Capita

Pop quiz. Suppose you start with a human population of size two, and the population grows at an annual rate of 2%—that's the rate at which a population will double in 35 years. At that rate, it takes 1,128 years for the population to reach 10,000,000,000, which hypothetically we'll call the carrying capacity of Earth. Now suppose that after filling Earth, humans discover a nearby Earth-like planet that also supports 10,000,000,000 people, and further suppose humans innovate the means to transport themselves and their stuff to that planet cheaply, safely, and instantly. How long would it take to fill the new planet to its carrying capacity?

The answer is—duh!—35 years. Filling a second planet is merely another way to double the existing population, and 35 years is the doubling rate. And after filling that new planet, it would take 35 years to fill two more planets, then another 35 years to fill four more planets, another 35 years to fill eight more planets, and so on.

There's a physicist named Albert Bartlett who lectures on overpopulation, and he says inability to understand exponents is humankind's greatest shortcoming. Maybe he overstates his case, but there's a lot of failure going on in people's understanding of what per annum growth is all about, as evidenced by all the talk one hears these days of sustainable growth. There is not and can never be any such thing as sustainable growth, not for as long as the laws of physics resemble anything like what we understand them to be. As an upper-bound example, at our species' present size and with a 2% growth rate, it would take a mere 5,000 years for humans to convert all mass in the observable universe to human flesh. That's about as long as humans have been living in cities.

I pride myself on being able to understand a diversity of arguments, irrespective of whether I agree with their premises, but the argument that humanity has not, is not, and will not continue to be plagued by overpopulation problems is one I don't understand. It's not that I disagree with the premises. Instead, it's that any case that's to be made that overpopulation is not a continual threat for a successful species, including ours, has neither math nor biology on its side.

From the mathematical perspective, the problem is that exponential growth is fast—even if the annual rate is low, such as 2%. In our finite observable universe, all exponential growth must fail eventually.

But some people think this isn't a problem for us modern humans. Isn't our species' rate of growth slowing down? Aren't demographers predicting our species' population to stabilize sometime in the 21st century? Aren't the Malthusian doom-sayers going to be proved wrong?

This idea—that humankind will come to gracefully control its population—isn't the escape from overpopulation it may at first appear to be. And this has to do with biology.

The problem isn't merely that humans, on average, want to reproduce a lot. The scenario in which we're gracefully controlling our numbers hypothetically has that problem solved—presumably through the use of mild voluntary contraceptives, such as television. No, the problem begins specifically after we've stopped growing as a species: Natural selection requires a lot of graceless population control in order to work. Without some forceful culling from it, a gene pool isn't selected for anything, and given enough time without the negative feedbacks of selective pressures to keep it fit for its environment—whatever that may be—a genome will degrade. In short, without a drive to keep growing, a species will eventually find itself ousted by one or more other species. As living things, the point is not that we grow but that we try to grow.

I don't know what will happen in the 21st century or any other future century, but I do know that over the long term there'll be no such thing as graceful population control. Nor will there be sustainable growth. At best there'll be bursts of unsustainable growth followed by longer periods of graceless population control, and the latter will take the same regrettable forms as it has for past generations.

Why are we so afraid of this?

Underwhelmed by conscious choice

The genetic mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia also increases one's resistance to malaria. But whereas sickle-cell anemia is a recessive trait—meaning that to get the disease you must have two copies of the mutation—increased resistance to malaria is a dominant trait that comes from having only one copy of the mutation. Therefore, the optimal strategy for individuals living in an area with a high incidence of malaria is to have a single copy of the sickle-cell mutation, thus gaining resistance to malaria without the early death brought on by sickle-cell anemia.

The problem with this strategy is that if too many individuals pursue it then individuals suffer as a group. People who have a single copy of the sickle-cell mutation are carriers of the disease, and an offspring of two mated carriers has a one-in-four chance of having the disease and a one-in-two chance of being a carrier. An offspring of a carrier mated with a non-carrier has no chance of having the disease. So even though it's better for an individual to be a carrier and benefit from increased resistance to malaria, it's better for the group to have a mix of carriers and non-carriers, thus reducing the incidence of sickle-cell anemia. As with prisoner's dilemma, there's a best solution for the group that's in conflict with the best solution for the individual. How many other prisoner's dilemmas are lurking in our DNA?

For most of our species' history, we have benefited from mindless Nature solving our genetic prisoner's dilemmas for us. When the optimal solution is a mixed strategy, such as in tropical zones with regards to the sickle-cell mutation, Nature does an OK job of selecting for the mixed strategy. Without a mind to overthink the problem, or to pursue fashions or Faustian gains, Nature finds a balance between two diseases.

So when I hear that designer babies are on the way, Gattaca-style, and that some couples are already choosing the sex of their babies, I'm not struck with overwhelming confidence that this is a smart move over the long run—not until we're consciously able to deal with prisoner's dilemmas as well as mindless entities do.

I quit

As many of you know, I quit my job. I don't have another job lined up, so today is my first weekday of indefinite unemployment since November of last year.

The most common question I've heard this past week about my quitting is: Why did I do it? What I've done isn't common. While there are many reasons to leave a job—sometimes workers find another job, sometimes they're laid off or fired, sometimes they retire—quitting to go be by oneself and have no income is unusual. So it makes sense that people are curious about my motives.

Nevertheless, I like to flip the question: Why not quit? I believe unemployment is the ideal state for most people; we work nine-to-five jobs as a compromise with a world that, for most people, doesn't let you live well without the compensation a job provides. Foremost, people work for the money, though a surging second-place motive for full-time employment is insurance benefits. There are also some intangible benefits to working a job—or at least there should be—such as gaining a sense of accomplishment or spending the day socially, in the presence of other workers. Some people might assert that their job is important to society and few if anyone can replace them and do their job as well. I suppose.

But if unemployment is the ideal state—and let me clarify that I'm talking about unemployment as any alternative to working full-time to make profits for someone else, and yes I'm aware this is strange definition of the term—then presumably people who're employed are missing some critical ingredient for living life unemployed. As to what those ingredients usually are, we need only traverse the list of motives from the previous paragraph. For most people the primary missing ingredient is money. For many others it's stable health care coverage. And for some others it's a lack of a sense of accomplishment in their life away from the office, or a feeling of loneliness.

So why did I quit? Now the answer should be a little clearer: For the time being, my life is going well.

Therefore no wherefore

Today's post is a quick idea:

Whenever we're unsure about what will happen in the future, we don't really understand the past or present. Whatever information we lack that makes the future uncertain is the same kind of information we lack to make certain sense of the past or present. For example, if we don't know which way the stock market will move tomorrow because we lack some information about the market, then we also don't know why the stock market moved whichever way it did today because of that same lack of information.

Hindsight gives us the answer of what has happened, but it doesn't tell us why, no matter how compelling a concocted why may be. To understand why something has happened, you must've been able to predict it—else you're only guessing.

Auction sniping

Less than a minute left. It's up to $41. Laura sat at the table in our apartment, her eyes anxiously fixed on her laptop. $47. She crossed her fingers. A short gasp. Frantic typing. Bated breath. Then, with a smile and happy waving of hands: I won! It bumped to $50, but I won!

Great! That was your maximum bid.

No, I bumped my max to $53 a few minutes earlier—just in case.

Laura won the privilege of buying a pair of used running shoes.

Nearly everyone who has bought stuff off eBay knows the phenomena of last-minute bidding, a.k.a. auction sniping. An auction lasts for a week, and the first 6 days, 23 hours and 58 minutes bring about no activity beyond a few low-ball bids and maybe some questions for the seller. Then, in the two minutes before the auction closes, a swarm of would-be opportunists fish for a winning bid: The price spikes to somewhere around the market price for the item, and someone somewhere is rewarded for being irrational—though not so with my victorious Laura and her running shoes.

I'm not a fan of auction sniping—not on sites like eBay which include a proxy bidding service that automatically bids on your behalf up to a defined maximum amount. Proxy bidding is an efficient way to ensure you pay no more than what you value an item at. Either you're willing to pay up to X for something or you're not. Put in X as your maximum proxy-bid. Why bother with sniping?

But what if you really want to win?

You mean by changing your mind and paying more than X?

Well, yes.

Then change your mind now and proxy-bid more than X.

OK, I'm aware my argument leaks some air. The principal counterclaim of snipers is that their acts of sniping affect the auction by causing other bidders to bid, on average, less than they would otherwise. One idea here is that sniping reduces the chance of competitors falling into a sunk-loss fallacy whereby, upon seeing their maximum bid outbid, they increase their maximum bid to something more than they're otherwise willing to pay for. The dog fights hardest for the bone it has already tasted. I admit this is a concern. One way this problem could be solved is by changing the format to silent bidding: everyone makes a maximum bid and the winning price is the maximum bid. This system has the advantage of forcing people to think about value, not price. But it has the disadvantage of forcing people to think about value, not price.

Oh What a Weekend!

• You spent the whole weekend watching some of the food in your refrigerator grow mold and spores. It sure was fun.
• You spent the whole weekend watching the water in your refrigerator freeze.
• You spent the weekend baking oatmeal cookies.
• You spent the entire weekend watching Star Trek reruns.
• You rented some movies and ate artificially flavored buttered popcorn.
• You spent the weekend playing your stereo and patching the plaster your speakers cracked.
• You spent the weekend cleaning your microwave after you tried to dry your pet rat in it. You also need a new pet rat.
• You and some friends had a Hottub party this weekend.
• You played games on your computer all weekend.
• You watched CELEBRITY INCOME TAX EVASION on TV this weekend.
• You read all about the mating habits of the North American computer programmer in your encyclopedia.
• You read your dictionary all weekend. Boy, that was fun.
• You read your atlas and commited the population of 43 countries to memory. OH WOW!!!
• You went to the baseball game this weekend and ate hotdogs till you puked.
• You went to the theatre this weekend and saw the one MAN version of Cats.
• You had front row seats at a rock concert. The doctor said that the hearing loss shouldn't be permanent.
• You watched them change the mannequins at QT Clothing this weekend.
• You washed and waxed your marble this weekend right before it rained.
• You stayed home and did absolutely nothing this weekend.
• You spent the weekend hiking around Yosemite.
• You listened to the Talking Bear 256 times this weekend.
• You read the 'Wall Street Journal' this weekend.
• You thought about what you would do on your next turn.
• You spent the weekend in a hotel because they had to fumigate your apartment.
• You played in a ping pong tournament this weekend.
• You pitched horseshoes in your apartment all weekend. The people downstairs love you.
• You sat around and played solitaire all weekend.
• You went panning for gold this weekend, but all you got was wet.
• You spent the weekend in the laundromat washing your clothes. Now that was exciting.
• You took a friend out to a cheap restaurant this weekend.
• You went out and caught your own froglegs this weekend.
• You crawled around on your knees chasing snails this weekend.
• You spent your weekend thinking about work. Eccch.
• You spent your weekend trying to remove the mildew between the shower tiles.
• You spent the weekend listening to the newlyweds in the next apartment set up a new waterbed.
• This weekend, you won first prize in a beauty contest and collected $10. Whoops, wrong game.
• This weekend, you closed your curtains, locked your doors, turned off the lights, and ate presweetened morning breakfast cereal, with little marshmallows!
• You played stickball this weekend with the neighborhood kids and ended up wrenching your back and spraining your ankle.
• You read a romance novel, NURSE'S TURN TO CRY, in one sitting.
• You took a long hot bath this weekend and emerged looking like a California Raisin.
• You watched a torrid romance movie, LIBRARIAN'S DILEMMA, this weekend.
• One of your fillings came loose this weekend. It's a good thing you're handy with a soldering iron.
• You spent the weekend examining yourself under the fluorescent lights in the bathroom. Eccch!
• You spent the weekend wondering if black holes were lit with black lights.
• This weekend, you hung out at the mall, filled up on junk food, and made your mother ashamed of you.
• You went bowling with friends this weekend.
• You played two rounds of golf this weekend.
• This weekend, you had to bail your nephew out of jail.
• You had your marble repainted this weekend.
• You played in a volleyball tournament this weekend.
• You took a friend out to an expensive restaurant this weekend.
• You went to San Diego to play in the Over The Line Tournament.
• You went to Las Vegas in a $20,000 car and came back in a $200,000 Greyhound bus.
• You tried to drive to Hawaii to watch a surfing contest.
• You went scuba diving in La Jolla.
• You went deep sea fishing this weekend.
• You volunteered to take the local scouts to Disneyland.
• You drove the senior citizens' bus this weekend and they drove you - crazy.
• You helped several little old ladies cross the street to get to their aerobics class.
• You visited a sick friend in the hospital. REALLY!

You spent $15.

Note: Spelling and grammar mistakes in this post are attributed to an unknown North American computer programmer from 22 years ago.