nomenym
2hr ago
Yeah, it's going to create a small cohort of highly capable individuals and a much larger cohort of ne'er-do-wells. The number of diamonds in the rough will diminish over time. It will create the hyper unequal dystopia the left fears, but it will be even more intractable unless we figure out a technological solution to the genetic rot. The accumulating genetic load must also be addressed by similar means, or else natural selection will eventually do it for us and that is likely to be rather unpleasant.
nomenym
3d ago
But remigration isn't a solution. First, because I can't imagine how to do it remotely ethically.
The question now is whether the alternative can be done remotely ethically. Frankly, I think it's too late for a remigration policy in the UK, but by the end of this process you might wish it hadn't been.
nomenym
7d ago
Tribalism is too baked into human psychology. You can taboo all the old tribal markers, but then people will just find more indirect, abstract, and novel markers to be tribal about even while earnestly believing themselves to be non-tribal. Tribalism is not optional. Its excesses can only be mitigated. It cannot be effectively mitigated by denying or hiding it, but only acknowledging and restraining.
nomenym
10d ago
The relevant issue is that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape your daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion". There is no way back from here.
One materialist explanation is that this has to do with housing, which has increased by some 5-600%, which the safety nets don't help with at all unless you're truly destitute.
This is kind of like saying the house collapsed because there was a stronger than normal wind. I mean, sure, that may be the proximate cause, and if the wind were a little lighter that day then the house would not have collapsed. But, fundamentally, the problem is not really the wind but the extremely poorly built and fragile house. Until yesterday, human fertility rates were incredibly robust across time and place under myriad different circumstances such that everyone agreed that overpopulation was an impending catastrophe, but then suddenly it all collapsed because the wind changed direction.
Most of these policy wonk discussions set the implicit frame as "the last domino fell, so how do we prop it back up?".
nomenym
22d ago
The 2008 crash resulted in an excess demand for money. That's what catalyzes a crash in a particular market of the economy into a crash throughout the whole economy. The mechanism was that the mortgage backed securities were being used like money substitutes, so when they lost value there was a widespread shift into holding more money itself. When not matched by an increase in supply, this causes a systemic failure. Money is traded on every market, so a disequilibrium in the money itself screws up everything.
If there is a data center crash that means people suddenly stop spending money on data centers and their inputs. That is bad for that particular market and the people who depend on that (like me), but for the economy as a whole the relevant issue is what happens instead. If people shift that spending into different markets, then there will not be generalized crash like 2008. If people simply increase their money holdings instead, and the Fed does not increase the supply to meet demand, then there might be a similar crash. However, the mechanism here will be less direct and seems less likely to me though not impossible.
nomenym
27d ago
Right, it's not the slippery slope fallacy if you're pointing out that the slope is in fact a waterslide.
nomenym
1mo ago
But if, like Jameela Jamil, you don’t want children because you like being childless and don’t want your lifestyle to be disrupted by them, just come out and say that.
The tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should want them to keep making excuses, because a world where no excuses are necessary is even worse.
nomenym
1mo ago
Phenotype includes behaviors. Dams are a phenotype (or extended phenotype) of beavers, but I would presume aggressive selection could produce a breed of beaver that looked very much the same but did not build dams (or perhaps only built very weak and ineffective dams) in a few generations.
nomenym
1mo ago
Perhaps they're like a dog breed. Genetically, they're quite difficult to distinguish from other dog breeds, but phenotypically very distinct due to small genetic differences having an outsized influence. Intense selection pressures over short time periods can have interesting consequences.
nomenym
1mo ago
In most places, inflation has effectively repealed minimum wage laws. However, other indirect regulatory and legal costs have accumulated that make people more expensive to hire.
nomenym
1mo ago
I think Newsome said he had like a 960 IQ. I don’t believe that so perhaps he’s actually much smarter and just pretends to be stupid like Bush.
That's some extreme humble-bragging.
I think this is exactly what is happening.
For most of human history, the selection of cultural memes and biological genes has been more or less aligned. The most successful cultures were those that produced high birthrates, because creating more people was the best way for cultural memes to propagate themselves. Horizontal transmission of cultural memes between separate lineages was relatively rare; most cultural replacements were accompanied by population replacements. In this environment, cultural memes and genes were more or less symbiotic, and what was good for one was good for the other (with the exception of some edge cases).
Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.
We have no psychological immune system adapted for this. It's too novel, too powerful. It's like we're North Americans being exposed to European colonist diseases for the first time. However, this cannot go on forever. The parasitic memes are burning through hosts, and the remaining hosts are being selected for resistance to the parasites. The psychological immune system is beginning to take shape, but the process is too slow.
nomenym
2mo ago
Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.
It's so revealing that he chose to include this objection. There are layers of assumptions one must ascribe to before this even makes sense, and yet he doesn't feel the need to explain anything.
I don't think he's going to get the same female attention as Mangioni.
The great thing about Reach is that it ends with the beginning of Halo 1, so it forms an infinite loop. The correct game to play after Reach is Halo 1 again, and we can go on pretending no other game in the series exists.
nomenym
3mo ago
The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state. Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design. The left won either way; they will have torn down the old order and replaced it with chaos. It's ironically not unlike the Wiemar Republic, though perhaps even worse. Imagine if the Jews were actually as bad as Hitler said they were, except the degenerate elites sided with the Jews and won. Accelerationism might be the least bad path forward, because it's too late for anything else. Whatever remains of the British peoples after this, I'm pretty sure they're going to find their religion again.
nomenym
3mo ago
over time
But it is already too late. Brexit was the last chance, and it was not just squandered but completely betrayed.
nomenym
3mo ago
Could be just because we've had at least a century or more of dysgenic population policy. We treat genetic capital like an infinite resource. Dysfuctional people dysfunction in many ways all at once. Infant mortality was load bearing, sadly.
The issue is rather simple, though you may dislike it. Men are attracted to youthful features combined with developed secondary sex characters, and it's around 15-ish that most girls begin to really exhibit that combination. That is when most men start to notice girls sexually, even if they are not especially interested in actually having any kind of relationship with them for other reasons. Probably around 25 percent of men have a strong preference for women who look like they're about 15-18 years old, whether they are actually that old or not. The actual age has nothing to do with it.
It seems like ethnic Europeans might be outliers in having a stronger preference for women in their 20s, since Europeans have long practiced later marriage and tend to remain fertile longer than other groups. I suspect this might be genetic, and this makes Europeans unusual. For the rest of the world, the preference for younger girls is even stronger and much more culturally normative for most of their history. Just look at all the recently arrived doctors and engineers literally chasing after unattended schoolgirls in Europe today. You might as well try to train your cat to not chase the mouse.
Now, all these preferences are telling us something about the human evolutionary history of sexuality. We have inherited these instincts because they were successful among our ancestors. We're all descended from men and boys who got with fertile teenage girls at least some of the time, and so preventing that is going to have consequences for overall sexual behavior and fertility. There are trade-offs here along multiple dimensions, and it's not clear to me that the maximizing the taboo is the best solution in all circumstances.
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