site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from 50,000 to 64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.

[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.

Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -

(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.

(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.

(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.

(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.

(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.

So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.

For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me

I'm not actually aware of many folks that do the latter. Most presentations I've seen of why GDP is a useful number at all actually reason about GDP/capita, saying that this tends to correlate well with general living standards. Not perfectly, of course, and those folks will be quick to point out areas where it's still an imperfect measure.

I think the main argument for raw GDP would be on a national scale. Raw GDP on a national scale tends to correlate with state capacity to wage war. This obviously has its own benefits, but it's definitely a sideshow for any country that doesn't have significant security concerns. For countries that have significant security concerns, I can't imagine that any form of degrowth could possibly have much purchase.

Perhaps an argument could be made for tech development, in that having a significant pool of economic activity/capacity is an enabler. Robin Hanson is probably the closest to this, but I think his model heavily weighs just raw population, though I could imagine that if you pressed him on edge cases, he would say that some factor or threshold on GDP, GDP/capita, or something or other is potentially in play.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats