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Would you think a tax levied on the childless and payed out the child-possessing to be sufficiently gender neutral?

Why are childrens well-being not the concern of men? You have assumed something to be true, that I haven't, maybe.

I'd be careful assigning meaning depending on a relative time frame.

After all the Sun will swallow the earth in about 7 billion years. I like to think the things we do matter independent of that fact.

Foxpro, visual basic (6 and below), and pre-bad delphi were workhorses. Surely, demand for similar tools today still exists.

The RT article said that "Nearly half the couples had not had sex in a month". That happens because they prefer to do something else instead.

Will you grant that this means that interest in sex has fallen?

The Politifact article says "In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged 16 to 24 ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact,’ and more than a quarter of men felt the same way."

Which matches my claim:

> Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested in sex" or "averse to sex"

My claim was that disgust with sex is rising.

Another article makes these delightful claims:

https://time.com/5297145/is-sex-dead/

  - More than 40% of Japanese 18- to 34-year-old singles claim they are virgins.
  - the fraction of people getting it on at least once a week fell from 45% in 2000 to 36% in 2016.
  - more than twice as many millennials were sexually inactive in their early 20s than the prior generation was.
  - In 2016, 4% fewer condoms were sold than the year before, and they fell a further 3% in 2017.
  - Teen sex is flat and has been on a downward trend since 1985
  - The median age for first marriage in America is now 29 for men and 27 for women, up from 27 and 25 in 1999.
  - the highest drop in sexual frequency has been among married people with higher levels of education
  - those with offspring in the 6 to 17 age range were doing less of what made them parents

What do you make of these data points? I think they successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.

I think framing child-rearing as an individual choice is a dangerous framing.

That's what I was getting at with the comparison to the movie Bird Box.

It's important to think of ourselves as biological systems first and thinkers-as-choosers second.

I suspect that an increase in the virtualization of our lives will lead to an equal increase in the will-full termination of our lives. Suicide. As our lives become less biological we will end them with greater intensity and frequency.

You may not be convinced, but ask yourself what would that road look like? Would you recognize the indicators? Could you and the people you care about hop off the ride in time? Why did so many Westerners join the ranks of ISIS?

A running car would be equally disruptive I think.

I have worked at places that paid for convenient nearby parking.

I worked at a university that had a daycare just across the street. Given the dramatic pay gap between there and elsewhere it must have been sticky enough for some.

If we imagine that the work of women was craft work that could be safely and comfortably be done in the presence of children, then we can compare that to the places and conditions of the workplace of todays woman.

If yesterdays woman could bring her kids to work and todays cant, then we are pressuring women to have fewer children, and dumping the blame on them to boot.

What does todays idealized woman look like? Who are the role models we assign to our daughters?

I would expect that if wages wise, that screens-per-person would increase and children-per-person would continue to decrease.

Housing, healthcare, and actual-cost-of-food (because eating out is on the rise) are all increasing beyond any realistic hope of political reform. Best to optimize for children at the expense of any dream of middle class comfort.

My parents had a low income and made 2 kids work. I expect to stretch things thinner than they had to even with our middle class-ish income. (Most meals are homemade and vegetarian for example).

I wonder how much the feeling is one-sided. I visit my grandparents more often than they visit me (even generously discounting for physical ability, income, and the one-to-many relationship).

I think the way to measure this might be grandparents moving out of state of family (think Arizona and Florida).

Obviously the stigma of aging should get the bulk of the responsibility here.

Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early childhood.

Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested in sex" or "averse to sex"

- https://www.rt.com/news/377342-sexless-japanese-marriages-st... - https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/23...

I remember seeing a similar headline for German women but cannot find a source now. (I think people expect weird think from Japan so it's good practice to compare to other countries)

Maybe social media and instant communication has replaced (or dulled) some of, what used to be, our sexual appetites.

Half the world is sub-replacement-rate: "As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

What statistics should I look for the document disinterest in sex?

>People would have children for emotional reasons even if society does not intervene.

What if that isn't true though?

Fertility is universally falling in rich countries.

Could you give me a number of births-per-woman that would motivate your concern? I think 1 birth per woman is a reasonable number for national concern. South Korea is already at 1.0.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...

Without a future generation long term concerns evaporate from concern. Maybe this has already happened in some peoples minds with regard to national debt, and the long-term sustainability of social security.

Some indigenous North Americans used the strap their babies into cradle boards that could be propped up somewhere safe while parents did whatever. That handles pre-walking children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradleboard

I wish we knew more about how children spent their days in pre-industrial societies. Maybe they played out of site of their parents, only coming home to eat. I had a pretty autonomous childhood.

It may have also been the case, that before industrialization, metal smelting, and anything-faster-than-walking the world was inherently safe.

Daycare only become necessary once transportation, tools that could cut, and exposed toxins became abundant.

Imagine a world were all parents let their children roam the streets from dawn til dinner, child-right-of-way, and any harm befalling a child was universally met with public outcry against the adult responsible for creating unsafe conditions. (If you left a can of gas unlocked and Jimmy burns thing down, you are responsible, not Jimmy or Jimmys parents. Rational precautions etc.)

Kids would be barred from factories sure, highways and other necessarily dangerous places could be fenced off. Contrast this with our blame-the-parents instincts, now.

Can we collectively consider taking a step in that direction?

When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?

>And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children.

Consider these possibilities:

1. A best case scenario is that what you have expressed is a personal opinion that takes your genes out of the future in a Marty McFly fading away fashion as this opinion hardens.

Fine. Your choice. More pie for the rest of us.

2. A worst case scenario where this opinion accumulates in the market place of ideas and inevitably leads to human extinction.

Impossible right? Well, know that disgust with sex is climbing in rich nations (like Germany and Japan) and the number of births per woman is falling. Is this a function of wealth, or technology?

South Korea has fewer than 1.1 births per woman. That can only translate into a poorer, older, and smaller country for the future. [1]

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...

(I tell people that this was the thickly veiled premise of the movie Bird Box.)

If that is true, then can it be called a choice? Are people actually choosing to have fewer sexual partners than their parents generation? Are people really choosing to feel disgust at the thought of intimate contact?

Maybe repulsion-to-sex is a bigger threat to continued human existence as nuclear weapons.

Another fun article:

https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...

I think you are right.

Also anybody could right-click and "view source". (Imagine being able to do that in any Swing app in their peak, for contrast.)

When pages were just a few hundred lines any page could be recreated with a web browser, ambition, and enough time. Those days are long gone, now, with huge transitive node dependencies, minification, and feature-combinatorial-explosion. Like a sandboxed document-centric qbasic.

In some circles C has a better reputation than C++.

Surely you see that other people value other things than you do?

If you value simplicity check out the programming language zig.

https://ziglang.org/

I like my code to look simple and behave as expected. Stability and "one right way to do it" are great language features.

I think this was why Python was able to overtake Perl, for example.

It's nice to see Microsoft embracing Rust.

I'm sure crustaceans would love to see if they can extend it's reach through their product range.

They chase demand. Ideas exist in a market place. I wouldn't expect "Everything is great, No problems here, Weekly" to sell many copies.

If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine.

Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off.

Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2].

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

- https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...

We can do both. One doesn't limit the other does it?

Correlation is all we have to go on mostly.

If A causes B and B causes C then we can only say that A and C are correlated. If the average chain of causality is 4 long then the Bs outnumber the As and Cs.

Inductive (observation) evidence is more available than deductive (purely logical) evidence. Why limit yourself to only deductive evidence?

I don't have to resort to a chemistry lesson to convince you that drinking bleach would be very harmful, right? Can't I merely show you photos of bleach-bellied-corpses?

What conclusions can we make about the fact that Japan (an industrialized country) has a longer life span the US (also an industrialized country)?

There is more than one variable in play. We can optimize wealth AND health.

(An aside: Your argument is a form of learned helplessness. I expect more from you. I am certain that in matters of business and your families well-being you are not so reductionist.)

What kinds of solutions would you like to see?

The value of a treatment can be measured in lives saved. Causes (where no treatment is implied) can only be measured in ink on paper.

Which would you value in your medical care professional?

Measure what you value and optimize for it. Why do this devils advocate stuff?

Being the kind of person that is willing to experiment to solve their problems is better than being a person that is miserable and changes nothing.

A random walk may not get you out a bad situation, but staying put is strictly worse less likely to get you out.

What would a reinforcement learning agent do?

I have a friend Galant who cleans his room everyday and has wealth and happiness. I have another friend Goofus whose room is a mess.

I'm not suggesting that the things in a room cause depression. Correlation tells you more than strict causation ever could.

An example: Income is higher among vim users than eclipse users. Does that suggest anything to you?

It does to me, but that's because I'm willing to let the evidence shape my decisions. If I waited for strictly-causal proof then I'm leaving money on the table.

Another tip: When will it stop being the case that vim users make more money than eclipse users? When evidence mounts and marginally push the lazy-about-evidence-people toward vim. By the time the last eclipse user switches away there won't be any more money on the table to take. Also eclipse will be dead by then.

Be greedy with evidence and lazy with your attachments, not the reverse.

Mental health isn't a strictly subjective experience though. You can measure days called-in-sick. You can measure suicide count.

Cause and effect isn't necessary to reduce harm. You with me? It's nice to have certainly, but it is not required.

Imagine that I am a friend of yours. I tell you that my child is depressed and the doctor suggests pill1, it makes my child more lethargic. We try pill2 and the depression is gone.

I tell you that I am happy with the results of pill2 and that while I am interested in how it works and potential long-term consequences, I'm happy staying on pill2.

Is this imagined parent strictly better than a parent that refuses to try any pill until convinced of its mechanism and success? I would say yes.

Observation is the workhorse of the scientific paradigm, not idealized experimentation. The quantity, and thus value, of Inductive evidence is greater than that of Deductive evidence.

Differences in Birth Weight Associated with the 2008 Beijing Olympics Air Pollution Reduction: Results from a Natural Experiment

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1408795

Personally, I'm down with harm reduction even if it doesn't teach us anything. As a goal it seems pretty good on its own.

Why insist on causality depending on a single variable? This is very strange to me. Of course the trust is confounded, the truth is multi-variable.

The algorithm to pursue truth:

    1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
    2. Reduce those differences however you can.
    3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
    4. That's the whole thing.

Does being poor suck? Yes. Reduce it's likelihood and it's impact.

Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.

A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.

Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".

An example: Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.

I can think of 2 research questions:

1. Does adding an air filter in peoples home improve health outcomes? 2. Does pumping a suspected noxious element into a room in lab harm some small group of people in some limited testable way?

Question 1 is better than 2. Why? Because there are more people like those in question 1. Answers to question 1 inform my future choices, answers to question 2 do not. I prefer answers that improve health to those that harm health.

Always prefer observational studies done in the field (in situ). Demanding experimental studies done in a lab will give you less bang for your buck. Let's all do our part to drive down health care costs, please.