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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

And of course, there's a simple low-cost way to do this... fight more wars. That was the traditional way society's removed their excess males, and it would be a huge strategic asset for America or any other 1st-world country if we could treat soldiers as expendable rather than a huge national tragedy every time a single grunt dies.

So arrange for combat by tournament to resolve international disputes. Use large hoplite armies recruited for one time cash payments, fighting on glorified football fields.

Idiots aren't useful as soldiers in modern warefare. Has been so since at least WWI, but probably even going back to 1776 you mostly could not have low-intelligence soldiers. The risk of them being near firearms or explosives simply outweighs any physical benefit of them carrying stuff around for you.

In case anyone reading doesn't know. In the 1960s they rounded up low IQ people and sent them to Vietnam. So they could benefit from military service.

Turns out low IQ people are terrible at modern combat. Whatever quickness or coordination it takes, they don't got it.

I think this would be a huge improvement if it was done moderately and selectively. That is, take the people at the very bottom socioeconomic classes (mostly young unwed mothers), and offer them a financial incentive to choose daughters over sons. Then we end up with, say, 51% of babies being born female, compared to the present situation of 51% male. And that 2% would come from the demographics most likely to commit crime and get into trouble, so changing them to female would massively reduce those risk factors.

Unfortunately I think the people most likely to voluntarily choose this would be upper class liberal women, and that would just be a disaster. Even more girl boss feminist women!

You could also speculate about some fascist government forcing it on everyone, to the point where we end up like 75% female or even more. As a guy I'll admit it sounds like a fun sex fantasy, but... I suspect this would cause some horrible consequences down the line (the women would end up fighting with each other and not cooperate at all in running society).

While everything seems to work better with slightly more females than males, I strongly expect that would break down long before reaching a supermajority.

I think this will would improve things for a generation or so, but likely increasing the fraction of women in classes which reproduce unplanned will increase their fertility.

One juvenile delinquent can easily impregnate a dozen 16yo's, if there are no competitors, after all.

It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.

Even so, I don't really think Inceldom is a problem big enough to justify 'removing' men. If Incels lives really were so bad, they are fully capable of killing themselves. Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one. There are counterarguments, such as suicide != never existing, but at that point we are going into Schopenhauer anti-natalist territory and that is a bigger question.

It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Two very common issues with utilitarianism as practiced is the issue of calculating utilions, it's very non-trivial and I'd argue practically impossible at scale, and the fact that the world is so complex that calculating n-th order effects quickly becomes practically impossible for tons of activities, especially the more granular you get. I think those two issues are often why utilitarianism, where is a very good heuristic to use when pair with others, often morphs into horror and/or 'I wanted to do this anyway and I can fabricate a post-hoc justification for it using utilitarianism" when it's the sole "guide" or morality or action.

But weren't the genes selected for in an era when mortality was a lot higher? Especially for males? A 50/50 sex ratio at birth might be quite different after a couple of decades of low intensity war and hunting at maturity.

I doubt the 50/50 ratio comes from "male mortality being higher than female mortality." It comes from the fact that the most successful males are just so damn successful that from an expected value calculation, gambling on being a male (from behind the veil of ignorance) is worth it.

This. Every individual in the next generation will have half of their genes from a male and half from a female, so [i]ndividual selection favors equal parental investments in male and female offspring. Obligatory link to the sequences.

A fun shower thought I had:

In competitive videogames, "smurfing" is a pejorative for a more-skilled player fooling skill-based matchmaking systems to play (and win) against a less-skilled player. This is seen as a kind of stolen valor: you only look impressive because of unfair comparisons!

I think its interesting that we do not respond emotionally similarly to hypergamous norms: Chad is basically smurfing the ranked queue, no?

If I caught myself describing romance like this I’d go ahead and remove myself from the gene pool.

Actually, incels are the real high-status and valorous winners because only they have the moral fortitude to survive being losers.

I think when encountering Chad "smurfing" in person, i.e. someone from a high-status environment coming to a lower-status one to fish for girls (or even just coming there without the overt intent to steal mates), men did react with hostility historically. The city boy among the country boys; the student from an elite school among the kids from a merely "decent" one, etc.

I think I recall variants of that meme in literature, although the initial examples that come to mind (The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders) are upper class boys gatekeeping the lower-class heartthrob from upper class girls.

Although I think it's also possible to see it as Chad smurfing the women: they go in assuming it's a fair matchmaking game, but he's hiding that he's got a separate account with lots of experience elsewhere, but is tired of losing all the time (the tyranny of PvP games: the average player loses half the time, and good matchmaking looks like everyone losing half the time). The classic story (I'm sure there are literary examples, but none come to mind) would tell you that he wasn't after true love, just using her for a cheap thrill.

That's closer to how I'd model it.

A hot, high status guy looking to get his rocks off can find a naive but physically attractive woman with self-esteem issues, and use his talents honed on much more selective girls to gas her up enough to bang him with relative ease. But the sheer truth of it is that being seen with her would detract from his status (and hurt his odds with the more selective girls) so its a bare, unvarnished fact of the universe that he will absolutely NEVER advance a relationship with her.

In a world where physical altercation isn't allowed, the girl's male family, and her other potential suitors, cannot actually slap the shit out of an interloper to discourage this. So males that can flex pure status and high verbal IQ have no real risk here, they don't have to fight their competition like deers locking antlers.

So I'd say the male-male competition aspect is narrowed by the fact that the only two factors you're allowed to compete on are pure attractiveness + status. The real challenge for getting laid is overcome the lady's defenses.

My comments about 'smurfing' are in the context of a female gaze, wherein girls choose according to the result of the ranked queue -- male competition.

"Chad is smurfing" is just a way to phrase the realization that hypergamous norms are positional. That is, any solution that attempts to do away with the suffering of loser men (through abortion, embryo selection, or just plain mass murder) is self-defeating. Chad is not impressive objectively (because "impressive objectively" is a contradiction). Chad is just smurfing the ranked queue.

That our moral intuitions are different about these two things shows us that my clever comments are just: cope.

That's interesting. Do you have any examples? Also, if those men react with hostility, isn't that just simple male competitiveness? What I was talking about was more "society and social norms as a whole" e.g. including other high-status men who think that behavior is unfair.

Furthermore: historically, the purpose of monogamy was to marginalize hypergamous norms. In strong monogamous societies, "smurfing" is not possible, because the society is trying hard to equalize mens' status.

Rather, I mean: it should seem that society that acknowledges and strengthens hypergamous norms (e.g. by legalizing harems, codifying a virgin male underclass, etc.) is self-defeating: wouldn't they realize Chad is just smurfing? That it's all just positional?

So it would seem something primal about status is immune to this fairness instinct. Alternatively, hypergamous societies like this tend to never happen because people actually do feel it is unfair. I do not know.

E: Skill-based matchmaking is interesting because its an admission that high-skilled players are not entitled to high win rates in gameplay. I suppose that is fundamental difference.

Aren't there very few women promiscuous which have sex with chads? Most women have relatively few dating partners. The promiscuous women are selecting for superficial features since they are in for sex and pleasure. Normal women are just not having that much sex and are not available on dating apps since they are taken.

So it gives an appearance that all women are very shallow since only the very shallow women are available for dating.

Number of Partners Men (%) Women (%)
0 to 1 16% – 17% 22% – 23%
2 to 4 21% – 22% 30% – 31%
5 to 9 20% 25% – 28%
10 or more 42% 19% – 22%

How would an incel uprising work in this context? Normal men and women are pairing up. Promiscuous women are choosing to have sex for pleasure instead of dating the bottom 20% since they don't have any societal pressure to do so.

If we lived in a gender reversed world lots of incels would indeed be having sex with female equivalent of chads who are readily available instead of getting in permanent relationship with ugly women.

In this gender reversed world, there would be few hot women who are satisfying lot of medicore men and there would be lot of fat women which are never picked.

This is not even a new thing by the way, even in 1800s there were still an lowerclass of men who never reproduced.

In places like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the early United States, the rate of adults who lived to old age without having children was shockingly high—between 15% and 20%

Even then women were not dating poor men and preferred living alone than that.

The behaviour simply makes sense from game theory and evolutionary perspective.

I might be using "hypergamous norms" differently than usual. I don't mean in the sense that women are actually being promiscuous, only that they try to date out of their league. Also I didn't mention incel rebellions anywhere in this reply chain. Did you respond to the wrong comment?

The uprising thing was in another comment by you

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

I assumed that by hypergamy you meant something close to the meme where there are ten women who are trying to date one man while rest of nine men are ignored.

Some women preferring to date men richer and more successful than them is a much weaker assertion.

That comment is about accelerationism, i.e. pushing for a different future. The idea is that pro-feminist solutions to fertility collapse are necessarily oppressive to men. Done correctly with the right technology though, the rebellion can be probably be prevented.

I mean, even if the top players think smurfing is lame (they are motivated by their competitiveness and do not desire weak opponents), there are still smurfs who are skilled enough to stomp on weak players and driven enough by the desire to simply win, no matter against whom, to do so.

I don't think the metaphor applies to men striving to get women anyway, because most men don't appear to be competitive with other men on this. They want a partner above some baseline level of beauty, and would take several if they can get away with it, but competing with other men is not a motivation. "Trophy wives" only appear to be a male status symbol among the very top elites, who appear to be pathologically driven to competition in as may small ways as possible.

Yes, I think that is another way to see it. "high-skill players are not entitled to high win rates" is a competitive attitude. Since mating is not competitive in this sense, Chad is in fact entitled to a harem.

In gaming it's more like "high-skill players are not entitled to infinite noobs to stomp". Noobs don't like getting stomped, and it doesn't seem to be good for long-term playerbase vitality. High-skill players can always have as high a winrate as they want against bots.

There is actually a very fundamental reason why the sex ratio is 50:50!

Yes, and that is based on individual natural selection.

The thing is, we are no longer aligned to the imperatives of natural selection. We use contraceptives. We build corrective glasses and synthesize thyroxine for the likes of me rather than letting natural selection deal with them. We have escaped from the yoke of our blind idiot god. Why should we keep this tenet when we have broken so many others?

Let's give it a few years lol

The rumours of the death of God may have been greatly exaggerated.

Knowledge workers constitute more of a privilege in modern society than they would have thousands of years ago. Yeah you still had “philosophers” back then, but subsistence labor was still much more prescient and important for the days ahead and was harder to come by. Even today, “all societies are only 3 meals away from anarchy.”

The problem with this is that males become a kind of elite celebrity class, where the average male will have higher social status than the average female. Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

I legitimately think that female envy (which is what drove Western Feminism) requires something of a low-status male slave class to rule over. Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

From this perspective, the humane solution to female emancipation is something like male p-zombies. Of course, that would require a Big Lie, so is it really humane?

Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

I think women looking for men are mostly similar to this, they might want the best mate they can get but are perfectly fine with having a mate roughly as good as their peers.

We are kind of talking past each other. It is true that the rich do not desire to interact with the poor. But it is also true that a person prefers to be rich than to be poor. When you think about it, that's a little crazy! You'd think a persons preference would be something like "I want a washing machine" but actually, people prefer to be rich than to be poor.

I think it means we do desire to know ourselves to be Kings. We just don't want to be the only King -- how lonely!

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

America is unusual among societies with relatively high inequality in that the "rich" class arranges things to make it easier to avoid poors 100% of the time, not to make it easier to hire servants with the tradeoff of only being able to avoid the other poors 90% of the time. I don't know if this is because America has a cultural norm of fake egalitarianism which makes people want servants less, or if it is because America is worse at policing such that people are willing to make more tradeoffs to avoid poors.

This is because of measures designed by real egalitarians ostensibly to help the poor, such as minimum wage and nanny taxes. Of course, if you can't hire poors to work for you (unless you're Elon Musk rich and not just two-doctor household rich), you're best off avoiding them entirely.

Two doctor households in Texas- or one doctor households- regularly hire nannies and housekeepers. Of course, we have very high inequality by US standards. But a cleaning lady once or even twice a week merely requires one to be middle class if it's a priority, or upper middle if it isn't.

Two doctor couples in the UK routinely hire a full-time nanny and a part-time housekeeper, and we have less inequality and higher taxes than you do, so there is something other than taxes or wage compression preventing Americans hiring servants.

It's not "fake egalitarianism", it's a genuine egalitarianism that a lot of our "elites" and "elite aspirants" think is fake and this discontinuity is a major driver of tensions in the culture war.

When affluent liberals talk about how we need illegal immigrants because they do the jobs Americans wont. What they are saying in effect is that they don't think that people who pack meat or clean toilets should earn American level wages. To put it another way, they don't think they should have to pay "the help". They are saying that what they want is not employees but rather an underclass who they can exploit. And because there is a genuine norm of egalitarianism in the US this desire for an underclass is interpreted by many as a deliberate act of disrespect towards not just the class of people who pack meat and clean toilets, but towards the entire American experiment.

Illegal aliens do not make less than native citizens working the same jobs, but are more willing to work those crappy jobs to begin with.

Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

They already say all that. Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class? Go, 1/10 gender ratio fanfiction made reality!

Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class?

Who is "we" here? If you're posting this then you can just not give women what they want.

The rest of society will just give them what they want though.

Seems reasonable at first pass but I think you end up with a coordination problem. How do you decide who gets to have the male child and thus have their genes highly represented in the next generation?

If you normalise sex-selective IVF for white normies, families wanting two children will have one of each and most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl. I suspect the same is true of black babymamas and well-assimilated Asians.

The problem is that you preferentially need to remove the bottom 20% of males to get the benefits of @Testing's idea, whereas this policy would preferentially remove above average males.

Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.

Making life socially tougher only removes the bottom quintile if you define it tautologically. You'll remove those who are least socially adept within every stratum, not the least adept overall.

The benefits of his idea have nothing to do with gene quality. It has only to do with positional status. The idea is just to make men rare so women are more desperate. You don't need to ensure the men are "high quality" -- what could that even mean? As long as the policy isn't making men worse each generation in a noticeable way, it should be fine.

This would be a society where girls are the desired sex and boys are the undesirable one. If we look at that in the real world, what you get is:

(a) Sex-selective abortion. In gender-flipped world, this means if you get pregnant with a boy, you abort it and keep trying for that girl. (b) Skewed sex ratios, which is the point of the experiment. Parents want girl children, boys are a mistake. We see places where that plays out. See China in the one child policy era, where the preference for boys meant that there were not enough women to go round when these boys grew up. (c) Scarcity will not mean the scarcer sex now becomes high-status and desirable. The preference for sons meant that even where daughters were scarce, women were not given high-status due to that scarcity:

The male-skew in India's sex ratio has increased since the early 20th century. In 1901 there were 3.2 million fewer women than men in India, but by the 2001 Census the disparity had increased by more than a factor of 10, to 35 million. This increase has been variously attributed to female infanticide, selective abortions (aided by increasing access to prenatal sex discernment procedures), and female child neglect. It has been suggested that the motivation for this selection against female children is due to the lower status and perceived usefulness of women in India's patriarchal society.

Your "one man for every ten women" world would not be "now even the most ugly, loser incel can have his pick of women", it would be "oh dear, you're having a boy? sorry to hear that" for every pregnancy.

We are talking past each other. What are you even talking about? Your "oh dear sorry to hear that" is just an emotive distraction. Using 'status' to refer to 'children as status trophies' is completely alien to the conversation. It might as well be off-topic. In your hypothetical world, you think men are so low status that no woman would ever want to have sex with one, and the mens' sperm would just be siphoned for IVF?

Status and quality here refer to 'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up. This specific thread is about whether it is even necessary for the male minority to have 'desirable genes.' I argue that merely making men scarce would be enough to offset the hypergamous instinct.

You could do welfare/tax incentives for girl children only.

Personally you just convince the existing feminists/misandrists to not have male children. Taking it one step further, you could offer to-be-single-mothers incentives for aborting sons, which is morally equivalent anyways. I'm the same vein, you can institute a policy of doctors spending relatively more time caring for female infants in neonatal care, and pushing harder for male children to participate in extreme sports and dangerous behavrior. Heading into pubescence, advertising and subsidizing potentially-lethal behaviors to boys would also work.

[Obviously this is all highly immoral, but I think this is a problem soluble to engineering solutions.]

I'm laughing because guys, this is already happening in parts of the world for women. So if you want to know what the world of skewed sex ratios would be like, you can just look around!

Son preference causes parents to utilize sex-selective abortion to ensure they have their preferred number of sons. The availability of abortion allows parents to abort female fetuses until they get pregnant with a male fetus, leading to a disproportionate amount of female feticide. Although female infanticide, the intentional killing of already-born girls, also occurs in India, research indicates abortion has become exceedingly more prevalent to determine the gender of children. In India, upwards of 1 million fetuses are sex-selectively aborted each year in India out of an estimated total of 16 million abortions in 2015. Additional research shows that the selective abortion of girls increased from the 1980s to the 2000s. Although sex-selective abortion is widely practiced in India, as evidenced by the abnormal SRB of 110, it is illegal to have an abortion based solely on the gender of the fetus. Abnormal sex ratios cause various problems for a country due to a shortage of women, as there will not be enough women for men to marry. One study projected a female deficiency of 6.8 million in India by 2030.

After birth, son preference results in health inequities for women and girls because parents prioritize the well-being of their sons over their daughters. Son preference causes unusually high mortality in female infants and girls.110 Parents are more likely to seek out and provide medical care for sick sons rather than sick daughters.

...In addition to mortality, girls in India experience health disorders and conditions at much higher rates than boys because of a lack of care. For instance, 54% of girls aged 15–19 were anemic, compared to 29% of boys in the same age range. Researchers have also found that son preference also increased the rate of stunting among girls. These outcomes occur because Indian girls often receive fewer calories and less nutritious food than boys. One study on nutrition in India found that, among breast-feeding children below the age of 2, girls were 15% less likely to receive supplemental milk-based solid foods, and 21% less likely to receive valuable meat, fish, or eggs. Girls were also 7% more likely to be malnourished than boys, demonstrating the nutrition disparity among children stemming from gender discrimination.

Ah, gentlemen. 'Gosh wow, what would this unprecedented thought experiment look like in reality? We can only speculate!'

We've also done all of those.

The first one is a gimme. Of course, they don't have female children either.

The second one is already law in Blue areas (some nations take it a bit further and only make it illegal if the child is female- it's sold as an anti-Muslim thing, but the incentives align).

The third one is likely already the case for Women are Wonderful reasons.

The fourth one is war-as-population-control (re: white feathers of WW1).

Easy, its a lottery.

Then you'd breed unusually lucky people, I guess that could work.

I don't mean this as an attack on you: "Breeding lucky people" sounds like the kind of phrase LessWrong.com would call "a confusion"

The Pierson's Puppeteers tried that, hoping the luck would rub off on them. Didn't work out as they intended.

It's a reference to the scifi Ringworld series.

Larry Niven's gonna have to sue somebody.

Black people commit more crime than white people, but you will not make similar suggestions about them.

It'd be a bit tricky to do that via gamete selection.

Also, I seem to recall we've had a few people here make such suggestions; whence your confidence?

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

It'd be funny if there wasn't a vocal population who seem to genuinely think like this.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

This where the absence of luminaries like DavidFriedman, BarnabyCajones, Ame_Damnee, Et Al are most sorely felt. As one of their rants on different moral systems, reframing of sin as virtue, or the pernicious evils of utilitarian thinking is what this thread really needs.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed. Now you can take this one of too ways, as an argument in favor Nazi style death camps. or as an argument against Utilitarianism. I take it as the latter. To me, utilitarianism looks like a philosophy that was specifically designed for the purpose of allowing high-functioning sociopaths to justify and excuse horrible behavior.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

I realize I'm going off topic here but the idea the Nazi medical experiments provided some amazing medical advances is a but of a myth based on the just world fallacy. You're right about them helping us understand shock and hypothermia. However, most of their experiments were closer to macabre torture porn then proper science. The vast majority of their experiments weren't rigorous or documented enough to be of any use.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

Incels often float the idea of getting rid of women once there are artificial wombs. I propose a competition: one country gets rid of their men, and the other their women. Which country wins?

I don't like this tendency to insinuate that posters with outrageous theses must be trolling/dishonest. If this is not the place to discuss outrageous proposals at face value, what is? Moreover, to begin with, if it generates interesting discussion and the original proposer follows conversational decorum, does it even matter whether it's trolling? Your interlocutor might be honest; he might also internally laugh at you; he might also be a p-zombie and have no internal experience at all. If on the other hand the proposal is so offensive to you that you can't engage normally, that's on you.

does it even matter whether it's trolling?

I would argue that yes, it does matter. and that the failure to police bad actors is often one of the most visible manifestations of "toxic femininity". See Theodore Dalrymple's the rush from Judgment.

I did say in the post itself that I wasn't serious.

Note I am not serious here

I mostly wrote it to hear intresting moral arguments against it or for it.

I am not posting it to convince anyone to do it but because it's a good starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)

Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?

... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.

Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:

  • Significantly increased terror among the population
  • Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
  • Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
  • Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
  • General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc

... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)

It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It does read like something written by Dr. Strangelove.

I recall the Chinese did infant sex selection, and that it didn't require Nazi camps, merely incentives aligning the right way. Their efforts resulted in demographic horrors because they selected against female children, and women are the bottleneck for reproduction. I'd like to hear the actual arguments against OP's proposal without devolving into "that's Nazi shit", or else I would like to see actual Nazi shit such as proposals to expel Jews/blacks treated the same way.

Obviously it is an argument in favor of Nazi style death camps, minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit. Your argument relies on conflating these things.

With regards to the OP, I have (only a little tongue-in-cheekly) argued in favor of various feminist "solutions" to low-fertility: gender ratio control like this poster suggests, and also taxation-based polygyny (see recent paper making the rounds on Rightwing Twitter). When I promote these, the purpose is to show that the solutions require horrendous measures.

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit

Minus? There are 16.5 million Jews in the world, getting rid of most men among them would hit that number pretty reliably.

No it does not rely on conflation of those things.

It relies on the supposition that evil things are always evil, and that good things are always good. But like others here, you are so steeped in left-wing anti-western propaganda that you do not even see it.

Furthermore removing and replacing an approximate third of the US (never mind the world) population would quickly make "the whole killing 6 million Jews bit" look like rookie numbers.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It's dated April 2, 2025, but it's possible that's a time zone issue and it is indeed a year-old April Fools post.

I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.

Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.

Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).

These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.

There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.

Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.

Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.

"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."

That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.

That can't last.

Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.

So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.

Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.

That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.

I'm very skeptical that women couldn't do any of those jobs, indeed there are some who do most of them now. Raw physical strength isn't that needed in modern society what with all the tools and hydraulics we have. And even so wouldn't that just let young uneducated men command a premium? Even at a ratio of 75% women to 25% men I'd still expect there to be plenty men to do all those. You'd have less young men working at Fast food or retail but it'd work out fine because they'd have more gainful employment. 25% men is easily enough to fill those jobs because very few jobs these days really require raw strength.

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...

Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.

It includes, non-exhaustively:

  • Automotive service technicians and mechanics
  • Construction laborers
  • Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators
  • Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
  • Refuse and recyclable material collectors
  • Industrial machinery mechanics

The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".

Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.

I suspect that much of that can be handled. Workloads adapting for lifting smaller weights at a time where before the weights were as large as men could afford to regularly lift; using more teamwork; employing the stronger women who can actually lift 50 pounds.

So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.

And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.

Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.

Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.

Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.

This appears to me to be like the thing with "economically viable oil fields". If we run out of economically viable oil fields, we don't run out of oil. We just move on to the next most viable oil fields. Similarly, many jobs appear to employ primarily men at the moment because a) women are less efficient and currently not economically viable; b) many of those jobs are shitty and men complain less about them. That doesn't show that women are physically unable to perform those jobs.

There would be some productivity hit, but I struggle to see how the market that can afford to pay so many people to do so many vastly less fundamental bullshit jobs couldn't absorb that hit without total society collapse.

Look, there's constant attempts to get women into the trades. I see it all the time.

Women do start. Single moms, married women, lesbians. Only the dykes make it(and this is what the ones who make it call themselves). Not necessarily she-hulks.

I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.

Like, say, after a war.

We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.

Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.

More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.

As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.

I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.

The dystopian take: We are moving dangerously close to the most radical feminist fantasies with this. Keep in mind that feminism seemingly needs to treat men as the outgroup to function, and that most women still identify as feminist. We live in a democracy. Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists. That scares me, because there seems to be no end to the slippery slope that ideology is currently on. If something is wrong in society, they blame men. If that doesn't solve it, then they blame men more. Increase their power and reduce the ability of men to organize against it, and we could see some truly dystopian shit.

Why not bar men from high-paying positions entirely? Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population. Any male politician speaking out against this trend can be efficiently cancelled by hordes of women and watch himself slowly lose influence.

You also mention that men are more common than women in STEM. But for several fields this is not true. Women outnumber men quite heavily in medicine and biology for instance, and if you look at science fields overall, women actually outnumber men overall. Also note that the link I have here is 6 years old. As far as I know, women have only moved further ahead of men in the past years. In spite of this, there is still a broad push to get even more women into higher education. I fail to see how a version of the current landscape actually dominated by women would not just result in women dominating academia completely. I can already see the argument: Men is only X% of the global population, so there should at most be X% men in any given degree. Of course if the male percentage is lower than X (or 0) this just goes to show that women are better.

Finally, I think you are misdiagnosing the incel and broader dating problems of modern societies. The culture promotes hedonism, women are taught to fear men, people spend less time in-person socializing than ever, and the way that men are encouraged to act is unattractive to women. Nothing about reducing the ratio of men to women actually fixes any of this. The addictive and convenient nature of social media and gaming means they will continue to be picked over social interaction. Men will still be brought up anxious and scared of approaching. Demonizing men will only be easier as you meet them less. Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it. That seems more like a male thing to do.

Just in general, screwing with the ratio of men to women seems like a Chesterton's fence of monumental proportions. No one predicted that the one child policy of China and the resulting increase in the proportion of men would turn out as disastrously as it did, even though it seems obvious now. Your experiment would probably result in some very interesting insights into the human mind, whilst similarly blowing up society in spectacular and unexpected fashion.

Fun to think about though.

Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population.

That's more than twice as generous as Sally Miller Gearhart's proposal to maintain the proportion of men at 10% of the human race.

It's actually only 60% more generous.

What? If men become scarce, then women will become desperate for men. That would increase mens' power, not decrease it.

The actual problem with the proposal is that this kind of society wouldn't actually be a feminist utopia. For one, women's hypergamous instinct is based on positional status, so making all the men tall or handsome doesn't do anything. There's nothing inherently short or ugly about Western men today. If they don't see the low-status men around, then the rest of men won't actually look high status! There's nothing to compare them to!

Indeed, even if the men are all the same (zero variance whatsoever), it seems unlikely this would make women happy. The purpose of hypergamy is to have a higher status partner than all your friends. If all the men are the same it might as well be a society without any men at all!

So the only thing that would happen is women will become desperate because men have more options. So the women will feel even worse than they do now! In addition to getting pumped and dumped, they will be getting dumped by actual losers! This will not feel like a feminist utopia at all!

It would seem women desire a male slave class.

Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists.

No, it doesn't. In fact, it's the reverse.

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors are now competing with each other and don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a "seller's market"). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier (and providers are competing with each other more) so the political power of selectors increases (a "buyer's market").
This is socio-economics 101.

Right now, even with a rough 50/50 split, men are in surplus due to automation that uniquely affects that gender, and have been for the last 100 years- hence they have no power -> feminism. Communism is the same way, for that matter; too many (male) Russians and too little economic opportunity to sustain a democracy. Implications for China are obvious.

If we were able to automate women out of their jobs just as hard as we did men at the opening of the 20th century, or experienced a massive war where 20% of Western men were wiped out, politics would shift for a generation. As they had from 1945 to about 1990, which is also the reason you don't notice that 2020 is, socioeconomically, closer to 1900 than 1960 because the socioeconomic problems were merely hidden for that generation, and now that the surplus (in power for providers/sellers/men) is all gone they've come back with a vengeance.

Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it.

It doesn't matter if they do or not. By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men. And that, empirically, is good enough.

By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men.

if you want someone you know despises you and only settled for you because the alternative was poverty, sure. You're still going to have adultery and affairs and all kinds of shenanigans, because you might be able to make Miss Susan marry Mr Thomas, but if Mr James is hotter or even just nicer to her, things will happen. Marriages where one party is lording it over the other that "I could have had my pick of anyone, I could have done better than you!" tend not to be the happiest. Maybe she'll just let it be water off a duck's back and put all her efforts into the kids while ignoring you. Maybe the Golden Age of British Murder will get a resurgence and there will be a lot of "suddenly, widows".

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a seller's market). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier, so the political power of selectors increases (a buyer's market). This is socio-economics 101.

@Bombadil is concerned, AIUI, about the possibility of a majority-feminist democracy removing a bunch of legal rights from men. You're using economic theorems that are founded on the assumption that both the buyer and seller are free citizens - that they have the option of walking away status quo ante. A slave can't walk away; his master (or, I suppose, mistress) can unilaterally torture him if he does not accept the deal, which tends to make his bargaining position pretty awful (and let's not get into the abuse of psychiatric drugs to remove his ability to refuse).

I personally, upon reading @Testing's OP, had more immediate/prosaic concerns, although still based on the "one person, one vote" point; the sex disparity in attitudes to liberty is huge (note that it mostly persists even for Red-coded oppression; this isn't just an artifact of the majority of women being Blue Tribe), and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

A slave can't walk away

Sure they can. But they don't, partially because there's no better deal to be found elsewhere. (Related: why don't women leave abusive husbands in 1860?)

The thing about one's group being in deficit is that it increases the benefits to defectors. Usually this means "pays a [higher/lower] wage if one is a [buyer/seller]", but it can be other things too, in particular political power.

For the last 100ish years, men have been the defectors, paying women higher and higher socioeconomic wages. They couch this in moral terms, but fundamentally it's just business, just like anti-slavery efforts (and democracy more generally) were back in their day.

Make the economic situation dire enough and people will literally fight to make themselves slaves. Communist countries are a pretty good object lesson in how that works.

We can debate the point that men are completely unnecessary in modern society (which is, in fact, a reasonable question to ask- as automation mostly replaces men, including suicide drone swarms); if they are, this won't work for exactly the reasons you stated. But if they are vital, then my point holds; I'll point to Western gynocracies' obsession with mass male immigration as a suggestion that they are.

and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

Yes, I'm fully aware of the track record of Western governance over the last 30 years.

I don't see how a critical mass of women can't just force the men to do the essential job that require muscles. Guns are the great equalizer, so if you just don't give guns to the men (or let gunmen be the only high-status job available), you can force the new underclass to do hard labor through regulation. It wouldn't have to be total slavery either. Just make it so that producing goods is the only viable path forwards.

I guess I will have to concede that very specific jobs cannot be relegated to an underclass though. Your military and emergency services would probably still require men, and those men would likely have a lot of bargaining power.

Women that are both psychologically and physically fit for a job involving subjugating men through overwhelming violence appear to be very rare, even with guns as the equalizer. I suspect the number of men such a society could control would be too low to do all the hard labor, or else it would be the men in the military who would be the actual slavedrivers.

The idea that the sort of eugenics nerds who want to calculate the optimal male:female ratio in the blind hopes that will get them into the top 75% of males in terms of reproductive sex are going to win a fertility contest with the people who......don't do those things is what's wrong with it.

Well it certainly isn't practically feasible. I am not arguing on that. It's more of an argument against eugenics, most people who consider themselves eugenicists would say there is something wrong with this but not normal eugenics. (Ignoring for the moment the obviously evil state repression which would be required for actually implementing eugenics)

I am thinking what is morally wrong with this plan or is it even wrong? Provided you can somehow convince everyone to follow it, should you? One poster pointed out that this can lead to demonization of men which can be a super small minority. That is one moral problem.

I also posted this because this seemed like the type of policy which would be supported by the most radical of feminists and incels both. Which I find pretty comedic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle - In a sexually reproducing species, the ratio tends towards 1:1.

https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/the-talk-a-brief-explainer-of-sexual - "sexual reproduction is virtually necessary to evolve into a complex fully-fledged multicellular organism."

So we're stuck with this, unless you think (a) we can institute a totalitarian surveillance regime to control the number of male and female babies people have, and (b) we can transcend biology and attain the purity of the blessed machine. Me, I'm not so sure.

How hard can it be to switch human reproduction to parthenogenesis? Then there would be no need for fertile male humans at all. You could keep some breeding stock of Mark I humans in third-world countries, just in case. You could take some of their sons, sterilize them and raise them for male-specific tasks, the way people have been doing with cattle for millennia.

It sounds like a recipe for severe inbreeding.

Unlike the harem world, men probably wouldn't vote for that one.

What makes you say that? Men vote for the faction that seeks to trans their kids all the time.

And why do you think that is?

Also you are completely correct about fisher. In a free society if a such a cultural movement arose women who are not selecting against male embryos would gain an enormous evolutionary advantage. The genes which make people not want to abort male babies would propagate and this society would go back to normal.

It's probably trivial to write a simulation to prove this.

Maybe it would take baby vats or something like that to keep the society going.

Any future where goverment is this powerful and uses it for such pointless bullshit is a complete dystopia. This assumes a scenario where very different cultural movements have won out and people are choosing to do this.

The research-type jobs are certainly a problem. The blue collar jobs are a bigger problem. Even Houston, Houston, Do You Read had them done by women given exogenous testosterone, which is going to bring back the violence. The creation of a superintelligence as with Banks's Culture solves this, but only by making humanity pets.

And of course if we're taking something as silly as gender eugenics seriously, we have to take race eugenics (which is a lot more practical) more seriously. You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women. Though if men were to disappear I would also suspect they would be the best replacements for those blue-collar jobs.

You also need to consider the female disadvantages, some of which are simply the flip side of male disadvantages (such as a higher risk tolerance).

You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women.

I suspect that this is probably not true, at least when it comes to the more dangerous forms of violence that cause severe injuries and deaths. The male vs female difference when it comes to this stuff is so large that it makes racial differences seem small in comparison.

But correct me if I'm wrong.

I have seen women in the trades, and black women are not overrepresented as successful compared to women writ large. You know who is? White lesbians. There are tons of black women in stuff like dispatching, purchasing, parts houses, etc, but they’re not actually trades- they’re staff hired from the existing pool of functional but lower skilled labor.

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much. Also, you might also upset some of the women who wouldn't like the lack of men, so some negative hedons there.

In terms of the moral principle violated, however, I think the small matter of forcing your vision of reproduction on billions of non-consenting people would be the main one!

If you can get everyone to agree to it though, have at it – I'll even sign your petition.

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much.

Oh, ASI will do all that for us, right? Also solves the "but who will do the heavy lifting manual labour jobs?" since robots will then be advanced enough to do the drudge work.

An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

I agree life would be a lot better for men in a world where the sex ratio was 2 or 3 women for every man. Possibly worse for women, though. Somewhere out there there is a ratio which maximizes everyone's welfare and happiness. Given that mankind is a tournament species, I wouldn't be surprised if that ratio was something north of 1 woman for every 1 man.

Anyway, how would an embryonic sex selection policy be enforced? In a world where there are 3 women for every 1 man, lots of people would prefer to have sons.

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

(Legally enforced monogamy is a social technology that makes life better for males because it papers over the worst outcomes of unmanaged natural sexual competition. This much should be obvious given the last hundred years of western civilization. In the present day we're still operating on the fumes left over from those norms, and clearly there wouldn't be anything like them left in 3:1 world.)

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

FWIW I attended one of those gifted scholar programs and for whatever reason the sex ratio was 2 girls for each guy. As far as I know, nobody had a harem but most of the guys had a girlfriend if they wanted one. Even including a lot of guys who wouldn't stand much of a chance in a typical university or high school setting. I don't know if this would translate in the situation of a society wide lopsided sex ratio, but I am pretty sure a lot would depend on social norms.

I recall reading that in the 1930s, there was a huge man shortage in Germany (owing to World War I) and the Nazis encouraged single women, in effect, to become concubines in an effort to raise birth rates.

Girls mature faster, so I suspect age cutoffs make a big difference in why so many of those programs are majority female.

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