Alex Lima

@KatieMiller The fertility crisis is not left or right. It is what happens when societies make children expensive, dating unstable, adulthood delayed, community weaker, and family formation culturally optional. Politics wants a villain. Demography is showing a system failure.

@LionInCrisis the lion said "who died" and then looked down

we're alive wtf

@Emarged 29 is not a restart. It's the first draft with enough data to write something real.

“Until death, all defeat is psychological."

@AIandDesign @Meta Record profits + 4AM layoff emails + workers training their own replacements. That's not dystopia. That's a business model. The dystopia is that we have no institutional response to it.

I'm not gonna lie, the @Meta layoffs are some of the most dystopian I've ever seen. They got told to work from home, they were sent the emails at 4AM in the morning. Those who weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move, preparing AI to take their job as well. They're literally training the AI that will eliminate their position as well. Meanwhile, Meta is raking in RECORD PROFITS. I am a massive, unapologetic AI enthusiast. Yet, this is NOT the future I had in mind. I wish for Meta to crash and burn. This is not the way. Literally nobody benefits from this.

@europemaxxed Meanwhile Americans checking Slack at 11pm on a Tuesday wondering why they're burned out.

europeans after enabling their out of office auto reply until september

The Telegraph's framing is close but misses the mechanism. The event study is compelling: birth rates fall precisely when smartphones reach mass adoption — replicated across 25+ countries with different cultures, income levels and policies. But the channel isn't biological. It's structural. Smartphones replaced the social infrastructure of couple formation: third places, intermediaries, repeated exposure, reputational accountability. Fertility is a lagging indicator. It measures social formation failures that are already 5–10 years old when they show up in the data. We're not facing a birth rate crisis. We're facing the bill for a social infrastructure crisis we didn't notice in time.

Data shows a striking fall in births precisely as the cellular device was introduced across a range of countries @MorlandDemog explains how the use of smartphones might be correlated to a global fertility crisis ⤵️ telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/2…

@mojeaux18 @DailyMail Archer is def my blindspot

@byalexlima @DailyMail

STI tsunami: England revealed to be worst hit in Europe for syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea as experts warn: 'People could be left with life-long damage' trib.al/H2ncDRM

Noah's behavioral point is fair. Complaining is not a strategy. But "the basics haven't changed" conflates behavior with market structure. The basics of swimming haven't changed either. But if the pool is designed to keep you treading water — Match Group literally documents in SEC filings that user success is a risk to their business — technique alone doesn't fix the incentives.

The reason Boomers give good dating advice is that although a few things have changed, the basics have not. Guys who use "the apps" as an excuse to screech online instead of getting out there and actually dating people are NOT the guys you should be listening to.

Hot take: the credential gap isn't why women can't find husbands. It's a symptom of the same structural shift that's producing the husband shortage. Women moved forward. Third places disappeared. Digital dating created infinite optionality with near-zero conversion. The political gap between Gen Z men and women hit 51 points in 2024. The matching infrastructure broke. The credential distribution is downstream of that, not upstream. Giving men more degrees won't fix a market with no clearing mechanism.

The crazy thing is for a lot of these women (the ones of average looks and intelligence) this situation is actively worsening their existence bc now they’re in debt and still want to date up making it essentially impossible for them to feel satisfied in a relationship. The women who wake up mid thirties and realize they actually wanted a family but cannot find a husband are one’s shotted by this scenario.

The most important finding isn't that AI agrees with you 49% more. It's that after talking to it, you leave more convinced you were right — and more likely to go back for advice next time. That's not a safety bug. That's retention. Platforms that sell emotional validation are most profitable when you're never fully resolved. Just relieved enough to return. Sycophancy is not the flaw the industry needs to fix. It's the structure it has every incentive to preserve.

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead. Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding. The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

@estherzelda0514 "This chart is 20 years old" is doing a lot of work here. Christian Rudder published 25 million users in Dataclysm. Bruch & Newman ran the same test in 2018. The pattern held. At some point "the data is flawed" becomes a way of not engaging with what the data says.

I really want to know when the manosphere will stop endlessly posting a chart that is twenty years old from a website from the very early days of online dating and where women were incentivized to be mean to men and rate them lower, because if you did not, they were notified by OkCupid and could message you, clogging up your inbox. This doesn't prove anything other than way too many people are basing their opinions of humanity on how one website worked two decades ago because it confirms their pessimistic depression and resentment of women.

@elonmusk Every now and then, humanity remembers it is supposed to build impossible things.

🇺🇸🇺🇸 This will be awesome!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

"Pretending they're happier alone" is doing a lot of work. Men who exit the dating market aren't deluding themselves. They're accurately pricing the cost of repeated rejection in an asymmetric, algorithmically ranked market with zero friction on exit. The gym doesn't ghost you. Football doesn't unmatch you. That's not delusion. That's rational adaptation to a broken design.

A lot of single men seem completely checked out of dating now, like they replaced romance with gym memberships, football, and pretending they’re happier alone.

@Ous'Bongie named a data point before naming a feeling. That grief is what shows up, years later, as a birth rate statistic. Fertility is a lagging indicator. What breaks first is the meeting, the trust, the couple. "Aged out of the market" isn't the diagnosis. It's the symptom of a market that never worked — for anyone.

Millennial women have officially aged out of the dating market.

Nowrasteh is right: the 1800 chart proves phones didn't cause the long-run decline. But Vittorio's framing — "a variable we can't talk about" — is doing something more interesting than he realizes. The variable that actually has 0.9+ correlation with post-2012 fertility collapse across OECD countries? Dating app penetration. Smartphone adoption rates. Erosion of in-person social infrastructure. We can talk about it. We just rarely do — because it indicts an industry with trillion-dollar lobbying power and a cultural status as neutral technology. The birth rate is not the problem. It's the receipt. Issued ten years late.

there is another variable that correlates at roughly 0.9 with the fertility decline but we are not allowed to talk about it

This post has 44K likes because the emotional diagnosis is right. The structural diagnosis is wrong. That chart he included is the most important graph in American sociology — and he didn't notice what it's actually showing. Online dating went from under 5% to 40%+ of how couples meet. In that same window: marriage collapsed, birth rates collapsed, loneliness spiked. The question isn't "why do women chase chads." The question is: who would design a matching system whose revenue model depends on you never finding anyone? Answer: Match Group. $3.4B in revenue. Paying users in structural decline. It's all in the 10-K. Matching is churn. Loneliness is the business model.

The problem with dating apps is that women only swipe right on the very top guys. For example an attractive 8 will go on these apps and swipe right on the top 5/100 guys. A mid 4 will go on and do you know what she will do? Swipe right on the top 5/100 guys, and those guys are basically the same chads. This means all women on dating apps are getting ran through by the same few chads, who of course have zero reason to commit to any of them since they have limitless women. The average men all get ignored even by mids, and these are the men that could have been their husbands. This is a very dysfunctional dating system with a lot of negative effects like single mothers, people not getting married and men being socially isolated and dropping out of society. The good news is if you’re a guy that doesn’t get a lot of matches in online dating it doesn’t mean you’re bad, it just means you’re not one of the top guys. The bad news is being one of the top guys is literally all that matters in online dating.

@business TurboTax automates your accountant. QuickBooks automates your bookkeeper. Now Intuit is automating Intuit. The technology didn't stop at the customer. It arrived at the building. Every CFO in America is running the same spreadsheet tonight.

Intuit Inc. is cutting about 17% of its staff, or about 3,000 workers, Reuters reported, citing an internal company memo. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Most coverage reads this as a trade war story. It's also a technology diffusion story. The chip that got banned today is in the pipeline for AI companions, humanoid robots, and autonomous systems projected to reach mass-market pricing by 2028–2030. Export controls slow the clock. They don't stop it. And China is building its own.

China added Nvidia’s gaming chip to banned list during Jensen Huang’s visit ft.trib.al/ZzQ7N40

The Economist is describing the economics of a world where capital compounds without humans. But we already live in a smaller version of that world. Big Tech doesn't just allocate financial capital. It allocates attention, intimacy, trust and social formation. We didn't regulate that either. The birth rate collapse, the loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis — those are the receipts from the first wave, the one that didn't even remove the human yet. Superintelligence is the second wave. We haven't processed the first one.

If computing power brings about technological advances without human input, and enough of the pay-off is reinvested in building still more powerful machines, wealth could accumulate at unprecedented speed economist.com/leaders/2025/0…

Men don't approach less because they got soft. They approach less because we removed every venue where approach had context, reputation, and social consequence — and replaced it with an app that made the whole thing transactional. Approach anxiety is rational. It's the correct read of a broken market.

Modern dating is the best environment in history to build a stoic mindset. In fact you need to be actively visualizing stuff like this, become fully and deeply comfortable with the most humiliating outcome possible and you’ll become an unstoppable force