Thread by @eigenrobot

i think this is going to become bigger news yes

also have a theory about this

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1478495440698068993

ok i was gonna link an essay but i cant find it

basic idea is this, many of you may be familiar

there are certain cultural behaviors that have hidden and load-bearing value that is not related to their ostensible purpose

for example, consider the story that in preindustrial agricultural societies, growing crops is done so people can eat, but it also happens to be good physical exercise

but nobody thinks about it like that, its just for getting food

so the problem comes if eg you replace farm workers with robots but don't explicitly create a new source of physical exertion

and why would you? crops are for getting food right?

oh no why is everyone weak and/or fat

this is the basic idea but you can expand it out quite a bit

for one thing, each cultural behavior has the potential to be load bearing on *lots* of hidden dimensions

and further, cultural memeplexes may be mutually reliant on producing outcomes as well; maybe a culture does A "to" get result X, and does B "to" get result Y, but both doing both A and B in tandem incidentally produce Z and if you drop A *or* B you lose Z

there are lots of further directions you can take this, my point is just that cultures are a very complex system with lots of behaviors and outcomes that are not obviously linked to specific behaviors, and perturbing cultural behavior may have wide and unexpected effects

sort of a generalized chesterton fence argument basically but i think its somewhat bleaker on account of this model proposes that we really have no idea how any change will cascade throughout society

anyway cultural-behavioral changes since the first industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution and the information revolution have been massive. in terms of the rate of change i doubt weve seen anything like it in human history

"reproduction" is the sort of thing that is likely to be affected by these changes. my sense is that historically no one worried about *sufficient* rates of reproduction (i am aware of one exception, will note later), it just kind of happened without deliberate action by cultures

but maybe this, like physical fitness, was a consequence of lots of second-order effects of normal cultural behaviors that had other explicit purposes that were disrupted by these technological revolutions

heres the other example im familiar with, Rome had massive issues with reproduction among native Romans after the empire was established and the mos maiorum were abandoned

im not sure they managed to solve them

https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1447935803188031488?t=4bMVxgK6wkbnYWViDKo7OQ&s=19

other points people will likely raise yes from @RokoMijic

these are arguably a subset of my argument, also note that the introduction of education and birth control didnt cause fertility to plummet immediately in the US, its been a long and *continuing* decline

also, yes,

ok i have to go to work will respond a bit later :o)

not the essay i was thinking of earlier but extremely related

https://twitter.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1478791290942898176?t=TxVtpKzBJiM3p4DwXomaUQ&s=19