Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Douglas Knight's avatar

This is confusing cost with value. If you burn resources in the name of improving the quality of your mate or kid, that isn't K-selected unless it actually increases fitness. The conservatives are just saying that you should pursue fitness at all. Demographic collapse is not a pressing problem, but it is a sign that something has gone wrong.

I have read conservatives accusing liberals of pursuing r-selected strategies, but I don't remember what they actually said. I brainstormed and came up with a couple examples: serial monogamy increases the variance of male fitness, which is a related axis. If education is a lottery that decreases median fitness but increases mean fitness, that actually sounds like r-selection to me. It is possible the instinct favoring education is in fact r-selected (compare Hanson's Kings and Queens post), but probably it is a K-selected instinct.

I recently ran across a conservative pretty explicitly endorsing an r strategy. He felt hopeless against the memetic pressure of society for declining birthrate and thought the solution was to have lots of kids in the hopes that one would be fertile. Perhaps he was one of 8 siblings and the others hardly had any kids, so he estimated that he would have to have 8 children to reproduce himself as someone in favor of fertility. If he knew how to build a culture to make his children value fertility, he would settle for 3, but he has no idea how to do it.

Is primogeniture K or r?

Expand full comment
Schneeaffe's avatar

>Which of these does this sound more like?

If you look at the reasons that these concrete points are favoured, youll find the conservatives dont agree with this pattern matching by eye measure.

They would argue that dating around for a long time before you settle down and get to the kids part is focused on short-term pleasure, that more school doesnt help much or is worse then a head start on career advancement, that safetyism results in more survivors that are worse in some way, etc.

>instead, we will reverse our species’ projected demographic decline through extending lifespan and reproductive period indefinitely

I mean, it seems pretty understandable that people respond to the situation as it is, and not as it will hopefully be.

Expand full comment
4 more comments...

No posts