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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I find concerns about sub-replacement fertility rates to be largely pointless:

  1. It's an inherently self-correcting problem. Fertility below the carrying capacity results in massive selection pressure for more fertility, this weird transition period where memes and genes haven't caught up to our seemingly endless abundance is just that, transitory. Sooner rather than later, particular groups or individuals who persist in higher fertility will fill in the blanks, even if I personally find most such groups rather distasteful.

After all, the future belongs to those who show up.

  1. Even the above is entirely moot, because if you look outside, the Singularity is imminent, once ASI is a reality, manufacturing endless new humans would be a trivial endeavor, assuming you want to do something weird like that. Not that it matters, because economic output and standards of living will end up entirely decoupled from population size, or at least the population of biological humans.

In pretty much no plausible future will population crashes meaningfully impact standards of living, outside perhaps the most sclerotic nations such as Japan and China in the next decade or so. You simply won't notice before it becomes as quaint a problem as worrying about excess horseshit on city streets as the people switch to flying cars..

I agree. It seems way overblown. Japan's population has only fallen a tiny amount despite sub-replacement fertility rates for over 50 years, and this despite having among the most restrictive immigration laws of any country.

That's likely because the great dying-off hasn't happened yet; there's two large peaks of people in their 50s and their 70s, and when the currently-70s cohort die off the figures will be more dramatic. Japanese life expectancy is >80 for both sexes.

That's assuming population decline in a vacuum. The 'transitory' nature of selecting for high fertility in, for example, the US would leave it with, proportionally, a lot of Amish and traditionalist types. The transitory nature of selecting for high fertility alongside mass immigration, however, means those who inherit the earth are not the fertile native but rather the excess population of whatever foreign country.

In real world terms that means that the country that is backwards for the longest and in turn manages to maintain its high pre-modernity birthrates the longest will be the one that wins out. There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

Given that my timelines are less than 10 years for a fully fledged technological singularity to be upon us, I see absolutely no way that we continue struggling with demographic collapse for the 20+ years it would take to be truly debilitating, short of something like a nuclear war, in which case we have bigger problems to worry about.

There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations (as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!).

As an Indian, I can only chuckle and pour myself a drink, who exactly is going to be demographically replacing us?

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing. From the way I understand the dangers of technology, they primarily come from very effectively distracting people from propagating themselves. I don't see why anyone would care otherwise.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations

I am talking about modern native populations. In that sense it might be unclear. I'm not talking modern as in 'exists today', but modern as in, 'has abundance food, electricity, clean running water and functional toilets and the ability to maintain those things'. That mostly encompasses East-Asia and the western world.

(as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!)

There is no United States of America without the white people that built it. In that sense most white Americans are native to the US. Other than that I find the 'native' song and dance very tiresome and low brow. I don't think how long someone has occupied an area has much relation to the value of their existence. I'm much more interested in what they actually did whilst they were there. In that sense the short existence of America, measured in centuries, eclipses large swaths the brown world and all the millennia they had to make something out of themselves. But sure, those browns are 'native' to the travesty they call home whilst the Americans are merely 'immigrants' to the place most brown people wish they could live in.

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

We are too reliant on the word 'slightly' here, for my taste. From what I can understand, the demographic change in the US is much more than slight, with a white minority already being a thing for 15 year olds. I'd call it a safe prediction to say that the current paradigm won't last for long. If you only care for the next 10 years then I can see why you wouldn't care. But for a longer term outlook, again, I'd predict rather drastic changes. The most notable one being a lack of a credible 'world police'.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing.

Artificial wombs and robo-nannies?

In 10 years? Maybe I'm just a fuddy duddy but that seems optimistic to the point of delusion.

It's an inherently self-correcting problem.

So is a plague, but both can cause a lot of social disruption and avoidable damage before they are corrected.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse, unless you're Japanese or Chinese in the next 5-10 years.

Also, the histrionic claims made by OP about this being tantamount to an "extinction", which it categorically isn't.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse

This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.

You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?

And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.

What are your AI timelines? As far as I'm concerned, I expect ~30% unemployment rates within 5 years due to to automation, and an outright Singularity (in the sense that superintelligent AGI breaks all the charts, not that it necessarily goes FOOM) within 10.

I specifically said significant population collapse because I don't see the problem becoming noticeable within 10 years, and certainly not 5.

I strongly disagree that technology can't mitigate or even reverse the negative effects in said time frame. The primary concerns of demographic collapse are loss of tax revenue to prop up social security and pensions, and insufficient productive workers to maintain infrastructure and care for an aging populace. In a largely automated economy, those are moot points, and the latter can be mitigated by caretaker robots.

If humans become obsolete, then I don't see how a decrease in their number matters!

Also, in the particular case of the UK, it's multicultural enough that I genuinely don't think I could even tell if there was a 10-20% change in demographic ratios in said time frame. From what I can tell, they're finally cracking down on illegal immigration, so I have reason to expect that they'll largely take productive, reasonably prosocial immigrants in the future.

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