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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Why should I care if my one child is outnumbered by less intelligent, more credulous, or other colors of children? Quality over quantity.

It literally doesn't work that way when it comes to genetics. Maybe in the scope of different species and niches, but within a single species, it's simply incorrect. There is no amount of quality to overcome the inevitability of quantities.

As for why. Do you think you are a good person? Do you want more people like you, or fewer people like you? Most people want more people who they like, and fewer people they don't like. You're basically saying you want fewer people you like, and more people you don't like. That's backwards, and deserves justification in itself, especially if you want anyone else to share the sentiment.

Unless you hate yourself, hate your family, hate your people, you should want more of them, not less of them, in the future. And if you do truly hate yourself, well, I'm not going to stop you from solving that problem, but I'm also not going to listen to what you have to say.

I want people like me. Fortunately, the floor for that is pretty low. I’d be satisfied with one family unit, though it would be nice to have more for security.

That’s what I mean by quality—I don’t really care if the rest of the population doesn’t carry my genes. Not so long as they are carried. They’re pretty nice genes; I’m rather attached to them, but I expect they’ll do alright.

The people terrified by a future that includes their descendants, just not enough of them, are delusional. Perhaps they’re not confident about getting to stay in the gene pool. Or they could misunderstand exactly how far their kinship circles extend today. I know some of them subscribe to a bizarre counterpart to Marxism, where racial interests supersede class, culture and self-interest.

Unless you hate yourself, hate your family, hate your people, you should want more of them, not less of them, in the future.

You're drawing this false dichotomy between "want more" and "want less". I would wager that the majority of people who don't want more of their people simply don't care if there are more or fewer, not that they want fewer.

Frankly I don't find your argument compelling either. Who gives a shit what future generations look like? I'll be dead, it's got nothing to do with me. I don't care if people who live after me share my values, and I don't really understand why anyone would.

I'll be dead, it's got nothing to do with me.

I mean, you can certainly go full nihilistic hedonism if you like, but then you won't mind if the people who do care what happens after they are gone try to mold the world into the image they desire.

I don't particularly care. I said as much.

I think he meant "quality over quanitity" as bringing up the idea of: why try to increase the TFR of the other colors/less intelligent, causing them to (relatively) outnumber your children? It doesn't obviously benefit your genes.

And "if you disagree with me, it's because you hate yourself and your people, so you should off yourself." isn't charitable, or interesting. Maybe something poetic instead, about not reproducing = casually discarding a project a thousand generations in the making, idk.

No, I was trying to head off the argument that we have to boost (white) TFR to keep the barbarians off the gates. That the West will fall apart without a nice supply of white babies. It assumes a level of race-to-the-bottom racial spoils which I find overblown.

I’d be satisfied if I had one family of descendants alive 1,000 years from now. That’s success! Doing better than that is a bonus, but not one worth handwringing over.

Oh. Even if it's not what most who care about birth rates believe, the non-racial 'steelman' is that fertility rate decline seems to be coming for almost every population worldwide, so we should start trying to stabilize somewhere modern now - any racial immigrants we have assimilate to our culture quickly and have low birthrates, and even birthrates in africa are declining rapidly, especially in urban environments. It's a less urgent argument, but with a TFR of 1.6 the decline-based fertility rate argument in the US isn't urgent either.

There's a separate argument that, independent of a current decline, more people (whether of some quality or people in general) is good morally, so one should raise the TFR anyway.

It assumes a level of race-to-the-bottom racial spoils which I find overblown.

Are there good examples of multi-ethnic democracies where this has resoundingly not occurred?

Mexico and Brazil and the Philippines. Singapore. Turkey was an example when it was still a democracy. Canada up until recently.

Singapore literally only exists as a sovereign nation because catastrophic ethnic conflict happened between that city and the rest of Malaysia, and then it had a dictator impose authoritarian segregation rules which still bind for the exact purpose of keeping ethnic tension under control. It's not a good example of ethnic tension not being a huge deal.

"Up until recently" is also an anti-example; @netstack was claiming the bailey of "it won't happen ever", not the motte of "it won't happen within a few years", and contesting the bailey is valid.

Anti-segregation rules, not segregation rules. HDB allocation enforces ethnic balance at the block level.

I mean, the cases I was thinking of were the illegality of proselytisation (which seems to me an attempt to both reduce interracial annoyance and avoid the rapid demographic shifts which evangelism enables and which can lead to people deciding violence is a good solution), and to the at-least-partial school segregation I observed the one time I was there (I was representing Australia in a maths competition run by Singapore's Chinese High School, and, um, that's actually its name), though admittedly I don't know to what extent the latter is actually a legal thing.

Thanks for the additional info, though.

Does anyone know how to selectively increase tfr for high IQ populations?

There are like a dozen ways. Some of them aren't robust to people faking low IQ, but others (e.g. "$500,000 per year per child for high-IQ woman with high-IQ father") are more so.

The problem is that unless you're really fucking subtle about it, it's political suicide, because advocating eugenics (and this inherently is a eugenics project) gets you called a Nazi.

Providing academically segregated primary schools with extended hours (so mums can work a regular 40hr/wk professional job without paid childcare, even if they can't work a 50+hr meritocratic elite job) would be the simplest option. You can identify the top 20% of the IQ distribution at 4-ish - you need to wait to identify the tip-top, but I don't think you even want to distinguish between the 1% and the 19% if you are doing eugenics.

I don't think this would work. The parents don't know whether the kid will be in the top 20% before having him/her, so it'll only have a very-slightly-different effect on high-IQ parents vs. low-IQ parents.

I was reading my mum's university textbooks at 3, so I think you can have a fair idea about the higher end quite early.

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