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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?

I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.

Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.

Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.

Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.

When the organism is a society the means of adaption is memetic. The ability to struggle about the birthrate and find a solution is fitness. Societal conversations and self correction isn't socialism, it's a much older thing that's at least as old as religion. I'm perplexed why you seem to want to bring socialism vs capitalism into the conversation, even by your loose definition of socialism here as when the government does things socialists do not have a better track record on birthrates and your remedy of evolution is not kind to their societies.

In nature, tough, fecund generalists invariably outcompete long established species in time of environmental chaos. Rationalists note that there is socioeconomic chaos on the horizon, they note that low birth rates are a contributing factor, and rationalists are not tough, fecund generalists.

This is an expression of anxiety about who the feral hogs of future society are. It’s quite reasonable to be particularly worried about that stratum’s biggest weakness.

Why so much ire over nature taking its course?

There's a decently convincing and certainly coherent argument that birth rates going too low, even if it doesn't extinct humans, renders us unable to maintain a technologically advanced civilization.

I like living in a technologically advanced civilization, and its our only hope for getting humans off this rock in the near future. Which I think is important. Any threat to this raises my ire.

Short argument: too many nonproductive elderly supported by too few young, healthy, intelligent, productive citizens means our most advanced technologies (i.e., those that utterly RELY on globalized trade and capitalist hyperspecialization) cannot be built at scale. Too much economic activity is devoted to keeping oldsters alive, there's not enough talent in the younger generation to go into the most advanced fields, or to even maintain the advanced capital we've built.

Any industrial and economic advances that depend on such techs shrinks and stagnates. Standards of living fall everywhere.

A microcosm of this is Russia, which 'cut off' from global trade and can only produce tech, including military tech, that it can design and build at home, with resources on hand. If they didn't have massive energy reserves, they'd be even more screwed than currently implied.

Germany is also experiencing this problem, from all appearances.

Maybe AI and robotics comes in clutch, or we make some other crazy saving-throw (artificial wombs, anti-aging tech, some unforeseen breakthrough in global peace and cooperation) but all else equal the predictable outcome of current trends is advanced civilization sputters and regresses, if not collapses entirely. No ignoring the numbers.

I talk about it at more length here.

Isn’t that fully generalizable?

Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?

I find it far more likely that there’s a control loop. Negative feedback. At the extreme end, it’s “I won’t starve to keep Grandpa alive,” but it doesn’t have to get that far.

Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?

I have no good answer to this particular question.

We can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars squeaking out a few extra weeks/months of 'life' for a dying elderly person.

They will not enjoy this life, but they will be alive.

Or we can have some norms around end-of-life care that decide that its NOT appropriate to blow wealth that might benefit a younger generation on such diminishing returns.

We currently do not have any real traditions that allow the elderly to end their lives with 'dignity,' And the current instantiation of MAID is clearly not being limited to true "end of natural lifespan" cases.

We had a discussion about this quite recently, and as then I want to argue that we have not figured out a way to maintain technologically advanced civilization while forcing high birthrates either. "We are going to die, better preemptively kill ourselves now" does not sound like an appealing policy platform.

I mean, are we saying "high" birthrates, or replacement-level, with maybe a small buffer.

Me I'm not going to say we need to politically mandate a 2.1 birth rate per woman, or require that every woman put out at least 2 kids or face expulsion.

But I think maintaining the 'nuclear family' as the primary economic unit of the country is so self-evidently good for such a country's stability and development, and for the happiness of its citizens, that any policies that might be linked to weakening that unit and reducing family formation should be viewed extremely harshly.

Problem we seem to run into repeatedly is that sans some kind of biblical mandate for family formation and buy-in from some large % of the population, there's just no compelling reason to individually prefer family formation over individualized hedonism in a world where raising kids is no longer critical to individual survival. Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.

Then there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue: can you convince other people to have enough kids to keep the show running, whilst you instead defect and enjoy childfree life with all the joys an advanced civilization can provide you.

Cue the research showing fertility is higher across the board among the religious.

I get to see this happening up close. I have two younger brothers. The youngest has a wife and a 1-year-old kid now. The middle one is continuing with an extended adolescence, chasing every whim and indulging in various vices without much regard for anyone else. He can get a girlfriend with relative ease (currently has one) but is allergic to true commitment.

No prize for guessing which one has a more stable, fulfilling, happy outlook on the world. Then there's me, who really does want kids, and wants to continue to live in an advanced civilization, and considers the propagation of the human species to be a good thing in and of itself. And yet everywhere I turn I see the pillars upholding it all being chipped away, and very few seem to be willing to give up their own immediate comfort to try and address that fact, even assuming they realize there's an issue.

Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.

Is it? Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels. So unless you have kids in the first place, and thus create someone who will be dead a few decades later, how is it in one's best interest?

That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing. And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.

That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing.

Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.

Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels.

The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.

This will probably lead to a reversion in living standards on its own.

We got the tiniest taste of how quickly this can happen with COVID restrictions shutting down ports.

I'm also going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.

And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.

Realize that this 'side' was a largely Christianized, largely Western European-derived stock, and what we're heading towards/currently have is VERY DIFFERENT from that along most dimensions.

We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.

No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.

Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?

The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.

This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".

I'm going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.

For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.

We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.

We should. But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.

But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.

See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.

But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.

I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.

But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.

So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.

Western women are getting less content with life.

Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.

A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.

Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.

Religious groups have higher TFR.

Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.

Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.

Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.

I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.

I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.

And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.

The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.

So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.

This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".

Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.

Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?

If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.

That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.

For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.

Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.

More comments

Aren't the transhumanist wing of the Tough Minded Rationalists the ones who wish to defy nature taking its course? So why be surprised they want to go against the tide of falling birth rates of the intelligent high human capital elite?

I believe that in your rush to throw shade, you have confused rationalists with Objectivists and/or Social Darwinists.

I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.

Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.

but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.

Wasn't it 2021-22? A.k.a. when Substack and then MuskTwitter broke SJ's lock on the public square? Doesn't seem surprising that things would show up "out of nowhere" if they were being suppressed prior, and SJ generally considers birth rate worries a dogwhistle for racism.

artificial wombs

I think some people are under the mistaken impression that we are living much, much further in the future than we actually are. We barely understand how these systems even work, much less how to recreate them. It’s like Romantic era scientists thinking we’re a decade out from creating life because we got a dead frog’s leg to move by shocking it.

@faceh

Reject Bladerunner, RETVRN to Mad Max

Research seems to be further along than I would have thought, even if we're still talking "probably decades away".

Womb transplants are now functional, which surprised me as I expected this not to be feasible yet.

I'm not betting on Artificial wombs arriving in the next 10 years. Or 15. 20 seems a stretch.

Which makes the extant supply of organic ones that much more critical.

Aren't the massive immigration waves to the West being pushed as a result of the fertility crisis (Well, really the inability of the current population to support adequate pensions & pension-adjacent for the elderly)? It isn't exactly an unfathomable conclusion that the current rate of reproduction is too low and that a lot of the current incentive stack is essentially dysgenic. This isn't something that's just come out of Incel spaces, though the 'women's liberation is the core of the current issue' take

I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.

I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.

it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force"

You believed an innovative solution would come from what passed for progressive thought 50 years ago traditionalist thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is just mostly just men being butthurt.

Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.

You believed an innovative solution would come from what will be traditionalist thought in 50 years progressive thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is mostly just women being butthurt anyway.

or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

There are no table stakes. We're not interested in investing in youth outside of how much interest that student loan is going to generate, we banned all development that would make their current salary appropriate, and we're too invested in "teach men to not rape" to make sure that those who weren't going to do that anyway aren't getting treated as pre-emptively guilty (we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).

(we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).

Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.

I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.

On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.

I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.

Countries with maternal laws/customs have even lower fertility than the US though. The modern/western society didn't find an answer aside from going back to past patriarchy vs sci-fi solutions.

making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years

This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...

  1. Redirect the labor of childless women toward parents? That sounds a lot like coercion to me. (Also all taxes are coercion, but I'll only mention this here because this seems like the only type of coercion you care about.)
  2. Redirect the labor of childless men toward parents? To put it bluntly: taxing incels to subsidize chad and his baby momma is deeply unfair and liable to result in suicidality and violence.
  3. Redirect the labor of parents towards other parents? Congratulations, you have made parenting even less appealing.
  4. Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.

The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.

I mean, to some extent, all 4 of 1-4 are already happening:

Most countries have at least some form of policy that incentivizes being coupled off with children; Canada, at least, directly pays parents via the Canada Child Benefit. I'm fairly confident that the US has options to file jointly or single for couples, enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes. This means that people who are single are either paying more than their fair share, or couples are paying less than their fair share (depending on your viewpoint).

In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way, parents (as in, working parents) are forced to spend their income on programs that are intended for the welfare of the elderly, or to support single mothers; most of these elderly have had children, so the labor of working parents is subsidizing the lifestyle of parents who are not working.

And it is currently illegal in Canada to discriminate against a pregnant woman; I ran into this as a kid when my teacher left for maternity leave, they hired a pregnant substitute, who also left for maternity leave.

I don't really have any point to this "well, acktually"-ing, just thought it was kind of funny.

Canada Child Benefit.

To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.

enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes

The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.

In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way,

That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.

Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.

This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.

If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.

Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?

Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.

There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.

Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs.

Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.

But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.

So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.

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I thought usually vets are people who've served in the military and then moved on to civilian life, and, as civilians, they get casual nepotism from fellow vets and non-vets who have high regard for military service, but otherwise are hired based on their merits. Akin to, say, a company that's run by a mother or a non-mother who has high regards for mothers who might give casual nepotism towards a mother in terms of hiring, but otherwise judges potential employees on their merits.

But where I'm not sure how the comparison works is where vets generally aren't expected to take time off to go back to their military service, possibly multiple times and unexpectedly (well, with around 9 months of lead time, anyway). I think that, once they return to civilian life, vets are generally expected to keep working like a regular civilian. This can't be said for any given woman in a certain age range with respect to motherhood. A vet's ability to perform the job can be assessed before hiring and then, if they get hired, the employer can generally rely on them to behave like any other employee; in the case of potential mothers, that's not the case. Mothers who have aged out of birthing more children and have already spent their time raising them before they apply to the job, perhaps, is a better analogue. But those aren't the mothers that are under discussion.

There's also the issue that, as best as I can tell, there's very little empirical reason to believe that extra maternity leave would have any meaningfully positive impact on fertility. It certainly could, and we could try it out, but if the predictable happens and it has no positive impact, then it becomes an arbitrary handout that's basically impossible to revert, leading to high costs for no gain. Of course, there's the gain of mothers having more time with their babies as they grow up, which is a positive in its own right, but it's also a different issue than fertility and one that needs to be argued on its own merits separately.

Unfortunately, it seems like replacing the shoggoth of Capitalism with a simpler, cruder social system or inventing artificial wombs is easier for people than things like

making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.

, even if I would prefer that too. Also, it seems a waste to not root for glorious transhumanist destiny in the age when it seems most possible yet.

In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf, and no steady gf is because divorces and tinder. Which are large-scale enough factors that some coercion would be required to attack them.

In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf

Serious question, how would one gather evidence on which way the causal arrow runs between "no motivation, poor social skills" and "no gf"? "I would do it if they changed" is just the default narrative for people with external-locus-of-control, same as the /r/antiwork people who would totally work hard if someone made them a tenured professor of philosophy.

Legions of awkward, self-indulgent, self-absorbed Gen Z men complain that girls are too picky about sex, sure; and legions of plump, vain Gen Z women complain that boys are too withholding about relationships. When both sides in a stalemate plaintively assert that it's the other side's fault, and when both have what the other side claims are unrealistic expectations of what's owed to them, what's a good method for adjudicating where the actual ZOPA should lie?

no steady gf is because divorces and tinder

But is that true? How much of the female withdrawal from the dating market is driven by the incredible level of fearmongering about male bad behavior? I mean, there's the family guy clip about campus sexual assault training, but tiktok is just way way worse at playing up female neuroticism than liability-minimizing bureaucrats.

How much of it is simply that a far higher percentage of young women are unattractive as GF's, mostly due to higher obesity rates?

Sure, you can throw tiktok in, too. Tinder does take up some of the "fearmongering about male bad behavior" space with all the low effort dick pic guys, or so I'm told.

I don't think obesity is a factor for most guys in question. The sentiment I observe is usually "no one is interested in me", not "only the fatties are interested in me".

This is like framing America's obesity epidemic as "liberation". Technically correct, I suppose.

No doubt some liberated slaves were worse off for having the responsibility to earn their own keep they weren't used to.

I choose to give the western society credit where it's due: there is no such thing as famine anymore. That you have to put in a bit of effort to not grow fat is small potatoes compared to that. Also, it's a choice to let your food industry dump tons of sugar into everything or whatever it is that is wrong with American food industry.

I'm not comparing you to someone who claims that western society is good, because it provides abundance, even if that means you have to put in effort to not grow fat, or regulate the food industry.

I'm comparing you to the HAES / Lizzo's beuty enjoyers / fitness is fascism people. People who see fatness itself as liberation from oppressive forces like beuty standards, healthy diets and exercise.

Is your view that "fitness is fascism" people are to being in shape like the "I don't want to have to marry a man to make a living/have to marry a woman to obtain companionship and sex" people to obligate marriage?

Rest assured I don't think that being a 1000 body count fuckboy/slut should be the highest aspiration and the goal of all freedom-loving people.

like the "I don't want to have to marry a man to make a living/have to marry a woman to obtain companionship and sex" people to obligate marriage?

Like the "there is no such thing as famine anymore" / "motherhood is merely the means of reproduction and little else" people are to it. People who didn't want to marry always existed and weren't a problem.

Rest assured I don't think that being a 1000 body count fuckboy/slut should be the highest aspiration and the goal of all freedom-loving people.

I'd say that this what your views lead to, whether you think they should or not, but the next step is likely going to be sexless rat utopia, so we won't even get the 1000 "body" orgies.

Rationalists tend to worry about x-risk and the very long-term survival of the human race. Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.

(Of course, this is assuming one only values survival of the species and nothing else, which is true of very few rationalists.)

Rationalists are basically a doomsday cult dedicated to surviving the chaos of the singularity through human power; it's reasonable to assume they're very concerned with having sufficient human capital to harness that power.

Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.

Look, I still remember how popular the opening bit of Idiocracy was with a lot of left-wingers all those decades back, well before "HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists" were a thing. For that matter, I remember classmates from Caltech talking about how we needed "parenting licenses" out of mid-20th century sci-fi to keep the dumb, Bible-thumping rednecks from breeding too many future Republican voters, before we end up another moron like Bush the younger in the White House. (They also had either one of two explanations as to why this wasn't eugenics.)

Why so much ire over nature taking its course?

because they don't like that course? The invisible hand of the free market leads to plentiful goods and prosperity. Low birth rates lead to extinction. What's next "Why do you wear a jacket in the winter? Heat flowing from hot to cold is natural, and therefore you should freeze."? Liking one default outcome doesn't imply liking every default outcome.

Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering...starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.

Yup, that's a problem. Sucks that there aren't any nice solutions, but nature doesn't have to play according to our desires.

It's about as confusing as a person wanting to get in shape, instead of being content to fill themselves up with junk food and whatching their health deteriorate. It would be nature taking it's course too, wouldn't it?

As for it sounding socialisty, there aren't that many devoted libertarians out there.

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