Would the world be better off without 50% of the people in it?

I prefer futures in which we don't return to subsistence living, even if all the lives are worth living (robin hanson has posted extensively on this topic). I prefer fewer people with higher standards of living. Preferably standard of living continues to outpace population indefinitely. That said, we're no where near out pacing our increase in living standards currently, pro-natalism is fine for a good long while.

What's the rush? Why burn the limited resources we have as fast as possible on subsistence when we could make better use of them living more efficiently over a longer time period?

So you have a “conscious decision,” whether you become the replica in Omega’s new Solar system far far away, and your original Earth self becomes a zombie, or you stay on the original Earth and everything continues as before. Which do you choose?

Hang on... Omega is creating a replica Earth? I like the idea of a backup irrespective of population considerations.

I'm under Crocker's Rules, and criticism is welcome.

Meh, tl;dr. I'm on LW because the essays are entertaining. In this post, I barely got through the introductory paragraph before my eyes glazed over. (Though that might just be fatigue.)at might just be fatigue.)

Ah, I just scrolled back up before posting and ended up reading most of it. You made your point about halfway through; the rest of it comes off like trying to convince yourself that, yes, the world really is benevolent and beautiful after all. It doesn't matter what conclusion you're arguing, apologism is ew.

Upvoted, but only because I precommited. Your main argument seems to be that:

1. higher population -> faster tech growth.

2. more advanced technology -> better quality of life

3. therefore higher population -> better quality of life (this doesn't follow, due to the increase in population also having negative effects which you've ignored)

1 and 2 are both reasonable, but 3 is a flawed conclusion. You have looked at one positive impact of increased population, but you have not shown that it is larger than the negative impacts. ie. we're currently needing lots of non-renewable resources to maintain our civilisation. With a lower population we could have transitioned to primarily renewables, while maintaining the same, or better, standard of living.

This would leave more time for people to engage in science and technology, and less time doing subsistence labour, which means that a world with our tech level, and 1/6th our population, would have >1/6 of our rate of technological development.

It was difficult for me to follow your point due to your writing style. You use too many rhetorical questions and too many parentheses. Stay on topic. Don't make an aside unless it's interesting and consider using footnotes. In general, cut down on words and sentences you don't need. I really think your point can be made in 3-4 paragraphs.

What are these numbers for? Certainly not to show my ignorance about the dangers of inferences at the tails of distributions (the tails are much less well-behaved than the middle, or so the story goes). My point (technically not my point; need a but I heard this in class without a )

What is this I don't even

Echoing the other comments: the writing here could use a few more revisions. The basic idea also runs into problems- ok, if we have a normal distribution we need lots more people to push out to the tail. But what if intelligence was an exponential distribution? If we had a policy of killing the dumbest 50% every generation, we might end up with something like that instead of a normal. And the tails of an exponential distribution are way taller (since it's e^-x instead of e^-x^2) than the tails of a normal.

(I'm well aware of the central limit theorem, but in the scenario I'm constructing the makeup of intelligence isn't independent, meaning we could actually have an exponential distribution, or something like it.)

think there were a couple setbacks in the form of ice ages along the way somewhere, but what we’d observed as a general trend throughout the homo sapiens’ time on Earth is more population => better technology => easier life => more population.

I don't know if the ice-ages contributed that much to serious reductions in technology. But the Black Death did cause a substantial drop in total population.

Not convinced? US population US Patents per year I know correlation does not imply causation, but come on.

Well, there are more complicating factors here as well, such as what is being patented. There are a lot more things now where minor improvements can still occur. But how many of those patents are in the category of things like the wheel that as you observe are large game changers? Pretty few.

Also keep in mind that as we learn more it takes more to improve on existing ideas because one needs to start with more understanding. Moreover, discoveries and inventions naturally have much of the low-hanging fruit picked first (that's not always true. The Diffie-Hellman algorithm and RSA are both ideas that could have been constructed in the late 18th century but the supporting technologies and motivation didn't exist.) and so the level of intelligence and background knowledge it takes to pluck the lowest remaining fruit may steadily go up.

Nick Szabo has had some interesting posts on this, and I believe Robin Hanson also explored related ideas. By contrast, this just seems to be a bunch of ungrounded speculation and hand-waving with little effort to figure out prior art, current academic consensus, etc.