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The Decline of Marriage

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Re: The Decline of Marriage

#71

Post by cmahler7 »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #55
cmahler7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your method would destroy society. Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits, leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or would become violent. Marriage came to be as a way to essentially harness productivity by eliminating most conflict over mates. I'm agnostic but I still think religion as an institu…

You're conflating your personal experience with modern courtship and kinship rituals in a particular society with some sort of universality of human nature. That's a nice way of saying you're wrong. You and all other humans exist because of what you say you believe would "destroy society". Sex wasn't even associated with pregnancy, let alone progeny until fairly recent history. There are existing kinship models where…

The reality is our brains are built on hardware hundreds of millions of years old. It would be nice if we could build a perfect world but until we can genetically modify ourselves we are stuck with it and all the biases and instincts associated with it. Our strongest instinct is to procreate, social conditioning can't stop that.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#72

Post by remarkEon »

cmahler7 wrote: post #68
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pseudoscience and I suspect we'll have firm genetic proof that this has occurred. However, it is so slow it likely won't matter. Genetic engineering for increased IQ is looking like it will be easier than anticipated. Hell, even embryo selection would give us 8 points per generation. Should be possible as soon as we have about a million genomes tagged with their donor's IQ. This would make quick work of any…

I agree, China is already investing massively in research on intelligence and they won't be afraid to use it. Chinese culture combined with super-intelligence will be unstoppable. >such denial of the biological realities around intelligence and reproduction I've always thought it was funny how people are perfectly fine saying height is genetic but saying intelligence is genetic is unthinkable. Research shows intellig…

>I've always thought it was funny how people are perfectly fine saying height is genetic but saying intelligence is genetic is unthinkable.

Or behavior, and then purchase a specific dog because of that breed's selected behavioral characteristics.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#73

Post by rmrm »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #25

Monogamy isn't dead as the author seems to imply by the falling marriage rates. Many people I know are not married but are in 10+ year long-term monogamous relationships (myself included). We don't ever plan to get married because I don't like the government telling me what to do and how our assets must be split in the case we decide to break up (though we never plan to). We also are vehemently anti-religious and wou…

If you all did split and there was a dispute between you too, the government (courts) are still how things would get settled, no? Marriage I believe is just a form of contract. I believe you can write you own binding legal marriage contract that can specify whatever you would like. As a nonreligious married person, that's what I consider marriage to be. A legal framework for deciding these things. Not having one just means things won't be well defined, but the adjudication process is still similar it seems to me.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#74

Post by api »

Danihan wrote: post #40
api wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence brings up something I've been thinking about for a long time, namely that secular philosophy seems completely blind to children or to the needs of family and child rearing. It's a fairly massive shortcoming. Philosophy must address all of human life, not just the aspects that apply to early 20s single people and that subset of society that doesn't have kids. Some secular communities actively seem t…

How many agnostic / atheist people do you know that have four or more kids? Atheists don't genuinely seem to believe in natural selection, it's ironic.

I wasn't arguing the opposite -- that people have some kind of duty to have kids. I was simply pointing out that there exists a complete void in secular philosophy and culture when it comes to this aspect of human existence.

Many people turn to religion when they have kids for this reason. There's just nobody else in society and culture that acknowledges the importance of this aspect of human existence or provides any social framework for it.

Another hypothesis I have is that there exists some kind of deep cognitive link between the emotional basis of religion and the emotional basis of parenting and fertility. "God the father," etc. When I hear God spoken of it is generally as a kind of idealized parent. Most religions seem to have a strong fertility cult aspect.

Secular philosophy refuses to touch this. Maybe this comes from its general phobia of anything emotional, aesthetic, or "spooky." Secular philosophy has a similar reluctance to touch things like "consciousness," which gives us the bizarre spectacle of conscious beings experiencing themselves proclaiming that consciousness does not exist.

Of course religion has its own denialisms and refuses to look at certain things. When we decide that we believe in a philosophical framework, generally we start discarding anything that doesn't fit neatly into it. This IMHO humanity's greatest cognitive weakness. Finding a way to short circuit this would be a path to super-intelligence.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#75

Post by remarkEon »

Bbowen100 wrote: post #69
cmahler7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your method would destroy society. Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits, leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or would become violent. Marriage came to be as a way to essentially harness productivity by eliminating most conflict over mates. I'm agnostic but I still think religion as an institu…

>Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits. Is the implication here that this is not already the case? I think you are marginalizing the many variable preferences that people have when choosing partners. There is no general set of optimal human traits. >...leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or wo…

>Men do a lot more than just make babies, so why then would their productivity disappear if they cant make babies anymore.

Because if you're not passing on your genes, who cares. One of the best historical indicators of more violence or unrest in a society is a gender imbalance. Idle males who don't/can't find a partner end up acting out. If you're talking about men higher up the IQ or socioeconomic ladder, then sure they might find happiness or value in life outside of marriage/child-rearing. We encourage people to put off children at our own risk.

Edit: This is the paper [1]. The finding: "Gender is a well-established individual-level correlate of crime, and especially violent crime (50). It is a consistent finding across cultures that an overwhelming percentage of violent crime is perpetrated by young, unmarried, low-status males (50–52)."

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569153/

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#76

Post by cmahler7 »

Bbowen100 wrote: post #69
cmahler7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your method would destroy society. Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits, leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or would become violent. Marriage came to be as a way to essentially harness productivity by eliminating most conflict over mates. I'm agnostic but I still think religion as an institu…

>Women would make the choice for who the father would be and would choose only top tier traits. Is the implication here that this is not already the case? I think you are marginalizing the many variable preferences that people have when choosing partners. There is no general set of optimal human traits. >...leaving out a vast majority of males. Men would either have no reason to be productive members of society or wo…

>Is the implication here that this is not already the case? I think you are marginalizing the many variable preferences that people have when choosing partners. There is no general set of optimal human traits.

Marriage limits a man to one women, IVF would allow one man to impregnate essentially infinite women and other factors like personality wouldn't factor into the OPs nearly anonymous genetic propositioning.

>This is very perplexing. Men do a lot more than just make babies, so why then would their productivity disappear if they cant make babies anymore. "Uh, hey ma,n we cant have kids anymore so lets go rioting?"

Yes, look into the studies on young men in the US and Japan who are coasting because they see no reason to work hard. They have video games and are happy. The alternative to apathy is violence. Neither is good for society, apathy leads to lack of progress and violence destroys society

https://qz.com/186066/this-lost-generation-of-young-men-is-t...

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#77

Post by api »

abfan1127 wrote: post #46
Danihan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many agnostic / atheist people do you know that have four or more kids? Atheists don't genuinely seem to believe in natural selection, it's ironic.

atheist here, 3 kids.

I was speaking of statistical averages of course. On average religious believers have more kids.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#78

Post by Danihan »

maxerickson wrote: post #59
Danihan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many agnostic / atheist people do you know that have four or more kids? Atheists don't genuinely seem to believe in natural selection, it's ironic.

What are you implying that a belief in natural selection requires?

An understanding that natural selection is a competitive process and at least some inclination to participate in that competition.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#79

Post by maxerickson »

Danihan wrote: post #78
maxerickson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you implying that a belief in natural selection requires?

An understanding that natural selection is a competitive process and at least some inclination to participate in that competition.

There's nothing ironic about people not embracing your misapprehension of the idea.

Re: The Decline of Marriage

#80

Post by Danihan »

maxerickson wrote: post #79
Danihan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An understanding that natural selection is a competitive process and at least some inclination to participate in that competition.

There's nothing ironic about people not embracing your misapprehension of the idea.

What is my misapprehension exactly?
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