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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think the truth of the crisis is a kind of trifecta of the three most common reasons here - that motherhood is no longer particularly high status for women; that there are now many other more fun hedonistic things to do that didn’t exist in the same way to normal people a hundred years ago; that a combination of ever more time spent in education and a status-obsessed rat race (the consequence of popular meritocracy, which is one of the worst inventions of all time) mean that people don’t get round to having kids until they’re not going to have more than one or two - plus a little bit of this, although I don’t think it’s the main reason.

The main reason though is 2. Think of the average white collar worker today, say a software engineer. Now compare to the equivalent 120 years ago, say a mid-level accounts clerk at a large company. The truth is the engineer is going to experience a much bigger fall in living standards from having four kids than the accounting clerk did in 1904.

the consequence of popular meritocracy, which is one of the worst inventions of all time

I usually understand the motivation behind people's opinions here even if I don't agree with it, however I'm utterly lost on this one. Other than fertility dropping, is there any other reasons you're so negative about meritocracy?

There's a great comment on the communism thread about how an arbitrary but efficient procedure is better than a fair procedure that eats up arbitrary amounts of resources to calculate:

The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".

(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)

Making everybody spend seventeen fucking years in the school system so that we can determine who most deserves the high paying, high status jobs is the meritocratic equivalent of having a societal conversation every time two cars arrive at an intersection instead of using traffic lights and stop signs. Literally reserving those positions for a hereditary aristocratic caste would be better than what we have now, because then people could know where they stand and get on with their damn lives instead of grinding themselves to the bone trying to compete with everyone else in the all-consuming zero-sum red queen's race.

Okay, I think I understand the point now, but what I find to be the real issue is that if we were completely honest there's no need for "seventeen fucking years" to determine stuff like who should go to what college and etc. We can determine who is suited for what job with much simpler metrics like IQ, OCEAN personality traits, etc. The whole problem of inefficiency in the current "meritocratic" rat-race is that we lie by saying that "everyone can potentially become anything if they work hard enough for it", therefore subsidizing for example teaching non-basic math to kids that have neither interest or talent for it, making them also suffer through the process. We currently think of "meritocracy" as "giving everyone equal opportunities to compete" rather than "giving those that stand a chance opportunities to compete", the latter being much more efficient and still a "meritocracy" to me.

There's much better aptitude tests we could create if we were willing to throw out of the window two very important principles in the western hemisphere, namely "Everyone is equal" and "Hard work is more important than natural talent". They're very bitter pills to swallow though so I guess we just don't. The current education system is a very long, inefficient and expensive (but "fair") aptitude test, I agree on that.

Competition for resources or general adversity are the main factors that drives improvement not only in economy but in natural evolution too as far as I understand it (improvement in evolution being something like maximizing reproduction/survival efficiency in a given enviroment), a hereditary system removes or undermines those two factors and seems prone to stagnation/atrophy in the long-term.

If you told me then that we would make this "aristocratic caste" a large enough part of the population that it would still allow plenty of competition within it for higher paying positions, I would agree with you that it would be a better system than we've today but it would still feel like "meritocracy" to me, as long as "new aristocratic families" could join the club if they were more fit to compete rather than an "old aristocratic family" that somehow had a downturn in the metrics for consecutive generations. You would also have to ban marriage outside of the "caste" I guess which again also means you need it to be large enough to have enough genetic diversity.

So, on my part I conclude that hereditarism is perhaps a short-term improvement in efficiency but long-term decline in efficiency if we want to maximize results/achievements. Would be interested to see what you think of my logic here.

An endless and unnecessary rat race when heredity / “nepotism” (ie children of doctors becoming doctors, children of actors becoming actors and so on) is a perfectly effective way of sorting people into an occupation in life.

I replied to @erwgv3g34 that had a similar way of thinking and would also be interested to read what you've to say to that if you're willing. In regards to "children of doctors becoming doctors" especifically, how would that work out over generations? Would families of doctors only be allowed to marry other doctors? If the family of doctors married to a family of actors should the kid be able to choose between becoming a doctor and an actor? Would the children of mixed occupation families really be that good in either of their "original" occupations?

Even if we assume that over a long period of term those families wouldn't potentially stagnate or atrophy due to progressive genetic mutation and lack of competition/adversity, it still seems like either a very rigid system (families of a given occupation can only marry their offspring to families of other similar occupations) or a looser system that I would question the efficiency (families, even if only in "high prestige" positions, could mix with not necessarily similar occupations like doctors and actors which may not bring out some of the best doctors or actors especially in the long-term). I'm not sure making the process of selection easier would be a good thing when balanced with my perceived negatives of this system.

It's like, eugenic and functional enough but prone to be overthrown by a system that ensures long-term improvement more assuredly?

Even if we assume that over a long period of term those families wouldn't potentially stagnate or atrophy due to progressive genetic mutation

To my recollection, it doesn't take much of an effective population size to prune out deleterious mutations. Something on the order of the square root of effective population size, just like how a portfolio of 10,000 stocks by market value yields little diversification benefit compared to 1,000 stocks, and surprisingly little diversification benefit compared to 100 stocks.

You misunderstand. I’m not proposing some kind of ultra-authoritarian society in which a caste-based profession system is legally mandated and in which people are required to marry within a profession.

I’m proposing a society that looks a lot like our own, with the sole difference that the expectation of heredity is the default principle in employment. That is to say that there is no law barring children of non-doctors from medical school, but that it would be normal and expected for, say, 80% of medical school students to be the children and/or grandchildren of doctors, and it would be seen as peculiar and strange for someone with no family connection to seek to join the profession, and they would face a tougher time applying (because the 80% would mostly go on to practice in the same areas as their parents, joining their hospitals and practices).

That highly ambitious and smart people of humble origin will make their way in the world has always been true, and it’s a great thing. There would be nothing to prevent someone smart starting a business, making money, and then paying or persuading someone in the professions to take on their child as an apprentice banker, or corporate lawyer, or doctor for that matter. Maybe your childhood best friend comes from a family of engineers, and becomes one too, so you send your own that-way-inclined child to follow that path with his (official) recommendation. These things are all good and normal. What is not normal is the masses being forced into the rat race for no real reason, forced to become grasping, desperate people in search of a profession.

Most people are happier with a path in life than with the endless (and mostly unrealized) possibilities of meritocracy. And they matter more than a few ultra-ambitious psychos who we have geared our entire society around allowing to ‘ascend’ to MIT and then Wall Street / FAANG via two decades of sorting.

I see, that sounds much more reasonable, apologies for misunderstanding.

I still can't quite get behind the idea due to details that I won't bother explaining too much (the most important one being that I would hate having "a path" laid out to me, especially if it was my father's), but I can certainly understand why someone could think like you. Either way, thanks for explaining!

No problem, it’s always an interesting question.

That's a real problem when new job categories appear or old ones vastly shrink. I mean, my father was a computer programmer, but nobody in his father's generation was. And the 2500 or so ditch-diggers who built the Delaware Canal... well, their descendants would have been out of luck thanks to Caterpillar.

It’s not like there’s a permanent prohibition on changing jobs, or even that highly capable and ambitious individuals can’t make their own luck - that’s always been the case. In 1650 it was hardly unheard of that a blacksmith might not be the son of a blacksmith; perhaps one required an extra apprentice and took on a boy from the village, or an orphan. Jobs were still created and destroyed. But the presumption of ‘career choice’ didn’t really exist, even for the urban artisanal and nascent middle classes.

Even if we wanted to sort most efficiently (something I would oppose for many reasons), we would be better just giving everyone an IQ test and sorting them into a future profession aged 10 and being done with it.

How can you not select for efficiency and not be defeated by an enemy that selects for efficiency unless we all agree to not be efficient which is a classic case of a molochian trap? Unless you don't think being defeated in the long-term is a big deal?

Maybe you think it would be "efficient enough" I guess?

Hear me out, you could group jobs into categories by the mental requirements, which would also allow associative mating between professions with similar skills.

Even better, you could have dress codes for the different castes to reinforce the division. And you could solve the rapid scaling problem by growing babies quickly in hatcheries.

It would be a world of Community, Identity, and Stability

Right, this is where it once again becomes clear that Huxley utterly failed to write an actually dystopian world, and had to resort to the cheap tactic of making things gratuitously and unnecessarily ugly to make sure readers understand that the Brave New World is supposed to be bad, actually.

You have it backwards, he was writing his utopia and had to cover it up with the thinnest veneer of criticism, so people don't show up at his door with torches and pitchforks.

I love you man, but you're never beating the closeted leftist allegations

At this point I no longer care whether people think I’m right-wing enough. As this recent post of mine probably makes clear, I’m getting increasing disillusioned with a number of trends that I see congealing on what passes for the “intellectual Right” these days, and I’m searching for a sphere that’s far more akin to the early-20th-century “Progressive” intellectual movements that inspired works like Brave New World. Thinkers who had a profound optimism about humanity and technology, instead of the dour, overly-cautious naysaying of the Christian conservative right - a movement I’ve explicitly distanced myself from many times. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a techno-optimist who wants to live in a hyper-modern mega-city on Mars surrounded by effete Hapa urbanite aesthetes, because I’ve said that openly more than once.

Authleft and authright are always going to have more in common with each other in certain ways than with many small-l liberal ideologies.

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