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 -
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.
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.
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.
Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?
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".
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link