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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26457 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I don't understand the people criticizing Biden for pardoning Hunter. Who would let their son go to jail? Is not a parent's truest role to protect their children?

Maybe you have to let him rot if he had committed murder or another horrible crime. But Hunter was convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms. Nothing mortal.

Would anyone here actually let their son go to jail for this stuff. I feel like you would have to be a sociopath to do that to your own kid.

If I thought the prosecution and sentencing was legitimate then absolutely. How is this even a question?

Because he explicitly said that he wouldn't pardon him.

And because rule of law requires everyone to be subject to the same laws, and not to have members of the ruling family treated differently. America is a republic, not a monarchy where the president has the divine right of kings.

This isn't a case of the president correcting an obvious miscarriage of justice, as pardons are generally used in the free world. This is pure corruption/nepotism. It is, dare I say, Trumpian.

It's Monday. The next thread is going to go up in a couple hours, I think you'll get more eyes on the conversation if you post it there instead.

I have a level of sympathy for someone trying to protect their family, even in this context. Like Camus said, between my mother and justice, I pick my mother.

But let us not blind ourselves here, Biden did not do this solely because he so loves his son. He did it in part because he wants to prevent the next administration from investigating his own money laundering shenanigans. You don't get credit for sacrifice if you're saving yourself.

Also he broke his own oath not to do this, whilst nobody forced him to commit to that. This should be reason enough for opprobrium.

What about all other dudes convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms? Everyone understands that parents want to help their children as much as they can, but imagine a small-town deputy busting a rave and arresting the sheriff's son for drug possession among others. If the deputy let the kid go the scandal would be small. But the son was arrested, booked into jail, everyone arrested accepted the plea bargain, the judge even gave everyone the same jail time. Then the sheriff announced that he's going to build a jail extension. On his property. In his house.

It's corruption, but it's not even a scary form of corruption. He couldn't release him and "lose" the paper trail, he couldn't get the charges dropped, he couldn't threaten the jury. He sat and watched as everyone learned that his son is a user and then exercised his power in the most pitiful way.

Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse

Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).

They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.

So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.

The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).

Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:

Status

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.

But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.

Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.

Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.

Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.

So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.

Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.

Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.

So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.

The discussion is really about how to fix the fertility crisis. Talking about what's caused the fertility crisis is distracting and drives me a little nuts, because the cause simple and obvious: increasing access to safe, cheap, effective contraception depresses fertility.

Imagine if humans, historically, could just choose when to have children. All else being equal, our ancestors never would have made it out of their tiny niche. The only reason we flourished was our sex drive, which obliterates our intentions and exerts irresistible pressure to reproduce. (Hormones, oxytocin, etc. play a complementary role, but couldn't have carried the day alone.)

The solution that suggests is also simple: the Ceaușescu regime demonstrated that outlawing contraception can get the job done: Romania raised TFR, from 2 to 3.5.

Simple, but not sustainable. Ceaușescu also showed how difficult it is to maintain those policies: a sharp decline quickly followed. By the 80s, Romania's TFR was hovering just above replacement-level and trending downward. When the regime fell, so did the restrictions and TFR went down to 1.3. It has recovered, but has not ever reached replacement since.

Where does that leave us? The Romainians offered economic incentives for larger families, but those programs shouldn't get much credit, since they have been tried many other places to little effect. Sure, economic and status incentives can help on the margin: relaxing car seat mandates will improve things a bit, for example, and would be good in itself. Maybe we can even find a few dozen policies like that, which could add up to a measurable but inconsequential boost. Ultimately, though, there's nothing that's going to make large numbers of young people in WEIRD countries to consider their lives and say "yes, a(nother) baby will make my life better". Dreaming of a cultural solution is a dead end: we do not engineer specific outcomes via cultural change. Cultural change and its outcomes are emergent.

But I'm not here to call for a ban on contraception. Restriction proponents are like anti-auto crusaders and other activists unable to accept a new technology. There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives, whatever the tradeoffs or externalities. Mail-order Mifepristone is the 3d printed gun of the left.

If there is an answer, it's to go deeper. We have ample survey data that tells us people (well, Americans) want more children. There's some reason to be skeptical of that survey data: we clearly want other things more than children. But at least it suggests a plausible path for the future of humanity. I think the most likely solution involves enlisting human desires instead of restraining them, which means improving fertility-extension technologies is our best hope (and perhaps easing the process of giving birth).

Surely Romania disproves your argument? You claim that contraception caused the fertility crisis, and then point out that Romanian TFR collapsed in spite of contraception being illegal.

Meanwhile, the baby boom happened across the western world while contraceptives were freely available.

Imagine a world where condoms, the contraceptive pill and hormonal implants don't exist, but where credential inflation, atomisation, the internet and social media do exist. In my mind that world would have the same crisis that our current one does. After all, Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 and yet birth rates were barely at replacement in the 1950s and 60s, only to decline below it in the 1970s. Even hunter gatherers have effective methods of birth control that don't require contraception (long periods of breastfeeding, timing, the withdrawal method and infanticide, primarily).

Meanwhile, both the Amish and the Haredi Jews can and do use contraception. They just prefer to have larger families because their cultures assign high status to having a large family.

I don't think this responds to my claim, which are that the default human position on kids is "not worth the trouble" and therefore making contraception cheaper, more effective, or more accessible mechanically reduces fertility.

I agree that there are legal regimes, beliefs, and customs that foster fertility. I'm just annoyed whenever people write about what "caused" the fertility crisis. There's no theory that makes sense or matches history apart from "people don't want kids and will take measures to avoid having them" except "mo' better contraception."

Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 but its TFR fell from 5 to 2 between between 1925 and 1960. What happened?

Sparked by the visit of Margaret Sanger to Japan in 1922, and through the dissemination of printed information, and the opening of clinics, birth control became widely understood by the general public.

The article goes on to say "Governmental thinking of population as a marker for national power and international strength, however, remained steadfast and led the Japanese government to ban the sale and use of birth control in the 1930s, considering it harmful to the user." I freely admit that there are innumerable confounding factors, but I'm going to take "the introduction of a new technology did exactly what it promised to" as the null hypothesis. (Also, wow, what shitty prose. Do better, Wikipedia.)

Or read Cremieux's post about Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, "The Fruits of Philosophy". TLDR: family-planning advocates disseminate information out to the English population, fertility craters.

Romania only proves that it's hard to stop people from practicing contraception for long.

The Amish and Haredi communities are interesting and useful, but they don't contradict what I'm saying. In fact, the Amish formally prohibit contraception. People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.

The Haredi might prove me wrong, in some sense, but they are also a world-historical outlier that are not obviously reproducible (pun intended).

At any rate, I'm not saying we shouldn't look at communities and societies that have done better. I'm just pessimistic that we can overcome the default human bias by copying them.

People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.

Rad trads ban contraception without quietly using it anyways, and have an overall TFR from our shitty internal data of 3.6. Not 7. There’s lots of different practices that can make big differences in ‘natural’ fertility rate. Female age of marriage, for one thing. Or acceptance of men spending lots of time away from home doing travel jobs; less time with their wives makes a difference at the margins.

There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives,

If that were true, most electricity would be nuclear and I'd have plastic straws right now.

Cultural campaigns can have lasting effect.

In the long run, Luddism is fated to lose because your society stops to exist if it doesn't adopt better technology. But for the specific case of technology that causes your society to become unsustainable, it is fated to win.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth. I welcome our new Islamo-Mormon overlords and their actual concern for family life.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth.

There's a reasonable chance this is right. I can't find the comment, but someone here recently summed up that position as "evolution works". Correct! But it just means that negative-fertility species will lose (on a geological timescale), not necessarily that the fundamentalists will win. Most of the fundamentalist groups have a problem keeping children onside, and even their fertility is in decline, with a few notable exceptions.

Both Mormon and Muslim TFR are in extreme, rapid decline worldwide.

Everyone's is, worldwide. But there's spots where it isn't, and all the ones I know about are radically religious compared to the average.

A quick google suggests that the same is true for secular Jews in Israel, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews (in Israel and the west) as the only group capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility in a way compatible with modernity.

Global GDP per capita has never been higher

the revelant metric is wage for people in fertile age vs housing cost...

Sure, let's compare average wages to average house costs in Europe and see what we get.

The cheapest houses are in Denmark (TFR 1.46), Ireland (1.47), Sweden (1.42) and Spain (1.12), for a mean of 1.36. The most expensive houses are in Slovakia (1.45), Czechia (1.36), Slovenia (1.5) and Montenegro (1.79) for a mean of 1.53.

According to this article, the cheapest houses globally relative to wages are in Brazil (1.47), Poland (1.12) and Thailand (0.95!!).

Cheap housing does actually increase birth rates, as I mentioned in my post, but its effect is miniscule compared to the massive cultural effects of whether or not getting married young and having children is high status or not.

I'm not sure the concept of 'status' as this drive we semi-unconsciously pursue adds any explanatory value. The reason that having kids isn't 'high status' anymore is that the moral values we hold and express have shifted away from ones that name having children and a family as a duty, and a good, to ones that name 'freedom' from the coercion of patriarchy as a good. So if people are having fewer children, it's because they value them less. That it's higher status in Amish and Haredi communities to have children is just a direct consequence of them valuing children more! A reasonable number of people in liberal communities have two children, and some have 3+, because they, personally, value it, even though it's 'low status'.

I think removing that layer explains why this is harder than the government merely telling citizens they should have children - the reasons we value children less are very deep ideological ones tied with the growth of liberalism and progressivism over the past few centuries. And the reason the government isn't doing that is because the people in government, and the voters, don't value having more children. If everyone (or even all elites) valued having children as much as you or Elon do, the game would already be over!

As I’ve said before, it is possible to reduce declining fertility by making having more children higher status. It wouldn’t even be hard (to paraphrase Moldbug). But it would require:

  1. Blocking college admission to the 70th+ percentile of colleges for anyone with fewer than 2 siblings.

  2. Reserving 90% of seats on corporate boards (for major public companies), and cabinet positions, along with senior federal and state government jobs for adults with at least 3 children

  3. Implementing a 70% inheritance tax on adults with no children for all assets over $500k, which would fall by 20% per child. This encourages families with one or two children to have more so.

  4. Require all full professors at universities that receive any public funding to have at least 2 biological children; 70% should have at least 3.

  5. Require 75% of actors over 30 on all film and television productions that receive state tax credits and other incentives to have at least two children.

  6. Legally mandate 9 months of paternity pay (which can be split or taken all at once) per child at full pay for all American men, but only if married (and make it much harder to fire fathers under threat of federal civil rights investigation than it woul be to fire childless men).

I’m not advocating these things (necessarily). But low tfr is always a choice, and that should be remembered.

The issue with this idea is that it encourages all the super high powered innovators etc. who would otherwise have created massive new companies to emigrate to another country without these laws if they don't want to have children.

Would be bad in Britain. But America can afford it, there is nowhere else like it.

One solution would be to have the laws only apply to the half of the population that has traditionally focused on child rearing, while the half of the population that has traditionally focused on innovating and building companies would be exempt.

But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.

You can have that conversation, but it would lead to a lot of aimless women rather than many more children because most 24 year old men don’t want to be married with three children at that age.

most 24 year old men don’t want to be married with three children at that age.

24 year old men, for the overwhelming majority of human history, absolutely wanted to be married with multiple children. Modern society is the exception, not the rule. Now, let's not resists temptation to hit the RETVRN button.

Instead, let's figure out how to encourage earlier family formation while still enjoying the benefits - and avoiding the pitfalls - of modern technology and industrial capacity.

Uh, in human history most men did not marry by 24, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that they wanted to.

Non-WEIRD societies had a typical marriage of teenager+30 year old. Europeans in the late medieval and early modern era married later as women, but not earlier as men. The fifties saw most 24 year old men married and having children.

There's no law of nature saying women can't marry older men. I suspect that if women actually had strongly restricted prospects they would do just that, because it's what women do in societies where there prospects are strongly restricted.

In many conservative Muslim countries both men and women marry older, and in most trad communities men aren’t significantly older than women at age of first marriage. What examples are you thinking of?

The US, circa 1900.

But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.

Oh? I hear the faction of childless unmarried women talk about what you’ve described- equity, not equality- all the time.

They know what the solution is, it’s just that if it was implemented correctly they’d be in the crosshairs.

I agree this would work, but I'm not even sure it's the hard part. The hard part is convincing the 'best people', those that drive culture and policy, that it's necessary. But if you've done that, it'll probably already trickle down to the masses anyway (and not just via pure cultural diffusion, but because if a set of ideas has convinced most of the 'best people', it's probably a very convincing set of ideas, and it'll probably work for others too! I also think this is a general way in which the influence of the elites on culture is somewhat overstated.)

Wouldn't rich people just adopt an adult, Japanese style, in order to avoid the penalty. They could pay the adoptee a small amount for their trouble and leave the rest to the Richburger Fund For Getting Skinsuited By Activists like they all do now.

“Couldn’t people just lie to the IRS?”. Yeah, sure, but you scare a few people with enforcement and make sure the rules include “the spirit of the law” (as they do with tax) and violation will be limited.

That's not lying to the IRS though. They're legally your heirs, they're your children, and iirc at least in the US you can still give them $50k for their trouble and do whatever you want with the rest. Unlike France, say, where they could sue for an equal share.

Seems like the solution is to allow children in the US to also sue for an equal share.

Sure but if you are already talking about a sweeping legislative change with the explicit goal of increasing the number of children born, it seems like the political will to say, no you can't adopt adults to get around it, should not be very hard to find, relative to the will needed to actually do all the other stuff in the first place.

I’m fully in board with this, but I think going back to keeping married women out of high powered positions. This would reduce women going to college and therefore increase the likelihood that they end up marrying early and having more kids. Heck, as much as I as a woman enjoyed college, I think keeping women out would help here.

Very wealthy women already have more children than almost every other demographic.

Are these very wealthy women, or the wives / partners of very wealthy men?

Assortative mating means they are often both.

I'd guess there's an old money / new money cultural difference in the assortive pairings.

In my experience new money wealth marries young / hot not necessarily wealthy.

Why would you want to keep top women away from college? They have just as much right as top men to contribute to the future of humanity. It's the middling women you want to discourage if anything because the top ones will by and large not fall for the negative messaging of college anywhere near the middling women will.

Again, I’m trying to optimize births, and particularly high quality births. If a woman goes to college, she’s going to delay childbearing until after college, and if she’s highly intelligent and goes as far as she can, she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

And if we’re shooting to simultaneously try to get high IQ people to have more kids, then the above is the worst thing to do. A woman with high IQ giving birth to 3-5 high IQ kids is likely to do more to raise the general IQ of the country than anything she could accomplish in the workplace. I’m sure there might be one or two high IQ women who will make life-altering contributions to science, but if you lost that and had that woman give birth to 3-4 high IQ kids who go on to do similar things you end up getting a better return.

she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

That would be true if masters degree programs ended in a woman's thirties. They don't. An average woman who marries at 25 is totally capable of having 3+ children and there's lots of examples known to me personally of this happening. Heck, there's an example downthread of a man whose wife had four children after finishing her residency first.

Yes, but people typically do masters degrees because they want masters-degree-level careers. The masters degree itself is probably only the first stepping stone; they will need to do oversubscribed entry-level jobs that may require them to move around a lot and/or devote lots of hours per day. If you get a masters and then start having 3+ children then I think you're either going to be a very absent mother or you might as well burn the diploma now. I would say it's going to be another 5 years until that woman feels stable enough to consider children.

contribute to the future of humanity

The best way for top women to contribute to the future of humanity is by bearing humanities future directly.

Ehhh... in the strictest sense yes, and it's inevitable that women will bear the brunt of childbearing/childrearing, but the burdens of both don't seem great enough to be any woman's sole occupation. It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children. With how trivialized housekeeping has become, it seems to me that intelligent, childbearing women would be well served by WFH positions so they can contribute to the household in a more tangible sense.

Besides, you be the one to tell a curious young woman that the boys get to do all the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys.

Often these stifling parents will only have one or two children. If the goal is four or more different styles of parenting are necessary along with greater demands on home making for a larger family.

Is it the top women selecting WFH positions? These typically don't have the challenge or prestige top women are looking for. The bulk of the WFH ladies are mid, many in fake email jobs.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit, as opposed to telling them that boys have to do all the boring, tedious, monotonous, and dangerous shit?

Like, sure, you can, but that's a weird framing to take for what even you concede as the strictly superior option for society. Why would a society want to approach persuasion in that way?

It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children.

This is not the well established conclusion, since the comparison isn't terribly stifling parenting styles versus beneficent parenting styles, but rather terribly stifling parenting styles versus no parenting at all.

The repugnant conclusion of ethics is only repugnant if you think sub-optimization is worse than non-existence. Certainly the general child is not better off for having never been born to suffer parents (or worse, puberty). Those that disagree can and would resolve that issue themselves, but the survivors will- by definition- prefer the life with bad parents to no life.

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ. It is true that women have a certain baseline privilege, but with it comes a certain cap on their expected competence. It's a tradeoff that works to the favor of some, perhaps even most, but certainly not all women.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit

It's not explicitly said, but that's the message that at least one teenage girl got (though granted, perhaps she isn't a representative sample)

Aella is like the textbook example of a high-testosterone woman. She's definitely not a representative sample.

your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy

This is not a thing that normal little girls do.

Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.

More comments

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ.

Again, this is reversing the paradigm to assume the conclusion. It's not about 'the male equivalents of the women in question,' it's how you are characterizing the jobs these women's spouses would be doing if they were expected to be breadwinners, i.e. "the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys."

Most bread-winning jobs are boring, tedious, monotonous, and/or dangerous because that is why they are paying you breadwinning wages in the first place. Higher wages aren't correlated with fun or excitement, but with the compensation required for people to take them, generally because the work is not generally desirable 'cool shit.' Quite often the greater the wage advantage the worse the desirability, because if it was highly desirable then other workers would want that job and be willing to do it for less.

Which returns to the question of framing bias.

Why would you insinuate to high IQ women that they should be envious of the often unpleasant jobs of their bread-winning spouses, while denigrating the alternative, except for the purpose of elevating the former over the later?

Unfortunately, saying that top women should have careers and middling women should have babies makes ‘not having a baby’ a status symbol. Which is how we got here.

Within Finland (and as far as I know, other Nordic countries as well) there's a persistent pattern of women with high education having higher fertility rates than those with low education, which at least somewhat challenges the idea of education being universally disruptive to fertility. (Of course all these segments have fertility rates below replacement, but still, just limiting university education would not solve anything here, and there must be other factors keeping TFR low for those with lower education.)

Could this not be explained by women with high education marrying men with high or even higher education (i.e. wealthy men), which has a positive effect on fertility. Confounder?

I mean, I assume you want these babies born in wedlock, yes? Where do you think high-IQ women are going to meet high-IQ husbands at an early age if not college?

"Go to a school with a strong engineering program and pretend to struggle with your math homework in the engineering commons until a senior in the program helpfully explains what your professor couldn't" is and remains the best way for a middle class woman to become a tradwife. The Christian Nationalist Revolutionary Guard Corp is not coming to restructure our society, and the people who would have to staff this organization if it existed don't want to. We won't have arranged marriages outside of very small, insular subcultures that don't really care about the prevailing TFR.

I don't think it would take that much to merely reduce declining fertility. If you treat "conservatives" in the United States as a social group, they reproduce at or above replacement rates. Partially I think this is because kids make people conservative, but partly because in their circles having children is an honorable thing that is encouraged.

People forget there was a lot of anti-natal propaganda in schools, television, etc. I suspect that simply running that experiment, but reversed, on another generation of kids would get birth rates to rise/decline more slowly.

It seems possible that bigger-stick stuff like what you lay out would be better at getting to quicker rates more rapidly.

It's because conservatives live in rural areas, close to their extended families from which they receive millions of dollars in free child care.

So perhaps what you're suggesting is making pre-K childcare free would boost fertility? I'd buy that.

No, all the way until they are like 14.

Working/middle class families in the US already get free pre-K(not younger though) and Children’s health insurance through means testing.

American pop country music has lots of pro-natal messages, and while country music listeners would have a higher TFR anyways(because ruralness etc), you also tend to see higher fertility rates in situations where you wouldn’t already expect it.

So the question becomes ‘what else can the government do to make large families high status’. You could hand out awards for having large families, as Mongolia does. You can meddle in entertainment; it shouldn’t be hard to find a 19 kids and counting family that doesn’t come with the baggage and ridiculousness of the Duggars. You can reach down increasingly lower to reward large families with the tax code- no property taxes for families with 3+ kids, for example.

I don’t think any of these will be enough for the general population. Let’s face it, the fertility success stories are mostly populations that are ruraler and more religious and conservative anyways(Mongolia, Georgia the country, the stans, the faroes, Byzantine Catholics in Europe, and maybe Afrikaners and conservative Americans). You would, I think, have to make religion high status somehow- Byzantine Catholics, Georgia the country, and the stans saw this as a major driving factor for their fertility booms, and it’s certainly where I would look to explain the faroes continuing high fertility.

Global GDP per capita has never been higher Well, some part of GDP increase is fake and some part of GDP is not owned by population at fertile years. A hairdresser doing same work in 2020 as in 1950 is counted as higher GDP but you can't eat it.

Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture. Kazakhstan actually switched to Latin recently. The common in these countries is nationalism.

Something I've been thinking about writing an effort post on is the seeming death of "the adult", and the issue of delining issue seems directly related.

My 30-second elevator pitch is that the people talking about dysigeninics and raising the status of big families are either burying the lede or missing the point. That lede/point being that the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families and rearing of children.

In the immediate aftermath of the election there was a user here asking who were the 40-something percent of women who voted for Trump because the didn’t know any. In contrast the answer seemed obvious to me because I know many women who voted for Trump, and the answer was "Moms".

The reason big families are "low status" is that they signal a rejection of many core secular liberal beliefs. A married couple with multiple car seats in the back of thier vehicle may as well be screaming "the things you care about are not the things we care about" at every member of the intellectual, activist, and managerial classes they drive past.

You have a "fur-baby"? That's cute, call me when you're ready to stop playing the game on "beginner mode".

the seeming death of "the adult"

I mean, you'll get engagement from me, at least.

But you won't quite get what you're expecting; I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.

The active anti-adult memes are part of this, but they don't entirely explain it among the children; the typical failing of the wise parent is that they refuse to delegate and make time for delegation, because they're too busy believing the meme about their kids not becoming fully human until way later than it actually happens. I've seen this first hand from parents I consider to be pretty wise, but at the same time they're failing their children because they didn't grow up in a memetic/economic environment that's far more blatantly hostile to human development (and no, it's not 'social media' or 'video games' or other purely reactionary Boomer cope; if anything, they're more popular than they otherwise would be because every other avenue of "actually doing something" has been shuttered for safety or cost reasons- it's not a surprise they spend every waking hour in the only free space they're allowed [for now] to participate in).

A married couple with multiple car seats in the back of thier vehicle may as well be screaming "the things you care about are not the things we care about" at every member of the intellectual, activist, and managerial classes they drive past.

So's a 10 year old walking down the street or riding his bike unsupervised. He screams that his parents don't put an absurd value on safety and hiding under the bed from all risk whatsoever.

The PMC, and people with that mindset, respond in kind; the fact they're allowed to is kind of the central issue there. Safety arrests development; and kids are inherently a very unsafe thing to do. Hence fur-babies, where you're [for now] allowed to kill them or otherwise dispose of them if they turn out wrong, can send them to multi-day daycare whenever you want, can keep them in a cage to prevent them from wrecking the house, and their purpose [to us] generally matches their intellectual capabilities quite well- something that it's a meme for parents to bemoan without end the minute this stops being true for their children ('teenagers').

I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.

Sure, you can always blame the parents but that's also part of what I'm talking about when I say that "the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families". You see, I actually agree with you that having kids is inherently "unsafe", and therein lies the rub. Because if there's anything in the world that the modal secular blue/grey-tribemember seems desperate to avoid, it is personal risk, or more pointedly blame.

I believe this aversion is at the root of many modern pathologies including the seeming death of the adult. That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

Yep, another way to say this is that our response to shame is dramatically over exaggerated exaggerated.

I enjoy theories like this, but personally I separate:

1: The anxiety of intelligent (and often autistic) people, who feel like they need to control the world and make everything legible and predictable, because they hate risk.

2: The mentally fragile, who is afraid of being a "bad person", afraid of being judged, and afraid of anything which might push them out of the category "mediocre" because such things poses a social risk.

Group 1 tend to be individualistic and unafraid of questioning the narrative, whereas group 2 is the polar opposite of this. Group 1 is neurotic and tends to have low EQ, whereas group 2 has high EQ but avoids risk because they have very little faith in themselves as individuals, and they need to be part of something bigger in order to act, so they're always looking for some cause or group to be a part of. Group 1 are often childish and sort of naive in that they trust people too easily, and they're higher in the trait "openness" which allows them to believe in more far-out ideas, part of this naivety is likely that they dislike lies, and project this onto others, and another cause is probably spending a lot of time alone, so that they more easily retain childhood naivety. Group 2 are are childish and naive in that they are afraid of negative emotions and anything else which might aid their personal growth. They tend to consume whatever helps distract them from reality (modern entertainment), and they have plenty of friends who will aid them in keeping their delusions intact (You're so valid! Being a little chubby is okay! Being triggered over mean words is totally normal!)

It's hard to cut these two groups perfectly in two, but if I had to try, group 1 are rigid and logical people in an illogical world which requires flexibility, and group 2 are flexible but weak-willed normies who live in shared social delusions (blank slate, etc) and care more about emotions and social reality than they care about objective reality.

Sure, you can always blame the parents

Well, and in fairness that's not the complaint I'm answering (or rather, it's the far more complicated version of "protect your kids from hostile social memes" that, unless you have time [and most parents don't], you won't have neither the presence, energy, or finances to combat it correctly- which is part of why parental rights are a dead letter these days, but I digress).

That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

Humorously, the people blue tribe love to import have a much healthier relationship with risk than the natives do (risk-taking is obviously selected for when immigration is illegal). And then blues are shocked when their imports won't vote for the party of risk-aversity.

or more pointedly blame

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing):

First, when blame (and failure) becomes rare, the ability to assign it (or threaten such) becomes a far more powerful force than it otherwise should be relative to the objective risk.

Perhaps, in economic booms, there are very few ways to truly fail, so the ability to properly weight failure is diluted; then, when that boom ends and more ways to fail appear, the people who grew up in the 'too much opportunity to fail' times can't handle weighting risk correctly. After that, if the bust continues for long enough, you'd get another generation passing on that problem, and the negative feedback loop of "too scared to do anything" continues until the next generation has more opportunity than the last.

Second, we did such a good job (in that boom time) engineering all risk (and the human factor in general- WEIRD people automate everything, it's just how we are) out of our systems that when something does blow up, now it's a big deal.

It is, quite literally (on a social level) an allergy to risk; then, when kids are born into a society that has such an allergy that metastasizes into an allergy to blame.

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing)

These are legit points that I l will have to bring up if/when i get around to writing said effort post.

Isn't this death of the adult the same as described downthread here https://www.themotte.org/post/1199/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/257235?context=8#context

By

@jeroboam as

government competency crisis

And

@Capital_Room as

Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity,"

And

@The_Nybbler as

the essence of modern management theory

All describe the same aversion to agency and personal responsibility.

I would say that what @WhiningCoil, @jeroboam, @Capital_Room, @The_Nybbler, Et Al. are describing is the downstream effects of what I am describing. IE the afore mentioned "modern pathologies"

And @Capitol_Room as

It's Capital_Room, with "capital" as in letters, city, or punishment, not "capitol" as in legislative building.

And I'd agree that, yes, these do all point toward the same thing.

I've fixed it.

having kids is inherently "unsafe"

Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.

You're not wrong.

I would argue it's just feminism. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Pregnancy sucks for women, it takes 9 months and does permanent damage to their body. It's only natural that as women gain more power in society, they make the rational choice to not have kids and do other things instead.

It jumps out at me that all the high fertility socities you list- Mongolia, the Amish, the Haredim- are, uh, not very feminist groups. I think people get distracted looking at the economy, because most socities get more feminist as they get wealthier.

I know some people will argue with this by saying "but what about Korea!" And I would argue that Korea is actually a very feminist society now, maybe not in the same way as the US, but in the sense that women have a huge amount of social power there. Notably, they elected a woman president, while still excluding women from the draft. The men are killing themselves at work just so they have a chance at getting married, but the women are under no obligation to produce a baby.

Japan, South Korea and China aren't exactly bulwarks of feminism compared to western countries and yet they have even lower birth rates than most European countries.

this is one of those things that gets 10000x updoots on reddit and yet no one can ever show the work to actually prove it. why do you think that east easian countries are all horribly unfeminist?

I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.

This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.

However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.

as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.

Eastern European countries had and have much more progressive ideas about gender roles thanks to socialism. However, their birth rates were higher due to the elimination of the rat race:

  • they had a relatively solid QoL floor: if you had more kids you were entitled to a bigger apartment and even a car, you had ubiquitous daycare and your old position was reserved for you at your job
  • they had a relative solid QoL ceiling as well: if you weren't a cunning wordcel planning to climb the party ranks, you had no real reason to delay childbirth: your salary by the time you retired could be 200% of your starting one or it could be 190%, not really worth it

When the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, all these limits were gone as well. Forget about doubling your income by retirement. You could double it EVERY YEAR. Worse, you HAD to double it every year because hyperinflation. And at the same time, there were no glass ceilings like in the West: while some heavy industrial jobs were verboten for the weaker sex, women managers were the norm.

I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.

Interestingly, Galicia(Ukraine) is likely the most conservative area of the Christian world about stuff like that, and is a fertility bright spot in Europe despite the overall Ukrainian fertility rate being east asia tier.

Thanks, that's a good response. I don't know how to quantify it or prove it either. I've just noticed that a lot of people on the internet seem to think "oh, those east Asian countries are all so sexist" to the point where its becoming a stereotype.

Eastern Europe I think is more of an economic problem. A lot of this countries really cratered with the end of the USSR, but have since recovered a bit

But they are bulwarks of feminism compared to 1920s America, as is everywhere else in the developed world.

That would be a lot more convincing if we didn't incur permanent damage to our bodies merely by staying alive.

As it happens, "why bother caring about my body's state if I'll die anyway" is in fact not very convincing counterpoint to me.

It is a different situation.
It's like I'm asking you to spend money on something I think is worthwhile, and you say "but then I will have less money" except the government keeps the printer on 24/7, you know?

As it happens, there are tons of thing people do to their body regularly that incurs damage. The idea that pregnancy is unique is the outlier position.

Preserving one's decaying youth at the price of preventing the next generation is literally fairy tale evil queen levels of morality.

I believe the canonical fate for people who make such a bargain is to be cast in a bottomless abyss.

Not exactly esoteric symbolism. But there are few moral choices that are less universalizable than this one.

It's a fertility crisis, not a parenting crisis. Can it really be called selling out your children if you never have any?

Well it's not exactly leaving hungry kids in the woods to fend for themselves but it certainly is selling out the future for the present.

I have yet to see evidence that reticence about pregnancy and childbirth is responsible for more than a non-negligible percentage of the fertility decline, although I suppose you can say every little bit adds up.

Instead I think people don’t want babies, rather than not wanting pregnancy. People don’t look forwards to sleepless nights and changing diapers(yes I’m aware this isn’t a huge deal in practice), they want the flexibility to not have to worry about childcare arrangements, they dread paying for daycare or remember parts of their own childhoods that sucked(and I think this is underdiscussed- by all evidence a big part of the conservative fertility advantage is literally republicans looking forwards to going to t-ball games), they’re afraid the man in their life isn’t committed enough(and extended periods of premarital cohabitation are an increasing problem).

Sure, babies too. the whole package deal is kind of a crappy deal when you think about it logically. worst deal in the history of deals, etc. It's not surprising that women are choosing not to take it.

the whole package deal is kind of a crappy deal when you think about it logically.

I think you ought to stop and examine exactly why you think this, i suspect the answers may surprise you.

i can't find it right now, but someone linked a substack here a few months ago that laid out in brutal detail just how bad the entire process of childbirth is for women. Of course maybe it pays off in some longterm, ineffable, spiritual joy, but you should be able to appreciate why a lot of women wouldn't willingly take that deal.

Nobody I know who has children thinks the suffering of pregnancy or childbirth is on the same order of magnitude as the benefits of having children

Presumably those were all people who had a choice to have kids? At least the choice to not abort. You might hear differrently from women in 3rd world countries where they really don't have a choice (if you can even get them to speak honestly)

Uh, it pays off not in some long-term, ineffable, spiritual joy but in a baby.

Again I think you ought to stop and examine why you would believe such a thing seeing as (as @Gaashk observes) childbirth is arguably a "better" deal than it has ever been in human history and yet birthrates have declined. What do you think is up with that?

I remember the piece you're talking about. It was of course, written by a woman who has never had children.

Meanwhile, women who have children usually have more than one.

do you have a link to it, or remember the author's name? I wanted to read it again but I can't remember it.

On the other hand, birth rates have been dropping especially fast over the past decade, when women have had choices for generations, and things like ultrasounds, epidurals, prenatal testing, formula, c-sections for the convenience of the doctors, and whatnot have been improving. Childbirth is less bad than before. Even feeding babies is less bad than before. Freedom of women is about the same, at least in the anglosphere. Yet birth rates continue to drop.

As you said, the birth rate has dropped despite healthcare getting better, which suggests that it's not a simple matter of healthcare. But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.

But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.

That's one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it, however, is that as wages are equalized, the wife's income is more likely to be essential to the household budget, such that she is expected and needed to go back to work as soon as possible.

Also, the prenatal programs are pushing breastfeeding. So she's expected (not able, I mean expected) to work until she gives birth, then breastfeed for a month or two, then drop her infant off at daycare and pump at work, and still get up in the middle of the night to feed her infant, while also working a full day outside the home. Even elementary teachers are struggling with this, with a generally easy schedule/ They hide their children in windowless offices on "professional development" days, for instance, because they aren't allowed to organize childcare amongst themselves.

Maybe making childbirth safer, easier, and more delayable has led to women putting off having a baby, because now it's not a now-or-never, might-as-well-get-it-over-with kind of thing like it was?

This appears as you typical minding to me. Honestly, the more I think about the deal, the more it appears to be, logically, the best deal in the history of deals, and someone who can make deals that are better than that one is someone who must be in an almost unimaginably privileged position.

not have to worry about childcare arrangements, they dread paying for daycare

This is only a reason if both parents work outside the home. If one parent is a homemaker no daycare is required.

If lack of daycare / affordability was impacting fertility I'd expect to see higher tfr in countries that have improved access / lower cost care available. Is this what we see?

My suspicion is that what they want is the flexibility to not have to worry about children. The cohort of childless or low fertility women I've the most exposure to other than the lesbians, would see themselves dipicted in fiction as the women from 'Sex in the City' or the strong capable lady doctors of 'Grey's Antotomy'. Free childcare would be unlikely to promote children in this cohort.

Whether free childcare raises the TFR is a question with an answer that depends on how you adjust for confounders IIRC, which almost certainly means that even if it does work it doesn’t work very well. But that’s one thing in a list and I mostly agree with you about what it actually codes for.

"Permanent damage to your body" is something millions of people will willingly do if the STATUS incentive is high enough:

  • Military Special Operations
  • Professional Athletes
  • High stress jobs with extreme levels of compensation (Banker, High end Surgeon, big Litigator etc.)

In fact, what I just listed above are some of the tippy-top status markers for men. Personal health is not at all sacrosanct (flip the coin; millions of people smoke, drink too much, eat too much, and never exercise).

"millions" means about 0.1% of world population yet we want >80% women to become mothers.

That’s more succinct than what I was going to say, but yes. More than half of women are still having children.

It’s a bit odder in Korea, which still has mandatory conscription for men, but fewer than half of women are having babies. Seems related to almost their entire childhood being stressful, not just a year here or there.

I don't think I see your point and, to the extent that (I think) I do, I reject it.

Are you saying that it's unreasonable to expect 80%+ of women to go through pregnancy and labor? I mean, I get it, it's not like this is a species level existential issue - oh, wait, that's exactly what we're talking about.

This is a deeply values based discussion. Pregnancy and childbirth might "suck" and "ruin your body" but the end result is the creation of a human life and, if done during peak fertility years, decades of love and joy. Furthermore, it's necessary for the species to continue itself.

Are you saying that it's unreasonable to expect 80%+ of women to go through pregnancy and labor?

It's obviously unreasonable to expect 80% of women to be held to the same standards of special military operators or pro athletes, and, if that's not relevant, why did you bring it up?

This is an amazing conflation of two points. I wouldn't want to debate you in person as you seem adept at twisting an argument.

Point 1: Incentives matter. People will put themselves through extreme hardships given proper incentives (this was the Special Ops / pro military argument)

Point 2: We should expect the overwhelming majority of women to go through childbirth as the species is dependent upon it.

Your franken-counter-assertion "We are demanding that women be like special operations!"

I see what you did there. It was well done, my congratulations.

That this observation (about minority of men) is a very weak evidence whether median woman would be affected by it

I can't make heads or tails of what you're saying.

Yup.

You can convince a young guy to literally endure repeated blows to the head if the payoff is high enough.

Status is key, however there is another mechanism that is playing in here.

With hypergamy and women not needing men for protection and provision women can seek higher status men. Men can achieve higher status by spending more time. Even if you wanted to just have kids at a young age it is going to be hard to find an attractive wife without going to college, without traveling, without buying a nice house etc. The status that you get from getting a low skilled labour job and from renting a place that a 22 year old can afford doing unqualified labour is shooting yourself in the foot on the dating market.

There is no time pressure to have kids. We have effective contraception and people are pushing through grad school, trying to buy a place in the right side of town or trying to take the right tinder pics on Bali so they can get an attractive partner. If people were more naturally paired up more kids would be born.

This is only true because our culture does not like age gaps, though.

Old women do not like age gaps. Young women and older men are happy enough with them. And nobody cares what young men want.

And nobody cares what young men want.

Only prosperous societies care about that; whether or not that's causal or a consequence is still up for debate.

Young women mostly don’t like the idea of age gaps, though, even if they’re happy enough with them in practice.

I think there’s another factor here. The Western WEIRD culture actually discourages having kids young. Both parents are highly pressured to go through 4 years or more of college, then work for a few years before getting married. Then you spend a few years building up a nest egg and a career before you start thinking about kids.

Given the relatively short real fertility window, the delay in childbearing means fewer kids just because of biology. A woman’s best fertility is between 18 or so and 25. So she might well be too old to have kids by the time that she’s secure enough to think of having them. She’s not even getting married until 22 at minimum. Three years after that, her fertility is starting to decline, but she’s not yet getting pregnant.

Getting married at later than 22 wasn't uncommon as a historical norm. Although I agree that people often don't think clearly about biological realities, we know that getting married in the mid-twenties on average wasn't by itself a barrier to population growth.

Uh, who waits for years after getting married to start having babies? Is it really something that's common in the blue tribe?

Like even very secular people I know, or know of, do not do this- if they're dead set against having kids for years, they do not get married.

Uh, who waits for years after getting married to start having babies? Is it really something that's common in the blue tribe?

Yes, very.

The marriage is a big, self-referential celebration of Disney style True Love. Marriage inside of an actual church is less and less common and, for the couples that are doing it because Mom and Dad would be otherwise displeased, the "ceremony" is one reading and the vows. The real ceremony is always the reception which is a strange bacchanalia devotion to the Wife. The husband is pretty much a slightly drunk usher. The "best" weddings are the ones where everyone gets incredibly hammered, but there is no violence, vomiting, or immediately broken vows.

Usually it's about 2 years before the first kid.

Narcissism is strong.

We 'waited' seven years. We'd likely have more than 4 if we started earlier. My wife was trying for a top decile career.

Not blue tribe in any sense.

....Why? Is it really impossible to have children and be a lawyer or a doctor or what have you?

It's just mindboggling that people actually do this.

@hyrdoacetylene

Can you share your most commonly seen models of family formation and early child rearing where you are? Genuine question / curiosity.

People don’t marry when they don’t intend to have children fairly quickly. They might date ‘for fun’ but not ‘seriously’ up until that point. The woman’s parents can veto a prospective groom; family goes to the wedding along with a few close friends. When the woman’s father begins referring to them as ‘engaged’ is an inflection point in the relationship that comes well before the actual proposal, or even the prospective groom speaking to him about it. If the couple has a ‘church home’ that’s where they marry, if they don’t then they marry outdoors with a clergyman in someone’s extended social circle officiating, the denomination is irrelevant, using classic Christian vows and following a brief prayer service- even if they only go to church a couple of times a year. The bride’s parents would not allow the wedding if they didn’t think both parties meant every word of their vows. Child free weddings are not a thing, and the reception afterwards allows considerable latitude for teenagers and older children to do things normally not allowed on account of age(eg sneak a few beers, stay up very late). There is a dance floor and some toasting, it’s normal to get a bit tipsy. The maid of honor catches the bouquet and the garter is caught by a photogenic preadolescent boy.

Babies come quickly after marriage. It’s not a sin to marry poor or have babies poor, it is a sin to neglect them. The grandparents are very involved and usually a young couple has a female relative come stay to help for a few weeks after the first and second baby. Not having at least two is weird. It’s ideal for a woman to stay home until her youngest is at least out of diapers, or maybe in elementary school if she can swing it, but if not childcare from relatives or on the market has to do. The children have to come before the parents’ wants or ambitions, and it weighing heavier on the woman is just the way the world works.

It would be better if people could marry young, but they are no longer as wise, selfless, mature, and virtuous as they were in the fifties, and particularly young men take longer to grow up these days. Some of that’s their fault and some of it isn’t. It is normal for parents and grandparents to provide extra help to try to overcome this by co-signing loans or making gifts, to try to get around the socioeconomic factors like high housing costs. An elder who cannot see when doing this is destructive rather than constructive has a serious character flaw for co-signing on a corvette purchase or giving money to a wastrel who will lose it sports betting or what have you. Most women will not accept a large age gap, so people are into their twenties before they marry.

That’s more or less a description of the extended branches of my extended family doing things.

It's not impossible. It is hard. I have one kid. I am a programmer, so work in male dominated environments. There was no work support for a lactating mother. Fortunately I was senior so had flexibility in schedule and an office. But I had to pump every 2 hours. I could do that because my job allowed for it. A litigator would have had a much harder time. I could bail on work for random sick or injured kid needs (spouse work wasn't as flexible). When we had a childcare problem, my 4 yr old spent a month at work with me, hanging out under my desk until I got it sorted. Doctors or lawyers would likely have had a harder time with that. These things are the sorts of things that kill a woman's career. I could struggle through with one. More than one? Unlikely. I could struggle through as a senior in a flexible career. Not a senior or in a less flexible career? Unlikely. If my spouse had had a less demanding career and was able to be more helpful it would have been easier, but in my experience women with excellent career options tend to be married to men with equivalent or better options.

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but there wasn't an abundance of successful examples.

Despite the efforts to reduce the working hours of junior doctors, it's still alot of work frequently at odd hours. If the program has an academic commitment or requirement this is often on-top.

We were fortunate that there was no school debt.

We were also fortunate to have a very easy time conceiving.

I had my kid about 10 years after I got married. I wouldn't say it's common to wait that long after marriage but if you add dating + marriage, several friends fall into a similar time frame. I am not blue tribe, some friends are, some aren't. It's not that weird to marry to commit to your spouse, especially for those of us who are secular. Children are a separate choice.

Had our first around 4/5 years after our wedding. Despite what I was taught by Risky Business, it's not always that easy to get a woman pregnant.

Sure, fertility issues are understandable. I’m confused more by people who marry with the intention of delaying childbirth.

To clarify, do you find this more confusing or uniquely confusing compared to not marrying until later?

I find it confusing that a non-negligible number of people marry without intending to go ahead and have babies whatever the cost. Delaying marriage because you don’t want no baby seems pretty easy to wrap my head around. Having a baby and stopping at one because you don’t think you can handle more seems easy to grasp. Going ahead and getting married with the intention of not having a baby for years just seems confusing.

I loved my husband. He loved me. We wanted to spend our lives together. Marriage provided a legal structure to that decision, and offered protections that living together wouldn't. We didn't even have the "do you want kids" conversation until we'd been married several years, and were fortunately on the same page when we got to it. OTOH, both of our siblings married specifically with child-bearing in mind.

IME, religious weddings seem to focus a lot more on the idea that marriage exists for kids. Health insurance, property inheritance, SS, medical care decisions, and specifically committing to building a life together with someone you love and respect were plenty of motivation for us.

Most people (I know) don't view the purpose of marriage to be producing kids, and therefore don't think it's weird to get married without any intention of producing kids.

In spite of being exposed to a bunch of supposedly relevant data in the past few weeks, I feel compelled to ramble about myself / my family / other narcissism-flavored anecdata.

So first of all, divorce would appear to run in my family. My maternal grandmother maried at least thrice, and my paternal grandparents maried young and died single. As my parents were maried 3 months before I was born, well, grandma was starting on marriage 3 at the same time, so I'm not sure that "shotgun marriage" is accurate, but...

Then my parents divorced before my episodic memory kicks in, and I remember things (and remember remembering things) from before I was 2 (with evidence, and yeah, there were times when my memory and the evidence disagreed, but that's a whole other ramblement.) I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't dating his current wife / my stepmom, but I do remember when they were dating and vague images of their wedding. My mom took longer to find a second husband, but seemed to always be dating someone in the interim. She's currently on #3, after dating him for several years.

My paternal grandparents had 6 children, 18 grandchildren, and when my grandmother died at 71, 42 great grandchildren and 1 great-great grandchild. My maternal grandparents are harder to figure, because they didn't talk much about family members I didn't know, so ... 2 or 3? Maybe 4? I actually did meet my great grandmother on my mother's side, and it seems she had close to as many children as Grandma, ±- 1. That side of the family did a lot of migrating, so has been harder to keep track of. Stepmom is the oldest of 2, and her sister is still childless.

On my great grandmother's deathbed, my mother and her sister-in-law both promised her they'd have another child. Mom did; aunt did not. My mother's stated goal was to keep having children until she got a girl. She got 3 boys, and then a broken work/life balance, turned out second husband was abusing my brothers, ... wait did she pay for that big roadtrip we took in 2002 with divorce money? :O I just realized that makes a bunch of sense. ... anyway, then she had to have a hysterectomy, so has 3 boys and last I heard, 1 grandchild from the middle brother.

My dad and stepmom had my sister, then my dad got a vasectomy... then they got two more kids, because my cousin went to prison and they were the only family members responsible enough and healthy enough to trust with them. We've always lived closest to my dad's extended family, though on the opposite side of town. Stepmom's family are in the same general area, maybe 30min away by car. Mom's family is a lot of military people who have moved around a lot, but somehow they always arranged it so Grandma was around to help.

So going any further without tripping over my weird identity crap is tricky, particularly as I'm starting to suspect the subjects are somewhat related... But by the time I got to puberty, I defaulted to wanting children. However, I was not at all interested in finding a partner, and one of the earliest instances of me imagining myself with kids I remember, I just kinda handwaved away their mother with "we probably got divorced; everyone gets divorced." I had one flash-in-the-pan crush in high school that lasted all of until I found out she already had a boyfriend. Plus, my dad told me in no uncertain terms that I should not mess with girls until college. I got to college, and was not interested in anyone there, even though the hormones would not STFU.

By that point, I'd flipped on the subject of children. Theidea was terrifying, and luckily the antinatalists and environmentalists had given me pre-made rationalizations. It wasn't until I got out of college, was exposed to the likes of Lesswrong, and started questioning even more that I concluded that, no, I always wanted children, but when I got enough wisdom to realize how big a responsibility it is, and how antiprepared I was, and also the conflicts with my special snowflake identity crap, I recoiled in panic and took shelter in rationalizations.

Oh, and my sister has one kid, and finds it so stressful that she's got a progesterone implant and stepmom encourages brother-in-law to get a vasectomy (he is not comfortable with the idea).

My dad is the only of his siblings to avoid jailtime, avoid substance abuse, get out of the white trash ghetto, go to college, hold a long-term job and own multiple businesses, and send 3 of his four kids to college (the other took up welding and farming). Though he is a bit more pronatal than stepmom, his branch of the family appears to be an evolutionary dead-end. It kinda pisses me off when I think of it that way. He did everything right, lived the American Dream and pulled himself up by his bootstraps when that was going out of style, but unless my nephew single-handedly raises family TFR, it seems to have all just been converted into a Disney Vacation Club membership. ... OK, now I'm more sad than pissed.

But for me, personally, that "wants children, but is repelled by the things that go into making them" thing, combined with the super atomized and isolating social situation, renders that super unlikely. Even were I to go back to HS or earlier, I doubt I'd have much success overcoming that, unless a magic marriage candidate just randomly appears.

... So, about that time a magic marriage candidate appeared, and I couldn't convince myself it would work long-term, or be worth the sacrifices (she was clearly not planning to live anywhere near me, so I'd functionally be giving up everything I couldn't bring with me on a gamble that it would work out)... At a not-to-be-repeated 9-month training center that was bizarrely effective at constructing a halfway functional temporary community.

What is the unifying factor in all that mess? ... IDK; economics? Social pressures? Too much aspiring to travel? Parenting failing to adapt productively to the changes in technology resulting in Boomers, GenX, Millennials, and GenZ all having unique excuses that are probably manifestations of an underlying unifying principal?

I've seen that article before. It's plausible, I suppose, but I don't think that in countries like the US, the government confers much status, so there's not much to do there. The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.

There's a lot about this on the message boards this week, including a link to a fairly interesting article on the Reddit (by CanIHaveaSong, who sometimes used to post here). DSL is going on about nannies and au pairs, because they're upstanding citizens like that.

Clearly, the transition to a post industrial economy has been bad for birthrates everywhere. But, also, the population of many of these places doubled in living memory, while the political entities, "good jobs," and "good colleges" did not double. At least agricultural output more than doubled, so we don't have famine, but if we really want to sustain the current population level, we should probably have more top tier institutions, more cities, more high quality corporate jobs -- twice as much of the things people aspire to and work for. Apparently Georgia's population sank by a million from 1993, and is about the same as 1960. Mongolia's rose, but the country still has fewer people than the Phoenix metro area.

The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.

Except among the 40% of the country which supports him, I suppose.

It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR by somehow making babies higher status among that subset. It doesn't seem like he will actually do this, obviously, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason he can't.

It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR

Believe it or not, that already happened in 2016. I'd put money on it happening again, since the conservative-liberal fertility divide has deepened since then.

Most of my immediate family voted for Trump, but I'm still having trouble imagining anything he says or does increasing the social status of parents.

I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of five. But even among the evangelicals and Christian homeschoolers of my youth that ship had already sailed, and the families with decent status needed the father to be an engineer at least, so that he could support his six children and still go on retreats that cost some amount of money, and send his wife and children likewise. Several of my friends also have at least three children and may have voted for Trump, and I still feel like if we got awards we would all laugh and think "that's so weird."

But you have several children in an environment where you're bucking the trend. Maybe such a recognition would be more aimed at encouraging people like me (one and done) to have more? Wouldn't have worked. I know my limits. But I know folks who wavered on the second/third who might have been budged by messaging that doing so was "good" in some way. I wonder though if making access to fertility treatments cheaper/easier might not work more if you want more kids. While having kids younger would make some of that less necessary, at our current state of later marriages and child bearing, it has to play a significant role.

Yeah. I had a second partly because I wanted someone to eventually play with my older daughter. But I'm living in a 2500 sq ft mobile home on a half acre, with a wagon/SUV that fits three child car seats already, so have different costs/benefits than someone in a dense city with expensive housing.

laugh and think "that's so weird."

I have four children and I'm with you on this. Yet I think there may be something to the discomfort in accepting the thanks / reward for doing something pro-social that not enough capable people are doing.

What is the source of the "that's so weird" discomfort? It feels a bit like embarrassment to me. I'd rather heap shame on the childfree.

It's probably related to America not generally having many meaningful awards outside of the military, so it would kind of feel like it was coming out of left field. It would seem less weird to be part of some sort of ceremony involving the Georgian patriarch, even as an American, since he already belongs to an extremely ceremonial church (and culture more generally).

I think that's part of it, to some it sounds like the, Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter, something Nazi's would do.

Is there a form it could take that would be not weird?

If the award was a free 7 or 8 passenger SUV that let you buy untaxed fuel and park in handicapped parking spots or a license to buy gold from the gold window at 1971 prices.

If it had real tangible benefits to the recipient is it less weird?

It would be less weird, but much, much more expensive.

I'm not sure what the government could do at this point to get me to have another child. Maybe a year of maternity leave at my full salary and a vehicular upgrade. I absolutely did not like going back to work with a month old newborn, and having to hand deliver a check to pay back their side of my insurance for that time.

There are countries with significantly more maternity leave and public health care, still with low fertility.

Could you be tempted to have four or more children if the government canceled / retired your student loans / and or mortgage debt? No income tax for the rest of your life? The elderly giving up their seats for you on public transit, boy scouts, police and other public servents saluting you? You get the veterans and first responders discount at Lowe's?

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I mean, lots of people would take a free car and $.40 off per gallon no matter how weird it is.

I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of

I'm not sure this is possible? The reason one can't support a family of five is that our standards have gone up. All the material goods you need to support a child are cheaper relative to median income than 100 (to say nothing about 200!) years ago.

Yeah, that's why I don't think it's likely to work out.

Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline

Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.

The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.

Yes, this is completely correct.

Mongolia and Georgia share the common thread of awards to big families from widely respected institutions playing a big part of their story.

I wonder what the teacher would have said to a boy who said he wanted to be a dad.

She probably would have started making veiled hints about homosexuality and said that she’d be happy to talk to him about his confusing feelings.

I’m puzzled by this response. Why would a kid who wants to grow up to be a dad be presumed by anyone to be gay, when gay men are less likely to have kids than straight men?

Since stay at home dad is even less a long term plan than stay at home mom, it comes across as non sequitur in the context of school. Kids know that by 9, even four old boys all say things like "firefighter" or "policeman" (the girls said "princess" at my child's pre-K). So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?

So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?

Exactly. The progressive's response to a kid who is different is that he must be gay or trans or something. In fact, the teacher may even be hoping for this outcome!

It's of course perfectly fine for a kid to want to be a dad, or to just be different, without a label getting stuck on the them.

Same thing adults have been telling boys for millennia: "Insufficient".

I think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.

"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.

Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore).

This made me wonder how many American TV series with multigenerational non-Hispanic White households I could come up with. And the number is... zero? The protagonist of Hey, Arnold is an orphan who has to live with his grandparents. Chris Hansen's Jim Henson's Dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs of color quadrupedality, so I guess they should count?

The Waltons (of course)

Mama's Family (very dysfunctional, but happy families make bad sitcoms)

ChatGPT suggested The Waltons as well, but it's a series from the seventies about the Great Depression. Are there really no series about the Great Recession instead, with a Millennial couple forced to start a family in the same house one of them grew up in?

Wasn't the latchkey kid phenomenon basically peculiar to Generation X and thus a historical anomaly in the grand scheme of things?

Also, I just had to look up that car seat thing on the interwebz and actually found this: "German law requires children up to 12 years of age who are less than 1.5 metres (59 inches) to ride in an approved car seat or booster. If all other restraints are being used by other children, the child may ride in the back seat with a seat belt."

Maybe in the US? I'm pretty much core millennial, but nothing I heard in Europe suggested that children were supervised more at any point since WWII.

To begin with, "latchkey" seems to suggest that you go home and stay home alone. We were playing outside alone, and maybe half the time the parents were actually home - it's not that they couldn't supervise the children, they just didn't choose to.

"Latchkey kids" were called as such because they had to enter the house with a key when they got home because nobody was home yet, as both parents were / the single parent was working late i.e. the kids had to spend a couple of hours on their own everyday. Neither the parents nor the grandparents were around to supervise them, as the latter usually lived somewhere distant etc. They would normally go outside to play actually, because PC games weren't around much yet, cable TV wasn't that widespread and safetyism wasn't yet the social norm. And they often carried the key around their necks to make sure it didn't get lost.

Again, I think it was a peculiar phenomenon facilitated by a combination of social factors that mostly aren't around anymore.

Here where I live, in the same damn village I grew up in, kids get to play outside unsupervised just like they used to. But good luck convincing my wife that there isn't a ruthless violent pedophile lurking behind every bush - our daughter will never be allowed to go outside without a chaperone.

Social media and anxiety disorders fuck people up.

My daughter's in college, and based on the Facebook parent groups, having your daughter tracked with a phone app is completely reasonable, and not some bizarre invasion of privacy for an 18-22 yr old. I understand we've extended childhood, but if my 18-22 yr old can't navigate college without me knowing her location every single second, I've failed. When young adults, who should still be in their "nothing can harm me" phase, are so willing to surrender independence in the name of safety, it seems to signal something seriously wrong.

And back to the child thing. How does a 22 year old go from "my parents are tracking me on my phone" to "I'm ready to marry and be totally responsible for an infant" without it taking years?

I mean, we let very young teens babysit. ‘Taking care of a baby’ is not actually beyond the capacity of a 22 year old being tracked by her parents.

No one in my experience of raising my child let very young teens babysit. I babysat when I was young, but I am genx. I would have been considered a neglectful mother if I had ever allowed someone younger than college aged and infant/child CPR certified to watch my genz child. Several of her peers - a couple of whom are now in Ivy League schools - weren't allowed to cook anything on the stove in HS ... You think those parents would have allowed a 14 yr old to babysit a 2 yr old (with their child on either side)?

We live in very different worlds.

That’s basically the status quo for traditional multi generational households, except the mother in law actually provides physical benefits, like a floor of the house, pooled cooking, and childcare.

Funny enough, when I was in primary school (this was in Germany, though probably further north than your username suggests), perhaps around 3rd grade (though memory is fuzzy on that), we had an incident when several girls actually reported having a stark naked exhibitionist jump out from the bushes in front of them on the way home from school. This resulted in some evening information session for parents and a special lesson where we were told to run away and scream for the kids, but at least as far as I remember it put no long-term dent in the frequency of kids (of either gender) playing in the gravel pit, which was right next to unpaved road (cutting through some fields) where the flasher flashed.

Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries

It's more of an Anglosphere (particularly American) thing. In continential Europe children have tons of freedom. Here's Norway, the Netherlands, France, Japan (admittedly not western, but still WEIRD).

Japan seems much, much less WEIRD than Western Europe, similar to the deep deep red dirt part of the red tribe or Galicia or something. It just emphasizes education to a peculiar degree.

I think it registers as clearly WEIRD on the one fairly culture-independent marker of weird self-actualization (as in Scott's "black people less likely"), perhaps in excess of any Western demographic apart from White Americans. As for the rest, the congeniality to the red tribe is being severely overstated in part due to American culture war projection, turning Japan into some sort of anti-Sweden in American memespace (which is funny because, having pretty deep familiarity with both, I keep being surprised at how similar they turn out to be to each other in random aspects). There are some aspects of Japan that code right wing in the American scheme, but all in all it's very "blue-and-orange morality" to the black-and-white of the Western left-right divide.

Surely Japan is, by global standards, and even compared to Western Europe, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (that last one is debatable). It’s hard to argue that they’re on the whole more Westernized than Western Europe, the literal birthplace of Western-ness, but certainly in some respects Japan is very Westernized.

I think you are arguing that Japan is not as woke/culturally Blue as Western Europe, which seems broadly true to me. But this is, strictly speaking, distinct from WEIRD-ness, and more importantly there are senses in which Japanese culture displays the same lack of memetic antibodies against wokeness as Western European cultures (namely, relatively low emphasis on extended family/clan relationships, and “pathological altruism”).

I’m really struggling to see how Japan is culturally much closer to deep Red Tribe. Respect for ancient traditions perhaps? But Red Tribe (like all of America) doesn’t really have much in the way of ancient traditions. And if Japan is so culturally, whence their much-lower-than-US-Red-Tribe TFR? Do you think that’s entirely explained by their greater emphasis on education?

It’s far less individualistic than Europe or the Anglosphere; the idea that an adult can be obliged to obey a family member is normal there. It’s not western and is generally socially conservative.

My comparison was of degree, not kind.

So, I had some thoughts on this topic come up when watching the Nostalgia Critic review tv commercials from the 80s and 90s — specifically, the “baby doll” commercials. Ads for dolls that cry, and wet themselves, and such; with those all held up as selling points for the toy. In particular, the 1996 “Take Care of Me Twins,” with their burping, drooling, runny noses, etc., and how stressed out the girl in the ad looks — and this is intended to make girls want these dolls? And yet…

Which reminded me of the 2016 Australian study discussed here, about how baby simulator dolls intended for education programs discouraging teen pregnancy — replacing the old “haul around a bag of flour for a week” method they used back when I was in “health” class — actually increased a girl’s probability of having a kid by age 20 (and, interestingly, also “a 6% lower proportion of abortions, compared with the control group”). This raises a few points, starting with the fact that as family sizes have gotten smaller, society has become more atomized, birthrates have fallen, and childcare has been increasingly professionalized, the amount of exposure people — particularly young people — have to babies and infants has definitely declined.

First, like the article notes, there’s nothing that triggers “baby fever” in some woman like spending time around babies — or even just a quality simulacrum of one. But with no extended family, fewer siblings (and siblings closer together in age), no babysitting the neighbors’ toddler for a couple hours as a teen, fewer of the women in their friend group having kids and bringing the baby around for everyone to coo over, and so on, how many people these days can go most of their life with minimal exposure to cute young humans? So many women end up with their only exposure to maternal-instinct-triggering-stimuli being small animals, and then we wonder why they end up with “fur babies” instead of children? (It’s a sort of feedback loop.)

Relatedly, people have mentioned the decline of alloparenting in the context of not having Grandma around to help with the kids anymore. But go far enough back, and plenty of alloparenting used to be done by younger relatives too. Back when you could have families of five, six, or more siblings, spread out across a decade or more. You’d have the older girls as teenagers helping out with their younger siblings, and then the younger girls as teens helping their older siblings out with their nieces and nephews. Teenagers babysitting younger kids. Many more girls would end up with some level of experience in child care before becoming mothers themselves. Now, how many women have no experience whatsoever before having a kid, making parenthood a sink-or-swim prospect of plunging straight into the metaphorical deep end?

Then, of course, there’s the messages that those anti-teen pregnancy education programs mentioned above end up sending. Sure, they’re supposed to be about delaying parenthood, but the actual message ends up being pretty antinatal. A lot about waiting to have kids “until you’re ready,” but nothing about what that readiness looks like. A lot about being too young to become a parent, but nothing about ending up too old to become a parent. The message is all “BABIES ARE HORRIBLE! HAVING ONE WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE FOREVER! PARENTHOOD IS SCARY! SCARY! SCARY!” We make the prospect of motherhood terrifying, give no opportunity to prepare for it, encourage delaying it until conditions are absolutely perfect… and then wonder why people aren’t having kids. Particularly when you add in everything discussed in this thread about safetyism and allergy to responsibility.

Note that this suggests another way we can help address the birthrate issue, by addressing the education issue here. Note, to some degree it’s simply a change in emphasis. That is, go from “don’t have kids (until you’re ready)” and “(teen) parenthood is awful” to “don’t have kids until you’re ready” and “teen parenthood is awful.” And, as noted above, it used to be that we could count on families and communities to teach people parenting skills prior to becoming one (making the prospect less scary), but, as also noted, social atomization and the decline itself have deprived us of this. Hence, the need for institutions to step in to fill that gap, and provide a way for young people to be taught and given practice in basic child care.

All of this, of course, is not to say that many of the other factors people point to — housing, the modern hyper-moble job market, the two-income “trap”, safetyism, decline of religion (or even just positive visions for the future) — don’t also matter quite a lot; nor that fixing middle school sex ed will reverse it entirely. But, as the old saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging it deeper.

I think that this is a very good take, but I would further add that I think "teen pregnancy" as a snarl phrase is a malformed or malicious meme to begin with, antinatalist in itself even before the emphasis is added. We should be trying to discourage unwed pregnancy, while encouraging women to have children inside of wedlock both early and often. Surely our society would be in much better condition than it is now if it was seen as a terribly unfeminine thing for a woman to be unmarried or childless at 16. It might seem gross, backwater, Muslimesque - but what did being liberal and feminist get us?

We should be trying to discourage unwed pregnancy, while encouraging women to have children inside of wedlock both early and often.

Agreed. (The decline of the "shotgun wedding" has probably been a net negative for society.)

I think that this is a very good take, but I would further add that I think "teen pregnancy" as a snarl phrase is a malformed or malicious meme to begin with

In support of this, I'd note that at least some of the statistics on "teen pregnancy" define "teen" in the numerical sense rather than the conventional — that is, they count any female getting pregnant before age 20 ("Nineteen is in 'the teens,' so it counts!"). Thus, a woman marrying the summer after graduating high school at 18, and expecting her first child a year later, gets counted as a "teen pregnancy."

As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?

As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?

Where is the line drawn?

Dude I don’t know. I assume none of these games have explicitly anti-woke themes. Correct me if I’m wrong.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

The main game series we can consider "explicitly" anti-woke is the Postal series, and that devolved into cynical, low-complexity slop immediately. If the criteria of "anti-woke" was clearer, it would be easier to find a game that fits.

2016 Doom's main antagonist is a lesbianesque woman, and only the Doomguy can stop her, and Eternal even makes a few digs at hr wokeness with lines akin to "we like to think of the demons destroying earth as mortally challenged".

Relaxing it to 'games conservative white males can enjoy without feeling attacked for existing' widens those horizons dramatically.

Yeah, I mentioned this before, but it seems like the best we ever get are games that are accidentally "based". As in, they might have a conventionally attractive woman with a pleasant personality. Or they depict a happy, cis heteronormative family. They might not even be mixed! Maybe they depict men as capable protectors and providers, or wise sovereigns, without some fucking girlboss with zero flaws who's just obviously better than them in every way because woman.

Basically totally ubiquitous shit from before 2012, which is now so atypical and rare people push them up on pedestals as "based" or "anti-woke" just for normal. Meanwhile game journos are praising a game where you get butt fucked by a bear as game of the year.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

Sure. But the same should apply to woke games. Why are (apparently) some huge percentage of games pushing a failed, corrupt ideology on consumers?

If the games matched the consumer they would be like this:

  • 10% woke
  • 80% non-woke
  • 10% anti-woke

Instead, it's apparently more like this:

  • 50% woke
  • 45% non-woke
  • 5% anti-woke

Seems like an obvious fix right?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.

Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.

Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.

They used to buy those games. But increasingly “woke” games are now associated with fundamentally broken or derivative technical/design aspects and are starting to flop. For example:

-Concord: a game you have to pay 60 dollars for that’s worse than a free game that came out 10 years ago

-Star Wars Outlaws: broken AI and particle effects that look like they came out out of a 1996 Tomb Raider game.

-Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the 400th derivative remake of the first Assassin’s Creed game from 2007.

There are exceptions, like Baulder’s Gate which was pretty woke and had solid underlying mechanics, but increasingly AAA games are just a garbage fire of slop.

I would build out the model as something like: If there is a genuinely good woke video game with solid mechanics and few competitors, most anti-woke people will still buy them.

I think most slop isn't bought by non-woke normies, let alone wokies themselves. The question is whether "it's woke" is being advanced as the whole reason for the game's marketability, or is just a big part of the story.

Though arguable, video games are already one of the most gender egalitarian artistic mediums. Plenty of strategy games like XCOM make no distinction between male units or female units, and there's plenty of Amazonian protagonists in the medium.

Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.

Mega crit is An american group (of 2 guys) Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, who live in Seattle.

That's what he said?

yes I was just adding more details as to who they were!

It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.

You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.

And even then the international consultants will recommend changing Male/Female to body type A/B. The localizers will further censor it (particularly Nintendo).

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

I mean, it's the political orientation of devs.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals. It's an unfortunate truth, but conservatives have to face reality here -- there is no hidden trove of right-leaning engineers waiting in the wings to take over.

I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.

Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.

A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.

While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.

But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.

It does, but it's not the majority. Brendan Eich was clearly brilliant as was Bill Gates, but there's a lot more Gates' just due to programmers largely being the kids of the PMC and inheriting their political affiliations along with the high IQ.

Also, I don't think political/social conservatism and appetite for change are all that correlated. I knew a cracked engineer that was extremely right wing but was always eager to try and asses new technologies and trends. Of course, if it was shit, he would say so, but if it was good he would be the first adopter and bring everyone along as well. YMMV, anecdote != data.

There is an old saw that says that a man is often most conservative about what he knows best.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

Turbo-lib here meaning the PMC version of limousine liberal -- performative and extra.

The libertarian streak is definitely present -- although it took a bit of a backseat during COVID -- but it's not as defining of a feature as liberalism. Moreover the rise of FAANG has lead a lot of those with libertarianish sentiments to think of government as the agent for vindicating liberty against the excesses of private power. I tend to think that's rather a silly view, but here we are.

there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.

By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?

I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe

Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.

I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.

However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.

Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.

Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"

I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:

The obligations of each person to society consist in defending it, serving it, living in submission to the laws, and respecting those who are the agents of them.

Every citizen owes his services to the fatherland and to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property whenever the law summons him to defend them.

No one is a virtuous man unless he is unreservedly and religiously an observer of the laws.

And my favorite two:

The one who violates the laws openly declares himself in a state of war with society.

The one who, without transgressing the laws, eludes them by stratagem or ingenuity wounds the interests of all; he makes himself unworthy of their good will and their esteem.

But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!

Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.

Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.

At the time of Eichgate Eichpot Dome Eich Mobilier Let's go Brendan whatever we're calling the matter, I was just beginning to follow the rationalist sphere; the wokists, then called 'social justice warriors' or 'SJWs', had not yet burned all their credibility, and I still looked with favour on the movement, despite dis-agreeing with it when I felt it was wrong.

I thus held the following Views on their actions:

  1. Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people.
  2. A person who harbours animus against gay people ought not be the CEO of a company, as they cannot be trusted to take sufficient action should gay employees face discrimination from their supervisors or harassment from their colleagues. (The same applies to the head of the HR department.)
  3. However, such animus ought not be dis-qualifying for other positions; had Mr Eich been dismissed as CTO, CFO, EIEIO, Assistant Regional Manager, Assistant To The Regional Manager, or Deputy Assistant Head Of Purchasing For Custom-Colour Office Supplies Such As Red Staplers, despite not having acted on his animus while on the job, one could reasonably argue said dismissal to be an act of injustice.

Accepting (2) here is really wild. For one, it's quite hypothetical -- perhaps such discrimination never even occurs. Or perhaps it occurs and some lower-level management handles it appropriately. Or perhaps it occurs and Mr Eich recuses himself from the response and delegates it to his COO or other suitable entity. There are a half dozen ways that any putative animus need not have any impact on gay employees at all.

And even if it does come to Mr Eich to decide on the response (for whatever reason the CEO really handling such mundane personnel decisions), it's hypothetical that he would not conclude that he had to set his animus aside and decide on the merits. Either for his own ethical sense or at the advice of counsel.

hypothetical

Many bad things are hypothetical, but we guard against them anyway. It's quite hypothetical that Mozilla headquarters catches on fire, but we still insist that they have fire-alarms, sprinklers, and stairwells with doors and walls that won't burn through in less than two hours.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

Yes, but fire safety equipment doesn't require excluding anyone for their political views, which is itself its own negative.

Anyway, you could run the entire argument in reverse except signaling that folks can get away with discrimination based on anti-marriage-equality views. Or anything. At this level of hypothetical one could justify excluding anyone.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

This seems like the kind of thing that one would actually need to prove with empirical evidence. As best as I can tell, there's no evidence that someone donating to a mainstream cause against gay marriage would lead to any such downstream effects in their professional conduct in their workplace, or that gay employees in general (versus gay employees of a certain ideological stripe) tend to interpret their boss's political views against gay marriage as being a signal about how welcome they are in the workplace.

Affirmative Action is discrimination against jews, asians, and whites (in that order). Should someone who has contributed a few hundred bucks to the democratic party which works in favor of that ALSO not be allowed to be a CEO? Or does this just apply to causes lefties care about?

Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people

You made a version of this argument when we were discussing immigration. It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

Heterosexual and homosexual people cannot be regarded as literally exactly the same. There is a clear characteristic that distinguishes them: having intercourse with members of the same sex vs the opposite sex. Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant. Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant. No animus is required, though of course it may be present.

And this applies in all sorts of cases. Consider paraplegic sports. There is a distinction between an able-bodied person pedalling a bicycle, and a paraplegic operating an electrically powered bicycle. Depending on what you think sports are for, one might regard this difference as important, and split these cases into separate leagues, or one might not. Discrimination between them would not necessarily indicate animus against the disabled, but instead, say, a belief in the importance of fair competition as opposed to the importance of building community spirit.

In short, I do not believe it is sensible to maintain a moral system that regards evidence of discrimination as evidence of animus or unfairness, because people differ on so many axes that a reasonable person may find relevant.

It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

I believe that right and wrong consist in how one treats individual human beings; 'committing a wrong against a group' is an abstraction of wrongs committed against individual members of that group. Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant.

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant.

The government's interests in marriage largely involve 'financial cooperation', along with things like 'this person is in hospital, unconscious; whom do we ask about their wishes: the person with whom they have lived for two decades, or their parents who kicked them out when they were 16?'.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

This applies to civil marriage; a church which teaches the doctrine of 'complementary sexes forming a well-rounded whole' and thus only solemnising opposite-sex marriages is a different matter. There were proposals made that the State withdraw from the business of marriage entirely, issue 'civil unions' to couples without regard to gender, and leave 'marriage' to religious organisations, which could set whatever criteria they darn well pleased.

If such a proposal had been on the ballot, support thereof would not constitute animus against gay people.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

Everything about this is wrong by the standards of any civilization in western history. The government has always had a sacral function and the sacred rites aren’t always theological in nature but always have a foundation in ideas of right ordering. Every western government has been very concerned with the legitimate propagation of citizen children. Etc, etc.

Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

I don't believe "group membership" was ever a significant factor of the issue. It was always the characteristics of the specific individuals involved. E.g., nobody ever campaigned against allowing a gay man to get married to a woman.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy

This is only true if you take for granted a very modern libertine view of the role of government. In reality, "religion-adjacent" concepts like morality, justice, and the promotion of human flourishing have more or less always been the proper aim of law, since prehistory. The movement for gay marriage won not by persuading some people that these are illegitimate ends but by persuading them that gay marriage does not in fact have any negative consequences along those lines. However, not everyone was persuaded by that judgment, and it is not an act of hatred to be skeptical, a mere handful of years hence, that that foretold negative consequences will never manifest.

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

That's simply not the case. The state has a vested interest in stable family configurations that produce children that grow up to be healthy citizens, and that's exactly why marriage is a recognized concept in the first place.

"Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

But worse ceteris paribus, yes? I’m saying that the ceteris are not necessarily paribus, and which ceteris you consider relevant is a matter of judgement and of individual conscience.

From where I am standing, you have asserted a set of conditions for what the government’s legitimate interests are, and what information it may or may not consider when dealing with people. On what basis do you make these assertions, and why should I consider them compelling? Do you truly believe that nobody could disagree with you on any of them them except through hatred of those involved?

Proposal: Had Brandon Eich been CTO, CFO, EIEIO, etc when he got the boot, and been just as famous, the content of your comment above would be basically identical except the substitution of his counterfactural position for "CEO" and some slightly different rationalization in item 2.

The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.

Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.

The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.

I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.

And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.

Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?

As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.

So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?

Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.

How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?

What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?

Hogwarts

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Spider Man 2

Diablo 4

Jedi: Survivor

Mortal Kombat 1

Starfield

Call of Duty

Elden Ring

Madden

God of War: Ragnarök

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Pokémon

FIFA

Horizon: Forbidden West

MLB: The Show

Battlefield 2042

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Resident Evil: Village

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

Horizon: Forbidden West
Spider Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)

Hogwarts

Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.

It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.

and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

It wasn't actually Rowling who decided to cast a black actress. She did praise the choice, however, and then said "The books never specified Hermione is white." Which is technically true, but while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "gaslighting" (Rowling didn't actually claim that canonical book-Hermione was black) she was pretty obviously taking the piss out of people who were complaining about the casting.

I wouldn't call Harry Potter "woke" in general, unless anything liberal is woke. It's got some multiculturalism and very tepid feminism, and nothing else that would offend your average conservative. Rowling is a standard liberal feminist Gen-Xer with slightly heterodox (by today's standards) views on trans people. You're right that gay Dumbledore was a retcon. (Rowling claimed he was always gay in her head; whether or not you believe her, she clearly knew it wasn't something she could put on the page in the 90s/early 2000s.)

The movies and games have been much woker than the books (no doubt with her approval).

Regardless of whether Dumbledore was gay in Rowling's head when she wrote the first book, I think it's worth keeping in mind that she had pretty clearly already decided on it by the time she wrote the seventh, which seems to be designed around the gay Dumbledore even though it doesn't make it explicit. I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

Sure, but that's the [classical] liberal argument where "it doesn't actually matter, it never actually says in the books, Just Like You (angers the traditionalists), It's Not Special (angers the progressives)".

Which, I'll point out, is generally how those who are feminist-but-not-gynosupremacist treat womanhood in general (because that is how they were raised). It's common in media properties created by Gen Xers (because they were the most exposed to that viewpoint); that's why 4chan loves My Little Pony (G4 only), for instance.

I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.

That would be anti-woke by the current paradigm, in which negative representation is generally considered worse than non-representation for the same reason that 'don't concede the existence of excesses since it will give the bad people grounds to continue criticizing' is a norm.

A paradigm of prioritizing beneficent representation doesn't go well with making light (or villains) of it. The viewpoint of 'any representation is bad representation' being replaced by 'you must endorse' is one of the distinctions between liberalism and woke.

I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.

Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?

Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.

I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.

LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?

Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.

If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

It's not about the individual characters or elements though, it's about the philosophy behind them. The idea of having a character in a wheelchair in your fps about elite spec ops units is bugnuts retarded and can only come from a brain warped by a perverse concept of inclusivity. World war 2 was not won by girlbosses and jamming one in your game immediately demonstrates a fealty to diversity over anything else like pleasing your fans or historical accuracy.

But yes, the justification used to do all that was easy money. It was an overly simplistic perspective that equated to cooking the golden goose to smuggle in the progressive agenda, but that was the justification.

Adding a [certain style of] women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

I don't think that's the case. Rather, I think it's a low effort way to convince oneself that the game is more appealing to a wider audience, assuming that the oneself in this case buys into a certain ideology. The question then becomes why so many decisionmakers buy into this ideology, to such an extent that it overrides their greed.

You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"

The bias to action is orthogonal to the question, though. There's no limit to the types of actions they could have taken in order to expand their audience, but for some reason, they chose to "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay" instead of one of the other options, such as, say, making the chick sexy and gay (a tactic that was likely more common a couple decades ago, though the expansion target was a different group than women).

The answer to that is pretty obviously their ideology, but then the question becomes, why this ideology in particular, and why follow the ideology off a cliff?

I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

The beginning of this paragraph seems true enough, but I don't think we'd need to focus necessarily on individual studio effects. The various things people are complaining about might not all be specifically "add a gay lame woman to it," but they all still fall within the same one ideology or tight cluster of ideologies. Why that specific cluster of ideologies and why follow that off a cliff are the questions at hand.

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This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?

I've never been convinced on this.

Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.

I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.

Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?

Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.

The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.

If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.

Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.

Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.

*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.

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Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Since you don’t play games, let’s talk movies. Assume you have to choose between a perfectly neutral film and one that flatters your politics. How much is that flattery actually worth?

We don’t really have to imagine this, because the Christian film market exists. They’re still trying to tell compelling, entertaining stories, but they’re doing it without the talent, funding, or awareness advantages of Hollywood. As a result, they are generally worse on technical and social metrics. The audience is there because they think the messaging is laudable.

soy-type politics

Come on, now.

Are you implying that a Christian would perceive Holywood movies as "perfectly neutral"? Because from my understanding of US Christians, they would think a more accurate analogy would be between political movies with politics you like, but cut off from major funding vs political movies with politics you hate, but with budgets in the nine digits.

I think that there's something to be said for a movie's thinking that it's neutral (because it's part of the hegemonic culture) actually making it somewhat more neutral. Sure, I'd rather that movies comported with my values rather than values I find noxious - but I'd also rather have movies take values I find noxious for granted rather than try to sell their noxious values to me.

Better a movie written by someone who thinks gay people are normal than a movie written by someone trying to make them normal.

There's a common refrain among the "woke" that all art is political/ideological, and if you don't notice it in some work of art, then that's just because it's pro-status quo, and you're just comfortable with the status quo. What I've come to realize is that, buying into this framework, art that is political/ideological in the pro-status quo perspective is better than other art. Not categorically or anything like that, but that a work of art having a pro-status quo political/ideological message is something that meaningfully improves that work of art compared to the alternative of it having some non-status-quo (i.e. overtly noticeable) political/ideological message.

What's your point? Because in the real world we observe a lot of overly woke games and movies that just flop and lose a lot of money. And we see some that make money also. It's usually when they take a pre-existing franchise that has built an audience that likes what it already was and then change it to be more woke that, although might appeal more to more progressive audiences, annoys the existing audience and then makes way less money than a faithful continuation would have.

You can't explain this by just claiming they're flattering the politics of the audience for monetary gain. They're literally doing the opposite on both counts.

But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?

(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.

(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.

(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.

Uh what. Women already control 75% of discretionary spending, and the encouragement is to... empower women?

From that link:

By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.

Is that with or without an AI-caused extinction event, if we are talking hypotheticals?

89% Of women globally say they have shared or primary responsibility for daily shopping, household chores and food prep.

Wait, so daily shopping is discretionary spending?

Per wiktionary, that is defined as:

The amount or portion of a person's or group's expenditures which is used for non-essential or voluntary disbursements; the amount or portion of one's expenditures which one may make as one sees fit.

Whoever does household shopping might decide to go for beef, pork or tofu, but if they decide to spend their budget on video games and feed their family rice for a week that decision will likely be brought up in the divorce hearings.

Also, that sentence again:

By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.

Assume that women and men make roughly equal amounts, that half of each are single and that half of them are in hetero relationships where the women do most of the shopping for the pair or family. Would it not be fair to say then that women will own half of the discretionary spending, but control 75% of it, rather than that bold claim above?

I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.

I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.

How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

Ironically this might actually be true (eg, Candy Crush), but at the same time the autists and transgenders that primarily pushed this reasoning at AAA game devs and were tasked with designing them were uniquely unsuited to designing games actually appealing to the modal woman.

Well, no. Part of the ideology is that the notion that women tend to be more into games like Candy Crush than games like Battlefield is a misogynist, conservative, right-wing idea dictated by The Patriarchy rather than a reflection of true preferences of women and, as such, doing stuff like putting ugly girlbosses into competitive FPSs or fighting games is how to attract women to your games rather than making games like Candy Crush or Stardew Valley or the Sims or the like.

I think the best version of this sort of argument is demonstrated by Genshin Impact, which IIRC has a fairly high proportion of female players for a 3rd person action gacha game, and which accomplished it through... putting tons of conventionally attractive, sexualized female characters with a diverse range of personalities from tough girlbosses to meek wallflowers. And also male characters sexualized in ways that tend to appeal to straight women, i.e. having attractive personalities that show things like competence, assertiveness, stoicism, confidence. Of course, these also contradict the ideology pretty directly.

I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.

*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.

On a somewhat less culture-war-ish note, consider the other primary impact of the low-time-investment Candy Crush mobile set on traditional gaming - the rise of microtransactions, games as a service, whale hunting, the transformation of the gaming industry into a bizarrely legitimized clone of the gambling industry. There clearly is actually a lot of money in chasing the success of Candy Crush.

Precisely! I mean, there's no point in empowering chumps who don't spend money, right? A business genius looks at that situation and says "women spend money like crazy, but vidya is male dominated! If we could only get women to buy our wire monkey of masculine development we'd be rolling in dough! I know, let's paint it pink!"

Most “anti woke” consumers still enjoy woke media. Marvel movies attracted hundreds of millions of moviegoers in red states. The new Gladiator movie is extremely woke and lib and yet box office data suggests it’s attracting a primarily white male audience (unlikely to be mostly progressives).

Most gamers don’t even play games for the story and don’t pay attention to it, so the relative ‘wokeness’ of the writing is irrelevant. Among those who do care, I’d guess a disproportionate number are women, gay or lib.

Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?

This is a misunderstanding. Most game devs aren’t software engineers / programmers, for whom this is (sometimes) true. Most devs are QA, artists, level designers, 3D modellers, writers, sound engineers, producers, cinematic designers, and system/game designers. Those jobs can’t be ‘easily’ found at much higher salaries elsewhere; in fact if you’re a professional artist or writer who doesn’t want to write non fiction (ie be a technical writer / copywriter) being a game dev is probably one of the most secure, highest paying roles.

There are lots of non-woke games literally so many

It's just that you focus on some weird niche of american games, but the Japanese and korean studios make plenty of interesting ones. There are also american indie titles which... are actually pretty woke (I'm a member of many indie game publishers private discords and the politics channel is like Bluesky)

So it is the devs who are super woke then?

Yes. I think it's selection bias on the kinds of people who make games compared to other types of programming.

While Japan is an entertainment superpower, and mostly doesn't make woke games, I don't think it's that strange that people want non-woke stuff from American studios. It's not like telling people that India is making a bunch of awesome action movies that aren't woke will suddenly make them feel good about the fact that Star Wars has a Mary Sue as the main character. (Though seriously, people should check out some good South Indian movies like RRR, Karnan or Baahubali. Some of my favorite movies of recent vintage, and very trad.)

Yeah that's fair. The thing is that disney owns many of the highest grossing media franchises and we may quibble about how much that correlates to "large media franchise" but it's really hard to find other measurements and this one is an easily accessible wikipedia page. of the 17 that are bigger than $20 billion 7 are from disney. of the 10 that are not Disney franchises

3 are japanese (Anpanman (Yeah wtf is that), Pokemon and Hello kitty)

2 are toy brands (Barbie and Transformers) (is transformers Japanese it originally is but the main seller now is Hasbro the american company, I'd probably count it in Japan but hard to say)

2 are western video games (Candy Crush, Call of Duty)

2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)

1 Korean Video game (dungeon fighter online)

basically once you exclude disney you're looking at a group that is 50% east asian franchises anyway, (counting transformers as Japanese). If you estimate like me that roughly 1/3rd of the media landscape is woke to some degree then the 2/3rds that are not are going to lean more heavily in the direction of the 1/3rd of the media landscape that is not western.

2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)

JK Rowling still has a significant amount of creative control over Harry Potter (both legally, and because the fandom care about not letting her setting become American-generic) so I wouldn't say it is culturally a WB franchise. Rowling is, of course, a basic woke leftie apart from her heresy on trans issues, so that doesn't change the big picture.

Throwing Rowling into the pit over her "transphobia" and having one of the nice rightists with cookies who hang out there befriend her would be a world-historical self-own for the left. Fortunately, the British left is less dogmatic on trans issues than the Americans so it didn't happen.

I'd say Transformers pretty much belongs to Hasbro now. For a decade-plus, they've taken the initiative on Transformers media, on top of printing money with the toys. It's not like the old days anymore, where they could rely on the Japanese side conveniently making content for them.

As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios...

Does this explanation make sense?

Not really. It runs into similar problems as most attempts to explain wokeness, especially the first one:

  1. "Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
  2. The idea that young gamers who want to be devs will naturally be woke doesn't pass muster to me. Gamers tend(ed?) to be irreverent shitbags and were a target of woke whining from feminists for a reason. Even if they were woke today, they'd eventually find some way to piss off the keepers of the revolution because the ideology doesn't stand still (the same way progressive, "science, bitch!" atheists pissed off their feminist fellows). They'd end up on the same trajectory as Elon Musk basically. There have to be some disagreeable autists that go the other way.

Something else has to be happening.

"Overrepresented" is not enough.

But it is. Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences. If you double or triple their representation in a given population, they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing, especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity. Not to mention, many trans women are excellent programmers, and so therefore valuable to placate.

Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences.

Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes? Why don't they win, if a minority can seize all the spoils? Surely the presumption should be on their side since until comparatively recently unwoke things like "objectification" of female characters and jokes that punched down were common.

The "trans priestly caste" explanation simply doesn't work because someone is going to say "no". Someone is going to find trans people changing their plans offputting (or the trans themselves tbh -- they were a punchline in living memory). Why is it that small percentages of people are able to swing entire organizations across the entire industry? No one wants to pick up the $20 bill?

And what about industries that don't attract people with programmer socks? Why did they go woke?

they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing

I'm actually not sold that random devs, even good ones, can do this. There's plenty of work that doesn't involve the story.

especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity.

And there we go.

There's always some other element that explains the "and then the entire organization bent the knee". Seems to me that, as with woke more generally, whatever that is explains why the vidya game industry is where it is more than the trans priestly caste.

I think what people around here are missing is that trans people in tech are more important as a long-term byproduct of feminism than they are as their own specific hot-button issue. There are so many of them in tech because they're an end-run around demands to load he industry up with mediocre authoritarian women and restructure everything to cater primarily to them. There are some women who excel in STEM, sure, but as a demographic, women are so uninterested in the field that it turns out that the easier way to comply with the demands of feminism is to convince a significant portion of the actual male talent (who were kind of incel-y anyway) to take up the trans thing. For culture war reasons (to put it charitably), we get a warpedly negative sample of the trans population around here. In fact, transgender "women" are obviously much more culturally compatible with tech than their cis counterparts; they aren't attractive but they're more pleasant to be around. They aren't going to call HR to have you written up for having an anime figurine on your desk, they aren't going to try to have math devalued as a racist skillset, they aren't going to get pissed off and go scorched Earth on the company and have everyone fired on trumped up sexual harassment charges and replaced with the Gestapo. "Loud exhibitionist Chris-Chan-type autist" is the common model of the situation on the culture war right, but it's the wrong model; the ones who succeed professionally in tech are meek intellectual rationalist-type autists. They think like men and it's a field where you need to think like a man to make money. They aren't a real priestly caste, they're a fake priestly caste, a stopgap to prevent the installation of a female-feminist priestly caste, and to be frank, I much prefer things this way over the way things were going about a decade ago. (Of course it would be better if relations between the sexes weren't falling apart in the first place.)

Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes?

They tend to be fired if they don't shut up. If they get into a dispute with the visible minorities, management can't fire the visible minorities so they fire the anti-wokes who rile them up.

"Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.

I think politeness and not wanting to get in trouble with HR plays a big role.

I work with some trans engineers. Luckily there's no intersection between their identity and what we work on. It wouldn't make sense to inject the concept of gender identity into storage drivers.

But if I worked in some area that involved storytelling, and the trans engineers wanted to insert their identity into the stories, I'd be incentivized not to speak my mind. I'd want to say things like this is a vanishingly small portion of the population, it's harmful to children to encourage gender identity navel gazing, etc. But then I'd certainly be upsetting all but the most extreme high-decoupling autists among them, and I'd end up being told by HR not to say those things.

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs?

I think the problem with any endeavor like this is that you end up with the "Christian music sucks" effect. You're hiring from a smaller talent pool, and so the works that get created are going to be, on average, of worse quality, and if a work gets too preachy it can be a turn off to some people.

Just as I'm sure there's not many non-Christians earnestly watching "God's not Dead", I assume that most non-anti-woke people wouldn't line up for an explicity anti-woke game.

Am I remembering correctly that @ZorbaTHut is a dev for video games? If that's right, he might have opinions on the things in this thread.

He probably does, but talking about them too much could also be a career limiting move...

There are a lot of good video games made by teams (or individuals) that don't go out of the way to alienate their fans.

I think that a lot of the Discourse is generated by big games that are put out by relatively big companies that are very vulnerable to being targeted and controlled or influenced by activists (some people talk about "skin-suiting" in this context.)

I generally don't play your typical AAA or AAAA games and focus more on strategy/4X or other even more niche areas of gaming and I very rarely or never feel like I would be interested in a game but am concerned that it will be "woke."

I agree that there might be a market out there for an "anti-woke" vidya game manufacturer, and I think the raw talent is there (or could be gotten together eventually) but I suspect that simply not attacking parts of your player base is a perfectly fine solution that is practiced by large parts of the industry.

You're correct that the rate of autism is quite high among programmers, but I think there's even more competent non-woke programmers. So yeah, these companies hire people who are woke, and non-woke people do not apply at these companies.

Here's my personal intuition-based view: All larger companies are political, and often woke and generally left-leaning. Smaller companies and individual developers tend to be neutral or at least non-woke. To escape the bullshit, and the producers who have a hostile relationship with their producers, you just need to avoid mainstream products. It's not just video games, it's basically everything. A personal rule of mine is "everything sucks once its gets big and popular enough". It seems to tie into enshittification, in that companies only initially try to please users. After a while, they try to please investors and business partners and shareholders - not the users who consume the product.

Non-woke publishers can get devs, but it's politically dangerous to not be woke, since there's a constant pressure against you, and the media is likely to harass you, you might even get in legal trouble. See for instance how Steam is accused of allowing hateful content because some users have Pepe profile pictures. So it's not that there's too few non-woke developers, but that there's too few non-woke companies, especially at the top.

There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming. (Edit: it happened https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1861801046949191686)

Gaming studios seem to need ESG dollars which come with strings attached like requiring narrative review by DEI SweetBabyInc-like consultants.

Ubisoft and others are on a run with bomb-after-bomb releases underperforming massively. Real financial losses.

It may just be a matter of time has the market adjusts post-election.

Yeah that’s kinda what I was getting at. Elon has joked about buying MSNBC but he should save his $$$ and buy some game publishers instead. For a couple billion you could flip the political polarity of the games market which reaches hundreds of millions of people.

Yeah, but you'd make a lot of money doing so which might not be so good for Elon's tax bill. At least with journalism the write-off is nigh-guaranteed.

The number of people who want to bet against Elon grows larger. So far their record is pretty dismal but good luck.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

Elon would have made a massive profit if Twitter went completely bankrupt today and charged him another ten billion dollars for nothing on the way out.

He used it to buy himself a seat in the halls of power, not just embedding himself in a brand new government but doing so with an explicit mandate to fire the people who were in charge of regulating his various companies. I'm honestly not sure you could put the value of that trade into dollar terms.

Hard agree. And imagine the influence Elon could buy for just a couple billion invested in video game studios.

Somehow we allowed far left activists to dominate video games. It's bizarre. Video game players lean conservative. Why is there no conservative content being made for them? It's as if Mormons in Utah were forced to watch gay furry porn on TV because that's the only thing available. Sure, they'll watch it, but that's only because nothing better exists.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

Take a look at CNN's ratings and see the future of current game devs who refuse to pivot.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

They won’t because to the average Call of Duty or League of Legends player the ‘lore’ and any associated progressive politics are completely irrelevant to their enjoyment and these franchises have $10bn moats in terms of brand value and built up expertise.

This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.

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If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.

The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".

Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:

  1. Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
  2. Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
  3. Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
  4. Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
  5. Rinse and repeat

They have no agency.

Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.

Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.

The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.

Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.

To be direct:

  • Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
  • MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
  • Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
  • Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
  • Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
  • Devs keep getting abused
  • Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
  • Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
  • Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
  • MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
  • Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
  • CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
  • 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
  • -> WE ARE HERE

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.

When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.

My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related

Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes.

The most profitable franchises in core gaming (FIFA, GTA) were made as profitable as they are by an Australian grifter with no real tech skills (Andrew Wilson) beyond html (they hired him because he was a jock, unironically it’s on Wikipedia) and the Houser brothers, who were two London rich kids with no technical skills who started a music label.

What happens when you don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP, run by German autists who missed out on 30 years of technical progress. Epic would be toast right now if they didn’t get lucky with Fortnite, they only had the money to pivot unreal into film because of it.

It's not so much that non-tech people are bad for games. But that their utter dominance means tech nerds rarely get their voices out.

When doctors & lawyers take on secondary leadership roles, they don't turn into narrow minded autists. They learn the ropes of their new role, and apply those to their profession. Tech people should be able to do this too.

A company must have at least one of - love for the product, love for the tech or love for the user's identity. The counter to that is love for the money, love for the optics & love for the media. The nerds are most likely to have love for the tech, love for the user (because they're gamers themselves) and love for the product (because they want to make good games).

MBA types usually love the latter. But, media, optics and money are downstream from success. You can game media + optics and temporarily identify a money extraction strategy. If the MBAs don't play the games, don't care about the tech and don't identify as a the user (a gamer), then they'll inevitably crash and burn. In the woke era, many video game art-people hated gamers & gaming, and were using it as a way to tell their own woke story. This doesn't work. GTA was the Housers' baby. They may not write code, but they surely loved the product.

Andrew Wilson

Wilson definitely revolutionized the monetization of gaming as EA CEO. It's not to say that people like him shouldn't be hired or given important roles. But the CEO is the lifeblood of a company. Give bean counters the reigns, and they destroy the whole company for better quarterly results. Ballmer is the classic example.

The counter to this is Google and Facebook. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg turned them into the world's richest companies. But, because the CEOs were technical, the focus of the company remained technical. Even Tim Cook's peak MBA personality (in the best way possible) was balanced by Ive & Craig as two people who loved the product. It's cliche to say you need a balance. But, you need a balance. For instance, look at the EA board. 2/11 people have technical backgrounds (2 CTOs). One of them is a forever program manager without game-dev experience and another is a head of security, who while technical, has nothing to do with game development. This is the lopsidedness I'm talking about. 0/11 people are hard core game dudes.

don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP

I guess I'm in the Bay Area where technical people are fiercely business focused. I can't relate to the SAP situation

Say what you want about Elon, but he quickly reaches a 201 level technical knowledge in the companies he runs. Your CEO doesn't need to be an expert. But they need to be good enough to smell bullshit when it stares them in the face. Listen to Elon's reasoning about major strategic decisions. It is simple first principles reasoning on top of the core technical primitives of his company. (and I don't even like the guy).

Ballmer is the classic example.

How much of a bean counter was Ballmer, really? I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill.

I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill

Their respective portfolios certainly seem to imply so

"bean counter" isn't exactly the right word. But he instituted the "rank and yank" system which pitted employees against each other in a brutal competition for survival. From a distance I can sort of see the logic, but in practice it completely destroyed their teamwork and cohesion as everyone tried to make sure someone else was below them in the pecking order.

It’s hard in big tech where so many senior developers work hard in their 20s then have a family, coast, rest and vest, though. There’s no truly fair way of getting rid of them.

…yes and no.

Devs are overworked, underpaid, and lack creative control. Yes. They are politically oblivious, subject to the whims and aesthetics of their MBA-wielding superiors. Yes.

But these are not a consequence of anti-expert sentiment. The door isn’t open for everyone. Those managerial nobles and HR legions were invited in thanks to the iron law of scaling: comparative advantage. Time spent managing is time not spent on interesting technical problems. Most of the senior devs I know, socially competent or not, are much more interested in the latter. So they hire their counterparts who, technically competent or not, prefer to manage.

Cartelization doesn’t help. Every hour spent on management or marketing or compliance or HR or accounting or basket-weaving is an hour not spent on the core technical task. If you need them all you have to hire more manpower. That’s more expensive with constricted supply.

The smaller studios of the 90s just had fewer non-core tasks. You don’t need a manufacturing specialist when your whole production line is one CD burner.

Why should devs be the one in charge? It's the designers, the ones that design the systems, that make the games what they are.

Is design really that exclusive of a skill? I find it hard to believe.

I'd put artists above designers in terms of value, and programmers above all of them.

I can come up with the coolest game you've ever played, in my head, right now. Good luck making it without artists and programmers.

No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.

Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.

Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.

You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played.

First I'd disagree with this - stealing systems that I've played and modifying them is exactly what I'd do. Could I have come up with MtG on my own 30 years ago? Probably not, but a background in software and being a huge fan of games means I could probably come up with something serviceable, if not 100% unique.

Tons of great games have been made without artists.

I can think of vanishingly few games where the art and design were not significant. My video game dev friends often have something great on their hands, design and system-wise, that is ultimately not fun to play with stock art. Simple platformers with great art and music (Braid, Limbo) are vastly more successful than their hideous, bare-bones brethren. Sure, games are developed before artists get involved, but they don't make it to production or succeed without it.

Yeah, good luck making a movie without actors, camerapeople, costume designers and so on, but it's still the director who is the lynchpin of the whole production.

I am one of the people who would agree with you that leadership in any team context is key, and it's a lesson that took me too long to learn.

I see the value in a designer/team who has a vision and can push to see it through. The analogy of a director may be a good comparison, in that they can produce what I would consider a good movie with very little in terms of assets or contributions from the team.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "Value" and "Success". An indie film with one director is almost always going to be crap, occasionally a niche art-house classic, and very, very rarely a breakout like Blair Witch or something.

It's not management specifically I was talking about, it's having a detailed vision that you know how to iterate upon all the way to the successful release. You can be the sole developer/artist/writer/composer working on the game, but game design is the only critical skill you can't really subcontract. Theoretically it's just a PDCA cycle, but in practice it's a complex learned skill:

  • can you tell why your vision is a game people will play?
  • can you tell which features are quicksand and have to be dropped or replaced before you've wasted too much effort on them?
  • can you tell why build A is better than build B and what the next build C should be like to be even better?
  • can you tell when your game has started to diverge from your vision and rein it in or pivot to a new vision?
  • etc.

Indie devs have to learn this because they are often wearing multiple hats. It's very useful for designers to know the limits of engines/art/music/writing they have to work with. It's very useful for a developer to have some design skills ("Dave, the game is based around massive leaps across massive maps, our current movement code feels sluggish, I think we need more air control," says Steve the designer, and Dave can either increase air control and send the new build to Steve or keep tweaking the code until the movement feels just right). But it general that's two separate skillsets and one of them is critical.

This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.

Maybe I've been out of the gaming world too long - where are these fantastic games with no/crappy art?

Even very designer-driven games (EX Super Meat Boy) have great visual components.

Vampire survivors and co? Juice Galaxy was my first thought, but that barrel of lunacy is free already.

EX Super Meat Boy

If super meat boy has great visual components then basically anyone who can download a free asset pack from itch.io has great visual components.

I believe the contention is that the devs should also be designers, or rather, that the designers should rise up from the dev mines.

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

No, there's no $20 bill.

Big companies are woke and will mandate woke BS. People who climb the greasy pole in corporations are socially adept conformists with sociopath traits. Not the kind of people who care about truth or beauty or get disturbed by woke shenanigans. They read the room and act accordingly.

This will change as US business and political elites become anti-woke which they must. According to Thiel, in SV in '16 they thought he was crazy, by '20 people were telling him he was right. People got fired over activism since then. So the tide is turning.

MtF devs, rare as they are, or woke devs in any normal company would simply toe the line or be told to go elsewhere if they acted out.

But then, you're not missing anything because big companies make games for big market shares and big market share require games made for the average person, who are not that interesting.

But could they get devs?

Yes. For example, Factorio devs are anti-woke to the point there was a minor scandal when someone called out one of them for recommending a programming essay by Uncle Bob, he was told to shove his opinion up his ass..

Another anti-woke game is Kingdom Come, whose developer is notorious for talking back at liberals, unapologetically told people to get lost after they wanted blacks in medieval Bohemia and is even mildly politically active in Czech Republic having founded a small NGO called Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression which has of course been accused of spreading 'disinformation' by the arbiters of truth working for the Ministry of Interior. (for Americans, that's the guys who run the national police, jails and so on )

It's a matter of funding and publishers culture moreso than the raw talent. Factorio was self-funded, Kingdom Come got funding for development from a local oligarch. Not sure how KC2 will be, there were rumors but the guy in charge is not the kind to let himself be overruled, so I expect no wokery even if publisher/funder is no longer local.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

(If you're black with that IQ, you can get paid much, much more by being a businessman etc)

Glad someone mentioned Factorio and Kingdom Come. I think Factorio shows the most likely path out of the mess: non-woke, not anti-woke. Contrast explicitly anti-woke games like Hatred where you just trigger a new wave of thinkpieces that probably hurt your cause more than they help.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

Is that true? Europe is 500 million, Japan+Korea combined is about 200 million. Brahmins roughly similar, we can probably guesstimate another 500 million whites and Asians in the western hemisphere. Arab Christians are about 15 million, add African whites to get to 20 million, and Russia is about 1/3 Muslim 2/3 Christian- if we assume all Russian Christians belong to high IQ groups(and most of them are ethnic Russians so this is probably close enough for government work) that’s 100 million. Add Oceania and the Ashkenazim. So we’re at 1.5 billion before we account for China, which might be lying about either its population size or its IQ scores, but we can probably say at least another billion at an average similar to other East Asian countries. That’s 2.5 billion before we start trying to chase down every Tutsi and Igbo and Yakut, but there’s so few of them that it doesn’t matter very much.

Of those, woke is the official culture for the western hemisphere(hate to break it to you, but Latin American elites are not based, although some of them are racist and woke on every other issue), plus most of Western Europe(Italy and Austria seemingly the only partial exceptions) and Oceania. This is probably closer to a billion out of 2.5 billion than than .5 billion.

Japan at least is already over represented in game design.

Uh, not an expert on the video game industry, but isn’t the US tech industry far less dominant in video games than in other fields?

That would make sense. US devs are overpaid to a ridiculous degree. Good luck getting them to work 80 hours a week on some video game for 50k a year.

Well yeah, and my understanding is that Japan, Poland, etc are a lot less woke.

Rule of thumb for me is game devs make 50-66% of what they could make doing boring enterprise dev work, with 50-100% longer hours

I think that rule of thumb only works for the US and a few other western countries with very high-paying enterprise dev sectors, especially the countries with a booming financial sector. It is not the case in Japan, Korea, or China, where game devs can make as much or more than enterprise devs.

Why aren't there antiwoke Game devs?

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Anti Discrimination law MANDATES that you continually hire hostile sexual and ethnic minorities who largely resent the cre audience, and then increasingly pander to those employees, lest they file suit for workplace discrimination.

This is why indy games don't have this problem and are still creative, sexual, violent, disturbing, male-coded, etc.

As your games company employs more people the more DEI people you're forced to hire and shove into every function you can fit them... This is why hollywood and videogame writers rooms are so woke... There's maybe 0.1% gender-queer black people who can code or 3d model at the level of the pros in the coding employment base... but you can shove anyone in a writer role, have them throw out horrible ideas, and then have some poor intern turn that into dialogue.

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Ludicrously uncharitable reading of the lawsuit. While the complaints ranged much more widely than the dispute over the 'core gamer' criterion, even on that point this wasn't a disparate impact claim of the form 'women are less likely to be gamers therefore hiring on the basis of playing Riot games is discrimination', the argument was that 'core gamer' was a nebulous and fake term that was the fig leaf management used to avoid promoting women, rather than actually having anything to do with playing games. Now I'm sure you disagree with that reading, but that was the thrust of the case they made.

Thankfully, this does seem to be going away.

Walmart just canceled their DEI program, following many other companies like John Deere, Harley Davidson, etc...

It's not so much that the law required these departments. It's more that folk beliefs sprung up thinking that DEI was "best practices". This thinking is now obsolete, and DEI programs are now accurately perceived as damaging to public relations and the bottom line.

I don't see how that avoids a 100 million gender discrimination lawsuit.

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Where can we read the best breakdown of this?

A quick Google search reveals the following documents:

By offering only "hardcore gamers" the right of passage into its workforce for years, Riot denied equal employment opportunities to hundreds of qualified female applicants since opening its doors.

Note that this lawsuit (1) was brought by the California govt. in state court rather than by the federal govt. in federal court, (2) alleged more illegal behavior than just hiring discrimination, and (3) ended in a settlement rather than in a determination of guilt after trial.

I donno man. I think a lot of things were going on at once.

The centralization of the video game journalist profession in San Francisco when Ziff Davis bought everyone and consolidated their offices there didn't help. You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.

There is a certain type of terminally online, always offended psychopath that always seems to work their way up the ranks from forum bully, to jannie, to "Community Manager", to holding a gun to a company's head threatening to run to their game journalist buddies if they don't get what they want. Sometimes the company calls their bluff, I think the developer behind Guild Wars did that.

Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house, and employees feel emboldened to bully their coworkers into conforming with progressive dogma. Although given all the leaks you see Grummz getting, it's obvious some dissidents are keeping their heads down and cashing paychecks.

There are all the theories about ESG loans and other financing options only being available if games pay protection money to DEI consultants. I'm not sure how much concrete proof has ever come out about that. I've never seen a contract with it spelled out, but it wouldn't shock me.

I know the indie scene is incredibly cliquey and woke. BPD chicks who've practically never made a game somehow hold court and decide who is or isn't allowed to network and make connections, and who get's slandered by the woke games journalist. Sometimes they even drive their targets to commit suicide, and then their own family throws them under the bus and refuses to tell the dead man's side of the story because of some word salad about privilege and lived experience.

And then there is the fact that the pay and the hours suck. I make way more fucking money plying my trade literally anywhere but the video games industry, despite loving games and desperately wanting to make them my entire life. In the early 00's when I was choosing a career path, The EA Spouse scared me away from even considering it. Now I wouldn't want to subject myself to how utterly toxic the entire industry appears from the outside. And I wouldn't trust anyone who tries to sell me that it's not that bad. I don't know how you tolerate the work culture unless you are already mostly on board with progressive dogma.

You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.

Surely video game journalists don't matter. These clowns can safely be ignored or, even better, mined for exposure as their performative tears serve to drive engagement.

I don't follow video games, but this seem incredibly obvious.

No one cares what these people think.

I disagree. Games journalist have proven themselves quite able to collect scalps in the industry even fairly recently. And while a good game often overcomes their smears, sometimes they don't, and I can sympathize with an executive not willing to bet the company on pissing off Jason Schreier.

Jason Schreier.

With respect, no one gives a rat's ass about this creature, whoever he may be.

At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power. Don't apologize, don't cuck, and things will be fine. In fact, they will be better than fine if you mine their outrage for engagement.

At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power.

They do, though. They can have you fired. They can have other companies break contracts or refuse to do business with your company. Including companies like Mastercard and Visa.

Fair enough. If you’re a wage slave they can get you. If you’re a person or brand with a real audience they are powerless.

The situation can be fixed by firing DEI departments and it’s happening right now.

Sometimes the good guys win.

If you’re a person or brand with a real audience they are powerless.

If you're at least as powerful as Joe Rogan, they're weaker. Others with real audiences have indeed been canceled, e.g. Roseanne Barr, Mel Gibson, and Louis C.K.

Potentially related: Elon Musk just claimed xAI will start an AI game studio to make games great again!. Not sure if it's a serious announcement, but it came in response to another tweet by Dogecoin creator Billy Markus:

i don't understand how game developers and game journalism got so ideologically captured

gamers have always been trolls, anti-greedy corporations, anti-bs

gamers have always rejected dumb manipulative bs, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser

why lean into the bs?

The video game industry became "woke" because of a combination of factors.

First, the whole tech industry is woke and video games are technology. Input/output, California, etc. Austin is a video game development hub, the blue-ing of it followed. Hell, look at AI.

Second, video games were considered an endless growth industry, "recession-proof" and with infinite potential for monetization and expansion. They made more money than Hollywood a while ago and the trend has continued ever since. The more money you get, the more investors salivate at the thought of unloading their capital cannons at something and flakking it to death. You also tend to attract vultures who see opportunities for easy grift or coasting. A diversity consultant at a video game company doesn't do much in the way of actual work but can get a good salary when times are good and potentially infinite growth means lots of opportunities for free money.

(Creative industries awash with cash don't tend to make very good use of this cash; this is not unique to video games either.)

Third, it's known that DEI/ESG investing makes it easier to get loans. Triple-A video game development is lengthy and very expensive. Why fund your own development when you can get a low-interest loan to do it for you as long as you DEI a bit? Better yet, you can use it to hedge against your failure, because you, personally, didn't lose money. Blackrock did! Roll hard left and die, or die and roll hard left etc.

Finally, there's something that Steve Jobs famously identified; as companies grow, product guys get sidelined in favor of marketing guys. Marketing guys end up running the company, and marketing guys are very sensitive to how their companies are perceived. Everyone swallowed the meme about how consumers don't like supporting companies or brands that don't share their values, and the loudest people that end up giving marketing guys the most input on the internet with the most social reach tend to be very loud about social justice in particular.

Video game development is very, very hard. The modern SDLC can occasionally write functional software or simple CRUD apps to spec, but very rarely will it make a genuinely fun game. The fun in a game requires near-autistic levels of dedication to design, interaction with players, and a wealth of technical knowledge to even implement, let alone test. Hand-adjusting animations frame by frame for simple actions or interactions, hours spent manually adjusting the lighting for areas, design documents written in arcane notes over napkins, walls and coffee tables, playing and iterating again and again.

It's pretty apocryphal that during Blizzard's golden age they knew they were onto winners when their own employees would put off working on the game to play the game they were making some more.

Mark Kern talked about this: https://www.geeksandgamers.com/video-game-producer-mark-kern-talks-sweet-baby-inc-and-esg-in-gaming/

Basically the issue is how games are funded. The studios get investors to front money for game development.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money. Companies like EA saw the cheap money with the only condition being that they had to hire a bunch of DEI storyline consultants.

Now games are failing, but it's hard to fire the storyline consultants. They know how to work the system.

Also the various left wing activists they've hired over the years are trained to form a block and not back down, so it's a giant fight where just getting rid of the new hires isn't an option.

Of course you're right in that part of it is the devs. Trans women in particular tend to have issues with women's hips in games.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_Canada#Studios

Assassin's Creed 4 has it's modern day sections set in Montreal. Mass Effect 3 has Shepard's trial take place in future Vancouver.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs

Actually this is because of a massive tax credit scheme which meant that not opening a game studio in Canada meant you were actively paying a big premium for the privilege. Any large company which could open an office there did, because any employee on a salary under 100k a year was effectively subsidized by the local government.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money.

Why were companies like BlackRock pushing ESG hard?

It's hard to know all his motivations. I think part of it was that hiring a bunch of leftists to run funds kept Elizabeth Warren and her ilk off of his back.

Larry Fink simply believes in it, and it's not his money he's wasting.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib. He strongly resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms. Blackrock isn’t primarily or even substantially responsible for DEI in corporate America and its influence on firm culture at board level is minimal. Fink is likely in the 65th percentile, no more, on the right-left scale among Americans. ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry. What little was done was often under pressure from big institutional investors who do care, mainly universities and progressive pension plans (like teachers and academics), along with some progressive sovereign funds like the Norwegians. Blackrock promoted ESG under pressure from these institutional clients, not because of Fink’s own politics.

"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.

"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.

edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Can you elaborate? My 401k tracks SPY almost perfectly.

Fink is on video talking about forcing behaviors which was pretty infamous and is probably something that those who talk about ESG and Fink, one way or the other ought to be aware of.

"You have to force behaviors. If you don't force behaviors, whether it's gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you're going to be impacted. That not just recruiting, it's development," Fink said. "We're gonna have to force change."

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/blackrock-ceo-slammed-force-behaviors-dei-initiatives?intcmp=tw_fbn

The guy wanted and still wants to throw his influence around to transform or lock in social governance goals which are DEI goals. It isn't a credible argument to claim he didn't do nothing, only a little and he was just pressured into it.

ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry

Global Assets under management is set to rise in 145 trillion by 2025
https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/press-room/global-assets-under-management-set-to-rise.html

And ESG assets were according to bloomberg 30 trillion on 2022 to reach 40 trillion by 2030 https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/global-esg-assets-predicted-to-hit-40-trillion-by-2030-despite-challenging-environment-forecasts-bloomberg-intelligence/

This isn't a tiny part of global assets.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib.

This is like saying that apart from the shooting, Lincoln's theater experience was uneventful.

I agree that he is like a mainstream Democrat which puts him firmly in the cultural far left.

Centrist is one of the most abused words in the motte. Sure he fits with the kind of people who tend to get the title centrist neolib here, but it is often people who are in fact quite culturally left wing and very willing to push an agenda on that direction. In addition to those, at best those who do so on some key issues and are also zionists, but might not be leftists on some other issues also are too easily inaccurately called centrist. Which doesn't make them centrists since on the issues they are converging with the left and hardcore about, because they aren't really anywhere near the center. For example pro mass migration types such as Hanania fail at being centrists too.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

The video I mentioned above of Fink directly talking of forcing companies to have change effectively counters the idea of the guy as an inconsequential centrist.

The reality is that Fink is still pushing ESG and also he responded to the backlash by limiting to an extend how much he pushed it.

Downplaying the ESG issue and excusing Fink helps the DEI agenda.

It isn't happening and it isn't (much of) a problem is how the real ESG problems enlarge. There is a woke/stockholder capitalism model that promotes a DEI agenda where there is pressure to be ESG compatible.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

Maybe I am wrong but it seems to me that ESG funds means ESG etfs while the bigger figure is ESG assets. For example, if Microsoft is considered ESG then it counts fully in the bigger figure but only to the extend it is part of ESG funds in the smaller figure.

If ESG assets are a sizable part of the global assets then that matters however. ESG corporations are at least much more likely to have DEI but also policies such as with the AI if big tech companies that are culturally far left.

Moreover, if a pro ESG organization like Blackrock manages assets in a fund that isn't ESG, that doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't be bringing their influence in a pro DEI direction. Influencing things in such direction doesn't mean they need to call this ESG To be doing it. And due to backlash they have made statements of rebranding as the term has become too charged, they say.

There is also ESG lending incidentally given to companies that pass these criteria.

Additionally that 7 trillion can matter too because organized minorities that are pushy can often get people to go along with them over larger groups that are less forceful and don't push a singular agenda. Which is why backlash and institutions turning away from Blackrock is useful in stopping the likes of Fink from forcing the changes that he wants to make.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

This. Recently I was thinking about all the effort that various "intellectual" movements put into basically saying that any thing that happened was the inevitable result of material conditions, technological progress, or whatever else that can be invoked plausibly and give the explanation an aura of inevitability. It's like a whole bunch of people internalized that quip about "creating other new realities, which you can then study too", or are repeating it deliberately so that others internalize it.

That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction

So? We know from academia that merely having a sponsor with a particular interest is enough to bias a study, even if the money ostensibly comes with no strings attached, which is why we require to disclose conflicts of interests. But suddenly, when in comes to the corporate sector of all places, the standard of evidence is supposed to be set at direct funding for specific activities?

Why do I keep associating BlackRock with Erik Prince instead?

That's Blackwater, the private military contractor.

There's also Blackstone which is a different asset management company.

In the cyberpunk future, we will see a news headline stating that BlackRock hired Blackwater to put the hurt on Blackstone.

Making a video game is an extremely risky proposition. Wokes coordinate to credibly threaten increased risk for those who resist, and can at least plausibly promise reduced risk for those who cooperate. Up until recently, the other side wasn't even on the field as they had to build an entire information economy from scratch. This is not all of the picture, but it's a big part of it.

Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about obese superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.

Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies and circulating blacklists, because there's literally no oversight.

It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.

TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.

HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked.

Wow... you weren't kidding. I looked up the term "cluster hiring" and was greeted by this helpful description (in an academic context):

Cluster hiring, a recruitment practice known to increase diversity and promote interdisciplinary collaboration, is becoming increasingly popular among colleges and universities looking to diversify faculty and advance research related to social justice.

That's almost, but not quite, the most on-the-nose self-aware description of the long march through the institutions I've ever seen. I also enjoyed the one HR blog that described it as "an approach that aims to aggressively onboard diverse candidates", which sounds rather, um, unnecessarily violent. (Perhaps it's just a microaggression.)

The most self-aware description of the long march I've ever seen was from a book by a progressive theologian, described in an academic article I read like this:

"I do think the church is well placed to bring about some significant change in the world. And change in the world is desperately needed." The church’s "new mission" will be to “develop spiritual awareness in individuals and communities around the world”. Because the church – at least in North America – is so widely distributed throughout the community it is well placed to effect widespread consciousnessraising about such issues as AIDS, Global Warming, equitable access to technology etc. "The church has ground level access to millions of people. And millions of aware, reflective, conscious people is exactly what this world needs."

(Students of history may be reminded of suicide-cult-leader Jim Jones, who -- before drinking the Kool-aid -- attempted to convince the people of Indiana to "put real socialism into practice" through the guise of Methodism and then Pentecostalism. Sometimes a wolf comes as a wolf.)

I do appreciate all the evidence we're gathering on how progressives are wearing all our institutions as a skinsuit, but one wishes they might try to be more subtle.

The Kraft Heinz Company would kindly like to insist that it wasn't Kool-Aid®. The Kraft Heinz Company products have never been used to facilitate a mass murder-and-suicide.

Cyanide tastes horrible. I would be insulted as a Kraft Heinz executive that Jim Jones didn’t trust Kool-Aid® to mask the flavor.

Well, not a fast mass suicide.

You're not wrong overall, but FWIW there absolutely are non-woke devs. Very few are explicitly anti-woke, though, that's a very small niche. And either way, they try to keep their politics out of the public as an issue of self-preservation. The userbase being anti-woke isn't entirely true - there are elements of it, but numerically I think the vast majority of players are actually just plain not interested in politics. There is a sizable group of vocal anti-woke players, but they're a drop in a bucket compared to the many more who just want to grill game.

One problem is that even anti-woke devs need to cooperate with woke publishers, influencers, reviewers, community managers, contributors, and of course a sizable woke customer base. Very few anti-woke people who work in game development for reasons you have pointed out. It's better for devs to try and be apolitical than to risk suffering sabotage, bad or no publicity, uncooperative business partners, negative reviews and alienating a large number of potential customers. It's a woke ecosystem; you can't thrive in it by swimming against the current. And given how ridiculously oversaturated the market is, it's hard enough to make a profit without making yourself a public enemy.

As a result, non-woke games made by non-woke devs do absolutely exist. Take any game without controversy about it, and chances are it's one of them.

But who can make an anti-woke game? It might have to be someone who doesn't care about an uncooperative environment and doesn't care about making a profit, i.e., an indie hobbyist. Those games exist, but they usually don't gain much traction, visibility or longevity, because this type of dev has very limited resources with which to make an actually good game. Alternatively, a serious game development company that managed to associate itself with politically indifferent influencers, publishers etc. might decide to market a game as explicitly anti-woke...but it would still have to be a good game, else they're just shooting their cause in the foot and ruining their own future prospects on top of it. But here's the rub, for a hobbyist or a company: if they can make a good game, then why not market it to everyone instead of just the small anti-woke minority? Ultimately even anti-woke gamers are gamers first and anti-woke second, that's why they play games at all, and will play a good game over a politically appealing game.

In conclusion, game development is a woke world with very little breathing room to spare, and trying to fight an uphill battle in there just has you run out of oxygen.

I'm not convinced that the SWEs they hire in the video game industry actually are all that woke, that's at least not my experience with swedish video game developers. They're not anti-woke but they aren't really woke either.

The people that are woke and who are able to insert woke inte video games are the writers, artists and designers (and game journalists but that's outside of the developers), and i believe its that pipeline thats really rotten if any. What percentage of writers with a "relevant degree" are even non-woke? Anti-woke?

Furthermore even if you're non-woke, if the only acceptable culture in your industry is woke what are you going to do? You'll at the very least put in performative nods towards wokeness like "body type a/b" and inserting a girlboss here and there.

Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.

To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.

Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.

You're right, and it's such a shame, and it's because marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed. So for every dollar spend on making something of value, 9 dollars are spend trying to convince others that it have value. This tendency generalizes to most of society, which is why most things have become so fake.

marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed

There are reasons for this. A friend of mine is a VERY successful indie developer and publisher, and his business thinking is as follows:

The vast majority of people buy very few games every year. Even most ‘gamers’ might play five to ten.

So if you’re in the top ten in your market, whatever it is, you’ll rake in money. If not, you’ll make almost nothing.

Therefore, it’s worth spending whatever you have to on marketing, celebrity cameos, etc. Anything to shift you from 11th on the list to 9th.

I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.

I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!

Ratio of positive/negative reviews is easily gamed and also selects for very niche things that has a loyal fanbase, rather than something with a wider appeal. I'd go as far as to say that positive/negative ratio on its own is worse than a pure view metric.

What you want is some kind of Bayesian weighting.

I don't see how it's easily gamed, but it does select for niche things. If these niche things are high quality to those that it appears to, isn't that fine? If less than 20% enjoy jazz, the better conclusion is "Of people who like Jazz, this one album is really good", rather than "Only 19% of all people like this album". Everything with a wider appeal has less depth, there's a sort of trade-off. I'd go as far as saying that everything good is niche. There's more people towards the middle of every standard distribution, but the best things (which are still popular enough to survive) are a few standard deviations to the right. And, if you allow those outside the niche to change what's inside of it, through the power of numbers, they will just destroy it or turn it into what they already like (which is plentiful everywhere). Hence why communities (like this one!) protect themselves with gatekeeping and rules and try to stay under the radar of outside political pressure.

I think the reason that votes aren't visible for a while on here is exactly to avoid starting a feedback loop (this one is the social one where people are influenced by other peoples votes). I also think that comments are sorted by "new" by default rather than by "best" (but I could be wrong), and that the "controversial" rating exists because the alternative is that the first decent comment to be made on a thread ends up being #1 simply because it started its exponential growth earlier.

Would your proposed weighting account for these things? (I don't know much about bayesian weighting)

You game it by controlling who gets access/early access to the game.

You can also review bomb other new games released close to your own release.

Given the quantity of games released this sort of score manipulation effectively turns that particular metric into a view of what has been released very recently, what is sufficiently niche to not attract non-fans and non-shills and what has most ratio manipulation behind it.

More comments

The main gaming that happens is review bombing. Even a few negative reviews can push your game out of the profitable peak and into the dead tail, so there’s lots of opportunities for bad actors to threaten devs into submission.

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Why is the law so woke?

I have the displeasure of working with a legal textbook, it's full of stuff about destigmatizing prostitution and drugs, getting overincarcerated minorities out of prison, criticizing socially invented 'fear of crime', the neoliberal practice of fining people... This isn't a 'random academic writes law about the plight of refugees that nobody will ever read' (though there are plenty of those), it's a textbook that thousands of students are supposed to study. It's written by a bunch of established academics, it reflects a certain level of consensus that is filtering through to the next generation.

Why are Jaguar so woke? Jaguar is/was considered a heritage British brand for classy and wealthy drivers.

https://x.com/Jaguar/status/1858800846646948155

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1859813947396047075

There must've been a consensus decision that this was the way the brand was headed, that this was the fellow who should be in charge of marketing.

I think it's a mistake to say 'this is one local effect' when we see it in so many places. There is a broader systemic cause, people think that this is good and prestigious so they do it regardless of whether it makes sense in context. There might be many commissars in the Red Army but the root cause doesn't have to do with the Army being particularly attractive to Commissars, it's that the Red Army is part of the Soviet Union.

Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.

The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.

Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.

If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).

Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.

Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.

Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.

Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.

End users, as you say, no real issue.

And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?

Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.

Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.

The answer to virtually every "why is X industry/sector/institution woke?" is the same: It's the colleges and universities.

Every institution that wants or needs college graduates are getting people filling their ranks who have been subjected to four years of woke propaganda. I would call it entryism, which it kind of is, except it doesn't take much to subvert an insitution when the overwhelming majority of your generational cohort already believes what you do. Every insitution that is not explicitly right-wing/conservative/anti-woke and requires college graduates is subjected to this. Turns out, a lot of insitutions meet this definition, including most of the important ones.

Even if the game developers themselves are mildy resistant to woke ideology on account of their nerdiness (a fact I am not convinced of, but for the sake of the argument), the HR, Payroll, Executive Support etc teams are all full of woke graduates.

I've said it before, but I probably should say it more. If you want to stop 'wokeness', you have to target the academy first and foremost. Otherwise, we are just going to keep reaching "peak wokeness" every year.

I remember a decade and more ago people - back when the woke were called "SJWs", people would just brush them off as silly college kids, it's just a college thing that won't affect the 'real' world. Turns out, those college graduates actually had to go somewhere after college.

Notably, this thesis has to account for a control group- Roman Catholic seminaries.

Seminaries are generally agreed, by everyone with actual knowledge of the situation on the ground, to sit well to the left of their median graduate. The most basic available course of study is a non-watered down masters degree and doctorates are common, so we can assume human capital is at least semi-elite. Seminary professors and rectors enjoy much more respect among the student body than is the norm at universities and there are no TA’s. It’s also a totalizing, residential institution which heavily restricts student’s internet access and reading material and doesn’t allow phones. Yet new priests grow steadily more conservative over time.

The actual difference, I think, is that the Catholic right is good at appealing to high human capital and other right wingers are not.

If that were the case, wouldn't it apply to Roman Catholic undergraduates as well as to seminarians?

I'm not Catholic nor close to Catholic seminaries, so this is just spitballing: I wonder if the situation can be explained by the facts that Roman Catholic seminarians are a relatively captive audience regardless of how liberal the institution is (in a way that Baptist seminarians, say, are not) and that young Catholic seminarians are heavily preselected for cultural and theological conservatism in a way that their professors weren't.

If that were the case, wouldn't it apply to Roman Catholic undergraduates as well as to seminarians?

There is some evidence that this is at least partially true, but I don’t think an uncomplicated case can be made about it.

I think this might be true based on my experience with other contexts – I don't know practically anything about Catholic seminaries. But I suspect what's going on is perhaps a bit more nuanced; I think the non-Catholic right has plenty of good human capital, at least in some areas [for instance I suspect the best Protestant colleges in the US are probably as good or better than the best Catholic colleges].

Gotta think about why that is. Some ideas:

  • Catholics have always been outsiders in the US, which gives them more clarity to think strategically (US Protestants, as the former dominant force, can be tone-deaf or reactionary since they are used to things being a certain way and/or bound up in wanting things to be that way again; Catholics have less time for this.)
  • Catholics have attachment to and access to a preexisting magisterial institution that constrains their ability to fully sell-out on a political party, which makes them less "gettable," more stable in their intentions, and generally more even-keeled and ready to work towards long-term projects with high degrees of success.

If either of these are true it would suggest that the LDS is also better at appealing to high human capital for the same reasons. I am not sure if that's the case or not – I don't have enough experience with the broader LDS community.

  • Catholics have access to higher human capital for Founders Effect/regional reasons (not sure I buy this).
  • Catholicism is more respectable/higher status/honored more in the public discourse than Protestantism (especially evangelicalism). There's sort of a compounding effect here, but the gist of it would be that people who wouldn't work for a tacky right-wing Evangelical organization would work for a high-status elite Catholics-aligned organization, hence the Catholics stay winning. I definitely think there is something to this.
  • Catholics have fewer bones about working outside of their faith community. Protestants (especially Evangelicals) can be insular, whereas Catholics are quite happy to work with high talent of other faith groups to achieve their ends. (You see this in their schools.) I definitely think there is something to this as well.

Catholics have access to higher human capital for Founders Effect/regional reasons (not sure I buy this).

Catholic institutions(eg, Notre Dame) do seem to be the main high-prestige route available for Italian and Slavic Americans, who are too white to be non-legacy admits at the conventional ivies and too recent to be legacy admits. It’s possible that this is a factor- and Italian and Slavic Americans are a bit to the right of other Ellis islanders.

But Irish-Americans should have the same factor apply, and they would push things left.


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