The moderate position on immigration would be something like an updated version of the 1924 quota act (say, using the composition of the foreign born in 1970 as the baseline), thereby stopping the demographic transformation of the country, which is by far the most radical and destructive aspect of current immigration.
The 1924 Immigration Act allowed immigration from countries proportional to the "national origin" of Americans at the time. So national origin demographic.
You asked what Arcotherium meant by "demographic transformation"? Since he was using the 1924 Immigration Act as a baseline, and the Act used the national origin of citizens at the time, "demographic transformation" would mean change away from people with those national origins. I was trying to answer your question.
Re immigration (or any other subject), I don't think it is helpful to characterize positions as moderate (good) or extreme (bad). Sometimes the middle position is the worst, and what some might call extreme is best.
Turning to immigration, consideration of just how broken our legal immigration rules are gets forgotten because we are currently overwhelmed with the illegal immigration promoted by the machinations of the existing regime. Legal immigration, properly managed, can be a source of valuable talent and ability that contributes to the good of the existing population, but it can also strip out needed talent and ability from the source countries, much to their disadvantage.
The death penalty is another such, and of course support for exacting it has been the moderate or mainstream position even into modern times.
The extremists (who may or may not be visionaries depending on your view of the matter) try to steal a march on the natural course of things, by assigning the extremism label to what has been the perfectly ordinary view of things.
“They are very pro-gay; I met a lot of Christians who have a gay person in their lives who they want to see treated with respect and who they hoped would find lasting love.” I’ve never understood what pro-gay means but this is a good starting definition even if it doesn’t apply to everyone. Thanks for highlighting. I don’t consider myself pro-gay, but rather pro-respect for everyone.
"I don’t think you want to be chasing toddlers at 45. Instead, I would recommend trying to get back to the older standard of getting married before age 25 and having two children before age 30."
Poppycock. I was 26 and 28. My wife a year and a half younger. I have no doubt our kids would have been far better off if we were older, up to and maybe even a little past where the health risks of late age pregnancy start to be a factor. I see zero advantage prior to 30.
While I also wouldn't recommend planning to chase toddlers at 45, that is how my own life has turned out, and it's working out well enough; I still seem to be blessed with enough energy for the job, and financially I'm playing on easy mode. I would not dissuade any other men in their early 40s from starting families.
“Instead, I would recommend trying to get back to the older standard of getting married before age 25 and having two children before age 30.” Thank you.
Being able to get infinite eggs rather than the painful process of IVF for limited eggs would be the ultimate game changer. In eugenics it opens up true sci fi type change rather then incremental change.
Variation among all potential full blooded siblings can be pretty big, but even "spell checking" out genetic load mutations which are often net negatives for multiple capabilities could be an order of magnitude larger in impact, and my impression is that, so far, it is easier for us to identity deleterious genetic load mutations than it is to model macroscopic polygenic phenotypes.
My prediction is that as soon as some people start doing it privately, the local then international competition will heat up, and genetic load removal will soon thereafter be considered basic health care for which the provision without charge by (or mandated by) the state is a fundamental human right. It seems totally plausible to me that this will happen before 2050, soon enough to cover a hypothetical grandchild.
However many fertilized eggs one can make from a particular couple, one still has to do a full genome test on each egg and have a model precise and reliable enough to accurately pick out the "best" ones. Selecting from even a small number of embryos but getting rid of load seems likely to have an even bigger effect, and is also a genetic gift to subsequent generations of descendants.
Still, in the race between genetically engineered superhumans who will still be fragile in many ways and take a lot of time and money (and the right culture and incentives) to raise up to be as productive as their potential, and artificial general intelligence for which one could theoretically and eventually make billions of copies in no time and for negligible marginal cost, well ... who knows. If say the first super-baby is born in 2035 and is just hitting his stride by 2060, then given how fast things have gone in the last 5 years, where do we imagine the AIs are going to be in 35 more years? We're heading for turbulent times; buckle up.
Agreed but I treat all these predictions of when and if this or that technology we be available with a shrug. Partly because I feel totally unequipped to evaluate the claims, but also because I’ve heard these kind of things forever and they often they turn into the flying car that never was.
When I see something really being used in practice, like polygenic scoring, I’ll treat it as for real.
Polygenic screening of embryos for various traits (including psychological ones like schizophrenia, which is highly heritable) is not just real, it's already a commercialized reality you can buy right now. Look up orchidhealth. Full genome sequencing of fetus or embryos is something you can do right now (no surprise, Razib was first), and while I am not up to what the latest legal or regulatory restrictions might be in terms of being allowed to pay for help, I suppose parents could always just get the raw data for a number of fertilized eggs and run it through publicly available screening tools (conveniently included in your ivf doctors pamphlet) and then just say, "we choose number 4" with a wink. From what I've heard we have already gone past the point of "first early adopters" with that.
I have heard that genetic load removal with CRISPR-like tech has already been achieved for a small number of genes in simple organisms, and while not yet 'real' for humans, I suspect delays will be more due to political and regulatory factors than to hard tech bottlenecks, and that these factors won't bother or stop folks in certain other countries which will consequentially get a head start on building the industry and also enjoy a windfall of medical tourism.
If you're going to edit 100 genes in a human embryo, I'd think you'd want at no more than a 1 in1000 error rate and more likely a 1in 10,000 or 100,000 error rate to be conservative.
Certainly true. We shall see if the geneticists will eventually achieve such reliability, accuracy, and precision. Then again if people really do start making tens of thousands or more of embryos because able to do so easily from stem cells, and if becomes feasible and economical to sequence them all, then perhaps a high error rate can be tolerated. We shall see soon enough!
The default answer to basically any question is “the status quo”. And I’m guessing most people that answer “keep the same” are referring to legal and not illegal immigration.
So 70% support a decrease in immigration.
Even amongst the increase set, who knows. When you ask about specific immigrants (Asians versus brown people) polling changes substantially. Elon musk might even respond to this question as “increase” because he wants more h1b programmers while at the same time he’s on X screaming about how the brown hordes are going to great replace us into third world status.
Moratorium is like the default position of all of East Asia. What epithets and misfortunes do you think they deserve?
"At most 40% of people want any reduction in overall immigration numbers, much less a moratorium, and if people did support that kind of position, they would fully deserve whatever epithets and misfortunes that befall them."
The moderate position on immigration would be something like an updated version of the 1924 quota act (say, using the composition of the foreign born in 1970 as the baseline), thereby stopping the demographic transformation of the country, which is by far the most radical and destructive aspect of current immigration.
What do you mean by “demographic transformation”? Age demographic, skill demographic, perhaps you are talking about racial demographic?
The 1924 Immigration Act allowed immigration from countries proportional to the "national origin" of Americans at the time. So national origin demographic.
Why is that important?
You asked what Arcotherium meant by "demographic transformation"? Since he was using the 1924 Immigration Act as a baseline, and the Act used the national origin of citizens at the time, "demographic transformation" would mean change away from people with those national origins. I was trying to answer your question.
Sorry, I didn’t notice that you were a different person than the person I asked the question of.
Re immigration (or any other subject), I don't think it is helpful to characterize positions as moderate (good) or extreme (bad). Sometimes the middle position is the worst, and what some might call extreme is best.
Turning to immigration, consideration of just how broken our legal immigration rules are gets forgotten because we are currently overwhelmed with the illegal immigration promoted by the machinations of the existing regime. Legal immigration, properly managed, can be a source of valuable talent and ability that contributes to the good of the existing population, but it can also strip out needed talent and ability from the source countries, much to their disadvantage.
The death penalty is another such, and of course support for exacting it has been the moderate or mainstream position even into modern times.
The extremists (who may or may not be visionaries depending on your view of the matter) try to steal a march on the natural course of things, by assigning the extremism label to what has been the perfectly ordinary view of things.
“They are very pro-gay; I met a lot of Christians who have a gay person in their lives who they want to see treated with respect and who they hoped would find lasting love.” I’ve never understood what pro-gay means but this is a good starting definition even if it doesn’t apply to everyone. Thanks for highlighting. I don’t consider myself pro-gay, but rather pro-respect for everyone.
"I don’t think you want to be chasing toddlers at 45. Instead, I would recommend trying to get back to the older standard of getting married before age 25 and having two children before age 30."
Poppycock. I was 26 and 28. My wife a year and a half younger. I have no doubt our kids would have been far better off if we were older, up to and maybe even a little past where the health risks of late age pregnancy start to be a factor. I see zero advantage prior to 30.
While I also wouldn't recommend planning to chase toddlers at 45, that is how my own life has turned out, and it's working out well enough; I still seem to be blessed with enough energy for the job, and financially I'm playing on easy mode. I would not dissuade any other men in their early 40s from starting families.
“Instead, I would recommend trying to get back to the older standard of getting married before age 25 and having two children before age 30.” Thank you.
Being able to get infinite eggs rather than the painful process of IVF for limited eggs would be the ultimate game changer. In eugenics it opens up true sci fi type change rather then incremental change.
Editing is the ultimate game changer.
Variation among all potential full blooded siblings can be pretty big, but even "spell checking" out genetic load mutations which are often net negatives for multiple capabilities could be an order of magnitude larger in impact, and my impression is that, so far, it is easier for us to identity deleterious genetic load mutations than it is to model macroscopic polygenic phenotypes.
My prediction is that as soon as some people start doing it privately, the local then international competition will heat up, and genetic load removal will soon thereafter be considered basic health care for which the provision without charge by (or mandated by) the state is a fundamental human right. It seems totally plausible to me that this will happen before 2050, soon enough to cover a hypothetical grandchild.
However many fertilized eggs one can make from a particular couple, one still has to do a full genome test on each egg and have a model precise and reliable enough to accurately pick out the "best" ones. Selecting from even a small number of embryos but getting rid of load seems likely to have an even bigger effect, and is also a genetic gift to subsequent generations of descendants.
Still, in the race between genetically engineered superhumans who will still be fragile in many ways and take a lot of time and money (and the right culture and incentives) to raise up to be as productive as their potential, and artificial general intelligence for which one could theoretically and eventually make billions of copies in no time and for negligible marginal cost, well ... who knows. If say the first super-baby is born in 2035 and is just hitting his stride by 2060, then given how fast things have gone in the last 5 years, where do we imagine the AIs are going to be in 35 more years? We're heading for turbulent times; buckle up.
Agreed but I treat all these predictions of when and if this or that technology we be available with a shrug. Partly because I feel totally unequipped to evaluate the claims, but also because I’ve heard these kind of things forever and they often they turn into the flying car that never was.
When I see something really being used in practice, like polygenic scoring, I’ll treat it as for real.
Polygenic screening of embryos for various traits (including psychological ones like schizophrenia, which is highly heritable) is not just real, it's already a commercialized reality you can buy right now. Look up orchidhealth. Full genome sequencing of fetus or embryos is something you can do right now (no surprise, Razib was first), and while I am not up to what the latest legal or regulatory restrictions might be in terms of being allowed to pay for help, I suppose parents could always just get the raw data for a number of fertilized eggs and run it through publicly available screening tools (conveniently included in your ivf doctors pamphlet) and then just say, "we choose number 4" with a wink. From what I've heard we have already gone past the point of "first early adopters" with that.
I have heard that genetic load removal with CRISPR-like tech has already been achieved for a small number of genes in simple organisms, and while not yet 'real' for humans, I suspect delays will be more due to political and regulatory factors than to hard tech bottlenecks, and that these factors won't bother or stop folks in certain other countries which will consequentially get a head start on building the industry and also enjoy a windfall of medical tourism.
The latest CRISPER result on a human trial looks like it had a 1 in 13 undesirable result rate editing one gene.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/update-human-crispr
If you're going to edit 100 genes in a human embryo, I'd think you'd want at no more than a 1 in1000 error rate and more likely a 1in 10,000 or 100,000 error rate to be conservative.
Certainly true. We shall see if the geneticists will eventually achieve such reliability, accuracy, and precision. Then again if people really do start making tens of thousands or more of embryos because able to do so easily from stem cells, and if becomes feasible and economical to sequence them all, then perhaps a high error rate can be tolerated. We shall see soon enough!
The default answer to basically any question is “the status quo”. And I’m guessing most people that answer “keep the same” are referring to legal and not illegal immigration.
So 70% support a decrease in immigration.
Even amongst the increase set, who knows. When you ask about specific immigrants (Asians versus brown people) polling changes substantially. Elon musk might even respond to this question as “increase” because he wants more h1b programmers while at the same time he’s on X screaming about how the brown hordes are going to great replace us into third world status.
Moratorium is like the default position of all of East Asia. What epithets and misfortunes do you think they deserve?
"At most 40% of people want any reduction in overall immigration numbers, much less a moratorium, and if people did support that kind of position, they would fully deserve whatever epithets and misfortunes that befall them."
"Liked by Arnold Kling"
Remarkable.
They used to ask about population growth but seem to have lost the nerve.
"customized feeds of nothingness" sounds like you're referring to doom scrolling, but then you namedrop the Apple Vision Pro.
In any case yes this tension between old morality and new tech *is* a bit of a quandary. I recently spoke with Alexander Murshak on this: https://youtu.be/N4FIY2Izkoc?si=LfJFsGuV6sX4DS5-