>the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously
Because clearly the name "Titan Invictus" is going to inspire nothing but respectful awe.
So, there could be a number of psychology papers, that have some metric for evaluating which names are more feminine vs. more masculine. Those studies, could based on the evidence, point to some overall inclusion conclusion that women with more masculine names tend to score higher on subjective scores of professionalism than the women with more feminine names in, like, a certain set of business environments.
I don't know. Maybe that's how it is or maybe not. That's not the point.
The point is that that sounds like the kind of reasonable, middling conclusion you can expect from social science, but only a rationalist would take that and run with it all the way to the end of naming their daughter after a spacefaring emperor from their own sci-fi novel.
You could spend your time on addressing the underlying issue for everyone, or you could just try and end run around it while creating an entirely different set of problems for your kid.
> "You have an 18-year sales pitch to your kids… and if you fail, well f—k you – your kid’s gonna leave,’ says Simone.
They're so superior to the rest of us, they didn't even need all 18 years!
They couldn't even give their daughter a reasonable first name, or even last name. Like, if her name was "Titania Robertson" or whatever, she could at least pass a someone with hippie parents but otherwise a normal person. She doesn't even have that though now. "Titan Invictus" gives away the fact she could only be the daughter of a family into some super creepy shit.
It's both a spectacular grift and an earnest reflection of how they view the world and their place in it. It's like how Elon Musk and Grimes gave one of their kids a name on hexadecimal but even worse than that.
Trad wife self help but with a sailors outfit. Also makes you wonder how quickly they run out of ideas and end up where all self help groups end up 'what if we start a book club where everybody reads a book and then writes a report on that book so we can read more books!', guess they will first have to reinvent womens right to read for that.
Everyone rich enough to not have to worry about space for the kids in their house, or time off from work for parental leave.
Because solving the problem so that it's easier for ordinary people to have kids is apparently not on the table for some weird reason. (Hint: it's racism and classism.)
She's also not worried he'll pull a Nicholas Francisco.
That's a father from one of those young Mars Hill families back in Mars Hill's heyday. They were hipster fundie Calvinist megachurch devotees of Mark Driscoll who believed in marrying and having children pretty young and the men making the entire living and women not going to college.
Well, this one Mars Hill dad, Nicholas Francisco, just disappeared out of the blue and started a new life under another name. https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/nicholas-francisco-family-man-disappears-revealed-leading-double/story?id=11145043
That wouldn't happen because they'll enrol their kids in a eugenical private school system for the wealthy any kids you have will never get into.
These people want to outbreed the rest of the population to shape the future of humanity. That is, of anything, an argument for regular poor people who can afford it to have more children.
…but I’m sure that if you told natalist ideologues that population
decline could also be mitigated by liberalizing immigration law they’d
start foaming at the mouth and raging incoherently
How exactly are Japan’s insanely racist and draconian immigration
laws doing for its age-old population problem?
I fucking hate the US immigration system. One of my coworkers mentioned that it's sometimes faster to have kids (who will be citizens), then have them sponsor you when they turn 18. Just an inhumanely cruel system towards people who only want a better life
…are you not aware of the huge number of immigrants coming to the U.S. every year? All dumb idiots who aren’t up to your level are they?
Like I know I know Murica Bad etc etc but you shouldn’t let your glib snark take over your mind to quite this degree
Ha I’m honestly fine with that. I don’t care about ribbing.
I was defensive because some young Americans use ‘Murica bad anyway’ as a way of downplaying problems like the fucked up immigration system. Sorry, shouldn’t have immediately jumped into lecture mode
Some of them aren't that as up in arms about it but others can barely contain uttering their racist sexual urges and impulses, including this couple.
The difference in Japan is that Japan doesn't, at least so far, have this subculture of the wealthiest right-wingers, and furthest-right rich people, all having 5-10 kids they're each raising to have as many kids. It's not just Elon Musk's 8 kids but more and more of his billionaire friends who are following suit after he's told them to do the same. It has been apparently been a growing, super-creepy trend for years and the news about it is breaking only now. Even Elon has had most of his already 8 and counting kids in the last decade.
Just google "natalism tech billionaire" and you'll find a whole wack of articles.
The only problem is that immigration to bolster population doesn’t maintain cultural continuity, which a lot of people value very highly.
Setting race aside, let’s say 10 million white Americans moved to Germany or France to bolster their population count. That would cause major shifts in the cultural and political milieu of the country.
Tbh, best solution is probably some kind of managed decline, the population will eventually stabilize, and a lot of things would work better with fewer people. Rent wouldn’t be so damn high, at least. And wages for blue collar people would be better when there aren’t zillions of desperate people competing for those jobs.
The other issue with immigration to boost pop is that it only works as long as those other countries stay above replacement. The trend globally is towards decreasing fertility, we have to answer the question of how to live without constant growth eventually.
Its core tenet is deceptively simple: our future depends on having
enough children, and yet life in developed countries has become hostile
to this basic biological imperative. Linked to the subcultures of
rationalism and ‘effective altruism’ (EA), and bolstered by declining
birth rates, it has been gaining currency in Silicon Valley and the
wider tech industry – especially its more conservative corners.
“Why aren’t the povvos breeding? Surely it can’t be because they have
no job security and no housing security because they’re priced out of
the market and therefore in larger numbers do not feel safe and
comfortable enough to take on the economic burden of raising kids? Even
though we are literal billionaires, we’re gonna solve this in the most
stupid way possible: by having our fellow rich people plop out more
kids. That’ll fix it! Parental leave? Why would you lobby for that?”
They're not trying to fix it. They're rich and powerful.
If a rich and powerful person points out something that seems problematic (to them, to you, to society, to the human race) and then \*tries to tell you how they're going to fix it\*, they're not trying to fix it. They're trying to take advantage of it. They're trying to win. Individually, not collectively.
Musk propagandizing about colonizing Mars and starting to work on a means of getting there isn't him trying to save the human race, primarily, it's about making sure that HE is the one who profits most from a Mars colony. Someone else getting there first means he's lost that particular race. Whereas those of us without pathological competitiveness would try to get to Mars in order to spread the human race, to find new resources, to use that goal to accelerate scientific and technological advancement, to discover, to explore...Musk is literally just champing at the bit to be on top (even more so than he is now).
Anyone below this hyper-rich, hyper-powerful, god-like class of people that are like "yeah, he has the right idea, I'm gonna actively promote this ideology" might have their heart in the right place, but are pawns with giant holes in their philosophy.
How many times in the article does it say "Industrialized nations are...falling behind on birth rates" and "won't be able to maintain their population numbers without immigration". Literally...fuckin...
"By 2100 only seven countries are projected to remain above 2.1, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, meaning developed nations won’t be able to rely on immigration to keep growing."
Can't have AFRICAN immigration, if our population problems are so dire. Gotta ban abortion and give medals to tradwives.
I'm also entirely unsure as to the value of having so many people on the planet in general. Let the population decline, and maybe skyrocket again when we've figured out how to support that many people without ravaging the ecosystem, or have terraformed Mars. This whole thing is icky and wierd.
There are the freaks behind the Thiel-backed “Project Eureka”, an
in-the-works-but-never-gonna-happen planned city previously sneered at
here.
My favorite part is its “unique governance” promising “no community
politics”. The solution: these two weirdos make all the decisions.
Basically, a monarchy.
I can’t emphasize enough how dumb it is that they think a
monarchy will have no politics.
sequel to *a confederacy of dunces* where howard hughes suddenly starts wiring ignatius lots of money so he can publish his "lengthy indictment of our century" and take over metairie in order to run it by his philosophy
I have autism and I was a teenager once and so I kind of get it. Actually my father (also definitely autistic but old and undiagnosed) said to me when I was in primary school "the best form of governance is a benevolent dictator, the problem is finding a benevolent dictator".
If you never stop to properly consider it, having a single source for all rules and organisation who is both benevolent and organised is appealing. It breaks down if you think about it but clearly they don't.
It is easy to dismiss just how difficult human governance is if you simply assume eveyone else is either a copy of yourself or not worth considering because "they're wrong". I was like this when I was a kid. Not everyone grows up sadly.
An underappreciated issue with dictatorship is that the dictator is an information bottleneck. Even if they're truly benevolent, it's impossible for one person to consume enough information and make good enough decisions to run an entire society.
One of the unspoken tenets of the rationalists/EAs is that their intellectual powers have no real limitations, so they are ideologically unable to consider the possibility that putting themselves in charge of everything would be a bad idea even if they're genuinely trying to do it right.
This is why a lot of them--and people generally, I've even seen some "anarchists" argue for a version of it--are fans of having a robot decide everything.
There's a reason a lot of the people who actually tried personal rule (and none of them were trying to micromanage things to that extent) were absurd workaholics who can get by on only a few hours sleep.
When screening their own embryos, the Collinses did not worry about
traits such as autism or ADHD. ‘We don’t think humanity can be
perfected, we just want to give our kids the best possible roll of the
dice,’ says Simone, who herself is autistic and Jewish.
Uh….does this author (or the Collinses) think being Jewish is like a
mental illness?
Also they’re in their 30s and only have two kids but received
millions from some EA billionaire to start a pronatalist organization
like…smh guys practice what you preach
I would have thought that as well, but it seems like every GOP dominated state is banning abortion. It is no longer clear to me that anyone other than the 1% would be able to get safe abortions if the GOP gets its way.
They don't care, they don't think it'll affect them and they're probably right if they can afford to fly or pay doctors under the table.
There's a good chance that the people in the OP are morally against people using abortion for birth control as they literally use abortion for birth control themselves. It doesn't make sense because they don't care.
Sure, until they next get a trifecta in the federal government, and pass a bill requiring a negative pregnancy test before women of child bearing years are allowed to fly.
it does come around to bite some of the less wealthy or more sheltered rich folk. the point remains that if you have money and/or connections, laws banning things don't affect you as much so you vote accordingly
There's always other countries. Maybe I am cynical in the wrong way, but I think someone this rich is going to be able to dodge any ban short of stopping pregnant people from leaving the country at all.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they introduced a bill to ban out of country travel for abortions. Nothing I've seen in the GOP suggests that would be out of the question.
I have no doubt they will, and I have no doubt that either there will be some exceptions carved out that seem nonsensical but in practice cause the rich to be exempt, or it will not be enforced on the rich (for example, going abroad in a private plane will be allowed or no-one is even going to check it).
I'm asking for clarification and understanding: are you saying selective choosing of egg and sperm is a form of abortion (since they're discarding the unused ones)? Unless I missed it or misread the piece, I didn't notice where it was said or implied they're using abortion as a method for selection.
I believe they're doing embryo selection, so the eggs will have been fertilized and would be considered living human babies by most anti-abortionists.
As an aside, a few years ago I interviewed at a company that does this and whose founders are Steven Hsu and some other Less Wrong-related guy. It's was just as eugenics-y as you'd expect, and the other founder literally said out loud, and proudly, that *Gattaca* was his inspiration to start the company.
The position was advertised as if the company helps would-be parents with serious genetic diseases, but in their promotional material and their website, that facade goes out the window and they specifically mention that they can and will select embryos for traits like "intelligence".
I noped out, but they did a good job of attracting employees who sit on the intersection of rationalism and transhumanism. It was one bizarre fucking place full of bizarre people. They had millions in funding, though, which is scary.
Apparently, the Diana Fleischman from the article in the OP is the same person that consults for the company I'm talking about. She also coauthored this paper titled ["Can ‘eugenics’ be defended?"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321981/) with Peter Singer.
I wondered if that's what they're doing, but I didn't catch it directly in the article. And yes, that discarding embryos would be abortion by Republican standards.
The whole time reading that article, all I could think about was GATTACA
I wondered why on right wing stuff Ashkenazi Jews came up all the time. Of course it’s a weird racism thing, that’s just how things work.
Thanks for noting this though, I was really confused by the references.
Ethnic group origin really isn't the most relevant thing for those of us on the left; the relevant thing is the nature of Israeli society, as well as historical ties between Zionism and European colonialism.
I recommend this paper (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273369474_How_Jews_Became_Smart_Anti-Natural_History_of_Ashkenazi_Intelligence) for anyone interested in a skeptical analysis of this phenomenon.
Also a lot of good historical points in the article at http://www.talkreason.org/articles/chosen.cfm about how Ashkenazi Jews only really became "high-achieving" in various secular fields starting in the late 19th century, pointing to a cultural shift rather than genetic advantage as the likely explanation. They note other examples of sudden bursts of cultural creativity in specific groups as an analogy:
>There is no doubt: during the strictly defined, brief span of history that, as we have seen, is roughly termed the 20th century for the sake of convenience, the Jews (specifically the European Jews, as SP and CH&H emphasize) were indeed "over-represented" in science and culture -- as well as in business and politics. In fact, they enjoyed considerable overall success during that period. It should be kept in mind, however, that this phenomenon is far from unprecedented in history. For example, in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, it was the Italians, mainly the Tuscans, who were over-represented in every possible intellectual, business and other fields, while in early antiquity it was the ancient Greeks. While this phenomenon of over-representation certainly merits examination, it can hardly be explained by selection. For the sake of accuracy, we should stress that the issue of over-representation has yet another aspect: over-representation has a tendency to disappear as well as to appear. Where are they now, the geniuses of Miletus and Athens, or the titans of the Renaissance? The issue of their disappearance is fully as interesting as that of their appearance. Indeed, why does this celebrated over-representation shift so actively -- now west, now east, now north? Once again, the causes are unlikely to be genetic.
The overall tone of that article is really anti-Semitic; I get the impression that it's meant to be anti religious, but it should be possible to criticize religions without sounding like genocide-apologists.
What specifically are you referring to? Note that in section 1.4 the author makes clear that he is himself Jewish by family background:
>I shall begin by following SP's mistaken strategy, and share a childhood memory of my own. (This may be a good time to tell the reader that SP's ancestors are ludicrously similar to mine: the same traditional Ashkenazi Jews with nationalistic tendencies, the same Yiddish, albeit in moderate quantities -- though without a necktie factory in my case).
Yeah, there's this thing in white supremacy with not only Jewish but Asian people as well that they're smarter but they're so smart they're too crafty to trust. It's all fucked.
I've seen it justified by calling it the "goldilocks" theory or something like that? Basically that anyone with melanin is too stupid, asian and Jewish people are too smart, but Anglo-European whites are just right...very scientific I'm sure /s
Hijacking this top-level reply to post some actually hilarious stuff this couple posted on reddit (unconfirmed!)
https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/1648473159363072002
I think there's a strong argument against posting a videos of your kid being a kid on r/KidsAreFuckingStupid . It's karma farming on a deeply un-empathetic level.
How do I put this? I feel like a bunch of these alt-light fucks are people who are in groups that conventional Nazis want to kill but who like fascism overall. Gay men who are eugenics curious, members of various ethnic and religious minorities who are Just Asking Questions about race and IQ, etc.
It's the last one. Also your post history is pretty fash buddy.
Lots of 'Everything is fascism, except actual fascism, which is fine, actually' right wing bullshit.
How the fuck is that Eugenics? Speaking of not understanding definitions. Unless there is like an unspoken 'it is okay to pay "degenerates" not to have kids' or something.
Maybe you are just not very well informed.
If this is the case I may have to withdraw my previous comment. From an actual eugenics supporter a RW post history is fashy. In the context of someone who doesn't believe in Eugenics then it might be normal right-wing horseshit.
Eh, eugenics is one of those things that's goes well with (well, shitty) with fascism, but I wouldn't say is actually *core*, likewise the reverse: There were plenty of non-fascist eugenicists.
Like.... most fascists were racists to some extent (though there are some weird outliers) but there were also plenty of racists, or even avowed white supremacists who weren't fascists.
Fascists are like communists in that they think that there's nothing wrong with the basic idea, it's just that previous attempts have either failed to implement it correctly or have been adulterated by other ideologies.
Fascism is only bad when the fascists come for *good* people, you see. So you have to just, like, make sure the good people are protected. I vaguely recall a poem that explains this...
I'm just drawing a comparison that I think people would be familiar with. It's stereotypical of a communist to respond to criticism with "well it's never really been tried" or "well they didn't do it right".
I think that fascists think in pretty much exactly the same terms, you just don't hear about it as often because openly admitting to being a fascist has been taboo. It's never surprising to hear a fascist apologist say things like "sure hitler was a bad guy, but what about all the good he did?" The implication being that fascism might somehow be a good idea if you just avoid simple mistakes like doing a genocide.
To be clear, I'm not making any value judgments RE communism here; it's possible for both communists and fascists to give the same kinds of excuses for the supposed failures of their beliefs, and for communists to be right and fascists to be wrong.
So you're saying that the "stereotype" of communists is that they respond to criticism with "well it's never really been tried" or "well they didn't do it right"? In your original post you never indicated that this is a stereotype.
Do you agree with the "basic idea" of communism or not? Your posts are extremely unclear.
I think what he’s trying to say is that the “basic precepts of communism” lead to bad outcomes, eg: Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc.
But when you criticize those examples many people say it doesn’t count.
Not advancing his opinion, but that’s what I think he’s trying to get at.
Edit: I also think he doesn’t exactly know what “stereotypical” means. He seems to be using it when he means to say “typical”.
Then my original question to grotundeek would still apply. What does grotundeek disagree with in the “basic precepts of communism”, and it would really help the clarity of the argument to refer to the works of Marx & Engels.
[Rabbi Eliezer Kastiel: "Hold my beer, I got this."](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/rabbis-recorded-saying-hitler-was-right-pluralism-the-true-holocaust-588203)
I mean, based on my deep knowledge of Jewish culture (Seinfeld reruns and three guys I knew in college), Jewish people are disproportionately afflicted with diagnosable anxiety disorders and neuroses. So, why not lump it in? /s
(To be clear, this is 90% a joke. The 10% is that the Jewish guys I knew really were like that, but I doubt they represented the whole population)
> Also they're in their 30s and only have two kids but received millions from some EA billionaire to start a pronatalist organization like...smh guys practice what you preach
[they've spawned more news articles than children](https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1648359283132710918), but that's probably their goal
I can imagine there are a lot of couples who want to have as many children as they can but can't and so they're earnest in encouraging their friends to have more kids. Like, I'm sure there are a lot of evangelical Christian couples who struggled with a lot of fertility issues, and so by their 40s they have only 3 children instead of 12, and so they actually tell all their friends to have 10 kids to make up for the fact they couldn't have that many kids themselves.
Seems like it was pulled because poptart didn't like you linking to them via the antinatalism sub.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/yy8byq/pronatalist_movement_elon_musk_is_part_of_it/iwtxxy0/
My bad I suppose. The antinatalists don’t bother me so much. They’re a young crowd so I don’t read too closely.
But seriously these people are performance artists, right? Doing a bit to get sneerers and antinatalists alike all riled up. Right? Please don’t be real…
> There are few things more perverse and dehumanizing than a marriage founded on basal human emotions like love and lust. Depending on your worldview, these are either tools of the devil or things we experience because ancestors who experienced them had more surviving offspring.
Love is the most dehumanizing emotion smh
>We broke up before deciding to get married to cool off. After the (literal) withdrawal symptoms subside, you can make wise choices.
reading this thread made me feel like i was falling down a hole for days on end gandalf style
> tools of the devil
A lot of people have observed that "Rationalism" is converging with Christian fundamentalists in terms of political positions as well as beliefs, but I think we should consider the possibility that this is false and that they just *are* Christian fundamentalists.
It's really telling that they know the secular argument for the case they're making that renders unnecessary any supernatural argument about the lesser pagan races being possessed by the devil, but they need to invoke Satan anyway.
> [love and lust] are either tools of the devil or things we experience because ancestors who experienced them had more surviving offspring.
One of the underappreciated facets of chronic mental illness is that the mentally ill actually have no idea what being a baseline human feels like.
These two think that this "love" stuff is pathological because *they can't experience it as easily as other people can*, and when they do experience it they don't do so in the way that everyone else does. And they don't even realize this.
It reminds me of deaf people who are ideologically opposed to cochlear implants.
Reminds me of my old neighbours who were into a sect werein their children would become Nietzschean ubermenschen. Those kids could read books at 5 read Sanskrit at 7, play different instruments and got really fit... In the end they ended up in mediocre jobs and never went for an education or sport because they got too much traumatized in their youth. It is kind of sad because they never have been taught that learning or sports could be fun.
The part where she said she didn't naturally want to hold babies before she got into this movement jumped out at me. I don't have any children but I like them and want to hold and cuddle babies for sure.
I have a friend exactly like that, he's fucked up from religious conservatism growing up but every time he has some weird fucked up worldview he's like "yeah but that's normal". I feel for the guy but it starts to get unbearable after a while
It's just that the poors should die off, so they should only be allowed to fuck each other as long as they're sterilized or will die because of deprivation in the next 5 years anyway.
Any natural instincts towards love that evolution selects for to spread more loving people in the world is degenerate. Real human evolution depends on eliminating genetic diversity to breed as genetically homogeneous a population as possible.
I am not a supervillain from the X-Men comics.
The worst part about how they're literally X-Men villains is that they're not even a cool villain. Magneto is a silly character but he's at least an anti-hero with cool superpowers inspired by anti-fascist themes. The X-Men are all mutants and so all their stories are about genetics and a lot of their bad guys are just obvious eugenics-obsessed super-Nazis.
These people are more like the latter.
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
> Can't wait to see what cultures and religions emerge once families can literally create AI-enabled ancestral gods embodying the collective wisdom of deceased ancestors—gods that will be able to act as agents in the real world (e.g., controlling family finances).
https://nitter.it/SimoneHCollins/status/1646214501924995079
"Imagine if all the reactionary old boomers never died off but could continue ruling the world with very outdated and racist ideas." - them, apparently.
Yes, let's resurrect Rupert Murdoch so that he can control his family's finances through the ages. What a great idea! What could possibly go wrong with removing the last remaining barrier for perpetual wealth concentration?
Holy shit that's literally just Warhammer 40K's Leagues of Votann. Between that and naming their kid Titan Invictus they have to be Warhammer fans, and are the horrible subset of fans who think the Imperium are the good guys
Of course plenty of totally OK people are into 40K but there are so many fash ... and even more not-quite-fash fans who like certain parts of it just a little too much and are VERY touchy about questioning that. Makes me wary
League of Votann is literally the least worst faction though. Except for their weirdly odd need of mining inhabited planets when uninhabited ones would be less hassle and greatly outnumber everything else.
> I'm not opposed to large families. I am opposed to people using technology like in vitro to get pregnant that were unable to have children, passing along bad genes. 10k years ago these 2 would have been eaten by a lion because they are blind as bats. We shouldn't subvert Darwin.
kek.
first we had 80s nostalgia (stranger things and ready player one) now we have 1880s nostalgia (social darwinism and phrenology)
~~not that there's a difference~~
Geoff's wife is literally trying to bring back positive connotations of the word "eugenics".
[Not exaggerating. ](https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=From%3Asentientist%20eugenics)
Are we sure Malcolm isn't transmasc?
Nothing wrong with that, just... in that Twitter profile pic he's giving something on a spectrum between closeted gay and transman. Which is unexpected for a pronatalist. (Or is it?)
I don't think that would be compatible with their pro-natalist ideology. Also, he just looks like the average Young Republican, they all look like that.
The other comments in this thread speculating that Malcolm is a soy boy lacking in male hormones were already kind of creepy, so if anything there's something wrong with your need to guess whether everyone is trans.
It's weird. You need to work out your own stuff.
“What changed Simone’s mind was not any kind of Stepfordian
conversion but a simple promise from Malcolm that she would not have to
surrender her career. So it proved. She took no time off during
Octavian’s gestation, answered business calls while in labour, and
returned to the office five days after his birth”
If this is Republican pro-natalism, this is why it’s DOA.
I’m struggling to understand these people, by their own standards
they don’t seem like the people who should be cranking out babies to
improve the race.
Sure, I guess they’re smart, but they’re both apparently severely
nearsighted and pencil-neck McGee doesn’t look to have a superhuman
endocrine system. Now take somebody like Dolph Lundgren who was a
Fulbright scholar, champion athlete, and looked the way he did, there’s
no contest. He’s even aged pretty ok for a guy who spent most of his
life in Spain and California. Sure, that’s one guy, but there’s gotta be
a few more around.
(Note, this is tongue in cheek, and I don’t think we should actually
start a Dolph Lundgren breeding program. The seeming hypocrisy of many
rat-sphere quasi eugenicists is baffling though.)
Doesn’t seem like the sequences type.
I follow him on instagram, and he’s a big fan of Thich Nat Hanh, and has also talked about Ram Dass and Transcendental Meditation. Rationalists are gonna be the wrong kind of big-brain for a guy like that haha
(I know this was a joke, but the idea of this giant man reading the Dalai Lama’s little book of wisdom is just such a hoot, thought you all should know.)
Parker Malloy [did some research](https://nitter.poast.org/ParkerMolloy/status/1648359283132710918) and this couple has had puff pieces every couple of years without fail. Just awful.
Too awful to care if they're dragged on Twitter I bet, let alone SneerClub lol
Best would be for an anti-eugenics rationalist (they must exist) to BTFO them long-form on SCX or in the NYT. Then they'd listen
They *love* being dragged. It’s a kink for them at this point. This is the third article I’ve seen on them in as many years. In one article it was revealed that they met and got engaged *on Reddit*, so we’re all responsible for this.
ETA: no I’m not linking. I refuse to dig back and give them more clicks.
As I have gotten older I have developed the ability to look at
someone and immediately discern if they’ve worked at a real job for a
single day of their life
I’d like to highlight the following quotes from the article:
Simone […] grew up as the only child of a failed polyamorous marriage
among California hippies, where her understanding of a wedding was
‘everyone puts on masks in the forest and there’s a naked sweat lodge’.
She was also a ‘mistake baby’
`I was very excited to spend my life alone, to never get married, to
never have kids,’ [Simone] recalls.
Malcolm, 36, was held by court order in a centre for ‘troubled’
teenagers, where he was told by staff that if he resisted they would
simply invent new infractions to keep him locked up.
Malcolm starts our interview by saying, ‘Absolutely spectacular to
meet you!’ […] He begins our interview by speaking without interruption
for nearly half an hour, incredibly quickly and with frenetic intensity
as if chased by the enormity of what is coming.
When screening their own embryos, the Collinses did not worry about
traits such as autism or ADHD. […] Simone […] herself is autistic
I think this is maybe the most important context to have about the
myriad dysfunctions of Rationalism and EA: serious, chronic, untreated
mental illness is pervasive in these communities.
That last quote is especially notable because it highlights a
reoccurring theme, which is that they often don’t recognize mental
illness or believe it to be a problem. A lot of them seem to think that
it’s a good thing; these are broken people who are rationalizing their
brokenness.
Consider this other quote from the article:
Titan was born through just such a [embryo selection] process, the
Collinses tell me, winning out over other embryos that had higher
estimated risks of traits such as obesity, migraines and anxiety.
So, they’re worried about migraines, but not ADHD?
Guess which causes of death people with ADHD are at higher risk for?
All of them.
This was not a choice that was made based on rationality.
Nothing I can link since my one twitter got killed unfortunately. I can tell you you’ll largely get softblocked real passively aggressively, and the odd dm about how your life is over, etc. really nice people. 🙄
I think we really shouldn't undersell the possibility that this is a neurodivergence thing. Like, get a load of [this tweet.](https://twitter.com/SimoneHCollins/status/1646838711634780160?s=20) They're optimizing for *something* but it's not necessarily skin tone.
Neurodivergency isn't a mental illness.
What we consider neurodivergency is often neurodivergency + trauma, since there are very few people who don't have trauma from a neurodivergent childhood, and trauma amplifies the symptoms.
If we take the argument to the logical conclusion we could just as well call transgenderism as mentally illnesd, if we only look at the negative societal outcomes rather than the actual intrinsic symptoms.
I don't think the comment said add and autism by themselves are mental illnesses. But that members of these groups often have other more serious issues. And often a inability to self reflect.
Many wear their mental illness as a badge of honor because they aren't 'normies'.
Basically a shit ton of narcissism, lack of empathy, Machiavellianism, etc.
I don't think that mental illness consists of being different from the baseline, I think it consists of being impaired by those differences. Being transgender (for example) isn't a psychiatric disorder, but gender dysphoric disorder certainly is. The solution for gender dysphoric disorder is to seek medical or psychiatric treatment so that one can lead a happy and fulfilling life while also being transgender.
I think it's bad to unnecessarily pathologize one's psychological eccentricities, but I think it's also bad to ignore the ways in which one is impaired by those eccentricities, and I think it's *really* bad to try to rationalize those impairments as being some kind of special distinction or advantage.
What I'm saying here is that a lot of people in the rationalist/EA community are clearly experiencing chronic mental illnesses and are choosing to ignore them or to rationalize them, when instead they should be getting help.
Edit: and that these people, simone and malcolm specifically, are basically the poster children for this kind of rationalist dysfunction. They're in so deep that they've even specifically left their mental illnesses out of their embryonic screening when having children. They seem to think that the way they are is good.
The point is that neurodivergency isn't an inherent impairment. It's much more an issue of the way post industrial society is structured, together with likely tons of trauma.
If society dictated that everyone must conform to their assigned gender at all times in school or the workplace, there wouldn't be any meaningful distinction between transgenderism and gender dysphoric disorder, and people would just see it all as mental illness.
My ADHD isn't an impairment, because I have gone through a ton of trauma therapy, and my work as an engineer allows for me to use the ways I work differently as an asset that few can match. If you don't have either available, then of course that will result in massive stress, and the bodys reaction is an entirely natural and well adjusted immediate reaction to an unhealthy situation.
Neurodivergency isn't an issue of the individual, it's an issue that we have structured a modern society where neurodivergent people are relentlessly punished from childhood to adulthood for no tangible reason other than for being neurodivergent.
I think it's definitely true that the normies usually can't recognize neurodivergency and respond appropriately to it, with the result being that e.g. ADHD kids get criticized a lot even though that doesn't really help anyone and often makes things worse.
But it's also true that ADHD - and autism and various other conditions - is genuinely impairing, even in preindustrial society. The fact that it also comes with some advantages doesn't change that. In a medical sense ADHD is almost definitionally a condition in which the advantages of taking e.g. stimulant medications to counteract those impairments is thought to outweigh the costs.
I wasn't joking about that risk of death thing. That's a measurable phenomenon: all-cause mortality is higher for people with ADHD. That's not just because of the prejudices of modern society, it's also because of impulsiveness, aggression, difficulty paying attention, chronic disorganization, etc. Difficulty with consistently making good decisions leads to a higher risk of death in all circumstances for obvious reasons.
It's good that you've sought treatment, but not everyone does, and a lot of people in the rationalist community either deny that they have any problems or refuse to seek treatment for them. And I think it's absolutely bonkers to do embryonic screening for migraines but not for ADHD. That's not a choice that's based in any sound understanding of medical science.
There are people that wear their problems as a badge of honor. "Oh I have add, I'm better than those normies", and at that point we're bumping into issues of narcissism.
That is what I am feeling too. If there was a magical button I could press that I could be rid of my ADHD, you betcha that button would be smashed instantly. I fucking hate having ADHD, it has been a terrible detriment to my life.
Of course, but the issue remains that with psychological help and society wide accommodation, all of those symptoms are massively reduced to the point that we should question whether they even are inherent impairments or whether those impairments were created by a hostile society.
My psychologist argued that if society was structured in such a way that our education was based on having three day periods where we cram as much as humanly possible and then take an exam on how much you managed to cram, it would be considered a significant impairment to not have ADHD. Children would be severely punished for not showing ADHD symptoms and we would be arguing for how to make our children more ADHD like so they won't end up with worse life outcomes. Taken to it's logical conclusion, trauma would eventually cause many of those children would develop symptoms which we associate with neurodivergent people today.
Even if we only go on outcomes, transgender people are massively worse off in so many metrics and especially mental health and risk of death, so it wouldn't make any sense to screen for neurodivergent correlated traits but not transgender correlated traits. Both have negative outcomes heavily based on lack of societal accommodation, and positive outcomes heavily based on societal accommodation.
There are places in the world where exams are something like what you describe, and in these places living with ADHD is even worse than in the western world, so I don't think your psychologist was correct there. I mean ADHD might help with cramming but as I understand it can also be a problem.
It's great that your psychologist has such an enlightened attitude, but I think either that they might be too optimistic or that they're telling you the good without also mentioning the bad.
Like, it's totally possible to restructure things so that it's a lot easier (or even advantageous) to have ADHD, but it will always be impairing too. No amount of restructuring will stop people with ADHD from taking insane risks, getting into unnecessary fights, failing to stay on top of self care, having difficult interpersonal relationships, etc. Those things are always there if society does everything it can to be supportive.
Personally, if it actually works then I wouldn't hesitate to do embryo screening for all this stuff, including ADHD and being transgender. There's nothing morally wrong with being e.g. transgender, but it is an undeniable reality that being transgender is a lot harder than not being transgender, and I wouldn't want my kids to have a hard life when they could have an easy one instead.
To be clear, ADHD is one of the most treatable psychiatric conditions. Medication, psychotherapy, and other interventions are well-supported by scientific evidence as being effective at substantially improving people's lives when they have ADHD.
It is important for people who have chronic psychiatric conditions, or other forms of disability, to have a realistic understanding of their condition. Someone who forgoes effective treatment because they believe that their problems would be solved if the entire rest of society dedicated itself to accommodating them are setting themselves up for failure and suffering.
> Guess which causes of death people with ADHD are at higher risk for? *All of them.*
That's just because people with ADHD are smarter and work harder and do everything better rather than being lazy and wasting their time on stupid things like "leisure" or "being healthy". Like rock stars that revolutionize their genre and then end up dead at 27 except for things that actually matter, like rambling 30k word essays on LW.
"Autism spectrum disorder" is a psychiatric disorder listed in the DSM V. It definitionally consists of having certain kinds of social and behavioral problems.
I agree that "mental illness" isn't the best possible term for it; "disability" is probably a better one. But I think that's quibbling over semantic details.
Fuck off lol
Pathologizing people different from yourself is a lot closer to a "disability", it's miraculous that you have the audacity to complain about "broken people rationalizing themselves" when you presumably own at least one mirror
Literal eugenicsposting ffs
Yeah in "lesser intellects" speaking quickly for half an hour is considered a sign of mania. If anything they could benefit from neurodivergence politics.
I knew it was going to be those assholes before I even finished
reading the title. I can’t remember where I learned of their existence,
but I think it might have been this sub.
He also proposed to her via Reddit memes - it was controversial
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jqvv6/usirtechnocracy_proposes_to_his_girlfriend/
For all these techno-fascists who want the population in 500 years to
just be scions of nobody’s lineage but their own, given how into
genetics they are, has anyone tried explaining to them that that’s what
the Habsburgs tried doing and how it really backfired?
Hungary, where fertility long ago dropped below 2.1 births
per year per woman – the ‘replacement rate’ necessary to
sustain a population without immigration
Remember, merely having one kid every six months is not enough! You
must go above and beyond to save the human race!
hungary, where the dictator in all but name got rod dreher permanent work at an ad hoc "post-liberal" think tank after his fash tourism stay there ended in him being deported for overstaying his visa; hungary, where the streets are full of posters of anime girls spreading gee-whiz antiziganist propaganda; hungary, where immigration would ruin our perfect ossified society so what paltry little of a welfare state exists is almost entirely directed towards incentivizing OUR WOMEN to be BROOD MOTHERS FOR THE MASTER RACE
If these two were the people you describe, yes. However, they are people who say things like “As we know things like altruism, prosociality, aggression, religiosity, and voting patterns have genetic correlates, we can quickly calculate how they will change in expression over time.”
I.e., they believe in pseudoscientific eugenics.
Well, kids' religious beliefs almost always correlate with their parents'. Can YOU think of another explanation rather than generics? It's the only possible answer!
TBH, I could believe it about prosociality and aggression, those seem to have genetic influence in animals. Religiosity and voting patterns seem like a huge reach though, with tons of confounding variables.
The thing is, human genetic variation is tiny. Dogs are twice as diverse as humans. Animal species tend to start more distinct because animals tend to be less mobile and in many cases deliberate breeding for characteristics across shorter life spans increases the variability.
Titan Invictus, she’s going to remember her parents fondly
Sometimes is hard to distinguish articles about EA movement from satire
These people seem completely fucking insane. Also who exactly is supposed to be inspired to start popping out kids by the example of these loonies?
…but I’m sure that if you told natalist ideologues that population decline could also be mitigated by liberalizing immigration law they’d start foaming at the mouth and raging incoherently
How exactly are Japan’s insanely racist and draconian immigration laws doing for its age-old population problem?
“Why aren’t the povvos breeding? Surely it can’t be because they have no job security and no housing security because they’re priced out of the market and therefore in larger numbers do not feel safe and comfortable enough to take on the economic burden of raising kids? Even though we are literal billionaires, we’re gonna solve this in the most stupid way possible: by having our fellow rich people plop out more kids. That’ll fix it! Parental leave? Why would you lobby for that?”
There are the freaks behind the Thiel-backed “Project Eureka”, an in-the-works-but-never-gonna-happen planned city previously sneered at here.
My favorite part is its “unique governance” promising “no community politics”. The solution: these two weirdos make all the decisions. Basically, a monarchy.
I can’t emphasize enough how dumb it is that they think a monarchy will have no politics.
There’s a lot here
Uh….does this author (or the Collinses) think being Jewish is like a mental illness?
Also they’re in their 30s and only have two kids but received millions from some EA billionaire to start a pronatalist organization like…smh guys practice what you preach
You really want to read their Twitter account for the full impact.
> Linked to the subcultures of rationalism and ‘effective altruism’ (EA),
Can I just say how much I hate the fact that ‘rationalism’ didn’t even get qualifying quotes in that sentence?
Like, this shit is now mainstream.
Fuck this timeline.
“What changed Simone’s mind was not any kind of Stepfordian conversion but a simple promise from Malcolm that she would not have to surrender her career. So it proved. She took no time off during Octavian’s gestation, answered business calls while in labour, and returned to the office five days after his birth”
If this is Republican pro-natalism, this is why it’s DOA.
I’m struggling to understand these people, by their own standards they don’t seem like the people who should be cranking out babies to improve the race.
Sure, I guess they’re smart, but they’re both apparently severely nearsighted and pencil-neck McGee doesn’t look to have a superhuman endocrine system. Now take somebody like Dolph Lundgren who was a Fulbright scholar, champion athlete, and looked the way he did, there’s no contest. He’s even aged pretty ok for a guy who spent most of his life in Spain and California. Sure, that’s one guy, but there’s gotta be a few more around.
(Note, this is tongue in cheek, and I don’t think we should actually start a Dolph Lundgren breeding program. The seeming hypocrisy of many rat-sphere quasi eugenicists is baffling though.)
Hey, at least it was in the Telegraph. Small mercies. Could have been in the NYT in current year and not surprised me
Also two walking arguments for Physiognomy Theory right there. I still think Schopenhauer was wrong about it of course
As I have gotten older I have developed the ability to look at someone and immediately discern if they’ve worked at a real job for a single day of their life
Computer. Identify and isolate the genetic correlate to the propensity not just to wear blue jeans with a blazer but with a vest and tie as well.
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Another piece on these people? I remember last year’s Insider article.
Honestly, Titan Invictus is a really good name. For a transformers villain, not a real life human being, but still.
Well of course they aren’t into racism or eugenics, that would make them sound really bad.
I’d like to highlight the following quotes from the article:
I think this is maybe the most important context to have about the myriad dysfunctions of Rationalism and EA: serious, chronic, untreated mental illness is pervasive in these communities.
That last quote is especially notable because it highlights a reoccurring theme, which is that they often don’t recognize mental illness or believe it to be a problem. A lot of them seem to think that it’s a good thing; these are broken people who are rationalizing their brokenness.
Consider this other quote from the article:
So, they’re worried about migraines, but not ADHD?
Guess which causes of death people with ADHD are at higher risk for? All of them.
This was not a choice that was made based on rationality.
I knew it was going to be those assholes before I even finished reading the title. I can’t remember where I learned of their existence, but I think it might have been this sub.
get another puff piece, op
Most people who believe it’s important for their genes to be propagated actually need the opposite.
Why do these insane people keep getting covered? This is the 3rd article I’ve seen about them in the span of 2 months. Who is supporting them?
You’d think birth defects, mental or developmental disorders would be the FIRST thing to screen out.
Titan Invictus? I guess they really liked Space Marine.
Here are some of their Reddit posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/2iougw/back_in_college_i_made_a_helmet_out_of_300/
https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/o1qoim/my_kid_hates_being_told_what_to_do_his_granddad/
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iula6/eli5_why_does_human_genitalia_differ_so_much_in/
He also proposed to her via Reddit memes - it was controversial https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jqvv6/usirtechnocracy_proposes_to_his_girlfriend/
Ffs not these poindexter jagoffs again
Just bring on the asteroid please.
“a simple promise from Malcolm that she would not have to surrender her career”
Ha! She’s too young to know how quickly THAT promise falls apart, along with the “I’ll help 50-50” with the child-care” b.s.
I dunno know why two gene determinists - I assume - would name her that when CAT GATATACA has a nice ring to it
There are many problems facing humanity. Not enough people is not one of them.
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https://artforauthors.com/ he ran, or maybe still runs, a site where erotic authors can buy custom cover art for their books
For all these techno-fascists who want the population in 500 years to just be scions of nobody’s lineage but their own, given how into genetics they are, has anyone tried explaining to them that that’s what the Habsburgs tried doing and how it really backfired?
I know a couple who legally named their son first name Broly the Legendary middle name Super Saiyan.
These people aren’t actually EAs. EA as a movement does have a eugenics problem, but it hasn’t been co-opted by the pronatalists yet.
They had a custom body pillow made of her
https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/1648473159363072002
Remember, merely having one kid every six months is not enough! You must go above and beyond to save the human race!
The Chapo Trap House episode on these freaks is great.
https://youtu.be/q68WDPN8Cw0
What Is EA?
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