On the other hand, as William James wrote, one of definite characteristics of a religious experience is seriousness. "All is not vanity."
I guess the way this could work itself out is that if you prefer a hyper-reality, your genes do not pass on, and someone else's do, and within some number of generations we bounce back in response to evolutionary pressure.
I learned a fun fact in a recent interview of David Reich (by Dwarkesh):
> Every mutation that can occur does occur. There are eight billion people in the world. There are maybe 30 new mutations every generation, so that’s 240 billion new point mutations every generation. There are only three billion DNA bases in the genome, so every mutation that can occur does occur about 100 times every generation. We’re not mutation-limited anymore.
People prefer scrolling to sex enough that using the iPhone explains up to half of the U.S. birth decline since 2011.
Since people using other carriers also experienced 2008, it's not that.
Terretta•17h ago
Study claims iPhone contributed to a significant decrease in the birth rate after its release in 2007, when AT&T was the only carrier for the phone, allowing researchers to “isolate an iPhone-specific channel” and compare birth rates in areas with a high AT&T customer base to competitors' areas:
“The diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44.”
Authors go on to muse that “as modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex.”
Nothing to do, of course, with AT&T’s customer base at the time being urban, well-educated, and white, or that U.S. birth rate in the youngest groups had already been falling before 2007 with the trend continuing during study period.
dash2•41m ago
It might be worthwhile using local lightning strikes as an instrument for 3G coverage. Others have done this, but not for fertility afaik. But the lightning strike data costs about $1000.