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Azathoth123 comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong
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Well written essay - I realise what I've written below seems a little critical, but that's because I'd rather discuss the bits I dont agree with.
Most people in general are averse to wireheading! I can see how this corrlates with progressive thought wrt sex and drugs, although it doesn't explain issues of race for instance, and I think its at best a partial explaination of the disagreement.
Very few progressives would condone eugenics. But more to the point, very few people on either side of the debate have thought about the issues to this level, or are even aware of these issues. Most of the political debate in the wider world is "my opponents are fasists!" vs "my opponents are dirty hippies!".
This is a question with an objective answer, and the second option is probably correct. However, I'm not sure that progs believe people have far-sighted discount functions, in fact I would think the distinction is between what long-term effects people are complaining about (progs: burning fossil fuels will destroy the planet in the long term! vs NRx sexual freedom will destroy families in the long term!).
I would say this is partially true, but OTOH feudal Japan, Europe, China etc were all quite different cultureally dispite allmost identical technology. The lines are more blurred now as we can communicate faster.
To my understanding, modern technology makes monarchy more palitible in many respects. The ubiquity of international travel makes exit easy, and closing boarders would presumably make trade difficult. The very fact that modern society is complex is an arguemnent against democracy, as the average voter cannot understand the issues on which they vote. I presume that a hypothetical monarch would have a councel of advisors which most of the running of the country would be deligated to, meaning that its not just one person handeling all this complexity.
Again, I don't think progressives believe this. Environmental catastrophes/government corruption/corporatism are said to be serious dangers. And many NRx people believe that the wheel will turn again and NRx values will return in time to stave off absolute disaster.
This is definately what worries them. To be frank, the fact that fertility is inversly corrlated with education and positivly corrlated with religiousity would worry me a lot if I did not beleive that the singularity is probably reasonably near. Michel Anazimov tweeted that (not verbatum, but as close I can remember) "By 2040, when..." which I pattern matched to some Kurtzweilian statement about uploading with unrealistically precice timeframes "... white people are a minority, there will be hell to pay". My reaction was less "that's not politically correct" and more "But, you beleive in an imminent singularity. What is going on in your brain?"
Given that that link is talking about Singapour, I think this extends beyone the west.
I've been thinking about politics too much, and this is what I see as the underpinnings of NRx:
Cognitive bias explanation of NRx:
There seems to be an inbuilt tendency for people to romanticise the past. This happens in Christianity (the garden of eden) in Hinduism, in myths of noble savages and everytime anyone says "In my day...". I would imagine this is probably more the justification for the less intellectual reactionaries.
Steelmanned 'tried and tested' explanation:
I used to think that progressivism was almost right by definition, after all, everyone wants to make progress! But while all progress is change, not all change is progress. Society is a complex machine designed by a long period of social evolution, and if you make random changes to complex machines it might improve but it will probably stop working. Traditional society is tried and tested. Changes may seem appealing for various reasons, but then a few generations down the line society collapses for unforeseen reasons. Note this doesn't really hold if society is adapting to technology - even if patriarchy were best for a medieval society where the superior physical strength of men is important, it doesn't necessarily hold for the modern world with a knowledge and machine based economy. Furthermore, some aspects of traditional society are almost universal, such as patriarchy, while others are not, such as attitudes to homosexuality. We know of functional civilisations e.g. ancient Greece where homosexualtiy was tolerated and AFAIK this did not cause social collapse, rendering the NRx argument invalid in this case.
Anti-egalitarianism
A general attitude that not everyone is equal, and it is necessary for the state to remedy this, seems to simultaneously explain almost all of neoreactionary thought - the different schools of NRx dependant upon which criterion is used (race/culture/religion/monarchs/gender/sexuality).
I would agree with the first part, some people/ways of life are better than others. But this is partly according to my own terminal goals which differ from others people's. Attempting to enforce whatever you believe to be superior seems like defecting to my libertarian instincts, although I concede that my instincts may be wrong. Understanding about temporal discounting has shifted my views on this matter - self-reported discounting rates are far too high, and I can see that perhaps economic regulation is necessary to prevent, for example, people becoming massively in debt. However, social decisions can be looked at in economic terms too. One can discuss trading the short term value of, say, risky sex, against both the long term possibility of STDs and the tragedy of the commons where no-one bothers to raise the next generation. However, while I can understand the NRx viewpoint if the population is fallible while the government is perfect, in practice this seems far too open to corruption. The aforementioned cost-benefit analysis of sexual norms is ickly enough IMO if done by a dispassionate computer, but if done by humans it seems almost certain to simply enforce the prejudices of whoever is in charge.
A third option.
I think what seems to be missing from many of these debates is even if NRx identifies problems are valid, there are less authoritarian ways to deal with them. Suppose, for sake of argument, that gays are a big threat because of underpopulation (or is it underpopulation only of white people? Which rather begs the question, don't other races have gay people too?). Now, one could try to stamp out homosexuality, and in the process force people to live a lie, fill prisons with victimless criminals, drive Turing to suicide etc., or one could e.g. instigate a policy of financial incentives for childrearing. Now, I'm not saying that would be an option without its own downsides, but the fact that policies like it are not even considered shows that arguments such as "gays are a threat because of underpopulation" are just attempts to rationalise homophobia.
This has been tried in many places, the results are generally not encouraging.
The best financial incentives for childrearing are ones that remove the financial deficits caused by having a stay at home mom.
I can only think of two general ways of removing the financial difference between the mother not working and the mother working: a subsidy for the former or laws against the latter. Do you favour either of these, or some other incentive?
Do you mean "between the mother not working and the mother working and hiring a nanny"?
I mean between the mother not working and the mother working and getting the childcare done somehow — or, for that matter, not. Why?
Nevermind, I had misread the thread.
And yet fertility is inversely correlated with income. So it appears that the "people are too poor to raise a family" theory doesn't hold up.
I'd guess by “financial deficits” mayonesa meant opportunity costs, which are higher for a prospective mother in an upper-class career than for one in a welfare trap.
By providing free childcare, or by paying people to be stay at home moms, or both or something else?
By improving working conditions and monetary value so that a home needs only one working parent.
Time was when a home did need only one working parent (that is, working to bring in money). If things are always getting better, and they seem to be (in the developed world, e.g. the Internet, etc.), what changed?
Recently answered in detail on State Star Codex. Basically, two-income families are competing against each other for housing in good areas, driving up prices, and seeing no benefit in disposable income.
Ok, now taboo "good area".
Area with good school.
"Good schools" is a euphemism.
And a good school is the sort of school that those families want to send their children to. I don't know anything about how high school education is organised in the US — why is the market not supplying this need?
SSC is sceptical about whether the effect claimed in the book he's reviewing is big enough to account for the problem.
Part is what TheAncientGeek says, part is that present-day children have higher living standards than children a while ago, and if they were OK with earlier children's living standard (and didn't care about status signalling) they could probably get it with one parent's income (see also).
(Both Mr. and Mrs. Money Moustache and Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are raising children on a tight budget.)
Well, that's certainly ambitious...
No, I didn't think it would work particularly well. What about propaganda campaigns?
I am just trying to say that I would be inclined to investigate every possible form of positive reinforcement before resorting to oppression.
Tried even more often, also ineffective.
Would you mind tabooing "oppression".
Ok, maybe I should have avoided a word with strong emotional connotations such as "oppression". What I mean is physically forcing people to alter their behaviour when this behaviour does not directly impact others (although I fear I may now need to taboo 'directly'). 'Negative reinforcement' would probably be a better choice of phrase. To be clear, this covers the criminalisation of homosexuality, but I wouldn't necessarily count not recognising gay marriage as oppression.
Would criminalising homosexuality be effective at increasing birth rates, or would gays then just not marry anyone and still not have children?
If the primary goal is to get people to have more children, perhaps the propaganda campaign should be to denormalize not having children. On the other hand, that one doesn't seem to work, either.
That was what I meant - did you think I meant a propaganda campaign against homosexuality?
homosexuality != infertility
I feel the need to point out that I started by saying
I don't actually think this is very plausible. Its a hypothetical.
Ok, missed that hypothesis.
The more important thing is to stop teaching children that homosexuality is a "perfectly normal lifestyle" and that they should "find out if they're gay".
As for dealing with population decline here are Jim's views and suggestions on the subject.
The statistics about fertility rates in Nepal corresponding closely to level of education are telling. Education past the age of 12 has to be having some effect. But what is the mechanism?
Jim hypothesizes that there is a subtle indoctrination that begins in school around that age that dissuades women from having children. Perhaps a little bit...but is that all there really is to it?
Let's think about this for a second: let's imagine that it were legal for girls in the U.S. to drop out of school at 13. (I think the current legal age is 16).
What does a 13 year old girl do in American society if she isn't going to school? What can she usefully do?
She could theoretically get a job. There are probably some jobs that a 13-year old could be reasonably good at...like coffee house barista. Or maybe just the coffee house barista's helper who buses the tables. How hard are those jobs, really?
But, how's a 13 year old going to get that sort of job when the job market is swarming with over-qualified college graduates who can't get work in their fields of study, will be at least marginally more effective at those jobs (perhaps in terms of social interactions with the patrons or ancillary skills they might have picked up in college), and who will also be willing to work for minimum wage?
So a 13-year old drop-out can't reasonably expect to get a job. So, what about marriage and kids? Can a 13-year old reasonably expect to find a man who is at least vaguely within her age range (<18 years old) who is willing and ABLE to support her and her kids?
I noticed that this Jim guy pins a lot of the blame on Western women not wanting to have kids. Now, do we actually have evidence for this? Do we in fact know that it is not the Western MEN who are hesitant about having to provide for kids?
I myself have a beautiful wife who would make for a great mother, both genetically and in terms of raising kids, but the thought of having kids seems just insane to me right now. Why? I make about $10,000 a year with a MASTER'S DEGREE as a part-time college adjunct instructor and as a K-12 substitute teacher. My wife makes about the same with a BACHELOR'S DEGREE as a part-time nurse's aid in a hospital. Together, we might scrape together $20,000. Our expenses are about $16,000 a year if we are frugal (we have a very small apartment and only one old car). Not much buffer room. Not much money to save up towards a house or a new car for when the old one breaks down. Don't even talk to me about children.
Now, our luck could change. One of us could land a full-time job with benefits. Realistically, a job where one of us made $25,000 a year would have us jumping for joy. But in the current economy, there are no guarantees. And even if I did get a nice full-time job, I would still not have the confidence in the economy to expect that I would keep it, or something like it, for the next 20 years while my wife and I raised our kids.
It seems to me that the problems are that: 1. There are way too few well-paying jobs in the economy for the number of over-qualified college graduates that there are to fill them. This is why I think that the politically-correct catchphrase, "Education is the KEY!" is way off track. Our problem is not lack of education. If everyone tomorrow suddenly starting doing better in school and went on to higher degrees, the only difference that would make is, we would suddenly have Ph.D.s working at McDonalds or Starbucks. More education does not magically create more jobs or better jobs.
2. There are also higher cultural expectations on how good of a parent you have to be (at least, if we are talking about the "nice middle-class white" demographic whose low fertility rates the neoreactionaries are so worried about). "Close-parenting" is now the expected norm among this demographic. I get the sense from the stories my parents and grandparents tell that people used to assume that kids kinda "raised themselves." You just told them to go out in the neighborhood and play with other kids, and be home for supper, and you put food on the table, and you occasionally reprimanded them when they misbehaved or did poorly in school. You didn't micromanage their extra-curricular activities, go to all of their extra-curricular activities, research college-preparatory programs, etc. You didn't "helicopter parent." Now, if you don't "helicopter parent," then A. other parents will look down on you, and B. your kid probably will go off track and end up as a street thug in some gang or as a couch potato because the surrounding culture is not as much of a supportive ally. (Now why is that?)
All of this adds up to the fact that it is probably not just women who are wary of having kids, but men too.
If a girl starts having kids at 14 like some neoreactionaries advise, it is NOT going to be in a stable marriage with a nice male provider. And that is not necessarily going to be solely due to any bad choices on the girl's part. Even if the girl only tried to woo nice, decent men, what nice, decent 18-year olds are going to be willing and ABLE to raise a family in our economy and culture?
A big problem I see is that, in traditional societies, children are a net economic assets, whereas in modern society, children seem like a net economic drain. That, combined with the inability for a person to get a single-breadwinner job at 18, pretty much makes Jim's neoreactionary strategy not viable, even if a young woman tried to take his advice and execute it conscientiously.
FWIW, as of the last LW survey women and men were about equally likely to want (more) children (though they're not necessarily a representative sample of Western people).
Also keep in mind something people quickly discovered when they first started doing market researcher. What people say they want can be very different from their actual revealed preferences.
It's not obvious that revealed preferences are necessarily more “actual” than stated preferences [1, 2]. In any event it takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child; how do we disentangle their revealed preferences from each other?
And yet fertility is negatively correlated with income.
Bingo. Except its perfectly possible to raise "nice middle-class" kids without micromanagement, your parents' generation did just that.
Really, I get the feeling that these days people don't pay much attention to their neighbors, also why do you care what they think?
Also in the "old days" the neighbors would look down on someone who divorces or has sex outside of marriage rather than someone who's a non-helicopter parent. Why did this change?
Probably not if you live in a neighborhood without thugs, granted this is becoming harder now that progressives are transporting thugs out of ghettos to other neighborhoods in the name of diversity.
Does that still hold when controlling for IQ, conscientiousness, age and religion?
I imagine that, if I were making more money, I would be working more hours, which would mean I would have less time for parenting, which would make parenting even more unattractive. (This is under the assumption, which might be mistaken as you point out, that good parenting requires lots of money and time).
So basically, Westerners have gotten more picky about having children to the point of insisting on having a lot of free time AND a high income, AND for child-rearing to be a more intrinsically interesting activity than other things they could be doing with that time and money (say, being an unemployed millionaire who trades stocks and plays poker for fun). Time, money, and interest have all become necessary, but not sufficient conditions.
I think this has to do with the vast increase in the number of fun distractions in modern society. As a farmer in Sub-Saharan Africa, what does one do with one's time? Herd cattle? Why not have kids? They are like little super-intelligent robots that you can help program and develop. How neat! That sort of technology pretty much blows every other entertainment they would have right out of the water. But Westerners? They think, "Oh, whoop-de-do, a super-intelligent robot that you can help program and develop...but which you will also be responsible for and which may occasionally be stressful...no thanks, I'm more interested in football/LessWrong/youtube/something that is equally interesting but not as stressful."
Nah, my parents helicoptered and micromanaged. But if you want to talk about my parents' parents' generation, then yes. The thing is, they didn't really raise good middle-class kids, in that my father ended up being a roofer and my mother a housewife. Neither graduated college until my mother went back to school after my siblings had gotten out of high school. Not that it hurt them too much in their generation. My father made good money at roofing. Would the money still be as good? I don't know.
By "neighbors," I mean social circle, whether or not they geographically border one's property.
And living in a neighborhood with a good peer group requires money.
My naive progressive feeling about this is because "ending an unhappy marriage through divorce" or "sex outside of marriage" produce net good things. Progressives have this idea that divorce is the psychologically "healthier" option in that it is more honest and builds less resentment. Likewise, progressives tend to have this idea that having sex outside of marriage is a good way to make sure that sexual chemistry is compatible before marrying, plus it is just fun, and if protection is used and people are careful with each other's feelings, then there are no downsides (and progressives do not see lack of babies as a downside).
On the other hand, progressives have this idea that being a non-helicopter parent produces net bad things, such as children getting stuck in dysfunctional life situations. Buuuut...I will admit that there are those intriguing studies that suggest that parenting style does not have much of an effect on child outcome, which would be a bombshell to the progressive mindset.
You seem to have strange ideas about what constitutes "middle class".
How about making it harder to bond with your spouse when you do settle down?
B strikes me as unlikely, or at least not much more likely than it was twenty years ago when I was a largely unsupervised preteen. Everything I've read about childrearing suggests that parenting style (short of abuse or utter neglect) has very little effect, suggesting in turn that the contemporary norms of "good parenting" have much more to do with signaling than actual outcomes.
The popularity of a belief is, strictly speaking, evidence against its being a delusion, but it isn't necessarily very strong evidence. Especially in a field as rife with superstition and bullshit as parenting.
I think there are plausible claims that helicopter parenting can be psychologically damaging. Maybe find some beneficial activities which require little oversight. Giving someone a book requires less work than driving them to Karate lessons.
So why don't you get a job?
Given that he wrote
the answer would appear to be that he has tried to get a better job and so far been unsuccessful. Your question, on the other hand, seems to presume that he hasn't tried and isn't trying. Do you have some relevant knowledge that makes that an appropriate presumption?
A full-time job is more or less 2,000 hours/year. The federal mininum wage is $7.25/hour and the state minimum wage is often a bit higher. 2000 * 7.25 = $14,500/year.
Someone who managed to get a master's degree can probably manage to get a job at higher that the federal minimum wage -- if only he'd be willing to ignore the status considerations and just get down into the blue-collar trenches.
At the time I was very poor I worked, basically, as a construction worker for cash. If you don't have any money, working as a "part-time adjunct" is silly.
“‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag” (or, as the SJWs put it, “check your privilege”).
I'm not telling the OP to follow his dream -- I'm telling him to get out of the bottom income quantile of his peers.
Well, as long as we don't teach children that homosexuals are evil, this seems acceptable to me. After all, we don't teach children about BDSM (do we?) even though BDSM relationships could lead to children.
As for Jim's views, well, blaming feminism does seem a lot more realistic than blaming gays, although his views are not without their own problems.
Women don't enjoy sex?
I had a conversation with an Indian friend of mine a while ago, who was telling me about a friend of hers who was in a forced marriage. At the wedding the bride was in tears (of sadness), hugging her friends and refusing to let go. While I can see that highly intelligent women not having children can be a source of concern for anyone who does not believe that the singularity will ride in and save the day, I'd like to think there is a better third option that does not cause emotional damage. Not that reality conforms to what I want to believe...
As far as I know not yet (outside of may be some of the most progressive schools). However, if progressivism continues on its current track within several decades sentiments like that will be considered "anti-BDSM hate speech".
Women don't enjoy sex with men whose status is equal to or lower than theirs.
Do you know what her life and happiness level are like now? Would you guess she's better or worse off than the women who freely chose to marry Henry?
A few ironically contradictory things just struck me about these topics:
1) If you want to be in a patriarchal relationship, then the most politically correct way to describe this is to say its a D/s kink thing. Helps if there's actual spanking involved. Actually, I think it is accurate to say that among my peer goup, traditional relationships would be regarded as a kink.
2) Being pro-arranged marriages isn't PC because feminism, but being anti-arranged marriages isn't PC because you are being intolerant of Indian culture.
There is in fact a significant overlap between "game" and BDSM, the latter not merely in the "kinky bedroom games" sense, but as an ideology about what constitutes natural and proper relations between men and women. For example, the well-known Roissy blogger takes his pseudonym from "The Story of O", whose action (ho ho) largely takes place at a chateau near the French town of Roissy. Back when his blog was called "Roissy in D.C" (paralleling the full name of the real town, Roissy-en-France) the masthead picture was a still from the film of the book. And surely the least important aspect of John Norman's notorious Gor novels is the overt BDSM activities.
1) Agree. I find that even monogamy gives me the creeps unless I think of it as kink.
2) Nitpick: unforced arranged marriages happen too. I would say that being anti those might be un-PC, but being anti-forced marriages is entirely PC. Admittedly the boundary between encouragement to marry the selected partner and being forced is not too sharp.
Citation needed?
While I can't speak from personal experience (I'm neither a woman, nor did I have plenty of sexual partners to compare with) this doesn't strike me as true based on conversations I had about the subject.
The fact that there are people who make stupid (grossly sub-optimal w.r.t. their own preferences) life decisions is a cost for a society which in general gives people substantial freedom to make their own decisions.
The classical liberal position is that this kind of freedom benefits most people. It might harm a few of them, but this is considered an acceptable trade-off.
In a traditional, arranged marriage system, where marriage is negotiated between the parents of the prospective spouses, you have that in general the parents' interests don't perfectly track the interests of their children. Moreover, while stupid children might be protected from their stupidity by smarter parents, smart children might be harmed by stupid parents that pick bad matches for them.
Children's intelligence correlates with their parents, while their parents have more life experience, so on average parental advice ought to be fairly good.
I can imagine this future. I certainly wouldn't say that there's anything wrong with BDSM, but probably best to leave it to adults to discover of their own accord.
Oh, ok now I understand. Reminds me of a woman I once knew who decided she couldn't associate (romantically or platonically) with any of her colleagues who were younger and lower-status than her, whether male or female. Its interesting, because she describes herself as a communist.
No, but I'd guess she's probably better off than that woman. I've already read that SSC article, and I understand your point, but I would hope that there is some way of avoiding the Henrys of the world without anyone ever having to say "If I try to run away from home my family will break my legs". Of course, there is a difference between forced marriages and arranged marriages.
I don't thing even Jim advocates going that far. His position is more, "if I run away from home no one will financially support me and my status will go through the floor".
Why? Will that make it vanish?
It will certainly decrease it.
AFAIK there is no scientific consensus on the cause of homosexuality, so we can't really know whether de-normalising homosexuality will have any affect on its prevalence. The fact that there are gays in cultures that do not accept homosexuality shows that it cannot be all choice/normaliseation, so the question is whether normaliseation is a factor at all.
So your argument amounts to since there is no scientific consensus we should assume its 100% genetic.
But the number of gays is significantly smaller.
I think technology and better framing might be more helpful here. People already screen embryos for known genetic diseases. "Eugenics" has become a scare word, but "help you have healthier (better) children" is something people can applaud...
Perhaps. Interestingly you can raise public approval of reproductive cloning from 10% to 32% by using the technical term 'somatic cell nuclease transfer'.