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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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How can modern 'gender roles' possibly be sustainable? Fertility rates below 2.1 mean that civilization itself is unsustainable in the medium-term (let alone the long-term where more fecund civilizations will overcome less fecund peers, ceteris paribus). Either it dwindles to nothing in a kind of evaporative cooling where the few remaining young people leave their many senescent dependants for greener fields. Or you get mass immigration, the importing of other societies. Either the immigrants assimilate and age into oblivion, perpetuating the problem, or the natives assimilate and their civilization is gone.

The universe does have rules - reproducing is rewarded. It's not like worrying about masculinity is a new thing (see all the concerns about the degeneracy of the youth as the article points out). But in this case, we know masculinity and femininity are broken because they're not working at sustaining the population! Anti-social is not a bad thing if society is broken (not in a small way but in a terminal way).

All through this article there's an awkwardness as the author tries to describe a problem without admitting any kind of serious change is needed.

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

Like people say in the comments, this is just recycling 1950s Boy Scouts rhetoric, the sort of stuff you'd see in a Tom Swift novel. Did it work then? Maybe. Did it keep working? Obviously not. And it's a really facile thing to propose 'finding ways to work with powerful stories like self-mastery'. What does that mean in concrete terms? Nothing at all. WTF is self-mastery? Is the author proposing media manipulation, putting more strong father figures in film? Who knows, maybe we're expected to be mind-readers.

There's a model of how industrial states were run with medium-high fertility - women were not in the workforce at anything near the male participation rate. One option is taking women out of the workforce and higher education (a universally proven sterilizing agent), which entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is mass-scale human cloning, which also entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is rushing for life-extension or AI to bypass the problem entirely, which has problems of its own. Or we could try to found powerful religions like LDS or Islam or Orthodox Judaism. Or we can just wither away talking about pro-social stories of self-mastery and be written about in the history books of others.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

I mean, I strongly disagree. I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever, at least under your worldivew.

I'd like to see a humanity that moves forward and values things more than just base reproduction. I'd like to see us value knowledge, and understanding, and frankly love. Even if it contradicts some of the transhumanist futures some other users believe in.

Demographics are not destiny, and never have been. Memes are destiny, and you'd better start acting like that's the case, or you'll be outcompeted.

This is a techno-optimist take. But I don't know that the techno-optimist take is well supported by evidence. The current elites will stay in power until they die in office- living much past 100 is just not attainable even for the elites.

Well yeah current older folks are dead. With the advance of the pace of science I see coming with AI and other advances though, I'm optimistic that anyone younger than say, 45 or 50 today, may be able to live a lot longer than people can right now.

Remember that it used to be almost impossible to survive things that are routine to cure nowadays. Medicine inexorably advances, and if we techno-optimists are right about the potential of AI that advance will be swift indeed.

Remember that maximum human lifespan hasn't really changed in centuries.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia. Remember that space was a celestial sphere thought unbreachable. Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

The march of technology renders these claims pointless. We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia.

Still can't. Humans can only build machines that fly.

Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

Based on pandemic propaganda, it still is, except the Devil is now personified as a Republican instead of a humanoid with horns and tail, or a man of wealth and taste.

We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

This claim is vacuous, though.

Humans can only build machines that fly.

There are human-constructed flying objects in all four quadrants of the machine/not-machine//self-powered/human-powered schema.

(Normal aeroplane/helicopter/etc.; pedal-powered aircraft; helium balloon; hang-glider.)

All of those are machines.

Sure, but they're talking about a technology change.

Before the internal combustion engine, the maximum human travel speed hadn't changed in centuries either.

Not to say that it's likely, but I think you're ignoring the essence of the argument.

The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200". Without this (bad) essence, it's no better than "well we seem to be very smart, surely we will figure out a way to increase the maximum lifespan real soon now" -- which seems pretty unconvincing given that it hasn't budged a bit for hundreds of years.

The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200".

You can't take the average argument for a position, you have to engage with the argument in play, because it only takes one good argument for something to be right. I can generate several hundred bad arguments for any position you want right now.

Even further, that wasn't the case this time. TheDag explicitly called out a technology change.

Quoting them:

I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever...

And when talking about what science is coming, they don't talk about past medical advances, but reference AI, presumably some sort of intelligence explosion.

So what technology has increased the maximum lifetime of humans so far? If the answer is "nothing", than why should we think that future technology will do so? Even if we allow rationalist-fever-dream-AIs, they are not gods -- all concrete science so far indicates that maximum human lifespan is really quite a persistent and narrow range.

More comments

How can you strongly disagree to me saying 'we have no choice but to pick one of these options' and then say 'oh they'll follow the life-extension path', when that's a path I mentioned? Do you have a different path in mind or do you strongly disagree with the premise?

Demographics is destiny. You can't do anything if you don't exist. Numbers are power, though not the only source of power. In geopolitics, there's a struggle between the 1st and 3rd most populous states as to who will rule the system. There's a reason that Iceland and Monaco are not in the running and it's because they're not populous!

Even once we establish life extension, demographics still matter. The most populous states, ceteris paribus, will be still be stronger, have more geniuses, more capital, a bigger internal market, more resources... Exponentially growing populations of immortals can burn through a lot of resources very quickly.

Human values must ultimately be in accordance with the basic structure of the universe. Whatever else we do, we must not be diminishing in number, our civilization must not be unsustainable. When there's a conflict between memes and reality, reality wins. If knowledge, understanding and love are useful (and I think they are) in sustaining our species, then great! But if they or anything else is sabotaging us, then let's discard them before nature forces the issue.

How can you strongly disagree to me saying 'we have no choice but to pick one of these options' and then say 'oh they'll follow the life-extension path', when that's a path I mentioned? Do you have a different path in mind or do you strongly disagree with the premise?

The short answer is that I just get annoyed by the 'demographics is destiny' crowd because, as @self_made_human points out, I don't think that will be true for much longer.

Demographics is destiny. You can't do anything if you don't exist. Numbers are power, though not the only source of power. In geopolitics, there's a struggle between the 1st and 3rd most populous states as to who will rule the system. There's a reason that Iceland and Monaco are not in the running and it's because they're not populous!

Even once we establish life extension, demographics still matter. The most populous states, ceteris paribus, will be still be stronger, have more geniuses, more capital, a bigger internal market, more resources... Exponentially growing populations of immortals can burn through a lot of resources very quickly.

This seems to assume that humans will be net economic positives in the future, which I think is highly doubtful myself.

I suspect that in a decade or two, the power of a country will correlate far more strongly with the number of data centers and automated factories it possesses rather than the mere number of people living off UBI.

After a certain point, you don't need more people around, though as a person myself I'd rather we stay in charge.

In all likelihood, it's a battle between the US and China as to who'll have more automated factories. Surprisingly, China is ahead of the US in robots per worker (and so hugely ahead overall) despite the US having a head start. China has a more aggressive attitude towards manufacturing and industrial efficiency than the US.

Maybe South Korea is a competitor, they're well ahead in the 'robots per industrial worker' index of everyone except Singapore. But can South Korea secure the input resources needed, given their declining demography? Robots need iron, chemicals, mines, logistics, scale, young people to innovate with them. There's probably a critical mass of market size, brainpower and resources you need before you can develop a world-class robotics industry like China or America. It would surprise me if a small country was able to leapfrog the big powers. Can South Korea supply everything it needs domestically, or even most things? Can they compete in 'let's throw 10 billion at this gigafactory/huge research project'? I don't think so.

I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.

I think Asia has a distinct advantage here simply because they culturally value education far more than most of normie Americans. We don’t push our kids that hard even compared to European states. We don’t worry too much about grades and achievement, in fact we are often destroying our education system in the name of student’s feelings, or racial disparities. A lot of schools no longer have “gifted” programs to develop potential minds. There are schools no longer pushing to get kids into algebra before high school. If we weren’t attracting our engineers from abroad, we’d be even farther behind because of how bad our K-12 system is compared to Europe let alone Asia.

I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.

I agree, but I also expect automation technologies to diffuse quite fast, such that after a period of time economic progress will depend more on total resources available to a nation (perhaps surface area covered by a nation would a half decent proxy) instead of human-driven progress.

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