> It’s true that birth rates must eventually flatten out and become sigmoid
All positive growth eventually flattens out and becomes sigmoid, but a lot of phenomena experience negative growth and nose dive. No gentle curve, but a hard kink and perfect flat line at zero. Forever. I think it would be a stretch to categorize that pattern as sigmoid. Predicting a sigmoid pattern for negative growth implies some sort of a soft landing (depending on your definition of soft).
We can think of many populations that are no longer with us. So just a caution about over applying this reasoning in the negative case.
People put up with what they have to put up with. Many millions of people have lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes with basically zero options to do anything about it. I think that's where we're headed and by the time a sufficient amount of people realise how bad their situation is, the moment to do anything about it will have long since passed. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue this time.
Instead of discounting some of the results, can we alternate the value of the coin each toss? So on the first flip, heads is 0 and tails is 1, then on the next flip, heads is 1 and tails is 0.
Well said. There are some exceptionally hateful things openly said by those in power (especially in the US) that face no repercussions. It isn't a stretch to imagine similar people working within the intelligence community. Perhaps they don't work there today but there's nothing stopping them working there tomorrow. Again the US has a history of abusive surveillance, the FBI has a very checkered past to say the least. I especially don't like what I'm hearing about the relationship between the DEA and the Mexican drug cartels. We really must not be complacent about abuses by these organizations. By the time it is indisputable that they have been subverted, it will probably be too late to change them.
All positive growth eventually flattens out and becomes sigmoid, but a lot of phenomena experience negative growth and nose dive. No gentle curve, but a hard kink and perfect flat line at zero. Forever. I think it would be a stretch to categorize that pattern as sigmoid. Predicting a sigmoid pattern for negative growth implies some sort of a soft landing (depending on your definition of soft).
We can think of many populations that are no longer with us. So just a caution about over applying this reasoning in the negative case.