Daniel, another reason why there are more men than women among the very successful is that men have higher Std. Dev. of IQ distribution. This would make sense if intelligence is a highly polygenic trait, and if some of the relevant genes fall on the X chromosome: since women have two of those, their influence would average out.
I think this difference between male and female std. dev. has been known for a long time (I myself have calculated expected gender ratio for Mensa (the high-IQ society) members based on std. dev. difference, and got a number very close to actual – twice as many men as women : -( I wasn’t going to those meetings for the food…). That was more than 20 years ago…).
It’s part of popular culture too. Just look at the classes for children who in earlier decades used to be labeled ‘retarded’: what do you think, are there more girls or boys among those kids? Assuming the male and female IQ mean is the same, guess what looking at the ‘retarded’ kids can tell you about the other IQ extreme…
I don’t want even to talk about differences in ambition, and how much career success means to an average men. This comment is already too long…
jldsays:
The statement “women are more risk averse than men†is fundamentally a metaphysical assertion
This CRETINOUS and it would also be for any other “assertion”: Once you can define a testing protocol with respect to some observable characteristics it may be inconclusive or irrelevant to this or that subject matter but it is not “metaphysical” anymore.
Michel Lemaysays:
Exponential growth always seems a bit weird to me be cause we live in a resources limited finite world. In chip manufacturing, costs (researching new processes cost as well as lower yields as chips gets more complex) and energy consumption/dissipation are the main brakes to development. Exponential growth cannot be sustained unless we change paradigm along the way. For instance, we stopped doubling clock speed a while ago in favor of multiplying cores. And now, we are slowing down adding new cores to chips in favor of adding more cpus to distributed computing. For me, these are completely different charts and do not share the same Moore’s law line.
Exponential growth always seems a bit weird to me be cause we live in a resources limited finite world. In chip manufacturing, costs (researching new processes cost as well as lower yields as chips gets more complex) and energy consumption/dissipation are the main brakes to development. Exponential growth cannot be sustained unless we change paradigm along the way.
Moore’s law as originally stated was clearly time limited. However, even the diehards like Kurzweil would agree with that. An idea like Dennard scaling runs its course. Then something else comes along. That is, we are in an open-ended model of innovation. We don’t get one innovation that we have to milk forever. We get a stream of innovations.
Exponential growth is an empirical observation that goes from way back… from the industrial revolution if not before. We know that it goes all the way to the beginning of life. If you look at the emergence of species, you get exponential curves everywhere. It took a really long time before you had unicellular organisms, then less time to get multicellular organisms then much less time before you got mammals, then much, much less time before you got human beings. If you look at biological time scales, the exponential curve is clear. In technology, you see the same. It took forever to get electricity. Then it took so many years to get the transistors… Progress is clearly accelerating.
We don’t know whether progress is unavoidable. I think that people like Kevin Kelly expects that it might be. That is, technology is its own thing, and it basically on its own quest, whether we like it or not.
What is clear also is that the future is super hard to predict. It does not follow nice trajectories. That’s pretty much what “open-ended” means.
For instance, we stopped doubling clock speed a while ago in favor of multiplying cores. And now, we are slowing down adding new cores to chips in favor of adding more cpus to distributed computing. For me, these are completely different charts and do not share the same Moore’s law line.
Right. But I think that’s somewhat about semantics. We are making progress… maybe not exactly how Moore’s imagined it, but Moore never thought about 2018 when he drafted his law.
Michel Lemaysays:
It’s interesting that you mention biological evolution. My point about limited resources particularly applies to the human population. We saw exponential growth in the number of human beings but that trend cannot continue very far in the future. Last time I checked, earth could not sustain more than 10-15 billions peoples. Same thing for CO2 emissions. We are bound to stop exponential growth sometime in the near future otherwise we are doomed.
Going back to technological progress.. I can’t tell where we are in the curve but it got to slow down eventually. We face limitations in terms of economical costs to develop. My view of the world fits more an array of S curves than a single infinite exponential curve 😉
And yes, that was only semantic interpretation of the topic..
Earth’s population is not growing exponentially. Everywhere but in Africa, we are aiming toward a near-term plateau, followed by a fall. Germany and Japan are already in massive decline. Simply put, educated women rarely decide to have many children early on.
This population decline is happening just as most of us have incredibly long life expectations. The two appear to be related: the longer we live, the slower we reproduce.
A natural extrapolation is one where few of us reproduce but we all live much longer.
This being said, how many people could make up humanity? I don’t think we know, and I think it may be far greater than anyone might estimate currently. Certainly, if your refer to primitive human beings, the answer is relatively small… but if you refer to technological human beings (and all of us are, one way or another, technological human beings), then the question is how much technology are we talking about?
Prior estimates of how many human beings could live on Earth have been far exceeded without harm. In fact, fewer people starve today and obesity is a problem.
Why were the prior estimates wrong? Because they assumed constant technology…
We live in larger houses than our ancestors or even than our grand-parents. More of us have private bedrooms, private bathrooms, and so forth. We have lots more food.
That is, there are more of us, but we also have more food and more room!!!
You have to take into account that each additional individual is more than just a mouth to feed, it is also a potential for invention, new science, new engineering and so forth. The more of us there are, the more quickly we can innovate and the more complex a civilization we can sustain.
Run an experiment. How much complexity could you and I on a deserted island sustain? Surely nothing like our current technology. We’d be lucky to survive a few years.
However, with billions of us, we can make incredible progress. It is enough for one of us to solve a hard problem for all of us to benefit years later. Thus, having more people is not necessarily a drain. It might be, in fact, critical for our sustainability. It is not at all clear that it is a good thing to have fewer people. Fewer people means less innovation and we need constant innovation to be better off. Thankfully, as the number of human beings is set to start decreasing during this century, we are also in the midst of a cognitive revolution (e.g., computers).
Why would technological progress slow and come to halt? I can tell you that if it does, it is very bad news. It is not at all clear how we make people better off without technological progress.
Long-term stagnation did happen in the past. The fall of Rome was not great for technology. But it was also not good for the people.
If you are worried about things like energy use… you should be aware that we are generally using less energy today than we did in the recent past… We are hitting a plateau. Look around you. I am typing this on a tablet that uses a fraction of the energy that my PC used 20 years ago.
Technology does not necessarily require more ressources.
Anyhow, there is no way to be certain about the future. Certainly, we can hit a plateau. My main point here is that if it should happen, it is not going to be good for the people.
Even so, try Africa where the population is still increasing exponentially (at least in large parts of Africa) and look at the food consumption per capita. It is going up! That’s not what a model indicating that we are about to run out of ressources would predict.
(Of course, people generally eat too much and we should lower the calories per capita. But that’s another story.)
Look also at the forest cover: it is going up. That’s right… in most rich countries (Europe, North America) and several not so rich countries (e.g., China or Russia), there are more forests today than before.
You read this right: more people and, yet, more forests. Part of the trick is that human beings actually occupy less land than we used to!
Where do you live, Michel? Probably in a densely populated area, right? What about your ancestors? Probably in a not-so-densely populated area, right?
So as time passes, we aggregate closer and closer together.
That sounds terrible… less space per person, right? Except no… with technology, we create space.
Daniel, another reason why there are more men than women among the very successful is that men have higher Std. Dev. of IQ distribution. This would make sense if intelligence is a highly polygenic trait, and if some of the relevant genes fall on the X chromosome: since women have two of those, their influence would average out.
I think this difference between male and female std. dev. has been known for a long time (I myself have calculated expected gender ratio for Mensa (the high-IQ society) members based on std. dev. difference, and got a number very close to actual – twice as many men as women : -( I wasn’t going to those meetings for the food…). That was more than 20 years ago…).
It’s part of popular culture too. Just look at the classes for children who in earlier decades used to be labeled ‘retarded’: what do you think, are there more girls or boys among those kids? Assuming the male and female IQ mean is the same, guess what looking at the ‘retarded’ kids can tell you about the other IQ extreme…
I don’t want even to talk about differences in ambition, and how much career success means to an average men. This comment is already too long…
The statement “women are more risk averse than men†is fundamentally a metaphysical assertion
This CRETINOUS and it would also be for any other “assertion”: Once you can define a testing protocol with respect to some observable characteristics it may be inconclusive or irrelevant to this or that subject matter but it is not “metaphysical” anymore.
Exponential growth always seems a bit weird to me be cause we live in a resources limited finite world. In chip manufacturing, costs (researching new processes cost as well as lower yields as chips gets more complex) and energy consumption/dissipation are the main brakes to development. Exponential growth cannot be sustained unless we change paradigm along the way. For instance, we stopped doubling clock speed a while ago in favor of multiplying cores. And now, we are slowing down adding new cores to chips in favor of adding more cpus to distributed computing. For me, these are completely different charts and do not share the same Moore’s law line.
Moore’s law as originally stated was clearly time limited. However, even the diehards like Kurzweil would agree with that. An idea like Dennard scaling runs its course. Then something else comes along. That is, we are in an open-ended model of innovation. We don’t get one innovation that we have to milk forever. We get a stream of innovations.
Exponential growth is an empirical observation that goes from way back… from the industrial revolution if not before. We know that it goes all the way to the beginning of life. If you look at the emergence of species, you get exponential curves everywhere. It took a really long time before you had unicellular organisms, then less time to get multicellular organisms then much less time before you got mammals, then much, much less time before you got human beings. If you look at biological time scales, the exponential curve is clear. In technology, you see the same. It took forever to get electricity. Then it took so many years to get the transistors… Progress is clearly accelerating.
We don’t know whether progress is unavoidable. I think that people like Kevin Kelly expects that it might be. That is, technology is its own thing, and it basically on its own quest, whether we like it or not.
What is clear also is that the future is super hard to predict. It does not follow nice trajectories. That’s pretty much what “open-ended” means.
Right. But I think that’s somewhat about semantics. We are making progress… maybe not exactly how Moore’s imagined it, but Moore never thought about 2018 when he drafted his law.
It’s interesting that you mention biological evolution. My point about limited resources particularly applies to the human population. We saw exponential growth in the number of human beings but that trend cannot continue very far in the future. Last time I checked, earth could not sustain more than 10-15 billions peoples. Same thing for CO2 emissions. We are bound to stop exponential growth sometime in the near future otherwise we are doomed.
Going back to technological progress.. I can’t tell where we are in the curve but it got to slow down eventually. We face limitations in terms of economical costs to develop. My view of the world fits more an array of S curves than a single infinite exponential curve 😉
And yes, that was only semantic interpretation of the topic..
Earth’s population is not growing exponentially. Everywhere but in Africa, we are aiming toward a near-term plateau, followed by a fall. Germany and Japan are already in massive decline. Simply put, educated women rarely decide to have many children early on.
This population decline is happening just as most of us have incredibly long life expectations. The two appear to be related: the longer we live, the slower we reproduce.
A natural extrapolation is one where few of us reproduce but we all live much longer.
This being said, how many people could make up humanity? I don’t think we know, and I think it may be far greater than anyone might estimate currently. Certainly, if your refer to primitive human beings, the answer is relatively small… but if you refer to technological human beings (and all of us are, one way or another, technological human beings), then the question is how much technology are we talking about?
Prior estimates of how many human beings could live on Earth have been far exceeded without harm. In fact, fewer people starve today and obesity is a problem.
Why were the prior estimates wrong? Because they assumed constant technology…
We live in larger houses than our ancestors or even than our grand-parents. More of us have private bedrooms, private bathrooms, and so forth. We have lots more food.
That is, there are more of us, but we also have more food and more room!!!
You have to take into account that each additional individual is more than just a mouth to feed, it is also a potential for invention, new science, new engineering and so forth. The more of us there are, the more quickly we can innovate and the more complex a civilization we can sustain.
Run an experiment. How much complexity could you and I on a deserted island sustain? Surely nothing like our current technology. We’d be lucky to survive a few years.
However, with billions of us, we can make incredible progress. It is enough for one of us to solve a hard problem for all of us to benefit years later. Thus, having more people is not necessarily a drain. It might be, in fact, critical for our sustainability. It is not at all clear that it is a good thing to have fewer people. Fewer people means less innovation and we need constant innovation to be better off. Thankfully, as the number of human beings is set to start decreasing during this century, we are also in the midst of a cognitive revolution (e.g., computers).
Why would technological progress slow and come to halt? I can tell you that if it does, it is very bad news. It is not at all clear how we make people better off without technological progress.
Long-term stagnation did happen in the past. The fall of Rome was not great for technology. But it was also not good for the people.
If you are worried about things like energy use… you should be aware that we are generally using less energy today than we did in the recent past… We are hitting a plateau. Look around you. I am typing this on a tablet that uses a fraction of the energy that my PC used 20 years ago.
Technology does not necessarily require more ressources.
Anyhow, there is no way to be certain about the future. Certainly, we can hit a plateau. My main point here is that if it should happen, it is not going to be good for the people.
Sorry for the wrong information. I saw exponential growth charts in human population but that was from twelve millennia up until half a century ago. (something like this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-1750-2015-and-un-projection-until-2100) Indeed, closer inspection to the latest metrics show a steady decline in growth rate.
Even so, try Africa where the population is still increasing exponentially (at least in large parts of Africa) and look at the food consumption per capita. It is going up! That’s not what a model indicating that we are about to run out of ressources would predict.
(Of course, people generally eat too much and we should lower the calories per capita. But that’s another story.)
Look also at the forest cover: it is going up. That’s right… in most rich countries (Europe, North America) and several not so rich countries (e.g., China or Russia), there are more forests today than before.
You read this right: more people and, yet, more forests. Part of the trick is that human beings actually occupy less land than we used to!
Where do you live, Michel? Probably in a densely populated area, right? What about your ancestors? Probably in a not-so-densely populated area, right?
So as time passes, we aggregate closer and closer together.
That sounds terrible… less space per person, right? Except no… with technology, we create space.