Shirayuki
20hr ago
Fantastic post, you've given me a lot to think about. If couched in those terms, I suppose I am indeed a blackpiller lol.
I’m guessing you’re from a striver background and are on the first or second rung of some or other intense career and feeling pretty lost
Scary psychoanalysis haha, that's pretty much it. Spent a bunch of time striving to "make it" and now I'm having my quarter life crisis I suppose...
I agree completely on the idea that the blackpill is the idea that nothing you do feels like it matters, where you have no traction on something you wish to move.
If I say I'm blackpilled over, say, my ability to beat the final boss of Final Fantasy or improve my deadlift obviously that's silly; everyone who isn't disabled can do that, and there's clear feedback loops on how to accomplish your goals. It's very easy to have "traction" when playing video games and when working out, which is why so many men find themselves drawn to such things.
By the same metric, if I say I'm blackpilled over my ability to beat Lebron in ball or beat Carlsen in chess it's hardly a "blackpill" in any real sense, there's nothing I could ever do to achieve that and my chance of doing either is 0.00%, any blackpill here is just being realistic and I should probably abandon my goal.
Where it gets complicated is for goals that are neither 0% or 100%; I definitely agree that a lot of disaffected guys are cognitively distorted about what they can achieve, but at the same time it's abjectively true that career and dating "success" is becoming harder and more costly, while any feedback loops are increasingly being broken down.
The true percentages of success nobody can really know, an optimist might say they're high enough to be worth trying, while a nihilist might say their chances of finding a partner that improves their life are the same as my chances of checkmating Carlsen, so it's time to check out; two ways of looking at the same picture.
Like the supposed truth that men aren’t big spenders and would happily sleep on a mattress in a cardboard box that had wifi
Of course I can't speak for all men, but I think it's a bit more subtle than men be spending too; yofuckreddit put it well in the sense that many men's lives are more simple. Sure, I spend money on my home office and gym because I can afford it, but that doesn't really change my day to day life; if I ever went broke I'd still have a computer and be working out.
Obviously speaking in generalities, but I've found women enjoy a more dynamic life and are more attuned to keeping up with the lives of others; new experiences, new toys, new clothes etc. You can see how this might pre-dispose men to dropping out as opposed to women.
I’ve never seen an “average” man have issues with dating (casual sex, sure, but not dating).
I agree in the sense that most people, especially in middle-class+ demographics, could probably find a partner if they put a lot of effort into it and relaxed their standards; a lot of incel/red pill discourse is either fairly lower-class coded (single mothers, criminal chads etc) or wildly high standards for a partner and for a relationship.
The point I'm more trying to make is that it's significantly more difficult and costly than it ever used to be to find a partner, and even for those who do, the incentives for actually having a partner are falling further and further. Having high standards is not wrong, for a lot of people it probably is true that they're better off alone vs partnering with the people they can convince to commit to them; the single life is pretty damn good nowadays!
You can ask out basically any single member of the opposite sex. People try to set you up with their friends/co-workers/whatnot
You can hook-up with random strangers at a party
And as a man the bar is honestly pretty low and it’s ridiculously easy to set yourself apart
you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation
I will say that this is emphatically not the lived experience of most (straight) young men nowadays [it may be different in queer spaces like yours, I'm not sure].
Others already linked Radicalizing the Romanceless, but in general unless you're significantly above average in looks/charisma/wealth etc you're not getting set-up [especially work relationships are verboten], off-the-cuff hook-ups are not happening unless you're in college and rarer even there, and the primary way most men are going to meet women is through the dating app hellscape.
Yeah, if put in those terms I definitely consider marriage primarily as an material alliance for childrearing purposes.
I enjoy fiction about romance occasionally, but I suppose I'm blackpilled/realistic/cynical enough to think about romance (in the eros sense) in Roman terms, as a force that wounds men and drives them crazy; that the initial burst of limerance for someone that doesn't exist will always fade with time, and that it has very significant risks to my health and happiness.
At the end of the day, romantic drive (in the storge sense) is definitely more something that would hypothetically be nice, not something that substantially motivates me day to day.
Shirayuki
21hr ago
Yes, you're correct that I'm a materialistic atheist, and that this is where my beliefs have lead me to.
I enjoy reading your posts on theology; in the words of the rationalists, rationality is winning, and I do believe that the religious are winning in a way that secular society increasingly is not. It's pretty clear, however, that society has largely rejected religion as a whole, and so it is for me; I don't think it's possible to convince myself into religion at this point.
Like I said in another post, perhaps the way this ends is that us atheists all die out and the religious end up fighting for control of the planet; it could certainly go a lot worse.
Shirayuki
21hr ago
I do have fears of tail-risks involving medical episodes that could be fixed by just having someone to call an ambulance or tell me I've lost it
You can always consider getting a roommate or checking yourself early into some sort of supervision program.
I've heard this sentiment a few times, but realistically 50, 60 years is a long time; plenty of happily married couples end up with someone dying and the other being forced to go it alone, the kids end up apathetic/abusive/fuck ups etc.
I'll grant that having a family does give you better odds of mitigating these tail risks compared to being permanently single, but I've seen enough elderly end up alone and abused even with a big family to know that it's no guarantee.
Shirayuki
21hr ago
The main problem I have with blackpilled monk types (and this post is pretty archetypal blackpill despite claiming otherwise) is that it can work while you're younger but it has an expiration date
Yes, to some extent this is true; I'm coming at this from a place of relative financial privilege, am not looking to divest all my worldly possessions anytime soon and the risk calculus probably does change if you're flat out completely broke.
Yet at the end of the day, everyone and everything has an expiration date, doesn't it? You can justify working arbitrarily hard for the sake of security, but if you get a terminal cancer diagnosis or you swallow a bee no amount of grinding at work or worrying about it would have helped very much.
It's mostly a question of risk tolerance; there's plenty of guys on the Bogleheads forums that won't retire until they have 100x annual expenses which is frankly silly, there's plenty of guys who regret being workaholics on their death beds, and plenty of guys with significantly higher risk tolerance than either you or I who are happy to carpe diem and forget about retirement altogether.
My P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) is probably higher than the rationalists or the collapseniks, but how high is my
P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) * P (I run into a problem where I need more money and the state won't provide) * P(working harder would actually result in me having the money I need)?
Not sure about that one.
Shirayuki
22hr ago
This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
I've probably been on 250 dates, had sex with 125 women, been in some serious relationships
I hang out with her and her ballet friends. They're top 1% in terms of looks and talent
It's true for the ballerinas and its true for the SF tech girlies and the PE girls and the McKinsey girls and the HR ladies too
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I like women, in fact I love women. I love going on dates with them, I love hanging out with them, I love flirting with them, I love hooking up with them, I love dating them
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative
I don't consider myself as a passive victim but it's undeniably true that people as a group are passive victims. Just look at weight loss; everyone knows that eating healthy food in small portions will mean you lose weight, and yet the efficacy of prescribing diet and exercise as a health intervention rounds down to 0%, and almost all people need Ozempic before they actually lose any weight.
Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
Because marrying her makes my life better and allows me to make hers better, isn't that what love is?
Because having children and raising them well makes my life better and I can give them a good life, isn't that what love is?
Because treating my parents well and being treated well in return makes my life better, isn't that what love is?
I don't mean to say that we should all be trad rvturners, the idea is silly, and I'm well aware that there was a lot of misery hidden in pre-modernity, and that not all trad marriages were idyllic and happy. I simply mean to say that in the past, working hard, getting hitched, and doing my best to make it work pretty directly correlated with my own incentives, in a way that it's not at all clear whether it does now.
you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for
You may call me a cynical bastard for saying this, but if the incentives don't line up for me, saying that I should stop caring about my own ego and pleasure to care about someone else's just sounds like they're trying to figure out the best way to exploit me.
Shirayuki
22hr ago
convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs
No rationalist or hedonist of even middling intelligence would ever recommend doing destructive drugs unless on your deathbed.
The downsides are obviously much worse than the upsides, drugs will break your body and mind trying to chase the dragon, and you'll likely ruin all your relationships and die early.
I don't think there is a rationalist reason not to be selfish and NEET
Well, that's the point of this post, isn't it? If being selfish and NEET is what society incentivizes, then eventually that's what you'll get. I have a deep respect for the faithful, but clearly religion is no longer a scalable solution for society at large.
Perhaps in a hundred years all us atheists will be dead and we'll be back to Christianity and Islam battling it out for dominance of the planet.
It’s not some new thing caused by the awfulness of modern women
I tried to make it quite clear that I don't blame women beyond the fact that they are also rationally responding to incentives.
The standard feminist line, that a man must make their life better than the counter-factual, is fundamentally true. The revealed preference of the majority of women is that pregnancy/childbirth/child-rearing is physically unpleasant, they enjoy the economic freedom provided by work, the state and childlessness, and that they disproportionately pursue hypergamy [in the same sense that most men would disproportionately prefer one-sided polygamy if they had the opportunity, it's no great failing].
I cannot blame them for responding to incentives any more than I can be blamed for responding to mine or the average citizen can be blamed for contributing to climate change; I merely wish that it didn't have to be this way.
Part of it is that modern society just coddles men more.
There's a good post on the Motte, that I can't seem to find, that pointed out that an increasing amount of skills, from fitness to cooking, are becoming bi-modal. Most people, lacking significant incentive, will let their skills atrophy, and a small subset of people will compete at all costs to take those skills to the very limits.
I think it's a similar dynamic here, where it's indeed true that lots of men get coddled and drop out in the face of adversity, but there will always be strivers who will fight at all costs, and so competing for "prestige" or "status" still becomes ever-increasingly difficult even as more people drop out.
This is pretty much the point of this effortpost; sure, I'm pretty successful relative to the average young person and could grind even harder, but at the end of the day what's actually incentivizing me to try so hard when all the incentives are pointing the other way?
A lot of the boomer success literally does come from being willing to work twelve hour days in travel jobs while sharing bedrooms
My father is the hardest working man I've ever known, who moved heaven and earth to bring himself out of poverty and broke his body to provide for the family. He is and will always be my hero for what he's done for my mother and I, and yet sometimes I look at him and I regret forcing him through so much pain and suffering.
He's never complained once; yet at the end of the day everyone likes to adulate heroes from afar, but how many people want to suffer as a hero does?
First, I think one major problem that we are seeing with a lot of…everything… is that the ability for people to extract more “value” out of the average individual.
You may be interested in the Chinese concept of neijuan.
While I do think free market capitalism is really the only incentive structure that works at scale and we've never found anything better, I find it hard to disagree with the leftist criticism that the drive to optimize everything in sight, abetted by increased technological capacity, significantly eventuates human misery.
You can see similar dynamics everywhere, from college applications, dating and even PVP video games, where the competition is more and more of a red queen's race. Everyone would be better off if we all stepped off the brakes collectively, but of course nobody has any incentive to surrender an advantage and so we all drive off the cliff together.
Which leads me to my second point - I think the unfairness of, well, everything is one of the major drivers towards people being unhappy with buying into the system
I think most people just aren't psychologically equipped to deal with significant differences in the status of those "around" you without any way of being able to climb up. It's one thing if the king is far away, you'll never meet him and you only have to compete for status with your tribe, a whole another thing to feel like you have to compete with status with the entire world, which of course is an impossible fight to win and only the insane would try to joust the windmill.
Is it "fair" that the family of my lawyer friend is ludicrously rich because his grandfather owns a bunch of valuable patents? Objectively his grandfather's provided much more value to the world than I ever have and my friend is a great guy personally, but my monkey brain just isn't happy about it and still makes me miserable from time to time.
The modern liberal ideology of trying to Harrison Bergeron anyone that sticks their head up is of course a ridiculous way of addressing this dynamic, but it is true that free market libertarians have no answer.
I have no answer to neijuan either unfortunately; I can only wish you the best with your job and partner.
In many ways that the people who predicted East Asia to be the future of the West had the right idea, I can only hope we look more like Japan and less like South Korea.
Shirayuki
2d ago
Why Should I Care?
I recently greatly enjoyed Naraburns' post on the life of Dylan, so I thought I would give back by putting together my thoughts as someone that empathizes greatly with Dylan, and would probably be picking pineapples right next to him if I didn't happen to be born with some aptitude for shape rotation. To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
As any good economist knows, people at scale generally do what they're incentivized to do. Yet from the point of view of a young man it's increasingly harder to get a bite out of carrots historically used to incentivize men to act pro-socially, while simultaneously most of the sticks and fences previously used to corral people's worst impulses have disintegrated. Viewed from a sufficiently cynical lens, it becomes more and more rational from a self-interest perspective to drop out of the system and become a disaffected bum, and indeed this does seem to be reflected in the male labor force participation rate.
The elephant in the room is, of course, dating discourse. It is absolutely true and subject to much discussion amongst these types of circles that relationship formation and TFR is dropping off a cliff in almost all countries on the planet. Everyone has their own hot take as to what's going wrong and who's at fault; personally, I just think it comes down to incentives.
Men no longer need women for sexual gratification [when HD video porn exists] or domestic labor [when household appliances exist], women no longer need men for physical or economic security [when careers and the state will provide] and there's significantly less status or social pressure for either gender to get into and stay in relationships early, unless you run in religious or traditional circles. It's a similar story for having children; most people, if asked, will at least nominally say that they want children, yet revealed preference is for global TFR collapse. In agrarian societies having children isn't a great burden relatively and they become useful quite quickly, whereas in modern societies having child(ren) will result in significant changes to your lifestyle, and impose notable financial burden [less than what most PMC's might think, but certainty an extant one] for at least twenty years for a very uncertain return; it's a hard sell to the modal person to make sacrifices to their quality of life and economic stability for the sake of very expensive pets [from an economic perspective].
As a result, polarization between the sexes is at an all-time high as a result as neither sex really needs the other, and left to their own devices the observed tendency is that they mostly end up self-segregating. For men that do still want a relationship and marriage, this means it's the hardest it's ever been; in-person ways for singles to meet have all but disappeared, dating apps are perhaps the most demonic application of technology ever invented, and the very high amount of options that most women now hold [including that to eschew dating altogether] heavily disincentivizing making any sort of commitment [to be clear, almost all men would and do act in similar ways given the same breadth of options as well].
I don't agree with the blackpillers, in the sense that I think the majority of people could eventually find a partner if they put in enough effort [which might be an incredible amount depending on the starting point!]. However, it is true that we went from a society where the standard life script ended up with everyone except for a few oddballs partnered up, to one where the standard life script results in most men ending up alone unless they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on dating or are exceptionally [hot/rich/charismatic/lucky] in some way. Most people really just go with the flow, and hence increasingly more people end up alone.
Even for those who do manage to summit the mountain, the returns on entering into a relationship and marriage seem to be diminished for most men. It's likely to be expensive financially [I'm not convinced by Caplan-style arguments that relationships save you money, the most expensive budget items like housing, childcare and healthcare are largely rivalrous or wouldn't otherwise exist, and it's reasonably well studied that relationships where the woman makes more money suffer] and of course there's little to really secure commitment or incentivize sticking it out if something goes wrong; getting divorced is one of the easiest ways to have your life ruined, after all.
At the end of the day, modern relationship formation is less about the practical benefits as was the case for almost all of human history, and almost entirely about self-esteem and self-actualization; hence the rise of incels [who are bereft of the validation of being desired, not the literal act of sex] and romantasy fiction. How much does it validate me that I have a high status / hot / rich partner willing to have sex and be seen in public with me? Have I now truly found my soulmate, the ideal parent for my children? This is, of course, an impossible standard to meet for the vast majority of people and relationships and hence most people who think this way end up dissatisfied and unhappy - and yet without the illusion of self-actualization what else is there really to gain bonding yourself to someone else with a bond that is not a bond?
With all is said and done, as the mountain grows ever-harder to summit and the rewards for reaching the peak become ever-increasingly a mirage, I think it's an increasingly rational choice for many people to decide not to climb and to try and find contentment at the bottom. That's certainly how I've been feeling lately, at the very least.
This brings me to my next point, where if a first world man decides that they no longer want to conquer the mountain, there's not really much else that buying into modern capitalism can offer them in many cases. It is of course a stereotype that men are happy living in squalor, and that women be shopping, but I've found it to be remarkably accurate; women make up something like 70% to 80% of consumer spending, and in general it's motivation to be a provider that drives many men to work as hard as they can, most of whom otherwise are pretty happy living with a mattress and WiFi.
If one's lost the motivation or opportunity to provide, suddenly most of what remains expensive in modern abundant society doesn't really matter; you don't have to spend money on up-keeping a lifestyle and status symbols to attract a mate, and you no longer need to spend most of your life paying off a house in the best school district you can afford to keep the wife happy and the child as advantaged as possible.
Similarly, the stick of impoverishment is no real threat in any rich welfare state; He who does not work, neither shall he eat is now comically false, food [and non-housing living expenses in general] are pretty trivial to cover if you're smart/frugal about it and if you're not the gibs will probably cover them for you anyways. Housing is a real problem that's been exacerbated near-universally across the world, but if you no longer need to provide for a family or make a lot of money there's still plenty of ways to keep a roof over your head without working too hard; living out of a van, moving to somewhere where the jobs aren't great but living is cheap, or the good old solution of failing to launch.
Anecdotally, my college friend group includes a guy who dropped out to live with his parents and do gig work and a high-powered lawyer who inherited a few million, and despite their significantly different socioeconomic classes still live materially similar lives and are still good friends. Sure, the lawyer can afford to live in a massive house, fly business and collect a bunch of expensive trinkets, but when it comes down to it neither of them worry about their basic needs, and spend most of their leisure time doing the same things; working out, playing the same video games, watching the same tv/movies/anime, scrolling too much on social media and going traveling to similar places from time from time.
Of course being wealthier and more powerful gives you more optionality in the face of adversity, and that's great if you're born into wealth or are exceptional/lucky human capital, but honestly the vast majority of people are never going to have enough power or money to matter if anything really goes wrong with their life, even if they spend their entire lives grinding and buying into the system. "Making it" to middle manager at a big firm or owning a small business doesn't save you from targeted lawfare, developing late-stage cancer where the experimental treatment is going to cost a few million out of pocket, or your home burning down and getting denied by insurance. And of course, no amount of money can save you from the true black swans e.g unaligned superintelligence, gain of function^2 electric boogaloo or nuclear war - how many young people in the first world really believe that they'll be taking money out of their retirement fund and living life as normal in 2080?.
So if the dating market is FUBAR and money has questionable marginal utility, what else is left to encourage men to work hard? Well, people will think you're a loser and low status if you don't work or you work a shitty job, maybe that will work? That's true, and historically granting young man status when they do pro-social things has been a pretty effective motivator.
Yet now we live in a highly globalized society for better or worse. No matter how far you are up your chosen totem poles, status has gone global; it's easy to look up, see who's still above you and feel bad about yourself. Chad is probably just a twitter DM away, in fact! Being unemployed or a gig worker might be low status, but even "good" jobs don't feel much higher status either; it's hard to feel the average software engineer or electrician job is particularly high status when constantly inundated with people who are orders of magnitude more successful. To me, it feels like the endgame is SoKo or China; competition for "high status" becomes more and more ludicrous and absurd, and everyone else sits on the sidelines resigned to feeling like a loser even if their lives are materially still great.
Faced with such competitiveness, you can either throw yourself into the maw and try and win an winnable game, or decide to tap out of the game altogether. Sure, there will always be those with immense will to power that will maximize for status, to strive for the stars and win at at all costs, but realistically most people don't have such strength of will. If the only options are play and lose and not play at all, it increasingly feels like the best play is to just drop out of striving for status altogether; it helps if you're no longer invested in dating or careerism, the arenas where status is most instrumental...
This piece ended up being significantly longer than I intended, and really I don't expect any sympathy nor do I have any solutions [much less politically viable and moral ones] to what I see as a deeply society-wide malaise. I have a deep respect for the incredibly autistic open-source emulator developer, the Japanese master sushi chef, and the Amish craftsman, those who still Care about their crafts in the truest sense of the word. Yet one cannot choose to win the lottery of fascinations, one cannot choose to be born into a high-trust society, and one cannot choose to have faith when it does not exist.
At the end of the day, it's hard to argue it's not a triumph of society that the modal first worlder spends most of their time wallowing in comfort and engaging in zero-sum status struggles in a world where so many still suffer. Yet what is great can easily be lost, and modernity as it exists today cannot survive without the buy-in of young men. Maybe it doesn't matter, that in the end us dysgenic neurotics will end up being weeded out of the gene pool, and that future populations will be able to break out of this local minima and take over the world. Perhaps the prayers for the machine god to deliver us salvation will come true and the priests shall finally immanentize the eschaton so that none of this matters.
In some ways it feels like to me that the barbarians are banging on the gates while nobody else notices or cares, as everyone else seems to be whiling away the hours eating bread and going to the circus. But well, if nobody else is manning the walls either, why should I be the one who cares?
Shirayuki
6d ago
Extremely depends on what you consider high status, Ilona Staller was famously elected to the Italian parliament off the top of my head.
I mean, I agree in general that active and former prostitutes are generally lower status, but I don't think looking for high status outliers is a good way to show that, since the vast majority of people are not high status or influential by any useful definition of the phrase.
Honestly, former prostitutes have better odds of becoming influential just by virtue of being closer to centers of power. It is not like most nurses or childcare workers have any power or influence either even those are much more respectable professions.
Shirayuki
18d ago
This didn't happen during industrialisation and electrification though. Yes, to some extent the nature of work expanded and changed, but productivity grew very obviously and rapidly in those eras in a way that we don't seem to be seeing with computerisation.
Shirayuki
18d ago
Great post.
I've recently learned about Solow's Paradox, the idea that productivity growth in developed countries doesn't appear to be reflecting the impact of computers / the internet / the smartphones despite their obvious incredible impacts on society and it's been pretty fascinating to think about.
Consensus seems to be split between productivity statistics overestimating inflation and underestimating real growth and theories that computing really just hasn't significantly moved productivity for various reasons [personally I think this would explain a lot....]
What kind of catastrophic scenarios are you thinking about?
I can see a lot of ways in which current/modest AI advancements are going to make the world worse (damage to the education system, the end of audiovisual content as reliable evidence, propaganda/astroturfing/surveillance) but really these are all just extensions of existing slow decline, not catastrophic scenarios per se.
I'm personally of the opinion that normie dooming about AI and the job market is just a way to express the growing malaise that's enveloping the west and has little to do with actual macroeconomic effects.
Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.
On the other hand, if we top out somewhere around "useful tools" level as we are now it's not clear to me that anything is likely to change macro-economically. There's been no meaningful changes to any macroeconomic statistics attributable to LLM's as of yet [unless you count the wild valuations of AI companies].
In my domain, software, there's quite bitter culture wars about how useful LLM's are on a micro level [personally I find them very useful but certainly not a replacement for anyone yet] but there really haven't been noticeable improvements in software productivity on a macro level. All the commercial software I use day-to-day is still varying degrees of shit and there's been no noticeable change in velocity in open-source [the use of Copilot in the .net repo is quite amusing, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762].
Even the internet, clearly the most transformative and life-altering invention of the last half-century has had questionable impacts on GDP and productivity growth.
It's true that individual tasks may become obsoleted like copy-writing and perhaps translation [although every translator friend of mine seems to be drowning in work right now] but jobs have always been augmented by technology to replace tasks and that's nothing new. The vast majority of white collar work is in my opinion either transformative-AI-complete or there because we want a human [for liability/regulation/comfort] even if a machine could already do it. If we reach the point where AI is not outcompeted by AI-human centaurs in doing meaningful white collar work then we should be much more concerned about not being paperclipped than whether Becky can still get a job in HR or marketing.
To return to the original point, my opinion is that AI kvetching is largely driven by people wanting a safe way to express the sentiment that life in the West is just generally going downhill. I was struck by a quote I heard from a friend the other day, that "nobody dreams of the 22nd century" like men in the 20th century used to dream of what the 21st might look like.
A blue triber might tell you it's because the billionaires are taking all the money and that climate change will end the world, a red triber might say it's because mass immigration and the death of Christian values is ending western society, and a grey triber might say it doesn't matter because AI will save/fix/kill us all. Nobody can agree on the causes, but pretty much nobody in the first world thinks life will look better in a century without some sort of eschatological transformation.
Anecdotally my extended family in the old country seem to be much more optimistic about the future and everyone seems pretty optimistic about AI despite being mostly pretty poor by first world standards. Each generation saw pretty drastic jumps in quality of life and things are looking upwards for the next generation too. You can see here that it's almost all poorer countries on an upwards trajectory excited for AI and richer countries going downhill that don't like it which is interesting to consider.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion
Shirayuki
27d ago
Interesting, thanks.
The current evidence seems to align with my preconceptions that absolutely nothing has happened so far for humans, although I wasn't aware of that dog trial which does seem promising. Perhaps it's true that AI will lead to further innovation in the space, but personally I'd at least like to see some immortal mice before I start hoping to overcome the human condition.
I'm not entirely sure I believe this but the bear case isn't that hard to articulate.
We hit the top of the S-curve for LLM's and they merely become very useful tools instead of ushering in the singularity or obviating human labor. Frontier research starts stagnating as a result of having picked all the low-hanging fruit / the competency crisis / failure of higher ed / loss of state capacity / pick your favourite boogeymen and life in 2050 looks about as similar to 2025 as life in 2025 looks about as similar to 2000. This hypothetical world is probably worse for the median westerner compared to 2025 owing to some combination of immigration / climate / financialisation etc etc and the path of civilization doesn't look great without some sort of technological salvation but it's unlikely that any of these issues will be back-breaking in one generation.
Re preparation: it's interesting to me that a lot of people's reaction to millenarism is to make life choices that would be very dumb in any world where Nothing Happens. Assuming you're already reasonably happy with your current life, liquidating your job and savings seems to me to have low upside (how much happier is burning all your bridges to be a hedonist really going to make you?) and very high downside (I can see lots of worlds where having a decade or more of savings gets you through the worst of AI societal upheaval, and of course if Nothing Happens your life is knocked significantly off-track).
This is kind of where I'm at personally, I still save a large amount of my income even though I'm also not quite sure if life will still look the same in 25 or 50 years. In any world where it does look similar I'm set, I'm more prepared for any medium-level scenario where investments are still useful in getting through the transition period or retain relevance post-transformation, and in worlds where life becomes so good or so bad that property and index funds become worthless there really nothing I could have done anyways, liquidating everything to do drugs or travel doesn't seem like it has a great ROI when I'm already broadly content with my current life.
As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.
You write like you're an AI bull, but your actual case seems bearish (at least compared to the AI 2027 or the Situational Awareness crowd).
LLMs, even if they don't progress one tiny bit further, will be transformative for this role and there are millions of roles like this throughout the economy.
True, there's a lot of places where LLM's could be providing value that are yet unexplored, but changing the workflows of bank analysts is a far cry from the instantiation of a machine god within half a decade.
There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything
This is vibe based I suppose and I can mostly only speak for programming, but personally I think most improvements are coming from increased adoption and tooling since around GPT-4. Benchmarks and twitter hype keep going up but I'm not convinced that this reflects meaningful improvement in models for real-world tasks and use cases.
Have we made any progress on an open-source AMD CUDA equivalent, closed out even a statistically noticeable higher number of outstanding issues in Chromium or made Linux drivers competitive with Windows yet? Has GDP or any macro-economic measure moved at all in a way attributable to AI?
Lots of engineers report more productivity using AI tools and I absolutely do too, but better code completion, better information retrieval and making prototyping much easier doesn't make a replacement for an engineer or even represent the biggest improvement to software dev productivity we've ever seen. I attribute a lot more of my productivity to having access to a compiler, the internet and cloud compute rather than LLM assistance.
With zero advancement at all in capabilities or inference cost reductions what we have now, today, is going to change the world as much as the internet and smart phones. Unquestionably.
I think this is true too, in a decade. The white-collar job market will look quite different and the way we interact with software will be meaningfully different, but like the internet and the smartphone I think the world will still look recognizably similar. I don't think we'll be sipping cocktails on our own personal planet or all dead from unaligned super intelligence any time soon.
Shirayuki
1mo ago
Therein lies the real proof of ownership, really. I agree with you that it's an universal concept but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
If I want something from you and can't take it, then you own it. If I want something from you and can take it, then you don't own it.
This is physical reality and one's physical body isn't exempt from this. Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
Shirayuki
1mo ago
If I'm standing in front of you I'm perfectly capable of making your fingers start moving by having my brain send a signal down my arm. Anything that happens in between those two events is just an implementation detail.
That's a lot of emotive language in your post.
I don't have an opinion about this guy in particular (although clearly you do) but this is a horrific precedent to try and set, this argument could easily be applied to a citizen. There's nothing about the executive's argument that actually requires him to be an immigrant and the courts could equally "not have jurisdiction" over a citizen on foreign soil.
If there was the executive will to actually get this man back it's plainly obvious a phone call could be made to El Salvador to put this man on a flight back tomorrow. He's only there on the behest of the United States in the first place.
I struggle to understand the polemic against lists per se.
It sounds like you and Sam have more of an issue with people treating these sorts of lists as an end all and be all which I completely agree with but I'm also not quite sure who's actually treating them as some sort of objective truth. It's just fun to show others what you like and think valuable and conversely what others like and think is valuable.
It's very difficult to contribute to scientific inquiry without first having a grounding in the state of the art and in my opinion it would also be difficult to be "an independent thinker" without first having a grounding in the most fundamental existing works. That's pretty much just a "list" by another name.
Sidenote: I do agree that often these types of lists are too often Anglo and Androcentric, probably because a significant number of people in the West who still have serious interest in reading are the based right-winger type at this point.
I personally actually like the 4chan one that Sam hates so much the most, although it is missing some obvious candidates like the Classic Chinese Novels, Austen, TKAM and Eliot (I'm sure I'm showing my own biases here though).
I'd be interested in what else you feel these lists don't cover enough. Maybe it could even be... a list?
Great posts, it does sound like you're having a rough time of it and hopefully it gets better for you.
Thanks, I didn't know that was how it's calculated; I think the broader point still stands though, e.g if a guy eats bachelor chow by himself but his girlfriend enjoys cooking big elaborate meals, it's true that he's the one eating but it's also consumption that wouldn't have happened without the girlfriend being in the picture.
This just kind of depends how you define "revealed preference"; it would be silly to say a prisoner's revealed preference is to to stay in prison because he hasn't broken out, obviously he's there because he's forced to and similarly there are real economic constraints on people that perhaps prevent them from having more children then they would have in an ideal world.
In your case though, I think the other posters are correct in the sense that your revealed preference is to value a host of other things over more children; you could value having them more but don't want to [for very understandable reasons!]. This isn't to mean that you don't want children or that it's irrational or morally wrong that you don't want to downgrade your quality of life, but I think framing it in this way is helpful in understanding the shitty incentives that are increasingly driving society.
I'm not familiar with Canada so don't have any practical advice unfortunately, but good luck whatever you and your girlfriend end up deciding, hope it goes well for you both.
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