Uncursing Civilization
[ Disclaimer: None of the below matters relative to the fact that we are all going to die of AI very soon. Scaling hits a wall, until it doesn’t. Or until somebody builds AGI in their basement and runs it on home hardware from 5 years after the present day of people running quantized Llamas on their laptops. ]
[ Cough. ]
Overweight. Sexual deviance. Neurodivergence.
Many people pine for a time, remembered only by their grandparents, when these hassles—which at least divide people, if not always hurt people—were seemingly nonexistent. People were just skinny, cishet, and had executive function, and didn’t have to put a huge effort into sorting any of it out.
I think the current consensus is to think of all of these syndromes [ except maybe ND, which might be underdiagnosed in poorer countries ] as in some sense “curses of civilization”. They seem to go with high national GDP and cultural liberalism in the same way that enlightenment and tolerance do. Possibly, they’re bathwater you can’t throw out without losing the baby, and thus, they must be overlooked if you want to live in modern wealth and comfort.
[ Disclaimer: I myself am LGBT. That’s part of the reason I, a tolerant liberal, feel OK to write this post rather than Living And Letting Live. And I apologize profusely to any long-suffering cishets who are irked that they didn’t get to say the obvious long before me, out of well-founded fear they’d be cancelled. Really, I’d most rather everyone was LGBT so normies would understand me [“so long as their clocks strike noon when mine does!”], but safely making everyone LGBT would be harder than safely making everyone cishet, and my goal is just for everyone to understand each other. Anyway, my real concern is that the increase in sexual deviance reflects less-ambiguously harmful damage under the hood. ]
I think it’s more likely that they’re all three caused [ at least in significant part, in the case of overweight ] by environmental toxins—endocrine disruptors. This would be great to learn, because then humanity could just remove the endocrine disruptors from our environment and have all the blessings of civilization with none of the curses.
Let this post be a call to anyone who also finds this theory plausible, and might be able to access the relevant domain expertise, to help identify the culprit neuroendocrine toxins, and damage pathways.
[Linking my own Substack:] The CICO model of overweight is false.
Some researchers from Stanford claimed in 2020 that human body temperature has “decreased monotonically by 0.03°C [~0.06°F] per birth decade” over the last 157 years, which they note is an indicator of lower metabolic rate. My experience, at least, is usually that my temperature is lower than the canonical 98.6°F.
As far as I know, population-genetic change doesn’t generally look like this.
Obesity for adults since 1960:
When Googling around, one tends to see graphs like this, which suggest that some overweight goes with prosperity, e.g. the prosperity of 1960:
But actually, the average USian in 1920 apparently had a healthy BMI, despite the fact that by all accounts they could get however many calories [note that the numbers under the bars denote year of subject’s birth, not year of survey]:
Seed Oils Are Bad. But we’ve all seen The Graph. You know, the one from That One Slime Mold Time Mold Thread.
As many people have pointed out, this graph sure looks A Way if you know where the Mississippi is and drains to. You know, that river that’s always filling the Gulf of Mexico with agricultural runoff feeding toxic algal blooms?
Slime Mold Time Mold thinks it’s lithium. It’s probably not lithium.
Every adolescent cohort has a higher % LGBT than the last:
The curve is starting to look as daunting as the overweight curve at this point. The rise feels inexorable.
We all know the explanation: Being LGBT has become more okay. Or, since we all know that 20% of young people weren’t really same-sex-attracted in 1950, or they would have acted like it, we say that some of this rise in self-reported % LGBT is just trend-following. Kids thinking of themselves as being like the righteously oppressed, interesting people they follow on Tumblr. And I’m . . . not really buying that story. Humanity can’t coordinate on any social trends. Especially not these days.
The standard story says that 10% of people were always gay; we just needed to break the silence and they could be themselves.
The Frogs-Gay-te theory is that, actually, the chain of causality is more like [neuroendocrine toxins] → [increased % LGBT in population] → [gay people reach critical voting bloc mass] → [public opinion shifts] → [Obergefell v Hodges].
[ This is not supposed to be an argument against tolerance! Tolerance is obviously good. Spooky toxins can, apparently, have any nice side effects. ]
There’s a potential line of objection to my move of ruling out preference-faking and jumping straight to neurotoxicity, that I myself would have made when I was younger. If you’re not savvy in the ways of evo-devo-psych and brain wiring, it might feel to you like there’s no way something as complex as sexual orientation could possibly be entirely reversed by exposure to one microplastic-or-something during early development.
There are certainly people who have money to make off the idea that you can recondition yourself to be bisexual, or to be attracted to less-hot people in the exact same way you’re attracted to the hottest ones, and sexual conditioning does have an effect. But if sexual orientation was really so malleable that you could validly call it a choice, then our ancestors must have been farsighted eugenicists, or possessed a deliberate goal of maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, to have chosen to obey their capacity for heterosexuality so much more frequently than the reverse. Same for the gender identities that go with prototypical heterosexual mating behavior.
Evolution wrote the cishet program, somehow. Adolescents come out cishet. Is it really so much more implausible, now that we’ve seen all the evidence of it with our own eyes, to imagine that the signs could get flipped, and adolescents come out LGBT?
Unlike the other two legs of my theory, I didn’t have sources in mind to show the increase in overall mental illness I was thinking of, before I started writing this post. I was surprised to find that psycho-[population-statisticians], or psycho-demographers, or whatever, don’t actually agree that there’s been an increase in depression rates in recent decades—except maybe in young people, maybe especially females [?]. Some authors blame this rise on Instagram & co. I’m actually inclined to stand behind that accusation. Just like any of overweight was probably seed oils, any of sociocultural insanity, was probably TV.
But autism diagnosis rates are, AFAIK, increasing far less ambiguously. This, to my perception, corresponds with the emergence of a new social caste, that began at least as far back as Kaczynski, and is now epidemic in my generation, on 4chan and Tumblr and Twitter and, yeah, LessWrong: the Extremely Online, the Introvert, the Loser Philosopher. The “former gifted kid” who genuinely struggles with holding down an average-strenuousness job, or making phone calls, or doing laundry. I could be wrong—I could really be wrong about this entire last section—but I don’t feel like the fact that my generation is like this, is entirely explained by Internetification.
Modulo everything else, I would not declare a rise in autism rates a bad thing.
Walker and Fitzgerald’s sketchy view that “genius” mostly requires proportionate autism did anything to convince me and mirrors my outlook on the subject pretty well. Mostly, I came to that position for a range of reasons outside the scope of this post [ though eg Nash, von Neumann, and Tao remain apparent exceptions ].
But I’m inclined to feel, at this point, that a society can have a great deal more neurodivergence than it can use.
In any case, we should probably understand the probably-exogenous thing that’s causing the increase in autism, before we accept it as part of a developmental process that’s good in the long run for kids.
[ Miscellaneous: IMO, some of the most obvious evidence for the presence of endocrine disruptors specifically in the environment comes from falling fertility rates in men and women, and falling testosterone in men. ]
Searching LessWrong for “endocrine disruptors”, in quotes, brought up exactly one result, a Q&A with Diana Fleischman and Geoffrey Miller from 5 years ago.
I intend to write further about specific likely-candidate signaling pathways for each so-cutely-called “curse”, but. Floor, open.
Does anyone know of any chemicals in the water, or know of anyone who might know of any specific chemicals in the water, that could physically be doing any of this cursing?
This is a set of fascinating questions and fascinating possibilities. I’d like to be more help; I find it all interesting and important, and I’ve thought about some of the general issues (genetics vs. choice vs environment factors vs societal influence) and some of the specific issues (modern American obesity). I don’t have clear answers on any of them, other than to say it’s complicated. There are multiple influences on both the reality and the measures of reality (self-reports/diagnosis of queer status, neurodivergence and mental illness in this case, and summaries of scientific studies in a lesser but still important way).
Unfortunately, there’s not even a way to discount some of those influences on some of those questions, as you seem to try in some places. It could be mostly one factor, or it could be all of them in roughly equal parts. It is definitely all of them to some degree.
This post is so complex that I find it daunting to comment usefully, since I’m supposed to be devoting my time to other things. I’m commenting mostly to say I’m impressed by the effort you’ve put in and the analysis you’ve done. I was outright embarrassed to find that LessWrong had downvoted this below zero at some point despite it being clearly high-effort and on topics of community interest. I consider LessWrong to be an exceptional community, but it frequently disappoints me in downvoting good posts that just aren’t quite fully written for LessWrong’s specific standards. This post might be a bit complex and make somewhat broad claims without careful argumentation this community likes, but that’s a guess on where the downvotes are coming from. Again, I’m a bit embarrassed that this community isn’t more understanding and supportive of new users who clearly are rationalists and want to get involved.
On to some specifics: This isn’t my area, and I defer to anyone who’s looked into it specifically. Calories have been plentiful for some time. But calories continually become cheaper and more delicious, making overeating more tempting to more people more of the time. Endocrine imbalances seem entirely plausible, but changes in average body temp seem as likely to result from average body size as to cause it. Changes in average activity level as demanded by occupation and transportation also seem likely to play a huge role in average weight/fitness.
WRT number of queer people, I’d have no idea how to disentangle incentives for self-reporting from any actual change. Choice (under societal influence) and genetic/cultural determination aren’t binary factors in this or any human area; it’s both in different measures in different areas. The Kinsey scale of straightness/queerness on a spectrum, has seemed highly plausible to me for some time.
All of which might not be helpful.
My biggest actual disagreement: You start out by saying we’re all doomed to die by AGI soonish. I’m pretty sure that’s not right, or at least more debatable than being able to take it as a fact. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a lot of my day job weighing that question over the last year and a half. There are quite reasonable cruxes of disagreement about alignment difficulty, and neither side can accurately claim that it’s either easy or very hard; we’re simply not that far along. The game is still afoot. So I invite you: join us in solving AGI alignment, and the related societal alignment question of getting it into the right hands. Then we’ll have plenty of analytical power to settle more other complex, important questions like the ones you address. They’re important, but I think actually perhaps harder than solving alignment, and a bit less pressing, since the survival of humanity seems to quite possibly be on the line, quite possibly based on the analysis we collectively do in the next few years. That’s not at all dismissive of the importance or interest of the issues you raise, just an explanation of why I’m not spending more time on them, and an invitation to you to turn your sharp mind in that direction.
Thanks for the encouraging feedback!
It is true that in future posts I should account for availability of calories over time, and physical activity over time.
Possibly I would get a better reception if I waded into all the sub-possibilities for what could be causing the increase in self-reported queerness, but that issue is so political that I doubt more positive reception from the audience, would correspond to more accurate Bayesian updates from the audience. As it is, I feel “you can lead a LessWronger to a hypothesis, but you can’t make them suborn their political arguments-are-soldiers brain to their adult brain”.
”AI alignment is not in the category ‘alarmingly impossible problems for the time we have left’” is certainly a position many people hold. I am doing my best to make them correct. Alas, going along with their fantasy world where it’s already true, will not help make it true.