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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Rationalism Done Right (and Hipster Eugenecists)

I don't follow the Rationalist sphere very much beyond this community, but I came across the above article with claims that there may be some rightward shifts within the rationalist movement in interesting directions. The author starts by mentioning that:

Richard Hanania said he wanted to start calling himself a “right-wing rationalist.” He thinks he has the same methods of reasoning that rationalists use, but he reaches right-wing conclusions. I spend time with effective altruists, read Scott Alexander, and all that, but I also come to some conclusions that most people would regard as right-wing. I think plenty of people in the community do the same, but they aren’t the majority.

I can't speak to Hanania's views so I would take that with a grain of salt. But the author creates "a list of beliefs for rationalists or effective altruists who lean right", which are the author's conception of "right-wing rationalism." They are described in the article but listed here:

\1. Rejection of the Blank Slate

\2. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates within countries

\3. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates between countries

\4. Within developed nations, we cannot substantially permanently change cognitive ability for the better

\5. Inequality of educational outcomes within developed countries is primarily driven by genetic differences

\6. Since genetic differences—especially in genes associated with IQ—play an important causal in socio-economic outcomes, we have to treat genetic changes—dysgenics and eugenics—seriously

\7. Rejection of “the orthodoxy”

\8. Markets are good

\9. We are in an evolutionary mismatch

\10. Suppressing the above information is more harmful than helpful, and we should face reality

The list is weighted too much on IQ differences and socio-economic outcomes. Basically five of these points are restatements of the importance of IQ. But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable. What makes China and what makes the United States is not only a function of IQ.

Point #6 is interesting because I felt it was the biggest differentiator between rationalist thinking and dissident right-wing thinking- the latter of which is concerned with the problem of ethnogenesis and race formation which, if you care about basically anything: civilization, politics, religion, you have to consciously confront the problem of ethnogenesis. It's interesting to see a higher awareness of that problem in a Rationalist, although again he seems only concerned with IQ drift and is missing the bigger picture of ethnogenesis. That is probably why he ultimately describes himself as "enthusiastic for immigration", still viewing the problem as capturing as many high-IQ genes as possible rather than confronting the harder problem of race formation.

Point #9 is also a step closer to DR-oriented thinking:

On the rationalist right, there is more skepticism around the practicality and utility of polyamory, promiscuity, substance use, and atheism. There is more sympathy for Christianity, having children, and the genders adopting their respective gender roles. The right also seems to like older and more traditional aesthetics in architecture, artwork, clothing, etc.

At the end of his article Parrhesia mentions "the Collin’s pro-natalist conservative faction" and linked to this article: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution'. There's a lot of sneering by the author, a lot of cultish goofiness from the subjects of the article (the Collinses), but ultimately I think there's a lot of substance there.

Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool? The Effective Altruist forum has a thread on this article under the thread name "Pronatalists" may look to co-opt effective altruism or longtermism. The greatest consternation was over this part of the BI article:

She [Collins] also weighed in on the stunning implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange FTX, which represented one of the largest financial hubs for the effective-altruism movement. The Collinses, who never directly associated with the top Democratic donor Bankman-Fried, spied an opportunity in his demise.

"This means our faction (more conservative, pronatalist, long-termist-civilization-building-focused, likely to self fund) is now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction in the EA space," Simone wrote in a text message on November 12.

The Collinses hope that advances in technology will keep pace with their growing family. The reproductive entrepreneurs who spoke with me seemed confident that the science would progress quickly. "I think we are reaching a point in which we are reinventing reproduction," Varsavsky said.

If scientists at companies like Conception succeed in creating viable embryos out of stem cells, they could in theory produce a massive number of them. Combined with enhanced genetic screening, parents could pick the "optimal" baby from a much larger pool. "There's a seductiveness to these ideas, because it's very grand," Torres said. "It's about taking control of human evolution."

I think the vision here is a far better implementation of longtermism than EA.

As these threads of of Rationalist thinking start to converge with DR thinking, they will have to confront the major problem of coordinating behavior. There's a tounge-in-cheek naivety in the plan of the Collinses:

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

This sounds like a crazy idea (and it is). But a much more attainable solution is to organize the social behavior of similar people by granting social status to reproducing, and incentivizing assortative mate selection with high-quality and like-minded people. Basically the things Religion has done for us until now. This could be accomplished with the revitalization of traditional religious institutions or the creation of a new non-theistic cult that coordinates this behavior. The DR is split between the two approaches, and the Collinses would clearly fit better in with the latter.

Another aspect of the article I found noteworthy was that the Collinses (who are Jewish) laugh-off the predictable comparisons to Nazism which (to be fair, credibly) are going to be associated with any pro-natalist movement by its opponents:

The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.

Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.

"It's funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism," when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. "I'm not eliminating people. I mean, I'm eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me."

Another interesting statement from Simone, which is something you will read verbatim in the DR:

"The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children," Simone said.

So did you intentionally or unintentionally cut the ages out of the article? The Collins' are in their mid 30s, and they're at 3 kids. They are highly unlikely to make it to 8 without serious, expensive, high health risk, and failure prone technological interventions. It is highly likely their fourth kid, let alone their eighth, is going to require thousands spent on procedures that might not work. And in a geriatric pregnancy highly likely to lead to severe autism or other genetic defects that make further generational breeding unlikely to be successful.

The whole scheme strikes me as hilariously inept, the sort of thing that happens when investment bankers try to go farm or Blue tribes go Red; figuring that if those stupid rednecks could do it surely we can do it better. The Collins' think breeding must be easy, they always heard about dumb welfare mothers doing it. Dynastic history is littered with men who needed heirs and couldn't produce them, men who would have loved to have eight kids and wound up with none. Having eight healthy children is physically difficult! That ability is rare!

She has undergone at least 6 rounds of IVF according to the article.

I also noted that the 8 kid goal is unrealistic at this point, but I think they have chances for 2 more without too much trouble. My wife had our kids at 37 and 40, and though we did go through some fertility treatments (which proved to be ultimately mostly unnecessary, both times), it didn't cost thousands. There's no guarantees for it, of course (as you indicated nothing is guaranteed when trying for kids).

I tried looking up statistics it's actually much more complicated than I thought because the raw numbers don't necessarily apply to very fertile women.

I agree one or two more could be possible, but unless you have quadruplets you're not hitting 8 if you start that late.

I was also thinking in terms of quiverfull families I know, out of eight they all get one genetic "dud" at least. So what do you do with that kid? To get 8 x 8 you'll really need 10 kids at least, to sub in for the duds.

On the rationalist right, there is more skepticism around the practicality and utility of polyamory, promiscuity, substance use, and atheism. There is more sympathy for Christianity, having children, and the genders adopting their respective gender roles.

In the words of some commenter from I-don't-remember-where: I've retrieved my fedora from storage. Soon it will be time to don it once more.

Atheism and Christianity are not lifestyle choices like the other items on this list. I am an atheist because I am convinced that there are no immaterial mental entities within the causal domain that includes me. And likewise Christians are Christians because they are convinced that Jesus died and was raised (etc.).

I know that not everyone sees it this way. Back in the day I used to get into arguments on /r/atheism whenever someone would post an article about gay marriage or abortion - I would say (perhaps naïvely) "This has nothing to do with atheism" only to be met with dumbfounded replies to the effect of "Wait, why else would you be here?" I just came for the metaphysics; I didn't realize I needed to join your orgies as well!

More recently I've encountered people (like the author of this piece) who endorse Christianity tactically, in a post-modern, Jordan-Petersonian way - "This church seems to share my conservative values, so I'm going to join them and maybe their belief will rub off on me."

For me, conservatism is (and always has been) inseparable from atheism. The way of thinking that led me to agree with the "dissident right" is exactly the same as what led me to seek a naturalistic explanation for things and to see value in the long-term future of the material world. If I were willing to put faith in a loving Sky Father just because it made me feel good, I would also be willing to accept that "all men are created equal" just because it'd be nice if that were true. If all I cared about was being fashionable among my peers, it would've been so much easier to adopt the "woke" position on everything.

Some conservative Christians see atheism and conservatism as antagonistic. I disagree, but I would say, if you forced me to choose, I would choose atheism over conservatism. At least atheists pretend to be receptive to evidence. But Christian conservatives I can only ever see as fair-weather friends - maybe we're allied on this particular political issue, but if your social milieu had gone another way, then we would've been enemies.

At least atheists pretend to be receptive to evidence. But Christian conservatives I can only ever see as fair-weather friends

I mostly agree with your post, but this contrast is comparing the groups using non-exclusive descriptions. An atheist tankie is a fair weather friend to me: they'll support my right to be an atheist, they won't support my right to be a capitalist. A theist conservative is also a fair weather friend to me: they'll support my right right to be a capitalist, but down the line I know that my atheism, especially my right to profess that atheism, is on their list of targets. Both groups tend to be allies only insofar as they are weak. The ideal circumstances for our freedom are where these groups and their respective enemies are all weak enough that they will at least consider mutual tolerance as a solution, and weirdos like us can sneak tolerance of us into the picture.

The same is true for receptivity to evidence. The atheist tankie will I fucking love science when science goes their way and become a Skeptic when it doesn't. The same is true for intelligent Christian conservatives, who will be happy to use the scientific method in, say, extrapolating from the failures of communism and not when extrapolating from the absence of supernatural beings in the systematically observable universe to the non-existence of certain other hypothetical supernatural beings. I sigh, remember that I am myself often just as bad as either group, and try to do better myself.

"Ugh, Dad, again, I'm not having eight kids."

"But Titan Invictus honey-"

"No!"

I mean c'mon, really? Your kids are real people.

Re: right rationalists

Seems like he's going to be hitting a lot of mottezans with this definition. I find bits of it compelling but at the same time I think a lot of it is him highlighting the points the center left get conspicuously wrong and the iceberg of the stuff I prefer the left on to the right below the surface is being brushed away.

Re: Collins

It's an interesting idea but I'm not so sure we're going to have enough time for those eight generations to come to fruition before the plan is undermined by something like ai. Applied a long time ago maybe it'd be big but I think the Horatio ship has sailed.

What am I brushing away in your view?

The list is just HBD with a dash of "slightly right-libertarian". There are a lot more right-wing views than that - see the entirety of neoreaction or the 'dissident right', or the current far-right. If one agrees with that, but wants to have 'lots of happy people enjoying life, at peace, of all races and creeds', and is more or less happy with the recent politics (and govt and democracy generally), occupations, morals, and aesthetics of society (or maybe as they were when the person turned 18), that's still mostly a centrist / progressive.

I don't know if I phrased my comment very well. By brushing away I'm not so much saying you're intentionally misleading, just that your highlight what I like about your deviation from my more natural tribe and if I'm not careful I may forget that the other values I have that make me generally associate and participate in blue tribe. Value differences that can't really be right or wrong like Genuinely valuing diversity, A certain kind of Individualism, Valuing of unproductive hedonism, newness and novelty over tradition, nonjudgementalism over honor, and the thousand other things that cause any two people to make different decisions in the same situation. I hate that some loud people in my tribe say and do ignorant and dangerous things and do nearly nothing else on this site but call them out on it, but they are my tribe.

Thanks. Makes sense. I also didn’t lay out all my beliefs because they aren’t all on the right or common among rationalist or ratadjacent people. I like some of those things too.

But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable.

You know, I've written and erased about a dozen half-formed comments on the topic, but...here we go. It's not clear to me whether you mean heritable in the scientific or colloquial sense; if the former, then literally any trait is heritable because you'll get a number for a trait, even if it's 0.1% heritable versus 99.9% environmental influence. If you meant it colloquially, in that our religious beliefs are inherited from our parents genetically, then so far as I can tell this is emphatically false.

Lewis and Bates (2013) describe a heritability of 26% for religiosity, in line with what they claim as a previously described range of 30-45%. Note that this study was done in a US population that is >90% white and 85% Christian. Majority of participants were aged 25-74 in 1995, so boomers and older which explains how their sample population was 85% Christian in a country that is currently only 70% Christian; I'm impressed by how fertile atheist and agnostic people have been over the last thirty years, but I digress.

Here are another pair of studies, one describing a heritability of 27%, the other 60%. The latter seems to be the outlier that is the source of the higher heritability claims, but critiquing the methods of either to potentially explain the difference is beyond me. If anyone is more familiar with the math/methods involved, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Many other papers cite a paywalled textbook chapter by a certain Thomas Bouchard; however, I did find this review he wrote where he claims the heritability of religiosity is 30-45% while the heritability of a specific religion is near zero. Anecdotally, this makes sense from the old Dawkins argument that the God you believe in is arbitrarily determined by the country you're born into, as well as the dozens of children of devout Muslim/Hindu immigrants I've met whose religious beliefs are nothing like their parents.

In other words, no, your religious beliefs are absolutely not genetically heritable in the way that (I think) you are claiming. Depending on the study, environmental influences range from being as important to 2-3 times more important than genetics. And the idea that if you ran the Lord of the Flies experiment version 2.0 but provided the children with a Quran, Bible, Torah and other religious texts they would unerringly choose the religion of their parents is ludicrous on it's face.

Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool?

I disagree. I think the community has overcorrected far too much towards inflating the importance of complex trait genetics which remain very poorly understood. That's not to say genetics don't matter, but what you call 'race formation' is very far from the only viable option for civilization building. If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now. Improvements in AI, synthetic augmentation (neuralink, etc) and social organization could very well eclipse anything you could accomplish with assortative mating given ~25-35 year generation times even if you managed to get everyone on board and biology works as well as you think it will. Genetics matters, what people refer to as blank slatism is false, but a myopic obsession with bloodlines is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In other words, no, your religious beliefs are absolutely not genetically heritable in the way that (I think) you are claiming.

I meant heritability of religion in the terms you are describing, and 25-45% range is about what I would have expected. The religiosity gene(s) are what matter, and they don't go away just because theistic religion is declining among certain demographics. A 25-45% heritability of religious impulse still has important implications. Those people want to latch onto something, and if it's not something eugenic then there's a chance it will be something dysgenic. Certainly from the perspective of the DR, the prevailing civic religions that capture the free religious energy of "atheists" is dysgenic as it entails the celebration of and political support for demographic decline. For a longtermist, that should be terrifying and just assuming AI is going to solve it is a dangerous bet.

But the heritability of "Collinsism" or whatever would certainly be near-zero. Their children will not have a lot of incentive to adopt that religion of their parents and a lot of incentive to put it behind them in their identity and their lives.

but what you call 'race formation' is very far from the only viable option for civilization building. If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now.

The ancients did invent eugenics. It's biblical. In the book of Genesis, Jacob swindles the herd of sheep from his father-in-law by peeling the bark off of a tree, in order to influence the breeding habits of the flock of sheep. Flocks of sheep are often biblical metaphor for humans and, according to the parable, the sheep saw the stripes on the tree from the peeled bark and that altered their mating habits. Jacob directed the mating habits of the herd (with cultural signaling) and acquired the flock.

In ancient Greece, priestly function was inherited. There were numerous fertility cults in ancient Greece and Rome that, through religion, provided breeding models for men and women, including the establishment of a physical ideal for men and women through the images of their gods. There were also caste systems, like the one in ancient Rome that eventually declined in prominence along with the decline of Rome itself. India's caste system was obviously designed with a eugenic function in the consciousness of its creators... and the Brahmin are now entering the American elite in growing numbers, aren't they?

Obviously the ancients did not have the genetic knowledge we do today. But they clearly learned eugenics and transmitted that knowledge through art and religion.

Improvements in AI, synthetic augmentation (neuralink, etc) and social organization could very well eclipse anything you could accomplish with assortative mating given ~25-35 year generation times even if you managed to get everyone on board and biology works as well as you think it will.

The biology of inheritance is certainly more reliable than theoretical improvements in AI. It's far more likely that AI would improve fertility, and therefore the impact of a eugenic-minded strategy, well before it replaces the importance of breeding habits and mate selection altogether (if it ever does, which it likely will not).

I meant heritability of religion in the terms you are describing, and 25-45% range is about what I would have expected.

I see. In that case, I'd ask you what your threshold is for saying something isn't heritable. A trait that is 25% heritable is (in our current environment) going to have much stronger environmental effects, and I assume that most people colloquially wouldn't call that trait 'heritable.'

Certainly from the perspective of the DR, the prevailing civic religions that capture the free religious energy of "atheists" is dysgenic as it entails the celebration of and political support for demographic decline. For a longtermist, that should be terrifying and just assuming AI is going to solve it is a dangerous bet.

Is your argument that 'demographic decline' is inherently dysgenic, or that "atheists" are genetically superior and their relative decline is dysgenic for society as a whole?

Obviously the ancients did not have the genetic knowledge we do today. But they clearly learned eugenics and transmitted that knowledge through art and religion.

Sorry hoss, I ain't buying it. But I don't think either of us would benefit from hashing it out.

The biology of inheritance is certainly more reliable than theoretical improvements in AI.

There are inherent limits to both human biology and biology in general that you aren't going to surpass with some assortative mating, not to mention the fact that you invoke some pretty theoretical technologies like iterated embryo selection from adult induced stem cells yourself.

It's far more likely that AI would improve fertility, and therefore the impact of a eugenic-minded strategy, well before it replaces the importance of breeding habits and mate selection altogether (if it ever does, which it likely will not).

I don't see a path towards AI increasing fertility, but regardless, there's plenty of ways AI (or tech more broadly) can be eugenic on your terms without having an effect on fertility or requiring people to change 'breeding habits or mate selection.'

Is your argument that 'demographic decline' is inherently dysgenic, or that "atheists" are genetically superior and their relative decline is dysgenic for society as a whole?

My argument is that atheists don't lose their religious inclination just because they are on the bandwagon of rejecting Christianity. Their rejection of Christianity doesn't change their genes. Their religious impulse is just directed towards other expressions of religious devotion and cult-like behavior. Many atheists are more "religious" in these terms than Christians- think the die-hard trans activist vs the average Joe who goes to church on Christmas and Easter because that's his family's tradition. There is arguably now greater social pressure for people to be atheist than to be Christian. I am speaking of religiosity as a behavior, not adherence to a specific traditional religion.

Sorry hoss, I ain't buying it. But I don't think either of us would benefit from hashing it out.

You are just willfully blind then. You think those caste systems which have persisted for thousands of years were just put in place and persisted for shits and giggles?

The Indian caste system was established 3,000 years ago, after the Aryan invasion, and Brahmins in India to this day have more Aryan DNA than the lower castes:

Among the upper castes the genetic distance between Brahmins and Europeans (0.10) is smaller than that between either the Kshatriya and Europeans (0.12) or the Vysya and Europeans (0.16). Assuming that contemporary Europeans reflect West Eurasian affinities, these data indicate that the amount of West Eurasian admixture with Indian populations may have been proportionate to caste rank.

They are unambiguous proof of eugenic thinking in ancient time, and society was almost entirely organized around these systems in many cases. They didn't understand genes but they clearly understood the importance of inheritance. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Jews, Indians, all of them attributed spiritual quality to what we understand as the science of inheritance, and they organized their religion and society around that understanding. The United States is likely less eugenically minded than any of these other civilizations at their height, as eugenic thinking is taboo today whereas it was the center of their religions and civic societies.

there's plenty of ways AI (or tech more broadly) can be eugenic on your terms without having an effect on fertility or requiring people to change 'breeding habits or mate selection.'

You are just using a "magic wand" to dismiss the issue. We don't know exactly how or when this "magic wand" will be sufficiently developed and integrated into society to have what impacts. We don't know if there will be political will to use these tools properly, for all we know AI will be used to suppress eugenically-minded behavior. Even rationalists are extremely fearful of eugenic thinking, judging by the EA forum, so how are the powers that be going to use AI on this front? It's a total unknown. I obviously do not oppose the involvement of AI in these initiatives, but to take it for granted that the theoretical advancements are already a substitute for culture, a substitute for evolution, is not at all certain and would far more likely complement such cultural changes along these lines.

Cultural changes towards eugenically-minded thinking would assist the development of AI towards these ends and reduce the risk of "AI alignment" being deployed against it.

The last absurdity with you and other posters saying "whatever AI will solve it" is you are still acknowledging the importance of the issue! You are just saying that culture and mate selection and breeding habits are already deprecated by theoretical advancements in AI. That is just completely absurd. We are already seeing geopolitical implications of a couple generations of assortative mating habits in Israel. It would not take 8 generations for other movements like this to make major political and geopolitical impacts.

I'm not sure that the Indian caste system is the best argument for eugenics or even a central example of it. Sure, the maintenance of genetically distinct Jati over thousands of years of close contact is impressive in its own way, but the end result seems to me more dystopian than anything else, with a tiny population of highly successful Brahmins lording it over a majority living in worse squalor than most of Africa. Meanwhile China, where there was to my knowledge no intentional eugenics of the sort you attribute to other ancient societies, has today a much more uniformly successful population than India by nearly any metric you care to use. Even if the average Brahmin is smarter than the average Chinese person, which I could believe (are there any IQ statistics on Indian subgroups?), I can't say I think it was worth it.

I did not bring it up as an argument for eugenics, I am citing it to prove eugenic thinking in ancient time. I am not familiar with Chinese history except that it's a long history of being conquered and subjugated, making their genetic lineage not very straightforward. I seriously doubt there were no elements of eugenic societal organizations there, i.e. inherited priestly or chieftain function, but I don't know nearly as much about that ancient history and there is already a huge wealth of examples in ancient Aryan civilizations to prove the point I was making.

Saying that the Indian caste system is not a central example of eugenic thinking... again, I just have to scratch my head wondering what you are smoking to not see this tradition as a central example of eugenic thinking. Not necessarily something to emulate, but to disprove the point he was making "oh, it's better the ancients invented writing than eugenics." They did invent eugenics, and it was central to their religions and civic society.

We could do much better with technology and knowledge of the biology of inheritance. But eugenic thinking is at least as old as writing.

The religiosity gene(s) are what matter

They are not "religiosity genes". All of these people, if born in 2000 BC, would be religious. Almost all would be christian in pre-enlightenment Europe. There are a variety of alleles that have small effects - maybe a low score on the many intelligence / educational attainment correlated ones means you sort into low SES groups in life, which is correlated with religiosity. This would not cause religiosity in 2000 BC. Maybe a bunch of alleles that (possibly in turn indirectly) make one more willing to dissent from one's group might decrease religiosity in 2000BC, but increase it today. It's much worse than that though, these genes help cause the incredibly complex biological mechanisms that relate to human thought, which we do not understand - so understanding mechanistically how this SNP correlates with that isn't happening any time soon. But even with what we do understand, there are many more causal pathways between some SNP and religiosity that take circuitous paths depending on the current environment, than ones directly causing 'religiosity'. I think this is what the phenotypic null hypothesis bit was about.

Also, whites aren't going to have more "religiosity genes" than indians or blacks.

If humans in antiquity had decided to invent eugenics rather than writing, we never would have made as much progress as we have now.

Or maybe both. this seems like a false dichotomy.

It is in real life, but they're presenting it as two options for EAs to choose from.

his newborn sister, Titan Invictus

Whatever eugenicist plans he has would probably work a lot better without this kind of jivyness.

Someone's going to see her name written down out of context and think it is a Black Library novel about fictional people 38 thousand years in the future who worship giant combat machines. I would not for a moment have questioned that it is the title of a new Dan Abnett novel.

It may seem petty to dismiss someone over something like this. But he has revealed himself as a goober who shouldn't be taken seriously.

Also, shouldn't it be "Titania"?

Also 'Invictus' is masculine. I suppose a girl should be 'Invicta'.

A quick googling seems to confirm.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/invicta#Latin

Giving your daughter a silly fake name is one thing. Giving her a silly fake boy's name is even worse.

I can't speak to Hanania's views so I would take that with a grain of salt. But the author creates "a list of beliefs for rationalists or effective altruists who lean right", which are the author's conception of "right-wing rationalism." They are described in the article but listed here:

I agree with all of this and the list . IQ predicts a lot, like which countries tend to have more innovation and dollar-adjusted GDP, real estate, and stock market growth and appreciation. Investing in high-IQ countries and regions , like Silicon Valley real estate, is almost always better than low/average IQ ones. But most of this is just HBD. Rationalism may include HBD but it's a lot more than that. Pre-2016 someone like Charles Murray would fit this profile, but now the trad or Trump-right has sorta overshadowed this HBD-right . I wish it would come back.

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What makes China and what makes the United States is not only a function of IQ.

I think it sorta is. the US is hugely diverse. The higher-IQ parts of the US seem to be closer to the high-IQ parts of China compared to less intelligent regions of either the US or China. Similar to China, high-IQ 'blue' areas imposed the most Covid restrictions. Same for higher ed. Culture is in many ways downstream from IQ. China likely has assortative mating by IQ, similar to in in the US. Very seldom will you see large IQ differences between couples in Bay Area, New York, etc.

IQ predicts a lot, like which countries tend to have more innovation and dollar-adjusted GDP, real estate, and stock market growth and appreciation.

Okay.

Investing in high-IQ countries and regions , like Silicon Valley real estate, is almost always better than low/average IQ ones.

This assumes those countries and regions are intrinsically high-IQ as opposed to being high-IQ because they're already wealthy. Otherwise, maybe it's much cheaper to raise the IQ of currently low-IQ regions than to get some marginal amount of additional productivity out of high-IQ regions. This is basically the Stephen Jay Gould* argument for EA directing resources towards poor countries in Africa.

*Quote:

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

It's more than just diverting cognitive resources to low-IQ areas. You need to also create economic and social conditions conducive to capital accumulation and innovation (otherwise you get brain drain, and thus back to square one). The US is perfect for this, being that it has generally low taxes and free markets. The UAE is the opposite, being fairly restrictive. Low but stable marginal returns can still be pretty good compared to negative or flat elsewhere or much more risk .

Titan Invictus

Anyone who inflicts that name on a baby, particularly a baby girl, should be removed from the gene pool by being stranded on a barren desert island where their time will be fully occupied trying to collect dew for drinking water. When you name your kid like a character from a video game, you deserve to be kicked from here to the Kerguelen islands.

I am willing to bet that by the time that child turns ten, she will insist on being called "Jane" and will be already plotting out the first chapters of her misery porn memoir about living with nutcase parents who treated her like a Warhammer miniature.

Obviously a girl should be Titania Invicta, and the offending parents should be sentenced to a term of 9 months of Latin grammar.

Titania is a perfectly good name:

https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath

Titania is more tolerable, and fits better with Octavian as her brother's name. Invicta can be the middle name that is never used. The parents should be beaten about the head with a set of baby name books then made spell all the modern variants on previously sensible names and shocked with a buzzer for each they get wrong. That would soon have them deciding "Joan" or "Alice" is as exotic as they want to go for their kids.

Titania Invicta

NGL that's a really badass name.

In keeping with actual Roman practice, the girl should be renamed a feminine form of her father’s given name.

Her father is Malcolm? Which is the Scots Gaelic "Máel Coluim, or Maol Choluim is a Scottish Gaelic given name meaning "devotee of Saint Columba".

So "Columba" for a girl would be fine. Maybe "Columbine" if they're feeling extra fancy. Although on second thoughts, given the associations, no.

TBH might still be better than ‘titan invictus’.

I know the whole premise of longtermism is in thinking about the far future but it seems to me the degree of uncertainty involved with respect to what it will be like makes it impossible to take them seriously. Making decisions today about what you expect things to be like in 11 generations, in a sociological or technological sense, is not rational, it is irrational.

Take the Collins example (that you rightly call crazy). How long is 11 generations? Assuming each of their kids has kids between the ages of 20-30 (for simpler math) it means their 11 generations is going to take between 220 and 330 years to realize. What was our own world like 220 to 330 years ago? Well 220 years ago would have been circa 1803. This is before the founding of Mormonism, indeed a few years before Joseph Smith's birth. The United States was still in the grip of a fierce debate over slavery. This was before the development of the ideology of communism by Marx and Engels. If you take the longer end, 330 years, that puts you at around 1693. So now we're back before the founding of the United States. This is around the time the Amish are founded in Switzerland and just a few years after Locke publishes his Treatises.

There is nothing "just" about 11 generations! Making decisions today on the assumption that your kids, and their kids, and so on up to 8 billion people will keep your ideology over the course of centuries is making decisions on the basis of a false assumption.

Even leaving aside this one family, how have various religious or ethnic organizations managed to hold their beliefs across this length of time? My impression is not very well. Firstly, many such organizations that are prominent today have not even *existed * that long. Secondly, among those that have, how many of the versions of these organizations from 11 generations ago would even recognize their modern incarnations? How much is the Catholic church today like the Catholic church of 1803? Of 1693? How much has the LDS church changed, since it's founding by Smith, in a much shorter time?

There is nothing "just" about 11 generations! Making decisions today on the assumption that your kids, and their kids, and so on up to 8 billion people will keep your ideology over the course of centuries is making decisions on the basis of a false assumption.

I agree. The DR has a more sober-minded view that the solution is to orchestrate the reproductive habits of a larger subset of people towards a common end. This can only be done with religion, whether theistic or non-theistic, traditional or hipster. I'm not familiar with Israel's internal politics, but I'll defer to the comment of @2rafa describing the looming dominance of the ultra-orthodox in that country. If trends continue, it's not going to take 11 generations for this to happen, and for the ensuing political (and likely geo-political) implications.

@Stefferi also mentioned the Laestadians in Finland.

Would longtermism want to emulate the Ultra-Orthodox or Laestadians in every sense? No. But if such a cult inspired and ameliorated productive and civilizational-oriented behavior instead of strict adherence to superstition, and incentivized a eugenic mate selection that increased the fertility of the most beautiful, intelligent, and physically fit- you likewise would not need 11 generations to see an evolution in the population.

The Collinses are surely fiercely intelligent, but based on those pictures, I'm not sure if most would describe them as the most beautiful or physically fit. Like, I'm not trying to dis - they're not physically unfit or ugly either. Just fairly average-looking for their age and situation, which is of course more than one might say of some other rationalist leading lights, if one was completely honest.

The Collinses are surely fiercely intelligent...

Are they though? Granted all I know of them is what's been posted/linked in this thread, but general impression that I get from what I'd read is not one of intelligence.

Another aspect of the article I found noteworthy was that the Collinses (who are Jewish)

Where did you get that? My reading was that, as mentioned, Simone is 1/4 of Jewish origin (ie. has a Jewish grandmother), but I would guess that if there were more Jewish relatives they'd have mentioned them too.

I've been thinking about this article a lot. To some degree, the whole situation comes across as one family's attempt to grapple with the fact that they've been a part of a subculture - rationalists - that almost often seems to price being weird and doing things differently from the normies - and at the same time they've been struck with one of the most normie human emotions of all of them, ie. the wish to have children. As such, it would not be enough to just have kids like a normie, you have to find some sort of a justification for acting normal - with the whole pro-natalist shtick being this justification.

At the same time, of course, as many parts of the article spell out, they are weird as hell. Moreso, their specific motivation is "filling the Earth with little Collinses" - ie. presumably people who would share their offbeat norms and values. In a way, it's similar to one of the AI alignment problems - sure, it might be good to teach AI some values and such so it doesn't destroy or harm the humanity, but at the same time, people who tend to be the most concerned about AI aligmnment and Skynet possibilities are also often deeply, deeply weird, and their values often come across as blue-and-orange morality to many others. Are those the types we would want to be in charge of AI alignment? Or the continuation of the future generations of societies, for that matter.

Of course, traditionally natali For instance, in Finland, the traditionally famously natalist religious subculture are the Laestadians, a strongly conservative Lutheran group operating nominally inside the state church but in actuality forming their own insular communities, particularly strong in the North of Finland.

Laestadians and groups like them were a part of why the Finnish fertility rates were healthyish, somewhere close to 2, until 2010s. It's possible that Laestadian communities have been hit by secularization like many other similar groups, and this might have played a role in why Finnish fertility rates have crashed since then, which of course can be predicted to lead to societal problems in the future.

On the other hand, anecdotes from people growing up in Laestadian areas or having to do with them in other ways tend to be about how Laestadian families only do business deals with each other, use their local political power to offer municipal deals to each other, and Laestadian kids tell the other kids in schools about how those other kids are hellbound for not having been born Laestadian (it's not an easy movement to join). These comport with what I've seen, in this form and elsewhere, with non-Mormons growing in Utah or people living in Hasidic Jewish areas and not being Hasidic Jewish. Of course, the problems of separation and insularity are also a common discussion vis-a-vis strongly Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and elsewhere.

I imagine that there's a number of people who might see natalism, generally, as a positive thing, but also know that subcultures that are actually strongly natalist are often quite such that having those specific groups being natalist might not be ideal for the others. As such, if rationalist natalism of this sort took off, well, then you'd have potential for another community of people with non-mainstream values, who have already shown that their little communities are suitable for business wheeling-and-dealing (ie. FTX) and for trying to make an effect in the society (EA and, of course, FTX). Maybe they will be the next secular Laestadians (of course, more likely is that their kids will simply drop off this grand mission and do something else).

It seems reasonable that the same things which make people high natality make them clannish and xenophobic. It also seems possible that laestadians are less than thrilled about sending their kids to those schools, and tell them to behave that way as a partial antidote to what they identify as indoctrination and bad influences, and they would make better neighbors in a society that allowed them to shelter their children without hostility.

I've been thinking about this article a lot. To some degree, the whole situation comes across as one family's attempt to grapple with the fact that they've been a part of a subculture - rationalists - that almost often seems to price being weird and doing things differently from the normies - and at the same time they've been struck with one of the most normie human emotions of all of them, ie. the wish to have children. As such, it would not be enough to just have kids like a normie, you have to find some sort of a justification for acting normal - with the whole pro-natalist shtick being this justification.

I think that's part of it. But I think it's also the "low IQ/high IQ" meme template of "the best people should just have more kids". Their recent post on the EA forum is a lot more well-thought out than a post-hoc justification for hormonal instincts. It was poorly received by the EA community who correctly identified it as getting very close to the train of dissident right-wing thinking, although I mean that as a compliment rather than a criticism.

Yeah they are weird as hell, but I like it. Part of what I dislike about Effective Altruism is it seems like a fancy way for rationalists to just be boring liberals- longtermists with an egalitarian hangover, and they can't quite escape the orbit of those liberal presuppositions. This is especially evident in the comments of the EA forum:

Moreover, it seems to me that one of the core values of effective altruism is that of impartiality― giving equal moral weight to people who are distant from me in space and/or time. The kind of essentialist and elitist rhetoric common among people who concern themselves with demographic collapse seems in direct opposition to that value; if you think a key priority of our time is ensuring the right people have children, especially if your definition of "the right people" focuses on elite and wealthy people in Western countries, I doubt that we have compatible notions of what it means to do the most good.

and:

The main reason for the post is not to start a discussion on whether or not the Collins' brand of pronatalism is appropriate or a logical conclusion to longtermism. I already have a fairly settled view on this, and if it's the case that we sit here and discuss the merits of this type of pronatalism and suggest that it is a natural conclusion to longtermism, I'm simply going to reject longtermism.

There is nothing about longtermism that requires "impartiality". Longtermism is nominally about civilizational trajectory, not egalitarianism (at least it should be).

The Collinses are trying to start a fertility cult. They have escaped orbit and their wacky adventures are going in the right direction from my view.

There is a long history of fertility cults. Arguably all religion, and politics for that matter, could be interpreted through the lens of different implementations of fertility cults. The Collins cult is myopic and not something I would support, but it's thinking in the right direction.

Of course, the problems of separation and insularity are also a common discussion vis-a-vis strongly Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and elsewhere.

The Collins cult seems to be aiming for insularity, but it doesn't have to be a feature of any theoretical solution. The cult of Apollo is referenced by some in the DR as a breeding model which facilitated eugenic mate selection, and it was the center of many aspects of public life.