This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Another interesting statement from Simone, which is something you will read verbatim in the DR:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.'
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?
Sorry hoss, I ain't buying it. But I don't think either of us would benefit from hashing it out.
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.
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.'
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.
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:
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link