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.
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.
Have you read Dune? It makes a compelling case that's the opposite of true. Maybe people who are so bad that they won't reproduce until 35 should just stop existing. Why save them with technology invented for them? What's the point?
The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
You know what, maybe we shouldn't have invented treatments for malaria, chemotherapy for aggressive cancers, ozempic for the obesity epidemic. Maybe reducing infant-and-child mortality rates from the ~50% they hovered around for most of human history to the rounding error they are today was deeply misguided. Maybe doctors should all retire en masse and society should return to the state of nature, however we're defining that this Sunday.
If you disagree, then I think the arguments for trying to fix demographic collapse write themselves. If you don't, then we're not going to get anywhere.
Apologies for that, I was trying to speak to the audience. More seriously, it's not that Dune is empirical evidence, but that the author's underlying reasoning for Butlerian Jihad being good is itself a philosophical case for what I am arguing. My own case for it, without reference to fiction and with reference to real science, would lead me to write a book about dynastic aristocracies with supermen who control technology instead of letting technology control them.
We spend way too much on healthcare and it really doesn't improve human happiness much. These medicines have pros and cons. You seem to fixate on the pros without acknowledging any cons. Why is that?
In some cases the pros outweight the cons. You rush to cases where most people would say that's that case. I don't disagree that much. I would probably say that some chemotherapies are actually scams and I would like to think I would be one of the patients who follows through on that and just dies earlier instead of having a wretched 6 to 12 month life extension. Others are life-savers and cures. It depends on the type of cancer. In the case of malaria, the impact of the cure and its widespread free distribution depends on what you think about a billion subsaharan Africans existing. Can't get anywhere negative on that topic with normies because it is impolite thought crime. The one downside of ozempic is that obesity was a mark of shame for people with terrible self-control, but I think that tattoos and other vices neatly fill the obesity void, so I see it as a positive on net.
Ultimately with these technologies, you must judge the life-form they help and weigh the externalities of that life form against the costs of the aid. Yes, this is so mean to do, because everyone is exactly the same and equal and equally valuable and so on, unless you want to be impolite. But is truth always polite? Anyway, IVF is extremely expensive and basically works to perpetuate people who barely want to reproduce. That attitude correlates positively with other negative behaviors that punish those around them as well. The babies it makes are sicker on average. Why should we have more sick people who hate family life at such a high cost? Who does that benefit? I'm not seeing it pass the pros and cons audit.
I wish to note that I put serious weight on an oligarchic future where a few elites control AGI, and thus the rest of us. I am far more skeptical of genetic engineering being the primary driver behind the creation of a permanent underclass, for the same reason that cars went from being something that were the playthings of the rich to available to most. Everything I've described has gotten cheaper over time, often drastically so.
This is more reflective of your unfamiliarity with me. I mean that without insult. I've written on exactly that topic at length, multiple times, over years. I have very long effort-posts on the importance of using metrics like QALY/DALY and cost-benefit/cost-utility when it comes to dictating policy on medical care. If that weren't true, that would be a fair critique, but this is one of the rare occasions where I genuinely can't afford to be as thorough as I'd desire. I am not writing a policy white paper, I am crunched for time because of exams, and in all honesty, I shouldn't even be here in the first place. I have not pretended to have done a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis here, but I have linked to the work of people who have.
But considering my own output:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/359026?context=8#context
In other words, I am the last person who you should accuse of not considering the diminishing returns to further healthcare expenditure. Also, note that diminishing returns are not the same thing as no returns, let alone negative returns. If you have a billion dollars and want to spend all of it on care that has a negligible chance of healing you, be my guest. I'm more concerned with public policy and public funds.
I am also a transhumanist, so I want medical technology to get even cheaper (which it mostly has), alongside society getting wealthier. The expected result is that we end up with cheaper, better treatments, and can provide them to more people. Be it privately or through public funding.
There is very, very good reason that I advocated for embryo selection above and beyond subsidized IVF. Consider that that cuts down the majority of your arguments at the knee. The "sicker IVF babies" finding is largely driven by maternal age, multiple-embryo transfers (now declining as standard practice), and underlying parental subfertility rather than the IVF procedure itself. You can't accuse me of not acknowledging that, when I have already offered a solution.
I also do not particularly care about whether people "barely want to reproduce", as long as the answer is more yes than it is no. I'm not a gynaecologist, but in general, if someone tells me that they want children, I support them. Even if it would be easy to scold them for being irrational or indecisive and making things harder for themselves. In psychiatry, it's all too common for depressed people to not want to be helped, because depression strongly correlates with reduced self-esteem and a sense of being unworthy of care. Many people show up in front of me who just care enough to get out of bed and see a psychiatrist. I treat them nonetheless, and I am happy doing so.
The IVF population is overwhelmingly composed of couples who want children intensely (often more than the median fertile couple) and whose biology has betrayed them, and that conflating them with "people who barely want to reproduce" is incorrect.
Humans are fallible, non-omniscient and imperfectly rational actors, and society should make some concession to those unfortunate facts.
If you disagree with this on moral grounds, be my guest. I am on Scott's side, in the sense that Society is fixed, Biology is mutable.
Society is biology, so this is not literally true. Although changing the biology of 300 million people is much harder than changing the biology of one. And if you can change the biology of one cooperatively, you might be able to do the same for 300 million people, but if you need to change 300 million people uncooperatively, that's going to have a big, probably unreachable cost.
It's not that I think these people can be effectively bullied into reproducing earlier, if anything them failing to replace themselves is better. Because what they do is unnatural, it both costs a lot of money to fix, and it comes off as extremely ugly to other people. I believe their lives are unhappy and that it is wrong to delay reproduction to 35. In the meantime I would enjoy it if a government of people who think like me lower the status those who live that lifestyle through the trumpeting the virtues of reproducing naturally at the appropriate age. I also think the late-reproducing people have a ton of negative externalities on the rest. of us and as they fail to replace themselves those externalities will fade and all of the well-adapted people will be happier and wealthier.
I mean, I expect that selection pressure will eventually result in a return to normal or historical TFRs, if only because the high fecundity populations replace the ones who act like pandas in captivity.
I am somewhat perplexed by how you, after telling me that I haven't done a basic cost-benefit analysis, happen to casually gloss over the rather catastrophic near to medium term economic and societal damage of societies with far more old people than children, or drastic population decline as projected.... in pretty much every developed country. And many developing ones.
I don't lose sleep over this, because I expect technological interventions like AGI+robotics, artificial wombs etc to reduce or eliminate the current coupling between population growth/composition and the stability of national economies. I genuinely don't think we're going to need humans for their physical or cognitive labor in a decade or change, possible less. It's the same reason I don't worry particularly hard about the worst case projections for global warming, if it gets that bad, someone is going to burn a billion dollars of sulphur or inject it into the stratosphere. Inertia only goes so far.
You do not seem as optimistic, nor even as open to technological solutions, and I do not see how you can reasonably claim that your distaste for nudging or assisting the sub-fertile into having more children (by any means) can compensate for decaying infrastructure or potential collapse in a generation or two. If it's business as usual with no major technological breakthroughs and serious social engineering (or even just the widespread adoption of the suggestions I've endorsed), I don't see how you account for the disaster that represents.
The solution to this is redistributing from the old to the young. He who does not work shall not eat. Easy.
That would be awesome. Can we design ourselves to be extremely beautiful, moral, and intelligent after that? Considering we will no longer will need the lower classes.
I think the people who made the disaster, so the old generation at that time, should suffer the consequences of their behavior. They are being told how to be good, by several voices at the moment, and they are not listening at all. That is wrong, and I'm fine with it if they pay the price. They deserve it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link