Our civilization depends on many key systems, such as for electricity, water, sewage, communication, transportation, news, law, education, marriage, elections, and regulations.
Does uniting behind a common cause increase TFR? Based on the basic idea that the cause of the demographic transition is memes diverting reproductive resources away from DNA replication and towards meme replication, one might expect a common cause to be of little relevance and to not have much effect.
The assumption that the cause of the demographic transition is a "drift" in values seems suspect to me. Contraceptives don't reduce fertility by affecting values. They let people control their lives more. Female education doesn't change values much - but it does occupy child-rearing years and "liberates" women from child-bearing activities.
If the problem is not just a value shift in the first place then giving people some work that they value may not solve the problem.
If we authorize a governance mechanism to do what it takes to achieve a goal that is in conflict with civ collapse, it will try to do what it takes to prevent civ collapse.
Civilization seems unlikely to collapse, we are just talking about there being fewer or no humans.
Uniting a population behind a common cause may have been done during wartime, and during the construction of the pyramids. Absent an alien invasion, it's difficult to imagine something similar in modern times. Maybe the coming invasion of intelligent machines will fit the bill - but somehow I don't think that will help with the human fertility crisis overall.
We are talking about at least a falling population, losing scale economies and product diversity, and innovation grinding to a halt. Much like the fall of the Roman Empire.
So: you might be talking about that - but it looks to me as though machines, technology and culture are taking over from the human roles. A forecast of loss of diversity and innovation assumes that the human roles decline before the machines can take up the slack. However if the machines (or more generally cultural products) taking the resources is what is making it harder for the humans to use of the resources to create human offspring in the first place, then that scenario seems less likely. Note that future cultural evolution is unlikely to depend on humans as it does today. Machines can copy information too.
This seems like a very different picture from the one you paint. It features a new beginning, and not just an end.
But many particular common causes would suffer from low fertility. So the futarchy would turn up policies to try to prevent that. Including clamping down on many forms for memetic trasmission if that is indeed the main issue. Right?
"Clamping down" on culture is challenging. The Unabomber famously attempted it, but didn't get very far. There have been various neo-Luddite movements, but again, relatively little impact. The forces pushing in the opposite direction are too powerful.
I don't really expect the problem of humans failing to make babies to be solved. However, there are plenty of other ways of failing to thrive that are more immediate. Fertility issues take generations to pan out, but plagues of viruses, drugs, anxiety and video games can act on shorter timescales.
> "Clamping down" on culture is challenging. The Unabomber famously attempted it, but didn't get very far.
The unabomber's message lives on, and gets decent airtime *and interest from Normies* on TikTok. It would be a shame if TikTok went away "for some reason".
I consider values and preferences to mostly exist inside minds. Most contraceptives have no effect there - for example, barrier contraceptives leave the mind alone and instead modify the environment. Hormonal contraceptives could potentially affect the mind - but the main mechanism of action seems to be via preventing ovulation. Contraceptives that affect preferences are possible - but it's not how most contraceptives work.
So: "willingness to have sex out of marriage" is not a value, but a behavioral propensity that is influenced by values (such as desire) and non-values (such as STD prevalance).
There’s a solution to the monoculture in the US that doesn’t involve radically new changes: simply devolve more power to the states. We’re already seeing this to a limited extent post Dobbs.
More state power *allows* more cultural variety across states, but in the present situation seems unlikely to cause very much variety of key cultural values.
Rather than physically colonize other planets or moons, I suspect a more feasible project is to colonize the metaverse with “Network State” societies and cultures that have real-world country status.
One somewhat fatalistic and apathetic alternative explanation is that there is no cultural super-organism that is rotting but rather two sets of individuals that use available cultural institutions: 1) commensally, and 2) parasitically; a few hundred years ago, humanity unlocked fossil fuels to artificially though ultimately temporarily boost those in group 2. As the system destabilized for various reasons, set # 2 will die off back to a natural base rate. During this coming time of cultural chaos, set #1 will continue to benefit from and contribute to cultural institutions as they always have and progress will continue and their fertility rate will be fine.
First, lol @ "Space elevator" receiving 4x the attention of "Answer big Q's". That is... par for the course for this species that did the Spanish Inquisition, continues to wage wars, and has not figured out that lying is bad in the year 2024. Pepper this picture with occasional twerking to have it really sink in.
This:
> However, we have almost no specialists who track or warn us on one key system, and also little wariness of big changes to it. This is our system of cultural values, which tells us our widely shared values and norms, and then changes them over time.
...is I think the core lesson of this, and the direction to tunnel in. This is not obvious to hardly anyone, it's something we take for granted, yet its a kind of emergency. I use this term "pathological pragmatism" and by it I mean I kind of obsession over details. We obsess over minutia, but fail miserably at the big picture, and this is a great example of that.
... what... the fuck are we doing on this planet? What is this place? Where are we? What ... should we be doing, right this second? We've really, really not thought this through. Instead, we just "do". We suffer from a feedback loop around "what merely appears to work", and just do more of that. That can be good, but it can also be pretty bad(again, Spanish Inquisition).
Off earth population does seem like a nice big goal to unite people. But I'm leery of having a bureaucracy manage it with metrics. If it happens, it'll happen romantically in waves of excitement, inspiration and crushing disappointments, through generations of heroes, prophets and misfits. More like epic poetry than technocratic 5 year plans.
Some bureaucracy and govt support is inevitable, but if you make the systems too hard, you'll kill the allure.
The fact that your suggested fix has not gained sufficient converts for 35 years suggests that it is not working, would you not say?
As a consolation, you are in good company. No other attempt to change the fertility trajectory the last 70 years has worked, either. Lower fertility is a common trend across all the world's major religions, including all major (pseudo-religious) secular ideologies.
...Suggesting that something even stronger that "culture" is at play. Or (alternatively phrased), that pro-natalist ideas within different cultures (pro-natalist ideas can be identified in, or made adjacent to, all major cultures) are not strong enough to negate other aspects of cultures, that change peoples' behavior in the opposite direction.
Empirically, the only possible barrier to low fertility seems to be fundamentalist religious worldviews (be they Christian, Islamist, or what have you). Unfortunately, fundamentalist religious worldviews may be deterministically linked to an anti-science worldview (what the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger calls "intrinsic linkages"). Implying that a global future populated by religious fundamentalists will have no defence once the "Reindeer on St. Matthew Island" overpopulation scenario kicks in.
Moral: A future with a declining number of (scientific literate) humans is preferable to the alternative.
> However, we have almost no specialists who track or warn us on one key system, and also little wariness of big changes to it.
Another key system/domain we have no specialists on (if there even are any that is): epistemology.
Interestingly, having a robust epistemology game could plausibly largely solve the problem you're pointing out as well, and many of the others. Unfortunately, epistemology is hated by both the strong and weak, smart and dumb.
While that seems like a decent start, it seems rather light (if not outright bad) on epistemology. I doubt that was your prime focus, so not so much a criticism as an observation.
Living off Earth is more readily available than fission-driven mass launchers on equatorial mountains, of course; seasteading: surface first, belike, then shallow, then deep.
probably would be helpful too if the cost benefit ratio was broken down into the timeframe over which the benefits were to be realized or costs minimized (shorter duration vs longer duration) and those of which could benefit how many others (i.e. smaller costs ones that benefit 10/30 others on shorter time frame may make more sense to pursue first compared to larger cost ones with highest cost benefit ratio that benefit 1/30 others where it takes longer for most benefits to be realized [naive example]).
Does uniting behind a common cause increase TFR? Based on the basic idea that the cause of the demographic transition is memes diverting reproductive resources away from DNA replication and towards meme replication, one might expect a common cause to be of little relevance and to not have much effect.
The assumption that the cause of the demographic transition is a "drift" in values seems suspect to me. Contraceptives don't reduce fertility by affecting values. They let people control their lives more. Female education doesn't change values much - but it does occupy child-rearing years and "liberates" women from child-bearing activities.
If the problem is not just a value shift in the first place then giving people some work that they value may not solve the problem.
If we authorize a governance mechanism to do what it takes to achieve a goal that is in conflict with civ collapse, it will try to do what it takes to prevent civ collapse.
Civilization seems unlikely to collapse, we are just talking about there being fewer or no humans.
Uniting a population behind a common cause may have been done during wartime, and during the construction of the pyramids. Absent an alien invasion, it's difficult to imagine something similar in modern times. Maybe the coming invasion of intelligent machines will fit the bill - but somehow I don't think that will help with the human fertility crisis overall.
We are talking about at least a falling population, losing scale economies and product diversity, and innovation grinding to a halt. Much like the fall of the Roman Empire.
So: you might be talking about that - but it looks to me as though machines, technology and culture are taking over from the human roles. A forecast of loss of diversity and innovation assumes that the human roles decline before the machines can take up the slack. However if the machines (or more generally cultural products) taking the resources is what is making it harder for the humans to use of the resources to create human offspring in the first place, then that scenario seems less likely. Note that future cultural evolution is unlikely to depend on humans as it does today. Machines can copy information too.
This seems like a very different picture from the one you paint. It features a new beginning, and not just an end.
But many particular common causes would suffer from low fertility. So the futarchy would turn up policies to try to prevent that. Including clamping down on many forms for memetic trasmission if that is indeed the main issue. Right?
"Clamping down" on culture is challenging. The Unabomber famously attempted it, but didn't get very far. There have been various neo-Luddite movements, but again, relatively little impact. The forces pushing in the opposite direction are too powerful.
I don't really expect the problem of humans failing to make babies to be solved. However, there are plenty of other ways of failing to thrive that are more immediate. Fertility issues take generations to pan out, but plagues of viruses, drugs, anxiety and video games can act on shorter timescales.
> "Clamping down" on culture is challenging. The Unabomber famously attempted it, but didn't get very far.
The unabomber's message lives on, and gets decent airtime *and interest from Normies* on TikTok. It would be a shame if TikTok went away "for some reason".
> Including clamping down on many forms for memetic trasmission
Is this a reference to the government suppressing free speech via banning TikTok? :)
No, I didn't have anything in particular in mind when I said that.
> Contraceptives don't reduce fertility by affecting values. They let people control their lives more.
Is willingness to have sex out of marriage or a relationship not considered a value?
I consider values and preferences to mostly exist inside minds. Most contraceptives have no effect there - for example, barrier contraceptives leave the mind alone and instead modify the environment. Hormonal contraceptives could potentially affect the mind - but the main mechanism of action seems to be via preventing ovulation. Contraceptives that affect preferences are possible - but it's not how most contraceptives work.
So: "willingness to have sex out of marriage" is not a value, but a behavioral propensity that is influenced by values (such as desire) and non-values (such as STD prevalance).
> I consider values and preferences to mostly exist inside minds.
So do beliefs - take this one for example: "willingness to have sex out of marriage is not a value".
Is it true? Is it (always) possible to even wonder?
There’s a solution to the monoculture in the US that doesn’t involve radically new changes: simply devolve more power to the states. We’re already seeing this to a limited extent post Dobbs.
More state power *allows* more cultural variety across states, but in the present situation seems unlikely to cause very much variety of key cultural values.
Rather than physically colonize other planets or moons, I suspect a more feasible project is to colonize the metaverse with “Network State” societies and cultures that have real-world country status.
Not only is that not very feasible, it is also not very inspirational, at least to most people.
Ah, but you are speculating on both counts.
If you focus your mind on contemplating what the truth of the matter is, does it produce anything different?
One somewhat fatalistic and apathetic alternative explanation is that there is no cultural super-organism that is rotting but rather two sets of individuals that use available cultural institutions: 1) commensally, and 2) parasitically; a few hundred years ago, humanity unlocked fossil fuels to artificially though ultimately temporarily boost those in group 2. As the system destabilized for various reasons, set # 2 will die off back to a natural base rate. During this coming time of cultural chaos, set #1 will continue to benefit from and contribute to cultural institutions as they always have and progress will continue and their fertility rate will be fine.
First, lol @ "Space elevator" receiving 4x the attention of "Answer big Q's". That is... par for the course for this species that did the Spanish Inquisition, continues to wage wars, and has not figured out that lying is bad in the year 2024. Pepper this picture with occasional twerking to have it really sink in.
This:
> However, we have almost no specialists who track or warn us on one key system, and also little wariness of big changes to it. This is our system of cultural values, which tells us our widely shared values and norms, and then changes them over time.
...is I think the core lesson of this, and the direction to tunnel in. This is not obvious to hardly anyone, it's something we take for granted, yet its a kind of emergency. I use this term "pathological pragmatism" and by it I mean I kind of obsession over details. We obsess over minutia, but fail miserably at the big picture, and this is a great example of that.
... what... the fuck are we doing on this planet? What is this place? Where are we? What ... should we be doing, right this second? We've really, really not thought this through. Instead, we just "do". We suffer from a feedback loop around "what merely appears to work", and just do more of that. That can be good, but it can also be pretty bad(again, Spanish Inquisition).
Off earth population does seem like a nice big goal to unite people. But I'm leery of having a bureaucracy manage it with metrics. If it happens, it'll happen romantically in waves of excitement, inspiration and crushing disappointments, through generations of heroes, prophets and misfits. More like epic poetry than technocratic 5 year plans.
Some bureaucracy and govt support is inevitable, but if you make the systems too hard, you'll kill the allure.
The fact that your suggested fix has not gained sufficient converts for 35 years suggests that it is not working, would you not say?
As a consolation, you are in good company. No other attempt to change the fertility trajectory the last 70 years has worked, either. Lower fertility is a common trend across all the world's major religions, including all major (pseudo-religious) secular ideologies.
...Suggesting that something even stronger that "culture" is at play. Or (alternatively phrased), that pro-natalist ideas within different cultures (pro-natalist ideas can be identified in, or made adjacent to, all major cultures) are not strong enough to negate other aspects of cultures, that change peoples' behavior in the opposite direction.
Empirically, the only possible barrier to low fertility seems to be fundamentalist religious worldviews (be they Christian, Islamist, or what have you). Unfortunately, fundamentalist religious worldviews may be deterministically linked to an anti-science worldview (what the late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger calls "intrinsic linkages"). Implying that a global future populated by religious fundamentalists will have no defence once the "Reindeer on St. Matthew Island" overpopulation scenario kicks in.
Moral: A future with a declining number of (scientific literate) humans is preferable to the alternative.
> However, we have almost no specialists who track or warn us on one key system, and also little wariness of big changes to it.
Another key system/domain we have no specialists on (if there even are any that is): epistemology.
Interestingly, having a robust epistemology game could plausibly largely solve the problem you're pointing out as well, and many of the others. Unfortunately, epistemology is hated by both the strong and weak, smart and dumb.
Sure, but I figured out how to do that 35 years ago, and have been advocating for it unsuccessfully ever since.
Can you give a brief overview of the methodology you came up with?
http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html
While that seems like a decent start, it seems rather light (if not outright bad) on epistemology. I doubt that was your prime focus, so not so much a criticism as an observation.
Living off Earth is more readily available than fission-driven mass launchers on equatorial mountains, of course; seasteading: surface first, belike, then shallow, then deep.
probably would be helpful too if the cost benefit ratio was broken down into the timeframe over which the benefits were to be realized or costs minimized (shorter duration vs longer duration) and those of which could benefit how many others (i.e. smaller costs ones that benefit 10/30 others on shorter time frame may make more sense to pursue first compared to larger cost ones with highest cost benefit ratio that benefit 1/30 others where it takes longer for most benefits to be realized [naive example]).