2026-10-20
no one left
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde with comments on recent Chinese birth rates data. Both Richard Hanania and Bentham’s Bulldog have pronatalist articles today, though it’s unclear to me how efficacious they will be in child-production terms, based on my understanding of their readership demographics. Regarding Matthew’s article in particular, as a response to an article complaining about being pressured to have children by society (when the burdens of pregnancy and childcare rest disproportionately on the woman), however true it might be, it doesn’t seem very persuasive to have a childless man say that having kids adds utility to the universe1.
Eurydice on grace as receiving goodness you cannot ever repay. Also, Xanadu Review has an interesting interview with her on her various topics of interest.
Relentless Podcast interview with Sulaiman Ghori with insider information on how things work at xAI. Somewhat related, Blake Smith in Colossus Mag on the tech right and the Silicon Valley canon. There’s an interesting quote about how “leaders of Silicon Valley, in contrast, inspire strong feelings, from admiration to jealousy to terror—various forms of recognizing their power to reshape the world”, which makes me curious to what extent various externalities the recent California wealth tax proposal might actually be the entire point. For some people, having the billionaires move out might actually be the point; for others, stasis maintained by neutralizing Silicon Valley could be seen as a laudable outcome.
Tan Zhi Xuan anecdote on the topic of Liu Thai Ker.
Samuel Hume biotech linkthread.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that it feels like a lot of guys are proactively declaring their pronatalist leanings as a sort of blame preemption, leaving women on the defensive on the birth-rates discourse, and left to work their issues out in the public2 via high-cachet magazines like The Cut, The New Yorker, or the NYT (or even directly on Twitter), as per the recent discourse around slashfic (partial paywall) and female romantic agency. I’m rather curious because this phenomenon feels sort of like an inversion to the meme that “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy”; if women have to resort to this, what have they been doing in therapy this whole time? Because when I read advice on the internet which is therapy-coded (partial paywall) or related, it seems mostly fine. Perhaps it’s just higher baseline neuroticism, and without the therapy things would be even worse? Are women OK? Jokes aside, it does seem that perhaps therapists, in helping patients seek happiness and self-actualization, may be systematically discounting the possibility that healthy relationships, children, and ultimately grandchildren are potential vectors to aid in their achievement, presumably as a backlash to the field’s historical experiences with unhappy marriages.
On the topic of working out issues in public, Guy has a recent tweet on secure attachment which gets at a blocker I have to fully inhabiting the Chris Lakin approach, which is that it seems to me that the desire for self-improvement is somewhat incompatible with feeling fully secure3. If I’m being forced to choose between my capability for self-improvement and my attractiveness to women, then unfortunately I’d probably choose the former every time.
Anyway, based on that topic my complaint is related to how at meetups one occasionally encounters girls who publically declare they are sapiosexual, and then you interact with their boyfriend and by the end of the night there’s an unspoken understanding that he’s not what one would call a consensus pick for topping that metric. At the risk of sounding like /r/iamverysmart, intelligence is pretty illegible for the average evaluator, which means that even more than credentials, what most people end up relying on as proxies are signs of confidence like volubility or contrarianism. If being wrong were still selected against, such traits would remain well-correlated with intelligence, but in modern life they are often anti-correlated, due to how it interacts with things like epistemic humility and the drive for self-improvement. You could say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. But this isn’t even about the game, I’m complaining because some people who claim to be playing something else are really just playing the same game after all. It sends an inaccurate signal to the population as to how effective this alternative strategy really is. That being said, “if you’re so smart, then why…”.
Edit: somewhat related article in Aporia Mag. Do not endorse all it’s claims or it’s general attitude.
Similar to what Freddie de Boer (partial paywall) writes about oversocialization. It’s interesting because this sort of norm-constraining environment is more or less how I understand East Asian societies to operate, for example via kuuki wo yomu or nunchi. Which is perhaps explanatory for both Asian-American neuroticism and their rates of institutional success. That being said, it seems to me that the Koreans have things at a totally different level, because in Japan once you follow all the explicitly understood rules, you are fine to do whatever you want, whereas in Korea the rules seem to be more implicit, which means always feel like I could be missing something.