As an advance upon a serious engagement with this remarkable paper:

Once the fertility transition to controlled fertility occurs in a population, its fertility generally continues to decline until it is below replacement. The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

(Admit it, you’re hooked …)

Heartiste (finally) discovers Weiss.

Of Heartiste’s six proposed policy responses, #2 (introduce counter-dysgenic incentives) is the only one this blog endorse without reservation. High-IQ immigration, assortative mating, and open markets all make a positive contribution to general social competitiveness, although due theoretical deference to IQ-Shredder problems is required. His point #6 is valuable if it is inverted, to make socio-political fragmentation a primary objective, rather than a consequence, or subordinate instrumental goal. Point #5 (“Eliminate all female-friendly public policies”) is unobjectionable because all ‘X-friendly’ public policies are objectionable, and its specific emphasis is material for consideration within a disintegrated oecumenon, where polities could experiment with all kinds of things. Talented people will tend to flee a heavy-handed authoritarian state, even if it’s social policies have impressive traditional validation. Consequently, as a response to local dysgenics, the outcome of any attempt to socially engineer a restored patriarchy from the top-down is likely to be counter-productive.

Social Darwinism, seriously understood, is the theoretical default that every attempt to neutralize spontaneous selection processes (entropy dissipation) will be subverted by predictable perverse effects. It’s no more possible to suppress Social Darwinism than it is to annul the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and social philosophies which teach that this can be achieved are the strict equivalent of plans for perpetual motion machines. That’s what Weiss is explaining, as Outside in understands it. Subsumption into an effective competitive environment is the only possible response that could work to reverse dysgenic trends, and this will eventually occur, whether human politics cooperates or not. Patchwork is the gentlest way this could be realized, since it enables a multitude of societies to decide on their own levels of entropy-accumulation tolerance. (That is not, of course, to suggest that a Patchworked-world is gentle in any sense we have grown accustomed to.)

There are all kinds of anti-techcomm arguments that impress people who don’t like techno-commercialism. Anything appealing to a feudal sensibility, with low tolerance for chaos and instability, and a reverence for traditional hierarchies and modes of life will do. There’s one argument, however, that stands apart from the rest due to its complete independence from controversial moral and aesthetic preferences, or in other words, due to its immanence. It does not seek to persuade the proponent of hyper-capitalist social arrangements to value other things, but only points out, coldly and acutely, that such arrangements are demonstrably self-subverting at the biological level. The most devastating formulation of this argument, and the one that has given it a convenient name, was presented by Spandrell in March 2013, in a post on Singapore — a city-state he described as an IQ shredder.

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe, once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity, with a strong neoreactionary bias.
(1) Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.
(2) Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e. first-order eugenic).
(3) It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.
(4) It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services, and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.
In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent, to optimize its exploitation.

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Nicholas B Stevenson twitting longer:

100 years ago, Einstein, Bohr, Edison, H. Ford, Tesla, etc. were alive on the earth. Today, the earth’s population is about 4 times greater. There should be all of those great minds alive today times 4. Where are they?
A) Incentive structures prevent the truly brilliant from contributing to great epoch-making discoveries; or
B) The human race getting dumber on a genetic level; or
C) both
Any of these answers is quite frightening if you have a long term concern for the human race.

… or even if you have a long-term concern for anything other than accelerating idiocracy.

ADDED: If it looks as if all the “we’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit” comments are ignoring each other — the fault lies at this end. A wave of these remarks were released simultaneously from the securomaniac Outside in spam filter this morning. Apologies for the resulting impression of redundancy. — Admin.

Some practical advice for the 333-current from Al Fin:

There are things that cannot be changed, disasters that cannot be averted. It is best to focus our energy and resources on the battles that can be won. And to learn how to best live on to fight another day.

This is the true kernel of wisdom of the dark enlightenment. Not to take over the Cathedral and run it the way we want. That would never work. Rather, the kernel of wisdom is to survive the building climax of insanity in high places, and to preserve enough resources and wisdom to pick up the pieces, in the midst of an Idiocratic collapse.

For those still haunted by shreds of false hope, the post includes two excellent dysgenics links (here, and here).

(Thanks to Stirner for the prompt.)

Charlton:

The Industrial Revolution had the effect of allowing many billions of people who would have died to stay alive — this meant that genetic mutations which would have been eliminated by death during childhood instead accumulated. […] … on the one hand mutations have been accumulating, generation upon generation, with (approx) one or two deleterious mutations being added to each lineage with each generation; on the other hand, people who exhibited traits caused by deleterious mutations — such as lowered intelligence and impaired long-termist conscientiousness, or higher impulsivity, aggression and criminality — were positively selected, were genetically favoured — simply because their pathologies meant they were either unable or unwilling to use fertility-regulating technologies. […] In other words, accumulating mutations which damaged functionality actually amplify reproductive success under present conditions and for the past several generations.

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Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy respond (in detail) to critics of their 2013 paper on the dysgenic implications of Galton’s reaction time data. Their adjusted evidence indicates an increase in reaction times among US/UK males over the period 1889-2004 from 187.1 ms to 237.1 ms (44.6 ms over 115 years), equivalent to a decline in g of 13.9 points, or 1.21 points per decade. They propose that 68% of this decline is due to dysgenic selection, with the remaining 32% attributed to increasing mutation load.

If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.

… on this question, at least. The sole real puzzle is the precise quantity of dysgenic deterioration that has taken place in Western societies over the last 150 years, or more. Charlton estimates a one SD decline over this period in the UK, which seems entirely credible. Due to the small sample size, his argument from mathematical excellence has an inevitable anecdotal quality, but it would be hard to contest its general direction. 

A fascinating paper by Michael A. Woodley (via @intelligenceres) is able to be more comprehensively persuasive. Its second table describes the innovation rate per capita across  a sample of European countries falling by almost three-quarters over the period 1845-2005, and roughly halving from 1945-2005. (Great Stagnation anyone?)

It shouldn’t need adding that it’s impossible to read this often enough (it’s always there in my ‘Resources’ roll).

Two more, somewhat more distantly related links.

(We’re so screwed.)

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