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A few comments here.

I hang out in these pronatal communities, mostly on Twitter. It's a very interesting mix. There's far right wing Nazis and far left wing Communists, atheists and deeply conservative Christians and Muslims. All groping for any clue about how to get people to have more kids. No one knows what recipe of key thing will make people have more.

It reminds me of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" (Season 6, Episode 20). It's the one where Picard and crew follow a trail of genetic clues left by an ancient humanoid species, eventually discovering that most major humanoid species in the Alpha Quadrant, including Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Humans, share a common ancestry. Once they figure it out, they all start shooting again and race for the prize.

I imagine the pronatal community will do the same thing if a recipe is discovered.

The other thing is that I do a lot of worldbuilding with mega large societies, like 1 trillion people. It's a weird thing, but fun for me.

In looking at all the data we have on nations and the fun story building aspects, one thing pops out over and over: population. I'd you want to model a city or a province or a state, you need to know the population more than anything else. That'll be the best guide to the number of subway stops, patents per capital, gasoline station placement, average talking and walking speed, etc. it's the key.

And you find that countries/cities/states with higher raw population are generally better places to live. It seems that the more people there are in an arbitrary area, the better things are in gestalt.

So, when we complain that we've got too many people, I think that's wrong. I think we're not taking care of people we'll enough. But in my ramblings through government datasets, it seems that more people is generally just an objectively good thing.



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