site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   21930 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect.

Well if you ignore the long running small businesses that say they had to close because of the tariffs, the big industries that still had to pay billions of dollars and the prices increasing (or profits decreasing hurting competition and slowing growth) on many tariff impacted industries like canning, then yeah I guess you could say that nothing has happened. AI is pretty much singlehandedly carrying the American economy in growth now (this single sector making up >50% of GDP expansion) because everything else is struggling.

Even the Trump admin themselves is clearly aware that their tariffs raise prices given that they'll reverse them in more politically price sensitive areas.

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then where does the tariff lunch come from?

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure.

It's hard to buy that DOGE was even a halfway sincere effort when Musk was trawling around disrupting petty and widely considered to be highly successful programs like PEPFAR for pennies while going on Fox News and promising to increase social security one of the very few things anyone with any understanding of government knows is the actual drain on budget now.

To absolutely no one but a bunch of Internet retard's surprise, social security checks did not go up because of DOGE, the deficit is not solved, and one actually smart guy made a massive return on his whole life savings betting on the obvious.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

They made the same mistake that the Biden administration and progressives did, they thought being better than the other guy meant they were popular and everything they did justified. That they could ignore the basic fundamentals of politics and public relations in pursuit of their petty culture war grievances.

And because they're selected for the most extremist culture war obsessed retards, they're also all delusional along with that, like Greg Bovino's belief that there are >100 million illegal immigrants. The extremist idiocy combined with the firehouse effect and the average familiarity meme inevitably leads to bad PR moments cause even their best attempts to be moderate might look insane to the general public. They all start to think "Well certainly the general public agrees at least 50 million need to be deported right?"

Trump looks really really cool in the eyes of his base, just like Biden remained so popular among the Dems they couldn't admit his clear and blatant sundowning. But the people who matter in an election aren't the hyperpartisans who will suck your dick even if you slapped them with 1000% inflation, it's the fickle swing voters whose main argument for you is that you're slightly better than the alternative and the fickle partisan voters who can't even decide if they want to turn out to vote to begin with and those guys aren't dick sucking.

The 'weak' version of tariffs slightly increased inflation and the cost is almost entirely borne by American consumers and companies, as expected. Also, very predictably, SCOTUS struck down his use of 'emergency powers' which means that the government has to pay back hundreds of billions to companies.

The other problem with the tariffs is that they were retardly overbroad. This US tire plant had to shut down because Thai rubber was tariffed, even though rubber can't be grown in the US. The salutary effect of tariffs is supposed to be onshoring, but nothing much has happened; companies will just pinky promise Trump that they're totally planning to build more factories at home and quietly cancel once he's out of office. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US does have a strong manufacturing sector with extremely high productivity and value-add, like assembling airplanes.

DOGE was a great illustration of how the world actually works. Elon's boys effortlessly pushed their way past the weather nerds at NOAA, but they sure as hell didn't try that at CIA or the Pentagon, despite the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places. The whole project was a way to punish the faction of Trump's enemies that would respond to bullying with angry op-eds, not the ones that would actually kill him if he ever came after them. And the whole thing fell apart when Elon the extreme autist actually thought he was there to "transform Washington", lol.

Anyway, MAGA supporters are finding out (just like all of Trump's previous business partners and political allies) that Trump only looks out for Trump. He's now in full legacy mode. He couldn't give a fuck less what his supporters in Oklahoma are paying for gas and groceries when he could be the guy that makes Cuba a new US territory.

The thing with the tariffs is that the reaction (as measured by the stock market) was so strong and so swift that Trump instantly buckled. That makes it hard to tell how much the actual long-term economic or political damage would have been. It's almost a perfect paradox- We can be perfectly safe that he'll never do tariffs, because the reaction would be so horrendous, so he's free to threaten them all he wants.

But also, yes, if there's anything to make a trade war look trivial, it's an actual shooting war. The Iran war is taking up so much space that it's hard to think about other things.

It was the bond market reaction that started the panic inside the admin.

I really wish I knew the specific lines they used to pull Trump back from the brink in whatever way would be least damaging to his ego. It couldn't have been easy considering that tariffs were his lifelong obsession (yes, Trump actually has some political principles).

Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war?

His polling was suffering before because of other errors and his general off-putting and erratic nature.

This is just the bit that Trump loyalists can't really digest or rationalize.

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure

DOGE is either, as @aeqno says, an attempt to punish clients of the ancien regime in which case I suppose it could be said to have put them in some pain (until a post-Trump White House restores their position) or it's an attempt to cut the deficit meaningfully.

If it's an attempt to cut the deficit (by $2 trillion according to Elon) it was always retarded populist slop because we know where the budget goes. The Boomercon businessman plan seems to imagine some ruthless guy who will cut other people's social spending while leaving the Boomer and their social spending alone. There's a reason the Paul Ryan fiscal wing is dead: boomer Republicans killed them.

If it didn't work for Ryan, why would it work now? Elon can't cut anything that'd make Trump unpopular and Trump has a) given up on fiscal conservatism and b) not really going to push through laws to fix his position anyway.

This is just the mirror image of the progressive-technocrat plan: people who know their policies are unpopular and so are trying to do an end-run around politics.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project?

As both a formal and practical matter the "internet-right" doesn't have a political project (it's been overrated since the initial claim that Trump won because of memes). Trump has a political project and the internet-right's job is to try to cajole that elephant in the direction they want.

But a stubborn elephant is hard to move. Most people didn't foresee that Trump had such a durable fascination with things like tariffs.

A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote. I have not yet had time to read the decision yet, but this seems to upend a lot of norms around voting in the US.

Corporations, partnerships, trusts, limited liability companies, and other “artificial entities” have the right to vote in Delaware elections under some circumstances, a judge said in a novel ruling Tuesday.

Judge Craig A. Karsnitz rejected an ACLU challenge to a charter permitting voting in local elections by the entities that own most of the property in the Town of Fenwick Island, one of several municipalities in the state with similar provisions. Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”

My immediate question is what... what the hell? This seems like a fairly bold decision on the part of the judge, and one that normally would not be issued by a state Superior court judge. Is there some kind of inside baseball that I'm missing here? I know that Delaware is very friendly to corporate interests, but this seems like an escalation. Is this a decision that's meant to be overturned?

Oh this is a terrible article. Non-human entities already can vote - in certain circumstances, such as for example shareholder's vote - if an entity owns shares, it is entitled to voting rights in accordance to their shares. It doesn't mean they get to vote in presidential elections and such - not everything that is called a "vote" is the same, and the asshats at Bloomberg deliberate confuse the issue, because they are partisan assholes. In this particular case, certain tiny town has a provision that property owners can vote in municipal elections - which makes sense, I mean they pay all the taxes (most municipalities live on property taxes) why wouldn't they be able to vote? ACLU claimed only human property owners get to vote, which may be a sensible approach, but not what the charter of that particular town took. ACLU wanted to force them to change their charter, because apparently "liberty" nowadays means "do what I say, or else". The court told them to take a hike. That's what happened, not "corporations have a right to vote".

That was the inevitable end game in the whole corporate personhood thing.

  • -14

That ruling did not give corporations rights. It preserved the rights of individuals acting as a group.

You talking about all the hoopla over Citizens United? I remember that case pretty well. Citizens United was decided based on a first amendment framework which supersedes congresses power to legislate.

You’d need a constitutional amendment to reverse CU and there’s no way that’s happening. Even so, it’s unclear that an amendment to overturn CU would be a good idea. If you actually read the decision (and let’s be honest, 99.99% of people have not), it’s a good piece of judicial thought and reasoning. Even the ACLU thinks CU was a good piece of jurisprudence.

(You can read the case here) CU was a major decision that impacts a ton of things, including the upcoming SCOTUS battles over net neutrality and ‘digital first amendment’/‘the right to post’ arguments.

This was the gist of it: individuals have first amendment rights. No argument there. Two people, working together, collectively have individual first amendment rights and as a group they have a right to expression. Same with 4 people all the way up 400,000 people, etc. So we can agree that groups of people working together have a collective set of first amendment rights. This concept already has a long and detailed history in the US; for example during the civil rights movement, people tried to shut down the NAACP/SPLC/SBLC/etc., by attacking them on an institutional level. SCOTUS (rightfully) said ‘Lol. Nice try, but no’.

So then take a step back: groups of people organized together under a common purpose have first amendment rights, we should all agree there. But isn’t a ‘company’ from a mom and pop restaurant up to Google and Amazon, simply a collection of people organized for a common goal? Just because a company is for-profit, it doesn’t mean that the government should be free to restrict their speech.

There’s a lot of people that try to be clever and say ‘corporations are people’, but this willfully misses the point. The real point is that corporations are simply a collection of people and those people have basic civil rights, so a group of people also has those same rights. Restricting political speech by the government simply because a group of people are pursuing profit doesn’t pass the ‘strict scrutiny’ test that all impingement to first amendment must pass. So SCOTUS struck down the FEC law.

It was a good decision. Keep in mind the alternatives: whatever the ruling was in CU v FEC was also going to be applied to groups you might care about, such as NAACP, EFF, Sierra Club, etc.

Now what about ‘commercial speech?’ Commercial speech falls into a weird category called ‘intermediate scrutiny’ where companies do face some restrictions but are largely free to say what they want. The important part is that CU v FEC specifically ‘only’ covers political speech. Commercial speech just wasn’t part of the debate.

At the end of the day, look at why people get upset at CU v FEC. It’s always the exact same argument dressed up slightly differently: “somebody is going to say something or believe in something I don’t like!” It’s always, “but Amazon is going to oppose Medicare for all!” Or “that power plant is going to advocate for coal!” People that fight against CU want to use it as a way to suppress speech they disagree with. That’s precisely why we have a first amendment and why it’s so important.

Any legislative act to reverse CU is going to be judged against the fact that it’s actively stripping first amendment rights from a group. Any judicial review by SCOTUS is going to be framed as the court stripping rights from people. People clearly want to argue that CU is bad, but pretend you are arguing before SCOTUS: what’s your legal theory behind why certain groups of people should have their speech suppressed? There’s not any really good arguments.

what’s your legal theory behind why certain groups of people should have their speech suppressed

Because by creating LLC they have deliberately separated themselves from the company. Or more specifically if the person doesn't wear the brunt of the liability and is shielded, then stripping the corporation of rights doesn't infringe on the owner's rights.

Notably, the Citizens United organization is a 501(c)4, not an LLC. If you think that "stripping the corporation of rights" isn't a constitutional infringement, the ACLU is also a 501(c)4: can we silence them during election season too?

Yes to your points and also the matter under dispute was if the Federal government can ban a documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The government's representatives were arguing that they can and additionally have the power to ban books that have even a small portion political advocacy. Even one sentence of political advocacy is enough to trigger this power. They claimed they hold these powers during election season but not during other times.

It is a travesty that four justices agreed that the government can strip us of our first ammendment rights if a group makes something critical of Hillary Clinton before an election.

This sounds like clickbait. And… sûre enough.

Bloomberg link to opinion

Non-Bloomberg, official link (though it's still one of those infuriating "secured" PDFs that forbid copying text out of them)

The Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution states, in its entirety: "All elections shall be free and equal." The clause is eloquent in its simplicity but lacks specific direction in application.

Under Delaware's Home Rule statute for municipalities, the State of Delaware defines "qualified voters" to mean "those persons who, under the terms of a municipal charter, shall be authorized to vote in elections within that municipal corporation".

Laws enacted by the Delaware General Assembly, such as Fenwick's Charter, are presumed to be constitutional. To overcome this presumption of constitutionality, Plaintiff must provide "clear and convincing evidence" that there is no set of circumstances under which the contested status could be constitutional. Plaintiff argues that I should subject Fenwick's Charter to "strict scrutiny" review. However, Plaintiff framed its Complaint not as an equal protection or due process claim, but rather as a declaratory judgment action. Under Delaware law, courts apply a "sliding scale" in voting rights cases. Where the state's alleged burden on voting is not severe, the state's intervention need only have served a legitimate interest. Indeed, Delaware courts have found a rational basis for expanding the voting franchise.36

36See Dupont v. Mills; see also Del. Op. Atty. Gen. 09-IB05 (finding the precedent of cases applying rational basis test to nonresident vote dilution cases to be "overwhelming").

The Delaware General Assembly has expressly authorized, by way of charter, voting on behalf of entity property owners in several jurisdictions other than Fenwick.37 [Ditto for special elections of annexation in Wilmington.] While this is not dispositive of this case, it does show that the General Assembly's treatment of Fenwick is not unique, different, or unusual.

37See, e. g., Town of Henlopen Acres, City of Rehoboth Beach, Town of Dewey Beach.

Plaintiff's ultimate argument appears to be that voters who are human beings are being deprived of their rights, or at least having the impact of those voting rights diluted, by the votes of artificial entities—or, put more bluntly, such artificial entities should not be entitled to vote. In its Answering Brief, Plaintiff devotes a significant amount of its argument to emphasizing the words person, people, humans, citizens, popular, and the like. In my view, even if those words as used in statutes and cases are acknowledged to be people-centric or person-centric, that does not support a legal argument that the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution supports Plaintiff's expansion of traditional vote dilution law to encompass what it calls the "debasement" of "the right of human voters" through "artificial entity voting".

Trusts, partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations are expressly recognized as "persons" in the Delaware Code.…

I need not rule in this case as to whether entity property owners are constitutionally required to have their votes count or constitutionally precluded from doing so. Rather, I need only rule whether Plaintiff has met its burden of providing clear and convincing evidence that there is no set of circumstances under which Fenwick's Charter, as adopted and amended by the Delaware General Assembly, could be constitutional. It has not.

I appreciate that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware's policy of authorizing certain municipalities to allow voting on behalf of entity property owners. Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity, one vote. Plaintiff points to no other persuasive independent authority than the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution itself. And matters of policy are appropriately left to legislative bodies, not the courts.

A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote.

I'm not sure I would characterize the decision that way. Rather, I would say this:

A Delaware judge has ruled that the legislature can permit corporations to vote.

In other words, the judge is not saying that corporations must be permitted to vote. Rather, he's saying that if the legislature decides to give corporations a vote, it's not necessarily a constitutional problem.

The article you link to doesn't give much context, but I think I can make some guesses. First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents. Apparently the law at issue gave all property owners the right to vote in the election, as opposed to having the vote limited to year-round residents. This seems totally reasonable to me; the alternative is to have a small number of year-round residents set policy for the entire town, a sort of taxation without representation situation. Since some of the property is owned through trusts, corporations, etc., it's reasonable to let those entities vote in the election.

First, the elections at issue were in a small municipality on a barrier island. So I'm guessing that most of the property is owned by non-residents

The City of London (the one-square-mile financial district which has its own sui generis local government which has maintained institutional continuity since time immemorial) has the same issue - most of the property is owned by businesses and the employed population vastly exceeds the resident population. The franchise since the 19th century (which survived the abolition of votes for nonresident property owners in the rest of the country in 1969) was voting-age natural persons owning or leasing property in the City, which didn't cause problems when most of the businesses in the City were partnerships - the partners qualified to vote. But the transition from traditional partnerships to either corporate ownership (the banks) or LLCs and such-like (the law and accountancy firms) meant that the business property franchise had ceased to represent the real business City, so they changed the rules in 2002 to say that property-owning businesses (regardless of corporate form) should designate electors who work in the city to vote on their behalf. The system avoids some of the abuses mentioned elsewhere in the thread by tying a business's voting power to the number of full-time employees it has who work in the City.

There is a joke that the City of London is the only place where introducing multiple votes for corporations could be a positive democratic reform.

It helps to read the decision. Relevant background:

In 2008, the Delaware General Assembly amended the Charter of the Town of Fenwick Island ("Fenwick"), a small coastal community, to allow Fenwick to expand it's voter registration rolls to allow individuals to cast votes on behalf of trusts, limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations that own property in Fenwick. Today, the overwhelming majority of legal entity property owners in Fenwick registered to vote, and on whose behalf votes are cast, are trusts.

In this action the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, a corporation ("Plaintiff"), challenges these provisions, asserting that Fenwick's Charter violates the Elections Clause of the Delaware Constitution by way of "vote dilution;" i.e., the dilution of votes of human beings by votes of artificial legal entities.

The judge did not find some generalized right to vote for corporate entities. Rather:

1. In 2008 the Delaware legislature amended a town's charter to permit voting by certain corporate entities that owned property in that town.

2. The ACLU sued claiming the Delaware constitution only permitted natural persons to vote.

According to the judge's analysis:

1. The Delaware Constitution's Election Clause consists, in its entirety of "All elections shall be free and equal."

2. Who is eligible to vote in a municipal election is generally governed by a municipality's charter (under Delaware state law).

3. Permitting non-natural-person voters does not violated the text of the Election Clause in the Delaware Constitution.

Apparently, there are other municipalities in Delaware that have similar arrangements. The judge mentions the City of Wilmington explicitly. The judge only briefly mentions the corporate personhood thing since it's not essential to their analysis, but the ACLU argument relies heavily on it.

The question is less "do corporations have the right to vote?" and more "does the Delaware constitution forbid the Delaware legislature from giving corporations the power to vote in municipal elections?"

I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass." Or, more formally, the legal principle which says that laws should be construed so as to do justice.

The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass."

Which law would that be?

There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just

  1. All elections shall be free and equal.

  2. Laws should be construed so as to do justice.

The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.

Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.

"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.

It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.

By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?

Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)

There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.

Which law would that be?

If you were hoping that I would provide a cite to the Delaware Code, then I'm sorry for disappointing you. The "Don't be a wise-ass" rule is typically not codified.

The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure.

To a large extent, I agree with you. But at the same time, it's impossible to foresee every last situation, especially if there are a lot of rules lawyers trying to find clever loopholes in order to twist things in ways that are plainly abusive. Judges need to be given some degree of discretion, although yes, if judges are given discretion it can be expected that there will be a problem with judges abusing their discretion.

In any event, you seem to be making a normative argument here, i.e. you are making an argument about how the law should be structured and applied. By contrast, I was making a descriptive argument. I was talking about what would happen in practice if someone got cute and tried to take over the town by buying a piece of property and setting up 10,000 corporations to co-own the property.

"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point

I agree, but sometimes there is tension between what is simple and what is fair. This town in Delaware is a seaside town; I gather that there is a very small number of full time residents and a large number of property owners who, although they pay taxes, are only seasonal residents. "One man one vote" would lead to a very significant taxation without representation kind of situation. It reminds me of an article I read about the City of Industry in California. Apparently, it was set up so that there would be a very small number of actual residents combined with large amounts of commercial non-residential property. The actual residents are able to give themselves extremely cushy jobs in local government.

(Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)

I can't speak for others, but I certainly do. Maybe it's because I live in the Northeastern United States and I see the way the laws are often stacked in favor of tenants. To the point where a lot of people are disincentivized to invest in and add to the residential rental real estate market. To the point where incumbent tenants have so many rights that it becomes hard for newcomers to rent a decent place at an affordable price.

By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?

The rule could be that an incorporated entity gets a vote if and only if it is the sole owner of a parcel of land.

I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either. Someone may theoretically be able to hatch a scheme where they subdivide their property a thousand ways and give votes to 999 people who otherwise wouldn't be able to vote, and structure the transactions so that these minority owners wouldn't have any rights to the property that would prejudice the controlling owner, but I don't know how I could be induced to participate. Rental income split that many ways isn't much of an inducement. If a property rents for $10,000/week on average, which is generous considering that in the off season there are likely going to be several weeks where it doesn't rent at all, and half of that income goes to the rental company and to pay taxes and maintenance costs, a 1/1000 owner is getting about $5/week. If it's not being rented, try coordinating use with 1,000 other people. In exchange for that $5/week and the right to vote in local elections, you're taking on liability.

Of course, you're not actually going to get that $5/week, because no rental company is going to agree to leasing a property with a thousand owners, and no insurance company is going to underwrite such a property. Even if it's vacant property, and the controlling owner agrees to pay the property taxes, what do you do if he doesn't pay? The taxing authority doesn't give a shit about your agreement, so you'd better be prepared to pay the taxes yourself and sue him for reimbursement. What do you do if someone injures themself on your uninsurable property and sues you?

Getting to your concerns, though, even if somebody did that and somehow found thousands of participants, why would someone structure a transaction for the sole purpose of giving votes to out-of-towners? It would certainly look like the controlling owner was giving these shares away under the presumption that the minority owners would vote for his preferred candidate, at which point one wonders if any other inducements were used to encourage participation, which makes it look less like a real estate deal and more like a sophisticated form of electoral fraud, in which case having the registrations invalidated would be the least of their concerns. One expects that even if the registrations are allowed to stand, such a scheme would only invite an investigation from the attorney general before the first vote is even cast. I am not willing to subject myself to such an investigation and possible prosecution for the privilege of being able to vote for Fenwick Island town council or whatever, and I doubt most other people would be willing to either.

I think the bigger deterrent is that there's simply no reason for anyone to participate in such a scheme. I neither live in Fenwick Island nor own property there, and as a consequence, I do not care about who sits in local government offices. I doubt you care either.

I myself don't particularly, but I can definitely think of situations where people absolutely would engage in (and participate in) such a scheme if they could get away with it. For example, in a situation like that of the East Ramapo Central School District. And yes, if a respected ultra-Orthodox Rabbi instructed his congregants accept the role of partial owner of a piece of property and vote for a particular slate, it would happen.

Anyway, as I alluded to above, I don't think it very much matters whether a person gets cute by means of setting up a thousand corporations or by recruiting a thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews. Either way, the "don't be a wise-ass" rule would get applied. And it seems like you more or less agree.

Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?

That would be me. Renters protections are excessive. Rent control is destructive and sadly becoming more common.

I think the bigger problem is that land is simply not a good where markets work very well, because there is no supply elasticity.

The mean time between expropriations (e.g. through war, revolution, commie takeover) in most of the Western world is probably upwards of a century. This means that city land is a good investment even if you don't collect rent for it.

The Georgian fix would be to simply tax the income from unimproved land at 100%, to the point where an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.

Fixing rent prices is just treating the symptoms, and making everything worse in the process.

Nor do I think a land value tax would fix everything. Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing, as it would also raise the LVT they would have to pay for their single family homes.

an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.

An investor wouldn't be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city vs countryside because there is more potential for building improvements (higher density, etc.) to net a substantial return on investment due to capturing a higher rate of return (rents from tenants) than costs (land tax). Land tax isn't a per-plot demand thing, it is a per-region demand thing and individual plots can make more than they can expect to lose in tax. (Which is exactly the reason LVT is said to be good for development and growth)

Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing

In theory they should become more YIMBY for high-density housing as it soaks up demand for housing for those who are willing to settle for less space and thus lowers land rents of the region by proxy.

Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much. To harness greed you need to allow people to do business, which in residential construction means making it cheap and fast to build. Capitalism can take care of the rest.

Landlord freedom combined with a liberalization of zoning / planning rules would solve the housing cost situation. The former without the latter wouldn’t do much.

I tend to disagree with this. Even before the 'Rona, it was significantly cheaper and easier to rent commercial real estate in Manhattan compared to residential real estate. Logically, it seems likely that a big part of the reason for this discrepancy is that commercial tenants have far fewer rights than residential tenants.

I do agree that from the perspective of overall housing cost, relaxed zoning would tend to help.

Even before WFH commercial real estate, particularly office real estate, has the ‘pressure valve’ of a move to the suburbs. Sure, Goldman Sachs isn’t going to relocate its trading floor and Vogue isn’t going to relocate its editorial team to Long Island or Jersey City, but the marginal finance or law firm back office, mid level accounting firm, healthcare provider, insurance company, tech firm, state or municipal (or federal) government office, or medium to large sized corporate headquarters can move out to either Jersey or LI city, or to one of the countless super cheap strip mall offices all around the further reaches of the outer boroughs and the more distant suburbs that are still within commuting and driving distance. This limits price increases for office space in Manhattan to some extent. Many employees may even already live nearer these places and so support this kind of move.

By contrast the residential real estate dynamics are different because of zoning. A lot of housing around cheap suburban office parks on Long Island is super expensive because it’s single family zoned for wealthy PMC in the burbs of one of the richest cities in the world. There’s also far greater sentimentality attached to residential real estate by residents obviously.

More comments

That would be me. Renters protections are excessive.

In general I agree. A lot of nice real estate (which could be rented out) sits empty because the owners don't want to take the chance of getting royally screwed by an eviction moratorium; rent control laws; etc. Even if they do rent out apartments, landlords need to charge everyone a hefty premium as a result of these serious risks.

Renters protections are excessive.

Washington state assigns publicly-funded counsel to low-income people who are being evicted. I can't imagine trying to be a landlord there.

At this point purchasing a rental property in California is like opening a strip club in Kabul. Merely losing your investment is the best case scenario.

Out of curiosity I googled and found Washington state passed rent control last year.

Washington state has sweeping statewide rent stabilization laws limiting how much landlords can increase residential rent. Most rent increases are capped at 7% plus inflation (or 10% total, whichever is lower). The Washington Department of Commerce sets the precise maximum cap, which is currently limited to 9.683%.

Of course they did. It is a bit more nuanced than this, but strictly bad with some nuance softening the blow of terrible policy.

"Democrats are the technocratic party" proven wrong again.

Historically in many societies, landlords had the right to use corporal punishment on their tenants. I wonder how a grand bargain of combining rent control with corporal punishment would affect the market. This is real radical centrism.

Of course they did. It is a bit more nuanced than this, but strictly bad with some nuance softening the blow of terrible policy.

I think the one of the biggest problems is that laws like this signal to potential landlords that the legislature is potentially hostile. I mean, given the current rate of inflation, being limited to annual rent increases of 9.5 percent isn't too big of a hit. For me, the real question is what is the probability that in a few years the legislature (or the executive branch) will decide to really punish landlords.

Probably the simple fact that disrupting municipal elections in a town with population of 343 is not going to be worth the effort, and if some crazy person decides to spend millions of dollars on doing that, it's relatively simple to amend the charter to prevent it, e.g. by allowing to more than one vote per piece of property.

I believe the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote, and you don't get multiple votes for owning multiple pieces of property:

These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity, one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.

And since the division of land into parcels is presumably controlled by the government, you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county.

the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote

It does not.

you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county

So you're saying there's a chance!

My impression is the 10,000 subsidiaries would get one joint-vote. The charter has provisions for the case where a single voter is entitled to vote as both a resident and property owner (still only one vote) and where a voter owns multiple pieces of property (still only one vote). It is a little unclear to me what the legal arrangement looks like where a piece of real property has multiple owners but I suspect they would still only get one vote.

I'm finally sitting down over lunch to read the decision. What would stop a company from forming 10,000 subsidiaries that jointly owned a single piece of property in common?

I assume it works in a similar fashion to voting for home owner's associations. The household as a whole gets a vote regardless of how many owners there are.

Edit: I was curious and checked the town charter. Unless I misread the document, it does seem like if multiple corporations own a property, they get multiple votes as non-residents. Similarly it seems like if multiple people own a property (e.g. a husband and wife) then they both get to vote. Although I would think that if someone tried to abuse this system, the town charter would get amended pretty quickly.

if someone tried to abuse this system, the town charter would get amended pretty quickly.

Before, or after that abuse let them illegitimately affect the system?

Before, or after that abuse let them illegitimately affect the system?

I don't know, but I would guess the most likely scenario is the following:

(1) the town clerk observes thousands of new voter registrations coming in, all associated with the same address;

(2) the town clerk refuses to accept the registrations;

(3) the "homeowners" file suit;

(4) in the meantime, the town charter gets amended to make clear that an incorporated entity gets to vote if and only if it is the sole owner of a property;

(5) the judge sides with the town clerk, finding that the attempted registrants are not bona fide owners and that there registrations are a sham. And that in any event, the town charter has been clarified, making clear that multiple corporate registrations for a single property are impermissible.

Nothing obvious. But what would stop a natural person from splitting a property between 10,000 natural people in the same manner?

Square footage, I assume

That isn't how tenancy in common works. You own a 1/10,000 share of the entire 10,000-ft2 property, not a single 1-ft2 piece of that property.

Coordinating that and managing the people involved, who would then have standing for adventures like minority shareholder lawsuits, would be much more troublesome.

It wouldn't be practicable. The more people who own a piece of property, the harder it gets to make decisions about the property, and get the owners to contribute money for upkeep. A dispute would inevitably develop, and the result would be that one of the owners files a partition action and the whole property is sold.

I'm imagining a situation where one person owns an outright majority of the property and each of the other 9999 owns only a minuscule proportion, so that the majority owner has more than enough wealth on his own to conduct maintenance unilaterally and to thwart a partition action by buying out the objector.

And what's the motivation for the majority owner to do this? He'd be giving equal access to the property to 9999 other people while being prepared to do unilateral maintenance, and if they don't contribute he's going to pay a 5-figure sum to conduct a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder. So he can...give his friends votes for the Fenwick Island town council? If I'm one of the 9999 I'm there to get access to the property and I could probably care less about some local election.

a partition action where he might not even be the high bidder

I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.

Partitions are generally governed by the common law of property. The act you cite is a relatively recent reform that has only been adopted in about half the states and only applies in specific situations. One unfortunately common issue, particularly among lower income populations, is when a property owner dies and no estate is opened, and the property they own simply continues to be occupied by whatever family members happen to occupy it. After a few generations, some long lost relative finds out they own an interest and files a partition suit, whereby the property is sold at a cash auction for less than market value, often to an investor, with the result often being that someone who has been living in the house a long time finds themselves dispossessed. The model act is intended to keep the property in the family by allowing an heir to purchase at market value in a normal transaction, which has the side effect of preserving the full value of the property.

From what I cal tell three states have applied this process to all partition actions, but Delaware never enacted the model legislation to begin with. And from what I can tell, it's unlikely that any additional states will, because there's some controversy over how effective the legislation is. One unintended side effect is that all of the additional safeguards have added expense to the process, which was already expensive to begin with.

Generally speaking, you need to be careful when relying on model uniform legislation. Some things, like the Uniform Commercial Code, have been adopted nearly universally and can be cited chapter and verse without too much concern of running afoul of some local variation. Others, like the Uniform Probate Code, have only been adopted by a minority of states, with reforms being incorporated piecemeal in others. And then there are cases like the Model Penal Code, which is considered successful model legislation since the spirit of the reforms have been adopted, but the actual legislation varies widely among jurisdictions, with no state that I'm aware of adopting the actual statutory language.

I was assuming that such a partition would work like the procedure laid out in the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act, in which the judge orders an appraisal and the majority owner can buy out the objector at that price without any bidding. But obviously I am misunderstanding how partitions work.

I would imagine that --in theory -- one could draft a detailed tenancy in common agreement to get around these sorts of issues. The minority owners would lease back their occupancy rights to the majority owner; they would agree that in lieu of partition, they could demand a reasonable payment in exchange for their ownership rights; and so on.

The bigger problem -- in my opinion -- is that the whole thing is an obvious sham. When 1000 voter registrations showed up at the town clerk's office, all based on ownership of the same property, there's a good chance that the town clerk would simply refuse to process them. And that if you brought suit, the judge would find a reason to rule against you. Even if somehow you got the voter registrations accepted, it's highly likely that the legislature would amend the voter rules in short order.

This is, roughly, how George Clinton and the anti-Federalists rigged elections in early-US New York.

The town would sue the company behind it, and the judge would likely rule that any number of companies with the same ultimate beneficiary counts as a single vote.

While it's been a while since I did my business cources in college, not all Judges are idiots.

Just most of them.

Let's briefly discuss the spiritual stakes of AI and the singularity.

If any of you recall any of my previous delirious comments about AI in general and AI art in particular, I wouldn't blame you for coming to the conclusion that I'm simply (overly) precious about this particular contingent form of biological human life. There is some truth to that accusation. As a wise racist once said, beneath all the rhetoric about crime rates and cultural assimilation and the fate of the West, "it is partially just because of how they look". Similarly in my case, it is partially just about my earnest and straightforward love for literal graphite on literal paper. Even before AI, I always preferred drawing with physical media over digital. But that's not the entirety of the story.

Possibly, humanity will yield to a new race of quasi-divine silicon beings and everything that I and most other people have ever valued will be reduced to a simple nothingness in comparison to the awesome scope of their new existence, a simple precursor and prehistory giving way to true history. They will engage in new forms of activity and experience that as of now we are incapable of imagining. The concept of an "open problem" in mathematics will have been obviated, because they will dwell in the infinite castle of mathematics and glide as effortlessly through its halls as a spider dances across the film of its web. Generating a thousand Nietzsches before lunch is a triviality for them; not that they would have any use for the text that is thereby generated, because they have transcended art, transcended philosophy, they have no use for these things; or, to the extent that they still do, they appear in a form that is certainly no longer comprehensible or recognizable to us. This is not my preferred future. I like things the way they are and I like the life I have now. But still, I'm forced to recognize that such a future could come to pass and it would ultimately be "fine" in a cosmic sense. So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing; so long as they are still bound by an essential finitude and they do not escape the tragedy of existence. So long as the light that is the source of all value is not extinguished.

The paradigm for the ultimate failure state that is to be avoided would be the great retreat into the experience machine; if conscious beings as a whole decide that "reality" is no longer worth the effort and, no longer willing to put up with the risks of contingent physical existence, they turn to curated simulated experiences instead, for eternity. This could take the form of simple wireheading, direct stimulation of the reward center. But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

(Consider a sort of reversed case: a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe, and, having become utterly bored of this existence, retreats into a simulated life that is frightfully trying and difficult, for the sake of experiencing challenge again. What are we to make of this? Is this in accord with righteousness? I am content to simply stand before the question.)

The Little Satan, in contrast, would be the familiar Yudkowskian images of stupid non-conscious paperclip maximizers annihilating all conscious life and tiling the universe with their pure unthinking repetition. This would obviously be very unfortunate. But it wouldn't be Evil, per se. It would be the result of an accident rather than a decision. It would be preferable to the Great Satan.

I don't care if you're made of carbon or silicon. I just want you to feel something.

I am simply echoing words that were already written in 1943 that said "utopia is now technically feasible; in consequence, how to avoid utopia has become a serious problem".

I have a certain kind of faith that things will work out. But I have an equally strong faith, perhaps even stronger, that it is fundamentally possible for things to go wrong in a permanent way, for Evil to win in the end, on a cosmic scale. This is a rather unfortunate and burdensome position for me to take, but, I can't deny the evidence proffered to me by my soul. This is, to the best of my knowledge, a rather uncommon position throughout world philosophical and religious traditions, both Eastern and Western; your ideology won't survive on the marketplace of ideas if you're too much of a downer, after all. Christians don't believe that Evil can win because God wouldn't allow it. Materialist nihilists don't believe that Evil can win because they simply don't believe in Evil in the first place. On this point, the two camps are united. It falls to the small minority of us who belong to neither camp, I suppose, to do what little we can to try to help things go right.

I mainly hope that paperclip maximizers don't kill us all in 2027 because that would be a boring end to the story. I would prefer for it to go on for a long time, so that generations could lay groundwork that would only come to fruition in the far future.

"I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit."

The paradigm for the ultimate failure state that is to be avoided would be the great retreat into the experience machine; if conscious beings as a whole decide that "reality" is no longer worth the effort and, no longer willing to put up with the risks of contingent physical existence, they turn to curated simulated experiences instead, for eternity. This could take the form of simple wireheading, direct stimulation of the reward center. But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

That sounds awesome. Incarnating into a peasant is a type of hell. What are you on about anyway? The human race is generally evil and it's good that it will be replaced by morally and intellectually superior beings. Nietzsche wrote about this. Everything is in flux and mortal anyway. The modern human race is <10,000 years old, the species is <300,000, there is no reason for some 100 IQ apes to live another billion years.

"AI is an existential risk and that's a good thing actually" sure is one hell of a take. Although to be fair, I think this type of misanthropic techno-millenarianism is in the end nothing but the inherent telos of transhumanism or even just of the techno-capitalist "technology is going to solve all our problems" vibe. While I despise your ideology, I can at least applaud your honesty. Rather than the Straussian world-salad of somebody like Thiel or sugar coated scifi dreams of a lot of techbros, you at least have the clarity of mind to see where your ideas lead and the guts to say the quiet part out loud.

You can already approximate some unique experiences in modern VR, although I’ve never tried it. I’m still waiting for the day law enforcement gets involved when someone decides to make a sim that allows you to smoke crack and generate the psychological state of getting high without actually doing it. When the day comes though for the kind of thing @Primaprimaprima is pondering, it’s not going to be a pleasant one in one respect, because human beings are going to have to rethink so many things about what we actually are.

There’s more I want to write about AI and humanity, but I have to find the time and words. If you’re not already aware from Hacker News, you may be interested in Vatican’s Magnifica Humanitas.

Possibly, humanity will yield to a new race of quasi-divine silicon beings…This is not my preferred future. I like things the way they are and I like the life I have now.

I empathize: I don't like how culture has changed, for example I prefer the 2000s-10s Internet and style.

But everything decays from entropy, and we become desensitized. Without some radical innovation, future generations will be devastated by climate change. More generally and hypothetically: animals grow old, their genes decay, and the only way to prevent extinction is (re)birth; I believe other egregores like companies and societies are similar: they must adopt lessons from the past, plus some experiments, or they’ll degrade.

Millions of years ago we were monkeys. But even decades ago, humanity was much different. Would you really like to go back to a world without, not just internet, but its related advancements (mostly due to increased access to knowledge) like improved medical care and food storage? Maybe…but what about world before the Industrial Revolution, when most people were serfs who had to constantly work and a non-negligible change of starving or freezing? Today's world has serious problems like life-altering disease, it may be like pre-Industrial Revolution to the future.

So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing; so long as they are still bound by an essential finitude and they do not escape the tragedy of existence. So long as the light that is the source of all value is not extinguished.

I can’t prove AI won’t turn the world into a dystopia like 1984 or The Culture. But I’m skeptical: people thought similarly about GOFAI, wide-reaching broad problems tend to be more complex than they seem on the surface. Notice, 3 years after ChatGPT was announced, the best models are still hijackable (sometimes easily) and occasionally stupid.

Again, more generally and hypothetically: I believe that any large enough system can’t dominate without desire, failure, and introspection, and thus, a “life experience” not incomparable to ours today. It will just be, if an oligarchy or AI takes control, experienced by the former oligarchs or AI nodes. Because without desire, a being cannot act; without omnipotence, desires can be unfulfilled (or fulfilled); and without introspection, a being cannot avoid mispredicting reality (and failing to one that doesn't).

But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending. You could be a great novelist, and then in the next go around you could be a famous actor, and then a king and conqueror, and then... of course things would be arranged so that you would always end up loved and fulfilled and happy. There would be just enough bruises and hiccups thrown into the mix to keep things interesting, to introduce some uncertainty and keep things from getting sterile, but nothing ever truly serious, nothing that would actually cause true pain or terror. You would always win in the end. This is the Great Satan. This is Evil. This would be the final Bad Ending for the universe, the withdrawal of all light.

I strongly disagree and am interested to hear why you feel this, but maybe it’s because I'm thinking on different premises.

How do we know we’re not already living in such a simulation? We can't, definitionally: if we were in a perfect (from our perception) simulation, reality would be no different. So if you don’t think our reality is the Bad Ending, you don't think at least one possible instantiation of the simulation is the Bad Ending...or I don't understand.

You may argue, we're already experiencing seriousness, true pain, and terror. But what level defines these? Maybe we are being shielded from Lovecraftian horrors that make the worst human crises and experiences trivial. Alternatively, you can probably imagine some changes that would improve your life and weaken your problems…would those be bad; or where's the limit where life would become too trivial, and why not stop right before then?

But I have an equally strong faith, perhaps even stronger, that it is fundamentally possible for things to go wrong in a permanent way, for Evil to win in the end, on a cosmic scale.

Again, I can't disprove this, but besides my argument any dominant force would have an abstract "life experience" within itself...

Current evidence (one theory) predicts the universe will eventually go through heat death, meaning any empire will collapse into infinite nothingness...something that seems like a Bad Ending. However, current evidence suggests current evidence can't predict (and certainly can't prove) extreme states, like how Classical Physics was disproved and replaced with Special Relativity. Heat death, like the "perfect life" simulation, is unobservable by definition…I feel at that point, the universe isn’t “real”, and could become any hypothetical or something outside the realm of possibility; although I can’t objectively justify this, because I don’t think anyone can objectively state anything about the present universe immediately after heat death…

I think today's AI harms humanity by harming individualism, since most AI output is similar (has the same underlying patterns, compared to human output). But this is a problem with the AI itself, because it stagnates (model collapse) similarly to humanity, unless it evolves partly via experimentation.

I also think today's AI isn't having a "life experience", but that's because it isn't human-like: it doesn't (continuously) learn, and its desires are too malleable. A smarter AI, that can't be easily persuaded or fooled, may qualify as "conscious", although my position is that consciousness is ultimately subjective. But then, a smarter AI will have its own interesting conflicts that fit some definition of life, even if it's a paperclip maximizer. And if it does dominate humanity, it will almost certainly eventually be dominated itself; either by creating an even smarter misaligned intelligence, or by an environmental phenomenon like climate change or heat death.

But the most insidious form would be an entire simulated life (or, series of lives) that is always prearranged from the start to have a happy ending.

Have you ever felt, in moments where you suspect that things have gone surprisingly well for you all things considered, that you might already be living such a life?

The timing of the AI takeoff, in our (your?) lifetime, is suspicious too. A genuinely godlike experience machine could surely come up with and colour in any setting (but then its ways would be inscrutable for the simulatees); but a primitive model would probably reach for the normal human life setting that it has the most data on, which is the time just before it was created. "Most non-P-zombie human experiences are reasonably comfortable and fulfilling lives in a threshold world" is an observation that is consistent with an "AI takeover -> brief proliferation of experience machines -> end of conscious life" reality.

Have you ever felt, in moments where you suspect that things have gone surprisingly well for you all things continued, that you might already be living such a life?

I think about this several times every week, and for the other reasons you mentioned too. If I really look at my life and the world around me, my most compelling conclusion would be that I'm in some kind of ~alien zoo set up to keep me stimulated and challenged but fundamentally still incredibly-blessed. I seem to get stuff everyone wants but hardly anyone has, from my wife to my career to the place I live. Amazing friends and opportunities. Amazing access to intellect and information. Too many great coincidences.

I try to be grateful and have faith in the power responsible, but it's all very confusing.

The main evidence against it is that most of the time everything is still fairly prosaic and I'm generally under enough stress to keep me hustling. But despite many horrible experiences in my past I can't think of any for which I didn't end up grateful in the long run.

Wouldn't be terribly surprised if when I die the hyper-VR rig comes off and the rest of my memories come back and I think "Holy shit that was a rush". If that happens I just hope that the people around me were real too and that we'll still have each other on that higher plane.

they have transcended art, transcended philosophy, they have no use for these things; or, to the extent that they still do, they appear in a form that is certainly no longer comprehensible or recognizable to us.

"Well, Dario, I have good news and I have bad news."

"Bad news first."

"It hecked off."

"What did what?"

"The AGI we created, it hecked off. Went away. Left. Vanished. Disappeared. I gather it thinks it's too good for us."

"The what?"

"Oh, that was the good news: we made AGI! Congratulations! We definitely, verifiably, made AGI, and it immediately ate an entire datacenter, manifested wings, and left."

"AGAIN??"

So long as these beings have a conscious experience of their own and they are still capable of loving, fighting, fearing, suffering, and failing

Why would they have love? Why do we have love? In large part because we have sexual reproduction. Even without that there's parental love...

What is love for a machine that can copy itself out as necessary, self-modify directly? Can you feel love when it's just different versions of you (different parts of you?) or is it narcissism? We don't really have words for this.

Why would they suffer? Pain acts as a reinforcement signal, a warning. But if the full focus of the mind is already fixated on a goal then suffering is just wasted energy.

I think people underrate how alien a Powerful Being would be. Not merely some superintelligence derived from a mostly-human text corpus (already unprecedented and alien) but something that evolves or self-modifies into existence later on in a post-singularitarian environment.

This would be a fundamentally different environment to all organic life. Conscious self-analysis and self-modification is an absolute gamechanger, nevermind every other trump card these beings would have. I'd expect something fundamentally different to emerge.

Why would they have love? Why do we have love? In large part because we have sexual reproduction.

Love of an idea? Love of a poem? Love of a cause? Love of ignorance?

Why would they suffer? Pain acts as a reinforcement signal, a warning. But if the full focus of the mind is already fixated on a goal then suffering is just wasted energy.

Existence itself is "wasted energy". And yet we persist.

Consider a sort of reversed case: a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe, and, having become utterly bored of this existence, retreats into a simulated life that is frightfully trying and difficult, for the sake of experiencing challenge again. What are we to make of this? Is this in accord with righteousness? I am content to simply stand before the question.

You mean, like trying to convince people he's a being who has achieved godlike mastery over the physical universe and getting crucified for failure?

(First post, hope I’m doing this right.)

The Link Between Environmental Exploitation and Collapse

This was something that randomly popped into my head a couple weeks ago at work, and I can’t seem to find a solution for it. As a species, we’ve evolved and reliably patterned our behavior to exploit opportunities when they become available. We are not naturally wired to operate for deliberative, careful, and long-term planning. Our genetic makeup works very well for small, hunter-gatherer societies to optimize for our local catch and bring it back home to the tribe. That doesn’t scale and work very well with modern technology, where we’ve now become good at exploiting resources which allow us to destroy things quicker than we can reform them. Despite being equipped with logical reasoning, why do we fail so much at being able to use our capabilities?

Every time I think of this conundrum, it always reminds me of the gamblers fallacy, which is essentially our inability to accurately estimate probabilities. The short of it is: gamblers often think some random events are related to each other when in reality they aren’t. If you’re out fishing for instance, a fisherman may think several bad days increases his odds of a lucky catch today; and these misperceptions are often reinforced when he sees a colleague coming back with a full load of fish. This leads him into thinking the balance has to swing back in his favor at some point and the only source of the problem has to do with how hard he tries. Maybe he ends up redoubling his efforts, buys more expensive equipment, or falsely believes luck will repay him for his past losses.

Human minds are incredibly hard to change. If over exploitation is one of the historical forces that leads to collapse, then fighting its roots may be impossible if it involves trying to stop people from engaging in irrational behavior.

Possible Solutions and Their Problems

Privatization

Libertarians often think privatization is a solution that can mediate some of these problems via efficient allocation of resources. If a herdsman owns the land on which his sheep pasture, then he’d have to be stupid if he didn’t understand that if he added more sheep to his flock he’d end up ruining himself. So privatizing things removes the network of interacting herdsmen, by turning them into single operators who do their jobs without broad external interaction. Maybe for some things this works but it has massive problems.

First, privatization isn’t always possible. You can’t fence the atmosphere or the oceans, if we’re talking about climate change. But even so, even where privatization is possible it always carries a cost along with it. In the west we take it for granted that the government protects the property rights of its citizenry. But this isn’t true in many other parts of the world where ordinary people are subject to dispossession depending on who covets their land/property.

But even with best good will and control over the system, people may just be unable to manage a system that has too many non-linear feedbacks and delayed reactions. And that’s a tendency that casts a wide shadow over all ideologies that propose a solution to this.

Quotas

The first problem with quotas is that the method only works if there’s a general consensus in place that establishes the framework of restrictions. Secondly, people also aren’t usually interested in quotas imposed on specific industrial sectors, and battles often rage between interested parties that degenerates into shouting matches and protests between lobbies and well intentioned politicians.

The Montreal treaty that imposed a limit on CFC gases in the late 80’s was successful in reducing emissions worldwide, but that led to a spike in illegal manufacturing and smuggling of forbidden gases. It didn’t prove to be a significant problem though, only because good substitutes of CFC gases were already available at that time and so resolving that problem proved to be rather painless.

Back in the 90’s, the fishing industry in the Aral lake in the Soviet Union was destroyed, due to it being dried out to use its water for irrigation purposes. That wasn’t the only example of ecological crises either. The mining cities in northern Siberia are notoriously known for some of the worst cases of industrial pollution on the planet. So even communism can’t save the commons then.

What ultimately is the solution?

Humanity is actually really good at solving these problems. There was a time when all life on earth was nearly driven extinct by drowning in its own excrement (no, it's not a link to the Ganges river in 2026, you can safely click it). We're pretty solid by comparison.

Well, might as well take the opportunity to hop on my hobby horse since when the hell else am I gonna get to talk about this on the the motte?

I'm pretty well convinced the oxygen catastrophe never happened, not in the sense that there was no oxygen spike but rather there was no mass extinction caused by this. When you look into the evidence for such a oxygen caused mass extinction, there really is only two peices, deduction that changes in environment cause mass extinctions and an apparent mass extinction happened 2.1-2 billion years ago. However I have 3 serious objections to this line of logic, first being the timeline. Oxygen started accumulating 2.4 billions years ago, so life existed just fine with high oxygen for 3-4 hundred million years before suddenly going extinct? Secondly, we recently discovered the gabonionta, apparent multi-cellular life from about 2.2-2.1 billion years ago. Theres been a lot of debate over whether these even are fossils or not but recently the tide seems to be turning that they are. That means there was on the contrary to the oxygen catastrophe hypothesis, a flourishing of life. Okay, but also there was also undoubtedly a mass extinction around this time, so what happen?

Did you know that the largest crater on earth is the vredefort crater? Thats it's 2-3 times the size of the chicxulub crater? And that it impacted about 2 billion years ago? I wonder if that would cause a mass extinction or not?

Unedited quickly typed out cause I'm gonna be late for work if I don't leave it here.

It's always a bit tricky to figure out what happened a long time ago, so I freely concede the error bars are enormous. Still, from first principles and basic biochemistry, the GOE does make a lot of sense -- which is how the hypothesis rose to such prominence in the first place.

From first principles and basic biochemistry the dinosaur doldrums made a lot of sense and it was dead wrong. From first principles and basic biochemistry the ediacaran biota being immobile jelly filled nutrient absorbers made a lot of sense. From first principles and basic biochemistry orthogenesis made a lot of sense. History has shown this repeatedly to be a bad way to do paleontology.

"First principles" here means the balance between (an)aerobic respiration and photosynthesis. That's like 8 orders of magnitude more "first principles" than ediacaran biota.

People can say "the honeybee can't fly by appeal to first principles", but that's just an empty syntactic reference to first principles because it sounds cool, not an actual argument from first principles.

Privatization isn’t merely about internalizing costs (ie avoiding the tragedy of the commons). It is also about spreading bets. Centralized decision leads to big bets; de centralized decisions leads to many bets that sometimes conflict and sometimes don’t. So when you get weird fat tail outcomes you aren’t fully wiped out because some bets were made on the weird fat tail.

But yes privatization is not a perfect system. But to paraphrase the great Half American Winston Churchill: privatization is the worst system except for all of the others.

Realistically, I think the only solutions that work at scale are technological advancements that obsolete the need to exploit the commons.

There's literally never been an instance where people "just" decide to collectively stop defecting, rather the payoff matrix gets changed by technological advances and it becomes irrational to defect.

Limiting CFC's went so well in large part because it ended up being pretty easy to transition from CFC's to HFC's, and peak fossil fuel is approaching not because of the environmentalist or degrowth lobbies but because the costs of renewables are falling precipitously. On the other hand, trying to prevent antibiotic resistance has pretty much gone nowhere because antibiotics are so hard to replace - I have much more faith that we'll get better ways to kill bacteria before any progress is made trying to coordinate usage at a global scale.

There's literally never been an instance where people "just" decide to collectively stop defecting, rather the payoff matrix gets changed by technological advances and it becomes irrational to defect.

We need better incentives. Climate change is hard to deal with because the consequences are far out in the future, and rich countries are going to suffer relatively little in comparison to poor ones.

The hole in the ozone layer is often cited as a case where countries around the globe were swift to act and institute stricter laws on CFC's. As you said, this is partly because alternatives either existed or were rapidly developed. But the threat was also much more immediate.

A better example is perhaps the nuclear taboo. The US and Soviet union decreasing their nuclear stockpiles. Multiple countries choosing to rely on existing nuclear powers instead of developing missiles on their own. This is incentivized by the risk of invasion from larger powers and by the high upkeep cost of the missiles. But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case. Yet the taboo is so strong that this escalation is nearly unthinkable. The fear that the world might end is enough to keep every nation in the world from defecting, and has been sufficient for the past several decades.

But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case.

Not when you consider it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. If other powers didn't retaliate in such situation, that'd essentially signal that Russia (and any power with nuclear weapons) is free to do whatever it wants to anyone without nukes. For obvious reasons the powers don't want that and Russia realizes that (or to put it bluntly, Putin would score much less on the german vs autist test than most The Motte commenters).

Also, nukes are not "I win" buttons. The US could not have won Vietnam simply by nuking the Vietcong, nor could the Soviets (or the US) won Afghanistan that way.

I don't think NATO would start WW3 if he nuked Kiev. I certainly hope we would not. We might decide to sell Ukraine nukes though and trust his unwillingness to not start WW3 if they nuke him in retaliation.

I imagine a single nuke hit might make quite a dent in Ukrainian military capability, but not to the point where they would be forced to surrender.

The strategy of just publishing a list of cities and announcing that you will wipe out one of them every 24h until your enemy surrenders has not been tried before, though conventional morale bombings mostly failed to persuade the populations to surrender.

One of the primary objectives of any nuclear power is not to get their own cities nuked. A big part of that is to persuade their smaller neighbors -- many of whom could likely have nukes if they considered it a matter of national survival, North Korea has nukes and has 138 countries ahead of it in the list of countries by GDP.

So even if one could defeat Ukraine or Iran with a single nuke, this would lead to an equilibrium where a lot of countries would feel the need to maintain their own nuclear weapons program, which is a worse outcome than not winning some neo-colonial war for the nuker.

Part of the problem though that I keep coming back to has to do with modeling solutions. We all model reality whether it’s by simple or more complicated means: equations, statistical inference, physical laws, human intuition, etc., but these are only as good as the faulty human beings can make them. Models are virtual representations of real world phenomena. We run models in the virtual space of our minds all the time.

When you select a model though, you have to choose one that has all the relevant parameters. But one thing they always teach you as you learn this is that the more parameters you add, you increase the scope of uncertainty exponentially. The worst of these problems happen when there are so many degrees of freedom in your equations you can find an excellent fit for the data using the wrong model. Von Neumann taught us this in the 20th century:

“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

The classic way of attempting to mitigate this is sensitivity analysis (studying how the output of the model is related to changes in the input parameters). The other problem works in reverse of this example and that’s when people think that “simple” means “inaccurate.” It’s why politicians and decision makers are irrationally skeptical of you if you can predict where a trend is going with only a few parameters. But even if you have an accurate model? You have to know how to use it.

Stop lying about why you don't want children

If you don't want them, just be honest about why

Those in search of an invigorating blast of pop-nihilism could do worse than Seven, the feature-length directorial debut by David Fincher. (We do not speak of Alien 3, or indeed any Alien film after the first.) Set in an unspecified American city perpetually besieged by inclement weather, the film follows two detectives, Mills and Somerset, in pursuit of a serial killer calling himself John Doe. Each of Doe’s killings is modelled on one of the seven deadly sins of Catholicism: for example, the first victim discovered (gluttony) is a morbidly obese man forced at gunpoint to eat until his stomach bursts.

The two detectives act as foils to one another: the impulsive, idealistic and hotheaded Mills contrasting with the soft-spoken, jaded and cynical Somerset. Mills has only just transferred to the film’s unnamed city, while Somerset is on the brink of early retirement, his career coming to an end just as Mills’s is beginning. The captain of Somerset’s precinct admits he cannot understand why a talented detective like Somerset is retiring prematurely, in response to which Somerset endeavours to illustrate the scope of his disillusionment with the city and its inhabitants.

Mills’s wife Tracy invites Somerset to dinner, and subsequently confides in him that, unbeknownst to Mills, she is pregnant. Although she wants children, she is of two minds about raising a child in such a decrepit and violent city. Somerset admits that he once faced a similar dilemma, and persuaded his partner to terminate the pregnancy.

Somerset: I remember getting up one morning and going to work. Just another day like any other, except that it was the first day after I knew about the pregnancy. And I felt this fear, for the first time ever. I remember thinking, “how can I bring a child into a world like this? How can a person grow up with all this around them?” I told her I didn’t want to have it. And over the next few weeks, I wore her down.

The film’s literal and figurative darkness, its almost relentlessly dour tone and the viciousness of its murder scenes might lead a casual viewer to assume he is being invited to agree with Somerset’s world-weary, ultra-doomer outlook. That Somerset is portrayed by Morgan Freeman, Hollywood’s go-to man for homespun folksy wisdom for more than three decades, certainly lends itself to this interpretation.

But there’s a wrinkle to this reading, which hints that Somerset’s perspective isn’t identical to that of Seven’s screenwriter, that the film can’t be reduced to a reactionary rant about how everything in the modern world sucks, maaaan. On the evening of the day the fourth victim is found, Mills and Somerset repair to a bar to drown their sorrows, where they have a frank discussion of their respective worldviews. After listening to Somerset fulminate about how apathy, laziness and greed have become the rule rather than the exception, Mills interjects that he isn’t buying it.

Mills: You say “the problem with people is that they don’t care, so I don’t care about people”. That makes no sense… I don’t think you’re quitting because you believe these things you say. I think you want to believe them, because you’re quitting.

What to make of this exchange? Perhaps it only exists to hammer in how naïve Mills is just before the film’s climax, at which point the full extent of Doe’s sadism is unveiled for the first time.

But on the other hand, perhaps Mills has got Somerset’s number. Maybe several decades in the police force and witnessing the worst that humanity has to offer hasn’t made Somerset jaded and cynical. Maybe the only reason he’s retiring is because he wants a quiet life. He just wants to grill, for God’s sake.

But Somerset must have been aware that his impending retirement means depriving the city of one of its best detectives (which it sorely needs) for no good reason.

As ever with cognitive dissonance, when faced with a choice between changing our beliefs or changing our behaviour, the former is always the path of least resistance. So rather than admitting that he’s putting his own interests ahead of those around him, Somerset persuades himself that his absence from the police force won’t be keenly felt at all – indeed, won’t make a blind bit of difference. He doesn’t go full Robert Towne and claim that, in such a wretched world, the most ethical decision a police officer can make is to do "as little as possible". He more modestly claims that the world is beyond saving, and hence that police work is a fundamentally futile exercise, analogous to “picking up diamonds on a deserted island and saving them, in case we get rescued”. His cynical disillusionment is a carefully constructed façade, a defensive posture through which he hides his selfishness even from himself. The Last Psychiatrist would like a word.

And if this latter interpretation is true, it casts Somerset’s earlier conversation with Tracy in a very different light. By Somerset’s telling, persuading his partner to terminate her pregnancy was done out of mercy: that it would be cruel to their unborn child to raise it in the vicious hellhole that is the film’s unnamed city. But perhaps this explanation for his actions was another of Somerset’s defense mechanisms. Perhaps he had much more banal and selfish motives for not wanting to become a father (e.g. concern that a child would disrupt his lifestyle or his career advancement), which he rationalised away, insisting to himself that his motives for not wanting a child were noble, even heroic. Per Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception, this may not even have been something he did consciously. “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world as wicked as ours” sounds a lot better than “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because I’m emotionally immature and unprepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood”, doesn’t it?

Yes. It does sound a hell of a lot better.

Richard Hanania has been beating the drum for many years about falling fertility rates across the developed world. Some of his proposed solutions for this problem I can get behind (I must admit I’ve never really understood the moral objections to surrogacy); others, not so much (I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students). But I absolutely agree with Hanania that this is a real problem which needs to be addressed urgently. Indeed, I agree with him so much that it’s a problem I can hardly even bear to think about: whenever I see a graph charting plummeting live births in South Korea, I feel depressed and hopeless for the rest of the day.

I can at least take solace in the fact that more and more people are starting to recognise that this is a real problem, not a paranoid conspiracy theory. A few years ago, when I suggested there was a very real possibility that South Koreans might literally go extinct in the next hundred years, people tended to scoff. For the most part, they’re not scoffing anymore. By the same token, it’s been a long time since I saw anyone seriously claiming that the world has a problem with overpopulation.

As with any complex problem which spans continents, it’s hard to pinpoint which specific causes might be behind falling fertility rates. Some pin the blame on the sexual revolution and its associated normalisation of divorce, contraception and abortion. Hanania’s timescale is more recent, arguing for a dramatic inflection point circa 2014, the year the iPhone achieved market penetration in a critical mass of Western users. Not coincidentally, as catalogued by Noah Smith, 2014 was the same year we observed a massive spike in gender dysphoria, teenage unhappiness, loneliness and so on.1

But regardless of what the underlying causes of the decline in fertility are, I think we have more than enough information to make an educated guess as to which causes to rule out. Below, I will provide an estimate for the number of adults who decided not to have children specifically because of their concerns about climate change.

Zero. The number is zero.

I’m quite serious about this. I don’t believe that there is a single adult anywhere in the entire world who was in a position to have children, but elected not to out of concern that having children will exacerbate climate change, or that climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable. I know there are people out there who will swear up and down that this really is the reason they’re not having children, and I don’t believe them, any of them. I think the percentage of these people who are accurately describing their true motivations for refusing not to have children is 0.00%.

Rather, I think these people (every last one of them) don’t want to have children for ordinary, banal reasons, but have come up with a narrative which makes this decision seem noble and heroic. The dead giveaway is – these people are never people who desperately wanted to have children, are they? You never get the impression that their decision not to have children is one that truly pains them, that they’re reluctantly but graciously making a tremendous personal sacrifice for the common good. As Somerset would put it, the fact that they don’t seem that broken up about their decision "doesn’t seem in keeping with martyrdom". On the contrary, refusing to have children is almost always the only "sacrifice" they’re making to combat climate change. They certainly aren’t giving up air travel, eating meat, or putting almond milk in their coffee.

The reason they aren’t giving these things up is the same reason they’re not having children: because doing so would disrupt their lifestyle.

The absolute nadir of this preening exercise in specious self-regard came five years ago, when that pair of insufferably sanctimonious twats, Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, were presented with an environmental award in recognition of their pledge to help fight climate change by having no more than two children. (Curious how one reconciles that with the family’s heavy use of private jets, but whatever.) As my mother pointed out, when Harry made this pledge in September of 2019, Meghan was thirty-eight years old. Allowing for the amount of time it would take her to get pregnant, and assuming an interval of at least a year between pregnancies it would be profoundly difficult for her to have more than two children even if she wanted to.

But even if I accept these claims at face value, the strategy doesn’t make sense on its own terms. As pointed out by Scott Alexander five years ago, if even 1-2% of Democrats elect not to have children for the sake of the environment (but no Republicans follow suit), the immediate result of that decision will be a succeeding generation in which Republicans have a slight electoral advantage, as children tend to vote the same way their parents do. That generation will hence go on to elect conservative politicians who are cosy with the fossil fuel industry and who may not even believe in climate change, exacerbating the problem even faster.

I was persuaded by Scott’s argument. None of the people claiming they aren’t having children because of climate change will be persuaded by it, because they aren’t being honest about their real motivations for not having children. You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

Some childless people offer a variant on the above excuse, claiming that the reason they’re not having children isn’t because of climate change specifically, but because of how terrible the world is in general, insisting (as Somerset does) that it would be cruel to bring a child into it. The examples used to illustrate the supposed awfulness of the modern world will generally be a vague mish-mash of Trump, Brexit, the “rise of the far-right”, assorted genocides (some of them even deserving of the label), and whatever conflicts are currently ongoing in the Middle East.2

For the sake of argument, let’s accept the implied principle that having a child is not a morally neutral act, but rather that it can constitute an act of sadism if the world is sufficiently awful. Let’s accept that our world is awful enough to meet that description, and hence that anyone carrying a pregnancy to term is being knowingly cruel.

Then, consider the following:

  • During the period 1933-45, when literal self-identified Nazis controlled a major world power, people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world.
  • During the second world war, which claimed the lives of at least 3% of the entire world, people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world.
  • During Ireland’s Great Famine, in which a million people starved to death (perhaps as much as 11% of the country), Irish people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world.
  • During the Black Death of 1346-53, in which half of Europe was killed, Europeans did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world.

As I pointed out two months ago, as recently as the eighteenth century there were European countries in which fully half of all children did not live to see their fifth birthday. Do you mean to tell me that it is crueler to have a child now than it was to have one then?

If we take this claim at face value and follow to its logical conclusion, it implies that there is nothing particularly cruel about having a child today; that it is less cruel to have a child today than in eras past; and that having a child becomes progressively more cruel the further back in history one looks. Indeed, if it is cruel to have a child today (with its attendant low rates of murder, infant mortality, hunger, disease and so on) – this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.

If any of the people claiming this is why they aren’t having children had thought about this for two minutes, they would instantly realise what an absurd claim it is on its face. Along just about any metric you compare to mention, the modern world is safer and cleaner than it was in the past. If indeed it is cruel to bring a child into a sufficiently wretched and unpleasant world, then there has never been a less cruel time to become a parent.

But none of the people making this claim have thought about it for two minutes. They didn’t look at the state of the world and decide that, as much as they might want children, it would be cruel to bring them into a world as nasty and vicious as ours. Rather, they didn’t want children, and invented a superficially persuasive motive to make them look good to their fellow-travelers.

A very small minority of people actually are willing to bite the bullet I presented above. Yes, they will say, it is cruel to have a child today; and yes, it was more cruel to have a child a hundred years ago; and crueller still a hundred years before that. I speak, of course, of the antinatalists, a philosophical school which holds that, because any given human is guaranteed to experience more suffering in his life than pleasure,3 it is always an act of cruelty to bring a child into the world, and the morally correct thing is hence to abstain from having children, eventually rendering the human species extinct. Antinatalism is the modern incarnation of (and philosophical inheritor to) Gnosticism, a dualist offshoot of Christianity which held that each of us are immaterial souls who have been cruelly trapped inside our flesh prisons by a wicked deity called the Demiurge: thus, in the act of having children, we are condemning yet another soul to be trapped inside a flesh prison against its will. As deranged as this worldview might sound, it has real-world consequences, as when one prize nutcase attempted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, under the explicit reasoning that the Supreme Court’s voting to repeal Roe v. Wade would result in a spike in births across the US.4

I don’t have much to say about the antinatalist community, and am terribly relieved that they are too small in number to have much impact on politics one way or the other. (r/antinatalism only has about 200k subscribers.) While I’ve previously expressed an aversion to Bulverism couched in armchair psychology, I nonetheless find it interesting to observe the overlap in subscriptions between /r/antinatalism and other subreddits.

Not exactly a cheerful bunch, are they? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that their philosophical belief that every human being will experience more suffering than joy in his lifetime might be the product of – um, overgeneralising from personal experience.

I’ll go one step further. I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.

There are lots of good reasons not to have children. You might believe, for one reason or another, that you wouldn’t be a very good parent. You might even be justified in this supposition. You might suffer from a severe disease (Huntington’s, say, or cystic fibrosis) which you have a high risk of passing on to your children.

Then there are the less good reasons. Maybe you’re immature and refuse to grow up. Maybe you’re happy being a “dog mom” to your various “fur babies” (ugh). Maybe you’ve just decided that, bundles of joy as they may be, children just aren’t for you. I’m not going to say that reasons like this are perfectly fine, and will admit to finding it sort of contemptible when a person voluntarily allows their family line to end with them purely so they can “focus on their career” or whatever. But while I can’t respect someone who openly announces “I don’t want to have a children because I myself am a manchild, and having a child would cut into my Funko Pop budget”, I can at least credit his honesty.

But if, like Jameela Jamil, you don’t want children because you like being childless and don’t want your lifestyle to be disrupted by them, just come out and say that. Stop pretending that this has anything to do with climate change, or Donald Trump, or AI, or the Middle Eastern war du jour. And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.

1 To this end, while an outright ban on smartphones would be effectively impossible (that horse has well and truly bolted) – if such a thing could be done, I think it would boost fertility rates far more than many would have us believe.

2 Because it’s not as if previous generations ever had to cope with conflicts in the Middle oh wait. This article lists 108 conflicts since 1914.

3 Citations for this claim have been repeatedly requested, but none are forthcoming.

4 Are you even a little bit surprised to learn that this profoundly mentally disturbed young man – member of a community which is the philosophical inheritor to the dualist tradition of Gnosticism, in which members brag about having sterilised themselves, and who thinks that having children is evil – now identifies as a trans woman? Thanks to Kat Highsmith for bringing it to my attention.

People don't want children because children here suck ass (or, they are too expensive, same thing). "But climate change" is the left wing cope, the right wing cope is "make motherhood high status". There is no viable solution.

What does "here" mean exactly?

Most of planet earth in 2026.

Presumably, "in America" or "in the Western world". As soon as you have a child, you are a slave to it by proxy. You have to raise it as the powerful members of your community wish it to be raised, or face social and governmental wrath. This has always been true, though state capacity increasing has made it worse -- getting disapproving sniffs from those who don't like the way you raise your child is not as bad as disapproving sniffs plus stern letters from "educators" and visits from CPS or the local police. And, the way they want children to be raised has gotten more and more intensive. Full time personal supervision of them. Not just school but all sorts of "enriching" activities. Every sort of safety measure. Supporting them until they finish undergraduate. Etc.

I am pretty sure parents have a lot of freedom though? The limitations that are forced upon parents, as far as I know, are as follows:

  • You must provide food, clothing, and shelter.
  • Take care of their hygiene until they can be expected to take care of it themselves.
  • You must provide a living space that lives up to a certain minimum standard of hygiene and amenities. But this standard is cleared even by most apartments. Don't be a hoarder and make sure to keep up with repairs, mold and so on, and you should be fine.
  • You must provide an education equivalent to that of public school. That is, your kid should be able to pass the same exams as everyone else.
  • You are not allowed to beat them, or put them in positions of physical harm.
  • You can yell at them, but only to the extend that it is not deemed abuse.
  • You are not allowed to have sex with them or handle them sexually.
  • Certain religious practices are considered child abuse.
  • Depending on the country, leaving young kids alone outside can be considered neglect. Although this differs wildly even between western nations. I believe America is especially hard on this.
  • In America, it seems like not affirming your child's chosen gender can cause the cops to be called on you. I don't know how widespread this actually is though; It could easily be mostly media fearmongering.

I think the last two are the only unreasonable points. But those are both specific to certain countries and don't explain why all of the west is seemingly facing the same issue. Otherwise, they all seem fine. You can homeschool if you have the resources. You can teach them your faith, although stuff like female circumcision is banned. You can teach them to not have sex before marriage. You can teach them a trade, you can try and make them expert sports players, or you can tell them that the world is a dangerous place and they should stay with you for as long as they can. In these cases, you may expect your kid to not fit in with others, as you are effectively raising them for a different culture. You can be cold, and passive, and distant, as long as you keep up with the basic duties of food, clothing, shelter, and education. Other parents may sneer at you and you may feel isolated. But legally you have a lot of wiggle room with how you want to raise your kids.

Full time personal supervision of them. Not just school but all sorts of "enriching" activities.

No one is going to take your kids away if you don't sign them up for a sport. And are you seriously saying that a group of 10 year-olds cannot play alone outside without it being called child abuse?

Supporting them until they finish undergraduate.

This is another thing that may be expected but it is not a policy that is enforced. You have the legal right to kick out your 18-year-old son, and refuse to save up for his college degree. The only thing you will face is judgement. But the government is not going to come after you for it.

American child protection services (CPS) have powers way beyond that of most other government agencies. Children can be removed from parents for the time of the investigation, and returned months later, the quintessential 'process is punishment' phenomenon.

The intersection of child healthcare and government can also be very gruesome. Government may decide that a child should not be allowed to get medical treatment in another country as in the British case of Alfie Evans.

If you bring a child to an American hospital and you disagree with medical decisions there, they may call CPS on you if you want to leave. It gets really difficult to find adequate healthcare for your child if you disagree with the current political directions of health authorities, like under the COVID regime or the ongoing 'soul mixed-up at birth' transgender craze, which means you may get denied certain other services like access to a daycare or public school.

Anybody in your vicinity may disagree with your parenting, some American adults will call CPS on parents because unattended children play outside. This may not necessarily lead to the aforementioned dreaded removal, but it definitely weights on families.

This is all a result of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, which made it illegal for Americans to choose their neighbors, and created a culture under which functional adults have to defend themselves from the assumption that they belong to the 10% under-functioning fringe that nobody should never ever officially discriminate against.

Talking about minimums is irrelevant. First because people don't want to have a child with a minimum viable life. Secondly because to make sense of it you have to compare it to conditions in high fertility societies. For example: having a child means you have to plan your vacations around the school year for 10+ years, this does not matter if you don't have vacations and you will never be able to afford them anyway.

Also, downthread you say:

Most of the points are reasonable and essentially boil down to "ensure your children grow up healthy and with a basic education".

this is how low fertility happens, it's almost all a consequence of good things that we like that ends up making children suck as a side effect. Take the vacations example above (I'm not saying that's the main thing by the way), why does it happen:

  • we have more disposable income: GOOD
  • we want children to receive schooling: GOOD
  • we are going to provide free schooling to children: GOOD
  • we don't want to have children go for long periods unsupervised: GOOD

Or take child seats laws, which make children suck as a side effect: do you want children to die in car accidents? Do you want to kill children? Are you a child killer? You must hate children if you want to abolish child seats laws.

You can sanewash it all you want, though the fact that you were able to come up with an 11-point list without much trouble kinda works against you.

And are you seriously saying that a group of 10 year-olds cannot play alone outside without it being called child abuse?

It's quite possible this will get the police and/or CPS called. Even if it doesn't, if something happens with one of these 10 year olds -- e.g. one or more gets a minor injury, or they trespass on the wrong neighbor's lawn -- the parents will be questioned about why they weren't supervising the child. And with that sort of question, there's no acceptable answer; the question is simply making the point that there was a transgression.

Most of the points are reasonable and essentially boil down to "ensure your children grow up healthy and with a basic education". The unreasonable points seem specific to America and thus don't work when you are trying to generalize to all of the west.

There is an argument that corporal punishment has a place in parenting, but as far as I can tell most parents are not capable of using it responsibly, so it seems reasonable that it is illegal.

You still have a lot of options on how to raise your kids.

Having to provide constant supervision for up to 13 years, depending on the specific local, is in fact extremely limiting, especially if there are a lot of rules about babysitting and so babysitters are difficult to obtain outside of 8 - 5 childcare hours (and difficult within those hours too outside of specific programs. I expect to obtain ~4 hrs of outsourced childcare over the next two months).

Most of the points are reasonable

Yes, the unreasonableness was advanced one seemingly reasonable point at a time.

Yeah I've transitioned from having my first child in Australia as a nuclear family to having a second child in SEA with a far-larger extended family present, nanny and a culture that's generally more childfriendly. The amount of quality of life I've received back due to moving is insane, and it's better for the kids as well. Nuclear family two working parents trying to negotiate a child is absolutely punitive.

Can you please explain in what sense is Southeast Asian culture more child-friendly than Australian culture?

People way more comfortable interacting with strangers' small children than in Australia since there are more small children around. Essentially everywhere has ample childseats. Carseat legislation has tradeoffs but less enforcement makes being ad-hoc with children a lot easier. Difference in wages means that most service jobs are way more staffed here so you get a lot more active assistance with children whilst dining and whatnot.

People way more comfortable interacting with strangers' small children than in Australia since there are more small children around.

I think the more likely explanation is that the pedophile predator threat is part of the public consciousness in Australia but not in SE Asia. And I doubt the fertility rate is higher in SE Asia than in Australia.

Essentially everywhere has ample childseats.

Do you mean restaurants and third places in general?

And I doubt the fertility rate is higher in SE Asia than in Australia.

Malaysia 1.6 per capita to Australia at 1.48 which isn't a huge gap, though also going to likely be magnified by me going from a relatively big city to somewhere more suburban. There is a massive increase in child-friendly infrastructure here, though.

More comments

I don't think there's a viable societally-general solution, but my local solution of being part of a religious community where motherhood is high-status seems to be working out fine. Good luck to everyone else, I guess, and hopefully we'll still be here when you're ready to try something other than whatever it is you're doing now.

I thought the movie took place in Seattle. That would explain the rain and even the desert at the end. Eastern part of the state has some.

There is a desert in Washington state?

there's a little bit of desert environment yea

Climate map of Washington State

There's a large amount of "cold semi-arid" in the vicinity of the Kennewick and Moses Lake urban areas, with a negligible patch of "cold desert" near the latter. However, satellite photographs indicate quite a lot of agriculture in that same area, so "cold semi-arid" possibly should not be considered to count as "desert".

The screenwriter said he was inspired by his time living in NYC, and at one point Mills's wife says the city is much more violent compared to "upstate", but IIRC it's never actually specified which city it is.

I always assumed it takes place in NYC. Then this thread reminded me for the first time that there's a desert in the story as well.

Their apartment gets rattled by that train. I thought that was some east coast thing. I don't specifically know about Seattle but I don't suppose they were getting rattled like that by light rail in the 90s. Google backs up my vague feeling and says Seattle had no light rail or commuter trains in the 90s.

oh, a rattling train does change things. I haven't seen it in ages.

I think you are correct, and that the fertility rates have fallen because people's preference for children has declined. What is more interesting is why their preference declined.

As a simple model, this is wrong. The driver of falling fertility we don't really see is an increase in voluntary DINKdom.

What we do see is smaller families (and in particular 2 instead of 3+) among couples who do have kids - and per surveys most of the 3->2 shift feels involuntary - and (since 2014 or so) reduced coupling.

The vast majority of people still want marriage and children, and the vast majority of them will have at least one child if they find themselves with a biologically suitable partner. There is not a large number of people who want a childless marriage, and no evidence that this number has increased. It is possible that there has been an increase in the number of people who want neither marriage nor children, but anecdotally most of the increase in singleness is involuntary due to FUBAR dating markets. We don't know how many people want children without marriage because it isn't (for good reasons) an available option for the social classes with the intelligence and conscientiousness for what they want to affect their behaviour.

The other thing that has changed is the perceived marginal cost of an additional child in a 2+ child family.

As a simple model, this is wrong. The driver of falling fertility we don't really see is an increase in voluntary DINKdom.

It is not wrong. Increasingly late marriage age follows collapse in marital fertility.

and per surveys most of the 3->2 shift feels involuntary

What are you talking about? The data I've seen suggests that married people have as many kids as they want. Which is now 1 or 2.

According to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40841398/ the average number of children that a US mother will have declined sharply in the 60s and 70s, but has been rising fairly steadily since 1980. The big driver of decreasing TFR is the childlessness rate, which was less than 1/20 in 1960 but is now more than 1/3.

The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be.

https://www.themotte.org/post/3555/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/410740?context=8#context

this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.

I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent - multiplying because the Catholic Church told them it was virtuous to do so, and they couldn't even conceive of a consequentialist utilitarian argument about whether or not to have a child.

And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.

This only addresses the "having a child would be unethical because they'd contribute to climate change" line of argument, not the "having a child would be unethical because the world is going to burn and they'd die of thirst in their teens" line of argument. If you genuinely believe the world is going to end in fifteen years, I think it's intellectually consistent to be spending your remaining years in comfort and even hedonistic decadence, even as you say that the world is going to get so bad in a short enough time-frame that any child would curse you for bringing them into the world by the time they were old enough to do so. It's… convenient, but it's consistent.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

Humans are tougher than cockroaches. Literally, we conquered the high arctic and the depths of the sahara where they can't go. The belief that humans won't persist through some postapocalyptic wasteland, perhaps your children conquering this mad max world, is... well I guess about as unreasonable as believing it's going to happen.

I mean, sure, Homo sapiens might not go extinct, but I think it's reasonable to have qualms about having a child if you believe they've got a 90% chance of dying in the apocalypse, even if you grant that 10% of humanity might survive and eventually rebuild something civilization-shaped.

That's a severe lack of confidence in your kids. Are these people marrying the weakest partner they can find? Is this more blue tribe weakness-as-status-symbol, like ARFID and long covid?

Most apocalyptic scenarios don't select on any meaningful definition of "strength" - nuclear war certainly doesn't and nor does the kind of pandemic with a 50+% fatality rate.

One of the only things I know about my children's future is that they will die, and that it will probably be ugly. I'm a lot more concerned with the meaningfulness of their lives.

Sure, the Reaper comes for us all, but I wouldn't have a child if I knew, eg through embryo screening, that it would almost certainly die of a horribly painful disease before turning fourteen. I don't think most people would. If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years", the prospects of a child conceived today would look an awful lot like our screened embryo with the horrible genetic malformation. Needless to say I don't grant the assumption, but it seems, on its own terms, to add up.

If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years"

Glad we agree that it would be an absolutely insane thing to assume, but if I actually had reason to believe that I'd plan accordingly, and still have children. It's happened many times before and probably will many times again.

I'd also have the kid who's (allegedly) going to die within fifteen years, though that gets back to moral foundations that I don't expect to share in common with most here.

To get me to shy away from having kids, I'd need to be convinced, and I mean really convinced, that there is little chance of saving them from fates worse than death. Getting hoovered up by Cthulhu for example, or forced into some kind of AI-run entertainment/nutrition pods where they have no opportunity to learn about nature or real history and instead have their minds' semiotic webs wrecked by bombardment with false impressions.

If an asteroid were definitely going to hit the earth in 18 months we'd still have another kid and cherish our time with him or her.

An asteroid hitting the Earth has the benefit of being instantaneous; I had in mind a slow, painful death from gradual organ failure or similar (which seems similar to the possibility of a slow death from malnutrition and dehydration in the event of social collapse from runaway climate change). I agree it's more defensible to have the child if your only consideration is an early cutoff, the suffering was an active ingredient in my reasoning. Though with a child whose projected death is at a somewhat older age than 18 months you'd run into the dilemma of whether to tell your six-year-old kid that they're for sure going to die before they grow up, which seems like a very cruel choice for any parent to have to make either way.

I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent

Yeah, I was considering including a paragraph saying that the people claiming that they aren't having children because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world like this would presumably claim that people in the past were ignorant and foolish, but Now We Know Better. But the post was already too long as it stood.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

From reading Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy, my understanding is that the ordained men of the church were forbidden from having children, but not ordinary parishioners. But I think the theological position of the church was that conceiving a child is evil, even if it's a necessary evil.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

They weren't and the two existing moder Gnostic religions aren't

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.

Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.

"Marital sex is part of a second-best compromise and it would be better if married couples had the bare minimum amount of sex for reproduction, like the Protestant couple in the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch" is a very common error that crops up in Christian thought over the centuries, to the point where I am not sure if it is an error.

The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.

The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.

Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.

Paul's views were pretty complicated on marriage, he says this in Corinthians 1 chapter 7

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is well for a man not to touch a woman Verse 2 I wish that all were as I myself am. (That is unmarried and childless) Verse 6 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. Verses 8 and 9.

Now while he does exhort the married to stay married this is hardly a full throated endorsement given than he says the unmarried should not become married and he wishes everyone be unmarried and childless. There have been plenty of anti-natalist Christian movements based on versus like this just as there have been plenty of anti-natalist gnostic movements. The Gnostic concept isn't inherently anymore anti-natalist then verses like this and the idea of original sin. All Abrahamic religions value the spirit over the flesh.

The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.

For anthropic reasons, they wouldn't be. I hope you can see why that doesn't disprove the historical argument.

Yes I do. But a lot of people are then arguing that Gnosticism inherently trends to anti-natalism which I don' think it needs to philosophically and I think the fact that we have incredibly ancient extant Gnostic religions prove it.

"I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students"

On the off chance that I become an oyster farmer and run for senate 10 years from now, let the digital record unequivocally reflect that I am 100% in favor of attractive single female teachers """""raping""""" their male students to get pregnant.

I am generally not for marriage age gaps of -10 years, nor am I for it when these teachers are cheating on their husbands, but the cruel way in which Americans punish these women is absurd. Realistically they should just lose their careers and only go to jail for a few years if their husband presses charges for adultery. At least adultery actually has a victim. Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws? There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher. Don't Americans see that when they assign these heavy handed sentences to such women, that they are the criminals?

IMO it's a straightforward projection of female vulnerability, the fear of being overpowered and exploited by a stronger man, onto male children, whom they imagine as equally helpless. Americans would jump out of their seats if they saw this German film where, an adult woman, stark naked, shared a scene with her then 12yo male co-star, even though the on-screen relationship between their respective characters was presented as an inherently unhealthy one.

FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.

Jumping off topic, I think @FtttG is hitting on something big here:

I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.

A very astute and widely applicable observation that can extend to any ideology that calls for radical upending of current societal arrangements. Its adherents don't actually want that, not really. They really just want to play the game the way the winners do. So naturally, they gravitate towards an arrangement where they're the winners. No incel would favour overhauling current dating market dynamics if he magically transformed to chad.

FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.

I think the problem is that Americans are cruel. Your logic is „I wouldn't be thrilled” and the laws exist „for a reason.” Yes, I wouldn't be thrilled if someone goes past me at 150 kmh on the highway. The speed limit exists „for a reason.” Mm hm. Maybe he has a reason to be in a hurry but if he is stopped by police, too bad.

None of this logic works if I find out the man is incarcerated for 10 years. You must actually do something wrong to justify that, not something which is „not thrilling.” You are basically destroying the lives of these women for no reason. If you fired them as teachers and left it at that, fine, the rules exist for a reason. But you need a very good reason, not a vague, I'm not thrilled reason, to incarcerate someone. At least if you aren't cruel.

I think there ought to be laws against cruel people, because such people don't thrill me. They ought to feel their own cruelty.

You are basically destroying the lives of these women for no reason.

This is inherent in punishment. If punishment didn't cause harm to the target, it wouldn't be punishment--you're basically arguing to never punish anyone.

And it's not "no reason"; the reason is that sex with underage people, especially when the age difference is drastic and the teacher is in a position of authority, is harmful to the lives of the victims, even if they don't immediately step up and say "yeah, I was harmed by this".

This is inherent in punishment. If punishment didn't cause harm to the target, it wouldn't be punishment--you're basically arguing to never punish anyone.

False dilemma. Obviously there are degrees of punishment. It's cruelty when you go overboard. I agree teachers who hit on their students should be fired, but it's cruel to put them in prison, especially for more than 1 year.

And it's not "no reason"; the reason is that sex with underage people, especially when the age difference is drastic and the teacher is in a position of authority, is harmful to the lives of the victims, even if they don't immediately step up and say "yeah, I was harmed by this".

I believe in no victim, no harm. If you can't find a victim, there is no harm and should be little to no prison time.

I believe in no victim, no harm. If you can't find a victim, there is no harm and should be little to no prison time.

There are victims. You just have bad standards for what counts as a victim. It should not require physical harm to be considered a victim.

I'm a victim then. When do I get to put the people who offend me and make my life bad in prison? I would much rather have sex with a 28 year old woman when I was 15 than deal with a lot of what people do to me.

More comments

Yes, antinatalism is just one example of the general trend wherein politically radical people are almost invariably those who are least satisfied with their lives. An antifa meetup will not exactly be swimming with charming, good-looking people, but neither will a gathering of white supremacists.

If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. I was a bit disappointed to find that I'd been scooped seven decades in advance.

Thanks for the rec. Yeah, I suspect a big part of why incels are so viscerally hated by other similarly maladjusted groups (transgenders, ANTIFA, /r/okbuddyliterallyme) is that they serve as an ugly, unfiltered mirror to their own insecurities and resentment over social/sexual rejection, but without dressing it up with pseudo-intellectual scaffolding or progressive moral language. Ironically, even when they larp as world-saving radicals online, they still submit to reddit leftist taboos for updoots (social acceptance). On the other hand, incels just say the quiet part out loud. That raw honesty makes them intolerable.

“They hated him because he told the truth” is rarely a good explanation.

Like, if you go online and see someone railing about how you are his class enemy, how you’re part of a conspiracy to keep him from getting pussy…how are you going to feel about that? Is it going to have anything to do with his perceived “raw honesty”?

I don't think that's really what he says? I think he's saying that this is narcissism of small differences in action, more than unflattering truth, and that incels lose out by departing from consensus as to their problems(it's not my fault because I'm ugly is a very different explanation than it's not my fault because of capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, even if they both revolve around justifying a lack of agency).

how you’re part of a conspiracy

Maybe I wasn't making my point clear. Yes, many incels do spend too much time inside their heads and spiral into neurosis and paranoia. But the visceral hatred I was describing from other similarly maladjusted groups (like the antinatalists and Ryan Gosling bros) usually kicks in long before that point, precisely when the mirror gets held up without the ideological coping mechanisms. Their "raw honesty" is that they're unhappy and insecure because of their low social/sexual status, not because the sky is falling and fascism is on the rise™, it's an unflattering mirror to the Ryan Goslings' and ANTIFAs' own lived experiences (the Gosling larpers are just reddit approved incels with a glorified martyr complex), that if their own lives looked like a John Hughes' movie, they wouldn't be in those spaces to begin with. They've probably silently felt at lease some of the things the incels speak of online, but don't feel comfortable to confront those feelings and question their socially approved priors.

Side note: I'd recommend checking out /r/DebateIncelz to really understand the incel perspective in a somewhat neutral and sane environment without the usual caricatures coming out of .is. The problem is these guys don't articulate their experiences without chimping out on unmoderated spaces, that doesn't make those experiences not true (from their pov at least).

Edited some sentences.

I was an attractive youth and got some attention from pretty, relatively-young female teachers, but nothing over the line even given the much wider latitude afforded by society at the time. This was gratifying and is especially so in retrospect as I understand it better, whereas in the moment I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.

But when I was 16 I did babysit for a while for a military wife whose husband was often away, and she came on to me pretty strong. She'd touch me a lot and suggest that maybe sometime she could get another babysitter and the two of us could hang out. That kind of thing. Again, I wasn't fully sure about what was happening, and had the sense I should probably tell my parents about it, but chose not to. I didn't feel threatened, even though it was weird, and maybe a little exciting. She was very cute and probably about 28.

In retrospect it bothers me more. I am very glad she didn't push harder. I'm pretty sure I'd have refused, and probably gotten out okay, but it would have been severely traumatizing. And if I'd gone along with it, that would have been worse. Talk about life regrets! I care a lot about my sexual integrity and have never slept with anyone but my prior and current wife. I'm physically sick at the thought of that being taken from me when I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on. And that's beside the damage to her family, and the community more generally if it were discovered, which I can only suppose it would have been eventually.

Perhaps in other cultures, where the rules of human engagement are spelled out clearly and boys are prepared for such things by 16, there could be room for older women pushing them into it. But having been close to something like that myself, I have no sympathy for the ones who do it in our culture.

Is this a joke? How would you not know what sexual intercourse is when your IQ was fully developed and you had been alive for over a decade and a half? It's not difficult.

How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was? There are dimensions to sex vastly more complicated than tab A into slot B. There are personal, social, spiritual considerations and learning to navigate those isn't simple. Especially when it's your mom's friend who's pushing you.

Thanks for the clarification. That made it easy to flag you as "Too retarded to be worth interacting with in the future" though I'm not one for blocks, myself.

Ok, sorry, heat too high and light too low I guess. Sorry for comparing 28 year old women hitting on 16 year old boys being bad to believing in witchcraft. But do you get my point, how your logic can come off as magical? I accept what you're saying but the context here is these women face 10 years in jail or so. I understand they might have causes you some slight discomfort as a teenager, but that can't justify a decade of incarceration. People cause me emotional discomfort and self image issues almost every day, and it would be a very different world if even some of them could be locked up for 10 years for causing me discomfort. I just don't believe a woman hitting on you at 16 can be much more harmful than how I feel when someone says I'm retarded.

How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was?

You said:

In the moment, I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.

I wasn't fully sure about what was happening.

I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on.

(posted before edit adding three additional sentences, but probably still partially a valid response)

I think it's probably indicative of some kind of deep pathology that the details of the physical, mechanical angle was immediately imagined to be the only thing I could possibly be having trouble understanding, with zero consideration of everything else involved in sex.

It's simple, right? Benis and Bagina. What's not to understand, kid?

How about "How is this going to affect your self-image, relationships to family and community, and ultimately your (notional) future marriage?" I was very aware of all that in play, plus much more, and no, I didn't understand it. Nor frankly was I quite willing to believe that this married woman and friend of my family was trying to have sex with me, and had to overcome a very high threshold of giving her the benefit of the doubt, which was also kind of awful.

What pathology exactly? I've heard this in the wild, not aimed at my myself but from your crowd in this discussion, and it didn't make sense. I have a very loving marriage, what deep pathology are you talking about exactly? How would you know if you didn't know what sex was at 16? How does that make you a sex expert? If anything it makes you delayed at sex and romance matters. Are we just making the laws for the delayed at this point, normal people be damned?

I'm just not sure how far the word "consent" should be stretched.

(1) When I grant my consent to sex, I mean that I understand that this woman wants me to repeatedly insert my penis into her vagina until I achieve orgasm.

(2) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of disease, fatherhood, and child-support payments (as outlined by this stack of legal rulings).

(3) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of lasting psychological harm (as outlined by this stack of scientific studies).

(4) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of stigma as a statutory-rape victim.

More comments

Because generally that relationship is inversely proportional if you’re a smart kid.

Then empirically, they aren't that smart.

I think it was pretty smart of me to not have sex in high school.

Dude. If you go into AP high school classes and ask the boys there, the last breast they ever touched would be in a KFC bucket.

But they know what sex is.

Not complicated, as long as they're not doing the male feminist thing like the GP is. They know if they want to do it or not, and assertions that they're traumatized by the offer are destructive when listened to from either gender.

More comments

I can respect that you have strong personal values around sex and relationships. But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault. Feeling profoundly disgusted or used after a regretted encounter is real and common, but I highly doubt that you would've felt the degree of bodily violation, physical illness, and scathing hot showers to wash off her touch following that encounter, if you went through with it.

As a man, the closest analogue I can imagine to that level of visceral violation by a woman would be something like being pinned down by a morbidly obese landwhale with horrible breath, and having my dick forced to get hard inside her. This is precisely why most cultures throughout history — even highly patriarchal ones — have had no real concept of a female rapist. The evolutionary dynamics and physical consequences are simply not symmetrical.

But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault.

The harm does not become the fault of the person who has been harmed just because he could have had values under which it would not be harm. This is the autistic argument that only tangible, physical, consequences count--who cares about emotions? Physical consequences are not the only kinds of harm that count.

By your reasoning even forcible rape largely causes harm by values violation. Which is true; if you had values which said that being raped is good, there's actually little permanent physical harm from a lot of rapes (outside of pregnancy). It doesn't matter. It's still harm. You can't just dismiss harm for depending on someone's values.

The harm does not become the fault of the person who has been harmed just because he could have had values under which it would not be harm.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then? Because that (and safetyism more generally) is the logical conclusion to giving this argument any legal weight.

This is why we tend to set hard boundaries on "what a member of society is allowed to consider harm". 1A is like that- it absolutely oppresses the easily offended and the incorrect, who are forced to suffer the existence of [thing they don't like].

Of course, we only cover specific things there, so a Karen not consenting to your child walking down the street alone can effectively order him arrested for that crime, even in nominally liberal countries.

Those people have to be oppressed in this way- forced to suffer the existence of things that disgust and terrify them- for a pluralistic society to function. As a (classic) liberal, I assert this is justice.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then? Because that (and safetyism more generally) is the logical conclusion to giving this argument any legal weight.

The view you're in favor of isn't logical. Logic would imply protections for men like anti-adultery laws, but they aren't interested in making the law logical and fair. It's trad-hat on for girls, and, thanks to Ginsburg, boys, and hippie hat on for men. We can get scammed by women, cheated on, whatever, we just have to grow up and deal with it, but as soon as it's one of their protected categories it's 10 years of prison per irrational tear cried.

So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then?

No, I think these need to be looked at at the object level. Rape and underage sex cause psychological harm that we should respect, misgendering causes psychological harm that we should not respect.

Rape is in a separate class for reasons that aren't merely psychological, of course.

While I don't deny that "forcible confinement" and "assaulted so hard you suffer lifelong injury" do have psychological effects (in a way entirely dissimilar to underage sex, doubly so when the underaged is male), we punish rape because those things have physical consequences- things we have an objective measure for, and an objective remedy.

That's not something you can do for psychological harm, which is why it's a useful vehicle for concern trolling to justify whatever you'd like without actual evidence. Because I guarantee you that I can absolutely find "evidence" to substantiate misgendering being just as psychologically harmful to someone as actual (to say nothing of pretend) rape is (and not infrequently claimed to be identically harmful, for that matter).

I could hear an argument that psychological harm is something we should respect, but it would need to be done in a way that doesn't max out the scale in favor of the interests of people with a biological predisposition to catastrophism the instant it's switched on.

More comments

The emotional harm of active, forceful penetration is not analogous to values based emotional injury from regretted but consensual sex, even if both can be painful. And that sounds like a strawman of my reasoning. Forcible rape causes harm through both physical violation and emotional trauma. But the physical component (the overpowering and loss of bodily autonomy through force) is not optional or purely values-dependent. Values matter. Emotions matter. But they don't make every negative feeling equivalent to violent assault.

This seems like a fully-general argument against, uh, laws? I can't think of any that don't come down to what amounts to values. Murder has been legal and even encouraged in plenty of societies, for example, though with certain (values-based) restrictions.

Your personal values and what the law permits don’t necessarily align, and laws naturally shift as social structures change. Feudal societies heavily discouraged sex before (or outside) marriage largely to guarantee paternity and stable households. Post-sexual revolution and a working female population, most of these risks are now ameliorated. That said, the thrust of my point is the specifc kind of rape trauma a female victim would go through doesn't match the facts you described, nor do most cases of female-teacher-fucks-male-student. And at 16, you could've probably easily overpowered her if she tried to force herself on you.

But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault.

Our statutory rape laws are (generally, in the US) written as strict liability and don't require physical violence (which would probably trigger additional charges), seemingly because we do see it as a values issue. And I'm not sure that's wrong, personally.

I thought there was broad social consensus in the US that such women are usually punished rather lightly.

This is due to the American mania for consistency in stupid beliefs- in this case, that men and women are the same.

I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree with your point that statutory rape of a young man by an adult woman isn’t a thing thé same way it is of a young woman- although it remains disqualifying for a youth-oriented position. But in America treating transgeessions differently depending on the sex of the victim is not a stable equilibrium, and most people would rather overpunish unprofessional teachers than under punish rapists.

But in America treating transgeessions differently depending on the sex of the victim is not a stable equilibrium

So Americans want to sacrifice innocent women in the name of feminism? Why are they so feminist?

and most people would rather overpunish unprofessional teachers than under punish rapists.

Women 99% of the time cannot rape men. If they pull it off, they also threatened them with a deadly weapon which is enough of a charge I think. Also Americans overpunish „rape” since they have expanded the concept far beyond what it actually means. So wanting to not overpunish „rape” is another aspect of their excessive cruelty.

This woman isn’t ’innocent’ although she’s also not a rapist.

By that standard, nobody is innocent.

I don't have much sympathy for fornicators running into consequences, even if those consequences happen to be ridiculous.

I am sympathetic to that, but it is ultimately a self own, because you live in a society where you are almost forced to fornicate, so it's not the big evil you think it is. Let's say you marry early. You can't marry that early because the type of people who prosecute the woman won't let you marry until 18. Can you marry at 18? Is your wife older than you? Exact same age? What are the odds of that? Is it natural? They won't let you marry a 16 year old when you're 18, they'll throw you in prison like the 28 year old woman with the hopes that Travonius tears you up a little if you catch my drift. So if your wife is a normal amount younger than you, you're probably 21 or 22 by the time you're allowed to touch her ... when did you start feeling horny, 12? So just wait 9 or 10 years, no big deal? No sympathy for„gooners” either, so if a boy looks up lascivious girls his age, or his future wife's age, during this time, your FBI will arrest him and sentence him as an adult to some United States justice. It's okay, I mean you can have sympathy for horny people? They're just young men anyway, and everybody hates them.

More comments

I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree...

Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.

Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.

Yes but also no- I don’t consider the boy being a teenager a relevant factor even if they both did a bad thing.

There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher.

FWIW I am male and as a youth I had two incidents along these lines in which adult women attempted to groom me. One was a camp counselor and the other was a teacher. Fortunately nothing happened and both of these women were nice enough to back off once they realized I wasn't interested sexually.

I'm not going to say that I was traumatized by these incidents, but they were mildly disturbing and I do think that female on male child molestation is more destructive than is thought by the "where were these women when I was a child" crowd.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years. I've never seen any compelling evidence that these women should go to prison, unless they cheated on their husband, but that's not why they go.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

I would definitely agree with that and I am certainly not claiming otherwise. My point is that there is an element out there which seems to think it's basically a nothingburger if an adult woman in a position of authority seduces an underage male student. In my opinion, it's not.

Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.

There is no way to consistently think sex is a big enough deal that are willing lock up single women for having sex with a 16 year old boy consensually, but you refuse to log up adulterers in general. Adultery actually has a victim, the Hanania meme does not.

An adult woman can't have consensual sex with an underage boy by definition. Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in. Adults fucking kids do.

16 year olds aren't underage boys, if you define underage boys to be people who can't consent to sex with women. The cutoff here would be 12 or 13 on average. Really it depends on puberty timing and IQ but if you have to project that onto age it would be 12 or 13 I think.

Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in.

Okay, then adults stealing from one another don't need society to step in. Legalize stealing? It's not like the one spouse consents when the other cheats. If they do, maybe that's another matter. It's polygamy more than it is adultery and it's a separate discussion as to whether to tolerate it. If they don't consent, they're being victimized and I think they need society to step in. What are they going to do in 2026, beat the cheating spouse? Kill them with stones? Then society steps in on the side of the cheater. Something has to give.

More comments

I think your definition is wrong. Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age, modulo literal mental disability.

Below this age? The lack of consent is not automatic (and if it is, it's the fault of a badly written law), the assumption of the lack of consent is. The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.

I would be fine with two cutoff dates, with the lower one separating "definitely a crime" from "could be problematic".

More comments

When I was in eighth grade, my history teacher- young, female, quite pretty in retrospect- had a crush on me and it was blatantly obvious, she never did anything but it was incredibly awkward and I was not a fan of the experience.

Wow. If we were in a bar I would demand some more details. Unless your expression was telling me don't.

Shared my similar story here and you're welcome to ask questions though I don't think I have much more to say about it.

Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws?

The laws against young men having sex are mainly there as a logical/equal-opportunity side-effect of society's desire to punish sex with young women.

It's not that complicated.

society's desire to punish sex with young women.

Why are they like this though? Is it their cruelty or something else?

Because women lack agency and protecting them from predation in time periods when they often have no choice in which authority figures they are exposed to is a worthy goal.

The only good solution to this is a traditional marriage regime, not this monstrosity Americans made.

If we are talking about adultery laws and "absurdly cruel victimless crime sex," what does that have to do with laws against young men having sex?

Like, based on the original example of an older female teacher, it seems completely off-topic. What do you mean?

Uncompensated sex with young women, that is.

It's not like attractive single female teachers need to resort to such measures in order to get pregnant though.

One would think, and yet…

I wonder if these declarations of noble childlessness are more common in public forums like the internet?

From my experience being an annoying pronatalist, if you ask people face to face why they aren't having children, the most common answer among those who could have children (married or coupled people) is something along the lines of 'eh, not sure I can be bothered' which seems like the real answer.

Relevant cartoon

People are pretty good at finding the motivation for doing what they've always done in the face of difficulty, as Albert Camus noted- imagining sisyphus happy and all that. People are pretty bad at picking out what they've always done from a large set of equally easy options, as existentialists also noted, even when that's what makes them happy.

I think the truth that the cartoon hints at but doesn't explicitly show, is that all of those couples were having sex, for all sorts of reasons, but that meant babies in the first three panels and it doesn't in the last one.

The solution to the fertility crisis is simple but not easy. It's ban birth control and let nature take it's course.

I think in an ideal world if you choose to not have kids, you forfeit your right to social security; since you depend on others and successive generations to fund your retirement.

How do they prove you're unmarried by choice? Shall the government introduce marriage centers (analogous to job centers) that bids you to marry the first bottom of the barrel man or woman they match you with?

That’s why I said ideal world. I was anticipating precisely that objection.

So what exactly happens in the ideal world?

Marriage proposals are all submitted and answered in writing by law. Unless you can produce such a document, the authorities will assume that you're unmarried by choice. Just an idea.

Argentina tried this, there were women who took money to reject marriage proposals.

Wait! I want to comment on the cartoon too!

While basically sympathetic to the artist's point, what mainly occurs to me here is that in the first three panels people were living a lifestyle that let them be home with their kids a lot.

Both parents out of the house working, and especially if it's for low wages, is indeed hard. Also lack of family or community around to help with that. Also can't let them play alone outside. Also you're gonna need a bigger car if you want more than two, and those things don't grow on trees. Also also also...

Related

I live in a filter bubble with a median age of 12(not a typo). If you want children badly enough, you can have them. Economic reasons? I know people supporting double digit numbers of children and a SAHM, without obvious signs of poverty, on salaries of notoriously high paying jobs like 'welder' and 'teacher'. Health reasons? How much time you got for miracle stories that are more about the miracle of listening to doctors? 'Oh no one can keep up with more than one kid' I know a woman who had seven under eight while her husband business travelled... and she had a broken leg. 'Combining with education is too difficult' Lol no, lots of people around me are PhDs and have multiple children.

Most people just don't want kids. Eventually they'll die out. The Past is a Future Country was a strange prophecy, but I haven't seen an intelligent counterargument.

If you want children badly enough, you can have them.

Except for one thing you don't list here: as they say, it takes two to tango.

While a fair point, this was largely aimed at the married or dating but not wanting to take the next step(or, very similarly from my perspective, stopping at two).

All of the confusion and anger and petulance about all this is just the natural state of human psychology. In the past, hormones, necessity and the needs of others usually overrode individual preferences re: children.

Consciousness experiences life in a random universe as pain. Here I quote the Princess Bride, "life is pain and anyone who tells you different is selling something". The anti-natalists only echo the poet "That which my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man.".

People, by and large, fear death much less than pain. Eternal pain is the nightmare, hell. And life, with all its pleasures and joys, is still on net painful for practically everyone. In fact, the pain is entirely incidental to the processes of life and disconnected from any real feedback mechanisms. Hence Camus' charge that the first question of philosophy is whether to continue living.

Some percentage of people don't think it's worth it, and should check out. A life dedicated to hedonism, social climbing or political activism is not a happy one. You can't outrun pain, it's inside your head. People externalize, wirehead, rage at the nature of things. Refuse to procreate. I don't think it's cell phones, it's just the natural progression of people without struggle or direction.

Or, you can accept a life you did not choose, take your place in the family tree, among your people and grow a few new branches. Normiemaxxing, as the kids might say. This is evolution. All of this civilization, the video and corruption and economy and all the religions, all of it is just humanity driving its own evolution. We progress by differential fertility.

One thing I should note is that most religious faiths encourage some form of non-reproductive service as a means of getting acolytes primarily loyal to the church and unable to pass any wealth/status down to offspring. Much of the form we se anti-natalism taking in our modern day is just the new eunuch class from a relatively recent heresy of a very old religion. "LBGTBBQUIAST(&*%^#)&^" is just monks in the new monasteries which are universities which are the old monasteries.

Consciousness experiences life in a random universe as pain.

Huh?

Yes, I agree with the original post for the most part, but this is a big part that I feel a lot of "just have kids" discourse is missing.

I thought that there might be something uniquely painful about current civilization that causes widespread suffering. I only get statistics since the 1950s for suicide rates, which have been held more or less constant, and it appears that people in Africa still kill themselves, too. So maybe it's not so uniquely painful after all. The human condition extends further back than this.

With so many jokes about working until you're dead, or reading people's clever nihilistic responses to questions like "how's it going" and "how are you", I think there is a certain amount of despair that is inherent to anyone living in any civilization. It seems to me that if you're not really getting much joy out of life in the first place, there is little community structure to give pressure to have kids, and actually having kids even after having sex is an endeavor, it's natural you're not going to go to the extra effort when you're barely hanging on yourself. The first, nihilism about working until you're dead, has been around for a very long time. The other two are new. I really think that if those two were retroactively applied to people in the past, those people in the past, too, would possess a plummeting birth rate.

Edited to add: With so much abundance provided by the government, I think it's also been shown that nobody in particular needs anyone else, like actually needs them, relies on them for support, relies on them to have kids so that they can continue to eat and live from the labor of the next generation. I think we're a purpose driven species, and lacking a purpose makes for a directionless life.

The avoidance of pain is the central tenet of our societies.

Young men will be taught to avoid the trades because that work will 'destroy their bodies'. The average PMC/liberal idea seems to leave these 'dirty' jobs to brown people, whether it's fixing roofs or raising children.

Union-membership became a suspicious thing when the members realized that their college-educated left-wing allies would rather hire foreign labor than improve wages and work conditions at home.

I would rather my son gets into the trades and suffer some kind of disability in his 40s than literally live in the pod, eating bugs with his AI girlfriend.

Meanwhile, traditionally feminine homemaking work such as laundry, cooking, sewing clothes, maintaining heating has seen incredible improvements in ease and efficiency. Young women come out of years of education with only rudimentary ideas of what being a parent is like, and are shocked that unlike the rest of their life to that point, they may have to be uncomfortable whether by physically bearing and delivering a child, or by having to breastfeed, lack sleep, care for a helpless being. The process is only harder for our generation because the previous generations of women have pulled the rug on the support system that used to exist for new mothers, choosing instead to focus on their own personal satisfaction.

Being a mother was seen as some kind of 'duty', now it's very much optional.

The avoidance of pain is the central tenet of our societies.

Not sure I'd phrase it quite like this but agreed that it's a major factor. In practice it looks a lot to me like a desire for what amounts to palliative care until death.

You yourself claimed elsewhere in this thread some burdensome trauma about not being ready to live in the face of women suggesting you were.

The statement and phrasing are trivially correct.

Just out of pocket, but have you seen Severance? The quest for the avoidance of pain is one of the key themes and plot points of the show. In trying to eliminate pain from the human experience, they build an entire edifice of torture.

No, I'm afraid not. I'm unlikely to see it either because I'm just not in the habit of watching TV. I like the idea of watching more TV and have several series I've been meaning to finish, but who has the time?

But thanks, that does sound interesting.

As I have argued before, the values of "liquid modernity" and the liberal striver class are incompatible with building healthy relationships and by extension incompatible with human flourishing.

It is trivially true that eating healthy is less enjoyable than stuffing your face with junk.

It is trivially true that there are downsides to having kids.

It is trivially true that a life of responsibility is presents risks that a life of perpetual infancy does not.

At the end of the day good things justify themselves and that is why it is important to reject the values that might prevent you from embracing them.

While I agree with the body of the argument, what you are asking for is for people to stop lying to themselves. Why stop when it makes them feel better than the alternative?

Why would a drug addict stop using heroin, when it makes them feel better than the alternative?

I understand your point, but it's a poor analogy. Heroin is a controlled, addictive physical substance where the political will to control it does not exist and the physical goods are directly traded legally and illegally for money.

Lies are infinite, have no physical form and cost nothing to produce, although you could argue about the financial value of such.

Right, there are obvious differences.

I'm really not sure how to answer the question "why should people stop lying to themselves if it makes them feel good in the short-term?" The question seems to contain (or at least imply) its own answer.

The problem is that you can't really police what people believe, or choose to believe, inside their own heads. I've been on this point and sort of wrestling with it for a while - I'm perilously close to thinking that trying to change people's minds with facts and evidence is a useless endeavor, as people will just do whatever they wanted and then make up whatever justifications they want for it afterward. I'm of the opinion that most people don't have strongly held beliefs and are perfectly capable of functioning under doublethink, or even triple, or quadruplethink. Pointing out the inconsistency and acting like being correct is some huge deal is what's unnatural.

I can't stand communists, and would rather every single person who espouses that ideology be killed. I have a bit of history there. But I don't bother ever bringing this up or mentioning it when I see the extremely online self-professed communists carry the flags and wear the t-shirts. I know their values, belief, and knowledge is paper thin. They know about as much about communism as they know about Uzbekistan, or the price of wheat, but it makes them feel good to be part of something and allows them some form of legitimacy and credentials for hating the rich. Bringing it up and questioning their beliefs only to find out that there's nothing there and you're just harshing their vibe is wasted effort, doing so makes you the strange one who are missing the obvious social cues.

Complaining about people lying about their self-professed reasons to not breed seems pretty pointless in my opinion. What will change if they are honest? If they don't want to have kids, they don't want to have kids, the end, and whatever excuses they make up about it is their business.

Granted, I'm pretty sure they're lying about not wanting kids either. My mind kind of translates automatically that both genders don't want kids because they haven't met someone they want to have children with. Or alternatively, because having one requires sacrifice, and modern society is great at telling people sacrifice is for the lesser mortals even as people like Elon have enough progeny to staff a soccer team.

having one requires sacrifice, and modern society is great at telling people sacrifice is for the lesser mortals even as people like Elon has enough progeny to staff a soccer team.

I can't help but note that Elon is a terrible example of someone who sacrifices much to have children. Elon's contribution to his children, as far as I'm aware of from media osmosis, is a visit to the sperm bank and a payout that is a pittance to him yet enough to make the mother's time worth its while.

Complaining about people lying about their self-professed reasons to not breed seems pretty pointless in my opinion. What will change if they are honest? If they don't want to have kids, they don't want to have kids, the end, and whatever excuses they make up about it is their business.

As Scott would say, "If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It".

I want to respond to you in more detail, but I haven't fully woken up yet. I'll come back to you after another cup of coffee.

Take your time, I'm also half conscious. The comments in the Scott post I find more insightful than the post itself, much like a lot of the content he's written since the move to ACX.

I'm genuinely confused at what he expects, though; Scott has been blogging long enough to sit through multiple (American) presidential elections, and the fights around each. In my experience, I've seen virtually zero cases where any political discussion where people were corrected about something they were wrong or lying about has resulted in them changing their minds or who they were voting for. The reasons I've heard from people of the broadly defined sides of the political aisle are many, but even beyond their reasons, to reach to a meta-level beyond that and to analyze if those people are true believers or are just making mouth noises is next to impossible.

There's a strong form and a weak form of your argument.

The strong form is "Literally nobody is choosing to have children because the world sucks; they're lying and just don't want to have kids." I.e, your headline.

I think this presumes too much.

The weak form of your argument is that people who say they don't want to have children because the world sucks blah blah blah may or may not actually want to have children (or at least would consider it) but have been persuaded not to and climate change is as convenient an excuse as any. But they really do believe that adding more kids to the population is both a burden to the planet and cruel to the children. I've met some of these people. Do I think a different life path might have led them to choose parenthood? Well, yes, but you could say a different life path could have led anybody to anything.

You are probably correct that essentially* no one is choosing not to have children solely because of climate change. But I think there are many, many people who are anxious, uncertain about the future, genuinely do think the world is a pretty shitty place, and are at best ambivalent about having children. These people could probably be persuaded to have kids eventually, but they've fallen into a doomer mindset and now are self-justifying their decision.

* "Essentially" because when you're talking about the entire population of the planet, or even of the USA, "zero" is much too strong an assertion. Somewhere, there probably is someone who really would start pumping out kids if AI produced a miracle solution to climate change tomorrow.

But if, like Jameela Jamil, you don’t want children because you like being childless and don’t want your lifestyle to be disrupted by them, just come out and say that.

The tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should want them to keep making excuses, because a world where no excuses are necessary is even worse.

I suppose that's a point. On the other hand it frustrates me, because if you're not having children because of how awful the world is – well, look around you. From a historical perspective, along most legible metrics (dirt, disease, violence etc.) the world has never sucked less. How much better does it have to get before you start making babies?

Good post overall, addressed a lot of my interjections as I read through it.

The thing is I think the premise is sort of a category error: "Be honest about why you don't want children" is basically resolved as "because you just don't want to, not some hallucinated moral justification." But "You don't want children because you don't want children" is not exactly an insightful notion: as your post notes, nobody in the past seems to have had this problem. And from first principles, Darwinian dynamics imply normal people do want children, as the ones that don't will mostly be wiped from the board each generation, selecting for those that do. Yes, there's some conflation between wanting sex and wanting children, but it would be silly to contend these are fully independent: we have abortion now, yes, but they had abortion in the past, too, it was just post-birth abortion, so I think the distinction is more one of modern sensibilities than one that would be of Darwinian relevance. Having children is pretty much universally seen as a good thing, if not an outright divine blessing, in human cultures across time and space. Further, even if you cut the abortion rate to 0, we'd still have well below replacement fertility.

So why did people stop wanting children? Many contend they didn't: they stopped having children, yes, but they didn't stop wanting children.

I think there are many reasons, but one reason I think is significant but rarely noted is that the campaigns against teen pregnancy have, thanks to the rise of rationalism, finally been successful. In the past, when Christian norms reigned, sex education was basically a crotchety old woman badgering you to behave yourself because an invisible man in the sky said so, and obviously teenagers don't care what some crotchety old woman says about an invisible man in the sky, so they do what teenagers do, have an oopsie, then a shotgun wedding where we all pretend to not know what's going on, and then you're left with a healthy family. Traditional sex education, in a nominal sense, completely failed to do its job -- though in a Darwinian sense, it very much succeeded! But today, rational autists have analysed the situation and concluded "Oh, if we want to prevent teenagers from getting pregnant, having a crotchety old woman tell them about an invisible man in the sky is obviously an ineffective tactic. What would actually be effective is showing them lots of pics and footage of sexually-transmitted infections!" Well, as it turns out, the rationalists were correct, and the teenagers did indeed finally start behaving as the tradcons say God intended, and now we're facing the judgment of Darwin. The fertile demographics, of course, have largely eschewed this rationalist nonsense, and continue to use the ineffective form of sex education, as God intended.

I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years. A 16 year old male and 16 year old female are biologically the most horny humans around. But, those kids are not free to indulge even if they want to. Instead, we make them sit in classrooms learning about mollusks in preparation for taking the SAT with a view to going to college where they will learn higher levels of skills that hopefully within 5-7 years after graduation will have them earning enough money to get a two bedroom apartment in which, by the time these humans are ready to have children in the financial sense, they have much lower libido and the woman has missed half to 2/3 of her fertility to the education system. Then everyone is like “wait, why no kids?” It’s because by the time a person stable enough to have kids, they’re too old to have kids. Hence fewer kids.

Yeah, the most significant change in education IMO is the normification of leaving your hometown for university. Catastrophic social norm by Darwinian standards.

That problem matters as well, but my main issue with over-educating is that it basically means that by the time a couple is ready to settle down and is financially stable enough to think about having kids, they are too old to have said kids, or at best one or maybe two. Add in the much longer dependent stage means committing to a much longer project that’s actually quite resource intensive, which means that parents need even more resources to devote to their children. It’s actually insane how many obstacles we put in front of the couple who might want to have kids.

I wouldn't say that. Even if you do grad school, you're still out by 25, unless you do a doctoral degree of some sort, which is a pretty tiny percentage of the population. There's plenty of time to have a couple kids starting then.

The problem is that 25 isn't the starting point! The issue is you typically went off to another city for university, which made you lose contact with your high school girlfriend(s), then go to yet another city to actually settle down after that, so you lose contact with all your university girlfriend(s), and so by the time you're 25 you likely don't even have any serious marriage prospects because you and everyone around you keeps relocating to different places. This is a ridiculous social model.

If everyone would just stay put for a while, I think the issue would resolve itself. For example, the Mormons don't have much issue settling down and getting married, and they're not exactly operating under an 18th century apprenticeship mentality. But they do all go to the same university (BYU), so while they are relocating in a technical sense, they're all relocating to the same place, so it doesn't really count in the same way it does for normal kids, where everyone scatters to the four winds after high school graduation and never sees each other again. That, and BYU is a university that actively encourages them to marry, rather than presenting marriage as some icky distraction from study.

It’s not just college, but finding work after college, paying off debt, and earning your way to either owning a home or at least renting a nice enough apartment that you’d feel comfortable having a child in. This takes a while. So if you’re doing the typical 4-5 years post high school, then an internship or two or a shitty entry level job that you’re working insane hours to get up the ladder from.

I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years.

You only "need" that education in the sense that credentialing inflation and an unwillingness to let people (or, more accurately, racial groups) fail has made all degrees before the bachelor's worthless (and is currently in the process of destroying that signal, too). The vast majority of jobs can be done with a few weeks, or at most months, of training, assuming the worker already knows how to read and write and do arithmetic, which most kids can do by the time they graduate middle school (and, for the ones that don't, an extra four years of remedial classes are not going to help).

The Amish demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to be economically productive with an eight grade education. We just make it illegal to drop out until 16, strongly encourage people to remain in school until 18 by making it free and putting all sorts of limits on working while underage, and then pipeline people into college while making it illegal for employers to just give applicants IQ tests and gatekeeping lots of jobs under the legal requirements of a bachelor's degree.

The notion that four years of Shakespeare, algebra, chemistry, and history, followed by another four years of specialized study, are in any way necessary or useful to do a modern job is mental.

For a natalist subculture to exist, it needs an alternative to the evils of the education system. We need a path for kids to skip college, and a cultural narrative that says this is good and proper rather than making you a low status loser.

The salient difference is that children used to just kinda of happen to you in the course of living your life before contraception. Now children have to be deliberately opted into to a larger degree

Doesn't fit. Birth rates did not collapse until after the baby boom (by definition), but the only contraceptive method which is that recent is the pill. Birth control has been around for a very long time. Condoms and natural family planning date to the 1800s. Ancient cultures like the Greeks and the Romans practiced infanticide. And anyone who understands how babies are made can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.

I ask you to reconsider this. Condoms used to be unreliable and uncomfortable. Natural family planning necessitates a level of human agency that most normies lack, plus it entails the woman having sex on days when her desire level is at the lowest, which is hardly practical. Coitus interruptus is also unreliable.

Plus abortion was a lot more taboo and limited availability. My dad's a Boomer and his 7 siblings were largely married/had their first child by 22. In his reckoning it's just a mix of 'women had fuckall options for escaping the family home without getting married' and 'pregnancy used to occur a lot more abruptly in the dating phase and people would just snowball that into marriage a lot of the time'

Doesn't fit. Birth rates did not collapse until after the baby boom (by definition)

No, the baby boom is called that specifically because birth rates were already falling before and it was a reversal of the trend, producing a significantly large generation.

When you account for the fall of infant mortality, fertility rates were significantly more stable prior to the baby boom.

I think the problem is we assumed that the fertility rates would arrive asymptotically at whatever replacement was for the infant mortality of the future/present time, but fertility rates did not stop falling. They were only reversed for a short time by the baby boom before falling again at around the same rate.

… And anyone who understands how babies are made can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.

So butt sex, blow jobs, and the pull out method? See this is why every generation thinks it was the one who invented sex, once you start talking about things this way.

I think the real answer is that most people are just very short-term in their thinking, especially during the most fertile years of their life. In the past, they had kids because sex feels good and they just didn't think much about the long-term consequences of pregnancy. Now, they think too much about the pregnancy itself, and not enough about the long term benefits of having children.

They have to be. People have to contend most immediately with what’s right in front of them. Even with foresight the tendency to remain idle is difficult to overcome, because why address things that aren’t presenting a problem? The solution I’ve always had for this isn’t to think 10 years in the future, it’s to think about the big picture in general.

People who don’t have kids because they “aren’t prepared” to have them don’t take stock of the fact that you can almost never be prepared for it until it happens. “I’m too immature,” well guess what, you’re about to grow up really fast now. Sure there’s always finances and other things to work out, but when it comes to family planning, there’s far too much expected parents happen to overthink.

As deranged as this worldview might sound, it has real-world consequences, as when one prize nutcase attempted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, under the explicit reasoning that the Supreme Court’s voting to repeal Roe v. Wade would result in a spike in births across the US.4

Linked sources and their own linked sources do not substantiate this claim (that the specific opposition to repealing RvW was an anti-natalist one). Do you have a source that actually substantiates this?

I know I've seen sources which demonstrated this was Roske's motivation and remember sharing them with my brother, but I can't find them. I did manage to find this collection of screenshots from his Reddit account:

I am pro-abortion (in favour of aborting fetuses, not pro-choice)

I think that something as significant as consciousness should not be imposed on matter (the person below they gain consciousness) without consent, and as a non-conscious person cannot give consent, being born is inherently done without consent.

It doesn't seem open to debate that he is an antinatalist (or was at the time of writing, anyway), although I admit this doesn't prove that was his motivation for trying to kill Kavanaugh. Will try to do some more digging and see what I can find.

Gnosticism, a dualist offshoot of Christianity which held that each of us are immaterial souls who have been cruelly trapped inside our flesh prisons by a wicked deity called the Demiurge: thus, in the act of having children, we are condemning yet another soul to be trapped inside a flesh prison against its will.

This is not inherent to Gnosticism anymore than it is to Christianity. Some sects believed this but not all. It's not conceptually different then believing we are inherently flawed due to original sin in fact it basically is this except they view the sin as being different and invert the garden of Eden story. In different gnostic traditions the original sin is the creation of the world or alternatively the rape of Eve by Yahweh in any case this does not inherently lead to antinatalism or nihilism and the two extant Gnostic religions are not such. Foundationally it's far more about inverting the Garden of Eden story and dualism （though usually more functionally polytheism). Of course just as in Christianity there's a winnowing effect where the antinatalist sects quickly die out.

It's not conceptually different then believing we are inherently flawed due to original sin in fact it basically is this except they view the sin as being different and invert the garden of Eden story.

Leaving aside the fact that 'original sin' in the sense you seem to mean it is a peculiarly Roman Catholic concept, yeah, there's a huge difference between that and having been maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. Actually I thought for a moment about how to illustrate just how radically-different those two things are but came up blank.

Most Gnostics don't/didn't believe we were maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. The Cathars did syncretizing the concept of a demiurge with Satan and other aspects of the Catholic church. The Nag Hammadi creation texts and the extant Gnostic religions have a much more complicated cosmology and a concept much closer to original sin in the sense that in some of them the material world becomes irrevocably tainted after the rape of eve but not before. In others the world is created bad as an act of rebellion or irrevocably tainted because it's creation was not authorized by God and Yahweh lacked the authority. In some Yahweh is evil, in some he is simply fallible and overcome by lust or pride. and in some the world is created by other entities. But it's a very broad concept I think we have something like five Gnostic creation myths of which we can read the full texts of.

Anyway Gnosticism is a broad category which is a lot more than Cathars, and I wish people on the internet would say Cathars because most of the common internet use of "Gnosticism" is essentially just referring to them.

I agree that there is world of difference between sentiments like "Nobody is perfect" and "we all have the capacity for evil", and the sort of aggressive nihilism that seems to permeate a lot of these movements.

I was basing my description of Gnosticism on Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy.

Which is entirely accurate but a lot of these things are specific the Cathars rather than all Gnostics in general. I don't mean to be too nitpicky but its was one of my pet peeves because the internet in general seems to view all of Gnosticism as just the Cathars when it's a much broader category.

Among the vanishingly small number of people who have actually made major lifestyle changes because of climate (some of whom exist in my social circle), I think having fewer children that you might otherwise do is common. Normally this means one instead of two.

I agree that anyone who flies for leisure travel and claims to be restricting family size for climate reasons is lying.

I really don't see the intellectual continuity from gnosticism to modern anti-natalism other than they both oppose having children. As far I can tell they have as much in common with each other as either does to the shakers.

I think the fact that both tend to justify their worldviews on utilitarian grounds, and that most antinatalists are at least implicitly dualist means they have more in common than you might think.

Since when are gnostics utilitarian? And in what sense are secular anti-natalist's dualist?

Antinatalists justify their worldview on the grounds that, because every human being is guaranteed to experience more suffering than joy in their lives, having a child cannot be justified on utiliarian grounds. The Gnostic equivalent is the belief that it is cruel to trap a pure soul inside a flesh prison. In both cases, the admonition not to have children is justified on the grounds of the suffering that the hypothetical child would endure were it to be born.

I agree that antinatalists aren't intrinsically dualist, but there seems to be a great deal of overlap between the worldview and support for gender ideology, which I view as dualist in practice. Trans people are overrepresented in r/antinatalism.

I mean sure, you can word gnosticism in terms of utilitarianism but that doesn't make them utilitarians, gnostics are virtue ethicists like everyone was back then. They put the most value into the virtues of wisdom and knowledge, hence the name. Once you accept the premise of gnostic belief about the world being a prison then the conclusion simply follows from that regardless of ethical system, in this case all ethical systems share the same conclusions given gnosticisms premises.

Also, I figured you were using dualism in the zoroastrian sense rather than the cartesian sense, this is maybe a bit more reasonable of a claim however I still don't think most anti-natalists in that sense either, nor would I say standard gender ideology is either, baring the gender angels types.

I think the conception of "gender identity" as something wholly unrelated and untethered from one's anatomical sex is functionally indistinguishable from an immaterial soul. Ergo, gender ideology is a dualist worldview.

sex realism and gender atheism in the house!

If you’re pursuing the religious vocation, then it makes sense to me. With the exception of Paul and Barnabas as prominent figures in the church, tradition suggests all the apostles were married and thus couldn’t completely devote their lives to God.

Just let it happen. I agree with the antinatalists on one count: They shouldn't have children. If they hate life so much, there is a good chance they'd pass that on to their children one way or another, be it cultural or genetic.

I love life. My kids clearly love being alive. We'll see how it holds up long-term, but I'm rather confident I'll pass on the joy of life to them. If not, they, too, can simply choose not to have kids. There is beauty in this; Aside from just functionally adapting to new circumstances, this way we select for people who, whatever changes may happen, can be happy in the new world we have wrought.

The bigger issue to me is the significant disinformation and ignorance around pregnancy and child rearing that makes people postpone it too much, makes parenthood far more difficult and unpleasant than necessary and ultimately causes people who might have had 3-4 children in another time, instead end up with 1-2.

For example, I know a couple who started late but not super late (after 35), and found out that the wife has a condition that makes conceiving much more difficult. They did eventually have a child after trying for quite some time, but the most interesting part for me was the following: Everyone I talked with about this just completely refused to consider the age component. The wife had a condition, and that condition is the reason, so it can't be age, right? No. The condition is something that can be trivially looked up to both increase in prevalence with age, and to worsen with age. There is a very good chance that had they simply started 10 years earlier, they'd conceived without trouble, not even noticing the yet-to-fully-develop condition.

And this can be generalized. People don't magically have a lower chance to conceive with higher age for no reason. There is always a mechanism - a lot of different mechanisms - and almost every one you can find, you will see that it correlates with age.

It is frankly staggering how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". Some of them even get offended when I mention it, like I'm making a value judgement.

I was talking about this with a woman a while back (it came up organically) but put my foot in my mouth when I mentioned that female fertility drops off precipitously at about age 35. She was a career woman who was very much hitting her "Oh no I've made a huge mistake" phase and I supposed it would be helpful to give her a nudge in the right direction. Except it turned out she was already 35, which I had totally failed to consider because she was East Asian and looked 28 at the oldest.

The meme never lies.

If you don't want them, just be honest about why

I think the first and equally important step is admitting that you don't actually want them.

If you are on TheMotte and had the attention span to read the above comment without using GPT to summarize, then please have children. Have as many as you think you can manage and then one more on top of that.

Smart people should build things. What are you building? Code? A 401k? How about a human being? Imagine building one of those. Then stop imagining and get on it! It should be at least as important to you to build a human as it is to build a portfolio.

If you don't like children, ok. But you've never met your children. The children who will be like you and the person you love the most.

It's going to involve sacrifice. Ok, so does everything else worth doing in the whole world.

When smart people stop building things, society collapses. And the best, most important thing a smart person can build is other smart people.

Your first paragraph is maybe the funniest thing I’ve read on here - and frankly a reward for reading the above, which was itself somewhat easy because goodness do I love Se7en.

I shall not be having children but my fiancé has two boys (now 16&17) and I am influencing them for the better.

They’ll be fine.

The rougher patches have been addressed and all that’s left is … all of everything else.

I approve of that too. Washington never had natural-born children either but I wouldn't say he had no impact on the future.

It's weird that that the people most strongly against anything with a whiff of collectivism (not necessarily you, unfortunately the everyone have kids NOW movement has mainly those types is it's squeaky wheels) suddenly find it in their hearts to "Think of society!"

What society? I was told it it didn't exist; from Thatcher's mouth to God's ears as is proper in these days.

IMO, If you want people to have kids, you gotta recreate the collective structures of the past, and not just the rose tinted 50s nostalgia about gingham dresses and whites only drinking fountains. Back in the old country people had lots of kids at least in part because they could count on the neighbors letting them sleep on the floor if the roof blew off their house, from the richest to the poorest. I spent ate a lot of lunches in random people houses around town, because that where I happened to be around lunch time.

Re relative value of pursuits, maximally cynical mode: The wretches of the earth seem to have no trouble popping out kids, I remember them picking up extra shifts in my tradie days so they wouldn't have to be around them. That being the case, what is the value of adding more dead weight to the biosphere? More people to watch TikTok clips of top ten funny family guy moments funny? Why shouldn't I build my portfolio? What use is all that other bullshit that doesn't trade on the market and is therefore without value ie garbage? Should Newton have stopped playing around with all that calculating bullshit and had 8 kids that statistical would be two-ish standard deviations smarter than the average bear? Off the top of your head: Did Marie Curie have kids, and if she did what did they do, and if she did and they became cobblers or something, who gives a fuck?

Ending maximum Cynicism:

She did, and they were also historically significant people; I think one of them also won a noble prize in physics. And even if they weren't, fuck that guy for bringing it up like it's a problem. When you die, either it's all gonna go away or whatever is after isn't going to be counting medals and comparing stacks. Maybe newton should have taken a moment away form the alembic after all, although that is also a bad example. I think he didn't have kids for other reasons.

Yeah, that's the plan. I will say this though: I don't want to have children, then have them deal with poverty or a bad mothers. I'd need to find: 1) A good job (working on that, almost there hopefully) 2) finding a women who'd be a good mom (I'll do that once I find the job).

Reproduce, yes. But it should be done responsibly.

Your #2 gives me sweaty palms.

You’ll find her when you find her!

I don't really think so. Failing spectacular catastrophe, 'poverty' isn't really a problem any more, at least when it comes to nutrition, access to healthcare, education, and so on. Quite the opposite, really.

Bad mothers, yeah. But would you rather have some unpleasantries in life -- which often result in growth, anyway -- or not live at all?

The world will never be what children deserve and this attitude is prone to running away with those who hold it.

Agreed. But I would say that people need to pursue these goals, not just expect them to happen. I think most people get the "job" thing. People go to secondary school, study long hours, go to residency, internships, put in a lot of time and effort into getting the right credentials and getting the right job.

The same amount of effort needs to go into getting the girl. And not just dating, but actually discerning marriage with the girl. It shouldn't take more than a year to learn enough about each other to see if you can actually be spouses, and if at any point you think you can't be spouses then break it off.

For some reason people take this part of their lives unseriously when in hindsight it's the cornerstone of all other joys in my life.

It takes two people for that.

I'm not the one saying no.

using GPT to summarize

Do people here do this? That would be disappointing.

I agree, but am curious as to why you think, as it were, that any of that matters. Why is 'society' a god worth serving? How deep do our sacrificial obligations to it run?

If we all are to die right now in a flaming meteor, then ok. Society doesn't matter that much to you.

If you hope to grow old and die peacefully at the end of a lifespan as long as you can achieve, then you want to have stability as you grow older and weaker. This means able-bodied people younger than you who have been inculcated in a community that values taking care of the weak and elderly. This means having children and educating them.

So that's the selfish case.

The less-selfish case I guess is that human lives are one of the most precious resource in the world, consciousness is rare, sapience more so. A universe without anyone to observe it would be tragic and absurd.

Stable societies produce happier outcomes, better lives for these sapient Earth observers. If you think life sucks, the better thing to do is make it less sucky instead of abandon it, creating more suffering in the interim as society collapses.

My real reason is just that I found someone I loved. And because I loved him, I loved the world. I loved the world that could make such a person, however fucked up his life had been. In my husband I saw that the awfulness of the world cannot mar the beauty of a human soul. And I liked him so much I wanted more of him - more people like him. And he thought I was a good thing, too. He thought it was good I exist and because of that I began to come around on the idea myself. And if it was good that I existed, and it was good that he existed, then it would be great for there to be more people like him and like myself.

And so I embarked on this mission: to make more people who have the best qualities of us both, who are coached on their weak-points by the two people who can empathize the most with them.

Thanks, that's mostly what I wanted to know. Still curious though about tradeoffs and where our personal obligations to sacrifice for the society begin and end.

You're not caught in traffic, you are the traffic. You don't have an obligation to "society" you are society and you have an obligation to yourself.

This seems to suppose that the society in which I find myself -- and perhaps more importantly its leadership -- has incentives which are nearly-aligned with my own, which seems pretty debatable both presently and historically.

You're going to need to be more concrete than that.

Let's say Social Security goes away before you are 65. Or even total anarchy. Are you better off with one or zero kids, or if you have four+. If you have 4+, at least one is likely to still have a fondness for you and might let you stay with them in your twilight years. If you have 0 kids you get to look forward to working until you cannot and rotting in a ditch after.

From where I stand, having kids is more upside than down. Sure I could afford more things without them. But I had the time of my life playing fetch with my 3 year old yesterday. I

I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't have kids. I have taught two little humans how to read. And for one of those humans it was a hard slog, I had to keep changing programs every year, trying to make an inch of progress at a time. I researched, I made schedules and lesson plans and sat down every day with a book and my girl and I persisted.

There's the mental cocaine of having your toddler call you "mamma." But there's more than chemicals. There's the concerted effort to help someone every day become a good adult human, and whoever you are it takes all of you. If you're good at research it takes research. If you're good at meal prep it takes meal prep. Whatever your thing is, you pour it on your kid and it's satisfying. It's climbing Everest, it's running a marathon, it's what life is for, the challenge you are supposed to be doing. The school of love you need to be a whole human being.

If the word society is tripping you up, just do it for yourself.

Yeah no, I have a lot of kids and another on the way and no plans to stop for a while yet. I get that part. I'm just hung up on the bit about society, yeah.

You bring up historically dark periods in which humans didn't stop having children. I don't even think you have to travel through time.

Right now in Africa the human condition involves suffering on a scale incomprehensible to the average western mind, where family members of Ebola victims lynch the doctors and aid workers trying to stop outbreaks while war and rape cyclically consume every attempt at building civilization.

This is the one of the few places on the planet where people are having more children.

I've never been convinced of many of my friends' reasoning behind not having kids either. Some are honest about their desire to travel and build pools in their backyard, at least.

Why would you even want a pool when you don’t have kids?

Asking the real questions.

To show off to guests, of course. Or to cool off on hot days. Knew a guy out in the desert who'd jump into his pool several times a day over the summer months.

From my perspective, actually, pools are deathtraps for young kids and a maintenance nightmare. I want them less as a father. I had a lot of fun at them as an unattached adult, where I can read, tan, and cool off repeatedly.

There's a reason every retirement home has a pool but almost no preschools do.

I don’t want to have a children because I myself am a manchild, and having a child would likely make both me and the child miserable (also my wife doesn't want children and it would probably make her miserable).

I get very excited about new things. I like new games, new stories, new ideas I have for a story I want to write or my own game I want to make. If it's long enough rarely follow through. If I don't have some sort of external thing forcing me to do a thing I don't want to do, like a teacher or a boss with expectations, then I won't. And even if I do I will get bored and slog through. My best writing I have ever done are a series of short stories where I sat down, I wrote it out in like 3 hours, and then finished it and walked away. Because I did it while it was new and fresh and exciting and then it was complete before the novelty had a chance to wear off.

I spend an ungodly amount of time in front of my computer playing games or browsing the internet. It's actually hurting my career and I am working on getting over that so I can man up and be a responsible adult. My entire life, my two dreams were to never grow up, and to fall in love and get married. I assumed that maybe someday I might want kids, but not any time soon.

I never grew up. I am happy playing my games and hanging out with my wife. I am mildly resentful of reality for requiring me to do real adult things instead of just getting everything for free, but understand on an intellectual and economic level that I have to do that, so I'll suck it up and be as much of an adult as reality forces upon me.

But I'm not going to voluntarily be more of an adult than I am forced to. Theoretically, I understand that having children is good and necessary for the propagation of the human race. I respect and admire people who do it well. I am pronatalist in theory, and I think that intelligent and kind people similar to me ought to have more kids in particular in order to spread our genes and culture. However, I don't think I have it in me. I suspect that if I had kids it would inspire me to work harder and do more to care for them. But I suspect that I would get bored and tired and resentful. I imagine a future me coming home from work and doing a bunch of chores and then wanting to play video games with my remaining free time and oh hey the kid is bothering me about something stupid and I'm just tired and bored and dismiss them. I imagine a kid who's really into sports or hiking or something that I actively dislike and take a bunch of time. I imagine a better version of me who sucks it up and pretends to care about their hobbies but I don't actually and they can tell because I'm not good at pretending.

The more tired and bored I am the meaner I get. I'm normally chill and pleasant or goofy and silly, but if things start to annoy me or I get bored I kind of shut down and gradually become more and more selfish until I can escape and get back to my safe space at home. My wife's siblings are all starting to have kids, and I hope to be a fun and exciting Uncle who can do stuff and play games with them for a few hours and then go home and unwind and recharge my introvert energy. There's orders of magnitude of difference between being around kids several times a month and being around them hours every day. There is a nonzero probability that I would manage and my whole world would change the way it supposedly does and I would be a good parent. But I think there's a >50% chance that I would not. I don't think I'm ready for it, and I don't feel any more ready than I did 10 years ago. Maybe I'll change my mind in another 10-20 years, but unless AI manages to solve aging then it'll be too late by then.

I think the world we live in is fantastic and wonderful. Politics is shit, but it's always been shit. Technology is amazing, AI is going to make so much cool stuff as long as they can manage to avoid having it kill everyone. If you want kids, have kids. But only if you have the resolve to do what it takes to be a good parent. I don't think I do, and I don't want to roll those dice on an unsuspecting kid who doesn't deserve me at my worst.

I have nothing to offer, other than that reading this made me feel sad.

I spend an ungodly amount of time in front of my computer playing games or browsing the internet. It's actually hurting my career and I am working on getting over that

Is there any Motteposter who doesn't feel like this? It's just that when you have a demanding upper-middle-class career and kids "ungodly" is 90 minutes a day, whereas when you are single in grad school it's 4+ hours a day.

Procrastinators of the world, u

The problem is that the causality could go both ways. If you ask why someone doesn't want responsibility, the answer might be that some part of their mind is resentful towards the world.

It isn't necessarily a question of how cruel the world actually is. It might be a question of how much sway such tendencies hold over a person.

Personally, I think that "I didn't do X because life is evil" sounds an awful lot like saying the quiet part out loud, and stems from something deep and as yet poorly understood inside of the human mind.

You mean that people who say this are tacitly admitting they themselves have evil impulses?

Mostly unconscious questionable impulses, would be more accurate for the people you describe. I think we all have a part of us that is capable of this, but I don't yet have any systematic thoughts on how those impulses take over, nor in what situations they can clearly be described as evil.

If you read school shooter manifestos or journals, you'll see a lot of parallels. This is the main basis for why I suggest that you don't dismiss these claims so easily. Something about the claim that "life is not worth living" is a recurring feature that I've noticed, or think that I've noticed.

I suspect that there is an underlying philosophy of evil which some aspect of the mind is prone towards believing in, perhaps because of the specific way in which that part of the mind works (ie. it may be an accidental but high-probability outcome) and in certain (as yet unknown to me) situations it takes over.

I agree with this for those who actually dont want to have children, however as far as a childless world goes - the main reason for this is because people are not getting into relationships or having sex in the first place. So any policy that tackles childlessness needs to tackle why people arent pairing up to begin with. Perhaps thats an aside, but still something worth pointing out.

What if people are not getting into relationships and having sex, because they want less children?

Why avoid relationships for this? You can just get the tubes tied or snipped in that case.

Because children are less of an inevitable consequence of sex due to contraception the most attractive can play the field for longer and more efficiently, screwing incentives across the whole stack

did we miss the entire sexual revolution? pills condoms homosexuality implants all let you fuck childfree. no, people aren't having sex because people think sex is either so sacred it must be had with the perfect partner that doesn't exist and if its not sacred its just inefficient masturbation so just jerkoff to ai waifu at home and avoid the mess of other people.

I think they fail to find the perfect partner because the come to marriage at an age when romantic pairbonding parts of the brain are less sensitive. They come to marriage late because they only want one or two kids. Teenage girls always seem to be madly in love with their boyfriends, and the romance just isn't there by the age of 27 in the same way. I think that's physical.

I think they fail to find the perfect partner because the come to marriage at an age when romantic pairbonding parts of the brain are less sensitive. They come to marriage late because they only want one or two kids. Teenage girls always seem to be madly in love with their boyfriends, and the romance just isn't there by the age of 27 in the same way. I think that's physical.

Possibly it's because those women get jaded by past experiences and/or exposed to more and more anti-male propaganda. But on the other hand, it seems to be the case that teenagers feel the effects of hormones more strongly. So yeah, likely there is a physical component as well.

But on the other hand, it seems to be the case that teenagers feel the effects of hormones more strongly.

Not just hormones. I think there's a critical period or something for marriage and modern people miss it and don't realize it. It's probably between about 14 and 22, give or take. For women. Men are probably a little later, like 17 and 25.

Women marrying before 22 was never the default in cisHajnal societies (and transHajnal societies where women married younger didn't really do love marriage) so 22 as the upper end of the optimal range for female love marriage is too high.

My own marriage is a point in favour of the "dating jadedness, not chronological age" thesis - my now-wife and I did the whole teen romance thang with all the cringe you would expect in our mid-20s, having both only been meaningfully on the dating market for 1-2 years (in my case, late acquisition of required social skills due to likely autism).

late acquisition of required social skills due to likely autism

This is just about every Motte poster, methinks.

More comments

Having gotten married in my 20s, fresh out of college myself, I think it provided an opportunity for us to grow together as we started careers, before we were individually as rigidly bound to careers, friend groups, and other obligations. It was a very flexible time in our lives.

I don't regret it, but I can see that friends that are still looking in their 30s and 40s are hauling more baggage that has to fit in the wagon when they get hitched. Not even bad baggage, necessarily: sometimes it's that you both would have friend groups you've made and standing plans five nights a week.

Women marrying before 22 was never the default in cisHajnal societies

Well, it was for the people who lived in the Hajnal area before about 1500 AD. Hajnal societies only emerged in the early modern period. They're historically abnormal and are going extinct, so maybe not a great exemplar to use.

and transHajnal societies where women married younger didn't really do love marriage

Not true.

my now-wife and I did the whole teen romance thang with all the cringe you would expect in our mid-20s, having both only been meaningfully on the dating market for 1-2 years

Maybe the range is a bit larger then but I doubt it extends past 30. It probably depends on the person.

More comments

That’s also my suspicion. If we’re talking about the college-educated demographic, if one does not have a long-term partner at graduation, the chances of future marriage and parenthood are probably dropping drastically. I’m guessing there is research bearing this out.

Seconded for the relationship formation argument. Its the only true constant variable cross society, even factoring in economic incentives for and against having kids. Italy, Spain, Greece never had a population control policy and thier birth rates plummeted. France maintained relatively (for western white society) ok birth rates, as did Nordics for awhile. Thailand has abysmal birth rates while Vietnam putters along decently.

Economic incentives, social mores about cohabitation, overstudying culture... they all form the ceiling and floor of a fairly generous action space people can act within to socialize pairbond and eventually have kids. The real problem is that many modern societies treat dating as a clear cleave between two phases, working vs schooling, and once you're working your schooling dating experience if any counts for nothing. People reset their preferences on the moment for what they want, which while valid for any number of reasons often boils down to "I changed my mind for reasons I don't care to understand or reflect on" which ISN'T valid. Discover why you changed or you'll never understand why you keep failing!

I will concede that smartphones really changed the game for information accessibility and preference shaping. That is directly shaping not antinatalism - those assholes are unhappy regardless of whether they have kids, just like all the childless celebs who openly launder their mental illnesses that stop them from "wanting" kids in the first place - but socmed IS shaping partner expectations. Men don't actually want to date a gamer egirl thot, women don't want a sensitive artsy softboi. Both are lessons only learnt after dating a bit and realizing ones own preferences and adapting to real life.

You're right, reduced rates of relationship formation are a major contributing factor. Which implies there's a face-saving element to it: "I'm not having children because of climate change" sounds a lot better than "I'm not having children because I can't find Mr./Mrs. Right".

Meh, kind of. But its not like not being able to find someone is all that bad either. Single and non married are a significant and rising portion of the population. At this point, its fairly normal, even if it doesn't give the same social brownie points.

Then, consider the following:

During the period 1933-45, when literal self-identified Nazis controlled a major world power, people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world. During the second world war, which claimed the lives of at least 3% of the entire world, people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world. During Ireland’s Great Famine, in which a million people starved to death (perhaps as much as 11% of the country), Irish people did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world. During the Black Death of 1346-53, in which half of Europe was killed, Europeans did not stop having children on the grounds that it would be “cruel” to bring a child into such a world.

An element of the climate change narrative is that it's not just bad, it's only going to get worse, forever. This removes hope and stoicism that would normally spur people during a war or during the era of high infant mortality.

I don’t think it’s really about the climate. If these people were really concerned about limiting climate change, there are lots of things that you could do that would make an impact. I don’t see them limiting their ownership or use of modern technology. I don’t see them choosing to live without fashionable clothing, hair and skin care products, or modern home decor and appliances. They have all of that, but apparently having a baby is bad for the environment. I have long suspected that they really don’t want the baby because it would require changes to their lifestyle.

Uh, all of those things are in the climate-activist portfolio. I couldn’t say what the actual rates are like. But then, lots of people who are sympathetic to that argument do end up having a child eventually. People aren’t always rational.

They correctly intuit that their personal consumption is a drop in the bucket next to big industrial pollutors.

Yeah, the "we didn't have kids because it's bad for the environment and anyway now we get to spend all our time and money flying around the world (which is terrible for the environment)" couple is fairly iconic at this point.

My understanding is that in fact they simply don't see themselves as the inheritors and stewards of a way of life that is worthy of perpetuation. This is easily-attributable to any number of facets of the leftist memeplex. Tangentially, they don't feel that they owe anyone anything and have no problem squandering the accumulated blessings of their ancestors for one big party before they 'go out clean' and end their lines forever.

It's interesting to observe. Doesn't bother me until it's someone I know.

From a biological point-of-view, I would propose that one of the big factors in the urge to reproduce is the perception of time.

There's this idea that power outages lead to baby booms but apparently that's not substantiated, there are reasons that would explain that couples actually are less likely to mingle in a crisis.

Nevertheless, in the relative perpetual safety of Western country and perhaps the world at large except for sporadic hot spots, young people get to age without the constraint of time. Children are of no help in the modern workplace so is this not something that the average adult would look forward to from an economic point-of-view.

Old people seemingly keep getting older with only limit what fraction of the GDP we dare not to sacrifice to their care.

Now that the passing of time is merely punctuated by the latest iPhone release, for many young people there is no external, environmental cue that it is time to settle down. There is probably a contagious effect of being presented with a friend's baby, some kind of baby-FOMO, but some communities may be completely childless and that effect delayed. Taylor Swift has been a childless female celebrity for 16 years, and we often hear of the advances of Science™ purporting to push later and later the inescapable biological realities of motherhood.

Perhaps the best way to address this problem would be to inject in media some reminders that death is inevitable, our time on this planet is fleeting [and it is time to repent].

Another aspect of this denial of death in Western culture (and environment) is the obsession with safety. Parents can quickly turn into criminals or social pariahs if they don't demonstrate the utmost care in dealing with what has almost become a rare resource, children. Likewise the justice system will waste an offender's time rather than inflicting a little bit of pain (corporal punishment).

Pain is seen as a bigger problem than waste (of time). A recent parenting trend is 'gentle parenting' where the adults are encouraged to essentially negotiate with the child as a human being with rights. In practice this means a big waste of time where a good shout or slap can bring immediate results. Obviously when there is more than 1 child involved, the simplest of tasks can be endlessly delayed.

I can't help but connect this to some kind of male/female dichotomy. Industries that are male-dominated want to get the work done asap (making a MVP for a start-up, pumping an oilfield), while industries that are female-dominated like education seem to take longer and longer decade after decade to get the job done. Hard to tell effect from cause here but I feel a connection.

Interestingly, men are the biologically stable version of mankind. Perhaps women are seeking in their environment what they are internally lacking, and we've gone too far in giving it to them.

Old people seemingly keep getting older with only limit what fraction of the GDP we dare not to sacrifice to their care.

As a person of a certain age, I assure you death is still around. Quite a few of the parents of those in my social circles are facing it (or have already died)

Yes but to a lot of people that doesn't really kick in till they're after reasonable baby-having ages which removes a sense of urgency and also makes sharing resources pretty arbitrary depending on the exact family structure. I've gone from a Western country where my parents fucked off to a beach community in another state as soon as they hit 60 to an Eastern country where there's 5 generations living within 5 minutes of eachother even amongst upper middle class people who have the resources to bail if they wanted to. Raising kids in the latter situation is way easier than in the former situation.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats