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Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in po

Indeed. As I see it (and I have lived in socialist and capitalist countries as well as developing countries) there are really only two problems. 1. People in power don't want the system to change because it's a threat to their position. 2. People with low education and no means to support their own kids keep having large families. We can solve #1 by just vetoing the current government and replacing it. But #2 is difficult to solve because we should not be comfortable imposing reproductive control on humans from the government. So popular education may be a good thing to focus on: lower birth rate, lower problems, higher productivity.

ileonichwiesz 1mo ago
Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?
- contingencies 1mo ago
  It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems. Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.
pixelready 1mo ago
As I see it #1 is the real problem. People whose sense of self worth is intimately tied to having authority over others don’t take kindly to it being threatened, and have many tools at their disposal to punish those who try. As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)

ileonichwiesz 1mo ago

Aren’t birth rates already at a historical low in most parts of the world?

contingencies 1mo ago
It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems. Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.

pixelready 1mo ago

As I see it #1 is the real problem. People whose sense of self worth is intimately tied to having authority over others don’t take kindly to it being threatened, and have many tools at their disposal to punish those who try. As for #2, as salient as the intro sequence to Idiocracy was, it seems like the only thing I’m hearing about recently is how far under the population replacement rate all developed countries already are. If we can set aside the tribalism long enough to start seeing them as our (society’s) kids, then it just becomes another distribution / investment problem being blocked by #1 (corrupt extractive leadership)