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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Cross post: the_ivory_tower (rdrama.net) :

The limitations of humanity:

In the 21st century we saw the exponential scaling of human capabilities. Our ingenuity has led us down a path of a million miracles. The capacity to not just harness the resources around us but to go as far as to alter them and apply them to our purposes. On this design uniquely singular in it's extreme propensity in human beings, we have created entire civilizations, tech trees, ecologies, social systems, ideologies, none of which would have been possible in the past.

However even through the age of miracles and seemingly infinite growth one question persists, what if humanity is not infinite in its capacity, what if it's nowhere close to fulfilling a neverending greater purpose. What if we are just another branch on the tree of life that goes so far and nevermore?

Are we the greatest child of this Earth, or are we the harbingers of something greater, whether it be an elevated species other than ourselves, or an AI master race. Or perhaps, we are simply a dead end.

Today I write to you to discuss the slow downs in human society and the hurdles that lie ahead of us. The limitations of humanity:

  1. The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.

  2. The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there. That is not to say that there is no creation during a time of peace. Many things are invented during times of peace. Yet in the previous lines there is a symbolism which we see once again in the fact that in the most developed societies of the west we have now begun to see people get dumber over time. A society wide fall in overall IQ. A warning of the possibility of bad days ahead. Even a possible sign that we in the past century went way past the point of our natural capabilities and now find ourselves in a world that none of us understand.

  3. The culture wars - There is utility in conflict. In an openly hostile setting where ideas come across each other, only the best survive. However, the 21st century appears to be way past that point of competing cultures and has instead fallen into a trap of trying to place equal value on all cultural systems. It is of course a polite impossibility. Our cultures define how we live our lives, how we live our lives defines the outcome of our lives. Then how can it be that all cultures are expected to provide equal results? It is a lie. However this is not the worst of it. We find ourselves in conflict with different systems of human life even when within nations themselves the ideas once again split apart along irreconcilable lines. We find ourselves fighting both within and without, but never breaking into open conflict. So now we are as animals forever drowning, falling further and further into the pitfalls of a culture warfare where there is no release, so we keep digging deeper and deeper, until all sanity and values that hold us to reality are lost on the path. The end product, the risk of it is simple enough, a collapse of society under it's own decadence without any release of the turmoil in time.

  4. Loss of growing up - Imagine you are 10, you now find out that for your entire life you could keep being 10 years old and acting the part and life would still work out for you. Would you then take the hard path where you fall and get hurt and learn and change? Or would you rather remain the 10 year old that can watch cartoons till he is dead? In a society that is so deep in success that a man need no longer be forced to lift a single finger, the man seems to prefer the latter option. All growth is lost, because the man can subsist even remaining within his childish nature. Society is put at risk, for any group or individual or external entity that chooses to grow up or learn greater maturity is now in a position to take advantage of the naive and innocent, which is all that we are filled with now, the sheep flocks so huge there is no longer enough grass for them to graze, nor enough wolves left to lessen their numbers. A death by decay of the spirit.

  5. Pace of progress - This one is the hardest to track of all the points made. However a simple way to think of it is this, a thousand years ago one man could revolutionize multiple fields, today it takes thousands of men to simply collate the data from the past. Often times the lack of progress is not even due to the information not being available, but the fact that two fields of science have their specialists never interact with each other. Which slows down progress as well due to all the relevant information not being available with the experts as the amount of information has far outpaced the amount of time available to a man to educate himself and even his intellectual capacity to collect all the data in the first place in a multidisciplinary way. Worse still, all the low fruit in inventions has already been picked up for the most part, so the only way to keep moving up is with higher effort with diminishing returns. Anyone who has taken an economics class knows how that graph looks, at some point those diminishing returns will always reach zero, and at that point either something new would be made to boost progress again or humanity will stagnate at that point.

Conclusion - The first four points regarding the fatdemic, lowering IQ's, the culture wars, and the loss of growing up when it is one of two or more options all display a limitation of our current cultural trends. As far as we have come, and as much cultural evolution as we have gone through, we find ourselves now faced with a wall that we are in this generation unable to overcome. Only time will tell how we surmount this obstacle and what the future after will look like, or if we even surmount these obstacles at all and haven't yet reached past a breaking point we do not yet recognize.

My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society? Already the soldier has fallen and military's see their numbers decline each year, if it could happen to the military, then why not the sciences in the years ahead?

Thank you.

K

  • -10

None of these one-word (or one letter!) responses, please.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there.

Yes there are some very visible technological achievements during war, but what's the counterfactual? More capital to invest in research, fewer short term economic decisions, fewer collapsed states, fewer dead scientists...

It's hard to believe that a Europe which didn't spend a decent portion of the last century blowing itself to bits isn't far ahead of where we are now. Where's our Austro-Hungarian space program?

They were ahead of you, then they wasted it all away since WW2. that's 75 years of wasted potential.

Fiume, the Erzherzog Karl Albrecht has landed! One small step . . .

With all due respect, where was China's industrial revolution then? How come they got conquered by the warlike people who keep murdering each other over small bits of land and not the other way around?

Ian Morrison's Why the West Rules - For Now offers the following explanation

  1. China is at the heart of East Asian civilization. At the very least, it is where civilization spreads outward from, and other nations in the area are at its periphery.

  2. The people at the periphery tend to be fairly good at fighting the people closer to the civilizational center as they can exploit institutional weaknesses more dynamically. The adoption of better war-making technology or theories is not an easy thing to do, especially if politics is lethal.

  3. When you conquer the center, you become it and thus start succumbing to the same flaws you exploited.

As for your question about the IR, he argues this.

  1. Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s (edit: 1600s, not 1700s. My mistake).

  2. You need both willpower and the ability to industrialize. China had so many people that it could simply add reliable human power instead of capital-heavy machinery that might be unreliable. Europe, on the other hand, was caught in centuries of war which encouraged nations to and their citizens to constantly try to improve their technology. The phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention" also works in a genetic sense, as what you need influences what you make. If you don't need to industrialize, then you won't.

Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s.

Do you know where to read more on this?

Whoops, looks like I misremembered. It was the 1600s, not the 1700s. My mistake. First, I'll quote Morrison:

Calculating Eastern [energy capture] scores is more difficult still, partly because scholars such as Cook and Smil were concerned only with the region of the world that had the highest energy capture, not with regional comparisons. We can begin, though, from the United Nations (2006) estimate that in 2000 CE the average Japanese person consumed 104,000 kilocalories per day (less than half the Western level). In 1900 the Eastern core was still largely agrarian, with Japanese oil use and even coal-powered industry in its infancy. Japanese energy capture may have been around 49,000 kcal/cap/day (again less than half of Western consumption). Across the previous five centuries coal use and agricultural output had risen steadily. In 1600 productivity was higher in the Yangzi Delta than anywhere in the West, but by 1750 Dutch and English agriculture had caught up and Eastern real wages were comparable to those in southern Europe rather than wealthy northern Europe. I have estimated energy capture in the Eastern core around 29,000 kcal/cap/day in 1400 and 36,000 in 1800, with the bulk of the increase coming in the eighteenth century.

The context here is that he's basically trying to estimate the "advanced" nature of a civilization by how much energy it uses.

I don't know why Europe industrialised while China didn't, the latter are in the same boat as other more warlike peoples for failing to do so.

Interesting. The ratsphere started with fears of AI risk, so declensionist, stagnationist, or collapse-oriented arguments like this tend to get a frigid reception here. Then again, maybe that's just reality having a rationalist bias.

The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.

I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war.

I don't know about this. WWII is the most salient event in recent memory, so I think people generalize it to the whole human experience, and in WWII war did drive progress. But, to offer a counter-example, probably the most dramatic period of social and technological progress in human history was the Victorian era from 1815 to 1914. (Looking forward to Vicky 3!) That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars, certainly none that were existentially threatening to England, where the progress was most extreme.

My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society?

Read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. You might find it interesting.

That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars

Yeah but, and as a vicky player you should know this, that's only really because Europe had a whole lot of other avenues for war than the homeland.

I don't think the Zulu appreciated how peaceful a time that was for some reason.

Yes, but @dont_log_me_out was talking about Necessity-Is-The-Mother-Of-All-Invention total wars which supposedly drive progress. You'll agree that mobilizing the nation to fight the Wehrmacht is different from sending expeditionary forces to mow down Zulu tribesmen. NATO does tons of stuff like that second thing these days, so the Victorian era would qualify as "peaceful stupidity" by OP's metrics.

I see. Yeah that's a fair argument. Colonial wars probably don't create as much pressure, that said they also helped Europeans get exposed to a lot of things previously unavailable to them, which must have at least offset that somewhat.

I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.

Obesity is an interesting subject. I think a distinction needs to be made between childhood/teen obesity and adult obesity. People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60. I think looking at childhood/teen obesity gives a more accurate perspective of the situation. Childhood obesity is particularly bad because the complications later in life are perhaps worse.

People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60.

Closer to 1 pound/year on average, IIRC. Not that that's not bad enough.

Though, I'd love to know for sure whether "tend" in this sentence is a law of nature or just another modern abnormality. One of the most astonishing claims from that Slime Mold Time Mold series was:

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older. Those Civil War veterans we mentioned above had an average BMI of 23.2 in their 40s and 22.9 in their 60’s. In their 40’s, 3.7% were obese, compared to 2.9% in their 60s. We see the same pattern in data from 1976-1980: people in their 60s had slightly lower BMIs and were slightly less likely to be obese than people in their 40s (See the table below). It isn’t until the 1980s that we start to see this trend reverse.

That's a good summation of the ruin that our civilization has become. I would add the poverty of art to the list as it seems as visceral a symptom as the others of our spiritual bankruptcy.

I have lamented this to myself, that it feels unjust to be trapped in history and condemned to strife when our ancestors had the opportunity to squander what was given to them.

Yet this is not a fruitful scorn. The beginning of wisdom it is said it to forgive one's father. And the hate you see lobbed at boomers for their egoism, real or imagined, doesn't help us in any way.

Worse yet I've seen people use this resentment as an excuse to engage in a looting of their own, even as there isn't much left to loot of our culture and institutions before striking at protections from the monstrous.

No I'd rather see it as opportunity. We get to shape the heritage of the next civilization in more ways that is usual. If strife is ahead beyond our years we should at least fulfill our own duty to the future in preserving that which hasn't yet been destroyed for the benefit of our descendants, whoever they may be.

If this is really our twilight, and it definitely feels like it, I want to ask:

What would you want the last Romans to have done? What was their best service to us? What are we glad they gifted us, even as we are not Romans ourselves?

What was poison better left forgotten?

And what did they overlook?

Yet this is not a fruitful scorn. The beginning of wisdom it is said it to forgive one's father. And the hate you see lobbed at boomers for their egoism, real or imagined, doesn't help us in any way.

I think blaming boomers, or any generation , is counterproductive, but people hate the boomers not because of ego but rather they are perceived as being out of touch. They, the boomers, don't understand or are not empathetic to how the younger generations 'have it harder' (even though I think this is debatable). True, homes were much cheaper 50 years ago, but so mortgage rates were way higher and I don't think 20-30 year mortgages existed. Jobs didn't pay that well even adjusted for inflation. The 6-figure white collar job didn't really exist in the 70s like it does today. Or the 7-8 figure 'exit'. YouTube, blogs, podcasting, apps and other ways of making money also didn't exist. It was better for highly conscientiousness people that Jordan Peterson talks about, who can put in long hours at a low-skilled factory job.

YouTube, blogs, podcasting, apps and other ways of making money also didn't exist.

On the other hand, you could earn a living writing for a newspaper that was distributed in physical paper format.

Substack..true, you have to build your audience, but a lot of people are having success with it. I think writers for top and mid tier publications still make decent money though.

That's part of it but the other part is that they hold direct responsibility in the destruction.

On the right you'll hear complaints about the sexual revolution, May 68, and ruining marriage and morality in general over short term bliss as well as handing a whole bunch of power to the state.

On the left you'll hear complaints about ex maoist neolibs crushing unions after benefitting from them, ruining the environment and turning the world into the car first concrete sprawl it is now.

Ironically these are sometimes the same exact people at different stages of their lives.

The frankly understandable and normal way in which old age makes them unable to understand the issues of the current world is just the trigger I think.

I question the relevance of your numbers though, given inflation. Boomers may not have had six figure jobs that often but they had cheap houses, job security and a whole lot of actually valuable things that you can't get easily today even with a whole bunch of paper

You're overstating the role of the Boomers. In '68, the oldest Boomers were 23; my mother was 17. Many were even younger. It was their parents and grandparents who were building the "car first concrete sprawls". If you want a point of comparison, the Boomers of the late 60's were like the Zoomers of today.

The marriage-ruining stuff was mostly Silent Generation, who tended to marry much younger than either preceding or following generations at 18-20, and in the 1970's experienced a massive, pan-generational sex FOMO, causing them to go divorce wild. This, in turn, did a lot of damage to their children, Gen X.

Aren't Xers normally categorized as the children of Boomers?

There is some overlap at the margins, but members of Generation X are typically children of members of the Silent Generation, and Millennials are typically children of Boomers.

On the right you'll hear complaints about the sexual revolution, May 68, and ruining marriage and morality in general over short term bliss as well as handing a whole bunch of power to the state.

I think people tend to overstate how old the boomers are. They are people in their early 60s to 70s. So even as recently as 1990 boomers were finally entering politics and busines in stride. True, boomers grew up in the 60s but they didn't influence policy, nor did they have much influence in the 70s either. The blame instead is mostly on the silent generation.

Boomers may not have had six figure jobs that often but they had cheap houses, job security and a whole lot of actually valuable things that you can't get easily today even with a whole bunch of paper

If you include compensation the picture improves a lot https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hcc-.png

Adjusted for inflation, today's college grads still earn more. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_381.asp

An MBA in 1976 made $10,200 ($52k in today's dollars) compared to $96-130k today. Even with student loan debt, this is way more.

The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there. That is not to say that there is no creation during a time of peace. Many things are invented during times of peace. Yet in the previous lines there is a symbolism which we see once again in the fact that in the most developed societies of the west we have now begun to see people get dumber over time. A society wide fall in overall IQ. A warning of the possibility of bad days ahead. Even a possible sign that we in the past century went way past the point of our natural capabilities and now find ourselves in a world that none of us understand.

I don't see much evidence that things are dumber per say. Math, medicine (certain cancers are now curable), physics (like James Webb telescope) , computer sci, AI (like Stable Diffusion, machine learning), etc. is making a lot of progress; the caliber of research today is greater than in the past; papers are longer, more complex....today's child prodigies are starting college at earlier and earlier ages, much like how the mile times and weightlifting records also keep being beaten despite a lot of Americans seemingly being obese and out of shape. Math research much more complicated, kids taking calculus at earlier age. YouTube guys routinely lifting weight that 50-60 years ago would have set records. I think rather there is a greater bifurcation between the smart and the dull, the fit & strong vs the fat or weak...High school seems dumbed down because it's designed to accommodate a lot of dull kids (blame demographics).

https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/dysgenics-by-the-numbers

I think that is sort of the point.

Sure we still have exceptional things, in fact they are so optimized as to be even more exceptional than were previously.

But those are few and far between. Is the average man really smarter, more well adjusted, stronger, fitter, etc than his grandfather at the same age?

Another thing is that we've had a tendency to optimize along metrics that get gamed. Tons more people go to colleges, but are they really better educated and more well read than in the past? Or do we just give them a pass?

Are we really better people than our forefathers? I'm not sure either way honestly.

Is the average man really smarter, more well adjusted, stronger, fitter, etc than his grandfather at the same age?

Ofcourse not. Most people have badass grandfathers because of survivorship bias.

On average, some skills definitely might have decreased, but we live in a kinder and wealthier society that allows for weaker people to survive and even thrive.

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