The reference is to r/K selection theory. It’s an old but still roughly right portrait of reproduction strategies. You have r species that make lots of offspring and lose a lot (rats) and K species that invest a lot in each of fewer offspring (elephants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory …
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Note that severe labor shortage was one of the effects of the Black Death. Already by them society was specialized enough it couldn’t tolerate the death rate. Society collapsed quite deeply.
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Humans can make such distinctions but the system may not have the ability to discriminate like that. So it reacts sharply to any death rate spike.https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1282202538868125698?s=21 …
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Plus system has evolved to work with the constraints that people tend to care about family elders and their own old age. A society that treated life past 60 as worth sharply less for eg would not have a stable incentive structure. Makes for fun sci-fi like Pebble in the Sky tho
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As specialization increases --> it creates a wider band of individual contribution --> decreasing system robustness. I think this is fairly factual, as such all that matter is the magnitude of harm done as specialization increases (10x, 100x, example you gave) One thing that...
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i don't think you considered is that you can't decouple the benefits of specialization. Said differently, Covid-19 is presenting a < death rate than Spanish flu but that isn't necessarily an intrinsic property, it could be because specialists allow us to create ventilators
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