rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
1d ago
This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.
Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.
rae
1d ago
If the government bans condoms and the pill, watch that number go down even further. People didn't have porn and video games back when TFR was high and birth control illegal.
Not sure where you're getting the "married to the state" idea from. Where I live, women aged 16-24 are out-earning men and the majority of NEETs are men, and 10x less likely to be raising children compared to their female counterparts. If you're suggesting cutting welfare to parents - the main source of welfare women are getting more than men, AFAIK - that seems to be the opposite of a pro-natal policy.
Plus, if you look at stats, fertility rate and income generally follows a U shape where the poorest people on welfare have more children than the middle-class, and are generally less likely to be married as well, so not sure what you'd be accomplishing there.
Promote the family as the pension system.
How is this supposed to work? Older middle class and upper people have private pension funds and own homes that have appreciated to multiples of their initial values. Poor people will struggle to help their parents, making raising children even more difficult and unaffordable.
The average parent spends a total of ~$200k per child here. In the absence of a state pension, it would be more rational to add that money to your retirement fund than to hope your child will be generous enough to give you a monthly stipend in your old age.
rae
1d ago
If a communist dictatorship couldn't enforce the policy, what chances does a liberal western democracy have? The War on Condoms will be even less effective than the War on Drugs.
rae
1d ago
I don't think low birth rates can be fixed through policy. If you look at historical or current pro-natalist policies, how many of them have succeeded? Norway has excellent compensation for parents, but the birthrate is still falling. Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway. Wealthy women bribed doctors while poorer women had risky illegal abortions, and many children were abandoned in orphanages.
I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional. Either religious groups with high fertility rate take over (although even the Muslim world is having declining birth rates) or technological advances make the whole problem go away. If you automate the vast majority of human labour, then nearly your entire population is non-productive dependents whether they're young and able bodied, or old and infirm.
rae
1d ago
C++ now has smart pointers and one you get the hang of them, you don't want to go back to the old way of managing memory manually. It's not about the language being intrinsically "safe" or "unsafe", but rather that it enables you to automate memory management and you don't have to think about it unless you absolutely need to. You can just have a small "just trust me bro" section instead of having the cognitive load of having to double check the entire codebase.
rae
3d ago
I think the article fails to bring up the most important factor: journalism, screenwriting and academia are all incredibly oversaturated and the number of people wanting to go into those fields massively outstrips the demand, and on top of that, the first two are rapidly shrinking fields, while academia is producing more new grads than ever competing for the same few spots. The old GenX/Boomers at the top are obviously going to want to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie, and let's not kid ourselves, merit was never the primary consideration when it came to hiring writers before either.
rae
3d ago
I don’t think the main reason for Hollywood’s decline is bad movies, but rather the fact that it now has to compete with streaming, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
What’s the point of going out of your way to the cinema when already you have more movies than you could ever watch available at home, and whatever’s playing in theatres will be available online in 4K HDR whatever in a few weeks anyway?
rae
4d ago
Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.
You can't claim to be a HBD understander and then confuse ethnicity and religion, then merge together hundreds of different ethnic groups in single categories. C'mon, bringing up Islam in that way is literally contradicting yourself. Bosnian Muslims, Iranians, Senegalese people and Indonesians are all Muslim and all have completely different genetic backgrounds. And it's not like there's a sharp distinction between "White" and "Middle-Eastern". People from the Levant can be whiter than many Southern Europeans.
Or if you talk about Jews, again, that's not a single ethnicity. Israel is a melting pot of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc, while the majority of Palestinians are Jews that converted to Islam centuries ago.
The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
If you actually believed in HBD, you would be pro-immigration of Igbo, Iranians and Brahmins elites, who have lower crime rates, higher educational achievement and financial success than White Americans.
rae
4d ago
Is religion really getting an upswing? Every statistic I've seen suggests a huge drop in the number of practicing religious people in most developed nations in the last decade. There seems to be a small number of right-wing young men going back to church, but it's not large enough to counteract the overall decrease in religiosity, which is especially pronounced in women and people left of centre. I've personally seen more an increase in a sort of generic spirituality than organised religion.
rae
10d ago
Engine efficiency was just incremental improvements, and then 90% of horses disappeared in 20 years.
Nearly all progress is based on small, incremental improvements. The first steam engines were toys, then they were only useful for pumping water out of coal mines, then for stationary factories, then trains, etc.
I think we've reached a point where AI is already materially transformative, and it's impossible to deny the speed of the progress that's happened since Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017.
rae
11d ago
What's stopping a blue collar working guy from also starting an OnlyFans and advertising to a gay/bi audience? Being straight can be a plus and play to the "turn him gay" fantasy too, or you can just lie the same way female OnlyFans models pretend to be interested in their subscribers. And male instagram models can also get invited to Dubai for highly paid sex work.
rae
11d ago
I think you're looking for role models in entirely the wrong industries. The only reason we scrutinise the character of entertainers like Ellen DeGeneres, PewDiePie or Will Smith is because their job is to be liked and their worth is almost entirely parasocial, and if they fail to appear "wholesome heckin' good human beings", they fail at their job.
But if someone actually significantly contributes to humanity, then them having an unimpeachable moral character is pretty unimportant. If Norman Borlaug cheated on his wife, it wouldn't detract from the fact that he saved over a billion lives from starvation, and if someone who looked to him as inspiration would still go into agricultural science. But if you want to emulate Ellen DeGeneres, well, what's there to be inspired by when the personality is the product? Musicians and actors at least have a separate output, but it's rare that they become celebrities purely on the basis on technical talent.
I personally think it's a societal failure that people look to YouTube streamers as people to emulate as opposed to scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. It feels cheap to call a guy who talks while playing video games in the comfort of his own home a hero, or even a semi-hero, when there's doctors risking life and limb to save lives in literal war zones. And if you want someone to emulate just because they have a good personality, look to people around you that you know personally, not celebrities of whom you know nothing about except their media image and some rumours.
rae
12d ago
I know it's not directly the point but I'm equally baffled by your views as you would be (I suspect) of mine.
AI will be an expensive nothinburger
What makes you say that? AI has already ruined education, flooded the Internet with even more low-effort content from images, text, video to music, and even caused new kinds of psychosis. Oh and it's changed a lot of the nature of software engineering (causing a crisis in the junior dev market), data analysis (NLP is pretty much solved), and general automation of tasks. That's without going into computer vision, speech-to-text, etc. To not see that would require you to be, I don't know, a rural farmer in an African country or something.
But I occasionally see people with the same opinion as you, and we don't actually live in completely different realities. Or do we? Is it just impossible not to be in a bubble and capture only an easily biased sliver of reality? How do you avoid that and stay objective? I can just bluntly say your facts are wrong and mine are right, but I feel like that's missing the point.
rae
12d ago
How is Tim Pool a centrist? He might have been one back in 2019, but now he’s pro-Trump, pro-Israel, anti-Ukraine and has right-wing guests on his podcast. Even Fox News calls him right-wing.
rae
14d ago
You're talking about Canada, not the US, which has had much stronger economic growth compared to nearly every other developed country, and yet the economic vibes don't reflect that.
rae
14d ago
I agree that the Meaning Crisis is real for many young people, but that doesn't explain the Vibecession. Young people aren't complaining about being awash in material wealth with no direction in their lives, they're complaining that the economy is doing poorly and getting worse, that they have no opportunity to advance, that they earn less money than their parents and grand-parents, that housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.
rae
16d ago
I’m getting a bit confused by your point so let me try and clarify what I meant:
A lot of the debate around being trans - e.g. are trans women truly women? Do people have an “inner gender identity”? Doesn’t change the reality which is that some people are distressed by having the characteristics of their natal sex and being perceived as a man/a woman, and want to transition with the goal of reducing that dysphoria. Some succeed in that they are eventually perceived as the opposite sex in most social situations and significantly reduce their dysphoria.
You can argue that alternative treatments should be researched instead, that medical transition is now insufficiently gatekept, that there is bias in research with regards to outcome, or even that it should be banned because it will lead to more harm overall.
But debates like “a woman is an adult who produces large gametes, so trans women aren’t women” versus “no, a woman is anybody who identifies as one”, would have no bearing on the above, and even if you thoroughly debunked the second collection of viewpoints, it wouldn’t matter to the practical reality of treating gender dysphoria.
rae
16d ago
I’m very confused as to how you made the leap to those other claims. If you’re at all familiar with progressive views on being trans, they literally say you don’t need dysphoria to be trans, and they are firmly opposed to transmedicalism, favouring an identity affirmation based approach.
@ArjinFreeman has it right, I think you’re the one conflating my views when I’m only arguing for point 1.
rae
17d ago
One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling). Unfortunately few people bother investigating these due to political factors - many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure", and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.
rae
17d ago
It's a valid response from society to say 'No you cannot be Trans' and plausible that on the aggregate that aggressively tamping down on the issue is better than leaving a plethora of individuals stuck in weird individual culdesacs of human expression that ultimately produce more sadness than happiness.
The Middle East does that, and I don't think their approach produces more happiness than sadness.
rae
18d ago
I think you might strawmanning their replies yourself. The intended message is probably something like
- Intersex people show that the gender binary is not inviolable - someone can have XY chromosomes but appear completely female externally
- It costs nothing to be polite and use trans people’s preferred pronouns, and not doing so, or making their lives more difficult, is pointlessly rude and mean spirited
- If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you
Although it is X/Twitter, so it is possible you got the replies you wrote verbatim. But I would still encourage you to consider their arguments more charitably, otherwise they might just dismiss you what you wrote after a single one paragraph.
rae
18d ago
Being a transsexual is not treatable by crossdressing and requires hormonal replacement therapy at a minimum, and usually surgery. If you look at that 1966 book I linked, the author brought up a treatment plan where the patient would take hormones but otherwise dress and appear as their natal sex.
Do share what angle you’ll be going for if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you will have much headway with the people you’re arguing with (I assume highly educated, compassionate people with a progressive bent, perhaps in the rationalist sphere or STEM), from what you’ve shared so far. Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.
rae
18d ago
I hope you look into the trans medical perspective as opposed to just debunking the modern progressive viewpoints.
Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person. No one who has profound distress at having breasts and can’t bare to look at themselves in the mirror will cancel their top surgery (or stop wearing a binder, or go abroad if you made the surgery illegal locally) after a convincing philosophical argument about the definition of “woman”.
Like others mentioned, Zack M. Davis has written tens of thousands of words on the subject from a rationalist point of view, and it’s clearly a desperate coping mechanism for a psychiatric condition/neurological problem that he’s unwilling to have properly treated.
For some medical deep dives, I like Dr Power’s subreddit and its wiki for a bleeding edge take, and this classic from 1966 which shows the medical necessity of treating transsexuals from a time before there was any “gender ideology”.
I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.
If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.
Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.
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