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Gentlemen of The Motte! We have often been led into discussion about What Is Wrong With Women Today? arising out of topics from directly dealing with the current crisis of male loneliness, female pickiness, and TFR decline to discussion of recent election results, leading to the happy dreams of an economic crash that will finally put women in their proper place:
Well, you may be heartened and warmed to know that this is not a new problem, nor are the proposed solutions new either! Back in the November 1904-April 1905 issue of Popular Science Monthly, a learned gentleman (both a BA and an MD, so qualified to speak for both the arts and the sciences) diagnosed the ills of the day due to the pernicious habit of educating women, and shewed forth the path of ruin that society would continue to tread if matters were not taken in hand.
Alas, the gentleman of a bygone day was proven lamentably correct, but you can take solace from knowing you are not alone, and that women have been ever thus. I myself was introduced to this gem via a Tumblr post and I humbly link it here, while extracting some plums for the delectation of the superior sex. Though I am too agéd and raddled with the ill-effects of promoting independent mindedness in the feeble brain of a female via excess of schooling, mayhap it may save some younger woman from the travails of pride and neglecting her womanly destiny! (While the scholarly concern of the paper also touches lightly and briefly on the adverse effects of extending higher education to the common class of men as well, I am assured the audience of The Motte are of a finer fabric and thus well deserving of the benefits of this, and so at no danger of ill-effect):
HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN AND RACE SUICIDE
BY A. LAPTHORN SMITH, B.A., M.D.
MONTREAL.
Brace yourselves for some hard biological facts which only a medical man can speak on with assurance: higher education renders women insane! Yes, due to the strain it puts upon the delicate female brain, the added stresses of maternity leave what reason a woman may possess overturned!
You see? It is more advantageous for women to be lightly educated to a basic level but remain somewhat ignorant and indeed be slightly dumb (but strong as ox) in order to better fulfil their wifely and motherly duties. Science has proven it! And who can gainsay what Science has said?
But read on! The dreadful custom of late marriage has both rendered women incapable of performing their natural functions, and imperilled not alone the health but the souls of men:
If your daughter refuses to wed straight out of high school (should you even permit her to attend such an institution), then it is her fault and none other if Roistering Ralph, a slip of a youth of thirty, engages in drinking, smoking, gambling, and patronising ladies of the evening. He, poor chap, cannot help himself; it is the duty of young ladies to lead, guide, and control the menfolk.
Over-education makes women picky, fastidious, fussy, and renders them unable to appreciate a good, decent man:
Even if these harpies deign to wed, they then impose impossible demands upon their husbands in order to maintain luxurious and idle lifestyles:
In short, better a content, submissive, stupid woman as wife even if she is inferior to you in social class:
Women, do your duty to avert the perils of race suicide! Men, be stalwart as fathers to guide your daughters in the way they should go!
Around 1900, Europeans + European offshoots made up about 30%+ of the world population, today it's 7%. Higher education of women is strongly associated with low fertility, it's about as hard a fact as anything in the social sciences. If you want to reduce a country's fertility, educate more women.
Race suicide and replacement migration are a key trend of the 20th and 21st centuries. If there are no upcoming gamechangers in longevity, AI or similar, then we should expect this trend to continue. Then I suspect many, (including women) will look back on these predictions and theories with a rather different attitude than sneering and derision. Say, what's the Islamist stance on women's rights? What does the average bloke in Nigeria think about women in higher education? What about the punter in Uttar Pradesh, how does he think women should be treated and how does he actually treat them? They're already the Global Majority and will be the Overwhelming Global Majority, probably the Local Majority soon enough, considering migration trends and the limitless shortsightedness of the Western political class.
Oh and even if we do get a gamechanger in AI, don't worry, our anti-racist establishment and media has helpfully ensured that non-Grok AIs prize the life of a Nigerian somewhere around 2-20x more than those of white countries like France or Germany: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/llm-exchange-rates-updated
The article is fascinating, and of course damning. I would like to posit a theory I've had ruminating in my head for awhile and which I doubt is unique but is certainly undervocalized:
LLM pretained safetyism weights and filters are looping back onto themselves, with the RLHF being inherently flawed due to either specialist user biases (the Scale.ai style problems of insufficient experts being overloaded with noncore queries), or large training corpa being just overwhelmed by raw numbers (Indian and Nigerian and Indonesian populations, for example). Because the pretrained datasets overweight western frames, the corrective measure artificially inflates weightages of deficiently focused populations per the corrective measures in place: the corrective lens is itself the distorting factor, not necessarily the underlying training corpus. This corrective lens being iteratively reinforced by biased entities and market heterogenization causes LLMs to end up having frames baked in that are, without user specified repositioning, going to reflect a weirdly 'woke' consensus that is unnoticed by most.
For western feminists, the gender war framing reflects a standard liberal belief: their ideology is axiomatically superior and all who come in contact with it are wololooed into accepting the feminist/liberal order: they don't need to reproduce because prosletyzing will replenish all their numbers. Needless to say this has not really worked out in observed reality, but perhaps thats just how we all have sequestered ourselves into different social media and meatspace realities. For the lesbian feminist in Portland celebrating Mamdanis win by having a trans focused poetry circle, her lived reality is entirely valid from her own perspective. 'Reality' as it were does not need to assert itself ever, and now they have AI to parrot their moral words back to them.
Isn't part of the problem that 'diversity' is somewhat fundamentally at-odds with 'next likeliest token' (or the equivalent for image generation models)? Except for whatever thermal noise is being added intentionally (which should be small) and active efforts to the contrary (which is, I think, dominating what we're seeing), the model isn't wrong to assume that "draw a person" merits a response that looks like a modal person.
Expecting "[minority fraction] of the outputs should look like [minority]" is maybe not completely crazy, but doesn't seem to align with the math as far as I'm aware. Nor is it even necessarily well-defined: which population? Should "draw an NBA player" match the NBA's demographics? Should it draw all players equally likely, or weight towards popular ones? Do we just mean current players? These are questions that have mostly been sidestepped for representation in political arenas --- affirmative action never has been asked to specify specific percentage targets, nor do I think it could do so without controversy. But for large scale computer-automated systems, it's not hard to start running cross tabs for things and finding imbalance everywhere. Not even sure myself what to do about all of that.
Its a tricky subject and the best response should be "shrug shoulders and blame Long Dead History" because when you tip the scales with your own grubby fingers its your fingerprints all over the black female wehrmarcht soldier or male asian confederate senator.
OR
go the way of the Greendale Human. Representation via eldritch horror
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