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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14630 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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I fell like much of the current discourse around social trends, such as birth rates & loneliness, need to do a better job at taking the current environmental constraints into consideration. My favorite video surrounding this topic of how environments produce cultural outcomes comes from the now defunct 1791L. (Honestly it sums up my views of current society)

On its face, this makes sense,(In response to an article by Ben Shapiro saying American spiritual ills are caused by culture) but it isn’t as though those cultural forces emerged from nowhere and spread purely by word of mouth. As argued before, it is not difficult to see how skewed incentives have developed not only through government influence, but also through market forces. This may be reflected in phenomena like pornography, which offers the convenience of sexual gratification without the associated effort, as well as media conglomerates broadcasting cultural messages into every American home. Additionally, the sexual liberation that has more recently reshaped society was facilitated in part by innovations such as birth control and the automobile, both of which were enabled by capitalist development.

After all, the number of men women can find desirable shrinks, (As women excel in the workforce) and men who are either unable or unwilling to attain those positions will grow resentful, bitter, and depressed. Whether they lack the willpower or the cognitive horsepower, the outcome is the same. “Will grow depressed” may not even be the most accurate description, considering that process is already well underway. Fundamentally, this is attributed to the cult of market success overtaking earlier moral foundations—the idea that raw economic gain nourishes the human soul rather than something higher. In their push to adopt traditionally male forms of competition, some women may find that status and excess income do not deliver the meaning they were led to expect. As some men perceive it becoming more difficult to meet standards of attractiveness, they may disengage, especially given the abundance of alternative habits available. Video games are progressing rapidly and transitioning toward virtual reality, while pornography’s exaggerated depiction of human sexuality can strongly engage the brain’s reward systems. In that context, there may seem to be less incentive to develop personality or skills if easier, more immediately rewarding alternatives are available—after all, the human subconscious has not fundamentally changed from the one shaped by evolution.

So, what might help if people are beginning to engage in actions that (I personally would consider to be) bad. Is finding a way to effect environmental structures. If one is a conservative , who values marriage & children and general human connections, you'll probably want to do this. I've talked about some solution previously. But not really targeting the environmental variables enough. I've also taken various other past critiques into consideration.

First

There needs to be a massive reconsideration of the current technological advancements. Here is a women falling in love with an AI. In Japan, this is notably worse - people paying for companion ship, and marrying dolls. Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way. Its only emotionally harmful, for basically all involved. Same deal with "Only Fans" and any other technology that seeks to make an easy way out of human face to face interaction.

Second

Get men, especially those without a degree, into a decent paying job. I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun. I can't imagine what the men who lack my experience & degree are going through. There are two sub problems with this one, mainly:

  1. Actually getting an interview to begin with

  2. Getting a good, well paying job after that

Both of these can be discussed at length. But im gonna give what I think is a good course of action. Make more vocational schools cheaper, and perhaps even free. Many states have done this. There also needs to be a cultural push to get men & boys to actually stay in these programs, and ensure an internship or entry level job after training is complete. I've been made aware of legislation to increase these jobs, Id like to see more of it.

Third

I think a lot of past discussions I've had miss an important piece by not really examining how incentives are affecting women differently.

There’s been some talk about shifting incentives away from women’s education:

So I'd suggest this has a number of impacts:

Women start attending college more often. Which has them burn more of their most fertile years, and the added debt load makes them less appealing as partners and less able to support kids.

Men start accruing more debt too, which stunts their personal wealth acquisition in their 20's and thus makes them less appealing to women... and just less able to support a partner/kids in general.

Obviously this allows economically nonviable majors like "Women's studies" to grow, which has some clear downstream impacts. Probably causes women's standards to rise, they wouldn't accept a partner without a degree if they have one.

Of course turned College into the 'default' life path rather than hopping into a career and getting married as the best practice for advancing socially. So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream. I dunno.

Unfortunately, that framing skips over a few structural realities:

  1. Housing has become a much higher barrier to entry. Access to good housing in good neighborhoods is significantly more expensive than it used to be. That raises the threshold for economic stability. In this environment, the college wage premium matters more, not less—it’s one of the most reliable ways to clear that bar. This also makes single-income households harder to sustain, regardless of preferences.

  2. Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.

  3. The modern economy rewards the traits women are, on average, better positioned to leverage. The college wage premium exists for a reason: today’s economy places a high value on a mix of cognitive ability and social/interpersonal skills. As demand has shifted in that direction, women—who on average tend to score higher on certain social skill dimensions—are relatively well-positioned to benefit.

It’s not that education is arbitrarily driving behavior. The causality runs the other way—economic and environmental changes have increased the returns to education, and women, given the available pathways and comparative advantages, are responding rationally to those incentives.

The easiest way around 1 is to just, well (clears throat): BUILD MORE FUCKING HOUSES. Yes, politically difficult, but If I had it my way, I'd adopt a similar housing policy on the state level, like Japan does.

I'd love for someone to add Ideas for how to deal with points 2 & 3. I'm not a well versed economists, so solutions are lost on me. Feel free to add your own thoughts, please!

Unrestrained, parts of the 'economy' don't work towards the benefit of 'the people'.

So we start by defining who 'the people' are, and call that our nation. Then we decide what's good for them, like having families with happy well behaved children, and facilitate that through collective action. We can call it 'socialism'. A national socialism!... of sorts. We now have an objective barometer for whether things are going good or bad.

Now, that's only half the pie. There are these parts of the 'economy' that benefit from whatever it is that causes people to be sad and not have families. We can refer to them as 'The Powers That Be'. They, like the name suggests, have a lot of power through words and money, and they want to keep it that way. But ultimately they are just people with perverted incentives. You don't need to reengineer society, 'solve' women and somehow clamber around a maze of arbitrary rules and shibboleths that was created by TPTB and only exists to benefit them. All you need to defeat them is to make them aware of the fact that their power is an illusion next to people with conviction, and that they live in physical space, and can be physically reached.

So what can we do? We can start by freeing our minds. It might not go like you hope. But on the flipside we can finally stop apologizing for wanting to put a swift end to an evil anti-human culture that is dragging untold millions into death spiral of self harm. Be a 'national socialist' in the privacy of your own head and stop burdening yourself with deference to a force that facilitates the destruction of everything you like.

So lets start: There is nothing bad about an 'authoritarian' solution that ends a mechanism that is making people into drug slaves for profit. The real 'authoritarianism' was allowing it to happen in the first place, not ending it sooner, and not punishing the responsible more severely.

All philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and all right wing thought is an echo of national socialism.

You can be part of the anti-human culture, or you can go into history's dustbin right away. Anti-human culture is the inevitable result of technological development, and it's been building up for thousands of years. The ancients railed against the devil of "writing", which made us trust scribbles on clay and papyrus instead of using our Gods-given speech and memory, and they were right. We became less human when we started reading and writing. We are far less human now, of course - bent out of shape, under all kinds of unnatural pressures and incentives, with far more technologies enabling us to do the previously unthinkable, and to sacrifice more and more pieces of ourselves in the process. At some point there'll be nothing human left. But there's no way out. Technology provides power, and no living thing has the option to make itself powerless and not suffer for it.

Um, Im not very comfortable with national socialism. I think a slightly heavy handed moderate form of conservatism, accepting some progressive economic policy is enough. Im not exactly Aryan, so I wouldnt benefit much from it anyway.

At a charitable guess, people treating "national socialism" as a political philosophy instead of a historical phenomenon probably elide the parts about the aryans. I doubt that's anyone's focus. I doubt most self-professed advocates for modern-day "national socialism" are aryans in any sense to begin with.

I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun.

Yeah but why is this? Fundamentally the market demand for labour is shrinking due to technology. Automation and software all reduce the amount of work that needs a human. There's no reason that enough new jobs should emerge to replace all the automated workers or sustain their wages and expectation. In the early stage of the industrial revolution, weavers had their wages fall due to competition from machinery.

A similar transition is happening now as labour gets less valuable, this is just masked by our wealthier modern societies.

We end up with more people in higher education rather than actually working.

We end up with these incredibly long interview processes, getting constantly ghosted.

We end up with many working only 3 or 4 day weeks.

We end up with a flourishing non-market economy of NGOs and govt workers and email jobs and fraudulent disability/caring jobs. They're not really necessary.

Knowledge work is disappearing too, just more slowly than manufacturing. I do this at work, make scripts that substitute for temporary workers we would've hired for some tasks.

At the same time, there's human quantitative easing via mass migration and offshoring. Supply rises while demand falls, so the price is lowered.

The answer is to halt mass migration and implement UBI, while decentralizing power from the big tech companies somehow, perhaps by demanding mandatory opensourcing.

I think the problems you are mentioning are downstream of spirituality/religion. A well-functioning society has widely believed shared stories, practices, values, rituals, and agreement on what is sacred.

There is something like an “American Civil Religion” that includes things like:

  • myths about how democracy results in good outcomes and leaders through public deliberation
  • the myth that anyone can start with nothing and end up successful (because of public education and scholarships)
  • the myth that you can achieve economic success through hard work (like starting as a entry-level employee and working up to manager)
  • the myth that the free market enhances life for all Americans
  • myths about the role of the military

I’m using the word myth as John Vervaeke uses it. It not something untrue, but rather a symbolic story that helps people make sense of reality.

Those myths have been losing their credibility/plausibility/power in recent times. This is because of information spreading and events like:

  • The handling of the pandemic by government officials caused some people to lose faith in the democratic process
  • Things like the 2008 financial crisis, growing wealth inequality, outsourcing, and AI have called myths about economic success through hard work into question.
  • The Iraq War and other military operations have caused people to question the myths around the military.
  • The rise of social media caused people to question the myth about the free market leading to better outcomes for everyone (social media caused a bunch of negative externalities that benefited tech companies by exploiting human psychology).

It used to be much easier to believe in the myths and to see bad individual outcomes as outliers that often resulted from individual lack of character.

I think instead of focusing just on material solutions we need new myths that people find widely plausible. There needs to be enough evidence that they are generally true. Without shared myths people become distrustful, conspiratorial, and tribal.

Given how divided the country is already due to the culture war, how do you see the country getting back to agreeing on a single myth?

Get men, especially those without a degree, into a decent paying job.

If you can't see why this can't be solved under current globalized market and current macroeconomic conditions, I don't know what to tell you.

You can print as much money as you like, but the world is engaged in active wholesale value destruction and redistribution in many areas and most actual financial growth these days is the result of arbitrage, not genuine productivity increases.

As Neal Stephenson put it in 1992:

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity

and most actual financial growth these days is the result of arbitrage, not genuine productivity increases.

I think this is overstated. There’s definitely a larger role for finance and asset appreciation than people are comfortable with, but it’s hard to argue that productivity growth is entirely illusory when you look at sectors like tech, healthcare, or energy. The bigger problem is that the gains from real productivity growth don’t necessarily translate into broadly accessible, non-degree employment.

A lot of men aren't positioned well to move into the sectors of the economy that are growing, some of those sectors pay well, others could pay better, but we have a lot of wiggle room to try some things before throwing in the towel.

Healthcare growing the economy? The majority of recent innovation is targeted at extending the retirement period at massive expense

There needs to be a massive reconsideration of the current technological advancements

Impossible Mr Ludd. The technology has military applications, therefore the only way out is through. Adapt or create better tech that doesn't have the problems. Reversing entropy is not going to happen. Your best bet is to start new social norms for the technology from scratch and have it slowly replace liberal use, which is a tall order.

As for your other two points, they can only be solved through the demise of the bureaucracy, whose power is the very thumb pressing on Men and builders, the same people really.

None of the things you want are possible without the destruction of the established order and therefore massive amounts of violence and chaos.

I still think it ought be done but measure what you're asking for here. Canvassing to pass a law isn't going to cut it. You are going directly against the interests and people who run your society.

There's no magic economic formula that's going to solve a very political problem. You need to organize with people that want things to change, confront the opposition and prevail, then carefully tweak the machine to get your way without collapsing everything. There is no other way.

The good news is that time is on your side since your enemies are mostly old people. But that just means you (or someone else like you) might get an opportunity.

I maintain that social decay is a result of wealth. We don't need anyone else to fulfill Maslow's bottom rung. Virtually no one has starved to death because of poverty in the United States in living memory. There was inertia that kept the systems going - hyper-available dopamine hits may have been the last straw - but now that the incentives for maintaining a social circle - going to church, joining a fraternal organization - are gone, atomization is just the natural outcome for a significant portion of society. Good news: their genetic lines will end. Bad news: they're going to vote in horrible policies until they shuffle off this mortal coil.

The easiest way around 1 is to just, well (clears throat): BUILD MORE FUCKING HOUSES. Yes, politically difficult, but If I had it my way, I'd adopt a similar housing policy on the state level, like Japan does.

Nobody wants this. The old pro-growthers already have their houses; they are the Boomers that the Millennials and Zoomers hate. They tend to be NIMBY (though they are not BANANA - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone). The Millennials are pro-urban, environmentalist and anti-sprawl, and don't see how this keeps them from getting houses; at best they want to build dense multiplexes for other people to move into so they can get a house. Many ARE BANANA, in effect. The Zoomers just see what the Boomers have and want it right now, especially if it means sending great-grandma to a home.

If you try to build, the Millennials will scream about corrupt developers and also demand "affordable housing" instead. Nobody wants to develop this and the old Boomers don't want affordable housing anywhere near them.

(Gen X, as usual, doesn't count)

Apartments are houses!

Around the world, people live in apartments, have children in them, and sustain rich communities inside of them. I fail to understand why apartments are antithetical to housing ? Its a uniquely American (anglo) obsession. I grew up in a residential apartment building in India, and it was great ! A neighborhood must have narrow-enough (safe) streets, few cars and enough parks. That's all you need to make it friendly towards children. Suburban Culs-de-sac achieve this by limiting car entry and making everyone have their own park in their own house. But nothing about dense apartments stops a community from achieving the same things.

In the US, NIMBYs have made it difficult to build apartments. So apartments can only be built in undesirable places (eg:highways) or loud places for singles (city downtowns). In their working years, Americans are forced to live in either shitty or lifeless apartments. Inevitably, they hate apartments, and move into houses as soon as they can afford it. Once they buy houses, they become NIMBYs, keeping apartments shitty and lifeless. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

I randomly chose a bunch of suburbs and residential neighborhoods of peer cities to the US. Random Paris suburb, Geneva, Istanbul ourskirts, Mumbai, Bangkok outskirts. What about these places is hostile to families ?

Even in the US itself. Brooklyn, Queens, SF or Seattle have great example of apartment-dominant residential neighborhoods that are still desirable for families and accessible from public transportation.

Yes, some millenials have gotten radicalized into doomerist (managed decline) and communist (subsidize demand) beliefs. They're loud, but very much a minority. The majority just want to live in a nice apartment in a neighborhood they like.

Raising small children in apartments is relatively a huge pain in the neck though.

Apartments are houses!

I don't share nybbler's raging hatred for apartments, but apartments are most certainly not houses: no upstairs or downstairs neighbors, having your own garden/patio, being able to expand it, etc. Houses have a lot of things apartments don't.

Apartments are houses!

No, apartments are pods, in the "live in the pod and eat the bugs" sense. With a few exceptions for the ultra-rich, they're small, dark, cramped, noisy spaces that you can only enter and leave by passing by multiple other neighbors, at which point you are not in your outdoor space (which you don't have) but out on the street.

I grew up in a residential apartment building in India

And why aren't you still there?

This idea that your existence is in some sense subhuman (or else what is "live in the pod and eat the bugs" supposed to imply?) if you can't leave your housing without passing by other people does seem like a uniquely American hangup. Since we left the whole hunting and gathering thing behind, most people everywhere across the globe have lived in settings where the walls of their housing unit are also the walls of someone else's. Cities existed for some 6000 centuries at least, and within the walls of a typical European city, maybe between zero and ten people would have a residence that meets your criteria. Over in Germany (admittedly relatively far in the direction of people not caring for houses among Western countries), even Chancellor Merkel lived in an apartment, which she could only enter and leave by passing by other neighbours including apparently a politician from the opposing party.

I now live in NYC, in an even smaller (personal preference, I can afford bigger) apartment. So.....clearly I like it.

Idk if you're rage-baiting or sincere. There is no way you actually believe that about apartments. You're describing a prison, not an apartment.

Apartments have better sunlight and ventilation than SFHs because they sit higher up. An apartment is only as noisy as the cars on the street below. Live by the highway, suffer from noise. Live on a side-street, and it is quiet.

Engaging with your neighbors is as optional as engaging with suburban neighbors. You may see them once in a while, but that's about it. In my current apartment, I don't know their names and barely see them. In previous apartments, we were of similar age groups and became friends. If you buy a condo, you're expected to vet your neighbors like you'd vet your suburban neighbors. You can choose your own adventure.

Apartments can have patios or balconies. The building usually has a shared rooftop and a shared back-yard. I don't get the obsession with large private outdoors. The whole point of staying in apartment is to be in a dense city where one can walk to whichever amenity they want. Want to play a sport -> walk to the sports ground. Want serenity -> walk to the local garden. want to play with your dog -> walk to the local park. As a bonus, all of them are better maintained than anything I could manage on my own.

Apartments have better sunlight and ventilation than SFHs because they sit higher up.

This is emphatically not the case for every NYC apartment I've ever been in. The dismal, exclusively artificial lighting and contant stench of foul, artificial scents are the two biggest reasons I would cite for never wanting to live there. I married a NYer, and the time I spent either visiting her or with her visiting family were just horrid on that regard.

Have you ever actually spent time in a decent house on a decent lot with actual trees? This might be a "fish doesn't know what water is" situation. I've literally come home from day trips to NYC blowing black snot.

Yes. I've lived in rural and suburban areas. Sunlight was worse. There was nothing to do. I hated it. I'll give you this. The air was cleaner in the rural town. But, the suburb didn't breathe better than NYC.

NYC is large. Times Square, Harlem and Hell's Kitchen suck balls. NYC proper has the same population as Arizona. It matters where you live. Visitors get a skewed image of NYC because all the hotels and touristy bits are in the most concrete-clad and crowded part of the most crowded city. I sounds like your opinion of NYC is informed by those few neighborhoods.

Once you leave those neighborhoods, NYC quickly becomes livable. The subway remains smelly. But, the streets feel pleasant, or smell of hotdogs and halal carts. Either way, I approve. I haven't visited the Bronx or Staten Island much. But, Brooklyn and Queens have a ton of green spaces. Everyone living North of 50th street in Manhattan can walk to Central Park. If you need more, you can live beside Prospect Park.

That being said, I've heard NYC was worse in the 90s. Maybe things have gotten better since. Even today, Shitty NYC apartments are shitty. But a shitty trailer park home is shitty too. Poverty sucks in general.

Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments. From tiny cheap ones next to the stations for young folk who are out and about all day anyway to bigger ones for families where the kids can get their own rooms. Apartments can be great, we've just decided we don't care.

And so many of the issues I see listed with apartments are completely fixable. Like one of the main complaints I see is noise, and I get it. I hated having upstairs neighbors but that is not inherent to apartments, that is just because we don't do sound insulation properly. It's insane to me that we over regulate basically everything else and drive up the costs of building to an insane degree and then with the biggest complaint apartment dwellers have we just shrug and go "oh well, nothing we can do". Sound insulation is not some new technology, we can make apartments that are quiet no matter how much your upstairs neighbor stomps. We just don't.

This is the case with so many problems people got about apartments. Completely fixable, but instead we're wasting money on pointless regulated shit like second stairwells and parking minimums way over the amount of occupants.

The noise I had to suffer in every single housing unit in the US (whether apartment or free-standing), due to your HVACs routinely sounding like jet engines and fridges like idling trucks, not to mention even wind and rain being loud due to your paper-thin walls and bad windows, is well in excess of anything you hear in a half-decent European apartment in a major city. In Germany it probably would be sufficient grounds to drag your landlord to court and have your rent slashed.

Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments

Honestly, my takeaway when I visited, expecting an unending sea of apartments was that I was surprised at how many freestanding (small footprint) single family houses Tokyo has. They exist within walking distance of even the densest city centers. Plenty of them only slightly larger in footprint than the single car garage they stand on top of.

Also lots of small multi-family houses, seemingly where a single small-footprint house was presumably replaced with a five story (ish) walkup.

Tokyo is constructed very differently from European Metro centers, and both are quite different from American ones.

I'm not saying that the apartments are why Japanese people have given up on romantic relationships, but "Tokyo does it" isn't a strong argument when the concern is with family formation

we don't do sound insulation properly

Specifically, typical US code requires a sound transmission class of at least 50 between apartments, but at least one study (found via this article) has found that an STC of 60 may be a better threshold.

It requires a 50 but there's basically no actual testing or enforcement of it done so STC ratings in the real world are often much lower. In part because even a tiny mistake can dumpster the rating. https://www.slrconsulting.com/insights/the-devil-is-in-the-acoustic-details-part-two-acoustic-caulking-wall-joints/

Even small gaps can drastically reduce the sound isolation performance of an acoustical assembly. A small gap permits sound to be readily transmitted just as easily as light in a corridor is transmitted through a cracked door or under-door gap, to a darkened room. A small opening of less than 1% of the area in a partition reduces an STC 50 rated assembly by as much as 30 dB.

Consider the case of a GWB wall assembly that is normally rated at STC 50, but has a ½” (12mm) gap between the floor and the wall at both the top and bottom of the wall. For a 14 ft high wall assembly (floor- underside of floor), these seemingly insignificant gaps represent a mere 0.6%, of the total area (i.e., 1” out of 168”) but degrades the sound isolation to STC 22. A reduction of 28 points!

Because there's no actual require testing and enforcement of insulation, so many buildings just go wasted.

I hated having upstairs neighbors but that is not inherent to apartments,

Correct, it's inherent to neighbors.

Well.

Certain neighbors. The ones I pay handsomely not to have anymore.

Hey, you know something else interesting about Tokyo? It's virtually entirely ethnically homogeneous. At least compared to your average European city where Europeans are the defacto minority.

Correct, it's inherent to neighbors.

It is insulation quality, not neighbors.

Sound insulation can make even the loudest neighbors playing a boombox basically unnoticeable, while leaky insulation (or lack of insulation) can make even basic everyday noise echo and amplify. And when very minor mistakes dumpster sound insulation quality, many people are left thinking that noise is just a part of life when it's really just shit construction.

For the brutal economy thing, I think that's a result of increasing technological sophistication requiring increasingly demanding skill levels from human workers. The economy bifurcates in two directions as the middle is eaten up through automation: roles where not much beyond warm bodies is required, say as in retail, and then roles where highly advanced technical abilities are required for filling in gaps left by automation.

This is a simplification, but the general trend is for automation to eat up moderately skill-dependent occupations. Computers ate into traditional office work but created more sophisticated tasks involving coding, but now the entry-to-mid level coding is being threatened by AI.

If an area is less technically demanding, it is more amenable to automation, generally.

Areas where this pattern doesn't follow are misleading: while ambulating around as a plumber, say, doesn't seem highly skill-dependent, ambulation is nevertheless a skillset very difficult for machines. There are incongruencies between human capabilities and those of machines which don't map cleanly to the pattern I have outlined.

I think one reason you're having trouble finding work is that there's been a major oversupply of white collar degreed workers for what the economy actually requires. Those sorts of jobs are very cushy and high status, but too many people have been going to college trying to get them, and now we're seeing an overshooting of the demand. Probably more tradespeople are required instead, but owing to the bifurcation effect I outlined, those don't pay as well as the absolute top-level knowledge occupations and are a lot more taxing, so everyone's trying to force their way through a narrow funnel to the top instead.

I think one reason you're having trouble finding work is that there's been a major oversupply of white collar degreed workers for what the economy actually requires. Those sorts of jobs are very cushy and high status, but too many people have been going to college trying to get them, and now we're seeing an overshooting of the demand.

This might play a role. Even if I'm making it to the last round, Im still competing with a guy with 4 years of SysAdmin experience. Its so fucking annoying, especially because i try and put in a lot of work into my resume and my interviews. I dont see any solution though - the best thing could be to try raising the pay of retail and non college avenues artificially, but those notoriously have negative consequences, such as a reduction in hiring and increase in the price of goods.

Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.

Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.

Cynically, there is already a good chance that a distressed woman texting her boyfriend late at night getting emphatic, engaging answers will be reading LLM responses. If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.

Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.

At least two of those things are within TheMotte overton window, and they're still human connections!

the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.

Now where's the fun in that

Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.

Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.

Yes, and they were right!

Cynically, there is already a good chance that a distressed woman texting her boyfriend late at night getting emphatic, engaging answers will be reading LLM responses. If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.

This is why I always add in a racial slur or two when comforting my wife. I want her to know she's talking to me and not some clanker.

Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.

Good thing none of these shift the environmental incentives the way stated technologies do

If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.

Yes, true love has its risk. It is precisely because of these risk, human love is valuable. I can make a conscious choice to love my wife, give her romantic gifts, stay loyal to her. An LLM has no such free will. Anyone who really loves you is gonna choose to be with you, its a sign of actual love. We deserve people who have the ability to love and respect us of their own cognition. A machine is nothing but a pale imitation at best.

I can make a conscious choice to love my wife

I find this to be an interesting statement. Could you please elaborate?

Love isnt just a feeling, its an ability. Every time you meet an emotional need, take her out on a date, show warmth and affection. You are choosing to love that person. The free will behind this choice is what makes it special, not just the action. I dont know if you are in a relationship, but think of it like this: What if you found out your partner was being coerced into being with you (someone threatened her, maybe a forced marriage a la Taliban). Would that person go on dates, kiss you, and have sex with you? Yeah. Would most consider this love? No! Without agency, we are left with a disgusting imitation, a fake "love" built on falsehood. The ability to stay means nothing without the ability to walk away! True love requires agency.

IMO, (2) is not really going to move the needle wrt birth rates / relationship rates. The sociological finding that women prefer a higher status male is robust. Whether the man is unemployed or whether the man is doing drywall is not going to make much of a difference. (And yeah, being very beautiful or very charismatic will negate the negative occupational status effect, but if we want to fix an entire national trend, we have to think realistically about the statistically normal case). And the finding is really about status and not work per se. In every city there are deadbeat arts types or popular social media figures who make no money but have their choice over women in finance. That’s because their status is higher. Or in Haredi culture, women are expected to work and men are expected to study all day, but the men have innately higher status than the women + studying is high status, so women don’t mind it. This is not so in American culture. Women believe they are higher status than men as a default, and many of them believe that typically-male beliefs are low status (ie conservatism). The easiest fix to this is literally just to prevent them from working in high status occupations. That’s easy in the “fix everything button” sense, but difficult in the “and who will bell the cat” sense.

IMO, (2) is not really going to move the needle wrt birth rates / relationship rates. The sociological finding that women prefer a higher status male is robust.

I mean, yes, but women are flexible enough in this area to where the gains can make real impacts. Much of the decline in marriage is with non-college educated women. College educated women are basically eating up both college educated men, and men with money but no college education. I think men having money will shift the needle a good chunk, as it will be giving women more options for attractive mates. Its also worth noting that just having a good chunk of change to spend creates status in its own right.

Wow, that's a fascinating graph. I was very confused and started writing a comment about how I'd want more recent data than 1980 before forming conclusions, but looking at the paper itself I see that's by birth year.

I guess the issues would be -- does this take account of divorce and remarriage? It's possible there are some serial monogamists here, and some situations that don't necesarrily demonstrate a continuous commitment between one couple over the course of time in which a couple would normally have children. Since we're talking about the effects on childrearing, it also doesn't necessarily take into account whether many of the college-educated women got married, but too late to have children, or more than one child. The way this data is sampled smells kind of fishy to me, because it genuinely just asks whether a woman is married at a certain point, not what the marital history looks like. I would want to see massively more data before we conclude what marriage is like.

But there are some fascinating takeaways there -- in particular, that there is a higher rate of college-educated women being married to non-college men than the rate of college-educated men being married to non-college women. Simple models of hypergamy would predict the opposite. But there does, like you said, seem to be a thing where earning potential (which itself is correlated with a LOT of other social variables) is more important than college degree in attaining marriage for men.

Perhaps I was onto something when I said:

The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.

To your job issue, I was laid off in January and had a really hard time in the job market. Dozen applications a week, no interviews, and only a couple even bothered to send a rote "we had more qualified applicants but thanks for applying" emails, most just ghosted me.

Then I updated my LinkedIn to be more attractive to recruiters. A recruiter got in touch with me within a week. Two weeks after that I had an interview. Day after interview, had a job offer for more money than the job which fired me at the start of the year.

In talking to Claude about this it said that most mid-market software dev jobs use recruiters and that the few jobs that do make it to the job boards are often not even "real" jobs (already internally filled or looking for H1-B and the job listing is just to check a box) and the ones that are get 100+ applications in the first day. Not sure how the market for Network Engineering works, but from my experience getting in touch with a recruiter might be a good idea.

I had a similar experience back in November when the company I worked for went out of business. Applied to everything that looked even remotely in my ballpark, and crickets. Updated my profile, and got scouted by two different headhunters almost immediately, both with offers better than my old job. My total compensation for one of them was nearly twice what I was making before.

It's kind of fucked though, when the job market is entirely "Don't call us, we'll call you. No, don't even apply until we've told you to." But the stories I've heard of people scamming the interview process are horrendous. They aren't even all Indians! Though most are... Internationalization and AI have really fucked things. The signal to noise ratio interfering between qualified candidates and open job positions is through the roof.

Turns out the bar is in hell, and the primary challenge is convincing a recruiter you are a real person and not an Indian or an LLM. Or an LLM behind a brain rotted meat proxy.

They aren't even all Indians! Though most are...

As a side note, the 21 an hour job i was offered was by a company full of Indians. They are so fucking annoying. They keep calling me all the damn time even though i've technically accepted the offer (Which tbh, I'm probably gonna be dropping in favor of the internship.) Its fucking ridiculous. And yes, an obvious #notall, but seriously, why are these companies like this?

When I first started searching I was having a tough time even getting call backs. Probably would help if i updated my linkedin. Surprisingly, ive been able to get call backs better once in began timing my application, which meant applying to a job within hours or a day of the posting. It works!

It also helped that i lowered my standards a bit and decided to just work more "entry level" work for longer (Im in the IT industry) but honestly, at this point any full time IT job with benefits is better than contract work, internships, or 21 an hr with no benefits at all.

Im making it to final interviews often in many of these cases. But its a huge pain in the ass sealing the deal! Im waiting to hear back from 2 full time job interview though, fingers crossed!

Most of the problems in US housing come from being unable to do explicit racial segregation so you therefore need to do regulations to make housing expensive enough to keep the poors out or they will ruin your schools and commons. The big home builders have their costs down but they can mostly only build far from city centers.

You could build city centers cheaply but regulations prevent it. If you don’t have the regulations those areas will ghettoize.

There is a slight compromise of having very vigorous policing but the only areas that have really pulled it off are NYC and Miami. Cali regulates expensive and limits public transportation. Chicago some how did north/south segregation for awhile. The rest of the Midwest once wealthy city cores are now bombed out.

Most of the problems in US housing come from being unable to do explicit racial segregation so you therefore need to do regulations to make housing expensive enough to keep the poors out or they will ruin your schools and commons.

How about we focus on policy to help them be functional individuals, instead of condemning them? Many black people used to get and stay married, the chaos we see now in the community is, in my opinion, a resulting combination of the sexual revolution, the war on drugs, and perhaps some perverse incentives from the welfare state.

Or maybe it’s genetic? Before all the things you mentioned happened; the great migration occurred and cleared out every midwestern city of whites because of crime and bad schools.

No thank you - I’m not buying a home in an area with Black Americans.

Renting is whatever - I don’t own anything so I’m not as mad at just what I find to be a disgrace of living standards, attitudes, appearances, and safety.

Sure, help the poor. I want everyone to be able to succeed - I also want to live in a white area when I’m older and no longer an intimidating large Slavic male.

I say a lot of this because black Americans of affluence make the same issues (as do their children) as less affluent ones. Obviously less, but still noticeably higher than the rest of us.

Maybe if I grew up in Vermont I wouldn’t hold these opinions.

I think I know the answers, but I'll ask anyway: Why do you hold prejudice against Blacks?

Personally I'm a huge tech optimist AGI in the next few years or at least next few decades believer and I really don't think a fair bit of these things are going to be an issue. Lowered birth rates sound awful at first, but we've already made significant advantages into artificial wombs for preemies and the idea that this tech could eventually extend to the very beginning of a pregnancy until birth doesn't seem unreasonable anymore. With stable conditions and active monitoring they might even be able to be healthier! What care do we have if people aren't fucking when we won't need people to fuck for society to have children anyway? And with AGIs, robots can be effective parents (probably better on average if they aren't abusive) for the artificial womb babies.

But even that is a complete misdirection, birth rates won't be much of an issue to begin with. The current problem with an aging society is that the old don't produce as much as the youth do, but still consume resources. But who cares about that if AGI bots can do all the work for humans? There's barely a difference in productivity between a society of average age 35 vs 55 when almost all the labor is handled by automation to begin with. And with AGI, just building another robot will always be more efficient to improving the lives of already living people than creating a new baby and having to raise them.

Of course this sort of concept is creepy and inhumane and no one really wants to talk about it. The idea of machines birthing and raising human children feels disturbing for an old population that doesn't work but it's honestly one of the better possible outcomes. People are happy and humanity thrives and grows increasing utility in multiple ways. And at the very least it's way preferable to a future where humanity shrinks/goes extinct instead whether from low birthrates or robots killing us.

But even that is a complete misdirection, birth rates won't be much of an issue to begin with. The current problem with an aging society is that the old don't produce as much as the youth do, but still consume resources. But who cares about that if AGI bots can do all the work for humans?

I'm of the belief that more children and families are an inherent good, independent of any societal effect that a declining population may have. Same thing with having less friends - regardless of whatever economic effects come of it, the fostering of love between to close friends, between husband and wife, between parent and child is worth preserving in its own right.

There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.

Sure there is. Lots of people are too dysfunctional to have a happy relationship. Take the happiest, easiest people in the world and pair them up. Do the same to the next pair, and the next, and the next. At some point you are either going to have couples where one makes the other miserable, or they both make each other miserable. It's simply not true that there is an (implicitly happy) relationship out there for everybody, either romantic or otherwise. And a mildly positive emotional relationship with a very laid back computer is far kinder than what we have traditionally done with such people, which is to look away and wait for them to die.

I get what you're saying, obviously, but you are comparing the imperfect reality (sometimes a machine is better than nothing) with an IMO overly-positive could-be (everyone or nearly everyone starts interacting more in person and becomes less lonely and gets into a happy, healthy relationship). A change in ideology can move the tipping-point of misery but only so far. As far as I'm concerned, the ability to mass-manufacture companionship and something as close to genuine care as makes no odds is genuinely miraculous, and makes me more optimistic about tech than I've been for a long time.

I get what you're saying, obviously, but you are comparing the imperfect reality (sometimes a machine is better than nothing) with an IMO overly-positive could-be (everyone or nearly everyone starts interacting more in person and becomes less lonely and gets into a happy, healthy relationship). A change in ideology can move the tipping-point of misery but only so far. As far as I'm concerned, the ability to mass-manufacture companionship and something as close to genuine care as makes no odds is genuinely miraculous, and makes me more optimistic about tech than I've been for a long time.

As a general rule, we should accept authenticity over bullshit. No machine can love a human in the same way a human can, and dying alone is superior to a false fantasy. But that aside, I don't think there is a great way to guarantee that only relationship challenged individuals get their hands on it. People are probably gonna try and get their hands on an android partner by either purchasing used or gaming the system. The drawbacks outweigh the positives.

dying alone is superior to a false fantasy

I would agree, but that's a hard sell on a civilizational level. Setting the unlovable up with cheap machine companions and remaining able to harness them economically or at least pacify them until they give up the ghost seems a lot safer than telling them the ugly truth. "Sorry, but you're a genetic dead-end and economically and socially irrelevant, please die quietly." won't happen, especially not in our fleshpot democracies. Doubly so when the march of technology makes it look like we will all be irrelevant dead-ends sooner or later, and we can tell that any pruning shears we put to the dead branches will come for ourselves eventually.

As a general rule, we should accept authenticity over bullshit

Again, a non-starter. When one makes more money than the other, then it will happen. Until then, lawyers, corporate management and liars will make exponentially more than people doing 'an honest day's work', and people doing the honest work notice.

As a general rule, we should accept authenticity over bullshit. No machine can love a human in the same way a human can, and dying alone is superior to a false fantasy.

I just flat out disagree, sorry. Many hugely important things in our lives are fictional; I've spent more of my life with fictional people than real ones if you judge hour-by-hour, and I'm no hikkikomori. Pastiche architecture, veneer furniture, boy's-own adventure stories: I'll take an artful illusion over brutal authenticity any day of the week.

I don't think there is a great way to guarantee that only relationship challenged individuals get their hands on it. People are probably gonna try and get their hands on an android partner by either purchasing used or gaming the system. The drawbacks outweigh the positives.

I'm open to discussing this, but I think your angle is wrong. Firstly because the happy individuals mostly don't need to bother with it, and secondly because interacting with a patient simulacrum seems to me to be a very good way for people who are bad with people to become at least a little bit better with people.

To make it clear where I stand, I was being serious earlier when I said I regard this technology as downright miraculous and I use it regularly myself, though for fiction writing and occasional venting rather than a romantic relationship. I am really, really upset that an increasing number of people want to ban it in the name of forcing me and others to try and fail to live their fantasy of a happy life. To me your proposition is very redolent of the socialist logic of, "if we ban all the good schools, people will have no choice but to make the bad schools better!". No. Life just becomes a little more shit for everyone.

Let's tilt the scale by all means, let's help people form relationships and not get addicted, I'm doing that for myself as we speak. And I'm doing it partly with the help of an AI assistant I constructed. The two can go together perfectly well.

House prices and number of houses aren’t really as correlated as most people think. Look at the Chinese housing boom for example. Look at New Zealand. Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose (yes, there was a very brief fall in 2009, but that was after the crash and the population returned to growth long before house prices recovered). In New Zealand, property prices have collapsed recently despite continued population growth. In Seoul in South Korea, house prices doubled between 2015 and 2022, even though the overall population of the city actually fell (according to many estimates) or at least stagnated. China spent many years building housing as if its population was growing at a tfr of 3, and yet prices continued to go up, up, up even as urbanization started to slowly turn the corner and birth rates plummeted (both objectively bad for house price speculation if you think the central driver of prices is demand). Here in London, prices in many desirable neighborhoods have fallen by ~20% in nominal terms in the last couple of years, even though the population continues to rise and unemployment remains low.

There are individual reasons for all of this, and you can handwave each singular datapoint, but the overall dynamic is harder to avoid - the reason houses are cheap in some places and expensive in others usually has very little to do with how many houses are available or even how much money people have except in some time-limited sudden dislocation events. It’s much more about culture, like stock market valuations (the same sector with the same margins in two countries of similar stability trading at vastly different multiples, for example, can be handwaved by talking about liquidity or local investment dynamics or blah blah, but really, it’s because in some countries people believe that stonks always go up, so they do, and in others they don’t, so they don’t).

The housing market has not magically found a way around supply and demand.

What happened in the US in 2008/2009 was destruction of demand through the end of cheap and easy loans.

The loss of cheap loans is also a very large part of current affordability issues.

Yes, but the contrast was much greater in 2008/2009. We're not talking going from 3% to 6% (in fact, 30-year-fixed interest rates actually dropped), we're talking entire classes of (very bad) loans essentially disappeared. No income, no job, no down payment? No house for you!

Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose

Didn't that happen partly because a bunch of new houses were built?

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