"Unconditional" makes a lot more sense if we think of it as "unconditional, conditional on my ability to think of conditions on my love". This is what I think most people mean by unconditional love: they can't think of any reasonable conditions on their love, and would discount unreasonable conditions as unusual or outside the realm of what's meant by "unconditional".

This is probably something like a shape-rotator vs. wordcel thing: shape-rotators take words literally and are uncomfortable with a word like "unconditional" unless there are literally no conditions, while wordcels are happy to say "unconditional" if the conditions are outside their Overton Window for reasons they would stop loving someone.

Unless you are going to one of the big prestige universities, I don’t think it matters which you choose all that much. Save money.

My experience is that this is right. The list of top-tier global institutions, in terms of prestige, is short: Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, CalTech, maybe Berkeley, maybe Stanford and Waterloo if you want to work in tech, maybe another Ivy if you want to do something non-tech. The prestige bump falls off fast as you move further down the list. Lots of universities have local prestige but it gets lost as you talk to people with less context.

Prestige mostly matters if you want to do something that requires it as the cost of entry. If you can get in, it doesn't hurt to have the prestige of a top-tier institution, but there's lots of things you might do where the prestige will be wasted.

Sadly, this is a tough thing to know whether you will need the prestige or not. You'll have to make an expected value calculation against the cost and make the best choice you can to minimize the risk of regret.

Perhaps, but I also feel like this is a real misunderstanding of politics being the mind killer. Rationality is critically important in dealing with real world problems, and that includes problems that have become politicized. The important-to-me thing is that, at least here on Less Wrong, we stay focused, as much as possible, on questions of evidence and reasoning. Posts about whether Israel or Palestine is good/bad should be off limits, but posts about whether Israel or Palestine are making errors in their reporting of facts in ways that can be sussed out using statistical analysis feel very much on brand.

For comparison, COVID was a hot button issue for a long time, and Less Wrong hosted tons of great posts about various mechanical things about COVID while avoiding many of the political issues. Less Wrong has also stayed away from topics like abortion and racism because there's little to say on the topic that isn't a thinly veiled attempt to argue over values. So while some aspects of the current Israel/Palestine conflict are fights over values and should be off limits here, I'd be pretty sad if we couldn't talk about trying to understand the facts of the situation, like whether or not Palestinian death figures are correct, just like we've been able to talk about COVID origins and whether or not masks are effective and controlling the spread of COVID (if you can remember back to when that was a controversial topic!).

I actually don't think the problem with this post is politics, but that it's nothing more than a link post, and except in rare cases, I'd like to see people add something more than just provide links.

The analysis in the linked article itself is interesting and not obviously politicized (or at least, isn't from a mistake-theory standpoint; it's definitely political if you're a conflict theorist, but then what isn't!).

I don't know if there's data available to answer this question, but it'd be interesting to know if the relatively small middle class that existed prior to the 20th century also saw lower fertility than their lower and higher class peers. And in that case maybe falling fertility is a middle class phenomenon that ends when people exit the middle class either by making enough to no longer be economically middle class or by making little enough money that they cannot aspire to middle class dreams.

Here's what Claude has to say:

There is some evidence that a similar fertility pattern existed in the past when the middle class was relatively smaller, particularly in the 19th century, but the data is more limited and the trends are not as clear-cut as in modern times.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, fertility rates tended to be higher among the aristocracy and wealthy classes, as well as among the poorest segments of society. The emerging middle class, which consisted of merchants, professionals, and skilled artisans, often exhibited lower fertility rates.

Here are some examples and observations from historical studies:

1. In England and Wales, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, fertility rates were highest among the landed aristocracy and gentry, followed by the urban poor. The middle classes, such as merchants and professionals, had lower fertility rates.
2. In France, during the 19th century, fertility rates were lower among the urban middle classes than among the nobility and peasantry.
3. In the United States, during the late 19th century, fertility rates were higher among the wealthy and poor, while the emerging urban middle class had lower fertility rates.
4. However, it's important to note that fertility patterns were influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including cultural norms, access to contraception, and economic conditions.

While the data from the 18th and 19th centuries is less comprehensive and more subject to regional variations, there is evidence that the middle classes, particularly in urban areas, were at the forefront of the fertility transition, with lower fertility rates than the wealthiest and poorest segments of society. This pattern is consistent with the idea that the marginal value of additional labor played a role in fertility decisions, although other factors were also at play.

I asked Claude for sources on the above claims. Number 2 might be hallucinated, but all the others I found quickly with Google:

1. Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., & Schofield, R. S. (1997). English population history from family reconstitution 1580-1837. Cambridge University Press. This study analyzed parish records and found that in England, fertility was highest among the landed gentry and aristocracy in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
2. Livi-Bacci, M. (1986). Social-group fertility differential in France: An economic analysis. Population Studies, 40(2), 223-243. This paper examined data from the 1851 census in France and found lower fertility among the urban middle classes compared to the nobility and peasantry.
3. Haines, M. R. (1992). The New England Family Study: A study of fertility differentials among Pre-Industrial Urban and Rural Populations. Journal of Family History, 17(1), 17-35. This study analyzed fertility patterns in New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, showing lower fertility among the urban middle classes.
4. Hacker, J. D. (2003). Rethinking the "early" fertility decline in the United States: Integration of old evidence and new models. Social Science History, 27(4), 545-586. This paper argues that fertility decline in the United States began earlier than previously thought, with the urban middle classes leading the trend in the late 19th century.
5. Livi-Bacci, M. (1977). A history of Italian fertility during the last two centuries. Princeton University Press. This book examines fertility patterns in Italy and found that the middle classes were often at the forefront of fertility decline in the 19th century.

Who's this ~no one? I came to see faith differently once I understood more of how the term (or another word in another language with the same base meaning of <trust>) is used in different spiritual traditions. Maybe few Christians and those primarily exposed to Christian memes conceive of faith in this way, but then this begs the question of why privilege their conceptualization of faith rather than looking for some some commonality between what people around the world seem to be pointing to when they say "faith" or a similar word to point to the idea of <trust> as part of a spiritual tradition?

I've always felt "predestination" is a funny way to phrase it. I get why it was chosen (the destination of your soul is already determined), but I think "deterministic" is better. It's a really useful frame to understand that what will happen is what was already going to happen, and it's just that you subjectively don't yet know what the future will be and couldn't compute it with certainty even if you tried (that's why we give probability estimates for things!)

This statement would be false is, for example, we discovered that people could change other's perceptions of the world by expecting them to be different and taking no other action.

Exactly. In each moment, the world is exactly as it is and can't be anyway other than how we find it. Then it's the next moment and the world is no longer the same as it was the moment before, yet is still however it is in that moment and no other way. The world is constantly changing from moment to moment, but always changing into exactly what it is.