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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25175 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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When genetic modification of humans is discussed, it is typically in the context of individual modification/augmentation. Whether in early embryonic stages or on fully developed people via gene therapy techniques, the goal is normally to modify outcomes for the specific individual in question.

Probably the reason we don’t discuss society-wide modification much (except in the context of huxly-esque dystopias) is that its proximity to eugenics makes it unpalatable to western society’s current ethics framework. But thinking in the longer term, I find it highly unlikely that future societies wouldn’t utilize this tool given the potential advantages it offers, especially in terms of group cohesion. This of course comes with the caveat that modeling the large scale implications of a small genetic change would be next to impossible. There would likely have to be a lot of trial and error, with some of the errors being quite horrific.

So in this context, I was thinking about what we could potentially modify that would have an out-sized impact on society with relatively little change on humans’ current genetic makeup. And the answer that seemed the most interesting is to modify the rate at which men are born relative to women. What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?). There are examples where there are fewer women than men (ex china), but I’ve struggled to find the opposite. Also, most scientific literature about “gender imbalances” is mostly just ideological fluff.

So anyway, the question I guess is what does this look like, and does it actually lead to a more stable/cohesive society.

Arguments in favor:

  • Less sexually frustrated young men who tend to get violent
  • Higher general agreeableness, since women tend to score higher on this personality trait

Arguments against:

  • Susceptibility to guilt based religious ideologies

-Susceptibility to military conquest by external groups with more balanced gender rations assuming this isn’t implemented everywhere.

Edit: Formatting

Your society will rapidly fail to pay its taxes. Generally, Men participate in a ceaseless hustle to make as much money as they can as it is one of the key indicators of worth they are judged by. This burning drive is necessary for society to have surplus production, even if it consumes the men in the process. In contrast, women are the net beneficiary of taxes due to various reasons such as being the recipient of child and housing benefits and other spending.

assuming transition isn't immediate, why wouldn't society adapt to it? Also, low M:F ratio also means number of children an average woman must bear for replacement level is also lower

How can society adapt to what is gradual extinction? Women would still have to bear 2.1 children to keep the population at a consistent rate. Human groups exist off the fact that some people do all the work and receive no remuneration (slaves, 12 year old congolose lithium miners) and others benefit from it.

If your sex distribution is not 1/1 male/female, but, say, 1/4 (at birth, without doing stuff like culling male embryos), then each woman only has to bear 5/4 children instead of 2/1.

I categorically reject literal cellular biological modification when we have already developed, employed, and enjoyed a social, cultural, and legal mechanism to address the problem. Namely; monogamous marriage.

Societies have a funny way of coming out about 50/50 men and women. It's almost like the species wants to remain capable of replication and self-propagation. Evolution be like that. In fact, as your posts points out, when you mess around with that rough 50/50 ratio, things get bad. China today is an excellent example. In Post WW2 Russia / Soviet states, the insane loss of men created similar odd circumstances.

I wholeheartedly agree that lonely, sexless young men can easily turn violent and up end communities if not societies as a whole. But the answer there is to give them a progressing (not progressive) life narrative, roughly; learn, work, serve, get married, raise children, die with dignity. Society then backs this up by demonstrating and exalting the value of this life pattern. This, however, is what the sexual revolution dismantled in the 1960s. It replaced it with .... nothing.

Edit: Societies the world over have also, rightly, prioritized dealing with male aggression because that leads to murder, rape, and injury. What we're seeing with the destruction of the family paired with female economic self-sufficiency is female aggression. It's far less overt than its male counterpart and doesn't result in immediate massive physical harm. Yet, it does exist and it can still have massive societal negative effects. Dealing with it is hard. Women shouldn't go to jail for cheating or leading men on or playing gossip and indirect power games. The historical solution was very harsh social pressure - look up what they did to scolds in puritan New England. Hell, despite the very online attitudes against "slut shaming," the median western woman still uses sexualized gossip to malign her opponents. I'm not going to say I'm in favor of institutionalized mean girl-ism. That's ridiculous. I put my faith (literally) in social conventions, however, that have much more rigid guidelines for both inter and intra sex relationships up to and including marriage. Choose-your-own sexual and social norms create ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, and neuroticism. Does this sound like your median Millenial single person and married couple? Don't even start with Gen-Z who have all managed to hyper neruoticiziezize themselves into digital multi-personas paired with real world hermeticism.

I've said this more than a few times on the Motte; I'm not out to paint 1950s American suburban marriage as the idyllic to end all idyllics. There were real problems. But since the destruction of the nuclear family began, there has simply been no meaningful alternative. It's a boundary-less personal "freedom" out to infinity. Phrased differently; it's nihilism. Hedonic nihilism, but nihilism none the less.

I think your "modify genes at the species level" theory is, at best, a techno-liberal solution (to a problem that was previously addressed) with a whole host of side-effects and just the teeniest little bit of lace between itself and eugenics. At worst, it's full bore eugenics with a side dish of state sponsored misandry.

What would a society with far fewer men than women look like? As far as I can tell, there is very little data to go on (maybe USSR after ww2?).

Another example might be ancient China, where eunuchs were sort of common in upper-class society. I don't know any real numbers, but they show up again and again in history, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Attendants and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He.

Perhaps the modern trans movement is just a move in that direction?

Fisher's principle - Wouldn't maintaining an uneven ratio require constant, totalitarian intervention in order to resist the natural equilibrium-restoring force?

But then again, sex-selective abortion (of females) remains a thing in China despite it being illegal. This doesn't make sense from the perspective of biological evolution. From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.

Can we imagine a similar dynamic producing a ratio with more females than males?

From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.

You've got that backwards don't you? It makes more sense if it's pushed by the mothers.

From the perspective of cultural evolution, it only makes sense if the "abort females" meme is passed on more by fathers than by mothers.

The last time I looked into this, I came away convinced it was economics. Chinese men have (had?) a legal and cultural obligation to provide care for their parents that Chinese women do not. If you think you might only have one kid, it makes financial sense to insure it's a boy.

One example of a society with more women than men is the black urban ghettos in the US, where a decent fraction of the male population is in prison at any given time, and they certainly don't do much to inspire confidence in this eugenics scheme. If we cast a wider net to look at matriarchal societies in general, which may or may not have arisen due to a temporary or chronic gender imbalance, we see that women do all the economically productive work and men spend their days gambling, drinking, and killing each other (my impression of Soviet Russia post-WWII is that it trended in this direction as well, but was kept more in check by heavy state intervention).

As far as feasibility goes, I'm also not sure that this is as easy a change to make as one might assume. We don't, to my knowledge, know the genes that regulate the frequency of boys or girls being born. We can infer that it involves control of X and Y chromosome segregation in male gametes, but that's about it. It's true that under famine conditions more girls are born than boys, but that's because male fetuses are more fragile and are preferentially miscarried when the mother is stressed, not because fewer of them are conceived. Of course, if everyone is doing IVF anyway you can select the sex of your child easily, but that's intervention at the level of individuals rather than populations.

The rate of incarceration of black men is 1 in 81 according to this: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons-the-sentencing-project/. So slightly under 1.5 percent. While high, that's not enough to slant the demographics highly in favor of women. I would think that the state of inner city black communities might be due to other factors. Likewise, post war societies are typically full of heavily traumatized men with severe PTSD. That might account for some of the behavior you're describing.

As for the actual process, I don't doubt that there would be some major challenges. But on the other hand, the process by which gametes are formed is very well understood. In addition, there are multiple species that do have different sex ratios at birth. Given that their gamete formation process is relatively similar to ours, there are likely several avenues that could be explored.

Inner city black ghettos are not the majority of the black population. I can well believe that those ghettos might be highly female because there’s lots of working and middle class black neighborhoods with average incarceration rates.

If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?

I think significantly less men would be incels. Just do it enough that men don't entirely lose their drive to build and make things to impress hot chicks (progress civilization), but rather just ease the pressure just a little so it isn't straight up impossible like it is nowadays.

women have to be choozier because they get more risks from casual sex (pregnancy, infections) and physically weaker with less ability to flee if something isn't going right.

I didn't love FarNearEverywhere's comment at first, but after reading through it, I think she's right. The elements that cause the dating market to be so asymmetric are legion, and not reducible to "women are less horny." If you wanted to somehow genetically engineer things so straight relationships look more like gay ones, you would have to alter the biology of women so throughly that the human species would be unrecognizable.

The solution to dating asymmetry is, and has always been, and indeed was, monogamy as an enforced social ideal, and norms and values that cultivate satisficing and not perfectionism when it comes to settling down. That doesn't mean pushing people to settle with an abusive alcoholic, but it does mean encouraging people to settle down with a homely, but kind and nurturing partner instead of chasing after hotness or status. It also means holding people to their vows, and leading people to see re-investment in their relationship rather than divorce as the solution to cooling off romance or non-abusive problems in a relationship. These are the conditions under which actual love can flourish, and furthermore I think they make both men and women much happier than the current situation, on net. The women get commitment and the men get regular sex.

That goes for men as well as women. Find your 5/10 sweetheart and marry them, damn it.

Genuinely, thank you for giving my comment the benefit of the doubt.

Now, as regards women and horniness: there was (may still be) a common belief that the reason women became prostitutes or fallen women was precisely that - horniness. They loved sex, wanted sex, and couldn't control their animal appetites, which is why they became pregnant outside of marriage and were ruined for anything afterwards but engaging in sex work. Thomas Hardy wrote a satirical poem about the contrast between the ruined girl whose life was vastly improved by her fall and her still 'innocent' friend from the country, but even there reading between the lines, it's all depending on her being young, pretty, and free with her favours (in a discriminating way; sleeping with men who can keep her, not just giving it away). That is not a long career and her easy life, unless she's very lucky and very careful, will vanish with her youth:

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Men did not value those women. They may sleep with them, but few (some may do) would boast that "my girlfriend's a whore". They might boast that a whore is so infatuated with them, she's in love with him or thinks of him differently to her other clients, but that only reflects credit on the man. He's so good in bed/so handsome and dominant and charming that he can satisfy the hyper-horny appetite of a whore and make her fall for him rather than the other way round, the traditional way of wily hyper-horny women getting men to fawn on them.

Women being less choosy and more horny, therefore more willing to have sex from the get-go with a guy, more willing to date guys, and so on will lead to the culture of whores, and the despising of such women by the very men who want more sex. Then the competition will be for the rare women who aren't giving it up on the first date and haven't had a boyfriend for every month of their life since puberty.

Prostitution has been the social escape valve for sexual pressure of men who can't get married, or don't have access to a regular source of sex. But prostitutes, in the main, have never been regarded as high-status women. Very few men want to settle down and marry an ex-prostitute and have a family with her (citation needed, I know, I know). Well-off men could have concubines and other marriage or established relationships in societies which catered for that, but promiscuity in women in the main was never highly regarded.

That well may change, but it's not just genetic engineering to get women to be just the right degree of horny - not too much, so they're not sleeping around like sluts, and not too little, so they'll match men's sexual appetites - that will need to be done to make whore culture acceptable to all.

why don't we just make women ever so ...slightly more horny?

Oh, you mean "riding the cock carousel" and other such charming descriptions?

Men don't want women to be horny. Let me refine that: men don't want women to be horny except for them in one particular instance, and not other men. Men don't want women to dump them, but neither do they want women to be clingy when the man wants to dump her.

There's a long tradition of poetry along the lines "sleep with me; if you don't, you're a frigid bitch who hates men and loves to make them suffer and if you do sleep with any man who asks you, you're a whore and a slut. Just sleep with me when I want, then go away when I'm tired of you".

Marvel's To His Coy Mistress: you don't wanna die a virgin, do you? Sleep with me!

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Even Donne got on the Bitch Ridin' The Cock Carousel wagon:

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

The Sexual Revolution was supposed to be about "now women can be horny too, without blame or the double standard". What are the results? Unhappy men claiming they can't get a girlfriend and that women can have all the sex they want, and are all sleeping around with the alphas while not giving them the time of day.

I think you would have to do a lot of re-tooling of both the physical set-up and the mental attitudes; you'd need to have women getting aroused as easily and quickly as men do, and orgasming from the same sort of stimulation, and not so fertile as to make it risky that they'd easily get pregnant, who are willing to just have casual fun with any guy that asks, don't have emotional attachments from that casual sex, and are approachable by all.

Of course, once women start being approachable by all men and stop being hypergamous, then some men will complain about the whores and sluts who're willing to just hop into bed with any guy, no discrimination or standards. It's a double bind!

Alternatively, just make the men better.

  • -10

"Better" doesn't really mean anything here, though. The whole point of the discussion is explicating the what and how of what "better" even means in terms of genetically engineering people for the sake of society.

E.g. we could genetically engineer men to enjoy being celibate to make them "better." This would obviously reduce a lot of the suffering that men are going through, but most women probably wouldn't find it appealing if almost every man they met had basically no sexual desire. Then again, perhaps it would make it easier for women to find the few high status males with mutations that countered the genetic engineering, which would benefit them greatly. But if the few high status males are so rare that each woman has to share a man with a million others, then that would be unsatisfactory. So perhaps we could also genetically engineer the birth sex ratio to be heavily weighted towards males, so that we have roughly the same amount of females and of high status male mutants, along with a 99% population of male volcels.

However, I'm not sure what a world where 99% of the population are volcel males would look like, what kind of political influence they would hold, and what they would do with it. They'd likely be far less productive than a similar population of standard issue males, but if we're in this fantasy scifi world, that productivity might not matter a whole lot.

However, I'm not sure what a world where 99% of the population are volcel males would look like, what kind of political influence they would hold, and what they would do with it.

We already know what a world where a significant chunk of volcel males looks like. They have little political influence; too busy with the video games and porn to acquire money or power. (Also, they were told wanting women was bad, and unfortunately for women by and large listened.)

but most women probably wouldn't find it appealing if almost every man they met had basically no sexual desire

Again, this is already true. Actually, by that token, since Western society considers the definition of "better men" to be "women", you're going to get a heavy female-weighted genetic engineering demand in areas where that's more locally true, and a more even distribution where that isn't.

Sure, it'll probably even out eventually because increased competition for men means women lose relative power over men- but I don't think the ideal gender distribution in a hyperfeminine world is anywhere near the 50/50 it is when the power of men-as-class and women-as-class are more balanced (by the chance circumstances of the local economy).

since the allegation is hypergamy is based on a relative metric, it doesn't matter how much better men are as a group

When it comes to hypergamy, men being “better” as a group (or not) does matter.

With regard to sexual and relationship dynamics, hypergamy is relative between men and women. If Becky perceives her boyfriend/husband Brad as her “better,” her hypergamous instincts can be satiated.

It’s polygyny, the degree of winner-take-all-edness, the distribution of women to men, the tendency of women to want the same men (female mate-choice copying), that’s zero-sum and relative within men. It’s not clear ex-ante to what extent men being “better” as a whole would aid with polygyny.

Brad could be taller, stronger, smarter, richer, and more dominant than Becky and satisfy her hypergamous instincts, but still lose her to Chad due to polygyny. If he were shorter, weaker, poorer, or less dominant than Becky, he likely wouldn’t have stood a chance with her in the first place before polygyny came into play.

Excellent encapsulation of the root problem.

And this is exactly what the concept of non-family arranged marriage has tried to solve for thousands of years. You (women) get to be the sexual selectors and a pick a mate. No one can force you, and men must compete. But once the choice is made, you have to stick with it so that society doesn't collapse in on zero-sum Chad-The-Warlord mating patterns.

This is the reason conservatives, like me, point to no-fault divorce as so incredibly damaging. It means mating patterns revert back to a situation that was worse for 99% of men and >50% of women (i.e. most of everybody). Stable marriages make stable communities with longer term outlooks. This is a great way to build society. Fluid marriages with easy opt-out clauses as well as a material incentive in many cases create a constant state of next-optionism and institutionalized anxiety. It's easy to see why your average secular-humanist married couple are neurotic basket cases. They are dealing with the >50% odds that the person they wake up with and go to sleep with will leave them and, maybe, take half of their stuff at any moment.

I see the polyamory movement as a weird cope to some basic realities. They're smart enough to accept human nature, but not pro-social enough to understand the value of discipline and final choice in marriage. So, they settle for what becomes a shared Chad-harem and a weak peace. I don't see how polyamory works out for your median non-Aella woman, however, as mate stealing just becomes (covertly) more acceptable and thus favors inherently more manipulative and anti-social women.

shared Chad-harem

From the men I've seen in polyamorous relationships, I wouldn't describe them as Chad's. Do you have any examples?

I've seen serial monogamous, polygamous, or monogamous relationships (where the man is a rake or cad) where the man might be reasonably described as a Chad.

You've stumbled upon the correct answer.

The Poly relationships aren't full of Chads .... the Chads are sleeping with the women in the Poly relationships outside of the poly relationship. The guys in poly relationships (willingly) are there for the classic beta support role. Chad - external to the poly system - has all of the "fun"

This sounds correct to me.

Chad doesn't want to be in the poly relationship with her 'boyfriend' or the less attractive girl.

Thank you for this explanation.

Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.

Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives?

Have you seen some of the hysteria over the restriction of abortion access? Then you want to make it more likely to get pregnant? That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage, you have to prevent pregnancy. To prevent pregnancy, you need contraception. If you decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives, then your alternative is "the woman who has had three or four abortions by the age of twenty-four", and using abortion as the main method of birth control isn't the greatest idea. Even medical abortion, because if you're going to be using drugs to provoke abortion, you may as well use drugs to stop conception in the first place.

But then, as you say, widespread use of hormonal contraceptives may decrease libido and so make sex less likely to happen. So it's which do you think is the lesser of two evils here: pregnancy prevention and less sex, or lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies?

Anyone fucking around, please wear condoms. This pill or multiple abortions talk is really missing the king of birth control for people jumps from one partner to another.

I've thought that PrEP will usher a wave of increased STD rates as it gives gay guys an excuse to not use condoms. They are ignoring the fact that HIV is merely one STD among many.

for abundant sexual access outside of marriage,

And if we nip the whole chain you lay out in the bud at this stage?

That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage

That is probably the problem here. Most of the rest of the bind that your comment presents seems to go away.

Arguably, "solving" that "problem" is about an order of magnitude more difficult than developing the types of genetic engineering tech being talked about here. The latter is just technological progress. The former is a political revolution in a way that is basically intolerable to both women and to the men most positioned to make any sort of change in society.

Cultural progress is harder to predict, and can be much swifter than genetic or technological progress (at least historically; we are in an incredible moment of rapid technological progress, and it would be difficult to construct an explicit metric for this). Especially if genetic engineering is on the table, I don't see why it is necessarily impossibly more difficult to affect people's senses of "intolerability" either as an aside/effect or as a goal. Literally the original subcomment in this subthread is:

If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?

That's a fair point, that one could genetically engineer people's sense of "intolerability." I do think there would have to be some sort of significant political/religious will behind developing and executing that kind of genetic engineering at a population level which would also of course be required for things like making women less hypergamous, etc. or changing birth sex ratios. I suppose my belief is that the political/religious force required to develop and implement the genetic engineering to make women more tolerant of losing abundant sexual access outside of marriage would be significantly more than what's required to implement the genetic engineering to make them slightly more male-like in their sexuality.

But you are correct that accurately predicting cultural progression is very hard. My own belief is probably mostly informed by my own lifetime experience of noticing how cultural progression always seems to go. But that's anecdotal and should be valued as much.

If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine? I was viewing some commentary on the recent paper claiming that there was a developing left/right divide between men/women, and one of the hypotheses was concerning the role of "religiosity", particularly among women. To the extent that we think we could plausibly target hypergamy/neuroticism/hornyness, plausibly one could hypothesize target "religiosity" or other factors that people associate with other cultural/political beliefs.

Moreover, the neuroscience literature has already identified plausible candidates for receptors and genes that relate to pair bonding, some of which even have animal analogs (e.g., there are two closely-related species of voles, one of which pair bonds strongly, and the other which doesn't nearly as much) or which seem to be correlated with measures of "relationship quality" in humans (it would take me a while to dig up some cites; I read this wayyy back in grad school). We could conceivably target something along these lines. Seems like we can think incredibly broadly; we really are considering quite a magic futzing machine.

More comments

Well, how are you going to square the circle? You want women to be more sexually active, but sexual activity brings with it the possibility of pregnancy. If you don't want pregnancy, you need contraception. If you're using contraception, so the OP argument goes, then that decreases libido, so women are not as sexually active.

You have to make a choice: women who are horny enough to sleep with you, but they end up with ten babies because of that, or women who don't have ten babies but are not horny enough to sleep with you. Or the third possibility: no hormonal contraceptives, lots of sex, but also no pregnancy because abortion as birth control.

(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').

IUDs, condoms, etc. Anything but the pill really. An unusually easy to square circle.

You could just ditch the whole modern set of sexual ethics, you know.

And I imagine this is precisely why Scott Alexander is fond of saying "society is fixed, biology is mutable." That "just" conceals a lot of the teeth-pulling involved with that course of action.

(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').

That is a particular form of a moralized stance. You have chosen a specific set of morals to adopt. You also now make no mention of marriage, which was in your original comment.

Here's my solution to whatever gender-angst people have:

  • make real estate cheaper (there's a correlation between Republican-voting areas and areas where young people can easily buy starter homes). Decrease building regulations as well

  • make having children easier by decreasing regulation : transform the Child Protection Services into an anti-nosy-senior-at-the-window enforcement force, somewhat in the spirit of the ACAB movement, stop regulating day-care businesses, get rid of carseat laws etc, and allow freedom of association. If the child dies he dies, but at least let them live a little.

  • get rid of sex discrimination laws as well. No more wasting 10 years in med school if you're only going to stick to being a doctor for 5 years, no more maternity leave, no more 'unsafe work environment'

  • relax domestic violence laws enforcement as well. Bring back some gravity to the concept of 'who you share a bed with', it's not other grown-ups' business to rescue you from all your bad choices

As a starting point (new platform for Mr 'Grab them'), mandate that any public figure or organization that publishes some kind of feminist statement, in general 'in support of women', for example this, should be labelled 'SIMP' for say a year (on their press release, any media, on their products, etc). Like a bud light halo. Any woman aspiring to some kind of important position should first be asked about her family and how she expects to continue being a mother or a grandmother while focusing on important position.

get rid of carseat laws

This is a weirdly-specific example. Why do you assume carseat laws have anything to do with people choosing whether or not to have kids?

Anything that would justify fining / arresting / causing trouble / calling CPS on parents is part of the environment that makes it harder for people to have children and more children when they already have 1.

I don't know what the ratio of calls to CPS / calls to CPS for parents who are actually abusive is but it is way too high in my opinion.

Anybody who has been around in a Western country in the past three years should know that governments will come up with crazy rules that make no sense and cause way more trouble to enforce than they actually help.

It's become a meme, maybe originally from this study.

I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.

Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.

*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.

Yeah, but hormonal contraception became popular because mechanical forms of contraception are often uncomfortable (I understand some men complain about condoms), ineffective, or even hazardous (the Dalkon Shield). Implants work well but they're hormonal. The female condom never really became popular. The Holy Grail is some form of contraceptive for men to take, but that's slow going and a different problem to blocking the female reproductive cycle.

I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage

Moi aussi, but we're dealing here with the modern problem of "Good God, I don't want to go back to the bad old days of having to marry the first woman who'd have me, just so I could have sex". People (men) want sex, they want it most when they're at their maximum horniest (young and full of hormones) and they don't want to 'save it for marriage' or 'only ever had one sexual partner, my spouse'. Porn also has a part to play in that, as does "what do you mean you only ever had vanilla missionary sex, you poor boob?" for both men and women is the attitude of the enlightened and liberated today. You have magazines teaching teenage girls how to have anal sex, we're not putting the genie of 'sexual liberation' back in the bottle of 'no sex outside of marriage'.

we're not putting the genie of 'sexual liberation' back in the bottle of 'no sex outside of marriage'.

Why not? Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but I don't see it being impossible. If nothing else, a total collapse of industrial civilization and global reversion to pre-1700 technology levels would indeed put the proverbial genie right back; which establishes that it's at least possible. Sure, "turning back the clock" would probably require some pretty strong measures to pull off, but I figure a determined, non-democratic far-Right government could probably accomplish quite a lot toward this end.

This sort of gradual change to existing tendencies, that merely tweaks existing circuitry in a direction that the basic design space clearly already supports, is supposed to be exactly the sort of thing blind idiot evolution is good at trying and fixing in the event of success. If your proposed change is in fact not civilisation-breaking, shouldn't we observe it in at least some stable subpopulation on earth?

Underlying material conditions are changing way faster than evolution can keep up with though. Even if current settings are fine for a preindustrialized civilization, and evolution in theory would adjust for this in time, it hasn't had time to do that yet.

It seems like traits like the ones mentioned should be selected for within a mere couple of generations though. If the slightly-too-neurotic and slightly-unhorny women aren't having children, then the problem is self-solving. Seems like a waste of resources to gene-engineer away a problem that is on its way out.

Two problems there. 1) The unforeseen consequences of modifying human psychology are very difficult to speculate about. 2) The engineering required to do this would be many orders of magnitude more difficult.

Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.

Let’s say we are in a Cold War with with China. In order to defeat the US they begin with their ideal Chinese man but then change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ. These guys crush the US. But then the super humans end ruling China too. And they are so modified they are more different from Han Chinese than European Americans.

You don’t really need War for this timeline as simply doing it in peace time would end up creating humanoids completely different to current humans and basically a mass extinction even or at a minimum making human existence void of any meaning a second tier species watched over by their better.

Same thing of course applies to AI.

Genetic modification seems so obviously to be progress but I am starting to expect it to face a great deal of political backlash.

Did you miss GATTACA? Beggars in Spain? Hysteria around designer babies when Dolly was cloned, or the human genome draft was published?

change the genetic code so that they create Shaquille O’Neill physical traits plus 250 IQ.

That's just not anywhere close to realistic with our current level of technology and understanding. You could try cloning Shaq or whoever you think is smart, but we're laughably far away from editing your fertilized embryos for traits in that way. Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.

Beggars in Spain

I've read it. I recall liking it. It is very obscure, right?

I'm not certain how popular it is, but I've seen it come up in a few contexts in the circles I travel in. People around here will cite obscure Larry Niven books fairly frequently ('On the gripping hand'...thankfully the much more crass 'Rape my lizard!' from the same novel never caught on), so I thought there were decent odds that Beggars in Spain was also well known. Particularly given the themes of transhumanism.

Like, it wouldn't happen in your lifetime even if the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned.

Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that? We were laughably far from good image-gen AI 5 years ago. And genetic augmentation is a particularly ethics-beholden field. We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways, it's not like FTL travel where we've got no good approach.

We've got CRISPR which can change genes in fairly effective ways

How many genes can it change? If we want to change a thousand of genes (because e.g. our utility function asks for it) and have no faulty changes in unintended genes, can it deliver that?

If someone wants to make a genetically modified plant, they can just try and change and just discard if edits were faulty, with humans we want reliable ones.

It can't change thousands of genes but it does demonstrate that it's possible to change genes, that presumably there are other ways to change many genes reliably. It's like how the first powered flight makes helicopters, jump-jets, jet-packs and autogyros much more plausible.

And hey, we're talking about a world where 'the FDA were nuked tonight and we just did whatever we want to embryos for the next couple decades, ethics be damned'. We can't even imagine how rapid development would be, it'd be a different paradigm.

Are you sure? Could anyone predict forty years of ethics-department-free AI progress like that?

It's true, predicting the future is a fool's game and betting against progress doubly so. We'll never be able to resolve our bet given the near certain continued existence of the FDA.

That being said:

  1. biologists (and I count myself in this camp) are morons who can't do math, code or do anything beyond draw pointless arrow diagrams. Moreover, the incentive structure actively pushes us away from solving any of these issues and instead focusing on shorter timelines, smaller scales and splashy headlines instead of any kind of substantive understanding. PGS gets around all of this because you can let biology do the work for you, but it comes with a host of other problems. You mentioned CRISPR though, so let's go with that.

Say you want to use CRISPR to...I don't know, increase the size of your gut to accommodate the caloric needs of the giant brain your 250 IQ Chinese supersoldier is going to have. There is no 'gut size' gene that you can just augment the expression of, there are massive, interlocking transcriptional networks who need to be turned on at the right times and in the right cell types. This is likely to be far beyond our capability to understand ever, so the only reasonable path forward is building an AI oracle to understand it for us. It's either going to 1) Need monstrous datasets that we probably can't generate in a reasonable way yet 2) Molecular dynamics simulation is impossibly computationally expensive, so figure out some other abstracted simulation method 3) ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.

  1. There is no 'gut size' gene; there are dozens if not hundreds of genes you would need to alter, and moreover, alter in ways that are temporally, spatially and functionally correct. CRISPR just isn't capable of doing that with the precision or reliability you'd need; it's great at knocking out 1 to a handful of genes, mediocre-to-bad at activating genes, and mediocre at silencing genes - and these latter two functions are transient, so you'd need to find a way to keep expressing the CRISPR and gRNA. Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need.

  2. Delivery to somatic tissues isn't currently possible in a meaningful way, although I'm optimistic we might actually solve this in a reasonable timescale. And I suppose you'd want to edit germline cells regardless, but I thought I'd point it out.

I'm most pessimistic about (1), and moreover a decided lack of interest in TPTB (to be clear, the academic establishment. I doubt the deep state cares overmuch) in understanding these systems in a way that we could build or intelligently edit them ourselves. Godlike AI is the wildcard, but at least so far, all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers. And Eliezer tells me we're all dead in that scenario anyways, no?

I'm not a developmental biologist and only tangentially touching on human genetics so I wouldn't say this is authoritative. But that's been my impression over the last decade or so.

  1. ??? someone else tell me how they'd envision this working, my imagination fails me.

A whole mountain range of skulls of the failed experiments when tweaking genes for "well, let's try this and see if it works"/"oh no, it didn't, well fire up batch of embryos number one thousand and let's go again!" and breeding programmes and all the horrors that cutting-edge tech and no ethical oversight will permit. Morals are for losers, baby, nature is red in tooth and claw, we ain't getting 250 IQ without breaking a hatchery's worth of eggs, and they're just clumps of cells that we permitted to go all the way through gestation anyhoo. Not like they're people or anything.

Why do we need such intensive transformations? We have large populations of very smart people, large populations of very physically capable people. We can sequence genes easily, see which ones are associated with intelligence and physical performance. 250 IQ might be a 1 in a hundred billion genius but still basically possible from blind chance. All we'd be doing is fixing the dice to get an impossibly rare natural creation. Maybe he'd be pretty hungry but we have plenty of calories.

I bet there'd be a bunch of problems with mental illness, you'd need to refine it with time and experience. I know it's more complicated than 'make a statistical model of what genes the smartest people are most likely to have and tick the boxes' but we'd have time for trial and error. Forty years is multiple gamechangers worth of time.

As for how one would edit those genes, I don't know. Technology advanced quickly in the last forty years, we didn't have anything like CRISPR forty years ago. We couldn't even sequence human genes.

all AI can do is hold up a mirror and regurgitate the same garbage that we write in review papers.

Come on, it can do more than that. I got it to write some decent Top Gear fanfiction. Google had theirs doing protein folding, which is vaguely relevant.

Even more relevant: https://nyulangone.org/news/new-artificial-intelligence-tool-makes-speedy-gene-editing-possible

Not perfect but surely proof AI is useful on this front?

With no ethics, and a big budget you could go very fast.

Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

No, I don't think so. We can already clone Von Neumann, and we can't actually engineer smarter people than that in the way we engineer airplanes or computers because we don't know how either intelligence or neurology work at that level.

We can certainly do iterated embryo selection on top of Von Neumann ... but I don't think that's going to work that well, you're running into non-additive effects there.

You can just take Von Neumann's genome and eliminate very rare variants (which are usually deleterous which is why they are rare), not even him was free from it (early cancer death).

Maybe that gets him 5 IQ points, certainly not 100. Or very likely that he was selected as one of the smartest out of billions people means that there's just less juice to squeeze out of that.

You don't need to know how intelligence works, you just need to sequence enough people in genome wide association studies, build a polygenic score and then run it

Right, that doesn't get you to 250 IQ or above existing variation I think.

250 IQ is 10 standard deviations from mean IQ 100, SD=15

If we have 1000 offspring per generation via egg harvesting embryos, taking the top 1% (10) they should be 2.33 SD from the mean

With 80% heritability, response to selection per generation is 1.86 SD

Thus it will take 5.36 (6) generations of selective breeding to get 250IQ with 1000 offspring per generation

Or 6 * 20 weeks = 2.3 years

If egg/sperm are from +3 SD donors, it's 3.76 (4) generations, or 1.53 years

Please consider donating towards my volcano lair lab on Kickstarter

Right, I'm suggesting that the mathematical model stops applying. Like, imagine humans are now cars. You can make a faster car than you did last time by copying the techniques of all the best car factories (this is sorta what embryo selection does). Maybe you could even go 10-20% faster than the fastest car ever by doing that, though I think non-additive effects will prevent that. But you can't make a car that goes at 1000 mph by picking out the best techniques from existing car factories. You'd need to do more technical design work than that, or have a LOT of new mutations and natural selection on them.

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Females develop eggs after 20 weeks so you could make 1000 per generation, polygenically screen them all, pick the best and iterate.

Those eggs are immature. I'm not a developmental biologist, but would you expect in vitro maturation protocols to work on eggs forcibly harvested from a 20 week old fetus?

I'm also not confident that there's enough genetic diversity starting from one person to get a true 1 in a billion; won't there be a bunch of alleles where neither parent has what you want? I admit that this may be a nonissue if most of the alleles you want are relatively common, I don't have a good handle on the numbers here.

Put it a different way - Do any of us have a 1 in a billion chance of giving birth to Shaq? I would tentatively guess no, modulo some genetic conditions like acromegaly. Do you have evidence that this is true?

In just over a year you have 3 generations and the pick of 1 in a billion (of descendants of your starting stock)

But what then? You have one embryo. Somatic cloning? Things are getting pretty complicated my man.

Oocyte in vitro maturation (IVM) is a thing. I am not sure if anyone has used it on foetal eggs, but it is likely possible.

You aren't restricted to the original stock you can introduce new sperm each generation

To scale it up, you could potentially encourage eggs to divide (like identical twins) then sequence one, and if its the one you want, keep splitting

I think these things are not too hard to solve, you just need time and money, and the will (and lack of ethical restraint)

I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.

The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.

In the United States it's about 1.05 boys per girl at birth. So about 51.2% male at birth.

The difference is that is a temporary imbalance. It will correct itself within a generation. If you imposed it at the genetic level, the results would play out over a much longer period.

Despite the existence of the Polyamorous movement, most people still treat monogamy as the default. And an unbalanced gender ratio makes monogamy not possible. I think that would be the biggest reason not to intentionally unbalance the gender ratio.

I think widespread genetic modifications would mainly be used for medical reasons. To prevent specific genetic diseases. Iceland has already sort of done this for things that can be screened in embryos.

My gut is that we'd see more male misbehaviour rather than less. Women have a civilising effect on men.

I would expect a situation with more women would lead to more promiscuity and less stable marriages, more children born out of wedlock, and generally more rootless lives among underclass men.

If women have a civilizing effect on men, shouldn't a higher woman/man ratio lead to greater civilizing on men? Also, I'd guess that, in this kind of society, most of the things you described, e.g. promiscuity, less stable marriages, and bastards, wouldn't really be considered misbehavior; because of the way the numbers add up, society would have to create systems that account for these things and integrate them into the way society functions. Rootless lives among underclass men, I could definitely see being an issue, but I wonder how much that rootless living will be correlated with antisocial behavior in this kind of setting. I honestly don't know how much competition for women (both in terms of extra resources and in terms of criminality actually making one more attractive) drives the antisocial behavior of underclass men now; if it's significant, then we could see more rootless underclass men but less bad behavior from them in aggregate (depending on the ratios).

When I say that women civilise men, I mean within marriages. My expectation is that a higher female to male ratio would lead to fewer marriages as more men play the field as they do at college campuses with similarly lopsided ratios.

No because men would have enormous power over women as they become scarce.

Have you ever seen what relationships are like at an engineering or nursing school?

One of the eeriest things for me was reading about how the gender ratio at colleges alters people's dating experiences in profound ways, and realizing that huge amounts of people's dating behaviors really were influenced by market dynamics.

Do you have a link to this? I would like to read it.

this isn't really "data" but anecdotes from this thread say no: https://allnurses.com/does-dating-get-easier-male-t698798/ just the usual stuff about "just be confident," "it'll happen when it happens," "don't date your coworkers," "I'm too busy to date," and my favorite "all my female coworkers already have boyfriends and babies."

It depends on if it's the presence of women that's civilizing, or competition for women. If it's the latter, less intense competition would lead to more brutish behavior.

It's neither. It's the romantic entanglement and love for women (and the children they bear) that has the civilizing influence. The traditional courtly ideal of love is a man winning the affection of a particular virtuous woman by cultivating and demonstrating virtue.

And the reality's not far off: give a man a woman who loves him and through her give him children, and suddenly he is concerned with the good not only of himself, but of his wife and children, and thus he takes fewer risks, he thinks more about the future, and is connected directly to the interests of women and children (from which he might otherwise be alienated by his age and sex). It is one thing to think of women and children indirectly. It is another to love them. "The married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife."

Good point. My intuition says that competition for women has, if anything, the opposite effect, and I think criminal behavior of single and married men bear this out, though I have no idea if anyone's done any studies with proper controls.

I agree the effect on underclass men would be less than ideal, but it would likely not lead to increased violence. From a societal standpoint that still seems to be a more desirable outcome.

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