Data does not speak to you
tantaman.com25 points by tantaman 3 days ago
25 points by tantaman 3 days ago
Tantaman's work is a very interesting block of research on why one group buys into the demographic transition more than some others. I think it's an interesting angle.
On interpreting data, seems like they're coming at LessWrong from a different angle? Bayes? Scientific Method? [1]
A bit more detail:
Demographic transition has been an explicit policy goal for decades. I imagine most moderate+ people have bought into the family planning concept. Yes the logistic equation predicts it could happen automatically too [1]. And no, collectively we've decided we don't want to find out for sure.
Some conservative confessionals just haven't bought into it. Because fair-or-not they might not buy into anything without a century of thought first.
This pretty much covers a big chunk of Tantaman's data from a different angle I think.
[1] All methods that study how priors shape what you explore.
[2] For instance: house, food, and fuel prices are signals for this kind of thing. I can imagine lots of conversations going "Can we really afford one more? We're up short as is!"
Reading further, I might be being too charitable.
Demographics are under government control, at very least at the dP/dt level. Much of the causality should be sought there.
Contraception, abortion access, immigration policy, tax incentives, childcare subsidies, parental leave, housing policy, education funding, propaganda. The levers are endless.
Until recently most governments were simply trying to level off their population. They may have succeeded a bit too well, but that's another story.
Somehow -in their essays so far- Tantaman has left out government policy almost entirely, which is a big elephant in the room to miss.
You don't declare your position on this issue, which irritating. What do you actually think is good or bad? It seems like you're anti-individual, pro-religion (or "telos", but that always seems to be a subset of some religion whenever you mention it), and pro-reproduction, but only as a side effect of the religion. You don't want us to be coerced, or coerced into approving of pressure to conform, but you want us to conform willingly. You want us to have a sense of place and community identity, and you want us to live like ants and reproduce a lot with diminished individualism. Why? Just because, I guess.
Well, I don't want that, those aren't my values, I like individualism. You use words in odd ways (what's "formation"?) so I lose track of your meaning anyway, so maybe I got your values wrong, who knows. You're kind of shady about your values.
This makes me wonder about whether having a purpose (telos) is a good value, and about the purpose of purpose. But I think wondering that is not the way forward. People have a sense of purpose innately, it just gets foggy sometimes, we don't need to tell them to have one, only tell them what it might be.
[flagged]
Which, mine? Why?
Incidentally I give my full approval to the title of the article. Measuring things doesn't tell you answers, because it doesn't tell you theories. The idea that you can get answers from data without interpretation is logical positivism (or something associated with logical positivism), and it's nonsense, truth doesn't seep directly into our heads through our pores, we have to reason in order to be able to see any thing.
But that's all an incidental lead-in to the author's views about birth rates.
There's a pattern I've noticed where relatively smart religious-adjacent people will attempt to fit things that are clearly from a religious-bent-of-mind into the structure that they believe will sell the idea to people not of that mind. I think this is one such thing.
In fact, it appears to be a recurrence of the pattern that is perhaps the most common religious view for "why do people no longer have children": "it is because they don't have purpose". Usually explicitly, and often implicitly we are informed that some religion (or any religion, occasionally) has purpose. One can then dress up these arguments in the language of other philosophy - and perhaps that is the way to buttress them - but it doesn't change the fundamental idea.
To lean harder into the aspects of my 'formation' by contrast, I think one can seek more parsimonious views. My personal pet theory is that it's all opportunity cost. Here are the assumptions:
# The joy inherent to being a parent is prosperity-independent
# Benefit from the rest of society is positive-correlated to prosperity
# Late gestation and the early stages of parenthood affect the ability to access benefit from society
So you can vary the outcome by varying the parameters:
* Make a society richer, c.p., and you miss out on more things
* Make a society more culturally oriented around families and you reduce the impact of #3
* Pay people to substitute for parental responsibilities and you reduce the impact of #3
* Remove individual freedom and a reckoning of utility no longer determines fertility
I did not know that parents in higher-income groups in the same education stratum have higher fertility. It's not obvious which way the coin lands on that, admittedly. Years off work are more costly the more successful your career. But also if you're sufficiently successful, you have access to more resources that permit you still access society's utility. Certainly my friends pay $90k for a nanny and you're not going to get that unless you hit some level of income.
Anyway, I have a lovely daughter, and I am eager to have another. I think it is a greatly enjoyable experience to parent, and I suspect there is some aspect to sociocultural contagion here because women have told my wife "watching how cute your baby is has made want one too" and things like that.
Here's a blog post about the opportunity cost thing to make it clear I didn't just come up with it as a middle-brow dismissal in reaction (if it is middle-brow it is wholly so ex nihilo)
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...
And here's a little bit more about what it's like to walk around as a father in a city with some of the fewest children per capita in the US.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-08-06/The_Latent_D...
Regarding the latent demand topic, I don’t think it’s quite demand. It’s just vocalizing that someone else’s kid is cute. They may say they want one but they really don’t, so that’s not demand. It’s no different than seeing a puppy and saying “I want one” in a baby voice. That’s not latent demand. Because most likely they’ve already forgotten about your cute puppy 5 minutes later or when they think through all the inconveniences owning a puppy will introduce to their life, they realize they don’t actually want one bad enough.
I think it’s opportunity cost as well but more specifically in the sense of greed. People are greedy about living their best lives as an individual they don’t want to have to put someone else’s needs above theirs.
In a sense, the long period of wealth and stability the western world has experienced has pushed all of the seven deadly sins to their extremes. I think there’s a reason why these things are commonly labeled as sins and discouraged by most religions, it speaks somewhat of the purpose of religion, and it’s to help humanity function as a society given our natural tendencies are rather destructive. This is the pattern you’ve described, or underlying.
But my computer does!
The blue screen of love.
I wouldn't have offspring because I don't want to have anyone be born into this world; it's awful. On the other paw, I would adopt if it could help someone already having to exist in this world to lead their best life.
Birth is as inevitable as existence, there is no opt out in the grander metaphysical scheme of things.
Also just a thought - is that really your reason for not having them? If a person truly believes the bad outweighs the good I'm less inclined to believe them when they're still among the living, because the choice to stay alive shows they see some inherent value in the state of being alive.
Personally I'm clear on why I don't want kids: because I'm a hedonist.
Hedonism itself isn't very clear, if basic gratification is vacuous. You end up seeking gratification through aims, because having a goal is satisfying, and then you're reintroducing values other than pure pleasure, by the back door (ooer).
> the choice to stay alive shows they see some inherent value in the state of being alive.
Eh, you don't choose to live any more than you choose to breathe. Even if you don't want to live anymore you can't simply "choose" to no longer be alive. There's no suicide-fairy that neatly and quietly removes you from existence on command, and that would keep taking care of anyone who's depending on you.
But then the next generation is all made of the people who turned this world awful. What about being the change you want? I guess if you gave an orphan a good life, that would count though.
It's a shame the author falls a little foul of the very thing he criticizes - out of a wish, perhaps, to needle individualist liberals with UnHerd-style communitarian-conservative talking points.
But let's ask some more questions.
The positive correlation between income and number of children, within education bands, is intriguing - and yet doesn't explain why policies intended to be pro-birth - generous financial support for young families, for example, seem to be ineffective. Even accepting that education does suppress the birth rate relative to income, increasing income ought to fix that.. but doesn't.
Perhaps there's a different story here, that income and number of children within a given education bracket isn't causal - that a third factor is behind both - or even that the causal arrow points the other way: if you've got lots of kids, you _have_ to take that higher-paying job, because you need to keep them fed and housed.
And there's an unspoken assumption that education = individualism, and that these are antonyms to communitarian-conservatism. Which isn't exactly true, and we can look at societies which sustain relatively high levels of both.
Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative. Not in the obvious way along Islamic or shouty Evangelical lines - morals around sex and alcohol are relatively relaxed - but in most other respects it's a distinct, cohesive and traditionalist culture, one which places more value on faith and nation than many.
They've high income, strong child support policy, and their birth rate is.. not much better than avowedly secular-liberal countries nearby. And a disproportionate number of kids are born to immigrants, which of course upsets the traditionalists.
But again, look for third factors. Do immigrants have more children because they're from "that kind of culture", or does the sort of innate drive which motivates somebody to pack their bags for a new life in a new country (by no means the easy path) also motivate them to have a family?
Or, flip that around, is there a "drag" factor affecting people who don't emigrate/immigrate, and that's suppressing "native" births? I certainly know more than a few people for whom that appears to be a thing, they're just kind of lightly anesthetized to life.
But I've also heard it said that some folks have always been that way, and that what's driving lower birth rates is more that on one hand fewer unplanned kids are being born (because contraception, and vastly lower teen pregnancy rates), and on the other, the women who do have kids (which has never been anywhere near "all") are often having one or two less than they'd ideally like for economic reasons.
> Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative.
Conservative is relative. Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, for instance. And many areas in the USA are about 100x more conservative than an average German.
I also don't think "scandinavian" works very well on the fine details. They are too different if you compare e. g. Denmark Sweden Finland Norway. They may be closer to one another than, say, spain or germany, but there are so many differences that the term liberal-Scandi is just too strange. With the same argument you can ask why the judicial system in Sweden prosecuted Assange. I am pretty certain this would have been much harder to do in Denmark or Norway or Finland. Are swedes thus more conservative?
I agree re the "Scandi" label, my point is that the stereotype isn't the reality. The weather and food might be similar, and peoples' physical appearance to some extent, but socially not really.
Conservative is maybe not the most useful definition here either as it covers too many unrelated things - a lot of US Conservatives (in terms of their declared moral attitude to abortion, homosexuality and so on) are also highly individualistic and quite selfish people. And in the UK you've the reverse, where the avowedly progressive, pro-trans Green party is also supported by culturally conservative Muslims, who are relatively unbothered either way by the trans rights movement.
So for example Germany, you've got Catholic traditional-conservatives in the South, and AfD nationalist-conservatives in the former East, both of whom are obviously big-C conservative in different ways, whereas for the Danes there's a specific kind of communitarian, tradition-centric national pride which is conservative (small "c") without being overtly religious or economically right-wing.
This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."
Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...
Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other possible narratives which you haven't even heard of?
My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays are made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.
Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps in the data.
Not to mention that many correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality.
The very idea that causality is always simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!
In my experience, I can't recall reading a single paper in the social sciences describing causality as "likely a self-reinforcing feedback cycle" - Even this language sounds unscientific. They're always trying to prove causality. It seems like nobody ever tries to prove "Likely a feedback cycle" because nobody likes these ambiguous answers.
I suspect this is because science almost always has a financial goal behind it and people want definite answers. They want to be able to use the data to craft a narrative like "No, drug X definitely doesn't cause condition Y."
> This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."
That doesn't follow. Yes, there are going to be multiple interpretations of the data, however the data must exist otherwise you're just pulling claims out of thin air.
Being asked to provide the data is just an easy filter for people who just say things, who only have the narrative, like "the earth is a flat disc" - okay, show me some experimental data that would show this to be true.
But people have data. A lot of empirical data from their own lives. When something resonates with someone, it just means it fits the data they collected in their brains.
Most people aren't stupid. If they sound stupid, it's often because they have not heard a better narrative which fits their data.
Our society completely disregards the wisdom of old age. We probably meet hundreds of thousands of people in our lives. We collect both quantitative and qualitative data. That's statistically significant.
The elevation of the individual as supreme to the communal is inherently anti-child rearing, the most communal of acts
Then the community is creepy and it can do one.
If that's how you perceive child-rearing property of communities that's a shame. It takes a village to raise a child. As the african proverb goes the child that doesn't feel warmth will burn a village down to feel it.
The creepy thing is that warm community turns into individuality bad which turns into obedience.
I don't know why you're getting so much hate. Individualism is a bad thing, and collectivist societies get things done. Simple as.
Usually to make that theory fit the facts, the facts of who is individualist vs. who is collectivist need to be massaged greatly. I would think, however, that most people would say that the USA is much more individualist than most. And we're coming up on about a century of America as the world's pre-eminent power and perhaps the half-century of America as the undisputed world hegemon.
In the end, all the smartphones, and the second amendment, and the male loneliness crisis, and all the terrible terrible signs of a society in decline did not stop the US from building 1100 F-35s, or creating all 3 of the world's most recent paradigm shifts (the Internet, the smartphone, LLM-based AI).
I think one model that has some use here (I lie - really it's just one I'm fond of) is that in an explore-exploit scenario, during the periods where exploring has greatest returns individualist societies perform better because distributed search is more effective, and in periods where exploitation has greatest returns collectivist societies with simple execution structures lose less to interaction costs and therefore outperform. The poor man's Coase's Theory of the Firm.
The biggest problem with it, however, is that only China has demonstrated this. Therefore, we're faced with that fun tweet:
> cars have windows and can move. houses have windows and can’t move. so it’s not the windows that make the car go, it’s something else entirely
So, it is not that difficult. People have much more info now. Life is not more difficult than before but is much more complex. There other factors like screen dopa. Only if you have a super reproductive dna or you are religion forced you are not going to have kids. If the give you money you are not going to have kids if you are too in to Elden Ring or holidays or whatever. There is too much out there. I do not think we are the final being ourselves, it is just all the small things that add up. (Sorry for the bad English, not IA corrected)