Assuming that some people respond to these memetic tools by reducing the amount of children they have more than other people do, the next generation of the population will have an increased proportion of people who ignore these memetic tools. And then amongst that group, those who are most inclined to have larger numbers of children will be the biggest part of the following generation, and so on.
The current pattern of low fertility due to cultural reasons seems to me to be very unlikely to be a stable pattern. Note: There are people who think it can be stable, and even if I’m right that it is intrinsically unstable, there might be ways to plan out the population decline to make it stable without the substantial use of harsh coercive measures.
But really, fewer people being a really, really bad thing is the core of my value structure, and promoting any sort of anti natalism is something I’d only do if I was convinced there was no other path to get the hoped for good things.
The really big con which is that people are awesome, and 1/70th of the people is way, way less awesome than the current number of people. Far, far fewer people reading fan fiction, falling in love, watching sports, creating weird contests, arguing with each other, etc is a really, really big loss.
Assuming that if it could be done, that it would be an efficient in utility loss/gain terms way to improve coordination, I think it probably goes way too slow to be relevant to the current risks from rapid technological change. It seems semi-tractable, but in the long run I think you’d end up with the population evolving resistance to any memetic tools used to encourage population decline.
Assuming that some people respond to these memetic tools by reducing the amount of children they have more than other people do, the next generation of the population will have an increased proportion of people who ignore these memetic tools. And then amongst that group, those who are most inclined to have larger numbers of children will be the biggest part of the following generation, and so on.
The current pattern of low fertility due to cultural reasons seems to me to be very unlikely to be a stable pattern. Note: There are people who think it can be stable, and even if I’m right that it is intrinsically unstable, there might be ways to plan out the population decline to make it stable without the substantial use of harsh coercive measures.
But really, fewer people being a really, really bad thing is the core of my value structure, and promoting any sort of anti natalism is something I’d only do if I was convinced there was no other path to get the hoped for good things.
https://github.com/daattali/beautiful-jekyll
The really big con which is that people are awesome, and 1/70th of the people is way, way less awesome than the current number of people. Far, far fewer people reading fan fiction, falling in love, watching sports, creating weird contests, arguing with each other, etc is a really, really big loss.
Assuming that if it could be done, that it would be an efficient in utility loss/gain terms way to improve coordination, I think it probably goes way too slow to be relevant to the current risks from rapid technological change. It seems semi-tractable, but in the long run I think you’d end up with the population evolving resistance to any memetic tools used to encourage population decline.