We have been discussing the demographic transition – the tendency of peoples to fail to reproduce, examining varying nations, religious groups and such to see what makes a difference and what does not. Sunshine Mary has proposed a theory which I think fits all our data. Ten changes that need to happen in order to promote society-wide traditional sex roles. The only way that it is safe for women to engage in traditional sex roles – keeping the home, nurturing the …
Entryist attack
Some time ago there were some thoughtful critiques of the Dark Enlightenment, Reaction, and Neoreaction, worthy of thoughtful and lengthy response. More recently, there was a lot of childish name calling. Â Racist And, predictably, the next step would be entryism. Patri Friedman, fresh from screwing over Libertarianism and anarcho capitalism, promises us a more politically correct Dark Enlightenment. I think I need to recap some of the more offensive hate facts of the Dark Enlightenment, for example what happened to …
The collapse of fertility
Spandrel has a post wondering where all the babies went, and whenever I propose one of the usual suspects, for example no fault divorce, denormalization of masculinity, and such, he says “Ah, but many Muslim countries also have fertility collapseâ€. Good point. So let us look at a Muslim country with dramatic fertility collapse, and see if we can find any of the usual suspects.
Darkness is the norm
Copper production shows three peaks: The Roman Empire in the west, the Song Dynasty, and modernity. The Roman Empire in the west and the Song Dynasty had about seven times the preceding and following level of copper production, thus while those civilizations were going concerns, they had far more production and wealth than the rest of the world put together. When the Roman Empire in the West fell, its GDP dropped about a hundred fold. So, looking at the past …
Freedom in Russia and the US
Let us compare the career of journalist and writer Yulia Latynina, with the career of Dinesh D’Souza. Yulia Latynina is a Russian megaphone for the Harvard microphone. Supposedly Bush was a moron, Putin is a tyrant, Putin is a homophobe, Putin murders his political opponents, or jails them on vague laws, selectively enforced Putin is a sexist, Putin is a criminal, and friend of criminals, and so on and so forth. Yet she has not been murdered, nor, unlike Dinesh D’Souza, …
No real AI progress
AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit. According to Yudkowsky, we will have AI when computers have as much computing power as human brains. The GPU on my desktop has ten times …
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big tell is that people are lying about it. The lie …
Now I understand the koan
Several people have been darkly amused by the koan I walked to Master Moldbug but the road was too long. I visited master Jim and he hit me with a stick. I did not understand it.  Seems to me that I am a pussycat. But now I think I understand
Tall buildings and the social order
To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology. The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence. It is not all that expensive. Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable. It is simply difficult to do, requires able people working together, both initially to …
Cthulhu swims only left
The Orthosphere and Zippy Catholic seem curiously optimistic about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Seems to me that anyone who is genuinely Roman Catholic should be making spiritual and organizational preparations for excommunication. Here are some entertaining bits from the Pope’s interview with La Republica, which came to my attention when it was parodied as “The Third Vatican Councilâ€. I at first mistook the parody for the real thing, since Pope Francis is hard to parody.