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Dueling Lines: Will AGI Arrive Before Demographic-Induced Deglobalization?

In industrial robotics, there's two ways you get consistency, reliability, efficiency, and speed:

  1. Limit the complexity of the required motions
  2. Control the environment to deliver the same inputs as often as possible

Manufacturing automation designs machines that break complex assembly problems into many separate sub-problems that can be solved by simple motions under a strict set of inputs. Much of the complexity of these machines is in developing schemes to guarantee the shape, weight, orientation, and velocity of pipelined precursors. Nearly all will "fail gracefully" under some unplanned set of inputs conditions at any stage in the pipeline - in other words, give up and complain to a human operator to fix the problem.

The value of AI in robotics is that it can help plan motion in uncontrolled environments. This motion could be simple or complex, but most examples you'll see are simple. For industrial robotics, this might look like machine vision and simple actuators to adjust orientation of inputs, or automated optical inspection to check for defects on outputs. But the whole value of automation is improvements over human benchmarks on the metrics listed above, and given the choice between designing a general purpose robot or a highly specialized machine, the specialist almost always ends up simpler, cheaper, and better at what its designers want it to do.

Self-driving cars are one of a small handful of applications where the mechanics are straightforward, but the environment is chaotic. The moving parts are all outrageously simple, even for racecars: the wheels tilt to steer, the wheels roll to accelerate, the brakes clamp to decelerate. The mechanisms that make each of these motions happen have a century of engineering behind them, of which many decades have been spent enhancing reliability and robustness, optimizing cost, etc. The only "hard" problem is safely navigating the uncontrolled environment - which makes it a slam-dunk next-step, since the unsolved problem is the only problem that needs focus.

The average blue collar laborer is combining dozens of separate actuators along many degrees of freedom to perform thousands of unique complex motions over the course of a workday. I have no doubt that advances in AI could plan this kind of motion, given a suitable chassis - but the size and form factor of manufacturable actuators with power comparable to their human analogues are physically infeasible to compress into the shape of a standard human body. Take a look at the trends in motor characteristics for the past few decades, particularly figure 8 (torque vs weight) - neodymium magnets and solid state electronics made brushless DC motors feasible, which greatly improved the power density and efficiency, but only modestly enhanced the torque to weight ratio. At the end of the day, physics and material science puts limits on what you can manufacture, and what you can accomplish in a given volume. And the kinds of machines we can improve - mostly motors - have to translate their motions along many axes, adding more volume, weight, and cost. Comparatively, human muscle is an incredibly space-efficient, flexible linear actuator, and while we can scale up hydraulics and solenoids to much greater (bidirectional!) forces, this comes with a proportional increase in mass and volume. This actually isn't so bad for large muscles like arms and legs, but for hands (i.e. the thing we need to hold all the tools) there just aren't many practical solutions for the forces required on all the required degrees of freedom.

In terms of what could suddenly change the equation, I suppose there are a few things to watch out for:

  • Room temperature superconductors could potentially increase the torque/weight ratio for motors by a whole fricking lot. This doesn't totally solve the problem, but it opens a lot of doors.
  • Cheap artificial muscles could help. There are a variety of designs available today, but most are science experiments (EAPs, thermal braids), pneumatics aren't exactly cheap, and rapid cycling of high pressures through tiny valves is challenging (not to mention loud). If anyone can make an electroactive polymer that's cheap, waterproof, and can torque, we might very suddenly be in business, but I'm absolutely not holding my breath on this one. The thermal braids tend to be really hard to control precisely because getting the fibers to a specific temperature is very challenging, and there's obviously environmental limitations, but otherwise they're potentially incredibly cheap and straightforward to make. Combining twisted fibers and electrical actuation could be promising, but I don't really see anyone doing that. There's a whole lot of material science between here and there.

My bet is on neither of these things happening any time soon. Basically every university in the world has an artificial hand or two under development, and they all suck. State of the art routinely costs six figures, weighs 5kg, and moves slow on 4x speed promo videos - it's been this way for decades and it isn't really getting better. Human hands enjoy a massive, durable nanomachinery advantage

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

I used to laugh at schizophrenic /pol/tards (who to be fair are pretty easy to laugh at) but the board does have its use cases, although it definitely requires mental filters to avoid brain-melting schizo exposure. Personal highlight is probably the happy little Chabad hobby tunneling accident, when every single American media outlet went totally radio silent while waiting for orders and literally the only place on the internet where I could find actual videos and happenings in the immediate wake were the scattered /pol/ threads popping on and off the catalog. It's decently documented now but it felt quite surreal at the moment, I don't laugh as much anymore and think such a place is definitely handy to have on the rare occasion that the fabric of reality tears so obviously.

Splitting "defensive alliance" into "chaining alliance" and "isolating alliance"

The metaphor is deliberately tortured into tangled conceptual spaghetti to obfuscate the logic trains path arriving at 'and therefore NATO, sorry Moralland is to blame for Aggroland pulling the trigger' because then it becomes an easy means to continue blaming Moralland for being hyperagentic, if not superagentic by being the actual agent driving decisions not just by allies but actually by aggressors instead.

The whole tortured argument is 'timidland doesn't want to be part of a war trigger by moralland perfidy'. This is, if anything, a reversal of how the world actually fucking works. Agreements aren't set in stone contracts enforced by gods lightning bolt, they are communication signals in a multiparty game to signal continued cooperation in future. Moralland didn't censure timidlands for failing to meet an arbitrary spending target, and the verbal wristslaps are couched in 'listen when the balloon rises you guys are fucking exposed'. Timidlands lack of military investment is based on a calculus that turned out to be inaccurate - aggroland turns out to be happy to seize timidlands property even when timidland companies just says they stop doing business with aggroland. Nothing obligated timidland to continue generating profit from aggroland, and the reward for timidland simply ceasing its exploitation of aggroland is to have aggroland make up a reason to punish timidland anyways. Moralland butters claim that guns solve nothing and that aggroland has no intention of going beyond weakland despite aggroland repeatedly and loudly pointing its finger at timidlands and making throat slitting noises.

This sneering at 'alliances' as if it is the fault of people who just dislike aggroland for unfathomable reasons. Moralland is perfectly capable of sidestepping preexisting alliances to find new friends who calculate continued relations with moralland being beneficial. NATO invaded afghanistan, but it was the Coalition that invaded Iraq.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

Indeed. What often people do not understand is that the Great Coalition, or at least the EPP-PSE alliance, is the mainstay of the EP and of the European Union. It will never falter because it is not supposed to fell.

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Should I be paying attention to /pol/? Serious question.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

The way I hear it, it's also used as a filtering mechanism to drive away right wing types. That these women fuck right wingers who ball up and talk to them in a bar is cognitive dissonance expatiated by the progressive Hinge profile enshrined for public presentation.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

I think we can extend some charity to the normie prog who is influenced by their social circumstances more than cogent conviction. I try to reserve criticism of bland normies who, in other social circumstances, would nod approvingly as Uncle Bob rants about the Wuhan Flu and how flouride saps your vital essence. Most people just want friends, and in this badly socialized world we just want the impression of community.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

BLM is also an unhelpfully vague umbrella able to capture a large variety of contradictory opinions within its multitudes. Buy Large Mansions proposes police abolition and abolishing the nuclear family, normie Blacks just wish police won't shoot them for tugging at a waistband. Progs signal vaguely that they are supportive of Good Things for Blacks, and given the extreme complexity of issues facing the community supports default to vague words of encouragement for whichever voice claiming ownership shouts the loudest.

Splitting "defensive alliance" into "chaining alliance" and "isolating alliance"

Because Putin repeatedly has threatened Europe, independent of European participation in Ukraine.

NATO didn't push Russia into the Black Sea, Russia was such a dick to all its imperial holdings that they all rushed for a defensive alliance against Russia. The risk of Russia getting back on its feet to assert its historical claim was present since Putin took over, with overt hostile actions conducted on Western European soil (Skripal) and influence/sabotage operations in Eastern Europe - a suspicious number of fires and explosions in Czechia and Bulgaria.

Lets also remember Russia repeatedly violating airspace, conducting what is politely called a dick move by irate Scandinavians and jollily termed 'live fire exercise' by chad Turks. Russia is not a cooperative actor, it is a belligerent threat actively seeking to pursue its own strategic interests explicitly at the expense of Western Europe.

Talking about 'NATO bases' or 'NATO missiles' is just repeating tankie claims of Russia being justified in lashing out like the petulant children they are. The 'NATO bases' are existing military facilities built by parties that reasonably assess Russia as the threat vector to actually guard against - Finland was neutral and they have a fucking shitload of mass aimed at Russian invasion vectors. There are SSBNs in the North Sea already, we haven't relied on intermediate range jupiters as a standoff asset against the fucking Fulda gap since the 1980s, much less as a MAD saturation tool.

People and the states they are resident within have agency, and the people who constitute the states in Eastern Europe have assessed accurately that Russia is a revanchist power too incompetent to actually seize their lands, but stupid enough to make an attempt and WRECK SHIT IN THE PROCESS. That Russia has stumbled like the drunken retards they are in their 2022 invasion of Ukraine doesn't change the fact that Mariupol and Bucha have been fucking annihilated, that Kyiv is under attack, that Odessa has been hit with cruise missiles, that Kharkiv was placed under siege. Russia is not competent enough to actually clown car their vatnik meat straight to Tallinn, but they've got enough fucking missiles to just wreck shit out of spite WHICH THEY ARE DOING NOW.

Russia is NOT an actor interested in mutual benefit, they are interested in asserting themselves as a power to be respected and if not feared. Right NOW they are actively threatening Western Europe and the USA and see fit to divert air assets to buzz Norway just for shits and giggles and limp their corpse fleet to Havana just to flex. Putin NOW actively states he wishes to send arms to states hostile to the west in order and we would see actual fucking deaths if there were western assets ripe for the picking - forcing the French out of Niger is a consolation prize for lacking any hostile states in that can host some Granits in range of the UK.

Europes bargain in Europe in the Scholtz- Merkel-Sarkozy era was that economic cooperation would diminish Russian interests if war happened more than Europe would suffer. That Russia sees this as a rope to tug as well is evidenced in their OWN information operations that have worked on YOU: we have too much to lose by resisting Russia so we just need to stop and they'll stop being dicks.

Lockheed and BAE didn't fucking make moves on the Balts or Eastern Europe, they just had the fucking capacity to fill in urgent requests. These people WANT to be defended, not bribed by Lockmart, and let me assure you others have tried to bribe their way to defense spending. NATO isn't some nefarious cabal coercing naive pacifists into buying unnecessary weapons, its the gate bitch guarding the treasure trove of Good Shit that can actually stand up to the orc at the border hollering his intention to ravage your lands. When the gate bitch is guarding the club too tightly these states pregame on any other fucker willing to sell anything, which is why fucking Hanhwa is making money hand over fist in Poland. The 2% isn't a procurement renewal exercise, its a commitment signal to ensure continuity in a world where Russia has actually fucking demonstrated its willingness to wreck shit for the sake of it.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 9, 2024

But you do have a say in it. You have moral culpability precisely because you have a say in it. I don't understand why the fact that you are shaped by influences would have any effect on the fact that your choices are very much the product of you, as you, whether deliberately or impulsively, took action by your own will.

Okay, if you can't define it, I'll just have to ask questions until it's clearer. Do you believe choices are based on things? That is, are they arbitrary, not based on anything, or are they based on your own state? (Or is there some tertium quid which you can describe?)

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

The big tent coalitions haven't formally included the Greens thus far.

Nevertheless, it's looking like now that the great coalition - EPP, S&D, Renew, will continue. It's familiar to them, and it still bears remembering how much most the EPP considers the maintenance and expansion of the European integration project to override all other concepts, barring cooperation with more hardline euroskeptics and making it uncomfortable with even the more moderate ones.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

Imho; Nothing will ever change and nothing will ever happen. EPP is way more ideologically similar to the Greens than the other right wing groups, it will signal to the Left that maybe they will cooperate with the Right to acquire a bit more influence in the coalition, than it will form another big tent coalition and we will have for other 5 years to follow the policies of the Greens and the Socialists.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

Men are fair (at least as regards this subject of evaluating the distribution of characteristics). Women are equivalently not.

In the sense of "fair" as a uniform probability distribution, I agree. And I think this creates enough social problems / advantages to think about. On the problem side, men often have a feeling of being valued only for what they do and provide in romance, which can create the feeling of being exploited. (The male counterpart of objectification, perhaps.) On the advantageous side, for most men, they must achieve something to be regarded as attractive; moreover, the more they achieve, the more opportunities they have; for mentally healthy men at least, this can serve as a motivation.

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Somehow, it seems like most people like the slop that's produced?

I think it's less a case of 'this person likes this thing' and more a case of 'This person is used to this thing and not pissed off enough to switch yet'.
And the initial adoption window was because 'everyone is doing it'.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer.

You're misrepresenting my criticism. My point was that your description of this specific situation was wrong, not the degree of sympathy you showed. It is in fact quite a big deal that people know where the line is between good behavior and bad, and saying that Wilson was "technically" in the clear is simply not true. In order to avoid further unjust treatment, it had to be proved that Wilson was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt--a complete inversion of the standards of criminal law--and he did so, meeting an unjust burden. Again, this was not a close case!

I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!

Splitting the difference between the truth and a lie is not admirable.

I largely agree with your second paragraph; one of my biggest meta-problems with BLM at the time was that it would prevent meaningful, productive police reform for a generation. I was wrong in that assessment in my undue optimism--the fallout has been much worse than I anticipated.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

I'm glad you brought up the question of "leftist" governance. One of the most insidious rhetorical tricks communists pulled (and there are many, as they are typified by such) was the invention of the concept of the "Lib-Left." Leftism is an inherently authoritarian ethos and this is evidenced by a simple looking at history. Since Marx, there has been no leftist political movement anywhere in the world that achieved majority power on the promise and subsequent delivery of a reduction in size of government. Leftism in all circumstances, again when in majority power, invariably strengthens itself. A state that seizes a child to trans them has identical spiritual power to the Soviets seizing Kulak land. In creating "Lib-Left" the trick was cemented with the two-axis political spectrum, thereby allowing leftists to deny any governance as left unless it were economically left, ie avowedly communist. Thus, all governments that failed to achieve communist utopia could be labeled "Auth-Left" and/or "not real communism", or even "Auth-Right", as everyday leftists were free to continue beating their drums in support of the most evil ideology ever conceived by man. We're swiftly approaching the final dissolution of political rhetoric into purely friend/enemy distinction, and I hope just as much that we are swiftly approaching the end of rightist political discourse entertaining the two-axis premise. Or at least until a new two-axis spectrum is likely conceived, but this one without the communist framing. To repeat just to be clear: I reject leftist framing as leftism requiring communist economic policy; leftism is about a powerful state, and the American state is very powerful indeed.

While I agree that leftism tends toward authoritarianism (and that "leftist libertarians" are mostly liars or useful idiots who would immediately be purged after their precious revolution, as seen in basically every leftist revolution in human history), I still disagree that this means that all authoritarianism is leftism. To me authoritarian leftism (at least in the sense of the leaders being genuinely more true believerish in leftism, or at least very credibly willing to signal that) still looks more like Mao Zedong or Stalin than the present American regime (which isn't to say that the present American regime isn't resembling those two more and more lately, but still). Though wokeism is a variety or at least an offshoot of leftism, and though it has infected the present regime to a significant degree and increasingly root and branch, I still feel that it's not quite absolutely embedded or fundamental enough to make leftism the absolute defining context of the present American regime yet (though it is absolutely of course still far more left-wing than right-wing). That is, regime hasn't quite entirely abandoned its military/bureaucracy coup on liberal, small government republic origins enough yet. (This is shown by the fact that it was willing to jettison wokeism in military advertising to try to achieve better recruitment numbers, which it couldn't do if it was its entire legitimacy narrative and raison d'être. You would have never seen the Soviet Union go "Hey we're gonna relax on this whole socialism thing." to try to boost contributions to the Red Army, because in their whole political formula, the army only exists to defend socialism in the first place and without it there's nothing worth protecting.)

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

Yes, because the purpose of a steel man is to test & strengthen your own reasoning, not to score internet dunk points on your opponents.

I don't think it's strengthening your reasoning to go so far beyond what your opponents actually express that it's outside of the realm of what they might even actually believe.

Whether this is true or false, it's materially irrelevant to whether sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable.

I'm glad you agree that bringing it up at all is materially irrelevant to what I'm talking about.

Moderations, Bans, and the State of the Motte - Let's have a Discussion

I'd caution you that maybe you don't know what I'm looking for in terms of my spiritual life or faith. I certainly don't perceive myself as looking for mere increasing physical mastery of the universe. On the contrary, that strikes me as a rather paltry prize.

At any rate, I don't see how anything that you've just mentioned demonstrates that any given religion is false. It's true that science is very productive, and has enabled humans to do many impressive things. None of that entails atheism or materialism or metaphysical naturalism. I'm just going to shrug and say, "so what?" You can't leap from any given scientific discovery to materialism. It's a non sequitur.

I don't underrate the value of scientific discovery, nor even the value of physical mastery of the universe. It's just not everything.

Anyway, I did not mention prayer, so I don't know why you're bringing that up. And if you think that the fact that keyboards work is 'proof of [your] world view', then... you're just wrong. "Keyboards therefore atheism" is just as wrong, and for just the same reason, as "tides therefore theism".

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

This is a fully generalizable argument against anybody deciding anything.

No, U. There's a spectrum between agency and coercion, I'm arguing that what the GAC doctors are doing is falling on the coercive side of the spectrum. If you wish to disagree about my assessment, that's fair game, but you're saying I'm denying the very possibility of someone having agency. This implies a strict binary (or hell, unary) worldview, where no shades of grey exist. It is you, therefore that is making a fully generalizable argument for the total invalidity of the concepts of manipulation and pressure. I wouldn't even mind, if you actually believed that, but as usual, I'm pretty sure you're only deploying this argument strategically. But I dunno man, surprise me. Show me your #MeToo era posts defending Harvey Weinstein.

You do not have to do what a doctor tells you, you can get a second opinion or a third

Why yes, if you don't like Dr. Freeman's opinion on the necessity of you getting a lobotomy, you can get a second opinion from Dr. Watts, and if you don't like his opinion either, you can always talk to Dr. Moniz.

Your right to get a second opinion does not absolve doctors from acting in an ethical way. The whole point of there being a licencing system to begin with, is so that people don't have to constantly keep "caveat emptor" in their mind, when they go visit a doctor. Now, if you want to argue for the total abolition of the licensing system (and no, "ho hum, I am not against relaxing the licensing a little" does not count), the conversation can progress, but as long as there is licensing, ethical rules must apply.

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

I might have some positive experiences at some point? Is that it?

Have you ever felt fulfilled, or full of love, or gratitude, or contentment? Have you ever felt hope, or joy, Would you like to experience that, but way more than you thought could be possible?

It's not just some positive experiences. It's more positive than anything else you're ever going to do, probably, and if you can't see that from outside I don't blame you, but I'm telling you anyway. It's just more. That's the best way I can describe it.

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Subtropical, surely; I'd climatically put the heartland at least in the same general class as Louisiana or the Mediterranean (east coast N hemisphere patterns suggest the former). If you go far enough back, every Japanese food of note is continental, but if you are willing to consider miso, soy sauce and fermented fish sufficiently native, those hardly make for bland fare. Generally, pickling and fermentation feature more in the older and lower-class dishes; "purity and fresh ingredients that stand on their own" sounds like copy for indulgences afforded by a modern society that has refrigeration and wants to flex it, not a tradition.

Splitting "defensive alliance" into "chaining alliance" and "isolating alliance"

Let's look at it from another angle. Why is NATO so obsessed with the 2% of GDP figure?

Never in human history has a country lost a war to an abstract ratio. They lose to brigades, warships and aircraft. Why is it that NATO insists on a budgetary commitment when what they need is a target for strength? They need to work out how many brigades are needed, how many reservists, submarines and so on to meet their needs.

When you actually look at the ratio of strength, you see that even European NATO alone is not threatened by Russia. Europe has more and better of everything except tactical and strategic nukes. The big European countries have fairly large, modern armies and a much larger overall population than Russia. The big countries alone have about 500,000 professional soldiers, ignoring the little ones. That's much more than Russia prewar. It's the same story at sea and in the air, probably even better for Europe there. At least 3:1 advantage for Europe alone, ignoring the US. And they have the advantage of being on the defence. Dean will of course come in with some galaxy-brained reasoning for why the Russian military juggernaut is really so much more powerful than the decadent NATO pigs, despite also being a pale shadow of its former glory and losing Putin's idiotic war in Ukraine - the worst strategic disaster for Russia since 1941. But for those of us who live in the real world where Ukraine is much weaker than the entirety of Europe, it stands to reason that Europe can defend itself from Russia.

Thus there is no defensive rationale in further conventional militarization. They could not lose to Russia in a conventional war, not if they were prepared to station forces in the Baltics. Given modern satellite surveillance they should be able to foresee a Russian invasion of the Baltics and move forces there to defend them. They should already have forces there if they want to defend them (and they do to some extent). Why offer NATO membership to the Baltics? It's strategically ridiculous, those countries have negligible military potential and bad geography. But if you look at it from the point of view of Lockheed and BAE, it's genius. They can create threatening stories about the Suwalki gap and sell more hardware. Diplomats and statesmen can feel important, prestigious and patriotic standing up to Russia.

Problems arise if Russia goes nuclear, since that's the one place Russia does have advantages. Given their conventional weakness, it makes sense to go nuclear, that's the TLDR of escalate-to-deescalate. They have something like 10:1 in tactical nukes against all of NATO and a large, modern strategic force. Britain and France can still get their warheads off and destroy much of Russia. The US can destroy all of Russia. But why would Britain and France accept megadeaths to ensure that Poland or Lithuania are immolated rather than having to bend over for Russia? It doesn't make much sense but it's possible - Britain has made huge sacrifices for Poland before. They don't even have permissive action links on their nuclear subs, British submarine commanders might execute their own foreign policy.

Why would Putin risk nuclear war with NATO over irrelevant countries like the Baltics, does he even want Poland? The whole scenario is very strange. But if we imagine that Putin is this evil megalomaniacal conqueror, what Europe needs is H-bombs. Tactical and strategic nukes would actually ward off Russia. We can have little doubt that Poland doesn't want to bend over for Russia and would use nuclear weapons to defend themselves.

Who doesn't want European nuclearization? The US and Russia. Nuclearization increases European strategic autonomy, it lessens US influence in Europe. It means that Europeans won't buy overpriced US hardware to suck up to America, that they won't feel the need to show up to wars that don't help them. It means that other countries around the world will nuclearize and lessen US strategic flexibility.

Who wants Ukraine to be in NATO? It has very little defensive utility. The Ukrainian military adds more mass to NATOs but NATO has plenty of mass already. It pushes Russia in the Black Sea. It puts NATO missiles closer to Russia. It raises tensions dramatically, Putin repeatedly warned this was a red line. Nobody's security is enhanced, least of all Ukraine's. But it does sell a lot of weapons!

The mainstream argument seems to be 'Europe needs to produce more weapons to give to Ukraine so they can fight Russia'. But why? Why does Ukraine fighting Russia advance European interests? It hurts European interests, Russia is Europe's natural energy supplier. It would be silly for Europe to attack Azerbaijan for assaulting Armenia or to fight America over Iraq's independence. Don't join wars that don't advance your interests. But when the experts have a chance at lucrative spots on the board of Raytheon, when the decisionmakers want to look strong and patriotic...

Splitting "defensive alliance" into "chaining alliance" and "isolating alliance"

So are you in fact intending to talk about the Ukraine war, or is there a cleaner question you would like to ask hidden in there? In the former case, I think your analogies are all over the place, and to begin with the invocation of the "defensive alliance" line is more than a little inflammatory to us rare anti-NATO readers (as we tend to see it as pure "dare to contradict me if you think you can get away with it" trolling in the vein of workplace neopronouns since the invasion of Serbia at the latest).

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Friends I cannot stress this enough: have kids.

People talk about loss of meaning and loss of rigid rites of passage that take you from being a child to being a man.

It's kids. It's always been kids.

Having kids is really hard (I apparently phrased this poorly since people are responding to it as if I am saying the opposite. My point is that you will find that the following things are the things you end of loving, and you will find the idea that these should ever have prevented you from having kids to be childish): your house will constantly be a filthy mess. They will keep you from sleeping, they will make it impossible to go out to dinner or to go to parties, and they make travel really difficult. Any of the dreams of adventure that you had before you had kids will be pushed back by 10 years.

And NONE of that will matter once you have them. You'll find the idea that you ever cared about any of this stuff laughable.

I remember asking my parents why they had created me when I was about 12. They told me something to the effect of 'You'll get it when you're older and have your own children.'
22 years have passed since and absolutely nothing has changed about my perspective. I see a lot of negatives: less free time, less money, interruptions during sleep, horrible noises and messes to clean up. The potential that I might have to spend the rest of my life as the caretaker for a human with brain damage or some other deformity. And so on and on.

And what are the upsides? I might have some positive experiences at some point? Is that it? I've seen a lot of what I would hesitantly call 'pro-natalism' but I haven't seen any real reasoning or logic. Maybe it's just a hormonal thing and that part of me was damaged or never formed because I legitimately don't understand people who want to be parents.

As far as 'Just trust me, it'll be worth it'. My answer is, sorry but no. I have been guided towards bad decisions far too many times already and this one in particular seems especially horrible in terms of possible consequences.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 9, 2024

You spoke earlier of incoherence, but this seems to me to be completely incoherent. How on earth can there be moral culpability for something which you did not have any say in? If indeed the choices you made were set in stone from the moment of your birth (by your genes, by the environment you were raised in, and so on) - there can be no possible moral culpability. You have not, in that event, done anything to be culpable for! The very idea of deterministic outcomes, but with moral culpability for your choices (which they really weren't, but simply the inevitable result of prior circumstance) is incoherent in my opinion.

In any case, as I started this comment, what is freedom of choice?

I quite honestly have no idea what you are driving at nor how to answer your question. The matter is self-evident, it requires no explanation (nor could I provide one without going in circles, because it is so fundamental).