My dear friend Robin Hanson has been losing sleep lately over what he calls “cultural drift.” Here’s our 25-minute conversation on this possibly ruinous problem. Enjoy!
Nice conversation. In this case very smart to keep it shorter, or I’d not have listened.
Been reading Robin long enough to take him seriously on culture, as clearly the TFR problem is real.
Bryan hit on the key point that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) in his writings Robin comes across as “we’re doomed” and implicitly that pre-modern cultures were better, as opposed to what I got out of this conversation which is closer to “there’s a chance we might be doomed, so we should be spending some time and effort trying to figure out how to build an asteroid deflector”.
Caplan does a good job pushing for family formation and pushing against Feminism which might be harming family formation. Good job for standing up against the taboo of criticizing women.
There is not a taboo against replacing domestic populations through mass migration and in fact one of the worst taboos is being pro your ethnic tribe (racism).
Caplan talks about replacing the bad non-baby-having genes which is pretty based but when paired with his support for mass migration it is pretty sinister.
Nice conversation. In this case very smart to keep it shorter, or I’d not have listened.
Been reading Robin long enough to take him seriously on culture, as clearly the TFR problem is real.
Bryan hit on the key point that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) in his writings Robin comes across as “we’re doomed” and implicitly that pre-modern cultures were better, as opposed to what I got out of this conversation which is closer to “there’s a chance we might be doomed, so we should be spending some time and effort trying to figure out how to build an asteroid deflector”.
Caplan does a good job pushing for family formation and pushing against Feminism which might be harming family formation. Good job for standing up against the taboo of criticizing women.
There is not a taboo against replacing domestic populations through mass migration and in fact one of the worst taboos is being pro your ethnic tribe (racism).
Caplan talks about replacing the bad non-baby-having genes which is pretty based but when paired with his support for mass migration it is pretty sinister.