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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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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.

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