site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29544 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Can anyone explain to me why the standard arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography don't generalize also to the consumption of terrorist "beheading videos" that were very popular several years back?

  • The revictimization argument (that consuming child pornography revictimizes the victim) obviously applies also to beheading videos. (Some might argue that as the beheaded are deceased, they can't be victimized again, so such videos should be permitted— which would lead to the absurd conclusion that a CP video that also depicts murder of the victim should be permitted, since, by their own logic, dead children can't be revictimized!)

  • likewise for the argument "by consuming it you incentivizes the further production of such videos and hence further victimization".

  • as for the argument that "consuming such videos makes one more likely to commit the crime depicted in them", I can see some intuitive plausibility in the idea that consumption of CP is more likely to turn the consumer into a criminal than consumption of beheading videos. If I know nothing else about someone X except that X consumes CP, then other things being equal I find myself perceiving X to be more dangerous, and more disinclined to associate with X than if I know nothing about X except that X consumes beheading videos. However I do wonder how much of this asymmetry is due to the fact that consumption of CP is already a crime, so it's difficult to imagine someone who does it but who doesn't have dangerous criminal tendencies.

Isn't the primary difference that there is no commercial market for beheading videos? Beheading videos are mostly produced and circulated for free release by terrorist groups. Child pornography that circulates is often produced or circulated for the purpose of either selling access to it, or for the purpose of bartering access to it in exchange for other child pornography. There is no argument that beheading videos lead to more beheadings, there is a plausible argument that allowing child pornography leads to more child pornography.

Sometimes footage of people being killed finds its way into commercial releases:

Has it ever even been alleged that a murder was committed for the purpose of filming it?

Maybe some of the Livestream killers we've seen?

Terrorism would lose its purpose, if it didn't receive media coverage. Yet journalists reporting on crime committed by criminals seeking notoriety aren't prosecuted.

Consider also that the authorities with the power to do so are often uninterested in tamping down on ISIS snuff films.

I'm not sure if I understand the question. If you mean "has it ever been alleged that a murder was committed for the specific purpose of filming it for commercial release?", I believe the answer is no. My understanding is that every alleged "snuff film" turns out to fail one of the two criteria: either it isn't a real murder but just an unusually convincing special effects job; or it is a real murder, but it wasn't filmed specifically for commercial release (e.g. ISIS and cartel beheading videos are intended to be released but not sold; serial killers filming their kills but never intending to release them at all).

But if you're asking "has a murder ever been committed for the purpose of filming it?", I think essentially all ISIS or cartel beheading videos meet that description. Or at least filming the murder (in order to publicly release it and hopefully intimidate one's opponents) is a primary purpose, along with the immediate purpose of killing the person who currently finds himself on the business end of your machete. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some of the people filmed being murdered by ISIS or a cartel did absolutely nothing to antagonise either group: the group just found themselves falling behind schedule in their content creation pipeline and the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now that I think about it, there are reasonable examples of murder committed for the purpose of filming it. And in those narrow cases, it would make sense to prosecute the channels distributing it. Publicizing ISIS beheading videos seems pretty bad to me! And certainly Livestream killers should be taken down.

But the contrast with CP still stands: while murder-for-content isn't impossible, it's less common than molestation for content, and certainly less common than filming molestation in order to sell or barter it. Prosecuting CP more plausibly reduces molestation, than prosecuting snuff films will reduce the murder rate.

I figure the two are not so obviously different in terms of raising appetite for the act depicted (though I don't have a strong opinion as to whether either of them does and to what extent), but a big difference is that in a modern context, violence is much more easily contained than sexuality. Slippery slopes from friendly interactions to flirtation to superficial physical acts to sexual intercourse abound, and while there are instances of the endpoint of the slippery slope that society wants to ban (age difference, intoxication, force), it is rarely practical to ban everything all the way up to the starting point or far enough that society would be around to intervene. We can't stop friendly interactions and can't even really police the flirtation step, but by the time that step is reached the interaction has usually been taken "offline". On the other hand, slippery slopes from unfriendly interactions to fighting words to violent altercation to murder are much more rare and rarely taken offline (who gets a room with someone they get along unusually badly with?). Murder has other differences that make it unlikely to burgeon due to a small difference in murderous ideation, such as invariably yielding hard-to-hide observable effects (a person is gone); circumstances where all the beheading videos you binged bubble up in your head and you think "we both want it and I can get away without consequences" seem unlikely.

If this is the actual argument, it is unlikely that people would say it out loud, since it implicitly centers an image of an act with at least superficial consent (Epstein, groupies and Discord casanovas rather than the dragged-into-white-van-at-playground scenario) which invites a whole tangle of thoughtcrime (ranging from revisiting '70s NAMBLA-style activist rhetoric to something like "I hear all the rich and powerful of the world get to engage in this. It must be really enjoyable if they jump through hoops to do it despite the risks. Why do they get to do that and I don't?"). So instead, they would resort to fielding the arguments that you list, which are socially unimpeachable but do not actually reflect the true target or expected mechanism of action of any anti-CP policy. As evidence, I don't recall "rape is actually about power" insight porn ever moving the needle on how much people want to ban CP.

One of the most effective arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography is that the consumption encourages production, including in places like the Third World where it is very hard for any law enforcement authorities to put a stop to the production.

When it comes to this argument, child pornography is not like beheading videos because when it comes to child pornography, consumption encourages production by funding it with money - however, people who make beheading videos generally make them not to sell them, but because of ideology and to try to intimidate others.

...to which the edgy response always has been that the government and MPAA should just set up a fully legal Megaupload for CP, thus destroying anyone's ability to get paid for producing it. Surely what's bad for the goose is bad for the gander.

In less edgy terms, making CP uncopyrightable and criminalizing buying or selling would have much of the same effect and presumably negate the advantages without needing any creature of the light to get their hands dirty. At that point you could at most argue that kudos/internet points for freely providing CP would also encourage production beyond what there would be otherwise, which seems like a bit of a stretch. Add a well-funded bounty programme to reward CP consumers if they help with tracking down producers and it's hard to imagine that the net effect would be more child exploitation. Some *chan NEETs could make an honest living beating their meat and using their autism powers to ID wallpaper patterns during the refractory period.

My sense from reading court documents (some interesting 4A law) is that just getting access to some CP is not all that hard. What is prized/valued in those communities is new CP, which does inherently involve new victimization. Warrant applications will say that they found such-and-such a server, and it had some 'examples' accessible on the surface, but you were required to upload new material that wasn't in their database already in order to get an account to access the rest of what they had. Moreover, you had to keep uploading new material every so often to maintain your account.

It seems that having this be inherently valued has a two-fold purpose for that community. First, it creates a direct incentive for people to become producers. Second, it serves as a 'law-enforcement filter', adding an additional layer of difficulty for law-enforcement to gain deeper access to the site. The unfortunate side-effect is that I don't get the sense that people are making large quantities of currency money by producing CP; they're instead gaining status and access in their tiny little community.

One of the main questions is to what extent this community value is dependent on the current size of the pool. They seem to like "new" and have these reasons other than the actual pool size to value it. I've seen some pretty large numbers in court documents about how big some of their pools are. Perhaps some of those numbers are somehow fudged (like how they talk about 'street value' of drugs seized), but it doesn't seem like the currently large pools that these folks are able to manage getting access to has yet become a serious impediment to them continuing to promote a local cultural value of "new".

I don't know for sure the mechanics behind how they manage to verify "new", but just from background knowledge of tech, I sort of have to imagine that AI gen is a much more serious threat to this local cultural value than just plopping up a Megaupload.

u/FPHthrowawayB argued at the old site that deep fakes are probably going to have pretty much this effect in the not so distant future anyway:

I do think in the very near future child porn will be naturally significantly reduced in scope if not largely eliminated by the general proliferation of deep fakes that are indistinguishable from actual CP and that society should not try to get in the way of this via regulating them (or requiring registration to view them, since that'll put them behind a gate that makes it clear they're fake, which eliminates their subversive effect of acting as counterfeit goods that drive the real goods out). Of course many if not most pedos will still prefer "the real thing", but if it's impossible to tell the real thing from the fake thing then what can you do? Are you gonna look through every clip of every single adult Chaturbate or MFC camgirl that's ever existed to find out if what you're looking at is an authentic webcam capture or a transformed version of an adult clip?

Basically, the "market" (which is actually, contrary to what most non-pedos believe, mostly a reputational and attentional market more than a financial one as most CP producers do it for kudos and prestige rather than to make cash) will be flooded by so many counterfeits that it will collapse. It will be so "bad" (or I guess good) that if most pedos knew it was coming I think many would try to stop it (as opposed to working toward it), treating it as an existential crisis for a significant sphere of pedo activity, but I don't think they can.

Here is interesting take from olden times by Rick Falkvinge why making CP consumption illegal has undesirable side effects - like eroding the digital privacy for everyone.

https://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/

I like how both his and corey doctorow darkest visions of the erosion of the digital rights (privacy and general computing) may turn out to be optimistic.

Banning child porn is something different from banning a bunch of other things under the pretext of banning child porn.

If you're going to actively try to ruin the lives of 17-year-olds taking pictures of each other, or going after people witnessing a rape rather than the rapist, you are acting in bad faith, and the same holds if you're trying to set up a censorship regime under the pretext of tackling child porn. That doesn't mean you can't ban child porn without doing these things. Changing the law so that intent does matter is trivial and obvious. Yes, that means you might occasionally let someone off, but that tradeoff is worth it, exactly the same as for any other law. As far as this is not the case for child porn, that is the result of politicians acting in bad faith.

Censorship or encryption bans also don't follow from a child porn ban. We don't after all open letters to see if there's child porn in there. People may be getting away with mailing child porn, but the secrecy of letters is such an old established right that nobody would think of trying to violate it. That same attitude should've been carried over to modern forms of communication, but this never happened, and so now bad people can get away with doing bad things under the guise of "think of the children". That's the problem.

Beheading is political while CP is obscene. You might see a beheading on the news, albeit censored or with 'this content may distress some viewers'. You never see a rape on the news.

An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from 50,000 to 64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.

[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.

Absolutely spot on. This 100% matches my observations.

If it's as accurate as I think it is, we're fucked. Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.

If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, with no prospects of a better future or any chance at reproduction, you are an evolutionary dead end. Alternatively, you pick up a rifle...

If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, I'm sure you're actually less likely to be an evolutionary dead end than those of your countrymen who got into college.

Probably not.

In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.

Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.

That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.

Here's how I see it: if you're a college-educated Korean man with a girlfriend/wife, who presumably is also college-educated and middle-class like you, your social circle will put enormous pressure on you to have exactly one child, preferably a boy, and make every conceivable sacrifice to try getting him into one of the top 5 or so universities because there's like a 5% chance that he'll succeed and that's more than zero. Of course, this all seems rather daunting to the average man in such a situation, and even more so to the woman, so they reject this idea in many cases. After all, there's a reason why the South Korean TFR is not even 1 but 0.8 or so.

However, if "you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die", no such pressure exists. Even if we don't categorize it strictly as underclass, it's still rather close. It certainly counts as the precariat, and when you belong to that social class as a woman, everyone in your environment implicitly understands that having children is the single most important thing you'll ever do in your life, and the only thing you'll ever be respected for, if that.

Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.

You might be understanding something different by "from above" than I do, but this seems flatly wrong. Wokeness didn't become high-status from the bottom-up, and for that matter neither did motherhood become low-status this way. I might I agree if what you mean is something like "you can't legislate status".

I agree. No human society could even exist in the first place without the ability to confer status from above. My guess is that the OP means that status in a liberal Western country cannot be sacramental - as opposed to Georgia, for example - and that it cannot stem from fertility under the current conditions.

Yep, what I was referring to.

When the western liberal government tries to advocate for something it nearly 100% of the time ends up doing the opposite. Nobody believes it, and nobody buys it. The only way they can conceivably transfer status is through transfer of power and resources within the Cathedral, which they generally try not to do for fear of power dilution.

Breeding propaganda in the liberal west will go over about as well as a lead balloon. Unlike OP I don't think culture can be improved in this direction, because we're too far down this route. If society devolves a bit, I think we'll get TFR back quite quickly - but I'm quite attached to society, and I'd rather it not get worse.

Alternatively we find a way to grow productive, state-compliant pod people who pay taxes, at a sustainable rate, as has been the remit of every government.

My takeaway from the discussion a year ago you linked is not that we're fucked. It's that things are bad, but bad in a way that's contingent on cultural factors that could absolutely change, even if it's hard.

I particularly liked @SpoonOfSugar's comment:

Both men and women are open to long-term committed relationships only if they get a great deal. People who marry often think that they both got lucky in the sense that they self-rate as a 6 but rate their partner as a 9. Of course this doesn't happen all that often.

This checks out to me. The most successful relationships in my life have been ones where explicitly, repeatedly, both my partner and I demonstrated that we thought higher of the other than we thought of ourselves. In other words, we both thought we were punching above our weight. But I question whether this not happening very often is a permanent fixture of human mating or whether there's something going on specifically in the 21st century. It used to be that people could see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."

I also liked @Forgotpassword's comment:

I feel like a huge amount of [men playing the field] is the sheer grind required to 'ascend' and the rejection along the way, especially in the modern dating app sphere. IMO the majority of both gender rock up with more-or-less good intentions, but it only takes a little bit of exposure to the current culture to reach a state of Fuck You.

I genuinely believe the core of the problem is the prevalence of online dating, which transforms dating from a personal test of compatibility into a meat market where women are overloaded by offers of cheap sex. This distorts people's perceptions of their actual attractiveness while also incentivizing sociopathic behavior. Women are incentivized to offer early sex to high-quality men (because they won't give them the time of day otherwise), and high-quality men are incentivized to avoid commitment (because they already got the milk(shake) for free) and proceed to avoid committing to them.

So then these unfortunate women's barometers for men's attractiveness are set on 'high' and they don't find more average partners attractive or interesting, which means, like a pornsick man, they can't bring themselves to find happiness with a suitable partner and they become disgusted and revolted by how "all men [who I am still capable of seeing as a sexual being] are like that."

And these are the women the unfortunate men on online dating have to try and woo, and because they don't see the men as attractive or valuable they make excessive, deranged, and unrealistic demands of them, and the men find themselves unable to find happiness with a suitable partner and become disgusted and revolted by how "all women [who haven't already found a suitable partner and are still on online dating after years] are like that."

With online dating taking over, we've also eliminated the other cultural opportunities where people meet spouses by labeling them sexual harrassment or stigmatizing them. The decline in voluntary associations has also played a role.

I can't tell you how many stories I have in my family of the average guy marrying the girl next door. When your dating circle is limited, and tied to your fixed community, you connect with people, and consider your potential partners part of your sphere of concern. You care about even the people you reject.

To fix dating, we need to rebuild communities. I realize that's basically the "draw the rest of the owl" argument. But we need to draw the rest of the freaking owl. I don't know how we do that, I don't know how we get people to talk to each other again, I don't know how we make people see others as part of their sphere of concern, I don't know how we do it. But we have to do it. Deus vult, deus vult, deus vult.

I don't think this is the entire picture, since there's also an incentive on the part of a man who 'knows how to play the game' to pose as a viable longterm prospect and then dip and/or incompatibilities are found during the trial period and it's donezo. I've seen in my friendgroup both men and women in their late twenties join dating apps with 0 meaningful relationship experience prior.

For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.

For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.

Well… yeah? I’m not completely sure where you’re disagreeing, that’s my point… many women get played and conclude “all men are like that” and many men are left with either women in PvP mode or no traction at all, and they conclude that “all women are like that.”

Maybe I'm just surrounded by giga-chads but that has not been the issue for any of the men around me IRL, whether they found their partner the old fashioned way or through online dating, but it's a complaint I hear repeatedly online. Then again, people in places like the ww threads here and elsewhere frequently have bizarre stories of their issues dating which suggest to me that they are not just slightly below the median in mate attractiveness but very much so.

I think the issue here is that the internet amplifes the voice of the bitter losers that always have had issues, but were just invisible before. People like to trot out the graph of recently increasing sexlessness among young men but that has since rebounded.

As for why people don't have kids, I always come back to historic fertility trends and note that urbanism killed fertility a hundred years before feminism or modern dating markets, and it's remained remarkably consistent throughout time and place and the primary thing that has changed is the rate of urbanisation.

It seems to me that some combination of children being a major economic drain rather than a boon, delayed pair bonding, higher cost of living (particularly sufficiently large housing in safe areas with jobs), access to entertainment and maybe female labour force participation (lots of evidence against this being a major factor though) are the real culprits.

Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -

(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.

(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.

(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.

(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.

(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.

So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.

No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them.

The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population. The problem is that you as an elderly will need things in the future: you will need fresh bread, a surgery, working power lines and maintained house. These things can only be provided by productive people that are being born right now. You cannot have a surgery now in reserve for the future, you cannot store electricity in order to have it in 50 years when the blackout happens due to insufficient maintenance. If there are not enough people born to be future doctors, bakers, linemen etc. - then you will not get product of labor of these unborn people. Whatever you save will be eaten by inflation.

AGI/Mass automation

Okay, so we will all live in in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism utopia in 20 years. And we will also have endless electricity from nuclear fusion any time soon. Also as a sidenote - not many people really believe this, otherwise they would just sell their assets now when they still have value, to enjoy some hookers and booze - since they will have robot hookers and endless booze in 20 years. So they should smooth out their lifetime consumption, that would be the most logical strategy, right? Like people selling their houses if they believe that apocalypse will arrive in 5 years. I am curious if you are doing so, since you are so sure about these utopian predictions about AI and automation.

Biotech revolutions

Of course, another technological solution is around the corner.

Degrowth

What an euphemism for economic and societal collapse. It will just be nice "degrowth" landing, no other issues as people are just dying on the streets in the middle of blackouts and wars for shrinking resources. A little bit of population and economic "degrowth" will not hurt anybody.

So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue.

I am, mostly because TFR is collapsing, and collapsing fast. Many people point out to South Korea as an example where the TFR dropped to record low of 0.68 in 2023, while already being bellow 1.2 for over two decades already. And it may not be the bottom, TFR in Seoul was 0.55 and is also falling. So let's look at simple math if TFR remains at this 0.7 level. One hundred young Koreans will have 35 children and 12 grandchildren. That is almost 10 times drop of young population in just two generations, this is catastrophic level of population collapse, way more than Black Death that ravaged Europe in 14th century resulting in 50% drop of population. The "nice" thing about demography is that it is baked in. There were just 230 000 babies born in South Korea in 2023. This means that there will be at most 230 thousand young 20 years old Koreans in 2044 who may go on and do all the necessary jobs that the country will require of them in two decades, like soldiers to stop North Koreans, firemen, policemen, scientists and everything else. There will be no more of them in next couple of decades.

The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population.

It's funny, usually the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant is pro-grasshopper. But then when the issue of retirement comes up, people see the grasshoppers around, it's all "no, there's no such thing as saving, you have to be an ant until you die".

It is still an apt parable. Go and buy canned food, with this inflation you would be king. The key thing is that good ant would also invest in his children to take care of him if he can no longer work thus “storing” and “saving” the labor.

I think the underlying assumption here is that the majority of the population won't save nearly enough so they will be forced to work longer and/or drastically cut consumption when they retire.

That is beside my point. There are things you can meaningfully save, mostly durable goods. You can build a house, buy pots and other goods that can last your lifetime. You could store some canned goods and so forth. You can also do this on larger scale of building national capital: highways, bridges, factories that may work a long time.

However unavoidably you cannot save labor. It has to be provided when you need it. Your house and highways etc. need to be maintained, the factory needs labor for production. You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.

In the extreme situation of the movie “Children of men”, where all that is left is 70+ old infirm people, they are fucked. There are no firemen and policemen and bakers and linemen and nurses and doctors and all the other essential workers to sell your gold to. The same it happens in wars and civil unrest where your gold necklace will buy you loaf of bread. You will die of hunger in your bed. Technically, you individually could save more, but it would be impossible society wide.

The same logic applies in 50% or 90% young population collapse scenario. That is the point.

Perhaps we're misunderstanding each other, when I say drastically cut consumption then I mean that they barely get any healthcare and no elderly care, most will work until they die. Retirement is consumption.

You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.

It's usually solved by the Grim Reaper. There's more young than old. Crashing birth rates make that a problem, but there's enough slack in the system to allow a build-down of the population (at US birth rates, if not South Korean). Provided the young people don't see the old people with assets, decide they'd rather take than trade their labor for them, and do so. Unfortunately that's likely to be what happens, once the Boomers are out of the way.

For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me

I'm not actually aware of many folks that do the latter. Most presentations I've seen of why GDP is a useful number at all actually reason about GDP/capita, saying that this tends to correlate well with general living standards. Not perfectly, of course, and those folks will be quick to point out areas where it's still an imperfect measure.

I think the main argument for raw GDP would be on a national scale. Raw GDP on a national scale tends to correlate with state capacity to wage war. This obviously has its own benefits, but it's definitely a sideshow for any country that doesn't have significant security concerns. For countries that have significant security concerns, I can't imagine that any form of degrowth could possibly have much purchase.

Perhaps an argument could be made for tech development, in that having a significant pool of economic activity/capacity is an enabler. Robin Hanson is probably the closest to this, but I think his model heavily weighs just raw population, though I could imagine that if you pressed him on edge cases, he would say that some factor or threshold on GDP, GDP/capita, or something or other is potentially in play.

Thats an interesting point. Everyone who wouldn't hit the button marked "3d print another billion slum-dwelling Bomali Rickshawaroo™ pullers who increase GPD by $10 a year" is a degrowther in the sense of prioritizing things above economic growth.

It's worth doing more theoretical work to distinguish lifestyle-improving GDP deprioritization from "we must ban air conditioning in the Bomali slums because human suffering appeases Gaia's wrath" degrowthism.

Ah, degrowthers calling for "sacrifice". Reminds me of the classic demotivational poster. "Your role may be thankless, but if you're willing to give it your all, you just might bring success to those who outlast you."

I honestly just don't see the problem with lower birthrates long term. Yes our current economic and retirement system is an unsustainable pyramid of overlapping obligations all pinned on neverending population growth.

But that ain't good! Every nice place on the planet is already overpopulated (even a lot of the shitty ones) and every great city and historical or natural wonder is being destroyed by mass tourism. We'll have bots or artifical wombs before the century is out, so all this hand wringing seems a touch performative in a kind of "it aligns with my right wing beliefs about society and women" sort of way.

I firmly believe it is a good thing to have a smaller world population than 8 billion or 10 billion people, we can increase it later if we start exploring the stars or some such. That is simply too many people that all want the same resources, it makes things shitty for a lot of them, if nothing else it makes it crowded at all my favorite spots. I don't like that.

Other groups have high birth rates. These groups are different from your group and have different values. It makes no sense to work for a future in which all of your labor will go to a group replacing you. Sadly birth rates are conflict theory stuff. There are 300k Hasidim in America with a population that doubles every 20 years, so there will be 10 million in 100 years, mostly in and around NJ / NYC, and they already possess extreme political power. Factor in the other groups: Amish, Salafists, etc.

The world will be a very different place in 100 years, to the point where I can't imagine that kind of thing mattering unless we get set back by an asteroid strike or nuclear war. If you think 100 years is too optimistic then think about the world in 1000. None of this kind of thing will have any bearing on the future once machines can outthink and outwork us at every level and in every field. So, work, don't work, whatever your doing don't do it for your in group values to be present in 100 years, they won't be.

I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.

For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.

Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.

None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.

I think economics are part of it, but I really don't think raising a kid is as expensive as people think. Like the Korean test prep mentioned in the threat, the things that seem expensive are things besides the actual raising of the kid (e.g. swim lessons, private school, tutoring...)

But just "having a child and raising them to adulthood" is not that expensive from what I can tell.

Yeah I'm 6 months into fatherhood (and whilst there's a bunch of schooling etc. fees that I'm obviously not paying yet). My partner and I are reasonably frugal/happy to procure second-hand things from marketplace and I'd be surprised if my daughter has cost us more than a thousand or two so far. We've probably come out far ahead considering savings on stuff we'd normally be spending.

I mean, to be fair, it's easy to be cheap when the kid has no real personality or interests yet.

True but there's been plenty of opportunity to spend up if we'd wanted to buy first-hand.

Walk around your average baby store and it's amazing how much you can drop on a stroller and a bed.

None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.

It’s not just Georgia, you know- in America church attendees are above replacement. In Holland and Ukraine religious fundamentalists are growing as a share of the population through differential fertility- and yes both dutch Calvinists and the UGCC are fundamentalist groups. Religion, or at least abrahamaic religion, really does improve fertility.

convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature

Same here. Societal shifts around 'status' or 'what we value' are necessary, but they will never gain traction unless the economic incentives align as well. Economics is about money, Money is about labor, Labor is about time.

Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP

These statistics are misleading, because it doesn't measure what qualitative changes it seeks to drive.

Can women return to the workforce in high-status roles after being out of the market for 5-10 years ? Can they take long maternity breaks without being fired ? Do the fathers gets long paternity breaks to contribute to housework ? Can they afford to add another room to their house without breaking the bank ? Is it possible for the kids to set your kids up for strong economic outcomes without dooming them to a horrible rat race ?

This is just motherhood. But you have to see economic incentives for long term romantic partnerships too. Can you stay in the same city longterm without affecting career prospects ? Do you have time for dating in your 20s, or is there immense pressure to be in the office instead ?

No amount of money is going to make up for misaligned incentives on these primary questions.

The trads complain about changing values which disincentivize motherhood. Free-market capitalists talk about bad economic incentives. Both have a point. But, the latter is lot easier to fix than the former. To top it off, capitalists have economic power, while trads are bleeding social power like a slit aorta. So, pretty large difference in agency as well.

Ofc, govts pick the worst of both worlds by spending money on bad economic outcomes and accommodating some real crazies who keep moving the value system further away from the metaphorical God's light.

P.S: Alongside economics, building environment and infrastructure also plays a huge role here. That's a topic for another day.

Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.

Children are expensive, and have become far more expensive over the past century, in currencies which we have not become wealthier in, namely time and effort. Once responsibilities are non-delegable, no amount of money can make them lesser, and anyway cost disease and regulation has made most delegation of even the reasonably delegable parts of childcare out of reach to all but the wealthy. Except for the underclass, who simply fail to pay the extra costs.

I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.

But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.

I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'.

You can look at it that way, but I don't think it gets to the point. Parenting children is a lot of non-delegable work that takes up time. It's less that you could be doing other things in that time and those other things have become more valuable (which is "opportunity cost") than that the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased. That's an issue even if the only thing you could do with the time was no more valuable than it was a century ago.

the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased

I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.

Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.

I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things.

That time counts!

I assume in bygone times the normal method of acquiring children's clothes was for the women in the family - especially grandmothers and spinsters - to make them by hand, and this distorts such calculations.

Those bygone times are more than 50 years ago.

Putting aside deeply illiberal solutions that both sides refuse to even consider, it seems like the most viable solution suggested by your post is to simply cut down on college as a necessary rite of passage.

How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

Increasingly, anyone who wants to do anything better-compensated or more-dignified than working at McDonald's or stocking shelves at Walmart. But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."

But the road to success for non-college-educated has eroded.

But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."

Isn't that a bit far-fetched?

I'm not completely sure what you mean. You could make a good argument for trade apprenticeships not being college, but people who get associate's degrees in HVAC or IT or aviation maintainence get them at community colleges, and they're counted as college degrees.

I know I worded it weirdly, what I was trying to say is, "While four years may be unnecesary for many, some sort of post-secondary education (whether an apprenticeship or two-year degree) is ultimately necessary for most people who want to progress farther in a career than low-skill service jobs." I'm not saying we should get rid of 2-year degrees, or anything like that. In fact I think they're a great alternative to a lot of four-year programs for many people.

I'm not completely sure what you mean.

I meant that it doesn't fall into the category of overall life experiences and phase that average people normally associate with the word.

Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.

And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.

I definitely agree that a lot of white-collar jobs don't actually require higher education -- just some interpersonal skills and Microsoft Office expertise. IMO very few non-technical fields actually require the level of education provided by 4-year degrees. Very little of it is retained, anyway, particularly if it isn't being used.

Ultimately what I believe is going on is that employers are using college education as a proxy for conscientiousness and IQ, whether consciously or unconsciously. You want to hire people for your office positions who are genuinely better employees than fry cooks. And testing directly for the desired traits is either illegal or too gauche. You try convincing Linda the HR lady you want to ignore qualifications and hire based on IQ tests. So college performance becomes the acceptable proxy, and it includes the relevant payoffs to interest groups like under-represented minorities and women that are the cost of doing business.

Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).

I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.

But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.

I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids

It's not just about IQ. I know plenty of smart people -- people smarter than me -- who couldn't finish college, because they kept on sleeping through class and missing deadlines. It's about IQ, and conscientousness, and either having low neuroticism or enough coping mechanisms to maneuver through the neuroticism you have, and being pro-social. Heck, conscientiousness might be more important than IQ for most things.

though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests

They do! We're talking about South Korea's fierce competition down below. And East Asian Confucianist competition is nothing more than an elaborate proxy for IQ, conscientiousness... and all of the aforesaid traits.

It needs to be grueling and competitive, because we know of no other way to test for industriousness other than actually putting people to work and seeing who sticks to deadlines and persists and who doesn't. There is no lab test we can do to measure that value, everything in the short term reduces to IQ. But for employment, it's the long term we care about.

The only other way we have to measure that part of people's personality is by straight up asking them -- "Do you keep deadlines?" "Is it important for you to work?" "Are you lazy?" -- and the second we try to measure a property by self-report and tie it to outcomes anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ will start simply lying.

College is just the West's version of Confucian examinations. Only the actual competition comes in secondary school, before anyone submits an application to any university, and we don't publicize the fact beforehand so most of the population doesn't realize how much their petty high school activities and extracurriculars will define the course of their life. And unlike the Confucian system, it's explicitly designed to favor children of the elite, while letting in some token minorities so the college brochures don't look 'too white.' China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.

China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.

Not to make a snide quip, but I doubt they do, because they seem fine with sending their kids to our colleges--because, for all of Western education's sins, there's still enough value in it for it to be a potential matter of geopolitical strategy.

More comments

How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

They want to spend 4 years drinking and fornicating. The diploma is just a side effect.

And their parents want them to spend 4 years establishing a social circle with other college students of similar background, and to marry one of those students. Which is basically the same thing, with the diploma indeed being of secondary importance.

Admirable goals. But if you can't actually pay for your rumspringa yourself some pragmatism has to seep in.

Maybe two years of fornicating and drinking and less debt to worry about is a good compromise.

The 18 years old horny guys and gals, brainwashed by numerous films about the party life and the whole society to follow their dreams are hardly the most levelheaded and pragmatic demographic.

I think Europe has a better solution - not so lavish student lifestyle, but heavily sponsored. Where I live the cost per semester for EU nationals is around the median monthly salary. And that is if you pay out of pocket. If you actually do well on the exam you can get subsidized which is roughly in half. Of course for foreigners it is a lot more expensive. So it is totally doable to study and work and be financially self sufficient.

For some of us it's a matter of work hard play hard. Hedonism and ambition can be made compatible.

His South Korean example points at the opposite of what he’s trying to get at. If a SK family had the resources to devote to another child, by his own logic they would because the child’s rank reflects on the mother, and more so if there are more kids. The bottleneck is thus resources, not culture.

There’s a lot of variables that go into fertility rates, but they’re not really that complex. Age of marriage, rate of marriage, and economic factors are obviously the most significant ones in western societies outside of some edge cases (Amish etc.). It’s not rocket surgery. The graphs this guy shows are not evidence one way or another because they don’t actually reflect the modal family’s economic status, and this should be obvious with a little thought.

But status is relative. If you increase everyone’s pay you haven’t changed the percent of income they devote to status. Everyone will just spend more money on that one kid’s opportunities. If Koreans get more money they will spend even more on ensuring one high status kid. So what is important is to value number of kids as a mark of success for half the living humans (all the women), to balance out status concerns.

Empirically that’s incorrect, since Korean families with 2 or even 3 kids do exist - they’re usually more well off than others. There’s a limit to how much resources you can pour into a single kid, and also not all Koreans will actually torture their kids like that.

I agree that helicoptering money on all parents will simply raise prices for everything, and tutoring specifically. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the bottleneck for a specific family is still economic, even when the example is taken at face value.

The status competition in East Asia extends to the status of one's children. Even if you were to magically boost the status of women with more children (and even give housing and financial benefits on top), that won't fix the intense status anxiety when it comes to how their children do in life.

In East Asia, status rankings are universal, overt, and familial. And because status is a positional good, it naturally invites full investment of every expendable resource. If you have to divide your resources across n children, they'll lose out to families with m < n children, which reflects badly on your own status.

There are easy ways of solving this, like limiting admission to all elite universities and prestigious graduate jobs to young adults with at least two siblings.

Would that be "easy" though? It seems like political suicide to propose such a policy and coercing private institutions to implement it would be difficult. Then there are all of the perverse incentives toward gaming the system. There would likely need to be carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications from a prior birth or other health concerns, so lots of buying out diagnoses under the table. Some might adopt a strategy of having the threshold number of kids and still hyperinvesting in only one. Etc.

carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage? If people actually want to solve the problem, they have to bite the bullet and get it done even if it makes some people worse off. Now I know that South Korea doesn't want to solve the problem and so they're mucking about with tiny financial nudges and lame govt programs.

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage?

How about we do that skipping for everything else first?

What's more important than the life or death of the nation? I said nation, not state. There are more important things in this world than raising the GDP figures and subsidizing the senescent.

I guess you have to smash the safety glass to get to the fire extinguisher... but that's included in the fire-extinguishing process.

I would say a large part of how we got here is by deciding that the "unfairly disadvantaged" must never be negatively affected by anything. But somehow it is only when those "unfairly disadvantaged" are a different group that we should skip those carveouts.

If this is correct (and I am sure the real picture is at least slightly more complicated) than low fertility becoming an elite concern will likely boost the status of having children.

I think part of the reason for a lack of children in the Western world was the media emphasis on Malthusian thinking and the difficulties of having children. If the elites double back it seems likely that fertility will also double back, although I doubt it will rise to the same degree.

What's significantly more complicated is that the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan. Clearly, there's more going on here.

The only truly developed country with above replacement fertility is Israel. Georgia is a much poorer second world country with replacement-ish and stably rising fertility. There are regions and social strata elsewhere in the developed world with high fertility(Eg the Dutch bible belt), but nowhere else in the industrialized world is above replacement on the national level unless you count the gulf countries as industrialized, although a few Latin American countries and Turkey were fairly recently. These countries vary vastly. More than likely there's no magic bullet.

F-LFPR doesn’t tell us what the Japanese woman or the Italian woman values, how she sees her identity in the world, whether she was nurtured at a young age to want to nurture children, and whether she feels pride/shame relative to her participation in fertility, all of which relate to status. It’s not clear that there is more going on, I don’t think, at least not from F-LFPR. If there is something more complicated than this, we should see the answer in the Hasidim, who raise lots of children while living near-exclusively in urban and suburban environments. This eliminates any diet or environmental toxin -related etiology. What is left? There’s money, but the experiments in paying women to have kids don’t amount to anything. So what’s actually left besides “pro-fertile culture” which relates to female status?

(Israeli non-orthodox fertility is complicated by the existence of the ultra-orthodox, who raise up the religious scholars, affect culture, and a percent of the ultra-orthodox become merely “religious”. The Jewish religion probably also increases female fertility as a status signifier because it’s so worldly / material regarding “existence of the Jewish people” etc.)

How much did those experiments actually pay them? I would expect the pay to be a drop in the bucket compared to how much the cost of successfully raising children who "make it" has increased in the last 20 years, because otherwise we could have UBI (top-tier US college tuition fees can easily pay for three adults to have a comfortable life!). There's also the matter of inflation in attention and supervision children are expected to be given, which can't be made up for by just pouring in money. This is most obvious in the US near-prohibition on leaving even 12 year olds unattended, but even an Austrian family friend (young academic mother of two) reports malicious gossip from parents of classmates about her never picking up the kids after primary school because she has to work. What I gather from her stories is that mothers helicopter-parenting their children has become a status thing (it's naturally a luxury, since it means foregoing one income), even as legally it continues to be okay for children to be classic European levels of unattended.

The hasidim truly and genuinely believe in a religion which forbids birth control, same as the tradcaths but without the latter's marriage rate problems.

the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan

... the latter of which, curiously enough, has the highest TFR of any country/territory in developed East Asia.

I'd actually forgotten that both of those countries had the highest TFRs in their respective regions(East Asia and Southern Europe- I'm excluding France from the latter), and the stablest ones too. But they're still a long way from replacement; a baby bonus of .1-.25 from 'women mostly stay home' does seem supported, but the average developed country needs much more than a .25 boost.

I saw a thread om twitter explaining that low fertility in South Korea is due to parental investment competion:

It's amazing how far people go not to point out every Korean born requires >9k hours of costly test prep for a chance at "good" college otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I have to wonder if there's a taboo.

In high fertility countries, slightly older kids raise their siblings.

That's the answer. It's not a hard mystery.

17 y/o Koreans can't help raise their 15 y/o siblings, because Korean teens are preparing for college exams, which only expensive adults can help with.

That's it.

Do people even bother asking Koreans?

Surely any married Korean couple, if you ask them why they don't have four kids, will surely bring up the nightmarish prospect of ensuring that all of them are "properly placed"?

"Have the older kids tutor the younger ones" yeah, right!

https://x.com/anarchyinblack/status/1817684593908080960

At this point, I wonder if we in the US could somehow shift our immigration strategy to target South Koreans. We receive people who will be good citizens and diligent workers, they get a society that isn't as insanely high-pressure.

As someone currently living in S Korea, I don't agree. Or at least, it's not that simple.

Korea has had a low birth rate for a while now, since the 80s, but it's only recently that's crashed into "OMG", sub-1 levels. Something has happened more recently. And it's not the tiger moms. If anything, I think they've eased up a bit on the childhood hardcore test prep stuff. I see more kids and teens hanging around now in malls and arcades, goofing off, or going to "fun" schools for things like drawing and sports, while the old-school test-prep schools are kinda languishing.

If anything, it might be a generational trauma kind of thing. In the 80s and 90s, people really did feel like they needed to study hard-core to get into a good college to have any chance of a good life. Now the country is much less poor, and there are a lot more options, including "alternative" paths like k-pop singer or esports streamer for kids who are not conventionally good students but have other talents. But people still remember the miserable childhood they had, and feel like "having kids = misery."

"Just ask any couple why don't have kids," well, it's not that simple, because people don't always open up about their deep emotional issues, you know? They'll probably just say "the economy" because that's a nice safe excuse. Doesn't really explain why the birth rate always seems to go the opposite direction as the GDP.

Why are you saying that South Korea was 'poor' back then as compared to know, relatively speaking? I don't think it was. This was before the Asian financial crisis of 1998, when SK was considered one of the Asian tigers. I mean I'm rather confident that one could make a decent living in South Korea without a college degree back when the manufacturing sector was booming.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly, not because they started out as some wealthy financial center. Their inflation-adjusted gdp per capita in 1980 was $4000. Which, ok, isn't as dire poverty as some nations, but certainly made it hard to find a middle-class job. Compare Japan which was at $19,000 in 1980.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly

Yes, that's what I meant. (Supposedly the tiger metaphor originates from tigers being able to jump really far.) I'd assume that a growing economy a) creates a large number of jobs in manufacturing and industry that are available to people without college degrees b) gives average people a sense of optimism, because one can believe that prosperity has increased, and will continue to increase.

otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I know this is indeed the root of the problem, but if this is indeed the social reality, it's baffling how a society can end up with norms such as this.

This sort of norm can only be sustained when there is plenty of human potential to waste in the first place. So it causing low fertility is probably a feature, not a bug: if success above the very lowest level is a high-cost tournament, there's probably too many people.

I'm not sure that really explains the phenomenon. Singapore has much higher population density than Korea, but parental investment seems much smaller. It's also not clear why there should be so much human potential to waste, especially in the era of globalization.

The TFR in Singapore and South Korea are roughly equal though.

Singapore is like 40% higher.

I've seen worldwide data online 5-10 years ago. Singapore was shown with the lowest TFR in the entire world while S Korea was the 3rd lowest or so, tied with Hongkong and Taiwan, roughly.

That was true 5-10 years ago and is no longer true.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=2002..latest&country=SGPKORTWNMACHKG

More comments

Perhaps Singapore's economic system can just use more people (proportionally) at those higher levels of achievement.

South Korea is very prosperous, though. The competitiveness doesn’t seem to match other developed countries with similar income rates, it’s not like in Britain or Germany people have to win an insane rat race or be Amazon warehouse workers.

All the OK-paying middle class jobs that pay just fine in every developed country exist in South Korea, and wealth inequality is average. It’s not India where life outside the top 5% sucks. The focus on the elite rat race is bizarre. The US has niche credentialist PMC status games for medicine or finance or big law or academia, but they are way outside of the life experience of most Americans.

South Korea is very prosperous, though.

Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.

It just doesn’t track with lower inequality levels compared to most Western countries in Korea and Japan though. There isn’t a tiny elite who pass the meritocracy test and go to elite colleges who are making tons of money while everyone else is poor (like in India with the IIT system), that’s not the distribution in these places.

More comments

Uh, isn’t South Korea at basically-western-European levels of prosperity? Like there’s no reason life can’t be perfectly decent for people who aren’t 90th percentile.

More comments

To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to have status lowered relative to motherhood.

I've never understood why Congress doesn't create an award specifically designed to raise mother's status, maybe after a certain number of kids. Give them a little ceremony and a title like gold star families. It costs nothing and is a simple way to boost status.

National awards have an Old World feel to them that doesn't jive with American culture. It is more in line with American culture for such awards to be handed out by associations organized at the local level.

There's Presidential and other government-given awards, though, no?

Well for one thing, an award like that would have very powerful totalitarian connotations, since both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR did very similar things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine

Closer to the modern day, Putin's Russia is also doing things like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/18/russia-offers-mother-heroine-medal-and-16800-for-having-10-children.html.

It is worthwhile, I think, to note that even though Putin's Russia has been trying to encourage the fertility rate to go up for many years now, the fertility rate has been recently slumping after hitting a peak around 2014: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010528/number-of-live-births-in-russia/. Perhaps not coincidentally, that slump coincides with a slump in GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=RU.

France has a similar decoration as well though.

The 2014 slump is an exchange-rate matter. The Russian economy did not actually shrink 40% in a couple of years.

Congress will not do this because republicans are distrustful of government action and progressives like to say that they support large families but will actually fight anything which celebrates marriage and childbearing for women tooth-and-nail. That leaves moderate democrats, who lack the numbers.

That wouldn’t boost status. Status is a real, felt, living social reality. What confers status is genuinely sought after. No status is conferred from participation medals or competitions where there are not losers. A congressional medal is pretty much worthless. You need “potentially valuable social others” to genuinely value you more highly as a result of the criterion of status. So what is required is a totalizing social change, not something fake. (“Gold star families” as a phrase fills me with utter disgust; it connotes kindergarten activity points and does not actually honor the families of dead soldiers).

Boy howdy is your opinion of the ‘gold star families’ concept outside of the red tribe norm, and probably far from the median American.

You think that the median American gives actual extra honor to the families of fallen soldiers? “We have to invite James to this function, he’s a gold star family member”; “You should really date Dave, his brother died in Iraq”. I think there is some pity to these families, but I would be surprised if their honor has substantively increased meaningfully as a result.

Here's a simpler* one: parental income is divided by the number of children for determining financial aid.

If your parents have an income of $200k and you have two siblings, you would be treated the same as an only child with $83k-income parents. I know that many costs scale sub-linearly with the size of the family (never mind just the number of children), but it wouldn't be very effective program if it was merely cancelling out an existing bias.

* Simpler isn't always better, of course.

The correct approach would be to directly attack feminism as the source of societies woes, since that’s the ideology of the working female. I have no idea how that could be coordinated though. It would take a societal and economic collapse due to low birth rates for it to happen, and maybe not even then.

Is it so over for OpenAI? I just signed up for a Grok subscription for $7/month. Apparently the reasoning performance of their new model is on the same tier as ChatGPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. Image generation is best-in-class (using Flux). And of course it's much less neutered than the competition.

The miracles that OpenAI accomplished in the last 3 years now seem rather... commonplace. There's a lot of competitors at nearly the same level. Facebook's open-sourced AI, Llama 3.1, will commoditize the space. While it's not really feasible to run these models on your home computer (yet) it will be easy for smaller companies to buy compute and then sell Chat-GPT similar services. It will be a race to the bottom now.

OpenAI is running at a gigantic loss. I'm sure they were planning to capture a monopoly and then raise prices. That seems less likely to work now as their product is undifferentiated.

And the irony of Elon controlling a Chat-GPT similar is just too delicious. OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain. Now open source is routing around the damage and rebuilding it all from scratch. I bet Grok's total development costs are like 1% of OpenAI's.

I don't think its "over" so much as the hype has run it's course leaving only sober analysis in it's wake.

There are definite use cases for LLMs and Star Trek-style universal translators are a genuinely revolutionary "killer app" but LLMs are not "reasoning engines" nor were they ever a likely path to true AGI, and this was fairly clear early on to those in the know, but sober analysis along the lines of "this is signifigant but now where near the major breakthrough it has been portrayed as" doesn't drive social media engagement and attract VC dollars the way "I Created an AI Scientist" does, so naturally its the latter that got signal boosted.

I just signed up for a Grok subscription for $7/month

Which region are you in where X Premium+ is $7/month? In the US/UK/EU, it's (respectively) $/£/€16

United States.

OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain.

What? How?

We discussed this at length last year but here's a short rundown.

In 2015, OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. Elon was by far the largest financial supporter. OpenAI was a non-profit, dedicated to sharing its research openly (thus the Open in its name).

Today, though the non-profit fig leaf still exists, OpenAI exists as a closed, for-profit company, half of which is owned by Microsoft.

Last year, Sam Altman was fired by the non-profit board because he was not being honest with them. However, many employees had stock grants worth tens of millions due to the deal with Microsoft. With these grants being threatened, the employees pledged to leave en masse and work for Microsoft directly. The board caved, and now Sam Altman has de-facto complete control of the "non-profit" board.

For that reason, Elon is suing OpenAI for breach of contract as they perverted the mission of the original non-profit for their own financial gain: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/01/tech/elon-musk-lawsuit-openai-sam-altman/index.html

It’s hilarious how these are the exact wrong people you want possessing decision-making capabilities regarding AI. Like, the moral test was placed in front of them, and they all failed it. They chose money over (1) honesty (2) their own pledged word (3) morality (4) the public Good.

I suspect that outside of a very small handful of genuine Yudkowsky-types, almost nobody who claims to be concerned about AI destroying the world is actually worried about AI destroying the world. They may say they are worried, but they are not actually worried deep down. The idea of AI destroying the world is abstract and distant, on the other hand getting tens of millions of dollars is very real and very visceral.

And for every one person who is genuinely worried about AI destroying the world, there are probably a hundred people who are worried about AI allowing Nazis to write bad no-no things online. Because Nazis writing bad no-no things online feels real and visceral and it pushes the deep buttons of ideology, whereas AI destroying the world sounds like a sci-fi fantasy for geeks.

almost nobody who claims to be concerned about AI destroying the world is actually worried about AI destroying the world.

Then the question would be why they would make such claims. I can see two reasons: (1) Signaling value. However, outside of the Less Wrong bubble, the signaling value of believing in p(doom)>0 is negative. Also, a significant fraction of partisans generally tend to believe the fears endorsed for signaling value: if some people are concerned that a Republican/Democrat will lead the US to fascism/communism, I think their fear may be genuine. Granted, they will not act rationally on their fears -- like emigrating to a safer country before the election. (2) Hyping AI. "Our toys are so powerful that our main concern is them taking over the world". This is certainly a thing, but personally, if I wanted to hype up the public about my LLM, I would go for Culture (post-scarcity), not Matrix (extinction).

As an anecdote, I happen to believe that p(doom) is a few percents. Bizarrely, despite me being a self-professed utilitarian, this does not affect my decision on where to be employed. I mean, given that alignment research is not totally saturated with grunt workers, and that there is a chance it could save mankind (perhaps lowering p(doom) by a third), it would be hard to find a more impactful occupation.

I think the reasons for my bizarre behavior (working conventional jobs) are as follows: (1) Status quo bias, social expectations. If half of my friends from uni went into alignment, this would certainly increase the odds for me as well. (2) Lack of a roadmap. Contrast with the LHC. When it was designed in the 1990s as a tool to discover the Higgs and SUSY, there was a plan. Ambitious, but doable, no big essential white spots marked "to be solved by technology yet to be discovered". Becoming a tiny cog in that machine, working on an interface for the cryo controls for the magnets or whatever would have been appealing to me. By contrast, AI alignment feels more like being kids on the beach who thinks there will be an incoming tide, and try to reinforce their sand castles so that they will withstand the water. It is possible that some genius kid will invent cement and solve the tide problem, but it is not something one can plan. Statistically speaking, I would likely end up in a team who tried to make the sand stickier by adding spit or melt the sand into lava over a campfire. The main reason our sand castles would survive would likely be that we are on the shores of a lake and the tide will end up rising only half a centimeter. This might be a psychological flaw of mine, but I prefer to make legible contributions with my work.

Of course, this means that you can say "by revealed preference, this means that quiet_NaN does not believe p(doom) to be in the percent range".

I know!! Gah if OpenAI really did secure the monopoly that would've been the darkest timeline. I definitely believe Altman and the rest of that cadre are incredibly corrupt, if not downright evil.

It's heartening to see how much genuine competition there is out there.

Why does everyone forget that there was a 3 year gap between GPT-3 and GPT-4?

Give it time. At least wait and see what GPT-5 brings before declaring their premature demise.

I didn't forget that, I think that it's a sign that returns are rapidly diminishing on their scaling approach and they are struggling to wring some new hotness out of what they've got.

I'm no fan of sama and the cabal he's built, but nonetheless I think it's still too early to write off any major company working on AI-related things right now. I'm not convinced all of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked wrt applications (even dumb stuff like "characterai but uncucked" alone is likely to be a smash hit), and besides most past/present developments were sufficiently arcane and/or undercover that you can't really predict where and what happens next - cf. Chinese LLMs being regarded as subpar until Deepseek, or Anthropic being safety fanatics with only a dumb soy model to their name until Claude 3(.5).

If Sora is anything to go by I think OpenAI still have some genuine aces up their sleeves, and while I don't believe they're capable of properly playing them to full effect, they at least have the (faded) first-mover advantage and Sam "Strawberry" Hypeman to exploit normies boost their chances.

I agree that it's hard to predict what happens next. But the next development could come from anywhere, even China. Two years ago this wasn't true. Back then, OpenAI was heads and shoulders above the competition.

My claim is not about AI in general but only that OpenAI is no longer special. Although the fact that everyone seems to have reached (but not exceeded) the level of Chat-GPT 4 might seem to indicate a plateau.

As regards Sora. In my mind, it was a neat demo but ultimately a dead end and a distraction. Where's the use case?

My claim is not about AI in general but only that OpenAI is no longer special.

That much is true, I agree.

But the next development could come from anywhere, even China. Two years ago this wasn't true. Back then, OpenAI was heads and shoulders above the competition.

I agree as well but I'll note the obvious rejoinder - the next development could indeed come from anywhere, even OpenAI. Sure, they get mogged left and right these days, whodathunk propping yourself up as a paragon/benchmark of LLM ability backfires when you drag your feet for so long that people actually start catching up. But this still doesn't negate their amassed expertise and, more realistically, unlimited money from daddy Microsoft; unless said money was the end goal (which to be fair there is nonzero evidence for, as you note downthread) they're in a very good position to throw money at shit and probe for opportunities to improve or innovate. Surely Altman can see the current strategy of resting on laurels is not futureproof right?

As regards Sora. In my mind, it was a neat demo but ultimately a dead end and a distraction. Where's the use case?

Fair enough but still counts as advancement imo, even though tech like that is guaranteed to be fenced off from plebs, no points for guessing what (nsfw?) the usual suspects try to make with "ai video" generators in this vein. I generally stopped looking for immediate use cases for LLMs, I think all current advancements (coding aside) mostly do not have immediate useful applications, until they suddenly will when multiple capabilities are combined at once into a general-purpose agentic assistant. Until one arrives, we cope.

Are there any other industries that AI has really had an effect on aside from coding and graphic design? Search maybe?

I use it daily for these tasks and I think most people like me do, but are there other industries like this?

Education? The kids are becoming lazier and more regarded than ever due to relying on LLMs to write all their assignments. Though I guess this doesn't destroy the industry itself, but it makes for teaching being even more frustrating than before.

Amazing that we now have a machine that will answer arbitrarily-worded questions about any commonly-taught topic, and the only education implications people talk about are fake assignment submittions.

Like no, the whole structure of the industry is now obsolete.

The more exciting implication is that future models may be able to act as personal tutors of a pretty high quality, with live audio input and output and visuals to boot. That sounds pretty good to me.

It's made educators no more obsolete than encyclopedias did.

Maybe the technology will improve, but AI is currently quite incapable of educating children despite what any cherrypicked demo might show you.

I have a friend who's a GMAT tutor and he's busier than ever, charging $300/hr. So even in a free market, no one wants to use AI as a teacher. For now at least...

As usual, the argument assumes no improvement in the models or any well-designed and marketed product to gain acceptance.

The unanswered question is whether kids who can't afford 300/hr are seeing benefits from LLM tutors.

I literally said: "Maybe the technology will improve".

So, no, I did not make that assumption.

Do you know how many kids who weren't able to afford tutoring are using it for tutoring?

Its a very strong claim that "AI is currently quite incapable of educating children."

Teaching has long been and will always be daycare, but the problem is that the carer must be able to discipline, and educators have lost that ability.

I would guess that many translation companies that previously used boutique translation models are now just using "common" LLMs, which has constituted yet another step in machine translation improving. Still a lot of translate-from-scratch work sent to me, though.

If we can get you to post quarterly reports on the state of the translation job market, that would be great. You're my personal barometer for when I should start taking AI seriously. My personal experience matches yours so far, and the idea that AI is some sort of a revolution in my field (software dev) is bizarre to me. So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete. Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

I've started retraining (returned to the university for a polsci degree), so hopefully I'll only be in the field for a few more years. (Partly preparation for if there's an unexpected leap in machine translation capacity that genuinely starts to eat into the job market, partly just that after ten years of freelancing and uncertainty a real job with a real salary and a real vacation has started to seem quite appealing).

Don't tell me I have to get someone to make a poli-sci AI so I can keep my barometer...

So far it didn't deliver on anything more than a slightly better autocomplete.

It is far better at that - for experienced developers doing something in area new to them

Some people use it as a replacement for Stack Overflow, which I still prefer to look up directly.

Often it is a superior replacement: you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want, very specific for your task. That sometimes is better than SO. And so far, on track of getting better and better.

I heard all that, tried it out for myself, and it just doesn't feel all that great to me. Maybe one day it will get better but it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks (which your own description kind of confirms).

you can get intern-quality work on any topic you want

That's terrible. I always seen internships essentially as charity work companies engage in to polish their PR, or, at best,extend their recruitment pool. You make it sound like the sale's pitch for Tesla's "full self driving (supervised)". It's awesome. Can take you anywhere. Almost no interventions... which results in you having to be ready to intervene at all times, or die driving into a truck.

Maybe one day it will get better, but I'd rather rely on Stefferi as my canary, than on the words of AI enthusiasts.

I wonder if we aren't observing some sort of split between students, hobbiests, web-devs and the like, and applications requiring genuine rigor. My own experience with AI generated code is largely summed up in this short here.

it's just not all that useful in day to day tasks

I guess it depends on how often you need to do stuff like "now I need to drop into badly written docs of a new setup and get simple program working".

I need it fairly often but I can imagine someone who needs it approximately never.

And I am quite surprised that it is useful even for that.

than on the words of AI enthusiasts

I am not an AI enthusiast

I've been hearing rumblings that it has made impact in the legal profession, big law firms are probably supplementing their paralegal staff, at least, and likely their attorneys.

We hear about the obvious ones that get caught fabricating caselaw wholesale, but I'd bet it's effective enough that most of the time no outsider notices.

https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-news/miami-dade-public-defender-is-using-artificial-intelligence-for-research-and-for-case-preparation/

I find it is excellent for small simple contracts. Want an NDA, a form for a leave of absence application, a privacy policy for a website, a small contract to sell a used car, a contract to hire the neighbors kid to work a bit during the summer as a tester or similar it works well. A will for a person who has simple finances or the paperwork that needs to be signed when checking into a hotel.

It is pretty great at coming up with domain/name combos for a business.

Chatgpt did a better job of explaining the swedish tax forms for me than the government website.

One thing I have realized after spending a few years in the startup scene is how legal expenses are a huge burden on a startup. Various contracts need to be drafted and they can cost thousands each. ChatGPT can draft these simple contracts.

I will use it for tasks where the scope of work is easily defined.

I've found it makes researching unfamiliar areas of law about 5x faster. It really seems to "understand" statutory interpretation and I've yet to catch it making a material mistake. It does a good job comparing and explaining two different statutes that are on point, especially when provided with current caselaw.

I have also used it to fine-tune an appellant brief. It is at least as helpful as having a particularly bright law student with access to massive knowledge reserves to bounce ideas off of.

A year or so back I suggested that any person who is currently in Law School should drop out. I think it is still good advice, although I understand the counter-arguments. It will not be long before these things are smarter and faster than any first-year associate.

What kind of law do you practice? I'm currently in litigation but I've done oil and gas law in the past and dabbled in bankruptcy and simple estate planning along the way, and I have a hard time thinking of any obvious uses for AI. It may make legal research easier, but I do legal research maybe a few times a year, and clients don't like paying for it so we usually only do it at their request, and they only seem to request it whenever I'm already pretty busy, so cutting my research billables by a couple hours wouldn't make much of a dent in the overall amount of work I have. The thing about most litigation is that few issues arise where there's any real fuzzy question that needs research. If you practice in one area the relevant appellate decisions are well-known and new ones are rare enough that it's news when they're handed down. This was even true when I was in oil and gas, and a relatively large number of decisions were being handed down during the boom, covering the three states I worked in.

Anyway, in litigation at least, I'm rarely ever doing the typical lawyer thing of applying the law to the facts and making an argument. What I spend most of my time doing is gathering facts and analyzing them so I can first make an argument to the client to get settlement authority in the amount I think I need and then making an argument to opposing counsel that they should accept what I'm offering them. The relevant information here is 1. The facts of the case at hand, and 2. The facts of other cases my firm has settled with Plaintiff's counsel. Any LLM would need access to hundreds of pages of depositions, thousands of pages of medical records, interrogatories, fact witness lists, expert reports, innumerable pages of discovery material, and other information each case generates. And then multiply this by every case the office has ever handled, and some that they didn't. Almost every case I handle involves discovery evidence and deposition testimony from prior cases that the Plaintiff is relying on as evidence. And I need it to digest the facts of all recent cases (at least the past 5 years, sometimes longer) to compare settlement amounts. In order to do this, a firm would need to be running their own AI servers, which would have to be training constantly. And that doesn't even get to the other problem, that AI can't take a deposition.

In oil and gas it's even worse since my job was in title, and title records are stashed in courthouses and often haven't been digitized. Some counties are getting better with digitizing land records but few counties have attempted to digitize historical probate records, and the ones that have don't have online access. I'm not aware of any county that has digitized historical court records. With the exception of Ohio, the counties that do have online access are fee-based, and I doubt many companies are willing to give AI the authority to charge credit cards. And once you do get the records, anything before about 1920 is going to be handwritten, often poorly, and anything before about 1970 is going to be typewritten in a way that OCR struggles with. Some online systems don't work off of a typical database, but simply have scanned index pages that require you to manually enter the book and page number you're looking for. These use indexing systems that computers have made obsolete, and it's an open question whether an AI could figure out how to use them absent specific instructions. But the ultimate question is whether or not the general AI's that exist now would even be able to understand what they're supposed to be doing. There's also the problem that even knowing if a particular instrument even applies to the parcel in question. In states that predate the US Land Survey System, property descriptions will often start with "Beginning at a white oak" or something similarly nonspecific, then run through survey calls. Sometimes the calls have inaccuracies that need to be untangled. Sometimes (particularly with old leases and ROWs) it will just state the owners of the adjoining property. Sometimes (pretty often, actually, a title chain will simply stop cold because it passed through an estate and the only record of the transfer is the probate record of the person who died, whose name you probably don't know. I could continue but you get the idea. Figuring out a title takes years of learning various techniques based on the resources available. And God help you if you work in West Virginia.

With bankruptcy and estate planning, while actual legal questions are more prevalent, the bigger issue is being able to advise clients about what they should be doing. The kind of people willing to half-ass estate planning are the kind of people who are going to get a basic will off of Legal Zoom for 80 bucks anyway and allow their heirs to deal with the consequences of the fact that their estate wasn't so simple after all. (Practically every client I did a will for told me their situation was "really simple" and this was almost never the case. One guy had property in another state. One couple had a blended family. One guy owned a fucking restricted business.) Bankruptcy is theoretically more straightforward, especially Chapter 7s, but bankruptcy clients need someone to tell them that things are going to be okay as much as they need legal advice. These people come into your office absolutely scared to death and want to hug you when they leave.

And then there's the thing that local courts have their own customs that can't easily be translated to LLMs. Does the PA Statute of Repose apply to equipment that's permanently affixed to a structure? In Cambria County it does, in Allegheny County it usually doesn't, and it's not something anyone is ever going to appeal. How will the bankruptcy trustee treat a particular situation? Depends on the trustee. These are things you can only know if you're a lawyer who practices in the jurisdiction, and there are no written opinions to guide the AI. I admit that it has some theoretical uses, but I wouldn't start telling people to drop out of law school just yet. I mean, there are plenty of reasons to not go to law school, but this isn't one of them.

I work in a specific heavily statutory / reg based area of the law.

I have asked it difficult questions about statutory interpretation and found that it missed a lot. So YMMV.

Just a note that you may be interested in my above reply.

If the model you're using allows you to upload information, it HAS helped to simply give it access to the corpus of laws that you're working with.

Digging deeper into regulatory law, beyond just the high level statutes where the rules and rulings may not have been part of the training data does seem like it would require heavier specialization.

God dang it's just so cool that we have so many smart and accomplished professional folks on here. Thanks for this insight, really interesting stuff.

Ironically I don't feel that accomplished because I consistently hang out in places where high level degrees and incredibly intelligent professionals is almost the baseline.

I have my moments, though.

Wouldn't it take the same amount of time to explain to ChatGPT what you want in the contract as it would to just write it yourself?

If you can dictate notes for the contract in about 5 minutes, you'll have a first draft from ChatGPT much more quickly than you could create one yourself, even using existing forms.

Teach it how to use you forms and it'd be even better.

ChatGPT can draft these simple contracts.

If I was gambling my career on a startup and handing over 30/40/50/60% equity to the venture capitalists I don’t know that I’d trust ChatGPT to let me know I was being screwed over [even more than expected].

I would probably get a better contract for something that big. But there are a million little agreements that have to be signed. I got a rental agreement for a 4 square meter space in an atic written by chatgpt. If I lose that small amount of money because someone actually wants to bring it to court I am still saving money.

I got a rental agreement for a 4 square meter space in an atic written by chatgpt.

I feel like I'm missing something here. I don't know much about law, but every rental agreement I've signed has been the locality's standard rental agreement. I don't think they were technically required to use it, but there was just no reason not to. Why aren't all of those simple boring contracts that are so trivial ChatGPT could do it just a standard contract that you fill in the blanks on like those rental contracts? How does the LLM help?

Tangentially relevant...

It's bizarre how much custom legal work gets down. It would seem that governments or standards bodies could provide "standard contracts" for things like wills, employment contracts, leases etc... Instead, everyone get their own bespoke contract, and most of them are badly written.

We already have a standard will. It's called intestacy law. In contracts cases, as long as there is some minimal reason to believe a contract exists, courts have no problem writing missing terms for you, and they're consistent enough to be predictable. You don't even need a price.

You'd be surprised (or not) how badly a layperson can fuck things up even using a basic form with instructions in plain english.

Standard contracts from reputable sources are available if you look for them. For example:

Sure, pretty much every industry where people write emails is being "disrupted". But Grok can write a bullshit email the same as ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. It's all fake bullshit. Very little actual work is being done with LLMs.

Search is probably the killer app for AIs right now, but I wonder how long that lasts. Website owners are blocking AI bots, and for good reason.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/

One day, AI will achieve the holy grail of being able to turn a PDF into a spreadsheet. But last time I tried it still didn't work.

A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.

At minimum they have the ability to produce lots of synthetic data to train future models with, now they have this newer and cheaper model. And they have far more compute than before.

Same with Anthropic. Where is Opus 3.5? Hidden from us mere mortals.

Wasn't this explicit when OpenAI announced Sora but gave no public access?

They surely have some impressive stuff that isn't even revealed yet.

To a large extent I would expect them to keep ChatGPT as the flagship product and any upgrades would just be added on as features rather than "separate" models.

I am wondering if they've lost first-mover advantage, since any other companies that were sniffing around the same research-space surely know where to direct efforts now, even if they haven't stolen IP directly.

My bet is on OpenAI having a couple sizeable rabbits to pull out of their hat, but they could be true witchcraft or mere illusions.

A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.

I'll admit that this thought has occurred to me. But given everything we know about human nature, do you think anyone could keep something of this magnitude under wraps?

The criminal mastermind always longs to confess his crimes so we can marvel at how clever he is.

Probably not indefinitely, but it is at least possible to keep something of that magnitude under wraps for a long time and effectively enough that the few occasional whistleblowers get dismissed as cranks or ignored until finally one day something comes out that is too big to be swept under the rug. Take the NSA domestic surveillance program, for example. It was successfully kept secret from the public for many years.

OpenAI are leaning hard into anthropomorphic design with their new voice features. These are unlike anything I've seen (or rather heard) on other platforms, and they're just rolling out a big update - Ethan Mollick had a good recent piece on it. While the idea of talking out loud to your AI may seem unnecessary, I've found it fits into a very useful niche in my workflow - e.g., getting an interactive lecture on long car journeys, workshopping a lecture while waiting for a train. And it's the one version of ChatGPT I've had success at pitching to older people in my life.

However, I suspect most of the revenue long-term from AI will come from B2B services. OpenAI are doing pretty well here - I don't have the exact figures, but chatting AI policy with some major (non-AI) firms, around half of them I've interacted with have service contracts with OpenAI (not Google, or even Microsoft) for an internal secure version of ChatGPT. However, these internal versions are typically worse than the off-the-shelf model, which is slowing employee adoption.

All in all I think it's way too early to write off OpenAI. OpenAI (and Anthropic) are definitely doing something a bit different by explicitly leaning into anthropomorphic design, as opposed to the Google/Microsoft/Apple model where LLMs should be utterly generic and boring and predictable.

They are still the top for now. No argument here.

But, a year ago, @sama said that AGI had been achieved internally and people thought he might be serious.

Now they are merely first among equals. As cool as the new features are, this is not AGI. I don't think they have any special sauce. There's probably nothing they can do that a startup with $100 million can't do. Hell, even China is making top-tier models now. OpenAI might end up as a successful company, they might not, but they are certainly not looking like the world beater that they did 18 months ago.

On the other side of coin, Elon is just crushing it on all levels now with Grok AI, Tesla FSD, Neuralink, and SpaceX. It's mind-boggling how he maintains all this despite apparently spending hours a day shitposting. GOAT.

But, a year ago, @sama said that AGI had been achieved internally and people thought he might be serious.

Some people still think he's serious. The "strawberry"/qstar meme train has been going for the better part of a year at this point I think, with the usual twitter personalities promising that it's just around the corner the whole time.

Elon is just crushing it on all levels now with Grok AI, Tesla FSD, Neuralink, and SpaceX.

Grok and SpaceX are the real deal. Neuralink seems promising but afaik there isn't much publicly demonstrated so far. Tesla FSD is multi year neverware best known for causing multi car pileups on US-101 thanks to oblivious drivers scrolling while driving.

You might need to update on FSD. The latest updates have been described as a phase change. It's not level 5 yet, but apparently they have a clear lead.

That sounds like the same marketing stuff that I've heard for previous versions. IMO - it is unlikely that we can get better than human driving performance (which is what will be necessary for the public to accept this) without advanced sensors (e.g. LIDAR). To my knowledge, despite the marketing name of FSD, Tesla requires that you remain attentive to the road, which is really a recipe for disaster.

But we'll see. I can believe they have a clear lead over other car manufacturers, because the rest of them are basically not touching this with a ten foot pole.

I'd dispute even first among equals. Claude Sonnet 3.5 is nearly always my go-to nowadays, falling back to GPT-4o when it's overloaded. (I will sometimes try the same prompt across all of Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude just to make sure they don't catch anything Claude would miss, and DeepSeek for code, but I've yet to be surprised.)

That said, I'd be surprised if Gemini and ChatGPT haven't caught up to/surpassed where Claude is today by end of year. But it's hard to imagine any of them building an enduring lead unless one has something up their sleeve.

Did y'all talk about this story by Aaron Sibarium earlier this month?

Meet the Little-Known Activist Group That Has Tens of Thousands of Doctors Registering Patients To Vote

The article starts by describing a psychiatric institute in Pennsylvania that started an initiative to register voters.

Located in a swing state that could decide the 2024 election, the hospital asks psychiatric inpatients, regardless of diagnosis, if they would be interested in "voter registration tools" that let them check their nearest polling station and register to vote online. Patients can also request a mail-in ballot with "assistance" from hospital staff, according to a pair of papers about the project, which began in 2020.

...as the institute puts it, [voting] is a "therapeutic tool" that "helps empower patients and makes them feel good."

"Voting is an important part of the recovery process," Julie Graziane, a geriatric psychiatrist

Since the initiative is in a medical institution it must be justified, because you can't just waltz into medicine and decide voting is important. No, these institutes are bound to a sacred oath that commits their staff to the health of patients. By necessity, voting must become good for patients.

After the starting the voter registration initiative, the Pennsylvania hospital "has turned to the nonprofit Vot-ER, which develops "nonpartisan civic engagement tools" for "every corner of the healthcare system." This is where my lack of strong objection turns into a fully committed objection.

Founded by an emergency room physician at Harvard Medical School, Alister Martin, who served as an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, Vot-ER has helped more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote. Vot-ER claims to be nonpartisan, it is staffed by progressive operatives, funded by progressive foundations, and run by an umbrella nonprofit, A Healthier Democracy, that has referred to DEI as "the bedrock of fair healthcare." And ahead of the 2024 election, it is leading a movement—backed by top medical groups and an executive order from the Biden-Harris administration

The basic gist is that medical staff wear a QR code around their neck and point patients to it in order to register. A 2021 executive order encouraged this behavior, but Vot-ER's site only cites the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 in its FAQ page as its legal reason to exist. Medical professionals have the greenlight to seek out patients and proactively attempt to register them to vote.

I did not vet every link in the article, but I did look at a few, and as far as I can tell most of the quotes are presented in a fair enough, if biased, context. There are professionals willing to say stuff like these bits:

Debra Koss, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Rutgers... described a patient who, depressed by the poor conditions in her Section 8 apartment building, gained an "internal locus of control" by registering to vote. "Ultimately, she became less anxious and depressed," the doctors wrote in an op-ed last year, "and for the first time in 15 years, her intrusive suicidal thoughts ceased to exist."

I think if voting cures depression that's great, but I suspect voting does not cure depression and Debra Koss is not offering a medical opinion.

At the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, Graziane, the geriatric psychiatrist, has argued that voting can "increase life satisfaction, decrease risky behaviors and increase mental wellbeing."

Their argument echoed what [the founder of Vote-ER] told the New York Times in a 2020 interview... The time for doctors "being impartial and apolitical," he said, "is over."

I watched most of a 20 minute talk from the founder of Vot-ER from 2023. It was very heavy on the voting aspect, the benefits of voting, and the benefit of voter registration. Not so much attention given to the medical aspect, ethical questions, or potential impacts. I briefly trolled through Vot-ER's site and, as far as I could tell, they don't provide any studies supporting the idea their program has significant positive medical benefits to patients. Which I would have figured would be necessary. If a doctor is doing something to me as a doctor it should improving my health.

If a person comes in with a broken arm and you offer to register them to vote on their way out I think this carries ethical questions but, fine, whatever. When the program extends to mental health institutions and picks up a motto of Voting Is Great For You Actually Because Anecdote this seems like it should be made an issue.

I'm no expert, but I am not under the impression that dedicating more attention to politics is the best path to a healthy mental state. I am under the impression that politics, particularly of the national sort, in this day and age appears to degrade many people's mental well being. Encouraging people to vote is not necessarily damaging to their psyche, but a focus on voting might be a gateway drug. An organization, staffed by party operatives or affiliates, pushing a political non-profits goals onto medical staff in hospitals is wrong.

Like ballot harvesting I think it's sleazy. I can accept sleaziness in politics. People accept that politics is not holy and sacred, but dirty. Importing it into medicine, which I know is not new, seems particularly bad though. Initiatives like this drives resentment when, on the other hand, I am inundated by messaging that claims one party is holy, good, and joyous democracy lovers-- while this party engages in what appears to be deeply cynical, irreverent electioneering. I guess I'll accept sleazy politics in medicine as well.

In 2020 slate or salon had an article about therapists who saw "toxic whiteness" as the cause of their patients' problems, and told them to give money to BLM riot bail funds as a step towards confronting and atoning for it (as well as Paying Black Women to Educate Them via zoom courses)

Just about every ethical line in the medical profession has already been crossed, and the mentally and emotionally ill are just easy marks when you have no ethical concern about exploiting them for The Greater Good.

It turns out there's very little you can do against a political machine that absorbs every neutral institution like borg assimilators, because it sees no value in the existence of any social good that doesn't serve the party.
How can you argue against or reason with a totalitarian system?

When the program extends to mental health institutions and picks up a motto of Voting Is Great For You Actually Because Anecdote this seems like it should be made an issue.

I think the issue here is really just the honesty of presentation.

A while back, I was feeling a bit unmoored and ahedonic, a uni counselor said (among other advice) "drink lots of water and take a walk outside every day". I asked if that would really help and he said maybe not, but in any event it was a good idea to drink water and take a walk outside.

Encouraging patients to do the things they need to do even if (and I agree) it very likely won't help with their condition seems OK if done with candor.

If you had to ask "does it really help", it was not with candor.

Things that people do involve tradeoffs. If the doctor doesn't properly communicate which measure has which effect, the patient can't properly decide the tradeoffs. Taking a walk outside is low on the scale of burdens, but it still isn't free, and implying that it helps with the patient's condition when it doesn't is dishonest, even if the doctor admits it when questioned.

He didn't say it definitely wouldn't help.

For a college age kid with a vague complaint like "I feel disconnected from my life and don't take pleasure in a lot of things", it's completely sane advice. And, as you said, it's certainly lower on the scale of burden than "spend $$$ on in depth psychotherapy to discover what it is".

It's the mental health equivalent of "take two advil, get a good night sleep, and call me in the morning if it's not better". Treatment proceeds from least invasive to most, even if the former has somewhat lower probability of success (if only because many health issues, mental and physical, abate on their own anyway).

People with depression should be encouraged to do normal person things. How far up the list would you put voting? High enough to start a major non-profit? There's plenty of functional, healthy people that don't find voting necessary or worth worrying about. At least when it comes to the psych patients it screams predatory to me.

What would a more candid presentation look like to you?

This is what it might look like to me: "yes we are a D political advocacy group that aims to register more Ds. We offer registration resources to other non-D voting demographics. As this allows us to call ourselves non-partisan and more effectively recruit potential doctors to help our political cause. We will not try nearly as hard to reach non-D voting demographics, either through resource allocation or messaging, but that is not our mission."

My candid description might be uncharitable. If it is I encourage you explain why it might be. I don't believe a truly non-partisan voter registration non-profit for hospitals goes national. It definitely doesn't creep into inpatient mental health treatment centers. Not enough juice to squeeze there. "You can register to vote here" sign in a waiting room doesn't have the same pizazz as massive non-profits with a mission and culture aligned with the interests of one party. The goal is to leverage trust in doctors on one end and hope the correct type of votes come out the other end. It's not even trying to obfuscate, really.

Addressing ethical questions should be more than half the battle in doing anything non-medicinal in medicine. That's a good standard to have in a high stakes profession.

People with depression should be encouraged to do normal person things. How far up the list would you put voting?

I would probably put it reasonably high given that they have to do it literally once in a year and then feel good they have performed their civic duty. Especially for people that likely feel significant sadness about not fulfilling many of their other duties.

There's plenty of functional, healthy people that don't find voting necessary or worth worrying about.

Traditionally we've described this as a minor abdication of duty.

yes we are a D political advocacy group that aims to register more Ds. We offer registration resources to other non-D voting demographics. As this allows us to call ourselves non-partisan and more effectively recruit potential doctors to help our political cause. We will not try nearly as hard to reach non-D voting demographics, either through resource allocation or messaging, but that is not our mission

Sure. That seems like bread and butter stuff in the advocacy world.

Maybe the disconnect is, I don't see non-partisan to be the same as non-political. Obviously any kind of GOTV is political in nature.

Time to kill some of my opsec. I have personally argued with Deb Koss at a conference in D.C. telling her to cut this shit out.

I won't say much about it but she (and others like her are) exactly as you'd expect.

It's not as worrying in the disciplines like Psych (hers), ID, and Peds where people are overwhelmingly left leaning but these advocacy people are still DEMANDING trainees participate in advocacy and politics (and it's always one specific kind of advocacy). Trainees who can't say no without negatively impacting their careers. It's gross and deeply unethical.

Furthermore these idiots seem fundamentally incapable of understanding how damaging this is to the long term health of the profession.

It's no different than any woke ideological capture but with a very damaging set up levers (ensuring incoming medical students are very left leaning, brainwashing them during vulnerable periods like residency, and mandating leftist political advocacy as part of educational curricula).

I hate it.

These pediatricians committing themselves to lefty advocacy understand that right wingers are the ones having babies and you do need to get parents to trust you to do your job?

Like normiecons used to never skip shots. Now my coworkers who only go to church when they're on call(widely believed that you can't be compelled to leave church early to go to work. I have no idea as to the accuracy of that belief per employment law but managers mostly respect it.) discuss it openly. The deep red tribe loss of trust in institutions is mostly from actions of those institutions that they can point to and it's driving radicalism and there is no outreach to these people to try to rebuild that trust. Just spinning bullshit to call us evil.

These pediatricians committing themselves to lefty advocacy understand that right wingers are the ones having babies and you do need to get parents to trust you to do your job?

They expect, correctly, that trust is conferred by the degree. They expect to convert the right-wingers...or at least the children.

Yup, when I started working the only anti-vaxxers were hippies, woo-moms, and low income blacks.* Now it is a mix of everybody.

Also the left hates doctors because they hate people who make money, now the right also hates us for lockdowns and political advocacy. Both sides are fucking doctors but it's impossible to have a discussion about this with most of my colleagues.

*Well and nurses are anti flu shot for reasons I have never really been able to get.

*Well and nurses are anti flu shot for reasons I have never really been able to get.

It's not complicated; the flu shot makes you sick and by the CDCs numbers (which I suspect are rather optimistic), is pretty poor at reducing the chances of getting the flu.

Knowing a few nurses, there's a bunch of them that are anti-flu shot because it's an annual PITA with Christmas-level season creep and doesn't really have the efficacy to justify its hype.

I get the "I don't want to put in the effort to go get it" but I've seen them like actively hide from the roving flu shot team like children hiding under a desk. Sit still for 15 seconds and move on with your life for fucks sake.

I think it's the principle of it being an incredibly annoying theatrical production for a vaccine with so-so efficacy. Not saying nurses shouldn't get flu shots, obviously, but relentless overhyping gets irritating fast.

Most people get mild side effects if any and while the efficacy is low people in healthcare get the treat of watching people actually die from the flu (which is why most doctors seem to not give a shit).

Nurses are crazy though so....sigh.

Again, not saying it’s a rational decision as much as a bunch of women who feel put-upon(rationally or not) and overrate their own importance throwing a fit about a predictable annual annoyance.

If it's any consolation, I'm sure right-leaning students handle this the way we always have: go through the motions, then make fun of it all behind their backs when we're hanging out on our own time.

But it is worrying. What separated us from the Soviets during the Cold War was you didn't have to be an activist to do things like medicine.

What separated us from the Soviets during the Cold War was you didn't have to be an activist to do things like medicine.

I highly recommend reading “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” by Alexey Yurchak. You can fully ignore Yurchak’s own postmodernist ranting, but at the same time he collected a fascinating account of what it was like to live in post WWII Soviet Union. In short, it’s a myth that you had to be an activist or even a believer. Regular people despised both true believers and open critics of Soviet Union. This sentiment is even more true for the STEM professions.

In short, it’s a myth that you had to be an activist or even a believer. Regular people despised both true believers and open critics of Soviet Union. This sentiment is even more true for the STEM professions.

It's not a myth, it's a simplification, and it's still accurate when contrasted with the pre-awokening West. Yeah, they'd let you work as a lower rank doctor / engineer / whatever, but that doesn't mean they'd let you advance beyond a certain level without enough displays of party loyalty, or that the lack thereof wouldn't get you shitcanned even if you were incredibly talented.

The important part is "displays of party loyalty". You did not want "true believers" next to you, when some high ranking general or other party member wanted something not exactly communist-like, such as expensive western gadget or other contraband. I think it is similar to HR ladies today - you want to have good activist cred by posting the right flag on your social media and all that, but you should also not interfere if the CEO has some fun with his assistant on his business trip. It's the same logic why Trudeau surfed through his blackface episode so easily - everybody just pretended it does not matter, because if you said anything, then maybe you would garner some level of (whispered) sympathy, but then find yourself suddenly redundant and replaced.

This is what is so comical about all the activists: the corruption and nepotism is not the bug, it is the feature of all these stupid systems. Communism was tried so many times and it always devolves into some kind of nightmare, often of fascist variety. It is because it is baked into the system.

Yeah, it was the "actiivist" part I was taking an issue with, not the "true believer" part. I'm also prepared to concede it's a peculiar definition of "activist" that I'm using, that the Western mind might not quite be able to grasp, but I struggle to find another word for someone who participates in all these totally spontaneous shows of support. "Ass kisser" communicates the level of cynicism and opportunism, but I think it only tells half the story.

Yeah, not being a party member certainly was a career barrier, but it’s not the case that you had to become a true believer if you became a party member. In fact, in the book author describes a guy who became a party member just so that he had more leverage to do really important things in his profession (sorry I’m fuzzy on details, read it a while ago) and privately even condemned the party. That’s also the case for the people in my life.

Condemned?

They do still exist but changes to the pre-matriculation "requirements" have decreased their numbers, and being "outed" as conservative or woke-questioning will kill your social life so they tend to be super locked down.

Add on the requirements to publicly go through the motions during times of profound stress and exhaustion.... you get people who legitimately convert or experience permanent changes.

Remember that medical school clinicals and residency is not far off from outright torture in a lot of ways and people get 1984'ed while going through this.

Salary and taxes walk some people over a few decades but it is less than it used to be.

Ok, ways to find a conservative doctor?

From the layman’s perspective it’s pretty simple- antivaxxers and the prolife movement will both give you a list of doctors sympathetic to their ideas. The former have been swimming right and the latter already were.

What’s the insider perspective?

Male, old, rural or otherwise red tribe location, etc etc all point more conservative in just the ways you'd expect.

Certain specialties are more or less conservative. Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Infectious Disease are extremely liberal, surgical stuff more likely to be conservative. Anything higher paying more likely to be conservative.

We are supposed to keep our noses clean and stay out of politics....but as usual the left doesn't listen, people who do more likely to be moderate or conservative.

More or less what I’d expected. Whites more likely to be conservative, or do they have to be ultra-woke to overcome the lack of affirmative action? I can see both possible worlds.

It's not worth worrying about.

Ultimately the politics of your doctor isn't going to matter 95 times out of 100, putting aside the more complicated issue of the COVID vaccine all the doctors are going to want you to get recommended vaccines, it's just conservative ones will add a heaping of "I support your right to be a fucking moron" on top of "you are a fucking moron." If it's about child healthcare well then no, they are all woke liberals (IDK maybe some of the ones over 55 aren't?).

If you go specifically looking for people contra narrative you run the risk of finding charlatans catering to that market or actual people. Neither provide good care.

A more practical concern is "does the demographics and background of this person suggest something about their proficiency. I won't comment on this here but it's more important than political leanings.

changes to the pre-matriculation "requirements"

Explain

For a few decades Medicine has felt angsty about claims of bad bedside manner in practicing physicians (never mind that this is as much about inherent pressures in the field and foreign trained doctors as it is about individual physician temperaments). The solution was to deemphasize grades, MCAT, and other traditional measures of academic success (and also research prowess). As we've pushed into the woke era this has turned more into looking for students to be engaged in specific types of volunteering and political advocacy. About ten years ago the MCAT was heavily updated to include woke content (although obviously this was pre "woke" era).

Additionally affirmative action* has gotten more and more egregious - troublesome given drop out rates and early retirement/exit from the field in some of those demos. On a less official note you'll schools pushing for "does this student match our mission" behind closed doors in admissions committee meeting. Of course this primarily impacts people from less affluent backgrounds and less prominent schools, since people with good backgrounds manage to slide in as usual.

Between affluent American children naturally becoming more woke and deliberate fingers on the scale with respect to who gets admitted theirs been less complaints about explicitly woke curriculums (sometimes removing traditional educational content and replacing those content hours on more trans health or whatever) some of which gets to the point where even the supporters are like...eesh man that's a lot.

The first part of the medical boards (Step 1) was also made pass/fail, which was sold as a way to increase diversity since minorities didn't do well on it, but was basically a move by top tier medical schools to make the bottom of their class look better, which absolutely worked leaving talented people from mid and low tier medical schools unable to differentiate themselves and move up a tier for residency. Anti-meritocratic bullshit.

*I'm going to throw women in here even though they are better candidates by most metrics but the problem is that they have a tendency to eat a training slot and then get pregnant a year or two into their career and then never return to the work force or work reduced hours, which is a huge issue with doctor allocation and shortage problems.

Why do they torture students so?

A lot of things are going on here, some of which are a bit more complicated to get the full picture on like the historical issues with hierarchy and abuse.

Two simpler bits:

-You don't decide where you work and learn during training and if you leave, quit, or get fired you are done. Sometimes with upwards of 500k in debt. Programs know this and will mistreat trainees knowing they can't vote with their feet and their lives are pretty close to over if they don't suck it up. Suicides and deaths from things like sleep deprived car accidents aren't common per se but are frequent enough that we all know multiple people who went out those ways.

-Unlike most high education/high skill labor you need a lot of 24/7 coverage and physicians are very expensive and in high complexity specialties like surgery you have to do a FUCKING LOT of stuff to become independently proficient in a reasonable number of years. The solution is typically to rely on trainees and long hours. On paper Residents aren't allowed to work more than 80 hours a week, must get at least 4 days off in a month, and aren't allowed to work more than 24+4 hours in a row. On paper. Very common for people to violate one or more of those in an easy specialty at an easy program. In something harder like procedural specialties? You might work 80-100 hours a week with an average of four days off a month.

For 5 years.

Shockingly!!! Substance abuse, mental illness, and medically measurable premature aging (fun study that one) are rampant.

This breaks people down and I think could be reasonably considered torture.

Add on the fact that you can't leave, and many other aspects of the training can be considered abusive (said things that are a bit harder to explain)...

I can't believe we even have doctors, given this system. I wouldn't live like that for 5 years even if the payoff was a trillion dollar lump sum.

This is why you'll frequently see us claiming the ability to easily retrain into other jobs if healthcare collapses. Effort substitutes well for a lot of talent and getting through medical education is tremendously difficult and outright traumatic, but if you can do it you'll be able to do most things.

This year a U.S. medical student got two olympic gold medals. She had to pause training to do it but that is the kind of aspirational insanity you'll often see in the field.

Wow I had no idea the state of medicine was so bad. Jesus.

Unlike most high education/high skill labor you need a lot of 24/7 coverage and physicians are very expensive and in high complexity specialties like surgery you have to do a FUCKING LOT of stuff to become independently proficient in a reasonable number of years

So are you saying that the state of residency is sort of justified by the difficulty of the profession?

How would you do it differently if you had the magic wand of 'fix up the medical training system'?

/images/17246063318586245.webp

Plenty of other crap is going on and much of that presents easier targets - excess regulatory burden, administrative overreach, wellness modules, U.S. malpractice environment, etc.

A large swathe of the central problem is that Americans doctors are expensive (so hiring more staff for instance is...difficult) and at the same time Americans won't work in American healthcare without those salaries (because of things like the American patient population, malpractice and so on). It makes bigger fixes extremely hard.

Many kinds of surgeons are just fucked - medicine has improved, which means we do surgery less often and the types of surgeries we do are more complicated and harder to learn. It's an order of magnitude or more easier to learn how to remove something from an option approach (think just cutting someone open) than a laparoscopic approach but the latter is much much much better for the patient. Finding ways to make this not extend training time is a nearly intractable problem.

However, a sensible target is malpractice insurance. Doctors do fuck up and do fuck up in ways that should involve penalties but functionally these seems to be entirely separated from who actually pays and gets penalized in our current system. Malpractice insurance alone for OB can be over 150,000 dollars a year. That's insane.

Stronger unions for residents and attendings is probably also a good idea. Unions can absolutely be bad but we are far off from the point where that's an issue.

Likewise kill some various forms of rent seeking and other bad behavior like egregious non-competes, physician boards that costs of tens of thousands of dollars, substance abuse programs that also costs tens of thousands of dollars if you somehow manage to get caught smoking weed, etc.

On a structural level you can probably free up money that can be use to improve healthcare and reduce burden on doctors by targeting various middlemen and administrative horseshit. Fire the front desk staff to pay for an extra useless diversity or infection control administrative and the doctor just adds that job to the list of things they do.

Walk that back, the ratio of clinical to administrative staff is insane and grows worse every year.

I'll try not to blather too much but however bad you think it is it's a lot worse. A classic example is the fact that the population of people we've selected to be doctors might be offered the option of working in NYC or getting paid 300k more a year to work 2.5 hours to the northwest and they'll pick the city. Shit's fucked.

Sidebar: 24+ hour shifts were taken away and then brought back because most people (including residents) thought they were better than the alternative. Which sounds insane and is.

Do you know how the medical system ended up in this fucked state in the first place?

More comments

On a structural level you can probably free up money that can be use to improve healthcare and reduce burden on doctors by targeting various middlemen and administrative horseshit. Fire the front desk staff to pay for an extra useless diversity or infection control administrative and the doctor just adds that job to the list of things they do.

Walk that back, the ratio of clinical to administrative staff is insane and grows worse every year.

Wait but you were saying earlier that it's hard to hire people and doctors need more support because it's expensive. Wouldn't the admin staff help with this??

I'll try not to blather too much but however bad you think it is it's a lot worse. A classic example is the fact that the population of people we've selected to be doctors might be offered the option of working in NYC or getting paid 300k more a year to work 2.5 hours to the northwest and they'll pick the city. Shit's fucked.

Oh trust me I am pretty severely blackpilled on the Western medical institution, although I do admit that modern medicine has miracles aplenty. My mother's life has been saved on three different occasions by relatively recent medical inventions. So I'm grateful.

But I also wasted over $20k in my early twenties trying uselessly to figure out my chronic pain issues with TMJ, sciatica, RSI, and other various health stuff. Was told by multiple doctors I'd need surgery if I ever wanted to use a keyboard and mouse again. I'm pretty close to recovered now but... anyway that's a story for another day lol.

Sidebar: 24+ hour shifts were taken away and then brought back because most people (including residents) thought they were better than the alternative. Which sounds insane and is.

I didn't realize they were taken away! Ugh yeah it's so fucked. I've seen studies on like the efficacy of doctors based on how long they've been on shift and it's terrifying. Going to the hospital seems like such a crapshoot luck of the draw type situation in some respects.

More comments

Given the low income urban persons they’re interacting with plus the political correlates of anxiety/depression, I suspect this initiative it strategic in getting more democratic votes. 50k registrations is huge! Doubtful that many will come close to voting but that’s easily Enough to sway the state and thus win the election for the Dems

I do feel like republicans just don’t have near the strategic thinking necessary for this sort of thing - does Trump have a Karl Rove who can help find a path to victory?

I do feel like republicans just don’t have near the strategic thinking necessary for this sort of thing

IME rather than a lack of thinking capacity it's a stubborn belief that "doing something like that would make us just as bad as them!" The right is still unaware that this a Culture War and I'm increasingly certain that this ignorance is willful and cowardly.

I don't know how difficult getting democrat favoring non-voters to turn out is. But getting republican favoring non-voters to turn out makes pulling teeth look like cutting your toenails.

doing something like that would make us just as bad as them!"

Everyone says this all the time. Both party supporters believe they have the moral high ground in whatever area they are incapable.

If Republicans could muster up a non-profit network that would do their bidding, they would do so without a second thought about the high ground. But they don't have this capability and dont have people willing or interested in building it. I think that lack of interest goes beyond "it is dirty and wrong."

Partly why I don't understand why @TracingWoodgrains gets so much push-back (on Twitter at least) on his Republicans Are Doomed piece. Maybe the conclusion is wrong, but the observations regarding disparity in human capital and reach are correct.

Think it mostly just goes back to Republicans with power caring about wealth generation and Democrats with power caring about power generation. AT least that is my theory.

Maybe they already do that!

I had a relative in a nursing home with dementia during the Trump/Hillary election. Someone was going room to room IN THE DEMENTIA WARD OF A NURSING HOME "helping" people fill out absentee ballots. My relative voted for Clinton because he recognized the name. I only know this because another relative happened to be visiting at the time and watched it happen. That other relative is extremely liberal and said that despite the extra vote for Clinton, she found the whole thing very disturbing.

That sounds like it could be a conspiracy... but towards what end? This happened in a solidly Republican town, and old people are even more Republican than baseline, so this could have been some kind of scheme from Republicans to turn out the vote.

Unless I read it wrong, the 50,000 number references the number of doctors they signed up to register voters. According to Google this is between 4-5% of all doctors in the United States. This number sounds unbelievable as I write it, but I'm no longer in a position to double check stuff at a screen. Did I quote that correctly?

Perhaps it is just the number of voter registrations and Aaron was sloppy with his writing? I can look tomorrow.

Are all of these people doctors, necessarily? One can well believe there's vast numbers of nurses who signed up.

Correct. The actual source says "healthcare professionals". This is much more believable.

Actually I suspect that a lot of them if examined would not be mentally fit to vote anyway. If someone is in the ER for a mental health episode, it’s obviously pretty severe, with either heavy drugs or commitment as real possibilities. Add in that a doctor, if you’re in acute distress, hold a lot of power and authority over them. I’d love to be a fly on the wall, because I have a suspicion that it’s at least somewhat implied that help is contingent on them registering to vote.

Doubtful that many will come close to voting

That's where ballot harvesting comes in. Or straight up fraud; intercept the ballots coming for the patients, fill 'em out, send 'em in.

Yeah it’s a shame the right doesn’t seem to have the will to engage in more aggressive ballot harvesting.

The right doesn't have the penetration into the right professions to pull it off -- this magnifies what Nybbler is saying, in that even if there is a right-wing social worker/doctor/whatever who wants to go around 'encouraging' people to fill out ballots, the other 99% of his cow orkers will be lined up around the corner waiting to rat him out.

The right can't do it for the same reasons they can't riot. The right can make 100 plausible accusations of ballot harvesting or fraud, and this will be "John Righty said, without evidence..." or "John Righty falsely accused..." and the courts will just dismiss the case. The left will respond with one accusation (true, false, or in one case a stunt to show how easy it is) and it will be taken entirely seriously, the media will crow about how this proves the right are the real cheaters, and the rightists involved will be prosecuted. For some reason even judges on the right prefer cases against the right than the left, perhaps feeling the right should be held to higher standards because they know better.

I’m not convinced it would work out well without the sort of institutional cover the left gets, even in its currently decaying state.

I remember discussion on right wing election twitter- so this would be much closer to the GOP establishment than the dissident right- in 2022 that Wisconsin had more white men with hunting licenses unregistered to vote than Biden's margin of victory in 2020, and complaints that there was no plan to register them.

These people would, if successfully registered, probably vote 95%+ republican. Based on my hunting buddies, though, convincing them to do something they don't want to do is a much steeper climb than it would be for depression patients. I suspect that unregistered natural republicans are, in general, much harder to register than unregistered natural democrats.

That Scott Pressler dude who has apparently been doing work registering voters in PA has definitely mentioned trying to reach out to hunters specifically for this reason.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats