wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
Two problems there. 1) The unforeseen consequences of modifying human psychology are very difficult to speculate about. 2) The engineering required to do this would be many orders of magnitude more difficult.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
I agree the effect on underclass men would be less than ideal, but it would likely not lead to increased violence. From a societal standpoint that still seems to be a more desirable outcome.
wingdingspringking
1mo ago
The difference is that is a temporary imbalance. It will correct itself within a generation. If you imposed it at the genetic level, the results would play out over a much longer period.
When genetic modification of humans is discussed, it is typically in the context of individual modification/augmentation. Whether in early embryonic stages or on fully developed people via gene therapy techniques, the goal is normally to modify outcomes for the specific individual in question.
Probably the reason we don’t discuss society-wide modification much (except in the context of huxly-esque dystopias) is that its proximity to eugenics makes it unpalatable to western society’s current ethics framework. But thinking in the longer term, I find it highly unlikely that future societies wouldn’t utilize this tool given the potential advantages it offers, especially in terms of group cohesion. This of course comes with the caveat that modeling the large scale implications of a small genetic change would be next to impossible. There would likely have to be a lot of trial and error, with some of the errors being quite horrific.
So in this context, I was thinking about what we could potentially modify that would have an out-sized impact on society with relatively little change on humans’ current genetic makeup. And the answer that seemed the most interesting is to modify the rate at which men are born relative to women. What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?). There are examples where there are fewer women than men (ex china), but I’ve struggled to find the opposite. Also, most scientific literature about “gender imbalances” is mostly just ideological fluff.
So anyway, the question I guess is what does this look like, and does it actually lead to a more stable/cohesive society.
Arguments in favor:
- Less sexually frustrated young men who tend to get violent
- Higher general agreeableness, since women tend to score higher on this personality trait
Arguments against:
- Susceptibility to guilt based religious ideologies
-Susceptibility to military conquest by external groups with more balanced gender rations assuming this isn’t implemented everywhere.
Edit: Formatting
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere
This line of reasoning suffers from two flaws in my mind. First, scale. This type of indecent is exceedingly rare. I think a very common tactic in modern political debates is to zoom in on a horrific incident, and then imply that this type of even is happening at a national scale. This works because the human mind is bad with intuition/induction at the scale of nation states. That doesn't make it a valid point though.
Secondly, I don't agree with your point about tacit support. In order to tacitly support something, you have to at least be aware of it. The vast majority of people have never heard of these incidents. Admittedly this is a bit of a semantic argument, since you could just as easily say that ignorance is tacit support. But in my mind that should be reserved for situations where someone becomes vaguely aware of a problem but chooses not to pursue it further due to lack of concern.
Well, it's a shot in the dark, but my guess is that you are a fairly average moderate light-blue Blue Triber, with some serious doubts about the excesses of the Social Justice movement and considerable nostalgia for the 90s-2000s era.
I suppose that is a reasonable assumption given the forum, but it's a bit off the mark. For the purposes of this discussion, let's say I have some strong traditionalist leanings. I think societies, governments, and cultures are inextricably linked, and they take a long time to evolve an equilibrium. I think that, once an equilibrium is lost, the resulting period of strife is typically pretty horrific. Given the massive technological and social changes that have occurred over the last several decades, I'm not sure that the previous equilibrium can be restored. But I would certainly rather try to do that than forage ahead with creating a new balance completely from scratch, given what the historical precedents for that look like.
Sinkholes form over years or decades, but the part where the ground opens up and swallows your house with your entire family inside can happen in seconds. Something building up slowly does not mean it remains slow once it starts rolling.
I would imagine this is the fundamental difference in our assessment of the situation. You see the sinkhole as already having caved in. I don't. Aside from a palpable amount of discontent and some unsustainable social norms, our society is still functioning. We don't live in a failed state. The amount that we still stand to loose is enormous.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
We have lost some function of some important institutions, but if you want to see what total loss looks like, take a look at Somalia for much of the last 30 years. The government functions in a small area around the capital, and everywhere else is run by warlords. There are no functioning institutions at all. Are you genuinely arguing that the US is in this same situation?
There is still a lot that can be lost.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
I think there are quite a few tools that are there, but that are not being used. The problem is that for the last several decades, a lot of political attempts have been made to fix cultural problems. Culture, while maybe upstream of politics, is still downstream of economics. If there were ever any real economic efforts made to change culture, I think we'd see some interesting results. Such efforts would have to be sustained and coordinated though. So far that has proved elusive.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
At the risk of sounding a little preachy, I don't think your us vs them mentality is doing you any favors here. I'm not sure what you think my views are, but I'm pretty sure the "you" described above doesn't encapsulate them particularly well. I'm not if favor of moving in the current direction and haven't been in a long time.
I am, however in favor of moving slowly. Despite what you may think, we did not end up in this situation overnight. Institutions have moved away from their traditional roles bit by bit over the last several decades. If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact, the progress is going to be equally slow. Thinking that we can quickly fix anything by tearing institutions apart is just going to make the situation far worse. We'll loose what we still have.
wingdingspringking
7mo ago
I don't think it's social undesirability at this point. The main issue a lot of people (myself included) have with Trump is the fact that he is likely to bring about huge systemic instability. Most people who have some vested interest in the current amalgamation of systems and institutions in the US are very reluctant to support the sentiment of "it's all rotten, tear it all down" coming out of the populist right these days. Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
wingdingspringking
1yr ago
I'm not talking about success or failure from an evolutionary point of view, but from a societal point of view. From that vantage point, success is somewhat equated with levels of material comfort or success. But the evolutionary forces that promote the transmission of behavior to offspring make it very difficult to alter these outcomes for people whose parents "failed" from a societal point of view.
wingdingspringking
1yr ago
I was having a discussion about wokeness/culture war stuff the other day and was accused (probably justifiably) of rambling. This got me thinking about how I’d sum up my views on the matter as succinctly as possible, while still painting a clear picture. I figured doing so here would also provide a good opportunity to see just how similar and/or different it is from the high level world views of others. So here it goes.
The first pillar of my cultural worldview is that a lot of the movements that have now converged to form wokeness were justified in their original incarnations. Your average idealist in the 50s/60s was probably easily drawn into these movements, and for good reason; the types of racism, sexism, etc that existed in the early 20th century were truly institutionalized, and truly damaging to society.
At some point in the last 40 years, however, most of these problems were solved. Not in the sense that tribalism was eradicated, but in the sense that it was no longer institutional. It was reduced to the most benign form that you can really hope for in a multi-ethnic empire.
The problem was that the institutions that had been created to fix these problems were still there. They had developed large funding networks, large amounts of political clout, and most importantly, highly effective mythologies and channels for recruitment. The people heading these institutions weren’t just going to give all of that up. They had to invent new dragons to slay. Which leads us to where we are today. The once useful institutions have turned feral. While still doing what they were intended to do, they have begun doing it in a way that most objective observers would immediately recognize as contrary to the original goals. In short, these institutions are unaligned. They’re slow versions of the paperclip optimizer.
The second pillar is that the vast majority of the harm currently visited on people by society in western countries is due to cycles of poverty. That, however, is just a euphemism for a poor outcome from a very basic mammalian trait, the teaching of survival skills to one’s young. In a Darwinian environment, you maximize the chances of propagating your genes by teaching successful patterns of behavior to the next generation. As such, this drive to mold your children in your image, as well as the drive on the child’s part to emulate the parent in some very fundamental ways, are baked into our genes. But absent any sort of Darwinian pressure, those skills might not be optimized for your environment. In fact they may be highly non-optimal.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the goal of “survival skills” in the modern society is to maximize comfort, not quantity of surviving offspring. But a relationship still remains between the utility of the survival skills and the genes of the organism employing the strategy. As such, you can’t just come up with a set of strategies and teach them to everyone in society. It’s much more beneficial to have parents that have worked out good strategies for their set of genes, and then to pass those strategies on to the recipients of those genes. This makes it much more difficult for people stuck with bad skills to help their children break free.
I think those two pillars, taken together, allow for a pretty good overarching view of what is going on in western society. We have large swaths of the population suffering from poor choices generation after generation. And we have institutions that are highly incentivized to blame these problems on something else. Since we never actually look at the real causes of the problems, we will never solve them. And until something changes, that is the equilibrium state. Thoughts?
The rate of incarceration of black men is 1 in 81 according to this: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons-the-sentencing-project/. So slightly under 1.5 percent. While high, that's not enough to slant the demographics highly in favor of women. I would think that the state of inner city black communities might be due to other factors. Likewise, post war societies are typically full of heavily traumatized men with severe PTSD. That might account for some of the behavior you're describing.
As for the actual process, I don't doubt that there would be some major challenges. But on the other hand, the process by which gametes are formed is very well understood. In addition, there are multiple species that do have different sex ratios at birth. Given that their gamete formation process is relatively similar to ours, there are likely several avenues that could be explored.
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