Interesting point, although it has the problem that we haven’t actually observed eugenics being useless because of the vast scale of intervention required. (Since the Nazis were stopped, and the other reasons for eugenics not working—e.g., having become a dirty word—could well explain its apparent uselessness even if the “vast scale” was not a problem.)
Your “as one would expect” comment reminded me of something obvious that doesn’t seem to be mentioned. One of the thing SF does is try to anticipate the future. I’ve read last year some rather old SF (early Harlan Ellison and the like), and the contrast between what “sounds weird” now and didn’t then, and vice-versa, suggests that we could “extract predictions” from such stories.
The example that came to mind was that the “weird future thing” in one of the stories (which, incidentally, I think was set around now) was that “in the future” only women were doing some cool job (I think piloting), almost never men, because women were better at it. The claim would sound normal now, but was probably a daring prediction for the time.
So, the trick for finding good predictions would be to read old SF, notice things that you wouldn’t notice around you, but that would be daringly avant-garde at the time. (For failed predictions, look for things that still sound weird.)
Although, of course, 90% of everything is mostly crap, including SF, even the good SF isn’t always applicable, and that “historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making” part is harder. I heard (within the last decade or so) of some part of the US government explicitly asking for predictions from SF writers, but I doubt that would have happened much fifty years ago, much less actually taking the advice.
In Starship Troopers, women were the pilots-- iirc, because of better reflexes.
I'm currently working on a research project for MIRI, and I would welcome feedback on my research as I proceed. In this post, I describe the project.
As a part of an effort to steel-man objections to MIRI's mission, MIRI Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser has asked me to develop the following objection:
In Luke's initial email to me, he wrote:
Luke and I brainstormed a list of potential historical examples of people predicting the future 10+ years out, and using the predictions to inform their actions. We came up with the following potential examples, which I've listed in chronological order by approximate year: