this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
149 points (91.6% liked)

World News

39005 readers
1576 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MeepsTheBard@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, they just need to be kept in that context. We trusted science on chlorofluorocarbons impacting the ozone layer, and chose to fix it rather than let it keep going. Was the projection "wrong" because CFCs were regulated, or did we just interact with it in a practical way?

The same applies here. There's a population issue that (as you mentioned in another comment) without other factors, will come into effect. China can fix it, or let things play out and see if the "unknowns" can fix it for them.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Except birth rates aren't physics that will progress if left alone, they're dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy. There's no such thing as "without other factors", because they're unable to predict fundamental inputs. What's China's economy going to be like in 75 years? How about their food supply under climate change? Is modern day "China" even going to exist? The CCP itself is only 75 years old.

They can't predict the inputs for 75 years, let alone their feedback into birth choices. It's just a highly simplified math sim with arbitrary coefficients for the few things they try to model. Pull a different number from your ass to plug into the economy growth box or add a new function to represent widescale automation and you get whatever number you want. You can look at macro birth rate trends for a single country and think "yeah, I could fit a pretty good exponential decay line to that", except then you look at another country that had the same birth rate in 1950 and the coefficients change. And since it's exponential those little coefficient tweaks make a big difference 75 years later. In 1950 did anyone have any reason to think that Mongolia's 75 year birth rate would be twice that of China? Or South Korea's would be 60 percent?

[–] MeepsTheBard@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The thing about long-term predictions (at least ones that get publicity) is that usually the goal is to change them, so few have been "proven". No one is printing stories about how an isolated set of rocks is going to be decayed by X% due to weather, because no one cares.

Except birth rates aren't physics that will progress if left alone, they're dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy.

Exactly. Those are the factors that are being considered when making these predictions. If economic factors and policies are making it harder to have kids, then birth rates drop, which is what we're seeing now. What else is going to have as much of an effect?

These predictions don't exist to take bets on. They're not scrying into the future. They're just binoculars that point to where we're going.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Hey, here's a possible future. Not the most likely or even the most accurate to some imagined neutral policy position, just one potential future. Or maybe even not a potential future if we're missing a key impact." It's all bullshit man, with practically zero prescriptive value. One of the broadly assumed core components of birthing decisions, economics, is almost unpredictable even 20 years out, let alone 75. The simulation-based social "sciences" are just prettied-up hunches and guesswork in anything but the shortest of terms.

But I agree that they aren't meant to be proven, because that's a very convenient space to work in when your methodology is "I made a guess about the coefficient" combined with "what if complicated things were actually simple". Garbage in, garbage out.

[–] MeepsTheBard@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

You sound really sure about your understanding of statistics and probability, and I don't think anything I can say can impact that. I'm going to defer to the experts, but you do you I guess.