"The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found."
Has not been true so far, I wonder at what population amount, will this start working ?
If we assume that distribution of professions scales linearly with population size, a 2x increase in population means there will be twice as many researchers and inventors that can dedicate their life to finding new solutions.
I would assume that the scaling is not linear. Do we need twice the workers in agriculture to feed twice as many people? With our modern agriculture technology that seems unlikely to me.
One could argue that this is counter-balanced by diminishing returns, as in: 2x the amount of researchers won't have 2x the output.
But it's hard for me to see how "more people = more progress" is false.
It might start working when we take away their screens, 24/7 couch-based entertainment, and their safe spaces to escape the violence of being misgendered.
When I see people thinking about voting for someone like Donald Trump I know the argument that more people = better solutions is complete bullshit. Even if we technically have more solutions, having more dumb people who are able to negate all the benefits is a far worse situation to be in.
Of course its true - we wouldn't have gotten to the moon, or been able to build world-encompassing highway and Internet systems, without the critical mass of people who built our academic and industrial institutions.
To see the nature of your fallacy, just look out at your universities and wonder how they will operate, as effectively as they have so far, with half the staff. And then, that staff halves again in 10 years.
Doing this, honestly, do you still have faith that the deleterious effect of humanity upon itself will be replenished with new perspectives, new generations, new ideas?
We humans are instinctively cannibals. We don't eat each other literally any more, but spiritually and culturally. The moment there is less of that human culture to consume, the closer we get to actually reverting to the physical manifestation of it ..
A Lot of academics already today are just trying to keep their job, and don't keep up with innovative teaching methods, they don't record their lectures, cause who would pay them if there's a video about it ?
So in reality we would be fine, if we focus on doing the job not keeping the job.