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The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.
The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
Also:
This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.
I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.
I'm not worried about 'evolution' doing okay. I'm worried about myself, my friends and family, and human civilisation. I know that humans as a species will survive, but I'd rather that every country in the world not turn into South Africa in the meantime. I think industrial civilisation is good and I want to maintain it.
Like sure, I guess I can admire your extremely long view from a certain perspective. But what can I say, I'm just a parochial worry-wort who doesn't want humanity living in mud huts and bashing eachother with rocks again.
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I have a much nearer and deeper fear. You are correct, evolution will out, women are liars and biological determinism will make sure that pandas that refuse to fuck all die out.
However, governments around the world, especially in what we think of as the liberal western/developed first world, are addicted to the expanding growth of their sclerotic, overweight bureaucracy, while running a state full of economic dependents.
I an deeply, deeply concerned with what they will inflict on me in the name of keeping things going once tax revenues dry up and the economic expenditures of supporting their old and infirm grow stupendous. Singles tax will be the first of many, it won't be the last.
Oh, and privately I don't relish having to compete with increasingly older and more wealthy men for an ever-shrinking pool of young women.
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IMO the problem with low fertility isn’t that humanity goes extinct, it’s that the more centralized and authoritarian countries figure out how to retain a high population before the West, and then they dominate us through greater manpower and industrial capability. China’s TFR is low right now, but China is authoritarian, centralized, and vaguely Han-supremacist. They will eventually realize that they can enhance fertility through cultural and economic change, and the day after that realization they can instantly implement laws to transform Chinese cultural and educational norms. America has no such capability because we aren’t centralized and authoritarian and we have the feminist fifth column which will make a big deal about schools switching to teaching/propagating women how to be mothers and excluding them from high stress professions entirely.
There are other issues at play:
4B disrupts the fertility of somewhat intelligent and conformist women, the kind of genes we want in a civilization;
Our consumer capitalist system demands a steady supply of immigrants, meaning the domestic fertility rate can steadily decrease without affecting business, so the government has little incentive in solving the problem unless there is an essentially racist pressure applied to it;
I also disagree that evolution will figure out the solution on its own. The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive. Humans may have a vague drive to care for a little cute creature, but that interest can be cheaply satisfied with pets, neopets, squishes and genshin impact. If you have an outlet for the sexual drive, which modern culture has, then an entire human population can gradually go extinct and evolution may not have the time to fix this.
Yes there is. Adoption is common enough. Some people- not all- really enjoy raising children and want to do so desperately.
Adoption is mostly an American phenomenon though, so that may be more cultural than evolutionary. For instance, only 4k adoptions for all of India’s 1.4 billion. If humans somehow evolved an evolutionary drive to care for kids who weren’t their own, then that evolutionary drive would have disappeared somewhere in our distant past, due to decreased gene proliferation
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This moral argument here is just-world fallacy. I also doubt that evolution would just trivially solve this issue. In this framework, why would cities and urbanization, which have always decreased fertility quite severely, still be a thing? If evolution could impact human behavior like this, people who refuse to live in cities would presumably gradually rise as a proportion of the population until cities were effectively irrelevant. But instead the opposite has happened.
I highly doubt humans will go extinct due to fertility issues alone, but even a roughly 30% decrease in population could cause a lot of problems. A decrease of ~90% (which I personally find unlikely, but is still in the realm of possibility) starts to make industrialized society itself look dicey, which means a huge loss in standards-of-living for humanity.
I don't get your strike-through, a decrease in 30% absolutely could bring a lot of problems.
It's not just the fact that there's less people, the world has chugged along fine with far fewer, but also the population pyramid inversion. A lot of old people depending on few of the young is an issue that might get sorted out eventually, but it won't be pretty. (Assuming no AI saviour/doom)
As the other people correctly guessed, my strikethrough was just a typo born of using two ~ symbols. I've fixed it now.
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It's not an intentional strikethrough; it's ~ (tilde) symbols (meaning "approximately") before "30%" and "90%" being misinterpreted as a strikethrough by the software.
I ran into the same problem with a post last week. Still have no idea how to manually type tildes without triggering strikethrough.
& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼
Also, & approx; → ≈
HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.
Nicely done
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Testing.
30% vs.90%. EDIT: backslashes don't work.30% vs.90%. EDIT: <plain> tags don't work. Okay, I'm stumped.30% vs90% (tilde number percent space tilde number percent) is showing non-strikethrough in my preview box, so it clearly can work and the real problem lies elsewhere. Now I'll post and it'll strikethrough and I'll look like an idiot.I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing
Double tilde:
30% vs.90%Triple tilde:
30% vs.High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%
EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736
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Max Anders the glasses-wearing nerd makes six-figures at his software infrastructure job keeping the city running. But because he has a nerdy and uncharismatic personality and poor facial structure he will never reproduce.
But Slaggern Thundercock has eight children with three different women because he has strong cheekbones and a violent alpha personality? Vigorous by the definition of the 10,000 BC tribal warrior is not really what we need.
Stacy Smartbook is clever and hardworking - she lives alone, her demanding job, lengthy education and high expectations for a partner leave little room or time for a partner or children.
Salmonella Sarvesian is stupid and abusive, raising her brood of children badly. Many will go on to be crooks. She's on welfare and doesn't care, or maybe she works a few hours at a low-income job.
On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing. We have the statistics on fertility by region, by demographic, by city. We can read a chart. We can see what's happening in front of our eyes. This is a bad thing, at least for those of us who value a high-quality human civilization. In some places it's worse still, the Korean race will vanish from the South if it keeps on this path of TFR going straight down - no genocidal foe is needed.
It is perfectly natural for nations and civilizations to die out. It has happened many times in history. While natural, it is not very pleasant for those who live in a dying nation. We should take steps to avoid this. It is natural for cars driving towards a cliff to sail off, the driver should swerve rather than burn.
At least in the US, this actually isn’t true- I made a top level comment about it a few months back. Blacks are the only group for whom the unsuccessful have generally higher fertility than the successful. For everyone else, higher income=higher fertility.
I guess @RandomRanger meant this
https://x.com/theHauer/status/1222514313723875332
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I saw a chart that showed the people with huge incomes had high (by first world country standards, so around 2.0 or 3.0) fertility, but they're quite rare. It was a U-curve chart, not a diagonal chart.
And it's certainly not commensurate with Niger's 6.4 TFR.
So the answer to the low TFR is enough money to escape the rat race? South Park already did it.
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This is true, but Niger’s TFR is not driven by low IQ, it’s driven by being full of subsistence farmers. The highest TFR group in the world is the Amish, who are high-IQ subsistence farmers(ish, it’s complicated).
Within country IQ/fertility correlations mostly don’t point towards idiocracy.
There is no evidence that Niger's fertility isn't dysgenic. For countries for which there's data, ones with greater share of population in agriculture like Moldavia have more dysgenic pattern than more developed ones. Higher IQ Nigeriens probably are more likely to use condoms, get higher education and emigrate to 1st world countries. Even if the country had zero dysgenics, it's still loss for the world at large.
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Agreed. Just take a look at Elon Musk's progeny. The expected value of grandchildren he's going to get from one of his normal children is much higher than the expected value of grandchildren he'll get from his trans daughter. Iterate for a few generations and the deleterious memetic mutations will weed themselves out.
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I'm not worried about humanity going extinct. I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society. Like there will be Amish in 200 years, but an all-subsistence-farmer society sucks. And yes, I am aware that the Amish are not pure subsistence farmers, but they depend on being able to trade with industrial society for inputs like solar panels to maintain the not-subsistence-agriculture parts of their society.
Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.
So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.
Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.
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The problem with highly-automated industrial societies is that you need relatively few people to maintain them. They need to be intelligent, of course- that's why hay gets made about "only the stupid breeding"- but the first indication that there were way too many people for a society to house without serious efforts towards UBI/make-work/bureaucratic expansion came to the US in the 1930s and it's weird nobody seems to realize this.
South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there; that's why their education system is a hellscape, that's why women don't feel the need to marry men for resources nor are men in a position to accumulate an attractive surplus (since the average man and average women are roughly equal in industrial and post-industrial productivity, and the men lose some of that through the draft, and the women complain that the post-military men just show up and compete successfully for the same level of jobs).
Their TFR of 0.7, and the fact men can't attract women/women can't be attracted to men in equal conditions like that, is thus natural and probably good for the country long-term, but certainly not beneficial in the short-term (you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).
This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.
I'm partial to the explanation by Hanania that East Asians are hyper-conformists. This explains why their education system is a hellscape by those who experience it. Education is a zero-sum status competition, and practically everyone in their societies are competing. This also helps to explain why they stopped having kids, as cutthroat educational competition explains part, and then once a lot of people aren't having kids, the entire society decides it's OK to forgo doing so since none of their neighbors are doing it.
The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East, and if you assume the Easterners are better workers that only serves to compound the problem (i.e. they need an even greater level of opportunity to function correctly than even the average American does simply because they're more efficient at exploiting it, so a lack of that opportunity is going to be harder on them).
That's part of why the US leads Western TFR (despite the generous terms European countries give to their citizens to have children it doesn't seem to be helping, but remember that the average European is significantly worse off compared to the average American even before the US sabotaged their gas supply). Twice the population for the same regional GDP paints an awfully grim picture and that's been true even before the MENA human wave.
And the Indians aren't a refutation of this, because their urban areas (40% urbanization) are just as bad for TFR, but perhaps it's a different story when your standards are that low? (I'd argue the same for China, but maybe that falls apart considering I also made this point about 100-year-ago US, which kind of had the same thing going on.)
What do you mean by this? South Korea is above average in terms of GDP per capita (PPP) compared to Europe, or even just Western Europe according to IMF estimates.
If by "economic opportunity", you instead mean something like "competition for jobs is much more fierce", then that mostly just goes back to zero-sum status competitions being particularly bad in conformist countries in East Asia.
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I think one explanation is that East Asian laborers are much better than Western ones.
One Japanese laborer at a convenience store is worth at least 2 and probably more like 3-5 American workers. In such conditions, it does create a race to the bottom for labor.
No doubt someone will chime in that the US has higher total factor productivity than Japan. That's true on a societal level. But the low wage workers in Asia are simply spectacular compared to their US equivalents.
We can see this in academics as well. Add a typical Asian kid to a typical American classroom and the Asian kid will excel due to a much higher level of effort. But when all the kids are Asian, it's a wasteful arms race. The smart kids still get the best grades, but everyone's working 3x as hard.
Asian societies are optimizing for worker drones, not for human flourishing. Without irony, they would be better off if they weren't such try hards.
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Given the likely effects of a war on Seoul (half the population is in the Seoul metropolitan area), that will depopulate the country faster than their birthrate will. Maybe the survivors would be willing to breed, I suppose.
If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.
More like the reduction of Mariupol.
Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.
Mariupol had half a million people to start. Seoul (metropolitan area) has roughly 25 million. And shells don't care what gender you are.
Also, it's much harder to see a civilian evacuation, since Seoul is so much bigger. Of course, if the South does well at first, the destruction will be much less (because they'll stop the artillery), at least until the North starts nuking.
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Total violation of Hume's guillotine. Yes, obviously, whichever human organisms manage to reproduce in the modern environment, will, and their traits will proliferate, and afterwards it may be said that evolution "worked". Evolution also works when underground mammals lose their sight, or male anglerfish lose their brains. Whether these adaptations to selection pressures are desirable is another question.
The bulk of people reproducing now are (a) extremely high time-preference poor people, or (b) highly religious people. There is also a tiny number of rich people breeding well. If you do not want humanity to consist of this type of population in the future, low birth rates should bother you.
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I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers (despite disagreeing with them). And I'm going to disagree with you today about needing more compassion for people who are lonely or anxious about politics.
I'm not worried about people who don't want kids not having them. More power to them.
I am exceptionally worried about people who are lacklove and lonely becoming depressed, atomized, and suicidal, because I care about human flourishing and I couldn't give one iota of a damn about what what "evolution thinks" should happen to them.
There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there that I find, well, inhuman. Maybe even evil. I'm going to be honest with you: what you've said strikes me as the sort of thing I'd expect a rogue AI or alien or demonic creature trying to maximize suffering would say.
Because it just so happens that some who walk the earth with us are one of these organisms that are "unable to reproduce... and rightly so." I'm not just talking about the young men who will remain lonely if this movement takes off, but about the young women themselves, people who are clearly neurotic and anxious and scared and desperately need someone to tell them that it's going to be ok, and hatred and resentment will just drive them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. There is nothing "right" about people being lonely, depressed, and terrified because their social environment has distorted their view of reality.
It's rather odd that you'd write:
just as we're discussing people who desperately need to hear that exact message. If you can make a difference in people's minds by saying this with regards to one worry, it stands to reason you can make a difference in the minds of the people under discussion -- and therefore perhaps there is something "you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way."
I'm reminded a little about that famous quote from Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right," that Leibnitzian saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I'm going to counter you with the view that not only the 4B people but the Christian people and the Muslim people and the new Atheist people and the progressive people and the conservative people disagree with you, and they disagree with you profoundly, at the core of their being. This world is fallen, less than it could be. And I take hope in the fact that, despite our disagreements, many people believe that we are not beholden to the origin of our nature or the vicissitudes of evolution as to the outcome of our existence.
I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.
No there isn't.
It's just a fact that some people are more fit for biological reproduction than others. But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth. Some of the greatest men to ever live (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, etc) had no children.
Nature is dumb; it is opinionated, certainly, but you can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take its opinions. The appropriate response, upon learning that you are defective according to nature, isn't "ah, I am defective, all hope is lost". The appropriate response is "very well, I am defective. I accept this designation. But now what? What can this defective organism accomplish? You might be surprised at the answer."
I'm not sure Nature has an opinion on who reproduces. That's what the phrase "fitness landscape" is for. The fitness landscape can change. It seems like you're trying to abdicate value judgements. It's fine if you don't care who reproduces, but this kind of appeal to nature shouldn't persuade anyone.
If two demons are fighting over to change the fitness landscape, you wouldn't care?
(After re-reading my post, I see I am making essentially a "postmodern"/subjectivist argument, kinda)
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Fair enough. Yet compassion is the more excellent way.
Let us review what you wrote:
Those are judgments based upon moral worth.
I’d also add that you were quite literally saying “it’s not happening, and it’s a good thing.”
You’ve attempted to retreat to the Bailey, by saying you were only descriptively stating “nature’s judgment” as “an objective fact”, but the motte is right there for all to see. You were clearly describing these things in terms of what is good and deserved. “It deserves to” is a moral claim of moral desert.
As it so happens, saying “you are defective, and it is good and desirable that fewer people like you exist in the future” is sneering, and is a moral judgment. If you think it is not so, I find your perspective quite perplexing indeed.
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