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Nornagest comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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In some Greek myth there's a fleet heading off to war - an important endeavor, involving a group of more than 50 people - but they get held up by some bad weather. After exhausting all the usual remedies, the fleet's leadership determines that the gods have to be appeased by some extreme measure, so he summons his daughter from home and sacrifices her. It's all very sad, but it works; the storm abates and the war can proceed.
Have we considered encouraging people to donate to science in a similar way? Not ritual murder, of course. Sacrificing a child in a more figurative sense. Produce more children than you otherwise planned to, send the spares off to be trained (from a very young age, making best use of that precious neural plasticity) as specialists in whatever field will be most needful 20 years down the road.
I think the myth you're thinking of is of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. It might not bear all that much on your broader point, but one possibly relevant difference is that Agamemnon was told to sacrifice Iphigenia by a prophet of the goddess holding up his fleet; he wasn't doing it on spec, but in response to a specific one-time demand, and perhaps more importantly to absolve himself of a personal mistake.
The medieval European approach to producing clergymen (roughly: make more heirs than you need and send the spares to the Church, preferably with generous donations to smooth over any difficulties) might make a better analogy.