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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34453 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Can someone steelman requiring prescriptions to buy medicine? Why not just allow people to buy whatever medications they want over the counter? Obviously many people would seriously hurt themselves as a result, but I don't think that's a good argument in favor of prescriptions. People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful. Why is medicine any different? If we stopped requiring prescriptions to buy medicines, then people who wanted to consult doctors about which medications to buy could still go ahead and do it. As for people who preferred to do their own research or consult alternative sources instead of doctors, in the vast majority of cases they would just be hurting themselves when they made mistakes, they would not be hurting others, at least not in any direct way.

Prescription medications can seriously harm you if you take them in the wrong doses, or take specific different medications at the same time. And just as importantly, if you don't use them correctly they won't treat your underlying disease. The average person will not effectively treat their diseases if they manage treatment themselves, and you'd get something that looks a lot more like the supplement industry, except instead of the pills doing nothing they'll be able to seriously hurt you.

Now what part of that changes by forcing a doctor into the process? Does the doctor come to your house and give you your pill, so you don't take the wrong dose? Does he monitor you 24/7 so that you don't take specific different medications at the same time? That might seem wild, but does he at least come twice a day to make sure you are taking it correctly so that it will treat your underlying disease?

EDIT: Wasn't looking for it, but Zvi's most recent had this and this. Interesting, to say the least.

Now what part of that changes by forcing a doctor into the process

Having someone who's more intelligent than you, knows a lot more about medicine than you, and has had a lot of practice managing patients instructing you on what to do helps a lot. It makes it a lot more likely that someone will benefit from treatment. Most people aren't actively attempting to ignore the doctor's advice, they're just kinda dumb, not really actively pursuing any particular goal, so having someone competent leading the process helps a lot, and the doctor can shut down obviously stupid ideas like 'take a huge dose of estrogen every six months as a Hormone Cleanse' that'd absolutely evolve if allowed to.

Does he monitor you 24/7 so that you don't take specific different medications at the same time

You phrased this very weirdly, but ... yes? The doctor has a list of all the medications you are taking, and when they prescribe a new one they check the list to make sure there aren't any bad interactions. This is an important thing that they do. It doesn't require visiting your house.

Having someone who's more intelligent than you, knows a lot more about medicine than you, and has had a lot of practice managing patients instructing you on what to do helps a lot.

No one is talking about banning doctors. There are options other than "mandatory" and "banned". You can still have literally every word of that.

The doctor has a list of all the medications you are taking

ROFL. Only if you tell him. Or he works for the same conglomerate as your other doctors with the same records system. And again, no one is preventing you from doing these things. And again again, they're generally just a second set of eyes, and a pharmacist does this. There are so many ways that you can have some eyes on what you're taking and look for interactions without blanket bans on prescription meds. But if the point is to make sure you don't take specific different medications at the same time, they're gonna need to be in your house 24/7.

the thing that makes it difficult for you to not take medications that conflict with each other is that the doctor won't give you both of them at the same time, and this covers >90% of the potential problem cases

the doctor

Makes it sound like there's only one. People often have many different doctors for many different things. It's more likely that they only have one pharmacist, or, rather, one pharmacy that may employ multiple pharmacists, but at least they're usually on the same computer system. That's the more natural bottleneck to have a pair of expert eyes on the medications you're taking.

Our role is to identify the correct medication, tell you what you need to know about it (which is later reinforced by the pharmacist), check in with you to make sure you are still doing as instructed, and so on.

Many medications are very dangerous if taken incautiously - TB drugs require a lot of instructions and very careful compliance for instance. Low dose Lithium is extremely safe but can easily interact with other medications, cause significant side effects, or cause problems in response to athletic activity and dehydration.

Some medications have side effects that will very rapidly kill you that are rare enough patients wouldn't think of them....the list goes on.

I'm sure all of that is very helpful to many people, but we're not talking about banning doctors. Remember, we are not stuck with just two possibilities of "banned" and "mandatory". For many, could you not just have massive warning labels that say, "This product is meant to treat specific conditions in specific ways; please consult a medical expert before use," in case someone has difficulty identifying the correct medication? They could still be sold by pharmacists, who can inform you of what you need to know about it (as they already do). If you show any uncertainty, they can say, "If you don't know, you should contact a doctor." The checking in sounds mostly paternalistic, basically just a verbal reminder; what's the real point here if you're not physically making sure they're doing as instructed?

Because remember, you're not actually making sure that they're not taking the medication incautiously. You're not actually going into their home and dispensing a precise dose at a precise time. You're an occasional verbal reminder that they need to comply with the instructions on the package of the TB drugs, another set of eyes to check if there are other medications that might interact. You're not actually stopping them from doing something dangerous.

Some medications have side effects that will very rapidly kill you that are rare enough patients wouldn't think of them

What do you actually do about that?

EDIT: The warning label can even say, "This product is dangerous if not used correctly," or even, "This product is dangerous even if used correctly," with another recommendation to consult a medical professional.

It's important to understand that medical stuff is more complicated than a layman is likely to understand, you see a lot of minimizing and belittling of the knowledge base of doctors these days and it leads to people not respecting the depth of complexity here. We do ourselves no favors in the process.

Consider a Statin. The benefits are pretty big...sometimes. But there isn't a lot of consensus as to who to give it and when. you have complex questions like "what number of rare debilitating side effects are appropriate for a moderate decrease in population risk. If you prevent 10 MIs is that worth one 30 year old getting an autoimmune issue and being unable to walk? What about 20? What about 50? What about 100? What do you do if the Family Med and Cardiology organizations disagree over what to do?

Medicine is both an art and a science and often lacks consensus. Standard of care is fuzzy and constantly being revised. We have to do ongoing education throughout our entire careers because a recommendation that was present from day one of my medical school is suddenly known to be wrong. Or maybe not, I have to read the paper and check.

Patients are not equipped to handle these considerations and don't realize how REAL they can be. We know patients will injure themselves or get themselves killed with poor decisions if left to their own devices so it's our job not to. Sketchy hormone replacement (testosterone), overprescription of stimulants and benzos, poor antibiotic stewardship...patients will do their best to do what feel is right with zero information and this can be extremely harmful to others or society (in the form of unnecessary medical costs and care).

You see a lack of consensus and a range of suggestions and think that this means that you must have an individual artisan. I see that and think, "Seems like there's kind of a range where most of the time, people will probably be okay-ish, so long as they're doing something plausibly in that range." At least until we have a more clear consensus. They can still go get advice, and if so, they'll get whatever doctor they trust, who thinks they should be in whatever part of that range. That's not killing them (at least not enough to form a clear consensus yet).

The rest of this is pretty much just paternalism. Like, I get it, many car owners are not equipped to handle the various minute considerations and the art of motorcycle car maintenance. We know car owners will injure themselves or get killed with poor decisions if left to their own devices (the number of bozos who get underneath a car that's just on a hydraulic floor jack, SMH; or maybe they'll screw up a brake bleed procedure and have a massive braking failure on the highway, etc.). But we don't ban it. Millions and millions of people still go to car repair experts, because they know they have zero knowledge. We don't ban auto repair experts, either! Sure, some people spend too much money on silly aftermarket turbos or whatever, and some of them even screw it up and blow up an engine, possibly causing death. But imagine if we took that and decided to ban people from buying their own car parts; do you think that "unnecessary car repair costs" (including the new cost of being required to go to a professional for literally every little thing) would decrease?!? I honestly do not have any idea what possible model of economics you could be using to get to this result.

I think the rate of self-injury from maintaining a car yourself would be quite a bit lower than the rate of self-injury from deciding on one's own medical treatment, and that's the reason for the different kinds of regulation.

Would it? Most of the time, when industry advocates are here arguing this sort of point, they're implicitly assuming that the use of medical professionals will drop to zero (or be banned). Thus, they're imagining the least knowledgeable person deciding on their own medical treatment. But when we look at the car maintenance world, we see the vast vast majority of low-knowledge folks still using automotive professionals. The rate of self-injury is, indeed, low, but someone needs a bit more than arguments from bad imagination if they're going to rest on a claim that the rate of self-injury would surely be "quite a bit" higher.

You hear this same shit from the realtor cartel, and frankly, any cartel that wants to maintain its market power. "Oh real estate transactions are so complicated; can you imagine how the sky would fall if we didn't get our 3% cut of every transaction?! PEOPLE WOULD BE HARMED!" You know what really would happen if you lost some of the sketchier tools to maintain your market control? First, you'd probably have to clean up your act, but second, lots and lots of people would still use you, but for your actual expertise, rather than because they think they're basically forced into it. Sure, will there be some harm that didn't occur before? Probably. But there's some harm now that wouldn't occur then, too. You need an actual argument about magnitudes rather than just imagination.

EDIT: Remember when it was every state, rather than just two states, who banned you from pumping your own gas into your car? Surely there were folks saying how risky and dangerous it would be (gasoline is flammable, don'cha'kno?) to let ignoramus individuals do it. How's that argument looking for those two states that have held on to it?

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We require people to get car insurance because we know they will make the wrong decision (not getting insurance) if left to their own devices. Some people try this anyway.

We know that people will make the wrong decision with medicine also. Some of this is objective - people would prescribe themselves substances that are controlled (for a reason, for instance opiates), people will ask for treatments where the benefits are clearly outweighed by the risks. Consider all the people who use marijuana when they clearly are not supposed to,* or try and get Addy as a performance enhancing drug, or use illegal substances. What do you think would happen if you could just Dilaudid at the pharmacy? It would be a catastrophe.

The classic non drugs of abuse example is antibiotics. People will ask for antibiotics every time they get sick. Even when it's clearly viral and therefore the abx won't help. They will demand abx, they will write reviews complaining about it and bully the prescriber into giving them abx - even though they won't do anything helpful. Zero benefit.

And the costs can be high to the individual (side effects can be very bad), and to society (antibiotic resistance is increasing greatly). If someone becomes disabled because they took an abx of their own recognize society will pay the cost. This is not theoretical, people kill their kidneys with NSAIDs for example (that's OTC).

If left to their own devices patients will make objectively shitty decisions. The regulatory state exists to prevent this, you don't want people on the road without insurance.

When it comes to the more subjective stuff it does get a bit fuzzier but the fundamental problem remains, no layman has the knowledge and experience to make these judgements, just googling a pubmed article is not enough, smart and educated people think they can figure it out but this requires training and experience. The average person has no chance and society needs to be organized around protecting average and below average people.

The regulatory state has its problems but we require building codes because people will elect to live in a poorly built slum if given the choice because it's cheap. We have to protect people from themselves.

People will take a gamble on "it's fine I have a 1% change of a bad side effect from this antibiotic but society will pay the cost and even though this infection is viral maybe its not."

This is stupid.

People do not like being told what they can do and put in their bodies, but little in the world is as important to get correct as human lives. I remember what it was like before I was a doctor, I thought I knew what I was doing I did not.

*I'm not saying nobody is allowed marijuana, it's complicated.

We require people to get car insurance because we know they will make the wrong decision (not getting insurance) if left to their own devices.

What type of car insurance do we require people buy? Hint: it's not the type that compensates them if they screw up their own car. It's for a different purpose. What do you think that is?

Most of the rest of your comment appears to be just additional restatements of the things I've already responded to. Yes, car owners lack knowledge, and they'll make mistakes sometimes when they don't use the services of a professional. I don't see where you've made any further advancement on the argument.

When it comes to the more subjective stuff it does get a bit fuzzier but the fundamental problem remains, no layman has the knowledge and experience to make these judgements, just googling a pubmed article is not enough, smart and educated people think they can figure it out but this requires training and experience. The average person has no chance and society needs to be organized around protecting average and below average people.

I do think that this part is a slight refinement. At least one that I only obliquely addressed, not directly. When it comes to the subjective parts of auto repair, it gets fuzzier, but the fundamental problem remains. Laymen aren't going to have the knowledge and expertise to make those judgments, and the Chilton guide isn't enough, either. They need training and experience. Average person has no chance... of that last few percent that is still probably within the realm of the basic guidance where there might not even be a consensus, anyway.

The regulatory state has its problems but we require building codes because people will elect to live in a poorly built slum if given the choice because it's cheap. We have to protect people from themselves.

This is just tripling down on paternalism, and it's one that is soundly rejected in most rationalist spaces. YIMBY is currently reigning supreme, haven't you heard?

People don't like being told what they can/can't put in their cars, but nothing is more important than thousands of pounds of steel hurling down the road at high speed, where lives are at stake. We can't possibly let people work on their own cars. ...or at least, that's the conclusion of your logic.

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We require people to get car insurance because we know they will make the wrong decision (not getting insurance)

Specifically, though, people are forced to get third party liability insurance, because there the costs of their wrong decisions is very much borne by others (the argument could be made that ultimately wrong medical decisions could end up like that, but it's a greyer matter).

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Medications and management of medical issues is more complicated than most realize. Medical education emphasizes teaching doctors about our knowledge deficiencies for a reason, and it's very common for people in the field to grossly overestimate their understanding and knowledge. We complain about nurses, midlevels, and even other doctors having no fucking clue what they are doing at times.

It is extremely challenging for a layman, even one who is intelligent and informed, to bridge the training gap.

"Ok but who cares" is a reasonable question, but it is important to understand that errors don't just hurt you. A big example right now is antibiotics. Left to their own devices people will ask for and use antibiotics even when it's dangerous or simply not even a bacterial infection. This has a downstream effect on others, like an increase in antibiotic resistance.

It's also easy to hurt yourself and we find it unacceptable to allow society to not pick up the bill.

Let's say you have some mild chronic pain like arthritis, you read and are smart enough to know that ibuprofen can be good for this. But then you don't know the right dose, or the right frequency and then don't realize it is not a good idea with your diabetes. After a reasonable amount of time your kidneys are dead and you end up on dialysis - and society is paying for that. Even if you have good insurance or a lot of wealth that's a spot that could be given to someone else.

And that's a medication you can already buy over the counter.

People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful.

Virtually all jurisdictions require a license to operate a car. Many jurisdictions either require a license to own a firearm, or forbid it entirely. Many jurisdictions place strict limitations on who may purchase knives (e.g. minors).

You need a drivers test as proof that you know how to drive a car. The test for understanding medications is being a physician.

Patients are also tested by physicians before some medications are prescribed, both physically and mentally.

People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful

Exactly, this is a bad idea.

Knives are safe enough, but guns and cars can lead to unintentional harm for both the user and onlookers. They should be regulated.

There can be 3 tiers: over-the-counter (free for all), needs based and testing based.

Pepper ball guns, tazers, and lowest caliber pistols can be over-the-counter. Wilderness communities can get needs-based allocation for larger guns. And hobbyists would have to take demanding tests to qualify for the wider selection.

Cars would come with speed limiters (80mph), limited acceleration (0-60mph 5 secs) and sales be limited to low-ground clearance vehicles of limited size. Tall vehicles like pickup trucks would be approved for those who need them. And those that want to go faster, must qualify for harder driving tests.

It seems excessive, but if you look at road & gun deaths in the US and it makes sense.

Pepper ball guns, tazers, and lowest caliber pistols can be over-the-counter. Wilderness communities can get needs-based allocation for larger guns. And hobbyists would have to take demanding tests to qualify for the wider selection.

You know that the vast majority of gun crime is done with small-calibre pistols, right? I mean, maybe not lowest, IIRC most of it's 9mm Parabellum instead of .22LR, but generally criminals aren't looking for stopping power and range - they're looking for low noise, low cost, low recoil, and especially small size, because the use-case of career criminals is "I need this unarmoured guy 10 metres away to go away on zero notice, ideally without attracting attention" and that usually means hipfire from something that can be worn on the belt and wielded one-handed (and ideally hidden).

If you want to stay on the Pareto frontier, small-calibre pistols are the first thing to ban over-the-counter.

(Also, pistols are really convenient for suicides; longarms are less so, although not much less.)

People generally don’t understand drugs or how dangerous or addictive they can be. Allowing the public to take addictive forms of morphine or opioids for every ache and pain without supervision just makes a population of addicts who cannot hold down jobs and are thus dependent on the state. Other drugs are easy to overdose on and do pretty serious damage to the body.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains are a good reason.

There's a very-clear argument in favour of requiring prescriptions for government-subsidised medicine, because the state has much more of an interest in people consuming appropriate medications than inappropriate ones. As it happens, I just got some drugs here in Oz that are over-the-counter legal but which are far-cheaper with a prescription.

There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed (methamphetamine because murders, plus all the various drugs to pacify people that can be abused for rape or slavery); requiring prescriptions for those appears pretty logical as well (obviously, if you buy into recreational-drug prohibition as a whole, requiring a prescription for medical use is necessary to enforce that).

There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed

There's also the point to be made that people in countries without a culture of medicine prescriptions just love taking antibiotics for anything that ails them, and those people not finishing an antibiotics regimen once they have started one.

This directly leads to things like India being a global hotspot of antimicrobial resistance, which kills at least 300k (likely a multiple of that) people a year.

they would not be hurting others, at least not in any direct way.

Unless they're buying them for children.

There are practical factors, like maybe some medications are supply-restricted so it's necessary for doctors to prescribe them only to people who actually need them. But it's for similar reasons that there's no country where all drugs are legal - most societies have decided to operate with a degree of paternalism regarding what other people can and can't do to themselves.

"Stereotypes are bad" is a motte and bailey argument.

The motte goes something like this: "Individual differences are bigger than group differences. So, even though group differences exist, it's unfair to treat people differently based on {immutable characteristic}. Treat everyone equally when you first meet them."

The bailey is more like: "There are no important differences between groups. Any time you think you notice one, it's because of your own inherent racism, sexism, etc.."

We're mature enough here to realize just how wrong the bailey is. In fact, almost all stereotypes are true. But, even so, some stereotypes really are false. Usually this is because of sampling bias. The people you come cross in a group are not representative of the group as a whole.

Here's an example. In America, there is a stereotype that British people are intelligent. Now, obviously, not everyone holds this stereotype. If you are a resident of southern Spain or Croatia, you've probably come to the exact opposite conclusion as you're invaded by drunken louts every weekend. But here in America, we're rarely exposed to the British working class. The Brits who make it over here tend to be the Received Pronunciation types who probably are generally smarter or at least better educated than the average American. Thus, many Americans hold the incorrect stereotype that British people are smart.

What other stereotypes are false?

If I didn't recognize the username I would have reported this as bait from a troll trying to get people to do base and boring racism.

Though we also got death, taxes, and @2rafa correcting various Americans on the intricacies of the British class system.

In general a lot of these examples suffer from definitional problems. What makes a stereotype True? What makes one Useful? Is "height correlates with intelligence" a true stereotype if there is any correlation, or only if it's the best tool by which to judge? A significant part of the perceived motte and bailey is a struggle between "Judging people by X is better than random" and "Judging people by X is less useful than judging them by Y."

A great example right now is gender race and politics. A white man is 6/10 likely to vote for Trump. So white man = Trump Voter is more accurate than blind chance. But we all know white men who didn't, and we all know white men who from across a room you can say with 95% certainty based on appearance that they didn't. Should I continue to hold the former stereotype in my mind when the latter evidence points the other way.

That said I'll throw one out there: ethnic in group preference exists, and as much as I was raised to be told it was a harmful racist stereotype one ignores it at one's own peril.

That all people with geeky interests (video games, anime, D&D etc.) are unusually intelligent.

Nerds are intelligent, and a lot of nerds have geeky interests, but there are plenty of people with geeky interests who are utterly lacking in intelligence or even common sense.

That people who play sports, exercise a lot etc. are just "dumb muscle"

All things being equal, the guy going to the gym four times a week is probably smarter, more accomplished and more disciplined than the nerdy Reddit moderator who blows all his disposable income on Funko Pops.

That homeless/underclass are unlucky and just like anyone else.

False stereotype: beautiful people are dumb and evil, ugly people are smart and have hearts of gold.

The penguin was amazing show. Too long since we had a proper protagonist that was flat out irredeemable.

But here in America, we're rarely exposed to the British working class.

Out of curiosity, what did Harry Potter qualify as?

Harry Potter's adoptive parents are an overtly negative stereotype of the Tory-supporting upper middle class, as would have been understood when the series began in the 90s.

Dursleys are middle middle not upper middle, they live in a barratt box in a new development with a tiny lawn and a small conservatory - expensive in the green belt today but relatively much cheaper in the mid 90s. Dursleys are people who say “settee” and “pleased to meet you” and so on. They scrimped enough to send Dudley to a cheap local private day school, but he would have been nobody special there. Hermione’s background is upper-middle.

Vernon Dursley is the director of a mid-sized company. Second paragraph of the first book.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.

The books and films might have lowered his mannerisms below what you'd expect for such a position, but that's because it's meant to be a negative stereotype. And part of that negative stereotype is that he gets to be the director of a distinctly unfashionable business, rather than working in a high-paid but fashionable (for the 90s) profession.

Dursleys are people who say “settee” and “pleased to meet you” and so on.

Not English, what is the connotation here?

Hermione’s background is upper-middle.

I'm rusty on my HP lore, but where is this implied? I don't remember her family situation being discussed much in the books or shown in the film.

She’s the daughter of dentists and speaks in RP English, it would be the correct assumption.

There are certain word choices that differ between classes. Using the words “toilet” or “posh” is a very clear indicator that you aren’t upper or upper middle class.

Washing your hands before eating and being generally obsessive over hygiene standards is middle class, while the upper class generally prefer shabby chic and pick up half-finished meat bones with their hands.

Steretypically, the middle classes are afflicted with status anxiety, and therefore obsess over getting things right. Witness the Dursleys scripting out dinner etiquette before Mr. Dursley’s boss arrives for dinner. Whereas etiquette for the upper classes is just ‘whatever the upper classes do’ so they don’t fuss about it too much.

A classic example is the very PMC Nick Clegg and his wife going to dinner with the the Camerons (the Prime Minister and his wife, as upper class as they get) and being shocked when Mrs. Cameron used cheap mayonnaise from a bottle instead of using something fancy or making it herself. Not needing status symbols is the status symbol.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3706031/amp/SamCam-s-idea-cooking-jar-Hellmann-s-says-Miriam-Nick-Clegg-s-wife-exposes-food-habits-political-elite-new-autobiography.html

Her parents are dentists, that’s all I remember about them

Dursleys were middle class social climbers (the most universally despised class). weasels and malfoys were the two types of old money with no money (and fathers who had to stoop to taking govt sinecures as welfare, or in shady business with The Wrong Sort ("directly in business" being the most disreputable part of course)). Hermione was the acceptable kind of rising middle class (dentist, daughter in higher education, probably going into non-profit work). Harry was the ideal form of old money, with a good pedigree on the father's side, fresh blood of undeniable quality from the mother's side, and the money still there (and nobody asks where it came from because it obviously wasn't from anything as tasteless as working for it). Goblins were the international finance class obvs.

Harry is the classic storybook prince who grew up noble living in a pig pen and instantly takes to the ways of his people through pure blood memory.

I'm not sure we even saw anyone who was legitimately from the lower orders except a few parodies like hagrid and the house gnomes, maybe the bus driver? There was probably a scholarship boy hanging from a bannister by his underwear that nobody bothered to mention because it would be gauche to bring attention to it.

I love that Americans can look at the same scene through an entirely different colour spectrum, and all the flashing red bits just look gray to them.

anyone who was legitimately from the lower orders

The thief Mundungus Fletcher surely qualifies.

Guess I need to read the books again, because that name only sounds vaguely familiar. He was filching stuff from Sirius's house, right?

(Spoiler: he will not in fact read the books again)

That's right.

I love that Americans can look at the same scene through an entirely different colour spectrum, and all the flashing red bits just look gray to them.

The question is what value is encoded in the British lens and what Americans are missing by not seeing this worldview. Does it make Americans worse analysts when interacting with the Chinese etc or does it free them to do more, with less mental burdens or are they stupider because they're not constantly doing such social calculus etc etc Like preeminent American Timothy Dexter I'll put my punctuation at the end...,,,???????

If some reader misses something that the author intended and the expected audience understood, I would think less of that reader. Like if all I took away from Animal Farm was that it is a sad story about animals, you would be correct to look down on me.

Certainly I find that living in a foreign country is more relaxing in many ways because my social radar isn’t going off all the time.

Weasleys werent old money, even if we discount the weird Irish twins none of them speak in RP / upper class accents except for Ginny to some extent. If one had to place them in the British class system it would be as middle-middle rurals vaguely involved in county life but certainly not upper class. There’s no real evidence dad’s job is a sinecure and the ramshackle thing they live in is more quaint converted barn (or grain silo) than dilapidated dower house.

No, I agree with @SteveKirk here. The Weasleys have a noble background (they’re on the Black tapestry) and they’re well known as an old-established Pureblood family. Lucius Malfoy basically dislikes them for being traitors and letting the side down.

It’s noted several times that Mr. Weasley could have a lot more money and be a lot more influential if he were willing to toe the line. He has personal relationships with bigwigs and Department Heads like Bagman and Crouch.

Many of their children also get distinguished positions: Percy goes straight to the top of government and Bill has an important job in the biggest bank in Britain.

(I’m ignoring accents and going by the books, I never had much interest in the films).

Yeah, I only got dragged to the first film by gf fam, but at least in that one they... didn't seem to know what to make of some of the characters.

Every pure blood family is a well known family because the total number of wizards in Britain is in the thousands, almost certainly below 20,000 even with much longer lifespan than normal for humans. There are conceivably older wizards in their nineties or hundreds who know by name the vast majority of the wizard population in the country.

It’s also a largely post-scarcity society in which bad jobs are done by magic or slaves (eg. the dishes do themselves in the Weasley kitchen), so we imagine people working “service jobs” like shopkeepers or cooks do so primarily because they derive enjoyment from that customer interaction rather than because they need the money. There is financial inequality but it’s mostly abstract except when it comes to the purchase of some magical goods and services (like wands or brooms or magic candy) that cannot be conjured out of thin air and thus require the labor of actual other wizards. Textbooks and other things seem to have some semi-inviolable magic copyright attached.

Most people are essentially middle class, working in the few things not outsourced to magic (aforementioned artisanal magic crafts, the justice/courts system and government, some hospitality, and education). Many people appear to do just fine having little or no real employment, perhaps because wizards can conjure space, light, heat, food, warmth and can teleport. In this context, a job in “the civil service” ie Ministry of Magic isn’t the same as a sinecure in a muggle government. It’s likely the ministry creates a job for any wizard who wants one; the destitute are those wizards who choose to be.

Dursleys were middle class social climbers (the most universally despised class).

I always got the impression that JK was channeling Hyacinth Bucket when she wrote Petunia.

There was probably a scholarship boy hanging from a bannister by his underwear

Snape, I think. I can’t remember the flashback well but I think it’s implied that child!Snape comes from the bad end of town.

And the week after I compare Snape's parentage to race-mixing, the new series makes him a half-black formerly known as Prince. Absolutely perfect.

Oh, Snape's wifebeating dad definitely was. His mom married down and Paid The Toll in American racial terms.

Unless he got a very good match Snape's children would have fallen out entirely, which is one reason him being in love with Lily in spite of his class anxiety was so meaningful.

weasels and malfoys were the two types of old money with no money

Uh, since when did the Malfoys have no money? They were famously generationally wealthy, as evidenced by Lucius Malfoy purchasing a new Nimbus 2001 for each member of the Slytherin Quidditch team in Chamber of Secrets

I thought their house was described in that "not enough money to keep up the manor" state, and they were paying off servants or something. Maybe I was mixing that up with something else.

I don't think it's enough to say they were in economically dire straits, but in the Half-Blood Prince, Narcissa is portrayed trying to sell some trinkets.

I'd have liked an angle where the Malfoys turn to Voldemort out of economic desperation.

More like Voldy eating them out of house and home :P Like Elizabeth I who destroyed political enemies by turning up with her retinue for two months.

Yes, the Malfoys were evil aristos parleying old money and social status for influence.

Malfoy’s mates Crabbe and Goyle - lower class or lower middle class? Servants of House Malfoy? As an American, all I can tell is they’re somewhere between soccer hooligans and Alfred Pennyworth.

Probably a dodgy genealogy chart claiming they've been cracking heads for the malfoys since 1352, and a dubious claim on the family heraldry they put on everything. That sort.

The lowest of upper/upper middle class, from what I've gathered if I'm not mixing it up with fanon. The kind that have to brownnose people like Malfoys to stay at their level.

Senior Crabbe/Goyle are in the Death Eaters so they couldn't have been too lowborn.

Though it's strongly implied that both Crabbe and Goyle generations are almost too dimwitted to use magic.

DEs had a lot of people and AFAIR accepted anyone who was pureblood and was willing to worship the big V. I don't think it required any special position in the society, at least for mere membership - it seems to be modeled after the Nazi party, which explicitly welcomed low class people that felt the society has left them behind and wanted to do something about it, no matter who gets hurt. It seems the true numbers of DEs weren't even known as many who were eager to join when the things were going well for them, later claimed there weren't true DEs as they were imperiused or coerced (weird that they didn't have means to detect somebody had been imperiused, but let's not dwell of that, HPs magic system is so full of plot holes).

(weird that they didn't have means to detect somebody had been imperiused, but let's not dwell of that, HPs magic system is so full of plot holes).

They could always dose anyone they wanted to question with Veritaserum, the problem in HP society is that the Good Guys can't just impose such measures on the important people.

The text implied there was a ton of low-level DEs who escaped any punishment basically just by going "don't know anything, was imperiused, leave me alone" and ministry of magic doing nothing about it. If anything, the prominent DEs were the ones who got Azkaban or forced to recant and snitch in public on others, and low-level goons largely got away with it - to flock back to Voldie once he came back.

weird that they didn't have means to detect somebody had been imperiused, but let's not dwell of that, HPs magic system is so full of plot holes

Also, sometimes you just can’t do stuff. Modern fantasy is very influenced by sci-fi and D&D, and readers expects thing to be rule-based, comprehensible, and amenable to experimentation. See for example all the silliness about playing rules-lawyer with genies.

I don’t think the deep HP magic runs on such modernist lines. It’s more like art: there are principles and the basics are straightforward but the complex stuff just isn’t, and you have to go by feel.

But it's not even explained why you can't do it, not even addressed. There are a lot of limitations which are spelled out, even if inconsistently - like Avada Kedavra being unblockable (which turns out not to be exactly true but ok) or you can't use Imperius to reveal certain secrets, or other stuff you can't do. But this point is never addressed - given that there are ways to remove Imperius (e.g. Thief's Downfall) why everybody, e.g., entering Ministry of Magic is not automatically un-imperiused? Worst thing it does nothing. There's also finite incantatem, there are also veritaserum (ok this one may be too expensive to use on each suspect consistently), and if MoM can detect magic done by underage wizards, up to knowing which spell what used by whom, why can't it detect Imperius usage by others? It looks like tracing works on adult magic (if it is performed in the vicinity of underage, at least) so again, it's inconsistent.

given that there are ways to remove Imperius (e.g. Thief's Downfall) why everybody, e.g., entering Ministry of Magic is not automatically un-imperiused? Worst thing it does nothing.

True, I forgot this.

In general, I feel an urge to push back against the ‘rule-ification’ of fantasy. It’s become gospel that fantasy worlds should have systems with clear rules, and a certain amount of post-enlightenment tendency to assume that everything is explainable and amenable to engineering.

We can’t even engineer human social systems, or understand how brains work beyond very basic principles. Why would we be able to understand literal magic?

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He was left with quite an inheritance/trust fund at Gringotts.

My new head cannon is that Harry Potter's wealth comes from his parents both having taken level term life policies and used Voldemort to have a legitimate insurance claim. Voldemort spend the next 10 years trying to get his payout from Harry Potter. The unreleased book Harry Potter and the Insurance Claims Adjuster is about the lawsuit and encroaching poverty as Harry Potter is faced with ever increasing lawyers' fees.

Weirdly enough, in the parody series Barry Trotter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerber_(parodist)), Barry and Ermine get married and have a son who's a Squib. Because their son has grown up around magical people, he experiences a "grass-is-greener" effect in which Muggle culture seems impossibly exciting and exotic to him. His childhood ambition is to become an actuary in an insurance firm.

Perhaps I'm not fully versed on the intricacies of the British class system, but it seems obviously middle class?

Obviously so, yes, but by posing a question anyways I was able to get some adults to nerd out about a children's book series. ;-)

I'm struggling with this one and it bothers me. Not quite a stereotype but at work most of the time people come off as smarter and more competent when I interact with them one on one, then through project managers. So if I'm screaming at an email chain that so and so is a fucking idiot I try to go talk to them in person and things end up better.

I asked google and got these fun responses from the AI:

Many stereotypes are not true, including stereotypes about intelligence, gender, and race:

Intelligence: The stereotype that Asian Americans are intelligent is not true.

Gender: The stereotype that women are not as competent as men is not true.

Race: The stereotype that African Americans are less educated is not true.

Race: The stereotype that African Americans are less educated is not true.

It bothers me that I have no problem imagining a woke person asserting that this stereotype is false, and then in the next breath asserting that lower rates of educational attainment among African-Americans is one of many metrics demonstrating the extent to which the US is still a systemically racist country. It should not be possible for a mentally sane person to simultaneously believe "owing to systemic racism, African-Americans have lower rates of educational attainment than white Americans" and "the notion that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans is a false and harmful stereotype".

Like, if you believe that African-Americans are less likely to get an education because of racist policies or teachers or how assessment procedures, that directly implies that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans! The latter "stereotype" cannot be false without completely invalidating the former assertion.

Related: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/if-you-believe-in-structural-racism-16c

It should not be possible for a mentally sane person to simultaneously believe "owing to systemic racism, African-Americans have lower rates of educational attainment than white Americans" and "the notion that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans is a false and harmful stereotype".

Why not?

I'm reminded of a past therapist who thought it was unhealthy to care about whether your beliefs are consistent with reality, or with each other, and that "rationalists" are all mentally ill, because not only do most people believe things simply because their peer group believes them, this is how sane people are supposed to acquire all their beliefs. Don't think about it, just believe whatever's popular to believe because it's popular. As social animals, the most important thing in life is fitting in, and therefore one should choose one's beliefs entirely in line with that goal.

It's why she said I should stop being an atheist and start going to church — because atheism is "weird" and believing in God is more popular, therefore belief in God is automatically more sane.

Thus, in her view, if it's popular (and high status) to simultaneously believe "owing to systemic racism, African-Americans have lower rates of educational attainment than white Americans" and "the notion that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans is a false and harmful stereotype," then holding both beliefs is "mentally sane" despite their contradictory nature, and that even stopping to think about them enough to notice that they contradict each other is bad for your mental health, and should be avoided. "Sanity" is uncritically embracing vox populi, vox Dei.

I wonder what your therapist would have made of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doublethink promotes wellness?

Psychiatry is all about normalcy. If the people saying that have power over you, it's an evidence that you are less sane than them.

Wait, what?

I asked Grok. It spit out lots of similar "false" stereotypes including this one:

Women are naturally better at nurturing and childcare: While some women might excel in these areas, many women do not feel an innate drive for motherhood or might not exhibit traditionally nurturing behaviors.

When I pushed back strongly, it did admit that women are, in fact, more nurturing then men but refused to do it in an unqualified way, always adding "it's important to remember" platitudes to the end.

So much for a based AI any time soon I guess.

Some days I wish people (or AIs) would actually think through their statements instead of just saying things that support their side on the topic of conversation.

African Americans aren't less educated? I guess it's mission accomplished for Affirmative Action, and all of the stats about race and educational attainment must be simply mistaken. Same with race/sex and medical treatment, as well as many other minor issues.

It's one of the things that really turned me off of social justice causes and their supporters.

Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false. They come from a combination of clueless tourists not realizing they're being rude first, or from Europeans playing up cultural mismatches/national rivalries. Even Parisians are no less friendly than the inhabitants of any comparable big city.

There are also a bunch of intra-African stereotypes Westerners would find very surprising to hear, but they tend to reflect reasonably accurately how Africans experience other cultures, so they're largely a result of different selection affects from intra-African migration relative to Africa-to-West migration. (This is talking about general stereotypes, of course, not those stemming from national or tribal beefs, which are just as ridiculous as the Dutch calling Germans bicycle thieves, but usually without the joking aspect).

Even Parisians are no less friendly than the inhabitants of any comparable big city.

This is totally wrong, have you seen how Parisians park? They literally ram the car in front and behind them with their bumpers to make room for parallel parking. Strangers will scratch up your bumper to make their parking easier and won't see anything wrong with it. This would be considered extremely rude in most other places.

Here's a video of Americans being shocked by Parisian parking: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n51OdFlOi1o

I would agree Parisians are crazy behind the wheel of a car, but I think that's orthogonal to friendliness.

Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false.

Interestingly enough, I have exactly the counter view of US culture, especially related to restaurant service. I find US waiters as rude. First they impose themselves upon me as if I care about their name or their stupid questions about where I am from or why am I in the US - as if I cannot tell that they don't give a shit. Then they constantly interrupt me and my friends with inane sales pitches - and if god forbid we go under some invisible sum of $spending per minute, then they actually slam the bill on the table and just kick me out as if I am some hobo. So much for friendliness. To me US waiters are bunch of fake stupid clowns putting on clownshow for US patrons, who for some reason like that shit.

Nevertheless despite this rant, I put up with it when I am overseas and act accordingly with fake smiles and everything - each country has its own thing and US people like their waiters to be clowns for some reason, it is what it is. I am not there to reeducate them about proper continental way of "invisible" manners of waiting staff. But it would be good to have some basic respect for other cultures as well and not take your own manners as the etalon everybody in the world should aspire to. For instance Japanese people are polite, they do not like to be touched and in general like their space. People in Brasil on the other hand love to touch each other, so if somebody comes to me and taps me on my back he means no disrespect or sexual assault or whatnot.

if god forbid we go under some invisible sum of $spending per minute, then they actually slam the bill on the table and just kick me out as if I am some hobo. So much for friendliness.

The hell? I have literally never had this happen in my entire life in the US. Either there's some other layer to why you're having that experience, or you are the unluckiest person to ever visit a restaurant here.

Maybe you reacted to dozens of "rude" cues of waiters who want to remove you from the table - after paying the tip of course - so they can sit down somebody else who will consume some more. If you ignore those hints, then the service can get really nasty. Try it sometimes.

Yes, U.S. waiters are awful.

"Hi, I'm Stacy, and I'm going to be taking care of you today".

10 minutes after your food arrives: "You still working on that?"

French service is much better, generally.

There are also a bunch of intra-African stereotypes Westerners would find very surprising to hear, but they tend to reflect reasonably accurately how Africans experience other cultures

Well, please go on, I want to be surprised.

There is a sentiment I’ve heard many times from Americans abroad which boils down to, “don’t worry, I’m American, it’s fine to be informal”.

It’s well-meant but often comes off as demanding unearned intimacy, or worse as, “I’m not interested in playing your silly provincial status games”.

or worse as, “I’m not interested in playing your silly provincial status games”

That's one of the only privileges you have as a foreign worker if assimilation is not your goal. Just smile and trample every boundary.

There’s a difference between trying and getting it wrong, versus thinking you’re doing everyone a favour by failing to respect how people are supposed to behave. Trampling people’s boundaries is deeply disrespectful to them and shows poor character IMO.

I remember a tourist I met once at a Meetup; she immediately gave me a rather demeaning nickname, clearly intending it as a playful icebreaker. Frankly I was appalled. I tried to be nice and not hold it against her but I still remember it as a quintessential example of someone trying to leapfrog social customs and botching it.

Hmm, but then why do I hear stereotypes about various central American or SE Asian countries being very friendly? I'm sure there are many rude tourists there, but somehow they come away thinking everyone is nice.

The cultures are in some ways more compatible with the US, but there's also an element of those countries being poor and needing tourist $$$ more, so their tourist-facing norms ended up being shaped differently.

It probably has to do with money.

In poor countries, people will dance for you. In rich countries, they won't. I actually much prefer the detachment of the French waiter who is too good for my filthy American dollars.

In the Third World, I always feel like a leaky sack of money more than a human.

Edit: Thinking about this some more, Latin Americans really do seem to have a friendly and positive attitude.

Also hilarious when people assume that Southeast Asians are more progressive than Westerners based on essentially 'The resort staff in a very narrow slice of Bali didn't say anything negative about my gay relationship, therefore progressive country'

People from big countries and open spaces seem to be more open and positive than people in more cramped conditions.

Thanks to everyone who answered my hypothetical about the startup.

General opinion seems to come down to ‘you don’t owe them anything but a decent sum of money would be a gentlemanly / ladylike show of gratitude. Which seems about right to me.

One of the reasons I’m interested in the question is that much social conflict comes from the discrepancy between the market value of labour (determined primarily by the number and type of people able to do the work) and what you might call the utility value (determined by how important it is that the work gets done. For example, @PutAHelmetOn’s code saves hundreds of thousands in processing costs, farmers stop everyone dying of famine, longshoremen make it possible to have international trade (modulo automation).

I would say the primary economic conflict of the last two hundred years is that the employees think in terms of the utility of their work while customers and employers think in terms of the market value.

Trade unions and guilds have historically been used as a method of arbitrage between these two values, limiting competition to drive market value closer to utility value. And the communist states show pretty clearly to my that trying to base your society on something other than the market value causes problems. I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.

Would like to write an effort post but this is what I have for now.

(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).

the discrepancy between the market value of labour and what you might call the utility value

The utility theory of pricing suggests that potable water (critical for life) should cost more than diamond necklaces (not important). That alone suggests it needs at least some nuance if it wants to make contact with reality.

I think if you want to be more coherent about theories of value, you should probably think a bit more about the margin and factor in include both substitutability & elasticity. Food as an entire category is essential, but on the margin the farmer's product can be substituted for the fisherman's or the shepherd's. Truckers as a category are essential, but on the margin if prices go way up people will ship less stuff. PUHO's super-performant code could be substituted instead for buying a bunch more hours on AWS.

I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.

I think there is a key question of filling in the reason why it's given anyway.

Some will say:

  • ... because we want you to get on your feet and go back to being a productive member of society

Others will say

  • ... because we care for you as an irreducible being worthy of grace

Yet others will say

  • ... because otherwise the poor will degrade the quality of life for everyone

And so forth.

I am not sure that the utility value concept is coherent.

So all the farmers quit one day and the rest of the economy stays the same, magically. People will likely decide that they want food more than they want shelter, move out of their rented buildings and spend their rent on what food there is to be had, establishing a utility value of food.

Except now the people running the waterworks also go on strike, and there is a water shortage. Very quickly, people decide that they would rather drink than eat. Nobody would waste precious water to irrigate crops.

And then some acute threat of violence looms, and people will trade their precious water so that they are not ripped apart by velociraptors in the next minute.

Depending on what their most urgent need is, that piece of bread is worth 1$, or a kings ransom, or nothing. So what should its utility value be?

The idea that utility value and market value are different is a fundamental economic misconception.

Market prices reflect real resource shortages and tradeoffs. "Important" jobs are often paid low because many people can do it.

I’m specifically differentiating the two concepts. My point is that the economically effective way of allocating value does not match fundamental moral intuitions many have about how to allocate value.

The Marxists put their fingers in their ears and say ‘akshually economic value is derived from labour’ and they’re wrong and it doesn’t work. But the concept is perennially popular because it’s fundamentally intuitive, and I suspect that until we find a way to make the two match a little better we will have permanent ongoing strife. The welfare system was an attempt to do this, but has the now-clear disadvantage that it’s a pyramid scheme that encourages dependency and bankrupts you. I’m interested in exploring the space of possible alternatives.

A pure market system with high liquidity and competition generally produces good results and humans hate, hate, hate being subject to it. Like evolution, market forces are an eldritch optimising machine. There are some people who seem to feel that market forces are morally good and I think this is a category error.

I see it as a sort of tragedy of the commons. You can have a better view and a better time at a baseball stadium by sitting down, but this is conditional on everyone else sitting down as well.

The politicization of economic value is super super tempting. I think it is inevitable to some degree and I'm fine with it happening. I think it would be best if it happens within Dunbar number limited groups of people of about 150. Let a small company or group of people determine among themselves how to politically split up economic value. But make them compete in a more global system where value is determined by the erldritch invisible hand.

There is a sweet spot of not being subject to the eldritch forces, but also it's a benevolent eldritch force that will ruthlessly optimize for the things we are willing to trade for. So I guess I agree with your assessment, I just dislike the people that band together to deny reality, aka Marxists.

I agree with pretty much everything here. I don’t think you can avoid politicising “how much is your work worth”, especially because liquid market conditions are something that has to be actively created and maintained through legal systems, economic systems, transport systems etc.

I think it works as an appeal to victimization and greed. The belief that you’re being exploited is something that comes up anytime you end up with any sort of hierarchy. It’s something that humans are just unwilling to accept unless it’s them at or near the top of the dominance hierarchy. So rather than accept that there’s a reason that they’re not at the top of that hierarchy. Incels certainly have theories about what kinds of external factors make them unfuckable. The kid cut from the football team will likely believe in some sort of favoritism hold him back. In the workplace we have a hard time accepting that we actually don’t deserve to be the boss.

The other appeal is greed. If those at the top are unfairly exploiting them, it’s “only fair” to ask that some of those ill-gotten gains go to them. So they stand to gain if they can leverage the power of the state to basically steal from their betters.

I mean, I agree directionally.

That said, there is such a thing as exploitation. The concept has been overused by the left but their dishonesty about it doesn't actually erase the subset of actual such cases.

The problem being trying to find out if you’re a real victim of exploitation or if you’re just unsatisfied with where you ended up. Most people will absolutely believe that they deserve more.

Absolutely. I did not mean at all to suggest that we can allow people to self-id as exploited.

That doesn't mean there are no such cases or the concept is completely devoid of realization.

In a perfectly efficient market, this would be the case. But it's easily disproven in practice by the fact that market prices can change by effects which have absolutely no impact on the utility value.

Ie, suppose we have a city with a bunch of plumbers, all of equal plumbing skill/ability, and a company that hires them and manages their distribution to clients, and pays between $80k and $120k depending on how skilled and aggressive the plumber is at negotiating (aggressive meaning they demonstrate an ability/willingness to quit and do a different job instead if they don't get the salary they want). We've assumed by axiom that they provide the same value, and yet get paid different amounts, let's assume the frequency is evenly distributed across this range, such that the average plumber is paid $100k. I suppose you could say that the "utility value" is the highest the company is willing to pay, $120k, and anyone being paid less is simply a bad negotiator, but I'm not sure if you'd say the "market value" is $120k given that most of the plumbers aren't earning that, and a new plumber entering the field is unlikely to get an offer that high.

Suppose then that the plumbers unionize and negotiate that all of them will receive the same pay of $110k. That's now the market value, unambiguously, that's what the market, as created by this single local monopolistic company (which is the only company offering reliable and consistent pay for plumbers in this city) and this one union (which all employees of the company must join) will pay. And yet the utility value of plumbing has not changed, because the union doesn't impact plumbing skill/ability in any way.

Suppose that the company actually takes in revenue of $140k for each plumbing employee it has, and keeps the difference as overhead/profit. There's a sense in which the utility value of a plumber is actually $140k since that's what clients are willing to pay, although if the overhead is necessary then I suppose the utility of the plumber themself is lessened by that. However if a plumbing emergency happens and the company gets a lot more business, earning $150k per employee one year, but takes the extra as profit and changes no salaries, then the utility value of plumbers goes up that year, the market price (from the client and owner's side) goes up, but the market price (from the employees side) remains unchanged.

And suppose that the employer uses local regulations, an army of lawyers, and relationships with local politicians to crush any new plumbers that try to form their own company or go independent in this area. It is not a free market, it is effectively a local monopoly. If you want to be a plumber, you negotiate here, or you leave the city and pay whatever transition costs it takes to uproot your life and your family and be a plumber somewhere else. The fact that this changes market prices but doesn't change the utility value of plumbers should clearly demonstrate that market prices are distinct from utility prices, even if an ideal perfectly efficient and free market would cause them to be equal. In practice, no market is perfectly free, therefore we should expect deviations in precisely the areas where these imperfections drive them apart.

There is an economic concept called "perfect competition" I want to be clear that this economic concept is not required for efficient prices.

And I am talking about efficient prices, not "perfect prices". Prices are a process and a search function for an optimal set of tradeoffs. One of the tradeoffs is information. To perfectly know all the inputs of a product, and to perfectly know the desire for that product would be a very costly search process. There is going to be some fudging of prices and that fudging should be expected given that information itself is not free or costless.

[Plumbers]

You've created a very long example that kind of assumes away many of the standard market fixes. I do generally like to use theoretical examples for most economic concepts, but I find that they tend to lead people astray when it comes to the nature of prices.

To me your example sounds a bit like this:

"Geologists say that older mountain ranges tend to be shorter and rounder than newer mountain ranges, because wind and erosion will gradually wear mountains down. But that's not always true, imagine there are two mountains. One mountain is 20k feet and in an old mountain ranges. And the other mountain is 10k feet in a newer mountain range. They are both subject to similar levels of erosion, and neither is a volcano. So older mountains can be taller."

You've assumed your position to be true in your example.

And yes the government is fully capable of distorting prices, or assisting companies in distorting prices. I usually bring this up as a reason why government should not have this power, or should at least have many restrictions on the use of this power. But this is also not evidence that prices don't reflect the real world, instead it is more evidence. After all if a government makes it hard to be in the plumber business we should expect the price paid for plumbing services to go up, because the supply of plumbers has been restricted. It would be strange if the government could intervene and not change prices.

Sure, but my example is basically a disproof by counterexample. In this example, prices don't match utility, therefore, the statement "prices always match utility" is logically false. It's really easy to disprove an "always" statement with a single example, even a hypothetical one, because an "always" statement is such a strong claim that it's almost never true. Utility value and market value are different things: sometimes they will be equal, sometimes they will not. I'm not saying they're never equal, I'm not saying they won't usually be close, especially in an efficient market. My point is that markets in the real world are not always efficient, therefore the two values are not always equal in the real world. This should not be controversial.

The only time I say "always" is in quoting a fake person that is doing a bad takedown on the concept of erosion with a bad hypothetical example.

I even mentioned fudging of prices. Which I would have thought helped clarify that prices are not some exact mathematical thing.

I'll say what I said again: Prices reflect reality.

Saying that they don't perfectly reflect reality is not a disproof of what I said. Just like finding one mountain that is coincidentally less eroded does not mean erosion is not true. Utility is part of reality and thus prices will tend to capture information about utility and reflect that information.

Marx's work doesn't say there is a slight mismatch sometimes between market prices and utility. It says there is almost always a mismatch, because employers exploit employees for their excess labor to make profits. That is the fundamental economic misconception.

If a price is wrong, then there is often a method to profit off of that incorrectness. If some segment of workers is underpaid then their is a profit opportunity to open a competing business and pay them more than they get now and less than the full value of their wage. The greater the discrepancy, the greater the opportunity.

Fine. It sounds like we don't disagree about any object level issues, just the meaning of certain words and phrases. I don't think what you said originally properly conveys the nuance of what you're saying now, but I understand you now and I don't disagree.

Market prices reflect real resource shortages and tradeoffs. "Important" jobs are often paid low because many people can do it.

Or as Dr. Kersten points out, there are many positions which are necessary but not important, like a gear in a watch -- vital yet easily replacable.

I think what Corvos is calling "utility value" is price at which consumer surplus reaches zero. That's definitely different than (and much higher than) "market value".

Yes, and it has to be this way because anyone providing me a necessary service must be paid less per person that I am paid. Otherwise I can’t afford those necessary services.

For example, I am dependent on food (farmers, truckers, shelf stackers etc.) to live. If those people are too well paid, I can’t afford to eat. So it seems that, most of the time, it’s a prerequisite for civilisation that people doing necessary jobs are paid less than people doing unnecessary jobs. Which is very awkward for society.

Yes, and it has to be this way because anyone providing me a necessary service must be paid less per person that I am paid. Otherwise I can’t afford those necessary services.

Err, no. This would only be true if those people were providing you AND ONLY YOU the necessary service. In actual fact, farmers, truckers, and shelf stackers provide services to many people.

Sorry, I’m thinking out load and so not always clearly. What I mean is that I physically can’t spend more than my total salary on basic necessities. Society requires that basic necessities be cheaper than skilled/intellectual work - if they aren’t cheap, society doesn’t function and everyone has to be a subsistence farmer.

The more fundamental the work, the more we have to drive the price down for our civilisation to remain functional. More physical work is resistant to automation is various ways (robots can’t interact with complex objects / human environments so no robot nurses, truckers, shelf stackers etc.) and the end result is that you have many low-paid physical labourers who notice that they are being paid badly for doing very necessary jobs while others are being paid better for sending emails. Before, of course, these jobs were done by peasants and slaves, so you had the same problem.

I can’t see a better solution but it always causes problems for social cohesion imo.

Society requires that basic necessities be cheaper than skilled/intellectual work - if they aren’t cheap, society doesn’t function and everyone has to be a subsistence farmer.

The requirement is that the cost of the basic necessities for a person is less than their pay. This says little, however, about the pay of those providing the basic necessities. And it is certainly not true that that work is particularly resistant to automation -- the work that remains perhaps is, but that's purely survivorship bias. We provide a lot more necessities with a lot fewer people (farmers especially) than we did in the past.

So everyone wishes they were a monopolist with respect to their own jobs. No surprise, but we need to treat these requests as the selfish self interested lobbying that they are, rather than some generous societal oriented philosophy.

Do you think most C-suite executives are over, under, or appropriately paid relative to the market value of their labor?

That seems a broad question. There are CEOs who are merely occupying a chair and collecting the salary. It happens in just about any position. There are also people who work their butts off innovating and improving life for the whole country who are taking risks to do so. I wouldn’t begrudge the second set a thing, and furthermore I think being keen to confiscate wealth on the theory that the first type is more common than the second ends up doing great harm as it prevents the second group from working effectively.

Even the ones just occupying the chair are producing a huge amount of value as compared to the replacement CEO that is actively tanking the company.

Paying an extra ten million for a lower risk of "destroys tens of billions" is not always the wrong move.

IOW, at that level it's not just about upside or actual job function/accomplishment.

Obviously overpaid. Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo for 239 million dollars, I would have gladly ruined it for 150 million. And there are people that would run it into the ground for a million and some for free.

So CEO decisions are so consequential that they can ruin a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That makes it seem very sensible to pay a couple hundred million if it increases the chances those decisions are good. Sometimes CEOs are paid those hundreds of millions and make bad decisions anyway, but generally people believe that being willing to pay more improves those odds, that's why they do it.

I can't understand why shareholders don't insist on tying CEO pay to company performance, Musk-style. Does it reveal too much about the board's expectations for growth/decline?

This is outcome based thinking and basically one of the best ways to never truly understand why the world works the way it does. If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.

If you look at the very top Contract Bridge or Magic The Gathering players for example they evaluate their play based on expected values of the boardstate rather than whether that specific time what they did worked out well for them or not. The right play that led you to lose the round is not an issue at all while the wrong play that led you to win that specific time is something you need to fix ASAP.

Sure you can run Yahoo for $150M but for the board it makes more sense to pay Mayer $249M if there's say a 30% probability she ruins the company and a 70% probability she makes it good again vs paying you $150M for a 100% probability of the company being ruined, irrespective of what the final outcome of Mayer's tenure turns out to be.

I don't have a specific opinion about Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO at the moment, other than that she's another amusing example of the female desire to be sex objects.

If you buy a game for $1 where a coin is flipped and you get $10 if it's a head then you did the right thing even if the coin flip turns up tails. The real life outcome is not important, what really matters is the expectation.

Indeed, a good outcome does not necessarily mean a good decision (and conversely with regard to a bad outcome and bad decision). Even as a kid, when watching professional sports, it annoyed me how coaches/managers would be razed or praised based on the outcome rather than the decision(s) using the information available at the time.

Some of the things she did were just ridiculous:

In November 2013, Mayer instituted a performance review system based on a bell curve ranking of employees, suggesting that managers rank their employees on a bell curve, with those at the low end being fired.[59][60] Employees complained that some managers were viewing the process as mandatory.[60] In February 2016, a former Yahoo! employee filed a lawsuit against the company claiming that Yahoo's firing practices have violated both California and federal labor laws.[61]

It's not as though she made ambitious ploys that might've worked but failed due to bad luck, she had a scattergun approach of random nonsense. "We need to do something" -> "this is something" -> "therefore we must do this" x50. Mayer had a hard task but bungled massively.

I think you can even switch those odds, it can be a hail marry, a 30% chance she turns it around. If you're a high end exec you're going to want to be heavily compensated for the risk that you're going to get fired and that possibly ending your career. "I'll try to patch up the Titanic but you're going to pay me enough that when it goes down I'm sitting on the life boat with a smile on my face."

(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).

Within reason it's okay. We only get annoyed if someone keeps starting multiple threads about the same topic.

Got it, thank you.

In Aristotle's Politics, he observes that families hold property "in common" while cities hold property privately (but for public benefit). He thinks this is natural, because if cities treated property as communal, no one would have stewardship and freeloaders would be a problem--but with our true intimates, it's actually normal and natural to live communally.

What you are saying sounds to me like kind of a modern take on the same phenomena, or maybe even just a more granular take. The reason we have the law of contract is to facilitate agreement between non-intimates. But the line between family and stranger can be more of a spectrum, and in many circumstances we find ourselves treating strangers as near kin, at least temporarily.

I don't think I have anything substantive to add, really, I just think it's always interesting to observe that these questions have been the subject of philosophical inquiry for all of recorded history.

Right. On the one hand, big cities / corporations / societies can only work on market forces, which treat you like a pawn and are constantly trying to drive the value of your important work down, and a lot of the time people wished they lived in a more personable system.

On the other hand, working within the family is often unpaid (eg waiting tables in the family restaurant or on the family farm, or changing nappies). One of the old feminist demands was that mothers should be paid for taking care of children. Though I doubt they were looking to receive only the salary of an au pair….

You might be interested in https://www.amazon.com/Order-without-Law-Neighbors-Disputes/dp/0674641698

It is a similar point in that law is useful when the game is functionally not iterative (either because of the size of the market or the size of the transaction) but when iterative law is basically irrelevant.

Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up

My two cents, but you're fine. It adds to the impression that we have a rolling conversation going around here. Personally I'm unlikely to go digging through prior topics to see what conclusion you came to if any, not least because it wouldn't be clear where to look.

People who aren't interested can minimize the post and its children. I minimize about half the posts here within a few seconds of skimming. It's a great system. Also, this isn't 4chan; no topics died to make room for yours.

Finally, as you say, it's Sunday. So long as things are kept in good taste, there's always been an unspoken understanding that Sunday-poasting doesn't have to adhere as tightly to the straight and narrow. It's like Hawaiian shirt Friday at the office.

How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.

My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.

Here's the article:

No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America

When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.

“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.

She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”

My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).

The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.

And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.

Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.

Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.

Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.

Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.

4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.

“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”

For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”

The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.

If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

I continue to hold the view that defending South Korea in 1950 was a mistake.

North Korea also has a very low tfr and declining population (official estimates are overstated, my estimate of the real rate is around 1.5), albeit still a higher rate than South Korea.

Noted. My assumption is that a unified Communist Korea would've likely ended up looking like current unified Vietnam i.e. something that's obviously not perfect but is at least not a cyberpunk hellhole like the ROK.

The 4B movement has already been disavowed by the American Left for not being inclusive of trans ideology (i.e., transwomen who may still have their initial bits and parts are not getting laid by a 4B chick; transmen are also encouraged not to do the same; it inherently focuses on reproductive functions; it started on a message board that includes anti-trans sentiment), which makes all of this somewhat odd to me - the gender divide isn't going to swing back to the Democrats by Democrats telling biological women that they can't have feminists movements without biological men being lifted up within those movements.

My immediate reaction to this 'movement' is the same as when I see the 'we're not having kids because it's too expensive' or even 'we're not having kids because of global warming'. A rationalisation for what's going on, not a true reason. After all, Korea's birth rate been low for decades, and only now are the women supposedly swearing off men?

There are clearly a lot of things that contribute to Korea's low birth rate; the punishing work culture, the educational arms race, the pathological status obsession, hyper-urbanism, the lack of in-person socialising (and the comparative amount of spending time online), the sleep deprivation. I see the breakdown in gender relations as a symptom of all this, rather than the cause.

If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.

I don't think 'capitalism' is a particularly useful label here. We've had 'capitalism' since either the 1500s (the breakdown of manorialism) or the 1700s (the industrial revolution) but global birth rates only really started to decline in the 1900s, and even that was reversed temporarily by the baby boom in the 1950s and 60s.

The Amish are extremely 'capitalist' (in the sense of being extremely engaged with the market, owning businesses etc) and yet they manage to maintain high birth rates. You can see Russian birth rates collapse after the communist revolution. 'Capitalist' America has long had higher birth rates than comparatively less 'capitalist' Europe.

Now I'd certainly agree that global culture is antinatal, but referring to that culture as 'capitalist' obscures more than it hides.

As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.

All of the things you mentioned (except high levels of consumption, lol) existed under communism in the USSR.

various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc.,

What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?

obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc.

Given that obesity and number of kids both correlate negatively with income, I'd be surprised if the obese weren't having more kids than the skinny.

government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment

Even government propaganda is capitalism now?

What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?

It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.

Even government propaganda is capitalism now?

Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.

It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.

It's caused by (some) people's revealed preferences for suburban living rather than apartment living and the increasing unusability of public spaces thanks to laws against nuisances not being enforced, for which we can thank leftists.

If this was actually true, we'd have expected higher birthrates in Communist countries during the Cold War. That was not, in fact, the case.

No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates

since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates

What is the basis of comparison?

Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.

Comparing city state against full sized country is crazy

Why is Oklahoma less enmeshed in capitalism than New York?

I mean it’s entirely possible that a slightly larger trivially small fraction of the population in Oklahoma supports themselves non capitalistically; realistically all of his geographical examples are better explained as urban vs rural though, and the class neighborhood difference is probably false.

There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.

(unedited, meandering thoughts)

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.

It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.

Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.

I think you're right that there's some important impact from the decline of embodied competence (material, social, physical) as a personal quality that people aspire to. In a society where people need to do more to survive on a daily basis, there's more value from the kind of deep, optimized knowledge you accrue through pure repeated experience; and that feels like a natural factor in making people respect their parents enough to want to become them, in a household/family setting that's similar to the one where they excelled. I definitely consult my mother regularly on workplace relations, etiquette, domestic stuff, child/husband/friend psychology, and various adulting skills, in addition to her professional areas of expertise, and I similarly pay attention to other women and men of her generation as models for social technologies and ways of being that I feel like we're in danger of losing. I expect it will be unpleasant to become a crone when it's my turn, but I don't think I'd trade the abilities and understanding I will have gained along the way.

If that kind of respect for experience is on the wane, I wonder how much of it is (a) the devaluation/ demystification of knowledge in general with the rise of the Internet; and (b) the massive Dunning-Krugerization and loss of intellectual humility that the culture has undergone as a result. But also, the high-status life narratives these days seem much more consumption-oriented than production-oriented, so maybe people don't particularly know or care whether they're good at anything.

Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint

As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.

They exhumed her body this weekend, that’s why I was reading about her, but I’m not quite sure how it works.

One issue is grandmas getting older. At the more extreme end but probably not incredibly uncommon in the past a grandma could be in her low 30's certainly 40's. My mom, who is now a grandmother to my toddler is in her early 70's.

That does seem like an issue. In my own family, it seems like grandparents are getting too old to safely lift babies and toddlers right when I have them. We've had kids in late 20s/early 30s.

There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose.

To be fair i think this goes for men too. I don't think this has to do with denigration of women's work or anything but with the very extended retirement and generally privileged existence of a good portion of the current generation of "elderly". The retirement, where people are protected from a lot of current hardships through various policies such as Medicare, inflation protected pensions or the abolishment of property tax (while simultaneously massively benefiting from their inflated value) leads to a sort of reversed and very prolonged adolescence where slightly diminished but perfectly capable people mentally, socially and spiritually degenerate through disassociation from the economy and purpose in general. Being a reality divorced leech isn't very admirable, regardless of age.

Men aren't protected from this much more than women, even if they often retire a bit later and aren't stay at home moms with kids in school.

People who keep working usually are worthy of respect though and I do respect most of my seniors at work, men and women. There are a few retired people I respect, they are almost always very active with helping out caring for their grandchildren, but can also be active in some kind of local charitable organisation.

Maybe there is something to that.

I liked my grandmother better, because she stayed and raised my mom and siblings while my grandfather moved to another state and didn't communicate with or visit them. My grandmother had everyone over for all the holidays, and it was nice. But she never babysat us, even for an hour, and that was probably stressful for my parents. I think she inherited money and didn't work, other than raising children. My other grandfather died when I was a baby, and we visited my other grandmother and stayed at her house, which was at least nice. I don't think she ever worked while I knew her, and she was fine, but I got the impression she mostly watched game shows and walked around the neighborhood once a day. The TV was never off at her house. I suppose my family made me feel neutral toward having children.

A couple of people in the thread brought up Korean mothers in law specifically, as being demanding and expecting their daughters in law to serve them, which seems interesting in a context where marriage and childbirth are very low. I would guess that they had to work for their husband's family when they were younger, and expect it to be paid back, but were less likely to work an 8 - 5 kind of job outside the home? I don't know what the actual facts are, not being very familiar with Korean culture.

I bonded with my own grandfather hunting, and fishing, and when school was out by helping him with various tool-related tasks he wasn't too old for. I legitimately don't know what non-redneck grandfathers do with their grandsons.

My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.

Plenty of people do much the same even if they're urban white collar people, like my father for instance.

My father in-law doesn't like that kind of stuff though and does things like taking them to soccer games, museums and going swimming.

Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers.

A phenomenon I didn’t even know existed. Where can we learn more?

For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

How much of this is two neurotic people being neurotic and bouncing off of each other? I don't always trust neurotics perception of reality.

Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.

Do you know where I can read up on this?

Check out Out of the FOG, it's got a lot of good info on personality disorders, associated behaviors, and best ways to preserve oneself. If you're interested specifically in Borderline mothers, I'd highly recommend reading Understanding the Borderline Mother which is, of course, out of print and relatively expensive. AFAIK it's pretty much the reference material on how BPD presents to children and spouses, regardless of sex.

Source: my mother is BPD as are many women on her side of the family.

I may be falling prey to Google being a fairly lousy search engine these days, but that was my experience when researching it as a teenager/younger adult. In fact, the first time I read about BPD was when reading about high-conflict divorces (because I was still a teenager stuck in the middle of one). Search for "son of borderline mother" versus "daughter of borderline mother" and you'll get more results for the latter. Search for "borderline ex-wife" and you'll get more material than either of the first two. That may just reflect there being more stuff out there about abusive/crazy spouses than parents.

It kind of makes sense. BPD is more common in women (to roughly the same extent that Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common in men), so it's unlikely that women are going to wind up in a closer relationship with someone suffering from that condition than that with their mother, while adult men are more likely to encounter BPD in the setting of a romantic relationship (which at that point will be a far more acute crisis than past mommy issues).

As for the disorder itself, This and in particular this are about the two best blog-length posts I've seen on the subject.

Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/

Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.

An interesting article. Comparing this to Astral Codex, I can’t help wondering if Lorien is where Scott has been investing the majority of his time and intellect.

I think he’s mostly played out on normal essays. I could pretty much boil his late output down to EA is good, AI is not so good, and Everything is Fine. I don’t demand constant contrarianism for the sake of it but there’s a self-satisfaction bordering on incuriosity in his recent stuff that I don’t like much. Moving to California seems like it was good for his life but bad for his brain.

I don't know where you can read more on it, but I can provide more evidence in that direction.

From my experiences, the Cluster B disorders tend to fall out (roughly) in this fashion.

Antisocial - male dominated (used to be called sociopathy). Tends towards anger as it's primary emotion. Borderline - female dominated (I've heard it called, derogatorily, "crazy bitch disease"). Tends towards fear of abandonment. Histrionic - slightly female biased. Doesn't get a lot of media attention (think of like, the mothers of child stars). Tends towards performative actions (my mother, who fell into this bucket, would run away from home every Christmas and make the whole family persuade her to return). Narcissistic - male biased. Extreme selfishness which is expressed as unending need.

Edit: I just realized all of the above sound extremely similar, so let me provide an example.

If you were, for example, trying to go out for an evening:

  1. Someone with Antisocial personality disorder would say it's fine, but would break something (or someone) to force you to stay.
  2. Someone with Borderline personality disorder would hurt themselves, or send increasingly scary messages indicating that they are going to until you stay.
  3. Someone with Histronic personality disorder would make a huge fuss about you leaving, and how much they do for you (and may pack up everything and leave, or sell all your stuff, or whatever).
  4. Someone with Narcissistic personality disorder would tell you that you cannot, and tell you how much you are hurting them until you return.

All of the above fall into cluster B behaviors, so it's not like they're exclusive to one or another; it just tends to be the predominant form of expression.

For reading purposes I'd recommend just looking at DSM criteria or searching pubmed and finding what seems to be a reasonable review article.

Correctly making these diagnosis can be hard, and many cases seem obvious but aren't. While Borderline (BPD) is more common in women we find that Antisocial (ASPD) is over-diagnosed in men (not all criminals have it but...) and under-diagnosed in women. Borderline is the opposite (just because this dude murdered someone doesn't mean he isn't borderline). People with disordered personality who hurt people almost always get an ASPD diagnosis but people with severe BPD often hurt others. Impulsivity is a cardinal symptom in both (contra organized serial killer stereotypes). Often the dx just gets thrown out on gender lines, which is sometimes accurate but not always.

ASPD can be thought of us being a fucking asshole in mild to moderate cases and evil in moderate to severe cases (as demonstrated by disregard for the rights of others).

People with BPD in contrast care too much about others to some extent. There's been an attempt to rebrand it as "Emotional Dysregulation Disorder" which is instructive. Impulsive, passionate, lots of relationships that end abruptly, things like "I LOVE YOU, I HATE YOU" (splitting). For most they'll pattern match to a moody teenager, but in an adult body.

This is also a core part of what Cluster-B disorders often are, over expression of immature coping mechanisms aka acting like a kid. Also one of the reasons why they often burn off with age.

Severe borderline looks like psychosis (inability to determine what's real) and that's what the border in borderline is named for. There's an attendant identity instability which sometimes leads to being trans. Severe antisocial is lizard people types.

Histrionic is less interesting, you can call it stereotypical energetic Italian disorder if you like and wouldn't be too far off.

Narcissistic is simple at a basic level - Trump often gets accused of this (although I'm not sure I buy that). It gets pretty complicated if you look deeper though, most mass shooters are a subtype of this and not ASPD.

People often overweight anger in antisocials, it is often present but the lack of emotion is frequently more startling - lack of remorse, lack of respect for others, lack of love for partners). Often violence, anger, and intimidation happen because they are cheat codes towards getting whatever utility they are seeking, not because of investment leading to anger.

Most mental health conditions have heritable elements and we suspect that ASPD and BPD are two-hit situations (lived experience and genetic predisposition). Raisedby types may have it themselves, and failing that some shit happens with mothers and daughters - boys will just leave or pushback physically and be able to protect themselves, would be my guess.

In contrast crazy bitch exes are of interest to men because a lot of borderline traits are desirable (most stereotypical: abundant, quality sexual activity) and unlike mothers, exes can be more easily a legal or financial threat.

Uhhh that rambling went on longer than I thought it would, sorry. Everything I said is shortcuts/oversimplification.

In discussions of South Korea, I never see any of the proudly childless express any concern about what will happen to them in retirement. They seem to be implicitly assuming that someone else's kids will be paying their pensions.

While women are largely the gatekeepers of sex, I don't understand how a sort of threat of withholding it would work on a macro level. My understanding is that by and large the sex that happens is mutually desired by both parties, so trying to go on strike will hurt the women as much as it does the men.

My understanding of the labor perspective is that strikes work through government capture or extralegal action such as assaulting strikebreakers. Though maybe an industry wide or general strike can work without those elements, they still require some representative to go to the bargaining table.

Human social lives are vicious. Watch your back. Alice has a dishy boyfriend Bob. Carol is jealous. Carol goes 4B and tells Alice how wonderful 4B is. Alice gets persuaded to break up with Bob. Bob is back on the dating market. Carol hooks Bob while maintaining the 4B charade around Alice.

Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?

Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?

Observation of events not consonant with pessimistic views.

Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.

Someone should inform my wife

As an aside, it’s ironic that women fear men the most in a place like Korea, statistically one of the safest, close to being THE safest place to be a woman on earth. I wonder what this fact says about women and gender relations . 4B makes a lot more sense in a place like South Africa or perhaps Sudan or Chad. But Korea? Lol

The only reason 4B ‘works’ in Korea (or at least doesn’t instantly collapse as farcical) is precisely because Korean society is actually great for women. In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped, and everyone will call you an idiot because OBVIOUSLY that’s what would happen.

Say what you will about sexual violence’s moral deficiencies, but it does keep women in line, as the fertility rates in Africa demonstrate.

In Africa if you try to withhold sex from men in general, or especially your husband, you’ll just get raped

And yet looking online, Africa seems to be the only place where sex strikes have ever actually worked. I realise of course that their effects are probably overhyped by activists, but it seems to me like a sex strike is more likely to work in a sexually conservative culture without high speed internet.

Most men actually like their wives, and don't enjoy using violence against them. And it's not as if activists invented 'not having sex with your husband if you're upset with him'. I'm pretty sure women (and to a lesser extent, men) have been doing that since forever. The silent treatment or storming off in a huff are variations of this too.

Of course, 4B is obviously a cope, and I predict that approximately 0 women will actually act in a different way than they would have acted anyway.

I'm not sure that 'sexually conservative culture' is the key ingredient. AFAICT Africa generally has no taboo on male adultery and lots of prostitution; you'd expect a sex strike to work worse in a sexually conservative culture with those conditions vs a more liberated society, because presumably prostitutes aren't participating in it.

Allegedly women paid prostitutes to make them participating in sex strike too, or maybe the problem was serious enough so prostitues considered supporting it too themselves

This feels like the uncanny valley of civil rights & protesting. A truly authoritarian country doesn't have protests, because everyone knows they will be squashed. Presumably South African women have it so bad, protesting would just anger the men.

Is it actually an uncanny valley? Do we know for sure that utopias don't have any complainers? Given that utopia is impossible*, is the question even meaningful? Yudkowsky's recent post on future humans being impoverished by lack of oxygen makes a lot of sense to me. As an average progress-critical reactionary, I think its human nature to want more, so my rule is simply the more protests and 4B movements, the better everything is.

Why do people protest? At the most fundamental level, it is because a large group of people on some level have done a cost benefit analysis and decided that protesting is more in their interest than not protesting. Their underlying motivations might be different (social status for some, entertainment for others, etc). But everyone needs a reason to be there, and that reason needs to be sufficiently positive so as to overcomes any negatives.

Let's look at a very safe, very "developed" society like SK. What are the positives of partaking or supporting such a movement.

  1. You get potential concessions from society if the movement is successful (laws guaranteeing more rights for women, more pay, more legal weapons at your disposal, etc).
  2. You get social status. Protesting for a "good cause" is generally seen as positive by your peer group.
  3. Personal fulfillment. You feel like you are making a difference/doing the right thing. You feel more in control of your life.

What are the negatives? Almost nothing.
1)Men might be mad at you. But there's not much risk there. Especially for younger women, since said men will still likely make concessions in order to have a chance to sleep with them.
2)The older generation might be mad. But in modern society, many young people are financially independent. So the older generation has much more limited leverage.

Contrast this to a less developed society. What are your benefits? Possible concessions (with a lower probability) and personal fulfillment. That's probably it. Your peer group will probably distance themselves from you out of fear of sharing the negatives, which are:

  1. Potential violence - both sexual and non sexual. This is the largest negative you can possibly have for most people.
  2. Ostracization - others don't want to share in your misfortune if something goes wrong.
  3. Anxiety - Even if nothing happens, the threat of these things always looms.

There are probably many more negatives, but I think those three are probably sufficient to deter most people. So looking at a cost benefit analysis, the choice to protest in SK vs in SA looks pretty clear.

I've heard this phenomenon called "Tocqueville effect/paradox". @MaiqTheTrue

From Democracy in America:

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.

See also: the psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of small differences".

I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.

Same reason why (sane) people don't start expressing rage at someone pointing a gun at them. Anger is used as a tool when you think it'll work in favor of your interests rather than against them.

You forgot to expand your asterisk.

Meta: your post is 700 characters of your own words, followed by a verbatim quotation more than ten times that length. The source you linked does not seem to be paywalled. Assume that the average reader is tech-savvy enough to click on a link if they want to read the article. Quoting two paragraphs should be plenty if you are not interrupting it with commentary. Besides I gather that the motte is likely run over a jurisdiction in which copyright is a thing, and thus relies on fair use exceptions for quotations.

The article you quoted is clearly partisan. For example, uncritically referring to the gender pay gap is a red flag for me. From my understanding, the pay gap is a typical example of an equality of outcomes, not an equality of opportunity. Women are free to pick high-paying careers like engineering instead of low-paying careers like gender studies.

To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers.

The article makes it sound like that statistic clearly refutes the perception of the men, when in reality, it does nothing of that sort. Perhaps men are less likely to see themselves as victims of sex discrimination. Or perhaps the cases of discrimination men experience are more severe.

From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise.

This sounds like the author was searching for an impressive statistic to support their claim that women are more in danger than ever. Of course, 2021 was still partly COVID. And it could be that it is simply the rate of reporting which increased, which would be great news instead. Of course, it could also be a real increase, and perhaps even part of a worrisome trend instead of a random fluctuation, but so far the author has not shown the non-partisanship that I would just assume that.

It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism.

Feminism can mean a lot of different things. The message of woke feminism to white cis-het males seems to be: "You are the oppressor group. By default, you are in the wrong unless conclusively proven otherwise. Your concerns do not matter because they are not the result of structural oppression." Clearly it is a total mystery why that message fails to resonate with young men.

It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election.

I will make the prediction that it will indeed not stay in the US.

Lots of single people do not participate in the dating market for a variety of reasons, and I doubt that the politics of their preferred gender is the main reason. Many more people will filter dating partners by their politics.

Finally, I think that if you want to avoid having sex with Trump supporters, a better strategy might be to select on geographic location. Fucking people from Hawaii (37.5% Trump) and avoiding people from Alabama (64.8% Trump) would be more effective. Wikipedia has a convenient list of criteria. The urban (38% Trump) vs rural (64% Trump) divide is in any case much stronger than the male (55%) vs female (45%) split.

The article makes it sound like that statistic clearly refutes the perception of the men, when in reality, it does nothing of that sort. Perhaps men are less likely to see themselves as victims of sex discrimination. Or perhaps the cases of discrimination men experience are more severe.

My understanding of Korean youth politics is that these men are probably referring mostly to the draft, which, let's remember, involves them being legally enslaved by the state for a couple of years. I can see why it might chafe for them to see young Korean women complaining about discrimination while the young men have to deal with a form of sex discrimination which is universal, legal and long-lasting.

Plus Korea places heavy emphasis on seniority, so when the men get a real job all the women are on top of them.

Finally, I think that if you want to avoid having sex with Trump supporters, a better strategy might be to select on geographic location.

Does someone even need to do that? Your statistics give the impression that filtering mates by Trumpism is a fool's errand, and the best she can do is move to Hawaii and hope for the best, doubling her odds.

In Scott's cannon post Outgroup, he writes about his strong filter bubbles. Surely an extreme liberal woman has a filter bubble pretty strong, no matter their location? But, I could see if the American-4B import is here to stay, then it wouldn't just be radical women who partake. More normie liberal women probably don't have filter bubbles that strong.

Western Cultural Appropriation of 4B has induced ample low-hanging-fruit-but-amusing counter-memes. Such as those to the tune of “Trump hasn’t taken office yet and he’s already stopping women from being whores” or “You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with [dark_knight_joker.png]”.

4B is just 2B, the 2B being sex and children. Actually, it’s just 1B. The 1B being sex. Thankfully so, to spare everyone the “2B or not 2B, that is the question…”-related references.

Without the prospect of sex, men generally would not care for dating women. Without the prospect of children and/or continued sex, men generally would not care for marriage (perhaps jokes on those men who get dead-bedroomed). Without sex, children will not result (aside from side cases like IVF or whatnot). Women striking by abstaining from 1) marriage, 2) dating, 3) birthing, and 4) sex would be just abstaining from 4) sex. Like how me hypothetically striking by abstaining from 1) dunking a basketball, 2) spiking a volleyball, 3) running 110m hurdles, and 4) jumping would be just me striking by abstaining from 4) jumping.

Given assortative mating, to the degree female Harris-supporters would be able to form a cartel to punish men by way of withholding sex, they’d with greater likelihood be punishing male Harris-supporters—not male Trump-supporters. It’d be mostly friendly fire. This is on top of the irony of attempting to punish your perceived political enemies—who you regularly and vociferously claim are incels—by withholding sex, and pwning the conservatives by refraining from casual/premarital sex.

It’s funny how online women, despite their insistence that women have value beyond sex and being Birthing Persons, immediately turn to the threat of withholding sex and bearing children when push comes to shove. Horseshoe theory strikes again: Feminists and manospherians agree, the primary worth of women is sex and child-bearing.

The revealed opinions of online women suggest they know that, if not for the bargaining chip of being gatekeepers of sex and children, their collective or individual negotiating power with men would plummet, perhaps to zero. Some part of them knows how their bread gets buttered.

It’s also funny how many women, despite supposedly being the empathetic sex, can’t fathom or are outright hostile to men having preferences, priorities, interests that don’t revolve around serving women.

Online women like to prattle about how men aren’t entitled to this or that, such as sex or female attraction (even, or especially, within marriage). However, they sure look like they feel entitled to men voting the way they want (in addition to other things like relationships/marriage if sex has already occurred, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, husband’s attraction regardless if she’s aged and/or gotten fat, to be wined and dined and taken on cUtE dates and vacations).

Women should look out for themselves and vote for their own perceived best interests. Men should be Decent Human Beings and vote for women’s perceived best interests.

My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net.

I don’t think so. As the possibly apocryphal quote from Kissinger goes, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

For example, apparently the percentage of US men who voted Trump was 55%, and it was 45% for US women. It was 57% and 13% (simulation scriptwriters are getting lazy…) for Whites and Blacks, respectively.

If women got Thanos-snapped away, I imagine a fair amount of young heterosexual men would be lost in life without the prospect of sex and later children. Life for the modal man would be more boring without the thought of the next chick you might bang, the children you might eventually have: It’d be grey, drab, and dreary. At least in Children of Men, one could still get laid.

If American Blacks and Latinos got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be a great increase to the quality of life for White and Asian Americans. Disproportionate sources of violent crime and net-lifetime-tax consumption gone. Living in a “good school district” would be less of a concern, as would be worrying if your grandmother will get randomly punched in the face. Entire neighborhoods would be available as open real estate. The outlook of White and Asian Americans would immediately become safer and richer.

The other thing is that the targets of this are very likely fellow democrats. The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit. They’re not really going to stick it to Trump voters, they aren’t dating them anyway. They’re refusing sex with Dudes for Harris.

Well, they weren't forharrising hard enough, so they get no prize. Yet again, meritocracy raises its ugly (at least as far as the left's theory is concerned) head.

Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.

Isn't this a bit, stated preference vs. revealed preference?

I cannot disagree with you.

That said, kinda low effort booing. You know we frown on posts that are just dunking on your outgroup like this.

Fair enough

The mating hasn’t been assorted in any real sense because most conservatives live in the Midwest/South/Western Plains where the women LARPing Bad Handmaiden don’t live or even visit.

With mass media and the internet, there are people like anything in every place, just in different proportions. I come from a red area of a red state, and yet there are many progressives here -- I was one, when I was a high schooler. And I've known a great many feminists terrified of Trump who were born and raised here. I've even known women who somehow fit in their brains both evangelicalism and feminism: my favorite was the woman who was obsessed with feminism and railed against the patriarchy, but wouldn't date me (despite straightforwardly saying she wanted to) because, at the time, I was an atheist. Modernity is a funhouse mirror.

Yep. I live in an SEC college town and we had to import our Trump supporting female bartender from California. There are few species of liberal more obnoxious than the first-gen college educated late Xer/Millennial liberal with high-school educated Trump supporting late boomer/Gen X parents, especially if they come from a place where the Moral Majority actually mattered. The middle-aged Yankee liberal English professor might be easy to offend, but was more tolerant in the long run. It's a shame I never got to meet her daughter, who is reportedly very high on the "hot, but crazy" scale (The professor is also this, according to the boomer regular who dated her.). My Gen X mom from George Wallace Democratic stock has been waging a Clintonian holy war on Facebook for far longer than my Gen X father's acquired Trumptardism and addiction to the dumb parts of right-wing Twitter.

Interestingly, the Southern liberals I know from more upper-class backgrounds have been vastly more relaxed about it. One of favorite drinking buddies (He is a hilariously obnoxious womanizer with a country lawyer's drawl and Yellow Fever when drunk.) is a lawyer's son turned Democratic campaign operative. Another is a 40-something professor who never got a steady gig, a hilarious, hopeless dandy who even his liberal female counterparts write off as gay (This does, in fact, cripple his dating life.).

My favorites to drunkenly talk history/politics with are female law students, by a mile. They're well informed and while tough in an argument, they won't take disagreement personally.

This is common enough that right wing twitter/substack has already "invented" a term for it. They call them hicklibs.

This is commonly treated as a slam-dunk argument that Western 4B is counterproductive, but is it really so? What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished, but that the men of the tribe go and figure out some way of making sure Trump doesn't win again, be it by running a better campaign, falsifying votes, principles-be-damned lawfare or one million assassination attempt suicide runs on him? What is the actual ratio of blue-tribe men who see the 4B threat and defect to the red tribe to ones who will redouble their efforts whether because they think of tribal duty or imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

Throughout history, propaganda of the form "women will spurn you if you don't do this self-sacrificial thing" has been leveraged too often to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, per what some other posters in these threads say, in general the Korean message that women will not put out unless men work 60-hour weeks to buy a house seems to be achieving its goal just fine, and most Korean men do go on to climb the standard career ladder and work 60-hour weeks and support the lifestyle of their women through the system, rather than "defecting" and going to fraternize with and dedicate their labour to some group of enemy women from the 4Bers' outgroup. Tribal loyalty is strong, and if you write from the perspective of the outgroup it is all too easy to be biased in a way like "Why would blue men not just go red then? As far as my red eyes see, life on the red side is perfectly fine!".

Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.

The White Feather Movement did not get large numbers of British men to elope with the droves of eligible German bachelorettes. Are you sure nothing like the many factors that led to this are present in the modern US scenario? The cutting of ties that would have been necessary to move and socially establish yourself in an enemy country will surely be necessary to a lesser degree for a blue->red defection, as will the circumstance that red women might not necessarily like blue men over red men (as German women may not have chosen British men over German ones).

imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?

"Imagine" is right. The exemptions from 4B will be granted to Chad, like they always are. Chad voted Trump, and he might wear a MAGA hat while collecting 4Bs.

What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished

I’m pretty sure that the intended effect is to inspire conservative women that they have safety in numbers and can leave their abusive husbands to become happy progressives.

That this belief is delusional and the husbands are probably not more abusive than the general population is of no matter; this is a small group of radicals.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war. The gender gap remained the same, or even decreased : https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/

Even if you think there's new evidence that says it makes sense to use sex as a carrot to convince men to vote Democratic, isn't going full Lysistrata a bad idea? If Democratic women go on an absolute intimacy strike while Republican women are still happy to form relationships etc., for men who would be swayed by such things, it just creates an incentive to become Republican.

Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.

All of this is probably overthinking things, though, as it seems mostly like a temper tantrum of the overly online set.

This is all getting silly. Women vote differently from men because they're more emotional, social and subjective. So they're camp "It's fine if everything gets worse, as long as we're not mean" while men tend towards "It's fine if we're mean, as long as our society improves".

There's like half a standard deviation of difference in the distribution of personality traits, which causes these differences in voting outcomes. There's no need to fabricate any wars, and act like natural tendencies are a way of punishing eachother and securing ones power. "Why are men keeping women out of engineering?" They just like engineering at a higher frequency.

Trying to pressure other people into having the same values as yourself is, and always was, bad taste. And both genders are biologically hardwired to enjoy sex. None of this is necessary, I know because I still hang out in communities with zero politics, and in which men and women enjoy eachother and in which people would be confused if you talked about power dynamics or even a gender divide.

Now, I don't disagree with your takes on the issue, I reject the issue itself and suggest that you do the same. I ended up replying to you because your comment is short and approachable

Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.

Seems that the discerning liberal woman can use the Trump victory as a plausibly deniable way to get the competition out of the market. I won't say all the American 4B'ers are "in on the joke" but maybe the most rabid are? See also: "wokefishing," and a post in this space a couple years back suggesting that a lot of progressive-coded dating dynamics are because the gender ratios of woke spaces skew heavily female.

If 4B was a cup size, how big would it be?

If 4B was a cup size, how big would it be?

Grotesquely oversized.

Maybe it's a 4' band, although I'm not sure which one's worse.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war

It's the abortion issue, which is more Christianity v. secularism than men v. women, but is often conceived of as men v. women.

I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war.

DNC shills and the usual suspects thought painting alt-right/maga as incels and pickup artists would be a great tactic to win some of that white woman vote. Relentles spam and inauthentic posts have been spewed down websites like 4chan and normie tier places like youtube and facebook, always focused on fomenting inter-gender animosity.

My suspicion is that the race thing got a bit too real once journalists and academics started losing jobs to dei, the transsexual thing is an oozing wound they don't want to touch with a 10' dilator right now, and so the only culture war left to push is warmed-over '12-'18 feminism.
And the idea of not pushing on any culture war front just doesn't occur to people who consider journalism and activism to be synonymous (and who are out-bidding each other for #resistance jobs that seem to be in shorter supply this time)

Agreed, this is wishcasting. Almost no one in the real world is doing this. The whole premise is bunk anyway. Most women don't want weak men who bend to society. They want strong men who mold reality.

Probably the bigger problem in South Korea isn't misogyny but rather effeminate men.

South Koreans really aren't very effeminate compared to other East Asians. They all go through military service which seems to change a substantial portion of them physically and mentally, at least IME. The problem (as explained in the linked AAQC) really does seem to be mostly caused by (unrealistically) high female standards.

The 4B movement will not change America because it will be embraced by an extremely small number of people who all come from subcultures with South Korea-tier fertility already.

It's also, as far as anyone can tell, not the cause of Korea's uniquely low fertility, because Korea's fertility is not uniquely low. It's on the low end of average for the region; Japan is actually an outlier up for developed East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore all have extremely low fertility and South Korea is on the lower end of average among that group. Not an outlier. The real question is 'what is Japan doing so right to have nearly double South Korea's fertility rate?' not 'why is South Korea's fertility so low?'.

And why developed East Asian countries have such low fertility rates is mostly known- they're highly urban places which generally have non-abrahamic religions which they barely practice in an ultra-competitive society in which childhood sucks. People don't like putting kids through hell, and South Korean and Chinese childhoods are hellacious. Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.

PRC is closer to Japan than it is to Korea, unless you think the numbers are fake. And I don't think it's fair to compare city-states with full sized countries.

Saying "developed East Asian countries" is kind of a loaded term, because you really only have Korea, Japan, and arguably China/quasi-china areas.

You have South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the PRC, and some city states. Taiwan is arguably the best comparison for South Korea and it also has a TFR below 1, while the PRC will dip there very soon. The city states are South Korea tier but they’re also city states, I’ll give you that.

East Asian fertility. Taiwan, the PRC, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore

Why is Monaco, a European state, in the middle of this list of East Asian locales?

Have to wonder if OP meant Macau

Stupid autocorrect. I meant Macao.

Funnily enough, both are the Casino-world tax haven of a bigger polity.

Strivers the world over generally have lower fertility rates, and everyone in these countries is a striver. Add incredibly dense urbanism and the lack of religious influence to raise fertility, it's not that hard to explain.

Also, remember the last time the [urban] US had South Korean-level birthrates: it was 1910-1920, and people were packing hard into cities to work sweatshop jobs in an economy that was hollow as fuck (and would collapse in 1929). [A TFR of 2.3 in a country that was 50% rural suggest the urban areas were serious fertility shredders.]

Remember also that China in particular is trying to make sure this doesn't happen by limiting the number of people from rural areas that will ever be allowed to take the sweatshop jobs- one could argue the Depression happened in the US because this process happened too quickly.

As @Amadan says, Korea’s demographic decline seems more likely to mirror those of every other advanced nation (including countries like Saudi Arabia that are much more socially conservative, even if they’re slowly liberalizing) than be something unique because of this “4B” phenomenon. In fact polling shows that many South Koreans, male and female alike, still want more children than they have, just like Americans.

That international correspondents saddled with the Seoul beat (Samsung, Kpop, Squid Game, DPRK, plastic surgery get boring to write about after a while) would write about this is one thing, that anyone else takes it seriously is quite another.

The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.

The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

Also:

I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race.

This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.

I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help!

I'm not worried about 'evolution' doing okay. I'm worried about myself, my friends and family, and human civilisation. I know that humans as a species will survive, but I'd rather that every country in the world not turn into South Africa in the meantime. I think industrial civilisation is good and I want to maintain it.

Like sure, I guess I can admire your extremely long view from a certain perspective. But what can I say, I'm just a parochial worry-wort who doesn't want humanity living in mud huts and bashing eachother with rocks again.

I have a much nearer and deeper fear. You are correct, evolution will out, women are liars and biological determinism will make sure that pandas that refuse to fuck all die out.

However, governments around the world, especially in what we think of as the liberal western/developed first world, are addicted to the expanding growth of their sclerotic, overweight bureaucracy, while running a state full of economic dependents.

I an deeply, deeply concerned with what they will inflict on me in the name of keeping things going once tax revenues dry up and the economic expenditures of supporting their old and infirm grow stupendous. Singles tax will be the first of many, it won't be the last.

Oh, and privately I don't relish having to compete with increasingly older and more wealthy men for an ever-shrinking pool of young women.

IMO the problem with low fertility isn’t that humanity goes extinct, it’s that the more centralized and authoritarian countries figure out how to retain a high population before the West, and then they dominate us through greater manpower and industrial capability. China’s TFR is low right now, but China is authoritarian, centralized, and vaguely Han-supremacist. They will eventually realize that they can enhance fertility through cultural and economic change, and the day after that realization they can instantly implement laws to transform Chinese cultural and educational norms. America has no such capability because we aren’t centralized and authoritarian and we have the feminist fifth column which will make a big deal about schools switching to teaching/propagating women how to be mothers and excluding them from high stress professions entirely.

There are other issues at play:

  • 4B disrupts the fertility of somewhat intelligent and conformist women, the kind of genes we want in a civilization;

  • Our consumer capitalist system demands a steady supply of immigrants, meaning the domestic fertility rate can steadily decrease without affecting business, so the government has little incentive in solving the problem unless there is an essentially racist pressure applied to it;

I also disagree that evolution will figure out the solution on its own. The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive. Humans may have a vague drive to care for a little cute creature, but that interest can be cheaply satisfied with pets, neopets, squishes and genshin impact. If you have an outlet for the sexual drive, which modern culture has, then an entire human population can gradually go extinct and evolution may not have the time to fix this.

The evolutionary drive to form families is the sexual drive. There is no other drive.

Yes there is. Adoption is common enough. Some people- not all- really enjoy raising children and want to do so desperately.

Adoption is mostly an American phenomenon though, so that may be more cultural than evolutionary. For instance, only 4k adoptions for all of India’s 1.4 billion. If humans somehow evolved an evolutionary drive to care for kids who weren’t their own, then that evolutionary drive would have disappeared somewhere in our distant past, due to decreased gene proliferation

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

This moral argument here is just-world fallacy. I also doubt that evolution would just trivially solve this issue. In this framework, why would cities and urbanization, which have always decreased fertility quite severely, still be a thing? If evolution could impact human behavior like this, people who refuse to live in cities would presumably gradually rise as a proportion of the population until cities were effectively irrelevant. But instead the opposite has happened.

I highly doubt humans will go extinct due to fertility issues alone, but even a roughly 30% decrease in population could cause a lot of problems. A decrease of ~90% (which I personally find unlikely, but is still in the realm of possibility) starts to make industrialized society itself look dicey, which means a huge loss in standards-of-living for humanity.

I don't get your strike-through, a decrease in 30% absolutely could bring a lot of problems.

It's not just the fact that there's less people, the world has chugged along fine with far fewer, but also the population pyramid inversion. A lot of old people depending on few of the young is an issue that might get sorted out eventually, but it won't be pretty. (Assuming no AI saviour/doom)

As the other people correctly guessed, my strikethrough was just a typo born of using two ~ symbols. I've fixed it now.

It's not an intentional strikethrough; it's ~ (tilde) symbols (meaning "approximately") before "30%" and "90%" being misinterpreted as a strikethrough by the software.

I ran into the same problem with a post last week. Still have no idea how to manually type tildes without triggering strikethrough.

& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼

Also, & approx; → ≈

HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.

Nicely done

Testing.

30% vs. 90%. EDIT: backslashes don't work.

30% vs. 90%. EDIT: <plain> tags don't work. Okay, I'm stumped.

30% vs 90% (tilde number percent space tilde number percent) is showing non-strikethrough in my preview box, so it clearly can work and the real problem lies elsewhere. Now I'll post and it'll strikethrough and I'll look like an idiot.

I can get behind some wall spaghetti testing

Double tilde: 30% vs. 90%

Triple tilde:30% vs. 90%

High-spatial efficiency double tilde: ≈30% vs. ≈90%

EDIT: this is a known issue, see https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/issues/736

And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.

Max Anders the glasses-wearing nerd makes six-figures at his software infrastructure job keeping the city running. But because he has a nerdy and uncharismatic personality and poor facial structure he will never reproduce.

But Slaggern Thundercock has eight children with three different women because he has strong cheekbones and a violent alpha personality? Vigorous by the definition of the 10,000 BC tribal warrior is not really what we need.

Stacy Smartbook is clever and hardworking - she lives alone, her demanding job, lengthy education and high expectations for a partner leave little room or time for a partner or children.

Salmonella Sarvesian is stupid and abusive, raising her brood of children badly. Many will go on to be crooks. She's on welfare and doesn't care, or maybe she works a few hours at a low-income job.

On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing. We have the statistics on fertility by region, by demographic, by city. We can read a chart. We can see what's happening in front of our eyes. This is a bad thing, at least for those of us who value a high-quality human civilization. In some places it's worse still, the Korean race will vanish from the South if it keeps on this path of TFR going straight down - no genocidal foe is needed.

It is perfectly natural for nations and civilizations to die out. It has happened many times in history. While natural, it is not very pleasant for those who live in a dying nation. We should take steps to avoid this. It is natural for cars driving towards a cliff to sail off, the driver should swerve rather than burn.

On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing.

At least in the US, this actually isn’t true- I made a top level comment about it a few months back. Blacks are the only group for whom the unsuccessful have generally higher fertility than the successful. For everyone else, higher income=higher fertility.

I guess @RandomRanger meant this

https://x.com/theHauer/status/1222514313723875332

I saw a chart that showed the people with huge incomes had high (by first world country standards, so around 2.0 or 3.0) fertility, but they're quite rare. It was a U-curve chart, not a diagonal chart.

And it's certainly not commensurate with Niger's 6.4 TFR.

So the answer to the low TFR is enough money to escape the rat race? South Park already did it.

This is true, but Niger’s TFR is not driven by low IQ, it’s driven by being full of subsistence farmers. The highest TFR group in the world is the Amish, who are high-IQ subsistence farmers(ish, it’s complicated).

Within country IQ/fertility correlations mostly don’t point towards idiocracy.

There is no evidence that Niger's fertility isn't dysgenic. For countries for which there's data, ones with greater share of population in agriculture like Moldavia have more dysgenic pattern than more developed ones. Higher IQ Nigeriens probably are more likely to use condoms, get higher education and emigrate to 1st world countries. Even if the country had zero dysgenics, it's still loss for the world at large.

Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology.

Agreed. Just take a look at Elon Musk's progeny. The expected value of grandchildren he's going to get from one of his normal children is much higher than the expected value of grandchildren he'll get from his trans daughter. Iterate for a few generations and the deleterious memetic mutations will weed themselves out.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.

I'm not worried about humanity going extinct. I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society. Like there will be Amish in 200 years, but an all-subsistence-farmer society sucks. And yes, I am aware that the Amish are not pure subsistence farmers, but they depend on being able to trade with industrial society for inputs like solar panels to maintain the not-subsistence-agriculture parts of their society.

Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.

So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.

Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.

I am worried about losing the ability to maintain an industrial society.

The problem with highly-automated industrial societies is that you need relatively few people to maintain them. They need to be intelligent, of course- that's why hay gets made about "only the stupid breeding"- but the first indication that there were way too many people for a society to house without serious efforts towards UBI/make-work/bureaucratic expansion came to the US in the 1930s and it's weird nobody seems to realize this.

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there; that's why their education system is a hellscape, that's why women don't feel the need to marry men for resources nor are men in a position to accumulate an attractive surplus (since the average man and average women are roughly equal in industrial and post-industrial productivity, and the men lose some of that through the draft, and the women complain that the post-military men just show up and compete successfully for the same level of jobs).

Their TFR of 0.7, and the fact men can't attract women/women can't be attracted to men in equal conditions like that, is thus natural and probably good for the country long-term, but certainly not beneficial in the short-term (you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there;

This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.

I'm partial to the explanation by Hanania that East Asians are hyper-conformists. This explains why their education system is a hellscape by those who experience it. Education is a zero-sum status competition, and practically everyone in their societies are competing. This also helps to explain why they stopped having kids, as cutthroat educational competition explains part, and then once a lot of people aren't having kids, the entire society decides it's OK to forgo doing so since none of their neighbors are doing it.

are far more severe than in the West.

The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East, and if you assume the Easterners are better workers that only serves to compound the problem (i.e. they need an even greater level of opportunity to function correctly than even the average American does simply because they're more efficient at exploiting it, so a lack of that opportunity is going to be harder on them).

That's part of why the US leads Western TFR (despite the generous terms European countries give to their citizens to have children it doesn't seem to be helping, but remember that the average European is significantly worse off compared to the average American even before the US sabotaged their gas supply). Twice the population for the same regional GDP paints an awfully grim picture and that's been true even before the MENA human wave.

And the Indians aren't a refutation of this, because their urban areas (40% urbanization) are just as bad for TFR, but perhaps it's a different story when your standards are that low? (I'd argue the same for China, but maybe that falls apart considering I also made this point about 100-year-ago US, which kind of had the same thing going on.)

The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East,

What do you mean by this? South Korea is above average in terms of GDP per capita (PPP) compared to Europe, or even just Western Europe according to IMF estimates.

If by "economic opportunity", you instead mean something like "competition for jobs is much more fierce", then that mostly just goes back to zero-sum status competitions being particularly bad in conformist countries in East Asia.

South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there;

This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.

I think one explanation is that East Asian laborers are much better than Western ones.

One Japanese laborer at a convenience store is worth at least 2 and probably more like 3-5 American workers. In such conditions, it does create a race to the bottom for labor.

No doubt someone will chime in that the US has higher total factor productivity than Japan. That's true on a societal level. But the low wage workers in Asia are simply spectacular compared to their US equivalents.

We can see this in academics as well. Add a typical Asian kid to a typical American classroom and the Asian kid will excel due to a much higher level of effort. But when all the kids are Asian, it's a wasteful arms race. The smart kids still get the best grades, but everyone's working 3x as hard.

Asian societies are optimizing for worker drones, not for human flourishing. Without irony, they would be better off if they weren't such try hards.

(you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).

Given the likely effects of a war on Seoul (half the population is in the Seoul metropolitan area), that will depopulate the country faster than their birthrate will. Maybe the survivors would be willing to breed, I suppose.

If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.

More like the reduction of Mariupol.

Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.

Mariupol had half a million people to start. Seoul (metropolitan area) has roughly 25 million. And shells don't care what gender you are.

Also, it's much harder to see a civilian evacuation, since Seoul is so much bigger. Of course, if the South does well at first, the destruction will be much less (because they'll stop the artillery), at least until the North starts nuking.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will.

Total violation of Hume's guillotine. Yes, obviously, whichever human organisms manage to reproduce in the modern environment, will, and their traits will proliferate, and afterwards it may be said that evolution "worked". Evolution also works when underground mammals lose their sight, or male anglerfish lose their brains. Whether these adaptations to selection pressures are desirable is another question.

The bulk of people reproducing now are (a) extremely high time-preference poor people, or (b) highly religious people. There is also a tiny number of rich people breeding well. If you do not want humanity to consist of this type of population in the future, low birth rates should bother you.

I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers (despite disagreeing with them). And I'm going to disagree with you today about needing more compassion for people who are lonely or anxious about politics.

Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so.

I'm not worried about people who don't want kids not having them. More power to them.

I am exceptionally worried about people who are lacklove and lonely becoming depressed, atomized, and suicidal, because I care about human flourishing and I couldn't give one iota of a damn about what what "evolution thinks" should happen to them.

There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there that I find, well, inhuman. Maybe even evil. I'm going to be honest with you: what you've said strikes me as the sort of thing I'd expect a rogue AI or alien or demonic creature trying to maximize suffering would say.

Because it just so happens that some who walk the earth with us are one of these organisms that are "unable to reproduce... and rightly so." I'm not just talking about the young men who will remain lonely if this movement takes off, but about the young women themselves, people who are clearly neurotic and anxious and scared and desperately need someone to tell them that it's going to be ok, and hatred and resentment will just drive them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. There is nothing "right" about people being lonely, depressed, and terrified because their social environment has distorted their view of reality.

It's rather odd that you'd write:

Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright.

just as we're discussing people who desperately need to hear that exact message. If you can make a difference in people's minds by saying this with regards to one worry, it stands to reason you can make a difference in the minds of the people under discussion -- and therefore perhaps there is something "you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way."

I'm reminded a little about that famous quote from Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right," that Leibnitzian saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I'm going to counter you with the view that not only the 4B people but the Christian people and the Muslim people and the new Atheist people and the progressive people and the conservative people disagree with you, and they disagree with you profoundly, at the core of their being. This world is fallen, less than it could be. And I take hope in the fact that, despite our disagreements, many people believe that we are not beholden to the origin of our nature or the vicissitudes of evolution as to the outcome of our existence.

I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers

I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.

There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there

No there isn't.

It's just a fact that some people are more fit for biological reproduction than others. But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth. Some of the greatest men to ever live (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, etc) had no children.

Nature is dumb; it is opinionated, certainly, but you can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take its opinions. The appropriate response, upon learning that you are defective according to nature, isn't "ah, I am defective, all hope is lost". The appropriate response is "very well, I am defective. I accept this designation. But now what? What can this defective organism accomplish? You might be surprised at the answer."

I'm not sure Nature has an opinion on who reproduces. That's what the phrase "fitness landscape" is for. The fitness landscape can change. It seems like you're trying to abdicate value judgements. It's fine if you don't care who reproduces, but this kind of appeal to nature shouldn't persuade anyone.

If two demons are fighting over to change the fitness landscape, you wouldn't care?

(After re-reading my post, I see I am making essentially a "postmodern"/subjectivist argument, kinda)

I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.

Fair enough. Yet compassion is the more excellent way.

But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth.

Let us review what you wrote:

Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to

And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing

Those are judgments based upon moral worth.

I’d also add that you were quite literally saying “it’s not happening, and it’s a good thing.”

You’ve attempted to retreat to the Bailey, by saying you were only descriptively stating “nature’s judgment” as “an objective fact”, but the motte is right there for all to see. You were clearly describing these things in terms of what is good and deserved. “It deserves to” is a moral claim of moral desert.

As it so happens, saying “you are defective, and it is good and desirable that fewer people like you exist in the future” is sneering, and is a moral judgment. If you think it is not so, I find your perspective quite perplexing indeed.

All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.

So their conversations don't even pass the Bechdel Test.

I get that this is a different country with its own rat-race social problems, but I roll my eyes at the fear of men who hate women. Most men who hate women hate them because women won't get anywhere near them, so they never have an opportunity to hurt a woman apart from mean comments on the internet. Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable. Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.

Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.

Sexually successful men dont hate women, they just don't treasure them, and treat them how [sexually successful] women treat men; as disposable.

I guess it depends on what you mean by hate. "I hate you personally and want to hurt you" is pretty rare, but "I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person" is a kind of contempt near enough to hate as to make little difference.

Abusive men don't hate women, they hate the world and women just can't resist being around them for some mysterious reason.

I think some abusive men are just misanthropists who hate the world and take it out on those they can (which are most often their partners and children), but some abusive men definitely do hate women and take out their lack of success (sexual and otherwise) on them.

Or by "men who hate women" does she mean that don't soyfully agree with generic feminist talking points? I once ended a relationship over watching The Imitation Game, of all things. "Ah, here's Kiera Knightly reprising her role as a modern woman trapped in the past" was apparently such a hateful comment that it got me a continuous diatribe about women's suffrage until I flat-out got up and left. I wonder if that was proof that I hated women.

I dunno man, but you have so many of these anecdotes, the punchline always being that a woman rejected you for inexplicable and irrational feminine reasons (usually relating to you talking about how much you resent all things female). Do you actually like women? I mean as people, not as things you want to fuck? Pardon the blunt phrasing, but that is kind of what the "men who hate women" construct is getting at. I sometimes hear men who clearly despise women deny it and say that of course they love women, when what they really love is sex with women, and the fact that there is a woman involved in the process seems to be an annoyance to them.

Only thing I can say is I've had two real loves in my life, and most of the reason I loved them was because they had qualities and virtues that I was in awe of. And plenty of those qualities were feminine.

And by now I frankly want companionship, validation and physical comfort more than I want to get off. I find myself disappointed that so few people will let me in, or show me anything that's really theirs and not a regurgitated soundbite.

I consider you to be a disposable object to be used, and your feelings on the matter are irrelevant because you're not really even a person

This is how I treat my toilet paper. However I would not say I hate my toilet paper at all, in fact I am usually very grateful that it is present (assuming no bidet etc.) and would be very upset if it were missing.

Hate requires having a certain intensity of feeling and even if we were talking about particularly poor toilet paper I've got better things to do than give the requisite number epicycles to thinking so hard about the toilet paper than I can reasonably say I hate it (perhaps if it were the toilet paper used in all the toilets at my workplace so I used it on a daily basis then yes I might dedicate enough cycles, but if it's like a toilet in a shopping mall I rarely ever visit then sorry, I don't have the brain cycles to waste on hating the toilet paper).

For someone who's very sexually successful they may well have better things to do than waste their limited number of brain cycles on what exactly their next sex partner thinks, no different to how I have zero desire to waste brain cycles on what the guy sitting next to me on the train thinks, purely because of how abundance makes humans value things less, no hate involved (were the guy next to me on the train the only person I'd met in the last month I'd probably care about what he thought, but under current conditions, he's just an "eh").

This is how I treat my toilet paper. However I would not say I hate my toilet paper at all, in fact I am usually very grateful that it is present (assuming no bidet etc.) and would be very upset if it were missing.

Well, as I just explained, "hate" in the sense of harboring personal animosity isn't the same as "hate" in the sense of considering someone to be less than human, but I don't think women who claim men hate them are wrong when pointing to men who think it's appropriate to regard them as equivalent to toilet paper.

I don't think that the toilet paper sense qualifies as "hate", personally. Much like love is wishing for someone's good, hate is wishing for someone's bad. I agree that it is contemptuous and unpleasant to disregard someone completely and use them as one would an object, but I don't think it qualifies as hate.

I don’t think hate is necessarily the word, either. Maybe contempt or disregard. But probably not better than nothing in terms of romantic interest, even if he’s rich and hot.

Oh, I absolutely agree with that. Being treated with such casual disregard would almost certainly feel just as bad for the recipient as actual hatred.

It all depends on how much one has of one thing vs the other because we value things based on marginal and not absolute utility. If someone easily has access to say 50 women for sex but no toilet paper (or substitutes like a bidet) then they are completely justified in valuing a deluxe 9 roll pack of toilet paper more than a 51st female sex partner. They are certainly justified in spending money they would never do on the 50th woman to ensure the toilet paper is kept in a warm, dry place because it's no great loss to them if this woman disappears for whatever reason like it would be if their toilet paper got all wet and unusable.

You're just belaboring the equivalence. Obviously, if women are just commodities to put your dick in and produce babies (and I'm well aware there are people here who unironically believe this, though in your case it's hard to be sure whether you're serious or trolling) then yeschad. However, I would suggest it does not serve your purpose to act out the caricature of the dude who spawned the smarmy feminist "Women are human" meme.

Yes, I agree women are human. I just do not agree that being human gets you special exemption from the internal valuation process we all use to decide how much we care about a thing. If the devil came to me and gave me the choice that either Michelangelo's David gets crushed or a random human being named David gets killed I'd choose to save the work of art in a heartbeat. Inanimate objects can have higher value than average humans and recognising this doesn't mean you are demeaning these other humans, you are merely putting them in their rightful place in your personal hierarchy.

I'm actually in agreement with you that for most people they should value a sex partner higher than toilet paper (because toilet paper is easier to access than sex partners), all I'm saying is that we can think of edge cases where this is not true and it's not because the edge case is a woman hater, they are merely a personal utility maximiser and in their situation getting access to toilet paper brings them more value than access to yet another woman.

Well, I just disagree with you. I am not talking about utilitarian calculations about the value of a Michelangelo vs. the value of some random person, I'm talking about the equivalence you keep insisting on making between women and toilet paper, which you're doing just to be provocative. If that is your mindset, that you literally regard them to be in the same category (disposable commodities that are of value depending on abundance and your need), you can argue all you like that you don't "hate" women, but I don't think women would be wrong to see it otherwise.

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If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness

This is just thrown out there in the article, but this is massively important, the most significant consequence of what's being discussed.

"Women have decided to swear off men, which will lead to expressions of deep loneliness for both men and women" is a terrible outcome. It's people choosing to take actions that steer them and others into profound unhappiness.

In Korea, you can understand why people might make that choice: better unhappy alone than unhappy being a servant of the mother-in-law. But in the US, I hold that this is people choosing to avoid something that would be profoundly meaningful to them out of intense, neurotic fear that their partner might not be an angel. This is making the perfect the enemy of the good, and thus destroying all the good.

Amadan said this:

[Korean women] all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

This is the key difference between Korea and the US: in Korea women wish they could have fairy-tale romances but expect marriage to be hellish. In the US, however, women wish they could have fairy-tale romances and damn well expect this is what they're going to get. Korean women know what they're in for. American women, like American men, have swallowed all sorts of messaging about fairy-tales and then subsequently find their dating life to be disappointing, because it's not perfect. American perfectionism and hedonistic optimizationalism destroys everything it touches, like a metastatic cancer or a radiation burn.

But I disagree with him on this: something like the 4B movement is already going on among young women in the US already, albeit not explicitly politically. A huge chunk of women are simply uninterested in sex, dating, relationships, marriage, the whole sheboodle (or rather she-not-boodle). I've dated women like this. Didn't go well. I've certainly met many more; rates of explicit asexual identification have skyrocketed among US women. I don't know about political lesbianism, but practical asexualism seems predominant.

I'm agnostic on the cause, I don't know if men just aren't striking them as interesting any more, or if mass-media is just too satiating with its parasocial relationships (see Tumblr shipping and fandom), or if there's some kind of endocrine dysfunction (I genuinely worry there might be one affecting both men and women -- we're turning the frogs gay), or if incentives towards focusing on careers are just so great... but it's alarming. We have a whole generation of lonely men who can't get a date, and lonely women who don't seem to have any inclination towards resolving their loneliness.

There was one of the tiktoks about 4B going around, that featured a young women who said something like "I haven't dated for 4 years, I'm happy, and I'm fine swearing off men for the future." I don't know why this woman who was already off the market seems to think a permanent pledge is worthy of a video, but ok, sure! But really, this is just women politicizing something they were already doing. If it weren't Trump, it would be something else.

Women are asexual unless Chad is around. The upturn in their identification rates is just an upturn in hypergamy. I'm not sure if Korea's situation is the same.

Also, 50 Shades isn't porn for women; Tinder is porn for women. That's probably part of the situation, too.

I'm agnostic on the cause

What do you make of the idea that the government now fulfills most of the roles that a husband and the extended family used to fill, though in an inferior capacity? It seems similar to the way free streaming porn and thirst-trap simp-magnets have supplanted chasing girls in the lives of many young men, though also in an inferior capacity. In both cases, the choice used to be between a risky venture (dating/marriage) and simply having nothing at all (no sex/economic security/companionship). Now, there's a inferior choice on offer that requires way less risk/effort, so a lot of people "choose" that out of inertia.

Radical feminism/inceldom seem downstream from these massive changes in the sexual and romantic landscape. I can't imagine them arising in a state that did not have a massive welfare machine and lax sexual mores.

I think it might just be depression, housing unavailability and financial insecurity. When you’re clinging by the fingernails to the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, you aren’t going to be too concerned about self-actualization and fulfillment.

I kinda doubt that. People have lived in much worse conditions than the Gen Z PMC people deciding not to have kids. Go look at video of any third world slum — people have kids when things like electricity and running water aren’t available. They have babies in war zones. I can’t see that and then look at Gen Z refusing to have kids and see financial issues being the real reason.

I have a few hypotheses.

First, I think American children are much slower to mature emotionally and mentally. 25 year olds in the USA still act like teenagers and are still into drunken partying, staying out late to go clubbing. They aren’t really ready to settle into parenthood even if they had the means because they aren’t ready for the responsibility of a baby.

Second, Americans are pretty hedonistic. A baby isn’t about you, and worse requires sacrificing your lifestyle in major ways. You need to get serious about a career and making money because the baby needs food and diapers. You might hate what you are doing, but you don’t have the same choices that you have as a child-free couple. Likewise every other choice you make now has to include planning for the baby. You want to go out to dinner, you either find a sitter or the baby comes along. And I think the lifestyle most young adults like living just doesn’t have the room for a baby.

Pairing up is a SOLUTION to housing unavailability and financial insecurity.

Yes, that's absolutely correct.

But the association persists in people's minds. There was a youtube comment (bottom of the barrel, I know) that I saw which absolutely flabbergasted me. Who knows who the person who said it was, whether male or female, whether Western not, or whether they just weren't another 13 year old let loose on the internet posting silly takes. But they said:

Getting married is so expensive, there's no way young people can do it!

And then a thousand comments in response going, "what the hell are you talking about, marriage reduces your costs because you're sharing expenses!"

In subsequent comments, the person made it clear they weren't talking about wedding costs or honeymoons or anything dumb like that, they honestly believed it was more expensive for two people to live together than to live separately.

From "Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid" by Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle:

Marriage allows you to pool nonrival goods, such as Netflix accounts, but also what economist Bryan Caplan calls “semi-rival goods,” such as kitchens and cars:

Two childless singles, each earning $50,000 a year, marry. Both keep working, living by the old-school principle of "share and share alike." What happens to their material standard of living? If all depends on how rivalrous their consumption bundle is.

If all their goods are rival (like food), the answer is "Their standard of living stays the same." $50,000 times two divided by two equals $50,000.

If all their goods are non-rival (like Internet access), the answer is "Their standard of living doubles." They pool their money and buy a $100,000 lifestyle for both of them.

In the real world, of course, couples are rarely at either pole. Most goods are in fact semi-rival. Consider housing. If you share your home with a spouse, you don't have as much space for yourself as a solitary occupant of the same property. But both of you probably enjoy the benefits of more than half a house. If a couple owns one car, similarly, both have more than half a car. Even food is semi-rival, as the classic "You gonna eat that?" question proves.

But this is not the only benefit of marriage. Marriage also enables specialization. Which can be illustrated by a piece of wisdom I have developed in my brief three and a half years of marital bliss and now pass onto my friends who are getting married: “Marriage makes you stupid.”

I mean, I used to know where I kept my batteries and old documents. But when we got married, my husband, who is much tidier than I am, took over organizing the house. Now, unless it’s a piece of my clothing or kitchen equipment, I have no idea where we keep anything. And while I’m pretty sure I used to be able to put up shelves, now all I know how to do is ask my husband to do it.

On the other hand, he has no idea how much money we have, or in what accounts. And he can’t do the grocery shopping, because he doesn’t know what we consume. Individually, we are less competent to survive on our own. But collectively, we eat better, and we have a tidier house and better-managed finances. And our shelves don’t fall down so often.

Obviously, child-rearing is a major area of specialization. One interesting thing I’ve heard from gay parents is that they find themselves falling into roles that you might describe as “Mom” and “Dad,” even though this is obviously not some pre-programmed gender destiny. It just doesn’t make sense to try to jointly manage a kid 50-50; one parent keeps the social calendar and decides what kids Junior can play with, because two parents trying to do it actually makes the task take a lot more time, as both people have to learn about all the friends and the birthdays and the parents, and then negotiate what Junior does with her time. I’m not saying this happens with every gay parent. I’m just saying that gay parents I know report considerable benefits to specialization.

Specialization also allows for external income gains -- perhaps one reason that married men make a lot more than single ones do and married households are richer than single ones. Some of that is selection effect, of course -- stable, responsible men are probably more likely to get married, especially in this day and age.

So while pooling nonrival and semi-rival goods is an excellent benefit of marriage, it is far from the only one. And it doesn’t stop with economics: There’s also better health, less depression, and happier and healthier children to consider. At the end of his piece, Caplan calls being single a “luxury” good. But it’s not exactly an aspirational one.

I really doubt that this is specific movement is terribly relevant, but I'm willing to buy that there's some small-scale vibe related to it. One thing that's interesting to me about it is that it is the interplay with marriage dynamics - the electoral marriage gap is also quite wide, and married men and women are both more likely to vote Republican. So, who would be conducting an American 4B and whom would be getting punished by it? It doesn't seem like there will be a great deal of success in punishing right-wing men, who tend to already be married to right-wing women. You can see some of that in the dynamic here:

Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.

“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.

As a now-aging, happily married, somewhat right-wing man, this all sounds absolutely insane to me. The dream is having a cozy home with your partner. This isn't a trap, it really is just the best, easiest, happiest way to live life. To the extent that single women are vulnerable, it's not because of right-wing men, but because of their own failure to arrange their life in a coherent, ordered fashion. In rebelling and insisting on remaining alone, they continue to push further into insecurity and loneliness.

I have been hearing about the 4B movement from Korea for years, but it's not clear how pervasive it really is. Korea is facing some steep demographic decline, but I'm not sure how much is because of women intentionally signing up to a radical feminist no-men movement. Japan has the same problem and there is no real 4B movement there.

I have been seeing a lot of women posting 4B rage-videos, and they fit right in with all the post-election meltdowns. Women talking about how they're going to "burn shit down," how they're going to harm men, how they're going to go "feral" on any man that looks at them funny... And to be honest, all I can think is, "Honey, try it."

Because it's all performative. Sigma some very small number of genuinely mentally ill crazies, no woman is actually going to lay hands on a man in a situation where she'd face consequences. They know, deep down, that they are not dangerous or scary and they get to engage in these performative Internet Tough-Girl acts because if they scream at a man in public he's probably going to back away and avoid getting physical with a woman. They can get away with it because most men don't like to hit women and also know the burden will be on them to prove self-defense against a crazy woman.

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation. Political lesbianism and lesbian separatism largely failed as a movement because women found out that they can't just decide to be not attracted to men, any more than men can just stop wanting women.

This is exactly the same as the MGTOW movement, who are just as much a gang of performative blowhards who'd crawl over broken glass to actually score, but talk a big game online about how they don't need no woman. They don't care. They so don't care. Can you see how loudly and obnoxiously and convincingly they are not caring?

Women doing the same thing now.

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation. Political lesbianism and lesbian separatism largely failed as a movement because women found out that they can't just decide to be not attracted to men, any more than men can just stop wanting women.

This is exactly the same as the MGTOW movement, who are just as much a gang of performative blowhards who'd crawl over broken glass to actually score, but talk a big game online about how they don't need no woman. They don't care. They so don't care. Can you see how loudly and obnoxiously and convincingly they are not caring?

"No one will ever win the battle of the sexes, because there's too much fraternising with the enemy."

It's also performative because most of these ladies are not actually going to swear off men, because they like sex, attention, and validation.

One of the snarkiest and meanest comments under a "I am going 4B" post was - "If you were capable of keeping your legs closed, abortion would not be your top 1 issue", so it doesn't seem that people are bullish on 4B taking traction in the US. I guess you need a whole generation to pass for a culture that values promiscuity less to emerge.

It only works because the counterargument is less catchy than the quip and therefore loses according to Twitter debate rules. I don't think the women who are threatening 4B want, or claim to want, to "keep their legs closed", everything else being equal; their argument is instead that because of lack of abortion access, they can't open their legs safely, and therefore they will abstain from it, to their own detriment and the detriment of other beneficiaries of them opening their legs (men who want to have sex).

Compare something like "if you ban airbags, I will refuse to ride cars". Is it not obvious that "if you were capable of leaving your car keys in the drawer, airbags would not be your top 1 issue" would be a nonsensical retort?

No, but "if you were able to drive sober airbags wouldn't be a top issue" still works as a non nonsensical retort.

If you remove the reckless drivers from the road the value of car safety features goes down substantially

"If you were capable of keeping your legs closed, abortion would not be your top 1 issue"

This is a good line, but it fails the ideological turing test.

An interesting dynamic is that some of the strongest advocates for abortion access are women who have never and would never get an abortion. The view, which I do find at least somewhat sympathetic, is that it's necessary to maintain access as a bodily autonomy measure. This becomes particularly significant in the case of conceptions due to rape, which are indeed rare, and most everyone agrees are deeply tragic and awful.

It's precisely the fact that many of these people believe abortion is rare that they believe it's necessary to preserve access to it. "Abortion is so rare, and only used in tragic cases: why are you insistent on banning something to save 30 lives, even if we assume you're right about fetal personhood? Are you just trying to control women?" Actual knowledge on the frequency, stated reasons, and racial statistics of abortion is often rare among young white women like the people who are leaning into 4B.

some of the strongest advocates for gun rights are men who have never and would never [intentionally put themselves in a position to need to] fire shots in anger

The abortion rights debate is literally just a mirror of the gun rights one (especially if you accept the progressive framing that "nobody deserves to die by someone defending themselves over property, because all fetuses criminals are conceived? born innocent and literally couldn't help but being a burden on society"- complete with 'future lawyer or doctor' applying word for word).

Are you just trying to control women?

Are the motives for gun control initiatives primarily conducted with the end goal of controlling men?
They're certainly couched in "protecting innocent children from evil men is worth the violence risk", and so the abortion initiatives have learned to take the same tack (protecting innocent children from evil women is worth the rape risk).

It’s mostly that low time preference and intelligence are both correlated with each other and almost certainly linked to neuroticism. Affluent PMC women may rarely get abortions, but they probably worry about possibly needing one more than those who actually get them at higher rates.

Japan has the same problem and there is no real 4B movement there.

Korea is uniquely bad and in the running for worst in the world along with various city-states and crowded island nations. Korea is in a whole different league from any actual country with an actual landmass.

Japan's current TFR is on the low side but in line with the rate of other developed nations with stagnant economies, such as Spain, Italy, Canada, etc. They are just noted for being the first to experience serious population decline, since their TFR has been in the dumps before other countries caught up.

My actual real IRL girlfriend did in fact break up with me over the election. No idea if she swore off men as a whole (probably not tbh). Social media is real. Online meltdowns are real.

I'm reminded of all those species of animal that for whatever reason don't breed in captivity. Some natural impulse or function is being blocked.

How did she find out? Did you tell her outright? I'm sorry either way.

Sigma some very small number of genuinely mentally ill crazies

Pun not intended?

I might as well reply to your other comment here: I think part of why the 4B Movement has any legs at all in Korea is precisely because the expected "life script" of modern Koreans has become a crushing, zombified shit-show of a rat race for everyone, not just the women (as the men are similarly polarized). The culture war aspect is an unintended veil over the actual rebellion against the establishment, in my eyes.

I’m utterly baffled; what could “sigma” possibly mean in this context? Usually “epsilon” is the mathematician’s Greek letter of choice to denote very small quantities.

"Notwithstanding", but I've never seen "sigma" used to mean that. Sometimes "modulo" is.

"The sum of"?

Conspicuously missing from the article is how many korean women do participate in that movement.

The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.

I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?

MGTOW had two categories. Men who had genuinely been burned hard by women (eg divorce rape, abuse etc) and younger incel types that were being more performative. The first group were genuinely happy(er) being alone, in the same way I've seen middle aged women be happier being alone after getting out of a bad marriage. The second group is a bit like this US based 4B crowd.

I'm betting the US 4B movement has a big overlap with things like: being physically unattractive, being overweight, claiming 'Feminist' as an identity, watching Korean Dramas, listening to K-Pop, being young, being college educated, being a Harris supporter (duh) and being 'very online'. I suspect that this is just post-election histrionics and will quickly be forgotten as bad orange man doesn't start goose-stepping his way to push a federal anti-abortion law.

I was in Korea some 20 years ago, and the situation for women there really is pretty shit. It's still very patriarchal and traditional (maybe less so now than then, but still very much more so than the West). They aren't anywhere near Islamic levels of oppression, but I heard from a lot of women even before the 4B movement spread that marriage was widely seen as something that women just have to suffer if they ever want a life (and children). They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

Of course there are exceptions, and they all look at fairy tale romances as an ideal, but it seems like very few of them actually expect this to be the reality.

Related: I went to a college with a high Asian student population, also around 20 years ago, and there was a long-simmering argument over the issue of Asian women dating white men (at a much higher rate than Asian men dated white women). The Asian women were most likely to defend this choice with some variant of "you don't own us", but if pressed or in a spicy mood they would also point out that white men almost never expect a 10/10 submissive housewife, or have a mother who expects a servile daughter-in-law, whereas a non-trivial percentage of Asian men do.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them, they do not expect sex to be enjoyable, and they are expected to be essentially maidservants for their husbands' families. (There is an entire genre of Korean horror movies about evil mother-in-laws.)

This seems common with pagan cultures. Like we knock on Islam for its(tbh, pretty repressive) treatment of women, but Islamic religion does tell husbands to take their wives' wants and needs into account and care for them. Scott just reviewed a book all about how early Christianity spread by telling women that it would make their husbands love them. And a pretty good chunk of the republican fertility advantage in the US comes from telling young women that socially conservative values will make men love them and treat them better(there's an entire genre of country music about loving on women who are babycrazy and have strong family values and how they're worth holding off on sex for and cutting back on drinking to reasonable levels and all that).

You don't have to deny women opportunities on a societal level to make their lives suck. Women are not the same as men, you can totally set up society to make it so they get the short end of the stick in hundreds of little ways.

they do not expect sex to be enjoyable

I doubt that. Pagans have written books and created monuments to enjoyable sex.

essentially maidservants for their husbands' families

Nuclear families are the primary cause for this going away. England was admittedly the earliest nuclear society, and avoided this problem all together.

It's an underdiscussed aspect of single-core mega-urban countries like SK. More than half the country lives within commute distance of Seoul. So you can't build physical distance between you and the in-laws. Being a larger and distributed country helps mitigate this problem.

They don't really expect their husbands to love or even like them

Can't compare across different historic economic settings. But, women must be given opportunities. Opportunities to work, to choose their spouse, to leave their spouse, to choose a profession.

The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW.

This is a very good point.

When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?

It's probably a little of the former mixed with a lot of the latter. The best insight I've had into Korean gender norms came from this AAQC, which I've added to the OP. Almost anyone who dates will encounter heartbreak at some point. That, mixed with a media environment that aggressively highlights every instance of male misbehavior like men murdering their partners, could easily lead to the belief that men as a group are terrible overall.

Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism.

Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).

The resemblance to urban Indians is uncanny. Almost beat for beat.

  • Dads worked insanely hard to give kids a good life. Absent from home.
  • Moms over worked at home and ignored. Kids perceive dad as evil.
  • Women enter workforce en masse and start outperforming men because of affirmative action and strong preference for women in schooling.
  • Cities are bonkers expensive (Mumbai is more expensive per-sqft than SF)
  • Women enter liberal arts, and import western 3rd wave feminism whole sale
  • These women run all western MSM-aligned and portray men as trash
  • Indian men say fuck-this and live with their bros. Women ain't shit.
  • Eventually, 30+ men are married off to 30+ women in arranged marriages. Both lack co-ed socialization and have knee-jerk dislike for the other.
  • Divorce rates go through the roof.... (we are here right now)

Thankfully, there are a few main differences:

  • India is still poor. So wages haven't stagnated. There is still hope among men that their lives can be better than their parents. Optimism keeps defeatist incel-adjacent ideas sweeping the culture. (still, lots of Indian incels)
  • Indians are more outspoken. The culture is not as suffocatingly conformist as East Asia.
  • New cities are being built. So, while Delhi & Mumbai have become unaffordable, couples are moving to Hyd, Bangalore, Gurgaon, etc.
  • The majority is still rural. So, 3rd wave feminists haven't been able to quite takeover the culture like SK.
  • Lastly, other Indians speak English too. So, the voices of dissent are just as loud, even if western MSM won't platform them.

(Note: I am talking about upper middle class urban culture. Rural & Poor India is a very different world)

It seems like arranged marriage is another big difference, yes? From my understanding arranged marriages still exist in Japan but are uncommon, while they’re very rare in South Korea and the sinosphere.

4B going viral on tiktok, with long-term staying power, would put the nail in the coffin for me that the app is actively designed to destabilize and undermine the United States and its culture.


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