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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The top level post is about young women dating older men, instead of men of their own age.

You're proposing a solution to increasing birthrates. Considering older men are capable of impregnating younger women, I don't understand how this is related.

Could you explain how you landed here? I feel like I missed a transition.

But the political demand for this is hugely negative. The ones with current cultural power are either too old to have more children or are plugged into low-fertility norms, so it’s like pulling teeth to modestly expand parent tax credits. Your tax on careerist single women, you know, the ones with nothing better to do with their time than engage with luxury brands and girlboss feminism, would force them to do way more of the latter. What real stakeholders would back this plan for more than a few seconds?

That has to coexist with a moral / aesthetic desire for more children though, certainly among the 'elites' implementing the restrictions, but it'd help a lot for everyone. And incentives should extend to 4-5 children somehow, the 'marginal cost' to incentivize the least interested in children to have 2 is definitely higher than to incentivize those most interested in having 4.

Cultural factors here get weird, and this doesn't target the overall birth rate, but what about paying 'normal' women something like $5-10k per child with sperm donated from extremely-high-achievers (like, top physicists or executives or artists or w/e)? Or very large amounts like $50-100k to surrogate, and then raise, the children of two high-achievers? (Decade? out technologies like thousands-of-loci human gene editing / whole-genome synthesis, plus existing GWAS info gives something like "mental genes of random-mix-of-high-achievers, physical appearance (and maybe ""personality"") genes of raising parents, which would help with the cultural bits). Could be limited to two-parent households, or start with infertile couples, and uptake would (absent significant 'stick' or cultural shift) be pretty low, but the benefit's high - and whatever the social or individual cost of single parent households is surely dwarfed by loading the genetic dice. And ofc randomness, regression to the mean means famous mathematician / successful female exec children are still very unlikely to be famous mathematicians, but they'll still be much more economically useful, and personally benefit from the intelligence.

gwern had an interesting post on the economics of different eugenics methods; embryo selection is the most practicable in the short and medium term, and possibly net positive today depending on the estimate of an IQ point's economic value and discount rates.

If AI fizzles out one way or another, it's one of the less appreciated levers we have to improve the world.

Well, political/cultural and physical practicality are two different things! Non-iterated embryo selection, already done today (but not for IQ), is definitely less effective (for IQ or similar) than "be a surrogate/hire a surrogate for two extreme outlier parents" and i'm pretty sure less effective than "normal egg + donated sperm from one extreme outlier", and the latter has been doable for centuries! (And sorta is already done with sperm donation, but "college / graduate educated" is much much coarser than 'extreme outlier in iq/achievement'). But most people want kids who "are really their kids" and look like them, so embryo selection is better for that.

... for an infertile couple/lesbian couple who wants to adopt, this might already be both physically and culturally viable, if you can find willing donors?

Wow that’s quite a big stick. Surely we don’t need that much?

Yeah, OP's solution to {problem} just boils down to "make problems illegal, or more charitably unfeasible", which can be the default answer to any problem if you are sufficiently authoritarian. To be fair that might be the only thing solution that will "fix" the problem, not to sure about how likely it is to be implemented or not have other nth order effects, but constraints are for dummies anyways.

Sometimes, "make problem illegal" is plainly pointless, no king can keep the tide back (or can they?). Other times, it's possible, if those with power intend it - if your choices were 'have four children' or 'imprisoned by neostasi', you'd pick the former. And strong social coercion to have children is historically plausible, as is "authoritiarianism" generally, so given a significant change in the morals of the elite and population, something like the above isn't inconceivable overall, even if it is in the present moment. It's suggesting that, maybe, people should be receptive to that kind of policy, when they obviously aren't now.

It's at least a concrete plan that would plausibly work, instead of endless ineffectual kvetching about the gender war.

Anyone can come up with an overtly authoritarian plan with no regard to feasibility or worse nth order effects, it doesn't take much creativity to suggest "make problem illegal". That's more of my gripe with such proposals.

They are certainly popular because at least something is being put forward and "doing something about it" is a winning move in many domains; E.g We certainly did something about covid, that's for sure, who cares if the cure is worse than the disease?

@DaseindustriesLtd proposal for example, aims to attain the same goal but is more thoughtfully crafted, aware of its shortcomings, aware of its constraints and just around more feasible/effective in the ways that would matter. OP even cites the same comment but ends up being a low-rung parody of it. Maybe I am being too harsh and am discussing things out of my depth but it certainly seems as much to me that @2rafa went on a diatribe about TFR when the parent post doesn't even mention it. (My model of the discussion is that the male disenfranchisement issue is a superset of the TFR issue, not the other way around.)

Needs are always for something - it clearly isn't necessary for preserving society, and AI makes it less relevant, but if "raise birthrates by 50%+" is important enough, would anything else work?

Even just a mild use of the stick could probably push things back over 2.1 but any negative incentives seem verboten, not just for this but in general.

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