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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

It seems to me that expecting ASI in our lifetimes and worrying about fertility should be mutually exclusive. I fall in the camp that expects ASI, and it surprises me how many in rat-adjacent circles apparently fall in the other camp. If the intersection of these groups is actually non-empty and we have its representatives here, what is the cause of your concern?

For one, probabilities. If there is 50% chance of ASI in our lifetime, I still care about future worlds that fall in the other 50%.

We also have no idea what a world with ASI looks like. For one, there's a non-zero chance that we are already in the presence of superintelligence, either because the world is created by a deity/simulation or there are aliens monitoring us. This actually feels quite likely to me.

I think there's a good chance a superintelligent AI would just leave us alone or not interact with us meaningfully.

Finally, isn't this a general purpose argument for anything? Why care about the deficit? ASI. Eating healthy? ASI will come and save me. Meeting girls? Just wait for ASI and I'll have a whole harem of bots.

I mean, I mostly unironically agree with the thrust of your last paragraph. As you say, though, the probability we don't get ASI is not zero (though much less than 50% in my estimation) and you may want to hedge against it. But there is a cost to hedging and in many cases it's not worth it. Most people would be completely unprepared for survival if society collapsed, but they don't put in effort to be prepared, because it is a negative EV activity and the outcome is within their risk tolerance

Eating healthy? Absolutely, it improves your quality of life in the meantime as a nice bonus and it's not terribly difficult. Solving the fertility crisis? That is difficult and doesn't seem worth the effort. Similarly, I think the deficit is mostly irrelevant and isn't worth caring about, spending money you don't have is just too good. Meeting girls? Probably worth doing, you may find that you'll regret not having had "real" experiences, depending on the precise shape of the future.

That said, if I met someone completely neglecting their health and checked out of dating on the basis that "ASI is imminent", I wouldn't think of this as crazy -- just someone with somewhat different weights than me.

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