[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only. I’ve made some very small updates, mostly listing rebuttals that came out over the past few years. I haven’t updated the statistics and everything is accurate as of several years ago. I seem to have lost the sources of my images, and I’m sorry; if I’ve used an image of yours, please let me know and I’ll cite you.]
Also, complaining that "everyone I date is horrible in exactly the same way" should get them a timeout until they've completed some continuing education courses.
Some houses and apartments are small. I have a friend whose house doesn't have a laundry room, so the kitchen was basically the only place to put the clothes washer and dryer - and that effectively crowded out a dishwasher.
Why do people still have cupboards, instead of just having two dishwashers and cycling them between the roles of dishwasher and cupboard every night? It's simple, people are fools.
"For some reason nobody except libertarians has this gut feeling about anything else anymore, so we go and do the things that superficially look like they’ll make things fairer and better and safer."
This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas. An O'Neill Habitat, as implausible as it is, is still more plausible than libertarians taking over New Hampshire.
The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Plenty of countries would let you trade. Gaza is blockaded by Israel due to terrorism, so you would just have to not get blockaded (and blockading is harder if you are farther away, I think - although no tunnels)
Have 30 seconds of beautifully-animated O'Neill Habitat, set to a cheesy Japanese love song (copy the link to jump to the right part, or edit it once it's in your address bar):
> This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas.
Oh yes, I've been secretly saying (i.e., thinking) this for years! Somewhat like Scott's archipelago essay [1], but in space, which has virtually unlimited, unclaimed, uninhabited ... you know, *space*.
Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks. Just pay for the habitat in advance, please. And if an experiment doesn't work out, we can simply deorbit those damn commies.
Okay, the above paragraph is tongue-in-cheek, but otherwise, I'm serious. Just do it in Earth orbit – Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
> Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks.
For what it's worth, seasteading pretty much is this approach without the "also get to space first" part.
The problem that seasteading has already encountered several times is that, while the world is full of unoccupied land, it isn't full of unclaimed land.
Seasteaders keep running into legal trouble with governments that claim the territory they're trying to seastead on.
Space doesn't have this problem. If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
But if you're willing to go somewhere claimed just because it's possible to live there, seasteading doesn't really help you. It's hard to live there and you don't get any additional freedom. You might as well live on land and just avoid the government.
They can do seasteading in international waters. This will require building artificial islands (or floating islands), but this is still easier than space habitats.
Drifting off topic slightly, but I sometimes wonder if a Mars colony couldn't eventually construct a vast (maybe ten miles in diameter) underground rotating carousal with suitably sloping sides round the periphery, sort of like an upturned frisby, such that Mars's gravity combined with the centrifugal force would allow inhabitants on the interior edge of the periphery to experience almost Earth like gravity without sensing any rotation or bizarre effects or feeling they were on a hillside.
The two best are Revelation Space and Chasm City (parts 1 and 2 of the Revelation Space series).
But if you're interested in the "people make weird communities on their habitats in orbit (and also AI emergencies)", then it's the series The Prefect/Elysium/Machine Vendetta, which take place in the same setting but as prequels.
Revelation Space has an interesting plot, but bad writing—and bad writing from the second sentence: "Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night." "Any of" adds nothing and should be struck. Also from the first page: "'It's going to be a hard one, sir.' The man fidgeted, drawing the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck." We don't need the second sentence: the dialogue should stand on its own, and the reader can infer the speaker's mood or fidgetiness or lack thereof. Bad fiction is full of this sort of overwriting.
Page 11: "Cal nodded without saying a word." "Without saying a word" should be omitted: if there's no dialogue from Cal, we know he's not not saying a word. My book is filled with crossings out of superfluous, repetitive words.
Much later, on page 85, Sylveste "had taken to visiting and waiting with absolute patient while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings[. . . .]" The word "absolute" isn't needed—it doesn't convey anything important—and, beyond that, on page 88, we Lascaille says: "You had patience with me." The narrative voice already told us that Sylveste had patience with Lascaille, on page 85! Pick one spot, not both.
There's a better book in here, and one with a writer more attuned to language and meaning.
> The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Not a problem - by that time we'll either have superhuman sexbots, or if weight is still a problem, will be able to gengineer everyone to be gay and happy about it! (Mission Accomplished banner unfurls)
If the technical aspects of the space habitat are handled by a benevolent but aloof AI, maybe.
But if the technical aspects of maintaining a habitable environment are part of the human society, I expect such societies to trend authoritarian in the way that ships at sea trend authoritarian. When there are things we must do regularly and correctly, or we all die in a terrible fashion, the scope of liberty gets curtailed.
Of course I see this comment five seconds after proposing to market the habitats to gay libertarians. Not that Athos seems like any kind of libertarian utopia, what with their Social Duty Credit system and the rigorous censorship of any imported books and journals.
[slightly tongue in cheek:] Sure, they've got their religious hangups. But as Ethan's half-brother demonstrates, it's possible to go through life ignoring the social duty credit system, as long as you don't care about having children of your own. In a way, it's just the parenting license that some people talk about, but given a bit more force because there's (almost necessarily) centralized control of the means of reproduction. Or you can think of it as a parallel currency system, where you get paid in SDCs for pro-social acts, are fined SDCs for anti-social acts, and can spend SDCs for certain services that are not purchasable with mere cash.
And there's the whole homesteading/frontier aspect, which is libertarian catnip. And people who really don't want any rules can go off beyond the frontier and live the anarchist dream!
Seriously, in a lot of ways, I find it a very appealing vision of a future society.
A good point, but they'd have to be gay libertarians who want to live in space. I'm sure some of them are out there, but we're getting to a pretty small number of people.
Half the marriages worldwide are arranged though. The western idea of autonomous romantic love has high memetic power, but may lose out in the fertility game to the higher matchmaking capability and stability of arranged marriages.
Wikipedia:
> The lowest divorce rates in the world are in cultures with high rates of arranged marriages such as Amish culture of United States (1%),[97] Hindus of India (3%),[87] and Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel (7%).[98] According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%, which could be an indicator for the success rate of arranged marriages.[99] This has led scholars to ask if arranged marriages are more stable than autonomous marriages, and whether this stability matters.
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. There are lots of humans societies where parents invest at least as much effort into arranging their child's marriage as they would into arranging their child's education, and as far as I can tell it's not an irrational strategy.
There is the question whether it's better in terms of satisfaction, and therefore more stable, or culturally taboo to divorce, and therefore stable regardless of satisfaction, stable even if satisfaction is lower.
Personally, I have some friends in arranged marriages, and they seem just fine to me.
I think "the whole point" here is that Scott's original claim of love as the last unvarnished bastion of libertarianism is reading general principles into recent phenomena of the culture he/we grew up in.
If arranged marriages are the norm worldwide (and especially if divorce was nigh illegal for most of history) then a taboo against regulating love is a modern concept. If the metric is "how it looks" - e.g. ratio of marriage to divorce, number of children, per capita marriage rate - societies that eschew freedom for love are able to put up much stronger numbers than those that embrace freedom for love. The question of what actually works is a bit more difficult/nuanced, and entirely depends on how you define "works". But it's not true to say that love is uniquely unregulated, nor to say that its regulation makes life no longer worth living. Which system is better/preferable is a more difficult story to tell.
I think cultural expectation around a "happy marriage" play into it a lot, obviously - and I'm not saying that to mean that the Western model is better. If your goal for a marriage "Find a sane partner with good money management and childrearing skills who is attractive enough that I enjoy having kids with", the bar is obviously a lot more achievable than "Find the one TRUE LOVE that drives me mad with desire even 50 years in and also self-actualizes me to a better person and I do the same thing in reverse to them."
Love and marriage, pace old American proverbs, are not exactly aligned, though. Some of the most cherished love stories in cultures with arranged marriages are either of a socially-unsuitable but hot/clever party improbably marrying the other, or heartbreak on account of the lovers' inability to be together (but perhaps with the promise of being united in death).
There are also correlations between arranged marriages and fertility. Both cross- countries & cultures today, and historically. The global diffusion of the individualistic-romantic notion that siring and rearing children should be love- based, is connected to the global demographic transition.
Sure. That's why I wrote correlated & connected, not caused. These things are probably best seen as hanging together in some sort of "mental & institutional package", which includes changes in religiosity. Cue: Old-style modernization theory, assuming psychological changes like individuation & meta-acculturation, and changing social structures: new gender roles, increased geographical and social moblity, breakdown of feudal power structures, urbanization....
Parents can usually spot a bad match, and are more objective in assessing the relationship. If a couple is blinded by love, or other things, they may overlook or whitewash red flags, or yellow flags, thinking something like "love conquers all".
If you can't accurately select a good match, why not let your parents select someone at least likely to be compatible?
Arranged marriages also overcome the collective action problem of everyone pursuing the hot people and neglecting the plain-looking but otherwise desirable people. It’s not even sexual attraction that’s the main culprit here, but status seeking and status anxiety. And an arranged marriage takes a lot of the load off of a young person in terms of status anxiety and choice of mate.
It also reduces the time from young people reach fertile age till most of them find someone they permanently settle down & have children with. Hence the female "window" for having children is longer than in societies where women are on their own & therefore search longer before finding a mate they deem suitable to have children with (if at all).
Something similar is the case with men, but with men the main problem when pairing goes from being arranged till being a "market" based on attractiveness is increased probability of not being selected by any women at all. Childlessness at age 40 - a fairly good proxy for life-cycle childlessness - has been rising faster for men than for women during the last decades, in the countries where I have seen data.
Taken together, this helps explain the correlation between societies practicing love-based pairing and reduced (average) fertility levels. (Although there are also other factors involved, of course.)
Yes, although it's hard to disentangle all the confounders here. Families and societies that practice arranged marriage are likely to have parents very involved in their children's affairs, including providing financial support, housing, and childcare in a way that makes it much easier to have children while still young. They are also the sorts of societies that will pressure young people into marriage and parenthood at the culturally-prescribed age. It may be more useful to look at arranged marriage as just one aspect of a whole cultural complex that leads to these various outcomes.
Sure, cultural elements hang together in larger cultural packages/complexes.
Related to this, the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger made a useful distinction between intrinsic versus extrinsic cultural linkages.
Intrinsic linkages relate to cultural elements that hang together and mutually reinforce each other. People tend to have adopted all, or none. Arranged marriages + deference to the eldest + subordination of women to men + religious beliefs stating all of this pleases God, might be intrinsic linkages.
Extrinsic linkages are the opposite. Here, it is possible to pick elements from different cultural packages without creating contradictions (=instability) in the whole-of-culture overall mindset of members. One example could be fundamentalist Islam + cultural acceptance of weapons made by Western (secular) engineers.
The point in this context: If arranged marriages belong to a different cultural “package” than the romantic love cultural “package”, once you leave the former it is difficult to go home again. The new package consists of other linkages, which strengthens and locks each other in, and you and your local society are on the road to what (for lack of a better word) can be labelled “modernity”. Where low fertility is partly a long-term outcome, and partly one of the intrinsic linkages in the new package.
Only an (old) hypothesis. But old hypotheses that still intuitively make some sense are worth keeping in the theoretical repertoire; they have in a way stood the test of time.
At the end of the day it is an empirical question, of course. Some individuals as well as societies are better at living with cultural contradictions without individual members experiencing psychological tensions (leading to cultural instability).
Your analysis is extremely compelling and also depressing. The jokes I make with my college friends about arranged marriages between our children are probably doomed to remain jokes.
The major problem with arranged marriages isn't a lack of love issue, it's the carrot and stick technology issue. I've seen more than one woman go mental after entiering an arranged marriage because technocratic perverts convinced her that she was wronged and isn't realizing her true self.
Which is of course downstream of a lot of things but most directly urbanization.
Even in India people generally frown upon people being forced to get married. Arranged marriages still involve people getting a choice in whether they want to marry the other person.
It's my understanding that the potential bride and groom have a say in the process, or perhaps a veto, but you'd better have a good reason, or at least be firm in your refusal if the parents are set on the marriage going forward.
I was going to say something like that. Valuing romantic love and eventually using it as a basis for marriage goes back to the 12th century. Not so long ago in human history. It's not a human fundamental.
It was and is a fascinating cultural innovation. European countries were early adopters of this cultural practice, but it has turned into a global cultural diffusion process. Still ongoing.
...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way.
Many Thanks! Yes, they involve things. I tend to see the distinction as fairly blurry.
Does having someone in the role of matchmaker not count at all as a thing? (and then omitting them in the switch to romantic marriages becomes a negative technology) What about the documents that record the marriage? What about written laws that say which marriages are considered as legitimate and which not?
And literacy, yes, involves some sort of writing tool and some sort of writing surface, but involves inventing the alphabet, teaching it, the acts of writing and reading, so I see it as more cultural than technological.
One other competitor: Government. Would that count as cultural, or partly technological? A person acting in the specialized role of king - as with matchmakers, they could be considered an object as part of the machinery, or as a purely cultural phenomenon. Are the weapons of the king's henchmen the crucial part, or does strong-arm rule, where it is just the obedience of the henchmen to the king, and therefore of everyone else to the king and his henchmen, count as purely cultural?
Good points all of them. So yes, I agree, "culture" is a concept with blurry edges.
I wanted to boost Nancy's comment, through, because this innovation (romantic love being/becoming seen as the main legitimate reason for pair-bonding) is more under the radar than the innovations you mention. While its long-term consequences arguably are just as important - perhaps even more important - for nothing less than the gradually evolving gene-pool of us humans:-)
"...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way."
This is like saying "You cannot build infinitely high, therefore it's a good thing you only built two stories high."
Well, we're going to build approx. 11 billion humans high, if I may mix metaphors...I would argue that may already be dangerously high, before we start to scale down
This is true, but as I understand it even arranged marriages are changing to be a little more like romantic marriages. People are talking more, getting to know each other more beforehand, calling marriages off where they find their partner unsuitable where before they just would have gone ahead with it, etc.
The average arranged marriage of today is a little more flexible than the average arranged marriage of the past. Will that eventually become full on romantic marriage? Maybe, maybe not.
Love the bubble confirmation: Indians are obviously a huge percentage of world population, and also huge in tech, where Scott swims. Yet very few weighing in with personal experience, real knowledge, just a lot of "I understand . . ." or "I've heard . . . ."
Considering the base-rates of domestic violence and child abuse the world over, I would say that these rates of divorce are too low. There are situations where a person should leave a marriage. These rates do not reflect stability, but force or a lack of other options, that come at the expense of someone's wellbeing.
If the government doesn't especially help or hinder arranged marriages, then they can still be part of a libertarian regime. Families and communities make steep bargains with individuals all the time. There isn't necessarily anything statist about it.
The practice is still surprisingly common (surprising to me at any rate) in many migrant communities. I have several friends who travelled to their home countries for a few months (and no, not primarily India or China) only to then return to the west with a bride or groom in tow.
Or, on a couple of occasions, return to the west without said bride or groom but a very very interesting story about how they almost did.
One argument why love is special: it affects the specific person you're intentionally involved with instead of the general public (unlike things like selling drugs at pharmacies or crypto scams, or driving where you can potentially hit and kill anyone on the street).
I guess child raising is also like this? But the advocates for the laws that interfere with child raising would argue that those laws are only against abuse, which does also apply to marriage. And the laws against home schooling probably come from schooling's history as a communal thing everyone sent their kids to. Which does imply that centralized dating apps increase the risk of regulations on love.
Maybe there were exactly 64695 pounds of fins, but they didn't want to risk having their case dismissed on a technicality, such as the lawyer of the other side drying the fins a bit more, weighing them again, and demonstrating that now it is only 64694 pounds? But if they wrote "approximately 65000" instead, the lawyer could accuse them of exaggerating the number on purpose?
I thought economic deregulation had been more common than the converse, past 50 years so, barring DEI initiatives?
It's not that hard to break out the life-satisfaction stats on arranged marriages vs. non-arranged marriages, and the former generally stack up pretty well, though obviously there's a lot of confounders related to SES and ethnic background.
Deregulation can very plausibly (I don't know how to actually check this) lead to laws with higher word/page counts, because many forms of deregulation come in the form of new and convoluted loopholes inserted by regulatory capture.
Perhaps this isn't what "deregulation" means to most people, but it seems plausible as a manner of disagreement; principled libertarians would plausibly view regulatory capture as equally bad (or at least on the same scale of bad) as any other sort of government regulation. I (and many others on the left) would view regulatory capture as very bad (it's regulations that cause harm to increase wealth disparity while leaving the net welfare of the general population the same or worse than before) while other types of regulations as often neutral to good (it causes harm to either improve the net welfare of the general population while either leaving wealth disparity the same or lower).
De facto deregulation via loophole is possible. I am not sure how common it is: when the regulators don't like that loophole, they can close it with a new law.
You are right that what counts as deregulation can require a judgement call, and different people can make different judgements.
There are a few clear cut cases that most people agree on, but also lots of grey areas.
Incumbents are often quite ok with extra regulations, because there are economics of scale in compliance: ie extra rules hassle upstarts more than bigger established players.
> Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution.
I suspect there are very few incels among the Amish, or other very religious groups, because they have a strong interest in match-making within their groups.
Thinking back to your gene selection post, I suspect the Amish are on average more evolutionarily successful than even the richest billionaires, the most intelligent geniuses, or the tallest basketball players.
I think culture wins over genes a lot of the time, provided the genes are just *good enough* to provide a substrate for the culture to grow on.
Maybe that's how Jews have lasted thousands of years, even.
He would have had to sleep with a new woman every day for 55 years to do that. He died at 63, so in fact he would have to average over 1 new woman every day during the years he was sexually active.
According to wikipedia, he based the claim on having slept with 23 different women in an unremarkable 10-day period, halving that (to err on the conservative side while accounting for variation), and then extrapolating back to age 15.
Sex != children because of birth control. Chamberlain was a multimillionaire, if any of those women got pregnant, they would have had a *very* strong monetary incentive to file for child support. So it's unlikely he had *unacknowledged* kids.
He has at least one unacknowledged kid. There was a recent basketball documentary called "Goliath" where they tracked down and interviewed a man whose DNA test results confirmed that he was Wilt's son.
Supposedly part of the explanation for polygyny is that if you have very high fertility population where men marry downwards in age, there are too many women as younger generations are bigger. I've heard similar issues about unmarried women among high fertility groups such as Jews.
They don't even have to marry down in age; women generally outnumber men even across the same age. More males than females die at every age, even from birth.
But do the Amish have nukes? They're not actually "evolutionarily successful" if they don't have the power to secure their own existence. Technology and violence are part of the game. Native Americans learned that the hard way.
The Amish have nukes in the same sense that everyone else in America does. That is, the government has them, and we (hopefully) benefit from that protection.
But they barely have any societal influence. If the rest of society sees them as a liability, they have no means of protecting themselves. The same can't be said for bigger, more powerful social groups, which have enough influence and leverage to avoid being ostracized in the first place.
The Amish win. At least until their influence, unbeknownst to them becomes a threat by caveat of simply not losing. I'm sure some blue hair wacko will start causing them more shit for no good reason other than mental illness via city living.
the Jews did it the other way, via infiltration and coincidentally being the smartest, whilst dually only breeding with other Jews, a LOT more suffering and discontent that direction though. Amish are the Isolation path.
Yeah, I was going to say, the whole norm of <always punish the man> and <believe women> definitely seems like an increase in regulation. You also see a corresponding rise in prudery...I'm sorry, *preventing the objectification of women* in movies, TV, and video games by showing much less skin and (in video games) making major characters much less attractive.
(My hypothesis: cultural norms are sticky in subtle ways, and Americans just found another way to suppress sex. even though the political valence switched sides.)
I think some places in US maintain enough equality that when the man complained about the drunk date first, it was the woman who ended up with some restrictions imposed.
«Believe» is about evidence standards, though! I tried to pick an example where the situation is symmetric, people wanted (in the moment) what has happened for non-transactional reasons, and even with facts being undisputed and well established the regulation previously was not expected to happen.
I'm pretty sure the attractiveness of female leads in Hollywood films plummeted over the past decade as well. Sure, there are still some obvious bombshells, but there are a lot more realistic-looking women up at the top now, too.
I do not particularly think of this as a good thing. I think films should show the pinnacle of achievement, not average, and that this should follow through to physical nature.
The rise in "prudery," preventing objectification of women, doesn't really follow for males. This seems almost blindingly obvious in eg TV series like "The Boys" where they will show full male nudity, and have an entire scene taking place in the ass of a man (who shortly thereafter explodes... yes, the entire man). Meanwhile, never even a bare female breast is ever seen, because <CLUTCH THE PEARLS>.
It's also going to be market forces; you probably can't sell a film/tv show to men on the basis of sex appeal, as porn's so ubiquitous it's destroyed the market for quasi-porn.
From the 2017 repost:
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only. I’ve made some very small updates, mostly listing rebuttals that came out over the past few years. I haven’t updated the statistics and everything is accurate as of several years ago. I seem to have lost the sources of my images, and I’m sorry; if I’ve used an image of yours, please let me know and I’ll cite you.]
"Dating licenses can be revoked for sufficiently serious crimes - eg cheating, domestic abuse, or persistent alcoholism/drug use."
Another crime, "failing to do the dishes after promising to," should be added.
Also "nagging me to do the dishes when I'm definitely going to get around to it later and I'm just having a quick rest, geez".
What a nice view into another world's hellish culture war.
If you say you'll do it, you'll do it. You don't have to be nagged about it every couple of weeks.
What about generalizing that to breaking promises?
Then it would no longer be humorous.
"The dishes are never the dishes" - Esther Perel
Also, complaining that "everyone I date is horrible in exactly the same way" should get them a timeout until they've completed some continuing education courses.
Just in general: why do people still do the dishes by hand?! Why are dishwashers not a thing in every house and apartment?
Some people still insist on buying dishes which are not dishwasher safe.
Some people think doing the dishes by hand is more environmentally friendly even though the opposite is true.
Some people need 30 pieces of cookware to fry an egg, so even loading and unloading the dishwasher is a major chore.
Some houses and apartments are small. I have a friend whose house doesn't have a laundry room, so the kitchen was basically the only place to put the clothes washer and dryer - and that effectively crowded out a dishwasher.
Why do people still have cupboards, instead of just having two dishwashers and cycling them between the roles of dishwasher and cupboard every night? It's simple, people are fools.
Or voting for Trump...
"For some reason nobody except libertarians has this gut feeling about anything else anymore, so we go and do the things that superficially look like they’ll make things fairer and better and safer."
This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas. An O'Neill Habitat, as implausible as it is, is still more plausible than libertarians taking over New Hampshire.
The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Yes, Atlas Shrugged is a fascinating book to read, but in real life, Galt's Gulch would crash and burn for this reason.
Plenty of countries would let you trade. Gaza is blockaded by Israel due to terrorism, so you would just have to not get blockaded (and blockading is harder if you are farther away, I think - although no tunnels)
If you can turn social problems into technical problems, you raised your chance of perhaps being able to solve them.
Hooray for space habitats.
>If you can turn social problems into technical problems, you raised your chance of perhaps being able to solve them.
Very much agreed!
Have 30 seconds of beautifully-animated O'Neill Habitat, set to a cheesy Japanese love song (copy the link to jump to the right part, or edit it once it's in your address bar):
https://archive.org/details/the-gundam-supercut&start=555
> This is why we need to build O'Neill Habitats, which will re-open the frontier and allow for greater experimentation in terms of policy ideas.
Oh yes, I've been secretly saying (i.e., thinking) this for years! Somewhat like Scott's archipelago essay [1], but in space, which has virtually unlimited, unclaimed, uninhabited ... you know, *space*.
Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks. Just pay for the habitat in advance, please. And if an experiment doesn't work out, we can simply deorbit those damn commies.
Okay, the above paragraph is tongue-in-cheek, but otherwise, I'm serious. Just do it in Earth orbit – Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
Plus it'd be fun.
> Are you convinced that libertarianism/communism/whateverism is the one true path to happiness and prosperity? Go ahead, find a few hundred thousand like-minded people and test your hypothesis without first having to murder millions of kulaks.
For what it's worth, seasteading pretty much is this approach without the "also get to space first" part.
The problem that seasteading has already encountered several times is that, while the world is full of unoccupied land, it isn't full of unclaimed land.
Please elaborate?
Seasteaders keep running into legal trouble with governments that claim the territory they're trying to seastead on.
Space doesn't have this problem. If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
But if you're willing to go somewhere claimed just because it's possible to live there, seasteading doesn't really help you. It's hard to live there and you don't get any additional freedom. You might as well live on land and just avoid the government.
> If you can live in space, you can go somewhere unclaimed.
Well, until governments start claiming orbital bands...
They can do seasteading in international waters. This will require building artificial islands (or floating islands), but this is still easier than space habitats.
Yeah; Earth first, e.g. ocean, polar caps. Then the Moon, maybe L4 and L5. Then the Earth-Mars asteroid belt and Mars.
> Mars colonies as a first step are a dumb idea.
Drifting off topic slightly, but I sometimes wonder if a Mars colony couldn't eventually construct a vast (maybe ten miles in diameter) underground rotating carousal with suitably sloping sides round the periphery, sort of like an upturned frisby, such that Mars's gravity combined with the centrifugal force would allow inhabitants on the interior edge of the periphery to experience almost Earth like gravity without sensing any rotation or bizarre effects or feeling they were on a hillside.
I mean, nobody's even built Biosphere 3 yet, but Prospera is getting started. Why not begin there?
Someone's been reading their Alastair Reynolds? :-)
No; looks like he's written a lot of books. What's the best to start with?
The two best are Revelation Space and Chasm City (parts 1 and 2 of the Revelation Space series).
But if you're interested in the "people make weird communities on their habitats in orbit (and also AI emergencies)", then it's the series The Prefect/Elysium/Machine Vendetta, which take place in the same setting but as prequels.
If you watched 'Love, Death, Robots', then he has a couple of stories there.
Revelation Space has an interesting plot, but bad writing—and bad writing from the second sentence: "Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night." "Any of" adds nothing and should be struck. Also from the first page: "'It's going to be a hard one, sir.' The man fidgeted, drawing the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck." We don't need the second sentence: the dialogue should stand on its own, and the reader can infer the speaker's mood or fidgetiness or lack thereof. Bad fiction is full of this sort of overwriting.
Page 11: "Cal nodded without saying a word." "Without saying a word" should be omitted: if there's no dialogue from Cal, we know he's not not saying a word. My book is filled with crossings out of superfluous, repetitive words.
Much later, on page 85, Sylveste "had taken to visiting and waiting with absolute patient while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings[. . . .]" The word "absolute" isn't needed—it doesn't convey anything important—and, beyond that, on page 88, we Lascaille says: "You had patience with me." The narrative voice already told us that Sylveste had patience with Lascaille, on page 85! Pick one spot, not both.
There's a better book in here, and one with a writer more attuned to language and meaning.
It must be terrible to have good stories ruined by a pedantic writing-bot in your head
Good stories are good because the words from which they're composed are good. If the words aren't good, the stories aren't.
It must be terrible to read badly written material and not even realize it's badly written!
> The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Not a problem - by that time we'll either have superhuman sexbots, or if weight is still a problem, will be able to gengineer everyone to be gay and happy about it! (Mission Accomplished banner unfurls)
If the technical aspects of the space habitat are handled by a benevolent but aloof AI, maybe.
But if the technical aspects of maintaining a habitable environment are part of the human society, I expect such societies to trend authoritarian in the way that ships at sea trend authoritarian. When there are things we must do regularly and correctly, or we all die in a terrible fashion, the scope of liberty gets curtailed.
>The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
Ethan of Athos?
Of course I see this comment five seconds after proposing to market the habitats to gay libertarians. Not that Athos seems like any kind of libertarian utopia, what with their Social Duty Credit system and the rigorous censorship of any imported books and journals.
[slightly tongue in cheek:] Sure, they've got their religious hangups. But as Ethan's half-brother demonstrates, it's possible to go through life ignoring the social duty credit system, as long as you don't care about having children of your own. In a way, it's just the parenting license that some people talk about, but given a bit more force because there's (almost necessarily) centralized control of the means of reproduction. Or you can think of it as a parallel currency system, where you get paid in SDCs for pro-social acts, are fined SDCs for anti-social acts, and can spend SDCs for certain services that are not purchasable with mere cash.
And there's the whole homesteading/frontier aspect, which is libertarian catnip. And people who really don't want any rules can go off beyond the frontier and live the anarchist dream!
Seriously, in a lot of ways, I find it a very appealing vision of a future society.
>The libertarian O'Neill Habitat would probably be very male, which would be a drawback for men.
The obvious solution would be to market it to gay libertarians.
A good point, but they'd have to be gay libertarians who want to live in space. I'm sure some of them are out there, but we're getting to a pretty small number of people.
why am I tearing up right now
Half the marriages worldwide are arranged though. The western idea of autonomous romantic love has high memetic power, but may lose out in the fertility game to the higher matchmaking capability and stability of arranged marriages.
Wikipedia:
> The lowest divorce rates in the world are in cultures with high rates of arranged marriages such as Amish culture of United States (1%),[97] Hindus of India (3%),[87] and Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Israel (7%).[98] According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%, which could be an indicator for the success rate of arranged marriages.[99] This has led scholars to ask if arranged marriages are more stable than autonomous marriages, and whether this stability matters.
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. There are lots of humans societies where parents invest at least as much effort into arranging their child's marriage as they would into arranging their child's education, and as far as I can tell it's not an irrational strategy.
Slightly confounded by the way divorce tends to be much more frowned upon in those cultures.
Slightly? : )
What do you mean, confounded? That's the whole point.
There is the question whether it's better in terms of satisfaction, and therefore more stable, or culturally taboo to divorce, and therefore stable regardless of satisfaction, stable even if satisfaction is lower.
Personally, I have some friends in arranged marriages, and they seem just fine to me.
I think "the whole point" here is that Scott's original claim of love as the last unvarnished bastion of libertarianism is reading general principles into recent phenomena of the culture he/we grew up in.
If arranged marriages are the norm worldwide (and especially if divorce was nigh illegal for most of history) then a taboo against regulating love is a modern concept. If the metric is "how it looks" - e.g. ratio of marriage to divorce, number of children, per capita marriage rate - societies that eschew freedom for love are able to put up much stronger numbers than those that embrace freedom for love. The question of what actually works is a bit more difficult/nuanced, and entirely depends on how you define "works". But it's not true to say that love is uniquely unregulated, nor to say that its regulation makes life no longer worth living. Which system is better/preferable is a more difficult story to tell.
Yeah
I think cultural expectation around a "happy marriage" play into it a lot, obviously - and I'm not saying that to mean that the Western model is better. If your goal for a marriage "Find a sane partner with good money management and childrearing skills who is attractive enough that I enjoy having kids with", the bar is obviously a lot more achievable than "Find the one TRUE LOVE that drives me mad with desire even 50 years in and also self-actualizes me to a better person and I do the same thing in reverse to them."
there’s also the school of thought that says most if not all of the latter can be built over time from a foundation of the former.
Love and marriage, pace old American proverbs, are not exactly aligned, though. Some of the most cherished love stories in cultures with arranged marriages are either of a socially-unsuitable but hot/clever party improbably marrying the other, or heartbreak on account of the lovers' inability to be together (but perhaps with the promise of being united in death).
There are also correlations between arranged marriages and fertility. Both cross- countries & cultures today, and historically. The global diffusion of the individualistic-romantic notion that siring and rearing children should be love- based, is connected to the global demographic transition.
There are a lot of confounders, like religiousness.
Sure. That's why I wrote correlated & connected, not caused. These things are probably best seen as hanging together in some sort of "mental & institutional package", which includes changes in religiosity. Cue: Old-style modernization theory, assuming psychological changes like individuation & meta-acculturation, and changing social structures: new gender roles, increased geographical and social moblity, breakdown of feudal power structures, urbanization....
By 'half', you mean China and India? (Which are indeed something between half and a third of world population.)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arranged-marriage-countries Mostly, but Indonesia and Bangladesh too
Parents can usually spot a bad match, and are more objective in assessing the relationship. If a couple is blinded by love, or other things, they may overlook or whitewash red flags, or yellow flags, thinking something like "love conquers all".
If you can't accurately select a good match, why not let your parents select someone at least likely to be compatible?
Arranged marriages also overcome the collective action problem of everyone pursuing the hot people and neglecting the plain-looking but otherwise desirable people. It’s not even sexual attraction that’s the main culprit here, but status seeking and status anxiety. And an arranged marriage takes a lot of the load off of a young person in terms of status anxiety and choice of mate.
It also reduces the time from young people reach fertile age till most of them find someone they permanently settle down & have children with. Hence the female "window" for having children is longer than in societies where women are on their own & therefore search longer before finding a mate they deem suitable to have children with (if at all).
Something similar is the case with men, but with men the main problem when pairing goes from being arranged till being a "market" based on attractiveness is increased probability of not being selected by any women at all. Childlessness at age 40 - a fairly good proxy for life-cycle childlessness - has been rising faster for men than for women during the last decades, in the countries where I have seen data.
Taken together, this helps explain the correlation between societies practicing love-based pairing and reduced (average) fertility levels. (Although there are also other factors involved, of course.)
Yes, although it's hard to disentangle all the confounders here. Families and societies that practice arranged marriage are likely to have parents very involved in their children's affairs, including providing financial support, housing, and childcare in a way that makes it much easier to have children while still young. They are also the sorts of societies that will pressure young people into marriage and parenthood at the culturally-prescribed age. It may be more useful to look at arranged marriage as just one aspect of a whole cultural complex that leads to these various outcomes.
Sure, cultural elements hang together in larger cultural packages/complexes.
Related to this, the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger made a useful distinction between intrinsic versus extrinsic cultural linkages.
Intrinsic linkages relate to cultural elements that hang together and mutually reinforce each other. People tend to have adopted all, or none. Arranged marriages + deference to the eldest + subordination of women to men + religious beliefs stating all of this pleases God, might be intrinsic linkages.
Extrinsic linkages are the opposite. Here, it is possible to pick elements from different cultural packages without creating contradictions (=instability) in the whole-of-culture overall mindset of members. One example could be fundamentalist Islam + cultural acceptance of weapons made by Western (secular) engineers.
The point in this context: If arranged marriages belong to a different cultural “package” than the romantic love cultural “package”, once you leave the former it is difficult to go home again. The new package consists of other linkages, which strengthens and locks each other in, and you and your local society are on the road to what (for lack of a better word) can be labelled “modernity”. Where low fertility is partly a long-term outcome, and partly one of the intrinsic linkages in the new package.
Only an (old) hypothesis. But old hypotheses that still intuitively make some sense are worth keeping in the theoretical repertoire; they have in a way stood the test of time.
At the end of the day it is an empirical question, of course. Some individuals as well as societies are better at living with cultural contradictions without individual members experiencing psychological tensions (leading to cultural instability).
Your analysis is extremely compelling and also depressing. The jokes I make with my college friends about arranged marriages between our children are probably doomed to remain jokes.
good point, but I'd also say status is driven by limbic technology offering more than what is healthy.
The major problem with arranged marriages isn't a lack of love issue, it's the carrot and stick technology issue. I've seen more than one woman go mental after entiering an arranged marriage because technocratic perverts convinced her that she was wronged and isn't realizing her true self.
Which is of course downstream of a lot of things but most directly urbanization.
Even in India people generally frown upon people being forced to get married. Arranged marriages still involve people getting a choice in whether they want to marry the other person.
I've heard that that's a fairly new feature. Anyone know when it started?
It's my understanding that the potential bride and groom have a say in the process, or perhaps a veto, but you'd better have a good reason, or at least be firm in your refusal if the parents are set on the marriage going forward.
I was going to say something like that. Valuing romantic love and eventually using it as a basis for marriage goes back to the 12th century. Not so long ago in human history. It's not a human fundamental.
It was and is a fascinating cultural innovation. European countries were early adopters of this cultural practice, but it has turned into a global cultural diffusion process. Still ongoing.
...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way.
Thus all hail romantic love!
Agreed re population growth.
Re
>and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history
Umm... It has a lot of competitors for that slot. Agriculture. Literacy. All of our technology, from stone knives to LLMs.
...but these are not pure "cultural" innovations. They also involve technological innovations, i.e. things, not only ideas.
Many Thanks! Yes, they involve things. I tend to see the distinction as fairly blurry.
Does having someone in the role of matchmaker not count at all as a thing? (and then omitting them in the switch to romantic marriages becomes a negative technology) What about the documents that record the marriage? What about written laws that say which marriages are considered as legitimate and which not?
And literacy, yes, involves some sort of writing tool and some sort of writing surface, but involves inventing the alphabet, teaching it, the acts of writing and reading, so I see it as more cultural than technological.
One other competitor: Government. Would that count as cultural, or partly technological? A person acting in the specialized role of king - as with matchmakers, they could be considered an object as part of the machinery, or as a purely cultural phenomenon. Are the weapons of the king's henchmen the crucial part, or does strong-arm rule, where it is just the obedience of the henchmen to the king, and therefore of everyone else to the king and his henchmen, count as purely cultural?
Good points all of them. So yes, I agree, "culture" is a concept with blurry edges.
I wanted to boost Nancy's comment, through, because this innovation (romantic love being/becoming seen as the main legitimate reason for pair-bonding) is more under the radar than the innovations you mention. While its long-term consequences arguably are just as important - perhaps even more important - for nothing less than the gradually evolving gene-pool of us humans:-)
"...and perhaps it will turn out to be the most important cultural innovation in our species' evolutionary history. Since the shift away from arranged marriages has helped solidify the demographic transition, which is driving world fertility below 2.1 children per woman in the foreseeable future. "Peak humanity" in numbers is likely to be reached some decades after 2100, and then the world population will start to decline.
Which is very good news.
Since if humans do not stop population growth voluntarily, Nature will sooner or later do it for us - and not in a pleasant way."
This is like saying "You cannot build infinitely high, therefore it's a good thing you only built two stories high."
Well, we're going to build approx. 11 billion humans high, if I may mix metaphors...I would argue that may already be dangerously high, before we start to scale down
Given the level of obesity I'd argue that we're way below being dangerously high.
This is true, but as I understand it even arranged marriages are changing to be a little more like romantic marriages. People are talking more, getting to know each other more beforehand, calling marriages off where they find their partner unsuitable where before they just would have gone ahead with it, etc.
The average arranged marriage of today is a little more flexible than the average arranged marriage of the past. Will that eventually become full on romantic marriage? Maybe, maybe not.
Love the bubble confirmation: Indians are obviously a huge percentage of world population, and also huge in tech, where Scott swims. Yet very few weighing in with personal experience, real knowledge, just a lot of "I understand . . ." or "I've heard . . . ."
Considering the base-rates of domestic violence and child abuse the world over, I would say that these rates of divorce are too low. There are situations where a person should leave a marriage. These rates do not reflect stability, but force or a lack of other options, that come at the expense of someone's wellbeing.
If the government doesn't especially help or hinder arranged marriages, then they can still be part of a libertarian regime. Families and communities make steep bargains with individuals all the time. There isn't necessarily anything statist about it.
I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage
The practice is still surprisingly common (surprising to me at any rate) in many migrant communities. I have several friends who travelled to their home countries for a few months (and no, not primarily India or China) only to then return to the west with a bride or groom in tow.
Or, on a couple of occasions, return to the west without said bride or groom but a very very interesting story about how they almost did.
One argument why love is special: it affects the specific person you're intentionally involved with instead of the general public (unlike things like selling drugs at pharmacies or crypto scams, or driving where you can potentially hit and kill anyone on the street).
I guess child raising is also like this? But the advocates for the laws that interfere with child raising would argue that those laws are only against abuse, which does also apply to marriage. And the laws against home schooling probably come from schooling's history as a communal thing everyone sent their kids to. Which does imply that centralized dating apps increase the risk of regulations on love.
Different countries have different laws against home schooling and different historic contexts for them..
Best American legal case name: Loving v. Virginia.
Shortly after which, Virginia acknowledged its defeat by establishing as its slogan, "Virginia is for Lovers."
Most romantic perhaps, but have you heard about United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton? Sounds like an anime title.
Hahahahaha
My personal favorite is United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins
It's a toss-up between this one and the Tyrannosaurus for me, but I think this one has the edge because the shark fins actually won.
Also the pedantic legalism of "Approximately 64,695" instead of "Approximately 65,000".
Maybe there were exactly 64695 pounds of fins, but they didn't want to risk having their case dismissed on a technicality, such as the lawyer of the other side drying the fins a bit more, weighing them again, and demonstrating that now it is only 64694 pounds? But if they wrote "approximately 65000" instead, the lawyer could accuse them of exaggerating the number on purpose?
(I am not a lawyer.)
More lovely examples here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction
United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster
United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls
United States v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque
South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats
Gotta love the "More or Less" in there. I'm not counting all of them, geez, whattya take me for a calculator?
I'm also taken by the absurdity of referring to this collection as an 'Article' rather than an assemblage or 'Goods' or what have you
I thought economic deregulation had been more common than the converse, past 50 years so, barring DEI initiatives?
It's not that hard to break out the life-satisfaction stats on arranged marriages vs. non-arranged marriages, and the former generally stack up pretty well, though obviously there's a lot of confounders related to SES and ethnic background.
I guess it depends on how you measure the amount of regulation.
Measures by page count, regulation has definitely gone up almost everywhere.
Measured by eg government ownership of companies or top marginal tax rates, regulation has receded in some places compared to 50 years ago.
Deregulation can very plausibly (I don't know how to actually check this) lead to laws with higher word/page counts, because many forms of deregulation come in the form of new and convoluted loopholes inserted by regulatory capture.
Perhaps this isn't what "deregulation" means to most people, but it seems plausible as a manner of disagreement; principled libertarians would plausibly view regulatory capture as equally bad (or at least on the same scale of bad) as any other sort of government regulation. I (and many others on the left) would view regulatory capture as very bad (it's regulations that cause harm to increase wealth disparity while leaving the net welfare of the general population the same or worse than before) while other types of regulations as often neutral to good (it causes harm to either improve the net welfare of the general population while either leaving wealth disparity the same or lower).
De facto deregulation via loophole is possible. I am not sure how common it is: when the regulators don't like that loophole, they can close it with a new law.
You are right that what counts as deregulation can require a judgement call, and different people can make different judgements.
There are a few clear cut cases that most people agree on, but also lots of grey areas.
Incumbents are often quite ok with extra regulations, because there are economics of scale in compliance: ie extra rules hassle upstarts more than bigger established players.
> Usually when things are this unfair, we demand some attempt to restore fairness, maybe through redistribution.
I suspect there are very few incels among the Amish, or other very religious groups, because they have a strong interest in match-making within their groups.
Thinking back to your gene selection post, I suspect the Amish are on average more evolutionarily successful than even the richest billionaires, the most intelligent geniuses, or the tallest basketball players.
I think culture wins over genes a lot of the time, provided the genes are just *good enough* to provide a substrate for the culture to grow on.
Maybe that's how Jews have lasted thousands of years, even.
Wilt Chamberlain, (7'1") claims to have slept with 20,000 different women. I have to imagine he's got a good number of unacknowledged kids out there.
He would have had to sleep with a new woman every day for 55 years to do that. He died at 63, so in fact he would have to average over 1 new woman every day during the years he was sexually active.
According to wikipedia, he based the claim on having slept with 23 different women in an unremarkable 10-day period, halving that (to err on the conservative side while accounting for variation), and then extrapolating back to age 15.
The man loved threesomes, and could have them on-demand, apparently.
Sex != children because of birth control. Chamberlain was a multimillionaire, if any of those women got pregnant, they would have had a *very* strong monetary incentive to file for child support. So it's unlikely he had *unacknowledged* kids.
Many Thanks! I'd _thought_ I'd remembered a case like that, but had forgotten the athlete's name.
He has at least one unacknowledged kid. There was a recent basketball documentary called "Goliath" where they tracked down and interviewed a man whose DNA test results confirmed that he was Wilt's son.
Supposedly part of the explanation for polygyny is that if you have very high fertility population where men marry downwards in age, there are too many women as younger generations are bigger. I've heard similar issues about unmarried women among high fertility groups such as Jews.
They don't even have to marry down in age; women generally outnumber men even across the same age. More males than females die at every age, even from birth.
But do the Amish have nukes? They're not actually "evolutionarily successful" if they don't have the power to secure their own existence. Technology and violence are part of the game. Native Americans learned that the hard way.
The Amish have nukes in the same sense that everyone else in America does. That is, the government has them, and we (hopefully) benefit from that protection.
But they barely have any societal influence. If the rest of society sees them as a liability, they have no means of protecting themselves. The same can't be said for bigger, more powerful social groups, which have enough influence and leverage to avoid being ostracized in the first place.
Becoming a larger group takes time but the Amish are achieving that faster than most other groups their size.
The Amish win. At least until their influence, unbeknownst to them becomes a threat by caveat of simply not losing. I'm sure some blue hair wacko will start causing them more shit for no good reason other than mental illness via city living.
the Jews did it the other way, via infiltration and coincidentally being the smartest, whilst dually only breeding with other Jews, a LOT more suffering and discontent that direction though. Amish are the Isolation path.
> becoming progressively less regulated
Isn't «both parties were equally drunk when agreeing» moving from «people have right to be stupid» to «let's punish someone, or both» though?
Yeah, I was going to say, the whole norm of <always punish the man> and <believe women> definitely seems like an increase in regulation. You also see a corresponding rise in prudery...I'm sorry, *preventing the objectification of women* in movies, TV, and video games by showing much less skin and (in video games) making major characters much less attractive.
(My hypothesis: cultural norms are sticky in subtle ways, and Americans just found another way to suppress sex. even though the political valence switched sides.)
I think some places in US maintain enough equality that when the man complained about the drunk date first, it was the woman who ended up with some restrictions imposed.
«Believe» is about evidence standards, though! I tried to pick an example where the situation is symmetric, people wanted (in the moment) what has happened for non-transactional reasons, and even with facts being undisputed and well established the regulation previously was not expected to happen.
I'm pretty sure the attractiveness of female leads in Hollywood films plummeted over the past decade as well. Sure, there are still some obvious bombshells, but there are a lot more realistic-looking women up at the top now, too.
I do not particularly think of this as a good thing. I think films should show the pinnacle of achievement, not average, and that this should follow through to physical nature.
The rise in "prudery," preventing objectification of women, doesn't really follow for males. This seems almost blindingly obvious in eg TV series like "The Boys" where they will show full male nudity, and have an entire scene taking place in the ass of a man (who shortly thereafter explodes... yes, the entire man). Meanwhile, never even a bare female breast is ever seen, because <CLUTCH THE PEARLS>.
It's also going to be market forces; you probably can't sell a film/tv show to men on the basis of sex appeal, as porn's so ubiquitous it's destroyed the market for quasi-porn.