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When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
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Whenever you criticize something adjacent to my beliefs I'm always bothered, but since we're all biased, I have to be honest and admit that I might only be bothered by the disagreement/criticism itself, rather than the quality of you arguments or the background low-key antagonism towards your targets. This post was very helpful in clearing up the question of what's bothering me. If you managed to make me feel defensive towards Paul Ehrlich of all people, then I think we've found the problem, and it is you.
If you say things like "when someone tells you they're lying", I will be expecting some admission of deception, not run of the mill rationalization of the "even when I'm wrong, I'm right" variety.
Which is probably why he's seems reluctant to concede his broader argument about us eventually running into limits of what our planet can sustain. For people like him the Green Revolution is a bailout, not a permanent solution, or a change of trajectory towards a more sustainable path. Focusing on a specific prediction would be missing the forest for the trees, unless you want to claim that there will always be a new Green Revolution coming to bail us out when we need it.
This part in particular rings true. If he was so wrong, why is every single influential organization, governmental or otherwise, constantly blasting us with propaganda about "sustainability"?
Huh... they were already talking about declining sperm counts in 1995? I'll be...
Given that global population growth is slowing and the global population is likely to peak this century, the ‘green revolution’ is indeed sufficient to feed the projected maximum human population of the earth. So calling it a ‘temporary bailout’ is wrong.
This assumes the slowing of population growth is organic, rather than the product of decades of social engineering by people like Ehrlich.
I see no reason for that assumption, birth rates are dropping even in countries that have never tried outright population control measures, and in turn they do not respond to attempts to increase fertility.
This is still transitory, since it increases selection pressures on the remaining fertile till we reach new resource constraints. Even then, only the ignorant would think that we'd be anywhere close to reaching that limit in this century, or the next, unless we absolutely change or exceed the limits of our biology (which might happen).
When you say "never tried population control" do you mean things like the one child policy, and mandatory sterilization, or propaganda about sex being primarily for pleasure, contraceptives, abortion, "women's empowerment", deconstruction of the family, and deconstruction of various identities?
The former.
I dispute the latter matters all that much because "propaganda" in the other direction has been useless, leaving aside more concrete incentives.
No, propaganda in the other direction has not been useless- red tribe propaganda about how awesome having kids is is probably the main reason for their oddly high fertility rates, and non-haredi Jews in Israel are to my understanding under a very similar propaganda-fertility boost, albeit more about the duty of having children than the joys. Now if that propaganda is obvious lies, or drowned out by anti-natal propaganda, it’s useless. The key is to make good propaganda.
Fair point, but I would like to point out that as propaganda goes, the latter doesn't really scale.
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Well, it's something reasonable people can disagree on.
For my part I believe propaganda in the other direction has been essentially non-existent, and if you look at the sub-groups that do reproduce you'll find that they hold strong beliefs about all the issues I mentioned above, which go in the direction opposite to that promoted by the regime.
Sure, I can agree to disagree. I see it as being moot for most relevant time scales, be it because we're not going to expand beyond 11 billion in a "business as usual" world (itself extremely unlikely), or because of clear technological pathways that also raise the carrying capacity by OOMs.
But I will say that the evidence that strong pro-natal propaganda doesn't work is also evidence that anti-natal propaganda doesn't work, it seems that the a decreased urge to have or raise children is a consequence of modernity as a whole, not concerted action by any particular interest group, barring a weird definition of interest group that would include like 5-6 billion people.
This isn't a "if she floats she's a witch, and if she sinks she's a witch" deal either, because I am transferring the probability mass to a third outcome, that having 1.8 kids is what most people raised in modern culture want to do, at least from revealed preferences. I don't think that something as broad as widely-conserved aspects of global culture ought to be described as propaganda, not merely things like condom distribution or sex ed classes. The latter is not outright anti-natalist, it only seeks to shift the window of fertility to a more stable part of a woman's life, even if in terms of outcomes it does likely suppress total birth rates. The teachers conducting them or the bureaucrats endorsing them don't care if their kids go on to have 3 or 4 kids, as long as they don't do it while in school.
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