This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/
In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.
One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!
Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.
Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.
In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.
So I was listening to Gad Saad on Joe Rogan recently, not really haven't heard about anything he's done since probably 2018 or so. And he's laying out his thesis about a parasitic idea. This thing you see that causes such a strong emotional reaction, it overrides your entire brain and even your survival instinct, and your priorities, even your identity, is replaced. And by example, he brings up Queers for Palestine. Joe, seemingly entirely missing the point, just rebuts "Yeah, but what if they've seen the images coming out of Gaza that are so upsetting, they feel irresistibly compelled to be angry about it and protest it?" With much sympathy for this perspective. Yes Joe, that is precisely the "parasitic idea" infection vector being described, thank you for participating. And he goes on missing the point for another 90 minutes or so.
But I digress. Everything about this national behavior sounds like a country hijacked by a civilization scale parasite. The country possesses zero survival instinct, even to propagate itself into another generation. And yet it happily throws it's blood and treasure away on... what exactly? Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster? Giving all the land to Africans faster? It's absolutely baffling.
It's a shame one way or another billions will die before either the parasite wins, or the parasite is exterminated with gigadeaths of collateral damage.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not going to get into the whole cultural debate around declining TFR or putative causes. I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):
A country as wealthy as Sweden can circumvent the dysgenic concerns raised by @sleepyegg through embryo selection. The primary costs are the IVF itself, which should be in the realm of affordability for the middle class and above (who suffer disproportionately from reduced TFR). If not, I think any sane government should be willing to spend enormous sums of money to prevent population collapse.
You can screen for a lot of things, including strong proxies for health/mutational load. The screening itself is a trivial fraction of the cost compared to the egg extraction, freezing and IVF, and as mentioned it's the IVF that's the costly part.
Further, implantation success rates are remarkably stable even for older women. It's the age of the ova itself that matters, someone using eggs they harvested at 25 when they're in their late 30s is way more likely to succeed (for a given number of cycles) than that person using recently harvested eggs.
In other words, the uterus can handle things just fine for a very long time. The eggs continue to degrade the longer they stay in the ovary. You're already born with all the eggs you'll ever have if you're a woman, or as man, though that depends on when you last went to the supermarket. The success rate for implantation or the dysgenic effects of mutational load on the viability or overall health of the eggs/children increase precipitously once you're in your 30s. It's no coincidence that the risk of Down syndrome shoots up with increasing maternal age around that time.
The problem is, of course, that few governments have crossed the minimum sanity threshold to do these things. The fruit couldn't hang much lower without already being in the dirt.
Recommended reading:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dxffBxGqt2eidxwRR/the-optimal-age-to-freeze-eggs-is-19
As a matter of fact, I would strongly recommend everything GeneSmith has ever written on the topic. I'd trust him to smith my genes, or those of my children.
Seems unworkable because while the process and technology is sound, the main barrier is individual lack of planning. Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure. Many women would probably delay it until it was too late to be worth doing. Countries like Israel which make heavy use of IVF have religious-cultural-social pressure for young women to bear children, so the women are more likely to freeze their eggs early.
Still, there would be some takers for free or partially subsidized IVF. Just need to convince the voting public it is worth the cost, a benefit for future generations that will not generate direct benefits for them.
Young women, the demographic known to be particularly fond of cosmetic surgery? Hmm..
The easiest answer is to
bribepay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.As far as I can tell, my proposal involves less demanding all-encompassing public propaganda or government intervention than any alternative I can name. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not, but praying away cratering TFRs might be cheap and also wouldn't work.
Well, I'd vote for $10k subsidies, but good luck to any politican who tries to get the public behind it. There would probably be serious opposition from women too old to benefit from it, and it would be reframed as a form of neo-patriarchal enslavement of wombs.
More options
Context Copy link
It's no longer a technological solution and has become a social and political problem, so you're kind of back where you began.
Why not cut out the middleman and pay them $10k for their first baby, no IVF required? Or $10k for each baby born before whatever cut-off age where IVF becomes relevant. There's a few dials you can adjust there and it seems like less government involvement and propaganda required than adding in the IVF step.
I wish to note that my proposal is not mutually exclusive with anything you've said.
What differentiates $10k for egg-harvesting from a direct reward for natality?
So the real target for my proposal are people who want kids, but have a tendency to postpone things till it's way too late. At that point, having eggs preserved (preferably from way earlier) would be an absolute godsend. To contrast, if they wanted to get the $10k for the child then, it's far more likely that it's too late. That's true regardless of how badly they want the kids.
The benefit of the wider embryo-selection policy is that avoids or minimizes dysgenic effects. Even if $10k means a lot more to the poor, you can still screen and select for the higher quality potential children. Conveniently, the same markers that promise general good health also correlate positively with IQ. Follow the LW link for a better exploration of that point. You don't even need to do the politically difficult thing of actively selecting for IQ, you can just say you want healthier kids (by pretty standard definitions of health) and get IQ points as a happy little accident.
And even if there's no embryo selection? Well, at least we have good eggs for the IVF. That should make a difference. There's plenty of other things you could reasonably try, but I'm not writing a policy whitepaper here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agree that fertility issues are a tiny part of modern birthrate woes, and probably a big chunk of those fertility issues have solutions more like 'wear boxers instead of briefs' and 'stop having the woman of the house clean out the litterbox' rather than expensive medical treatments. But- and I don't like IVF- modern states are political will limited, they're not money limited. Moar fertility treatments(and literally, I've spoken to people who had five children as soon as a doctor visited their home to figure out why they couldn't have kids. The answer? Preventive antibiotics from a cat born illness. Fertility treatments have some role) are likely to be more effective because they might actually happen. Sweden is a wealthy society which can throw money at healthcare very easily, but which can't encourage marrying your partner or having many children very easily, that's simply not done.
More options
Context Copy link
I do think the fertility crisis is still percolating towards the mainstream, and there are potential grandparents who still interpret potential overpopulation in Africa as the same thing as potential overpopulation for them. Also, there are still a bunch of millennials who think they have to be basically perfect, watch their kids constantly, play constantly, never lose their tempers, and so on in order to parent well. Propaganda against these viewpoints have barely been tried so far. It's mostly just a bunch of online rightists talking about it. The culture at large hasn't even stuck its toe in he discourse with fake babies and home ec at high schools, they're currently still below even the 90s in terms of acknowledging teenage girls might eventually become mothers.
I mean this is definitely not the US; what are Sweden's parenting norms? I know it's illegal to hit your kids there, and they genuinely helicopter parent less. I've heard that, like the rest of the nordics, there Are Issues with CPS. But what does the average Swede think they need in order to have kids?
From my PoV what the average Swede thinks they need in order to have kids is full time employment (which in many/most cases means a finished degree/post graduate degree as well) and being established in their respective careers for both parents and owning a sufficiently large home, likely a house, in a sufficiently decent area (IE. Not one with a ton of crime) and obviously a longterm relationship.
This means that you at the earliest would look at having children at about age 25. Many do not finish their degrees by that age, for many reasons, and housing is unaffordable in major metropolitan regions which pushes that date back significantly.
If you're in Stockholm this likely means you're only going to be ready at some point in your early thirties, unless you get a lot of money from your parents, assuming you have a longterm partner that is. This tracks relatively well with the age of first time mothers.
If people could choose freely I think people would have their first kid in their late 20s on average.
As for parenting norms i believe things are far more relaxed than what they seem to be in the US, that I have insight into anyway (coastal "elite"). Kids are out playing on their own all the time, both in urban and suburban areas. Parents aren't expected to arrange and drive their kids to playdates much beyond starting school. What is expected, at least for the middle class (but I assume for everyone but the lumpen proles), is to have your kids attend various kinds of activities like soccer and drive your kids to practice and games.
I personally never felt like the expectations placed on parents were that excessive. I think my parents generation had it worse with parental neuroticism and radical belief in tabula rasaism. Then again, that might be more my parents and where I grew up than a general thing.
To me the issue is the time it takes for people's lives to get started, which is a combination of too much education and too expensive housing. I refuse to believe that the price of housing increasing in real terms by some 500-600% the last 30 years had nothing to do with delayed family formation.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, I hear they have better maternity leave than the US. I've also heard that Japan has been at least beginning to ask their people to form families.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Solving infertility by supporting aging couples probably leads to increased genetic flaws in the general population over time. A sort of procrastination of dealing with the issue directly.
Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women, through a combination of carrots and sticks. It's the only way any religions or subcultures maintain high TFR.
Do fresh eggs in old women develop more closely to fresh eggs in young women or expired eggs in old women? The former seems more likely to me, though I've not looked into it. Genetic risks especially.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree. Age-related infertility is a major cause of couples with children having fewer children than they wanted after starting too late, and "couples with children not being able to have as many children as they wanted" is about half the fertility decline.
Unfortunately, "mum too old" is one of the harder fertility problems to fix with IVF.
actually, trivial if eggs are frozen when they are young
From "The Struggle to Conceive with Frozen Eggs":
This egg-freezing meme needs to die.
This cannot have helped. I wonder how her story would have changed, if she'd done it at 20?
More options
Context Copy link
And if they don't die, they need to change. The doctors know the stats, at the very least they could/should be frank with their patients.
A friend of mine was told during her first consult with the IVF clinic that a chance of success at "high confidence" would require a number of eggs equal to her age at implantation - so to prepare for 3 rounds of egg retrievals at the bare minimum, and as soon as possible. She got unlucky, and the first round only retrieved about 4, so the number of cycles was immediately upped. When she asked if they couldn't try those 4 first before cycling again, she was advised to not waste time and get the inventory as young/soon as possible, and to expect more setbacks.
Sounds like this lady did a single (more successful) retrieval cycle, and nobody showed her the math.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think at this point artificial wombs, genetically engineered babies, AI making human labour obsolete, or even radical life extension and making geriatrics physically 20 year old again, are all vastly more realistic than any social engineering attempt at making the fertility rate go above 2.0 long term.
Why? Secular Israelis and red tribe America(which is not based and trad barefoot and pregnant fundies) both manage replacement fertility through social engineering. Your solutions sound like science fiction, yes, but they also sound like a continuation of the trends that lead to below replacement fertility to begin with- they make kids 'less than the default'.
From what I looked up, secular Israeli women had a fertility rate of 2.0 in 2020, projected to decreased to 1.7 in 2030.
And the most democrat counties in the US have 1.3 children per woman vs 1.76 for the most republican.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link