I’ll be honest, I can’t engage with some lesswrong posts because of the endless hedging, introspection and over specifying. The healthy desire to be clear and rational can become like a compulsion, one that’s actually very demanding of the reader’s time and patience. The truth is, one could clarify, quantify and ‘go meta’ on any step in any argument for untold thousands of words. So you have to decide where to stop and where to expand. This sort of strategic restraint is at the core of good writing style.
So while I can agree that the classic style may be unsuitable for many purposes when carried to an extreme, you have to decide where your communications fit on a scale. The opposite of writing everything in a fully classic style is a world where every piece of writing about anything becomes endless throat clearing and philosophising.
If the population falls the circumstances that created the low birth rate will change. This seems like the equivalent of an economist extrapolating a high inflation situation into the future and determining that only billionaires will be able to afford tomatoes.