deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth.
There's a reasonable chance this is right. I can't find the comment, but someone here recently summed up that position as "evolution works". Correct! But it just means that negative-fertility species will lose (on a geological timescale), not necessarily that the fundamentalists will win. Most of the fundamentalist groups have a problem keeping children onside, and even their fertility is in decline, with a few notable exceptions.
The discussion is really about how to fix the fertility crisis. Talking about what's caused the fertility crisis is distracting and drives me a little nuts, because the cause simple and obvious: increasing access to safe, cheap, effective contraception depresses fertility.
Imagine if humans, historically, could just choose when to have children. All else being equal, our ancestors never would have made it out of their tiny niche. The only reason we flourished was our sex drive, which obliterates our intentions and exerts irresistible pressure to reproduce. (Hormones, oxytocin, etc. play a complementary role, but couldn't have carried the day alone.)
The solution that suggests is also simple: the Ceaușescu regime demonstrated that outlawing contraception can get the job done: Romania raised TFR, from 2 to 3.5.
Simple, but not sustainable. Ceaușescu also showed how difficult it is to maintain those policies: a sharp decline quickly followed. By the 80s, Romania's TFR was hovering just above replacement-level and trending downward. When the regime fell, so did the restrictions and TFR went down to 1.3. It has recovered, but has not ever reached replacement since.
Where does that leave us? The Romainians offered economic incentives for larger families, but those programs shouldn't get much credit, since they have been tried many other places to little effect. Sure, economic and status incentives can help on the margin: relaxing car seat mandates will improve things a bit, for example, and would be good in itself. Maybe we can even find a few dozen policies like that, which could add up to a measurable but inconsequential boost. Ultimately, though, there's nothing that's going to make large numbers of young people in WEIRD countries to consider their lives and say "yes, a(nother) baby will make my life better". Dreaming of a cultural solution is a dead end: we do not engineer specific outcomes via cultural change. Cultural change and its outcomes are emergent.
But I'm not here to call for a ban on contraception. Restriction proponents are like anti-auto crusaders and other activists unable to accept a new technology. There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives, whatever the tradeoffs or externalities. Mail-order Mifepristone is the 3d printed gun of the left.
If there is an answer, it's to go deeper. We have ample survey data that tells us people (well, Americans) want more children. There's some reason to be skeptical of that survey data: we clearly want other things more than children. But at least it suggests a plausible path for the future of humanity. I think the most likely solution involves enlisting human desires instead of restraining them, which means improving fertility-extension technologies is our best hope (and perhaps easing the process of giving birth).
deadpantroglodytes
14d ago
I don't think Yglesias is committing the pundit's fallacy, exactly. Instead, in the intro to his Common Sense Manifesto he writes:
when you lose an election, a leadership void opens up. And that void will be filled — with people and institutions and, hopefully, with ideas — and I would like the ideas that fill the current void to be good.
One way to read that is "my ideas would have won the election and they'll make us popular", but I think he's going for something more like "my ideas are good, so if we take control of the party that already gets 45% of the vote by default, we'll have a shot at making good things happen."
"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."
Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:
"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.
For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.
Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.
You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.
I agree there are many places where driving is a miserable experience (often enough, at least).
Yet people still choose to drive.
Congestion is a highly visible issue, but that's because it's the problem that's left over after cars solved all the important ones.
Cycling, walking, and transit all have advantages, but cars blow them away for the vast majority of people's normal use-cases. Cars:
- Run on your schedule.
- Allow you to haul more than any other modes of transportation. Not just more, but also more cumbersome things. I cannot bicycle my amplifier to an ad-hoc show at a local block party.
- Collapse space, allowing you to live near work and the beach/mountains/trails/relatives/friends/ultimate frisbee league/your band's rehearsal space/etc./etc. This cuts in multiple directions, working for other people at the same time, putting you in reach of a critical mass of people that share your interests and satisfy your needs.
- Are weather-independent. I salute the hardy souls that commute via bicycle in New England, but there's no timeline where a significant portion of the population follows their lead.
- Allow pets.
And that's just the big, widely-applicable ones. I haven't mentioned comfort, the ability to socialize, or benefits for people with disabilities. I also didn't include the benefits they offer families with kids, which is a massive blindspot for a lot of Marohn-pilled types. You can see it when someone says things like "cars only save you 20 minutes on your commute" ... as a parent, there are days when 20 extra minutes would quadruple my free time.
I'm in favor of transit in principle: a first-rate transit system gets close enough to cars on those points that its other benefits net out. But no one has figured out how to bootstrap a first-rate transit system in a US city from scratch in the twenty-first century.
Edit: fussy formatting. Also, I regret that I did not at least mention pollution, another problem left over after cars solve the others, even though it wasn't at issue in context.
deadpantroglodytes
3mo ago
Streets should be built in a way that is adjusted to people and how people use the streets, not cars.
This bit of linguistic gamesmanship is ridiculous: cars don't use anything. It's all just people out there. Anti-auto advocates ought to find a less saccharine and grating slogan.
deadpantroglodytes
3mo ago
Can you give me 1 reason why the 'just 1 more lane bro' meme is not valid criticism of car infrastructure ?
Assuming you're talking about the unquenchable thirst for more lanes, that doesn't seem like a criticism at all. It's a ringing endorsement of car infrastructure: people cannot get enough convenient mobility.
deadpantroglodytes
5mo ago
Those bullet points are too abstract, too many inferences away from a useful definition of power. Power is the ability to change others, nature, or one's self, and also the ability to resist changes to one's self.
You might laugh and say I'm just repurposing the classic elementary-school-level framework for talking about literature ("man versus man/nature/self"), but it's a firm foundation for thinking about power and I doubt you'll find anything better.
deadpantroglodytes
5mo ago
I agree that it would be interesting to see a detailed analysis like that and I realize you aren't saying large QOL improvements would be exculpatory ... but reading your comment made me think about discussions about progressive indoctrination in US schools.
It's plausible that learning progressive manners and beliefs will give children a substantial leg up, socio-economically. Depending on events, graduates of the Evanston, IL public schools system might be on average, better-positioned than those from, say, the Florida suburbs in the US of 2045. But I don't think many parents resisting leftward changes to their public schools would be impressed by that.
The analogy is quarter-baked, but just contemplating it weakens my openness to arguments that material improvements can justify inter-generational dispossession (for lack of a better term)
deadpantroglodytes
7mo ago
Yes, something along those lines:
I guess the idea is the exchange might object to Pornhub but not the third party?
When big money's at stake, plausible deniability is usually all that's needed to keep things moving.
deadpantroglodytes
7mo ago
It seems quite easy to interpose a cut-out for crypto-to-fiat conversion, so that your only real exposure is to tax authorities. The only challenge is ensure there are enough socially acceptable crypto use cases that you don't draw too much attention.
In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.
This is not credibile. If it were true, I would expect progressives to participate in efforts to measure skill, qualifications, and merit. In fact, despite the many difficulties of doing so (Good heart's law, etc ), the urgency should inspire tireless ingenious effort to that end. Instead, everywhere I look, the opposite is true: progressives direct their energy towards frustrating the project of improving meritocracy, often enough ridiculing the goal itself.
The historical treatment of black Americans is a stain on our country and the progress we've made combatting discrimination fills me with pride. The job is not complete, but is close.
It has absolutely lost its original propagandistic edge and become all-purpose filler. A recent NYT article about a scandalous Russian party made me laugh out loud:
The suggestive photos and videos that surfaced on social media soon after were unremarkable. Yet the blowback was immediate and severe.
“The country is at war, and these scum, beasts, are putting on this,” one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote on his Telegram channel hours after the event. “Cattle who don’t give a damn about what’s happening.”
Some prominent conservatives went further, claiming, without offering evidence, that the party was a satanic ritual because it occurred, according to their calculations, on the 666th day of the war in Ukraine.
Perhaps it was a joke? Is anyone here willing to own up to entryism at the New York Times?
[Edit - instead of being so snarky, I feel like I ought to give more weight to the opposite interpretation, that it was an occult signal, a quiet protest or a cry for help from within.]
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
Yeah, I don't think there's a plausible story to explain a widespread deep-state conspiracy. But there are other plausible theories (completely unsubstantiated, to be clear). They would involve either
- an informant with bad judgement going full Leeroy Jenkins or
- an undercover agent assessing the crowd, deciding they didn't pose a real threat, and doing their best to goose the crowd on
In the absence of evidence, those are idle speculation, but I'm a little surprised they didn't come up (or at least not more clearly).
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
I also prefer the written word, but I like to listen to podcasts when running and driving.
Podcasts also give me an option to avoid the farce of trying to do dishes while thumbing through essays and comments with wet fingers.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
I enjoyed a lot of this, and admired Shakesneer's composure under rigorous questioning even if I think you have the better of the argument, Yassine.
But wow, I wish I'd skipped the first hour. Couldn't you just stipulate that the PMC hates MAGA voters instead of pressing so hard on their motives, in this context? For a while, I thought you might be trying to go Socratic and lure Shakesneer into admitting that the Feds have a rational reason for persecuting conservative groups, beyond losing their jobs (if one grants that they persecute them). But it didn't quite cash out that way.
I'd say that employees of federal agencies have strong motives for their hatred of conservatives, even setting aside the "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup" reasons and fear of losing their jobs, especially if we're talking about the FBI and ATF:
- Conservative political thought emphasizes the contingency of the state's legitimacy, moreso than the left (CHAZ notwithstanding). Right-learning separatist groups are closer to the mainstream of the conservative movement than those on the left, at least in the US.
- Conservative political thought challenges the state's monopoly on violence. Pro-gun advocacy makes the FBI and ATF's jobs harder.
And that's how it plays out in real life. I have several friends that are FBI agents, and I occasionally go to parties where more are present. To a person, they take it for granted that Trump and his voters are contemptible. I'm sure it's not unanimous, but it definitely isn't generational - I'm a Gen-Xer, and the parties are generally +/-10 years around me.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
I've been with you all the way up to here, upvoting and even reporting one of your comments in this thread as a QC, but this is clearly wrong: the feds can be guilty of luring the protesters/rioters into taking risks that would make them look bad and expose them to prosecution.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I agree, not much, but the federal government can definitely avoid exacerbating the problem by limiting supply.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
The Democratic response is infuriating. The way this is currently playing out is simple: people and families that would benefit from skilled nursing either get no care or, like a close relative of mine, spend weeks in a hospital (soon, months).
As an aside, this has increased my appreciation of the Fed and reduced my enthusiasm for keeping unemployment extremely low as a method of spreading prosperity.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Plain old supply and demand drives CEO pay, for the most part, not value-over-replacement.
Even sub-replacement-level CEOs require an extremely unusual skill set. Large companies are like Game of Fucking Thrones. Running one is like herding cats where one of every three animals is actually a serial killer, a thief, or a company-destroying liability risk and three out of four would sell you for a sandwich, must less a shot at your job. On top of that, you're steering (at best) half-blind in a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tornado at the same time (macro-economically speaking).
There are certainly problems, like back-scratching boards determining compensation, but I don't see obviously superior alternatives.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:
I trust that combination of judgement [the student's and school's] a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here
This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.
It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:
I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.
I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.
I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.
* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
I agree with you, without reservation. Moreover, I loved reading your post I was responding to - the historical perspective is useful and relevant in Hanania's case.
But I stand by my point, which is that while Hanania has come a long way, I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as a convert. Moreover, as you observe, progressive activists would welcome converts - from whatever ideological distance. But the price of conversion is complete submission, not apology or even renouncing myriad specific offenses. I don't think any American intellectual is willing to pay that price, whether it's because of pride, tribal instincts, or the manifest philosophical defects of the social justice worldview, which means we may never see CCP-style conversions. (At least I'm crossing my fingers that it never comes to that.)
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
As another data point, in my affluent blue bubble, hyphenated children's names are everywhere, partly because of the relatively large number of same-sex couples, but not remotely exclusively.
This includes mine, and while I have to admit that hyphenated names can be a mouthful (paving the way for endless jokes about fitting names on, e.g., swim caps), I love them for surfacing family history. I've always loved the extravagance of Spanish names for that reason, even if they are usually truncated for daily use.
deadpantroglodytes
1yr ago
Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert.
This isn't right: progressive activists are more than happy to accept converts, as long as they abase themselves completely and become zealous true-believers. If you continue to challenge their authority or their most important commitments, you have not actually repented in a meaningful way.
Consider Peter Boghossian's one-time collaborator Émile P. Torres, turned dogged antagonist of rationalism and BFF of Timnet Gebru. Hanania didn't do this: he merely renounced some of his earlier beliefs. It's as if Martin Luther trimmed his sails a bit and decided he would only stand behind sixty-three of his theses after all, and, by the way, the Pope still isn't legitimate.
It was a big change for him, but as far as progressives are concerned, he hasn't even started to repent.
I don't think this responds to my claim, which are that the default human position on kids is "not worth the trouble" and therefore making contraception cheaper, more effective, or more accessible mechanically reduces fertility.
I agree that there are legal regimes, beliefs, and customs that foster fertility. I'm just annoyed whenever people write about what "caused" the fertility crisis. There's no theory that makes sense or matches history apart from "people don't want kids and will take measures to avoid having them" except "mo' better contraception."
Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 but its TFR fell from 5 to 2 between between 1925 and 1960. What happened?
The article goes on to say "Governmental thinking of population as a marker for national power and international strength, however, remained steadfast and led the Japanese government to ban the sale and use of birth control in the 1930s, considering it harmful to the user." I freely admit that there are innumerable confounding factors, but I'm going to take "the introduction of a new technology did exactly what it promised to" as the null hypothesis. (Also, wow, what shitty prose. Do better, Wikipedia.)
Or read Cremieux's post about Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, "The Fruits of Philosophy". TLDR: family-planning advocates disseminate information out to the English population, fertility craters.
Romania only proves that it's hard to stop people from practicing contraception for long.
The Amish and Haredi communities are interesting and useful, but they don't contradict what I'm saying. In fact, the Amish formally prohibit contraception. People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.
The Haredi might prove me wrong, in some sense, but they are also a world-historical outlier that are not obviously reproducible (pun intended).
At any rate, I'm not saying we shouldn't look at communities and societies that have done better. I'm just pessimistic that we can overcome the default human bias by copying them.
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