TL;DR: Musk has 23 kids and NDAs with (most or all of) the mothers because he wants them to be his Mars scions well I finally fiinished the rest of the article and I got trolled where I got this from, it doesn’t say that. I’m sorry
this was what :will-fancy: was speculating about in the last listenable Chapo episode
Google searches for “population collapse” spiked this summer
We’ve just reached 8 billion people, 11 years after the 7 billionth person was born, and these people are concerned about population collapse? Insane.
"We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids
The audacity to compare yourself with the anti-slavery movement. Unbelievable.
They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. (…) Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. (…) [Simone] believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will “become the new dominant leading classes in the world.”
Doesn’t sound nazi at all to me.
The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth
No, that doesn’t sound nazi either. Why would anyone even suggest it?
“Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception,” [Musk] wrote in another tweet this past May. “Most people I know have zero or one kid.”
Contrary to what statistics show, my feeling is correct, because of some anecdote I experienced.
[MacAskill devoted] a chapter of his best-selling book, “What We Owe the Future,” to his fear that dwindling birth rates would lead to “technological stagnation,” which would increase the likelihood of extinction or civilizational collapse.
This guy is going to be shocked when he hears about climate change.
We’ve just reached 8 billion people, 11 years after the 7 billionth person was born, and these people are concerned about population collapse? Insane.
Not that insane, considering the trend lines. We were supposed to be careening towards 10B by the end of the century, but everything we know now suggests we’ve functionally peaked. What happens next is the big question. If reproduction rates stay below replacement levels for a decade… or a generation… yeah. You’re talking about shedding a billion or more people and having a population indefinitely lopsided towards the elderly going into the foreseeable future.
Population decline isn’t strictly the problem so much as how we handle a surplus of elderly people. Consider how much prior generations have invested in daycare and school (or, at least, consider how much we should have relative to demand) then flip that on its head.
Doesn’t sound nazi at all to me.
Honestly, it sounds like straight up Monarchism. Divine Right of Kings. Hapsburg Dynasty shit. Elon was just some schlub with a B-list celebrity mom 40 years ago. But he hit the lottery with Paypal, so now he thinks he’s an Ubermensch. Fucking bananas. But its the exact same kind of brainworms I’d expect to hear out of the British Royal Family.
This guy is going to be shocked when he hears about climate change.
There’s a certain serious concern that collapses in food supply and manufacturing capacity will force large portions of the population back into the business of subsistence farming. And that’s absolutely going to be terrible for technological development, infrastructure maintenance and expansion, and engineering output.
But… like… there’s not really any sort of people shortage in this regard. We have enormous numbers of talented, educated, motivated people who spend most of their free time going on the computer to do the computer things. Sometimes they’re doing bank computer things or law computer things or sales computer things. But they aren’t contributing anything real to the overall economy. They’re as much surplus labor as any out-of-work blue collar midwesterner. They just found a rich vein of busy work to exploit.
The westerners refuse to tackle isn’t Volume Of People or Degrees of Intelligence. Its the phenomenal, monumental, soul-crushingly massive amount of waste that we all produce. We’re not burning up the planet in order to build a Utopia. We’re destroying this beautiful blue gem of a world so that we can argue on the internet about who manages the website hosting the spank bank.
so glad we don’t have interstellar colony ships with frozen zygotes and spacy colony overseer AI technology
I wonder what other billionaire wanted to spread his seed around the world and tried to create an industry for such with prominent investors and scientists :didnt-kill-himself:
Also how does he enforce these NDAs? I guess when you’re a single mother and the father is a dead beat billionaire, you have to accept his child support or else the kid will end up like him and the cycle continues
Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the “best” available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.
Oh no, they’re doing Gattaca.
“We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,” Malcolm told me.
Oh no, THEY KNOW THEY’RE DOING GATTACA.
Somehow, that’s worse to me.
Edit because it just keeps getting worse.
Together they write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel.
I see Thiel’s name, and the Kill Bill siren starts going off in my head. I genuinely wish that man would drop dead.
I found a new philosophy to hate.
While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas.
agreed with the flypaper comment. I like Matt’s formulation here: even though you have to act as though you have free will, you know that everyone else doesn’t, and you don’t either— you just can’t tell how, what is making you do the thing you’re doing, and that is also consciousness. they’re inextricably linked
Musk was echoing an argument made by Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of longtermism, who wrote that he worried declining fertility among “intellectually talented individuals” could lead to the demise of “advanced civilized society.” Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist philosopher who has become one of the movement’s most outspoken critics, put it more bluntly: “The longtermist view itself implies that really, people in rich countries matter more.” A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire’s pronatalist ideology. “He’s very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible.
This article is really something :agony-limitless:
Sitting around the breakfast table after the 6 a.m. day-care drop-off and “morning strategy walk” the Collinses take every day, Malcolm read aloud a text message from his mother. She wanted to know how he and Simone planned to monetize their pronatalism “hobby.” “Remember: Everything is transactional,” she texted.
I need to stop reading this article, I think it’s breaking my brain.
‘smart’ people are so fucking stupid like 95% of the time
it feels like most “smart” people are basically AIs and they can’t think in non-linear/multifactorial frameworks.
IE: everything is about magic DNA letters even though they’re not, and you understand nothing about DNA, and worse you don’t even understand the stuff that perplexes geneticists (there’s a ton, and would inform you why the magic DNA letters are to a large extent BS when talking about many types of traits, intelligence being a key one)
It’s like they literally got goodboy points in school for spitting back the same stuff that was fed to them and they just continue doing that in adulthood
Except they aren’t even “genetic” parasites. They’re just people predating on other people. Purely due to the accident of their birth.
Having a hundred kids doesn’t mean you’re going to produce a hundred parasites. It means you’re going to produce a crop of kids who will start eating one another in order to secure the decreasing number of spots in the parasite hierarchy.
