Enh, see, I want to agree with you. I really do. And I hate that I have to qualify this by saying that I am Chinese, because I hate that I feel the need to state my race before applying my argument, especially here. Ideas should be colorblind no matter where they originate from.
I want to tell you that you are simultaneously both spot on, and that you are overthinking it.
I think the best way to put it is that (mainland) Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do. Whether these values are inherent, or they are taught, is not my concern - nature/nurture debates do not interest me, and modern Chinese history involves enough bloodshed to justify the color of the flag. What they are is what they are, and given that a multipolar world seems very likely barring dawning American AI dominance or continued military dominance, it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism, or the standard American practice of saying (or believing!) one thing while doing another.
You may be absolutely right that your struggle with China is in fact racial. You may even be right in fearing a high-IQ species with alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts.
But at the end of the day, China is simply optimizing for its own values. Everyone does this. Your examples are entirely valid. Foot-binding conferred status and sexual market value at the time, so they did it. The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong. There are millions of Chinese people who are competition, losing the competition means you are one of the weak, so the toddler will eventually grow to be competition, so why care for it? Man's best friend is made of meat, and meat is protein, so why not eat it? Your political enemies can potentially threaten your existence, so why not eat them? You can sell a literature book by describing a scenario where the lower class gets a moment of catharsis by screwing over those more powerful, why wouldn't you?
I am entirely convinced, given the mess that America is in, that they are also subservient to perverse incentives. While they are not remotely comparable, the mechanisms behind it are the same.
It's simply more naked in China. Everywhere, the weak exist to be destroyed, or to be subservient to the strong. Losing in China is existential. The culture has a long history of genocide, either by the hard, physical method, or the soft method of cultural assimilation. Whatever chance that the weak had of affecting any kind of change was run over by tanks in the streets of Beijing as they were reminded what it meant to be weak, and what it meant to be strong.
You can't change anything about China without changing the values - or, well, as Chinese would put it - the dog-eat-dog nature of reality. If you don't wish to change the values, then there's nothing for it - nuke the bugmen, or attempt to practice isolationism. There are millions of Chinese. The preferred method of problem solving through the years by China's rulers was to throw bodies at the problem. Life is, and always has been, cheap. Winners win, and losers lose. If you can't grasp what this means, you haven't lost hard enough. Losers in China know what it is to lose.
(I lie, maybe I will bring up nurture after all - I have noticed that Chinese-Americans, especially the born-in-the-US generation, have poor comprehension of "winners win, and losers lose". Even if they lose, they assume family, community, social security, academia, the federal government, will be there for them and have managed to optimize for America in many ways. They will wear their "Chinese-ness" on their sleeves to get ahead for diversity points and wouldn't be caught dead wanting to move back to Mainland China. They know how the game is played.)
Maybe Chinese TFR being as critically damaged as it is will change some things. I'm not optimistic, because China will simply apply a top-down brutalist attempt to fix this. Or, alternatively, the opposition will become strong and eat the top, and apply their own fix that might be just as bad if not worse.
Video game writing is one thing. Have you seen Hollywood recently?
I went to the cinema recently and saw two movies. One is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It's Kaiju Wrestlemania, the monster fights are pretty fun, Kong at one point beats a monkey with another monkey. Entertainment. And in between it all is some of the most agonizing, painfully bad human-scale plots, characters and exposition I've seen. Granted, it's a movie about a nuclear dinosaur fighting a giant monkey, it's not exactly somewhere people look for good writing. It's going to make a lot of money.
The other was a matinee showing, I woke up early, offset a healthy morning walk with some unhealthy breakfast, went to an AM showing of the only flick that still had the discount pricing. Some anime flick called Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle. It's an animated movie about high school volleyball featuring two teams playing a single best-of-3 match in the lower bracket of a tournament.
After finishing that movie, I came out of it gobsmacked. Not because it was great or anything, but because this nothing anime movie from a series I don't think is any good managed to clear the what seems like a ridiculous bar, these days, of being a human story about humans doing human things. You know, a story featuring characters who drink water and breathe air. Humans.
It's not that Japan is somehow exceptional at this, it just seems like Hollywood has entirely forgotten what humans are like. How they talk, how they think, how they react around other people. What they care about. It seems like the ability to model human beings, or write from their perspectives, is completely missing.
When Hollywood writes characters these days, they almost inevitably end up as one of the following:
- Cliches
- Cartoon characters
- Obnoxious
Or some combination of the above.
To go back to GxK: the cast of characters in that movie exploring Hollow Earth are as follows. The adoptive mother of a mute child, who is having trouble connecting to her adoptive daughter (probably the closest to an actual person, cliche). Angry security man who is rough, tough, and angry at everyone for no apparent reason (cliche, cartoon character). Weird surfer Australian hippie kaiju vet heavily implied to be adoptive mother's ex boyfriend (cartoon character). Mute girl who can talk to Kong (plot device). Chubby black podcast conspiracy nerd trying to get views on a podcast and complaining about trolls (cartoon character, obnoxious, cliche).
None of these people are people. I don't know if they drink water or breathe air. The podcast guy looked and acted like if you cut him he'd bleed Monster Energy. None of them talk like human beings. Their dialogue is either snappy oneliners, built for movie trailers, or clunky exposition. It's telling that the movie's best sequences featured exclusively kaiju, had no dialogue whatsoever, and props to the special effects team - Kong was capable of emoting and communicating who he was and his thoughts and feelings to the audience far better than any of these cardboard cutouts in the shape of human actors.
Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle opens with a slow, almost arthouse-movie-esque sequence, with things framed off center or slightly out of frame, where a dispassionate character who doesn't care about the sport of volleyball at all is lost on his way getting to a practice bootcamp and doesn't consider it a big deal. His phone is out of power. And instead of trying to find his way to bootcamp with any urgency, he sits down and we hear the sound of a handheld video game console powering up.
I almost wanted to jump up in my chair and point at the fucking screen, as if Hollywood were watching: It do be like that. In a sequence that's two minutes long at maximum we have established who this kid is, what he's like, his attitude, and what he cares about. Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings? Are they just bad at modeling what those people are like? Do they know any? In lieu of this, I have to conclude that the writers genuinely do believe human beings are either cliches, cartoon characters, or obnoxious.
My working theory is that the ability of western writers to model other human beings seems stunted. The current crop are narcissists, incompetent, or incapable of basic human empathy. Either that, or whatever they put down doesn't survive peer and funding review.
Beyond that, the other takeaway I had is that Hollywood seems to have completely lost the ability to impose any sort of meaning on their stories. I don't mean in a didactic or parable like sense, but I mean in the sort of literal 'here are the story stakes' meaning.
GxK, spoilers, has stakes like the world ending in a new potential ice age. H:TDB is a sports movie about a single lower bracket game in a high school tournament. Somehow, the latter was a story that felt like it had higher stakes. Every hard rally meant something, every small micro-victory and every way characters and their ideologies were tested felt impactful and meaningful.
Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:
Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?
This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.
The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.
Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.
To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).
You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.
This is because it's incentivized.
It's beneficial for business that capital, and labor, is fungible anywhere. Something something give me control of a something something money supply, and I care not who makes the laws, to that effect.
Place-rooted culture is a competitive weakness in a post Bretton Woods international order. Over time, of course the elite of this order would have no loyalty to place. They can move and spend their money anywhere they want.
clo
22d ago
I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.
Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.
Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.
clo
6mo ago
Why are you shocked? Support for Israel is Team Red-coded in America.
American political theater is so polarized Blue team in America could ritualistically eat babies and people still wouldn't vote for Team Red.
While I am no fan of alarmism and I think Yud is a clown, I am struggling to understand this mental block you - and others - have whenever it comes to the dangers of AI.
You seem to feel the need to understand something before it can kill you. There are plenty of things in this world that can kill you without you understanding the exact mechanisms of how, from bizarre animal biology to integrated weapons systems.
There are plenty of things in this world with proven - not unproven - capability, that regular human beings can use to kill you. An AI that demonstrates no more capability than regular human beings can kill you, as well as potentially a large number of other humans - and this is only with the methods my stupid animal brain can come up with! It doesn't even need to be particularly smart, sentient, conscious, or even close to AGI to do so. It could be something as simple as messing with the algorithms that have an outsized disparate impact on large amounts of everyday life.
And that's without even considering the things that bare-ass naked-ape plain old humans could get up to with a force multiplier as big as AI!
There are massive amounts of x-risk from regular people, doing regular things, fucking up, or intentionally doing things that will cause an untold amounts of suffering. Some people consider regulated research on viruses or prions extremely dangerous! Is it a failure of imagination? Do you need to know every chess move Magnus Carlssen makes before believing that he can beat you at chess?
clo
16d ago
If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.
I want to engage, but I think doing so would be largely pointless given that the conversation seems to be entirely about semantics and a misunderstanding of terminology.
I got about four sentences in before I realized that you're taking a remarkably reductive view of things and then basing whatever argument you have on that reductive view.
Modern society is only "in love with Darwin" to the extent that people believe they are going to outcompete the ones that will be eliminated by evolution. If you've read the last couple of weekly Culture War threads, an actually interesting topic has come up in the pile of black tar that's the HBD debate; the popularity of rejecting the conclusions of HBD because it posits you can't improve your life beyond what your genetics have preordained for you.
Evolution doesn't care who (or what) it kills. It just kills, and those left behind get to go on. What would you do, if someone told you that you've been naturally selected out of the gene pool and you're doomed to no bitches?
We in many cases actively fuck with evolution because the implications (and actions taken on behalf of those implications) are frequently obscene. Our modern society protects the weak, the infirm, the elderly, and even with the massive advantages enjoyed by intelligent individuals who can leverage their intelligence in first world societies, the first world is essentially reproducing below replacement.
The future belongs to those who show up. All else is word games, dross, arguments, bullshit. To make it worse, we have no idea what might be evolutionarily advantageous and everyone who thinks they do is probably lying to you, subject to recency bias against timescales completely irrelevant to evolution, or self-selecting themselves not to die. If tomorrow some cosmic entity beyond our comprehension snaps its fingers and kills every person who was not born blind, the blind will inherit the earth, who gives a shit what the people with 20/20 vision managed to do.
clo
6mo ago
I think if you advocate genocide in a hot take you need to justify your bona fides. ie you should have murdered someone, or been a war veteran, or had your family murdered or something.
Agreed, definitely! I would therefore advocate for using this framework, and logic, to permanently silence Americans off the entire internet. The amount of ignorance demonstrated by citizens of the global hegemon is a massive net fail and the foreign policy conducted as a aggregate of and on behalf of that ignorance is, in my opinion, worth kneecapping an American with a shotgun and taking away their internet access every time they say anything about anything they know nothing about and have never experienced.
Luckily, or unluckily, we don't live in a world where people's feet are held to the fire every time they say anything stupid, so people can continue to spout their hot takes as they wish.
clo
7mo ago
Why wouldn't you believe (or pretend to believe) something that isn't true if there are such massive benefits to be accrued and such huge incentives for doing it?
Try looking at the stock market sometime. Do people really believe that a nothing EV maker in Vietnam is worth more than Ford?
Dune
Fertile
I'm sorry, what
By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?
Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.
I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.
They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.
You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.
What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.
I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.
Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.
That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.
clo
1yr ago
You may want to read TLP's dissertation on the subject, whether you agree with it or not. Beware, following this guy down the rabbit hole may be infohazardous.
When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."
Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?
I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is both pathological and totally on purpose. Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better about yourself, by all means go ahead, but at what point will you stop pressuring other women to go along with it? When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?
clo
1yr ago
for the sake of argument, your first point could be applied to just about anyone who is a net drain on the economy, like old people, unhealthy people, or disabled people.
clo
19d ago
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
clo
1mo ago
Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.
I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.
clo
1mo ago
We found out what other people really think and talk about, and the conclusion is intolerable. The internet's leveling effect meant that random nobodies could be signalboosted into the consciousness of the body politic.
Once undesirables were allowed an audience and became clearly visible, those who weren't undesirables wanted them destroyed, silenced, and removed from their public spaces.
Don't worry, there is an easy workaround for this mess. Just never be an undesirable in the eyes of those with power.
clo
1mo ago
"We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice."
I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
People don't give a shit about harm, and when they do at all, it's often the point to maximize harm to the outgroup.
My understanding of why gay marriage was legalized is that it was a power and institutional flex by the ascendant progressive left as a way of hurting their outgroup, the religious right. They saw an opportunity to stamp on some faces after the religious right was used as a political force by Bush 2 to win his elections, and they did it. Had it been any other issue they could have hurt their political opponents on, they would have done it. Gay marriage was an easy low hanging fruit because it had little to no short term economic costs, there was little political capital used in getting it passed if you worked in a heavily urban area, it stimulated a lot of fervor in the voting base, and it expanded the marriage/divorce lawyer clientele.
Just my two cents, because the movie is weird in a way that I'm not quite sure the directors intended. Disclaimer: I enjoyed the film but I think everyone is misreading it, mostly because of the charisma of the two lead actors and their performances.
The Space Odyssey cold open of the children smashing their baby dolls in response to the appearance of Barbie should have clued people off, really. Barbie and Ken are not characters, despite the movie trying to make a gimmick of her ending up in the real world and fish-out-of-water comedy sequences. They don't make sense as characters, and the fact that they have any internal coherence at all is a necessary function for the main narrative thrust of the movie.
The tension in the movie is caused by the fact that Barbie and Ken are amalgams of ideas. Ken is the idea of men as accessories to women. The dramatic tension comes from how that idea is trying to reconcile itself with the idea that men could be fine on their own. This is why people reacted to his arc: they read it as a metaphor for women's liberation, because it's clearly meant to be played this way (even if the bro-patriarchy is an idea that was given to him from outside sources).
The cold open is Mattel saying to the little girls, "you didn't know what you wanted until we told it to you. Before us, toys told you that you could be mothers. After Barbie, toys told you that you could be anything." There's an arrogance to it, in claiming that Barbie is defining an aspirational idea of women. The fact that the movie seems incredibly defensive about this is not an accident - the feminists waged war against the pink toy aisle for years, with Barbie being the main culprit, and a quick Google will dredge up articles from as late as 2013 with mothers asking if it was actively harmful to be buying their girls Barbie dolls.
And then comes The Monologue - an impassioned delivery by America Ferrera playing the mom, who shows the movie's hand. It's a tour de force of bitching, a finely aged whine that complains about the incredibly contradictory and difficult values of what it means to be a woman today. It doesn't make any sense unless you understand that Barbie is supposed to be representative of women. This is why Barbie's neurosis comes from anyway; as an plastic avatar of female identity sold by Mattel(tm), she doesn't know who or what she is anymore because the contradictory demands of modern women and what they're supposed to be are messed up. This breaks the Barbies out of their brainwashing, something I didn't get until I realized it's because they've accepted the contradiction: it's okay if women don't know what they're supposed to be.
(Of course, the monologue truly shoots itself in the foot with the line "I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us." The possibility of, just, well, learning to deal with not being liked doesn't seem to occur. Except for a toy, being liked is everything. A little known fact: Barbie started as 'Lillie', a doll of a sex symbol/gold digger from a German comic.)
One other interesting anecdote: the musical theme of Kendom is "Push" by Matchbox Twenty, a song accused by feminists of popularizing misogynist lyrics. To the point where the songwriter had to explain that it had actually been written about an emotionally abusive girlfriend.
Another: the movie's veneration of Ruth Handler, an opportunist, perennial grifter, liar who avoided personal responsibility at every turn and was indicted on conspiracy charges.
clo
9d ago
This is not my experience, or my read of the 4chan video.
The 4chan video is sophisticated race-baiting and trolling of a sort I expect from the chans. It is specifically designed to incite anger, disgust and revulsion, an inflammatory piece of content in search of an audience. This is incredibly consistent with the standard 4chan MO, which largely boils down to trying to get a reaction. As this behavior is now widespread across the entire internet and it becomes harder and harder to shock people, they have to try harder to get a reaction.
To put it shortly: Gawker and their ilk turned trolling into a clickbait business. And then clickbait proved to be not really all that profitable, in the end. What are outrage merchants to do except escalate?
I don't think people are mostly good. I also think power law is universal and those who don't strive lose to those who do. People who don't think this is true have not lost hard enough yet, or are sufficiently isolated from the consequences of their losing that they don't notice those who are losing. I think the latter is one of the great tragedies of human civilization, and the more divorced from reality the elite or ruling caste get, the closer disaster gets (c.f. Marie Antoinette).
clo
1mo ago
I don't understand this example. Are you implying that a sane authoritarian government would exert their power to ban the burning of hydrocarbons for heating or cooking?
How is that in any way sane, especially if they don't have the power to stop other countries from doing it? Unless you are advocating for this sane authoritarian government invading all the others and maintaining this ban through force of arms, in which case it makes more sense, but still a fair ways away from 'sane'. Doing so would require the development and manufacture of weapons at scale, which unfortunately requires large amounts of hydrocarbons.
clo
1mo ago
I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.
You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").
White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.
Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.
clo
1mo ago
It's not an euphemism for the rejection of individual justice and individual merit. When people reject individual justice and individual merit, they do so on the basis of it producing unequal outcomes, not because those differences exist.
As opposed to arguments as soldiers, surely if your soldiers as soldiers all belong from similar genetic stock, it would be beneficial to any militaristic society to make sure that your genetic stock of troops would be stronger, faster, smarter, and harder than any other. Similarly, your doctors, scientists, you would want to be significantly more intelligent etc.
HBD awareness is currently deeply unpopular amongst the general population. There was a time when it was not, and it was considered both fashionable and critically important to the future of a nation to guard one's genetic pool against undesirable elements. The unpopularity comes from the sectarian and ethnic demographics of the United States as well as the historical atrocities performed by those who believed themselves stewards of what was considered genetically more desirable. Evolution doesn't care who it kills, it just kills, and those that don't die get to carry on.
The strife comes from the issue that no human being is psychologically or otherwise adapted to being told that they are inferior, and that inferiority comes from something that they cannot change. They act out. They cause damage. And if they don't, they descend into learned helplessness.
Of all the debates on here but HBD, this is the one that tires me the most, because no matter the conclusions, there is no solution that powerful and culturally-dominant societies are willing to accept.
The sexual marketplace is Moloch's little bitch. Women control access to reproduction. As long as women control access to reproduction, they gain power by withholding it. A man acts, a woman chooses. Q.E.D.: it's in the interest of women to withhold it to their own benefit for as long as possible (what if a better mate comes along?) while the world feeds them a constant parade of men to swipe left on. Sufficiently large network effects mean that this, at scale, will mean that reproductive access is limited to a smaller and smaller % of the populace.
There's no fixing this in ways that the currently dominant social and cultural paradigm will accept. How can you, when women can actively weaponize men against other men with nothing but the mere promise of access to reproduction?
There's nothing left to debate. At the rate things are going, either find a first world society someplace where TFR is above replacement so we can isolate the factors responsible, attempt some solution sufficiently alien the memeplex doesn't recognize it as a threat to women's autonomy, agency, education or power, or get women to actively seek reproduction with males they consider low status.
I consider freely available access to cold fusion, FTL, and entropy an easier nut to crack than the latter.
More options
Context Copy link