. That's impossible without abandoning civilized standards.
Quote: "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012."
I love hearing from environmental deniers, who say there's no limit to how many people we can feed -- people who ignore the fact that this is already not true.
> The article actually says we produce enough to feed the whole world.
The issue is not whether we could feed the whole world, the issue is whether we do. If we don't, then the hypothesis that we could is small comfort to those who are starving.
> Massive death tolls from famines always come down to political stupidity.
Political stupidity is much harder to sustain with small populations, people who can vote with their feet.
Your basic view is that there can't be progress until noone on the whole world is hungry? And no amount of declining starvations over the past decades and centuries is worth anything at all?
[I apologize in advance for having to go "meta" on this one; given the rest of the discussion I don't think it can be helped.]
lutusp: Do you care whether the statements you make are true? Or do you just want to not seem wrong, no matter what arguments are required to accomplish that?
When you give a link supporting your views, do you read the link first and check that it supports the argument you're making? Because it seems like you're not doing that.
In this case, the link you gave says that using the "new estimate method", there were 1 billion hungry people in 1990-92 (out of a world population of 5.370 billion) and there were 870 million hungry in 2013 (out of a population of 7.095 billion). So world hunger didn't just decrease as a percentage of population (from 18% to 12.3%), it decreased as an ABSOLUTE NUMBER. As the population went up, the total NUMBER of starving people DECLINED.
Your link also says this:
> "The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day"
So as you said, a bit snottily, "We already can't feed our present numbers, or haven't you been paying attention?", the link you provide in "support" actually said we CAN feed our present numbers and also says we're getting ever-better at actually doing so.
In short, your link does not in any way support your argument. So the "environmental deniers" you refer to are probably correct; you are wrong. As this is starting to seem like a trend, you might want to re-evaluate your information sources; they are not serving you well.
Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots. If your sources give you the impression that everybody in some huge ideological grouping (say "environmental deniers", or even "climate deniers") IS a complete idiot, then they might not be showing you the whole picture. Try to seek out the MOST credible arguments against your position - and strengthen them if you can. Don't just harp on the relatively few stupid people making stupid, easily debunked arguments and assume that the opposite of what they believe must be true - "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". Give the other side some benefit of the doubt. Otherwise you can't learn anything.
Feynman said some of the necessary stuff better than I could:
> the link you provide in "support" actually said we CAN feed our present numbers
The hungry aren't fed by unrealized possibilities. All the numbers do is fluctuate, they don't ever indicate that we're feeding the hungry. It's not at all surprising that the numbers fluctuate, we're talking about reality, not a computer model. But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.
When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry, as you put it. There's only whether we did -- everything else is hand-waving.
> In short, your link does not in any way support your argument.
Of course it does. The number of people who are starving is very high. Some years it's higher, some years lower, but it's never "acceptable" and it always supports the claim I made about it -- we aren't feeding the hungry.
The presence of unused stockpiles of food means nothing -- there are any number of reasons why that situation exists, but the bottom line is that the hungry aren't fed. Do you really think some conscientious aid worker goes home after a hard day's work, satisfied that he had fed the hungry in principle?
> Here's a useful tip: most people are not complete idiots.
Think like a scientist. Use the null hypothesis as your guide. Let yourself be pleasantly surprised by what people know, but never assume that people know what they need to know to have any given conversation or deal with any given problem. The consequences of that mistake vary between foolish and dangerous.
Yes, very familiar with this article -- I use it in my anti-psychology campaign. For some reason, many psychologists think it identifies psychology as a science, when it clearly does the opposite.
> But one thing doesn't change -- the shocking number of people who are starving at any given time.
But that one thing DOES change! It improves! In what sense is the vast improvement since the 1990s not change?
> we aren't feeding the hungry.
We ARE. Hunger is becoming less prevalent, worldwide. Again, here's a gapminder chart (are you looking at these?). This one shows calories consumed per person, all countries, plotted against GDP, over time. Notice how at the start most of the mass of the chart is BELOW 2000 calories/day; at the end of it all but a few countries are ABOVE that line. Progress is occurring, even in very populous countries. Even in countries with a high rate of population growth. How do you explain that fact?
> When it comes to hunger, there's no point in arguing that that we can feed the hungry
If you meant to claim we don't feed the hungry, you should have said that. But you said can't. While giving a link to support it that said we can, and what's more, that showed that we were.
Yes, that's true, but it's a temporary adjustment, always followed by mass death. This is easily shown in the laboratory -- in the first phase of a multi-species model, one species wipes out all the others. Then the winners turn on themselves.
We are in that temporary zone for quite some time already, and all we need is 100~200 years more until we can get colonies on other planets.
If by some miracle human population was reduced to say 1bln it would make space colonies much less likely, and we'll slowly eat out our petri dish without a chance to enlarge it.
Depends on what you mean by "thrive." Many of them will "thrive" in conditions that it would be illegal to put a human into. I'm not sure if I call that "thriving."
Many humans "thrive" in conditions that are illegal to put humans in to.
I don't really see your point, since it doesn't even remotely talk about the relative rates of the two populations or compare what would happen with humans to what would happen without for any of the species.
It seems to be contentless objection to what I said, despite the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species, many of which seem to be getting by just fine for many of their members.
> humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species
Based on this definition the American colonies helped Africans 'thrive' on the American continent by bringing them over as slaves, and allowing them to reproduce.
I could agree with you in the case of wild animals that mooch off of humans (racoons, crows, rats, etc), but in the case of livestock, or animals raised for the sole purpose of being tested on in laboratory settings (and possibly killed immediately after), I don't think you can really spin that as a positive thing from the perspective of those species.
It would be like an alien species taking humans away to 'domesticate' them and raise them as livestock on another planet. And then hand-waving away concerns about all life on Earth going extinct because the "livestock humans" are 'thriving' because they are bred in large numbers in captivity (and even trying to make it sound like putting them in captivity for such a purpose was actually better for them then letting them live their own lives).
Quote: "There have been five past great mass extinctions during the history of Earth. There is an ever-growing consensus within the scientific community that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of this extinction."
>> ... the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species ...
> Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate.
Okay, now I'm definitely confused: Is English not your native language? Are you very young, perhaps in high school? You don't seem to be reading the claims that you are with such great confidence declaring to be wrong.
FWIW, the phrase "all of those species" in context pretty clearly referred to THIS list of species:
> raccoons, crows, cows, pigeons, rats, mice, dogs, house cats
Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.
The point of the article is we wouldn't be here today at all if we hadn't been able to manage our resources. The science demonstrates this, over and over: land re-use is the key to it. The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth, and have done so for 200,000 years.
But what does your superstition have to do with this? Malthusian theories super-posit that we will perish, but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.
> Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.
Science isn't a political movement. Science can produce very reliable results if conducted efficiently, but it cannot get people to listen. That's the divide between science and politics.
> The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth ...
Nonsense. It shows how biological colonies adopt increasingly clever ways to squeeze more sustenance out of the environment. All such efforts eventually collide with the real carrying capacity of the environment, a fact that we ignore at our peril.
> But what does your superstition have to do with this?
Biology is science, not superstition. The logistic function is science, not superstition. All these scientific results show the peril of ignoring the role of environment in survival.
> ... but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.
It does nothing of the kind. The archaeological record shows any number of examples of species being wiped out by changes in their environments. In one case, an environmental change wiped out 90% of all species on earth. Apparently those species weren't aware of your blithe dismissal of the role of environment in the equation of life.
> Remind me, with science: When were we humans last wiped out, again?
I bet you think there's no answer. But in fact, on at least one occasion in the past, human numbers dropped below 10,000 individuals, which means the fact that we still exist as a species can be attributed to chance, not destiny.
Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."
I emphasize this is an example that we can establish by studying the human genome from relatively recent times. Farther in the past, the genetic record is less easy to read, but it's very likely that the Toba near-extinction is only one of many similar events.
There a much longer time when one could have said that about any of large number of other species than there has been when one could have said it about humans.
And its an invalid argument to make for the future prospects of any of them.
I think that neither of the historical trend models are going to be realistic except by chance. Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns. Basically, I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.
Also, this misses a big part of what's important to me. The standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?
> Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns.
You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.
>he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?
For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.
(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)
> You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.
Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)
> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.
You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?
> I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.
The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.
We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs, or have you missed that point in your rush to cast away any faith in the human species' ability to manage its resources? Because: managing our resources is what makes the difference, entirely, between extinction and survival, and we've been doing precisely that for 200,000 years so far.
> We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs ...
Bend doesn't equal break. Obviously a species will adopt more and more ingenious measures to stave off the inevitable, but that doesn't change the inevitable, only its arrival date.
The basic equation collides a finite planet with an infinite capacity for growth. Ultimately the finite planet determines the outcome, not the infinite capacity for growth.
To be fair, we'd both agree that we're bending "natural laws" not physical laws. Right? I mean: we're not getting energy for free, we're just capturing more of it.
The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically. One interesting thing about news coverage is it covers NEWS - stuff that is new or that happens rarely. Once you've seen something happen a thousand times before, it stops being news. Auto accidents, being common, don't get national news coverage. High-profile kidnappings and large-bodycount school shootings, being much more rare, do.
The fact that news has this dynamic means you can't take the amount of news coverage as an indication of how serious or common a problem is. We DO do that due to a cognitive error called "availability bias", but if anything, the reverse strategy would be more sensible.
In short: if you see a threat in the newspapers, you should assume it's news because it happens so rarely that it isn't worth your worrying about anymore (if it ever was).
> The rate of both mass killings and individual killings is WAY down from what it's been historically.
You're making a common statistical error, one that climate change deniers use daily -- if you perform a moving average using a long averaging interval, the climate is warming up. If you perform a moving average using a short averaging interval, the climate is cooling off.
The second measurement is an error because it can only predict the future if the future is limited to a year or two in duration. But the long averaging interval is a more honest and reliable predictor of the future. That predictor shows a warming of the climate, and it also shows that eventually, population growth will collide with mass death.
In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago. So how big an interval do YOU think is appropriate to look at for the murder rate? Go back too far and you get into measurement problems. Merely counting incidents (as the wikipedia page does) is nonsense for several reasons (1) a vastly better news network is going to make more incidents easy to find today than in the past, (2) incidents that happened since the internet and in recent people's memories are going to be overrepresented, (3) population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining.
In the case of climate change, the trend for the last decade is flat/cooling - that's more than "a year or two". Which is not terribly consistent with the models - the models clearly have been running hotter than observations and are have been unreliable predictors.
> In the case of murder, the murder rate today is no higher than it was a century ago and much less than it was 30 years ago.
To make that claim, you need to define "rate". Does "rate" mean the absolute number of murders per day or year, or the number of murders per day or year divided by the population?
The absolute rate is obviously higher -- the burden must be is yours to offer evidence that it's unchanged since 1800. But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.
Also, when you perform a moving average, you can "prove" anything by choosing the right interval. But, because the future is expected to be long, so should our averaging interval. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
For example, climate change deniers use short averaging intervals to "prove" that the climate is actually cooling, where the same measure using a longer averaging interval shows this is false.
Oh, I see you do just that. Too bad -- choosing an inappropriate averaging interval is not science, it's politics.
> ... population growth means we expect more incidents even if the base rate were flat or declining.
Well ... now that you're arguing my points for me, I guess we're done.
"rate" means per capita per year. By "a century ago" I meant around 1913; 1800 would be TWO centuries ago. The murder rate in the US has been in the general ballpark of 5-10 per 100,000 annually since 1910. Currently we're near the low point of the last century. Um, here:
Quote: "Today's murder rate is essentially at a low point of the past century. The murder rate in 2011 was lower than it was in 1911. And the trend is downward. Whatever we've been doing over the last 20-30 years seems to be working, more or less. The murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1980: from 10.7 to 4.7."
> But the rate per population might be unchanged (not likely), but if so, that supports the idea that increased population is a factor, which circles back to my original point.
You now appear to be stark raving bonkers. No, silly, if the rate is unchanged it does NOT support your point. Yes, as there are more people, there are likely to be more murders as an absolute number. There are also likely to be more hugs, more kisses, more birthday parties, and more people making silly arguments over the internet. NONE of those constitute a population-limiting crisis.
That's by no means the only meaning of "rate". The meaning of a rate depends on the two values involved -- the dividend and divisor. The identity of both defines a specific use of the term "rate".
"Murders divided by years" is one example of a rate.
"Murders divided by (years times population)" is another.
And "(mb-ma) divided by ((yb-ya) times (pb-pa))" starts us toward a moving average.
Rate doesn't have only one meaning -- to accept your definition would severely constrain mathematics.
> No, silly, if the rate is unchanged it does NOT support your point.
Of course it does -- given a rapidly increasing population and the same rate, it means the absolute number of incidents has increased. That was my point.
> There are also likely to be more hugs, more kisses, more birthday parties, and more people making silly arguments over the internet. NONE of those constitute a population-limiting crisis.
But in truth, all of them do. It's a classic case of an increasing population held within a finite land mass -- eventually the system collapses.
If the population is increasing without constraint, it doesn't matter what those people are doing apart from increasing their numbers -- the fact that they're increasing their numbers eventually becomes the only issue worth addressing.
A "murder rate", being a fair bit smaller, is almost always expressed per 100,000 people per year.
> If the population is increasing without constraint
It isn't. Population growth rates have rapidly declined all over the world. The US population would already be shrinking were it not for immigration. Even Bangladesh and India are currently reproducing at right around replacement levels.
> It is the standard definition when talking about a CRIME rate.
That wasn't your claim, and it's false in any case. There's no standard definition of "rate" -- you need to define your terms, and "rate" means a measure of change, not any specific measure without additional information. In any case, the exchange below tells me that you really don't understand what "rate" means.
>> If the population is increasing without constraint
> It isn't. Population growth rates [emphasis added] have rapidly declined all over the world.
Honestly. I say population is increasing. You reply by saying that the "growth rate", i.e. the first derivative of population, has declined. Both are true. To sort this out, take Calculus. Until you understand the difference between a function and its first derivative, we won't be able to discuss this issue.
No. What you said was that population was increasing without constraint. It's that last bit I was responding to.
The fact that the rate of growth is declining does suggest the presence of one or more constraints, even if the overall growth rate hasn't quite reversed just yet. The primary form of the constraint appears to be that as childhood survival rates and living standards improve, families voluntarily choose to have fewer kids. This is happening all over the world, there's no reason to think it will stop any time soon, and it argues against your implication that "mass death" is the only likely way out.
(For what it's worth, I have taken calculus. And if you're the guy who wrote AppleWriter: Nice job! I liked that program. I used it in high school.)
> The fact that the rate of growth is declining does suggest the presence of one or more constraints ...
Yes, or more likely, it's a random fluctuation indicative of nothing in particular. The latter assumption, which may seem overly skeptical, is how a scientist is expected to look at an unexplained change in the rate, based on a precept called the null hypothesis -- a presumption that (in a manner of speaking) it's all random and meaningless.
> ... and it argues against your implication that "mass death" is the only likely way out.
Not really. Remember that nature efficiently picks out those with the highest birthrates and makes them the entire future population. My point is that population growth is naturally unstable, depending only on food sources and a willingness to push other species out of the way.
1.1% per annum may not seem like a very large rate of increase, but 63 years doesn't seem like a very long time to double the world's population either.
Exponential increases of all kinds are rather scary to model. They're scary enough when one looks at compound interest and how that naturally creates a chasm between rich and poor over time, but the "big show" for exponential increases is population, where much more is at stake.
> For what it's worth, I have taken calculus.
Okay, glad to hear it. Given that, I think you will appreciate what I thought when I heard you object that population couldn't be increasing because the rate of increase was decreasing.
> And if you're the guy who wrote AppleWriter: Nice job! I liked that program. I used it in high school.
>Yes, or more likely, it's a random fluctuation indicative of nothing in particular. The latter assumption, which may seem overly skeptical, is how a scientist is expected to look at an unexplained change in the rate, based on a precept called the null hypothesis
It's NOT UNEXPLAINED and it's NOT RANDOM.
Does your browser support Flash? If I point you at a chart composed using gapminder.org could you please please LOOK AT IT? (Or if you can't, could you let me know what the constraints are on what your browser can see, so I can find another way to get you the information?) The link will follow this paragraph. Press the "play" button below this chart to see an animated plot of fertility versus child mortality. Several specific countries are hilighted - you see a trail of their progress over time - but the ENTIRE MASS of countries follows much the same pattern - it moves down and to the left. Here's the link:
It truly boggles my mind that you could think even for a second that the slowdown in population growth is "likely a random fluctuation indicative of nothing in particular". It is a TREND. The phenomenon is quite consistent. Across the ENTIRE PLANET, countries are increasing their GDP, decreasing child mortality and decreasing the rate at which they have kids, with all those changes roughly in tandem. And it's not a random walk where one needs to cherry-pick any specific interval to see these trends - if you just look at the entirety of ALL the data we have available and plot it, you can see a consistent movement.
Please look at the animation. Play around with it - use the checkbox list on the right to highlight other specific countries. Get a sense of what the data is actually DOING before you claim it's a random fluctuation.
A random walk WOULD be susceptible to cherry-picking - the trend would only show up if you pick certain time ranges or certain sets of countries.
This is not that.
(Given current trends, the world population would not double again - it would stop growing short of that.)
>> You are the one that said things are worse compared to 1932.
> And they are -- much worse. More incidents in an absolute sense, and more incidents per capita
Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932. 1932 was near a local maximum in terms of violence rates in the US; currently we are near a local minimum. (The current homicide rate is less than half what it was in 1932.)
> Except that there are almost certainly fewer incidents per capita compared to 1932.
No, not if a reasonable moving average is performed. And per capita modifies the logic in a way that reduces the importance of population, when my point is the size of that population.
Here's a small interval graph that shows an increase per capita since 1960:
The above graph shows the risk of using too short a sampling interval. If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased.
> If you sample on the interval 1990 to the present, crime appears to have gone down. If you sample from 1960 or any longer intervals to the present, per capita crime has certainly increased.
How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate, and do so over a range wide enough to INCLUDE 1932. Can you do that?
If you do that, I think you will find that you are wrong about this - the homicide rate today is lower than it was in 1932. Because there was a huge peak around the 1930s PRIOR TO the relatively low point in the 1950s. I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average" since the underlying trend is pretty smooth, but if you did, say, a 5-year moving average it would STILL be lower today than in 1932.
> How about instead of SAMPLING, and without performing any sort of "moving average", you just SHOW the homicide rate ...
The answer is simple -- it serves no purpose. If the point is to establish historical trends, and in particular if it's desirable to create a future trend line, the first thing to do is avoid the classic mistake of examining the raw data. (This is true in climate studies also, for the same reasons.)
In this case, a moving average meant to confirm or refute the thesis that crime rates are higher now than in the past, is best conducted with a long interval. Such an interval shows that crime per capita is much, much higher now than it was in the past, along with population (which also fluctuates over time).
The 1930s were a historical anomaly -- the Great Depression (an increased level of social upheaval and desperation), and prohibition coming to an end (which meant that gangsters had to think of a new way to make a living), arriving at once, make it unrepresentative. Any statistician hoping to establish social trends would treat that period as an obstacle to producing a meaningful trend line.
> I don't see much point in applying "a reasonable moving average"
Yes, I got that. And I won't be likely to successfully explain to you why it's needed.
You started out somewhat promising, but then you use anecdotes to try to support your view. The big flaw with that is that your anecdotes are cherry picked to support your point, and are just as easily defeated with other anecdotes.
E.g. in Europe the story of Madeleine McCann, a girl that disappeared in 2007 is still regularly getting headlines, not just in the UK where she grew up, but elsewhere as well (I'm Norwegian, and regularly see her covered in the Norwegian press, for example).
When I wanted to look up the year she disappeared, autocomplete on google brought up her name by the time I got to "mad". A search for "madeleine" on google.co.uk brings "findmadeleine.com" in the first spot, and a picture of her and three headlines from the last two days related to her case, and a further 4 links on the first page.
Why? Because the parents have raised hell, and because of all kinds of intrigue (allegations of all kinds of things flying from her parents against the investigators; by some people involved in the investigation against the parents; and more).
Add to that fame, and the amount of attention the Lindbergh story got was "nothing special", especially given the circumstances:
In the Madeleine McCann case, there is no body, no real suspects, and there's been little news for the last 3-5 years or so.
In the Lindbergh case, after two months the baby was found, the subsequent investigation lasted for "only" two years, and then came the court case and trial. The whole thing was 4 years where there was a steady availability of actual new developments: The race to try to find the baby; finding the body; the hunt for suspects in what was now a gruesome baby murder rather than "just" a kidnapping; the court case, with a suspect that insisted on his innocence; the execution, with a suspect that still insisted on his innocence. Coupled with a famous couple as the distraight and grieving parents. It was an intense human interest story.
If anything, the Madeleine McCann case shows that it's possible to sustain media interest far longer than with the Lindbergh case, even for parents that were not celebrities, even today, as long as the human interest angle is there.
Syria is poor comparison: At some point when the number of people go up, our empathy dampens. That's nothing new - it's basic psychology: We can't deal with the numbers; we can't personalise it.
It's something e.g. aid organizations (like psychologists) have known for decades, when they parade some little malnourished girl in ads and ask us to adopt her, by name, rather than give us the raw numbers, that ought to be far more horrifying and get us to react far more strongly.
Showing that we are reacting even less to mass deaths would be big news, and requires rather more than some anecdotes.
What a myopic view. I think Joseph Stalin had the perfect response to your argument: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. When one dies, it is a tragedy. When a million die, it is a statistic."
That's not a perfect response to people's attitude toward population control by mass death, which is what I'm describing -- it's exactly the same argument that's offered in the linked article: "In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it." Indeed it will.
> What a myopic view.
It's myopia to imagine, as the linked article does, that we can force the earth to provide sustenance regardless of our numbers. That's a fantasy.
Actually, its a view supported by evidence, whereas your view is supported by .. superstition, scientifically described but nevertheless: still superstition.
You didn't post any evidence, but lots of theory, whereas there is plenty of evidence that the human species does indeed manage to survive .. in spite of ones best efforts.
please post enough evidence, which conclusively says we are not even scratching the surface of earth's resources and it is cool to increase population to 15 billion by mid 21st century and pollution is not due to humans and global warming is a sham created by Neo-hippies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
The Logistic function concisely describes the behavior of biological systems that don't have any control over their numbers, as humans most certainly do not.
At the left, the function's curve is nearly flat because there aren't enough living organisms to support a higher birth rate.
At the right, the functions's curve is nearly flat because mass starvation and death prevents a higher birth rate.
The Logistic function models a growing biological colony in a finite world, and it applies to any biological colony. For such a biological colony, eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death.
Does this model have any bearing on the human biological colony? Let me answer by saying as time passes, more and more accounts of mass death are met by less and less surprise or alarm among the world's population.
At Sandy Hook, a boy has a fight with his mother, so -- being a healthy young boy, possessed of normal instincts -- he kills her, then goes to a local school and kills as many people as he can possibly manage. The story makes national headlines for a few days, all those innocent children systematically killed by an amateur, acting on a whim. But that story evaporates, pushed out the public's consciousness by another story of mass death, and another.
By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"
The author of the linked editorial concludes his article by saying, "The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."
Both claims are likely, but with one important difference -- future populations will wonder what we were thinking, as we struggled to avoid considering the consequences of our own actions. As to "the environment will be what we make it", that is certainly true -- we will gradually tolerate more and more mass death, a process that has already begun.
At the next Sandy Hook mass killing, people will say, "Hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys. But this can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress."