This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Male self-love: a key hidden determinant in the high fertility of the conservative religious?
I came across this interesting study (PDF archive link here) that measured the correlation between “dark triad” traits and lifetime offspring. The authors claim that this is one of just a handful of studies on the subject. Among the dark triad traits, only narcissism was significantly associated with lifetime offspring, and only in men. There’s something insightful here, because men and women differ in their level of selection for sex, so a narcissistic woman may be overly-selective and end up with a lower number of offspring. A narcissistic man, on the other hand, is predisposed to be less picky, so his narcissism turns into maximizing offspring earlier with less selection. The study is flawed because it uses a basic question as a proxy for “narcissism”, but I think the preliminary finding and the hypothesis are still worthy of discussion.
A common belief for why religiosity impacts fertility is that having children is socially sanctioned and esteemed among these communities. But on closer inspection this falls apart. Consider that the Japanese and Korean, with their disastrous fertility rates, are chided by their mothers and grandmothers to have children. Their governments and media push family formation which is also a metric for a successful life. All of this is amplified by their culture of conformity. Yet the fertility rate trends downward. Regarding the study’s finding on the difference of male and female narcissism, we can note conservative religion privileges men uniquely with honor and respect. In traditional religions, women usually cover their head and stay quiet in sacred spaces as symbolic gestures of obedience. Women are told to be subservient to their husbands and that their role is to support him, which works to reduce female self-esteem and increase male self-esteem. Men are told that they are privileged by God for certain duties.
There’s a more significant dimension to this that I want to discuss. Having a child fundamentally changes a person’s life, and people do not voluntarily change their whole lifestyle unless the pleasure of the change outweighs all the discomfort. You need to sincerely desire the change to make the change. Humans are terrible at making changes that are merely “good for them” in the abstract without any concomitant overriding pleasure, which obesity and addiction and low exercise rates clearly prove. So when we’re talking about having children, we really ought to ask, “why would anyone want to be around a child every day instead of having fun?” Because adults don’t usually make this decision — they don’t skip the bar to go read a book to children at the library. So what’s the reason that the conservative religious actually desire to be around their children, these versions of themself in miniature?
Reproduction in all of its sense
I think that what the fertile religious cultures are good at is inculcating sincere and deep-rooted male self-love. As a consequence of this self-love, they naturally desire to have children as extensions of themselves, to be around and expand themselves. This desire is intrinsic and compelling on its own, and they are not compelled to have children because of a social prescription. Their self-love means that simply being around their child is fun and positive regardless of any criteria of parenting or external criticism. If you love yourself, and know yourself to be loved and to enjoy living, then reproducing yourself is intrinsically desirable. There’s more of you! It’s like a self-friendship, where one wants to increase their friends and time spent with friends.
Now, I mean self-love in a particular way. I don’t think these words — esteem, narcissism, pride — capture the type of positive self-assessment of the devoutly religious. I’m not talking about clinical narcissism here. What I mean is all follows: (1) there is a complete devaluation of capitalist or hierarchical notions of success, as well as concerns for beauty, meaning that a man is buffered against attacks on his worth which overwhelm so many today, eg balding or income, not to mention there’s an equality among believers; (2) there is intensive gratitude for the primary aspects of a man’s identity: merely the state of being alive, having a healthy body, being a man, and being personally selected and personally cherished by the maker of the universe itself regardless of one’s acumen or skillset; (3) lust for one’s wife, contrary perhaps to popular notion, is invested with divine purpose, and each moment of intimacy fulfills a chief command of God Himself; (4) in a counterintuitive way, one’s own life and local community become the center of the universe, because it’s through here that God works, and nothing else has relevance to one’s ultimate purpose, so no such comparisons to self are made.
An immediate (and anticipated) criticism of this would be: what about sin? What about original sin? But sin is just one item within whole religious package, and the package needs to be understood as whole. Whether one believes he sins daily doesn’t actually tell you about his self-regard unless you know whether he is forgiven daily. The emphasis in traditional religion is on the state of being forgiven and favored by God, and the emotions of guilt and shame are fleeting and quickly washed away with more positive emotions. (This holds true for the Abrahamic religions). And so, while sin is a big aspect of religion, it needs to be understood that (in practice) sin is merely a way to increase thankfulness and forgiveness and so forth, which increase one’s own positive valence. (Consider the emotional life of a child who is bad at chess yet is being lovingly tutored by Magnus Carlsen. His self-esteem as a whole is increased, and yet his skill has never been self-judged lower. The calculus on positive/negative valence vs self-judgment can be pretty nuanced).
So maybe this is key variable for understanding religious fertility. Maybe this is why the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalist East Asian countries are dealing so badly with fertility right now. Maybe the esteem-crushing competition of a consumer nation can never be more fertility-promoting than simply loving the act of being alive. And maybe the direction that society is going with its condemnation of male pride and (seeming) reduction of joie de vivre will prove to be disastrous in the future.
Even if I exist in severe epistemic uncertainty about the possible future of the globe, I can categorically exclude "business as usual" from the consideration.
We're well on course for a Singularity, and if it's stopped, it will be forcibly, we have AI that is on par (and better than the average human) at most cognitive tasks that don't require physical embodiment, and even for those that do, robotics is (not) falling over itself to catch up, especially by hooking LLMs into the motor function loop.
This implies either the biggest boom of all, or the population of humans of any description plummeting to nil in short order, my median timeline for grossly superhuman AGI is like 3 or 5 years at this point. It's no longer an AI/fusion is 20 years away for 50 years kinda deal, we've yet to even grapple with the long-term consequences of what we have today, if progress abruptly stops.
Either way, humans, at least for the purposes of the economy, will become entirely obsolete, and even duties like child rearing or childbirth will no longer require us, be it because AI nanny bots are filling the roles of disinterested daycare workers on the cheap, or because we have working artifical wombs or find a way to make child rearing so undemanding on parental lifestyle that the natural desire of women keeps them coming. After all, most women in the West who get polled say their ideal number of desired offspring is >2, even if they're not doing a good job of reaching it. Wealth has a bimodal association with fertility%2C%20the%20difference%20in%20the IR) , you have poor junkies churning them out, and billionaires who sire on a whim, it's the unlucky few~ many stuck in between who face painful tradeoffs in terms of QOL.
Given that automation will likely provide a QOL for those who can avail that is closer to the billionaire (or at least multi-millionaire) end of the spectrum..
As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the "disastrous consequences" you point to are the outcome of a lack of humans needed to fuel the fires of industry. Onerous burdens of maintaining the decrepit elderly, a lack of growth and innovation, these all cease to matter in the least when humans no longer contribute the bulk of cognitive labor, or even physical labor.
Further, I expect genuine extensions to lifespan with extended healthy lifespan boosted too, or even biological immortality, at which point the number of health, productive people will either stabilize or keep on increasing, and in my opinion, cause the population to skyrocket as people cease exiting the gene pool.
With timelines so short, we simply don't have the time to suffer, barring countries like Japan and potentially China that got on the gerontocrasy fast-train decades back. The median Westerner is unlikely to even notice a decline as it is smoothed out or even turned positive from increased productivity.
This has plenty of other implications, such as the current tendency to import large amounts of unskilled labor from the Global South only becoming a drain sooner rather than later (though it's likely we'll be wealthy enough it won't particularly matter), leaving aside that even skilled workers like myself are soon to be obsolete.
As I see it, religion is a viral memeplex that may have once served a beneficial purpose in history, but has long outlived its usefulness, in much the same manner as certain retroviral fragments help produce a placenta and keep the uterus congenial for pregnancy, but become potential proto-oncogenes when we're out of the cradle.
At the very least it's a deeply flawed worldview, for all that smart and thoughtful people I genuinely respect here succumb to it, and I think we're better off without it. If evolution has cursed the average human with a God-shaped Hole, then in the absence of said God (or at least one not of our making), I'm getting myself a secular excavator, while being thankful I don't suffer from the same design flaw.
Or we could all die, I guess, the Amish might disdain electricity, but it's not like a misaligned superintelligence cares. In the extremely unlikely event our naively project population trend lines persist decades into the future, I still think the proposed cure is worse than the disease, even if religiosity in the West has largely adapted in much the same way as cowpox to not be as pernicious to the host.
I'm certainly aiming for 3 kids, not that I think I'll have time to even raise one past toddlerhood, and since the future belongs to those who show up, I'm ensuring a front-row seat with the family even if it's crowded with Hasidic Jews and the like.
Eh, I feel like grossly superhuman is at least 8-10. Look at how much progress has been made in intelligent text generation since gpt4? Not that that's particularly comforting morally or philosophically.
The delay before GPT-5 seems like an intentional decision on the part of OAI rather than an inability to do better. I suspect that as soon as competitors release a true GPT-4 equivalent model instead of matching or slightly exceeding 3.5, they'll roll out a new one.
If I had to put very rough numbers on it, I'd say GPT-3.5 is around 110 IQ, 4 is 120, and a potential 5, if the same kind of improvement, would be anywhere from 130-140, beyond which I would start calling them genuinely superhuman in breadth of knowledge and capabilities, even if humans might be competitive in their niches.
Not that 5 years versus 10 years is much comfort, like you mentioned, at least my potential kids might even attend school!
OAI just announced last week what could be considered GPT 4.5 in their dev event, including it's integration with a vision solution for uploading images to the LLM and having it interact with it. While I don't consider this in the same realm as AGI nor I think we are in any danger from it exterminating the human race ala Skynet; I think this advancements will render a great many people unemployed with its accompanying social unrest.
Why this one and not the one before it?
sorry, wasn't very clear. What I'm referring to in "I think this advancements will render a great many people unemployed with its accompanying social unrest." isn't GPT 4.5 specifically, but the entire field of language models. I don't think they are still there but I imagine GPT 6 or 7 will be enough to take a few thousand jobs; that is if, it isn't lobotomized into oblivion by that point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link