Robin Hanson has a recent post on problems of declining fertility. One thing he does not mention and perhaps should is pessimism about the future as a cause of, or excuse for, not having children. It appears in our culture in a variety of forms: Overestimating Climate Change
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
You appear to be looking at global statistics. I don't think most people look there when deciding whether "things have been getting rapidly better for [their] entire life and well before". I suspect they are more likely to compare what they have with what they expected to have by this stage of their life. That's a little hard for outsiders to measure (we don't know what they were thinking 20, 40, or even 60 years ago). So one commonly used proxy compares individuals with their own parents.
I regularly read articles stating as an unchallenged truth that the median American is less well off than their parents. Their parents bought homes younger; their parents lived comfortably on a single income; their parents had relatively secure jobs; their parents had far less debt. This is blamed on a combination of increasing inequality and a rearrangement of the work force requiring two incomes to attain the same living standard previously attained with a single income. (That would of course be among those not desperately poor - poor women have always had to work, even while middle class feminists were complaining about being stuck in their homes.)
You will of course notice what isn't mentioned. Their parents didn't have the same tech tools modern youngsters can't imagine living without. Their parents may or may not have had better access to routine care, but moderns who can afford them have access to effective treatments for conditions which would have killed their parents. (I compare my experience with cancer to that of my grandfather.)
And that's before we talk about unrealistic expectations - in particular, that they'd be doing *better* than their parents, perhaps enormously better.
My parents imagined me as becoming a famous academic scientist, perhaps complete with Nobel prize. Instead, I'm merely a retired Principal Software Engineer. That's more prosperous than they were - dad was a unionized factory worker. But I certainly didn't live up to their (inflated) expectations. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of folks like me, not achieving inflated expectations ;-)
Bottom line though: improvement or its reverse can be in the eye of the beholder. and the perception of improvement, as well as hope for future improvement, tends to be very localized.
It's definitely looking at the false, idealized version of the past you described. The idea is that the man went to work at his cushy factory job and bought a 3,500 square foot house at age 23 while the mom stayed home with the 5 kids. It's completely false. Not only do we have more technology, but we get more for less. Real incomes have risen. We don't need two people working to afford the extra technology or to live at the same standard of living that our parents did. It's a myth.
Were other generations like this too? I have no idea because I'm only 30. If not, I also have no idea why people are so pessimistic now. Maybe as things improve people keep finding smaller and smaller things to worry about. There's some evidence in psychology for this. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, though.
By a lot of objective measures -- hours worked per year, home size, life expectancy, etc. -- every generation for the past 200 years has been distinctly better-off than the preceding generation at the same age, so today's young adults _reasonably expected_ to be better-off than their parents, and they aren't.
Yes, health care continues to improve, but many people in the US don't have access to that high-quality health care, and life expectancies in the US are actually dropping.
Of course, as you point out, there are other metrics that nobody would have thought to measure 200 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Having a movie camera, hundreds of encyclopedias, hundreds of language translators, thousands of games, millions of recorded songs, movies, and TV shows, billions of pages of books, billions of pictures, and helpful guides who can find what I want from all of it within seconds, plus the ability to communicate in seconds (text, audio, and video) with people halfway around the world, all on a box in my pocket that costs me an hour's wages per month, is hard to compare with what any previous generation had.
Life expectancy is a projection, not an observed fact, so depends on assumptions about future death rates. The much publicized figure was based on using the 2020 mortality figures to predict future mortality. It was, in effect, assuming there would be another pandemic every year.
If I recall correctly, there was already a drop in life expectancy for certain demographics in the US before covid. What there was not, again IIRC, was an overall drop in life expectancy.
Other than that, I agree that "life expectancy" metrics are almost as misleading as "gross national product", though nowhere near as misleading as the "unemployment rate" statistic.
Sure, a life-expectancy projection based on extrapolating 2020 mortality numbers is very suspect.
But the much-publicized Case-Deaton work on US life expectancies (and "deaths of despair") was published in 2015. And https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/ shows US life expectancy falling behind that in all other "comparable nations" around 1990, peaking in 2014, and dropping slowly for several years before the pandemic.
The relevant question isn't whether it has fallen behind other countries but whether it has fallen, since that is what would justify a negative view of the future.
Do you have a link to the Case-Deaton work? The latest Reason has an article criticizing the "deaths of despair" category and arguments based on it for restricting pain killers.
The healthsystemtracker link has a graph of life expectancies over the past forty years in a dozen or so “developed nations”. In the 1980’s, the US was in the middle of the pack. But US life expectancy grew very slowly for most of those years, both in comparison to its earlier growth and in comparison to other developed nations. It seems to have actually dropped slightly from 2014-2016, then grown slightly from 2016-2019, then dropped dramatically in 2020 (much more than in other countries, which can’t be attributed to methodological problems unless they used different projection methodologies for different countries).
I can easily imagine people developing “a negative view about the future” from life expectancies growing more slowly than in previous generations, and perhaps from life expectancies growing more slowly than in other countries (“relative well-being” is a thing). The graphs don’t address income discrepancies within countries, but if d(LE)/dt was even lower for low-to-middle-income Americans, that too could justify pessimism.
I haven’t read any of these myself, so I’m not in a position to critique them. I’ve seen some criticism on grounds that they excluded Native Americans, who had an even more dramatic drop in life expectancy (which would have diluted the story about white people, but not about “deaths of despair”, since a lot of Native Americans are poor, unemployed, and/or alcoholic — the standard picture of someone susceptible to “deaths of despair”).
Yes. My generation is probably the last one where those expectations were mostly fulfilled. (I'm in my mid '60s.)
I'm honestly not sure about those other metrics. On a bad day, I'd trade google search for a combination of the Yellow Pages and a good paper encyclopedia. (At least I'd get the same results each time I did a particular search.) I'd gladly trade a modern clothes-destroying (sold as "water saving"), short-lifetime washing machine - complete with touch screen instead of dials, and maybe internet access, forced software updates (and hacking!) for one of those old workhorse machines that lasted for decades with my level of use. And my oh-so-wonderful cell phone camera can't do basic things I used to do with a non-digital cheapie - in particular, it can't be convinced to refrain from enhancing what it thinks I should want enhanced. I'd also be much much happier if no one had any access to modern "deep fake" technology.
For people who would like to interact in real time, I host an online meetup on Saturday mornings as well as a very occasional realspace meetup, originally for readers of the blog Slate Star Codex. Details:
Too much of my favorite reading for pleasure, Science Fiction) now routinely has some sort of climate disaster in the story, even if it takes place lightyears from Earth. Also, most i=of it also has gratuitous mention of LGBTQ+ talking points.
Even Analog magazine (the SF with nuts and bolts) has fallen into this kind of story. Seldom is there a need for either in the story, it's just jammed in there.
OTOH, I'm still waiting for the SF novel/story where people 50 years from now go all medieval on those who lied to them about Climate Catastrophe to the detriment of their lives. I want an angry woman in a story who is hunting down the "97%ers" because she didn't have children de to their lies, and now she wants to go all Rambo on their *ss.
BTW, just saw a picture of the Plymouth Rock (it's smaller than most people think), and oddly enough, after 400 year of global warmening it's still above sea level.
There is a Niven and Pournelle novel, _Fallen Angels_, where the progressives have taken over and the ice is coming south.
An example of the pattern the other way was an sf novel, not bad, where part of the background was much less land on Earth due to sea level rise. We know what Earth looks like with the ice caps melted, that having been a majority of its past condition.
I read that back when it came out. Early 1990s? When I was in grad school, anyway. Enjoyed it at the time but thought it was a bit lightweight for those authors. (Wasn't there a third author?) Kind of an environmentalist case of Heinlein's Crazy Years.
I am unaware of Cirsova. I'll look into it. I've read some Wright, liked some, kind of 'eh' about some. Read and liked all of the Honor Harrington stuff that actually had her in them. Of course, I loved the Horatio Hornblower stories, so there you are.
There are vested interests in believing that humanity is worse off: activists, NGOs, and CNN lose their reason for existing if things keep getting better. Same with many politicians: look how bad current politicians are; clearly this candidate or that party will make things better. Their ideas trickle into the popular culture.
I think this is exactly so. There is a great deal of money and status in fighting some great catastrophe, and very little in having done so. Many people's goals, money, status and meaning, are tied to there being a catastrophe they have to fight. If the catastrophe ends, but itself or by their actions, well, what's left for them?
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
My argument is this: culturally reinforced belief in God is effectively a high prior on hope. I think that kind of prior is like posture: it decays overtime unless it’s continuously reinforced via intentional effort.
Most of what most people “believe” isn’t based on evidence, it’s just culturally transmitted narratives. So from my perspective what’s happening is, the Protestant reformation is still playing out in the west, as the complex philosophy of thomism slowly gets replaced by more competitive memes, each one less subtle and more emotionally resonant than the one it outcompetes.
In other words, I think this despair simply makes sense as the default for people who haven’t cultivated a mindset of hope and optimism. Just as material wealth requires explanation, whereas poverty is the default, I think the same is true of spiritual wealth, such as hope.
When I was an evangelical, I didn't worry about having any hope in "this world" as I "KNEW" it was the dominion of Satan and was going to be destroyed anyway.
My "hope" was in Christ and Christ Alone.
It's hard to get someone to care when they ultimately believe it's "out of their hands" and is being controlled from "above" by a "perfect" being.
Oddly, when I became an athiest I didn't shift to the common ground many of my leftist friends seem to hold, i.e. "the world is gonna end with climate change" and "you'd better to x y and z" if you want to be a good citizen. XY & Z can be anything from recycling, to turning vegan, to buying an electric car, to simply voting for left-wing politios....
All hubris in my opinion.
Perhaps we evolved to expect the worse, and, well, looking at history, that's not a bad interpretation of how life plays out. Disaster, disease, war, pestilence, etc., seem pretty much the norm.
The evangelical tradition comes out of the Catholic Church. The Catholic teaching tries to walk this line between “the material world is all there is” and “the material world doesn’t matter because heaven has the real goods.” If the material world is all there is, it becomes difficult to have hope and easier to argue in favor of tyrannies to promote the good. This is basically what we see happening around us.
Looking at most of human history over the span of just one human life, sure, expecting the worst makes sense. But technological progress is real, and I think is evidence that the laws of physics themselves are good.
I think your instinct that it's an excuse, not a real reason (or the main reason, at least) is spot on.
In developing countries it seems that one of the driving forces for not having kids or holding off until later or having less kids is that more women are going to college/work force. I'm a first born Gen-X (b. '65) and when I was in my teens it was just sort of normal to think about getting married, having kids, and you know, living the life.
I have two childless daughters (my eldest has two kids, but he married a Catholic -- she waited until well after getting her degree to start having kids).
Of my two (and many of their peers) they're spending (or had spent) their 20s getting degrees and putting off the idea of a starting a family. I think it's pretty normal for that age range to consider waiting, especially if they have plans for university. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing based on my personal experience, but it seems like a good theory.
If there are a large number of people like me, the reason for the declining birthrate is trivial.
Precious few women consider raising children to be the best available use of their limited life span. In a society that restricted women's alternatives, with technology that was ineffective at allowing heterosexuals to be sexually active without creating pregnancies, lots of babies got created that simply would not be created today because their potential mothers now have alternatives.
Part of the problem is situational/cultural. You don't get much in the way of status, power, or approval for being a mother. The best ages for having children are also the best ages for advancing one's career, and if you miss out on university/early career workaholism you'll never catch up with peers who delayed or omitted childbearing.
Those cultural disincentives could be fixed. I've played with the idea of a society where teenagers bear children, whose middle aged grandparents then raise them. The grandparents either have successful careers by then, so can afford to hire paid childcare, or know their careers are going nowhere, and welcome the excuse to drop out of the rat race.
The conservative fix on the other hand is to limit women's opportunities, so they can either be a wife-and-mother, a (gasp) barren housewife, or a total failure spinster, relegated to caring for parents and the offspring of more successful siblings. They may have no opportunity to be as respected or high status as the worst of their male siblings, but that's OK, because they are raised knowing that even the least of males out-value them.
Theoretically there could also be a distinct-spheres culture that valued child production and rearing over everything else, and regarded the male sphere as low importance scutwork. Given human nature though, I can't see that happening, though it might just be more plausible than a separate-but-equal regime where both genders are truly seen and treated as having equal value.
I don't know whether having been raised in a culture hyper-valuing broodmares and nursemaids would have changed my attitude to the activities required for that profession. I suspect I'd have hated most aspects of being in charge of children, regardless. The only difference would be that I might have done it anyway, out of a combination of stubborn competitiveness, and youthful limited self-knowledge.
The conservative reply would be not that women should be excluded from other activities but that producing and rearing children, running a household, should be treated as a respectable activity and that part of what has changed is that it now isn't. Most women don't have the option of being a senator or a Google programmer or a partner in a top law firm — nor do most men. Compared to the jobs most people end up with, running a household and rearing children doesn't look unattractive.
That's one conservative reply. There are others, and you are on some of the forums where I've seen those other replies.
And certainly I've encountered people who actually want to rear children. (I've even encountered some who want to carry a baby to term, or give birth to one, rather than regarding that as a necessary evil.) I've also known some who want to be homemakers - not entirely the same thing - rather than e.g. settling for homemaking because they personally have few career prospects.
The real question - for both of these - is how many people want what. It wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO, to have some selection pressure for wanting to raise children, or cultural improvements to make it more feasible and/or more attractive. OTOH, if I were still young enough to be forced into being a broodmare, I'd also be young enough to apply the US second amendment to that situation.
What does "forced into" mean there? Does it include a situation where abortion is illegal and the only easily available contraceptives are condoms, so a woman who chooses to have intercourse has some risk of pregnancy — roughly the situation when I was young? If so, who do you propose to shoot?
Does it include a situation where the alternatives to being a housewife that are available to you are unattractive — schoolteacher, checkout clerk at a grocery store, secretary? Same question.
Or are you only referring to a situation where you were literally forced into bearing children? The only cases that occur to me in American history would be the situation of some slaves prior to abolition, and I am not even sure if that was common then. Perhaps I am being insufficiently imaginative.
That's an interesting question. I think if I had a guaranteed-fatal ectopic pregnancy I wasn't allowed to have aborted, and couldn't escape the political jurisdiction forcing this fate on me, I'd dedicate my remaining months to assassinating the maximum possible number of law makers who I knew to support that state of affairs, starting with those who'd proposed the legislation in question. If I ran out if law makers, I'd start in on some combination of judges (who'd failed to strike down the law when given the opportunity) and political supporters of the deceased law makers.
Obviously the degree of violence appropriate in response varies with the scale of the cost on the person being compelled to bear an unwanted child. It's much the same calculus as the one that applies for someone drafted to serve in an unjust war. (E.g. a war for the benefit of the profits of political donors.) Though the draftee does have the advantage that they will be armed and trained in the use of weapons, then likely sent somewhere where they have a good chance of quietly fragging their officers without getting caught, if not the politicians and donors.
Commenting on myself here: I kind of unconsciously jumped from "if women have nothing else to do, they'll 'voluntarily' become breeders" version of "forced" to the currently *more* politically salient "if heterosexual women have a contraceptive failure, or anyone not on systemic contraceptives is raped, they'll be forced to carry the baby".
I didn't actually intend that sort of derail. Instead I got caught by my own all too human cognitive tendencies.
Of course it was entirely common, otherwise we wouldn't see the genetics we see.
Obvious in my opinion.
Also, let's admit to our base nature...if any one of us heterosexual males was essentially a king on our own plantation and felt (for whatever distorted reason) that it was okay (or God's design) to own slaves, there's is zero doubt we'd be dipping into the cookie jar.
To suspect otherwise would be to deny all of base human nature and the actual genetic mixes we can easily observe.
I'm sure it was common for whites to have sex with female slaves. I was thinking of a situation where the female slave was actually being used as a brood mare to breed more slaves. The female slave having forced sex isn't exactly being forced to bear children, although that might be the result.
<And certainly I've encountered people who actually want to rear children.>
In my former life as an evangelical, this was nearly everyone I knew. Certainly the strenght of the church/religion has dropped over time, but it's still a big influence.
Thesedays, where a good number of my friends are non-religious, it's certainly true that a lot of them don't want/plan to have kids, however, it's not all of them. A fair number of non-religious friends are married with or planning kids.
The thing I think you're forgetting (or leaving out of the equation) is the evolutionary pressure to have kids. It's not that we, in modern society, cannot use birth control, it's that there's a pressure to have children ingrained in us (tied, of course, to the sexual drive, but not correlated with it exactly).
My girlfriend is smart, industrious, clever, and likes to work, however, if I said to her, "hey, I just won the lottery, let's buy some property, have kids, raise some animals, and live a simple life," she'd agree to this in a heartbeat.
She wouldn't spend a second reflecting on the missed opportunity of working for a living, communting to an office, etc. She'd likely want to start some boutique business or something, but it would be for pleasure more than making money to survive.
And, as an aside, if I won the lottery, yeah, I'd reverse my vasectomy and have as many kids as I could handle before I felt I was too old to be a responsible father....maybe seventy would be my limit, if I suspected I'd live to 90 at least.
Why? Well, I've found being a parent infinately rewarding and fun to do (despite the sacrifices) and the three kids that I have, well, one lawyer, one in L3 about to be a lawyer, and one getting a masters in neuroscience. I see my contribution to the betterment of the world and think it's good. Maybe random luck, but maybe not, maybe, inspite of my faults, I was a decent dad.
At least I have good genes (apparently).
Anywhoo, we've been talking about RAH a bit in these posts here and it reminds me that he had some possible answers with different types of marriage arrangements (line marriages, groups that form a family and a corporation and share duties, etc).
So, part of our current problem is a failure of imagination and a rigid stickness of religous rules that dictate archaic marriage rules (outlawing polygamy, as an example).
I don't think we really know whether humans have evolved a tendency to want kids, given a free choice, or merely a tendency to want to have sex, with the kids coming along as a side effect. Provided there was an aversion to infanticide, the evolutionary results would be almost indistinguishable.
Consider also a cuckoo female - genetically inclined to foist her offspring on some other person to rear. (aka "put the kids up for adoption" ); that, too, could have been selected *for* in some previous environments.
What we have now is a separation of evolutionary pressures. If all you want is heterosexual sex, you can have it with little or no risk of pregnancy. And if you want to have kids but not rear them, well, lots of people who can't have kids are eager to adopt, though this may change somewhat with surrogate technology.
I suspect that if things are allowed to run their course, without interference that relinks sex with pregnancy with child-rearing, there will be interesting results in a few generations. At a guess, there will be more women who actually want children, because they'll be the daughters of mothers and grandmothers who wanted children. I.e. there will be fewer people with my attitudes.
<I don't think we really know whether humans have evolved a tendency to want kids,>
I'd say it's axiomatic that we evolved to want kids, it goes hand-in-hand with wanting heterosexual sex, nature would seemingly select to people who want kids (as you pretty much conclude in your last sentence --- if humans didn't evolve to want kids, your last sentence would be false, and I don't think it is).
Granted my experience is ancedotal and I haven't taken any surveys, but such a huge percentage of all the humans I've ever known have wanted kids, so it's kind of stretch to think my experiences are some insane anomaly -- although I'll concede it's possible.
A quick Google search gave me a Statistia stat that says in 2021, 40% of US households had children (under 18) living in them. If you figure a big percentage of households without kids in 2021, used to have kids, then the percentage of people who have kids is pretty high.
The only way to reconcile that with the idea that people don't really want kids at such a high percentage is to assume the majority of these kids were accidents (and the majority of the women were against abortion and just had the brats in spite of not wanting them).
As a sidebar, my first two kids were unplanned, but in neither case did I not want them, the timing sucked, but the kids were welcomed and wanted. I don't think my attitude is a rare case, but rather the more common one.
As another aside, the most common cuckhold sistuation isn't where a woman doesn't want kids, she does, but she's trying (unconsciously for the most part) to get the best of both worlds, a stable mate to provide resource (husband) and a better genes (the hunk neighbor with six pack abs and high paying job).
Source for that is the book Sperm Wars, don't know if the research was backed by others, but it seemed pretty sound when I read it. When I was in highschool biology class in the 1980s, my teacher told us in the "blood lab" section that she no longer had her students blood type themselves and their parents as too frequently (and this is the research conclusion in Sperm Wars) the child discovers daddy ain't the daddy.
Seems that a woman's drive to have sex outside her marriage can't just be for sex itself, at least subconsciously, because if you're going to plan and scheme to cheat, you're certainly capable of using BC. That women don't do this seems to suggest the drive to bear kids (with the best genes possible) is an evolutionary principle that even our logical brains with the science to avoid having kids cannot overcome. Or these women are just high risk individuals that only get off on the risk, but that seems a stretch as well. I think the statistic is that 5% or more of children are the result of a cuckhold situtation, but this is just my (bad) memory's recollection and the stats might have been bad to begin with (but not totally wrong, I mean what happened to my biology teacher wasn't a one off anomoly, but something that happened so often she had to change her curriculum).
I suspect some part is also how much you liked your childhood and your family. I am an early Boomer and have 3 siblings. Between us we have 9 children. I would have been happy to have more, but my first wife caught that early 2nd wave feminist thing and decided she'd missed a lot, so . . .
But my two have six between them, and my daughter says she couldn't imagine not having children because she had been so happy. And her life has not been a bed of roses. (I came from a poor tenant farming family, and by the time I had been divorced we had maybe made it, barely, to the lower middle class.) My son is the same. And both believe kids need sibs.
I also now have e great-grandchildren and fully expect more.
My sibs have 12 grandchildren, one on the way, and 4 great-grandchildren.
We came from a physically rather impoverished but incredibly loving childhood and it passed to our children and apparently to theirs.
Dystopianism might in part be an outlet for illegible unhappiness/dissatisfaction/anxiety. People are much richer now, but have less power over their own lives; eg a medieval peasant got their food by growing it but a modern employee gets their food by obeying instructions. Similarly, raising children is subject to far more social pressure, and every aspect of human life is subject to competitive pressure (competition is bad for the competitors). I don’t think many people have the concepts necessary to articulate this as a source of unhappiness though, and without the intellectual legwork that would involve saying “I’m unhappy that I’m not a subsistence farmer and my kids have opportunities.” I don’t think I’ve even grasped the whole of it, particularly as I probably could live like that if I wanted to.
Dystopianism tends to involve political and economic systems either breaking down or being obviously awful, and may be the only way most people can give expression to that.
As a sidebar, I think Robin Hanson's response to guys like Yudkowski was comical.
He takes such an extreme "everything is going to be uptopian," I have to wonder if he's on drugs, selling something, or has never picked up a history book.
AI has the potential to extinct humanity. That's not even debatable unless you're going on some kind of faith and injecting a God or gods or miracles into the picture.
That doesn't, however, mean it's likely or very likely, it's just in the light cone of possible futures. To act like that's not the case, well it seems silly, although I pretty much admit there's not a damn thing we can do about it and trying to stop it would be futile.
In one of Yudkowsky's essays he points out that teenagers, while they acknowledge that people die in car crashes, cannot conceive that it could happen to them. There is a magical thinking that "I'm an exception."
He relates this same illogical thinking to the idea that humans cannot go extinct, as if there is a magical force protecting us from nature. No, he writes, nature doesn't care about humans.
Perhaps part of the Grabby Aliens and Fermi Paradox discussion is that evolution drives carbon based sentient life towards compute and the end result is machines take over....or not....who knows about some of these ultimate answers but, anyway, the more I read about it, the more convinced we live in a simulation. So, yeah, at the end of the day, I'm staying an anarchist hedonist who remains optimistic only because the alternative is suicide and that wouldn't let me see the possible outcomes of staying alive (which, when practiced well, is pretty fun and challenging).
As to worrying about human populations...haha, Ted Kaczynski had this correct: the future population will be either destroyed or enslaved by the AI robotic overlords, OR Mark Zuckerberg will rule the world and we can only hope, as a good socially conscious leftist, he instructs his machines to treat us like loved house pets. Say hello to UBI and universal everything...
As Kaczynski says, we might be well cared for, well fed, and have tons of leisure time, but we won't be free.
“ AI has the potential to extinct humanity. That's not even debatable unless you're going on some kind of faith and injecting a God or gods or miracles into the picture.”
It surely is debatable and it doesn’t need any supernatural refutation either. The burden of proof is on the people making the extraordinary statement. If there’s any religious belief here it’s in the demonology of AI.
“ In one of Yudkowsky's essays he points out that teenagers, while they acknowledge that people die in car crashes, cannot conceive that it could happen to them. There is a magical thinking that "I'm an exception. He relates this same illogical thinking to the idea that humans cannot go extinct“
That’s absurd. Like telling a billionaire that there’s a homeless guy who lost his only dollar and therefore losing all his wealth could happen to the billionaire easily enough.
“ OR Mark Zuckerberg will rule the world and we can only hope, as a good socially conscious leftist, he instructs his machines to treat us like loved house pets. ”
Dude we don’t even have those kind of robots. We have LLMs, non conscious pattern matchers with no agency.
You think it's absurd to think it's possible that humans could go extinct or a billionaire could go bankrupt?
I guess you've lived on a different earth than I have.
And, yeah, I know we don't have "those kinds of robots" today, not saying we do, but I.J. Good and A. Turning both recognized this issue back in, what, the 1940s? The logic hasn't changed since then, and while you might argue it's 100 or 1000 years away, that's not refuting my point, it's making my point.
How would you debate in favor of the proposition: "It's impossible for humans to go extinct."?
Without injecting the supernatural?
Seems extinction is the most common fate on this planet for all species, and while I grant humans are indeed a special case of animal, and we have agency other animals don't, I can't see how you'd build a solid Bayesian logical argument why human extinction is impossible.
Btw, I'm not saying it's likely, I'm an optimist on this and think we'll reach mind uploads and we'll colonize space. But, Yudkowsky's point is valid, we don't know what we don't know and a Black Swan extinction event is well above 0% likelihood.
I think under the right conditions, I'd probably submit myself.
I do wonder, sometimes, about the ethics of having a kid. I'm glad I had mine, they're great, but you know, I never asked them if they wanted to be born.
And nobody asked me....but I guess I'm glad to be here, although, that's only said not being entirely sure of the alternatives.
I bring that up because, if you think about it, having a kid is sort of like creating your own slave, at least for a good part of our lives in the beginning, we're just slaves/pets/property of our parents. The good ones help us find freedom but most parents suck and just victimize their kids into mind slavery as they were (i.e. government and religion is good).
I was more an indentured servant to my kids than they were a slave to me, but YMMV. ;-)
I agree that we need more good parents (I'd want a reasonable working definition for "good parent"), but given evolution and the ruck and run of humanity that will probably always be the case.
I think at base I tried to help my children achieve Heinlein's quote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I'm hoping my children and other descendants won't need to die gallantly, but I'm sure my children could, and would, at need. The rest they can do for sure. And more.
Being able to do all of that, and more, makes them capable of being a good citizen, family member, friend, worker, and a dangerous enemy. I'm satisfied.
Wasn't that quote from Time Enough for Love? I think so, but it's been a long time.
Sure, if you're living a thousand years, you can do all those things, but I don't know if it's so necessary to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none in the short lives we have. Maybe. I can't do all those things, and I'm pushing 60 and not exactly unhandy.
I guess in a pinch I could butcher an animal and set a bone, like if the zombie apocalypse happened. Program a computer? Not a chance....
I'd rather do some things I'm good at and trade.
I hear on the indentured servant thing....it was that way, when they were little for sure, what I meant by "slave" is more that we cannot help but influence them to see the world like we do (at least when they're young).
I waver these days between wanting to be a hunter gather in the Amazon and being rich in the city. I don't know the right answer and in the end, I think I'm just faking it like everyone else.
A couple years back, when I was a high earner and had a big house, I hosted a weekly dinner party. Part of the gig was if you were a regular guest, you were (sort of, not legalistically) expected to either cook or help cook at least once. I had some great bonding experiences this way.
Anyway, one of the problems with my transition to a Kindle library is that in the zombie apocalypse, I could lose access to my books (which include things like How to Raise Animals on a Small Farm and how to survive TEOTWAWKI).
I lost my physical books in a condo fire -- and transitioned to ebooks.
My point is that I'm handy enough with my hands (a career in construction helped with this) that I think most things that require hand-eye cooridination (hunting, fishing, building, dressing meat, etc) I could figure out from a book. At least well enough to survive.
I guess I should buy a few "How to Survive" books in physical form and keep them well protected.
This is not Hanson's response, there are various disagreements about Foom etc. But the crux of the issue is that Hanson thinks that independent of AI, our descendents will be very alien from us anyway. Moreover he views our current cultural moment as being a sort of "dreamtime" and thinks that once evolution corrects itself our descendents would be very unlikeable by contemporary standards, and that if your concerned about AI alignment, there is the general concern about descendent alignment. Relatedly Hanson is not utopian about the future, he infact recognises that If people could get a clear vision of it they would be horrified. Although interestingly he seems personally very sympathetic towards such alien descendents.
"once evolution corrects itself" is a meaningless phrase, evolution is blind, stupid, and cannot "correct itself" nor is it guided to some predetermined point.
Any descendents we have that are significantly different due to evolution (as opposed to cultural changes) will be so distance in the future we can safely not worry about it. Now, if an AI and/or AI-human team starts genetically breeding us like dogs, that's another story.
I don't disagree with those that say the foom is pointless, but I've heard some dumb interviews/speeches about how everything is going to be peaches, and I think that's naive at best.
Could you link me something where Robin Hanson says everything is going to be peaches, either a blog post or in some interview. As for the claim evolution is a blind idiot god, in some sense this is true, but I fear most people take this too far. That in reality what evolution is selecting for is fairly obvious and as such one can easily make predictions about what kind of creatures will dominate the future say with respects to time preference or valuing reproduction abstractly etc. Relatedly there is that funny joke about Haldane and teleology and also about teleonomy.
Hanson also thinks cultural evolution is going to be the main way in which genes are selected for, his most recent posts outline the possibility that insular high fertility culture manage to replace moderns. This would happen fairly quickly.
Your concern seems to be with time span, which is something Hanson has discussed quite a lot with others (you can find the interviews on his yt channel).
On a meta level I don't think you have a clear view of Hanson, I would recommend his blog, books and papers. He's definitely not what you portray him to be.
You're correct that I reacted emotionallly to Hansen and dismissed him as an un-useful idiot too quickly. I rectact that, I was wrong.
However.....where I got the ideas that Hanson was saying everything is going to be peaches, is an interview he did on Bankless, post Yudkowski, in which the hosts wanted a counter to Yudkowski's doomsday prediction "kiss your loved ones goodbye."
That link should start you at the part in the interview where he basically seems to say, "My disagreement with Elizer is the time scale more than the outcome." I'm paraphrasing here.
Essentially he's saying what you seem to be telling me, i.e., humans will change, that's evolution (both natural and cultural) and so what? We'll be new beings, just like we're new beings from 10,000 years ago and 1,000 years ago, and even a lot different from pre-internet, if we're honest. I get this....
However, and this is a big however, he seems to saying that homo sapiens as we know ourselves won't exist and that's fine --- no problem because we've always evolved (I mean, hey, we're not monkeys anymore, right?).
I listened to an interview with Hinton where he said that perhaps humans are just a step in the evolution of machine intelligence, i.e., yeah, we're going to die out, and won't exist, but that's okay, it's how life works. Which seems to be the same thing Hansen is saying.
Now, I'm not religious, but the "human" in me wants to rebell against this idea. I'd like to see humans continue, to explore the universe, and, frankly, I'd like a mind upload of myself to exist and to be downloadable into a clone of my choosing. I think I'd like to try a six foot tall red head supermodel with a body that could stop traffic, but that's just one of my many fantasies about the future.
What's interesting, and just dawned on me, is that Hansen is signed up for cryonics, yeah? So, in his mind, the idea of the possibility of being "woken up" and "healed" in the future only to be stuck in a zoo or studied in a lab or made a slave doesn't bother him, he's willing to risk the future is bright.
So that would be my "evidence" if you will, that Hansen is seeing the future as "peachy" as his actions seem to reflect that. Who would sign up for getting their brain frozen if they thought they had a good chance of waking up in hell?
Anywhooooooo......I did, like said, sort of jump to a conclusion based on emotion. I watched that Hansen interview after watching a ton of interviews with Yudkowski (and others) and I was feeling this sort of existential crisis thing.....but I've since recovered.
I think we might all die, but I realize there is nothing I can do about it.
Meanwhile, maybe the future will be amazing, and maybe I'll live long enough to find out.
It's hard to tell what Hanson's values and normative and positive beliefs are, I suspect he has no normative beliefs and unusual values, and in conversation he only vaguely explores his various positive beliefs and their corresponding probabilities. Part of this is because he's always wearing some sort of "hat" say the efficient economist's pledge for example.
My suspicion is that Hanson thinks that future descendants would have a very favorable view of him, even if most people would find those descendants completely alien and disturbing, this is possibly why he has on net a favorable view of cryonics. This is sort of clear in the age of em scenario, but could also apply to a AGI scenario etc. The biggest puzzle is why he doesn't have more biological children, perhaps he thinks spreading his ideas is sufficient, although its hard to see why having more meatbags around to resurrect you would be a bad thing, or a difficult goal.
I definately like having kids around that I know love me.
It's a sense of security that is better than anything else, except maybe a 40 acre compound with good lighting and a machine gun bunker, but that's another topic. lol
As a sidebar, I listened to about an hour of that interview today, after thinking about it, and I was definately judging his position unfavorably due to my anxiety about impending doom.
I agree that the best we can do is plow forward and hope the mess comes out in the wash (similar to George Hotz).
In general, when faced with a tough decision, it seems the most libertarian/anarchist position, based on first principles, is the right decision, even if it leads to risk.
My understanding is that most cultures in history have had a pessimism of the future. They see culture as being in decline from the once great ancients. But most cultures had high fertility rates regardless.
I don’t see why the usual economic explanations don’t hold: People have better things to do than have kids, because the world has gotten so much better.
People without kids have far less counterfactual money than those with kids, and far less counterfactual time. If society would instead pay those people a lot more money, or withdraw social safety nets like social security, then having kids would be in people’s interests again!
Indeed, I anticipate if social security ever comes crumbling down, we will get an increase in fertility, snd that will be the control mechanism by which america at least gets higher fertility. Don’t know if enough though, since you still have the problem that people can just save for retirement themselves.
Social media disproportionately elevates the voices of unhappy people, because they spend more time online. Previously we mostly talked about public affairs with cheerful extroverts, because those are the people you tend to meet and talk to, and got our news from successful professionals because those were the people who wrote news articles as a profession. Because moods are contagious, everyone is now more unhappy.
I think it's precisely because life has gotten so good that people try to find catastrophes to be worried about.
Current generations (especially born after the 1970s) lack the intimate knowledge of what it's like to live in extreme poverty or war. We have to imagine it. I read a few months ago someone freaking out about the Ukraine War, because it represented a time of strife. I pointed out to him that it was a tiny war, by any historical standard, and that the 100+ years before the 21st century saw bigger wars more frequently than we've seen since 2000 - even if you excluded WWI and WWII! He seemed shocked by this, perhaps not really believing it.
I think we find it necessary to have things to worry about, and because we have so few real things to worry about, we latch on to things that might appear real or could potentially represent a problem.
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
The glib answer is regression to the mean. I don't think that's really what's going on, though.
I suspect the world is getting better in easy-to-measure, number-go-up ways and worse in complex ways. That's why you can point to graphs where simple metrics like GDP and starvation levels are improving, but there's a universal sense of doomerism. I think that intuition is really telling and not worth dismissing. For one thing, it's common across so many groups. For another, it's happening now in particular, more than at other times in history even when mass media existed. You could think of these varied visions of apocalypse as the dreams of a collective unconscious, which sounds woo, but I think it's a reasonable hypothesis if you buy a few uncontroversial assumptions:
1. Collective intelligence exists. The stock market (or prediction markets) can generate information no individual can, a corporation can process information and act in a coherent way, cultural memes spread and evolve independently of their human hosts. On a society-wide level, something you could call "cognition" is occurring (this doesn't require sentience).
2. In the human mind, some information is known only (or mostly) on the emotional level, and this has an analog in the case of society-level cognition.
3. Dreams have random elements but are largely not random; rather, they often correspond to complicated emotions in the dreamer, with made-up plots to contextualize the emotions.
So different subcultures collectively develop narratives that stick because they capture a mood, an intuition lots of people have but don't know how to describe, and each culture substitutes its own mores and bogeymen. From this perspective, you can't debunk climate doomerism any more than you can look at someone tossing and turning in their sleep and say, "Ha! You fool – you're not really showing up late for the final exam naked, you're just lying in your bed!" instead of saying "Huh, what in your life maps onto a feeling of being stressed and exposed?".
One theory for the underlying cause of the parallel evolution of these dystopian dreams is something like "misalignment" – AI is one instance of this, but the general principle is something about technological advances quickening the pace at which the modern environment differs from the ancestral environment, so that the subtler human and cultural capacities, the ones that had to evolve instead of being invented as technologies or discovered from first principles, become ineffectual; and load-bearing traditions and institutions get displaced faster than we can catch up to rebuilding infrastructure to handle all the auxiliary loads those traditions/institutions were bearing without us realizing it. The left calls it capitalism, the right calls it the decay of traditional values or something, the gray tribe calls it Moloch.
Also, "things are consistently getting better" seems largely orthogonal to "shit's on the brink of hitting the fan", rather than being a counterargument. If you're running a scam, your trajectory looks like "get more and more and more money and then oops implode and go to jail". If you're using up a finite resource, your trajectory looks like compounding returns followed by a nosedive. The higher you build on top of an unstable foundation, the less robust your system becomes; optimization pressures tend toward centralization pressures, which trade off against resiliency. (In fact, I'm not totally convinced the population argument, at least the more mainstream version of it, was implausible. Things didn't turn out that way, but I haven't heard a knockout argument for "people could have and should have known at the time that overpopulation wouldn't be a big deal", especially since I think it's not so much that population skyrocketed and it was fine, as that the population growth rate started going down right after The Population Bomb was written.)
Incidentally, I don't really think any of this is the proximate cause of people having fewer kids; my best guess is that that's more due to hormone disruptions.
One of the reasons I thought the overpopulation thesis was false was a calculation I did at the time, ranking countries by population density. The accepted picture was that countries were poor because they had too many people. But of the five most densely populated countries, two were rich European countries, the other three were countries in the process of becoming rich (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore). India and China had large populations but they were big countries so not particularly high density.
I have a bunch of talks on my web page, including some partly about the population scare:
AI may kill us. It’s the most likely outcome but certainly not 100%.
In climate change... yeah Gen Z think it’s a much bigger problem than it is. Even more pessimistic takes than yours are nowhere near as bad as what teenagers today assume their future holds.
Mostly likely most of these problems are meaningless because AI will change the context to the point that geoengineering seems like a minor problem. Either we’ll be fucked or massively more capable.
Too true. Nothing changes your perspective more than watching your hopes or fears not pan out as expected. You aren't going to be an astronaut, but you're also not going to die of Swine Flu. At this point in my life I consider than a win.
Agreed. Have you listened to any of Daniel Schmachtenberger's talks about the "Search for the Third Attractor?"
It's basically this idea that society tends to go off towards more (centralized) control or libertarianism and with AI we either get governments that can watch and monitor every single detail of our lives OR we end up in world where a couple of dedicated terrorists use AI to kill millions (or billions -- or pull of an extinction level act of terrorism).
Personally I'm less worried about sentient killer robots than a small dedicated group unleashing a plague by using generative AI to build a superweapon -- ala Frank Herbert's White Plague.
Fatalistic pessimism helps with more than just excusing low fecundity. For one thing, it excuses inaction when one would otherwise be expected to sacrifice and work hard toward change or to support resistance efforts.
Also, any community focusing on a particular set of shared ideas faces a common problem whereby the social dynamics of competitive sanctimony unleash a kind of signaling spiral that can incentivize members to quickly express the most extreme form of or commitment to those ideas. Those extremes manifest on the dimensions of confidence and severity as well, which leads straight to "black pill" positions.
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
Perhaps because when you have a lot, you become more fearful of losing it than excited to get more.
You write:
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
You appear to be looking at global statistics. I don't think most people look there when deciding whether "things have been getting rapidly better for [their] entire life and well before". I suspect they are more likely to compare what they have with what they expected to have by this stage of their life. That's a little hard for outsiders to measure (we don't know what they were thinking 20, 40, or even 60 years ago). So one commonly used proxy compares individuals with their own parents.
I regularly read articles stating as an unchallenged truth that the median American is less well off than their parents. Their parents bought homes younger; their parents lived comfortably on a single income; their parents had relatively secure jobs; their parents had far less debt. This is blamed on a combination of increasing inequality and a rearrangement of the work force requiring two incomes to attain the same living standard previously attained with a single income. (That would of course be among those not desperately poor - poor women have always had to work, even while middle class feminists were complaining about being stuck in their homes.)
You will of course notice what isn't mentioned. Their parents didn't have the same tech tools modern youngsters can't imagine living without. Their parents may or may not have had better access to routine care, but moderns who can afford them have access to effective treatments for conditions which would have killed their parents. (I compare my experience with cancer to that of my grandfather.)
And that's before we talk about unrealistic expectations - in particular, that they'd be doing *better* than their parents, perhaps enormously better.
My parents imagined me as becoming a famous academic scientist, perhaps complete with Nobel prize. Instead, I'm merely a retired Principal Software Engineer. That's more prosperous than they were - dad was a unionized factory worker. But I certainly didn't live up to their (inflated) expectations. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of folks like me, not achieving inflated expectations ;-)
Bottom line though: improvement or its reverse can be in the eye of the beholder. and the perception of improvement, as well as hope for future improvement, tends to be very localized.
My standard reply to such charges is to look them directly in the eye and say, "Modern dentistry!"
It's definitely looking at the false, idealized version of the past you described. The idea is that the man went to work at his cushy factory job and bought a 3,500 square foot house at age 23 while the mom stayed home with the 5 kids. It's completely false. Not only do we have more technology, but we get more for less. Real incomes have risen. We don't need two people working to afford the extra technology or to live at the same standard of living that our parents did. It's a myth.
Were other generations like this too? I have no idea because I'm only 30. If not, I also have no idea why people are so pessimistic now. Maybe as things improve people keep finding smaller and smaller things to worry about. There's some evidence in psychology for this. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, though.
By a lot of objective measures -- hours worked per year, home size, life expectancy, etc. -- every generation for the past 200 years has been distinctly better-off than the preceding generation at the same age, so today's young adults _reasonably expected_ to be better-off than their parents, and they aren't.
Yes, health care continues to improve, but many people in the US don't have access to that high-quality health care, and life expectancies in the US are actually dropping.
Of course, as you point out, there are other metrics that nobody would have thought to measure 200 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Having a movie camera, hundreds of encyclopedias, hundreds of language translators, thousands of games, millions of recorded songs, movies, and TV shows, billions of pages of books, billions of pictures, and helpful guides who can find what I want from all of it within seconds, plus the ability to communicate in seconds (text, audio, and video) with people halfway around the world, all on a box in my pocket that costs me an hour's wages per month, is hard to compare with what any previous generation had.
I think life expectancy dropping is very recent, due to Covid.
Also I don't think it is true. I have a blog post explaining it:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-cdc-gets-life-expectancy-wildly.html
Life expectancy is a projection, not an observed fact, so depends on assumptions about future death rates. The much publicized figure was based on using the 2020 mortality figures to predict future mortality. It was, in effect, assuming there would be another pandemic every year.
If I recall correctly, there was already a drop in life expectancy for certain demographics in the US before covid. What there was not, again IIRC, was an overall drop in life expectancy.
Other than that, I agree that "life expectancy" metrics are almost as misleading as "gross national product", though nowhere near as misleading as the "unemployment rate" statistic.
Sure, a life-expectancy projection based on extrapolating 2020 mortality numbers is very suspect.
But the much-publicized Case-Deaton work on US life expectancies (and "deaths of despair") was published in 2015. And https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/ shows US life expectancy falling behind that in all other "comparable nations" around 1990, peaking in 2014, and dropping slowly for several years before the pandemic.
The relevant question isn't whether it has fallen behind other countries but whether it has fallen, since that is what would justify a negative view of the future.
Do you have a link to the Case-Deaton work? The latest Reason has an article criticizing the "deaths of despair" category and arguments based on it for restricting pain killers.
The healthsystemtracker link has a graph of life expectancies over the past forty years in a dozen or so “developed nations”. In the 1980’s, the US was in the middle of the pack. But US life expectancy grew very slowly for most of those years, both in comparison to its earlier growth and in comparison to other developed nations. It seems to have actually dropped slightly from 2014-2016, then grown slightly from 2016-2019, then dropped dramatically in 2020 (much more than in other countries, which can’t be attributed to methodological problems unless they used different projection methodologies for different countries).
I can easily imagine people developing “a negative view about the future” from life expectancies growing more slowly than in previous generations, and perhaps from life expectancies growing more slowly than in other countries (“relative well-being” is a thing). The graphs don’t address income discrepancies within countries, but if d(LE)/dt was even lower for low-to-middle-income Americans, that too could justify pessimism.
Case & Deaton published a well-known book, _Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism_, on March 17, 2020, presumably at least a month after they finalized their galleys and therefore not showing any appreciable mortality impact of COVID in the US. This followed a couple of earlier papers, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1518393112 from 2015 and https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf from 2017.
I haven’t read any of these myself, so I’m not in a position to critique them. I’ve seen some criticism on grounds that they excluded Native Americans, who had an even more dramatic drop in life expectancy (which would have diluted the story about white people, but not about “deaths of despair”, since a lot of Native Americans are poor, unemployed, and/or alcoholic — the standard picture of someone susceptible to “deaths of despair”).
Yes. My generation is probably the last one where those expectations were mostly fulfilled. (I'm in my mid '60s.)
I'm honestly not sure about those other metrics. On a bad day, I'd trade google search for a combination of the Yellow Pages and a good paper encyclopedia. (At least I'd get the same results each time I did a particular search.) I'd gladly trade a modern clothes-destroying (sold as "water saving"), short-lifetime washing machine - complete with touch screen instead of dials, and maybe internet access, forced software updates (and hacking!) for one of those old workhorse machines that lasted for decades with my level of use. And my oh-so-wonderful cell phone camera can't do basic things I used to do with a non-digital cheapie - in particular, it can't be convinced to refrain from enhancing what it thinks I should want enhanced. I'd also be much much happier if no one had any access to modern "deep fake" technology.
For people who would like to interact in real time, I host an online meetup on Saturday mornings as well as a very occasional realspace meetup, originally for readers of the blog Slate Star Codex. Details:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Too much of my favorite reading for pleasure, Science Fiction) now routinely has some sort of climate disaster in the story, even if it takes place lightyears from Earth. Also, most i=of it also has gratuitous mention of LGBTQ+ talking points.
Even Analog magazine (the SF with nuts and bolts) has fallen into this kind of story. Seldom is there a need for either in the story, it's just jammed in there.
OTOH, I'm still waiting for the SF novel/story where people 50 years from now go all medieval on those who lied to them about Climate Catastrophe to the detriment of their lives. I want an angry woman in a story who is hunting down the "97%ers" because she didn't have children de to their lies, and now she wants to go all Rambo on their *ss.
BTW, just saw a picture of the Plymouth Rock (it's smaller than most people think), and oddly enough, after 400 year of global warmening it's still above sea level.
There is a Niven and Pournelle novel, _Fallen Angels_, where the progressives have taken over and the ice is coming south.
An example of the pattern the other way was an sf novel, not bad, where part of the background was much less land on Earth due to sea level rise. We know what Earth looks like with the ice caps melted, that having been a majority of its past condition.
I read that back when it came out. Early 1990s? When I was in grad school, anyway. Enjoyed it at the time but thought it was a bit lightweight for those authors. (Wasn't there a third author?) Kind of an environmentalist case of Heinlein's Crazy Years.
Have you looked at Cirsova magazine? Or some of the works of John C Wright?
https://substack.com/@euginenier/note/c-41396532
I am unaware of Cirsova. I'll look into it. I've read some Wright, liked some, kind of 'eh' about some. Read and liked all of the Honor Harrington stuff that actually had her in them. Of course, I loved the Horatio Hornblower stories, so there you are.
You're not reading a bunch of Kindle Unlimited science fiction are you?
I love science fiction, but hate about 75% of new things I try. Pretty much, if I'm in the mood, I just re-read something I know I'm gonna like. lol
As for virtual signalling, yeah, I can't stand it -- just write the story.
There are vested interests in believing that humanity is worse off: activists, NGOs, and CNN lose their reason for existing if things keep getting better. Same with many politicians: look how bad current politicians are; clearly this candidate or that party will make things better. Their ideas trickle into the popular culture.
I think this is exactly so. There is a great deal of money and status in fighting some great catastrophe, and very little in having done so. Many people's goals, money, status and meaning, are tied to there being a catastrophe they have to fight. If the catastrophe ends, but itself or by their actions, well, what's left for them?
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, _In Defense of Women_
My argument is this: culturally reinforced belief in God is effectively a high prior on hope. I think that kind of prior is like posture: it decays overtime unless it’s continuously reinforced via intentional effort.
Most of what most people “believe” isn’t based on evidence, it’s just culturally transmitted narratives. So from my perspective what’s happening is, the Protestant reformation is still playing out in the west, as the complex philosophy of thomism slowly gets replaced by more competitive memes, each one less subtle and more emotionally resonant than the one it outcompetes.
In other words, I think this despair simply makes sense as the default for people who haven’t cultivated a mindset of hope and optimism. Just as material wealth requires explanation, whereas poverty is the default, I think the same is true of spiritual wealth, such as hope.
When I was an evangelical, I didn't worry about having any hope in "this world" as I "KNEW" it was the dominion of Satan and was going to be destroyed anyway.
My "hope" was in Christ and Christ Alone.
It's hard to get someone to care when they ultimately believe it's "out of their hands" and is being controlled from "above" by a "perfect" being.
Oddly, when I became an athiest I didn't shift to the common ground many of my leftist friends seem to hold, i.e. "the world is gonna end with climate change" and "you'd better to x y and z" if you want to be a good citizen. XY & Z can be anything from recycling, to turning vegan, to buying an electric car, to simply voting for left-wing politios....
All hubris in my opinion.
Perhaps we evolved to expect the worse, and, well, looking at history, that's not a bad interpretation of how life plays out. Disaster, disease, war, pestilence, etc., seem pretty much the norm.
The next Black Swan is just around the corner.
The evangelical tradition comes out of the Catholic Church. The Catholic teaching tries to walk this line between “the material world is all there is” and “the material world doesn’t matter because heaven has the real goods.” If the material world is all there is, it becomes difficult to have hope and easier to argue in favor of tyrannies to promote the good. This is basically what we see happening around us.
Looking at most of human history over the span of just one human life, sure, expecting the worst makes sense. But technological progress is real, and I think is evidence that the laws of physics themselves are good.
I think your instinct that it's an excuse, not a real reason (or the main reason, at least) is spot on.
In developing countries it seems that one of the driving forces for not having kids or holding off until later or having less kids is that more women are going to college/work force. I'm a first born Gen-X (b. '65) and when I was in my teens it was just sort of normal to think about getting married, having kids, and you know, living the life.
I have two childless daughters (my eldest has two kids, but he married a Catholic -- she waited until well after getting her degree to start having kids).
Of my two (and many of their peers) they're spending (or had spent) their 20s getting degrees and putting off the idea of a starting a family. I think it's pretty normal for that age range to consider waiting, especially if they have plans for university. Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing based on my personal experience, but it seems like a good theory.
If there are a large number of people like me, the reason for the declining birthrate is trivial.
Precious few women consider raising children to be the best available use of their limited life span. In a society that restricted women's alternatives, with technology that was ineffective at allowing heterosexuals to be sexually active without creating pregnancies, lots of babies got created that simply would not be created today because their potential mothers now have alternatives.
Part of the problem is situational/cultural. You don't get much in the way of status, power, or approval for being a mother. The best ages for having children are also the best ages for advancing one's career, and if you miss out on university/early career workaholism you'll never catch up with peers who delayed or omitted childbearing.
Those cultural disincentives could be fixed. I've played with the idea of a society where teenagers bear children, whose middle aged grandparents then raise them. The grandparents either have successful careers by then, so can afford to hire paid childcare, or know their careers are going nowhere, and welcome the excuse to drop out of the rat race.
The conservative fix on the other hand is to limit women's opportunities, so they can either be a wife-and-mother, a (gasp) barren housewife, or a total failure spinster, relegated to caring for parents and the offspring of more successful siblings. They may have no opportunity to be as respected or high status as the worst of their male siblings, but that's OK, because they are raised knowing that even the least of males out-value them.
Theoretically there could also be a distinct-spheres culture that valued child production and rearing over everything else, and regarded the male sphere as low importance scutwork. Given human nature though, I can't see that happening, though it might just be more plausible than a separate-but-equal regime where both genders are truly seen and treated as having equal value.
I don't know whether having been raised in a culture hyper-valuing broodmares and nursemaids would have changed my attitude to the activities required for that profession. I suspect I'd have hated most aspects of being in charge of children, regardless. The only difference would be that I might have done it anyway, out of a combination of stubborn competitiveness, and youthful limited self-knowledge.
The conservative reply would be not that women should be excluded from other activities but that producing and rearing children, running a household, should be treated as a respectable activity and that part of what has changed is that it now isn't. Most women don't have the option of being a senator or a Google programmer or a partner in a top law firm — nor do most men. Compared to the jobs most people end up with, running a household and rearing children doesn't look unattractive.
That's one conservative reply. There are others, and you are on some of the forums where I've seen those other replies.
And certainly I've encountered people who actually want to rear children. (I've even encountered some who want to carry a baby to term, or give birth to one, rather than regarding that as a necessary evil.) I've also known some who want to be homemakers - not entirely the same thing - rather than e.g. settling for homemaking because they personally have few career prospects.
The real question - for both of these - is how many people want what. It wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO, to have some selection pressure for wanting to raise children, or cultural improvements to make it more feasible and/or more attractive. OTOH, if I were still young enough to be forced into being a broodmare, I'd also be young enough to apply the US second amendment to that situation.
What does "forced into" mean there? Does it include a situation where abortion is illegal and the only easily available contraceptives are condoms, so a woman who chooses to have intercourse has some risk of pregnancy — roughly the situation when I was young? If so, who do you propose to shoot?
Does it include a situation where the alternatives to being a housewife that are available to you are unattractive — schoolteacher, checkout clerk at a grocery store, secretary? Same question.
Or are you only referring to a situation where you were literally forced into bearing children? The only cases that occur to me in American history would be the situation of some slaves prior to abolition, and I am not even sure if that was common then. Perhaps I am being insufficiently imaginative.
That's an interesting question. I think if I had a guaranteed-fatal ectopic pregnancy I wasn't allowed to have aborted, and couldn't escape the political jurisdiction forcing this fate on me, I'd dedicate my remaining months to assassinating the maximum possible number of law makers who I knew to support that state of affairs, starting with those who'd proposed the legislation in question. If I ran out if law makers, I'd start in on some combination of judges (who'd failed to strike down the law when given the opportunity) and political supporters of the deceased law makers.
Obviously the degree of violence appropriate in response varies with the scale of the cost on the person being compelled to bear an unwanted child. It's much the same calculus as the one that applies for someone drafted to serve in an unjust war. (E.g. a war for the benefit of the profits of political donors.) Though the draftee does have the advantage that they will be armed and trained in the use of weapons, then likely sent somewhere where they have a good chance of quietly fragging their officers without getting caught, if not the politicians and donors.
Commenting on myself here: I kind of unconsciously jumped from "if women have nothing else to do, they'll 'voluntarily' become breeders" version of "forced" to the currently *more* politically salient "if heterosexual women have a contraceptive failure, or anyone not on systemic contraceptives is raped, they'll be forced to carry the baby".
I didn't actually intend that sort of derail. Instead I got caught by my own all too human cognitive tendencies.
Of course it was entirely common, otherwise we wouldn't see the genetics we see.
Obvious in my opinion.
Also, let's admit to our base nature...if any one of us heterosexual males was essentially a king on our own plantation and felt (for whatever distorted reason) that it was okay (or God's design) to own slaves, there's is zero doubt we'd be dipping into the cookie jar.
To suspect otherwise would be to deny all of base human nature and the actual genetic mixes we can easily observe.
I'm sure it was common for whites to have sex with female slaves. I was thinking of a situation where the female slave was actually being used as a brood mare to breed more slaves. The female slave having forced sex isn't exactly being forced to bear children, although that might be the result.
<And certainly I've encountered people who actually want to rear children.>
In my former life as an evangelical, this was nearly everyone I knew. Certainly the strenght of the church/religion has dropped over time, but it's still a big influence.
Thesedays, where a good number of my friends are non-religious, it's certainly true that a lot of them don't want/plan to have kids, however, it's not all of them. A fair number of non-religious friends are married with or planning kids.
The thing I think you're forgetting (or leaving out of the equation) is the evolutionary pressure to have kids. It's not that we, in modern society, cannot use birth control, it's that there's a pressure to have children ingrained in us (tied, of course, to the sexual drive, but not correlated with it exactly).
My girlfriend is smart, industrious, clever, and likes to work, however, if I said to her, "hey, I just won the lottery, let's buy some property, have kids, raise some animals, and live a simple life," she'd agree to this in a heartbeat.
She wouldn't spend a second reflecting on the missed opportunity of working for a living, communting to an office, etc. She'd likely want to start some boutique business or something, but it would be for pleasure more than making money to survive.
And, as an aside, if I won the lottery, yeah, I'd reverse my vasectomy and have as many kids as I could handle before I felt I was too old to be a responsible father....maybe seventy would be my limit, if I suspected I'd live to 90 at least.
Why? Well, I've found being a parent infinately rewarding and fun to do (despite the sacrifices) and the three kids that I have, well, one lawyer, one in L3 about to be a lawyer, and one getting a masters in neuroscience. I see my contribution to the betterment of the world and think it's good. Maybe random luck, but maybe not, maybe, inspite of my faults, I was a decent dad.
At least I have good genes (apparently).
Anywhoo, we've been talking about RAH a bit in these posts here and it reminds me that he had some possible answers with different types of marriage arrangements (line marriages, groups that form a family and a corporation and share duties, etc).
So, part of our current problem is a failure of imagination and a rigid stickness of religous rules that dictate archaic marriage rules (outlawing polygamy, as an example).
I don't think we really know whether humans have evolved a tendency to want kids, given a free choice, or merely a tendency to want to have sex, with the kids coming along as a side effect. Provided there was an aversion to infanticide, the evolutionary results would be almost indistinguishable.
Consider also a cuckoo female - genetically inclined to foist her offspring on some other person to rear. (aka "put the kids up for adoption" ); that, too, could have been selected *for* in some previous environments.
What we have now is a separation of evolutionary pressures. If all you want is heterosexual sex, you can have it with little or no risk of pregnancy. And if you want to have kids but not rear them, well, lots of people who can't have kids are eager to adopt, though this may change somewhat with surrogate technology.
I suspect that if things are allowed to run their course, without interference that relinks sex with pregnancy with child-rearing, there will be interesting results in a few generations. At a guess, there will be more women who actually want children, because they'll be the daughters of mothers and grandmothers who wanted children. I.e. there will be fewer people with my attitudes.
<I don't think we really know whether humans have evolved a tendency to want kids,>
I'd say it's axiomatic that we evolved to want kids, it goes hand-in-hand with wanting heterosexual sex, nature would seemingly select to people who want kids (as you pretty much conclude in your last sentence --- if humans didn't evolve to want kids, your last sentence would be false, and I don't think it is).
Granted my experience is ancedotal and I haven't taken any surveys, but such a huge percentage of all the humans I've ever known have wanted kids, so it's kind of stretch to think my experiences are some insane anomaly -- although I'll concede it's possible.
A quick Google search gave me a Statistia stat that says in 2021, 40% of US households had children (under 18) living in them. If you figure a big percentage of households without kids in 2021, used to have kids, then the percentage of people who have kids is pretty high.
The only way to reconcile that with the idea that people don't really want kids at such a high percentage is to assume the majority of these kids were accidents (and the majority of the women were against abortion and just had the brats in spite of not wanting them).
As a sidebar, my first two kids were unplanned, but in neither case did I not want them, the timing sucked, but the kids were welcomed and wanted. I don't think my attitude is a rare case, but rather the more common one.
As another aside, the most common cuckhold sistuation isn't where a woman doesn't want kids, she does, but she's trying (unconsciously for the most part) to get the best of both worlds, a stable mate to provide resource (husband) and a better genes (the hunk neighbor with six pack abs and high paying job).
Source for that is the book Sperm Wars, don't know if the research was backed by others, but it seemed pretty sound when I read it. When I was in highschool biology class in the 1980s, my teacher told us in the "blood lab" section that she no longer had her students blood type themselves and their parents as too frequently (and this is the research conclusion in Sperm Wars) the child discovers daddy ain't the daddy.
Seems that a woman's drive to have sex outside her marriage can't just be for sex itself, at least subconsciously, because if you're going to plan and scheme to cheat, you're certainly capable of using BC. That women don't do this seems to suggest the drive to bear kids (with the best genes possible) is an evolutionary principle that even our logical brains with the science to avoid having kids cannot overcome. Or these women are just high risk individuals that only get off on the risk, but that seems a stretch as well. I think the statistic is that 5% or more of children are the result of a cuckhold situtation, but this is just my (bad) memory's recollection and the stats might have been bad to begin with (but not totally wrong, I mean what happened to my biology teacher wasn't a one off anomoly, but something that happened so often she had to change her curriculum).
I suspect some part is also how much you liked your childhood and your family. I am an early Boomer and have 3 siblings. Between us we have 9 children. I would have been happy to have more, but my first wife caught that early 2nd wave feminist thing and decided she'd missed a lot, so . . .
But my two have six between them, and my daughter says she couldn't imagine not having children because she had been so happy. And her life has not been a bed of roses. (I came from a poor tenant farming family, and by the time I had been divorced we had maybe made it, barely, to the lower middle class.) My son is the same. And both believe kids need sibs.
I also now have e great-grandchildren and fully expect more.
My sibs have 12 grandchildren, one on the way, and 4 great-grandchildren.
We came from a physically rather impoverished but incredibly loving childhood and it passed to our children and apparently to theirs.
It's about family and love.
Dystopianism might in part be an outlet for illegible unhappiness/dissatisfaction/anxiety. People are much richer now, but have less power over their own lives; eg a medieval peasant got their food by growing it but a modern employee gets their food by obeying instructions. Similarly, raising children is subject to far more social pressure, and every aspect of human life is subject to competitive pressure (competition is bad for the competitors). I don’t think many people have the concepts necessary to articulate this as a source of unhappiness though, and without the intellectual legwork that would involve saying “I’m unhappy that I’m not a subsistence farmer and my kids have opportunities.” I don’t think I’ve even grasped the whole of it, particularly as I probably could live like that if I wanted to.
Dystopianism tends to involve political and economic systems either breaking down or being obviously awful, and may be the only way most people can give expression to that.
As a sidebar, I think Robin Hanson's response to guys like Yudkowski was comical.
He takes such an extreme "everything is going to be uptopian," I have to wonder if he's on drugs, selling something, or has never picked up a history book.
AI has the potential to extinct humanity. That's not even debatable unless you're going on some kind of faith and injecting a God or gods or miracles into the picture.
That doesn't, however, mean it's likely or very likely, it's just in the light cone of possible futures. To act like that's not the case, well it seems silly, although I pretty much admit there's not a damn thing we can do about it and trying to stop it would be futile.
In one of Yudkowsky's essays he points out that teenagers, while they acknowledge that people die in car crashes, cannot conceive that it could happen to them. There is a magical thinking that "I'm an exception."
He relates this same illogical thinking to the idea that humans cannot go extinct, as if there is a magical force protecting us from nature. No, he writes, nature doesn't care about humans.
Perhaps part of the Grabby Aliens and Fermi Paradox discussion is that evolution drives carbon based sentient life towards compute and the end result is machines take over....or not....who knows about some of these ultimate answers but, anyway, the more I read about it, the more convinced we live in a simulation. So, yeah, at the end of the day, I'm staying an anarchist hedonist who remains optimistic only because the alternative is suicide and that wouldn't let me see the possible outcomes of staying alive (which, when practiced well, is pretty fun and challenging).
As to worrying about human populations...haha, Ted Kaczynski had this correct: the future population will be either destroyed or enslaved by the AI robotic overlords, OR Mark Zuckerberg will rule the world and we can only hope, as a good socially conscious leftist, he instructs his machines to treat us like loved house pets. Say hello to UBI and universal everything...
As Kaczynski says, we might be well cared for, well fed, and have tons of leisure time, but we won't be free.
“ AI has the potential to extinct humanity. That's not even debatable unless you're going on some kind of faith and injecting a God or gods or miracles into the picture.”
It surely is debatable and it doesn’t need any supernatural refutation either. The burden of proof is on the people making the extraordinary statement. If there’s any religious belief here it’s in the demonology of AI.
“ In one of Yudkowsky's essays he points out that teenagers, while they acknowledge that people die in car crashes, cannot conceive that it could happen to them. There is a magical thinking that "I'm an exception. He relates this same illogical thinking to the idea that humans cannot go extinct“
That’s absurd. Like telling a billionaire that there’s a homeless guy who lost his only dollar and therefore losing all his wealth could happen to the billionaire easily enough.
“ OR Mark Zuckerberg will rule the world and we can only hope, as a good socially conscious leftist, he instructs his machines to treat us like loved house pets. ”
Dude we don’t even have those kind of robots. We have LLMs, non conscious pattern matchers with no agency.
You think it's absurd to think it's possible that humans could go extinct or a billionaire could go bankrupt?
I guess you've lived on a different earth than I have.
And, yeah, I know we don't have "those kinds of robots" today, not saying we do, but I.J. Good and A. Turning both recognized this issue back in, what, the 1940s? The logic hasn't changed since then, and while you might argue it's 100 or 1000 years away, that's not refuting my point, it's making my point.
How would you debate in favor of the proposition: "It's impossible for humans to go extinct."?
Without injecting the supernatural?
Seems extinction is the most common fate on this planet for all species, and while I grant humans are indeed a special case of animal, and we have agency other animals don't, I can't see how you'd build a solid Bayesian logical argument why human extinction is impossible.
Btw, I'm not saying it's likely, I'm an optimist on this and think we'll reach mind uploads and we'll colonize space. But, Yudkowsky's point is valid, we don't know what we don't know and a Black Swan extinction event is well above 0% likelihood.
Most people, in my estimation, wouldn't care that they weren't free. js
Agreed.
I think under the right conditions, I'd probably submit myself.
I do wonder, sometimes, about the ethics of having a kid. I'm glad I had mine, they're great, but you know, I never asked them if they wanted to be born.
And nobody asked me....but I guess I'm glad to be here, although, that's only said not being entirely sure of the alternatives.
I bring that up because, if you think about it, having a kid is sort of like creating your own slave, at least for a good part of our lives in the beginning, we're just slaves/pets/property of our parents. The good ones help us find freedom but most parents suck and just victimize their kids into mind slavery as they were (i.e. government and religion is good).
I was more an indentured servant to my kids than they were a slave to me, but YMMV. ;-)
I agree that we need more good parents (I'd want a reasonable working definition for "good parent"), but given evolution and the ruck and run of humanity that will probably always be the case.
I think at base I tried to help my children achieve Heinlein's quote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I'm hoping my children and other descendants won't need to die gallantly, but I'm sure my children could, and would, at need. The rest they can do for sure. And more.
Being able to do all of that, and more, makes them capable of being a good citizen, family member, friend, worker, and a dangerous enemy. I'm satisfied.
Wasn't that quote from Time Enough for Love? I think so, but it's been a long time.
Sure, if you're living a thousand years, you can do all those things, but I don't know if it's so necessary to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none in the short lives we have. Maybe. I can't do all those things, and I'm pushing 60 and not exactly unhandy.
I guess in a pinch I could butcher an animal and set a bone, like if the zombie apocalypse happened. Program a computer? Not a chance....
I'd rather do some things I'm good at and trade.
I hear on the indentured servant thing....it was that way, when they were little for sure, what I meant by "slave" is more that we cannot help but influence them to see the world like we do (at least when they're young).
I waver these days between wanting to be a hunter gather in the Amazon and being rich in the city. I don't know the right answer and in the end, I think I'm just faking it like everyone else.
I have a substack post on the subject:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/specialization
Great post, and I agree about cooking for people.
A couple years back, when I was a high earner and had a big house, I hosted a weekly dinner party. Part of the gig was if you were a regular guest, you were (sort of, not legalistically) expected to either cook or help cook at least once. I had some great bonding experiences this way.
Anyway, one of the problems with my transition to a Kindle library is that in the zombie apocalypse, I could lose access to my books (which include things like How to Raise Animals on a Small Farm and how to survive TEOTWAWKI).
I lost my physical books in a condo fire -- and transitioned to ebooks.
My point is that I'm handy enough with my hands (a career in construction helped with this) that I think most things that require hand-eye cooridination (hunting, fishing, building, dressing meat, etc) I could figure out from a book. At least well enough to survive.
I guess I should buy a few "How to Survive" books in physical form and keep them well protected.
This is not Hanson's response, there are various disagreements about Foom etc. But the crux of the issue is that Hanson thinks that independent of AI, our descendents will be very alien from us anyway. Moreover he views our current cultural moment as being a sort of "dreamtime" and thinks that once evolution corrects itself our descendents would be very unlikeable by contemporary standards, and that if your concerned about AI alignment, there is the general concern about descendent alignment. Relatedly Hanson is not utopian about the future, he infact recognises that If people could get a clear vision of it they would be horrified. Although interestingly he seems personally very sympathetic towards such alien descendents.
"once evolution corrects itself" is a meaningless phrase, evolution is blind, stupid, and cannot "correct itself" nor is it guided to some predetermined point.
Any descendents we have that are significantly different due to evolution (as opposed to cultural changes) will be so distance in the future we can safely not worry about it. Now, if an AI and/or AI-human team starts genetically breeding us like dogs, that's another story.
I don't disagree with those that say the foom is pointless, but I've heard some dumb interviews/speeches about how everything is going to be peaches, and I think that's naive at best.
Could you link me something where Robin Hanson says everything is going to be peaches, either a blog post or in some interview. As for the claim evolution is a blind idiot god, in some sense this is true, but I fear most people take this too far. That in reality what evolution is selecting for is fairly obvious and as such one can easily make predictions about what kind of creatures will dominate the future say with respects to time preference or valuing reproduction abstractly etc. Relatedly there is that funny joke about Haldane and teleology and also about teleonomy.
Hanson also thinks cultural evolution is going to be the main way in which genes are selected for, his most recent posts outline the possibility that insular high fertility culture manage to replace moderns. This would happen fairly quickly.
Your concern seems to be with time span, which is something Hanson has discussed quite a lot with others (you can find the interviews on his yt channel).
On a meta level I don't think you have a clear view of Hanson, I would recommend his blog, books and papers. He's definitely not what you portray him to be.
You're correct that I reacted emotionallly to Hansen and dismissed him as an un-useful idiot too quickly. I rectact that, I was wrong.
However.....where I got the ideas that Hanson was saying everything is going to be peaches, is an interview he did on Bankless, post Yudkowski, in which the hosts wanted a counter to Yudkowski's doomsday prediction "kiss your loved ones goodbye."
https://youtu.be/28Y0v5epLE4?si=Llm9-aGLXFCkHj5m
That link should start you at the part in the interview where he basically seems to say, "My disagreement with Elizer is the time scale more than the outcome." I'm paraphrasing here.
Essentially he's saying what you seem to be telling me, i.e., humans will change, that's evolution (both natural and cultural) and so what? We'll be new beings, just like we're new beings from 10,000 years ago and 1,000 years ago, and even a lot different from pre-internet, if we're honest. I get this....
However, and this is a big however, he seems to saying that homo sapiens as we know ourselves won't exist and that's fine --- no problem because we've always evolved (I mean, hey, we're not monkeys anymore, right?).
I listened to an interview with Hinton where he said that perhaps humans are just a step in the evolution of machine intelligence, i.e., yeah, we're going to die out, and won't exist, but that's okay, it's how life works. Which seems to be the same thing Hansen is saying.
Now, I'm not religious, but the "human" in me wants to rebell against this idea. I'd like to see humans continue, to explore the universe, and, frankly, I'd like a mind upload of myself to exist and to be downloadable into a clone of my choosing. I think I'd like to try a six foot tall red head supermodel with a body that could stop traffic, but that's just one of my many fantasies about the future.
What's interesting, and just dawned on me, is that Hansen is signed up for cryonics, yeah? So, in his mind, the idea of the possibility of being "woken up" and "healed" in the future only to be stuck in a zoo or studied in a lab or made a slave doesn't bother him, he's willing to risk the future is bright.
So that would be my "evidence" if you will, that Hansen is seeing the future as "peachy" as his actions seem to reflect that. Who would sign up for getting their brain frozen if they thought they had a good chance of waking up in hell?
Anywhooooooo......I did, like said, sort of jump to a conclusion based on emotion. I watched that Hansen interview after watching a ton of interviews with Yudkowski (and others) and I was feeling this sort of existential crisis thing.....but I've since recovered.
I think we might all die, but I realize there is nothing I can do about it.
Meanwhile, maybe the future will be amazing, and maybe I'll live long enough to find out.
It's hard to tell what Hanson's values and normative and positive beliefs are, I suspect he has no normative beliefs and unusual values, and in conversation he only vaguely explores his various positive beliefs and their corresponding probabilities. Part of this is because he's always wearing some sort of "hat" say the efficient economist's pledge for example.
My suspicion is that Hanson thinks that future descendants would have a very favorable view of him, even if most people would find those descendants completely alien and disturbing, this is possibly why he has on net a favorable view of cryonics. This is sort of clear in the age of em scenario, but could also apply to a AGI scenario etc. The biggest puzzle is why he doesn't have more biological children, perhaps he thinks spreading his ideas is sufficient, although its hard to see why having more meatbags around to resurrect you would be a bad thing, or a difficult goal.
I definately like having kids around that I know love me.
It's a sense of security that is better than anything else, except maybe a 40 acre compound with good lighting and a machine gun bunker, but that's another topic. lol
As a sidebar, I listened to about an hour of that interview today, after thinking about it, and I was definately judging his position unfavorably due to my anxiety about impending doom.
I agree that the best we can do is plow forward and hope the mess comes out in the wash (similar to George Hotz).
In general, when faced with a tough decision, it seems the most libertarian/anarchist position, based on first principles, is the right decision, even if it leads to risk.
My understanding is that most cultures in history have had a pessimism of the future. They see culture as being in decline from the once great ancients. But most cultures had high fertility rates regardless.
I don’t see why the usual economic explanations don’t hold: People have better things to do than have kids, because the world has gotten so much better.
People without kids have far less counterfactual money than those with kids, and far less counterfactual time. If society would instead pay those people a lot more money, or withdraw social safety nets like social security, then having kids would be in people’s interests again!
Indeed, I anticipate if social security ever comes crumbling down, we will get an increase in fertility, snd that will be the control mechanism by which america at least gets higher fertility. Don’t know if enough though, since you still have the problem that people can just save for retirement themselves.
Social media disproportionately elevates the voices of unhappy people, because they spend more time online. Previously we mostly talked about public affairs with cheerful extroverts, because those are the people you tend to meet and talk to, and got our news from successful professionals because those were the people who wrote news articles as a profession. Because moods are contagious, everyone is now more unhappy.
Clever answer.
I think it's precisely because life has gotten so good that people try to find catastrophes to be worried about.
Current generations (especially born after the 1970s) lack the intimate knowledge of what it's like to live in extreme poverty or war. We have to imagine it. I read a few months ago someone freaking out about the Ukraine War, because it represented a time of strife. I pointed out to him that it was a tiny war, by any historical standard, and that the 100+ years before the 21st century saw bigger wars more frequently than we've seen since 2000 - even if you excluded WWI and WWII! He seemed shocked by this, perhaps not really believing it.
I think we find it necessary to have things to worry about, and because we have so few real things to worry about, we latch on to things that might appear real or could potentially represent a problem.
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
The glib answer is regression to the mean. I don't think that's really what's going on, though.
I suspect the world is getting better in easy-to-measure, number-go-up ways and worse in complex ways. That's why you can point to graphs where simple metrics like GDP and starvation levels are improving, but there's a universal sense of doomerism. I think that intuition is really telling and not worth dismissing. For one thing, it's common across so many groups. For another, it's happening now in particular, more than at other times in history even when mass media existed. You could think of these varied visions of apocalypse as the dreams of a collective unconscious, which sounds woo, but I think it's a reasonable hypothesis if you buy a few uncontroversial assumptions:
1. Collective intelligence exists. The stock market (or prediction markets) can generate information no individual can, a corporation can process information and act in a coherent way, cultural memes spread and evolve independently of their human hosts. On a society-wide level, something you could call "cognition" is occurring (this doesn't require sentience).
2. In the human mind, some information is known only (or mostly) on the emotional level, and this has an analog in the case of society-level cognition.
3. Dreams have random elements but are largely not random; rather, they often correspond to complicated emotions in the dreamer, with made-up plots to contextualize the emotions.
So different subcultures collectively develop narratives that stick because they capture a mood, an intuition lots of people have but don't know how to describe, and each culture substitutes its own mores and bogeymen. From this perspective, you can't debunk climate doomerism any more than you can look at someone tossing and turning in their sleep and say, "Ha! You fool – you're not really showing up late for the final exam naked, you're just lying in your bed!" instead of saying "Huh, what in your life maps onto a feeling of being stressed and exposed?".
One theory for the underlying cause of the parallel evolution of these dystopian dreams is something like "misalignment" – AI is one instance of this, but the general principle is something about technological advances quickening the pace at which the modern environment differs from the ancestral environment, so that the subtler human and cultural capacities, the ones that had to evolve instead of being invented as technologies or discovered from first principles, become ineffectual; and load-bearing traditions and institutions get displaced faster than we can catch up to rebuilding infrastructure to handle all the auxiliary loads those traditions/institutions were bearing without us realizing it. The left calls it capitalism, the right calls it the decay of traditional values or something, the gray tribe calls it Moloch.
Also, "things are consistently getting better" seems largely orthogonal to "shit's on the brink of hitting the fan", rather than being a counterargument. If you're running a scam, your trajectory looks like "get more and more and more money and then oops implode and go to jail". If you're using up a finite resource, your trajectory looks like compounding returns followed by a nosedive. The higher you build on top of an unstable foundation, the less robust your system becomes; optimization pressures tend toward centralization pressures, which trade off against resiliency. (In fact, I'm not totally convinced the population argument, at least the more mainstream version of it, was implausible. Things didn't turn out that way, but I haven't heard a knockout argument for "people could have and should have known at the time that overpopulation wouldn't be a big deal", especially since I think it's not so much that population skyrocketed and it was fine, as that the population growth rate started going down right after The Population Bomb was written.)
Incidentally, I don't really think any of this is the proximate cause of people having fewer kids; my best guess is that that's more due to hormone disruptions.
One of the reasons I thought the overpopulation thesis was false was a calculation I did at the time, ranking countries by population density. The accepted picture was that countries were poor because they had too many people. But of the five most densely populated countries, two were rich European countries, the other three were countries in the process of becoming rich (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore). India and China had large populations but they were big countries so not particularly high density.
I have a bunch of talks on my web page, including some partly about the population scare:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/MyTalks/MyRecentTalks.html
AI may kill us. It’s the most likely outcome but certainly not 100%.
In climate change... yeah Gen Z think it’s a much bigger problem than it is. Even more pessimistic takes than yours are nowhere near as bad as what teenagers today assume their future holds.
Mostly likely most of these problems are meaningless because AI will change the context to the point that geoengineering seems like a minor problem. Either we’ll be fucked or massively more capable.
> In climate change... yeah Gen Z think it’s a much bigger problem than it is.
That's because they haven't yet lived through forty years of failed predictions.
Too true. Nothing changes your perspective more than watching your hopes or fears not pan out as expected. You aren't going to be an astronaut, but you're also not going to die of Swine Flu. At this point in my life I consider than a win.
Agreed. Have you listened to any of Daniel Schmachtenberger's talks about the "Search for the Third Attractor?"
It's basically this idea that society tends to go off towards more (centralized) control or libertarianism and with AI we either get governments that can watch and monitor every single detail of our lives OR we end up in world where a couple of dedicated terrorists use AI to kill millions (or billions -- or pull of an extinction level act of terrorism).
Personally I'm less worried about sentient killer robots than a small dedicated group unleashing a plague by using generative AI to build a superweapon -- ala Frank Herbert's White Plague.
Fatalistic pessimism helps with more than just excusing low fecundity. For one thing, it excuses inaction when one would otherwise be expected to sacrifice and work hard toward change or to support resistance efforts.
Also, any community focusing on a particular set of shared ideas faces a common problem whereby the social dynamics of competitive sanctimony unleash a kind of signaling spiral that can incentivize members to quickly express the most extreme form of or commitment to those ideas. Those extremes manifest on the dimensions of confidence and severity as well, which leads straight to "black pill" positions.
Can you reference the IPCC claim please? Or anyone else?
I can't tell who you are asking or what IPCC claim you refer to.
"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"
Perhaps because when you have a lot, you become more fearful of losing it than excited to get more.