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Liron comments on A speculation on Near and Far Modes - Less Wrong
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Speaking of rationality litmus tests, how about choosing your baby's sex? It's ridiculous that most people act as if the expected utilities of the two sexes are close enough together that the inconvenience of screening makes it worth leaving the decision to chance.
I can't tell: do you think it would make sense for most people to pick a particular sex for their child, which sex has an obviously superior utility; or do you just mean that to any given set of parents, they are sufficiently non-indifferent to the sex of the child that it should be worth it to them to screen?
That is, do you think the correct scenario is more like, "Gosh, everybody wants girls, we're going to have to start introducing legal sanctions or at least invent egg-egg fertilzation if we don't want to go extinct, but look at all the utility!", or like "Me and Joe want a little girl so we can name her after his mother, but Liz and Todd down the street are having a boy so they'll have one of each"?
To me it seems obvious that the intended meaning is "most parents are sufficiently non-indifferent in some direction".
Yup
I am not sure about this as a litmus test, because of Rule Rationality - if everyone goes with their preference the demographic ratio will be skewed in a way that's bad on average. (I am also not sure about the Rule Rationality theory itself, it clearly does not work in cases like Tragedy of Commons)
Come on, this is the same kind of irrelevant point that an anti-cryonicist would cleverly think up, rather than actually considering their actual preferences like they do when they're trying to get the best deals on amazon.com.
The people who preferred a white iPhone 4 waited an extra month to get it.
If a couples has had two boys, and now prefers a girl, then why mess around with Y-type sperm at all? It's because society says you're not allowed to use the "help yourself to what you want" pattern when the domain of your utility function is too biological.
Conflict between utility function maximization and cognitive conformity = rationality litmus test.
Well... attempts at sex selection (via abortion/infanticide/giving kids away) are leading to very skewed populations in China. This may be just because of an interaction with yi jia yi hai (the one child policy), but seems like a legitimate concern based on empiricism anyway.
Even if there were a huge tragedy of the commons at work (and there really isn't, since I'm sure a lot of Chinese parents wish they had had a girl in light of the current sexual marketplace)...
...it's still a rationality fail to thwart your own preferences for the sake of adhering to sound group-level behavioral policy if there is no logical connection between your actions and the degree to which others adhere to the group-level policy.
If your brain is running a rational decision algorithm for picking child sex, then it shouldn't even be raising this kind of irrelevant point. No one bothers to cleverly debate the group-level dynamics of amazon.com purchase decisions.
Citation really needed here. I understand that this would be the case if there were an efficient and fungible market in romance in modern China and if parents' incentives aligned with their future child's. But neither of those strike me as remotely true, and on the other hand raising a girl in a society of mostly men could be more costly and anxiety-inducing than raising a boy.
I inferred my claim from the premises:
It's quite possible that parents would in retrospect, 20 years later, regret picking a boy over a girl, if so does everyone else. However, given that the sex imbalance persists in Chinese kids born now (whose parents are aware of the gender imbalance, but are perhaps overconfident due to survivorship bias† or focused on other factors), I'd say that a tragedy of the commons is quite possible. If the technology were cheap and universally available, I suspect you'd see something like 3 boys to every girl.
† That is, of course their little boy will successfully find a wife when the time comes, just like his daddy did!
But now they get a free case, instead of having to buy one...
Current owners can get the free case too.