5 ms·

I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single

by bitL 9y ago

I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. It might sound silly and not modern, but the history and its established norms can point out an "algorithm" that preserved continuation of humanity, despite how horrible it might seem and how taxing it always was. A question is if our technological advancements are sufficient to sustain artificial rules that would be otherwise eliminated by evolution in natural environment, or if it falls apart like all previous attempts to deviate from a known "stable" model passed by traditions of what worked before. Not sure I want to be a guinea pig for social engineers either. See what Tinder did to dating; nobody can have any illusion they are getting a "premium" faithful partner and it pushes the attractiveness/transaction narrative and quick disposability to most intimate relationships. Not a way to build a stable civilization, rather a hyper-competitive cruel society where nothing is ever enough. Unless these warts are addressed by a proper patch, our civilization has no future (IMO). I can wonder about motivations of those groups, whether it is really continuation of civilization, or just taking advantage of usual biological idealistic attitude of males to work hard for carrot-and-stick motivations in a form of a woman they desire, and harvesting that energy for their own selfish reasons, painting it white as necessary for everybody.

8note 9y ago
You can say the same about most things that happen currently. historically, civilizations that survived did not use computers, for instance. Thus, if you want to avoid socital collapse, you should enforce that nobody uses computers.
- bitL 9y ago
  Yes, I think it's an experiment. I am more-less certain without technology this approach would fall apart in 1-2 generations due to human nature; the question for me is if current/future tech is sufficient or we will mess it all up. Warning signs are there - you have plenty of males that decided it's no longer worth it to be involved with society as they are denied females due to their low attractiveness, so if this continues, we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything). It's easier if you restrict access to sex to males, make rules that almost everybody can get it at some point in a committed relationship, instead of having only the most attractive males having it all with most females and the rest waiting for leftovers, and to drive any aberrations from this ideal underground, out of sight. I believe that's how past civilizations worked and in general people didn't talk openly about their side affairs and society built guilt/shaming wall to publicly scorn anyone that was doing it outside private sphere and didn't keep secrecy/discretion. We call it repression now, though it likely had its evolutionary reason as those rules survived and attempts to get rid of them vanished.
  - panic 9y ago
    > we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything) Men aren't the only potentially productive elements of society, though. "Females" are real people, not abstract objects which exist only to provide sex and motivation for men. (And if sex really is the primary motivation for men to do anything, maybe we ought to have more women running things…)
    - bitL 9y ago
      > to have more women running things Females in general need infrastructure to be built for them before they become productive. This is IMO a problem, we need a proper equality not only in high-paying jobs, but also in menial ones, i.e. getting more capable female builders, miners, machine operators etc. Not just cherry picking jobs in management as you suggest. I think Russians did that after WW2 decimated their male population, so there is a precedent.
  - watwut 9y ago
    You are saying that they don't have girlfriends because they are ugly and therefore we should limit access to porn (which is mostly targeted on men instead of on women)? How will his low access to paid or causual tinder sex make her consider him more attractive? Also I am very strongly agains paradigm where "everybody can get sex in commited relationship". It is wrong, because it would punish good people who end up with abusive, cruel, overly controlling, violent ot simply very difficult people. (Of both genders of course). There is no and should not be entitlement to have partner.
    - bitL 9y ago
      I wrote that previous functioning civilizations purposefully restricted male sexuality, enabled utilizing energy that would be otherwise evaporated by sex into building society and its civilization structures instead. So that might be intent of some groups pushing these changes. Other groups might be pushing it for moral reasons, but those rarely had any tangible effects. Whether you like it or not, it is politically incorrect or going against the Zeitgeist, males still do most of the difficult, manual work that keeps the world running and is invisible to most women. There is a very little hope females would step up to the challenge as what we see so far is cherry picking high-income jobs isolated from crushing challenges of manual work and heavy robotics is not there yet. So if you tell those males they aren't desirable, they can't be entitled to have a partner, you allow them free access to cheap sex/sensory satisfaction, gaming etc. what you'll get is they just wouldn't care about work anymore, live minimalist lifestyles, working only to pay their immediate expenses, your society will be on a path to decline. By removing this "carrot" of a desirable woman, you neutered one of primary motivations of males to do anything at all. As they see 5% top guys getting all the girls and girls being fine with it during their desirable ages, and being interested in them only when their desirability wanes, and that only for financial reasons, why would they even bother being involved with society? So they simply drop out, do whatever they like, don't contribute to taxes, don't do any menial work, refuse to be slaves and disengage from society. I see it on my cousin, who was a top graduate of the most prestigious university of my country, and since graduation he is not working (a few years already), disgusted by women, and playing some stupid online games all day, without any way to poke him to do anything at all as it all seems pointless to him. So please keep closing your eyes, let's have another completely lost generation and see how our civilization tanks in front of our eyes. I would suggest you to study reinforcement learning, which even if using really stupid models, could show you how small changes in rewards can completely reshape environments, not mentioning complete removal of rewards, as is happening these days.
cookiecaper 9y ago
I agree with you in the broad sense. Social experimentation is dangerous and despite our rapid technological progress over the last 100 years, people are still governed by biological, not technological, forces. Many in society have lost sight of that today -- not uncommon when luxury and wealth abounds and people come disconnected from the hard realities they're forced to recognize when they're fighting for daily survival. I have a few nits. Due to some lesser social sicknesses, polygamy gets a bad rap in the West. It's not always the right course and like everything else, there is the potential for abuse, but it is a normal and functional component in most pre-Roman/non-Christian social structures. Also, national law is the wrong place to codify such intimate issues. Self-sufficiency is important along all axes, including moral and social ones. The community needs to be empowered and entrusted with the ability to make these standards on its own. Federal law is a very dangerous place for such things to wind up. Anyway, this isn't really the right venue for this type of discussion, but I thought I'd lend some moral support since I expect you'll get eviscerated for this.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. If we're talking about what's known from history, this is total nonsense. Polygamy was permitted in China into the 20th century. China was the best place in the world by a whole host of metrics up to about the 17th century. It is still known now for the cultural stability it's displayed for the past couple millennia. What did you mean by "classical non-dying civilization"?
- bitL 9y ago
  Polygamy has issues with excess males that aren't able to mate due to high-status males having their "harems", leading to very violent outbursts as those disadvantaged males don't have any outlet for their energy and society basically doesn't care about them beyond slaving away. China was also pretty much decaying society, which was perfectly utilized by British during Opium Wars. The typical mindset in China was to keep their old, dysfunctional ways, and add western technological advancements without replicating the conditions which allowed these to be created first, a meta-algorithm that killed Qing dynasty and that lasts until today. These days the effects of unoccupied males can be seen in the Middle East. Is that a model for your perfect stable and just civilization?
  - nasredin 9y ago
    OT. WRT Opium Wars I always found the casualty figures astonishing: UK: 69 China: 18,000-20,0000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
- 127 9y ago
  Polygamy and proximity to the end of a civilization would be a interesting scatter plot.
  - bitL 9y ago
    How to get enough data though? :( I don't want to simulate miserable universes just to get that data and I certainly hope we don't live in one...
Juliate 9y ago
This is ludicrous. Traditions, as myths, are stories we tell ourselves. That is, social engineered stuff that stick around, because people care to keep them around, for various reasons (some, only for the ludicrous reason that "people told it that way before, we shall not change a bit of it"). Your civilization, our civilization, _has_ no future. Not one civilization on earth has had a future that spanned more than a few millennia. History is full of only that: civilization, as people, appear, grow, and die into something else. They all evolved, changed, disappeared, what have you.
xg15 9y ago
There are so many things wrong with this. But ok, if you assumed that "survival of our civilization" equals the survival of certain biological lineages, wouldn't the most efficient solution be to increase research into in-vitro fertilisation and synthetic sperm and remove men from the equation completely?
- bitL 9y ago
  + artificial uterus and 0-day support systems, and we are living in a dystopia with baby factories and nameless masses. If you are into optimization algorithms, what we observe in the nature might be one of those. Messing with this optimization might get us to states we never wanted.
  - xg15 9y ago
    Ah, but > ...you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. is not a dystopia but just a necessary evil. It's a subtle difference. I understand.
otakucode 9y ago
What exactly is the flaw in the system described in the book 'Sex At Dawn' that likely flourished prior to the introduction of agriculture? In a modern incarnation it would basically boil down to shared parenting of children and fluid relationship statuses. The point of monogamy was to establish certainty over bloodline in a situation where a male would be significantly disadvantaged by expending resources raising another mans child. That's irrelevant now. We're not bouncing from famine to famine, racked with plagues and wars, etc. Things are quite a bit better than they were at the advent of agriculture (which nearly ended the species but also brought many advances - monogamy among the former rather than latter).
- bitL 9y ago
  The main issue IMO will be that there will be undesirable males (70%) and desperate females (>35 age) without any chance for a stable partner (look at Japan, it's in full swing there; put your otaku into researching this ;-) ). Also, the system in that book is just a fantasy, a speculation how it could have been, not a historical fact. Biologically males are still naturally inclined to seek faithful, young and pretty virgins they don't share (despite cuckoo "education" trying to change that), and females seek the highest status/income/excitement males they can capture. This might be result of evolutionary algorithm at play over a very long period of time and it's unlikely this would change anytime soon, unless we have means to directly reprogram our brains for different rewards.

by bitL 9y ago

8note 9y ago

You can say the same about most things that happen currently. historically, civilizations that survived did not use computers, for instance. Thus, if you want to avoid socital collapse, you should enforce that nobody uses computers.

bitL 9y ago
Yes, I think it's an experiment. I am more-less certain without technology this approach would fall apart in 1-2 generations due to human nature; the question for me is if current/future tech is sufficient or we will mess it all up. Warning signs are there - you have plenty of males that decided it's no longer worth it to be involved with society as they are denied females due to their low attractiveness, so if this continues, we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything). It's easier if you restrict access to sex to males, make rules that almost everybody can get it at some point in a committed relationship, instead of having only the most attractive males having it all with most females and the rest waiting for leftovers, and to drive any aberrations from this ideal underground, out of sight. I believe that's how past civilizations worked and in general people didn't talk openly about their side affairs and society built guilt/shaming wall to publicly scorn anyone that was doing it outside private sphere and didn't keep secrecy/discretion. We call it repression now, though it likely had its evolutionary reason as those rules survived and attempts to get rid of them vanished.
- panic 9y ago
  > we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything) Men aren't the only potentially productive elements of society, though. "Females" are real people, not abstract objects which exist only to provide sex and motivation for men. (And if sex really is the primary motivation for men to do anything, maybe we ought to have more women running things…)
  - bitL 9y ago
    > to have more women running things Females in general need infrastructure to be built for them before they become productive. This is IMO a problem, we need a proper equality not only in high-paying jobs, but also in menial ones, i.e. getting more capable female builders, miners, machine operators etc. Not just cherry picking jobs in management as you suggest. I think Russians did that after WW2 decimated their male population, so there is a precedent.
- watwut 9y ago
  You are saying that they don't have girlfriends because they are ugly and therefore we should limit access to porn (which is mostly targeted on men instead of on women)? How will his low access to paid or causual tinder sex make her consider him more attractive? Also I am very strongly agains paradigm where "everybody can get sex in commited relationship". It is wrong, because it would punish good people who end up with abusive, cruel, overly controlling, violent ot simply very difficult people. (Of both genders of course). There is no and should not be entitlement to have partner.
  - bitL 9y ago
    I wrote that previous functioning civilizations purposefully restricted male sexuality, enabled utilizing energy that would be otherwise evaporated by sex into building society and its civilization structures instead. So that might be intent of some groups pushing these changes. Other groups might be pushing it for moral reasons, but those rarely had any tangible effects. Whether you like it or not, it is politically incorrect or going against the Zeitgeist, males still do most of the difficult, manual work that keeps the world running and is invisible to most women. There is a very little hope females would step up to the challenge as what we see so far is cherry picking high-income jobs isolated from crushing challenges of manual work and heavy robotics is not there yet. So if you tell those males they aren't desirable, they can't be entitled to have a partner, you allow them free access to cheap sex/sensory satisfaction, gaming etc. what you'll get is they just wouldn't care about work anymore, live minimalist lifestyles, working only to pay their immediate expenses, your society will be on a path to decline. By removing this "carrot" of a desirable woman, you neutered one of primary motivations of males to do anything at all. As they see 5% top guys getting all the girls and girls being fine with it during their desirable ages, and being interested in them only when their desirability wanes, and that only for financial reasons, why would they even bother being involved with society? So they simply drop out, do whatever they like, don't contribute to taxes, don't do any menial work, refuse to be slaves and disengage from society. I see it on my cousin, who was a top graduate of the most prestigious university of my country, and since graduation he is not working (a few years already), disgusted by women, and playing some stupid online games all day, without any way to poke him to do anything at all as it all seems pointless to him. So please keep closing your eyes, let's have another completely lost generation and see how our civilization tanks in front of our eyes. I would suggest you to study reinforcement learning, which even if using really stupid models, could show you how small changes in rewards can completely reshape environments, not mentioning complete removal of rewards, as is happening these days.

cookiecaper 9y ago

I agree with you in the broad sense. Social experimentation is dangerous and despite our rapid technological progress over the last 100 years, people are still governed by biological, not technological, forces. Many in society have lost sight of that today -- not uncommon when luxury and wealth abounds and people come disconnected from the hard realities they're forced to recognize when they're fighting for daily survival. I have a few nits. Due to some lesser social sicknesses, polygamy gets a bad rap in the West. It's not always the right course and like everything else, there is the potential for abuse, but it is a normal and functional component in most pre-Roman/non-Christian social structures. Also, national law is the wrong place to codify such intimate issues. Self-sufficiency is important along all axes, including moral and social ones. The community needs to be empowered and entrusted with the ability to make these standards on its own. Federal law is a very dangerous place for such things to wind up. Anyway, this isn't really the right venue for this type of discussion, but I thought I'd lend some moral support since I expect you'll get eviscerated for this.

thaumasiotes 9y ago

> I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. If we're talking about what's known from history, this is total nonsense. Polygamy was permitted in China into the 20th century. China was the best place in the world by a whole host of metrics up to about the 17th century. It is still known now for the cultural stability it's displayed for the past couple millennia. What did you mean by "classical non-dying civilization"?

bitL 9y ago
Polygamy has issues with excess males that aren't able to mate due to high-status males having their "harems", leading to very violent outbursts as those disadvantaged males don't have any outlet for their energy and society basically doesn't care about them beyond slaving away. China was also pretty much decaying society, which was perfectly utilized by British during Opium Wars. The typical mindset in China was to keep their old, dysfunctional ways, and add western technological advancements without replicating the conditions which allowed these to be created first, a meta-algorithm that killed Qing dynasty and that lasts until today. These days the effects of unoccupied males can be seen in the Middle East. Is that a model for your perfect stable and just civilization?
- nasredin 9y ago
  OT. WRT Opium Wars I always found the casualty figures astonishing: UK: 69 China: 18,000-20,0000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
127 9y ago
Polygamy and proximity to the end of a civilization would be a interesting scatter plot.
- bitL 9y ago
  How to get enough data though? :( I don't want to simulate miserable universes just to get that data and I certainly hope we don't live in one...

Juliate 9y ago

This is ludicrous. Traditions, as myths, are stories we tell ourselves. That is, social engineered stuff that stick around, because people care to keep them around, for various reasons (some, only for the ludicrous reason that "people told it that way before, we shall not change a bit of it"). Your civilization, our civilization, _has_ no future. Not one civilization on earth has had a future that spanned more than a few millennia. History is full of only that: civilization, as people, appear, grow, and die into something else. They all evolved, changed, disappeared, what have you.

xg15 9y ago

There are so many things wrong with this. But ok, if you assumed that "survival of our civilization" equals the survival of certain biological lineages, wouldn't the most efficient solution be to increase research into in-vitro fertilisation and synthetic sperm and remove men from the equation completely?

bitL 9y ago
+ artificial uterus and 0-day support systems, and we are living in a dystopia with baby factories and nameless masses. If you are into optimization algorithms, what we observe in the nature might be one of those. Messing with this optimization might get us to states we never wanted.
- xg15 9y ago
  Ah, but > ...you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. is not a dystopia but just a necessary evil. It's a subtle difference. I understand.

otakucode 9y ago

What exactly is the flaw in the system described in the book 'Sex At Dawn' that likely flourished prior to the introduction of agriculture? In a modern incarnation it would basically boil down to shared parenting of children and fluid relationship statuses. The point of monogamy was to establish certainty over bloodline in a situation where a male would be significantly disadvantaged by expending resources raising another mans child. That's irrelevant now. We're not bouncing from famine to famine, racked with plagues and wars, etc. Things are quite a bit better than they were at the advent of agriculture (which nearly ended the species but also brought many advances - monogamy among the former rather than latter).

bitL 9y ago
The main issue IMO will be that there will be undesirable males (70%) and desperate females (>35 age) without any chance for a stable partner (look at Japan, it's in full swing there; put your otaku into researching this ;-) ). Also, the system in that book is just a fantasy, a speculation how it could have been, not a historical fact. Biologically males are still naturally inclined to seek faithful, young and pretty virgins they don't share (despite cuckoo "education" trying to change that), and females seek the highest status/income/excitement males they can capture. This might be result of evolutionary algorithm at play over a very long period of time and it's unlikely this would change anytime soon, unless we have means to directly reprogram our brains for different rewards.