This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map)

The original conversation happened almost 2 centuries ago I think (1830's). But sure! I think we throw away the baby with the bathwater when we say "Malthus was wrong". I think it's better to say "Malthus inspired the beginning of an awesome idea". Malthus' original idea was where he plotted population growth and food production in the same graph. When the 2 lines crossed, that's bad. That's obviously not very realistic, but actually he had the gist of it; it just needed a bit of refinement. Not much later, another Belgian by the name of Verhulst did indeed improve on Malthus' model. He came up with a formula where at first the population grows exponentially; and then later it slows down before it reaches the limit (carrying-capacity). In Verhulst's model, you don't have a catastrophic line-crossing. At that point, you basically have an actual Minimal Viable Product that you can use to predict and think about real-world population dynamics, and a whole lot more besides. Over the last two centuries people have built a lot of discoveries on top of that. This Veritasium video is about one small (but awesome) bit of that: [this video] It's a good thing not everyone thought Malthus was (completely) wrong!