Paul Ehrlich Was Wrong
On March 13th, physician and scientist Paul Ehrlich died. Below are a few snippets from Conjecture Institute affiliates about Ehrlich’s ideas.
Paul Ehrlich Was Wrong
On March 13th, physician and scientist Paul Ehrlich died. Presumably, he thought that his death was inevitable. He was wrong—death, like any other problem, is soluble.
The New York Times wrote, “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
His predictions were wrong—since 1968, humanity made scientific and technological discoveries that neither Ehrlich nor anyone else could have possibly predicted. Indeed, that is the deeper problem with Ehrlich’s predictions—he was implicitly making a prediction about the growth of human knowledge, which is an inherently unpredictable process. Ehrich was, in the language of critical rationalism, making the error of prophecy. His ideas were also pessimistic in that he did not think that people could create the knowledge required to solve the problems they faced.
A few snippets from Conjecture Institute affiliates about Ehrlich’s ideas:
Advisor David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 17)
The troubles of the day in American inner cities, rising crime, mental illness – all were part of the same great catastrophe. All were linked by Ehrlich to overpopulation, pollution and the reckless overuse of finite resources: we had created too many power stations and factories, and mines, and intensive farms – too much economic growth, far more than the planet could sustain. And, worst of all, too many people – the ultimate source of all the other ills. In this respect, Ehrlich was following in the footsteps of Malthus, making the same error: setting predictions of one process against prophecies of another…
Once I realized that Ehrlich’s prophesies amounted to saying, ‘If we stop solving problems, we are doomed,’ I no longer found them shocking, for how could it be otherwise?Cofounder Aaron Stupple (Original, longer X post)
Crucially, CRUCIALLY - here is another point to shout from the rooftops - he couldn’t see that people can invent new things to fix the current problems. Of course Ehrlich couldn’t know that Norman Borlaug was going to boost crop yields, because you can’t do genetic engineering when you’re convinced it’s impossible. (Incidentally, neither did Borlaug know it was possible before he did it, discoveries are not known beforehand. Just bizarre that we don’t understand what the word “discover” means, it isn’t known ahead of time!)
What is the opposite of Ehrlich? What is the opposite of this anti-human pessimism? What is optimistic humanism? It’s not simply expecting things to turn out alright - they might not! Disaster IS possible? Especially disasters produced by our own discoveries. That kind of Pollyanna-ish optimism is blind or naive optimism. It’s more akin to pessimism, because it renders people apathetic, “It’ll work out.”
Humanist optimism sees problems as solvable, but only if we actually work at it! It sees us as inheritors of a long and precious tradition of problem-solving, one that our ancestors produced at enormous cost and suffering. We have never had more tools to solve problems, we’ve never had more time, we’ve never had the opportunity to become more wealthy through productivity than today.
And it’s never been more important to capitalize (literally capitalism-ize) on these tools, like the internet, smartphones, social media, AI, all the things that today’s pessimists are trying to Ehrlich-ize.Fellow Tom Hyde (Original X post)
The Malthusian prophecy of doom has been echoed by many. In 1968, the American biologists Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife Anne Ehrlich, in their book The Population Bomb, argued a familiar sentiment: our numbers are too great to be sustained, and that our destruction by poverty and famine is already determined. They went as far as to begin their book with the words, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
That is with the notable exception of staunch population controls, of course, which are the darlings of all resource pessimists. And Paul Ehrlich went one step further than Malthus, suggesting we purposefully starve those nations that are unwilling, or simply unable, to impose such controls. The small nation of India, for example (then home to over 600 million people) would have had their food aid eliminated and be left to ruin.
It’s by far the closest we have come to our very own Thanos. But his solution has always been the least serious aspect of his philosophy—not only because of its clear moral insanity but because it makes no sense in his own terms (people would, after all, continue to have children). What has really captured the minds of audiences is his tale of disaster—that we are, despite all efforts, destined for destruction.
It almost seems petty to point out that none of these prophecies have come to pass—and that in the time since Malthus and even Ehrlich published their respective arguments, population and quality of life have increased in tandem with one another (see Steven Pinker’s work). But this is to be expected for all predictions that underestimate, or outright reject, our capacity for creativity.
Physics
In celebration of Pi Day (3/14), Fellow Maria Violaris made a video titled, How to program a quantum computer using just pi!
Watch on YouTube or X.Maria recently interviewed with Professor Gerard Milburn about quantum gravity and whether quantum particles have any gravity at all.
Watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Artificial General Intelligence
On Fellow Carlos De la Guardia’s latest episode of ‘AGI with with Carlos’, he explains that evolution, universality, and explanation are the underappreciated pillars of AGI.
Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or X.
Conjecture Press
Conjecture Institute’s fourth book, The Farthest Reaches: Why People Are the Most Important Entities in the Universe, by Ambassador Brett Hall, is now live in both paperback and Kindle!
Get your copy here.
Office Hours: Maxime Desalle
Last week, Fellow Maxime Desalle spoke about ZCash, the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, and his course for Conjecture University, Taking Schrödinger Seriously.
Listen here.
Conjecture University
President Logan Chipkin’s Constructor Theory, Module 3: Four Laws of Thermodynamics and Economics, Module 0: The Constraints of Personhood, are now live on our Course page.
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