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Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.
Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.
The relationship between medicine and homicide isn’t necessarily clear cut because presumably many ‘survivors’ who return to their previous lives after being treated for gunshot/stab/etc wounds end up killed anyway. People can be ‘harder to kill’ without that guaranteeing a decline in homicide rates in very high crime communities.
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Because the maximum human lifespan has not been increasing, only the average. Unless something fundamental changes, life expectancy is going to plateau somewhere around a century.
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idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.
At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.
I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.
IIRC this is driven by a smaller percentage of the population having more of them, so it should be more than balanced out by a declining share of the population owning guns.
But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.
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