They really need to get cracking on that: Deus Ex: Human Revolution established that Final Fantasy XXVII will exist (at least in poster form) by 2027, and here we are in 2022 and still at XV...
I mean, we know that the Flynn effect is real, and there are various theories about what it is. If it's childhood malnutrition, which I believe is the leading hypotheses, then we would expect any gains from that to eventually plateau as everyone gets fed.
I thought the leading hypothesis was cultural- being raised in a society with a higher level of abstraction in every day life (computers, etc.). If it was malnutrition you would think it would not be happening in places like the U.S. (where it stopped only fairly recently) and it would be g-loaded.
Logically it can't be the fact that a) IQ is highly heritable and b) low-IQ people always had the most children and c) there has not been a decrease in IQ
Even if your hypothesis is correct, in the past low education probably did not correlate very well with low IQ
Probably didn't correlate well with living in cities, either -- a lot of aristocrats were well-educated for their society, and spent most of their time living on their country estates.
In the past the rich had a better chance of surviving relative to the poor. Enterprising poor people who climbed the ladder either had more children, or their children had more children, those who survived to adulthood anyway.
Cities are population sinks but probably not for all classes equally.
Request fewer comments like this, it seems to just be creating social pressure to make it hard for people to talk about things that are concerning them, without really filling in any step of the argument.
I do not think a proper and informed knowledge of intellectual history is out of place in rational argument about the state of the world and the choices in front of us. I think @DannyK was well within bounds to bring up Grant's book. He was not using it to suggest that people advancing arguments about population growth and control are evil, but a corollary point that evil men have used the issue to justify their evil deeds.
The Grant book was very important in the inter war years. Fitzgerald put a reference to it in The Great Gatsby but in the mouth of the buffoonish antagonist Tom Buchanan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race#Reception_and_influence leading us to believe that he was not sympathetic to the argument and that his readers would think it was characteristic of boorish people.
I think it is important to understand the place of Malthusian thinking in the development of social science and literature in 20th century America. "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era" by Thomas C. Leonard (2016)
I made several arguments against your piece about Black Lives Matter but they were among the ones that there was no space to answer.
1) I linked to several pieces in the NYT that said the same thing without making it sound like a racial dog whistle.
2) You would not acknowledge the fact that during the lock down, no one had a job to go to or classes to attend greatly increased the pool of demonstrators.
3) These massive crowds immediately put the police on the back foot and it became olly olly in free for anyone, black or white to act out on whatever antisocial impulse popped into their head. The destruction in large part had nothing to do with BLM.
4) There are video documented instances of a local white biker striking yet another match by smashing store front windows with a 4 pound hammer. I have one just like it for situations that call for ‘a bigger hammer’. He has been identified and there is a warrant for his arrest.
5) Putting your thumb on the scale for right wing media because they beat the ‘BLM protests were awful’ drum hard and often - the destruction was in fact awful, black people are not - is fucked up because their business model is to gin up hatred and white outrage. If you think that is a good thing, I don’t know what to tell you.
6) You gave short shrift to the emotional gut punch of the video of George Floyd’s death. You start your analysis with the destruction that followed.
7) What’s with the graphs of violence in countries without our complicated racial history?
I’ve held off on saying anything about this in case that article was an anomaly. But now this. I’m not calling you a racist. I am saying actual racists do love stuff like this. Pointing that fact out should not be a problem.
And you are the type of person to read someone that is loved by actual racists. Doesn't that make you part of the problem? Your points are unrelated to the current article, but it's not like Scott has to be racist to make those (alleged) mistakes. Even if racists love Scott. So what? We should be talking about the true and the good. Not "but will the racists have a favorable view of this?"
No I don’t think Scott is a racist. I do think he might enjoy dunking on the ‘bad people’ at the NYT.
Edit: I had actually clicked unsubscribe from ACX on the Substack gizmo before I saw Scott’s request to not point out the obvious. I got an email from you and Scott’s latest email too so apparently I’m doing something wrong.
1. Why should we go out of our way to avoid making something "sound like a racial dog whistle?" A racial dog whistle is itself something that "sounds like" it is alluding to something actually racist, so you're claiming it's very important for us to avoid... sounding like someone who sounds like they might be alluding to racism? At that point, is two degrees of separation even enough? Shouldn't we also avoid sounding like someone who sounds like someone who sounds like someone who is racist?
3. Would you apply the same principle to the January 6 trespassers?
4. There are also video documented instances of black rioters shooting and killing white people and police officers.
5. What alternative do you propose? Ignore the truth when it's inconvenient for the left, to avoid giving points to the right (even when the right is correct)?
6. The video really wasn't much of an emotional gut punch. If you watched the full footage and looked closely, Floyd said "I can't breathe" while he was still standing up, so it's clear from the beginning that his difficulty breathing is drug-related. Then, Chauvin puts his knee on Floyd's shoulder blade, and nothing much happens after that.
7. Why would that be of interest? Sure, if you were having a discussion about sociology, it would be relevant to bring up racial history, but not every discussion is a sociology discussion.
Yes, that first part is true. DannyK said that worrying about population decline itself is not racist. That seems sufficient to me to not worry about it. "Some racists have beliefs that seem to hover close to your beliefs on an issue which is not racist itself" is not particularly insightful, and if you can count it as evidence it must be extremely weak evidence.
Racism is not a well defined word and is used to make people look bad. It does not provide particularly good insight into a situation. Some people think Scott Alexander is a racist. Now, you could have a 3 hour conversation about whether or not that is true, or you could just point to where Scott is wrong. Seems much better to just point to where he is wrong.
There used to be a strong correlation between being a racist and being bad. Now the accusation just means dissenting from the egalitarian critical social justice orthodoxy.
Some cultures, societies and civilizations are able to pull off incredible cultural continuity and preservation throughout the generations though. But I agree with you, culture tends to modify and be reinterpreted in different contexts, so this is probably not a great argument ("Japan's culture will be different with 1/3 non-native Japanese" -- It will and it will also be different even with 100% Japanese a century or two from now just like you said) and is probably an indirect coverup for a more primal reasoning of simply wanting your group's survival to continue. Maybe some other reasons too, but I don't want to keep writing.
My wife now isn't interchangeable with my wife ten years from now, but I neither want to force my wife to never change, nor would I be happy with replacing my wife with some woman who's a bit different from her.
I agree this is an unsatisfying response but I think ethical intuitions will always be unsatisfying.
But even if you did that, you'd still need it to be economically viable, scalable, and you still need to raise all those kids somehow up until they're productive educated adults. All of this is very expensive and takes a lot of time until you get to the point where they can contribute anything, if at all.
Now, I want to make a prediction here which might be wrong but whatever: Even if you could hypothetically mass produce babies on demand and engineer them to be very smart, beautiful, etc. it still largely wouldn't lead to many magical new breakthroughs in different fields. What would happen instead is increasing perfection and sophistication of things we already posses with some level of technological development and applied science. Other than that, society would ossify, fossilize and harden and just continue to live on as an animated corpse, trying to go to yet another planet, build yet another city, develop another app, etc. After the initial wave of the results from the new tech settles down, things get quite boring. Maybe if they make babies literally live inside VR in other specific settings and societies something else would happen, the most likely outcome being civilizational disintegration though. Idk...
Like TGGP said, you should read Gregory Clark, specifically his book The Son Also Rises. You will see that elite status is inherited and that last names maintained higher status than you would expect if it was random. He goes into the reasons for thinking it's genetics.
The more direct way to see that cognitive ability is highly heritable is through studies on twins and people who were adopted. You can determine the proportion of variance that is attributable to genetics and the proportion that is attributed to the environment. If it was not genetic, you would think that adopted kids would be more like their adoptive parents than their birth parents. What they find is that genetics matters. In fact, all behavioral traits are heritable.
You may be interested in the concept of "regression to the mean"--I'm sure Scott has written about this before but I'm too lazy to find links. Basically, IQ *is* heritable but there are also random other factors, so it's quite unlikely that the number 1 smartest Gen Z kid is the offspring of the number 1 smartest millenial (or number 1 smartest couple, I guess). (But the number 1 smartest Gen Z kid probably *is* born to some top-10% parents.)
We believe it because we base our views on actual heritable studies, not some indirect inference based on faulty premises. You not believing in the heritability of IQ is a product of you not knowing about/understanding the intelligence research literature, not a failure in the reasoning of the people you disagree with. Sorry if that sounds strong, but you didn't pose this as a question, you made a statement implying people who disagree with you are being particularly foolish.
There's no reason to think leaders are or necessarily would be elected on solely the basis of their intelligence, so there's no reason to imagine Einstein or someone like him would stand an especially good chance at being elected.
And heritability doesn't mean "the same as your parents". It means what proportion of the observed variation in a trait is a result of the observed genetic variation in the population being looked at. Being a child genius seems to be almost entirely heritable, but not many child geniuses are born to former child geniuses.
1. We're not even ruled by the most intelligent people this generation, unless you think Joe Biden is the smartest person in the US. Why should this happen transgenerationally?
2. Chance and regression to the mean ensure that the single smartest person next generation probably won't be the kid of the single smartest person this generation. While the children of smart people are on average smarter than the children of dumb people, there's lots of noise, and the noise is most apparent at the very top and bottom.
3. This might be easier to understand if you looked at some trait that you knew was passed down parent to children. For example, the children of rich people are on average richer than the children of poor people (you don't have to believe this is genetic for it to work). But the richest people this generation are Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who came from mildly rich but not ultra-rich families. This doesn't disprove that parents can give wealth to their children, it just proves the process is noisy.
No idea...I'm a Democrat. I think Biden is reasonably adequate and passing some good bills lately. My comment was entirely tongue in cheek. Donnie T, is sort of a mad genius though except in a clownlike and spectacularly incompetent (tripping over his own metaphorical feet kind of) way.
I am seeing that scenario in Italy and it's not nice. Like, not nice at all. Young people are full of hate, all the familist culture that was typical of our country is gone. The Italian equivalent of "ok boomer" is something roughly translatable as "ok, old piece of shit" , and we started saying it about 10 years before "ok boomer" was coined.
And old people really, really don't get why. After all, what's so wrong? Sure, they might have voted themselves some unsustainable benefits that weight so much on treasury that the rest of population gets Swedish taxation and Bulgarian services, but from their point of view their fault was only optimism. Sure, they keep voting themselves even more benefits, but doesn't everybody vote with their interests in mind? And it's their fault if they are outnumbering everybody?
As you said, it is taking the connotations of a class war. Old political rivalries are blurring: as long as you are young, there is some reason to hate your elders no matter your politics. Libertarianish? See above, plus so much regulatory capture to write an horror books for economists, never to be touched because hey, old people might be upset if something changes.
Leftist? Hey, what do you think if spending your 20s working for free so that some octuagenarian owner can afford a better suite in Sardinia, and maybe start paying you a pittance when you are wiser and older enough?
Progressive? Hey, you know how your boss considers sexual harassment a form of team building? Well, EVERY boss is like that, because none is younger than 60!
Seriously, I have seen political polarization in my generation going down a lot lately. Mostly because for any "kill landlords" or "offer communists an helicopter ride" post that disappeared, two about the glorious tradition of euthanizing old people whether they wanted or not appeared
> That said, regarding #6, I was recently startled by the release of the newest census results, which revealed that Canada (where I live) is becoming a country of olds with shocking rapidity.
My advice to anyone concerned about the age structure is to take a moment to consider the implications of the Demographic Transition model more fully.
In going from a high-fertility/high-mortality regime to a low-fertility/low-mortality one, you are necessarily going to have a number of generations whose size will exceed those that come after, because they were born during the high-fertility/low-mortality phase.
However, the same issue of concern - these people will not be replaced when they leave their productive period - also necessarily implies that these people will not be replaced when the time comes for the subsequent generation to retire.
In short, once the boom generations complete their journey up the population pyramid, these age imbalances may cease to be an issue.
My worthless prediction for future demographic trends is that populations will trend towards some sort of stability in the long run, fairly likely - at lower levels than we have today. This will probably be a Good Thing (there's a sweet spot where you have just enough people to get things done, but not so many that resource constraints start to kick in).
I think aesthetics and morality are sort of inseparable. I agree you need more assumptions than just "maximize happiness" to prove that the human race surviving is good, but I am willing to make (some of) those assumptions.
That dumb matter has created beings that can even consider this question is a miracle beyond imagining. It would be a tragedy beyond imagining if they were to die out so early in their potential lifetime, or even if they were to become moribund and muddle through as 21st-century idiots for a million years.
Call that aesthetics, if you like. If the prospect does not appall you, we have nothing to talk about.
Do you have a rational argument for your statement that "Individuals should be cared for because suffering is bad"? Or is that just a matter of taste on your part?
Perhaps you do think moral propositions can be deduced logically, in which case it would be interesting to hear why you think "suffering is bad" is one that can be logically deduced, but "humanity going extinct is bad" is not.
There's an asymmetry to your reasoning. You take "suffering is bad" as axiomatic, but it seems you don't take "joy is good" as also being axiomatic.
Beyond that, I think you have gone astray by selectively intellectualizing morality. You've just said that you don't have any logical arguments for your moral position - you just assume what you want to assume. But then you dismiss others' moral judgements by saying "I can't think of an argument" for that.
Doctor Mist's view - "That dumb matter has created beings that can even consider this question is a miracle beyond imagining" - is a sense of wonder at the goodness of life that should not be dismissed on the basis that you can't think of an argument for it. Even if we suppose that logical argumentation is relevant here, do you really think that you have thought of all valid arguments, so your not thinking of one for this view is a decisive point against it?
> What I don't see is the offering of a cogent alternative moral foundation from which one could deduce the badness of human extinction, except relativism
If you haven't already read A. J. Ayer you'll find him reaffirming.
I'm not an Ayerist, I think there are some cogent alternatives to choose from where you scale up from values that appear universal. But agree this is nontrivial work and sympathize with the appeal of Ayer and the error theorists out there.
You don't think "person alive + happy" is better than "person does not exist"? Personally I think it is good that I exist and have a happy life instead of not existing, and IMO it would also be good if future people also existed and had happy lives rather than not existing.
I'm not sure why you think my preference to go on living is important/valid, but my preference to have more humans in the future is not.
I don't think I follow this attempt to take the perspective of the world - "the world", as you say, is obviously not an entity with preferences. Shouldn't I try to implement my own preferences? (Isn't that what it means to have preferences?)
I agree. Making belonging to a nation binary is a gross oversimplification. I am myself the child of immigrants, and I've never fully identified with the nation I grew up in, and I don't expect others to fully identify me with that nation, even though I pass as belonging to that ethnic group.
Some Asian nations are like Japan, and to a less extent some European countries, but most states in the world are multi-ethnic. But they are multi-ethnic in a somewhat similar way as the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather than multi-ethnic in a present-day US or Canadian sense.... Think of most Latin American countries, India and Indonesia in Asia, and definitely most African countries - relevant since Africa is the "coming continent". (The 22nd will likely be Africa's century.)
Probably agreed, but with a large uncertainty about the likely date of the switchover. _Maybe_ in part of the 21st, but AI has progressed more slowly than expected before, and might again.
Blessed if you consider GDP growth to be more important than having a unique and cohesive culture, say. But I'm sure at some point all this atomistic materialism will eventually make people happy.
You could have a Roman-style civilisation-state, where being Roman (Canadian, Japanese...) is a matter of following Roman (etc.) culture rather than being genetically decended from the founding population.
Then again, the people who believe in increased immigration are generally against making immigrants assimilate to the host country's culture, so in practical terms I'm not sure that's an option at the moment.
If you parse the corporate/quango language, then a world religion, say, is quite literally "[ethnically/geographically] diverse communities of people [trying to] achieve change we can believe in." It's not as meaningless as all that.
I do think the one exciting possibility of a globalised future - as against plenty of potential gloom - is human assortment based on shared values/ideology rather than (if you'll forgive a stray personal opinion) the dumb default of ornamental culture, ethnicity, and nationhood.
Why would you expect those shared values/ideology of a globalised future be any less dumb or ornamental than what you call the dumb default? You do not like what people have constructed in terms of culture/ethnicity and nationhood so far. Fair enough.
But since people have made that what you don't like already, why is it any better if it's ethnically and geographically diverse?
"Ornamental culture" is the bits that are left of cultures once they're fed through the cosmopolitan meat-grinder. If you're going for nationalism vs atomic individualism, culture would be the major determinant of behaviour and attitudes, which are the bits now left of atomic individualism.
To be clear, I think atomic individualism's probably underrated, and I'd really doubt it's reversible for people who've been absorbed by it. I don't think intentional communities organised around shared interests would work though, as no-one's going to surrender their autonomy to a group that they're able to leave (which is what molecular collectivism entails, and why it would probably suck for someone who hadn't been raised in it), so it'd just be a community when it's convenient.
If you don't build housing. If the immigration system were still routing new arrivals to the wilderness to go build their own log cabins and homestead some land, this would not be an issue.
There's only so much space in a city with hundreds of thousands or millions of people though, even if you build enough housing it would still lead to congestion/commutes and unaffordable housing in the center.
Japan is famous for this: you can live there for decades and never really be considered "Japanese" - but if Japan and America are the two ends of the spectrum, I'd guess a lot of the world is closer on the America side of the spectrum - most countries have had pretty significant shifts over the times.
Consider China: while some might think of it as predominantly ethnically Han, it's a lot more diverse and than that for centuries, (and in fact - China's fear is more the opposite: they're actively trying to keep their diverse country united)
The two countries you’ve exempted there are Brexit Britain and France with the strongest far right party in Europe. The U.K. is multinational of course, but that’s likely to break up. In any case preserving say Spanish culture, and its distinct regional culture, is an important task. The US is a blank slate which is probably culturally improved with any level of immigration, but Europe is already culturally diverse. Much of what diversity exists in America is due to immigration.
Beyond that the causes of immigration to Europe is often wars and refugee crises, often caused by US meddling. Which causes strains. And of course the US was building a literal wall under the last administration. It doesn’t look like the idea of an open pro immigrant society is universal.
It massively depends on what are and aren't "far-right parties."
The UK's actual neo-nazis are (perhaps ironically) really ill-disciplined and disorganised, so don't presently have much of a party. When they last did (the BNP), it was pretty small and peaked at 6.2% of the vote in a European Parliament election, slipping to 1.9% in the general election the next year.
UKIP, and then the Brexit Party (both now more or less defunct) peaked at 30.52% in the European Parliament and 12.64% of the vote in a general election.
Virtually no-one in the UK describes pre-Brexit UKIP or the Brexit Party as far-right. The BNP et al are extreme even by the standards of the European far right more generally, being roughly equivalent to David Duke in the US.
The French National Rally is huge now, but are either on the left-most boundary of the far right or are else pretending to be.
Hungary and Poland are a bit more complicated - Jobbik were very far-right but have done a weird 180, and Fidesz have moved a long way to the right whilst in government. Law and Justice in Poland are less extreme, at least on racial issues, than the National Rally are now.
You probably need to multiply the support of each potentially far-right party by percentage of how far-right they are to get a good read on a country overall.
The UK's also barely multinational; the English/Scots/Welsh/Ulstermen/Irish/Cornish all speak the same language, have basically the same culture other than a few quirky traditions (most of which were "revived" in the late 19th century).
The more relevant point is that "British" referring to citizenship is accepted by everyone outside the far right (probably going back to the idea that everyone who lived in the British Empire was equally a British subject) but it's really rare to describe non-white people as English, or for them to describe themselves as such.
Sure. Not multinational. Just one constituent nation likely to break away and another that was at war just a few decades ago, which might also break away.
You are right on the second count though, British isn’t an ethnic group
That's dubious. Scottish independence any time soon seems fairly unlikely (Metaculus puts it at 19% by 2030). By contrast, Metaculus is more bullish on Northern Ireland having a referendum by then, but given that can only happen if a majority of the population support reunification in opinion polls (currently at about 30%), that also seems pretty unlikely.
Sorry, who told you that about Italy? That's plainly not true. Also, for that matter, it seems to me to be plainly not true for any Western European country
Yeah, it's totally true that the European idea of assimilation goes way, way deeper than the American idea of integration. Unfortunately, it's also true that European deep down consider nationalities to be mutually exclusives, so that somebody might be perfectly assimilated even by the very high European standards and still be considered foreigner if they happen to refer to themselves by the nationality of their parents.
But this does not absolutely mean that it's impossible to be really felt as a national, it's just harder.
(Also, there are some shortcuts, like adopting a regional/urban identity. In that case the recognition of the national one comes as a bonus)
Ah, tu sei il tipo convinto che le risposte caustiche e i memini sfottò su Twitter siano una minaccia esistenziale alla civiltà moderna. Senza offesa, ma non mi sembri esattamente la persona più affidabile per sapere come si sente l'italiano medio, men che meno la casalinga di Voghera.
So che in questo periodo l'erba è tutta giallognola e bruttina, ma ti potrebbe comunque far bene toccarla un po'.
It's 92% han, and han are the overwhelming majority of all positions of power and prestige (government, business, academia, media).
They have a huge number of ethnic groups, but its irrelevant if they're all combined much smaller than the majority. Practically speaking a 50% white 50% black country would be vastly more diverse than China with numerous ethnic minorities.
They're also diverse in a very different way to somewhere like the US - most of the minority groups are in fringe regions like Yunnan, Tibet, Turkestan etc, with a distribution more like Native Americans than urban immigrant groups.
I would say China is exactly as Japan. Highly racist - not necessarily in the meaning that they consider other people inferior, but just that they are separate races with intrinsic differences. Also tied to belief they have special culture etc. that can't possibly be comparable to others. The chances of these two countries resorting to mass immigration to solve labor shortage problems is close to zero, even if only involves somewhat proximate cultures say east asia. Africans? Forget it. At best there will be some attempt to rally the diaspora similar to what Japan did in 80s/90s with Japanese-Brazilian guestworkers. China also may import some amount of foreign SEA brides due to shortage of women. That's it. I have less knowledge about Korea, Taiwan etc. but strongly suspect it's same spiel.
How would this happen? Most rich people in rich countries have enough money that they could easily afford more children if they wanted, they just don't. How does carrying capacity affect fertility decisions? And why didn't Amish people or Orthodox Jews get the message?
It seems to me that the Amish would reach carrying capacity pretty fast, because they cannot live in urban areas that rely on electricity. The carrying capacity of the countryside is much lower.
I'm not sure how the Amish work. If each family has seven kids, assume three of them are boys and will need farmland to be proper Amish. One will probably be able to take over dad's acres, but that leaves two boys who either have to buy farmland or become hired hands. Buying farmland, even for highly efficient Amish farmers, can be expensive, and it isn't clear that hired hands are as likely to sire seven children as farmers.
Lots of Amish are not farmers and have found other occupations. If they need to travel somewhere for work, they can ride in a shuttle bus (but not drive it).
The Amish (and the Plain Mennonites - see my explainer https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3429.0.html) are not nearly all farmers--a lot of them are tradesmen of one sort or another. But the dynamic of needing land and markets means that new communities start all the time: there were very few Plain churches in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1960, and now there are Plain churches everywhere in those states.
Immigrants with less money than average Americans have more kids than average Americans (and often more kids than they would have back home). It's not economics giving people low Darwinian fitness, it's a novel culture.
It's economics but it's class-dependent. I make about 3x the UK's average income (that's where I live), but I couldn't afford to have kids on that because it's not enough to educate them, house them etc *to the required standard.* The big problem in most developed countries is people being worse off than their parents, so they can't afford to raise their kids in a manner they deem acceptable. If your only concern is that the state won't take them away, then almost everyone can afford kids, but that's not the financial level people make the decision on.
If downward mobility is unnacceptable, then that will of course reduce fertility. As Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms", the modern English population is descended from the downwardly mobile children of successful farmers.
Isn't your first point predicting that fertility should correlate with income? Because this isn't true, it's the opposite. (At least in the US, I didn't check other countries.) I can certainly believe that money influences the decision to have a child (or more children), but there must be another factor correlated with income that works in the opposite direction and overwhelms it.
You left out by far the most important factor: having children carries positive *status* among high-fertility groups, or at least the failure to produce many children carries negative status. They are deliberately pro-natal.
"Lo, children are a heritage from the LORD, and the fruit of the womb is his reward."
Among the Plain, this is facilitated by the fact that they have relatively few other markers of status -- no fancy dress, homes, cars, etc.
"the sort of place where having kids *gives* you money since they can do manual labor for you"
This is a meme that always seems to pop up, but it's biologically absurd that the average child would ever have a positive NPV to his parents, any more than laying an egg conveys a positive NPV to the hen or the apple to the apple tree. Though I do believe it's a meme that, while false, had positive survival value in past societies. Kids were less expensive in agricultural societies, but they did not make people materially richer.
For thousands of years, the only predators that humans had to worry about were cities. It seems like it's pretty easy to run away from cities. But maybe it isn't any more.
I think this is almost right, but two items maybe to add in:
1) humans are prediction engines and prediction increases (not necessarily accuracy but the number and consensus of predictions) with education and communication. We only have to imagine children starving in the future to stop having them because we now have the ability to control our own fertility. So if you change the population curve to something like “the projected average human consensus population curve for how worth showing up for the future will be” then I agree.
2) carrying capacity is a function of our technology. With a cave, a fire, and a couple spears maybe that’s 150. With agriculture maybe a few thousand. With fertilizers, modern techniques to get water, etc millions. We could be much more than we are now if we started asking ourselves what we need to increase ourselves.
I see it as humanity’s responsibility to act as the reproductive organ of the Earth. We need lots of us to go out and do that.
As long as some culture exists which ignores the Demographic Transition, they will be able to expand their population until reaching Malthusian limits (just like other species of animals).
There are populations in rich countries which are still growing: subpopulations that have separated themselves from a culture deleterious in Darwinian terms.
"Child labour + support in old age > cost of raising child" does not require "child labour > cost of raising child" (your post I'm responding to) nor "support in old age > cost of raising child" (Caplan's paper).
Children are helpless and provide no labor when very young. Resources are flowing from adults to children then. Once children grow up enough to do some child labor (generally much less productive than adults)... their parents are STILL producing more resources than they consume.
"For most of human history children were a net positive in economic terms."
I don't believe that. People were not competing with each other to adopt children, instead the tradition was to designate someone you trust very much as a godparent to look after them. Single mothers were rare in pre-industrial England because they just couldn't support a child on their own.
If you're convinced the technological singularity is approx 30 years away, and that it's likely to be ~bad for humans (AI take over etc), then why are you trying for a baby with your wife?
I don't think this is the same kind of antinatalist point of "the world is bad, why bring more life into it". It seems like you seriously believe that something is different about this point in history, and to me it then seems a bit odd that you'd want to plunge someone new in at the deep end just when the robots take over!
How do you reconcile this?
PS: forgive me if I've misremembered about the baby part, think you said that a whole ago!
There's some chance I'm wrong about a singularity, there's some chance we make it through the singularity, and if I'm wrong about both those things I'd rather give my kid 30 years of life than none at all. Nobody gets more than about 100 anyway and 30 and 100 aren't that different in the grand scheme of things. I'd feel an obligation not to bring kids into a world that would have too much suffering but I think if we die from technological singularity it will be pretty quick. I don't plan on committing suicide to escape and I don't see why I should be not bringing life into the world either.
Having kids is the perfect utilitarian decision. Either we'll have a singularity and everyone dies, then our one or two extra generations are rounding errors in the grand scheme of things, or there isn't a singularity and the best thing we can do is to continue the human race.
but having a kid would maxamize your own utility as compared to adopting. it seems youre still being a utiltarian, just in the sense of “what makes the world most how I want it” not “what makes the world most like the average of all human values wants it”
If you don't actually want to adopt a child, you're probably not maximizing utility by adopting one. Being brought up by an adoptive parent who didn't really want you probably makes for a crappy upbringing.
I used to want to adopt when I was younger, but I've come around to feeling otherwise as I've come to think that it's very likely it would give me poor chances of being matched with a child I'd actually relate to, and I don't think I'd be a very good parent to a child I related to poorly. Some people might, and I think they're better candidates to adopt than I am.
I think a utilitarian attitude encourages actually crunching the numbers where possible (even if only made up ones) to check on whether uncertain cases are likely to be worthwhile. But in general, I think we should start with a default of extreme skepticism that choices which really fail to make us happy are worthwhile. What are we trying to trade off that happiness for, and can that trade work at scale?
"there's no Effective Altruist case for having kids of your own"
Highly doubtful. You don't think there's any difference between a world with Scott's kids and lots of people like them, and a world full of foster kids raised by Scott?
People with eugenic impulses do tend to think it is people like them whose genes should propagate through time and people unlike them who shouldn't, but I don't think there's a lot of reason to believe that people following these impulses to their logical ends results in a world that is better off in terms of advancing general welfare.
There is a total utilitarian case for having more kids, which has always struck me as more sensible than average utilitarianism. Yes, I embrace the "repugnant conclusion" of massive numbers of people less happy than us. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/poor-folks-do-smile.html
Underappreciated distinction: fostering and adoption are very different things, with different backgrounds, process, and results. A fostered child is very likely to have been removed from their previous environment by state services after multiple years of neglect, and placed with a volunteer on a presumably-temporary basis with reunion with the biological parents the nominally preferred end goal. Something like half get that reunion, with roughly a quarter ending in adoption (and not always adoption by the foster parents).
While there is a shortage of foster homes in the US, there is definitely *not* a shortage of people willing to adopt infants less than a few years old. This is where homo economicus would pipe up about the inevitable results of a market where the price is set at zero by fiat, but I'm not quite cold blooded enough to endorse that position.
Know this might be overly personal and at the same time highly meaningless coming from an internet stranger, but good for you and your wife. That takes real courage. There’s certainly a possible future worth showing up for.
The chance we make it through a singularity is a pretty convincing argument for having kids imo, since life in a good-end singularity is likely to be far higher utility than now (to the extent that it probably dwarfs the other worlds in weight even if the chance of being in this world is only a few percent), and there's always some chance you will die or otherwise be rendered unable to choose to have kids before you know you're in that world, which would deprive them of that utility since they don't exist.
Not to mention there are perfectly selfish reasons to have kids as well -- they're often great at coming up with things to do and injecting variety into the dullness of everyday life.
"I'd rather give my kid 30 years of life than none at all."
What's the cutoff point with this philosophy? If you knew your child will die at age 15, would you go ahead and have the child? What about percentage of suffering? If your child were to suffer, say 30% of his or her life, would you go ahead and have the child? Does it matter whether the suffering is distributed throughout the life, stacked at the end, or towards the beginning?
I think suffering and death work completely differently. I'd be nervous about bringing a child into the world who would face any abnormal amount of suffering, but I don't think it would be morally wrong to bring a child into the world who would die at 5 or 10 or whatever (though it might be unfair to my family since they would have to grieve them)
I can't remember what I thought at 10 or 30, but I'm 37 now and if I got hit by a truck tomorrow I would be happy to have lived even for this relatively short period. I think if I had to suffer a lot then I would be upset and regret coming into existence.
Agreed on the big difference between suffering and death. I had a friend who got hit by a car and died instantly, and while I think it's horrible and I miss him, I am also a bit jealous that he didn't have to face death or go through the dying process.
It seems as if this being ok with a child's death depends on the child meeting their doom suddenly and without prior knowledge of it, because any knowledge of upcoming demise would cause untold suffering. Does this mean you think the AI apocalypse will be instantaneous? Because any period of time from the recognition of impending doom and the actualization of it would be utterly terrible. It could potentially last years. Also, what makes you so sure the AI apocalypse will more like a paperclip maximizer and less like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream? I can see something like that happening based on a misaligned goal of the AI to keep people alive.
" because any knowledge of upcoming demise would cause untold suffering"
seems like an awfully strong take. Unless you expect a particularly terrible form of demise (e.g. no mouth) isn't this literally what nearly every single person eventually encounters? Barring some singularity or step change in the advancement of medicine there's a >60% I'll die 35-45 years from now, quite possibly in a pretty unpleasant fashion, for my parents it's more grim, for the surviving grandparents even more so (one is likely to die in the next year or two and is already in pretty bad shape quality of life wise from mouth cancer).
Most models of the AI apocalypse have it happening very fast, since if one could see it coming years in advance it would be relatively easy to stop (that specific AI). Based on the speed of response to the pandemic, I don't expect governments to admit the threat is real until there's less than 24 hours left to live :/
(N.b. I personally am not a doomsayer about AI, in that I don't think it's more likely than not in my lifetime, but much like nuclear war even small odds are very bad)
What about quantum immortality arguments that imply any conscious being brought into existence has a chance of eternal suffering in their immortality? Seems like those sort of arguments would dominate any kind of Pascal's wager type considerations.
I'm pretty sure utility is undefined when considering an infinite multiverse scenario, and no conclusions can be drawn.
For an incomplete example, suppose you conclude the probability of infinite suffering through quantum immortality is morally wrong. You are then duty bound to maximally extinguish life to limit the number of universes where suffering can exist (infinity - human civilization), which means you must now weight the probability of eternal suffering of creating your child (infinity * (human civilization in our universe - your hypothetical child and their descendants)) vs. the extinguishing of all suffering should your child or their descendants manage to figure out how to extinguish life in all universes (infinity * probability of human civilization influenced by you or your descendants figuring out multi-universe WMD and using it).
I'm not sure exactly what the math would be but I think some infinities would turn out to be larger than others.
There's ~20 influential interpretations of quantum mechanics and at least one implies quantum immortality, assuming each interpretation is roughly equally, likely that makes the immortality infinity quite large, definitely a lot bigger than P(the extinguishing of all suffering should your child or their descendants manage to figure out how to extinguish life in all universes).
But yeah maybe that kind of calculation just isn't possible in principle, not sure if that result would transfer to all types of Pascal's wagers.
Then the decision you actually make doesn't matter because you have to consider all possible multiverses including the ones where you make the opposite decision
As someone with a nine year old I would say just about now is the time where if they suddenly dies in an accident or had some devastating fatal illness, I would feel like they had gotten to cash out some of the investment and life in them and live a bit of their own life and own projects.
Five year old isn’t there yet. If he were to die tomorrow and you could somehow magic it all away, I might (if not for the emotion/memories involved).
But by the time they are nine they are little people with little interests and projects and a stable personality. They have started “living life themselves”, and are less just a “pet” in training of their parent.
Kudos for tackling the question directly. I'm really interested in what number people would come up with if forced to give an answer, might lobby to get it included in one of the reader surveys next time those come around.
I think a "pet" (and even a real pet) could be happy that they live (even if they could not call it that way). On the other hand, there are gloomy scenarios that can end or threaten the lives of humans of all ages, and many of them can also be very traumatizing.
Isn't the key point here that Scott doesn't KNOW 30 years or 15 years or any other number. It's all speculation. Would the prospective kid want a shot at 30 or 60 or 90? I think YES.
Would you advise your child to avoid having children of his/her/etc. own ? After all, by the time your child is grown, the Singularity will only be a few years away, right ?
I’ve never understood the perspective that “there will be unforeseen challenges in the near future so it’s best to not bring any humans into existence to experience it”.
Humans are always facing new challenges. I’m glad my parents were born, even though the future at the time of their birth was radically uncertain and dangerous.
Heck same story with my grandparents, and my great grandparents. Who in their right mind would have babies after the events of the Great War, or the 30 years War, in the midst of the Cold War, and just as the future was looking to be even worse? Well, I’m quite glad people were short sighted enough to do so.
"Who in their right mind would have babies after the events of the Great War, or the 30 years War, in the midst of the Cold War, and just as the future was looking to be even worse?"
True. I suspect (but don't really know) that every generation sees their times as uniquely dangerous and momentous. I suppose that there are uniquely bad times to live, but I doubt that anyone can forecast them with any accuracy, certainly not the decades in advance that one would want if it were influencing one's fertility decisions. ( I, personally, am childfree, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the historical moment. )
Agreed. There are other possibilities as well which are less predictable: Wars (particularly long ones like the 30 years' war), plagues, extended periods of bad weather (e.g. the "little ice age"), unpredictable crop failures (e.g. "Irish Potato Famine" - though these usually wouldn't span most of a lifetime), particularly bad rulers (especially if they can sit on the throne for decades).
I might not be that smart, but I see our current time as fairly stable and not very momentous. A good time to have kids (I have two and hope to have more), invest for the long term and make decisions for the long term. As someone who lived through the 80’s, I’m always struck by how similar the 80’s and 90’s feel to now, whereas the 50’s and 60’s feel like a complete different historical epoch.
Hmm... I don't see the current time as either particularly stable or particularly unstable. I was too young to remember the Cuban missile crisis, but there were a number of public nuclear threats after that - and several near accidents only revealed years later. Putin's nuclear threats this year look approximately comparable, perhaps marginally less worrisome.
There are always potential long term threats being aired. Currently global warming has the spotlight - at least it has reasonably well understood physics! But in general, the probability and severity of any long term threat is very hard to assess.
As I mentioned upthread, I, personally, am childfree, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the historical moment. ( I dislike hassles and time sinks, and children add an entire category of hassles and time sinks. )
If it's 30 years, you might want a bunch of your kids in their twenties to help fight the robots with. They might be the difference between victory and defeat.
You may see it as plunging "someone new" into the apocalypse. Or you might also see it as pluging a compound being of yourself and the other parent. This is just commiting more of yourself, in as far as you are define yourself by your membership in and ownership of your family.
Has anyone written extensively about how AI would, uhh, kill us all, and why it might choose a quick painless method over something more gruesome but perhaps less resource intensive?
A common argument re quick AI victory is that a powerful intelligence is much more likely to want to maximize risk of success than to minimize resource usage. A plan that involves slowly and painfully exterminating humans is much more likely to fail than simply coordinating a nanobot swarm to release a neurotoxin that kills everyone instantly before we even realize we shave anything to worry about
I'm having difficulties parsing this. Do you mean "would have dropped 2.5 points if not for the Flynn Effect", or are you saying that the Flynn Effect is measurement error? Or what?
yeh, that's a good point. IQ is after all the only thing being measured and it is either dropping or it isn't. I believe we have dropped in real intelligence (G) but the Flynn effect is measuring artefacts that are not that important to the functioning of society, spatial ability and so on, and is missing some of that drop. No hard evidence.
Or you could argue that people are getting slightly dumber, but having environmental obstacles to actual maximum eliminated quickly enough that the average is going up.
Average person can say get to 110, but social/environmental issues kept the average at 100. Then 10 years later average person can max at 108, but the barrier mean most get to 104.
"And I notice it’s weird to be worried both that the future will be racked by labor shortages, and that we’ll suffer from technological unemployment and need to worry about universal basic income. You really have to choose one or the other."
Of course those two are inconsistent. The correct answer is that technological unemployment is a myth. There is little credible evidence for that outcome. Some who talk about it are (consciously or unconsciously) motivated by a desire to promote UBI for independent reasons.
I'm not particularly "worried" about labor shortages, but of these two outcomes, I consider it to be the one with more evidence, by far.
Hm, maybe a better way to think about it would be the amount of labor it takes to maintain a certain standard of living. The existence of agricultural technology meant that we needed only about 2% as many farmers as before; the other ~98% of people were able to go into producing things other than food without any decrease to our food-related quality of living. If robots mean we only need 2% as many everything as before, the other people can either do new stuff that raises our quality of living, or be technologically unemployed, I'm agnostic as to which but it doesn't seem to imply decreasing quality of living except for distributional reasons.
Yes, I agree that's a better way to think about it. New technology shifts what labor is needed.
I see robots increasingly used in manufacturing, warfare, construction, and selected other high exertion/risk functions, but nowhere near "most everything." Similar story with AI: real impacts but nowhere near "most everything."
I think there will always be plenty of work for humans to do. There may still be difficulties, but they may be more cultural and psychological than literal lack of work. For example, it could be the jobs are plentiful but increasingly shifted towards high cognitive demands, and so are not well matched to a portion of the population.
That's true, both at present and for the near future. I do expect robotics to improve, but incrementally, not in any way that ends up with little work for humans to do.
Nobody said AI is there yet. If it were, we wouldn't even be discussing this.
However, if AI does get there this century, it will likely be very suddenly relative to a position where it is far off (due to recursive self improvement).
Additionally, the main jobs that will be destroyed first by AGI will be white collar jobs, not robots performing manual labor (that it currently cannot perform). Which means a lot of people who would have otherwise gone into white collar jobs would instead be in the market for jobs involving labor not easily replaced by machines. Which sucks for them, but it does mean that there won't be labor shortages if the pupation falls.
We get massively richer because AI and robots can do so much stuff cheaply, but some jobs are no longer human jobs because they've been automated away. If there are still things people (at least the owners of the robots) want done that can't be done by robots/AI, this ought to lead to new jobs being created to do stuff that previously was too expensive to pay anyone to do.
This is how automation has worked so far. Many individuals were made worse off because some new technology killed their job or industry, but overall, we still had plenty of stuff we wanted done that we were willing to pay people to do.
There's no theoretical limit on the number of people who can work in service-oriented industries, especially home nursing, child care, etc. Even if humans were no longer needed to work producing anything at all, we could just pay each other for basic services (including accompanying children, the elderly, handicapped/special needs) and still have full employment.
Scott has also talked about the concept of Slack before. There's always room for more Slack, which can take many forms. Reducing class sizes at school, hiring redundant employees to back each other up, lots of ways to increase Slack and hire more individuals. The Western world has a LOT of Slack compared to the pre-industrialized world, and appears to be a normal result of vastly increased wealth. Children as young as six were routinely needed to do productive labor, and now people continue to consume vast resources from society (especially in the form of education, but also entertainment, parent's time/effort, as well as basic supplies like food and clothing) until 18-25 and nobody bats an eye.
On the agricultural note, the reason we have so many people is due to nitrogen fixation for fertilizer and the Green Revolution, which is the reason The Population Bomb and other 1960s doomers ended up wrong; they simply did not account for a massive increase in agricultural productivity.
However, many people have raised concerns about the environmental impact of mass nitrogen fertilizer farming, with some countries aiming to reduce their emissions. If we do this broadly then we simply won't be able to feed the current population, and would potentially face mass starvation if population was not already peaking.
In that regards underpopulation allows us to mitigate the environmental damage that mass fertilizer use has caused and continues to cause, at the cost of people not being born who wouldn't be born anyway due to whatever societal reasons.
Population is still growing, just at a slower rate. I don't think we'll actually get to shrinking total world population, though growth for enough time will eventually hit Malthusian limits.
See Sri Lanka and nitrogen protests in Netherlands as counter-examples.
It is possible for such trends to reverse - like with EU increasing coal burning emissions due to potential gas shortages - but "just starving/freezing" from less production cannot be ruled out.
And you can also "just buy replacements that go to highest bidder on world markets" from your for-now superior position - shifting the burden elsewhere and driving lesser countries into extinction.
Peter Zeihan is already predicting a fairly massive famine over the next few years due to (1) wheat disruptions from RU/UKR conflict, (2) fertilizer production disruptions due to same, plus Chinese hoarding, plus natural gas supply disruptions, (3) increased cost of capital as the WEIRD boomers retire cutting into development aid, and (4) unintended side-effects of green policy re: mechanization of agriculture.
It does because a large part of the way money circulates now is through wages. The wage compensation percentage of GDP runs from 60% (Western Europe) in Germany to 10% in Venezuela. It looks like oil production is a major factor there, and even though Venezuela is nominally socialist that’s not getting redistributed. In the absence of massive redistribution (or perhaps universal share ownership) the demand for the products won’t be there in a fully automated luxury future. The likelihood is fully automated luxury feudalism.
If there are fierce labor shortages in the future, then any kids you have are likely to be able to do well for themselves in finding well-paid, rewarding, pleasant jobs.
>There is little credible evidence for that outcome.
A lot of smart people take this issue very seriously and have written about it at length. You ought to at least make a token effort to address the specific arguments and why you think they're wrong rather than just declaring there's "no credible evidence".
Right :)
They really need to get cracking on that: Deus Ex: Human Revolution established that Final Fantasy XXVII will exist (at least in poster form) by 2027, and here we are in 2022 and still at XV...
I mean, we know that the Flynn effect is real, and there are various theories about what it is. If it's childhood malnutrition, which I believe is the leading hypotheses, then we would expect any gains from that to eventually plateau as everyone gets fed.
I thought the leading hypothesis was cultural- being raised in a society with a higher level of abstraction in every day life (computers, etc.). If it was malnutrition you would think it would not be happening in places like the U.S. (where it stopped only fairly recently) and it would be g-loaded.
Logically it can't be the fact that a) IQ is highly heritable and b) low-IQ people always had the most children and c) there has not been a decrease in IQ
Even if your hypothesis is correct, in the past low education probably did not correlate very well with low IQ
Probably didn't correlate well with living in cities, either -- a lot of aristocrats were well-educated for their society, and spent most of their time living on their country estates.
Yeh. Or they could escape the plague by leaving.
In the past the rich had a better chance of surviving relative to the poor. Enterprising poor people who climbed the ladder either had more children, or their children had more children, those who survived to adulthood anyway.
Cities are population sinks but probably not for all classes equally.
Request fewer comments like this, it seems to just be creating social pressure to make it hard for people to talk about things that are concerning them, without really filling in any step of the argument.
I do not think a proper and informed knowledge of intellectual history is out of place in rational argument about the state of the world and the choices in front of us. I think @DannyK was well within bounds to bring up Grant's book. He was not using it to suggest that people advancing arguments about population growth and control are evil, but a corollary point that evil men have used the issue to justify their evil deeds.
The Grant book was very important in the inter war years. Fitzgerald put a reference to it in The Great Gatsby but in the mouth of the buffoonish antagonist Tom Buchanan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race#Reception_and_influence leading us to believe that he was not sympathetic to the argument and that his readers would think it was characteristic of boorish people.
I think it is important to understand the place of Malthusian thinking in the development of social science and literature in 20th century America. "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era" by Thomas C. Leonard (2016)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691169594/
As I wrote above. I am opposed to Malthusianism not just because it has been misused, but, more importantly, because it is just plain wrong.
BTW Grant was not very original see the wiki above cited. In that @DannyK is incorrect.
I wonder if his handle is a homage to the comedian, singer, actor Danny Kaye who was popular in the 50s and 60s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJzwC_8f6nA
Maybe that social pressure is a Chesterton's Fence.
Oh god, Scott.
I made several arguments against your piece about Black Lives Matter but they were among the ones that there was no space to answer.
1) I linked to several pieces in the NYT that said the same thing without making it sound like a racial dog whistle.
2) You would not acknowledge the fact that during the lock down, no one had a job to go to or classes to attend greatly increased the pool of demonstrators.
3) These massive crowds immediately put the police on the back foot and it became olly olly in free for anyone, black or white to act out on whatever antisocial impulse popped into their head. The destruction in large part had nothing to do with BLM.
4) There are video documented instances of a local white biker striking yet another match by smashing store front windows with a 4 pound hammer. I have one just like it for situations that call for ‘a bigger hammer’. He has been identified and there is a warrant for his arrest.
5) Putting your thumb on the scale for right wing media because they beat the ‘BLM protests were awful’ drum hard and often - the destruction was in fact awful, black people are not - is fucked up because their business model is to gin up hatred and white outrage. If you think that is a good thing, I don’t know what to tell you.
6) You gave short shrift to the emotional gut punch of the video of George Floyd’s death. You start your analysis with the destruction that followed.
7) What’s with the graphs of violence in countries without our complicated racial history?
I’ve held off on saying anything about this in case that article was an anomaly. But now this. I’m not calling you a racist. I am saying actual racists do love stuff like this. Pointing that fact out should not be a problem.
And you are the type of person to read someone that is loved by actual racists. Doesn't that make you part of the problem? Your points are unrelated to the current article, but it's not like Scott has to be racist to make those (alleged) mistakes. Even if racists love Scott. So what? We should be talking about the true and the good. Not "but will the racists have a favorable view of this?"
No I don’t think Scott is a racist. I do think he might enjoy dunking on the ‘bad people’ at the NYT.
Edit: I had actually clicked unsubscribe from ACX on the Substack gizmo before I saw Scott’s request to not point out the obvious. I got an email from you and Scott’s latest email too so apparently I’m doing something wrong.
This comment is a great example of https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/motivated-reasoning.
1. Why should we go out of our way to avoid making something "sound like a racial dog whistle?" A racial dog whistle is itself something that "sounds like" it is alluding to something actually racist, so you're claiming it's very important for us to avoid... sounding like someone who sounds like they might be alluding to racism? At that point, is two degrees of separation even enough? Shouldn't we also avoid sounding like someone who sounds like someone who sounds like someone who is racist?
3. Would you apply the same principle to the January 6 trespassers?
4. There are also video documented instances of black rioters shooting and killing white people and police officers.
5. What alternative do you propose? Ignore the truth when it's inconvenient for the left, to avoid giving points to the right (even when the right is correct)?
6. The video really wasn't much of an emotional gut punch. If you watched the full footage and looked closely, Floyd said "I can't breathe" while he was still standing up, so it's clear from the beginning that his difficulty breathing is drug-related. Then, Chauvin puts his knee on Floyd's shoulder blade, and nothing much happens after that.
7. Why would that be of interest? Sure, if you were having a discussion about sociology, it would be relevant to bring up racial history, but not every discussion is a sociology discussion.
If I show you how Scott used motivated reasoning in his essay will you listen?
Not related to Scott but your point 6
From the trial where Chauvin was found guilty of murder.:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/07/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-trial-479796?_amp=true
I can go on point by point if you like.
What’s wrong with sharing concerns that racists have if the concern is not racist itself?
Racists drink water. Should I think drinking water is unacceptable to any degree because of this?
Concerns related to demographics hover a little closer to The Actual Thing Racists Are Bad About than their hydration habits, surely.
Perhaps this kind of social pressure would be intuitively more acceptable if we labeled racism an infohazard.
Yes, that first part is true. DannyK said that worrying about population decline itself is not racist. That seems sufficient to me to not worry about it. "Some racists have beliefs that seem to hover close to your beliefs on an issue which is not racist itself" is not particularly insightful, and if you can count it as evidence it must be extremely weak evidence.
Racism is not a well defined word and is used to make people look bad. It does not provide particularly good insight into a situation. Some people think Scott Alexander is a racist. Now, you could have a 3 hour conversation about whether or not that is true, or you could just point to where Scott is wrong. Seems much better to just point to where he is wrong.
There used to be a strong correlation between being a racist and being bad. Now the accusation just means dissenting from the egalitarian critical social justice orthodoxy.
Some cultures, societies and civilizations are able to pull off incredible cultural continuity and preservation throughout the generations though. But I agree with you, culture tends to modify and be reinterpreted in different contexts, so this is probably not a great argument ("Japan's culture will be different with 1/3 non-native Japanese" -- It will and it will also be different even with 100% Japanese a century or two from now just like you said) and is probably an indirect coverup for a more primal reasoning of simply wanting your group's survival to continue. Maybe some other reasons too, but I don't want to keep writing.
My wife now isn't interchangeable with my wife ten years from now, but I neither want to force my wife to never change, nor would I be happy with replacing my wife with some woman who's a bit different from her.
I agree this is an unsatisfying response but I think ethical intuitions will always be unsatisfying.
If you replace your wife with a slightly different woman over the process of ten years rather than instantly, does that change your intuition?
The Theseus Wife Paradox.
Hm?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
But even if you did that, you'd still need it to be economically viable, scalable, and you still need to raise all those kids somehow up until they're productive educated adults. All of this is very expensive and takes a lot of time until you get to the point where they can contribute anything, if at all.
Now, I want to make a prediction here which might be wrong but whatever: Even if you could hypothetically mass produce babies on demand and engineer them to be very smart, beautiful, etc. it still largely wouldn't lead to many magical new breakthroughs in different fields. What would happen instead is increasing perfection and sophistication of things we already posses with some level of technological development and applied science. Other than that, society would ossify, fossilize and harden and just continue to live on as an animated corpse, trying to go to yet another planet, build yet another city, develop another app, etc. After the initial wave of the results from the new tech settles down, things get quite boring. Maybe if they make babies literally live inside VR in other specific settings and societies something else would happen, the most likely outcome being civilizational disintegration though. Idk...
Why do you think that our rulers are determined by IQ rather than "moxie"?
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/natural-aristocracy/
Read Greg Clark on turnover.
Like TGGP said, you should read Gregory Clark, specifically his book The Son Also Rises. You will see that elite status is inherited and that last names maintained higher status than you would expect if it was random. He goes into the reasons for thinking it's genetics.
The more direct way to see that cognitive ability is highly heritable is through studies on twins and people who were adopted. You can determine the proportion of variance that is attributable to genetics and the proportion that is attributed to the environment. If it was not genetic, you would think that adopted kids would be more like their adoptive parents than their birth parents. What they find is that genetics matters. In fact, all behavioral traits are heritable.
You may be interested in the concept of "regression to the mean"--I'm sure Scott has written about this before but I'm too lazy to find links. Basically, IQ *is* heritable but there are also random other factors, so it's quite unlikely that the number 1 smartest Gen Z kid is the offspring of the number 1 smartest millenial (or number 1 smartest couple, I guess). (But the number 1 smartest Gen Z kid probably *is* born to some top-10% parents.)
We believe it because we base our views on actual heritable studies, not some indirect inference based on faulty premises. You not believing in the heritability of IQ is a product of you not knowing about/understanding the intelligence research literature, not a failure in the reasoning of the people you disagree with. Sorry if that sounds strong, but you didn't pose this as a question, you made a statement implying people who disagree with you are being particularly foolish.
There's no reason to think leaders are or necessarily would be elected on solely the basis of their intelligence, so there's no reason to imagine Einstein or someone like him would stand an especially good chance at being elected.
And heritability doesn't mean "the same as your parents". It means what proportion of the observed variation in a trait is a result of the observed genetic variation in the population being looked at. Being a child genius seems to be almost entirely heritable, but not many child geniuses are born to former child geniuses.
1. We're not even ruled by the most intelligent people this generation, unless you think Joe Biden is the smartest person in the US. Why should this happen transgenerationally?
2. Chance and regression to the mean ensure that the single smartest person next generation probably won't be the kid of the single smartest person this generation. While the children of smart people are on average smarter than the children of dumb people, there's lots of noise, and the noise is most apparent at the very top and bottom.
3. This might be easier to understand if you looked at some trait that you knew was passed down parent to children. For example, the children of rich people are on average richer than the children of poor people (you don't have to believe this is genetic for it to work). But the richest people this generation are Elon Musk and Bill Gates, who came from mildly rich but not ultra-rich families. This doesn't disprove that parents can give wealth to their children, it just proves the process is noisy.
Joe Biden _is_ the Stephen Hawkins of politics. But more in the wheelchair/voicebox way than in the mad genius way.
And what is Donnie T then...?
No idea...I'm a Democrat. I think Biden is reasonably adequate and passing some good bills lately. My comment was entirely tongue in cheek. Donnie T, is sort of a mad genius though except in a clownlike and spectacularly incompetent (tripping over his own metaphorical feet kind of) way.
yeah. +1!
>wouldn't we be run by a [...] plutocracy of Rockefellers?
Some people might say that you're onto something, but those are called antisemites and worse in polite society.
The Rockefellers weren't Jewish. Are you thinking of the Rothschilds?
That’s ok. Automation pushing up wages is why we are richer than we were. Although maybe we need strong unions to guarantee that.
I am seeing that scenario in Italy and it's not nice. Like, not nice at all. Young people are full of hate, all the familist culture that was typical of our country is gone. The Italian equivalent of "ok boomer" is something roughly translatable as "ok, old piece of shit" , and we started saying it about 10 years before "ok boomer" was coined.
And old people really, really don't get why. After all, what's so wrong? Sure, they might have voted themselves some unsustainable benefits that weight so much on treasury that the rest of population gets Swedish taxation and Bulgarian services, but from their point of view their fault was only optimism. Sure, they keep voting themselves even more benefits, but doesn't everybody vote with their interests in mind? And it's their fault if they are outnumbering everybody?
As you said, it is taking the connotations of a class war. Old political rivalries are blurring: as long as you are young, there is some reason to hate your elders no matter your politics. Libertarianish? See above, plus so much regulatory capture to write an horror books for economists, never to be touched because hey, old people might be upset if something changes.
Leftist? Hey, what do you think if spending your 20s working for free so that some octuagenarian owner can afford a better suite in Sardinia, and maybe start paying you a pittance when you are wiser and older enough?
Progressive? Hey, you know how your boss considers sexual harassment a form of team building? Well, EVERY boss is like that, because none is younger than 60!
Seriously, I have seen political polarization in my generation going down a lot lately. Mostly because for any "kill landlords" or "offer communists an helicopter ride" post that disappeared, two about the glorious tradition of euthanizing old people whether they wanted or not appeared
> That said, regarding #6, I was recently startled by the release of the newest census results, which revealed that Canada (where I live) is becoming a country of olds with shocking rapidity.
My advice to anyone concerned about the age structure is to take a moment to consider the implications of the Demographic Transition model more fully.
In going from a high-fertility/high-mortality regime to a low-fertility/low-mortality one, you are necessarily going to have a number of generations whose size will exceed those that come after, because they were born during the high-fertility/low-mortality phase.
However, the same issue of concern - these people will not be replaced when they leave their productive period - also necessarily implies that these people will not be replaced when the time comes for the subsequent generation to retire.
In short, once the boom generations complete their journey up the population pyramid, these age imbalances may cease to be an issue.
My worthless prediction for future demographic trends is that populations will trend towards some sort of stability in the long run, fairly likely - at lower levels than we have today. This will probably be a Good Thing (there's a sweet spot where you have just enough people to get things done, but not so many that resource constraints start to kick in).
I think aesthetics and morality are sort of inseparable. I agree you need more assumptions than just "maximize happiness" to prove that the human race surviving is good, but I am willing to make (some of) those assumptions.
That dumb matter has created beings that can even consider this question is a miracle beyond imagining. It would be a tragedy beyond imagining if they were to die out so early in their potential lifetime, or even if they were to become moribund and muddle through as 21st-century idiots for a million years.
Call that aesthetics, if you like. If the prospect does not appall you, we have nothing to talk about.
Do you have a rational argument for your statement that "Individuals should be cared for because suffering is bad"? Or is that just a matter of taste on your part?
Perhaps you do think moral propositions can be deduced logically, in which case it would be interesting to hear why you think "suffering is bad" is one that can be logically deduced, but "humanity going extinct is bad" is not.
There's an asymmetry to your reasoning. You take "suffering is bad" as axiomatic, but it seems you don't take "joy is good" as also being axiomatic.
Beyond that, I think you have gone astray by selectively intellectualizing morality. You've just said that you don't have any logical arguments for your moral position - you just assume what you want to assume. But then you dismiss others' moral judgements by saying "I can't think of an argument" for that.
Doctor Mist's view - "That dumb matter has created beings that can even consider this question is a miracle beyond imagining" - is a sense of wonder at the goodness of life that should not be dismissed on the basis that you can't think of an argument for it. Even if we suppose that logical argumentation is relevant here, do you really think that you have thought of all valid arguments, so your not thinking of one for this view is a decisive point against it?
> What I don't see is the offering of a cogent alternative moral foundation from which one could deduce the badness of human extinction, except relativism
If you haven't already read A. J. Ayer you'll find him reaffirming.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/
I'm not an Ayerist, I think there are some cogent alternatives to choose from where you scale up from values that appear universal. But agree this is nontrivial work and sympathize with the appeal of Ayer and the error theorists out there.
You don't think "person alive + happy" is better than "person does not exist"? Personally I think it is good that I exist and have a happy life instead of not existing, and IMO it would also be good if future people also existed and had happy lives rather than not existing.
I'm not sure why you think my preference to go on living is important/valid, but my preference to have more humans in the future is not.
I don't think I follow this attempt to take the perspective of the world - "the world", as you say, is obviously not an entity with preferences. Shouldn't I try to implement my own preferences? (Isn't that what it means to have preferences?)
Really? In my impression it's not hard to find people who think that second-generation immigrants aren't fully British/French/German/etc.
I agree. Making belonging to a nation binary is a gross oversimplification. I am myself the child of immigrants, and I've never fully identified with the nation I grew up in, and I don't expect others to fully identify me with that nation, even though I pass as belonging to that ethnic group.
But my point is that it's considered a right-wing view, not the mainstream view.
Anyhow, having thought a bit about it I may have been exaggerating and simplifying, so I'm sorry, I'm deleting that comment.
Some Asian nations are like Japan, and to a less extent some European countries, but most states in the world are multi-ethnic. But they are multi-ethnic in a somewhat similar way as the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather than multi-ethnic in a present-day US or Canadian sense.... Think of most Latin American countries, India and Indonesia in Asia, and definitely most African countries - relevant since Africa is the "coming continent". (The 22nd will likely be Africa's century.)
The 22nd century will be the century of AGIs or post-humans (as will most of the 21st)
Probably agreed, but with a large uncertainty about the likely date of the switchover. _Maybe_ in part of the 21st, but AI has progressed more slowly than expected before, and might again.
Blessed if you consider GDP growth to be more important than having a unique and cohesive culture, say. But I'm sure at some point all this atomistic materialism will eventually make people happy.
Pretty much. "Empowering diverse communities of people to achieve change we can believe in"-type stuff never really goes anywhere.
I guess some sort of Caliphate is technically option 3?
You could have a Roman-style civilisation-state, where being Roman (Canadian, Japanese...) is a matter of following Roman (etc.) culture rather than being genetically decended from the founding population.
Then again, the people who believe in increased immigration are generally against making immigrants assimilate to the host country's culture, so in practical terms I'm not sure that's an option at the moment.
If you parse the corporate/quango language, then a world religion, say, is quite literally "[ethnically/geographically] diverse communities of people [trying to] achieve change we can believe in." It's not as meaningless as all that.
I do think the one exciting possibility of a globalised future - as against plenty of potential gloom - is human assortment based on shared values/ideology rather than (if you'll forgive a stray personal opinion) the dumb default of ornamental culture, ethnicity, and nationhood.
Why would you expect those shared values/ideology of a globalised future be any less dumb or ornamental than what you call the dumb default? You do not like what people have constructed in terms of culture/ethnicity and nationhood so far. Fair enough.
But since people have made that what you don't like already, why is it any better if it's ethnically and geographically diverse?
"Ornamental culture" is the bits that are left of cultures once they're fed through the cosmopolitan meat-grinder. If you're going for nationalism vs atomic individualism, culture would be the major determinant of behaviour and attitudes, which are the bits now left of atomic individualism.
To be clear, I think atomic individualism's probably underrated, and I'd really doubt it's reversible for people who've been absorbed by it. I don't think intentional communities organised around shared interests would work though, as no-one's going to surrender their autonomy to a group that they're able to leave (which is what molecular collectivism entails, and why it would probably suck for someone who hadn't been raised in it), so it'd just be a community when it's convenient.
"when our farm teams, so to speak, aren't producing and don't seem likely to."
Part of the reason for that could be the fact that massive immigration causes housing shortages though.
If you don't build housing. If the immigration system were still routing new arrivals to the wilderness to go build their own log cabins and homestead some land, this would not be an issue.
There's only so much space in a city with hundreds of thousands or millions of people though, even if you build enough housing it would still lead to congestion/commutes and unaffordable housing in the center.
Sure.
Japan is famous for this: you can live there for decades and never really be considered "Japanese" - but if Japan and America are the two ends of the spectrum, I'd guess a lot of the world is closer on the America side of the spectrum - most countries have had pretty significant shifts over the times.
Consider China: while some might think of it as predominantly ethnically Han, it's a lot more diverse and than that for centuries, (and in fact - China's fear is more the opposite: they're actively trying to keep their diverse country united)
The two countries you’ve exempted there are Brexit Britain and France with the strongest far right party in Europe. The U.K. is multinational of course, but that’s likely to break up. In any case preserving say Spanish culture, and its distinct regional culture, is an important task. The US is a blank slate which is probably culturally improved with any level of immigration, but Europe is already culturally diverse. Much of what diversity exists in America is due to immigration.
Beyond that the causes of immigration to Europe is often wars and refugee crises, often caused by US meddling. Which causes strains. And of course the US was building a literal wall under the last administration. It doesn’t look like the idea of an open pro immigrant society is universal.
It’s pretty dubious to call the US a nation state? What’s the nation? It’s definitely a state of course.
Yeh the qualifier was doing a lot of work, though. There were plenty of examples to pick. Ireland has no anti immigration parties if note.
It massively depends on what are and aren't "far-right parties."
The UK's actual neo-nazis are (perhaps ironically) really ill-disciplined and disorganised, so don't presently have much of a party. When they last did (the BNP), it was pretty small and peaked at 6.2% of the vote in a European Parliament election, slipping to 1.9% in the general election the next year.
UKIP, and then the Brexit Party (both now more or less defunct) peaked at 30.52% in the European Parliament and 12.64% of the vote in a general election.
Virtually no-one in the UK describes pre-Brexit UKIP or the Brexit Party as far-right. The BNP et al are extreme even by the standards of the European far right more generally, being roughly equivalent to David Duke in the US.
The French National Rally is huge now, but are either on the left-most boundary of the far right or are else pretending to be.
Hungary and Poland are a bit more complicated - Jobbik were very far-right but have done a weird 180, and Fidesz have moved a long way to the right whilst in government. Law and Justice in Poland are less extreme, at least on racial issues, than the National Rally are now.
You probably need to multiply the support of each potentially far-right party by percentage of how far-right they are to get a good read on a country overall.
The UK's also barely multinational; the English/Scots/Welsh/Ulstermen/Irish/Cornish all speak the same language, have basically the same culture other than a few quirky traditions (most of which were "revived" in the late 19th century).
The more relevant point is that "British" referring to citizenship is accepted by everyone outside the far right (probably going back to the idea that everyone who lived in the British Empire was equally a British subject) but it's really rare to describe non-white people as English, or for them to describe themselves as such.
Sure. Not multinational. Just one constituent nation likely to break away and another that was at war just a few decades ago, which might also break away.
You are right on the second count though, British isn’t an ethnic group
That's dubious. Scottish independence any time soon seems fairly unlikely (Metaculus puts it at 19% by 2030). By contrast, Metaculus is more bullish on Northern Ireland having a referendum by then, but given that can only happen if a majority of the population support reunification in opinion polls (currently at about 30%), that also seems pretty unlikely.
Sorry, who told you that about Italy? That's plainly not true. Also, for that matter, it seems to me to be plainly not true for any Western European country
Yeah, it's totally true that the European idea of assimilation goes way, way deeper than the American idea of integration. Unfortunately, it's also true that European deep down consider nationalities to be mutually exclusives, so that somebody might be perfectly assimilated even by the very high European standards and still be considered foreigner if they happen to refer to themselves by the nationality of their parents.
But this does not absolutely mean that it's impossible to be really felt as a national, it's just harder.
(Also, there are some shortcuts, like adopting a regional/urban identity. In that case the recognition of the national one comes as a bonus)
Ah, tu sei il tipo convinto che le risposte caustiche e i memini sfottò su Twitter siano una minaccia esistenziale alla civiltà moderna. Senza offesa, ma non mi sembri esattamente la persona più affidabile per sapere come si sente l'italiano medio, men che meno la casalinga di Voghera.
So che in questo periodo l'erba è tutta giallognola e bruttina, ma ti potrebbe comunque far bene toccarla un po'.
It's 92% han, and han are the overwhelming majority of all positions of power and prestige (government, business, academia, media).
They have a huge number of ethnic groups, but its irrelevant if they're all combined much smaller than the majority. Practically speaking a 50% white 50% black country would be vastly more diverse than China with numerous ethnic minorities.
They're also diverse in a very different way to somewhere like the US - most of the minority groups are in fringe regions like Yunnan, Tibet, Turkestan etc, with a distribution more like Native Americans than urban immigrant groups.
I would say China is exactly as Japan. Highly racist - not necessarily in the meaning that they consider other people inferior, but just that they are separate races with intrinsic differences. Also tied to belief they have special culture etc. that can't possibly be comparable to others. The chances of these two countries resorting to mass immigration to solve labor shortage problems is close to zero, even if only involves somewhat proximate cultures say east asia. Africans? Forget it. At best there will be some attempt to rally the diaspora similar to what Japan did in 80s/90s with Japanese-Brazilian guestworkers. China also may import some amount of foreign SEA brides due to shortage of women. That's it. I have less knowledge about Korea, Taiwan etc. but strongly suspect it's same spiel.
How would this happen? Most rich people in rich countries have enough money that they could easily afford more children if they wanted, they just don't. How does carrying capacity affect fertility decisions? And why didn't Amish people or Orthodox Jews get the message?
It seems to me that the Amish would reach carrying capacity pretty fast, because they cannot live in urban areas that rely on electricity. The carrying capacity of the countryside is much lower.
I'm not sure how the Amish work. If each family has seven kids, assume three of them are boys and will need farmland to be proper Amish. One will probably be able to take over dad's acres, but that leaves two boys who either have to buy farmland or become hired hands. Buying farmland, even for highly efficient Amish farmers, can be expensive, and it isn't clear that hired hands are as likely to sire seven children as farmers.
Lots of Amish are not farmers and have found other occupations. If they need to travel somewhere for work, they can ride in a shuttle bus (but not drive it).
The Amish (and the Plain Mennonites - see my explainer https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3429.0.html) are not nearly all farmers--a lot of them are tradesmen of one sort or another. But the dynamic of needing land and markets means that new communities start all the time: there were very few Plain churches in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1960, and now there are Plain churches everywhere in those states.
Immigrants with less money than average Americans have more kids than average Americans (and often more kids than they would have back home). It's not economics giving people low Darwinian fitness, it's a novel culture.
It's economics but it's class-dependent. I make about 3x the UK's average income (that's where I live), but I couldn't afford to have kids on that because it's not enough to educate them, house them etc *to the required standard.* The big problem in most developed countries is people being worse off than their parents, so they can't afford to raise their kids in a manner they deem acceptable. If your only concern is that the state won't take them away, then almost everyone can afford kids, but that's not the financial level people make the decision on.
If downward mobility is unnacceptable, then that will of course reduce fertility. As Greg Clark wrote in "A Farewell to Alms", the modern English population is descended from the downwardly mobile children of successful farmers.
Isn't your first point predicting that fertility should correlate with income? Because this isn't true, it's the opposite. (At least in the US, I didn't check other countries.) I can certainly believe that money influences the decision to have a child (or more children), but there must be another factor correlated with income that works in the opposite direction and overwhelms it.
You left out by far the most important factor: having children carries positive *status* among high-fertility groups, or at least the failure to produce many children carries negative status. They are deliberately pro-natal.
"Lo, children are a heritage from the LORD, and the fruit of the womb is his reward."
Among the Plain, this is facilitated by the fact that they have relatively few other markers of status -- no fancy dress, homes, cars, etc.
"the sort of place where having kids *gives* you money since they can do manual labor for you"
This is a meme that always seems to pop up, but it's biologically absurd that the average child would ever have a positive NPV to his parents, any more than laying an egg conveys a positive NPV to the hen or the apple to the apple tree. Though I do believe it's a meme that, while false, had positive survival value in past societies. Kids were less expensive in agricultural societies, but they did not make people materially richer.
Don't we see population collapses like that in hunter/prey dynamics sometimes?
My understanding is that adult males are particularly likely to die during famines because they require more calories to survive.
Wouldn't they also be better at securing their food, though (by violence if necessary)? It's not as though it's automatically distributed equally.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/04/feminizing_fami.html
For thousands of years, the only predators that humans had to worry about were cities. It seems like it's pretty easy to run away from cities. But maybe it isn't any more.
You are forgetting about worms, viruses, bacteria and other parasites?
I think this is almost right, but two items maybe to add in:
1) humans are prediction engines and prediction increases (not necessarily accuracy but the number and consensus of predictions) with education and communication. We only have to imagine children starving in the future to stop having them because we now have the ability to control our own fertility. So if you change the population curve to something like “the projected average human consensus population curve for how worth showing up for the future will be” then I agree.
2) carrying capacity is a function of our technology. With a cave, a fire, and a couple spears maybe that’s 150. With agriculture maybe a few thousand. With fertilizers, modern techniques to get water, etc millions. We could be much more than we are now if we started asking ourselves what we need to increase ourselves.
I see it as humanity’s responsibility to act as the reproductive organ of the Earth. We need lots of us to go out and do that.
Having kids doesn't pay off even in less developed economies, people have them because natural selection has primed us to want them.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/was_having_kids.html
As long as some culture exists which ignores the Demographic Transition, they will be able to expand their population until reaching Malthusian limits (just like other species of animals).
That only applies as an equilibrium over long enough time spans.
If conditions change quickly enough, Malthusian limits aren't reached.
Eg like with today's population in rich countries.
There are populations in rich countries which are still growing: subpopulations that have separated themselves from a culture deleterious in Darwinian terms.
Yes, and those populations haven't reached any Malthusian limits. And might never reach them, if things keep changing.
The US is one of the least Malthusian countries around, and those subpopulations started as very tiny proportions of the US population.
Yes. And if nothing changes about technology or future, those subpopulations could eventually hit Malthusian limits.
But I don't think technology nor culture will oblige and stand still.
The agricultural bit there is dodgy since it ignores child labour.
Not too dodgy, child labour doesn't typically provide more value than caring for a child consumes.
"Child labour + support in old age > cost of raising child" does not require "child labour > cost of raising child" (your post I'm responding to) nor "support in old age > cost of raising child" (Caplan's paper).
Yes, that's true.
Children are helpless and provide no labor when very young. Resources are flowing from adults to children then. Once children grow up enough to do some child labor (generally much less productive than adults)... their parents are STILL producing more resources than they consume.
"For most of human history children were a net positive in economic terms."
I don't believe that. People were not competing with each other to adopt children, instead the tradition was to designate someone you trust very much as a godparent to look after them. Single mothers were rare in pre-industrial England because they just couldn't support a child on their own.
Genuine question here, no snark.
If you're convinced the technological singularity is approx 30 years away, and that it's likely to be ~bad for humans (AI take over etc), then why are you trying for a baby with your wife?
I don't think this is the same kind of antinatalist point of "the world is bad, why bring more life into it". It seems like you seriously believe that something is different about this point in history, and to me it then seems a bit odd that you'd want to plunge someone new in at the deep end just when the robots take over!
How do you reconcile this?
PS: forgive me if I've misremembered about the baby part, think you said that a whole ago!
I don't think he thinks it's necessarily going to be bad. But definitely different.
There's some chance I'm wrong about a singularity, there's some chance we make it through the singularity, and if I'm wrong about both those things I'd rather give my kid 30 years of life than none at all. Nobody gets more than about 100 anyway and 30 and 100 aren't that different in the grand scheme of things. I'd feel an obligation not to bring kids into a world that would have too much suffering but I think if we die from technological singularity it will be pretty quick. I don't plan on committing suicide to escape and I don't see why I should be not bringing life into the world either.
Isn't that always the argument for adopting kids? Does the singularity change it at all?
Don't tell anyone, but I'm actually not a perfect utility maximizer.
Having kids is the perfect utilitarian decision. Either we'll have a singularity and everyone dies, then our one or two extra generations are rounding errors in the grand scheme of things, or there isn't a singularity and the best thing we can do is to continue the human race.
but having a kid would maxamize your own utility as compared to adopting. it seems youre still being a utiltarian, just in the sense of “what makes the world most how I want it” not “what makes the world most like the average of all human values wants it”
Ha ha!
If you don't actually want to adopt a child, you're probably not maximizing utility by adopting one. Being brought up by an adoptive parent who didn't really want you probably makes for a crappy upbringing.
I used to want to adopt when I was younger, but I've come around to feeling otherwise as I've come to think that it's very likely it would give me poor chances of being matched with a child I'd actually relate to, and I don't think I'd be a very good parent to a child I related to poorly. Some people might, and I think they're better candidates to adopt than I am.
I think a utilitarian attitude encourages actually crunching the numbers where possible (even if only made up ones) to check on whether uncertain cases are likely to be worthwhile. But in general, I think we should start with a default of extreme skepticism that choices which really fail to make us happy are worthwhile. What are we trying to trade off that happiness for, and can that trade work at scale?
"there's no Effective Altruist case for having kids of your own"
Highly doubtful. You don't think there's any difference between a world with Scott's kids and lots of people like them, and a world full of foster kids raised by Scott?
People with eugenic impulses do tend to think it is people like them whose genes should propagate through time and people unlike them who shouldn't, but I don't think there's a lot of reason to believe that people following these impulses to their logical ends results in a world that is better off in terms of advancing general welfare.
There is a total utilitarian case for having more kids, which has always struck me as more sensible than average utilitarianism. Yes, I embrace the "repugnant conclusion" of massive numbers of people less happy than us. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/poor-folks-do-smile.html
Yeah because utility maximization is a pretty atrocious ethical theory to try and live your life by (which is why no one does).
If so, Effective Altruists really need to remember that Effective Altruists are moral subjects as well as actors.
> Question: why not adopt a foster kid instead?
Underappreciated distinction: fostering and adoption are very different things, with different backgrounds, process, and results. A fostered child is very likely to have been removed from their previous environment by state services after multiple years of neglect, and placed with a volunteer on a presumably-temporary basis with reunion with the biological parents the nominally preferred end goal. Something like half get that reunion, with roughly a quarter ending in adoption (and not always adoption by the foster parents).
While there is a shortage of foster homes in the US, there is definitely *not* a shortage of people willing to adopt infants less than a few years old. This is where homo economicus would pipe up about the inevitable results of a market where the price is set at zero by fiat, but I'm not quite cold blooded enough to endorse that position.
You have to be a special kind of machoistic to want to put yourself through that.
Know this might be overly personal and at the same time highly meaningless coming from an internet stranger, but good for you and your wife. That takes real courage. There’s certainly a possible future worth showing up for.
All good points. Your last part about suicide reminds me of Tolstoy's Eastern fable, escaping the dragon by clinging onto the twig.
The chance we make it through a singularity is a pretty convincing argument for having kids imo, since life in a good-end singularity is likely to be far higher utility than now (to the extent that it probably dwarfs the other worlds in weight even if the chance of being in this world is only a few percent), and there's always some chance you will die or otherwise be rendered unable to choose to have kids before you know you're in that world, which would deprive them of that utility since they don't exist.
Not to mention there are perfectly selfish reasons to have kids as well -- they're often great at coming up with things to do and injecting variety into the dullness of everyday life.
"I'd rather give my kid 30 years of life than none at all."
What's the cutoff point with this philosophy? If you knew your child will die at age 15, would you go ahead and have the child? What about percentage of suffering? If your child were to suffer, say 30% of his or her life, would you go ahead and have the child? Does it matter whether the suffering is distributed throughout the life, stacked at the end, or towards the beginning?
I think suffering and death work completely differently. I'd be nervous about bringing a child into the world who would face any abnormal amount of suffering, but I don't think it would be morally wrong to bring a child into the world who would die at 5 or 10 or whatever (though it might be unfair to my family since they would have to grieve them)
I can't remember what I thought at 10 or 30, but I'm 37 now and if I got hit by a truck tomorrow I would be happy to have lived even for this relatively short period. I think if I had to suffer a lot then I would be upset and regret coming into existence.
Agreed on the big difference between suffering and death. I had a friend who got hit by a car and died instantly, and while I think it's horrible and I miss him, I am also a bit jealous that he didn't have to face death or go through the dying process.
It seems as if this being ok with a child's death depends on the child meeting their doom suddenly and without prior knowledge of it, because any knowledge of upcoming demise would cause untold suffering. Does this mean you think the AI apocalypse will be instantaneous? Because any period of time from the recognition of impending doom and the actualization of it would be utterly terrible. It could potentially last years. Also, what makes you so sure the AI apocalypse will more like a paperclip maximizer and less like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream? I can see something like that happening based on a misaligned goal of the AI to keep people alive.
" because any knowledge of upcoming demise would cause untold suffering"
seems like an awfully strong take. Unless you expect a particularly terrible form of demise (e.g. no mouth) isn't this literally what nearly every single person eventually encounters? Barring some singularity or step change in the advancement of medicine there's a >60% I'll die 35-45 years from now, quite possibly in a pretty unpleasant fashion, for my parents it's more grim, for the surviving grandparents even more so (one is likely to die in the next year or two and is already in pretty bad shape quality of life wise from mouth cancer).
Most models of the AI apocalypse have it happening very fast, since if one could see it coming years in advance it would be relatively easy to stop (that specific AI). Based on the speed of response to the pandemic, I don't expect governments to admit the threat is real until there's less than 24 hours left to live :/
(N.b. I personally am not a doomsayer about AI, in that I don't think it's more likely than not in my lifetime, but much like nuclear war even small odds are very bad)
What about quantum immortality arguments that imply any conscious being brought into existence has a chance of eternal suffering in their immortality? Seems like those sort of arguments would dominate any kind of Pascal's wager type considerations.
I'm pretty sure utility is undefined when considering an infinite multiverse scenario, and no conclusions can be drawn.
For an incomplete example, suppose you conclude the probability of infinite suffering through quantum immortality is morally wrong. You are then duty bound to maximally extinguish life to limit the number of universes where suffering can exist (infinity - human civilization), which means you must now weight the probability of eternal suffering of creating your child (infinity * (human civilization in our universe - your hypothetical child and their descendants)) vs. the extinguishing of all suffering should your child or their descendants manage to figure out how to extinguish life in all universes (infinity * probability of human civilization influenced by you or your descendants figuring out multi-universe WMD and using it).
I'm not sure exactly what the math would be but I think some infinities would turn out to be larger than others.
There's ~20 influential interpretations of quantum mechanics and at least one implies quantum immortality, assuming each interpretation is roughly equally, likely that makes the immortality infinity quite large, definitely a lot bigger than P(the extinguishing of all suffering should your child or their descendants manage to figure out how to extinguish life in all universes).
But yeah maybe that kind of calculation just isn't possible in principle, not sure if that result would transfer to all types of Pascal's wagers.
Then the decision you actually make doesn't matter because you have to consider all possible multiverses including the ones where you make the opposite decision
“ What's the cutoff point with this philosophy? If you knew your child will die at age 15, would you go ahead and have the child?”
Honestly, yeah.
Similarly, I would prefer being born and living to 15 over not being born at all.
As someone with a nine year old I would say just about now is the time where if they suddenly dies in an accident or had some devastating fatal illness, I would feel like they had gotten to cash out some of the investment and life in them and live a bit of their own life and own projects.
Five year old isn’t there yet. If he were to die tomorrow and you could somehow magic it all away, I might (if not for the emotion/memories involved).
But by the time they are nine they are little people with little interests and projects and a stable personality. They have started “living life themselves”, and are less just a “pet” in training of their parent.
Kudos for tackling the question directly. I'm really interested in what number people would come up with if forced to give an answer, might lobby to get it included in one of the reader surveys next time those come around.
I think a "pet" (and even a real pet) could be happy that they live (even if they could not call it that way). On the other hand, there are gloomy scenarios that can end or threaten the lives of humans of all ages, and many of them can also be very traumatizing.
The Darwinian response is long enough to reproduce.
Isn't the key point here that Scott doesn't KNOW 30 years or 15 years or any other number. It's all speculation. Would the prospective kid want a shot at 30 or 60 or 90? I think YES.
Would you advise your child to avoid having children of his/her/etc. own ? After all, by the time your child is grown, the Singularity will only be a few years away, right ?
People who argue themselves out of having children are an excellent example of maladaptive intelligence.
I mean, the odds should be clearer by then - I expect the decision will seem obvious one way or the other.
Yup. Also, kids are cute & fun. You get to watch all the early Pixar films 100 times. (The good ones!)
I’ve never understood the perspective that “there will be unforeseen challenges in the near future so it’s best to not bring any humans into existence to experience it”.
Humans are always facing new challenges. I’m glad my parents were born, even though the future at the time of their birth was radically uncertain and dangerous.
Heck same story with my grandparents, and my great grandparents. Who in their right mind would have babies after the events of the Great War, or the 30 years War, in the midst of the Cold War, and just as the future was looking to be even worse? Well, I’m quite glad people were short sighted enough to do so.
Erasmus said something similar in "In Praise of Folly".
"Who in their right mind would have babies after the events of the Great War, or the 30 years War, in the midst of the Cold War, and just as the future was looking to be even worse?"
True. I suspect (but don't really know) that every generation sees their times as uniquely dangerous and momentous. I suppose that there are uniquely bad times to live, but I doubt that anyone can forecast them with any accuracy, certainly not the decades in advance that one would want if it were influencing one's fertility decisions. ( I, personally, am childfree, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the historical moment. )
If you're up against Malthusian limits, then you are in relatively bad times.
Agreed. There are other possibilities as well which are less predictable: Wars (particularly long ones like the 30 years' war), plagues, extended periods of bad weather (e.g. the "little ice age"), unpredictable crop failures (e.g. "Irish Potato Famine" - though these usually wouldn't span most of a lifetime), particularly bad rulers (especially if they can sit on the throne for decades).
I might not be that smart, but I see our current time as fairly stable and not very momentous. A good time to have kids (I have two and hope to have more), invest for the long term and make decisions for the long term. As someone who lived through the 80’s, I’m always struck by how similar the 80’s and 90’s feel to now, whereas the 50’s and 60’s feel like a complete different historical epoch.
Hmm... I don't see the current time as either particularly stable or particularly unstable. I was too young to remember the Cuban missile crisis, but there were a number of public nuclear threats after that - and several near accidents only revealed years later. Putin's nuclear threats this year look approximately comparable, perhaps marginally less worrisome.
There are always potential long term threats being aired. Currently global warming has the spotlight - at least it has reasonably well understood physics! But in general, the probability and severity of any long term threat is very hard to assess.
As I mentioned upthread, I, personally, am childfree, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the historical moment. ( I dislike hassles and time sinks, and children add an entire category of hassles and time sinks. )
If it's 30 years, you might want a bunch of your kids in their twenties to help fight the robots with. They might be the difference between victory and defeat.
You may see it as plunging "someone new" into the apocalypse. Or you might also see it as pluging a compound being of yourself and the other parent. This is just commiting more of yourself, in as far as you are define yourself by your membership in and ownership of your family.
Has anyone written extensively about how AI would, uhh, kill us all, and why it might choose a quick painless method over something more gruesome but perhaps less resource intensive?
A common argument re quick AI victory is that a powerful intelligence is much more likely to want to maximize risk of success than to minimize resource usage. A plan that involves slowly and painfully exterminating humans is much more likely to fail than simply coordinating a nanobot swarm to release a neurotoxin that kills everyone instantly before we even realize we shave anything to worry about
The first 5 minutes of idiocracy sums it up
See section 7 on dysgenics!
I’ve a feeling we’ve dropped 2.5 points or more already in the west, hidden by the Flynn effect.
I'm having difficulties parsing this. Do you mean "would have dropped 2.5 points if not for the Flynn Effect", or are you saying that the Flynn Effect is measurement error? Or what?
yeh, that's a good point. IQ is after all the only thing being measured and it is either dropping or it isn't. I believe we have dropped in real intelligence (G) but the Flynn effect is measuring artefacts that are not that important to the functioning of society, spatial ability and so on, and is missing some of that drop. No hard evidence.
Or you could argue that people are getting slightly dumber, but having environmental obstacles to actual maximum eliminated quickly enough that the average is going up.
Average person can say get to 110, but social/environmental issues kept the average at 100. Then 10 years later average person can max at 108, but the barrier mean most get to 104.
"In general, less educated people reproduce less than uneducated people (although this picks up slightly at the doctorate level)."
First "less" should be gone. (This was a confusing one!)
You're right, thanks.
"And I notice it’s weird to be worried both that the future will be racked by labor shortages, and that we’ll suffer from technological unemployment and need to worry about universal basic income. You really have to choose one or the other."
Of course those two are inconsistent. The correct answer is that technological unemployment is a myth. There is little credible evidence for that outcome. Some who talk about it are (consciously or unconsciously) motivated by a desire to promote UBI for independent reasons.
I'm not particularly "worried" about labor shortages, but of these two outcomes, I consider it to be the one with more evidence, by far.
Hm, maybe a better way to think about it would be the amount of labor it takes to maintain a certain standard of living. The existence of agricultural technology meant that we needed only about 2% as many farmers as before; the other ~98% of people were able to go into producing things other than food without any decrease to our food-related quality of living. If robots mean we only need 2% as many everything as before, the other people can either do new stuff that raises our quality of living, or be technologically unemployed, I'm agnostic as to which but it doesn't seem to imply decreasing quality of living except for distributional reasons.
Yes, I agree that's a better way to think about it. New technology shifts what labor is needed.
I see robots increasingly used in manufacturing, warfare, construction, and selected other high exertion/risk functions, but nowhere near "most everything." Similar story with AI: real impacts but nowhere near "most everything."
I think there will always be plenty of work for humans to do. There may still be difficulties, but they may be more cultural and psychological than literal lack of work. For example, it could be the jobs are plentiful but increasingly shifted towards high cognitive demands, and so are not well matched to a portion of the population.
Exactly. Humans are pretty great and relatively cheap robots.
Compared to existing robots in most tasks. In 100 years time maybe humans have no chance of competing.
Naw, any robot that can do what a barman does will be prohibitively expensive.
That's true, both at present and for the near future. I do expect robotics to improve, but incrementally, not in any way that ends up with little work for humans to do.
The real problem with robots is that what you really want for a mass production robot is the opposite of what you want for a general purpose robot.
Robots used for many forms of mass production will always be expensive because they have to be custom built to task as there's poor economy of scale.
Nobody said AI is there yet. If it were, we wouldn't even be discussing this.
However, if AI does get there this century, it will likely be very suddenly relative to a position where it is far off (due to recursive self improvement).
Additionally, the main jobs that will be destroyed first by AGI will be white collar jobs, not robots performing manual labor (that it currently cannot perform). Which means a lot of people who would have otherwise gone into white collar jobs would instead be in the market for jobs involving labor not easily replaced by machines. Which sucks for them, but it does mean that there won't be labor shortages if the pupation falls.
We get massively richer because AI and robots can do so much stuff cheaply, but some jobs are no longer human jobs because they've been automated away. If there are still things people (at least the owners of the robots) want done that can't be done by robots/AI, this ought to lead to new jobs being created to do stuff that previously was too expensive to pay anyone to do.
This is how automation has worked so far. Many individuals were made worse off because some new technology killed their job or industry, but overall, we still had plenty of stuff we wanted done that we were willing to pay people to do.
There's no theoretical limit on the number of people who can work in service-oriented industries, especially home nursing, child care, etc. Even if humans were no longer needed to work producing anything at all, we could just pay each other for basic services (including accompanying children, the elderly, handicapped/special needs) and still have full employment.
Scott has also talked about the concept of Slack before. There's always room for more Slack, which can take many forms. Reducing class sizes at school, hiring redundant employees to back each other up, lots of ways to increase Slack and hire more individuals. The Western world has a LOT of Slack compared to the pre-industrialized world, and appears to be a normal result of vastly increased wealth. Children as young as six were routinely needed to do productive labor, and now people continue to consume vast resources from society (especially in the form of education, but also entertainment, parent's time/effort, as well as basic supplies like food and clothing) until 18-25 and nobody bats an eye.
On the agricultural note, the reason we have so many people is due to nitrogen fixation for fertilizer and the Green Revolution, which is the reason The Population Bomb and other 1960s doomers ended up wrong; they simply did not account for a massive increase in agricultural productivity.
However, many people have raised concerns about the environmental impact of mass nitrogen fertilizer farming, with some countries aiming to reduce their emissions. If we do this broadly then we simply won't be able to feed the current population, and would potentially face mass starvation if population was not already peaking.
In that regards underpopulation allows us to mitigate the environmental damage that mass fertilizer use has caused and continues to cause, at the cost of people not being born who wouldn't be born anyway due to whatever societal reasons.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-govt-sets-targets-cut-nitrogen-pollution-farmers-protest-2022-06-10/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/trudeau-spars-with-farmers-on-climate-plan-cutting-fertilizer-grain-output
My guess is we're just not going to reduce emissions if that means eating less.
My point is that we don't need to eat less if there's less people eating, which seems to be happening naturally anyway
Population is still growing, just at a slower rate. I don't think we'll actually get to shrinking total world population, though growth for enough time will eventually hit Malthusian limits.
See Sri Lanka and nitrogen protests in Netherlands as counter-examples.
It is possible for such trends to reverse - like with EU increasing coal burning emissions due to potential gas shortages - but "just starving/freezing" from less production cannot be ruled out.
And you can also "just buy replacements that go to highest bidder on world markets" from your for-now superior position - shifting the burden elsewhere and driving lesser countries into extinction.
I don't understand your last paragraph. What has made the position superior? What is being replaced?
I think Shalcker just means rich countries with low birth rates buying up most of the food on international markets and letting poor countries starve.
Peter Zeihan is already predicting a fairly massive famine over the next few years due to (1) wheat disruptions from RU/UKR conflict, (2) fertilizer production disruptions due to same, plus Chinese hoarding, plus natural gas supply disruptions, (3) increased cost of capital as the WEIRD boomers retire cutting into development aid, and (4) unintended side-effects of green policy re: mechanization of agriculture.
It does because a large part of the way money circulates now is through wages. The wage compensation percentage of GDP runs from 60% (Western Europe) in Germany to 10% in Venezuela. It looks like oil production is a major factor there, and even though Venezuela is nominally socialist that’s not getting redistributed. In the absence of massive redistribution (or perhaps universal share ownership) the demand for the products won’t be there in a fully automated luxury future. The likelihood is fully automated luxury feudalism.
If there are fierce labor shortages in the future, then any kids you have are likely to be able to do well for themselves in finding well-paid, rewarding, pleasant jobs.
>There is little credible evidence for that outcome.
A lot of smart people take this issue very seriously and have written about it at length. You ought to at least make a token effort to address the specific arguments and why you think they're wrong rather than just declaring there's "no credible evidence".