I am Malcolm Collins, a long-time EA who was only recently convinced to take a shot at posting on the forums by one of our students. My core passions are trying to rebuild the education system with CollinsInstitute.org and trying to preserve the EA sociological profile in the face of demographic collapse (Pronatalist.org)—because right now the EA meme is liable to extinguish itself through negatively modifying the fitness of individuals with the sociological profile that makes them amenable to it, which is . . . not good.
Education: Stanford, MBA; St Andrews, Neuroscience
Books (released): The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships
Books (in final stages): The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Culture/Religion, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance
Day job: I run Travelmax.com with my wife which we acquired via the search fund model. In our spare time we do “secret society work” (my wife was formerly Managing Director of Dialog and we were tapped to lay the foundations for Schmidt Futures’ Act 2 Network).
“homophobia (“cultures that accept gay people on average have lower birth rates and are ultimately outnumbered by neighboring homophobic cultures”, in a piece that is all about how low birth rates are a key problem of our time)”
How on earth is the homophobia? A core concern of this piece is that there will be increase in the rate of homophobia as a result of this trend. Are you arguing with the trend, do you want statics? Here is a study that dives into this trend.
From 2004 to 2018, differential fertility (more conservative people having more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.
Vogl, T. S., & Freese, J. (2020). Differential fertility makes society more conservative on family values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7696-7701.
Also, how is this “ethnonationalism (“based in developed countries that will be badly hit by the results of these skewed demographics”)” ethnonationalism?
This point is brought up in the context of most of EA funding and activity happening in developed countries. It is just a fact that developed countries will be hit harder by demographic collapse. Are you arguing the most EA funding does not come from developed countries or that developed countries are not disproportionately effected by demographic collapse? Or that both things are happening and we shouldn’t care because more EA money will come from developing countries in the future?
“I believe that genetics influence individual personality, but am very skeptical of claims of strong genetic determinism, especially on a societal level.” That’s not how genetics works. At an individual level genetics will always be less predictive than it is at the population level (e.g., if I know a certain persons polygenic risk score my ability to predict how they will vote will intrinsically be lower than my ability to predict how a large population will vote if I know all their polygenic risk scores).
Think of it like this. If I know an individual card has a 60% probability of having a blue dot on it that represents a vote for a specific political candidate that is all I know. However, if I know that is true for 100K cards then I can predict with near certainty what the overall “vote” will be.
We are not genetic determinists at all (we even wrote an entire book on cultural determinism). However! We are also not science deniers. At the population level you can make predictions based on genetics and one of those predictions is voting patterns.