Links to Consider, 4/7
Katherine Dee on technology and society; Ginerva Davis on feminism; the Zvi on fertility; Batya Ungar-Sargon talks her book;
The Internet is a place, not a communication tool. This has been one of my talking points for a minute. I say it in almost every interview I give. I'm working on a more in-depth piece on it. An important one! So, because I say it over and over, I'll keep it short and sweet: The Internet is a place, but it's not like any other place. It's more like the Astral Realm. And we're all astral projecting.
We should keep thinking about the trend for technology to take us away from the immediate world. For most of human existence, we lived only in the immediate world. Stories and writing gave us access to remote worlds. Printing allowed us to spend more time in remote worlds. The telegraph gave us some real-time access to remote worlds. The age of mass media (TV, radio, magazines) made us really care about the remote world of celebrities, politicians, and sports stars.
The Internet and smart phones completely confused the picture. Friends and family in our immediate world look like celebrities on line, and celebrities from the remote world on line try to enter our immediate world.
If the goal of feminism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and scientific, that could help alleviate their condition. But if the goal of feminism is perfect sexual equality—that no mind should ever have to make sacrifices, in productivity or love, because of its body—then the end of feminism must, necessarily, mean the end of females. There is no other way.
Recall Joyce Benenson’s claim that women are naturally “worriers,” who need to put more effort than men in caring for their bodies. Davis is saying that if the goal of feminism is to reduce the cost of worrying, fine. If the goal is to get rid of the need to worry, that means getting rid of the female body altogether, and be careful what you wish for.
Pointer from Rob Henderson.
The transformative answers are coming. Eventually.
Max Novendstern: the most underrated technology right now: the capacity to generate egg cells from stem cells in arbitrary quantity + capacity to select for IQ among embryos means IVF will enable the selection of children with one-in-a-million IQ markers. this is not priced in.
Yes. When (not if, when) we gain the ability to do this, and do it sufficiently cheaply, not only do we remove practical age limits on fertility, we can also do arbitrary amounts of embryo selection.
There is more to the age issue than making it possible for a woman to have a child after she reaches age 40. It takes tremendous energy to deal with very young children. 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.
And,
Cousins (and nieces and nephews) are a clear example of a positive externality that is not properly priced into people’s decisions. Cousins make us less alone, provide social support and connections and optionality. They do this at vey low cost, if a cousin is not relevant to your interests you can mostly ignore them.
Yes, thick family trees are great.
An extreme moderation characterizes America’s working class, coupled with the kind of deep tolerance and humility you learn from a life of precarity. By and large, I met a lot of people who say they would never get an abortion but feel appalled by the idea of an abortion ban. Most people support something close to a moratorium on immigration, both legal and illegal, for the foreseeable future. They also support a government-backed healthcare plan or even full government healthcare. 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. But they are also very worried about transgender ideology, especially in schools. They support taxing corporations and the rich but not expanding the welfare state, which they see as rewarding laziness. They all knew someone who was scamming the welfare system while they worked and worked and worked and still struggled, and they felt frustration toward those who chose to live off the government—but also anger at corporations that maximized profit at the expense of their workers, and politicians who didn’t care.
She is, like Ruy Teixeira, a person of the left who mourns the way that the Democratic Party has become the party of luxury beliefs.
I don’t think that average middle-class Americans are right on every issue, perhaps not even on most issues. But I am willing to grant that where my positions are extreme and those of average Americans are moderate, that my positions probably should not prevail. But I don’t see a moratorium on immigration as the moderate position. The moderate position, in my view, would be to close the back door (illegal immigration) but open the front door (legal immigration, with more sensible criteria for legality than what we have now).
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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.
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.