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Azathoth123 comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong Discussion
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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?
The question is what causes more or fewer children to be conceived. Jim argues with some evidence that a major factor is relative status of men and women.
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.
Well, I don't know what he's tried, or what work is available where he is, or whether getting down into the blue-collar trenches would worsen his chance of getting a better job later.
Unless you have specific knowledge of Matthew's situation, asking "why don't you get a job?" and telling him that working at the job he actually has is "silly" has, to me, a definite whiff of Qu'ils mangent de la brioche about it.
Not quite -- been there, done it, didn't care about the T-shirt.
It is not necessarily safe to assume that because you could do it, Matthew can do it. His circumstances could be relevantly different in many ways.
(I apologize if this is insultingly obvious. I'm pointing it out only because your comments seem not to acknowledge its obviousness.)
Well, of course. But I don't claim certainty. All I offer is opinions and opinions about people over the internet are quite likely to be hilariously wrong. That's the well-known baseline and reciting it in every post will get tiring pretty quickly.
In any case, in my badly informed opinion Matthew lives in poverty because of status considerations which prevent him from taking on a lower-status but a better-paying job. Unless he has severe disabilities, earning more than $10K/year is not hard at all.
“‘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.
Ceteris paribus, yes, but arranged marriage systems generally entail little time for the parents to get to know the prospective spouse for their child (up to the extreme case of black-box marriage) and generally also make divorce difficult or impossible.
Overall, I think that, even if the parents interests are perfectly lined to the interests of their child, the chances of landing a bad match and getting stuck with it are higher in an arranged marriage system than in a free-choice system.
South Asia, where arranged marriages are still commonplace, with its high rates of domestic violence (India, Pakistan) and honor killings, is a piece of evidence pointing in that direction.
Maybe there is a compromise, where children listen to their parent's advice and take it seriously (as opposed to doing the opposite because they want to rebel) but in the end make their own decisions. And social norms could be pro-natalist without endorsing domestic violence.
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".
It is true that the case I mentioned is a fairly extreme (but real) example, and not representative of arranged marriages in general. There is still a problem that even if it works in the case of benevolent and wise parents, it is really open to abuse.
The question is whether it on average works better than letting women chose their boyfriends and husbands without any parental oversight.
Do you have an objective way to answer this question?
Also, are you proposing that men get to choose mates without parental oversight, possibly due to waiting longer to marry due to staying fertile longer?
You can compare happiness or fertility or whatever your favorite metric is between cultures that have different attitudes about this.
Do men tend to make bad choices? Who are the male equivalents of Henry's wives?
Well, a quick search seems to indicate that there's no difference in average happyness and it seems probable that this could solve problems of dysgenics (assuming that the 'right sort of people' adopt this as quick or quicker than average) so I think I shall concede this point.
Everyone makes bad choices. Men are the victims of emotionally abusive relationship at the same rate as women (the technical term for this is 'pussy whipped') although women are abused physically more.
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.
You:
Me:
No, I'm arguing for agnosticism on the issue due to lack of data. I know arguments like this are generally rhetorical, but on LW it is possible that people mean exactly what they say.
The number of people who publicly identify as gay is smaller.
It is possible that homosexuality is 100% genetic (or epigenetic), its also possible that its partially due to environment. [edit: In retrospect I wasn't communicating very clearly, because epigenetic effects are caused by environmental factors. See my next comment]
So denormalising homosexuality would result in the expected number of gays decreasing, using 'expected' in the probability theory scene.
So do you agree that denormalizing homosexuality would decrease the number of gays?
Um, why are you assigning the "100% genetic" comparable probability to the "not 100% genetic hypothesis"? I could equally well say its possible its 100% due to environment.
Time to look at the evidence (I've read it before, but this time I'll actually quote it). Via wikipedia:
Schooling is a shared environment, so my estimate is that denormalizing homosexuality would have barely any effect upon male gays and might decrease lesbians by at most 16%.
Of course, if all Swedish people are tolerant of homosexuality, then the study would not have had a chance to detect the effect of de-normalisation.
When I said this:
In retrospect I wasn't communicating very clearly, because epigenetic effects are caused by environmental factors.
So to be more precise, its 34-39% genetic and some percent epigenetic.
So did the study contain twins where one of them didn't go to school.
I'm not sure about all, but Sweden is probably a rather uniform environment these days.
Good point! I dunno much about Swedish schooling, but a brief search seems to indicate that there are religious schools, which presumably do not normalise homosexuality to the same extent as the prog schools. Its also possible maybe some of them are homeschooled?
Your turn, do you have any evidence that de-normalisation would decrease the prevalence of gays?
Would you also point that out about twin studies on traits other than homosexuality?
A better counter-argument to this just occurred to me: if Sweden's attitude to homosexuality was entirely uniform, then there would not be a shared environment effect upon the prevalence of lesbianism, which there is.