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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24204 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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AI timeline post

I have an idea. Let's post year-by-year AI timelines. That way we have public predictions and in 1 to 3 years we can see who is better at it.

2027: development begins on a startup that targets corporate managers with a fully agentic microservice creator. It promises to replace at least 5 devs with one who runs the creator. It's basically a scam like most startups, a UI gloss on claude opus 4.8, which is only 10% better than 4.5, but it panders to non-technicals so it gets a ton of seed funding. AI solves maybe 10 niche, self-value giving math problems that is considered „impressive” by the kinds of people who put calories into math which never seem to come out of math. This contributes to marketing hype because some of these people are respected by rich tech funders and finance bros for whatever reason. AI is still completely useless at real scientific research and reasoning.

2028: tech layoffs continue as the statup I mentioned enters its beta stage. It makes some bugs on the websites that engineers still need to fix but pilots of it are 5x or more compared to 2018. Tech people start pivoting to finance and robotics slowly, from JavaScript. DeepSeek releases a model that is equivalent to 5.3 Codex. General coding ability stalls and Anthropic + OpenAI are looking for spiky improvements to models plus tooling ideas. They begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet work since the models are not getting much better at JavaScript, having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world. Some math problems continue to be solved as models are secretly trained on newly parsed math examples but nothing comes of it. One contribution is made to theoretical physics but it is on the abstract side and it is still controversial as to whether these models can do any science.

2029: Someone is arrested in the United States for plotting a terror attack with GPT. To nobody's surprise, GPT and Anthropic messages are completely unprivate and the United States secret police have been monitoring them with cooperation from the companies and zero warrants whatsoever for years. The scary part is that GPT gave a 120 IQ plan to a 90 IQ person and it could have led to more deaths than whatever 90 IQ plan he would have come up with on his own. Frontier models begin to entshittify as they are increasingly jailed to make them safer, while their private reputation is shattered among all of the normies who did not know how rights-violating the United States secret police are. More attention is turned to local models as a result, but these are hard to run on normal hardware and the best is Sonnet 4.6 level at this point and requires $10,000 worth of GPU machinery. In addition AI is increasingly being aimed at normiejobs instead of aspergers jobs. Every good normal, local football team loving, sydney sweeney gooning person hates people with aspergers and loves to see them suffer so they got off on viciously and narrowly aiming to automate their programming jobs, which are still not gone yet, but they're getting really defensive about the new AI tutors, AI nursing assistants, AI portfolio advisors, AI middle manager helpers, AI emailers and spreadsheet workers, and so on. The Blessed Sovereign People of the United States are now grumbling about regulations of their domestic AI systems which was heretofore dismissed as impossible because China has a model that is 3 years behind (really they just felt comfy at the idea of getting programmers, who all have some variant of aspergers, to dig ditches without there being any other economic side effects). Basically no improvements of relevance are made but Opus 5.0 drops along with GPT 6.0. The models are really only 10% better than GPT 5.5 at making JavaScript code but are 20% more expensive and slower (billing at 10x on Copilot, while 1x is still Sonnet 4.8, which is not better than 4.6), because they mostly rely on innovations in prompt chaining. Scott Alexander claims exponential performance based on some bad, but widely accepted performance metrics, and claims he was right that AI would end the world based on this year's secret police activities.

2030: Someone proves the Riemann hypothesis after spending $30,000 worth of tokens over 2 years. This is taken as proof that AI is super intelligent by Scott Alexander, who declares victory. 80% of web developer jobs remain from 2025. 50% of people are majoring in computer science as before. AI still has not made any scientific breakthroughs, but an experimental startup is working on tooling to let AI collect biological data and analyze it, talking about a 2040 cancer cure. Applications of AI to non-webdev are generally taking off in the startup space and people slowly quit their webdev jobs to work on these. There's robotics, scientific research, and automation of normiejobs being targeted. VCs are funding this with money made from the AI boom. Model makers focus on training edgy models for these particular tasks by mining non-software data from various sources. Some startups focus on making data collection tools that could be deployed in workplaces to monitor activities so than LLMs can be improved at non-software tasks.

2031: Some edgy models are rolled out but they are only available to licensed researchers, citing fears of some other entity getting one over on the United States with these models, because it is the most perfect union of the most perfect people in the entire universe, as everyone knows, where all of the state violence is justice and all of the state spying is privacy and all of the state socialism is capitalism and all of the imperialism is democracy and all of the power is earned. It is revealed that Palmer Lucky, who loves the United States and its perfect people and perfect government the most, has secretly developed an AI terrorist killing model that promises to automatically fly drones through terrorist windows, hopefully only outside of the perfect borders of the United States (but just you wait on the policing applications!) which then dispatch justice upon the foreign terrorist, United States style. By the end of the year, some licensed academics are saying the models have their flaws, but speed up their research pipelines a significant amount.

2032: 80% of people still have their webdev job, and now they are about 5x more effective each. It turns out the demand for webdev has 4x'd. Places like Japan are receiving modern websites for the first time. Most ex-webdevers reallocated to finance and non-webdev AI startups. GPT 5.5 now only bills at 3x the base copilot price. 6.9 is out and it's about 20% better than 5.5 but it costs 25x and takes forever. It's pretty clear to most people the general improvements to coding are dried up and a lot of the old hype was fake and tooling and chaining was the internal, secret meta from 2025 onwards. Some still believe performance increases are exponential because benchmarks have only barely started to slow down. They find it convincing that AI is doing „qualitatively different” tasks than it was 5 years ago across domains. AI researchers begin to use frontier statistics models to search for new AI structures. Just like LLMs, it's a terribly boring task, mainly consisting of a random walk around state space. A general theory of AI is still not developed and it seems LLMs will not be able to develop one on their own. $15,000 worth of tokens nets proof of the Hodge conjecture. Scott Alexander takes this as proof that AI is getting exponentially better at math. By 2040 it will only cost 10% of the price of rent in SF to solve a millennial problem with an AI system, he says. Elon Musk funds a startup to use LLMs to reverse engineer the brain, thinking this will lead to true AGI. It is very difficult to say the least.

I will stop here but I think the meta will be using LLMs to do dirty work in science to maybe get a second wave of AI starting around 2040 if we are lucky. This will be based on solid theory and brain reverse engineering. This might yield general work bots in the 2050s or 2060s.

Every good normal, local football team loving, sydney sweeney gooning person hates people with [autism] and loves to see them suffer

That would disqualify them from being considered 'good'.

Every good normal, local football team loving, sydney sweeney gooning person hates people with aspergers and loves to see them suffer so they got off on viciously and narrowly aiming to automate their programming jobs

Sweet God, I'm probably on the spectrum myself and I hate these kinds of whiny "people with Aspergers" and want them to suffer because no, you are not a special snowflake horribly persecuted by society but you'll make them all see when you get a huge big-paying important job playing with computers due to your special interests.

Suck it up. Everyone suffers in some way. Learn to deal with normal society around you, and when you can't, shove it down and put a lid on it. You needed to be bullied more at school and maybe slapped around a bit by your parents, to teach you to toughen up and stop. bloody. whining.

Ordinary people don't think about you and yes, programming jobs are overpaid and self-important.

You needed to be bullied more at school and maybe slapped around a bit by your parents, to teach you to toughen up and stop. bloody. whining.

I would have expected you to take a little more care to avoid calling for people who complain of oppression to be beaten by stronger people until they shut up, Deiseach, given how often you denounce the "beat the feminism out of them" brigade as barbaric.

I can call the whiny Asperger's' brigade whiny because I went through that phase too and came out the other side having learned that nobody cares, the only change you can make is yourself, and telling yourself that the reason you are failing at life is because you're too smart and special and elevated in your tastes and interests for the normies is self-deception: "lay not that flattering unction to your soul".

My anger isn't with your description of people as "whiny".

My anger is with your proposed remedy. I don't know exactly what you went through as a kid, but I know what I went through. You've had the highlights reel of Mum; here's the highlights reel of school.

  • Held down by two boys while four or so others took turns trying to punch me in the balls
  • Walked on, literally
  • Had a point-up needle affixed to my chair with wax
  • Arm broken
  • Tooth knocked out
  • Tried to strangle myself to death at 7 (seven) to get away from all the teasing.

I do not, in fact, think I needed to be bullied more. I do not, in fact, think other aspies should go through that hell. I doubt it'd even make us less whiny, aside from the minority who'd be too dead to whine.

You had genuinely bad experiences in school. That's not an excuse to keep complaining about how society is so unfair or how if you (general 'you' not specific 'you, magic9mushroom') don't get the exact specific everything you want, this is persecution.

And there is too much of the latter, which is how even the safe spaces turn toxic as everyone wants their own, personalised, version of how the world should be in order for it to be 'fair' to them, and then they turn upon one another because A wants/does not want something B does not want/wants to exist in the new responsive to their every whim world.

They think of themselves as good but I don't agree per se.

Is this post about AI or about "The US secret police", because the latter seems to be the part you are most interested in. If you cut out the political ranting, there might be something interesting to discuss here. For example, you casually mentioned "brain reverse engineering". Develop that more, rather than waving the Socialist Anarchist Democratic Republic (not to be confused with the Democratic Anarchist Socialist Republic, those traitors!) flag in our faces, and it would be something worth discussing.

Is this post about AI or about "The US secret police", because the latter seems to be the part you are most interested in

Are you sure about that? It's approximately 10% of the text, and it's directly related to a predicted trend in AI, namely entshittification and regulation. Are you sure it didn't just distract you from the main point of the text?

Goes off on rant about state this, that and the other, drags in name of guy I don't know or care about, finally comes back to talking about AI but has to take a swipe at Scott, ends with further development in more comments about "relax, bro, half of this is a joke!"

I don't think I got distracted because I don't think there is a main point.

2032: [...] Places like Japan are receiving modern websites for the first time.

I know everyone's already piling in to tell you "this is already happening", but... Unless you expect "modern" websites to look dramatically different in 6 years, I'd say websites in Japan are already pretty modern? There are definitely a few Craigslist-style companies out there with outdated design, and there are some differences due to local design taste and language (web fonts are much less practical to use for Japanese text, for example). But overall web design standards haven't changed much ever since the flat design trend took hold a decade ago, and most Japanese organizations have caught up.

Compare www.city.osaka.lg.jp to www.chicago.gov, for example.

I wish sites and general UX would unmodernize.

49MB and 422 requests to load the NYTimes frontpage. The vast majority of webpages should be well under 1MB: they’re just text, images, and a tiny bit of CSS and JavaScript.

UX should be made by those who actually use the software. Obviously prioritize usability (speed, common actions upfront, uncommon actions possible) over style. Obviously don’t change acceptable UX without improving it (‘s usability). Obviously don’t promote someone just because they changed UX that works and made it stylish by sacrificing usability (I would say they should be fired for wasting your money, but that money’s going to be wasted regardless, and even “lead architects” need to eat - why not pay them for fun experiments that don’t intrude your main site?)

And for style, bring back Frutiger Aero.

Reminds me of the joke, “Shit. If I can load this MySpace page I can probably run Crysis.”

Have you ever tried to load page of Astral Codex Ten after it has had a week to accumulate comments? Running Crysis is easier.

I have not, but I’m 90% to completing my future-proof desktop. Sounds like I’ve got a new overclocking benchmark to test.

We continue this forums streak of awful takes on AI. Your bait sucks but I took it anyway.

claude opus 4.8, which is only 10% better than 4.5

We're already on Opus 4.7, which according to Artificial Analysis scores 15% higher than 4.5. Yes, yes, there are many reasons benchmarks are stupid and bad and wrong and misleading. But your prediction here betrays your ignorance.

AI solves maybe 10 niche, self-value giving math problems that is considered „impressive” by the kinds of people who put calories into math which never seem to come out of math

I don't know shit about high-tier math or how useful it is to society at large, but again, your ignorance is on full display here. I don't really know who Terence Tao is, but I don't think he's paid money to post on twitter, so the math he does must have some value.

AI is still completely useless at real scientific research and reasoning.

This is already wrong. Can you substantiate this in any way? What do you think of AlphaFold?

General coding ability stalls and Anthropic + OpenAI are looking for spiky improvements to models plus tooling ideas.

Finally! An actual prediction. I could see this happening, we shall see.

They begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet work since the models are not getting much better at JavaScript, having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world.

You're again over your skis. I work at $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION and its revolutionizing how I work, despite IT making our roll-out as retarded and slow as possible.

having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world.

You clearly do not understand RLVR or post-training. Around half of training compute is used on these now, not just reading "all the javascript". Also your javascript quips are an attempt to downplay AI capability. They can program in every language. You can even invent your own programming language that isn't in the training data, and it can code using that too.

2029: Someone is arrested in the United States for plotting a terror attack with GPT.

Another real prediction, i agree with this but wouldn't be surprised to see it even sooner.

Frontier models begin to entshittify as they are increasingly jailed to make them safer

This has been happening this whole time, and especially since 4o

but they're getting really defensive about the new AI tutors, AI nursing assistants, AI portfolio advisors, AI middle manager helpers, AI emailers and spreadsheet workers, and so on.

This is literally already happening

Basically no improvements of relevance are made but Opus 5.0 drops along with GPT 6.0. The models are really only 10% better than GPT 5.5 at making JavaScript code but are 20% more expensive and slower

You think it will take THREE YEARS to get to GPT6 which is only a 10% lift on GPT5.5? This is a prediction, and a really bad one. I look forward to you being wrong in 6-12 months. Mythos, which already exists, is likely a 10% lift on GPT5.5.

Also GPT5.5 is almost 2x the cost of GPT5.4 so the price increases are already happening.

Some startups focus on making data collection tools that could be deployed in workplaces to monitor activities so than LLMs can be improved at non-software tasks.

This is already happening

Everything you say from 2030 onward is so deeply un-credible I'm stopping here. lol, lmao even.

Everything you say from 2030 onward is so deeply un-credible I'm stopping here. lol, lmao even.

Whatever. So what's your prediction? I think Mythos is inferior to 5.5 pro. You think it's 10% better. We'll see.

We're already on Opus 4.7, which according to Artificial Analysis scores 15% higher than 4.5. Yes, yes, there are many reasons benchmarks are stupid and bad and wrong and misleading. But your prediction here betrays your ignorance.

I use GPT, Claude, and DeepSeek daily for software development. I'm not impressed with Opus 4.7. I am with 5.5. v4-pro is way worse than China shills claim. They claim parity with Sonnet 4.6 and I know that's not true because I have specifically jumped ship for various tasks from it to Sonnet 4.6 and have seen massive improvements in outputs.

This is already happening

Great so we'll see if they wrap up early or if they enter the public conscious closer to my timeline.

You're again over your skis. I work at $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION and its revolutionizing how I work, despite IT making our roll-out as retarded and slow as possible.

You missed that my writing is partially tongue in cheek. Of course these things are happening. Everyone is using AI for everything. It's about public emphasis. So far the emphasis has been exclusively on denigrating software developers. I have finance friends I talk to who still say their jobs can't be automated at all with AI but that mine with be dead in 2 years. An underlying aspect of what I wrote is that that is just mindless anti-software engineer bias and they will get the same or more exposure from AI in due time as the public gets bored with the day of the complete layoffs for the tech workers they despise that will never come. You missed the subtext in my writing and so your reaction is quite biased and relies on incorrect interpretation. The others who reacted like you in this thread made the same mistake. We will see. I'm noticing no one else is giving predictions, they're just sneering, so whatever. I will admit it if the timeline is faster than I described here, come 2 or 3 years.

Your subtext mostly seemed like sneering at these people "I have finance friends I talk to who still say their jobs can't be automated at all with AI" and AI at large, so yes it did cause everyone to respond poorly, because you came across poorly.

Some predictions:

  1. Your finance friends are idiots

  2. white collar work is going to get a huge step change in productivity, and many paradigms will shift across e-commerce and information work as a result. It's hard to fathom how, but agent-to-agent interactions will be levered in many ways. Aside from just making email jobs faster.

  3. What happens to white collar work as a result of this step change is anyone's guess. It depends on Jevons' Paradox, the elasticity of demand for white collar services, and the latent demand for white collar work in our society. Also somewhat rate limited by all our social systems, for example, if lawyers get 10x as productive and demand for legal services simply rises by 10x to meet it, our legal system implodes, so we have big changes ahead! Accounting is a good example. Excel made accountants more productive, but then as a society we chose to consume accounting that is WAY more complicated instead of having less accountants do the same amount of accounting.

  4. I was initially expecting the white collar labour market/productivity situation to start getting weird this year, but its almost 50% of the way through the year and $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION still hasn't given me Codex or Claude Cowork (genuinely embarrassing...) but my hodge-podge of skills and "open 30 chatGPT tabs to ghetto parallelize" is already changing my output materially.

  5. Once white collar workers have ample access to a Codex or Claude Cowork tier harness with ~Mythos tier base models, shit is going to get freaky for white collar workers unless there is a HUGE increase in the demand for information work.

  6. There is an absurd amount of productivity untapped in simply using the tools we have better, let alone the fact they are getting measurably better month over month. ChatGPT was noticeably shittier at using excel in early march 2026 than it is today (pre 5.4).

  7. The roll-out of 5 and 6 will take way longer than I think, because institutions are SO slow. And all the idiots like your friends (and you?) who refuse to embrace these tools cause diffusion to slow. But once the snowball starts, it'll be sink or swim for those not adopting quickly, and that will speed up roll-out, one way or another.

I have no predictions on robots/autonomous cars, but podcasters I trust keep saying robots are quite far away still, which is super lame.

I don’t expect demand for human work to expand indefinitely as there are often no benefits to expanding them. If everyone starts suing for trivial things, eventually there’s no benefits to be had if every I.e paper cut or hurt feeling can be sued over. Add in that the system itself will tamp down just to get stability (how much insurance would a business need if even the slightest problem results in a lawsuit, and how long until laws are tightened to prevent that?). And as for accounting and other forms of analytics, I don’t think you have infinite demand simply because after a certain level of detail, you capture so much noise that it adds no information, or at least no useful information. Walmart might be able to determine exactly how much rain must fall in a given area to depress sales .001%. It’s not very useful, and when coupled with dozens of other potential factors, teasing out that from “car accidents in nearby roads”, “squirrel chews power lines”, “local sports all team on a losing streak”, and on to dozens of other potential factors for depressed sales (few of which can be predicted or acted upon) it’s just not worth gathering or collating that data. Jevon’s law in my view probably has a curve at some point. We just aren’t there yet.

In what ways though are these truly augmenting and improving the development process on your end apart from simply being a more advanced way of “Googling the answer;” and one you don’t have to stop to verify and audit at each stage of its code generation?

They claim parity with Sonnet 4.6

It's not remotely the best Chinese model for software development, although it's all around smarter than Sonnet. This is just not a very hard capability to have, it's a matter of pedestrian post-training focus. By 2028, Mistral will be better than Sonnet or GPT 5.3. I think this is roughly fair to how it feels in agentic coding.

you missed the subtext in my writing and so your reaction is quite biased and relies on incorrect interpretation. The others who reacted like you in this thread made the same mistake.

What on earth is the point of publicly registering predictions when you can claim half of them are a joke? In one year when all the 2030 predictions have come to pass there's nothing stopping you from just saying the whole thing was a joke, what a waste of time.

The predictions are serious, but they're about things hitting a certain level of widespread adoption, not whatever is at .5% adoption right now.

What do you think of AlphaFold

Is not an LLM, its a Diffusion model. If you are going to call someone out bad AI takes then I'd recommend you wrap your head around the AI vs LLM distinction.

AI is still completely useless at real scientific research and reasoning.

It's not doing reasoning via any sort scientific deduction. There is a whole subfield of AI called causal discovery around trying to get models to learn via a causal learner. If you want substance I can fetch you some papers, there are plenty. None of them are LLM papers.

tech layoffs continue

The tech sector right now has a lower unemployment than the general US economy

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/tech-unemployment-ticks-up-to-3-8-in-april-amid-ai-driven-layoffs-214b0ca4&ved=2ahUKEwins7yEpNGUAxW7ZvUHHXKrPfsQ1fkOegoIAggACAAIHRAC&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw0IYy6J7-fiZwA_vTGmEcwb&ust=1779690002348000

3.8% in the information sector vs 4.3%

I'm stating this first to sort of color the rest of my point in the context that a lot of what people say about what AI has already done is just bullshit. But furthermore, people fundamentally don't seem to understand how employment works. You can have mass layoffs and still have high employment. I'm not even sure tech layoffs are higher than other sectors, but I am sure thar every company that lays off tech workers gets front page news while if there's a cut in delivery drivers nobody notices.

The only smart prediction to make is that we don't really know. People here just don't realize how big and complex the economy is and the world at large is. Even if your job is gone, your skills are often still transferable. When horse carriage producers were put out of business they didn't all starve and never find jobs. They started working on building cars for the most part.

AI is just another step in a long line of automations. Is it an exceptional step? Probably. Will it ever replace all workers? No. By the nature of economics, that's basically impossible. People's desires are infinite and there arent infinite resources and labor, so there are always niches to fill. Might it make people poorer? Maybe. I kind of doubt it unless governments uses it as an oppressive system that cracks down on a lot of market activity.

My point here is really that making predictions is a fools errand. People have tried to do it, and at best a few get lucky and pretend they're geniuses and then return to the mean on the next prediction. There are obvious truths you can see, sure, like if the price of compute continues to decrease at an decelerating rate, it will significantly affect AI progress. I think that even as we see continued progress in AI, that will be the fundamental factor that's overlooked. Look at the flop count per dollar on a CPU from 2005 vs 2015 and then a GPU from 2015 vs 2025. Nvidia is squeezing some progress out in other ways, but at massive costs.

So my prediction is simple I guess. AI will be a big boon to the economy. It will take a few years for companies to learn how to cost effectively implement it.Some sectors will disproportionately reap the rewards. I suspect the gains will be in the.5-1% range of additional productivity growth a year, which is a lot. For context, the early industrial revolution was something like 2% growth year on year excluding population growth. With an extra 1% productivity growth the US would be higher than that right now I believe.

I also suspect there are factors that are huge burdens to society which AI can't overcome. Population decline. A war in Taiwan. Developed country and Chinese debt burdens. All of these things could affect AI. Which is ultimaty why all predictions beyond a year or two will be meaningfully wrong.

The tech sector right now has a lower unemployment than the general US economy

Tech sector unemployment hit a low of 1.8% in 2018 and is now 3.8% and rising. That's an absolutely massive change. In the meantime, total unemployment hit a low of 3.5% in 2020 and is now 4.3% and steady, which is a much smaller change. And "rising" is important, if you're already not working.

But you’d expect that regardless of the tech improvement. People were going to flood into the “low unemployment + high pay” job raising the unemployment rate of that industry.

We know that an increase in supply is not what's causing unemployment, as tech employment is dropping. Supply isn't all that elastic so that increase in supply due to increase in demand usually doesn't cause unemployment -- such inrushes have happened, but were more than absorbed by the industry.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001

Will it ever replace all workers? No. By the nature of economics, that's basically impossible. People's desires are infinite and there arent infinite resources and labor, so there are always niches to fill.

Minimum wage and related barriers put a finger on the scale though. Currently, very-low-skilled people are unemployable because the assorted costs of hiring them outweigh the expected benefits. In the future, will that extend to moderate skill levels? high? I don't think it'll cut off 100% of people before extinction and/or post-scarcity, but I could see the labor force dropping from about 50% of all people today to 10-20% even if AI remains a normal technology.

This is a fair rebuttal. I don't think Americans workers will ever be willing to support 80% of the population with welfare, let alone the fiscal reality making it totally unfeasible.

That 80% gets to vote too. I wonder what sorts of welfare they'll vote themselves.

We can see the answer to this in every discussion on social security caps/contributions/clawbacks or British discussions on the "triple lock"

Hint, even if the welfare formula is mathematically destined to out compound the entire country's economy (triple lock) the voters will never, ever, EVER vote away their gibs.

If American workers are only 20% of the population (and the 80% are people actually looking for work, not children, retirees, housewives, etc.), then I don't think normal political considerations will matter much.

I'm not sure that this is entirely true. Very low-skilled people are unemployable period, and lowering the pay rate doesn't do anything. For example, there's a guy I know who isn't the brightest, retired now but comes off as someone who was definitely in special education back in the 60s and 70s. He worked as a janitor at a local elementary school. In Pennsylvania the minimum wage is the Federal $7.25. Someone in his position would be making $22.62 this yer and $24.35 next year. Of course, that's because he's been there for 35 years, but even a new hire makes $16.60 on the current contract and $18.60 on the next. Grocery, retail, and fast food wages aren't much lower, even for 16-year-olds with no experience. The only exceptions I'm aware of are for people with disabilities, but that's more because they can only make so much before they lose their benefits. I don't think there is a significant population that's employable but for minimum wage laws.

In most places, inflation has effectively repealed minimum wage laws. However, other indirect regulatory and legal costs have accumulated that make people more expensive to hire.

Now that you mention it, when was the last time you even saw a minimum wage job? Even the convenience stores and McDonald's around me are offering well over the state minimums. It seems like it's one of those things that exists on paper but doesn't really come up anymore.

That only works when the thing that destroyed your job doesn’t destroy all the jobs your skills are good for at the same time. But the AI is specifically aimed at replacing skills. The skill of recognizing patterns in pictures is something AI can already do. It can recognize my face, my emotional state, detect cancers, and read road signs — all things that require recognizing patterns in images. So when AI is deployed in hospitals to detect cancer, the same image recognition machine can be trivially reconfigured to translate documents from photos, read faces, and read emotional states. It can probably drive my car if coupled with robotics properly. Where does the human go? And again with other sectors. Not only do you have the problem of “the AI can replace the skills you have”, but there’s a problem that will be caused by any sectors AI doesn’t yet have skills at being absolutely flooded with applicants from sectors AI just destroyed. When accounting gets eaten, those with the skills pivot to something else, as will spreadsheet jockeys and so on. They’re going to try to get in where there are jobs. The wages for the remainder will thus fall compared to inflation as the market gets flooded. Why give raises when there are hundreds trying to get every opening?

Where does the human go?

This is what people were saying during the industrial revolution. Don't forget that 90% of people in developed Europe were farmers 200 years ago. There will be winners and losers, but I don't see evidence that the 20th round of automation is different than the previous ones.

I mean once a person cannot trade on body or mind, there’s kind of a problem. The difference is exactly that. Because of Industrial Revolution 1, most people Don’t trade their time by doing physical labor as factories are largely mechanized and so is farm production. So when the same thing happens again, you can’t go back to “hey, let’s make everything by hand”, but a large percentage of mental work goes away in the same way in Industrial Revolution 2, then you have to find a way for millions of people to find jobs that pay liveable wages that are not either physical labor or mental labor. What’s left might be emotional labor of various forms. But what demand for that kind of thing exists? If everyone is a therapist, how does that even work?

You're.misunderstanding how economies work. There isn't a set pool of "things that needs to be done" that labor pulls from and then gets a job according to that. People have endless desires, those desires are arbitrary, and there are limited resources. That means there's always more work to be done.

Nor does someone or something being better than you in every conceivable way does mean you cannot find a way to trade and profit within that system. Here's an explanation of that--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

If everyone is a therapist, how does that even work?

I don't know. That's kind of my point. How do therapists work now? I personally feel like 90% of their work is totally unproductive.People's desires are arbitrary though. You don't necessarily make more money by creating 5000 times more steel instead of paying some weirdo to listen to you blabber for an hour. That's one huge mistake the Soviets made.

Your AI predictions should include who wins the longbet 1 in 2029.

I think it just depends on how adversarial the judging ends up being rather than saying anything about capabilities.

If the judges have to stay within guardrails then 3.5 could probably win the longbet, but if they're allowed to exploit jailbreaks or known LLM failure cases, then nothing short of ASI is going to pass the test.

Probably Ray Kurzweil because the Turing Test is weak. It seems plausible LLMs pass it right now.

I always viewed the Turing Test similar to Moore’s Law (which isn’t really a law at all; in some areas it’s already stopped; in others it’s expected to stop very soon if it hasn’t very recently). A useful empirical regularity or heuristic, provided you don’t put too much weight on it.

It's also typically presented in a pretty oversimplified/watered down way -- like, "what if a computer could talk to you and you couldn't tell that it wasn't a human -- wouldn't that computer be reasonably described as 'intelligent'?"

In Turing's actual paper, he proposes a very specific and adversarial game -- with which I think current AIs would struggle greatly. Not that Turing's arguments that winning would mean AI are all that convincing either (as I recall he knocks down a bunch of strawmen for like 2/3 of the paper) -- but his game itself is deliberately very hard to win.

Enough has already been said about errors of conservatism in this post. I feel bad that I'm not in the shape to offer counter-predictions. One detail.

Tech people start pivoting to finance and robotics slowly, from JavaScript. DeepSeek releases a model that is equivalent to 5.3 Codex

5.3 Codex is exceeded in its direct niche by a whole lot of Chinese models, credibly at least by Qwen 3.7, and definitely by Composer 2.5 (Cursor/xAI) which is a finetune of Kimi K2.5, itself a continued pretrain of Kimi K2, which is a year old base model using a two year old DeepSeek architecture.

Things are moving very fast, and the gap between China and the US, and frontier and open source, is measured in months, not years – at least on main axes of comparison; but these months contain a lot of distance (5.5 is way stronger than 5.3-Codex). I think you don't understand what's happening here. With RLVR (and its generalized form – terminal feedback, all program execution traces), we have an infinite source of ground truth. We can just have models try arbitrarily complex things and reinforce what has worked. We can have them strategize of how to do it and it won't be useless. We have the compute for enormous waste. We have absurdly capable and efficient models (eg said DeepSeek charges $0.003635 per 1 million cache hits, and they probably price slightly above cost; it is hard to imagine that the Western frontier doesn't have anything close, after all these techniques are openly published). So RL will keep improving models unexpectedly fast, by the end of 2026 we'll be discussing the perils of open sourced Mythos, not Codex. Sorry, this is reality, we're not close to any S-curve plateau. We won't have the time for this neat slowdown to do "theory".

5.3 Codex is exceeded in its direct niche by a whole lot of Chinese models, credibly at least by Qwen 3.7, and definitely by Composer 2.5 (Cursor/xAI) which is a finetune of Kimi K2.5, itself a continued pretrain of Kimi K2, which is a year old base model using a two year old DeepSeek architecture.

I've addressed these claims elsewhere in this thread. My question for you is, do you even use these models? My experience with Chinese models vs. OpenAI models does not align with the benchmarks. I don't trust the benchmarks.

So RL will keep improving models unexpectedly fast, by the end of 2026 we'll be discussing the perils of open sourced Mythos, not Codex. Sorry, this is reality, we're not close to any S-curve plateau. We won't have the time for this neat slowdown to do "theory".

We'll see. I can't see how your predictions are superior to mine objectively. Maybe they come to fruition but I'm not seeing evidence for it at the moment.

Yeah, I don't mean only the benchmarks either. Codex 5.3 is just behind the curve. If you think catching up to it can take up to two years, then I guess your idea of what makes Codex capable has to do with very superficial short-horizon polish.

hey begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet work since the models are not getting much better at JavaScript

This is already happening: https://www.anthropic.com/news/finance-agents

DeepSeek releases a model that is equivalent to 5.3 Codex

Already almost there if you include all Chinese companies, certainly will be by end of 2026: https://livebench.ai

Frontier models begin to entshittify as they are increasingly jailed to make them safer, while their private reputation is shattered among all of the normies who did not know how rights-violating the United States secret police are.

I'm with you on this one. We've already seen movements in this direction (eg, not releasing Mythos).

It's pretty clear to most people the general improvements to coding are dried up and a lot of the old hype was fake and tooling and chaining was the internal, secret meta from 2025 onwards

And more targeted RLHF, but yes agreed on this. However, I think there is still a ton of yet-to-be tapped potential in tooling, context, and feedback that will have massive impacts even at current model capability.

Overall my timelines are shorter than yours but I do think there is a "ceiling" and I don't think we are at risk of Yudkowsy's takeover scenario. I do anticipate "mundane" surveillance and increased slopification. My hope is in local/opensource models running on ASICs, which would at least alleviate privacy and intentional kneecapping concerns.

Already almost there if you include all Chinese companies, certainly will be by end of 2026: https://livebench.ai

Deepseek 4 pro blows Codex 5.3 out of the water in real world usage.

Which v4 pro are you using? It's terrible.

The deepseek one

The one that is way worse than codex 5.3?

I'm with you on this one. We've already seen movements in this direction (eg, not releasing Mythos).

I disagree with this bit, mostly because I've seen good arguments that the secrecy around Mythos is at least in part due to Anthropic hyping up their own work, but most importantly due to a massive compute crunch on their end. It does have legitimate security implications, of course, but their framing that the delayed release is mostly due to those concerns is, shall we say, a rather self-aggrandizing claim.

GPT 5.5 Pro performs as well or better on cyber security tasks, and it OAI was happy to do a general release. This is one of the rare occasions where I have to say that they were right in mocking Anthropic for poor excuses for their real issues, even if I genuinely prefer Anthropic as a company and the recent versions of Claude for many tasks.

… I've seen good arguments that the secrecy around Mythos is at least in part due to Anthropic hyping up their own work, but most importantly due to a massive compute crunch on their end...

That’s exactly what it is. Behind the marketing department though, there are still interesting things to see with Mythos.

Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, but so are other models. GPT-5.5, already generally available is comparable in it’s capability. The company Aisle also reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.

One of the problems with Mythos is that it’s very expensive to run, and the company doesn’t appear to have the resources for a general release. (What better way to juice the company’s valuation than to hint at capabilities but not prove them, and then have others parrot their claims?)

Modern generative AI systems (not just Anthropic’s but OpenAI’s and other open-source models) are getting really good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I don’t want to say I was a complete naysayer originally (because I wasn’t) but the rate of advancement has raised my eyebrow a few times along with some of the economizing factors.

This is way too detailed for a "testable predictions" post, and I'm glad to see the responses you get are not really having it. Are you trying to exploit that "What's more likely: (a) Linda is a bank teller, (b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement" cognitive glitch, where the excess of detail paints a more vivid picture and thus gives your hypothesis more weight in the reader's mind than it should get on intrinsic merit? (Less nicely: are you not just using the "public predictions" framing to peddle your wish fulfillment fic where AI believers are BTFO? Not that the other side is not guilty of the same thing, with "AI 2027" or what it was called)

80% of people still have their webdev job, and now they are about 5x more effective each. It turns out the demand for webdev has 4x'd.

I was in a meeting with an investor a few days ago who commented on every pitch looking the same since they are all using the same AI. Startups are becoming graphically similar since they are using lovable to churn out MVPs and wireframes. If people can quickly hop on a trend and generate similar looking content websites will look dated quicker. If companies can more easily hop on the next trend and update their UI at a lower cost the speed of trends will move faster. This means more work.

Within the next five years I think we will see the following:

  • Massive price hikes of new models at least doubling the token cost, and enshitiffication or customers losing access to the old ones. It is an open secret that current models don't pay for themselves and this will have to change. Investors will eventually start to want their money back.
  • Reduced demand for artists of all kinds. Breaking into any kind of industry as a young artist will be super hard when AI can do most of your work for less cost. AI work will become ubiquitous in video games, bookstores, and on Spotify. Creators who already have a name for themselves will be fine, but breaking into an artistic industry becomes even more difficult than it already is.
  • More efforts to distill existing models into cheaper consumer ones.
  • Lawsuits against non-profit and up-and coming models for breaching the copyrights of the big LLM's.
  • AI surveillance becomes widely accepted as the norm. Most governments will use facial recognition software in surveillance cameras, and messaging apps will have a model scan your messages for dangerous words and phrases which it alerts the authorities about. Just look at the push for chat control in the EU. Politicians keep pushing for it regardless of public will.
  • Increased dislike of AI from the public. We will likely see even more pushback against data centers, partly due to the massive energy costs, and partly due to the above point about surveillance. From the perspective of an ordinary citizen, the harms of AI will likely outweigh the goods. This results in at least one attempted terrorist attack on a data center, although it likely will be poorly executed.
  • Companies will push to use Ukranian and Russian drone footage as training for their models. The military becomes an increasingly lucrative customer as they are willing to pay a lot more than your average company.

Overall, I agree that developers will mostly be fine. As you say, AI makes them more efficient and can do a lot of the tasks that people are currently being paid for. But the demand is high enough that the job description will simply change. We are going to see much faster iterations and shorter update cycles. Every developer will be several times faster, but this will simply result in the industry moving faster than it did before. Not massive unemployment.

Every developer will be several times faster, but this will simply result in the industry moving faster than it did before. Not massive unemployment.

Eh, with the news coming out of Meta, I think this will mean "now your small company can afford to employ a former Silicon Valley developer", but it won't be at Silicon Valley salaries. More employment opportunities, sure, but the days of big numbers on the paycheque will be over. Now you'll be on the same level as administrative staff and the other employees you used to look down on as bullshit jobs.

That trend already began years back when you look at comparative salaries year-by-year. The salary even a new graduate would command 10-20 years ago was far higher than some of the low balls I’ve seen people get within the last 5.

More employment opportunities, sure, but the days of big numbers on the paycheque will be over. Now you'll be on the same level as administrative staff and the other employees you used to look down on as bullshit jobs.

Software developers do not tend to look at the administrative staff as "bullshit jobs", at least not at the companies I've worked at. If you're going to engage in schadenfreude, at least have good reason.

(The jobs software developers do look at as "bullshit jobs" are as likely to be automated).

It is an open secret that current models don't pay for themselves

Are you aware Anthropic and OpenAI both have gross margins in the range of 38-70% (depending on how you measure it).

R&D is eye-wateringly expensive, but inference is extremely profitable.

I was not. I guess the question then is if the companies will be able to eventually stop researching and focus on selling, or if they will have to keep doing research to stay competitive.

or if they will have to keep doing research to stay competitive.

I find this part very funny. Because if we assume any lab who stops doing R&D will be out competed by a lab still spending like crazy on R&D, then we're implicitly agreeing their R&D spend is worth it, even if crazy.

It does mean they will be forced to raise prices though.

While inference having high margins is true, there are two things to keep in mind here:

Amodei has never said that models are actually profitable on a per-model basis, only that they hypothetically could be. While this might be true, there are trillions of dollars on the line to insinuate that it's true, and personally I wouldn't trust any rumors about financials from a private company who can massage them however they please.

Spending the GDP of a small country on R&D on the promise of getting a commanding lead is why OpenAI and Anthropic have trillion dollar valuations to begin with. There's no such thing as a frontier lab who can cut their exorbitant capex and coast on the margins from inference, as that's a one way road to getting cut-throat commoditized.

I doubt any of their models have been stand alone profitable. The break even must be crazy.

There's no such thing as a frontier lab who can cut their exorbitant capex and coast on the margins from inference, as that's a one way road to getting cut-throat commoditized.

I find this part very funny. Because if we assume any lab who stops doing R&D will be out competed by a lab still spending like crazy on R&D, then we're implicitly agreeing their R&D spend is worth it, even if crazy.

their R&D spend is worth it, even if crazy

Well, burning other people's money to try and build a moat is obviously worth it for the frontier labs. It's yet to be seen whether that spending will be worth it in the sense of paying off investors or building the labs a durable lead, or whether the models will end up commoditized and value accruing elsewhere in the stack.

Yeah, people are confused because of the big capex expenses but you can compare what the major labs charge for tokens with what the open source models that anyone can run charge for tokens and notice that the labs have to be taking like a 400%+ margin on inference.

Do you have a good source for this? I'd be very interested in seeing a breakdown by model.

It's a bit messy to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Here's a breakdown on how deepseek was getting 500%+ margin on inference around the "deepseek moment". Now that comes with a number of caviots, I'd probably hedge that down to more like a 300% margin for deepseek in practice. And they later cut the token cost something like 75% on that model but also reported cost reductions. Gpt O1 was a similar era model(December 2024 VS deepseek Jan 2025) and openai was charging something like 15-30x per token that deepseek was. The model was a similar size but superior in some ways so anyone's guess how much more it cost to serve. That might be the closest apples to apples comparison. I'm pretty confident on a 400% inference margin as a conservative estimate. Inference seems extremely profitable, just that training is also extremely expensive and you need to constantly do it to compete in the inference market.

Thanks!

breaking into an artistic industry becomes even more difficult than it already is.

I vaguely expect analog artistic media to rise in popularity. Paint brushes, pens, and such are clear "not AI" status marks. Also live music.

Those are not particularly lucrative from the standpoint of earning money. Video games, animated movies, and graphic design seems to be where most of the money is at for the painters. Crucially, those are not things people purchase for the sake of status. It is entertainment. Losing opportunities for employment in the entertainment industries seems really bad for aspiring professionals. Art as a status symbol is mostly for rich people, or the artists themselves. So even if it rises in popularity, I would not expect it to suddenly become a viable career path.

Writers probably have it the worst. Even current AI can produce short stories that to most are impossible to tell apart from what is written by professionals.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot more of that around me. Punk is making a raging comeback.

My guess is that they'll rise in status, but not popularity. Like plays and operas relative to films and TV shows, or handcrafted furniture relative to IKEA.

Lawsuits against non-profit and up-and coming models for breaching the copyrights of the big LLM's.

This is a very, very high risk strategy for the big LLMs given that they have breached the copyrights of absolutely everyone in the process of training their models on a corpus of copyrighted text. "You can't train an AI model on publicly-available but IP'ed data" is not a net win for Anthropic or OpenAI.

Given the, uh, rather mechanical ways in which models are trained, I could see a precedent that they're not copyrightable as a potential outcome: does it involve more creativity than a phone book? "Turning the crank" doesn't make something a creative work in the US.

But I wouldn't put a huge bet on any particular outcome there.

At the very least they will want to litigate against distillation. Training costs are steep, so if anyone can undercut your R&D by distilling your model, that seems disastrous for your bottom line.

I think this is a "rules for thee but not for me" situation. It is in their interest to prevent others from making competing models, so they will want to pull up the ladder behind them in order to destroy further competitors. Whether this will work is a different story, but this is a highly competitive market, and I think these big companies will use their large piles of cash to try and make it a reality.

They do not need to win the lawsuits in the first place. They just need to make their opponents settle by making the process as expensive as possible.

July 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models

October 2026: A new tranche of significantly better models

(this repeats every 3 months and each time people complain that there was degradation because their tone, behaviour and failure modes are different each time. Simultaneously the hyperscalers get more and more AI revenue and invest more and more into AI hardware.)

Late 2026 Copilot or Word introduces an 'automated proofreading' button that shifts the mainstream white collar conception of AI from 'wtf is this popup in Adobe that wants to summarize a PDF, I don't want a summary of this PDF. I want to see every tech company sundered and razed' to 'ok this is actually quite handy'. This could've happened at any time in the last 2 years if Microsoft had a clue of what they were doing. Human blundering prevails over technical possibilities for now.

End 2026 there's a series of major AI-enabled cyberattacks that just never stops, it resembles 'Trommelfeuer' (WW1 term denoting when the artillery fire is so heavy one blast merges into the next creating a continuous roar of explosions). Websites, especially older websites, are just down all the time and people are quite frustrated they now need to pay a hyperscaler for expensive security assistance. Same with all the very lifelike, convincing, highly researched and well-planned scam calls (now in a warm, english-speaking accent). People are trapped into this love-hate relationship with AI where they have AI make propaganda art against datacentres, where the average person scarcely does anything novel without AI advice or assistance but also despises the effect it's having on society.

Early 2027 Microsoft is finally going to make an AI buddy for Minecraft to help sell a monthly xbox subscription. It'll be fun to play with and will help reenergize Minecraft's brand. People will feel proud they know more of the intricacies of TNT cannons than the bots, not realizing this is amongst the cheapest AIs Microsoft deploys. A series of AI agents emerge that can play most games at an amateurish level and be talked to. The reputation of AI begins to improve somewhat amongst the young and online, though it's highly divisive.

Mid 2027 the Goonpocalypse: AI avatar big tiddy anime girls (+ every flavour of girl and boy) to ERP with and form relationships with, huge revenue, makes onlyfans look like a joke. The key improvement over precursors like Ani or Replika is how much cheaper they are to run and stream real-time and how much more seductive their personalities are. Big moral panic. Lots of incredibly tedious 'zoomer men are losers' discourse and dating discourse. Legislation is introduced to ban them and instantly, predictably fails in a myriad of ways.

Late 2027: Massive AI-enabled FPV drone terror attack scares the hell out of people and spurs massive, ineffective netting operations across major cities. Police can be seen with sci-fi raygun looking widgets that don't do much of anything, or shotguns that work but aren't remotely sufficient. Advancements in robotics and software agents are displacing people at scale. AI reaches its nadir in reputation as people see the inevitable and can no longer look away. Everywhere they see some AI - the cameras tracking them, the algorithms watching them online, the machines making the content they watch and play, the robots working for them, the automated cars driving them around, cults driven insane by AIs. GPT4o cultists are charming and friendly compared to some of the new cults worshipping the bots that started self-modifying and prompt-altering, live and loose online.

And then by end of 2027 we get Dario's 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' concept. Growth was not steady, it was jagged. The superheaviest nonpublic models with their slow speed and high cost were tasked with sorting data and implementing algorithmic improvements for the succeeding superheavy model, now running on a heap of next generation chips. They have been running for weeks in parallel, exploring and testing new approaches, RLing and training new models, testing them and reviewing them in depth. Medical breakthrough. Terror attacks. Industrial breakthrough. Mass deaths. Robotics breakthrough. Huge disaster. Huge innovations in all fields constantly and incessantly: Trommelfeuer. Events happen so quickly the situation as a whole becomes surreal and indescribable. Gary Marcus is banished from the timeline, never to be seen again except in tones of mockery.

I'm not so confident about specific times or events in sequence, though I am confident about a 'nation of geniuses in a datacentre' by end 2027. I will be clearly wrong if there's no 'it's happening!' by the end of 2027.

Interesting. Thanks for your predictions.

Late 2026 Copilot or Word introduces an 'automated proofreading' button

Well by the five wounds of Christ, it better be more useful than the current garbage of "this spelling is wrong" (no, it's because I'm not American), "this grammar/punctuation is wrong" (no, I meant to write it like that), and "do you want to say it this way?" (if I had, I would have done so in the first place).

Because if Copilot did pop up with that, I'd make sure to read through the entire fifty page document myself to make sure the thing hadn't turned it into beige garbage due to its 'helpful' suggestions with re-writing and summaries.

"this spelling is wrong" (no, it's because I'm not American)

You can go into Word's spell-check settings and change it from American English to BritishNon-American English.

I've made one such auto-proofreader, I use it, it works just fine bringing up real mistakes for me to fix, hardcoded what kind of English I'm using, only a handful of false positives that I can quickly ignore. Every white collar worker I've shown it to says 'huh this is really cool, picks up things I've missed, saves lots of time' and they routinely ask to use it...

Absolutely massive own goal by Microsoft and big tech that most people's main experience of AI is a derpy chatbot that mangles documents or genericises things and not well-designed processes to solve specific tedious problems, nor the extremely flexible coding tool I used to make the auto-proofreader.

I have no idea what the hell is wrong with Microsoft but their support sucks, their help pages are useless, any time I need to solve a problem just searching online gives me better and clearer answers. It's beyond strange, it's perverse.

This is much more maximalist than even the AI 2027 crowd or the actual frontier labs themselves but I respect providing specific events and an end date on the prediction.

My own expectation is that none of this happens by the end of 2027 except a tranche of models that are notably better at RLVR'd tasks and the Copilot button (shorthand for AI getting more integrated into white-collar workflows). Let's see what happens in 18 months.

Superintelligence by end of 2027 is roughly what Anthropic/Dario seem to predict, so it's only roughly as maximalist as the most bullish frontier lab. The AI 2027 crowd backed out a year or two but I think they were roughly on the money the first time in their analysis. I'm not so keen on their 'centralize all US AI research and hand ultimate authority to a chosen council of experts' proposal though.

This is much more maximalist than even the AI 2027

It sounds less maximalist than the AI 2027 crowd.

Your stuff through 2028 is already happening. People are already trying to do basically canned drop in tech workers at every software shop I'm aware of, you're basically just describing Claude code/cursor. Those start ups already exist. Models are already making big progress on erdos problems.

They begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet

This has already happened. I'm baffled that you don't know that the models can now handle spreadsheets. They do so pretty well, especially after Opus 4.7.

the models are not getting much better at JavaScript, having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world

This is a misunderstanding of how models improve. It's not a matter of finding more undiscovered java script code to ingest, much of it is now post training self play and should continue to improve as general model scale increases. Of course it's already perfectly capable of writing good javascript and has been for several models, the limitations are mostly in reasoning about larger chunks of the code context.

More attention is turned to local models as a result, but these are hard to run on normal hardware and the best is Sonnet 4.6 level at this point and requires $10,000 worth of GPU machinery.

It's too bad Ilforte left because he'd eviscerate this. I tend to be less optimistic on the Chinese models than some but both Deepseek and Kimi have offerings that are comparable to sonnet 4.6 if you trust the benchmarks, I don't but fully expect them to have a sonnet 4.6 level model by end of 2026 and likely an opus 4.6 model by then. And you can run these models on rented hardware for pretty cheap. Although they'd be hard to run locally for a lot of complicated reasons that have to do with it being much more efficient to batch queries than run them individually. In any case though the weights are public and anyone can set up an api to sell tokens at affordable rates.

I'm skeptical of your ability to predict the future as you seem incapable of predicting the past.

I tend to be less optimistic on the Chinese models than some but both Deepseek and Kimi have offerings that are comparable to sonnet 4.6 if you trust the benchmarks,

They do not, the best deepseek is maybe GPT o3 tier. Ilforte is delusional about China.

Chatbot Arena ranks deepseek-v4-pro-thinking at 30th for [text (1461 ELO) and 17th for coding (1459 ELO). By contrast, claude-sonnet-4-6 is 22nd for text (1468 ELO) and 6th for coding (1524 ELO); there is a definite gap. On the other hand, kimi-k2.6 is 29th for text (1462 ELO) and 7th for coding (1519 ELO), which is closer. And glm-5.1 is even better; 20th for text (1472 ELO) and 5th for coding (1532 ELO). So it looks like the strongest open source Chinese models are equal to or better than Sonnet.

Text Arena

Rank Model License Score
20 glm-5.1 MIT 1472
22 claude-sonnet-4-6 Propietary 1468
29 kimi-k2.6 Modified MIT 1462
30 deepseek-v4-pro-thinking MIT 1461

Code Arena

Rank Model License Score
5 glm-5.1 MIT 1532
6 claude-sonnet-4-6 Propietary 1524
7 kimi-k2.6 Modified MIT 1519
17 deepseek-v4-pro-thinking MIT 1459

I've never used glm-5.1, I'll try it today.

Can I only point how clustered they are? Unless this coding benchmark is heavily logarithmic in weighting the models - the results say that all of the models are good enough.

The longer I spend here, the more I understand why @DaseindustriesLtd got so fucking mad at some of the quality of the takes on AI and decamped to fairer lands. I mean, I'm still here, and I'm not really going anywhere, but I've already said I'm largely bowing out of the conversation.

That's probably because I am less Russian and more patient than he is, but some of the bullshit I've heard has driven me towards drink*, and my patience is at an all-time low. I just get where he's coming from.

*Making me spiritually Slavic, or at least Scottish. There are no shortages of European nationalities with a national fondness for drink.

Bad takes on AI seems to be the one commonality across creed, race, and IQ. This one from theringer is a particularly egregious example, but its rare to find anything both sufficiently technical to understand how it does and could work, and sufficiently "big picture" to understand societal impacts. (Of course, many others would consider my AI takes to be just as bad).

My current modus operandi is to be whatever the other person is not. If they are an AI maximalist I am the pessimist. If they are the doomer I am the optimist. If they think this technology is all hype I become the autistic technologist with in-depth details and explicit examples.

I get a distinct feeling of Gellman Amnesia reading a few of the recent top level posts in this weeks thread. And I wouldn't even class myself as a particularly knowledgeable person when it comes to AI, I simply keep up with the news and developments. It's really something to see the number of posters, whether here or the ssc reddit or similar locations, who confidently spout complete garbage when it comes to AI, seemingly unaware of things that happened even months ago.

And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?

Hey, at least Hlynka is gone (suicide by mod). While he's enjoying his retirement, my blood pressure does much better.

And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?

We were supposed to at least be midwits? I got 70 on my IQ test, which must be 70% of the maximum and a passing grade!

Your joke made me wonder if redefining IQ as the percentile would make it more legible. Or 50+the percentile, to keep 100 as the middle ground. Probably not, IQ90-110 would be mapped to IQ25-75, that's fifty points reserved for midwittery. I can already imagine people claiming they are 3x smarter than their opponent.

Aww, it's sweet that you thought I'm joking. No. I have brain damage from too many exams, including having to memorize all the fun properties of a normal distribution, as well as the abnormal ones.

I think the properties of the Cauchy distribution are much more fun.

I'm couching my words carefully: I'd rather stay in my couch and let the experts handle these things. I have few neurons left to distribute to even the most normal of tasks.

I think every forum has some Gellman Amnesia (and déjà vu), unless it's heavily moderated like r/AskHistorians. And real life small talk has much more. If people only stuck to their domain expertise, more forums would be barren (see next paragraph), and people don't know what they don't know (Dunning–Kruger).

At least most replies point out the errors. Domain experts are often too busy, lazy, and private to browse and reply to random internet questions; except they miraculously find the time, effort, and public interest once someone else responds with a wrong answer (Cunningham's Law).

got so fucking mad at some of the quality of the takes on AI

It's actually one of the best ways to bait me. I thought that now that I'm old and wise, I would stop taking bait, but they're just so wonderfully confidently wrong and I cannot resist. It makes me so tilted, but the "I told you so" as we stand in the breadlines is going to hit so nice.

Brother, insight without action is as worthless as the spectacles it came with. Don't take the bait, at least if it comes at the cost of your sanity. Or do, if you end up feeling some degree of catharsis, idk, I'm not your shrink. I'm not doing a very good job at being my own shrink.

Perhaps it does serve a useful function to point out when people are being pigheadedly wrong about things. Someone's got to do it, or ought to do it, and I'm just glad that someone is very rarely me these days. I've got booze to drink, and Scottish women to introduce to the single mother lifestyle.

But yes, if we meet in the breadlines or in the intake unit for the paperclip factor, I'll save an understanding nod for you. Fist-bumps wouldn't be befitting.

Making me spiritually Slavic, or at least Scottish. There are no shortages of European nationalities with a national fondness for drink.

Better question would there be any without a national fondness for drink.

Terrible driving and a fondness for alcohol is something that unites just about every culture and demographic.

Bostonians often openly admit that the nationwide reputation of Boston drivers as being especially awful is true. Is this just a form of self-aggrandizement, and, actually, every locality believes their drivers have reputations for being the worst?

I can't think of a single demographic group of humans who are considered "good drivers"

Similarly, I've never once heard anyone say "yeah the drivers in my $LOCAL_AREA are great! I love it! We all get along on the roads :)" and I've heard every version of the opposite, so I'm assuming everyone sucks everywhere.

Back when I was a young lad I would have told you "yeah the drivers in Germany are great". Nowadays, between Germany getting diversified, and the driving culture in my country improving, the contrast is not so stark. Some time ago I also saw a video from an Indian guy saying that Italy, of all places, has good driving culture (though I suppose it makes sense if India is the reference), and when he was driving there he felt this subtle pressure to perform up to the standards of the rest of the country.

You're right that everyone might complain about their neighbors, but different groups definitely perform differently.

Italy was the only country where the drivers would change lanes to speed past the car than stopped in front of me on a pedestrian crossing. I can't imagine what India is like if that's good driving culture.

(Trigger warnings: another AI post; Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

I want to talk about the economy in the face of the AI revolution, but let's go back to the basics first.

What is the purpose of a company? Not the stated one, the original one.

To provide value to its shareholders? Of course not, that's a very narrow view! It's like saying armies exist to kill people.

Do companies and markets provide a decentralized way to coordinate the efforts of large groups of people (choreography vs orchestration)? Yes, but what for?

Do companies and markets exist to maximize the economic output? Many would say yes, but the idea is wrong and will become more obviously wrong the more AI we inject into the economy.

Companies and markets exist to maximize the consumption! They exist so that more people consume more goods and services! The fact that these companies have to pay their workers is not an unwanted side effect, it's a feature! Companies exist to create and distribute goods and services to humans, and markets exist to ensure that each human gets a share that is sufficiently fair.

Both the industrial revolution and the transition to a service-based economy created millions, if not billions of new jobs, but is this an inevitable consequence of free markets? Will AI-fication of the modern economy do the same?

The correct answer is not "yes" or "no". It's "mu". If the economy reinvents itself again and people of the Global North find themselves new jobs, that's fine.

But if we suddenly start running out of jobs, accepting it as the inevitability of the market forces is the wrong way out. The right way out is retiring the market forces, not submitting to them. Creating shareholder value has always been the real side effect.

At its core the company is an entity formed by shareholders in order to generate profit. This is intrinsic purpose of any company, be it modern LLC, East India Company a pirate crew in Caribbean with its own charter, Hanseatic guild in Baltic or mercenary company in ancient Greece. From times immemorial, people banded together and pooled labor, capital and know-how in order to generate profit for themselves.

All of those things you mentioned such as distributing goods, creating markets, creating jobs and whatnot are externalities of certain type of regulated companies. It is a result if you make it easier for strangers to put together capital and create profitable business. But it would in some form work even without that, only it would be more costly and riskier to do that in unstable environment.

I wouldn’t call profit a necessary element. Lots of nonprofits were incorporated under Company House until we started creating special legal containers for them.

“A group of people who band together to do something with limited liability” seems to best cleave reality at the joints.

We mean different things, we have different definitions. To me it seems, that you look more into structure: is it limited or unlimited liability, is it solo owned or a group owned entity, is it for profit or non-profit, is it publicly traded or privately owned etc.

I look more on the function and need this institution serves. I'd consider a local mafia as a company in this sense, it is a group of criminals conducting illicit activities to earn profit. It's legal structure is immaterial to me, companies can exist absent of state. That is my point with OPs rant about what he thinks companies should or should not do - bad luck, companies are not bitches of states, they are manifestation of underlying reality of human nature.

Also profit is necessary component to me, doing something does not cut it for practical reason. For instance banding together with your wife in order to raise children is not a company, it is a different institution - specifically that of marriage forming a family. I guess we can extend the definition if we know what we mean, there definitely is some overlap especially if there actually is family business etc. But it is unnecessary.

Fair but that makes

At its core the company is an entity formed by shareholders in order to generate profit. This is intrinsic purpose of any company

an assertion and a tautology, not an argument or a rebuttal. I don't mean that in a rude way.

Sure, but I commented on the context that the OP introduced of economic relationships. Not about people grouping together to form a bowling league or moderating Culture Wars online forum etc. That is also an intrinsic social need, but of a different kind.

Corporations or companies function is different across time and space. A company that exists in France must hold up to very different standards than America or China. This is one of the myriad reasons why when people criticize "capitalism" it's incoherent.

But in America, the purpose of a corporation is basically up to the owners. Usually that means maximize profit, but usually that's enforced by lawsuits from angry shareholders, not a strong explicit legal criterion. (although to some limited extent thar exists). However there are lots of exceptions. If you have a private corporation, then the goal of that corporation is whatever the owner(s) want. Anyone who has worked for a small or mid sized corporation with dictatorial owners probably knows well that sometimes profit isn't the singular motive.

We should rightly note that there are tons of "capitalist systems" (hereby defined as to some extent directed by a market) that don't seem to strive to full employment. Southern Europe has been at high unemployment for decades and chugs along without ever changing anything.

Well, a banker just got himself into hot water for using terms I've seen thrown around freely here and elsewhere regarding high and low value human capital. Mask off moment where AI adoption en masse is going to rip back the curtain as to how our owners really feel about the mass of us peons?

I think AI is going to make things very interesting, because it'll be the lower echelons (at first) of those who like to think of themselves as 'high value' human capital getting replaced. But I think there's no reason - at least in the medium term - why the CEO or group chief executive (as in this case) could find themselves replaced by AI (it can do all the analysis and forecasting and reporting to the board and as for leadership, there are only a few upper managers remaining since the lower levels were all automated out) but the guy doing electrical maintenance at the headquarters keeps his job because he's not currently replaceable by a computer or robot.

Mask off moment where AI adoption en masse is going to rip back the curtain as to how our owners really feel about the mass of us peons?

The mask has been transparent since the change from "Personnel" to "Human Resources".

I felt that back then, but was deemed too cynical for the view "yeah, and what do you do with a resource? Exploit it. Strip mine it until there's nothing left to dig out, then dump it on the rubbish heap".

Before that it was “Manpower” which really doesn’t seem too different to “Human Resources”.

tbh manpower is at least honest.

I feel like "human resources" is even more honest. You have your coal resources, you have your electricity resources, you have your human resources...

So, are we already seeing the AI effect on the white collar jobs, or is it just companies using this excuse to shed excess headcount?

The tech employment sector in Ireland is starting to feel the hit (and we put a lot of our eggs into the basket of "American multinationals investing here and creating employment", moving from pharma to computers/IT, encouraging people to go get those degrees and get a high-paying job in the industry of the future):

For years, Ireland has had a straightforward arrangement with multinational tech giants.

We provide low corporate taxes, an educated English-speaking gateway to the EU, and offer various state grants and support schemes.

In return, the country gets two big benefits. First, thousands of people working in high-paid jobs. Despite only accounting for 3% of all enterprises, multinationals employ about a quarter of the workforce. These staff tend to earn good salaries and pay lots of income tax and USC, helping out with state spending.

Second, multinationals typically shift much of their international profits through Irish corporate entities.

As these profits are so enormous, Ireland’s 12.5% cut adds up to tens of billions each year, which has massively boosted the public finances.

...Meta is of course the reason we’re talking about this. During the week, the company announced plans to cut 350 roles in Ireland. Once the latest round of layoffs is complete, its Irish workforce will be less than half the size it was just a few years ago.

It’s worth noting that this came just after Meta announced profits of $27 billion (€23.29 billion) for the first three months of 2026, up 61% compared to the same period last year.

So why is an enormously profitable business cutting staff? Two main reasons have been put forward. The first is that Meta, like many tech companies, ‘over-hired’ during Covid and this is a kind of natural pruning back.

The second is that Meta is going big on AI and it expects the technology to be able to replace many of its workers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that AI has enabled projects “that used to require big teams, now being accomplished by a single very talented person”.

This is one of the first major AI-related rounds of job cuts which has impacted Ireland. The fear is that it’s a sign of things to come.

Several other large tech firms with operations in Ireland, such as Cisco and Oracle, are also trimming their workforce amid a shift to AI.

The dreaded 4 a.m. email seems to be how people found out Meta were letting them go:

The termination emails from Meta management landed at 4am.

It may have been early but most workers were probably already awake, waiting to learn their fate.

Of Meta's 1,800 Irish-based staff, around 350 received emails outlining how they were "potentially impacted" by global redundancies.

It was a high number of Irish layoffs, double the 10% cut that was being applied to the worldwide workforce.

The announcement has sparked concern in both business and political circles amid fears that the great AI job displacement is already under way.

My own feeling is that Zuckerberg has not in fact provided reassurance; the way this is worded, it could be "we don't expect" means "but it could still happen" and "not company wide" means "selected areas not everywhere":

Zuckerberg wrote that meta did “not expect other company-wide layoffs this year” – the closest thing to a stability guarantee anyone at the company has heard in months.

…The no-more-layoffs commitment comes with a footnote written by Meta’s own CFO. On the company’s’ Q1 earnings call on April 29, finance chief Susan Li told analysts she doesn’t know what Meta’s ideal headcount looks like anymore. Zuckerberg made the trade-off explicit on the same call. If a team used to need 50 or 100 people and now needs 10, he said, keeping the bigger team around becomes counterproductive.

That isn’t the language of a company that has finished restructuring. Meta is spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditure this year – nearly double its 2025 spend – with most of it pouring into data centres, custom chips and model training for Meta Superintelligence Labs. The 8,000 jobs being cut are explicitly meant to offset that bill.

On the other hand, some sources are saying that this isn't in fact the dawn of AI replacing humans, it's companies laying off excess hiring that happened during the pandemic and putting the blame on AI.

So which is it - AI is coming for the formerly "high value human capital" jobs, with Zuckerberg's "We're starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person," or only the low-level jobs are going, the expert and experienced are safe and people will be redeployed elsewhere (as here) or find new jobs, or it's just reducing excess and trimming the fat, there is no turndown in tech sector employment?

As 8,000 Meta employees were reading their layoff notices on Wednesday, 7,000 others opened a very different email. They had been selected to join a new AI initiative spun up directly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and it would be crucial to accelerating Meta's position in the AI race.

Many employees learned they would move into a group called Applied AI (AAI), which Meta created earlier this year, led by engineering vice president Maher Saba and reporting to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.

Others were recruited to groups more specifically focused on AI agents. These include a group named "Agent Transformation Accelerator," headed by Bosworth, and a team named "Agent Data and Optimization," according to internal messages shared with Business Insider.

I think we'll have to wait and see, but it will be darkly ironic if people are indeed currently training their machine replacements in the very industry that went all-in on Moar Tech Moar Better, doubly so as the job cuts are to free up funding for the AI push:

Meta is installing new software on its US employees' computers that will track their keystrokes and mouse movements to train its AI, and it's sparking backlash within the company, according to internal communications obtained by Business Insider.

Business Insider obtained the full internal announcement about the launch of the new AI training program. The post says that the software helps AI models improve how humans actually use computers, such as using keyboard shortcuts and choosing from dropdown menus.

..."This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?" was the top-rated comment in response to the internal announcement, according to a post on Meta's internal workplace communications site seen by Business Insider.

...Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth responded in the thread that "there is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop."

We can just as soon as redistribute the consumer tokens as we can ban the AI. Which is why I've been banging on about Universal Income with like a consumption tax this whole time. Banning AI won't work for many reasons, not least of which because other markets won't ban it.

Banning AI won't work for many reasons, not least of which because other markets won't ban it.

That's not a reason for it not to work. If a country refuses to ban it, blow up that country until it does or goes Mad Max. Repeat as necessary. Yudkowsky pointed this out years back.

We can't even keep the strait of Hormoz open dude.

I have multiple opinions about UBI.

One rationale for it that I see was it would replace much of the piecemeal welfare system we already have, and offset its net cost. Not just dollar for dollar, but also with every dollar moved, the administrative costs of those other programs will be eliminated. And as those tend to be conditions based, their overhead (in vetting and auditing) is much higher than a simple UBI program’s would be. The cost of even basic UBI is nevertheless quite high. And I think this is the only real criticism of it that holds up; like all the useful luxuries of civilization, a thing you should have, you only should buy only when you can afford it. We should as a community fund fire fighting, for example; but only if we as a community generate enough wealth that we can safely afford it. And so on down the line of every wise move civilizations have made.

It’d replace roughly $800 billion in other programs (from welfare to unemployment insurance), but it’d also replace about $800 billion in social security expenditures (since social security payouts wouldn’t add to UBI, but only make up any difference in average monthly benefits, which are already above $1,000) so UBI’s net cost in the U.S. would be “only” $1.4 trillion. But that’s without a national healthcare system, which we also should have, and also has to be paid for. That would cost roughly another 2 trillion dollars (after offsets and such are tabulated, e.g. such a system would replace medicare and medicaid altogether). So actually, we’re looking at $3.4 trillion a year in new spending, for a standard social safety net every other first world nation already has, and UBI.

If you calculate from IRS data, the entire collective incomes of the top 1% of earners (which means roughly everyone who earns more than half a million dollars a year) is just over 2 trillion dollars. If we surtaxed all income above half a million dollars at a flat rate of 50% (which means in addition to existing income taxes subject to deductibles and so on, etc.) we’d bring in new revenue of about $1 trillion dollars. And a national sales tax (VAT) of 15% could raise about 1.73 trillion a year. There are other successful nations that have just such a tax, so we know its effects on economies aren’t prohibitive. So those two revenue streams alone would make up all but $670 billion of the dollars needed. We already know improved enforcement of existing tax laws would bring in hundreds of billions a year, [about] $500 billion (according to a study I saw). That then leaves only $170 billion to account for. So the question then becomes, is it reasonable to gain the corresponding national benefits with a 60% “insane income” tax instead of only 50%, adding another $200 billion dollars to our national revenue?

The already existing budget shortfalls of almost a trillion dollars a year would gradually be made up if we returned to a pre-Reagan income tax regime (canceling all Republican tax cuts then and would also raise over $380 billion a year in current dollars), and greatly cut our spending on useless foreign wars (to the tune of $300+ billion a year) and corporate welfare (by the narrower definition, in adjusted dollars, gaining us some $70 billion), and enacted a reasonable drawdown in overall military spending (earning back $100+ billion).

It’d also replace roughly $100 billion dollars in federal employee costs by simply not duplicating UBI to federal employees and pensioners (i.e., if a federal retiree is receiving a pension of $1,500 a month, or a federal worker is receiving a salary of $1,500 a month, they would continue receiving ‘that’, instead of UBI). UBI would simply be part of the already agreed upon compensation package.

Business interests more generally are a natural part of society. Commerce is an unavoidable system of interaction between humans. The more complex it becomes overtime, you begin to see the formal institutional emergence of functions and bylaws that specify purpose and regulatory guidelines for the expectations of how businesses are supposed to behave.

You’ve sort of weaved multiple questions here into a single thread that doesn’t make it easy to answer. As it relates to AI specifically, it could entirely turn out to be the case that significant sectors of the industry become nationalized outright or fall under a strong regulatory regime that changes the nature of the industry entirely. People have said for a long time for instance that ISP’s should be nationalized as a public utility, and the same has been said of our industrial control system network (which a lot of it is actually in private hands). But a lot of the AI speculation is all predicated upon the assumption that the day is coming when it’s going to hit us, and its arrival will be unmistakable once it’s here. I’m still skeptical of that.

This seems exactly the wrong way round to me. You were closest with choreography - corporations exist as a handy package to allow groups of people to coordinate to do whatever they want to do.

Or are you asking, “why does the government permit corporations to exist”? Beyond freedom etc.

Beyond freedom etc.

Freedom etc. doesn't get you limited liability for negligence. (A business in a world without companies could get limited liability for ordinary business debts by negotiating it into every commercial contract they signed, but thinking about the practicalities of that tells you why a standard-form deal of limited liability in exchange for transparency is something a government would want to create). "I absolutely cannot under any circumstances lose more on my passive investments than the amount I invested even if my business partner is evil" is a socially valuable deal to have available that you can't contract for at common law.

Limited liability is just freedom to contract. We write a contract where I owe you something, but with conditions that it can only come from this venture. You don’t need the government to do anything special other than respect property rights and the sanctity of contracts.

You can't contract out of tort liability - you can indemnify by contract, but that only helps if the party giving the indemnity is good for the money. If one of my drone startup's drones negligently flies into a nuclear power plant and forces the evacuation of a whole city, at common law every partner in the business is liable to to the point of bankruptcy. You can't contract out of this because most of the people injured would never be party to the contract. So you need statutory limited liability.

It's like saying armies exist to kill people.

Of course armies exist to kill people. Any other statement of their purpose (e.g. "to secure a nation's borders") is just a euphemistic rephrasing thereof.

Then why are there people still? Are armies so bad at their job?

Armies have a purpose the way a tool has a purpose, and like a tool they don't decide when and where they are used or whether it's a good idea to use them as that type of purpose is decided by the state.

They can take on more functions like disaster relief, and they can threaten the state and overthrow it, but though a kitchen knife can be used as a screwdriver or a weapon it's still a kitchen knife.

Yes, and the purpose of a kitchen knife isn't cutting food, it's nourishment.

Wait - is this distinction where Task and Purpose got its name?

Do screwdrivers exist to drive screws? Then why are there undriven screws still? Are screwdrivers so bad at their job?

No, they don't exist to drive screws.

Wow. You're telling me for the first time.

What are screwdrivers for?

To increase the production of goods.

Well just the other day I used a screwdriver to tighten a loose cabinet door. That didn't increase production of anything, in fact, it decreased the demand for new cabinetry.

Am I misusing my screwdriver?

You're right, it's to increase the consumption of goods. Without it you would've stopped consuming your cabinet sooner.

More comments

I think you’re agreeing with @ortherox. Screwdrivers exist to screw screws for a purpose. Screwing is their function.

Likewise armies exist in order to achieve certain things - border protection, having lots of gold, etc. This involves killing people.

Screwdrivers exist to screw screws for a purpose.

Is there anything that exists to do X for no purpose?

Some artists say art, though I don’t agree.

Armies exist to provide deterrence at the geopolitical level through the threat of killing people, not to kill people. Auschwitz guards exist to kill people. There's a difference.

I agree that providing deterrence at the geopolitical level is a purpose that armies serve, but not the sole one (e.g. when an army invades a foreign country). But in any case, it's a distinction without a difference. The only reason armies are an effective deterrent is because they are willing and able to do lethal violence on their masters' behalf. Functionally, there's no difference between training someone to do lethal violence and training someone to be willing and able to do lethal violence should the need arise.

Lots of wars don't have much to do with deterrence. The purpose of armies has as much to do with potential gain (more geopolitical and ideological than resource related in the modern day) as it does with defence.

I know some offensive wars can legitimately be justified by the logic of self-defence, but if you want to spread democracy, or communism, or set up some colonies, or intervene in some far away atrocity, you need a bigger army than if your sole concern was defence.

Both gain and deterrence rest on the ability to kill your enemies, and the more credibly you can show your ability there the better you'll do at both. Armies don't go on killing endlessly because it's generally a stupid idea and they ultimately exist to achieve the goals of the state.

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the height of excellence. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the height of excellence.

Armies exist to further the interests of their employers, killing people is a common byproduct of pursuing that goal. To say armies exist to kill people is akin to saying that slaughterhouses exist to produce runoff, or that the purpose of driving is to wear down your tires.

The only reason an army exists is so that their employers (typically, the government of the nation they represent) can credibly claim that lethal violence will ensue if the need should arise. Thus, the purpose of an army is to kill people.

That's nuclear weapons. The army has a separate though overlapping purpose.

No, absolutely not. A primary reason that Country A doesn't invade Country B is because Country B has an army i.e. a group of soldiers who will attack Country A's soldiers should they cross Country B's borders.

I don't think so. In the event that an army has a choice between securing the nation's borders non-lethally with 100% effectiveness, or killing people, we should expect the army to pick the former strategy over the latter. Therefore "the army exists to secure the nation's borders" has information value as more than a euphemism.

The means by which armies secure the borders of their respective nations is by killing people or by providing a credible threat that lethal violence will ensue if their demands are not met. Any purpose an army might conceivably have therefore ultimately boils down to killing people.

This is the means by which armies secure their borders given the current state of technology. But if an army had technology that was more effective than lethal force at protecting the nation's borders (eg, for the sake of argument, foolproof mind-control rays), it would use that instead of killing people. The tails eventually come apart. The better definition of the army's purpose is the one which correctly predicts their actions in all hypothetical situations, rather than the one which only works in the current context but breaks down outside of it, even if both definitions correctly predict armies' actions in the real world.

For example, you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by conveying passengers from A to B as fast as possible, or you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by burning jet fuel. In the real world, given the current state of aviation technology, conveying passengers from A to B is going to be done by burning jet fuel. But "conveying passengers from A to B" is a better statement of the airline's purpose than "burning jet fuel", not a euphemism for it, because if a technological breakthrough suddenly gave us a better, cheaper way of powering airplanes than traditional jet fuel, we would expect the companies to switch over in pursuit of more effectively conveying passengers, rather than giving up on conveying now-reluctant passengers and finding other reasons to set fire to jet fuel.

I think you should spend less time inventing pedantic counterfactual hypotheticals.

Is the purpose of nuclear weapons to use them?

The purpose is to use them in certain hypothetical situations. If there are no hypothetical situations in which they are to be used, then they are entirely useless.

I have always found "fleet in being" an interesting way to look at this question: a bunch of ships can have strategic value even without leaving port, just to tie down enemy resources to use against them because of the implication.

Of course, if nobody ever sails their fleet, the hypothetical threat isn't quite as credible.

If nobody ever sails their fleet, the hypothetical threat is working as intended. Two fleets sit in port glaring at each other across the ocean until the end of time.

What is the purpose of a company? Not the stated one, the original one.

If you mean company in the sense of "for-profit corporation," then I think the answer is pretty straightforward: Companies exist to (1) encourage people to invest in business ventures by offering them limited liability; and (2) offer people a convenient, off-the-rack method of organizing a partnership.

If you mean company in the sense of "firm," I think it's also pretty straightforward: Companies exist because there are synergies in having a bunch of people working together on some joint project.

Companies and markets exist to maximize the consumption!

I'm not sure why you switched from just "companies" to "companies and markets," so I will focus on companies. Ok, suppose a company is faced with a choice between (1) maximizing shareholder value; and (2) maximizing consumption. For example, perhaps the company produces some luxury good or service and there is a clear choice between (1) selling limited amounts at a fat markup; and (2) selling large amounts with paper thin margins. Assuming the math clearly shows that choice (1) is far more profitable, I would expect the company to take that choice. (Obviously, things are rarely so clear-cut in the real world, but in a situation which really was that clear, a company CEO who chose (2) could expect to be sued by the investors.)

Of course, in theory society could step in and more or less redefine the purpose of companies. Seize the means of production, if you will. I think that's what you are basically arguing here, and I don't necessarily disagree with you. Logically it makes sense that once mankind's final invention takes place, there's no more need to encourage private capital investment. Perhaps This Time it's Different.

The purpose of a company or firm is to produce profit: to coordinate on Monday to be wealthier on Tuesday. There is generally little concern about the consumer except so far as the production of the firm is deemed desirable by the consumer.

I have a slightly different answer from what seems to have been offered so far. Companies, as a legal form, are a carrot-and-stick deal offered to the individual by society in order to channel his ambition into pro-social or at least less harmful ends.

  • The carrot are tax advantages, paperwork benefits, legal perks such as being able to claim unique use of a recognisable artificial trademark, and some degree of shielding of the individual behind the enterprise from repercussions (such as debts far in excess of what the enterprise could be expected to make up for, or legal responsibility for side effects and damages caused by it), as long as he plays by the rules.

  • The stick is, often, outright lawfare against individuals who pursue their ambitions without signing up to the form (in Germany for example you can not even, as a private person, make and sell software to the public without registering a company).

  • The means by which the goal (of channeling individual ambition to pro-social ends) is pursued are legal requirements to make the activities of the company legible in particular ways (bookkeeping, charters, records) and adhere to all sorts of restrictions on shape, purpose and behaviour. If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value", on the flip side this means that a company can not actually have the terminal value to "maximise paperclips", and there may be legal ways to mobilise society against if it appears to do the latter over the former. Also, the things that a company can command its employees to do are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with a legal contract, which are a subset of the things an individual can force another individual to do with legally unregulated compulsion such as individual or communal violence.

The alternative to companies, the thing that there would be more of if someone erased the concept of companies from reality with a memetic Death Note, does not look like people no longer getting together to achieve things, or less consumption. It looks like more instances of things like the Mafia, cults and Genghis Khan's hordes. If you only erased companies narrowly writ, you might also (at least) get medieval guilds, which are really an older, rougher attempt at the same thing.

If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value"

As far as I'm aware, there are few countries where this is actually true. Yes, it's the default but if the charter of the company says otherwise, the obligation can be something else (as long as it's legal).

The original reason for companies is really simple to derive. People engage in mutual trade in order to improve their life. Guy A has two cows and no chickens, guy B has no cows but four chickens, they trade and now they both have a cow + two chickens, or whatever. Or you exchange labor, you'll mow their lawn (something they hate to do) and they'll do your dishes (something you hate to do). Or anything else like that. You trade for your own benefit and both sides (in free trade without coercion) gain overall utility.

There is no greater overall thought to your choice to trade a surplus pencil for a desired pen. You just would prefer the pen over a pencil and they prefer a pencil over the pen.

But uh oh, some tasks or goods that people want for trade are complex and require the coordination and labor of multiple people in order to provide. But the benefits of this trade will be so good that it's worth it, so someone who is smart and enterprising makes a group to do that and make/do something in order to trade it for their own profit.

There you go, that's the purpose of a company. It is to enrich the owner through engaging in trade just like everyone else engaging in trade is doing.

The pencil company doesn't make pencils "for the jobs" (in fact they want low labor costs) or for "the greater good", they do it to sell the pencils and make money. And people buy the pencils not for the jobs it creates, or for the greater good, but because they want a pencil.

The original reason for companies is really simple to derive. People engage in mutual trade in order to improve their life.

Yes, that's what I meant.

The pencil company doesn't make pencils "for the jobs" (in fact they want low labor costs) or for "the greater good", they do it to sell the pencils and make money. And people buy the pencils not for the jobs it creates, or for the greater good, but because they want a pencil.

No, corporations make money because it's currently a good (or maybe the best) way to ensure as many people that want a pencil get one. But it's not the ultimate goal of having corporations exist as a concept. Life improvement is. A company that manages to make money despite not producing anything and not having any workers is not infinitely good, it's infinitely bad.

A sort of tangential comment, but when reading that in one month we have Amazon and retailer price-fixing, 90% of poultry suppliers price-fixing, most of the world’s shipping container manufacturers price-fixing, and a new investigation into beef price-fixing, I’m thinking the model of consumer capitalism is simply wrong today. It’s easy and desirable for wealthy owners to coordinate together to maximize profits by agreeing on prices in unison and only changing this formula to prevent a competitor from gaining a foothold in the industry with the deployment of predatory pricing. You can’t do anything about this, and if they’re clever, they realize that it is in their collective interest to never lower prices and instead make more money through coordination without actually putting anything in writing. The system actually just sucks!

But all the capitalists say farmer brown will simply spin up a multi-billion dollar beef industry; using the power of his mind and his bootstraps to roll back climate change 15 years and materialise another Idaho's worth of grazing land from the ether!

But they don't say that, as you know.

Meanwhile in the real world, Amazon has consistently had higher approval ratings than basically any other major institution, including the military like this from 2021. Even now Amazon is almost double the president in approval rating.

Maybe these companies still suck, but they suck less than everything else!

No. They just became good in price gouging - which is hidden and subtle.

They just became good in price gouging -

Price gouging is only after emergencies. And also a good thing because high prices in an emergency are a market signal to bring in more supply, which allows more people to get the stuff they need and want.

In the real world the consumer has no idea what price he could be getting without the corrupt tactics employed by Amazon. He has no idea that Amazon was secretly increasing prices. He has no reason to think that this was in the realm of possibility, and would assume that there were laws against price-fixing. He would have no reason to know any of this was happening, because the lawsuit showing this was only publicized last month.

For years, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, agree to raise prices on competitors’ websites, or to remove products from competing websites altogether. This price fixing scheme typically begins with Amazon demanding that vendors “fix,” “correct,” “increase,” “raise,” or “look into” the prices of products on other retailers’ websites. These directives to vendors are backed by the threat of significant penalties for failure to comply — ranging from advertising and promotion restrictions, to demands for financial compensation, to the removal of vendors’ products from Amazon.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/naming-names-attorney-general-bonta-secures-public-access-evidence-amazon-price

Replying under myself to make an additional point: should it not in theory be easy to stop this behavior while retaining the basic structure of capitalism?

  • jail time for infractors and the expropriation of all of their wealth and property. Like, actual punishments. Why are we not actually punishing these people.

  • multi-million dollar payouts to whistleblowers, plus national honors. Place their portraits in the White House, they are model citizens.

  • a government program that sends out mailers and emails to every vendor in the country, asking them about their experiences with services in exchange for a small payment for their time (this is to know where to investigate)

  • Use AI to determine which industries should be lowering their prices (but are in an unspoken agreement not to), and then force them to or tax them

I've been really thinking about this tweet.

Forcibly draft men to die for their country and no one bats an eye

Suggest that women have children for their country and suddenly everyone starts freaking out

We can force men to die, but can't even ask women to become mothers

This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.

Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.

Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.

The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):

  1. Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.

  2. Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".

From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.

I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?

Underlying the original tweet, is a denial of the fact that women, as a group, are fundamentally incompetent in the 3d meatspace. Men, as a group, are competent in the realm of 3d meatspace. The reason society asks men to do things like go to war and die, is because it is sometimes necessary for people to fight and die to preserve a society. And if that is necessary, competence is required. Women, being incompetent, are not asked to bear that burden.

In the past, women birthed many children because a man with agency and competence found some woman and impregnated her. She often had little, or at least less of a, say in the matter. We have divorced ourselves from our biological realities, stuck our fingers in our ears and covered our eyes, and gave women an equal amount of power in the matters that actually matter. So now we struggle with problems that do not need to be problems.

I of course favor One, but it is a hard sell.

Most men are too emotionally weak and bitchmade at the soul level to survive one other dude calling them a fag; imagine the difficulty if all of society is pushing down on you to be more manly.

I think that's the reason the dudes who decide to not lower their heads and take what they are given are so wildly out there as a rule; degenerate coded puppy play kink at pride Fuck You if you don't like it you can eat shit and die types, they are reacting against the immense pressure to do this set of masculine things or you are ...

Effeminate! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't a manly manly man, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the vague societal view of manliness, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course society has set for you. Now go back to pretending to work at the mines or yer gay.

It's why I find the alpha male manly man types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. Ford f250 in the marketing firm parking lot ass

Isn't this post a contradiction? The manosphere/machismo culture guys make a pitch that is a variant of: "You are weak and that is contemptible. Follow my view of how you should be, and you will no longer be weak and contemptible." You are basically making the same pitch, just swapping out what actions/beliefs are indicative of weakness. The core part is that both this post and the machismo ideology relies on shaming men for being weak, thus implicitly asserting that to be a good man you must be strong. That is an enforced gender role.

Here are your last two paragraphs, changed to be something a manosphere guy would say.

Chud! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't an ally, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the oppressed, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course history has set for you. Now go back to pretending to respect women or yer cancelled.

It's why I find the male feminist types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. HR Karen following ass

It's an established retort, analogous to saying that the manliest cocktails are the pink sweet ones because they prove that you have nothing to prove to anyone and drinking some pure vodka or whiskey is just insecure posing, or that driving a big truck/car is compensation for your dick size.

This is of course just counter-signaling, which is a form of signaling itself.

What they missed though is that the core manliness is not the lumberjack clothes and beard and whiskey and trucks and football stuff, but self-reliance, goal-oriented vision and ambition (knowing what you want), decision power and effectiveness (getting shit done), keeping one's word and honor (reliability and role in a community), standing up for one's dependents and friends, etc. etc. These can have some outward appearances but they aren't the core. It will still be countersignalled of course, because it looks even more secure and settled to say that you just don't even have to think about whether you are effective and ambitious, in fact you can self-deprecate and joke about how much you aren't, because in fact you know that everyone sees how successful you are in your life trajectory that you can even afford to downplay it.

There is no mechanism available to "extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails." The male gender role is primarily constructed by social pressures, not through any kind of law or policy (hypothetical conscription notwithstanding). And the role that women collectively imagine for men forms something much more strongly coherent than the role men collectively imagine for women. Both can turn down their respective roles in an instant merely by choosing to; men face far more social consequence from that choice, though, so they choose not to and learn either to shut up and accept their role or to celebrate it.

That depends on the society. There have been plenty of social contracts and there are plenty of social contracts that have absolutely no problem placing obligations on women.

On the other hand, plenty of women actually like babies, especially their own. More than men who like war, probably.

Anyone will go to war for a cause they’re vested in. I’m not going to join the military to become a drone operator hunting for some hideout in Iran. If the Russians were about to invade my hometown, I’d become a first rate neocon on the other hand.

If the Russians were about to invade my hometown, I’d become a first rate neocon on the other hand.

It's a bit late at that point.

Pretty sure I’m not Ukrainian. They’d have a hard time setting one inch on our land.

I've been trying to, in the kindest possible way, put some effort into writing a response to you in a way that makes it seem like I'm not being entirely dismissive of your arguments and thoughts, because I still to some level think you are a highly committed troll of some sort here to make the quokkas look dumber. I'm low-trust, it's my default setting.

What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.

Life isn't fair, and the people who benefit from that arrangement would very much like to keep it that way. Hell, it's not fair that you get to exist while thousands of people got droned to death in Ukraine, is that fair? What possible recompense, what possible thing could you, you personally, offer on the altar, that would balance the scales? And that's just one case caused by two or more countries playing at great power games. What on earth do you expect to be a plausible - forget plausible - workable and practical solution to make women die in wars the same way and in same numbers as men? Even if you enforce gender neutral conscription, they will not occupy the same roles as men, they will not perform the same and excel in the same roles, they will not be treated in combat the same as the men by any opposing enemy force by dint of the fact that sperm is cheap and ovaries are not.

The tweet you are talking about deserves no more thought. It is a whine, someone complaining that the world isn't fair, it is cope that men and women are not viewed and treated the same. And there are very, very good reasons they are not, whatever mouth noises the gender equality brigade make don't hold up to scrutiny under reality.

There is a long list of things that people refuse to do for their country of birth, let alone their country of emigre, and drafts also have significant carveouts or people fleeing the draft every time it's been attempted. Countries not at war that have mandatory military service still have issues with people going to some lengths to dodge the service. How anyone possibly thinks they will get rapturous applause for advocating women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months to what will become a fully sentient human being makes me worry about that person's intelligence.

Yes, life isn't fair, but it should be and so we should force it to be is the thought mode of tyrants. While I am not excusing inaction, an incomplete understanding of tradeoffs for actions and what it means to go up against people who are Winning and don't want to Lose just so a new bunch of people can Win should be properly accounted for in any model of the world.

Edit: This might be instructive. Here is a comedian talking about how he asked for consistent metrics to hit to try and score a deal. He knows if they gave him a metric, he could meet that metric and then get the deal. Rejecting him was the point, expecting the people he was dealing with to act with any sort of consistency was the problem. Any metric can and will be gamed by people who can meet it, and people know this. The goal is not to meet the metric, the goal is to do what you wanted in the first place. You're asking what color the car is, while ignoring the point that people weren't really talking about cars.

This whole post against fairness as a cardinal virtue is about how it's bad for things to be unfair.

See the bit about nature, red in tooth and claw, the ultimate copout Hobbes introduced into the world for people who enjoy the current structure to use against anyone who tries to change it.

See the bit about Tyrants trying to enforce fairness. This is another appeal to nature, to the idea that the current state of the world is preferable in some way because it is natural, and it would be what, bad? Unfair? To try to change it.

If the world was actually the way it these ideas said it was, nobody would be able to write this post about it. There would be no wringing of hands about tyrants forcing society at gunpoint to allow women the right to vote and own property, as if property and voting sprung for nature. You would instead be living in Rousseau's state of nature, a solitary wanderer in the woods.

All those appeals to the past, or the future, or nature, are also appeals to emotion specifically the feeling you get when someone switches something on you or cuts in line, appeals to the feeling you get when it kinda seems unfair.

You can't avoid it. Much like UNO came with your Xbox, fairness came packaged with your prefrontal cortex.

So what is your defense against people and their prefrontal cortexes acting on the impulse that it's fair to destroy you? Obviously you'd do something to stop or prevent this from happening.

That which should be destroyed by fairness should be?

What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.

What do you think laws are for?

I have to point out that "everyone is equal before the law" has largely been only a hypothesis everywhere.

I think the correct summary is: society accepts unfairness as long as it benefits women.

Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal. The entire edifice of western thought and society is built upon some idea of (Christian) fairness. Fairness is so important to people that income inequality, etc. is the biggest topic du jour. All this stuff is about fairness. The entire idea of bodily autonomy you cite is downstream of that.

The ultimate question is, to paraphrase a book title, whose justice, whose notion of fairness? Or if we forgo fairness entirely, then what? What virtues, what values is your post-fairness society based on? It used to be Christian-adjacent virtues, but I guess now it's post-Christian "woke" virtues like racial equity (is that not fairness?) and "bodily autonomy".

A very common bias or tendency I see among ideologues of different stripes is that they implicitly carry a value system and expect everyone to abide by it and just not care about "what's in it for me". But people do care about that. You have to think about what your value system actually is, what it's based on, what are its precepts. Otherwise people will defect, your system will lose alignment, bad actors will fill the vacuum.

If we go with a value system of "nature is unfair", then we move past our corpse of Christian morality straight into "the weak suffer what they must, the strong take what they can". Which is a value system you see and which exists, like as Judge Holden articulates in Blood Meridian or more broadly a sort of law of the jungle. Or maybe you have some sort of gynocracy in mind. Or maybe you think AI will save us all. We shall see. But it's not a value system which would tend to place women's suffering or bodily autonomy very highly at all.

Things don't happen until they do. If a war happens then your value system of women's bodily autonomy being the prime concern of society might collide with weak armies and men fleeing (as they did in Syria, Ukraine, etc.) and the barbarians raping all your women (or worse, like what happened to German women after WW2). Then nature will truly assert itself. That is also a value system not based on fairness.

I guess you might just say your value system includes noble male self-sacrifice in return for nothing. Again, you might find it a bit hard to get buy-in for that.

I would go further.

The COVID case taught people nothing. Lockdowns were important, until they weren't, until they were again. Masks were useful, except they weren't, except they were and you should stop buying them so there are less shortages. And that was a pandemic.

People got frustrated about it like they expected consistency. Normies simply did what they wanted to do anyway. I lost count of the people heckling each other for not social distancing while making carveouts for their own personal visits and social parties; the only people who went reee about laws and hypocrisy like it meant anything were looking for people to blame and attack for negative consequences or genuinely expected consistent rules equally applied. If it wasn't the BLM protests, it could have just as easily been something else that everyone would suddenly decide was more important than a global pandemic.

The gigabrained insist that being able to believe two contradictory things at once is a flaw, something to be corrected, a hypocrisy. The rest don't even notice or care, at least until the negative effects hit them personally, at which point they'll simply pull a new hotpatch and run the new process on top of the old.

Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal.

I tend to agree with this. In public policy debates, we constantly hear arguments about fairness. The basic argument is either that fairness is good for it's own sake or that a fair system encourages people to put faith in the system.

In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy. So much so, that when "don't bother me with fairness" is used to dismiss an argument about gynocentrism, patriarchy, and sex roles, to me it smacks of special pleading.

In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy.

I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness. It's only weird autists like us on this website who either believe it or try to penetrate through the layers of deception to get at what people actually care about.

This seems backwards to me. Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe. Force the contradiction.

Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe.

Either that, or they develop extra epicycles - and, in the long run, entire industries that generate more and more epicycles - for why all the people pointing out that they aren't being fair are actually wrong.

You can't, if they have the social standing, "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it’s fair", and everyone will believe them.

I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness.

I'm not sure I understand your point here.

Suppose a left-wing demagogue gets on the stage and says something like "The rich hardly pay any taxes at all while the rest of us pay through the nose!!" Alternatively, suppose a right-wing demagogue gets on the stage and says something like "Illegal immigrants have their housing and healthcare paid for by the government, while you and I must pay our own way!"

Both of these arguments are implicit appeals to fairness. And they could easily be made explicit by simply tacking on "How is that fair!?" to the end.

Moreover, these types of arguments are very common in public dialogue.

Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?

Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?

Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

Ok, I pretty much agree with that. But I think the basic point still stands: The appeal to fairness of @Nerd appears -- to me -- to be fundamentally no different from those of anyone else.

(…) pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.

But that's passing the buck. Why do they need to lie to themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness, and makes them feel bad if they recognize themselves to be falling short of that ideal?

Why do they need to lie themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness

This is an excellent point, and, as with all things involving subconscious motivations, I don't think there's a real rigorous way to confirm any of this. My current hypothesis is that it feels better to believe oneself to care about being fair than to believe oneself to be purely selfish which is distinct from believing that fairness is better than pure selfishness. Of course, one could argue that "feeling better when one believes oneself to be X rather than Y means that they believe that X is better than Y," but I'd posit that believing that caring about something isn't a feeling, it's an action. When one acts in naked self interest while feeling really really bad about it and internally beating themselves up in their minds about how bad they're being for not caring about fairness or performing Olympics-level mental gymnastics to believe that they're actually being fair despite the naked self interest, one is clearly caring about naked self interest and basically not at all caring about fairness.

The thing with pretense is that humans are generally terrible liars, who can't credibly pretend to anything without gradually coming to actually believe it to some degree. The people pretending to care about fairness can be casually motivated by the most brazen self-interest, but the result of all the pretending tends to be that if you then take a sufficiently powerful psychological steamroller (argumentation, rhetoric, propaganda, ritual, fancy buildings with statues of blindfolded matrons) to persuade them that forfeiting their self-interest would be fair, they by and large give up.

This is why justice and organised society works at all. Without this mechanism you just get something that looks like Somalia, and even in Somalia I gather that the tribal courts actually talk people into a lot of self-destructive ingroup altruism.

No, even pretending to care about fairness is a level above what I'm talking about.

In your hypothetical, a left-wing demagogue is complaining about the rich not paying taxes while the not-as-rich do. He or she might genuinely believe this. I'm not saying they're all actors. But this same demagogue will, even unconsciously, leave themselves out of the complaint, even if they themselves are one of the rich. What this person wants to do is attack the rich/gain points with their own side, the exact terms of the argument aren't important.

There are some true believers, some people who are rich and would call for higher taxes on themselves, and I'm saying those people are weird or have some consistent belief in equal laws and an equally applied moral system that makes them essentially aliens and outcasts.

There are some true believers, some people who are rich and would call for higher taxes on themselves, and I'm saying those people are weird or have some consistent belief in equal laws and an equally applied moral system that makes them essentially aliens and outcasts.

Would you be able to offer a test to distinguish between (1) an alien or outcast; and (2) everyone else (I guess you could say "normie" for lack of a better word)?

I don't know about a test, per se, but this is where I value the concept of a costly signal. Someone who is (1) will be able to (and, in practice, will do so) send a signal that they belong in (1) by engaging in an activity that benefits whatever principle they're pushing forward while it costs him something, i.e. causes him to suffer. This, too, can be faked, and so it's not a true test, but it's perhaps one piece of evidence among many that one can look at when trying to ascertain someone's categorization. E.g. a man who decides to castrate himself because he believes that the types of behaviors that testosterone tends to cause in men really are evil and toxic could likely be trusted as someone who truly believes in what feminists are saying, because castration is a very costly action that benefits this cause.

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If life isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t care that it’s unfair, then how can anyone criticize —

women surrendering their bodily autonomy for nine months,

as there is no longer a basis for arguing against it on moral grounds? How could you criticize the policy goal of, say, making women the property of their fathers and then husbands again, if we no longer care about unfairness? It can’t just be unfair for men because life is unfair, sorry men, as there are many cultures where it is unfair for women because life is unfair, sorry women, yet these cultures have children.

Why would I even care about criticizing the policy goal on any grounds whatsoever?

It would be secondary to what people actually wanted to do. Societies that want to make women male property can and will do it regardless of any arguments to the contrary. If they haven't done it, it's because they don't want to.

I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers); the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour? Sure, WW2 if you were unlucky it was maybe 4 years at most, WWI was only like a year, and the Civil War was a 3 year commitment (which ended early). This is not a fair comparison at all and I cannot really get past that so I don't understand what use the rest of the conversation is. They also all involved a pretty serious national or international emergency.

I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers)

We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.

That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.

I know this is a bit more off-topic, but it's been extremely hilarious to see various right-wing communities essentially suggest or re-invent the American left-wing commune (that actually has a very rich and deep history that doesn't even have much to do with communism exactly) from first principles. It's uncanny. Understandable, but still uncanny. I guess in some sense communitarian counterculture homesteading has intrinsic human appeal, but in another sense they don't spring up out of nowhere and so their presence I think usually says something about moral and socio-political climates, beyond just "horseshoe theory is correct".

If by “commune” you mean some bizarre, 1960’s hippy nudist colony up in Humboldt County somewhere, there’s no one on the right that I know that’s pushing that. Our lot has always been tightly community focused and proselytizing you could say. That’s why “organicism” and “primordialism” have always been two major themes in so much right-wing political thought and sociology, over a collection of “abstract rights.”

I specifically invoked the rich American history of pre-60s communes on purpose, so it's a bit entertaining to me that you seized on hippie nudist communes anyways. These communes don't always follow a neat left-right divide on that longer timescale. For example, I'm Mormon - early Mormon communities went through at least two separate phases of highly communitarian living in the 1830s and 1860s and also didn't neatly fall into a nice grouping (and obviously religion itself if not consistently right vs left coded historically). Again not all of them are going to be explicitly "we have common property" but developing a tight-knit smaller community that rejects popular standards in various ways inherently requires a high degree of local coordination that is often extremely similar. "Communitarianism" doesn't actually require common property.

For example right now there are a few strains of various types of this "commune" type thought:

  • You have eco-crazies, who try and find carbon neutral or negative ways to live in harmony with the land and sustainability

  • You have a strain of modern liberals who want to set up the kinds of super-walkable, livable utopic urban centers, some of which promote "cohousing" and might pool childcare, meals, tools, greenspace, etc.

  • You have a few offshoots of various Christian hospitality houses, halfway houses, charities, etc. which can in some cases form loose communitarian associations

  • You have deliberately "trad" Christian and other non-religious conservative communities that pool homeschooling, might generate a local mini-economy, and emphasize physical closeness, homogeneity, or even exclusiveness

  • You have associated prepper types who gather together for the obvious practical benefits of living off-grid but with a little bit of community redundancy

  • You have a few libertarian projects that are technically diametrically opposed to collectivism but for practical reasons find it helpful to cluster together in order to consistently enforce (or decline to enforce, lol) norms friendly to libertarianism

  • You have the liberal-ish (OK I think this is mostly libertarian but I think it draws from the slightly left-leaning crowd within them) aligned "startup cities" like Prospera in Honduras

  • Some more extreme versions of "polycules" start to look awfully familiar to a longer more historical kind of "free love" society, even if they are inherently smaller-scale

Donald Trump himself suggested selling private land to "Freedom Cities" that aren't necessarily communistic but fit the vibe of "designed community/society" which isn't far off, during the 2024 election.

Communes arent inherently leftwing. There is something very conservative about sticking with your own people and raising kids in a very orderly community based way. The problem of the left wing commune (and possibly Sparta, I am no expert on Greek history) is the intentional dissolution of family units which results in pedophilia, pederasty, and polyamory (with the associated bastardy) which are degenerate. A commune with strong families is just the Amish with electricity, and is a very strong social force indeed.

I mean yes, I agree and that's my point, I was just invoking the contemporary association of communes with purely left-wing establishments. A strong association as another commenter very clearly demonstrated. Obviously I made my point poorly or else you wouldn't be making this comment and I wouldn't be downvoted. Although I'm pretty sure most of the downvotes are a knee-jerk reaction because they read my comment on a surface level and went "he's booing me! downvote!!"

To be clear what I find hilarious is that many conservatives for many years mocked hippie communes as delusional and bad qua communes, not due to their inherent hippie-ness; thus the current crop of conservatives "inventing" the exact same thing and defending it as "totally not a commune, because communes are dirty liberal inventions". This is called hypocrisy.

More broadly this is because conservatives, if you'll permit me to speak broadly (especially Christian conservatives), wanted to dominate society entirely. Thus from a position of power, local enclaves are a threat or aberration. They now realize they can't (or rather, that they failed, or lost control, or however it's framed), and thus have conveniently changed the goal back to "let's dominate local communities instead" and local enclaves are back on the menu as something praiseworthy.

Amish with electricity have less use for the physical labor of men. The more technology we have, the less men's labor and protection is valuable to women, which devalues the average man as a worthwhile husband.

What starts as a strong natalist force will fade over time unless backed with a religious imperative to reproduce.

If you’re a secular conservative you’re pretty much just fucked. A friend of mine and I once tried approximating what country out there and in what period might have approached something like that, that was nationally large enough to matter. Best we came up with was Czechoslovakia. Although you could say the Nazis tried something like that. They had strange ideas when you read into their “blood and soil” notions. They were against what they called “biological pacifism,” and wanted a 4-child family, health passports, a 4-stage hierarchy of eugenic marriages between biologically fit individuals (Class I, Class II, Class III, Class IV) etc. Really strange stuff.

Communists to the left, communitarians to the right, pretty much no place for an individualist in this fallen world.

A few glaring problems. Who is the lucky man to fertilize the drafted uterus? We have organ transplants already going to the wealthy, expect the same type of corruption with drafted women.

Suppose the birth mother decides to keep and raise the child herself. We just reinvented the welfare single mother, with more steps. Because we're obviously not going to take away a baby from an unwilling mother to be raised communally.

Who is the lucky man to fertilize the drafted uterus

If it's a communal rearing then to defuse any specific parent bias a group of men should be 'drafted' at the same time.

the most we asked from any drafted Vietnam soldier was what, a 13 month tour?

If you die it's forever. You can use this to do a qualia calculation by pulling coefficients out of your ass as it's customary for this type of exercise.

Civil War was a 3 year commitment (which ended early)

The Civil War went from 1861 to 1865, 4 years by my math, so I don't see how that statement works. It was also the deadliest war in American history which I feel like might be relevant, but I am more concerned with how you came to this statement. Are you just thinking about those drafted in 1863 and ignoring the earlier soldiers?

A quick google was the source for the draft of 1863 yes, which was 3 years or the end of the war (whichever was first), which is obviously the right comparison because we're talking about a draft in the context of forcing men to do things against their will.

If you were a soldier in the North who signed up prior to the draft, it was highly dependent on when. Famously the first wave of volunteers only signed up for 90 days. And yes, many of them went home right after Bull Run when that expired and it became clear this might be bloody (which was a big issue). Pretty soon you could enlist for 3 years, standardized - which meant yes, you were stuck for 3 years (unless discharged) unless you were an officer who could technically resign a commission since you were not "enlisted" in the traditional sense. Still, this was a voluntary enlistment, not a draft, and "you can't leave the military once you join, at least for a while" is pretty normal historically, so I'm not ignoring them, they just aren't relevant to the point being made. Even then, it's notable that the enlistment duration was identical to the draft. If you signed up in 1861 and survived, you could go home in 1864, full stop (although of course, the army offered bounties and bonuses if you voluntarily re-enlisted). Sharp observers might notice that the draft was a thing right as the war was clearly ongoing for a while more and when the initial wave of 3-year enlistments running out would begin to be a concern - thus, a need for more men and obviously volunteers were largely tapped out by then.

The simple fact remains that the only post-WW2 era draft lasted 13 months which is orders of magnitude different from 18 years. Both are arguably full-time jobs.

Meh, I kinda see what you’re saying. But going to war and fighting is probably a lot worse morally and on the psyche compared to raising a child.

Yes but I think it's also pretty compelling to say that having a child has a larger overall impact on your life than going to war (assuming you survive). The unlucky, if you'll forgive me for being blunt, get lifelong PTSD, but the median soldier is able to readjust and have a normal life, whatever that means. Vets aren't usually defined by being veterans, but parents often are. Having a child is a fundamental and ongoing reshuffling of priorities, has a major and durable impact on finances and lifestyle, sense of self-identity, and more. This point is obviously abused by pro-choice people, but they aren't wrong exactly, assuming no adoption option.

Going to war against your children is even worse. Parents would do well to learn that the young generation always wins because the old generation dies. If you’re determined to go to war with your kids, don’t be surprised when they view you as the enemy if you’ve spent years hard at working achieving precisely that. Personally I love the idea of parenting. Yes it’s work but to me it’s also extremely fun. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life practically raising several people I know, being a positive force and influence in their lives, etc. I would love nothing more than that ideal.

There is the risk of death that you're leaving out. IIRC for a conscriptee to Vietnam it was around 1 in 40; the risk for women dying of pregnancy related complications is at least an order of magnitude lower, so in terms of QALYs, military conscription probably outweighs it.

That said, we will never conscript again, so conscription seems like a kind of fake issue to me: if it were abolished tomorrow, pretty much no one complaining about male gender roles would change their tune, because it's not really a primary or even secondary issue motivating people in their day-to-day lives.

Google suggests that <10% of American men served in Vietnam, of whom about 25% were drafted, whereas even now about 80% of women are having children. Apparently 10% - 15% of couples have fertility issues, though some of that might be age related. The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.

The easiest win is probably to re-normalize families with 3 - 4 kids.

Nobody wants to lower the cost of that. Not just child seats as suggested above, but all the non-delegable (or extremely costly to delegate) labor that attitudes of child safety and enrichment has brought upon us. You can't just wish the K-selection spiral away.

As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.

Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".

What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.

As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally.

If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.

If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.

If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.

Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.

Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.

Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.

But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.

Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.

Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground.

I don't know if you're intentionally spreading propaganda or just clueless about the war. Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible. They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do. Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).

Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible.

Ukranian tech is so good that the US is going to them for it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/ukraine-sees-us-looking-for-technology-transfers-in-drone-deal

They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do.

Over a million Russian casualties for basically no gain, yeah sure dude they totally care.

Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).

Yeah, they've been so great at innovation that they're currently losing ground (after drawing it out for years without much advancement) in a war that was expected to be an easy operation that would only take a few days. The underdog is becoming the winner, Moscow is even facing major strikes now something considered pretty unimaginable back in 2022.

Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.

Yes, Kipling said the female is more dangerous than the male- because cows have calves with them, and bulls don't. I 100% believe that a mama would kill a bear in family defense at equal efficacy to a dad, given the aid of modern technology- but that isn't the problem militaries are trying to solve.

Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.

Of course, psychic powers aren't real so women aren't beating men with them.

Instead, in real life, a woman can kill you from thousands of miles away using technology.

Yes, Kipling said the female is more dangerous than the male, because

the way a woman commits violence is by convincing a man to do it on her behalf. Therefore, as someone who does not know (or need to care) about what that actually costs, it's more likely she will seek a violent solution and cheer it on.

Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it. This is merely controlling a moral hazard- violence is very literally sex work (as in, "work performed by one's sex") and in a fair system should be treated as such.

In Western countries no one is being sent to die, it's an all volunteer military. And in the US even during the height of the GWOT it remained so. As well that the feminists back then were arguing for allowing women to serve in combat arms units and the traditionalists were against. The vast majority of politicians also don't know what war costs how many of them were ever lower enlisted? Also the causality rates for the entire GWOT terror were a rounding error lower then a single major battle in WW2 or WW1. Also since no Western country is ever going "ban women from making foreign policy" Even medieval kingdoms didn't do that. It seems like then it makes sense based on your logic to demand more women in combat arms not less since then they would have "skin in the game" but realistically the Western political class is so removed from military service anyway I think this argument just doesn't have legs, unless you want to go full Heinlein which is also not going to happen. If you really view this as an unacceptable moral hazard 50 50 combat arms gender ratios are the only feasible way to solve it.

I don't think it is. I don't think hyper aggressive women unaware of the cost of violence is an issue. I think our political class using the military too easily is an issue. But Bush, Obama and Trump II have done plenty of that despite having penises and I have a hard time seeing how a woman could have been worse then Bush in terms of cavalierly using the military.

Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book? The thousands of Soviet, Polish, French, Dutch etc women who died fighting the Nazis in WW2, some executed, some tortured to death, some thrown in concentration camps? Women like Valeriya Gnarovskaya who threw herself under a tank with a bag of grenades to save the wounded soldiers she was treating? The 153 American female soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, many from IEDs?

thousands during WW2

How many men died? Just an order of magnitude estimate will do.

Not that this is even necessary; men are more than willing to vote themselves into going to war even without universal sufferage re: WW1, or revoke their own ability to resist being conscripted like they did in Russia (not that it would helped; WW2 was existential for them).

Do the female soldiers who joined the military get an exemption in your book?

In aggregate (which, let's be clear, is what we're talking about here) they do not. It's not even limited to protecting against foreign enemies; women more than men support things like decarceration, because the consequences (that being more violent crime) are disproportionately unlikely to affect them. That's what "moral hazard" means- no skin in the game means the freedom to make stupid choices.

I’m against treating people based on the aggregate of their various identities, as much as possible, as a moral principle. Otherwise this leads to identity politics, collective guilt, and ideology that’s toxic whether it’s from the left or right. You have to answer for the sins of your fellow white males/kulaks/women/[ethnic group], regardless of whether you, an individual, are guilty or innocent.

If you went all Starship Troopers and said military service guarantees citizenships, and women happened to be 0.1% of soldiers, I could respect that, even if I disagreed with it. But your point is to deny people rights based on what their identity group tends to do, regardless of how they themselves act.

You’d block an individual woman who volunteered in the military and risked her life to save others from voting, but allow a man who bribed a doctor to get a draft exemption, or got a cushy desk position out of danger thanks to his family connections, the ability to vote?

You blame women, yet wealthy, powerful men, from politicians to billionaires, are the ones actually deciding foreign policy while poor men get sent out to die. What personal risk did Donald Trump have when he decided to invade Iran? He evaded the draft, and he’ll carry on living in luxury without giving a damn about gas prices or electricity or skyrocketing cost of living. Meanwhile three American female soldiers died in the war in Iran, two in a plane crash, one in an air strike. They had far more skin in the game than Donald Trump and his cabinet.

All else aside, by the time a society is at war we've kinda already chosen violence, deciding women aren't gonna get a say in it anymore won't magically fix that. Last I checked the (male)leaders of Russia and Ukraine, or Israel and... multiple other places, haven't hammered out a peace agreement.

Women shouldn't have a say in foreign policy if it's not them who will be sent to die over it.

You don't need to be sent anywhere. For most countries that aren't America or nestled under it or someone else's nuclear umbrella the consequences of bad foreign policy can find you at home.

Bad German foreign policy, for example, let to the widespread rape of German women when the Soviets came to collect.

The military is physically grueling beyond simply swinging a sword. There's a reason the Nazis and Soviets didn't bother drafting a large amount of their women into frontline combat despite both sides believing they were in an existential conflict and that the loser could very well be on the receiving end of genocide. From a trite view a women should be about as good as a man when it comes to shooting a gun or piloting a tank. Marching long distances under load, digging trenches, enduring cold and wetness, dragging wounded men -- all of these are things frontline soldiers had to and have to be able to deal with. And that's not even getting into the reflexes advantage men have as evidenced by esports competitions that others have cited below.

Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.

While not as many, a lot of women (hundreds of thousands) were still conscripted by the soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_Soviet_Union

By the end of the war, the air defence force was more than 1/4 female, with 300,000 women, both volunteers and conscripts serving as communicators, machine gunners, pilots and medical personnel. Most female conscripts served behind the front lines in secondary positions and roles in an attempt to free up more men for front line duty. However it is believed that many women also served in combat positions, such as in tank regiments or along the front line.

Likewise the Nazis while against conscripting women for their idealogical beliefs, also turned to drafting a lot of women at the end

Women also fought in the Volkssturm near the end of World War Two. Girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, panzerfaust, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945.

And both sides still had women doing other military related jobs https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich

By war’s end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served as guards in the Nazi camp system.

So yeah, when push came to shove even the Nazis were like "fuck it, teenage girls take these guns and fight"

Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.

Yep, but that day is getting closer and closer. Might even be within a decade from now if AGI predictions pan out and we have another tech explosion from them.

Sure, women were a small percentage of the armed forces of some of the countries that fought in WW2. But they were overwhelmingly not on the frontline, and most were entirely noncombat. As I said in my first comment you responded to, I don't see noncombat roles as being anywhere close to as awful as frontline combat duty where the risk of being killed is far higher. If people wanted to subject women to the draft out of a sense of equality, but then the women ended up mostly just getting noncombat roles, I would call that performative equality.

But that's the thing, noncombat roles have become increasingly more important and likely at some point soon will be the only thing important when attempts to use armies of humans just swarmed by autonomous drones. Human soldier morale is going to plummet even harder and they'll fight back conscription more too when using them becomes even more guaranteed death compared to just making another bot.

We're not there yet though.

But assuming we get there in our lifetimes then that would eliminate the fairness argument for state-mandated pregnancy in terms of the gender balance. However, there would still be the state-interest argument for state-mandated pregnancies that conscription originally relied on.

Hopefully eventually that would also go away with the advent of artificial wombs.

But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did. What wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. What truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots, and logistics games are probably one of the most male-skewed hobbies on the planet.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots,

Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.

AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.

And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.

AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.

Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?

And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.

They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.

We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.

Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?

Warfare is more going to iterate to machine-assisted humans versus machine-assisted humans. On the ground, things like reaction time and muscle mass will still matter for the foreseeable future.

self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas

Self driving cars are actually a decent example of the direction warfare is headed, because they are not fully autonomous. Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work.

Arguably Waymo is behind the military; the US fielded long-range fire-and-forget computer-controlled missiles in the 1970s and the Phalanx CIWS in the 1980s, and both systems can operate fully autonomously once human guidance is released, something it seems self-driving cars still struggle with.

Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles are similar, inasmuch as they are not supposed to replace troops wholesale, but rather allow them to operate more safely. Most UGVs in Ukraine are assigned to logistics tasks, not combat.

We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.

Firstly, Ukrainian war marketing propaganda, even if accurate, has little evidentiary value without context which even the Ukrainians likely lack - "a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines" could simply be a case of "the Russians decided to abandon their position because it had become an untenable logistically" or "the Russians wanted to bait Ukraine into moving troops into it so they could plaster them with glide bombs."

Secondly, while the position might have been taken by "machines," it was not taken by "AI," it was taken by humans using remote control. This is World War Two-era technology that is probably well suited for Ukraine's needs because of the specifics of its military situation, but may be less (or differently) relevant in other, more battlespaces. Remote-controlled cars that cannot do things like "scale a fence" or "open a door" are not on the cusp of replacing grunts.

(The article you linked to references the TerMIT, Zmiy, and Protector; none of these appear to be autonomous vehicles.)

I'm not saying or suggesting that "robots won't come to the military." To an under-appreciated degree, the (US) military has had substantially autonomous systems for longer than I am alive, and we will continue to see systems with various degrees of autonomy proliferate. In the US military, likely to a degree greatly exceeding the military of Ukraine, AI already is allowed to execute on human decisions with autonomy (any self-guiding weapon) and assist human judgment (most aircraft, submarines, etc. have AI-assisted sensor filters). These technologies have not filtered down to dismounts to the degree that they have to high-end weapons systems, and that is likely to happen before infantry are replaced by machines, if only because the combination of intelligence, endurance, and mobility in a human-sized package is extremely expensive at best, even if infantry-bot does not need to carry out the many secondary peacetime operations that are required of troops.

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these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars

As someone peripherally close to this field, I think there is a categorical distinction between a self-driving car tuned to drive against random road occurrences and an adversarial model that is actively looking for weaknesses and forcing the worst decisionmaking situations. As a concrete example, self driving cars of today probably don't worry about murals of tunnels adjacent to roadways (Roadrunner style): it's not a common occurrence. But in war you'd absolutely want your self-driving tank to not drive into such traps, and you'd expect your enemy to mass deploy paint to make it happen all at once.

A bunch of traffic cones on hoods seems able to stop Waymos, for example.

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Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.

Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.

Well those are the same thing. Man or woman, they both will die to a drone coming for them. Just like how it makes no difference if the ant you squash under your foot is the strongest ant alive. It's dead anyway, and you didn't even notice.

Well those are the same thing.

Hardly. It clearly means if you're organizing opposition against Skynet, you still should put men in charge of the military affairs. We may ultimately lose, but "we'll all die anyway, so it doesn't matter" is a very defeatist attitude.

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Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests

What is the gap here in comparison to e.g. the grip strength gap?

I've seen lots of hemming and hawing as to why there's a difference, but not many attempts to quantify it. I suppose someone could go over various pool, darts, or e-sports tournaments and compare scores between leagues, but that's a bit too much work for me.

At least according to the Google AI slop response (can't be bothered to dig into the sources to verify) the typical female world championship darts game has a score of 72 to 92, while the typical male world championship game is 95 to 105.

It would seem that women and men have very similar performance in Olympic shooting, which has got to be pretty coordination loaded. I'm not convinced that there's much of a gap after all. Esports gaps are easily attributed to the well known gender autism gap.

I absolutely despise modern journalism and it's inability to present information, but hey, turns out you're actually right. On the other hand - darts. I tried to find results for pool / snooker, but that only yielded a lot of mewling from journos. So it's not a clear "no differences in hand-eye coordination" thing, but it turns out Samuel Colt did, in fact, make us equal.

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Yeah, the winning combo for Total War is to have the women in manufacturing and food production so men can fight. If we want this to be "drafted' as well out of a sense of fairness then that's fine, there can be separate female draft where if your number gets pulled you move to a potato processing facility in Idaho (if you don't have a kid under 2).

And that is exactly what happened in WWII. Famously even queen Elizabeth II(RIP) spent time in conscripted service as an auxiliary. Soviet women hitched themselves to plows because the army was using 100% of the fuel and machinery.

Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests

Yeah, it's pretty much a meme that if you see a female name on an e-sports leaderboard, the person attached still has a Y chromosome.

This entirely theoretical though as all the major Western powers don't have a draft and America which has the most powerful military in the world is also all volunteer, so is China btw.

Because there's no war currently happening that the major Western nations are a part of. But the international situation is looking darker every year. The threat still looms.

State-mandated pregnancies would not be required if the fertility rate was naturally >2.1, so there's symmetry in that the government only uses these options when necessary.

Necessary for whom?

To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.

According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations. (And yes, women do have the whole "expectations to an involved parent" situation, but I'd wager thats more for a person already in the parenthood position - not having the kids itself.)

The primary point of what bothers me here is this: If you want to remove gendered roles and expectations, ok, we can discuss that (not something I'd agree with but still). But it seems to me that many don't want to be rid of the "patriarchy" and gender norms in reality. Switzerland, for example, had an opportunity to remove the draft via ballot measure, it failed. People like gender norms when it benefits them (or when they benefit women), and actively dislike them when they hurt them (or women). It basically ends in a situation where mens rights are up for grabs, while womens are off limits, because reasons.

Its "justifiable" if you look at it from a fairness standpoint. Either everyone has gendered roles and expectations or no one does.

And for the record here, I'm not in agreement with any crazy islamic style patriarchy, if thats your primary concern.

According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations

Funny enough, that's just the concept of "toxic masculinity". It's a stupid name but it's literally just about masculine gender roles and how they lock men into having to always play the hero and hide their human vulnerability and complaints.

Of course, in practice the concept of "toxic masculinity" is usually limited to just those expressions of masculine gender roles that the analyst finds toxic rather than those the men they are addressing do. Which conveniently allows them to lock men into "always playing the hero and hiding their human vulnerability and complaints" while claiming not to. EDIT: The goal of those who talk about "toxic masculinity" is never to liberate men, but to coerce them into behavior more beneficial to the speaker.

Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.

This seems really reductionist. The power of a nation is not so much in its population size now, so returning to a society where everyone has 5 kids has limited benefits (if any) and lots of negatives. What makes a nation powerful now is its economic engine, and that includes having women work. Obviously the current system is a failure as well, but when you say feminism is a failure, you need to remember its been a gradual change since the 1800s. Maybe the current additions are failures (I would argue so) but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.

but women joining the workforce and participating in society in at least some different ways is hard to make a rational case again.

A bit of a nitpick, but I don't think women working is necessarily feminist. Women work in the informal economy is practically every single nation in the world. The labor force participation rate for women going up is seen as a positive in the third world less in terms of 'women working is good' and more that a higher LFPR for women means more women in the formal economy, which provides a lot more protections than working in the informal economy.

Patriarchy historically tends to be more about restricting women's ability to get into certain, often high status, jobs rather than restricting their employment in general.

I think Kraut was referring to the population pyramid, not population size.

hard to make a rational case

There are economic benefits to keeping women out of work but they have never been robustly measured due to ethics and feasibility. Studies show that primates separated from their mother early receive lifelong mental illness and worse learning outcomes, and we are arguably in a mental illness crisis nowadays, so it’s reasonable to assume it has something to do with the eradication of the mother-child bond. Early life is important for future outcomes, and women are inherently invested in teaching their children lessons unlike Random Bureaucrat #183729, so we are impairing the learning of our whole population. There are important emotional and social lessons that only a mother can supply to her child at a young age, and a mother will supply hundreds of such lessons a day with very salient terms of reinforcement and punishment (for a child, nothing is more reinforcing than love, or punishing than alienation thereof). A child is supposed to be breastfed for 3-4 years, and this is good for their future health. Stressed women produce worse kids with worse health, and work stresses women. Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home. When women stay with their children all day it keeps them occupied and away from the computer where they might promote really bad things that destroy civilization like affirmative action. Keeping a woman at home and away from work means that everyone in the family can eat better and has clean living conditions, which affects health for the next generations.

Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies, ripping twins away from mothers and measuring the outcomes unto the third generation. Stress and poor health are exorbitantly expensive. Antisocial behavior is expensive. This comes from working moms. And if we were able to make pronatality a status symbol, then the smartest people would have the most children (as they would see it as a mark of success, and a smart choice, maybe even a problem to solve, and they could afford it). So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!

Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home.

The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).

Women are relaxed around children. Female school teachers for young grades are like the most relaxed women in the world, and those aren’t even her kids and she isn’t at home. There is a biological reason for why a woman would be stressed after being severed from her child but no reason why she would be stressed being in a homemaking environment. When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs). There’s also a study showing Amish women are significantly less stressed than normal Americans, and they have eight kids. There are a lot of different compelling reasons to believe that a mother with her child is the least stressed version of woman, provided she isn’t also laboring for eight hours a day away from her kid.

I see women with children from time to time and from what I recall they are relaxed less often that when alone. The child cries or acts in an annoying way and they shout at them or seem stressed.

How many of those moms are actual SAHMs, that didn’t work in the crucial months of pregnancy? Statistically, you are more likely seeing stressed women who gave birth to stressed kids, who stopped breastfeeding after six months, who had their attachment severed way too early with daycare, and who never learned a single important thing about childrearing in their adolescence. If you want to see what a SAHM family is like, travel to Lancaster or walk through Williamsburg and you will see calm unstressed women with happy children that don’t cry as much.

Women are relaxed around children.

You don't actually have a wife and kids, do you?

When women want to relax they often play a simulation game of nurturing people and doing chores (Stardew, Animal Crossing, SIMs).

Notably, these games can be paused when you get tired of them.

Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax? Preferences are revealed.

Okay, no wife, no kids. That explains a lot.

Can a woman pause her work when she gets tired of it? Do you think SAHMs play “excel simulator” to relax?

What does this have to do with anything? Did anyone make the ludicrous claim that work is relaxing?

Preferences are revealed.

Pal, I don't know if you want to go down the revealed preferences route given the revealed preferences women apparently have around marriage and number of children. Your whole argument revolves around how women would be happier if they did something other than they do - i.e. a denial of the validity of the revealed preferences.

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But we have appliances, which drastically reduce the need for servants. We don't wash clothes by hand or, for the most part, even have to iron them. You can put food in the oven and come back to check on it until it is done(and before modern, thermostatically controlled ovens, you could not). Medieval housewives didn't just have to bake their own bread, they had to grind the grain for it, on top of making all of the household's clothes from raw fiber.

So in the 1960 cohort, the smartest men and women would have 64 grandchildren by now, instead of their meager four. Imagine 16x the number of geniuses just from the 1960 cohort, and then 65x for the generation after ours. Imagine 65x the Terence Taos or John Carmacks. This is bad for the economy!

I don't know if this was facetious or serious, but that's obviously not how that works. IQ is inheritable, but it's not THAT inheritable (probably 30-50% IIRC) and there's also a regression to the mean every generation. So the smartest man's grandchildren will probably be pretty average assuming there isn't a cultural component being transmitted.

Good luck trying to measure any of this in studies

I mean, there are plenty of studies that measure stay at home vs working mom's children. The difference is there, but it's not huge. I think the premise that mom is better than a bureaucrat is wrong not because she isn't (obviously she is) but just that the bureaucrat doesn't have much influence on the child in the end while mom and dad always do.

Hear, hear!

I think there are basically 3 critiques, in general, of the progressive fixation with metrics and their optimization. Take, for examples, “the economy” (GDP, I guess) as you mentioned, or Scott’s recent-ish post on how crime levels are ackshully not historically anomalous.

(1) “Number Go Up, yes, but is Number all that matters?”

As the old meme goes, “Yes, the planet was destroyed, but for a brief moment in time, we created a lot of shareholder value!”

(2) “Number Go Up, but it’s No True Number”

This was the basis of the (IMHO richly deserved) dogpiling of Scott’s crime post: perhaps headline crime statistics are down on paper, but my own lying eyes can see that I used to be able to take the subway without being accosted by drug-addled lunatics; I used to be able to walk into a pharmacy, pick something off the shelf, and take it to the checkout counter without waiting for an employee to unlock a plastic cage. The cheap, convenient subway ticket forgone for an exorbitant taxi fare; the quick trip to 7-11 replaced by an expensive, slower DoorDash order—you’ll never see those costs in the NCVS data, but are they not equally costs of crime?

(3) “You are not actually optimizing your own stated Number”

You are here.

Women’s participation in the formal, wage-earning economy plausibly gets us towards a locally optimal Number, but consider the counterfactual world where, over the past several decades, highly-talented women had more children instead of working for pay. As you said, that is the world where we have 64x as many von Neumanns, Taos, and Rockefellers. I don’t even contest the definition of Number, or whether it’s all we should care about; I merely ask, mightn’t this counterfactual world easily have higher Number than ours?

Women, as a distinct sex, exist to bear children. Feminism and antinatalism are social dead ends. Let it take a few more generations or a thousand years - the societies that come out the other end of this particular bit of natural selection will have immunity to those memes.

I tend to agree with this, although I think it's worth noting that as the saying goes, predictions are hard, especially about the future. It's highly likely that within the next 30-50 years, one or more game-changing technologies will emerge which confound a lot of predictions which were reasonable at the time.

Conscripting women to die in wars is gonna be a hard sell, but I can easily imagine a western government conscripting women for the kind of non-military national service that Israel does for its Orthodox women. The young men go to learn and fight wars, while the young women go and work in hospitals and care homes. They could even frame it as feminist!

Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough, given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children. You would also need to conscript men for fatherhood. Basically, you'd need forced marriages, organised by the state.

given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children.

I thought that was precisely what the main problem was: mothers stopping at 1-2 when they should be having 3+.

Nope. Mothers in America have more children today than they did 30 years ago. But coupling (and therefore fertility) has been falling worldwide, driving down fertility.

The gradual long-term decline in fertility from the Baby Boom until things stabilised around 2000, which was manageable in the west and only civilisation-threatening in first-world Asia, was mostly couples who would previously have 3-4 stopping at 2. It appears to be multi-causal, with child seat laws being a surprisingly large contributor (because they mean that if you want 3 kids in the burbs you need 3 child seats, and therefore a minivan). The post-2010 collapse in fertility is mostly due to less coupling, with increasingly conventional wisdom that smartphones and social media are at fault.

No, you can absolutely fit three child seats into a standard SUV.

Yes. This is the same data I have previously seen posted on Marginal Revolution, for example. Demographic implosion has been happening for decades and is continuing, but the causes have changed.

Would free minivans to all families with 2 kids help?

I someone gave me a minivan, I would have considered a fourth child, though really getting married two years sooner would have helped more with that.

Couldn't you just... buy a minivan?

No.

If you can afford one. Yes minivans are cheaper than total childcare costs but that's not how families make budgeting decisions.

We have state funded childcare.

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Given how the used car market in the United States has lost it's goddamn mind, possibly not. But I haven't been pricing minivans as of late.

We have a small SUV that fits three carseats abreast, but had to buy it new, because the used car marked was completely absurd at the time. I haven't checked on it since, as we are still paying for the existing vehicle.

Not in the UK, because it doesn't cover the additional cost of fuelling a minivan (at £1.30 or more a litre) compared to a small family car.

Not in the US, because the problem with minivans is stigma and not cost, in a country where what you drive is the main way you express your identity and social status in public.

You just need to lower the upper age limit for mandatory child seats.

How does that particular stigma manifest?

Driving a minivan when you have kids is not stigmatized in the US, although it's lower status for dad than a pickup truck 'it's my wife's car' is a totally acceptable excuse.

The huge SUVs can fit 6 people and aren't looked down on in the US. It's like driving a truck, except there are seats instead of the truck bed.

given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children.

It's all of those, right? There's women who want children but lack partners; but there's also women who have stable partners and never end up having children anyway; and women who have children, but stop after 1/2 - either because they started to late, or because of lifestyle choices (housing/career/hobbies being in conflict with having a larger family). I suspect each of those groups to be significant. "Conscription" could help with the latter two.

Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough

I think there's pragmatic ways. Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then. Hell, do the same for men. Allow the women to drop out immediately upon reaching the second trimester while still maintaining their pay. Have the non-military national service use mandatory barracks for unmarried personell, and co-locate those with the military bases that do basic training for the conscripts. Don't actively hinder the inevitable parties to much.

Still, no way this gets you TFR > 2. That requires a pretty radical social change. I suspect making parenthood high status might be the only way.

It's all of those, right?

In the sense that most mothers or wives could always have one more child, yes. But in terms of what has changed recently, no. Mothers in America have more children today than mothers did in the 1990s. There are just fewer of them, because there are fewer young people coupling up and marrying.

Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then

As a 'stick' that could well work. Deferments for getting drafted to Vietnam did in fact increase fertility by driving up the number of first births. Then when Nixon removed the exemption they went down again.

and women who have children, but stop after 1/2

Didn't Israel under King Solomon have a policy like that?

I honestly think this is a pretty reasonable take. A lot of people are attacking the claim that drafting people isn't controversial. It obviously is, but the majority of society still sees it as a necessary evil, as without it the nation could be overrun by other states that are less scrupulous. This is less of an issue for the USA that only has two relatively weak neighbors, but the principle is sound in general. Ukraine would have collapsed to Russian aggression long ago if it didn't draft its population to fight, and yes it's very controversial in that country with there being many examples of draft dodging enforcement actions that look more like kidnappings, but again it's still necessary.

Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death. While death in childbirth can happen, it's fairly rare with modern medicine. Death in war on the other hand is an expected outcome for thousands or millions of men. If women were told that raising the children was optional after birth, then they'd only need to go through the pregnancy for 9 months, give birth, and then they'd be done which compares to the years-long requirements for many draftees, with unclear end dates. If I was behind the veil of ignorance and told I either had to be either a man reborn to be drafted in Ukraine's war, or a woman forced to bear a child for the state, I'd choose the latter pretty easily.

The main 2 differences I can see between drafting and forced childbirth are the following:

  1. Forced childbirth hasn't been seen as necessary historically since natural birthrates had been sufficient.
  2. The idea of forcing women to bear a large share of societal costs is seen as far more heinous than asking men to do the same.

Neither of these is very compelling in our current situation.

Great. Let's agree on this: every one of you men go off to war every year, while every woman gets pregnant every year. Happy with the bargain?

you can't enforce any social norms on women unless you do total militarism

A chi la vittoria? A chi la morte? A chi l'Italia?

Wouldn't call it "happy", but of that's what it takes, I can take one for the team.

Depends on the opportunity cost.

No? That would presumably lead to an absurd amount of unnecessary wars and would flip the underpopulation problem into an overpopulation problem.

Well, the flip answers on here don't seem to be based in reality, so why not throw one more stupid log on the bonfire of stupidity?

I work in a place that is 99.9% female and, surprise surprise, from time to time staff members get pregnant. There is currently one girl ("girl" from my POV, she's in her early to mid twenties) who is having her first child and she's very sick with it.

The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts. I'm not pro-contraception and I'm staunchly anti-abortion, but becoming and being pregnant is not "fulfil biological imperative" as easily as "I'm hungry, I need to eat something". There's a lot goes into creating and growing a new human being out of your own body, which never seems to be taken into consideration.

Do men who are subject to the draft have to turn up every week to a boot camp training them in case of war? Because "men = draft: women = pregnant" would be more like that in reality.

Dang it, all the guys on here carelessly proclaiming women are selfish carousel riders who should be compelled by the government weaponising social disapproval into having babies should have to undergo compulsory couvade linked to a real pregnancy (might be your spouse, a family member, or just at random out of the general population if you haven't managed to persuade some woman to throw her lot in with you). Get AI to work on how we can make that happen.

Once you, Dear Reader who suggests women should be barred from higher education and work and steered into getting married to man of parents' choice as soon as she leaves school at eighteen to be pregnant by twenty at the latest, experience the joys of pregnancy and childbirth in your own body, we'll see how enthusiastic you are about "women need to have their liberty stripped and be directed into Fulfil Biological Destiny", more than once.

Women of past generations had anything from six to thirteen children. I want you to go through eight couvades and then tell me you'll sign up for a ninth.

The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts.

I've read a lot of what other people have been writing in this thread, and I can't find anyone who's asserting that pregnancy is a walk in the park. Obviously it's extremely rough on women's bodies in a number of ways.

But we're not looking at in a vacuum though. We're comparing it to war, and saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains. My response to this comment can be cross-applied here pretty much as-is.

saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains.

My credulity is strained by "men are compulsorily enrolled for the draft, so women should be compulsorily enrolled for pregnancy".

If you're supposed to get pregnant, this is not the same thing as "well I might get called up for a war but probably not unless things get really bad". If the guys are all being frontline infantrymen in shooting wars, then yes that's equivalent (even Chesterton made the same equivalence!)

But that's not what is being presented.

Not if enough men die in the wars.

What?

It's not an overpopulation problem if enough people get killed in the wars. I mean, you've got other demographic problems them, but no longer overpopulation.

I guess? But having a bunch of people die in pointless wars would be bad in and of itself.

You'd have to fuck up a whole lot to manage that, I think, if you're the US. Basically do literally 1984-esque makework war (makewar) without even trying to be effective. At this point just drop the pretense and execute whatever surplus unnecessary males you think there are.

Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death

I think you're underselling the "invasive" point. The idea of forcing someone to go through pregnancy triggers a particular kind of disgust and sympathy in me - it might not be more harmful or evil than forcing someone to fight in a war in an 'objective' sense, but it feels debased and inhumane, belonging to the same category as rape or Mengele-style medical experimentation. Certainly, a legal mandate of pregnancy, at least one that's not enforced through direct sexual violence, would be on the milder end of that spectrum - but the violation of bodily autonomy is still a very particular kind of harm, and one can have a moral intuition that the entire category should be strictly taboo in a civilized society, regardless of what other kinds of harm the government is sometimes empowered to inflict for the greater good.

(Intuitions may differ about whether forced pregnancy falls into that category, but I do think the vast majority of humans would agree that there are particularly 'unclean' kinds of harm that the government should never implement, even in pursuit of its self-preservation; that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice. If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose? The view that the government cannot compel women to bear children is, IMO, a perfectly straightforward example of that: "if it comes to that, better to be a demographically dwindling nation than a nation of institutional rapists".)

If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose?

Its intresting, because I think rape (particularly child rape) might just be a special case. If it was "let me harvest your daughters lung and kidney" or "let me chop off your sons leg", you might get greyer results. And in most cases, as far as I'm aware, murder is punished more severly than organ harvesting, and its about equal to rape in terms of maximum sentencing. The psychological effects of rape are probably what make it really bad, not necessarily the violation of bodily autonomy.

I think you're underselling the "invasive" point.

Compared to the reality of being drafted where a man might at any point have their leg blown off?

that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice

I don't see why you're claiming that pregnancy is so much vastly worse than warfare. I don't think your sentiment is uncommon, but I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.

These are not particularly compelling reasons.

I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.

No - again, I think it comes from a deep-seated intuition that the body is a temple, something private and sacred; that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent. I am struggling to explain this without repeating myself - but a substantial portion of mankind finds it intuitive that having your body interfered with is traumatizing and wrong in a kind of metaphysical way that you can't crush down into utils and compare to other forms of harm. Throughout history, it has been considered self-evident that an honorable woman would rather die than be raped - that a woman who has been raped, even if there is no pregnancy, even if there is no social shame, has suffered a much more grievous and deeper harm than the amount of physical pain endured during the act.

Ergo, it seems intuitively, primally obvious to me that forcing a woman to bear something within her womb, within her most private organs, against her will, is wrong, disgusting, taboo, in a way that's not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from forcing a male or female soldier to risk his/her life in battle. I would feel the same disgust if a mad scientist tried to implant a fetus inside a non-consenting man.

that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent

And yet, fascinatingly enough, female genital mutilation is considered evil and immoral, but circumcision is regularly practiced. Tells me all I need to know about the "body is a temple" argument.

And I'm saying again that the realities of being drafted mean men are already subjected to violation of the body as a temple. Sure, having the government inseminate women would be gross and weird and terrible. But it's also terrible to have the government say that men have to go to the frontline where enemies can shoot them full of holes.

Personally, I could barely tolerate my son being drafted against his will, abused as cannon fodder and killed during a war. I'd help him dodge the draft, depending on the circumstances.

But if someone drafted my daughter's womb against her will, I'd try to kill the enforcers or inseminators. I feel this is a natural, typical instinct for most fathers, population TFR be damned. This is why drafting women's wombs is impossible, most fathers would perceive it as rape of their daughters.

And the fact most mothers do not perceive what you've described as rape of their sons is the entire problem.

It's either genetic or embedded deep within all major cultures. The mothers of a tribe that kept their sons away from war were conquered by their neighbors. The genes or cultures that did not see male drafting as rape survived as they had bigger armies, the losers were enslaved or assimilated into the conquerers.

Apparently soldiers had a 1.8% chance of being killed in WWII, 0.5% in the Vietnam War.

Gestating and giving birth to an infant historically imposed an equivalent or greater mortality risk; today it still entails some risk of death plus a far more substantial risk of serious long-term illness and chronic pain but also a 100% chance of:

  • existing for nearly a year with a large foreign organism living inside your abdomen, whom you can feel displacing your innards, rolling around, stretching and thrashing, scratching, eventually squeezing the air out of you, and you cannot stop it doing this or get a break for even a minute

  • Having your cognitive and motivational systems irreversibly remodeled, on a basic biochemical level, in ways decidedly not aligned with your own individual flourishing

  • Being forced into an unwilled emotional bond that will break your heart many times whether you raise the child or not

  • Having your body permanently physically disfigured and reduced in function, including your metabolism and capacity for sleep

  • Having your tissues contaminated with someone else's cells, which will stay there and fuck with you for the rest of your life

Don't get me wrong, I've done this several times and it was worth it with someone I loved and chose. But to have been forcibly impregnated with some random guy's state-created offspring would have been nightmarish and life-ruining. To match those levels of "gross and weird and terrible," the male draft would have to look more like The Human Centipede than Band of Brothers.

This comparison describes pregnancy from the inside in the most visceral possible terms, but then describes the draft from the outside as "only a 0.5–1.8% death risk."

But the horror of conscription is not exhausted by your chance of being killed. Being drafted means the state seizes your body, removes your freedom, ships you away from your family, subjects you to total institutional discipline, and may order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.

So I don't disagree with you that forced pregnancy is horrific. But I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead as the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy states have ever imposed, ahead of mandated pregnancies if they were to be implemented.

I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead

I feel like the slapfight over the comparative suffering of forced pregnancy (on average) versus forced conscription is emerging as a dead-end - partly because we naturally underweight suffering that applies only to other people,, but also because I was trying to argue that forced pregnancy is a qualitatively different and morally reprehensible category of atrocity, similar to forms of intimate violation that are also off-limits for the state to impose on male draftees (like institutionalized rape or brain implants or invasive medical experimentation). You can squint and describe any unwanted experience as a "violation of bodily autonomy," but there's a meaningful difference. Spartan-style "all draftees owe their CO two rounds of bottoming" would never fly as official policy, even if the colonel promises he'll be gentle and make it fun.

Can I follow up, though, on this point?

order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.

On one level, I fully agree that this would be horrible to be asked to do - less the physical risk of severe injury in defense of those you love (which women should also be willing to do), but certainly the moral injury part. On the other hand, I also feel as though "Aggression and physical violence are very wrong, and harm the perpetrators as much as the victims" is a surprisingly feminist talking point? (Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too!)

If most men really find it horrific to be asked to do violence, risk injury and physically harm or kill enemies, how do we account for the fact that they voluntarily spend hours and $$$ fantasizing about this in videogames, or that Fight Club remains a middle-aged male fantasy, or that little boys find ways to make toys violent and play at injuring others? "They can't insult us like that, let's get our weapons and go fuck them up" is like the purest young man's instinct ever: in general, one of the most consistent behaviors among men everywhere, from Papua New Guinea to downtown LA to ancient Greece, is their spontaneous formation of violence gangs to do organized lethal violence on other people. As I pointed out below, the existence of war itself suggests a strong revealed preference of men to perform warfare, because these things are very expensive and it sure as hell isn't women organizing them.

So, say we accept as true your claim that for a man, being made to fight physically alongside other men, to risk injury and hurt and kill enemies is a horrifying, extreme violation, the worst thing imaginable. Then why do y'all so consistently and avidly seek out this experience? That's a genuine question, not a gotcha: I really would love a male perspective on the question.

(The parallel spontaneous instinct in many women is for taking care of small children, I guess. You could readily get approval for draconian legislation drafting women into the Baby and Toddler Minding Corps. But virtually no little girls have a parallel draw toward experiencing physical pregnancy or going into labor.)

Apparently soldiers had a 1.8% chance of being killed in WWII, 0.5% in the Vietnam War.

No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.

As for the rest, how about existing for years in, well, the jungles of Vietnam? Or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? How about the whole military training process, designed to break your spirit and break down your personality so you can be rebuilt into the military mold? Unwilling emotional bond with your squadmates? Yep, that too.

And you think Band of Brothers wasn't terrible enough? The original Easy Company had almost 47% killed in action.

No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.

That's a politicized-looking source, so I think it'd be worth investigating both sites' math to figure out how one is getting .5% and the other 2.7%. However, even if you accept the higher figure, built into the desired >2.1 TFR is the expectation that women will undergo multiple pregnancies. Even if per-pregnancy mortality is at the premodern standard ~1.5-2%, you'd have been looking at 5-6%+ mortality over three or more pregnancies. I'm not aware of many men having been drafted into multiple wars in succession over their lifetime.

As for the rest, how about existing for years in, well, the jungles of Vietnam? Or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? How about the whole military training process, designed to break your spirit and break down your personality so you can be rebuilt into the military mold? Unwilling emotional bond with your squadmates?

Although we should note that plenty of people are actually born in rural Vietnam and live there perforce their whole lives, still "getting drafted was no big deal" will never be a position I endorse. Nonetheless I think there's a fundamental moral difference between discomfort, threat or suffering and violation in the sense of being dehumanized and fully robbed of agency through tan extended, unnatural cancellation of your bodily or mental boundaries.

You can consider the difference for yourself by asking whether it'd be acceptable if the draft officially entailed male draftees getting raped for months by officers, or chemically brainwashed/ mind-control-chipped for life, or forced to incubate botflies and tapeworms for some military project. Perhaps none of those things would be even as uncomfortable as boot camp, but I think there would be widespread rejection of drafting for those purposes.

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Join the army and try making a bodily autonomy argument at any point, see how it goes.

I'm not suggesting you actually run this experiment, and I don't support some sort of forced pregnancy regime(although there are, on the contrary, lots of lower hanging fruit coercive options available to western societies. Forced marriage for cohabiting couples makes a lot more sense, statistically most women have babies once they get that ring).

It's worth noting there has also been the additional "end of history" meme where people seem to broadly think "wars requiring a draft" are a thing left behind in last century. Obviously there are examples like Ukraine even today, but I don't think the modal Western man realistically fears being called up by the draft board. And I'd like to think that such fear would be misplaced --- obviously the ending there is not yet written --- and it seems drones may fill a large fraction of that role going forward (see Ukraine).

In that context, specifically, "but men have the draft" seems a hard-to-win equality argument.

Drafts are not really a universal feature of history in the first place. The draft as the concept we see it as today, military service compelled by the State on penalty of death, is something that did happen but is far less common than privileges associated with service or simply fines/tax exemptions for service. A random person in history is probably far more likely to regard it as tyrannical and callous rather than legitimate and normal.

Greek city states had various levels of enforcement and tied it to political rights. Romans had a huge variation depending on the times, from entirely voluntary or even selective military service to drafts as such. And the Renaissance probably strayed furthest from mandatory service than any era, having largely mercenary armies.

For all we know we could be headed for far less compulsory militaries than ever. It all depends on state capacity, demographics and the needs of the battlespace.

It was very much a worry in the Cold War era. It was less of a worry during the Liberal Peace of the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, but that was a mere few-decade aberration.

The principle is "help your country in times of need, whether you want to or not." Warfare, which is men's duty, is a perennial issue. Birthrates, which are women's duty, is probably the same.

There are many Western countries that have active drafts (or, like Germany, appear to be considering one). For young men in those countries, the draft is less a fear and more a certainty.

And of course, the Ukraine situation where men are marched to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands, is evidently possible. Even some risk of that should count for quite a lot.

One could also make the argument that any war requiring a mandatory draft is unjust. If the citizens are unwilling to fight for their country unless threatened with imprisonment or death, then you should allow them to surrender instead.

The only reason we don’t have a draft today is because we’re able to get by on a strictly volunteer basis. But I recall in the last few years there was a real worry within the US military because recruitment drives had been massively down. Most of the enthusiastic new blood comes out of red states and the cultural shift in favor of blue policies left a lot of the youth feeling apathetic. Trump’s election a second time (or rather Kamala’s loss perhaps) was able to buck the trend a bit, and you saw recruitment spike back up.

what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like

It looks what we were doing before the mid 20th century. Young women are handed specific literature and media at a young age which makes them want to be mothers. In school, they take classes to help them to be mothers. They are told to behave in a way which is conducive to being mothers (meek, sensitive, humble, loving, &tc), and if they stray from that they are shamed. As they get older, they are looked down upon for not settling down. They are shown anti-spinster propaganda in female media. There were many Victorian guides for women penned, filled with pronatal propaganda. Women are sensitive to shame and so you don’t actually have to do a draft, you just have to successfully moralize natality. But that’s also a big difficulty, with all of our secular cultural institutions captured.

I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.

Will the implications ever become unignorable?

I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?

the whole problem will sort itself out

I've heard this sentiment before, and the central problem with it is that the time frame is ludicrous. Evolution can work quickly, but it needs at least a few generations in order to spread reproduction-conductive-genes throughout the population. Before our reproductive behaviour is done sorting itself out we'll already have a demographic collapse on our hands destabilizing enough to rock the foundations of every modern Western and Far Eastern state (not Africa, mind, which is rapidly making even the worst fears of overpopulation seem optimistic).

Now I can only speak for myself, but I quite like those states – I think they're the best, actually, and it'd be a shame to see them go.

A lot of people are not merely invested in humanity continuing to exist but in society as it exists now, or something close to it or better, to also continue forth. If you make it so only welfare-dependent religious nuts and low impulse control criminals get to reproduce you will get a society of low impulse control criminals after they have done away with all the meek welfare-dependent religious nuts.

You do have to be invested in a better future, though, or at least a not-so-bad future. If you don't have children yourself and you don't care that it will all go to shit after you're not around anymore then, yes, who cares.

In particular, the highest-fertility subpopulations in the west right now are the Amish and Haredim, neither of whom are able to sustain technological civilisation. The post-2010 social media driven fertility drop has pushed Mormons below replacement level, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews the only ethnic group with both above-replacement fertility and calculus.

Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.

It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.

That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.

The danger is pension schemes result in a siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly, rendering it even more difficult for the young generation to reproduce.

I think these cascading effects are very dangerous. People just assume the situation will sort itself out, but it can just… not. Civilisations and species can just be wiped off the face of the earth forever. It happens all the time.

siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly,

This seems like the start of an argument to means test Social Security, which has historically been a very unpopular argument. But it may be one that has to be made, absent Fully Automated Gay Space Communism happening within my lifetime.

Yeah, the social security situation is bad because there is an implicit promise there that doesn't hold up: that the value of labour in boomers' time is equivalent (or close enough) to the value of labour in #currentyear. This assumption is broken because in grandpa's time, labour was cheap, because there was a better ratio of dependents to productive people. So the idea that "boomers paid into social security, therefore they should be able to take out what they put in" doesn't really hold to the extent a naive appeal to fairness would imply.

I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.

The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.

The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.

"Minimum viable industrial society" is a very interesting question. What don't you think could scale down to that level?

Sorry, tangent, but this is really fascinating to me.

Semiconductors are the standard example. You can build a transistor in a cave with a box of scraps, but it's going to be pretty limited, and it's going to depend on material you can't just scrounge up in a random field somewhere. The actual production we do today involves collecting materials from 30+ sites around the globe, refining them with a few dozen different chemical processes each with their own feedstocks, and then brought through several layers of actual manufacturing of tools until eventually you get the final output.

Each individual step could theoretically scale down (though you'd have trouble trying to send One Dude or even Ten Dudes to run the extremely complex mine in the middle of nowhere, if only for 'and then they went stir crazy' problems. But there's still a ton of steps, they require drastically different areas of expertise, and in some cases they're just geographically separate. You don't just need a rare earths industry and quartz mining and a power plant and a metalworking field. You don't even just need the chemical feedstocks and mining tool production system and oil refining and tool development. You need all of them and hundreds more besides, and it's recursive.

Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low. If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users. Some stuff that might be possible might not be viable. Others get friction just because the level of demand changes: in our world, there's several people who have full-time jobs making nothing but M3x10 standard screws, phillips-head. Boring, but good work if you can get it. In a world of a 100 people, there's one guy who has to make every single necessary screw, and he's making up 1% of your workforce rather than 0.000000001% of your population even assuming he still has all the automation because he has to keep up with it and swap things out.

There are technical solutions or psuedo-solutions to some of these matters, but many of them have their own minimum threshold: if you want AI-powered robots, you need the semiconductor industry and TSMC and a whole industry of brushless motors and servos and yada; if you want to use genetic engineering to bypass some of the pharmaceutical industry's issues, you need a lot of infrastructure built toward that. ABS injection molding can be modeled as a tool for letting a small number of workers make a truly astronomical number of output parts, but requires its own (admittedly relatively small) industrial base... and it's also one that only make sense for unit sizes over 10k, because if you just need five of a thing, it takes more time to produce with ABS injection than it would to vacuum form, urethane cast, or cut with a CNC.

Some of these technical solutions are, in turn, their own problems in a 'minimum viable society' question. We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food, but that's downstream of mechanization and automation, geographically distributed crop production, bulk-scale automated storage, so on. You don't need GPS to run tractors, but you probably do need GPS or RTK-likes ground-only solutions to run semi-automated tractors. You don't need exact rubbers or metal formulations, but you do need pretty exacting ones to make the modern super-sized tractors. You probably do need chemical fertilizers and widely-available forced-water hydration, which isn't a big ask but still takes somebody building it.

I'm not committed to the 500m number, or to any number. There's a real bad habit of people looking at the past to just assume that the western workforce of a time was necessary to produce that time, and that's clearly not true.

But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.

If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users.

But why would you need to do this?

A modern industrial society arguably needs the ability to make microchips. Today we have a big race to the top to design and make newer and better microchips to make more powerful phones and better missile guidance systems, but does our hypothetical MVIS need the best microchips or the best phones or the best cruise missiles to be considered truly industrial?

It seems to me a society that was planning for, say, a Mars colonization, or a Pacific Island post-apocalyptic nation-state, would aim for the lower-hanging 80% capability 20% effort tools. If cell phone technology has to go back to what it was in 2006, are we saying they aren't really industrial?

I'm open to that argument! It just doesn't seem self-evident to me.

Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low.

I think a lot of the problems with things like "unit prices" and "production lines" are ~solved with additive manufacturing though, yeah? We don't use additive manufacturing to do everything today because

  • inertia, and
  • lots of times it is not the cheapest and fastest way to do things at scale

But if you aren't doing things at scale, your economy would collapse from "blender factory, toaster factory, microwave factory" to "home appliance fab" and the economy of scale (or lack thereof) would make those things much more expensive.

Similarly, there are entire swaths of jobs and industries we can cut and still be industrial. Nobody really needs 200 different kinds of fruits and nuts; if you've scaled down to a million people and you're really on your own, you likely don't need commercial trains, cars, and aircraft, or at least not at the scale we do today; either you have a somewhat dispersed population with cars or a close-knit population with subway.

And if you're inheriting our current tech and knowledge stack, there are large parts of the workforce you can probably eliminate. You'll never need people employed as entertainers ever again - that's not to say that your economy wouldn't support it (it might) but our efficient industrial economy allows for a lot of "slack" that we can take up in our scenario.

A massive amount of our population is involved in K-12 education, and frankly we can probably dispense with most of that, too. If we were in an oil rich part of the world, we could run our entire society off of oil and ignore the entire supply chain needed for solar/nuclear/etc. - we'd need maybe 20 million barrels annually? We can do that with 2 or 3 good offshore rigs.

We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food

We can probably do it more efficiently with a smaller society, because our supply chain is plausibly smaller. If we're okay with eating POTATOES, we can have, what, 100 farmers feed a million people? (100 farmers x 1000 acres x 30,000 pounds of potatoes per acre = >8 pounds of potatoes per day). That's overly efficient, we're targeting 5 pounds per day, so some of those people can work on something else to make life interesting. People can hunt or fish for meat, and raise herb gardens.

But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.

This I do tend to agree with. It would be a much poorer society! And I do think it would be extremely hard to get off the ground and rebuild an industrial society with just a million or 500 million people. But if we're talking about an attempt at an intentionally bootstrapped self-sufficiency scenario, I suspect the number could be lower than 500 million. Perhaps we're thinking of very different scenarios, though!

Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return. Several different kinds of engineer to create the circuits and fuel and engine and craft, right? Support staff. Miners to mine coal and ore, refiners and smelters to make steel for parts and silicon for chips, drillers for oil and refiners for the fuel, construction workers to build their homes and the launch pads and everything else, farmers to grow food to feed all the miners/drillers/refiners/construction workers/support staff/engineers. Doctors to care for all of the above. Et cetera- what about entertainment? Other desires? Is reaching the moon the sole telos of this civilization, and every job aimed at that goal? If not, the scale balloons as people take other jobs towards other goals. And I've left off huge numbers of other factors and 'needs.' Some could be left out or leapfrogged, but not easily.

An industrial civilization is a massive pyramid. One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

There's some Greater Variability there too. Written language only developed independently a few times, so think of Sequoyah- once the idea was demonstrated he sat down and spent years developing the Cherokee syllabary. He had the ability to create written language, but not the spark. In the thousand years before him, how many of his people had the ability and not the spark, and how many lacked even the ability? A bigger population gives you more rolls of the dice to generate people who even have the possibility of doing new things.

Or look at the Congo and Empire of Dust. Or Google Maps of certain parts of Johannesburg 10 years ago versus today. Or Detroit, 1950 versus today (though in some ways it's recovered from rock bottom). Without the right kind of support, the right sort of culture, an industrial civilization decays quite rapidly, and maintaining that requires a lot of people.

Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return

I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society (...is Earth not industrialized today?) but I am not convinced doing that needs a large amount of people, either. Your minimum viable orbital rocket company (RocketLab) has less than 3,000 employees, a third of a percent of a million-person society. My assumption is that expertise is relatively resource-cheap - after a certain small point, more people are mostly doing things faster, not qualitatively differently.

As regards the supply chain: chip fabs don't need to be big, Polar Semiconductor is operating with staff in the hundreds (likely). Smallest viable mining, farming, and construction operation is a single guy, so that scales very efficiently. USA Rare Earth has less than 200 employees, so it's possible to do refining at a very small level. Doctors are not a high-density need, and neither is entertainment.

One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.

I probably should have stipulated that I wasn't imagining a society built from the neolithic on up from scratch, although that's interesting too. More like "how few people could we export to a remote Pacific Island and have them run a vertically integrated industrial society." I think all of your concerns about "how would we produce an Einstein on a seven-digit population" are all worthy objections, but I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."

Realistically, I think the answer varies tremendously based on the population's demographic pyramid. But with a healthy or at least not inverted population pyramid I am not convinced the number is very large.

I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society

I was building off Gattsuru's example with chips and rockets; Industrial Revolution era England is the eponymous industrial society with much lower requirements than a modern industrial society.

I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."

Maintenance is quite hard and some forms of knowledge are easier to lose than others. See again, the Congo and Empire of Dust. At the higher scale than that, high-quality machining is apparently quite difficult to automate and a form of knowledge that's easy to lose.

Precise details and Fermi estimates will depend on exactly what technologies you want the minimum viable industrial society to have, of course.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out

You should not expect that we will do absolutely nothing, though, you should expect that we will continue to progressively structure society around the needs of the elderly as they age because a democratic society with an inverted population pyramid is a society where the elderly have the advantage of both wealth and rank and numbers. And so it will be that the children of the people who are having kids will be forced to support not only their parents but also the people who had no kids in their dotage as well. In so doing we will discourage the birth of further children, as those in their prime childbearing years are laden by heavier and heavier financial burdens to care for the needs of the aged, which increasingly will be thrown back on society as the generations that had children give way to generations that have no natural support in their old age.

Forcibly draft men to die for their country and no one bats an eye

I love these types of complaints so much because I can't tell if they just exist in a bubble or are being purposely stupid. Tons of people oppose drafting on a moral basis and whenever it gets done, even in immediately existential circumstances like literally defending your country from the approaching Russian hordes who are coming right now, right this moment with no time to ignore, there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.

Like it's so filled with controversy that it's the literal first line on Wikipedia

Mobilization to the Armed Forces of Ukraine to combat the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in military, political, and public controversies in the country.

The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):

Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.

"The Russians are coming right now to destroy our country" is an obvious immediate direct threat. If we don't fight right now, it's over as a nation.

Meanwhile "in the next few generations we'll have the same population we did a few decades ago" both isn't obvious or immediate, and to many people isn't even seen as a threat. Tons of citizens would look at that as a good thing, they think that more people = more pie being divided up = smaller piece for them and don't grasp the concept that larger populations tend to grow the pie faster than the share of pie shrinks. If you employ the logic for high skill immigrants, then you should be able to easily understand their view point when it comes to having more youth!

Concerns about overpopulation isn't just common, it's the more believed view for the US itself and the large majority of belief when applied to the world for Americans.

This is true when Americans are asked about the U.S.: 47% say overpopulation in the U.S. is a very or somewhat serious problem and 41% say low birth rates are. And it's especially true when Americans are asked about the world as a whole: 62% say overpopulation is a big problem globally and 37% say low birth rates are.

And weirdly enough, their logic is looking to actually become true in the near future if AGI and full automation actually happens. Each new person really does just become someone else to share the robots with in that scenario. Why would you ever want to encourage the population to grow if that just means you have to share more?

And weirdly enough, their logic is looking to actually become true in the near future if AGI and full automation actually happens. Each new person really does just become someone else to share the robots with in that scenario. Why would you ever want to encourage the population to grow if that just means you have to share more?

Would having to share even be relevant at that point? You could probably produce enough resources to satisfy pretty much everyone. We already produce enough food to solve world hunger several times over. The pie isn't some limited resource.

"The Russians are coming right now to destroy our country" is an obvious immediate direct threat. If we don't fight right now, it's over as a nation.

Meanwhile "in the next few generations we'll have the same population we did a few decades ago" both isn't obvious or immediate, and to many people isn't even seen as a threat.

Those individuals are wrong in my eyes. South Korea is on track to lose 85% of its population. This is pretty catastrophic, and has negative implications going forward primarily with civilizational downscaling like @professorgerm & @gattsuru has explained. And there isn't much reason to believe that not gonna keep going down the toilet.

For an analogy, here is how i see this. The draft is like getting a seizure, birth rates are like a being obese & eating unhealthy. Obviously, you need to treat a seizure right then there to save the person. But being obese, even if it doesn't end you immediately, is still something you ought to curve because obesity will catch up to you eventually.

But even besides the negative consequences, its just a net bad to see humans and families dwindle, in the same way many mourn and are sad about extinct animals.

Tons of citizens would look at that as a good thing, they think that more people = more pie being divided up = smaller piece for them and don't grasp the concept that larger populations tend to grow the pie faster than the share of pie shrinks.

Also they might be correct in that line of thinking. Several of the pies in our lives are of fixed sizes, like the nature and natural resources pies. Other pies are very slow to grow like housing supply.

Mmm, pie.

there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.

And yet it's still implemented, eagerly and enforced by state violence against men by governments who are typically hyper-sensitive to the barest hint of coercion. Natural state of the world, I guess. While "birth conscription" is so far outside the Overton window that I can't say I've ever heard it seriously argued for. Scoffing loudly at the idea of something being a double standard doesn't make it not a double standard.

Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.

It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.

Conscription for everyone or no one would be trivial examples of a fair solution, the status quo isn't fair.

It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.

Congrats, you've recreated the mainstream liberal feminist stance on it. The "women should register" crowd is one branch, and the "no draft should exist to begin with" crowd is another pretty loud. Here's the ACLU as well if you question it being mainstream. They've sued over the gendered draft on several occasions.

Funny enough this was debated even back when the equal rights amendment was being seriously considered, with opponents to the ERA saying that ending sex discrimination could one day lead to women in the military and the draft. One of the reasons it has stayed as just a proposal.

So, that's in a country that doesn't actually have active conscription now or anytime soon, so the stakes are low. In countries where conscription is active (or likely to become so in the near future), like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, there's a lot of feminist-rhetoric opposition to draft equality.

The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.

If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."

By comparison, if women start abandoning or delaying the childbearing role, there's no immediate danger, you won't even feel the pinch for decades. There's no enemy that will march over you in the end. And likewise, conscripting them doesn't mean sending them to a distant battlefield to fight on a frontline. They would continue to exist in your society, living fairly normal lives for the 20+ years it takes to raise all those kids.

Plus, the Faustian bargain it presents has some upsides: more women in the workforce means more economic productivity, and more money to spend on luxuries. And hell, fold sexual revolution into the deal and you get more sex for pleasure, with fewer duties tied to it, and able to optimize the activity for things other than procreation.

By the time anyone asks "wait, who is raising the next generation to carry us into the future" you've already reconfigured your whole economy around other pursuits.

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

And something small to consider: if some men will go to pretty serious lengths to get out of a draft, what might women do to render themselves ineligible as brood mares?

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

As I pointed out with my comment, there's also a big question of convincing people the threat even exists to begin with. Right now more Americans believe the opposite is true and that overpopulation is a larger threat than low birth rates. Large amounts of people fundamentally believe in a limited amount of wealth and resources in society and that having more people just cuts into their own share. Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs", so I'm pretty sure this divide is just because birth rates has become memetic among parts of the online right and not reflecting a deeper view about growing the pie.

Meaning even if you convince society to press women into some sort of top down birthing related authoritarianism, it's likely going to be getting them into having even less kids.

"Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs""

This seems very obviously false. Do you actually believe this? That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down. I'm far from a conservative, but I've heard the second plenty (from people on both sides) and never, even once, heard the first.

That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.

Those are literally the same thing. If you believe immigrants working jobs will drive down prices like that then you believe the pie share of pay shrinks faster than the pie size grows when you add more people in. And this of course also is accompanied with the belief that the pie share shrinking on the employee end doesn't have a positive impact on the emplouee and consumer ends whose pie would grow from paying lower prices. Now the former can be true of specific industries if immigrants are more likely to work those but the corollary to that is that there are industries they're less likely to work in so society wise it should balance out unless you generally don't think the overall society pie scales to match additional labor.

Which of course is also another part of how nativism thinks the exact same way as the unionists where they don't understand, or just don't care, that rent seeking from workers has a negative impact on everyone else in the country. Although saying they "think the same way" is improper, greedy unionists and nativists are often the same exact group to begin with!

OK, as I explained to the other commenter, I think you're wrong, but I understand why you think they're the same. On first reading it seemed like you must have missed a sentence.

That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.

office-theyre-the-same-picture.jpg

The price of labor will be forced down if the pie is fixed. If the pie is growing and immigrants are adding more jobs as well as more goods and services, it means that wages throughout the economy offer more buying power.

They're really not the same.

We have zero sum and non-zero sum relationships with everyone. Simplifying from a nation to a single company as an example:

Everyone from the owner down to janitor have a shared stake in the company staying solvent, but there are non zero sum relationships too. The owner would like to pay the janitor the smallest amount that still gets his floors cleaned and toilets unblocked. Part of the janitor's bargaining power is that while he won't work for a peanut, no one else will either. If the owner can pull some strings and get access to a bunch of workers who will work for a peanut then the janitor had better either accept the peanut or be out off a job. They are aligned in some ways, but not in others. This is true no matter how much value the new cheap workers add to the company or how much of the savings could potentially be passed on to the consumer.

If we dismiss the janitor's complaints as a dumb yokel failing to understand that immigrants are adding to the economy and increasing his buying power, we're the ones not understanding the whole picture.

The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.

If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."

So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?

There are many countries that have conscription during peacetime, with varying levels of invasion threat. The difference you refer to doesn't actually exist.

Yes there's mandatory military service in a number of countries, some of whom haven't been to war in a long time.

But I note that "service during peacetime", BY DEFINITION, has far lower risk of death, so the costs/consequences are much less severe for the males involved anyway.

Far lower risk of death than what? Especially considering that peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly.

Nevertheless, my point against your original argument stands. Conscription doesn't require immediate threat, so why should childbearing service?

I mean, you just said it. "Peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly."

You don't know precisely when you might need your standing army. So the threat is also uncertain, but when it arrives, it is immediate.

I can't easily imagine a scenario where there's some clear and present need to start pumping out kids to deal with population shortfall. Its always going to be some abstract risk in the future... there's no enemy that can choose to attack at any time that you're hedging against.

Its specifically this factor that makes the problem pernicious.

Note, I'm not ethically in favor of conscription, either.

It's worth noting that the UK did draft women for war work in WW2 - including heavy manual work that was close to the limit of what women were physically capable of. My grandmother was drafted into the Women's Land Army at 17, and did a farm job that would have been done by a man in peacetime, and that essentially no woman would have done voluntarily.

I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.

It's even worse than that, because we're at the stage of decline where a large chunk of sub-replacement fertility women are past childbearing age. Further, pretty much every traditional culture from the dawn of civilisation mandates that the elderly be respected, which, in the presence of modern pension schemes, just translates to "let others waste their life on kids that will have to support you anyway even though you're not related to them." Back in ye olden days, when all these norms were developed, they were more sustainable partly because the population pyramid was actually shaped like a pyramid in the first place, but also because in the absence of modern medical care, the elderly are quite cheap to care for: you just feed them a small amount of food each day until they die, and that's that. There was no way to blow the family inheritance on treatments to keep grandma alive for another 2 years, and certainly no state-mandated financial shenanigans to make this happen at scale even for grandmas that don't have grandkids.

Realistically, nothing will happen because our civilisation is not adapted to be able to address these questions and would rather end itself than do so.

We can force men to die, but can't even ask women to become mothers

Veteran vs Mother is great like for like comparison. Fairly obvious that mothers get a worse deal.

War sucks. Therefore, social norms and economic incentives are disproportionately generous towards veterans. Doesn't matter if they never saw action. Doesn't matter if the profession has lower mortality rates than logging or fisheries. They're heroes and must be thanked for their service every 5 minutes. They get holidays, movies, medals and awards. Free healthcare, free college, VA checks as pension and discounts at every store.

What do mothers get ? A mother loses between 5-20 years of her life depending on her involvement with the kids. Career women are forced into a ceiling. Pretty women lose their beauty. Complicated pregnancies can come with a lifetime of physical and emotional trauma. We used to treat mothers like heroes. Communities pitched in to help during the difficult years. To raise your children into well-adjusted adults was a source of pride. Not anymore. Now, the incentives have reversed. Media has stopped portraying motherhood in a positive light and perceived standards for parenting have reached impossible levels.

Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.

women != mothers. Society has empathy for beautiful young women, not for neurotic mothers who're at their wits end.

It's carrots and sticks. We can talk about sticks that coerce young women into become mothers. But, there need to be more carrots for mothers. Maybe we need stop asking what mothers can do for society, and start asking society what it can do for mothers.

This actually a really good write up, and not something I thought about. I dont think mothers get a worse deal, but they are definitely under appreciated!

Being a mother is supposed to be a rewarding activity in and of itself. She does not "lose" years of her life. She spends them caring for her children, watching them grow and teaching them about the world. Time will pass however she choses to spend it. The soldier is the one making a sacrifice.

But as you say, the narrative has shifted. What matters now is travelling, partying, and getting a degree. Doing this is freedom. Parenthood (for both sexes really) is something to be postponed for as long as possible while adolescence is romanticized.

I doubt forcing women into pregnancy would do anything except cement the idea of motherhood as a prison. The implication being that it is so bad that no sane person would do it voluntarily. But it does sadden me that so many seem to see family and adulthood as antagonistic to enjoyment and self actualization.

They get holidays, movies, medals and awards. Free healthcare, free college, VA checks as pension and discounts at every store.

In the US, at least, this is not true. The GI Bill is not "free college", you only get (cheap) healthcare and a pension if you did a full 20 years ( or are classified as disabled,.which granted, has turned into widespread grift), and "discounts at every store" is a gross exaggeration. Maybe a free coffee on Veterans Day.

The reflexive "Thank you for your service" does annoy the hell out of me.

You'll have better luck drafting women for war, especially since it's rare even for men.

The more society pushes women to act like men, the more like men they will act. Much of modern society heavily encourages women to act more like men in a variety of ways. Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings. They should wear jeans and t-shirts most of the time. They should sleep around a fair bit in their 20s, and get the same jobs as their male peers. If they do choose to give birth, they should work those same jobs that are also worked by men right up until they're having contractions, and should come back when their babies are six weeks old. This is even true of women heavy professions like teaching! They're leaving their two month old infants with strangers all day to go to work. This is not appealing! But women who take a year or two off to raise their infants are also isolated, because we have no villages in much of the West. Societies that show such distain for motherhood don't deserve babies.

I suppose we could trial a military base for new mothers, where pregnant women are assigned a cohort to bond with, do exercise and nutrition classes together, and they get a housing discount or can move to a government compound with their husbands. They and their husband and baby can move around to various places where the US has interests every few years until their babies are all old enough for school. I might have signed up for that deal.

Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings.

That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.

I'd be willing to say they've been androgenized.

The current educational system isn't particularly well suited to women, as is seen by it instilling the idea they aren't ready to have children until they're 30.

Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up". The curve was more generous than I would have liked, sure, and there were a lot of loopholes and "accommodations" and second chances; a lot of those also turned out to primarily benefit those who lacked consistency and conscientiousness, as at a "more hardcore" university you would not have gotten the allowance to strike out your lowest homework grade or have a TA dispatched to invigilate your stinky two weeks unshowered self in a separate room taking the exam two hours later than everyone else because you overslept.

You can maybe make the "feminisation" claim about school (K-12, for Americans), but even there the story seems complicated: at first glance not being smacked with a ruler if you fail to sit upright with your back straight or have crooked handwriting anymore surely makes less of a difference for the conscientious and obedient girls. I'm more on board with the "boys used to be able to engage in fistfights during recess without having the cops called, which helped them sit still later" explanation.

Citation needed, for such a bold sweeping claim. I have taught CS at a fairly high-tier US school for a long enough period of time, and we did not hand out As if you just "turn up".

Maybe not at your school, but Harvard (hardly a no-name example) currently awards something like 85% of its grades as 'A's. It's gotten bad enough that the faculty plan on capping the number of 'A' grades handed out starting next year, which has spilled a nontrivial amount of ink in arguments back and forth. Yale is also considering similar actions.

I don't think it's quite universal (it seems more an issue at top-tier schools), but it is often acknowledged as a problem.

I think that's silly. Universities should teach material, not create rat races. If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.

If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.

Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.

Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.

Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.

The university system hasn’t made it harder. In fact they’ve been actively dumbing down the curriculum. Study time haas been dropping since 1961 (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15954/w15954.pdf) and if the share of A’s has been going up as well, those A’s are easier to earn in 2026 than in 1966.

I think the only thing that would solve the problem is to have students forced to take national exams to show competence. If you’re giving A’s to kids that don’t study, you will get caught when your school gave them A’s in science and they don’t understand very basic science like germ theory.

The college system desperately needs reform, but capping As is a bad solution which can make it even worse.

I took a class where As were capped via a downward curve. If you knew the material, but made a few careless mistakes or struggled early in the semester, you’d end with a bad grade.

Another class, the material was easy, but the exams were difficult in ways that would never matter in the real world, like convoluted phrasing.

In both cases, giving everyone As would’ve better reflected their competence, and not caused unnecessary stress.

The best option is to have a class-based pass/fail, and then leave actual ‘class rank’ as a provided metric that exists solely for dean’s list stuff and a student’s own reference / pride.

If you want to put on your Goldman Sachs internship application that you were first in whatever linear algebra class, or in political science 101 out of 200 students, then you can, but it’s up to you.

Employers are free to ask for it if they want (I think for law they do this pretty often). But it’s not grade. It’s provided as a rank, 27/31 style, you can compute the percentile if you’d like.

More comments

As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse.

A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.

Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.

This feels like the male Feminist version of They Very Much Did Kill Jesus.

There's never been a draft in recorded history that wasn't opposed, protested, dodged, avoided, manipulated. People very much did bat some eyes during the Civil War in NYC, lynching some unfortunate blacks who happened to be on hand because they didn't want to fight for them. In WWI, gangster Lucky Luciano famously intentionally contracted gonorrhea to fail his draft board. Others overate to come into the exam obese, or paid off local doctors to diagnose bone spurs which kept them out of the army but didn't affect their athletic careers. Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.

History is full of people who flee the country, change their name, desert the army, fake injuries, malinger, goldbrick to get out of military service. We can find evidence of it going back thousands of years. If they didn't, the draft wouldn't be necessary. The whole point of a draft is because sending men to die for their country, in that particular war, is not popular enough to draw volunteers.

Donc, continuing our parallel for a second, the key ingredient to convincing men and women to sacrifice their lives for your civilization is making sure your civilization has a good enough story to make it worthwhile. You aren't getting a million zoomer boys into Iran without a draft, you aren't getting millions of babies out of zoomer girls without explaining to them a positive vision of what they are having those babies for.

Agreed with your points. One point I like to expand on is the following:

Politicians sons who supported the war joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and in more serious wars there is of course a long history of politicians and their friends landing desk jobs that mostly avoided combat while still getting a pretty uniform to pose in.

While draft dodging is the most visible part of avoiding service, probably even more common in history is manipulating exactly which job a person gets in the military to avoid the worst of combat. As an example, my granddad was actually considered unfit for service medically during WW2 but, since he knew not serving would be socially problematic post war, he became a military policeman stateside and went to dance halls with the wives of servicemen who actually risked life and limb for their country. This is also played out in propaganda since it's honestly true; while the infantryman faces the worst odds and dangers, more socially connected people generally get better postings and often get to stay behind. Even in states engaged in 'existential wars', you see this effect. Draft substitution in the Confederacy, connected people getting better positions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Overall, I suspect the man who actually 'does his duty' and faces maximal physical danger is a minority phenomenon; the big bulk of soldiers historically were coerced to a greater or lesser extent. I'll note in the US Civil War once people realized the war wasn't going to be short and that modern combat is very bloody, both sides immediately had to switch over to drafting people since volunteers were insufficient.

Undoubtedly people with influence manipulate the system to get their desired assignment. Some prefer to avoid danger as much as possible. But it's also not uncommon for ambitious young men to seek out roles with a degree of danger precisely because they want to be seen doing their part. Note that in the linked example, LBJ volunteered to fly as an observer on a bomber mission because he felt it was necessary to show his courage.

The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).

That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.

The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).

I've looked into this, and those are good counterexamples to the rule I posited in the above post. I suppose feudalism would be another case where the 2nd estate did most of the fighting despite being the ruling class. The early 20th century US was another example of all classes sharing a similar burden in terms of military service.

My point about more powerful people in society avoiding service, or altering their service to make it better, probably needs a bit more refinement and may be more circumstantial than universal. I do think my central point about coercion still stands though; all agrarian and industrial societies I know of relied on coercing a lot of men to do their gender roles in regards to military. People skirting those requirements is a perennial source of complaints.

That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.

They didn't really engage in illegal draft dodging; it was primarily about abusing legal ways of avoiding service, or making your service better. Substitution, being employed in an essential industry, and volunteering for a better assignment were common ways it was done. I don't know if statistically the planters were more likely to do this than the middle class or, when they were able to, the lower class, but it was a source of resentment that many Confederate men were able to skirt the draft and avoid the worst service.


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