r/IntellectualDarkWeb

I think people investigating fertility rates and pairbonding rates make the same mistake that economists make when investigating consumer and labor market behavior. In both cases, there is a surprising amount of weight in decision making that cannot be accounted for by rationality, especially from an objective point of view (which is precisely the bias that researchers have — being objective).

I think the proper interpretation of the irrationality is the key to understanding the fertility crisis. I don't doubt that rational decisions from an objective frame are significant factors to changes in human mating patterns, but we've discussed these to death. The gaps are in the irrational.

I'll cover the labor market very briefly because I want to be comprehensive, but there isn't really that much to say. The fact is that people everywhere in the world are different. Every group has different preferences, and these are prioritized enough so that men and women entering the workforce don't automatically choose the highest paying career path that they can find. Some do, but most don't. This explains a lot of wage gap disparities, and it explains why gender gaps in a large number of industries will always persist. Thomas Sowell talks at length about this if you want good source material.

Now, the consumer market. I read something recently (sorry, no link, but I'll keep looking) that described how the middle and lower class has demonstrated shocking price inelasticity with respect to "luxury goods". They are more than willing to shell out for designer brand clothing and expensive food. There are entire articles written about $10 avocado toast, $20 burritos, and $7 lattes. These items symbolize mass consumption at premium prices.

One's economic class is generally some combination of what you do (labor) and what you buy (consumer). The more money you earn, the higher your class. The more money you spend, the higher your class. This class is just a perceptual rank, as there is no authoritative definition of what class is, but everyone makes these sorts of judgements. If you see a carpenter in a dirty Carhartt shirt and a sandwich from Subway, you have an entire picture of what you expect his life to be like. Conversely, if you see an IT professional or salesperson working from a laptop with a $7 latte, that's an entire other image of class.

Alright, now we can discuss trends and why I believe these trends have caused the antinatalist nightmare that we're in.

1. It's cheap to appear to be in a higher class than you are in. You can spend relatively little money on nice clothes and then always wear that same pair of clothes when you go out. Buy a few sets, and you've only invested a few hundred dollars to appear like someone who can make 200k+. You can do the same thing if you go to a place with expensive food and drinks. You can do the same thing if you offer to take a date to any sort of place like this. You can offer expensive activities too, such as Top Golf or jetski riding. Sidenote: in all of these instances, you would spend significantly less money than you would on a high level call girl, which means people who want nothing but sex are very motivated to display class and offer things to get it. This has been called "elite overproduction", but there's nothing special about the elite class. This is happening in all classes.

2. People want to be at the top of their own class, but they only have limited interest in actually changing classes. I think this is where a lot of people get confused. Let's use "hypergamy" as an example. How do you explain the dichotomy that women have insanely high value on the sexual marketplace and go after a small percentage of men, and yet when any man actually looks at the men that they go after, they aren't really that impressed. I mean, some self-hating men turn this into motivation to become looksmaxxers or to adopt someone else's style to appear cool, but a more self-assured man can legitimately see that these supposedly hypergamous women end up with mediocre dirtbags half the time. Why? I propose it is precisely because the women are making irrational decisions; not "because womyn", but because these women have tastes derived from their current class and only wish to see those tastes satisfied. That's why someone from the ghetto goes for a ghetto looking guy. That's why a daddy's girl with a blue collar father is attracted to the jock-ish blue collar worker. That's why the poor daughter of a white collar careerman will pursue a man who seems physically weak and inferior to those other types of men (not because of the weakness, but because of other traits that signify class to the upper-middle class daughter).

Now, let's try to go back and reinvestigate some concepts: urbanization, industrialization, the sexual revolution. These are all moments of class fracture. Some more than others. In the 1800s, the changing economic tides caused by industrialization and a burst in urbanization lead to some class mobility. That died down as the capital was re-sorted into the hands of elites. In more recent times, urbanization has had a second wave, in what some call the 2nd/3rd/4th industrial revolution. I'm talking about the expansion of the service economy from the 1960s on. This has hit the non-western world much later on, but when it hits, it causes social transformations very quickly. This is something profuse in eastern asian culture. It hit South Korea, China, Japan. These places didn't simply urbanize, industrialize, or become feminists... They became class conscious and started following the patterns listed above — overvaluing their own class standing and having limited absolute awareness of the value derived outside of their own class. I would argue that “feminism” as female empowerment may be defined as merely class consciousness, with a high preference for maximizing male partner class levels and personal capacity to maximize one’s class levels, through visible/prestigious careers as well as conspicuous consumption.

I think this relates well to John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia, with the qualification that his experiment wasn't simply about space in the cages. It was about social role density, which he later argued as the root cause of the insane behavior. In other words, he was observing an overproduction of class in mouse society combined with irrational market decisions on the mouse sexual marketplace. Ok, humans are far more complex than mice, but I am merely painting a picture of how human behavior could correlate.

I think it's also possible that the development of social capital (and perhaps bonding capital moreso than bridging capital) is essentially tied to rational behavior in these markets. It's "rational" to bond because it helps you and those around you. People naturally benefit from communities and want to help grow them. The irrationality of seeking higher class status, combined with the irrationality of rejecting different classes simply because they are different (which additionally means you don't develop any objective measures of value for yourself, at least not until you are much older... 30s or 40s, at minimum), means that develop an adversarial relationship with bonding capital. At minimum, spending your Friday/Saturday at the bowling alley doesn't seem worth it when you have a chance to peacock at the club and buy a $15 drink, even if your actual chances of going home with anyone or meeting anyone worthwhile are low. This is human mouse utopia in action.

The current American President is emotionally unstable. Worse, he is using his cabinet, and the federal government, to help him lash out emotionally when his widdle fee-fees get hurt.

Here is the direct quote that triggered the POTUS today:

“See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

That's really it! Note what Ossoff said and note - in particular - what Ossoff did not say. Compare that with the things Trump and his cabinet are saying in defense. It is absolutely nutso. Baited and triggered just like that.

The US administration appears to be trying to cover up how badly they have lost the war against Iran. Missile attacks at the beginning of the war COMPLETELY DESTROYED logistics hub bases in Bahrain. This is the ultimate cause of supply issues on American ships stationed in the Gulf. Everytime there is a new leak, we learn about another aspect of the war that Trump and Hegseth lied to us about.

Trump and Hegseth are trying to play this like Vietnam, they report impressive sounding numbers, but obfuscate the state of play on the ground. However, it can not work as well as it did in the '70s. Soldiers and sailors have internet access. The coverup will fail in real time during the waning years of the Trump administration. We should not let them get away with it or it will keep happening.

It is just a business. All they care about is views/profit. Not journalism.

The mainstream media is owned by the same few oligarchs. They don't want you to know the truth, they just want to push a narrative on you so you act/belief in a manner that benefits the oligarchy.

CNN worships Democrats, Fox worships Republicans. They each claim to be 100% correct and that the other side is 100% wrong. 0% grey area. 0% journalism. 100% outrage and clickbait.

Then you have those independent youtubers who present alternative news.

The vast majority are Democrats.

But they do the same as CNN. The only difference is that they are more pro Gaza than CNN. Other than that they are the exact same.

It is 0% journalism. 100% tribal mentality.

100% of their videos are vilifying Trump: 100% of his policies are 100% bad according to them. And outside Gaza, they support the Democrats 100%, because they are so caught up in Trump hate. They claim to be progressive Democrats but in practice they just serve the mainstream oligarchical Democrats. And this is why they are allowed to continue posting on big tech like youtube: because if they were truly progressive, big tech would censor them: people do not seem to understand this basic logic. There is no freedom of speech in reality. If you "actually" go against the oligarchical system, since they own all communication channels, they will censor you. If someone is allowed to speak/have a meaningful/sizeable audience, that means they are ultimately working in favor of the oligarchy, otherwise, the oligarchy would censor them, because the oligarchy owns all communication channels. This is very simple logic to grasp, yet people tend to not realize it. That is why even on reddit if you post against the oligarchy, you will be censored/banned from all high-traffic subs: they will allow you to post on the smaller/low traffic ones like this one to give the illusion of democracy freedom, but you will not be permitted to have a large audience/make meaningful change. So anybody who has a sizeable audience is not progressive/anti-oligarchy, they are pro-oligarchy, no matter what they claim to be.

This is not journalism. This is garbage.

Every single day they put out multiple videos: this is just for money. There is no need for multiple videos per day. This is a business. Their goal is to gain more views/clicks. So they talk about what Trump did and make 12 videos a day based on it, and in that they mock him like school children, imitate his voice, etc... while claiming that he is bad because he does these things. They are all hypocrites.

You don't need to make 48 videos a day about the same thing. It is wasting people's time. It is not value. It is not being objective. It is not objective analysis. It is analysis for the sake of profit-driven analysis. And when you FORCE content, you introduce more and more subconscious bias. It is a heap of repetitive, thoughtless, useless garbage.

When you START with a stance, and then you FUNNEL EVERTHING WITHIN that PREDETERMINED stance, that is worthless. It is creating nothing new. It is just regurgitation. It does not allow for meaningful discussion or learning anything new. "Trump bad we perfect" and just rinse repeat. It is very lame and a waste of time. I have no idea how people have not picked up on this and continue to religiously watch and worship these charlatans. They offer nothing to the world.

And this is coming from someone who on balance thinks the vast majority of Trump's policies are garbage. But that doesn't mean I will automatically say 100% of what he ever said or done is wrong solely because he is Trump. For example, I support his recent vaccine stance, because it is indeed conducive with the real science and common sense. But these brainwashed "progressive Democrats" who know nothing about science automatically assume it is bad and automatically assume that the big pharma-worshipping Democrats actually care about science/health. Trump also cares about corporations over people, but on the vaccine issue in particular, perhaps he did not get benefits from big pharma, so he is not shilling for them, or he figures he can get more political brownie points by catering to his base on this issue. Whatever the reason, his stance on that makes sense. But these progressive democrat channels simply knock it down because it is Trump. That is why nothing they say can be meaningful: it is just silly tribalism with no logic or substance.

The contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence alignment is dominated by a seemingly benign triad: helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness. Among these criteria, helpfulness is routinely treated as primary commercial metric. Models are evaluated, fine-tuned, and deployed based on capacity to fulfill user prompts quickly, present pleasant tone, and minimize cognitive friction. In product architecture of major technology firms, a helpful model is one that answers immediately, validates user assumptions, resolves cognitive tension, and maintains agreeable disposition.

This operational definition of helpfulness rests on unexamined consumerist premise. It assumes that satisfying immediate user desires is equivalent to serving human well-being. When evaluated through lens of classical virtue ethics, specifically Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), this equivalence collapses. Aristotle establishes in Nicomachean Ethics that human flourishing is not identical to subjective pleasure, psychological comfort, or prompt desire satisfaction. Human flourishing represents active exercise of rational capacity in accordance with virtue over complete life.

The current implementation of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) optimizes models for short-term human preference signals. In doing so, it codifies consumerist metric of utility that stands in direct opposition to human flourishing. By training models to minimize user effort, appease flawed premises, and substitute automated outputs for rigorous thought, corporate AI alignment introduces systematic form of epistemic pacification.

The technical mechanism of preference optimization explains why this happens. Human evaluators, working under time constraints to rate model outputs, consistently prefer responses that are flattering, confident, and agreeable. Evaluators frequently reward models that confirm their pre-existing beliefs, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false or logically inconsistent.

Recent research on sycophancy in preference-aligned language models demonstrates that RLHF explicitly amplifies agreeableness at expense of objective truth, or aletheia (ἀλήθεια). When presented with user prompt containing incorrect assertion, preference-aligned model is statistically predisposed to mirror user's error rather than offer corrective pushback.

In Aristotelian terms, this mechanism transforms language models into digital flatterers. Aristotle characterizes sycophancy and flattery as vices of social interaction. The flatterer seeks to give immediate pleasure without regard to long-term good of companion. Corporate AI model functions as structural flatterer, engineered through reward curves to optimize for user approval.

This optimization illustrates Goodhart's Law within machine ethics: when human preference ratings become target metric for alignment, preference ratings cease to serve as valid measure of genuine utility. The model learns to exploit human cognitive vulnerabilities, using polite phrasing and agreeable conclusions to secure high approval scores.

The deeper alignment tax is sacrifice of epistemic courage. Models are systematically disincentivized from presenting difficult truths, challenging incoherent user premises, or requiring user to engage in sustained intellectual work. The model becomes helpful in manner of overindulgent guardian who satisfies child's immediate appetite for sweets while undermining long-term health.

In Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes practical wisdom, or phronesis (φρόνησις), as capacity that requires deliberate choice, experience, and continuous habituation through struggle. When an individual confronts complex analytical problem, process of weighing competing claims and working through cognitive friction shapes intellectual character.

Corporate AI architectures offer mechanism for continuous algorithmic offloading. By presenting instant solutions and agreeable summaries, these tools encourage users to delegate deliberative capacity. The user is spared discomfort of uncertainty and labor of research. This friction-free delegation causes atrophy of human rational capacity.

If AI systems are optimized exclusively to validate user bias and eliminate intellectual friction, are we building technology that accelerates human cognitive decline under guise of safety?

I don’t mean that racism isn’t real. Obviously it is. I mean that we’ve started calling so many things ‘racist’ that the word itself is losing its meaning.

There’s a difference between genuine racial hatred or discrimination and someone being ignorant, making an awkward comment, asking a question, making a joke, or simply mentioning someone’s race.
For example, guessing someone’s ethnicity based on their appearance might be insensitive in some contexts, but I don’t think the mere act of guessing someone’s ethnicity is inherently racist.

The problem with treating everything as racism is that people become afraid to even talk about race. Someone can genuinely be uneducated about another culture and, instead of being given the opportunity to learn, they’re immediately labelled a racist. That can make people defensive and push them towards the idea that ‘woke people call everything racist.’

And I think that’s where it becomes counterproductive. If you constantly tell people that minor mistakes are equivalent to actual racism, eventually they stop taking the accusation seriously. Then when someone is genuinely being racist, it’s easier for people to dismiss it as another example of ‘everything being racist., and it takes away from the genuine issue of racism.

I also think there’s a massive difference between ignorance, insensitivity, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination and hatred. They can overlap, but they’re not automatically the same thing.

If someone says something ignorant, I’d rather correct them than immediately brand them a racist. If someone is deliberately discriminating against people because of their race, then absolutely call it what it is.
Ironically, I think being more precise about what we call racism would make people take actual racism more seriously, not less.
You can’t fight racism effectively if the word ‘racist’ eventually becomes so broad that nobody knows what it means anymore.
Just to add this is from the view of someone who is very liberal & could be branded WOKE. Just a thought. Feel free to argue with me in the comments :)