The Steader Heap

Wheat, Age of Marriage, Signaling, and Family Size

A heap of thoughts of all different sizes

Smartens the wise and the unsmart wises

The steader heap, where we toss out a jumble of ideas and stir them around. The top dressing of the fertile mind.

How Long Can You Store Wheat?

Wheat, properly stored, lasts a long time.  We were just at the home of an older gentleman who was showing us his chickens.  He was feeding them wheat stored in tightly closed buckets in the 1960s.  It looked fine and tasted fine.  He said he’s made bread from it.  The only thing it the wheat would no longer sprout.  We ourselves have eaten 30-year old wheat before, it was fine.

(Image from theprepperjournal.com)

The man’s chickens free-ranged over a patch of grass and ate 60 year-old wheat.  They were laying well on the diet.  He showed us some eggs.  The eggs looked good.  We had some.  They tasted great.

Photo by Grace O'Driscoll on Unsplash

Old wheat is much better than nothing.

The Proper Age of Married is Younger than You Think

Worth thinking about.

Of course it often takes a village to get married young.  At minimum it takes two.  You will have to be truly willing to march to the beat of your own drummer.   Do you love each other more than you fear social pressure?  Most people don’t.

Realize also that if you marry young you are forming a team.  Marriage isn’t just the bf/gf experience with a ring.

The best reason to start young is because if you discover that it has transformed your life for the better, you have more time to do more of it.

Robin Hanson on How Signals Cut Fertility

Escalating Signals Cut Fertility

Robin Hanson has a typically insightful angle on the fertility crisis. Don’t skip it. The story at the beginning about his pets really drives the point home.

In short, he blames a lot of it on degenerated* signaling behavior.

*Degenerate does not mean what you think it means. We will give a rigorous, technical definition of degeneracy downstream in this transmission

Signaling gets a lot of play these days, but in effect it's just communication via action or affiliation. Specifically, communication about your personal qualities and commitments, or your group coalitions.

Eating a carrot because you are hungry is consumption. Eating a carrot because you want to improve your vision is health. But eating a carrot because you want to show someone that you are hungry or committed to health is signaling. So is eating a carrot to show your nonchalance.

Here is another example. In a reiterated Prisoner's Dilemma, your initial bid isn't really about the payoff matrix in that round but about signaling your willingness to cooperate. If the other player defects and you retaliate the next round, you aren't doing it to maximize your reward payoff in that round but to communicate that you won't be taken advantage of.

The online world is the world of the signal. Almost no one who puts a Ukraine flag in their handle can hope to accomplish anything by it other than signal. But signaling itself can be powerful.

Signaling is a not a bad thing. Everyone necessarily signals. 

Often without realizing it.  The more sincere the signal, the more it communicates about your character and affiliation, which means some of the strongest signals are people who just feel passionately about something and have to talk about it, with no conscious intention to make an impression. 

We should also mention that signals are more effective if they are costly.  Saying "yes" to a pollster is a whole different level of commitment from a yakuza taking a whack at his finger joint.

Hanson's claim in his essay is that a variety of signals that people increasingly want or even need to send are contrary to having children. Therefore fewer children.  For example, if you want to signal conscientiousness and discipline to employers, you get more degrees.  As more people get degrees, you have to get even more degrees for your signal to rise above the background hum.

You will have to read Hanson's essay to see what specific signals he has in mind. What we want to say here is that most of those signals accomplish nothing. The signals are bare. They are degenerate.

The main problem most people have with signals is that they can be lies.  True, but so can any other form of communication.  The real failure mode of signals is a result of costly signals being more effective and sincere non-self-aware signals being more effective.  Signals have a tendency to grow and grow, becoming ever more costly, far beyond any benefit they might bring.  Because costliness increases the value of the signal, there is a tendency to continually ramp up the cost of the signal.  And because the signaling behavior is often unconscious, people don’t rationally evaluate whether the increased cost of the signal will give them an increased expected pay out.

In other words, signals are highly likely to degenerate.  Degeneracy is when a signal, a system, a rule, or a cultural artefact has slipped loose from its purpose.  Degeneracy is when a  means to achieve a goal has gradually become the goal itself.

Imagine ants following a scent trail.  The trail jogs to the side because a rock is in the way.  The rock later gets moved but the ants continue jogging.  If the jog in the trail were a signal, a system, a rule, or some cultural artefact, it would now be degenerate.

If opening doors for girls and bringing them flowers once signaled good mate potential, but no longer does, the signal has degenerated.

Or imagine ballroom dance aficionados.  They love dancing because it’s charged with that pre-erotic courtship vibe, but no actual courtship is happening.  So they talk about how its good exercise, or tradition.  The art has degenerated.

The signals Hanson talks about are signals that you are trustworthy and conscientious and employable and marriageable.  The point of these signals is to get employed so you can support a family and to get married so you can start a family.  But as Hanson points out, sending these signals now defeats the purpose of having them.  It as if, besieged, you beat off attacks by hurling stones you pulled from your walls. It is destroying the village in order to save it.  It is, almost literally, like the ancients who sacrificed children to Moloch so that he would avert evil from their family.  It is enacting a contradiction.

You go through life single and childless to convince people how marriageable and worthy of having the resources for a family you are.

To thus signal ever more desperately is to live in fear of what people will think.  You must be master of your signals, not they of you. 

Why not?  It costs you little.  We know from experience that strategically ignoring or modifying the signals of middle class life has almost no negative consequences.  It is almost all in your mind.

Let us now affirm the truth respecting the signals that Hanson is talking about.

·         Jumping through corporate and educational hoops doesn't have that much effect on income once you control for intelligence and drive.  

·         You can have an education and have children.  Many highly educated professionals with large families started having children when they were in college.

·          When you are young, early to mid 20s, or even 18 or 19, is when you are best at having young children.

·         Early marriages rock.

·         "Finding yourself" is hokum.  Your true self is not something you find but something you make.  No character growth occurs when you are marking time.

·         Founding a family is more fun than being a consumer of packaged experiences and grinding your way through a dating pool.  It is exhilarating.

·         Marriage and children are not the capstone to a successful life.  They are the foundation of it.  They are where it begins.  Imagine trying to train up for a run without doing any running!

·         Fertility and happiness are easier in marriages that embrace some variant of traditional sex roles.

·         Grandparents who embrace helping their children have and raise grandchildren are better than grandparents who do not.  Savvy parents embrace the grandparents' help.

·         A young adult whose parents show an intelligent, tactful, and assisting interest in the young adult's courtship is blessed.

·         There is nothing wrong but also nothing admirable or exciting about living in expensive, crowded locations.

·         Religion is good.

·         Childlessness shows poor physical or mental health, bad luck, selfishness, or incompetence.

You should strategically ignore the monotonous reflex to signal but don't just ignore the monotonous reflex to signal. Countersignal.  You don't signal because you are better than that.  Your aims are higher.  Your understanding is better.  Your capacities are greater.  You won't be held back.

Countersignal.

Today in Childlessness

 A cousin's kid is doing an internship of a kind at a county court for a rural county. She mentioned that for the last two weeks the only arrest warrant issued was for an old woman with no kids and no nearby family; health issues; and very little money. She is apparently miserable and finds it hard to deal with life. The warrant specifically was because she failed to show up to a court date for some kind of code violation. It’s very sad. Over the next decades, there will be more and more people like this. Old, alone, sad, and in bad life circumstances because how can you strive when you are alone and miserable. Divorce, fatherlessness, childlessness, never marrieds: all these social statistics are written in accumulating tears. There is nothing to celebrate in these tragedies. For the most part, these people aren’t getting their come-uppance. For the most part, they are victims.

From an Engineering Perspective, How Many Children Should You Have?

“How many grandchildren/great-grandchildren do I want to have?” is an extremely clarifying question that changes a lot of parental approaches.

Begin with the end in mind.

The standard assumption is that a population needs a TFR of about 2.1 – 2.4 for replacement, depending on mortality rates.  But you are not a population.  One commenter asked how many children you need to have if you want it to be almost guaranteed that you will have family into the next generations.  The answer in one Swedish population study was 5.

5.

https://twitter.com/mmjukic/status/1699085342635176114

(The general math involved is here  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process )

Today we have less infant and child mortality but an ever higher percentage of childless adults.  Five is still probably a reasonable estimate.

So get out your spreadsheet, put on your green eye shade, and calculate yourself up a large family.

If you do, you will find that you have inadvertently created a family with a stronger sense of self.

But the best reason to have lots is this.  When you start having kids, you will discover that you like it.  There is poetry and spirituality and a connection to deep things and simple joys and real achievements.  So why not keep going?  If you don’t enjoy your children on some level and feel like they complete you and your spouse and connect you to eternal things, your family project is unlikely to succeed no matter what else you do.   But you will enjoy your children. You will feel they complete and connect you.  You will experience the dew of love.