If the algorithm (whatever it is) evaluates its own output based on whether or not the user responds positively, then it will over time become better and better at telling people what they want to hear.
It is analogous to social media feeding people a constant stream of outrage because that's what caused them to click on the link. You could tell people "don't click on ragebait links", and if most people didn't then presumably social media would not have become doomscrolling nightmares, but at scale that's not what's likely to happen. Most people will click on ragebait, and most people will prefer sycophantic feedback. Therefore, since the algorithm is designed to get better and better at keeping users engaged, it will become worse and worse in the more fundamental sense. That's kind of baked into the architecture.
Hypothesis: the ridiculous amount of resources put into the LLM (and other "AI") technologies currently, far beyond any realistic hope of profit from it, is because a bunch of techno-billionaires believe in Roko's basilisk.
I mean, I don't have any evidence for this, but it makes more sense of their actions than a profit motive, in this case.
One is reminded of the Behaviorist's attempt to do away with introspection and pretend that they could understand what was going on in the mind purely by examining behavior. Like the drunkard looking for his keys under the light rather than where he dropped them, because it's easier to see there.
This is an especially inviting mistake if one of the primary consequences of the internet/social media technology of the 21st century is mental health issues and doomscrolling ragebait. Andreessen helped to create this problem; no wonder he doesn't want to look at it.
"One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside."
That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.
This would also explain why it impacted the intensive margin (children per mother) but not the extensive margin (percent women who are mothers).
I don't have a problem with WFH where it makes sense, and I do think many societies need to look at how to help young adults become parents, but I am a bit skeptical of this particular relation. If you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest.
I have a commute that varies between 30 minutes and 2 hours (one way). I am in office 5 days each week, eight hours of work, and hour for lunch. That's 11 hours gone each day (sometimes more, occasionally less). Add in getting ready to go in, doing stuff around the house when I get home, and the only time that I am really available to my spouse is dinner and Saturday/Sunday. Due to the time lost, I end up doing household work at least one day each weekend. My spouse and I now have 1 full day together each week. Where in that is there really time for romance?
I can fully understand where even two days with more time and less stress would create opportunity for romance that otherwise may not exist.
Because if both are at home working, well, you can have some couple time (also called "sex") during lunch break or at any given moment when there are no meetings etc.
Deciding whether to have a child seems much less about finding the time for sex, than about thinking you have the time and resources for actually raising the child that you would have. The actual act is a rounding error in the time requirement.
IF both are very fertile, sure. Otherwise, it can take a while, months probably. There are just 2-3 days a month when the woman is peak fertile. So, just the mere physical presence can boost possibilities.
I disagree. It is completely irrelevant if you can "afford" raising a child. Your children are not gonna die because you "can't afford" them in ANY western democracy once you have them.
Actual affordability of children has zero direct effect on fertility, the only thing that really matters here is "perceived affordability" (=> and by implication, effect on lifestyle)!
So if you can "trick" people into having more sex, then expecting higher fertility is quite reasonable, while decreasing the monetary cost of raising kids might not really help much at all.
I don't think anyone is denying that here. What we are saying is that, all the other parameters equals, being together more time gives you more time and chances to have sex and get pregnant.
I'm pretty sure it also increases in some couples the chances of potentially deal-breaking conflicts, but that's another topic...
And… that’s just not how the time factor actually works. If wife and husband are home during her most fertile time window in a cycle, she will instinctively “find him” for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.
> If wife and husband are home during her most fertile time window in a cycle, she will instinctively “find him” [...]
Have you known many couples who had trouble trying to conceive? There's a reason fertility monitoring strips, apps, etc. are such a huge market, and it's not because people are trying to avoid pregnancy.
> [...] for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.
I guarantee that if you interviewed couples who had been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a long time a large number of them would strongly disagree with using "delightful" to describe the urgency of sex during the fertility window.
Don’t misunderstand the situation to which I’m narrowly referring:
Man available to the woman effectively around the clock every day, setting majority of the time is private and comfortable enough that sex can just happen, in compressed and sometimes exciting timeframe, i.e. even if busy with WFH and childcare.
I am aware of couples who struggled or are struggling with fertility, and using the various tools and techniques to increase the odds. I am not discounting their experiences and hardships. I am saying that, on average, if more couples of child bearing age are sexually accessible to one another effectively 24/7, then there are natural instincts that can and do play a role in them coming together sexually at the critical time for conceiving a child, and so more children would be conceived.
> They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.
Just a reminder that if you pull up a chart of countries with the highest birth rates, they all have poor economic conditions. If the theory that a better economy correlates with more babies then countries like South Korea would have the world's highest birth rate.
There is evidence that improved economic conditions and flexible work arrangements increase fertility in meaningful amounts. Is it enough to achieve 2.1 replacement rate? It isn't, but the evidence is robust that wealthier people do have higher fertility in some circumstances.
TLDR Fertility declines as countries urbanize, income rises, and women are educated and empowered to make more affirmed fertility choices, but also slightly increases when prospective parents feel economically secure enough to have a child, or more children (within some intent or desire band).
> Yet the trend at the aggregate level of the whole country disguises trends that are emerging among individuals in these countries. In my new book, coauthored with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber, Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship between Status and Fertility, we document that while in much of the twentieth century it was poor people in countries such as the United States who had more children than richer people, there is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women.
I suspect that if you have a situation where people's "situation" (to use the word twice) doesn't change much from year to year but they feel they're slipping behind/worse (e.g, inflation but everything else is basically the same) - you'll find a decline in the birthrate.
If you have a situation where suddenly your life improves noticeably, birthrates will rise - even if the first group is always better off than the second. It's relative.
So WFH may have contributed to a birth rate rise simply because people felt more secure and more in control (or better) than they did before.
Correlation is not causation. A huge part of this high birth rate is that in these poor countries people leave in rural areas, farming or doing similar work, this essentially “working from home”. They can have many children because they stay close with their families and also having more children is a survival strategy.
I have kids, so it seems obvious to me. It is much easier to coordinate kids related duties when at least one is at home every day. Things like, picking the kids up, taking them somewhere, being there when the kid comes home.
When the kid is sick and not in school daycare, that one person can do supervision. A sick kid usually does not need super involved care whole day, but they cant be left alone whole day either.
Just being able to say "I don't commute every Thursday so if I make this commitment for a random Thursday six months from now, I won't need to adjust my schedule." takes a bit of the cognitive load off.
When I had a sick baby I could work from home quite happily, but after he grew to be a toddler or older I don't even try.
If my kid is sick I stay home and look after him, sure half the time they'll be sleeping/reading, but the other half the time its just constant interruptions and caring for him.
At least I'm lucky that I'm allowed about ten paid "care of sick child" days a year.
It makes a lot more sense if you think about WFH in terms of flexibility rather than being able to be home with your children all day every day. As you point out, the latter is unlikely to be super productive if you have young children. But at the other extreme, where the only option you have for work is being physically present in the office, any situation where it would be useful for a parent to be home requires taking paid time off. If they have a long commute, even scenarios involving partial days or just uncertainty around whether a parent needs to be home requires PTO where a WFH option might allow them to work for some or all of the day.
This also explains the results specifically impacting the number of children per mother. Having to take time off to deal with kid related things is much more manageable with fewer children, while even modest WFH flexibility might relieve that logistical burden even for much larger numbers of children. Just one or two days a week of WFH hybrid flexibility could take the place of 10-20 weeks of time off, which is far more than any employee is likely to have or need to deal with even the largest of families.
To preemptively address an obvious complaint about my comment, I'm not saying WFH replaces the need for taking PTO when it comes to childcare. Some childcare situations realistically would not allow the parent at home to work. But a lot of scenarios just require a physical presence or the ability to duck in and out with short notice. In those situations, having the WFH option is dramatically better than having to take the entire day off and removes one more burden of trying to work and parent at the same time.
> you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest
Believe Switzerland allows professionals to choose the percentage of work time they want to sign up for. For instance, if 100% is 8h, 5d/week, 80% would be 4d/week. The parent can then both take 80% each & have 2 work days free for childcare.
The other reasons given make sense to me, but I bet there is also some psychological benefit in having a regularly scheduled escape from home, and having a guilt-free excuse for it built in, which partly compensates for being forced to come in a few days a week. The contrast makes it easier to appreciate the company of your spouse and probably makes child-rearing seem less oppressive. People theoretically could manage this without work imposing it on them, but in practice, having to make and justify the choice creates stress.
Escape from home is healthy. But not when you are escaping into the office. It’s healthy to escape for a hike, for groceries, to take a walk, go to the gym, etc.
Agreed, but I think the mechanism relates to different microbes. If there are two microbes in your gut, and type A requires a dose of high-calorie, low-fiber food coming down the pipe every day, and type B is not able to reproduce as fast as type A but is able to live on high-fiber food, this tells you two things:
type A cannot have been living in humans thousands of years ago, but type B might have
type A benefits from making your brain worse at choosing healthy foods, and type B does not
I think that "vaccine" is really not the right word to use for this; they sound as different as bandages and blood transfusions. But if it works as advertised, it could be useful if used in the right situation.
I do wonder if the kind of people who got vaccinated 10 times against Covid-19 will end up trying to get a sniff of this every month? Kind of like how we overuse antibiotics in cleaners. It seems like it would be best if saved for an "oh shoot" kind of situation.
As Deming once said in regard to manufacturing inspections: "Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product."
The fact that software is "soft" makes it seem like this doesn't apply, but it does, not least because of the fact that once you have gone down the wrong path with software design, it is very difficult to pull back and realize you need to go down an entirely different one.
I agree, but it's worse. Even a "simple" coding error (so, no long term arch issues) is a problem, if the review that catches it does not educate the author.
The analogy to manufacturing would be something like if the parts coming out a machine are all bad, just sending them to re-work is not a solution, you need to re-calibrate the machine.
Well, the Great Fiscal Crisis did not result in mass starvation, so in some sense, it "wasn't all that dramatic". But, it was a big deal in comparison to a normal downturn. So, it depends on what you mean.
Medium term, I think it would release a lot of resources (skilled workers, productive capacity, energy) to use on something more productive. But then, I kind of hoped for that after the GFC, also...
In time, every organic system has to develop an immune system. Immune systems do, sometimes, misfire (allergies, auto-immune disorders). But, eventually, it becomes impossible to do without them.
It is analogous to social media feeding people a constant stream of outrage because that's what caused them to click on the link. You could tell people "don't click on ragebait links", and if most people didn't then presumably social media would not have become doomscrolling nightmares, but at scale that's not what's likely to happen. Most people will click on ragebait, and most people will prefer sycophantic feedback. Therefore, since the algorithm is designed to get better and better at keeping users engaged, it will become worse and worse in the more fundamental sense. That's kind of baked into the architecture.
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