The argument you’re making seems strange to me. I’m going to talk purely about the logistics here. You say that no society in history has figured out how to keep peaceful men without the violent ones, and therefore this means it probably can’t be done. Presumably, the same argument applies to banning scientific progress.
But the same argument can be applied to a society without men at all! No society in history has managed to do it. In fact, the obstacles are far greater—men are still biologically necessary, there are billions of men already on the planet, and most of them wouldn’t agree with you that their gender should be phased out. It’s easy to say you’re not calling for violence, but I don’t see any way you could adopt this without violence, even if you had the technology to allow for it.
Finally, it occurs to me that if your ideal-but-untenable solution is to keep peaceful men and not violent men, then your solution is anti-correlated with what you want—what kind of man would willingly permit his own gender’s extinction for the greater good of humanity? Certainly not a violent one.
It seems to me like you’ve correctly identified a large problem that lurks behind several EA causes (The exponentially advancing state of knowledge resulting in existential risk) and a compelling analogy for it (The ever-increasing speed of a conveyor belt) which is a very useful question worth exploring. But then, having successfully identified this as a hard problem, you’ve then shied away from the difficulty of the problem, which is actually solving the problem. If you propose an unworkable solution, and then people ignore it, you at least get to say that you tried, and other people are to blame for denying your vision. In other words, you are Trying To Try.
In short—you’ve proposed a solution that would almost certainly fail in real life. It is in fact much more difficult than lesser impossibilities like “Remove the tendency for violence in men/humans” or “Halt all scientific progress in any field that is deemed unsafe”. It might not even solve the problem if it succeeded. And it also happens to be outside the Overton window to boot. And then, when people downvote your posts, you assume that they disagree with the solution because it’s outside the Overton window and not because it’s just...not going to work. And even if it could work, the solutions I mentioned above are better across every possible dimension. They’re slightly less impossible, morally more reasonable, societally more tenable, and equally likely to solve the problem if you could somehow pull them off. And even then, those aren’t good solutions because they STILL don’t bring the problem into a state where a solution can realistically be seen.
The problem you mention is real, but you’ve cut your search for a solution short way too fast.
Thank you very much for engaging my comment Jay. I almost missed your reply, and am thankful I didn’t.
Given that ideas widely accepted by the group consensus have utterly failed to cure the rampant human (mostly male) violence which has long permeated our world, my goal is to encourage explorations in to ideas outside of the current group consensus. The reasoning here is simple. If ideas within the group consensus could solve this existential threat, the problem would likely already be solved.
One of the challenges we will face in conducting such “out of the box” investigations is that many or most of those who make their livings doing intellectual work are not in a position to participate, at least not publicly. As example, if I was a philosophy professor working at a university, I would not be able to post about a “world without men” without fear of damage to my reputation, and thus my salary, my mortgage, and my children’s college fund. As evidence, I’ve already been threatened with being banned from this forum simply for mentioning a “world without men” might be an option worth exploring. Sorry to say, fear abounds in academia.
You are right. The challenges involved in a “world without men” proposal are vast. But then so is every other plan for saving our civilization from male violence. To me, it seems useful to be simple and clear minded in identifying the source of the threat, men.
Men will soon no longer be biologically necessary, as science is learning how to make sperm and egg cells from skin cells. To my limited knowledge such work is already well underway in mice, but not in humans.
In any case, it’s already true that a tiny number of men can impregnate a vast number of women. So while a world totally without men may not yet be an option, a world with far fewer men is. Critics of my posts never seem to get this far, because they invest all of their energy in to rejection, rejection, rejection, which obscures their own common sense analysis.
Also, why should men resist the idea of their being fewer men??? The fewer men there are, the more valuable the remaining men become in the dating pool. This is another obvious point critics always ignore in their rush to rejection.
But then, having successfully identified this as a hard problem, you’ve then shied away from the difficulty of the problem, which is actually solving the problem.
This is an understandable critique, which is welcomed. But to be more precise, what is really being said is that I’ve shied away from solving the problem in the manner preferred by those who make their living serving an out of control knowledge explosion. If such folks can solve the problem in the manner which they prefer, that’s great, I’m all for solving the problem. Let’s hear their solution....
As I see it, the underlying problem is a failure to think holistically, and acknowledge that the human condition with all it’s many weaknesses is one component of the knowledge development system. My reasoning is that, given that human beings are limited (like every other species) then knowledge development will have to be as well. It simply doesn’t make sense to keep piling more and more and more power on to a species that can’t manage the power we already have (thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throat).
Yes, the argument I’m making seems strange to you. It seems strange to most people. That’s what I like about it. We’re exploring outside the limits of a group consensus which has a proven record of failing to successfully address these existential threats.
Being outside the box doesn’t guarantee success, agree completely there. But where else would you have me look?
Thanks again for engaging. I was on the edge of retiring from the forum, so you’ve brought me back from the edge, for now.
This is obviously a huge topic and I’m attempting to not write a book in each of my posts. If there is some angle you feel I’ve not adequately addressed, please remind me of it and I’ll try again.
The reasoning here is simple. If ideas within the group consensus could solve this existential threat, the problem would likely already be solved.
First off—this isn’t necessarily true. There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war (advocate for nuclear disarmament), climate change (advance the state of carbon capture technology), and reduce global poverty. (Basically everything GiveWell does) The reason we haven’t solved them yet is that executing these ideas is still very hard due to problems around logistics, co-ordination, and they simply require a hell of a lot of work.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much. But that should actually move you towards thinking inside the box—if people aren’t thinking about it, there’s low-hanging fruit to be picked, and you don’t need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of. Maybe there are some good ideas within the Overton window that haven’t been popularised yet, just waiting to be found!
This is an understandable critique, which is welcomed. But to be more precise, what is really being said is that I’ve shied away from solving the problem in the manner preferred by those who make their living serving an out of control knowledge explosion. If such folks can solve the problem in the manner which they prefer, that’s great, I’m all for solving the problem. Let’s hear their solution...
No, that’s not what’s being said. What I am saying is that you’ve shied away from solving the problem. “Solving the problem” means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world. In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution, and coming up with such a path is a requirement for a valid solution. It is not enough to describe a possible state of the world that solves a problem—you have to have some path to get from our current world to that world.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge development—ban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways. Don’t get me wrong, these still don’t count as solutions in my definition above, but they seem at least as plausible as removing the male gender entirely. It seems “probably impossible” rather than “definitely impossible”, and limiting research even suggests some possible next steps, like banning biological gain-of-function research (even though these are still very hard and I’ve heard people make decent arguments for why it can’t be done, largely around the difficulty of international co-operation—but this is also an argument that applies equally well to your proposal)
Yes, the argument I’m making seems strange to you. It seems strange to most people. That’s what I like about it. We’re exploring outside the limits of a group consensus which has a proven record of failing to successfully address these existential threats.
Being outside the box doesn’t guarantee success, agree completely there. But where else would you have me look?
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box. This is from the same forum that has wild animal suffering as a small but real cause area. When I said your argument seemed strange, I was being polite. What I should have said was that your argument seems bad. Not because it’s outside the box. Not because I disagree with it morally. Because I don’t see how it could actually work, and there seem to me to be options that are simultaneously less radical and also closer to the set of things I would describe as possible solutions. The reason to think out of the box is because nothing else has worked—you should be aiming for the least radical solution that is necessary to solve the problem.
Finally, while I don’t think this point is necessary for my core argument, I’ll address it anyway:
Also, why should men resist the idea of their being fewer men??? The fewer men there are, the more valuable the remaining men become in the dating pool. This is another obvious point critics always ignore in their rush to rejection.
Firstly—a society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isn’t going to be very nice for men to live in. You can’t have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them. Any attitudes society adapted that would allow them to even consider such a radical act are going to be opposed by men for precisely this reason—which, by the way, is an extremely good reason and has my full sympathy. There are people right now who advocate for the extinction of men, and they are not the kind of people I would feel safe around, let alone being ruled by.
Secondly—let’s say I don’t care about the future of men, and I don’t care what people think of me, and I’m certain that society’s newfound attitudes that allow for the intentional extinction of men definitely won’t turn into violence, and I’m willing to throw away my entire gender to increase my chance of getting laid. Even then, I’m thirty years old now. How does this help me? If you’re not going to commit violence, which you’ve previously claimed, the only way you can reduce the number of men is to stop new ones from being born. That means that if you could start having statistically relevant effects a mere ten years from now, I’m still going to be in my sixties by the time the dating pool starts shifting in any sort of meaningful way, and there’s still just as many 30+ year olds as there ever was. That doesn’t seem like it benefits me.
Finally, if most humans were willing to consider twenty years in the future when deciding on what policies they support, we might not be in this mess in the first place.
Hi again Jay, I’m enjoying your responses, thanks.
There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war
Your point is taken on climate change and poverty. Nuclear war seems an example of conventional thinking which has failed.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much.
Thanks for seeing that. If I can change that a little bit, it’s worth a try. Like everybody else, I’m just doing what little I know how to do.
you don’t need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of
That’s true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. I’m not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, I’m just doing what I know how to do.
“Solving the problem” means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world.
What I see is that many of my readers often come to hard fixed opinions on what is possible after reading two paragraphs of one of my posts, on a subject they’ve never really thought about. And then all their further effort goes in to defending those positions.
You’ve helped me think of an example from the real world that seems somewhat relevant to the “world without men” idea. China’s one child policy. To the best of my knowledge that was pursued with financial carrots and sticks, not violence (not totally sure about this).
In the real world a great many people around the world have been prioritizing male babies over female babies for centuries. This demonstrates that when people have some population or gender agenda, they can take steps that move them towards their goals.
In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution,
How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday? I do agree that the world without men proposal faces a very large pile of challenges, I really do. But what proposal for radically reducing human violence doesn’t?
What you, and most readers, are not focusing on are the enormous game changing benefits that a world without men can credibly be said to offer. That’s not a good enough reason to immediately agree, but is does seem a good enough reason to explore further. That’s all I want. Let’s explore further.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge development—ban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways.
I’m receptive to that discussion. Let’s explore that too. I’m modestly optimistic on the first, less so on the second. My optimism will increase at the point of some real world catastrophe highlighting the problem in a manner many more people can access. It looks like it will have to be catastrophe of significant scale though. And probably something easy to understand, like a nuclear event for instance.
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box.
I’ve been floating this idea for years all over the net. I could indeed be wrong, but that is my current working theory. The theory comes from the observation that the overwhelming majority of respondents have been focused on automated rejection, not analysis. They typically never try to solve the puzzle, preferring the easier route of immediately declaring it impossible. It’s human nature. We want radical improvements, by doing all the same stuff we’ve always done.
Firstly—a society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isn’t going to be very nice for men to live in. You can’t have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them.
I must respectfully disagree here. Everybody wants to look at this through the “you must hate men” lens. As I see it, a society that wants to remove the male gender is taking the necessary bold action to create a near utopia (compared to today) for the human race.
What is so important about the male gender that our existence justifies unspeakable suffering on a vast scale over thousands of years? Why is such a concept rational???
The women I envision are human beings capable of making a bold, rational, altruistic decision which benefits the future of humanity in a revolutionary manner. It’s not about hate. It’s about reason. Civilization survival. A brighter future for humanity. It’s about adapting to the radical new environment the knowledge explosion has created.
NATURE’S RULE: Those who don’t adapt must die.
That doesn’t seem like it benefits me.
You think you have problems, I’m 70! I still look at the gals. They stopped looking back years ago. :-) Why do you think I’m trying to save the world?? I got nothing else to do dude! :-)
Good conversation! You’re personally making my attendance here worth the trouble, and I thank you for that. If you start a thread on the site and want engagement, let me know, I’ll do my best.
That’s true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. I’m not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, I’m just doing what I know how to do.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion. I thought there was a good idea there, and I replied since I had seen a lot of your posts recently and nobody else was replying to them. I replied in spite of, not because of, the proposed solution. I imagine it’s quite likely that others decided not to reply because of the proposed solution as well.
I apologise for misleading you there—I’ll focus just on the exponential knowledge explosion side of things to help correct that.
Me: In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution,
You: How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday?
The above line by me was an invitation for you to share a path. You’re right—my inability to see a path after five minutes isn’t a strong indication that no such path exists. On the other hand, you’ve had this idea for years—if you don’t have a path forward, that’s much stronger evidence for the idea’s untenability. If you do have a path forward, this would be a good thing to add to your argument.
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box.
This sentence was referring entirely to the EA Forum—people tend to be more tolerant of weird ideas here than in most places on the internet.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion
Ok, great, thanks. As you can now see, I’m obsessed with this.
The knowledge explosion idea and world without men idea are somewhat linked in my mind. Meaning, if violent men weren’t creating havoc all over the planet, there would be less reason to worry about the knowledge explosion. If there was no knowledge explosion, there’d be less reason to worry about violent men.
I do have a plan for moving forward on the world without men concept. The plan is to recognize that no single human being, certainly not me, can meet such an enormous challenge, so it’s necessary to engage many bright minds to work on the issue. That is, I have faith that once many bright minds are engaged, progress can be made. I’m asking readers to have as much faith in themselves as I have in them. Instead of chanting “we can’t” we might instead choose to start believing that we can.
I have a few detail ideas, such as financial incentives to reward female babies etc. Admittedly I am no where near a complete solution. I’m puzzled as to why anyone would think that I was, should be, or could be.
My main contribution, as I see it, is to boil down all the endless complexity in to a simple verifiable truth. The overwhelming vast majority of violence is committed by men. It’s not human violence that we’re talking about, it’s male violence. Being clear on this creates a target of opportunity.
The other thing I hope to contribute is to articulate the revolutionary positive benefits that would flow from radically reducing male violence. If this problem could be solved, the pay day would be almost beyond imagination.
The bumper sticker version is this:
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
Well, you’ll probably need to buy a big truck to get all that on the bumper.
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the “ever accelerating knowledge explosion” side or the “violent” side rather than the “men” side.
Good luck with your ideas, man. You’ve certainly given me a new idea to think about (knowledge explosion) and I hope I’ve done the same.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the “ever accelerating knowledge explosion” side or the “violent” side rather than the “men” side.
Ok, that’s cool. To each their own of course. But we don’t really have to choose, we can investigate both at the same time.
Should you start writing about the knowledge explosion side of things you will find it just as challenging as the “world without men” side. Search for my article “Our Relationship With Knowledge” on this site, it’s been down voted like crazy, no engagement at all. That’s pretty normal.
The science community in particular (those who have the most cultural authority on such issues) will view your writing on limiting the knowledge explosion much the same way the Catholic Church viewed atheists in the 12th century. You will be dismissed, ridiculed, scorned, deleted, banned etc. But probably not burned at the stake, so that’s good. :-)
If I was pressed to choose, I’d probably agree the “world without men” idea makes people more hysterical. But a notion that we can’t have never ending unlimited goodies from the knowledge explosion does not exactly delight people, to say the least.
Both of these ideas are wildly ambitious. Neither has much of a chance until MAYBE after some large historical event which undermines the assumption of the group consensus that we can somehow magically have our cake and eat it too, radical change for the better, without radical change.
The argument you’re making seems strange to me. I’m going to talk purely about the logistics here. You say that no society in history has figured out how to keep peaceful men without the violent ones, and therefore this means it probably can’t be done. Presumably, the same argument applies to banning scientific progress.
But the same argument can be applied to a society without men at all! No society in history has managed to do it. In fact, the obstacles are far greater—men are still biologically necessary, there are billions of men already on the planet, and most of them wouldn’t agree with you that their gender should be phased out. It’s easy to say you’re not calling for violence, but I don’t see any way you could adopt this without violence, even if you had the technology to allow for it.
Finally, it occurs to me that if your ideal-but-untenable solution is to keep peaceful men and not violent men, then your solution is anti-correlated with what you want—what kind of man would willingly permit his own gender’s extinction for the greater good of humanity? Certainly not a violent one.
It seems to me like you’ve correctly identified a large problem that lurks behind several EA causes (The exponentially advancing state of knowledge resulting in existential risk) and a compelling analogy for it (The ever-increasing speed of a conveyor belt) which is a very useful question worth exploring. But then, having successfully identified this as a hard problem, you’ve then shied away from the difficulty of the problem, which is actually solving the problem. If you propose an unworkable solution, and then people ignore it, you at least get to say that you tried, and other people are to blame for denying your vision. In other words, you are Trying To Try.
In short—you’ve proposed a solution that would almost certainly fail in real life. It is in fact much more difficult than lesser impossibilities like “Remove the tendency for violence in men/humans” or “Halt all scientific progress in any field that is deemed unsafe”. It might not even solve the problem if it succeeded. And it also happens to be outside the Overton window to boot. And then, when people downvote your posts, you assume that they disagree with the solution because it’s outside the Overton window and not because it’s just...not going to work. And even if it could work, the solutions I mentioned above are better across every possible dimension. They’re slightly less impossible, morally more reasonable, societally more tenable, and equally likely to solve the problem if you could somehow pull them off. And even then, those aren’t good solutions because they STILL don’t bring the problem into a state where a solution can realistically be seen.
The problem you mention is real, but you’ve cut your search for a solution short way too fast.
Thank you very much for engaging my comment Jay. I almost missed your reply, and am thankful I didn’t.
Given that ideas widely accepted by the group consensus have utterly failed to cure the rampant human (mostly male) violence which has long permeated our world, my goal is to encourage explorations in to ideas outside of the current group consensus. The reasoning here is simple. If ideas within the group consensus could solve this existential threat, the problem would likely already be solved.
One of the challenges we will face in conducting such “out of the box” investigations is that many or most of those who make their livings doing intellectual work are not in a position to participate, at least not publicly. As example, if I was a philosophy professor working at a university, I would not be able to post about a “world without men” without fear of damage to my reputation, and thus my salary, my mortgage, and my children’s college fund. As evidence, I’ve already been threatened with being banned from this forum simply for mentioning a “world without men” might be an option worth exploring. Sorry to say, fear abounds in academia.
You are right. The challenges involved in a “world without men” proposal are vast. But then so is every other plan for saving our civilization from male violence. To me, it seems useful to be simple and clear minded in identifying the source of the threat, men.
Men will soon no longer be biologically necessary, as science is learning how to make sperm and egg cells from skin cells. To my limited knowledge such work is already well underway in mice, but not in humans.
In any case, it’s already true that a tiny number of men can impregnate a vast number of women. So while a world totally without men may not yet be an option, a world with far fewer men is. Critics of my posts never seem to get this far, because they invest all of their energy in to rejection, rejection, rejection, which obscures their own common sense analysis.
Also, why should men resist the idea of their being fewer men??? The fewer men there are, the more valuable the remaining men become in the dating pool. This is another obvious point critics always ignore in their rush to rejection.
This is an understandable critique, which is welcomed. But to be more precise, what is really being said is that I’ve shied away from solving the problem in the manner preferred by those who make their living serving an out of control knowledge explosion. If such folks can solve the problem in the manner which they prefer, that’s great, I’m all for solving the problem. Let’s hear their solution....
As I see it, the underlying problem is a failure to think holistically, and acknowledge that the human condition with all it’s many weaknesses is one component of the knowledge development system. My reasoning is that, given that human beings are limited (like every other species) then knowledge development will have to be as well. It simply doesn’t make sense to keep piling more and more and more power on to a species that can’t manage the power we already have (thousands of hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throat).
Yes, the argument I’m making seems strange to you. It seems strange to most people. That’s what I like about it. We’re exploring outside the limits of a group consensus which has a proven record of failing to successfully address these existential threats.
Being outside the box doesn’t guarantee success, agree completely there. But where else would you have me look?
Thanks again for engaging. I was on the edge of retiring from the forum, so you’ve brought me back from the edge, for now.
This is obviously a huge topic and I’m attempting to not write a book in each of my posts. If there is some angle you feel I’ve not adequately addressed, please remind me of it and I’ll try again.
First off—this isn’t necessarily true. There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war (advocate for nuclear disarmament), climate change (advance the state of carbon capture technology), and reduce global poverty. (Basically everything GiveWell does) The reason we haven’t solved them yet is that executing these ideas is still very hard due to problems around logistics, co-ordination, and they simply require a hell of a lot of work.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much. But that should actually move you towards thinking inside the box—if people aren’t thinking about it, there’s low-hanging fruit to be picked, and you don’t need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of. Maybe there are some good ideas within the Overton window that haven’t been popularised yet, just waiting to be found!
No, that’s not what’s being said. What I am saying is that you’ve shied away from solving the problem. “Solving the problem” means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world. In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution, and coming up with such a path is a requirement for a valid solution. It is not enough to describe a possible state of the world that solves a problem—you have to have some path to get from our current world to that world.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge development—ban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways. Don’t get me wrong, these still don’t count as solutions in my definition above, but they seem at least as plausible as removing the male gender entirely. It seems “probably impossible” rather than “definitely impossible”, and limiting research even suggests some possible next steps, like banning biological gain-of-function research (even though these are still very hard and I’ve heard people make decent arguments for why it can’t be done, largely around the difficulty of international co-operation—but this is also an argument that applies equally well to your proposal)
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box. This is from the same forum that has wild animal suffering as a small but real cause area. When I said your argument seemed strange, I was being polite. What I should have said was that your argument seems bad. Not because it’s outside the box. Not because I disagree with it morally. Because I don’t see how it could actually work, and there seem to me to be options that are simultaneously less radical and also closer to the set of things I would describe as possible solutions. The reason to think out of the box is because nothing else has worked—you should be aiming for the least radical solution that is necessary to solve the problem.
Finally, while I don’t think this point is necessary for my core argument, I’ll address it anyway:
Firstly—a society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isn’t going to be very nice for men to live in. You can’t have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them. Any attitudes society adapted that would allow them to even consider such a radical act are going to be opposed by men for precisely this reason—which, by the way, is an extremely good reason and has my full sympathy. There are people right now who advocate for the extinction of men, and they are not the kind of people I would feel safe around, let alone being ruled by.
Secondly—let’s say I don’t care about the future of men, and I don’t care what people think of me, and I’m certain that society’s newfound attitudes that allow for the intentional extinction of men definitely won’t turn into violence, and I’m willing to throw away my entire gender to increase my chance of getting laid. Even then, I’m thirty years old now. How does this help me? If you’re not going to commit violence, which you’ve previously claimed, the only way you can reduce the number of men is to stop new ones from being born. That means that if you could start having statistically relevant effects a mere ten years from now, I’m still going to be in my sixties by the time the dating pool starts shifting in any sort of meaningful way, and there’s still just as many 30+ year olds as there ever was. That doesn’t seem like it benefits me.
Finally, if most humans were willing to consider twenty years in the future when deciding on what policies they support, we might not be in this mess in the first place.
Hi again Jay, I’m enjoying your responses, thanks.
Your point is taken on climate change and poverty. Nuclear war seems an example of conventional thinking which has failed.
Thanks for seeing that. If I can change that a little bit, it’s worth a try. Like everybody else, I’m just doing what little I know how to do.
That’s true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. I’m not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, I’m just doing what I know how to do.
What I see is that many of my readers often come to hard fixed opinions on what is possible after reading two paragraphs of one of my posts, on a subject they’ve never really thought about. And then all their further effort goes in to defending those positions.
You’ve helped me think of an example from the real world that seems somewhat relevant to the “world without men” idea. China’s one child policy. To the best of my knowledge that was pursued with financial carrots and sticks, not violence (not totally sure about this).
In the real world a great many people around the world have been prioritizing male babies over female babies for centuries. This demonstrates that when people have some population or gender agenda, they can take steps that move them towards their goals.
How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday? I do agree that the world without men proposal faces a very large pile of challenges, I really do. But what proposal for radically reducing human violence doesn’t?
What you, and most readers, are not focusing on are the enormous game changing benefits that a world without men can credibly be said to offer. That’s not a good enough reason to immediately agree, but is does seem a good enough reason to explore further. That’s all I want. Let’s explore further.
I’m receptive to that discussion. Let’s explore that too. I’m modestly optimistic on the first, less so on the second. My optimism will increase at the point of some real world catastrophe highlighting the problem in a manner many more people can access. It looks like it will have to be catastrophe of significant scale though. And probably something easy to understand, like a nuclear event for instance.
I’ve been floating this idea for years all over the net. I could indeed be wrong, but that is my current working theory. The theory comes from the observation that the overwhelming majority of respondents have been focused on automated rejection, not analysis. They typically never try to solve the puzzle, preferring the easier route of immediately declaring it impossible. It’s human nature. We want radical improvements, by doing all the same stuff we’ve always done.
I must respectfully disagree here. Everybody wants to look at this through the “you must hate men” lens. As I see it, a society that wants to remove the male gender is taking the necessary bold action to create a near utopia (compared to today) for the human race.
What is so important about the male gender that our existence justifies unspeakable suffering on a vast scale over thousands of years? Why is such a concept rational???
The women I envision are human beings capable of making a bold, rational, altruistic decision which benefits the future of humanity in a revolutionary manner. It’s not about hate. It’s about reason. Civilization survival. A brighter future for humanity. It’s about adapting to the radical new environment the knowledge explosion has created.
NATURE’S RULE: Those who don’t adapt must die.
You think you have problems, I’m 70! I still look at the gals. They stopped looking back years ago. :-) Why do you think I’m trying to save the world?? I got nothing else to do dude! :-)
Good conversation! You’re personally making my attendance here worth the trouble, and I thank you for that. If you start a thread on the site and want engagement, let me know, I’ll do my best.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion. I thought there was a good idea there, and I replied since I had seen a lot of your posts recently and nobody else was replying to them. I replied in spite of, not because of, the proposed solution. I imagine it’s quite likely that others decided not to reply because of the proposed solution as well.
I apologise for misleading you there—I’ll focus just on the exponential knowledge explosion side of things to help correct that.
The above line by me was an invitation for you to share a path. You’re right—my inability to see a path after five minutes isn’t a strong indication that no such path exists. On the other hand, you’ve had this idea for years—if you don’t have a path forward, that’s much stronger evidence for the idea’s untenability. If you do have a path forward, this would be a good thing to add to your argument.
This sentence was referring entirely to the EA Forum—people tend to be more tolerant of weird ideas here than in most places on the internet.
Ok, great, thanks. As you can now see, I’m obsessed with this.
The knowledge explosion idea and world without men idea are somewhat linked in my mind. Meaning, if violent men weren’t creating havoc all over the planet, there would be less reason to worry about the knowledge explosion. If there was no knowledge explosion, there’d be less reason to worry about violent men.
I do have a plan for moving forward on the world without men concept. The plan is to recognize that no single human being, certainly not me, can meet such an enormous challenge, so it’s necessary to engage many bright minds to work on the issue. That is, I have faith that once many bright minds are engaged, progress can be made. I’m asking readers to have as much faith in themselves as I have in them. Instead of chanting “we can’t” we might instead choose to start believing that we can.
I have a few detail ideas, such as financial incentives to reward female babies etc. Admittedly I am no where near a complete solution. I’m puzzled as to why anyone would think that I was, should be, or could be.
My main contribution, as I see it, is to boil down all the endless complexity in to a simple verifiable truth. The overwhelming vast majority of violence is committed by men. It’s not human violence that we’re talking about, it’s male violence. Being clear on this creates a target of opportunity.
The other thing I hope to contribute is to articulate the revolutionary positive benefits that would flow from radically reducing male violence. If this problem could be solved, the pay day would be almost beyond imagination.
The bumper sticker version is this:
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
Well, you’ll probably need to buy a big truck to get all that on the bumper.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the “ever accelerating knowledge explosion” side or the “violent” side rather than the “men” side.
Good luck with your ideas, man. You’ve certainly given me a new idea to think about (knowledge explosion) and I hope I’ve done the same.
Ok, that’s cool. To each their own of course. But we don’t really have to choose, we can investigate both at the same time.
Should you start writing about the knowledge explosion side of things you will find it just as challenging as the “world without men” side. Search for my article “Our Relationship With Knowledge” on this site, it’s been down voted like crazy, no engagement at all. That’s pretty normal.
The science community in particular (those who have the most cultural authority on such issues) will view your writing on limiting the knowledge explosion much the same way the Catholic Church viewed atheists in the 12th century. You will be dismissed, ridiculed, scorned, deleted, banned etc. But probably not burned at the stake, so that’s good. :-)
If I was pressed to choose, I’d probably agree the “world without men” idea makes people more hysterical. But a notion that we can’t have never ending unlimited goodies from the knowledge explosion does not exactly delight people, to say the least.
Both of these ideas are wildly ambitious. Neither has much of a chance until MAYBE after some large historical event which undermines the assumption of the group consensus that we can somehow magically have our cake and eat it too, radical change for the better, without radical change.