GBRK
1d ago
I'm surprised to see this entire discussion of watches pass by without a single reference to smartwatches. I understand that you're significantly influenced by the idea of a watch as an investment piece... But i feel like it's are least worth mentioning that we do still have a class of watches designed primarily for functionality. My Garmin Fenix coming in handy literally every day. And while the design perhaps isn't up to rolex standards, a smartwatch is still its own type of social signal. Given how often I see them worn by high-earning men in IT leadership, I associate them with what we in the business call "technical leadership." I.E., the management-class people who's eyes don't glaze over when you start to explain some esoteric about how an SQL variant works.
The main downside of course is the depreciation... But I really don't think watches are the best anti-AI hedge in any case. Watches buy you social status and (maybe) utility. They're not going to outperform land with mineral rights or magic the gathering cards as items of exchange with the post AI nobility.
GBRK
1d ago
The obvious way to square the circle is to make social security and medicare linked to "volunteering" for, say, ten hours of work per week at nonprofit childcare and education centers. (Making the rules intentionally lax so any ideological group can qualify so long as it actually takes some of the childrearing burden off parents.) Sunday schools, daycares, boy scouts, hell-- a chess club where the parents can drop their kids off for 3 hours to be supervized by a cadre of partially demented old grandmasters.
Notably this also solves the fertility issue. If you're going to be taking care of brats when you're old anyway, you might as well make sure they're your brats.
GBRK
6d ago
I think I have about an average sex drive for a man
Why do you think that? What evidence do you base it on? As a prior, "I'm average" is pretty decent... But if given counterevidence you might want to adjust that prior. Based on the posted study. The difference men and women is about half a standard deviation... All you have to be at above the 40th percentile to be about on-par with the average women, and that's nowhere near alibidinous or otherwise defective.
GBRK
8d ago
That either orthodox girls are less likely to catastrophise (which is already a win!) Or that they're equally likely to catastrophise but that they asses their risks are much lower and therefore make predicted catastrophes much more mundane.
GBRK
9d ago
The problems might be qualitatively the same, but to what quantitative degree? I'm inclined to believe that the problems men and women complain about when it comes to dating are intrinsic to the differences between the sexes, but that traditional organizations moderate their terribleness. We do so, for example, lower rates of divorice and higher fertility rates among the devout. That's suggestive of actual success in the traditional project.
As a trivial example, these Orthodox girls are unhappy about men pushing for sex and then leaving when they don't get it. But it's telling that we're not hearing the secular fears of getting raped and murdered by a tinder date.
GBRK
9d ago
True. I think that's an argument for filtering, not against it though. With he right incentives I think we could get teachers to specialize in either niche-- we already have dedicated SPED teachers and teachers who apply to teach junior criminals for example.
GBRK
9d ago
Probably not, sadly. I think there are specific categories of things that are reimbursable, and there's also a dollar-amount limit per year based on what your school determines to be your "Room and Board" allowance based on its cost of attendance.
...but you can make your children pay market-rate rent for living at your home, and then reimburse them out of the 529!
GBRK
10d ago
I noticed a pretty significant level of variability in teacher quality even in the advanced classes that benefited from strong filtering. In particular there was a notably excellent advanced physics teacher that caught that an "advanced" math teacher had failed to teach me the quadratic formula and corrected that. Filtering does raise the "skill floor" for teaching, in that you really can't do that badly with smart, well socialized students. But in the same vein I think it also dramatically raises the skill ceiling-- you need a good class and a good teacher to pull kids through an accelerated curriculum.
GBRK
10d ago
Fair enough. If there's no tax advantage, there's no advantage, period, for arbitrarily marking some portion of savings for children's education.
In the US it's pretty fucking slick though. The 529 my parents + grandma made for me has more money in it than when I entered college because I got a full ride and therefore barely touched the principal. That fund will continue growing tax free for the next however many years it is until I have children and need to put them through college, whereupon it should be able to easily fund their lifestyles for quite a while. I don't know if the money will be enough to cover tuition too, but my guess is that tuition is going to drop significantly as schools go over the demographic cliff.
GBRK
10d ago
If school savings account are tax-advsntaged in your jurisdiction (as they are with American 529s) I would HIGHLY advise you to reconsider your decision to save money for your kids but not specifically for your college. I have two main arguments for why, both stemming from the anthropic principle.
Argument one is that in disproportionate number of the futures where you manage to survive AI, it's because AI capabilities hit the logistic end of the growth curve and human intelligence remains a necessary input that actually increases in value due to AI serving as a force multiplier. Without speculating on the actual likelyhood of this being the case, it's the same wisdom as always betting against the apocalype. If you die, you're not going to miss the money anyway. If a small number of supercorporations take over the world and relegate us all to toys for the elite, the same applies.
Argument two is that even in worlds where AI surpasses humans, if pre-singularity wealth still matters that means existing large organizations (including schools) will continue to have some sort of ability to affect your life. There will be an evolution, certainly, but educational instituted will still find a way to provide some sort of value. Money is fungible, but institutions are malleable: market forces will push universities to evolve towards providing services worth on an average at least one dollar per dollar... And looking at the services they are already capable of supplying (food, spaces for people to gather, living arrangements, sports facilities, prestige) they seem likely to evolve into a sort of living community for high-class adults in their early twenties, which seem like the sort of thing that remain perenially popular.
Ignore all of that if your savings wouldn't be tax-advantaged, but at least in the US 529s are pretty fantastic. Even just going "full time" to an online school qualifies you to be reimbursed for stuff like FOOD AND RENT! Wouldn't it be great if you could deduct those expenses from your capital gains taxes? Well with a 529 you absolutely can! They're like Roth IRAs you can give to your children and grandchildren.
...
Seperately: a comment on school effectiveness. I grew up in a public school district that bussed people out of their home high schools (including the private catholic school) to a special technical highschool for part of the day, where students could take advanced electives, accelerated highschool courses, and rare ap classes. Admission into this school was based on performance at the local school and on standardized tests. And this system worked honestly pretty well! I feel like I learned a lot there, and afterward frankly breezed through college. The homework was hard, and the tests could be outright brutal, but the only tutoring I got or needed was my dad occasionally helping me with my math homework. (His math skills were and are admittedly formidable.) Everyone in my classes was both intelligent and a hard worker, but none of them seemed to be "strivers." I was probably among the most maladjusted kids in the upper-level classes and even that I blame more on body image issues than academic pressure.
Based on that experience, I really do think the "academic track" approach really does work to create an environment where kids actually can be taught in a meaningful way. Not every school can be blessed with the fortune to take the best and brightest students of an entire city, but I know that's not a necessary component because we were only ever came in second place in state math competitions in the state. Our hated rivals were fortunate enough to be located in a notorious college town, but were otherwise structurally ordinary.
GBRK
19d ago
All I'm saying is, if you have any interest, even peripherally, in being genuinely entertained, you should seek out smut deliberately targeted toward your own gender. (Which, based on my preconcieved notions of the motte's demographics, I'm guessing is probably male.)
GBRK
19d ago
FYI it's worth remembering that "smut written for women" and "smut written for men" are completely separate genres, even within nonvisual literature.
GBRK
24d ago
The woman who were burned obviously got a bad deal, but the women remaining had more power than they otherwise would have thanks to their scarcity. That doesn't mean they were powerful in an absolute sense, but it's not necessary to prove that they were to still believe culling younger generations of males to increase the relative power of the older generation of males.
It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".
You are clearly engaging with my argument in bad faith if you think anything you said in the paragraph is at all relevant to this discussion. I can tell you very badly want to rehash the "are men or women more oppressed" argument but even if you could prove your side of that argument to everyone's satisfaction, it wouldn't counter anything the other posters have to say about the effects of enforcing artificial scarcity.
GBRK
25d ago
I don't understand your comment. Yes, we've implemented policies similar to the policies I propose for obtaining a lower male/female ratio. That's my point. Your comment has the tone of a counterargument but doesn't actually oppose anything I said.
Yes, we all know about son preference in india and china-- and that's why we're discussing installing an artificial daughter-preference in the western world. Tilting the gender ratio away from women has the unintended but in-retrospect obvious effect of increased the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries, so now male mottizens are considering how to encourage the opposite preference in their own societies to eliminate male competitors and increase their own social power. Obviously that would be terrible and unethical because infanticide, including abortion, is bad, but speaking from a purely self-interested perspective it makes perfect sense.
GBRK
26d ago
Personally you just convince the existing feminists/misandrists to not have male children. Taking it one step further, you could offer to-be-single-mothers incentives for aborting sons, which is morally equivalent anyways. I'm the same vein, you can institute a policy of doctors spending relatively more time caring for female infants in neonatal care, and pushing harder for male children to participate in extreme sports and dangerous behavrior. Heading into pubescence, advertising and subsidizing potentially-lethal behaviors to boys would also work.
[Obviously this is all highly immoral, but I think this is a problem soluble to engineering solutions.]
GBRK
1mo ago
This is a really well-written polemic, to the point where I want to reflexively find something wrong with what you wrote and defensible about the original argument because I distrust how much I am in emotional agreement.
GBRK
1mo ago
I'll concede this argument, thank you for the history lesson and for citing your sources.
GBRK
1mo ago
Look, maybe the problem is that a lack of education is responsible for my ignorance of american attempts to restrict chinese economic growth. But if it is... what history lesson am I missing? As far as I remember, the rough chain of events was, WW2 -> chicoms defeat republican china -> korean war (attempt to constrain china's hard power, not economic power) -> sino-soviet split (leading to us/china rapproachment) -> vietnam war (again, not an attempt to restrain china's economic power specifically) -> nixon goes to china -> US/chinese economic alignment (including chinese stealing american IP) -> modern worsening of relations. Did I miss america backstabbing china industrially during the sino-soviet split?
GBRK
1mo ago
Speaking in terms of industry, China did, indeed, start it first. China can claim the british/japanese started things even firster, but excepting perhaps the boxer rebellion, the United States didn't make any particular effort to stifle china's economic growth until well after china began it history of stealing american IP. I don't judge china for doing that because intellectually property law-- i.e. government-issued monopolies on ideas-- is fundamentally bullshit rent-seeking. But relative to the diplomatic agreements in place, the chinese government promised one thing and delivered another.
This isn't even going to be a debate in 100 years-- just like Americans don't bother denying our rampant theft of british IP during the early industrial revolution.
GBRK
1mo ago
I'm talking about niches specifically because I care. Consider how welfare props up unsustainable modes of living that cannibalize the very productive systems that mantain them, demanding ever more welfare until the whole system becomes dysfunctional and collapses. Well, the same is true for anything else you want to point at. Trying to mantain the population of a specific genetic niche above their carrying capacity requires ever-more investment, as the very fact of their overpopulation reproductively advantages opposing niches. You can't feed pigeons without increasing the alleycat population. So you get a system where there's ever-increasing downwards pressure on whatever your favorite group is (which very tangibly makes people miserable), PLUS resources that could have been spent productively are getting wasted.
GBRK
1mo ago
Holding genes faulty for failing to respond to emergent situations is just what natural selection does. Trying to preserve maladaptive genes is fundamentally a futile endeavor.
As for memetic defense nets... How did you think these things get built? Whether childless people are suffering from bad genes or bad memes, the prescription remains, "leave them alone so they can't propagate those things."
GBRK
1mo ago
Any hypothetical complex trait would be doomed anyway due to the fact that modern technology massively changed the reproductive calculus no matter what political schema is implemented. And to be honest I'm not really concerned about alleles either, but at least those have a shot at persistence that could be affected by political machinations.
GBRK
1mo ago
Low-IQ psychopathy is a particular reproductive niche, and like with all niches attempts to overexploit it lead to localized population collapse and repopulation of other niches.
Right now, the "neurotic upper middle class striver" niche is overexploited, and that's why we're seeing a low tfr in that region. After collapse, there will be a natural rebound.
Phone brand smartwatches (apple, samsung) tell you whatever the phone brand tells you about that person in your cultural context. Usually they're a pretty straightforward status signal, but in my experience more for young women than for anyone else. (Apple cachet remains...)
As for garmins, they differentiate from other smartphones by having much longer lasting batteries (my fenix solar lasts 10 days under normal conditions and closer to 14 when I'm out and about a lot) and being notably more feature rich. No individual feature is killer, but in aggregate I end up using a whole lot of them. The sleep tracking + heartbeat sensing isn't unique among smartphones but having them has improved my self discipline. The heartbeat tracking in particular came in clutch when I had altitude sickness in colorado-- helping me notice my tachycardia and then validate that wim hof breathing actually helped me drop my heartrate from 100 to 80. The Maps+GPS+Compass works better than google maps on my phone for hiking and it saves on phone battery. (Plus it's fun to track walks/hikes) The weather+sunset/sunrise display is something I could do with a phone app but it's convenient to just have it on my wrist, especially when I'm driving. I definitely do appreciate not having to pull my phone out for notifications. There's an app for electric unicycles that can show my speed and battery readout on my watch, which I used fairly often before I got an upgraded wheel with a built-in display. Also I use the flashlight literally every day. Something about it being wrist-mounter makes it so much more more useful than a phone flashlight.
I almost feel bad for shilling them this much but my buddy works for them and got me mine for the employee discount so I feel like they've more than earned a few paragraphs of shilling.
More options
Context Copy link