cousin_it comments on Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments - Less Wrong

68 Post author: lukeprog 18 January 2011 03:19AM

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Comment author: HonoreDB 27 January 2011 07:53:53PM *  20 points [-]

Acausal sexual reproduction is quite plausible, in a sense. Suppose you were a single woman living in a society with access to sophisticated genetic engineering, and you wanted to give birth to a child that was biologically yours and not do any unnatural optimizing. You could envision your ideal mate in detail, reverse-engineer the genetics of this man, and then create a sperm population that the man could have produced had he existed. I can easily imagine a genetic engineer offering this service: you walk into the office, describe the man's physical attributes, personality, and even life history, and the engineer does the rest as much as is possible (in this society, we know that a plurality of men who played shortstop in Little League have a certain allele, etc.) The child could grow up and meaningfully learn things about the counterfactual father--if you learned that the father was prone to depression, that would mean that you should watch out for that as well.

If the mother really wants to, she can take things further and specify that the man should be the kind of person who would have, had he existed, gone through the analogous procedure (with a surrogate or artificial womb), and that the counterfactual woman he would have specified would have been her. In this case, we can say that the man and the woman have acausally reproduced.

Comment author: cousin_it 27 January 2011 08:50:22PM *  13 points [-]

Hmm. So the man has managed to "acausally reproduce", fulfill his utility function, in spite of not existing. You could go further and posit an imaginary couple who would have chosen each other for the procedure - so they succeed in "acausally reproducing", even though neither of them exists. Then when someone tries to write a story about the imaginary couple, the child becomes observable to the writer and starts doing some reproducing of her own :-)