2025-05-16
in search of forever
Scott Alexander has a review of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, primarily asking whether the low maintenance approach Bryan suggests is possible given prevailing attitudes and the existence of Child Protective Services. I feel like an extremely effective charity from the viewpoint of pronatalism would be providing pro-bono legal services to parents who get in trouble due to letting their children play outside. I could not find any such organization that currently exists, and I’m not sure why not. The only reason I can think of is perhaps lawyers are wary of accidentally representing parents who are actually abusing their children, but I feel like you can just fire your client if that turns out to be the case.
Aella describes a parenting style which appears to be more or less the opposite of gentle parenting. It seems like it’s basically answering every question by finding the strictest parenting style available and then autistically extending it to it’s “logical” conclusion: for example, rather than phasing in cry it out gradually, apparently they just started doing it right away.
Bayesian Conspiracy has an interview with Thomas Ambrose on why some rationalists might become religious. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this doesn’t seem convinced (it’s unclear to me whether this is some selection effect, where everyone who wants such a thing has already chosen their poison and is averse to switching again, or if I’m missing something), but it seems to me that the theory of cosmological natural selection has basically all the nice properties that spiritual atheists could want from religion. To elaborate, here are some features that Thomas and Eneasz describe as wanting in this interview, and how CNS provides them:
To feel there is a guiding force towards good. This is universal selection for black hole production, which encourages the creation and preservation of intelligent life.
To know there is a higher purpose for existence. This is human progress, to develop to the point where we can produce many more universes. That being said, Christians believe that God knows what is best for everyone, and yet he us everyone with free will. Correspondingly, humans have the opportunity to rise to their destiny of black hole production, or can choose to ignore or defy it1 (that would be leaving it to alien species instead).
To know there is a higher purpose in your life. Specifically, Thomas doesn’t agree with utilitarianism because entertainment definitionally provides utility but doesn’t feel sacred. But CNS resolves this, because if advancing human progress leads to the creation of many new universes, then positive-externality producing prosocial behavior could be infinitely multiplied. So helping other people is actually incredibly more moral than indulging in personal entertainment, despite providing similar gains in direct short-term utility. Because “whomsoever saves a life…”
To encourage community formation. The theory naturally encourages the continuation of humanity and society, and I think community should naturally form out of shared beliefs combined with a prosocial mindset due to innate human sociability.
To know that some things are unknowable. Since information cannot be transferred through black holes, we ultimately cannot know specifically what happens in other universes, or even if they really exist. This provides you an opportunity to exercise your faith muscle, to “know” that other universes are playing out well due to your belief in the fundamental goodness of the evolutionary driving force.
To not require belief in false things. CNS is consistent with our current scientific understanding, and actually has a lot of circumstantial evidence in support of it.
Lionel Page has an essay essentially arguing that political ideologies are powerful. It’s a weird experience to read writing which is arguing for something you take as being totally obvious, and realizing that not everyone sees it that way. Sort of related, here’s an obit for José Mujica in the BBC (via the Browser).
Jacob Falkovich interviews William Costello on inceldom. I don’t really get the outsized influence that incel studies has, because there’s clearly a distinction between being involuntarily celibate and incel culture, and the latter appears to be an extremely niche group of people. It seems to me that the common trait of self-declared incels and the people who are drawn to observe them seems to be an excessive focus on status: perhaps what is going on is that the latter realizes that the lesson they should be taking from the former is that status-obsession is bad, but they would rather not, so they have to intellectualize some deeper thoughts to explain how it is that the phenomena exists.
Statecraft Podcast with Peter Rogoff on the Federal Transit Administration. Very exciting to hear a former bureaucrat say words like “unreasonable”, “extortion”, or “absurd” in reference to the actions of various actors they encounter in the course of doing his work. Interestingly, a lot of this doesn’t seem to show up in the transcript of the conversation.
Alex Chalmers describes different types of nuclear fission reactors.
Edit: Katherine Dee covers a pro-mortalist bombing of a fertility clinic, which I’m hiding here since it’s sort of an infohazard. The ideology seems obviously wrong to me due to revealed preference, and I don’t just mean the argument “why don’t you go away”, since they have a ready-made response (which is essentially that the negative utility grows exponentially as the magnitude increases). I mean that the majority of people who are not depressed have both revealed and stated preferences for life, and it’s not up to the anti-natalist to tell them that they have some sort of false consciousness and are actually living lives of infinitely negative utility. Even assuming you have the right to dictate the utility function for everyone else, if it’s too much suffering for you to kill yourself, then certainly killing others who want to live is much worse; the logic states that you should either kill no one, or kill everyone including yourself.
Anyway, the reason I’m hiding this under this particular post and section is that under cosmological natural selection, even if you succeed in killing every human, you’ve still failed, because all the other universes still exist, continually producing more universes (and according to your definition, infinite suffering). Even within this universe, the death of all humans doesn’t prevent more universes from being made, since other alien intelligences will eventually unlock black hole creating technology. Therefore extreme negative utilitarianism which demands that you reduce suffering to zero is doomed to fail: the only path that makes any significant difference is trying to increase positive utility (that’s not to say reducing suffering isn’t good, because reduction of suffering (death being a notable exception) is usually a necessary step in order to start reaching for positive utility).