Comment by beeflet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beeflet | Hacker News Reader

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Fertility is regulated by education, culture, and labor because it is driven by social interplay between sexes and available resources. Education, culture and resources are women's criteria for evaluating suitable men. UBI makes these criteria meaningless. Cloning and surrogacy removes the need for inter-sexual selection altogether.

When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play.

The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources.

The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.

> UBI makes these criteria meaningless.

No, it doesn’t. You’re just assuming this is the case because it destabilizes the hierarchy you’re implicitly attached to.

Notice the pattern: women’s preferences are just artificial constraints, meaning and agency are hand waved away, and what’s left is a simplistic model of mindless replicators constrained only by available resources. The dynamics of human society reduced to that of E. coli. This is not how reality works.

This sort of fixation on “reproductive greed” mirrors market fundamentalism. Human behavior is collapsed into a single maximization drive which is circularly declared a law of nature.

> We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.

The Africa example is a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization. You take complex demographic dynamics and use them to selectively justify a prior belief of “free resources cause collapse” rather than letting the data inform your priors. In reality fertility is much better explained by declining infant mortality, low female education, and labor incentives.

Women's preferences aren't artificial constraints (I would stress that they are a fundamental regulating factor in human society), but in a UBI world they would be made artificial. In a world with cloning and surrogacy, they will become irrelevant constraints. If there are unlimited resources, there is no need to select for a suitable mate, so this skill will be unlearned.

Humans don't reproduce like e. coli, but in a UBI world that is the kind of human you are artificially selecting for. Ordinarily, bacteria aren't antibiotic-resistant, but exposure to antibiotics generation-over-generation changes them.

Show me the incentives, and I will show you the man they create. Like it or not, Humans are animals. We have the same primal motivations as other animals, just a more complex expression of those motivations. I think you focus on the details of that expression to lose the big picture, which is incongruent for your personal desires of being free from material constraints.

Life, like art, is defined by constraints. The meaning of our lives is to heroically struggle against them until we fail. To remove the constraints is to denature mankind. The process of evolution is nessisarially actuated through suffering. We naturally struggle against constraints like hunger, disease, and so on in an individual scale because this is what gives us meaning. But it would be a mistake to overcome these on a systematic scale, as it would rid of us of meaning. The future you propose is mankind wireheading itself.

Humans don’t have a single utility function like bacteria adapting to antibiotics do. When one constraint is relaxed, a fractal of others emerges. Behavior dominates any evolutionary effect. That’s exactly what we observe in rich societies.

You never articulate why reproduction would become the dominant axis of selection, except by assuming it from the start. People empirically do not behave that way when material constraints are relaxed.

> the process of evolution is necessarily actuated through suffering

That’s a quasi-religious claim. At that point you’re no longer arguing “this will happen,” but rather “this must not happen,” because abundance threatens a worldview where hierarchy and enforced struggle are what give life meaning. That’s not “the big picture,” it’s your big picture.

Look at the last thousand years. We’ve removed famine, plague, illiteracy, and constant violence, once considered inevitable and essential to discipline and social order. Society didn’t collapse into meaningless each time those went away; we simply gained more freedom to choose for ourselves what gives life meaning.

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