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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:
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.
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.
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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.
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).
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.
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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.
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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.
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 maybe 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:
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.
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