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Konkvistador comments on Equality and natalism - Less Wrong
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You can safely make arguments for contraception by talking about having children later, but actively recommending how many children different subsets of people should have smacks of eugenics.
But wait recommending people have children later de facto significantly reduces their total fertility too.
Are we really that hypersensitive to eugenics? I think eugenics is a great idea, yet this feels a strange policy to promote despite this. I think there is something more primal going on with the weak link to eugenics being just a rationalization for it.
Eugenics wasn't considered crazy during its first wave of popularity.
And given that it was associated with the single biggest evil that modern society acknowledges - indeed, the only thing you can straight-facedly call "evil" without seeming really old-fashioned and unsophisticated, wouldn't it make sense that modern culture, having extirpated the offending government root and branch, would then proceed to salt the surrounding memetic ground within a 200 mile radius?
Heck, we now even have "creepy" associations with large well-coordinated military style ceremonies, something that every other country in the world did at the time.
Basically anti-Nazism as a religion with some weird deontology attached. So like I may not believe in God but my moral tastes seem to match Christian tastes suspiciously often due to cultural baggage, I may think eugenics is ok in theory but actual applications hit my inherited anti-Nazi tastes.
For some reason that didn't touch smoking bans.
Lack of knowledge among the opinion makers of today vs. not a central theme of Nazi thought
Hard to tell which is more important to explaining your observation - I lean towards the latter, but couldn't explain why in any formal way. Vegetarianism seems to have performed a similar memetic escape.
Well, vegetarianism was a 'quirk' (I'd like a synonym without negative connotations but I can't think of one right now) of Hitler himself which AFAIK he didn't try to enforce on anyone else, so I don't think it counts.
Idiosyncrasy? Affectation? Notion?
It's because when you say "eugenics," most people hear "Nazism." The Nazis are the most mentally available example, and then the affect heuristic kicks in, causing people to despise the whole concept.
Sweden's social-democratic government pursued eugenics policies throughout much of the 20th Century, but that fact has fallen down the Memory Hole because it conflicts with progressives' propaganda in the U.S., based on a blank slate model of human nature, about Sweden as an advanced society and an example for Americans to emulate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Sweden
So I have to ask: Did Sweden turn out better than average because the government restricted the pool of people who could become the ancestors of the current population?
Obviously not. The number of people mentioned as affected in that article is tiny relative to the population, tens of thousands of people affected over a century in a country with a population of almost ten million today, and millions at the policies' peak. Fluctuations in immigration policy, nutrition, education, pollution, subsidized childcare, and gender equality would collectively dwarf any effect of those policies on Sweden's population composition.
What small effect = no effect? I'm pretty sure that on average their welfare state would have been burdened by those children. Cost wise it was probably a win even with the later paied reparations. Are you willing to take a small effect = no effect position in general for say welfare state policies?
Read advancedatheist's comment. It wasn't about benefits exceeding costs, or the fact that successful Sweden adopted a policy providing Bayesian evidence for the quality of the policy. It explicitly offered the hypothesis that Sweden turned out better than average because of the policy, i.e. that it was a but-for cause rather than a tiny irrelevant effect in that direction.
There is no straw-man here, the difference is important. Policies with small maximum benefits are not individually worth huge political efforts or fixed costs. Policies with large benefits can be.
Right now, one problem with eugenics is that, well, we don't understand genetics very well; messing around with the human gene pool in ways that we haven't done in the past could have Unintended Consequences.
Our current policies already mess with the human gene pool. A strong case has been made by some experts that humans have been self-domesticating for the better part of the last 10 000 years. You would actually need better knowledge of genetics to craft policies that don't mess with the gene pool than to craft policies that mess with it in likely desirable ways.
You don't really need to understand genetics very well to do eugenics see animal husbandry, the unintended consequences of it have proven to pretty manageable in animals (except in some breeds where targeting a certain appearance rather than temperament, physical ability or intelligence is the primary goal).
The difference is that with animal breeding you have a clear distinction between the people doing the breeding and the animals being bred. Humans breeding humans any attempt at being "scientific" is likely to collapse in the face of the resulting signaling games.
I mean look at the current state of social science, do you think it would somehow magically improve if eugenics were to be embraced? In fact, it's likely to get worse since the results of social science would then have even more significance.
The argument that human personality traits have been adapted to local conditions by evolution runs into the difficulty that local conditions don't tend to stay the same for very long. I'm aware of the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis but I suspect the results are a combination of random noise and our difficulty in figuring out and testing for the difference between intelligence and competence-in-a-particular-society.
Your point about animal husbandry is well taken. But how long did fixation of those traits take? Other than sheep dogs (and some types of horses?), were behavior traits or physical traits what breeders selected for? There are lots of examples of animal husbandry selecting for some other physical characteristic (e.g. larger chicken breasts).
Understanding genetics is not required to recommend that e.g. poor people breed less, because poor people's children are more likely to also be poor (and poorly educated, etc.) for reasons that don't have much to do with genetics. Genetics is a factor, but not a dominant one.
Isn't it as simple as the fact that eugenicist ideas, even obviously good ones, assume the reality of HBD and therefore violate Western Universalist taboos?
Arguments for eugenics always end up recommending that lower-status people have less children and higher-status people have more children. If you worry that you might be low status (perhaps you're a geek?), you might reasonably worry that you will be discouraged from having kids.
Ok what is so great about having kids? We see from revealed preferences that people who could afford huge families prefer to buy other things and the studies on life time happiness are kind of ambiguous.
This colleague of Robin Hanson thinks it's pretty great.
Also, revealed preferences reveal very little in this case, because:
(a) even if you don't want kids, you might prefer to make that choice for yourself
(b) some well-off people do choose to have kids
(c) almost nobody is so well-off that having kids would entail a relatively small financial sacrifice, in part because well-off people are expected to (and do) spend more money on their kids