Claude is a thinking model, and it makes lots of mistakes. Today, it corrected a word I wrote, and I told him that he was wrong. Then it said, "Sorry, you are right." It writes me, "We the engineers think so and so." Does it think it is an engineer? Certainly knows a lot. He thinks he is equal to me, so it is not unlikely that he thinks that is superior to me. Which may be true. Claude is very useful and I pay 20 dollars per month for its services. It is worth every dollar.
: “At their current fertility rate, for every 100 [South] Koreans, there’s only going to be 6 great-grandchildren.” (To which he added, “And that is insanely optimistic.”) Could that be true? Not really. The true way of describing the effects of a 0.8 total fertility rate would be this: At their current fertility rate, for every 100 Koreans born today, there would be 6 great-grandchildren born in about 90 years.” That is, the 100 babies (50 of them female) would have 40 children (20 of them female), who would have 16 children (8 of them female), who would have 6 children. He says it like the population will fall 94% in that time, but it’s probably closer to 60% because we’re not starting with 100 babies alone; there are a lot of people already alive — but still! A total fertility rate of 0.8 (and maybe still falling, if you don’t want to be “insanely optimistic”) is enough to drive a serious population decline, much of which is already baked in to Korea’s future. This is the most extreme case in the world by a fair bit — which makes it a dumb place to start a conversation about global population — but it’s real.
With Justine Wilson:
With c (aka Grimes, Claire Boucher)
