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gwern comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
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It's deeply unsustainable in the sense that geometric population growth of any kind is unsustainable in the long run, yes. I don't know if it's unsustainable in the sense you seem to mean it.
Every community is in a sense free-riding off of other communities (public goods in general); no complete accounting exists for Kiryas Joel, although the last quarter of the NYT article is basically discussing whether Kiryas Joel is a drain or not, with no clear conclusion.
And the question strikes me as pretty much a distraction; if you don't like Kiryas Joel, one could look at more 'respectable' high-growth groups and ask the same Hansonian questions; the Amish and Mennonites come to mind as groups rarely criticized for being welfare queens and with high growth rates (sufficiently so that they keep spreading out and moving out of Pennsylvania to find farmland). Unfortunately, their rates are not so high as to be as dramatic as Kiryas Joel.
I find the second parenthetical statement deeply, viscerally terrifying. I'm going to tap out in terms of my personal rationality on this issue, but I would just like to ask all the interesting questions this raises:
Will significant human natural selection happen before the extinction of the human race? If it were to happen, would it be a very bad thing?
Relax. These are genuinely nice people, even though they dress funny.
They're genuinely nice... aside from the Meidung, the restricted life opportunities and lack of many freedoms, whatever sexual (rape & incest, sometimes enabled by anesthetic) abuses are covered up by social structures, and all the other problems they have from our perspective. Let's not idealize them.
Indeed, but even if you take the worst imaginable view of them, you still have to admit that they respect the "good fences -- good neighbors" principle. I see no prospect that they might cease doing so in the foreseeable future, even if they expand greatly.
I sure won't be joining them anytime soon, but this still makes it irrational for me to be frightened by them, considering all the the high-status mainstream people whose Meidung I have to fear if I speak my mind with too much liberty, who limit my freedoms and opportunities in ways I find suffocating and frustrating, and who run the presently powerful institutions with an incomparably worse record of abuses. (The latter often aren't even covered up in an active and planned way, but rather kept from scrutiny merely by the high status of the institutions in question, making it a self-destructive status-lowering move just to start arguing against them.)
Genuinely nice people who still prevent people who, like me and (presumably) you, are cognitively atypical, from finding similar people across the world to socialize with.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we have created for ourselves.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we will create.
I don't want to tile the world with tiny genuinely nice people.
Consider various other groups that are presently in the process of demographic and migratory expansion, and whose typical members are similarly different from you, but whom it is low-status to rail against (and apt to invoke accusations of bigotry and extremism), unlike when it comes to fringe Christian groups. Does contemplating them fill you with similar fear and hostility?
I can think of groups but I am not sure if they count as similarly different from me.
I experience fear and hostility but it is dissimilar and weaker. I consciously suppress it because I am aware that it is silly. It sometimes takes me a period of time to realize that a specific instance is silly.
It seems like the question at issue is whether fringe Christian groups are different enough that it is right to fear them or whether they are similar enough that it is wrong to fear them.
So when you catch yourself feeling fear and hostility towards some demographically expanding group that is not a fringe Christian group, so that in polite society it would be seen as disreputable and extremist to dislike and fear them, you start with the a priori assumption that it is silly and wrong to fear them and you try to suppress your fear consciously. In contrast, when it comes to demographically expanding fringe Christian groups, you start with the a priori assumption that it is eminently reasonable to dislike and fear them. And it doesn't seem to you like there might be some slight bias there?
(I tried to come up with a more charitable interpretation of your comment, but this looks like the plain meaning of what you wrote.)
I object to your use of "a priori". I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general - they do not apply to all groups.
Is it obvious to you that these cases are symmetrical? It is not obvious to me.
I never claimed to be unbiased. I, in fact, went out of the way to state a lack of confidence in my local rationality.
Seeing your reply to Eugine Nier, I must admit that your position is more thought out than I had assumed. I still disagree with your view, and I think your arguments are significantly biased. However, as much as I'd like to try and straighten out the issue, I think getting into this discussion would lead too far into problematic ideologically sensitive topics. So I guess it would be best if we could respectfully agree to disagree at this point.
Could you summarize, at whatever level of detail is possible without problematic idealogically sensitive topics, where you differ from my views and what statements I made you disagree with?
Really, I'm skeptical. Can we hear them?
The argument is one of symmetry.
a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.
b. Most of my cultural differences from these groups are morally insignificant. For instance, I would prefer that they speak my language so that I can more easily understand them, but from an objective perspective it makes just as much sense to demand that I speak their languages.
c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women's rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women's rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.
Therefore, these people, if given resources, will put them to a use no worse than people from my culture would.
The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant - leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.
I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.
Instead it is argued that they are happy and nice - but happy and nice aren't all the good in the world - and that I am biased - but I already know that I am biased.
Hopefully my arguments above are clear enough that people will be able to provide me with helpful counterarguments.
I would like to "flag" this post as the point where "experienc[ing] fear and hostility" was warped into "feeling fear and hostility towards". That makes comments below subject to equivocation. It does not mean anything, at least not any one thing, to "[feel] fear and hostility towards" anything. The fear and hostility are in the brain and do not emanate therefrom.
This is more than a semantic quibble. Consider the fallacy of composition. It is possible for a liberal to hate all poor people and love the poor, and for a Confederate soldier to have hated blacks and loved all blacks.
I don't think "dislike and fear certain groups" is precise enough to have an non-careful conversation about because it is more than one thing.
I don't understand the relevant linguistic distinction here; it might be some finesse of English grammar that eludes me. Does saying "fear and hostility towards X" imply some observable action motivated by these feelings?
The sort of "fear and hostility" I had in mind is of the same sort as your hypothetical liberal's love of the poor.
I'm a native English speaker, and I did not understand the comment either.
Beats the word eventually being tiled with very genuinely not nice people.
That is a true moral statement.
What exactly is "natural selection" in this context? For example, smallpox is no longer part of our environment. Surely the absence of smallpox will have some effect on the gene pool. Would this count as natural selection?
By the way, I also find it a bit troubling that at least for the time being, secularism seems to be on track to extinction.
Yes, but not significant in the sense I am using it here.
Natural selection is changes in the frequency of genes not planned by wise and well-intentioned humans.
Significant natural selection is when this leads to a shift in the fundamental values of the human race.
In that case, I would say that the answer is clearly "yes," in the sense that significant natural selection is taking place at a rapid clip in the present day. For example, the percentage of people in the world with blue eyes has surely dropped significantly over the last 100 years.
Technically using my odd definitions the debate on blue eyes is irrelevant because:
Blue eyes do not shift the fundamental values of the human race. I think.
Fine, but now you need to specify what you mean by "fundamental values of the human race." :)
(By the way, I recall that there are studies out there corellating eye color with personality traits. I'm not sure if this affects the example I gave, but surely there are other genes which affect personality traits in subtle ways. And it seems likely that some of those personality traits affect a person's fertility given that a lot of people in the West flat out decide not to reproduce. So it's reasonable to suppose that natural selection, as you have defined it, continues in the present and affects human attributes less superficial than eye color.)
Because blue eyes are recessive and blue and brown eyed populations have mixed more than they used to? How is that an example of natural selection in progress?
Because blue eyes are found mainly in people of European descent and the percentage of world population of European descent has dropped quite a bit with the population booms in Asia and Africa.
Ok, but that's mostly because you use that particular cutoff point, European decended populations just have gone through the demographic transition earlier and their share of world population is similar to what it was in 1750. It has nothing to do with any selection against blue eyes in the usual sense.
Well that brings us back to the question of what you mean by "natural selection" which you defined earlier as
It sounds like you are limiting natural selection to frequency changes which are a direct result of the effects of the genes in question. Is that right?
That wasn't me, and I said "in the usual sense" specifically because the context was Will's (unusual) definition.
I differentiate between selection and genetic drift like usually done and the case of blue eyes would be an example of the latter. I think the difference is normally described as selection being a consistent non-random effect. Personally I'd describe it as an effect on the relative frequencies caused by the presence of the gene.
In the absence of a Singularity? Who knows. Evolution wins eventually, somehow, but the details matter a great deal.
That is the fundamental question of this post. Kevin Kelly argues in a somewhat related essay, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/11/the_origins_of.php , that evolution winning might not even stop progress.
There are plausible scenarios for a singleton control without singularity. Our institutions could outpace evolution at the rate they get smarter and eventually decide to stop it. You'd just need to build some highly stable, global architecture.
But nothing is perfectly stable. So I'm going to agree with your contention that Who, in fact, knows.
Genetic evolution winning causes irreversible negative progress. If human value is complex, then genetic evolution necessarily destroys information about human value - information that will not be replaced because our descendants will not want to replace it.
The question is how much value?
Indeed.