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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I don't think 'we, humanity as a whole, acting together' - like universalist, democratic humanism - works to 'deprecate the vast majority of humanity'. It'd have to be some small group doing that.

It's, arguably, good - some people clearly are more useful, or have better lives, or w/e than others, and whether you want 'the greatest good for the most' or just 'power', somehow replacing normal people with better people advances that cause. And it's very "natural", that's what evolution does, every time you want to marry an attractive girl instead of an ugly one, or someone of "good character" instead of poor character, you 'discouraging the reproduction of those with bad genes' in your own genes' reproductive interests. On the other hand, this may happen in the form of gene editing - and "normal people giving their children better lives with gene technology" and "prevent the useless people from reproducing" end up having the same observable long-term effects.

It's, arguably, good - some people clearly are more useful, or have better lives, or w/e than others

The problem is the winnowing down - as technological society progresses, the requirements to be the kind of person who is "more useful" or "has a better life" become more and more specialised and stratified. So the number of such people reduces down and down.

So now we're talking not "100 fewer peasants, 50 more factory workers", we're talking "tens of millions out of hundreds of millions" (if we even get that high) or "millions out of billions".

If only the 'useful, productive, creative' people should replace 'normal people', or those are the ones not a 'deadweight drag', then we are talking about the vast majority of humanity being deadweight that - what? should be euthanised? allowed to die of illness, hunger and other conditions of the developing world? Even within the developed world, how many people out of the entire population of the United States would you say are "the better people"? This is a general query, I'm not aiming it at either commenter above.

If I take some economic data for 2021, then the result seems to be - get rid of the whites and the blacks, leave the USA to the Asians alone, since by household earnings at the highest rate recorded here, they are plainly the "better people":

WHITE ALONE

Number of households (thousands) 102,057

$200,000 and over 12.1%

Median income 74,262

Mean income 105,804

BLACK ALONE

Number of households (thousands) 17,698

$200,000 and over 5.7%

Median income 48,297

Mean income 70,902

ASIAN ALONE

Number of households (thousands) 7,276

$200,000 and over 21.1%

Median income 101,418

Mean income 138,939

Let's see what that would look like, population-wise:

Population estimates 2022

Total: 333,287,557

White alone 75.8% 252,631,968

Black or African American 13.6% 45,327,108

Asian alone 6.1% 20,330,541

So reducing down the population to something over 20,000,000. But well worth it, because that leaves just the better people and not the deadweight!

No idea why you want to keep just Asians regardless of their skills, a high skill white/black is better than a low skill Asian. And we don't need to starve anyone. In fact we can deprecate them with kindness, at puberty (and later should they choose it) offer to hook them up to electrodes that stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain/simulate a massive open world they get to virtually rule over and leave them in bliss until they die of natural causes without leaving heirs (something like Nozick's experience machine).

In fact you can make this offer open to every single citizen and the people who refuse it will be enriched for better humans, just repeat this for a few generations and the dregs will have weeded themselves out.

Of course gene editing is also good and should be done alongside such a program.