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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.

Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"

If you don't accept the philosophical foundations of universalisms wrt human life then, yeah, sure. No argument from me. Using markets to determine the value of a human life comes with a lot of caveats in the best of times.

Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.

Sure, I don't know enough to debate its whole origin story. And had I been president I would not used taxpayer dollars in such a fashion. I'm actually not aware of detailed constitutional arguments/cases for/against foreign aid as a whole category. It seems if a national defense argument can be made, then it's going to be allowable by default.

PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.

I don't think I disagree with you here, overall. I'd just say that we could have compromised/hedged and ended U.S. involvement as a handoff, not as a near-immediate shutdown.

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today. Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.

Unfortunately it had very bad timing, as mere minutes later the place got blown up in a spectacular fashion.

So much of the Star Wars franchise doesn't plain make sense. It's soft science fantasy at best, and even I'm not shameless or contrarian enough to earnestly make that claim.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Reuters has a nice graph showing that large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.

Amen.

See also: Welfare Democracy

Ultimately, donors have to do their due diligence on efficacy and voters on sustainability.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Sure there are accounting identities involved. But the way I interpret the phrase is as saying that the action favored by Trump has a necessary consequence because of such an identity. For example, if your assets increase, either your liabilities or equities increase.

This is not the case for employment (what the comment I was replying to mentioned). There is no accounting identity in monetary economics (that I know of) which links interest rates and employment. There is the Phillips curve, but we can argue about the slope, causality, etc.

Lowering interest rates is not crazy, even if Trump suggests it. Even Milton Friedman recommended it.

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

I liked it for the unique take on 3D, which only he could do. Unfortunately, Avatar 2 was a mix of 24fps and something much higher, switching at the least inopportune times.

I don’t want to watch a video game, I want cinema. Heck, I think I wouldn’t mint in on 20fps, or 12, as long as it’s consistent.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else.

In the long run we are all very much dead. But perhaps giving up on classical liberalism altogether is premature.

And the "something else" is hard here. If we have reached the End of History, but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.

So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias

I'd argue many people do, not economic reality. Public choice theory teaches us this. Then you can get into "liberal" vs. "democracy" but that's a whole thing.

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

there's no way in hell it would work IRL.

Like FTL and several other things. Obviously, if Vernor Ving could implement either IRL he would be doing this rather than writing books.

Writing good stories with say FTL is much easier than inventing working FTL.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Yeah I actually did appreciate the follow up. It's a shame, I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent and willing to stick up for his views. I've even defended him multiple times. He just can't seem to avoid outright asking to be banned and personally attacking people. Alas.

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.

The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with long haul trucking trade and shipping .

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?

Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.

I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.

Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

As has long been theorized [citations from various sources, three known to Ølvira; the theories cited are of long standing and nondisprovable] the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms, or [hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores. - "Twirlip of the Mists"

Twirlip sounds like an utter kook ("Appears to be seriously out of touch. Program recommendation: delete this poster from presentation."), but one of its other theories (zone interface instability being connected to the Blight) was right on the money, and even its craziest theory ("Hexapodia as the key insight", "If these humans have three pairs of legs") sounds a tiny bit less crazy when you realize the Skroderiders have six wheels...

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I have a position that satisfies me: as long as you can support yourself independently, without the subsidy of others, feel free to procreate with whatever disability you want.

But if your disability causes a drain on those around you, then no, you should not be permitted to try to produce children with the same disability.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion.

nitpick: if job is so horrible that noone sane would agree to do it, then your choices include

  • improving job situation
  • relying on few insane people
  • leaving it not done
  • slavery

For example ancient world mines tended to be absolutely horrific, and at least partially it was unsolvable without technological progress. Aztecs were fans of human sacrifice and it is quite hard to get volunteers for that, especially at scale that Aztecs believed to be necessary. Also, bunch of deviant sexual practices.

But all of that is not really applicable in modern world or widely considered to be evil. I guess if you look hard enough you will find people going "actually sex slavery is fine and laudable" and meaning it, but...

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.

OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.

So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Fair, though I don't think this quite matches the pattern I was looking for, since it sounds like they had to almost be coerced into testing and made it clear beforehand that they would not actually care about this outcome. I guess it would be hard to contrive an actual example where someone wants testing but would make a point of keeping a child with Down's - maybe if they were trying to filter for a less politicized condition, like sickle cell anemia?

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

I don't think there was anything explicitly in the text to that effect, but it's at least a really good fan theory. It was only good luck that it didn't work, arguably: if Blueshell actually had been subverted, Ravna's genocide-survival-intensified insistence to the contrary could have killed them all and lost the Countermeasure to the Blight.

The other likely reason to turn everyone against humanity would be the possibility that the human-stolen Countermeasure might get revealed and/or destroyed as collateral damage in the ensuing pograms. The Blight would prefer to find, seize, and analyze it, not destroy it outright, but at that time in the story the Blight had very little idea where it had been taken, and so might have decided to take a gamble with wider variance but less extreme risk.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Why am I getting vibes of renowned author Dan Brown?

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

Do you want to be the guy in the office who adds in the unprincipled empirical fudge factor to a statutorily mandated report? The verbs in 29 USC 2 are “collect, collate, report, and publish”, nowhere does it say “estimate”, “calculate”, or “determine”.

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

I have very mixed feelings about the topic, but the debate over gene therapy and cochlear implants in the deaf community is at least philosophically interesting. On one hand, functional ears are a blessing and it makes sense to heal people where possible, but on the other it's not wrong that this effectively implies the destruction of a legitimate cultural community built around the disability. Neither answer feels fully satisfying to me.