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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.
@self_made_human where does your optimism for near term AGI come from? I am practically ignorant of AI, but my totally uneducated impression is that it is unlikely to happen within the next 10 years. I would prefer to be wrong, though.
You mentioned in other comments on educational savings for children that you were somewhat certain in would happen within 5 years. Knowing you, you must have some sources you find reliable on AGI progress. Again, from my uneducated view it seems like promises of AI / AGI is merely slick marketing to separate wealthy investors from their money.
The most impactful part of AI on my life so far is the elimination of customer facing jobs on the phone, who have been replaced with AI chatbots which can never fix the unique problems I need addressed. I end up waiting longer to speak to a real person to get the work or chore done.
I have answers that cannot fit in the margin of this comment box, mostly because I have a career gating exam tomorrow. Ask me later?
Good luck, @self_made_human. Rooting for you :)
(Rooting. Why? What are the roots of rooting? How in the name of God does roots have anything to do with wishing people well? Root beer?)
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