When the US and USSR came out victorious at the end of WWII, the world recalibrated its respect. That is, many correctly inferred that this win contained info about winner and loser abilities. Observers not only raised their overall estimates of abilities and virtues of the winners and losers, they also tried to guess which features of those parties were responsible for that win, and to change their estimate of the power and value of those features.
It's an interesting turn from the earlier post; going from a sense that distasteful communities might win in the end - the sort of 'cockroach after global thermonuclear war' vision - to the idea that virtue might actually be grounded in sustainability and health, and thus evidence of sustainability should guide the search for the aesthetic.
I am glad you continue to pursue this train of thought, but after spending most of my adult life studying progress, I am not following you. I can certainly see why the rate of progress and productivity might be expected to decrease with a smaller and older population, but I think it is jump to suggest it will stop, let alone drop.
The essential constricted source is new ideas. Here, historically, a tiny percent of people in a small share of nations have done all the heavy lifting. As the population drops, all that is needed is to make sure some people in some places continue to be rewarded for knowledge creation, innovation and entrepreneurial experimentation. I think this is very likely to be the case, and the total number of innovators in a century will be greater than it is even today, but certainly more than most of the 19th and 20th centuries which saw rapid growth.
What factors contribute to the rate of progress:
1) The population
2) The percent of the population capable of innovation (intelligence, specialization, education, freedom)
3) The rate of innovation based upon institutions and technologies to discover, test and select good from bad
4) The ability of ideas to propagate and spread once discovered (communication and transportation)
5) The ability of the population to work together and compete constructively to solve problems and NOT create problems for each other (positive vs negative sum)
6) The availability of cheap energy to drive the above
If I understand your position, you are focusing on #1. I think the others are just as, or more important, and these are not necessarily getting worse, and will quite possibly get better. Some (#3,4 and 6?) may get incomparably better. With smart AI and fusion, our problem is more likely to be excessive speed of change, not stagnation.
The summary of the Jones paper specifically warns this isn’t a forecast and that other factors such as technology and AI could offset this force. My take on their conclusion is that this is a growth headwind, which I agree with. But they specifically mention they are setting aside quality considerations (what is the value of one educated person vs twenty uneducated ones?) and I would add that their useful but oversimplified model ignores institutions, technology, energy availability, the entrant of 6 billion people from previously undeveloped nations and other many other factors.
Is this something we should be concerned about? Sure. Is it a reasonable and comprehensive projection of our future? Not necessarily.
It is food for thought and a starting place for better and more complex models tested against reality.
You see other possible relevant factors, and so you hope that somehow something there will save us. But we have already long been trying to improve those factors with only limited success. Not obvious why we'd have more success at innovation there than we had before in a new smaller world.
I am of course not sure about anything, but I think cheap clean energy sources and problem solving AI and a couple of billion educated people in Asia might offset lower populations in the West. Seems like we have a handful of negative forces against progress and a handful of positive forces. The future will be determined by how they play out.
I think you may be missing the magnitude of the change. It's one thing to think that there will be stagnation in the total population, leveling, or a few percent drop. It's another to foresee an order of magnitude decline. Then number 2, which may be in the 'long tails,' changes radically as do the institutions, the spread, and just about everything else you mention.
If the magnitude of the change is large enough and if all else remains the same, then I agree. What we are not sure of are those two ifs.
As a side note, I spent a career in business creating new financial products. To "sell" the idea to top brass we always made sets of assumptions and then had teams of actuaries and finance people create 50 pages of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations proving how well (or poorly) the product would perform. I called it "mathturbation". Most of the work was done based upon the quality and thoroughness of our assumptions, with the mathematicians just blessing it (or not) with numbers. I feel the same way about this paper. Great math, questionable assumptions.
The hypothesis that economic growth comes on the back of population growth, and vice versa, is known as the Boom Town Effect. But the population crash follows the economic crash, when the gold runs out and the town dies. An economy is measured by consumption of goods and services. A smaller population eats less and consumes fewer durable goods. That is the physical constraint imagined by the Limits to Growth people. But the consumer surplus is measured by value added, and with services the physical constraint becomes insignificant. Innovation will never collapse; it is driven by competition.
Also, just because you've found one trait where Amish style cultures have an advantage doesn't tell you that they are overall advantaged. Quite plausibly the reason they haven't been engines of economic growth is that they lack beneficial (or even have harmful) traits in other areas.
So it seems weird to recalibrate respect until we actually see what comes out on top. Quite plausibly what will happen is that either some fusion of the cultures will be necessary or some totally new culture will come to dominate.
You've already recalibrated respect for having a high birthrate but beyond that I don't see why you would want to increase respect for these subcultures since, for all you know, you are boosting respect for the aspects of the subculture that have inhibited their economic growth.
I think you are confusing different levels. A trait like maintaining high fertility is akin to a gene or a small packet of genes. A culture is akin to a racial group (meaning a subgroup that is currently more likely to breed within than without)
Back in prehistory knowing that the gene for adult lactase would eventually dominate the gene pool wouldn't tell you that the group which had that gene will dominate -- just that when they mixed with other groups that gene would get selected for. It certainly doesn't let you say that the gene package of the nomads on the step with that gene is superior to that of the celts or Greeks. They all may carry genes that will prove vital or even essential to humans in 5,000 years.
And memes are even better at recombining than genes.
What are you claiming is/isn't on track to go extinct? Since the culture that dominates in future will plausibly be some mix of our culture and their culture you can't say they won't go extinct and we will. And even if you knew it was *some* agrian high fertility culture that will dominate you don't know which so you don't know anything like that.
Heck, maybe we eventually reach equilibrium where an Amish culture pushes out babies who then switch to a low fertility culture frequently.
Wow, I really like this! Regarding: "raw emotional energy due to adults being surrounded and respected by so many basically happy children, kids who are themselves happy due to being around so many other kids. I can see a strong communal bond and lack of resentment of communal obligations due to their pretty egalitarian practices and strong communal autonomy..."
I appreciate what you said about having to recalibrate; you helped me understand why I'm more recalibrated already. One, I'm a psychologist, and we've long been wondering about the rise in depression and anxiety over the last 50 years. I appreciate "lack of resentment of communal obligations due to their pretty egalitarian practices." I teach cross-cultural psychology; in class we try to figure out why people in traditional societies made sacrifices for each other; we talk about the ills of American hyperindividualism. My students note how Americans do superficial and low-cost shows of caring for each other, like, the norm of holding a door open for the stranger behind you (this practice is unexpected for my students from East Asia); but don't (as often) do deeper ones.
I have examples of how American culture worked over a century to reduce / mute natural human feelings of interdependence. By what was the advantage for reducing human natural communality; cut bono? Answer: It served the larger economy. remember that in mid-20th century the colossal company IBM was called "I've been moved." Industry needed workers who could be relocated to different branches around the country for just-in-time business needs.
Mechanisms for muting interdependence include forbidding bed-sharing between toddlers and family members. One mother on a toddler-sleep internet forum wrote (some years ago), "My mother in-law was always yelling at me not to bed-share because how would my son ever learn to be independent; well, he just shipped out to Afghanistan last week. "
My students note: Anglo-Americans go to college 1000 miles away from their home; more recent immigrants either live at home or attend college near by *because they want to see their family on weekends.* When a culture spends 18 years telling children to be independent and self-reliant, well, they'll grow up to be that way.
My students want hyperindividualism to end. Funny, we just had a two hour discussion about that in my other course, Psychology of Poverty, Wealth and Inequality. But a cultural change that took hundreds of years to produce can't be changed back to communalism and interdependence so easily.
I can see you respect some features of these insular fertile communities. But I expect that you have reservations about many other of their features. So you probably still have work to do.
Wait -- are you projecting stereotypes on me because I'm an educated American female (and college professor etc)? Why do that? No, I have no reservations about these cultural value; I strive to understand them and why those values stood the test of time; cui bono.
"Who benefits" is the body count in terms of building large populations. The body count is the reason for the success of patriarchy around the world: not just warrior culture that could over-run neighboring groups, but an emphasis on women having as many children as possible; chastity and restriction of sexual agency of women was necessary to ensure paternity certainty. I value and respect those cultural practices because I see how they led to a group's survival. I don't have work to do to learn to respect those practice. (I have even analyzed why some matriarchical societies -- very few -- were able to survive to the modern day, such as the Mosuo in China.)
Robin, you are confusing several issues: It is a separate question: do I, *right now*, as an individual human being with a life to live, do I want to live in one of those societies that restricted female sexual agency. I can say 'no' to that, yet still understand the value of traditional societies and patriarchy. In a science fiction future or alternative universe, I may run to one of those societies if my own non-patriarchical society was on the verge of dying out; had no food or safe water; and I had my own children to feed.
Catherine, your insights into the cultural dynamics of interdependence and individualism are fascinating. Given your background in psychology and cross-cultural studies, I'm curious about your perspective on Amish communities. How do you view their approach to communal living and interdependence, especially in contrast to the hyperindividualism prevalent in modern American society?
Hey thanks. My view is similar to what has emerged here in the comments by diverse people. As in the material I quoted from Hansom, one can admire the communality and happiness that emerges from an egalitarian society and the feeling of belonging; but not want a culture that is 'tight' (in Gelfand's sense) with rigid, traditional gender roles and without the excitement from living in a technological society.
But contra Hanson, I expect humanity to culturally evolve to a point where we can take the 'best' inventions from prior experimentation. We can be interdependent, communal, loose in social normals, tolerant to outgroups, innovative, and creative. Hansom underestimates how much women want to have children (I could say more on that, its a complex topic). Right now, status-seeking is the obstacle to attaining replacement fertility (as Yong et al. describe in one of my responses to Hanson).
Just thought of this connection... relates to my other comments about evolution: Evolution (of course blindly) selected for adults who were choosy and strategic about childbearing. Humans parent strategically. Humans walk away (abandon) a disabled newborn; women neglect/abandon/abort/miscarry when they lack resources. Women today are getting tons of signals that they lack the resources and social support for rearing children. And so they put off childbearing until they have those resources (which in today's world come from snagging a millionaire or having a well-paid career, both hard to achieve). Evoluton set up women to want children **if conditions are right.**. Our evolutionarily-mandated choosiness about when to parent, combined with contraception, is the reason for world-wide declines in fertility.
Human are barely 100 years from understanding how to control our fertility. It's not surprising many of nature's plans would blow up and fertility would plummet given such a massive invention.
"one can admire the communality and happiness that emerges from an egalitarian society and the feeling of belonging; but not want a culture that is 'tight' (in Gelfand's sense) with rigid, traditional gender roles and without the excitement from living in a technological society." This is exactly what I had in mind in suggesting that you hadn't fully recalibrated your respect.
As I already said, respect is different from "desire myself to live in that culture." When the world recalibrated its respect for Russia after WWII, people's desire to live in Russia or emulate Russian culture didn't increase in lock-step with their increase in respect. Countries like Egypt come to mind. Russia funded the Aswan Dam. Egyptians respected the success, power, global influence and technological prowess of Russia, but didn't want to import its cultural values (much of that due to the atheism associated with communism). Of course, for many people around the world, respect for and desire to emulate Russia were more concordant; one hears that India during the cold war was at least a partial example .
Catherine, thank you for sharing your perspective. It's interesting how you envision a future where humanity can integrate the best elements from various cultural experiments to create a more interdependent, innovative, and tolerant society. Your thoughts on the strategic nature of human parenting and the impact of modern conditions on fertility choices add a significant dimension to this discussion.
I hold a conviction that the advent of advanced artificial intelligences with human-like capabilities will be pivotal in averting a potential collapse of humanity in the next 20 to 50 years, particularly concerning population decline. These intelligences, possessing the ability to think, learn, and adapt in ways akin to human cognition, yet with the enhanced processing and analytical capacities of machines, could offer innovative solutions to complex global challenges. While I'm aware that this perspective diverges from Robin's, I believe that the integration of these sophisticated, human-like computational entities into our societal framework could be a key factor in sustaining and advancing human civilization in the face of impending challenges.
Additionally, I think the cultural changes you envision will be critical as well. The synthesis of communal interdependence with innovation and tolerance, as you describe, could form a foundational aspect of a more resilient and harmonious society. This cultural evolution, in tandem with the advancements in human-like artificial intelligences, could significantly enhance our collective ability to address and adapt to future challenges.
I've come to believe that such societies can only exist if they control girl/women's access to education and control of our bodies (denied access Contraception, inability to control men's sexual access to our bodies). Typically the higher the education women have access to, the lower the fertility rate which is why many experts say the number one thing all countries can do in the fight against climaten change is to educate girls.
You want to learn how to respect the denial of education to women, denial of access to contraception, denial of women's ability to control men's sexual access to their bodies?
I think he is a typical bro who thinks in extremes perhaps it's either all Christian egalitarian or high tech. While many of us seculars are able to grow our own food while using tehcnology moderately. Most human societies are moderate and not radical or extreme because extreme living requires a large amount of effort in brain Washing to the cause.
Did you just discover Hanson this week? His hopes for humanity are transhumanist, and a sustainable tech-moderate human future would prevent precisely the kind of innovation that he wants.
Hanson a 'bro' who can't think in nuance? Please educate yourself before leaving comments.
Why bother trying to respect innovation-resistant, high fertility, tiny subcultures then? If they do actually win out after a few centuries, then that would seem nothing worth celebrating.
'Discover Hanson' gawd you bros really reach for self importance as if this creep is some important critical thinker. Hahahahahah. Laughable. We've all be hearing his garbage since freshmen in college circa 1992.
That correlation exists, yes. It's also the case that educating women is a symptom of widespread social changes of other sorts. "Education" is coded as a supreme good in what RH is here calling "the old world', and to assume it is itself sufficient reflects that coding.
Israel has high fertility and their women seem pretty educated.
I will posit something different. Women generally and low fertility habits specifically are heavily subsidized by most modern states. This is done to buy votes and because it provides temporary increases in GDP per capita.
Recalibrating respect... I’ve noticed in myself, this last year, a recalibration of respect in regard to women and men, who have many children and like them. A friend’s daughter, still studying, got married at age 20 and had her first child. I admire her more than her peers who just study, works and parties. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and mother of seven children, I respect more than a childless career woman or mother of just two children... Ursula von der Leyen herself comes from a family of seven children, and one of her brothers, Hans-Holger Albrecht is also known to have seven children. I wonder, whether a non-insular culture that lavished admiration, status and prestige on high-energy, capable women with several children and thought a lot less of or even held childless, selfish career women in contempt, couldn’t also be a viable culture/civilisation of the future?
You rightfully caveat the entire fertility thesis with “provided that AI /Ems doesn’t change everything”, but of course that is a very high possibility within this century, fast enough
Similarly, I fear you are underweighting the impact of change (cultural, technological), which might overwhelm fertility trends:
1. A fall in population will likely mean a fall in real estate costs, which are one of the sources of high costs of children. Reducing real estate costs will likely increase fertility
2. Similarly, many new techs are coming that are likely going to dramatically undercut parenting costs: remote work allows larger families (and many generations living in community), self-driving cars make small cars less of a problem (cars are shared, so the CAPEX is amortized across more people), artificial wombs, AI tutors... all these will come before the fertility drop will grind innovation to a halt
3. you’re assuming automation can’t make up for the reduction in innovation from fewer humans. Given the progress of AI, this might be a false assumption.
4. The sub-cultures you discuss are frequently possible within bigger cultures that support them, especially with defense. Take the defense away and such communities can easily be overwhelmed. Let’s see what happens to the Haredi culture in 30 years. My guess is it will either evolve or be suppressed (probably by Israelis, maybe by Arabs)
5. Such sub-cultures don’t scale. They fundamentally change as they become bigger. Equality notoriously doesn’t scale well.
I agree full human level AI would prevent the population and econ fall. But AI far short of that won't make much difference. I think subcultures can reasonably adapt as they change their fraction of a population. Seems to me fertility will fall in all the poor nation as they get rich.
Japan has had a shrinking population for a while, and there's enough construction in Tokyo to prevent the high real estate prices there found in other megacities. But their fertility has remained below replacement.
- my point is not that any single one of these changes will overpower the fertility drop, but rather that there are so many of these potential changes that fearing decades / centuries in advance of the problem really hitting appears like an overreaction.
- changes in fertility attitudes are generational. You need at least a generation of falling prices for this to affect fertility rates.
True but afaik most precedents (eg Rome) were in low-change-rate times. Now fertility changes faster. Eg the current crash was unprecedentedly fast afaik. The baby boom was quite fast.
Conversely, I don’t think you need AGI to solve this. Good enough ANIs can solve it.
The economic aspect can be solved by lowering the cost of child rearing: genetic engineering, artificial wombs, AI tutors, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, remote work to gather families, and cheaper real estate through a smaller population will all together cut dramatically our fertility costs. If this is the main root cause of low fertility, it will reasonably be solved.
The cultural component is another matter. It has been proven to be overcomable (Georgia), by increasing the number of children of families who already have children.
France was first modern fertility decline, many French lamented it, but France still declined as % of Europe. In 1905 US president said biggest US problem was Catholics outbreeding Protestants, but they didn't fix that, though it eventually changed for other reasons.
Robin, your transparent reflection on the difficulty of internalizing admiration for the Amish lifestyle, despite acknowledging its potential future significance, strikes a chord. It mirrors a universal human quandary: the effort to align our intellectual comprehension with emotional resonance, particularly in the context of lifestyles and cultures that diverge markedly from our own experiences. This interplay between cognitive recognition and emotional assimilation forms a pivotal element of human understanding and empathy. Your willingness to share this inner conflict not only adds depth to the conversation but also invites introspection.
In the early 2000s, I found Beverly Lewis' "The Secret Keeper" from her Home to Hickory Hollow series particularly insightful. This novel delves into the complexities of Amish life, juxtaposing it against the allure of the modern world. It follows the story of a young Amish woman grappling with the secrets and traditions of her community, while also being drawn to the freedoms of the outside world. This narrative could offer you a nuanced perspective on the Amish community's adherence to tradition in the face of modern societal pressures. Lewis' portrayal might help in bridging the gap between intellectual appreciation and emotional understanding, providing a deeper insight into the Amish way of life and its stark contrast to contemporary living.
> And even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate pushes me to recalibrate my respect.
It's not at all obvious to me that this is the correct move. It is true that humans tend to respect and admire those who succeed, and the features they suppose to have led to that success. And it's clear how and why such a tendency arose through cultural evolution. However, understanding the mechanism that produces a particular opinion does not give us a reason to hold that opinion ourselves.
The "admire the successful" dynamic is flawed in many obvious ways. It is noisy, especially susceptible to arbitrary network effects that lead to the volatile idol worship of celebrity culture. It is easy to imagine bundles of values (like blind obedience to authority coupled with high fecundity) that might lead to success in terms of propagation and stability in the medium term, but that would be disastrous for long-term propagation and stability because they suppress innovation and discovery. It is even plausible to me that some such societies could thrive in the medium term by being parasitic on other, less stable cultures which produce more genuine wealth and innovation.
I noticed a similar move in your discussion of "fertile factions" where you give an explanation for why a particular value preference might become widely held as a reason to hold it. I was confused then and I am confused now.
Far better, in my opinion, for people such as yourself, who seek to understand the mechanisms by which values, opinions, and preferences emerge and propagate, to attempt to see beyond these mechanisms to perceive, however vaguely, the kinds of values we ought to have, and why.
In a future dominated by stable and fecund, but boring and insular cultures, I would much rather be someone who figured out how to help preserve, and hasten the re-appearance of, the values that lead to genuine, long-term success, rather than someone who was early to adopt bad-but-self-perpetuating values.
I would like to convince you of a weaker claim, that being self-perpetuating isn't, by itself, a compelling reason to adopt a value. On the other hand, being self-improving, or capable of being part of a self-improving network of values, does seem to me to be such a compelling reason. Values such as love of truth, tolerance of criticism, respect for innovation, admiration of creativity, commitment to incremental, evolutionary improvement, dislike of hypocrisy, fear of static, inflexible equilibria, these seem to me to be naturally "Hansonian" values, and they seem to me to be self-perpetuating in a deeper, more dynamic way then the zombie values of authoritarian birth cults.
After all, they are the values that led you to have this insight about values in the first place!
How do you view values that support the existence of one group via exterminating their outgroup (can include exploiting via slavery)? We can describe three outcomes of intergroup competition. Group A exterminates group B; total human population halved. Group A exterminates B, and replaces group B by using their resources. The third outcome, similar to the former, except Group B had knolwedge/values that allowed it to use B's resources (including enslaving them) to yield a population size that is larger than the original size of A and B.
I'd prefer to exist without having to make others not exist, but sometimes there are existence conflicts, and in those cases I choose existence for "my" side.
After posting I gave it some more thought and landed up at the question you’re posing in your reply. The answer is uncomfortable though. In the end a community has to tell itself that it’s way of life is better than that of the outsiders.
Ultimately you're respecting only power. The faction that you see as winning - the more powerful faction - receives your approval. If Nazi Germany had won WW2, would Nazi Germany have received your approval as well?
If a plague destroyed humanity, would you view *the plague* with approval, because it won and humanity lost?
What matters more than power is how the power is used. If the power is used to enlighten and raise up humanity, and solve our collective problems, then it is good. If the power is used to oppress and deceive humanity, then it is bad. Fundamentalist religious communities oppress and deceive their members, because fundamentalist religion is actually just incorrect. Even if that brings them power, it does not make them good. (This oppression and deception *may* bring them happiness, but whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth.)
Anyway I don't think it will bring them power in the long run. The technological people - the ones with guns and tanks - are cruel enough to massacre the fundamentalists who just have high population, if it comes to a conflict. Declining population in the technological society won't be a serious problem for hundreds of years even if it does follow your prediction. Meanwhile, the threat from AGI is far more severe and urgent.
Indeed they would have. But anyone who participated in giving them that respect (and there would be plenty) would be doing something very wrong. Because the Nazis were evil, and that doesn't depend on whether they won. A philosophy that leads you to endorse evil, provided that evil prevails - which is the logical consequence of Hanson's statements here - is a bad philosophy.
You don't think technological society would massacre the Amish only because you aren't picturing what it would be like if the Amish were numerous enough to be in severe land and resource competition with the technological society. In that scenario, at least borders would be drawn to contain the Amish, and it would be like the containment of Gaza, in that you have a high-tech society living next to and competing with a poor, low-tech society that opposes it. There would be violent conflicts and massacres, similar to what's happening in Gaza. The poor, low-tech side never comes out ahead in such conflicts.
If I extrapolate forward, the rural areas will be depleted of technological people, leaving just the Amish to farm all the farmland. The technological people will leave them to that, competing with the Amish when there are too many Amish people for them all to fit in low-tech areas. At that point "massacring" the people they depend on for food wouldn't be sensible for tech society. Instead they would be like aristocrats of old hoping to extract food from the peasant majority. Perhaps they might institute something like the Chinese system for limiting migration from rural areas to cities. However, I also believe that pacifism is not an ESS. If a heretical strain of Amish start rejecting it and seizing their (also Amish) neighbor's land, they could run rampant and adopting more tech-friendly beliefs than their neighbors could help there (many Haredim are able to remain insular & fertile while not prohibiting tech).
Do you know the differential fertility rates between the old school Amish (no electricity) and the new Amish (basically running shops and wearing colorful clothing, some seem in it to avoid taxes).
Amish farming techniques can't economically compete with industrial farming operations. So there will continue to be industrial farming operations producing the vast majority of the food consumed by the technological society. They won't be depending on the Amish.
The rural areas will not be depleted of technological people. Or rather, the rural areas will have few technological people, but those relatively few people will occupy large amounts of land, just as they do now, in big country estates or industrial farming operations. They will use deadly force if necessary to prevent the poor from squatting on their property (as they do now).
The Amish culture will certainly change in response to these challenges. For one thing, they will send their excess children out of Amish culture to live in the cities. There, the children are no longer living as Amish, and instead will serve to drive up the population of and increase the power of the technological society.
> Because the Nazis were evil, and that doesn't depend on whether they won.
The issue is that, if the Nazis had won, we'd know them to be ruthless, but we wouldn't know the extent of their evil. Post-war all evidence to their death camps would be utterly erased. Their racist policies would continue for decades, and we'd be able to point at those do despise it. But they'd likely be economically very powerful, and so commercial and diplomatic agreements would have been set, and life would go on. It'd basically be a situation similar to the one the West has towards China.
Afterwards, it's likely that, as older generations of the Nazi leadership died of natural deaths, the following generations would care less for racial policies. The 2023 of a successful Nazi WW2, four generations removed from the war itself, would look in some ways akin to how things were in the 19th century: colonial powers, oppression of native populations under the guise of "white men's burden", that kind of thing. Socially we'd be 200 years behind where we are. And, unfortunately, it'd be anyone's guess whether socially things would start moving towards where we currently are here in the real world, only much later, or if they'd go in even worse directions.
But it's a fact their evil ideology would by this point have been normalized. There'd be statues of Nazi leaders all over Europe, and even if historians were learning right now of Auschwitz, Treblinka etc. by perusing surviving Nazi records after some alternate German version of Glasnost, current Nazi-descendant German leadership would likely hand-wave all of that under the guise of "they were great men who committed some errors, but we cannot forget their great deeds due to those" etc. etc.
And most everyone would either pretend to be fine with that, or be literally fine with that, because a Great Germany Europe would be too important for anyone not to be okay-ish with it.
The evilness of Nazi germany would depend on their ability to forge a successful post war state.
That’s the most dubious part. Their economics and politics were pretty fucked up. And there was an element to the ideology that demanded constant warfare as a good in and of itself.
Much less crazy fascist movements like Franco or Peron were stagnant at best.
So Nazi germany isn’t just “manifest destiny for the Germans where the slavs are their native Americans, but otherwise like us.” WW1 Germany might have been a bit closer to that, but the nazies were wacko violent socialist wierdoes.
I read an alternative fiction book one time where they have the nazies get all the breaks. They conquer Russia to the urals and end up in a Cold War with the Anglos, but it’s not stable. Ultimately the war goes hot again in the 1950s. The anglos still win but with even more destruction and death then in our original timeline.
I agree with you broadly, but I think a far greater threat is climate change, not AI. And in case, I’m skeptical about robin’s doomerism about population death. 8 billion is enough
What’s the best of these documentaries that you have seen? I’m kinda curious about the topic, especially having a bunch of Mennonite ancestors, but not curious enough to go seriously research things, more like the level of curiosity that would lead me to watch one documentary.
I've watched quite a lot of stuff over the years, a favourite I just rewatched was https://youtu.be/qdyVNoazurI?si=QLKRHi1Jqce_TUWE , There's something quite funny imagining these people in the middle of some random jungle in Peru, deciding whether or not to ostracize people for using phones or what crops to plant etc. whilst being completely oblivious to the fact that a great number of technophiles all over the world are preparing to bow down to them as our future overlords, or something like that.
How innovative have the Amish or Hasids been? These societies are only able to enjoy such high fertility rates because of innovations made by the very modern societies currently suffering fertility crises, so while emulating them may boost our fertility rates, it's doubtful it would do so in a way that would permit us to be innovative.
After World War II people recalibrated their respect toward capitalism and communism and away from fascism, but as a moral stance that was incoherent, and as a practical stance, it was even more so.
People do shift their moral compass and their offering of respect away from groups they perceive as losers and toward groups they perceive as winners, but that doesn't mean that they should. It particularly does not mean that somebody who studies all the way in which this psychological tic plays out in public policy, often in appalling and destructive ways, should fall into the same trap.
There is, after all, another group who are quite reproductively successful in the modern world: people with poor impulse control. Will you also start watching "16 and Pregnant" so you can absorb the secrets of their success? Shall we upgrade our respect for poor understanding of birth control, promiscuity, and backseats of Chevys?
If you don’t want idiocy you gotta figure out a way to get the people who like to have more kids.
There is something to “people shouldn’t be more impulsive”. Like it’s pretty clear to me that a lot of smart people would do just fine if they married at 25 and got cracking on kids. Or supervised them less so they could handle more.
I think this is the point you might want to connect your Sacred series of posts with this specific topic, with the notion of what makes religious sacred thingies into sacred thingies, as opposed to non-religious types of sacred.
In a gross over-generalization, "numinous" is that which religious people sensorially perceive when they get into contact with whatever it is that causes that feeling in them. It's a qualia without a corresponding measurable quanta, so from an objective reductionist perspective it isn't really there, but for those who perceive it, it definitely is, and that perception in turn strongly motivates them into supporting whatever it is that accounts for and makes sense of it.
Numinous perception may be an inheritable trait. Small insular communities who are also strongly religious may be the later due to everyone in there inheriting it and this binding them together more powerfully than extrinsic cultural or behavioral factors might, the later being more accessories to that perceptual binding than fundamental causes of their distinction.
If that's the case, then the first aspect to recalibrate for would be admiration towards the possession of numinous perception as a core precondition for high-fertility social arrangements, even if it alone isn't by itself enough, meaning admiration for a trait most religious people have, and most non-religious people may either lack, or even have, but redirected towards non-religious or weak-religious explanatory worldviews.
I can see that there must be something about religion we should credit for the fertility of the insular high fertility subcultures, but it isn't obvious that "numinous" is the key to that.
It's an interesting turn from the earlier post; going from a sense that distasteful communities might win in the end - the sort of 'cockroach after global thermonuclear war' vision - to the idea that virtue might actually be grounded in sustainability and health, and thus evidence of sustainability should guide the search for the aesthetic.
I am glad you continue to pursue this train of thought, but after spending most of my adult life studying progress, I am not following you. I can certainly see why the rate of progress and productivity might be expected to decrease with a smaller and older population, but I think it is jump to suggest it will stop, let alone drop.
The essential constricted source is new ideas. Here, historically, a tiny percent of people in a small share of nations have done all the heavy lifting. As the population drops, all that is needed is to make sure some people in some places continue to be rewarded for knowledge creation, innovation and entrepreneurial experimentation. I think this is very likely to be the case, and the total number of innovators in a century will be greater than it is even today, but certainly more than most of the 19th and 20th centuries which saw rapid growth.
What factors contribute to the rate of progress:
1) The population
2) The percent of the population capable of innovation (intelligence, specialization, education, freedom)
3) The rate of innovation based upon institutions and technologies to discover, test and select good from bad
4) The ability of ideas to propagate and spread once discovered (communication and transportation)
5) The ability of the population to work together and compete constructively to solve problems and NOT create problems for each other (positive vs negative sum)
6) The availability of cheap energy to drive the above
If I understand your position, you are focusing on #1. I think the others are just as, or more important, and these are not necessarily getting worse, and will quite possibly get better. Some (#3,4 and 6?) may get incomparably better. With smart AI and fusion, our problem is more likely to be excessive speed of change, not stagnation.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
The summary of the Jones paper specifically warns this isn’t a forecast and that other factors such as technology and AI could offset this force. My take on their conclusion is that this is a growth headwind, which I agree with. But they specifically mention they are setting aside quality considerations (what is the value of one educated person vs twenty uneducated ones?) and I would add that their useful but oversimplified model ignores institutions, technology, energy availability, the entrant of 6 billion people from previously undeveloped nations and other many other factors.
Is this something we should be concerned about? Sure. Is it a reasonable and comprehensive projection of our future? Not necessarily.
It is food for thought and a starting place for better and more complex models tested against reality.
You see other possible relevant factors, and so you hope that somehow something there will save us. But we have already long been trying to improve those factors with only limited success. Not obvious why we'd have more success at innovation there than we had before in a new smaller world.
I am of course not sure about anything, but I think cheap clean energy sources and problem solving AI and a couple of billion educated people in Asia might offset lower populations in the West. Seems like we have a handful of negative forces against progress and a handful of positive forces. The future will be determined by how they play out.
I think you may be missing the magnitude of the change. It's one thing to think that there will be stagnation in the total population, leveling, or a few percent drop. It's another to foresee an order of magnitude decline. Then number 2, which may be in the 'long tails,' changes radically as do the institutions, the spread, and just about everything else you mention.
If the magnitude of the change is large enough and if all else remains the same, then I agree. What we are not sure of are those two ifs.
As a side note, I spent a career in business creating new financial products. To "sell" the idea to top brass we always made sets of assumptions and then had teams of actuaries and finance people create 50 pages of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations proving how well (or poorly) the product would perform. I called it "mathturbation". Most of the work was done based upon the quality and thoroughness of our assumptions, with the mathematicians just blessing it (or not) with numbers. I feel the same way about this paper. Great math, questionable assumptions.
The hypothesis that economic growth comes on the back of population growth, and vice versa, is known as the Boom Town Effect. But the population crash follows the economic crash, when the gold runs out and the town dies. An economy is measured by consumption of goods and services. A smaller population eats less and consumes fewer durable goods. That is the physical constraint imagined by the Limits to Growth people. But the consumer surplus is measured by value added, and with services the physical constraint becomes insignificant. Innovation will never collapse; it is driven by competition.
Also, just because you've found one trait where Amish style cultures have an advantage doesn't tell you that they are overall advantaged. Quite plausibly the reason they haven't been engines of economic growth is that they lack beneficial (or even have harmful) traits in other areas.
So it seems weird to recalibrate respect until we actually see what comes out on top. Quite plausibly what will happen is that either some fusion of the cultures will be necessary or some totally new culture will come to dominate.
You've already recalibrated respect for having a high birthrate but beyond that I don't see why you would want to increase respect for these subcultures since, for all you know, you are boosting respect for the aspects of the subculture that have inhibited their economic growth.
The "one" advantage of not being on track to go extinct is a pretty big deal.
I think you are confusing different levels. A trait like maintaining high fertility is akin to a gene or a small packet of genes. A culture is akin to a racial group (meaning a subgroup that is currently more likely to breed within than without)
Back in prehistory knowing that the gene for adult lactase would eventually dominate the gene pool wouldn't tell you that the group which had that gene will dominate -- just that when they mixed with other groups that gene would get selected for. It certainly doesn't let you say that the gene package of the nomads on the step with that gene is superior to that of the celts or Greeks. They all may carry genes that will prove vital or even essential to humans in 5,000 years.
And memes are even better at recombining than genes.
What are you claiming is/isn't on track to go extinct? Since the culture that dominates in future will plausibly be some mix of our culture and their culture you can't say they won't go extinct and we will. And even if you knew it was *some* agrian high fertility culture that will dominate you don't know which so you don't know anything like that.
Heck, maybe we eventually reach equilibrium where an Amish culture pushes out babies who then switch to a low fertility culture frequently.
I will posit a negative recalibration.
When I went to STEM magnet school with a bunch of East Asians in high school in the 90s, I had a high estimate of East Asian culture.
Today its economy has been stagnant for two decades and its TFR has cut in half.
I’ve done the same thing in reverse, what about East Asian culture has caused such a failure mode.
Wow, I really like this! Regarding: "raw emotional energy due to adults being surrounded and respected by so many basically happy children, kids who are themselves happy due to being around so many other kids. I can see a strong communal bond and lack of resentment of communal obligations due to their pretty egalitarian practices and strong communal autonomy..."
I appreciate what you said about having to recalibrate; you helped me understand why I'm more recalibrated already. One, I'm a psychologist, and we've long been wondering about the rise in depression and anxiety over the last 50 years. I appreciate "lack of resentment of communal obligations due to their pretty egalitarian practices." I teach cross-cultural psychology; in class we try to figure out why people in traditional societies made sacrifices for each other; we talk about the ills of American hyperindividualism. My students note how Americans do superficial and low-cost shows of caring for each other, like, the norm of holding a door open for the stranger behind you (this practice is unexpected for my students from East Asia); but don't (as often) do deeper ones.
I have examples of how American culture worked over a century to reduce / mute natural human feelings of interdependence. By what was the advantage for reducing human natural communality; cut bono? Answer: It served the larger economy. remember that in mid-20th century the colossal company IBM was called "I've been moved." Industry needed workers who could be relocated to different branches around the country for just-in-time business needs.
Mechanisms for muting interdependence include forbidding bed-sharing between toddlers and family members. One mother on a toddler-sleep internet forum wrote (some years ago), "My mother in-law was always yelling at me not to bed-share because how would my son ever learn to be independent; well, he just shipped out to Afghanistan last week. "
My students note: Anglo-Americans go to college 1000 miles away from their home; more recent immigrants either live at home or attend college near by *because they want to see their family on weekends.* When a culture spends 18 years telling children to be independent and self-reliant, well, they'll grow up to be that way.
My students want hyperindividualism to end. Funny, we just had a two hour discussion about that in my other course, Psychology of Poverty, Wealth and Inequality. But a cultural change that took hundreds of years to produce can't be changed back to communalism and interdependence so easily.
I can see you respect some features of these insular fertile communities. But I expect that you have reservations about many other of their features. So you probably still have work to do.
Wait -- are you projecting stereotypes on me because I'm an educated American female (and college professor etc)? Why do that? No, I have no reservations about these cultural value; I strive to understand them and why those values stood the test of time; cui bono.
"Who benefits" is the body count in terms of building large populations. The body count is the reason for the success of patriarchy around the world: not just warrior culture that could over-run neighboring groups, but an emphasis on women having as many children as possible; chastity and restriction of sexual agency of women was necessary to ensure paternity certainty. I value and respect those cultural practices because I see how they led to a group's survival. I don't have work to do to learn to respect those practice. (I have even analyzed why some matriarchical societies -- very few -- were able to survive to the modern day, such as the Mosuo in China.)
Robin, you are confusing several issues: It is a separate question: do I, *right now*, as an individual human being with a life to live, do I want to live in one of those societies that restricted female sexual agency. I can say 'no' to that, yet still understand the value of traditional societies and patriarchy. In a science fiction future or alternative universe, I may run to one of those societies if my own non-patriarchical society was on the verge of dying out; had no food or safe water; and I had my own children to feed.
I am happy to stand corrected.
Catherine, your insights into the cultural dynamics of interdependence and individualism are fascinating. Given your background in psychology and cross-cultural studies, I'm curious about your perspective on Amish communities. How do you view their approach to communal living and interdependence, especially in contrast to the hyperindividualism prevalent in modern American society?
Hey thanks. My view is similar to what has emerged here in the comments by diverse people. As in the material I quoted from Hansom, one can admire the communality and happiness that emerges from an egalitarian society and the feeling of belonging; but not want a culture that is 'tight' (in Gelfand's sense) with rigid, traditional gender roles and without the excitement from living in a technological society.
But contra Hanson, I expect humanity to culturally evolve to a point where we can take the 'best' inventions from prior experimentation. We can be interdependent, communal, loose in social normals, tolerant to outgroups, innovative, and creative. Hansom underestimates how much women want to have children (I could say more on that, its a complex topic). Right now, status-seeking is the obstacle to attaining replacement fertility (as Yong et al. describe in one of my responses to Hanson).
Just thought of this connection... relates to my other comments about evolution: Evolution (of course blindly) selected for adults who were choosy and strategic about childbearing. Humans parent strategically. Humans walk away (abandon) a disabled newborn; women neglect/abandon/abort/miscarry when they lack resources. Women today are getting tons of signals that they lack the resources and social support for rearing children. And so they put off childbearing until they have those resources (which in today's world come from snagging a millionaire or having a well-paid career, both hard to achieve). Evoluton set up women to want children **if conditions are right.**. Our evolutionarily-mandated choosiness about when to parent, combined with contraception, is the reason for world-wide declines in fertility.
Human are barely 100 years from understanding how to control our fertility. It's not surprising many of nature's plans would blow up and fertility would plummet given such a massive invention.
"one can admire the communality and happiness that emerges from an egalitarian society and the feeling of belonging; but not want a culture that is 'tight' (in Gelfand's sense) with rigid, traditional gender roles and without the excitement from living in a technological society." This is exactly what I had in mind in suggesting that you hadn't fully recalibrated your respect.
As I already said, respect is different from "desire myself to live in that culture." When the world recalibrated its respect for Russia after WWII, people's desire to live in Russia or emulate Russian culture didn't increase in lock-step with their increase in respect. Countries like Egypt come to mind. Russia funded the Aswan Dam. Egyptians respected the success, power, global influence and technological prowess of Russia, but didn't want to import its cultural values (much of that due to the atheism associated with communism). Of course, for many people around the world, respect for and desire to emulate Russia were more concordant; one hears that India during the cold war was at least a partial example .
Catherine, thank you for sharing your perspective. It's interesting how you envision a future where humanity can integrate the best elements from various cultural experiments to create a more interdependent, innovative, and tolerant society. Your thoughts on the strategic nature of human parenting and the impact of modern conditions on fertility choices add a significant dimension to this discussion.
I hold a conviction that the advent of advanced artificial intelligences with human-like capabilities will be pivotal in averting a potential collapse of humanity in the next 20 to 50 years, particularly concerning population decline. These intelligences, possessing the ability to think, learn, and adapt in ways akin to human cognition, yet with the enhanced processing and analytical capacities of machines, could offer innovative solutions to complex global challenges. While I'm aware that this perspective diverges from Robin's, I believe that the integration of these sophisticated, human-like computational entities into our societal framework could be a key factor in sustaining and advancing human civilization in the face of impending challenges.
Additionally, I think the cultural changes you envision will be critical as well. The synthesis of communal interdependence with innovation and tolerance, as you describe, could form a foundational aspect of a more resilient and harmonious society. This cultural evolution, in tandem with the advancements in human-like artificial intelligences, could significantly enhance our collective ability to address and adapt to future challenges.
I've come to believe that such societies can only exist if they control girl/women's access to education and control of our bodies (denied access Contraception, inability to control men's sexual access to our bodies). Typically the higher the education women have access to, the lower the fertility rate which is why many experts say the number one thing all countries can do in the fight against climaten change is to educate girls.
If so, then I want to learn how to better respect such controls.
You want to learn how to respect the denial of education to women, denial of access to contraception, denial of women's ability to control men's sexual access to their bodies?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Bro, you gotta put in a qualifying statement of empathy before making a comment like that. I'm all for radicalism but you gotta read the room.
Her comment didn't include any qualifying statements of empathy; why hold mine to a different standard?
You're the baby boy victim, right?
I think he is a typical bro who thinks in extremes perhaps it's either all Christian egalitarian or high tech. While many of us seculars are able to grow our own food while using tehcnology moderately. Most human societies are moderate and not radical or extreme because extreme living requires a large amount of effort in brain Washing to the cause.
Did you just discover Hanson this week? His hopes for humanity are transhumanist, and a sustainable tech-moderate human future would prevent precisely the kind of innovation that he wants.
Hanson a 'bro' who can't think in nuance? Please educate yourself before leaving comments.
Why bother trying to respect innovation-resistant, high fertility, tiny subcultures then? If they do actually win out after a few centuries, then that would seem nothing worth celebrating.
'Educate yourself' hahahahahaha.
I thought you would appreciate that given your apparent love for women's education. You should be the change you wish to see in the world.
'Discover Hanson' gawd you bros really reach for self importance as if this creep is some important critical thinker. Hahahahahah. Laughable. We've all be hearing his garbage since freshmen in college circa 1992.
That correlation exists, yes. It's also the case that educating women is a symptom of widespread social changes of other sorts. "Education" is coded as a supreme good in what RH is here calling "the old world', and to assume it is itself sufficient reflects that coding.
Gross
Israel has high fertility and their women seem pretty educated.
I will posit something different. Women generally and low fertility habits specifically are heavily subsidized by most modern states. This is done to buy votes and because it provides temporary increases in GDP per capita.
Recalibrating respect... I’ve noticed in myself, this last year, a recalibration of respect in regard to women and men, who have many children and like them. A friend’s daughter, still studying, got married at age 20 and had her first child. I admire her more than her peers who just study, works and parties. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and mother of seven children, I respect more than a childless career woman or mother of just two children... Ursula von der Leyen herself comes from a family of seven children, and one of her brothers, Hans-Holger Albrecht is also known to have seven children. I wonder, whether a non-insular culture that lavished admiration, status and prestige on high-energy, capable women with several children and thought a lot less of or even held childless, selfish career women in contempt, couldn’t also be a viable culture/civilisation of the future?
No deviant non-insular culture is viable if it cannot convert the dominant world culture to its ways.
Nancy Pelosi, 5 children, said no achievement of her life compared to having a child.
You rightfully caveat the entire fertility thesis with “provided that AI /Ems doesn’t change everything”, but of course that is a very high possibility within this century, fast enough
Similarly, I fear you are underweighting the impact of change (cultural, technological), which might overwhelm fertility trends:
1. A fall in population will likely mean a fall in real estate costs, which are one of the sources of high costs of children. Reducing real estate costs will likely increase fertility
2. Similarly, many new techs are coming that are likely going to dramatically undercut parenting costs: remote work allows larger families (and many generations living in community), self-driving cars make small cars less of a problem (cars are shared, so the CAPEX is amortized across more people), artificial wombs, AI tutors... all these will come before the fertility drop will grind innovation to a halt
3. you’re assuming automation can’t make up for the reduction in innovation from fewer humans. Given the progress of AI, this might be a false assumption.
4. The sub-cultures you discuss are frequently possible within bigger cultures that support them, especially with defense. Take the defense away and such communities can easily be overwhelmed. Let’s see what happens to the Haredi culture in 30 years. My guess is it will either evolve or be suppressed (probably by Israelis, maybe by Arabs)
5. Such sub-cultures don’t scale. They fundamentally change as they become bigger. Equality notoriously doesn’t scale well.
6. Final side note: it doesn’t look like all Arab countries will fall below 2 children per woman. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=USA~FRA~MAR~DZA~SAU~EGY~LBY~SYR
In summary, it looks like so much can happen that worrying about such a long-term issue as existential for humanity seems overweighting its risk?
I agree full human level AI would prevent the population and econ fall. But AI far short of that won't make much difference. I think subcultures can reasonably adapt as they change their fraction of a population. Seems to me fertility will fall in all the poor nation as they get rich.
Japan has had a shrinking population for a while, and there's enough construction in Tokyo to prevent the high real estate prices there found in other megacities. But their fertility has remained below replacement.
Yeah, that's Tokyo. Elsewhere in Japan, people are now being attacked by bears.
I didn't even know Japan had wild bears.
Yes but:
- my point is not that any single one of these changes will overpower the fertility drop, but rather that there are so many of these potential changes that fearing decades / centuries in advance of the problem really hitting appears like an overreaction.
- changes in fertility attitudes are generational. You need at least a generation of falling prices for this to affect fertility rates.
But history shows that such fertility problems tend to be long lasting and not get fixed even when many lament them and try to fix them.
True but afaik most precedents (eg Rome) were in low-change-rate times. Now fertility changes faster. Eg the current crash was unprecedentedly fast afaik. The baby boom was quite fast.
Conversely, I don’t think you need AGI to solve this. Good enough ANIs can solve it.
The economic aspect can be solved by lowering the cost of child rearing: genetic engineering, artificial wombs, AI tutors, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, remote work to gather families, and cheaper real estate through a smaller population will all together cut dramatically our fertility costs. If this is the main root cause of low fertility, it will reasonably be solved.
The cultural component is another matter. It has been proven to be overcomable (Georgia), by increasing the number of children of families who already have children.
France was first modern fertility decline, many French lamented it, but France still declined as % of Europe. In 1905 US president said biggest US problem was Catholics outbreeding Protestants, but they didn't fix that, though it eventually changed for other reasons.
What is ANI?
I'm guessing artificial narrow intelligence
Robin, your transparent reflection on the difficulty of internalizing admiration for the Amish lifestyle, despite acknowledging its potential future significance, strikes a chord. It mirrors a universal human quandary: the effort to align our intellectual comprehension with emotional resonance, particularly in the context of lifestyles and cultures that diverge markedly from our own experiences. This interplay between cognitive recognition and emotional assimilation forms a pivotal element of human understanding and empathy. Your willingness to share this inner conflict not only adds depth to the conversation but also invites introspection.
In the early 2000s, I found Beverly Lewis' "The Secret Keeper" from her Home to Hickory Hollow series particularly insightful. This novel delves into the complexities of Amish life, juxtaposing it against the allure of the modern world. It follows the story of a young Amish woman grappling with the secrets and traditions of her community, while also being drawn to the freedoms of the outside world. This narrative could offer you a nuanced perspective on the Amish community's adherence to tradition in the face of modern societal pressures. Lewis' portrayal might help in bridging the gap between intellectual appreciation and emotional understanding, providing a deeper insight into the Amish way of life and its stark contrast to contemporary living.
Thanks for the specific suggestion.
> And even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate pushes me to recalibrate my respect.
It's not at all obvious to me that this is the correct move. It is true that humans tend to respect and admire those who succeed, and the features they suppose to have led to that success. And it's clear how and why such a tendency arose through cultural evolution. However, understanding the mechanism that produces a particular opinion does not give us a reason to hold that opinion ourselves.
The "admire the successful" dynamic is flawed in many obvious ways. It is noisy, especially susceptible to arbitrary network effects that lead to the volatile idol worship of celebrity culture. It is easy to imagine bundles of values (like blind obedience to authority coupled with high fecundity) that might lead to success in terms of propagation and stability in the medium term, but that would be disastrous for long-term propagation and stability because they suppress innovation and discovery. It is even plausible to me that some such societies could thrive in the medium term by being parasitic on other, less stable cultures which produce more genuine wealth and innovation.
I noticed a similar move in your discussion of "fertile factions" where you give an explanation for why a particular value preference might become widely held as a reason to hold it. I was confused then and I am confused now.
Far better, in my opinion, for people such as yourself, who seek to understand the mechanisms by which values, opinions, and preferences emerge and propagate, to attempt to see beyond these mechanisms to perceive, however vaguely, the kinds of values we ought to have, and why.
In a future dominated by stable and fecund, but boring and insular cultures, I would much rather be someone who figured out how to help preserve, and hasten the re-appearance of, the values that lead to genuine, long-term success, rather than someone who was early to adopt bad-but-self-perpetuating values.
I honestly don't know of a more solid basis for choosing a value than how well it supports existence.
I would like to convince you of a weaker claim, that being self-perpetuating isn't, by itself, a compelling reason to adopt a value. On the other hand, being self-improving, or capable of being part of a self-improving network of values, does seem to me to be such a compelling reason. Values such as love of truth, tolerance of criticism, respect for innovation, admiration of creativity, commitment to incremental, evolutionary improvement, dislike of hypocrisy, fear of static, inflexible equilibria, these seem to me to be naturally "Hansonian" values, and they seem to me to be self-perpetuating in a deeper, more dynamic way then the zombie values of authoritarian birth cults.
After all, they are the values that led you to have this insight about values in the first place!
How do you view values that support the existence of one group via exterminating their outgroup (can include exploiting via slavery)? We can describe three outcomes of intergroup competition. Group A exterminates group B; total human population halved. Group A exterminates B, and replaces group B by using their resources. The third outcome, similar to the former, except Group B had knolwedge/values that allowed it to use B's resources (including enslaving them) to yield a population size that is larger than the original size of A and B.
I'd prefer to exist without having to make others not exist, but sometimes there are existence conflicts, and in those cases I choose existence for "my" side.
After posting I gave it some more thought and landed up at the question you’re posing in your reply. The answer is uncomfortable though. In the end a community has to tell itself that it’s way of life is better than that of the outsiders.
Ultimately you're respecting only power. The faction that you see as winning - the more powerful faction - receives your approval. If Nazi Germany had won WW2, would Nazi Germany have received your approval as well?
If a plague destroyed humanity, would you view *the plague* with approval, because it won and humanity lost?
What matters more than power is how the power is used. If the power is used to enlighten and raise up humanity, and solve our collective problems, then it is good. If the power is used to oppress and deceive humanity, then it is bad. Fundamentalist religious communities oppress and deceive their members, because fundamentalist religion is actually just incorrect. Even if that brings them power, it does not make them good. (This oppression and deception *may* bring them happiness, but whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth.)
Anyway I don't think it will bring them power in the long run. The technological people - the ones with guns and tanks - are cruel enough to massacre the fundamentalists who just have high population, if it comes to a conflict. Declining population in the technological society won't be a serious problem for hundreds of years even if it does follow your prediction. Meanwhile, the threat from AGI is far more severe and urgent.
If Nazi Germany had won the war, I think they would indeed have gotten a lot more respect than they get now.
Personally, I doubt that technological society is willing to massacre the Amish.
Indeed they would have. But anyone who participated in giving them that respect (and there would be plenty) would be doing something very wrong. Because the Nazis were evil, and that doesn't depend on whether they won. A philosophy that leads you to endorse evil, provided that evil prevails - which is the logical consequence of Hanson's statements here - is a bad philosophy.
You don't think technological society would massacre the Amish only because you aren't picturing what it would be like if the Amish were numerous enough to be in severe land and resource competition with the technological society. In that scenario, at least borders would be drawn to contain the Amish, and it would be like the containment of Gaza, in that you have a high-tech society living next to and competing with a poor, low-tech society that opposes it. There would be violent conflicts and massacres, similar to what's happening in Gaza. The poor, low-tech side never comes out ahead in such conflicts.
If I extrapolate forward, the rural areas will be depleted of technological people, leaving just the Amish to farm all the farmland. The technological people will leave them to that, competing with the Amish when there are too many Amish people for them all to fit in low-tech areas. At that point "massacring" the people they depend on for food wouldn't be sensible for tech society. Instead they would be like aristocrats of old hoping to extract food from the peasant majority. Perhaps they might institute something like the Chinese system for limiting migration from rural areas to cities. However, I also believe that pacifism is not an ESS. If a heretical strain of Amish start rejecting it and seizing their (also Amish) neighbor's land, they could run rampant and adopting more tech-friendly beliefs than their neighbors could help there (many Haredim are able to remain insular & fertile while not prohibiting tech).
FYI, most Amish have already left farming.
Huh, I did not know that.
Do you know the differential fertility rates between the old school Amish (no electricity) and the new Amish (basically running shops and wearing colorful clothing, some seem in it to avoid taxes).
Amish farming techniques can't economically compete with industrial farming operations. So there will continue to be industrial farming operations producing the vast majority of the food consumed by the technological society. They won't be depending on the Amish.
The rural areas will not be depleted of technological people. Or rather, the rural areas will have few technological people, but those relatively few people will occupy large amounts of land, just as they do now, in big country estates or industrial farming operations. They will use deadly force if necessary to prevent the poor from squatting on their property (as they do now).
The Amish culture will certainly change in response to these challenges. For one thing, they will send their excess children out of Amish culture to live in the cities. There, the children are no longer living as Amish, and instead will serve to drive up the population of and increase the power of the technological society.
> Because the Nazis were evil, and that doesn't depend on whether they won.
The issue is that, if the Nazis had won, we'd know them to be ruthless, but we wouldn't know the extent of their evil. Post-war all evidence to their death camps would be utterly erased. Their racist policies would continue for decades, and we'd be able to point at those do despise it. But they'd likely be economically very powerful, and so commercial and diplomatic agreements would have been set, and life would go on. It'd basically be a situation similar to the one the West has towards China.
Afterwards, it's likely that, as older generations of the Nazi leadership died of natural deaths, the following generations would care less for racial policies. The 2023 of a successful Nazi WW2, four generations removed from the war itself, would look in some ways akin to how things were in the 19th century: colonial powers, oppression of native populations under the guise of "white men's burden", that kind of thing. Socially we'd be 200 years behind where we are. And, unfortunately, it'd be anyone's guess whether socially things would start moving towards where we currently are here in the real world, only much later, or if they'd go in even worse directions.
But it's a fact their evil ideology would by this point have been normalized. There'd be statues of Nazi leaders all over Europe, and even if historians were learning right now of Auschwitz, Treblinka etc. by perusing surviving Nazi records after some alternate German version of Glasnost, current Nazi-descendant German leadership would likely hand-wave all of that under the guise of "they were great men who committed some errors, but we cannot forget their great deeds due to those" etc. etc.
And most everyone would either pretend to be fine with that, or be literally fine with that, because a Great Germany Europe would be too important for anyone not to be okay-ish with it.
The evilness of Nazi germany would depend on their ability to forge a successful post war state.
That’s the most dubious part. Their economics and politics were pretty fucked up. And there was an element to the ideology that demanded constant warfare as a good in and of itself.
Much less crazy fascist movements like Franco or Peron were stagnant at best.
So Nazi germany isn’t just “manifest destiny for the Germans where the slavs are their native Americans, but otherwise like us.” WW1 Germany might have been a bit closer to that, but the nazies were wacko violent socialist wierdoes.
I read an alternative fiction book one time where they have the nazies get all the breaks. They conquer Russia to the urals and end up in a Cold War with the Anglos, but it’s not stable. Ultimately the war goes hot again in the 1950s. The anglos still win but with even more destruction and death then in our original timeline.
Quite plausible, but how does this present any issue for my position?
I agree with you broadly, but I think a far greater threat is climate change, not AI. And in case, I’m skeptical about robin’s doomerism about population death. 8 billion is enough
What’s the best of these documentaries that you have seen? I’m kinda curious about the topic, especially having a bunch of Mennonite ancestors, but not curious enough to go seriously research things, more like the level of curiosity that would lead me to watch one documentary.
I've watched quite a lot of stuff over the years, a favourite I just rewatched was https://youtu.be/qdyVNoazurI?si=QLKRHi1Jqce_TUWE , There's something quite funny imagining these people in the middle of some random jungle in Peru, deciding whether or not to ostracize people for using phones or what crops to plant etc. whilst being completely oblivious to the fact that a great number of technophiles all over the world are preparing to bow down to them as our future overlords, or something like that.
How innovative have the Amish or Hasids been? These societies are only able to enjoy such high fertility rates because of innovations made by the very modern societies currently suffering fertility crises, so while emulating them may boost our fertility rates, it's doubtful it would do so in a way that would permit us to be innovative.
Robin, I think you are confusing is with ought.
After World War II people recalibrated their respect toward capitalism and communism and away from fascism, but as a moral stance that was incoherent, and as a practical stance, it was even more so.
People do shift their moral compass and their offering of respect away from groups they perceive as losers and toward groups they perceive as winners, but that doesn't mean that they should. It particularly does not mean that somebody who studies all the way in which this psychological tic plays out in public policy, often in appalling and destructive ways, should fall into the same trap.
There is, after all, another group who are quite reproductively successful in the modern world: people with poor impulse control. Will you also start watching "16 and Pregnant" so you can absorb the secrets of their success? Shall we upgrade our respect for poor understanding of birth control, promiscuity, and backseats of Chevys?
If you don’t want idiocy you gotta figure out a way to get the people who like to have more kids.
There is something to “people shouldn’t be more impulsive”. Like it’s pretty clear to me that a lot of smart people would do just fine if they married at 25 and got cracking on kids. Or supervised them less so they could handle more.
I think this is the point you might want to connect your Sacred series of posts with this specific topic, with the notion of what makes religious sacred thingies into sacred thingies, as opposed to non-religious types of sacred.
One key concept I think would be relevant is the notion of the Numinous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous
In a gross over-generalization, "numinous" is that which religious people sensorially perceive when they get into contact with whatever it is that causes that feeling in them. It's a qualia without a corresponding measurable quanta, so from an objective reductionist perspective it isn't really there, but for those who perceive it, it definitely is, and that perception in turn strongly motivates them into supporting whatever it is that accounts for and makes sense of it.
Numinous perception may be an inheritable trait. Small insular communities who are also strongly religious may be the later due to everyone in there inheriting it and this binding them together more powerfully than extrinsic cultural or behavioral factors might, the later being more accessories to that perceptual binding than fundamental causes of their distinction.
If that's the case, then the first aspect to recalibrate for would be admiration towards the possession of numinous perception as a core precondition for high-fertility social arrangements, even if it alone isn't by itself enough, meaning admiration for a trait most religious people have, and most non-religious people may either lack, or even have, but redirected towards non-religious or weak-religious explanatory worldviews.
I can see that there must be something about religion we should credit for the fertility of the insular high fertility subcultures, but it isn't obvious that "numinous" is the key to that.