Someone flagged what I thought was a good comment so I couldn’t respond to it unfortunately.
I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
The only thing I would add is that the English anthropologist Chris Knight wrote extensively about “sex strikes” (which goes beyond the simple act of sex of course, into the entire structural notion of child rearing as a social function) being the driver of cultural peace throughout human history in his critical 1991 book “blood relations”
Seems fairly obvious that’s what’s happening and mirrors historical birth rate crashes aligning with general breakup of long running social expectations
Polybius wrote as such in 200BC:
“ In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us.”
Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
If you are talking about pjc50, I thought it was interesting as well, but also came off like a canned response or AI text.
With respect to Knight and polybius, I agree that is an interesting perspective. It can also be viewed through the lens of the evolution of memes. Just like biological evolution, some species are dead ends, go extinct, or form unstable fits between organism and environment.
It stands that we would expect the same to be true for memes. It seems reasonable that some memes, either individually or in combination can be detrimental in a way terminal to the individual or society.
Evolutionary pressures being what they are, ideas that promote continuity will prevail unless there is a cataclysm. That said, changes can be abrupt and painful, like the bubonic plague killing half of Europe
I’m curious, are you using meme in the original Dawkins sense because if that is the case then I would fully and passionately agree with that to the extent where that is precisely what it seems like is happening
I suppose I just don’t know what that meme is at this point
so how would you define the previous memetic position that led to children as a regular part of life?
Further, what is the new memetic position on children that is being implemented?
I think this is an interesting topic, so I've been posting all over the thread with some of my thoughts.
I'll start with increasing memes that I think are contributors to childrearing. I think risk aversion is a leading one. You see this in terms of teenage sex, drug use, and other risky behavior. The next increasing meme would be viewing the world through a materialistic and increasingly utilitarian economic lens. Think this comes at the cost of more sentimental for romantic view of existence. just looking at this threads, nearly every comment is materialist in nature: opportunity costs for leaving the workforce, social economic implications, ect. Conspicuously absent is discussion of experiential and emotional implications. What about people missing out on watching their child take their first steps or the joys and pains of the creative process that is nurturing a human into a functional adult.
I think this also plays into the idea that work is intrinsically something to be minimized or avoided, opposed to something powering that can be directed. I acknowledge that I'm presenting these all as unsubstantiated personal opinion, but I think they have Merit and would be worthy of further scrutiny.
Im not religious myself, but cant help but acknowledge the decline of religion it as an elephant in the room. Less so due to any specific religious doctrine, but the attention brings to non-material topics.
>> so how would you define the previous memetic position that led to children as a regular part of life?
>> Further, what is the new memetic position on children that is being implemented?
I'm not who you were asking, but I think "having children" may be an activity that is transitioning from being a larger part non-memetic to a larger part memetic, due to birth control technology. So the previous "non-memetic" position was if you like to have sex, that sex will lead to kids eventually. Now with birth control, you can like to have sex and not have kids, unless personal psychology and/or memes drive you to have kids.
> just looking at this threads, nearly every comment is materialist in nature: opportunity costs for leaving the workforce, social economic implications, ect. Conspicuously absent is discussion of experiential and emotional implications.
Your observation might be true, but I wouldn't really use a HN thread as support. This community, and the wider software engineer/technology community of which it is part, has a very skewed perspective and misunderstands quite a lot due to its poorly acknowledged limitations and biases. What I quoted from you hits one of those directly: a preference for and comfort with the mechanical over the emotional and interpersonal.
I will only react to the last paragraph, but imho, the decline of religions has no causal relationship to the decline in birth. I do think they might be correlated, but my example is that France is way less religious than Italy or Turkey, and kept their fertility rates above 2.1 longer. Also, recently France had a small increase in religiosity, while its birthrate declined.
I wonder if that holds up when you look at demographics within each country.
I don't know about the ones you mentioned, but I know that I the US, our national fertility rate is heavily increased by first generation immigrants, who are also more religious.
A fun meme to launch would be that the Scott Alexander's, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson's etc of the world should have to take at least some responsibility for the risk their memetic viruses introduce into the system.
Edit: I may be thinking of the other materialism, but they are closely related.
I'm actually a pretty big fan of Scott Alexander and the other rationalists, although I don't always agree with their conclusions.
Most rationalist philosophy is underpinned by happiness utilitarianism, which I think is fundamentally flawed. First, I don't think happiness on an individual or Global level is the most important metric to optimize for. I think there are other objectives that can stand on their own merits, and even in contrast to happiness such as virtue, progress, and integrity. Secondly, I don't believe in the fungibility of happiness utils. Utilitarianism assumes and even requires that different forms of Happiness can be made equivalent without loss of information included in their qualia.
That said, I still think rationalists are ahead of the pack simply because they are interested in introspection, trying to examine life with open eyes, and trying to increase their individual agency to achieve their goals.
Not much disagreement (and a huge fan of Scott himself), I'm more so thinking they could do so much more with the raw cognitive horsepower in the community. They'd be better without their ideology and methods imho.
I think the most important community outreach that anyone can be doing these days is encouraging people to think critically and take agency over there lives.
With that in mind, I think they are building an important foundation. This enables people to make up their own minds.
I have to admit that dialogue with rationalist or rationalist forums help me greatly and coming up with my own ideas, despite them being contrary to theirs. Simply Having forums to talk and think deeply is a rare and valuable service
Well, it is deployed regularly by people with a broad spectrum of "capabilities"...so what could it mean? Would the meaning (as it is used, and perceived) not also be a broad spectrum, that perhaps does not nicely intersect with a rigorous and comprehensive definition (that itself doesn't rely on numerous other complex compound terms, each of which suffers from the same problem, and others), which to my knowledge doesn't exist?
In simple terms, I just think it is just making effort to present the most robust and accurate case you can.
This involves questioning your work/thoughts before presenting/embracing them.
It involves being able put yourself in a skeptical position to it, and generate your own constructive feedback.
In some ways, it reminds me of the HN guidelines "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> Someone flagged what I thought was a good comment so I couldn’t respond to it unfortunately.
The best and the worst comments tend to be flagged. Not sure why we aren't allowed to continue the discussion within 'flagged' comments. Just hide it for those who don't want to see flagged threads and let the rest of us continue on.
> Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
Perhaps in certain instances in the past, but I doubt it. The current birth rate decline is a result of intentional policies of the elites. Starting with Europe and the US in the 60s and 70s and then these policies eventually got exported to or forced upon our 'allies' or major trading partners. The implementation of these policies varied from pushing '2 is enough' style propaganda to encourage couples to limit the amount of children, propaganda programming to encourage females to put off child bearing to work and of course enacting drastic policies like the 1 child policy ( the 1 child policy wasn't a chinese policy but one of american/european demands for opening trade and attaining foreign investment ). You can see it with bangladesh, india, etc. They are being forced to adopt 'child planning' policies by the US and Europe in exchange for investment. No doubt africa will get the same demands in the near future.
The birth rate decline isn't some natural quirk of society. It is a result of a planned systematic state policy. Everything from education to propaganda encourages men and women to have less children. What's laughable is that the same propagandists are scratching their heads wondering why fertility is declining all the while pushing propaganda to decrease fertility.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive elucidation of the kind of propaganda that you’re talking about in any kind of coherent or coordinated sense
There are certainly anti-natalist groups out there, but I wouldn’t consider those some kind of elite. In fact they’re usually fairly heterodox.
Similarly, the only people I see pushing natalism at this point are far right wing people
> I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive elucidation of the kind of propaganda that you’re talking about in any kind of coherent or coordinated sense
What? Every major global institution and nation is backing 'family planning', encouraging women to work, etc.
> Similarly, the only people I see pushing natalism at this point are far right wing people
And what 'far right' people are in charge of any major nation or global institution? None.
You'd have to be blind or driven by agenda to not see it. For the past few decades, from hollywood to the UN to education, we've been getting a certain messaging. As an american, I don't remember a single time where we were encouraged to have lots of children. All the messaging, in school, on tv, in movies, etc were all discouraging you from having children early and having lots of them.
Now whether it is a good thing or a bad thing it's up for debate. But it's silly to deny it. In modern times, birth rates are determined by the state. Prior to the current decline, many countries, such as china, iran, etc actually encouraged high birth rates and hence experienced population booms. We had a baby boom generation prior to the elites deciding to lower it.
So if the elites really wanted a population boom, they can switch the messaging and get the propaganda going. The masses follow where the propaganda leads them.
> I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
High quality communication is not the goal of any current social media platform. Some platforms are ideologically opposed to it.
From another comment:
>> Not sure why we aren't allowed to continue the discussion within 'flagged' comments.
The official reason: that "is not what HN is for".
Such a thing could be built, but whether it could be monetized (it would be extremely unpopular), or whether there is any wealthy human in existence who would fund it for the good of humanity, seems highly unlikely.
I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
The only thing I would add is that the English anthropologist Chris Knight wrote extensively about “sex strikes” (which goes beyond the simple act of sex of course, into the entire structural notion of child rearing as a social function) being the driver of cultural peace throughout human history in his critical 1991 book “blood relations”
Relevant chapter: http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Sex-...
Seems fairly obvious that’s what’s happening and mirrors historical birth rate crashes aligning with general breakup of long running social expectations
Polybius wrote as such in 200BC:
“ In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us.”
Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/06/11/polybius/amp/