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I don't believe that gene-editing is a viable solution to preventing dysgenics for the entire population.
Unregulated reproduction has the potential to harm others, so it's reasonable to regulate it.
The Race FAQs has lots of high-quality information on genetic group differences: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race
I don't support the past eugenics or forced sterilizations that you've mentioned. However, I still support eugenics. I argue that reproduction licenses would protect human rights: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/eugenics#human-rights
This is a great idea. I've brainstormed and compiled a list of additional ideas that could also help raise fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#boosting-western-fertility
This is honestly some of the best feedback that I've received on this site, so thank you for your comment. I edited the introduction and I clarified what I meant by "redundant" research.
I once tried to quantify the validity of academic research, but I gave up on trying that. I talk more about this in my reply to Seth Herd.
I didn't come up with the title for the essay, but I re-titled this LW post, so thank you for your suggestion. In hindsight, I'll agree that my comment came off as condescending to some extent, so I edited that as well. I just haven't been in the best mood when I post on this site since I've gotten used to people giving me downvotes, disagreeing with my comments, and sometimes sending condescending comments into my inbox, though that doesn't justify me being condescending to others. Regardless of the essay's title, the essay's contents raise serious questions about whether academia is intellectually honest.
I've thought about expanding my sequel essay even further to more precisely quantify and evaluate the research in each academic field, but I ended up not doing this since it would probably take me a week or longer to further detail everything. Another problem was that even if I finished it, people could always say that I failed to evaluate this or that, since there are tens of thousands of papers out there. Another issue is that not everybody agrees on what counts as "fake", as I mentioned in the sequel essay. So even if someone quantified all academic research as best as they can, it's not possible for them to make an overall assessment that a majority of people would agree with.
For these reasons, I don't think it's productive to quantify whether most academic research is true or false or high-quality or low-quality, which would explain why the author didn't do so. I think it's more productive to analyze how academia and the academic research process work and what kind of output such a system is likely to produce. From everything that I've seen across a multitude of fields, my overall impression is that most academic research tends to be low-quality. Blithering Genius's analysis and my own analysis both conclude that that's probably the case for most academic research.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment and reading your thoughts.
The bigger issue is that not everybody agrees on what's true or false. I did my best to address these considerations in greater depth in my sequel essay: https://zerocontradictions.net/epistemology/academia-critique
Regardless, the point of the essay is that the overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. Ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all these ongoing issues. I could expand it even further, but it would probably take me a week to do so, when I have more important priorities.
If you think that "humans will be living on Mars and O'Neill cylinders 30 years from now", then you probably haven't tried to calculate whether that's actually economically feasible and whether it's practical to get to Mars and live there:
- The Square/Cube Law makes it physically impossible to build megastructures like space elevators, mass drivers, orbital rings, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law
- 12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
- O'Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O'Neill Cylinder that's 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
- Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
- So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that's only for one cylinder.
- For comparison, the world's nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that's only the cost to put an O'Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O'Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that's comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of "you can't make more land" isn't true.
It is true. You can't make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it's far too expensive to try that. I didn't even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won't be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would've achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn't happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we've nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that's worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There's obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don't have to wait 30 years to do it.
No, that's a huge oversimplification, and it's much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
If it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes, then why bother?
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven't even colonized Antarctica.
If your goal was to post stupid comments with the intent of angering me, then you did not succeed. The only thing you have accomplished is wasting your own time. I will not respond to you any further.
One can only imagine how empty and miserable your life is, given that you have nothing better to do besides trolling strangers on the Internet. Out of everything else that you could do with your time, that's really what you like to do for fun?
If you're just going to mock my ideas without rationally engaging with them, then take a hike. You clearly don't have anything to offer to this thread, besides making comments that suggest that your intelligence is quite lacking.
You still don't have any rational arguments to defend your views, so there's no reason to consider anything that you say. Again, your behavior is pathetic, disrespectful, irrational, and unacceptable.
My point is that when LessWrongers see not enough water for a given population, we try to fix the water not the people.
That's also what I proposed. On my Georgism page, I explained that I support taxing water so that water will be used more efficiently. In the Overpopulation FAQs, I explained why that's only a temporary solution, not a long-term solution to overpopulation, but you didn't know that because you never bothered to read it and engage with the arguments that I made.
I read your argument that preventing people from dying of starvation and/or disease is bad:
And you're still misrepresenting it. I didn't say that it's "bad", I explained that it's putting the cart before the horse. Abundant food and increased disease resistance would increase the population and the risk of overpopulation. If we have a viable long-term solution to overpopulation, then we won't have to worry about that if we proceed to reduce starvation and disease.
I would rather we do the hard work of supporting a higher population.
I explained in rigorous, comprehensive depth that raising the carrying capacity is not long-term solution to overpopulation, not without population control.
I also explained that population control would protect human rights, rather than harm them.
solar panels
Solar panels have a low EROI, so they are an inefficient use of resources.
Desalination
Desalination could work in some areas, but it also has environmental consequences, and it would be better to focus on using water more efficiently in many countries.
I want to read actual interesting posts and not posts about "Why doesn't LessWrong like my content? Aren't you a cult if you don't agree with me?".
That was not the point of the post. The post has many interesting linked essays for you to read, if you bothered to click on the hyperlinks and read them.
how we're going to run out of water
The Overpopulation FAQs is about overpopulation, not necessarily water scarcity. Water scarcity can contribute to overpopulation, but it is only one of multiple potential causes.
if we don't forcibly sterilize people
That is a strawman accusation. I never proposed forcibly sterilizing anybody, except for murderers, rapists, thieves, and other criminals. A hundred years ago, that policy would've had strong public support.
EA is bad because altruism is bad
I wrote that EA is mostly misguided because it makes faulty assumptions. And to the contrary, I did praise a few things about EA.
Sorry, I just can't escape my cult programming here.
Yeah, I can tell. You can’t make any rational arguments. Your behavior is the antithesis of rationality.
It would be more rational for you to engage with the bullet points and the essays that are hyperlinked on the page. There is nothing wrong with giving a comparison of disagreements between two different movements. If anything, it's necessary to do that in order to explore different (and potentially better) ideas. Your paragraph of mockery and gibberish is pathetic, and it doesn't accomplish anything.
Viva Longevity by Chris MacAskil has some good videos on this topic. The descriptions for these video have more links to other videos and articles on the same topic.
The Poop Whisperer: Dr Johan Van Den Bogaerde on Gut Health - Viva Longevity
Actually, this was supposed to be a linkpost. I thought had I had submitted the post this way, but I guess not. In any case, the PDF version and the video version were already included I first submitted this post, and I edited this to be a linkpost to link to the original essay.
The post makes a separate claim with each sentence and, instead of going on to reasons, continues with yet another claim.
I don't think you read the entire essay then. Only the essay's introduction can be seen directly on this post. You'd have to view the PDF, the video, or the blog post to see the rest of the post and the justifications for the claims made in the introduction. That's pretty normal in most writing.
Freedom of speech can be limited by the state, corporations, the mob or individuals acting alone. Any use of coercion to suppress ideas is an attack on freedom of speech.
In the PDF version, you can most clearly see that there is a section of the essay dedicated to explaining how each of these can happen.
It [freedom of speech] protects people with minority views from persecution by the state or the mob.
As the author defined "freedom of speech" in the first paragraph of the essay, "Freedom of speech is the principle that coercion should not be used to suppress ideas." So of course having freedom of speech would protect people with minority views from persecution due to their ideas.
This seems significantly misleading.
How is it misleading? There are plenty of examples throughout history where not having freedom of speech lead to persecution.
Ideas should be selected based on their merits
You're missing the point of the essay. The author agrees that ideas should be selected based on their merits. If a society truly has social rationality, then it's already implied that the ideas that get selected and promoted by the society will be rational ideas. The point of free speech is to ensure that society never misses out on hearing a good idea.
And how are you defining "merit"? And from what perspective? When the Catholic Church put Galileo Galilei under house arrest, they censored him on the basis that his ideas contradicted their sacred texts. From the Church's perspective, his ideas did not have any merits.
Thus, suppression of ideas could be a positive thing to social rationality.
I don't think so. Can you give some examples of what you're talking about?
Ideas should be selected based on their merits, and that requires that some ideas do not survive.
If a society has social rationality, then it's going to reject irrational ideas by itself. The irrational ideas won't survive. That means that it isn't necessary to suppress "bad" ideas. If any ideas were being suppressed at all in a rational society, then there's a risk that the society will limit its exposure to good ideas.
Why do you think that it's better to forcefully suppress ideas that a fully rational society would reject anyway? How would you suppress the ideas that you think should be suppressed? How can you be sure that you would be suppressing the right ideas? You're doing exactly what you're accusing the author of doing in the essay.
Well, it looks like GitHub is running again. You should be able to view those links now if you click on them.
The problem is that my site is hosted on GitHub, and GitHub is currently down. Unfortunately, you won't be able to view those links until GitHub is up and running again.
it's necessary for it to be morally acceptable
What is "morally acceptable"? I think morality is an illusion. I've also argued that eugenics can be defended within the humanist value/moral framework of the West.
Your brother should get to go into cryonics and be revived once we can heal him.
That's a terrible idea. Cryonics is unlikely to succeed. My family also can't afford to put him into cryonics. It's also not any more likely that we could fix my brother, even if we did revive him with cryonics.
Failing that, it's just the risk you take reproducing.
Why? And according to who? Numerous historical societies chose to let severely disabled people die on their own in the past, because it was maladaptive to take care of them. My parents can't take care of him forever, and neither should society if he's not able to make his own positive contributions.
Having to take care of a severely disabled person is a burden that literally nobody wants to have, if they have the choice of avoiding it. That's the reality. If you disagree with me, then you better put your time, money, and effort where your mouth is and bear the burden yourself. If you won't do that, then you're a hypocrite.
I agree. I would support genetic engineering in some cases, but I've explained why I don't believe that is an adequate solution for humanity. It won't solve the problems of dysgenics or overpopulation.
you don't get to take "eugenics being good" as a given when you make a post, and you have to argue first that it's worth talking about, but like, that's exactly what this post is trying to do.
Yeah, that seems to be one of the most common criticisms of my FAQs pages. I actually agree that some people would be more receptive to my arguments if I tried to argue my support for it more gradually, but that's just not my preferred writing style. It would've made it harder for me to write everything in this post. I have autism (it runs in my family), and my brain just doesn't work that way, at least not for this topic.
Diana Fleischman has written a different essay that takes that approach, and some people might like it better. It's good that there are differently written essays out there on this topic.
If we can't get tech advanced enough to become shapeshifters, modify already grown bodies, we don't get to mess with genes.
Why not? As I explained in the essay, modern civilization will collapse without some form of eugenics.
I will never support tools that let people select children by any characteristic, they would have been used against me and so many of my friends.
You're probably still a eugenicist in some sense. Some people would argue that opposing incest and supporting abortion of any kind counts as eugenics.
Also, negative Eugenics laws have existed in many Western countries in the past. They only would've be used against you and your friends if you were violent criminals, or something along those lines. Are you saying that you support the reproduction of violent criminals, who will have offspring that also carry genes that predispose them to commit more violent crimes against others?
Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again.
Nazism is not the same thing as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't require fighting wars.
Abortion should be blind to the child's attributes.
If abortion should be "blind to the child's attributes", then you should put your time and money where you mouth is and be willing to take of disabled children who will never have a future or be able to take care of themselves. If you won't do that, then you should concede. Your dogma will not create a sustainable, long-lasting civilization.
Also, this is kind of personal, but my own brother is so mentally disabled that he cannot take care of himself. Both of my parents, my siblings, and myself all agree that it would've been better to abort him, if they knew that he would be as disabled as he is. Instead, my parents and myself will have to take care of him for the rest of our lives or until he dies. I love my brother, I don't hate him, and I think it's very unfortunate that he is disabled. But my parents and I still believe that it would've been better for everybody if he had never been born.
If you had to put up with everything that my family has had to put up with, I think you would change your mind. My hypothesis is that most people are against preventing dysgenics, until they have to experience the consequences of it for themselves.
Also, some social conservatives would insist that attribute-blind abortions still count as eugenics.
Eugenics would absolutely further rationality. The hard truth that most people can't accept is that the ability to be rational and intelligent is not equally distributed among humans. Intelligence and IQ are both estimated to be ~80% heritable. Humans won't become more rational or intelligent in the long run without eugenics. As I've explained on my website, reproduction licenses are the only viable way to accomplish this and prevent overpopulation. Reproduction licenses will kill many birds with just one stone. Reproduction licenses will protect human rights, not harm them.
The most important problems of our time are the ones that we can't discuss. A truly rational forum has to be able and willing to talk about controversial topics. Humanity cannot afford to stop talking about these topics just because they offend people and trigger emotions.
I don't think there's any authority that can be trusted with guided eugenics.
I could make the same argument about anything that a government does.
- "I don't think anybody can be trusted to control the police."
- "I don't think anybody can be trusted to run the military."
- "I don't think anybody can be trusted to collect taxes."
- Et Cetera.
Anybody who oppose eugenics on the belief that “nobody can be trusted” might as well embrace anarchism, which is doomed to fail. It’s clearly not a rational argument against eugenics.
that it's only ever usable for evil.
"Evil" is not a coherent concept. Morality is an illusion.
I'm not going to respond to most of what you wrote here because I think this will be an unproductive discussion.
What I will say is that I think it would help to reevaluate how you're defining all the terms that you're using. Many of your disagreements with the OP essay are semantic in nature. I believe that you will arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of epistemology if you learn the definitions used in the OP essay and the author's blog and use those terms to understand epistemology instead. Many of the things that you wrote in your comment seem confused.
As for how you're using subjective and objective, I recognize that there are various dictionary definitions for those two terms, but I believe that the most coherent ones that are the most useful for explaining epistemology are the ones that specifically relate to the subject | object dichotomy. You're disagreeing with the statement "knowledge is subjective" because you're not defining "subjective" according to the subject | object dichotomy.
I've also written a webpage that might help some of these concepts. You mentioned JTB in your response, and I've written a section explaining why JTB is not an adequate way to define knowledge at all.
It would be more productive if you gave a rational argument against eugenics. I shouldn't have to tell you this, but "fuck off" is not a rational argument. LessWrong claims to be a forum for rational discussions. If you don't have rational arguments against this post, then this is not the right forum for you.
If we can't get tech advanced enough to become shapeshifters, modify already grown bodies, we don't get to mess with genes. I will never support tools that let people select children by any characteristic, they would have been used against me and so many of my friends. Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again. Abortion should be blind to the child's attributes.
You haven't given a single rational justification for anything that you said here. Whereas, I've painstakingly every major argument against eugenics under the Sun in the FAQs.
I knew that I was going to get heavily downvoted for making this post, but I also don't care. The inability of this forum to give rational arguments against my steelman arguments proves that not even most LessWrongers can handle True Rationality.
At LessWrong, rationality stops and emotions take over when the forum-goers encounter taboo and controversial topics.
Never leave a question to philosophers
He was talking about academic philosophers.
An isomorphism common to each of the systems.
Are you saying that the mechanism of correspondence is an "isomorphism"? Can you please describe what the isomorphism is?
Knowledge is based in correspondence to reality
As the essay explains, knowledge doesn't correspond to reality. Knowledge represents reality.
For example, it was considered "true" hundreds of years ago that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Everyone was as strongly convinced that that was a fact as we are now of the opposite belief. Would a Geocentrist be accurate if he confidently claimed that Geocentrism corresponds to reality? Of course not (from our perspective). Instead, what can be accurately said from both perspectives is that the belief that the Sun revolves around the Earth represents reality from the perspective of the people who believe it.
If a person believes in the barycentric coordinates theory, then they would judge the Geocentrism theory to be false. They are using a different model of reality to make that judgment. I believe in the barycentric coordinates theory, and that theory represents reality to me, from my perspective.
I could claim that barycentric coordinates corresponds to reality, but what does that mean? In practice, people who say "X corresponds to reality" are essentially saying "I think X is true". This is problematic because saying "X is true" is also defined as "X corresponds to reality". The so-called "correspondence" is not well-defined. People can't even agree on what the "correct correspondences" to reality are.
A proper theory of knowledge has to explain why a Geocentrist judges the barycentric coordinates theory to be false. The answer is that a geocentrist and a proponent for barycentric coordinates both have different models of reality. Each person believes that their model of reality is true knowledge. To each person, their knowledge represents reality, from their perspective. That's possible because knowledge is subjective. For more information, see: What is Subjectivity?
The problem with the Correspondence Theory of Truth/Knowledge is that it does not use the subject | object dichotomy to describe what knowledge is. Contrary to popular belief, Truth is not objective.
One is justified in believing things on the basis of utility
That is circular. Utility is a value judgment. Value judgments depend on truth judgments. Consequentialism doesn't explain what the basis for truth judgments is, without using circular reasoning.
Truth goes on meaning the same thing it always did under consequentialism: accuracy to reality.
How do you judge "accuracy to reality"? People can disagree on what they think is accurate. You need a model of reality in order to judge "accuracy to reality". And Representationalism is the best theory for describing how mental models of reality work. As I said before, the subject | object dichotomy is necessary for describing what knowledge is and how it works.
Consequentialism doesn't necessarily try to identify what knowledge is.
Then Consequentialism is not a theory of knowledge.
a belief state need not be knowledge to be useful
Beliefs are knowledge.
How could evolution know an eye has beneficial effects?
That's a metaphorical question. Evolution is not a subject. Evolution doesn't know anything. Evolution is a process.
Some representations are knowledge
As the essay explained, knowledge is subjective.
The representations which reflect correspondences to reality are those that constitute knowledge.
Your brain is using a model of reality to make a truth judgment and statement. My brain is using a different model of reality that judges your statement to be wrong. I believe that you're implicitly using the representationalism theory of knowledge to make this statement.
ideal reasoning
In order to define "ideal reasoning", you need to define what's "ideal". What a person considers to be "ideal" is a value judgment. Value judgments are based on value knowledge. Value knowledge is a type of knowledge. Knowledge is subjective. Thus, ideal reasoning is subjective. It's not possible to give an objective definition of "ideal reasoning". And since you haven't specified how you're defining it, it's not clear what you're talking about.
If you believe that knowledge can be based on value judgments, then such knowledge would be subjective since value judgments are subjective.
California is a clean energy pioneer.
That ignores how California has had many electricity blackouts due to the state's energy policies. California also imports a lot of energy from other states since non-nuclear green energy doesn't produce enough power for the state.
Can you please explain why you doubt the proposed solution?
Models tend to be based on observations, but I agree with you that I should explain how observations would affect the population model. I updated the page to explain this. If I finish learning Javascript, I might even program a basic model to display on my site.
the path to shrinking (or even holding constant) may be less desirable (though neither seems great) than the "natural" cycle of overpopulation and shrinking.
Population growth, overpopulation, and shrinking (war, disease, and famine) is indeed a natural cycle.
Shrinking the population may have strong social and economic consequences, but it will have to happen at some point since the Earth's current population is unsustainable. It's not possible for populations to grow forever.
Shrinking the population without using population control will require millions or billions of people to die. I'm pretty sure that most people would prefer population control instead, if they understood just how bad the alternative would be.
I think I agree, so I will edit that paragraph. However, I don't believe that California's current resource consumption is sustainable.
That is a fallacious belief. The Overpopulation FAQs explains why you're wrong.
You cannot engage (in politics) in any better way than by backing a candidate.
Why do you believe that?
Backing a candidate is an opportunity to change political rhetoric.
How does it do that? Especially if it involves backing a mainstream candidate?
I don't need to back a candidate to change political rhetoric. A more effective way to change political rhetoric is figure out ways to change the current culture.
By supporting a candidate, we are instigating a conversation.
I doubt it. I don't think you're interested in having an open-minded conversation. I suspect that you're only interested in supporting Kamala Harris. You haven't explained why you support Harris, and you obviously need to do that if you want to start a conversation.
It’s about using political engagement to bring more people into the rationalist fold and out of tribalism.
How does backing a candidate "bring more people out of tribalism"? You haven't given any explanation for this.
I am surprised at section 3; I don't remember anyone who seriously argues that women should be dependent on men.
That’s because almost nobody views humans through a biological realism worldview. For more info, see: Understanding Biological Realism, https://zerocontradictions.net/#bio-realism. In this case, Family and Society in particular is probably the best introduction, out of each of the essays in the list. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2014/04/family-and-society.html
I’m also not the author of that essay (otherwise it would have my name on it), but I do agree with it, aside from a few caveats. Anyway, women’s suffrage is irrelevant to what the essay was explaining. It does not propose to abolish woman suffrage, nor does the author advocate for that.
As for cars replacing horses, humanity would’ve been wealthier, more prosperous, and more eco-friendly if walkable cities and high-speed rail were built instead of cars. But I understand the point that you were making. https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/wiki/faq
That's not true either. It may not be feasible to achieve below replacement fertility using only pre-industrial birth control technology. It would definitely be difficult to achieve that and produce sufficient birth control for hundreds of millions of people without industrial technology.
Regardless, new birth control innovations still increased both the availability and effectiveness of birth control, which still contributed to lowering birth rates. All birth control methods have pros and cons, and when people have more options to choose from, it becomes easier to pick one that works the best for their needs and desires. It also makes it easier to use multiple birth control methods at the same time, since it's possible for one method or another to fail.
New birth control technologies in 1900s also contributed to lowering birth rates. IUDs were developed during the early and mid 1900s. Wikipedia also states that "Vasectomy as a method of voluntary birth control began during the Second World War". Emergency contraception was first developed in the 1970s. Roe vs Wade was also passed by the US Supreme Court in 1973, which legalized abortion nationwide across the US and gave people yet another viable method of birth control. I know people who have had vasectomies, IUDs, emergency contraception, and abortions, and I can guarantee that they would all have higher birth rates if these birth control methods weren't available to them. It simply doesn't make sense to insist that increasing the availability and effectiveness of birth control methods did not help reduce fertility rates.
Actually, I have a few last points to say.
It's a dubious assumption that fertility decline is caused mostly by birth control. Fertility declined long before birth control became widespread.
That's simply not true. If you read Wikipedia and its external sources, you would learn that birth control was actually increasingly common in the developed world during the 1800s. So, it's logically sound to conclude that increased birth control was the real reason why fertility rates declined across the developed world during the 1800s and early 1900s. Birth control practices were also generally adopted earlier in Europe than in the United States.
Also, if you ask any parent who has a child, they will testify that their birth rate was low when they were using birth control, and that their birth rate increased when they stopped using birth control. It really is that simple.
As soon as we forget that birth control was what enabled women to pursue higher education and career advancement in the first place by liberating them from childcare, it's very easy to over-complicate all this and come up with beliefs that don't accurately explain why fertility rates decreased over the past 200 years. Any population that deliberately avoids birth control is guaranteed to have an extremely high fertility rate in the modern world.
So yes, birth control was the true reason why fertility rates declined in the developed world in the last 200 years. Birth control was invented for a reason: to avoid overpopulation.
Rising women status contributed more than everything else combined.
As the essay explained, increased birth control was necessary for that to occur. Women cannot pursue higher education or careers if they primarily work as homemakers who raise children. Birth control was necessary to liberate women from childcare if they so choose, so birth control was still the main factor that caused fertility rates to decline over the last 200 years.
That was a continuation of trend which started more than a century before that, after temporary baby boom reversal ended.
Birth rates still could not have decreased if it wasn't for increased birth control. As for the baby boom, it was predictable that birth rates would increase when society became wealthier and had endured ~16 years of the Great Depression and World War II, which both made it harder to have children.
The reason that happened is that communication became much easier.
Not quite. It would be more accurate to say that lower fertility memes have temporarily become more popular because humans in the developed world are not adapted to resisting them.
So it is reasonable to expect that low fertility memes will generally win for as long as the world remains interconnected.
No, that's not reasonable. Low fertility memes have failed to overpower the remaining high-fertility memes and memeplexes that I already mentioned (e.g. the Amish, fundamentalist Muslims, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, etc), and there's no evidence or reasoning to suggest that they will.
We need to think about this more dynamically. The future is not predicted by the average behavior of people today. The future is predicted by who is reproducing today. That is the fundamental principle of evolution. What is normal today will be extinct in the future if it doesn’t reproduce.
Eventually, humans will evolve genes and memes that are resistant to the effects of birth control. As the link explains, there's plenty of evidence that different genes and memes affect fertility rates. It's only a matter of time before the ones that promote the highest fertility win out and become the most popular.
There were many more highly religious (and fertile) communities in the past. So the default is to expect that they will follow the same path like say Quebec.
It doesn't make sense to predict that. The remaining highly religious and fertile demographics have failed to decrease their fertility rates. They practice different memes and they probably have different genes. So, what happened for Christians and Hindus isn't necessarily going to happen for Haredi Jews, Amish, or fundamentalist Muslims.
This list looks rather US-centric. Many countries, for example in eastern Europe don't have these specific problems but have low fertility anyway.
I strongly disagree. Most of the suggestions in the list are applicable to nearly all Western countries, including Eastern Europe.
Anyway, I don't think it's going to be productive to continue this discussion because I feel like I'm repeating myself. I'm going to stop responding, but if you have a question or an objection, it's probably already addressed somewhere in the Population Dynamics FAQs.
The first is that fertility decline is caused mostly by birth control.
If birth control hasn't been enabling fertility rates to decline, then what has? Birth control has existed ever since the Ancient Egyptians. However, the increasing availability of the birth control pill, other contraception methods, and the legalization of abortion during the 60s and 70s (in the US) are notable for contributing to the declining fertility rates in the US.
The essay also argues that reductions in wealth cause declines in fertility rates. In the last century, we can observe this during the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The second is that high fertility memes are durable. But usually exactly the opposite happens.
No, the opposite doesn't usually happen. For all of human history, higher fertility memes have tended to outlast lower fertility memes. Some maladaptive memes do persist, but that's mainly because it takes a long time for them to die out. By way of analogy, smallpox maintained a TFR of 30% after millennia of infecting humans.
Now of course, the last 200 years are exceptional, since many lower fertility memes have overpowered higher fertility memes. But exceptions to the rule don't disprove the rule, especially when the timescale has been too short since the Industrial Revolution to see how everything will eventually play out. We are living in the most exceptional times ever in all of human history.
"cultural change causes lower fertility" is the same as "high fertility memes lose"
We can think of memes using the traditions | fashions dichotomy. Eventually, the fashions will die out, after enough time passes.
Mormons used to have much higher fertility, and now they don't.
Yes, that's mainly because more Mormons are using birth control. And yes, some higher fertility memes are losing their ground to lower fertility memes, but there's also many high fertility memes and memeplexes that still have very high fertility rates, such as the fundamentalist Muslims, the Amish, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But industrial civilization can collapse due to low population long before natural selection would cause fertility to rise again.
I'm worried about this too to some extent. I've written a list of things that could be done to boost Western fertility rates.
With TFR 1.2 (like in Italy now) population would drop below 100 million in about three centuries.
What population are you referring to?
Population Dynamics are still part of Biological Realism, so what I wrote isn't quite wrong, but I've edited the page to clarify what I meant.
It's at least not obvious, considering that you seen to disagree with George himself about population dynamics.
Have you seen my webpage explaining it? I'm not convinced that George understood population dynamics at all.
There are a lot of different things that make people support Georgism - it has intersections with all kind of views across the political spectrum.
I'm aware of this. I've written about it too.
Not because it's actually going to make Georgism more popular
I still insist that understanding population dynamics would make Georgism more popular. That's the point of what I wrote. You're just fixating, extrapolating, and nitpicking on a single phrase, which I have now removed from the page, since I want the emphasis in that bullet point to focus on the connection between Georgism, population dynamics, and resource conservation.
The problem is when you delude yourself and others into thinking that spreading one is a great strategy of spreading the other.
I'm not deluding myself. I firmly believe that accurately understanding population dynamics would make Georgism more popular. Are you disagreeing with that?
Here you are proposing to take a simple and straightforward idea of Georgism that people from all across the political spectrum can agree on, and explain it through the complexity and controversy of "Biological Realism".
That's not what I said. My point was that understanding population dynamics makes people more likely to support Georgism, and that population dynamics is part of biological realism. Even if people deny biology, promoting biological realism is still good for our society, for other reasons. I'd even say that understanding population dynamics is more important than implementing Georgism.
I'm aware that associating Georgism with Biological Realism might damage some of Georgism's appeal, but that's a Guilt by Association Fallacy, so I'm not concerned with it. People need to learn to recognize and understand fallacies.
I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a reformist. As I've already said, I want a gradual transition to Georgism. That's what I support, and I do not endorse a revolutionary transition to Georgism.
The transition to Georgism doesn't have to be a revolution. The abolition of slavery in the US wasn't really a revolution either. Slavery was gradually outlawed in the northern states, and then it eventually got outlawed nationwide. Yes, it was a radical social change, but everybody today agrees that it was the right thing to do. Abolishing slavery lead to a wealthier and more prosperous society.
Since we arguing within the context of creating an ideal society, pointing out that Georgism could financially hurt landowners is not an argument against Georgism if Georgism would create a better society as a whole. It's as good of an argument as saying "the slaveowners will lose a lot of property if we abolish slavery, therefore we shouldn't outlaw slavery". A successful society is supposed to benefit the collective. Rent-seeking doesn't generate any wealth, nor does it provide any value for society.
Although you don't want to respond anymore, I believe that many of your remaining questions can answered by the KAALVTN essay collection.
The point of the essay is that fertility will eventually increase again, if enough time passes, even if that takes several generations.
It may be true that culture can evolve faster than genes, but culture is not homogenous, so I don't think we can predict that all subcultures will evolve to adopt low fertility memetics. Eventually, the low fertility memetics and the people who practice them will slowly die out. The essay also gave examples of how the fundamentalist Muslims, the Amish, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews have some of the highest fertility rates in the world. Even if most people adopt low fertility, the most likely prediction is that the factions that have higher fertility rates will gradually replace them until they become the new majority of people.
I wrote at least 30 years. 30 years may not be enough to have a smooth transition. A transition will probably also take less time if it occurs right after a real estate bubble pops.
Nobody is denying that a transition may have some economic losers, but the same is true of any political system that you choose. Plenty of people said the same thing when all the slaves in the United States were emancipated, which resulted in the largest property loss in US history. It obviously sucked for the slave owners to lose trillions of dollars worth of property, but I don't think anyone today would argue that that was a bad political move, even though it had significant consequences at the time.
Some people may not like the transition, but the whole point of the transition is to achieve a more stable and more efficient economic system, in the long run. Even if the transition period is somewhat turbulent, I'd argue that that's still better than having to deal with a real estate boom and bust every ~18 years (on average). People might criticize the transition, but the criticisms would have more weight if they apply to the Georgist system after the transition. That would be more productive because if anyone can prove that Georgism is not worth switching to, then there’s no point in doing the transition in the first place. If there are no valid arguments against Georgism after the transition, then we need to ask what we can to make the transition go as smoothly as possible.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. I was just trying to describe how Georgism controls land rights. Ownership and possession both have very different definitions in most legal systems.
I disagree. I think that access to birth control is the main factor that has been affecting fertility rates because birth control is necessary to enable the modern lifestyle that you're talking about. As a thought experiment, if all the world's birth control instantly disappeared, then it would be normal for everybody who has heterosexual sex to have large families, especially since modern technology ensures that nearly all infants live to adulthood. I've written some more detailed explanations in my Population Dynamics FAQs.
Although it's a common belief that the Covid lockdowns increased birth rates for the reason that you describe, it's actually false. The US Census Bureau recorded that birth rates declined during the lockdowns because people became poorer. This is consistent with my theory of population dynamics. My theory predicts that people have more children when they become wealthier, and they have fewer children when they become poorer. As the linked post explains, there is a better explanation as for why there's a negative correlation between wealth and fertility rates.
Yes, in my Georgism FAQs, I've partially explained how Georgists have very different goals and motives from Communists.
We should also note that the government wouldn't control how titleholders are using their land, as long as they are using it efficiently enough to pay the land value tax.
No practical Georgist would say that we should start taxing land at 100% of its value overnight. Any conversion over to a Georgist taxation system would have to be a gradual process, taking at least 30 years in order to give everybody enough time to re-adjust their personal finances, especially for the people who are relying on land speculation as part of their retirement portfolio. But once society is through that, the economy will be better off than it was before the transition and it should be smooth cruising from there on out.
There is a different Georgism FAQs that is more comprehensive than the one that I've written (KAALVTN). It might help explain what the new economic equilibrium will be like. It's a pretty big topic to breakdown, and answering it depends on how detailed you want the explanation to be.
Georgism is different from government ownership because Georgists still support private possession of land, while opposing private ownership of land. Private possession is necessary to solve the Tragedy of the Commons, and it's also necessarily to incentivize the titleholders to use their land effectively. Georgists also believe that titleholders should own all of the improvements that they make to their land. The land value tax only applies to the unimproved value of land.
If a titleholder loses his/her land because he/she can't use the land effectively enough to pay the land value tax, then that's actually a good thing. Confiscating land from people who are using it unproductively is necessarily in order to ensure that all land is being used to its maximum efficiency and increase economic wealth. That's a feature, not a bug.
I can answer your other questions if you want me to.
That depends on what you consider to be a "housing shortage". The cost of rent is a major reason why birth rates remain low in China, Japan, and other countries. One of the reasons why capsule hotels are popular in Japan is because rent is so expensive.
I'm not the person who wrote the linked post, but you can you add your comment to the Substack post if you want to talk to the author himself.
Thank you. I've never heard of that word until just now.