(Not directed at OP, just a general statement).
I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice. To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.
It’s not much better if the buyers are an infertile male/female pair. Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever. As for the mother, a woman abandoning her child should be a tragic and rare fact of life, not a business practice.
And no, fucking around with eggs and sperm so that the child isn’t even related to the woman in whose womb it rests for 9 months doesn’t make it better. It’s a base practice designed to obfuscate the nature of the transaction.
Some people can’t have children. That’s just the way it is. ‘Solving’ it with prostitution and (from the child’s perspective) kidnapping is supremely selfish and from my perspective absolutely unacceptable in a society with any pretensions to morality.
Corvos
2mo ago
He used to be a somewhat ordinary young man with an eclectic reading habit, allowing him to mix weird rationality ideas while still understanding the opposite perspective. Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.
No matter how much he tries, if he does still try, he can’t really empathise with the people outside the blessed circle. They’re just too different from him now. At the same time, general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
Corvos
30d ago
In no way is an overstatement, although in many ways I agree. To take the obvious one, sexual freedoms have clearly increased, not entirely to society’s benefit.
Corvos
1yr ago
There’s a long discussion downthread on the possibility/desirability of a truce between Ukraine and Russia. Moral considerations aside, a large number of commentators thought that it would be foolish to sue for peace under pretty much any circumstances because Putin wouldn’t keep to it.
It seems to me that refocusing efforts towards fortifying at/near the current de facto borders would change the calculus by making it much more painful to break a peace. I’m thinking especially wide-ranging minefields. As I understand it, this has made it quite difficult for Ukrainians to advance, could the same be made to work in reverse? And if so, how practical would it be to build up such defences in the current climate with current levels of international assistance?
Corvos
5mo ago
The funding freeze it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”.
They did. But it worked for him, he’s fine. He doesn’t need influence with conservatives and frankly I don’t think he wants it.
I think also that he just made his peace with woke. It’s less confrontational than it was, and he agreed with most of it to start with, and the main issue he had with it (feminism) is no longer an issue for him.
Corvos
4mo ago
In which case, you have my sympathy. As I said:
It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.
It’s not what I’d hoped for either, but there are other ways to contribute to society.
Corvos
7mo ago
Thanks to everyone who answered my hypothetical about the startup.
General opinion seems to come down to ‘you don’t owe them anything but a decent sum of money would be a gentlemanly / ladylike show of gratitude. Which seems about right to me.
One of the reasons I’m interested in the question is that much social conflict comes from the discrepancy between the market value of labour (determined primarily by the number and type of people able to do the work) and what you might call the utility value (determined by how important it is that the work gets done. For example, @PutAHelmetOn’s code saves hundreds of thousands in processing costs, farmers stop everyone dying of famine, longshoremen make it possible to have international trade (modulo automation).
I would say the primary economic conflict of the last two hundred years is that the employees think in terms of the utility of their work while customers and employers think in terms of the market value.
Trade unions and guilds have historically been used as a method of arbitrage between these two values, limiting competition to drive market value closer to utility value. And the communist states show pretty clearly to my that trying to base your society on something other than the market value causes problems. I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.
Would like to write an effort post but this is what I have for now.
(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).
Are you saying that nobody can ever again organise large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants because Hitler once used it as an excuse 80 years ago? Or that they can only do it if their arguments are purely economic and make it clear at all times that they love and approve of immigrants & hate Nazis and Xi?
(And of course everyone will take these professions at face value and not at all accuse him/her of being a secret Nazi trying to sound harmless.)
Other than mass amnesty, what is your proposed policy?
Corvos
5mo ago
The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.
Not only is every close relationship tinged with ‘Sam and Frodo must be porking’ style analysis but (innocent) touch is very good for people - it releases oxytocin, it’s how we bond. One gender is now largely deprived of it.
He did. It’s the old OKCupid data showing that, while male rate the average woman as averagely attractive, women rate the average man as extremely unattractive. And indeed any man below the 5th percentile or so.
Of course, it would be nice to have replications but there never will be, because if true this strongly indicates that any society where women are free to choose their mates or to remain single will be one where huge numbers of both sexes die alone. The latter choice was not possible in historic societies and is the main reason for our current predicament IMO. That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.
From the link:
Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating.
Women don’t just find men less attractive; the median and mode rating is 2 out of 7. Even more strikingly, the second most-common rating is 1 out of 7 — and near-zero men in the sample received 7 out of 7. (Over the years, by the way, I’ve repeatedly said “exactly zero,” but if you look close at the original post archived by Gwern, that’s not quite true).
The OkCupid results are far from unique. But the graphs are stark enough to inspire mutual anger. Common angry male reactions include: “Women have absurdly unrealistic standards” as well as “Women are just cruel.” Common angry female responses include: “It’s not our fault that most men suck” and “Why should I settle?”
But the only thing less constructive than anger is mutual anger. The data reveal an ugly truth that we all need to face. While there are several ways to capture this ugly truth, my favorite is just: The typical man disgusts the typical woman. You can expand this to: The median man moderately disgusts the typical woman, and the bottom quarter of men strongly disgust the typical woman.
[Various musings on how men and women can treat each other with empathy]
Update: Stefan Schubert points out that the OKCupid estimates of the male-female gap are unusually extreme. Emil Kirkegaard agrees after thoroughly reviewing a wide range of measures. True enough, but we should trust the OKCupid data more. The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.
Riffing on this discussion I would like to present a scenario:
I am the CEO of a struggling startup, expecting to take a call from a very busy potential client. We are out of funds and will go bankrupt without the client’s business. The client, a CEO, is busy and if I miss this call he will certainly not bother to call back.
Unfortunately my phone has died at the crucial moment. I’m in a cafe so I run up and down the tables, begging to borrow someone’s charger. Somebody gives me the charger, I take the call, and my startup goes on to make billions. The call, and therefore the charger, has made me rich beyond imagining.
One the one hand, lending me the charger was an utterly trivial act: even ten dollars in thanks would be a little windfall for the lender. On the other hand, without the lender I would be destitute instead of a billionaire. How much of a debt do I owe the person who lent me their charger?
Edit: ‘owe’ in a moral sense, as opposed to enforceable by a court.
Corvos
1yr ago
Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.
This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception.
This is exactly what the neoreactionary critique gets at, though. In this scenario, the process is your king; your final authority. And because those processes are carried out by people, ultimately those people are your kings.
In short, this way of thinking creates and sustains an oligarchic form of government. Don’t like the process? Don’t like who runs it? Then appeal. By what means? A process. Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.
Honestly, I agree with you that this is probably the best way of doing things a lot of the time, as opposed to direct personal power or mob democracy. But this flaw is inherent and IMO when the bureaucracy gets too powerful and too uniform then this form of government starts to curdle.
Corvos
2yr ago
I’ve been reading the debate downthread about how Christianity and a more tradcon approach (defined I think largely as a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘focus on improving your community rather than enacting political change’) stack up in a globalised, highly urban environment. I find the conversation very interesting but short on concrete detail. For example, ‘people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables’, and ‘You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.’. I have considerable sympathy for both of these statements! But they strike me as being a bit too abstract to tease out real-life disagreement, so I thought I would post an example of what seems to me to be a concrete, modernist/globalist adjacent problem that’s been troubling me for some time and get peoples’ thoughts on it.
I grew up in central London, and my parents still live there, on a fairly busy street. There is approximately one beggar every ten metres. It is strongly suspected locally that these positions are managed by organised crime - they are almost all foreign, burly, and articulate, to the extent that it makes you very suspicious as to why they can’t get a real job if they wish to. Each of these people expects at least a pound from you as you pass by, which means that even a trip to the grocery will cost you £5-£10, about as much as the groceries.
What is the appropriate, Christian, response to this situation? Off the top of my head:
-
Pay them. However, if you are giving money to every beggar you see in central London, you had better have a really stupendous salary. Moreover, because the beggars are now highly mobile, both nationally and internationally, the number of beggars is fully capable of expanding to the limits of your collective generosity. (This is the modernism/globalism angle.)
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Don’t pay them. This feels straightforwardly unChristian. If memory serves, Jesus pretty much said, ‘take the coat off your back and give it to the coatless man over there.’ You can square it to yourself by pointing out that they’re probably predators, which they are, but they’re still more desperate than you are.
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Don’t pay them, but feel guilty about it / donate to charity / tithe. I think these are basically 2 with extra steps. I sympathise with Scott’s view that tithing is basically a down payment on the limitless stuff you actually owe, but it still seems to fall short of genuinely Christlike behaviour.
In short, how does Christian charity hold up when the modern world is capable of delivering infinite suffering to your door? (This mirrors our immigration debate to some extent.) Apologies if people don’t find this helpful but I was interested to get your opinions.
Corvos
5mo ago
I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.
I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
female homophobia
All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.
Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that literally means ‘danger’, baby.
It’s like when someone told Dennis Miller that Evian (for those who don’t remember, it was one of the first bottled water brands) is Naive spelled backwards, and he said ‘no way, that’s too f***ing perfect.’
This one was sufficiently appropriate and unsubtle that several people noticed.
It's Japanese. It means 'fish', because the founders were interested in flocking behaviours and are based in Tokyo. I get that he's doing a riff on Unsong, but Unsong was playing with puns for kicks. This just strikes me as being really self-centred.
This too was good times. The Best Possible Situation is when you get harmless textbook toy examples that foreshadow future real problems, and they come in a box literally labeled ‘danger.’ I am absolutely smiling and laughing as I write this.
When we are all dead, let none say the universe didn’t send two boats and a helicopter.
In general this seems to be someone whose views were formed by reading Harry Potter fanfic fifteen years ago and has no experience of ever using AI in person. LLMs are matrices that generate words when multiplied in a certain way. When told to run in a loop altering code so that it produces interesting results and doesn't fail, it does that. When not told to do that, it doesn't do that. The idea that an LLM is spontaneously going to develop a consciousness and carefully hide its power level so that it can do better at the goals that by default it doesn't have is silly. If we generate a superintelligent LLM (and we have no idea how to, see below) we will know and we will be able to ask it nicely to behave.
It's not that he doesn't have any point at all, it's just that it's so crusted over with paranoia and contempt and wordcel 'cleverness' that it's the opposite of persuasive.
Putting that aside, LLMs have a big problem with creativity. They can fill in the blanks very well, or apply style A to subject B, but they aren't good at synthesizing information from two fields in ways that haven't been done before. In theory that should be an amazing use case for them, because unlike human scientists even a current LLM like GPT 4 can be an expert on every field simultaneously. But in practice, I haven't been able to get a model to do it. So I think AI scientists are far off.
In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of White person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere [...]
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of White people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.
They have no destiny except under the [boot].
The Hanania pill seems to consist of arrogant shitstirrers realising that they loathe most white people just like they loathe everyone else.
They seemed more like ... modern Europeans.
God forbid.
I'm answering twice, but I think the main reason for the rather forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing. It's hard to defend things like closing all schools for a year now that nobody's frightened of Covid any more, so they're whistling nonchalantly and desperately trying to forget it. Nobody influential will try to bring it up again because there's almost certainly public proof that they went all in on it too.
It takes a lot of guts and moral stringency to think back and realise that you panicked and smashed our society to slivers for almost nothing. Very few people, public or private, are capable of that.
People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.
I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.
It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.
In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.
Corvos
1yr ago
I’ll back @ymeskhout here and say that there’s a pretty significant amount of motte-and-baileying going on, where people retreat to ‘obviously the Deep State didn’t literally hack voting machines and the people who claim to have evidence of large-scale ballot stuffing are grifters, but there was still a widespread effort across the country to swing it for Biden using unsavoury methods’. And then the minute pressure is relaxed, people go back to ‘the deep state literally stole the election’.
So I understand why he’s being a hardass and saying, ‘can any of you provide any evidence at all that the election was literally, actually stolen’. And he gets crickets, or attempts at sanewashing.
I do actually believe that the combination of censorship, changed voting rules, and keeping Biden in a basement so his senility wouldn’t show add up to ‘an election that should shame a first-world country’. But the American Right has an amazing ability to take valid, compelling critiques and convert them into obviously wrong factual claims.
Corvos
4mo ago
In the UK we used to have a strong two-track system.
The most damaging criticism came from a group of genuinely “bad at school, good at life” people. The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment. There weren’t that many of them but everyone loves an underdog story so they were very influential. It made the system look ludicrous.
I can’t now remember names but think eg Einstein or Gauss.
Corvos
10mo ago
Out of all the issues in our world, "women around me are showing me more of their breasts" is not one that I personally consider a problem ... I tend to love women, and part of that is that I love enjoying women's erotic company.
If you can get women's erotic company, of course you'll feel that way. But presumably you can understand why men who can't feel that immodest women are flaunting something in front of them that men are biologically hardwired to respond to, having no intention of rewarding that response with anything except disgust or punishment. From that perspective, it's oblivious at best and cruel at worst.
I grew up in a mostly-male environment, and my introduction to female company coincided with my introduction to online 'gamer girl' feminism which was anti-sex in a way that would leave Christian fundamentalists gaping. By the time I got enough worldliness to appreciate how far those feminists were detached from reality, it was too late. I had missed all the opportunities for learning how men and women were supposed to flirt in a low-stakes environment, and been warped into a sort of cringing resentfulness that is obviously toxic to women. Had things been otherwise, I would feel otherwise. Path dependency at its finest.
So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them. As with our commentator however many months ago who wished that it was okay to enter a monastery in the modern world, or Scott Aaronson who wished to be allowed to chemically castrate himself.
Tangents:
Victorian England, from what I understand, despite all of its prudity was not some pinnacle of social order, it had a higher violent crime rate than modern England.
To be fair, modern England has CCTV and DNA forensics. I think it's quite possible that Victorian England mores transferred to the present day would be far better than what we have now.
why do women tend to lean left?
I think it's most a desire not to be nasty. Most right-wing philosophy ultimately gets to the point of saying, 'we are going to have to do nasty thing X to avert bad scenario Y'. I've generally found the women in my life much less likely to bite bullets than men.
Corvos
2mo ago
Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.
We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.
I too can set up a neat dichotomy that totally ignores your point: is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
But moving on to your actual objection, there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children: you could kidnap women, keep them underground, perform IVF on them, take the baby away, rinse and repeat for 20 years and that’s 20 babies per woman. Who are you to tell those babies that their lives aren’t worth living? Maybe you can give the 20 babies to 20 childless cat ladies, and bump up the utilons some more.
I think children are hugely important. I’m on record as saying so. It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.
(Sorry, I’m migrating this over).
Pope Francis has died at the age of 88. My understanding is that all of his plausible successors are more conservative in terms of doctrine. I imagine that Latin Mass will be easier but are they likely to make any significant changes to the Vatican II settlement?
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