161–170 of 202 posts
A world with declining population. Full of old people due to population pyramid inverted. Full of stupid, and impulsive, and likely religious zealots, as those are the only groups with fertility rates above replacement level.
I think you are experiencing the same gene pool concerns a racist would experience. In the end the only thing one can really do it have your own kids.
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I didn't see anything right wing or racist in the original quote, did you? It was an interesting observation regardless of who made it.
When we quote someone, we usually include the context of the quoted person. The same sentence is different when said by Dalai Lama and Usama bin Laden.
But you certainly could quote bin Laden here if it were relevant and interesting. It doesn't mean you agree with him or the terrible things he did.
I don't know anything about Spandrell or what else the person has said or written, so all I had to go by was the quote itself. I found it interesting and thought-provoking.
Not that I agree with all of it. I especially do not like the concept of an IQ scale. Different people are good at different kinds of things, and I think IQ is a dangerous oversimplification.
A world with declining population. Full of old people due to population pyramid inverted. Full of stupid, and impulsive, and likely religious zealots, as those are the only groups with fertility rates above replacement level.
Lots of religious people are perfectly nice and reasonably, by the way.
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Good thing war and military culture is not depressing, alienating and suicide-inducing. The opportunity to help and care for other people is a great gift. Killing or culling individuals, populations... directly affects everyone's spiritual and mental existence.
>The opportunity to help and care for other people is a great gift Which is why lots of people love the idea of pediatric care. You help them, they get better. You don't get better from old age. You deteriorate and die.
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This model may work when you don't have a kid but most people do (ie the size of the workforce is stable). It does not account for situations where workforce drops by large % and there are much more retirees than workers.
At what workforce % does compounding interest stop working? Or are you saying interest rates will become negative as the workforce drops? Society’s experience replacing workers with robotics and automation may suggest otherwise. Now may be the best time to stop having kids and instead invest what you’d otherwise spend. Chances are there will be few remaining un-automated jobs by the time they need employment. I say t…
Now translate demand for housing to demand for services, and low supply of houses into low supply of workers providing those services. Everyone around you is using compound interest, so relative to each other you have similar purchasing power to them. Now you compete with the same people for those services. It's the relative power that really decides whether you can afford the services or not. If the workers don't have to compete with each other then you'll spend all that nice compound interest chasing them.
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Can you give an example of why this is bad? What more do we really need in terms of technology, to survive as nations and be happy? Could this point in our achievement be enough? Maybe a drought of elevator specialists decreases the amount of elevators we can have. We have to walk up stairs more often. Not ideal. But maybe more people spend less time having and raising kids and more time working on themselves. Mental…
> Maybe a drought of elevator specialists decreases the amount of elevators we can have. We have to walk up stairs more often. Not ideal. Not really, it would make the skyscraper impractical. No one is going to climb 100 floors through the stairs. Actually, this is not that bad...
I think it comes from a competitive philosophy of life. Only some people are good enough to gift the world with their novelty and technology. Most people are fine in menial, alienating service jobs, they're just not good enough. This is inevitably how society works everywhere, and it has made people and life calm, fitter, healthier, more productive...
Quoting Spandrell: At this moment, every single human population with an IQ over 95 has a fertility rate below replacement; and the places where the most intelligent and productive people tend to live, big cities, have generally fertility rates below 1. Not below 2, replacement, but below 1, half of replacement. As I’ve said again and again, big cities today are IQ shredders, where the genes that code for high intell…
This doesn't fully explain why humans don't want to have a lot of kids. Have you ever been around kids? They're really a pain in the ass, especially if they're boys. (For instance, as a single guy, I'm far more likely to be interested in dating a single mother with girls than one with boys; little boys are just too destructive and disobedient.) Smart people aren't having so many kids now because they don't have to. I…
Humans in (actual or perceived) stable social and economic environments with strong extrafamilial support systems adopt low-number, high-investment K-strategy, humans in (actual or perceived) unstable social and economic environments with weak extrafamilial support systems adopt high-number, low-investment r-strategy.
> kids are very costly in today's society,
Kids aren't (generally) nearly as costly for the people having lots of them in our society as they are for those having fewer, as a direct result of different child-bearing approaches.
> The answer to me is simple: we need to outsource child-rearing to the State, as shown in the novel "Brave New World" where children were made in factories and then raised by trained professionals.
In the short term, immigration works. If the whole world is ever developed to the point where K-strategy dominates to the point where maintaining population is a real concern, then, after the giant global celebration we should have for that accomplishment, setting economic incentives so that people with means to raise multiple children at the level society as a whole considered appropriate investment levels also have a rational incentive to do so isn't particularly hard. It's a problem we haven't solved today because we aren't anywhere close to having it, not because it's even a little difficult or requires some kind of drastic reform like you describe.
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'Capacity' to do 'good' (even per your definition) is so strongly reliant on the environment that one exists in, that I do not think you can defend your position in a rational manner. I also find it mildly offensive that your comment, and that of Spandrell, implies that smartness is measured only in IQ. High IQ is only a predictor of high test-solving abilities. What's more, people living in poor countries and outsid…
High IQ is only a predictor of high test-solving abilities. Absolutely not. IQ correlates well with a number of desirable characteristics, for individuals as well as groups. education, role models, etc These things don't matter nearly as much as people like to think. roll of a dice A dice that appears to be consistently biased in favour of those with high test-solving abilities?
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Lots of religious people are perfectly nice and reasonably, by the way.
And they have lower fertility rates than zealots. See Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. The more tolerant, the lower the fertility rates.