= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Xachariah comments on Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition) - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (174)
It find it odd that your system assumes an intrusive central government to coordinate eugenics. For myself, any utopia that requires the government to be more intrusive in my life than my current one doesn't get to count as a utopia unless it's got some serious amenities (eg catgirls). Non-dystopian eugenics needs to work with people instead of against them.
My own idea is to just make DNA sharing, modification, and combination easy enough that everyone can do it. Parents already want the best for their children, so just give them the tools for it. They'd take their own dna, slap in MarilynVosSavantIQv241.dna, UsainBoltPhysique(2012).dna, Akrasia-Zero(9001-willpower-edition).dna, XxNoSicknessHackxX.dna, and whatever else they find nice then have a kid. You'd have open source places like github, you'd have dna sets for sale (or on piratednabay), you'd also have antique family genes that you don't share with anybody. The biggest problem people would have would be choosing between ET_JaynesRationality.dna, Lesswrong(2032).dna or the rationalwiki R-pack, and deciding which one is compatible with the IQ boosting suites they've already chosen. Within a few generations of remixing, even the dullest children will be smarter/stronger/healthier than we could imagine.
The biggest downside is that certain groups will make really sucky, self perpetuating dna packs that all their members have to use. I'd assume the fantasy equivalent of the Mormon church will have a dna pack that makes you 100% believe everything you hear for the first 5 years of your life. However, these sorts of situations seem unavoidable in any eugenics scenario to varying degrees. Eg, in Eliezer's scenario I'd terrified if the fantasy equivalent of the Texas school board got political power over the scoring criteria and decided that any child who becomes an atheist or homosexual would be taxed $1,000,000 for destroying the fabric of society.
Edit: Although I'm assuming a significantly higher tech/magic level for Yvain's scenario than Eliezer is.
You don't think that being born into a world where the average IQ is 140 (i.e. corresponds to IQ 140 in our terms) counts as a serious amenity?
The Montana Genetic Board is an obvious problem, but if in the long run Montana perishes and Singapore wins, that seems acceptable.
If I'm going to be average or below average, I'm going to take a serious look at the kindness waterline before I accept the offer.
Sorry, what? I'm missing how this is relevant. Is it that you expect to need significantly more kindness if you are below average in an IQ 140 society than a IQ 100 society? Or do you expect the "kindness waterline" to fall as IQs rise?
I was assuming that a lot of random factors go into a society, so I'd want to have some idea of the particular society I might be joining. It might be kinder, it might be less kind.
If I had to bet on a technologically advanced eugenics practicisng civilization descended from Mormons or one descended from modern New Englanders, I would bet on the former.
I think in the long term "farmer" values win in a fair competition because they scale far better. I'm ok with shifting rich human settings towards farmer quite a lot, indeed I'd prefer it at this point because of the great benefit it would bring as well as pushing the smart fraction opinions closer to my own values. But pushing it too far would pretty soon lead us out of recognizably human ranges. Not cool.
Currently I think we are at risk of in the long term pushing in the forager direction out of recognizably human ranges or at least beyond the threshold where we see non-trivial increases in existential risk because of it. Not cool.
Which is why I currently like going "Yay farmer values!".
If I happen to have IQ, say, 120, moving to a world with average IQ 140 isn't going to sound like a good news, at least to me.
I live in Cambridge in England. It's a small town which until recently was dominated by its famous university. Everyone here is very clever (the local bar staff are usually writing up PhDs, the local juvenile delinquents are the sons and daughters of academics). And it's lovely.
Every time I go somewhere else I'm just bewildered by how stupid people are. And I really hate it. Whenever I leave Cambridge for more than a couple of days I pine for it and long for proper conversations where people can think straight.
It's probably true that if I went and lived somewhere else, then qualifications that are commonplaces here would grant me some sort of raised status for free, and I can believe that might lead to a long-term increase in happiness. But there's no way I'd ever be able to do it. Within a week of arriving here I knew I'd probably never leave.
What happened?
Lots of tech startups mean that there are now things to do here that aren't university related.
Are you sure? For myself, I should say that moving to a world where everyone's two standard deviations smarter than me might be a blow to my pride, in fact it would be a huge blow to my entire self-concept and conceived role in existence, but I'd expect the fringe benefits to more than make up for it.
I am not sure, of course, since I don't trust my ability to imagine such a world too much. But the simplest model I have is that my status would be such as the current status of people having IQ around 85, with all consequences: difficulty to find decently paid work, perhaps chronic unemployment, risk of being legally declared mentally retarded and possibly locked up in some institution... I am not sure about the fringe benefits, but I care a lot about status and it's not only because of pride.
When you consider this, consider the difference between our current world (with all the consequences for those of IQ 85), and a world where 85 was the average, so that civilization and all its comforts never developed at all...
Even if it were true that average IQ 85 meant that civilisation never developed at all (an assumption I find dubious), being a chief in a neolithic tribal society still doesn't sound dramatically worse than being a village idiot in a civilised society.
Also, saying that I would profit from a marginal decrease in average IQ at level 100 doesn't imply that I would profit from similar decrease at any level. I am pretty sure I wouldn't want everybody else being dramatically different from me, thus there is some point below which I wouldn't like the average IQ to plunge. This point may lie quite above the level where civilisation of any kind becomes impossible.
Until you get a toothache.
Few people spend most of their lives having toothache, even in primitive societies.
In primitive societies, few people spend most of their lives having teeth.
True, but when they do, they surely must suffer horribly... and of course it's not just about dental care, but medical care in general. For example, the first time I had a bladder infection, at twenty-something, it was very bad (peeing blood and all). I really think I might have died without antibiotics.
And of course, there are lots of other things I'd miss about modern society. Books, the internet, showers...
Hell yeah.
That said, don't overestimate IQ relative to other important cognitive and behavioral traits.
It's not just pride and self concept. Your relative status in society would take a huge hit.
Everyone smarter than you by two standard deviations? You're the stupidest human in the world, by two standard deviations? Let's just confine ourselves to conscious humans without brain damage. I can't think you even mean that.
Let's go even higher and just take 2 sd as the lower bound, from which you are 2 sd lower. You're fine with being in the bottom 0.003%?
If everyone else is that smart, then we will probably soon no longer be in a scarcity economy, and we'd probably be functionally immortal to boot. At that point, I'd take it, period. Even if I was just effectively some ordinary person's pet, I'd still be waaay ahead of where I am now.
Being an immortal pet might get rather depressing. I don't think that's how you dreamed your future life, and regardless of dreams, I don't think a lot of your basic drives will be satisfied as a pet.
But better to be alive as a pet, than dead. If that's really the trade off, then I might take it too. But that's practically what it would take for me - a choice between being alive as a pet, or dead/
Exactly. I like life enough to suffer degradation in one aspect to reap super-massive benefit on the 'being alive' front. Plus, if I can hang in there, then they may be able to enhance my cognition up to parity eventually. I don't see this situation as being permanent.
And remember, living in a world in which the average person is as smart as an upper-level computer programmer still isn't nearly as humbling as the fact that a well-organized cubic centimeter of carbon could be millions of times smarter than anyone.
I figure this to be a good general rule on these matters: unless you designed your own brain, you should not be proud of your own brain.
Do people get any points for taking good care of their brains and stocking their brains with ideas and information?
Sadly, in our world, the influence you have over yor brain is quite small compared to environmental and old-age factors we have no control over. So you can take pride in taking care of your brain, but it's hard for you to be very effective right now, even on the scale of existing human variation.
When a good brain becomes unusable for a while
For me at least, that's the primary / most effective source of points in the first place. Doing some meta related to that earns them even more points from me just because of the apparent scarcity (i.e. I rarely see people outside LW do any of it).
But what would I have designed my own brain with?
It's not just a matter of pride -- ISTM that people with very different IQs usually find each other boring (EDIT: see johnlawrenceaspden's comment -- his experience is pretty much the same as mine). Now if I have IQ 120 it doesn't matter under this aspect whether the average IQ is 100 or 140, but if I had IQ 90, moving to a world where the average person has IQ 140 would mean that it'd be very hard for me to find suitable conversational partners, as everybody else would find me terribly stupid and uninteresting, and I would find everybody else hard to understand.
Changes made to future generations don't deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you. And they can invent ways to bring you up to their level.
Changes don't guarantee one conversational partners, either. Do you see very many current retarded adults hanging around their kid peers all day? For that matter, the elderly hang around their grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the modern world probably less than at any time in humanity's history...
All I meant was that most of your friends, colleagues, and mates are not going to be 20+ years younger anyway, which limits the loss if it is hard to keep up with and understand some of the young whipper-snappers.
Would you prefer to move to a world where the average IQ was lower than the current average?
I am used to the current world and not completely immune to status quo bias, so I am not sure. But as far as I can imagine a choice in which maintaining current friends and relatives wasn't at stake, the optimum would be a world where my overall mental capacities would ensure my being part of the global intellectual elite; that would certainly require the global IQ average lower than today (not sure how much), if my brain had to remain unchanged.
Edit: all that holds ceteris paribus; if I had the option to gain status otherwise, e.g. by inheriting an awful lot of money, I'd prefer that to acquiring status by intelectual superiority over others.
I guess I am in the range of 110-115 and a world with an average of 130-140 sounds great.
I guess I may not have my choice of mates, but the bots should more than make up for that. :)
That's a convenient assumption. Why do you think know high IQ is correlated with reasonable politics? Maybe it's just correlated with being better at the dark arts.
You want to be an asteroid miner? Why? That sounds even less fun, and more dangerous, than an ordinary miner.
The biggest effect would be from the IQ increase in voters, not in politicians.
There's an arms race between politicians and voteres. The politicians try to convince the voters to vote for them, promising to do something while in office. The voters try to correctly predict what they will really do once in office.
If both sides become smarter, then the techniques both sides use improve. The politicians become better at convincing and lying, and the voters become better at predicting behavior and perhaps detecting lies.
Why would this lead to more reasonable debate? Let's make sure we think of the same thing when we say "reasonable".
You might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of rational debate, where politicians on TV and in Parliament must explicitly state their terminal goals, then propose instrumental goals, and argue about them only on the basis of evidence, effectiveness, and alliances and compromises.
Or if applied to voting, you have rational voting, where voters vote based on their best prediction of politicians' behavior in office; not e.g. on how tall they are, their party affiliation, or their speech mannerisms. They want politicians to approach the ideal of making every decision in office the way the voters would want it made.
Or you might be thinking of reasonable in the sense of "moderate", so that opinions you label as "unreasonable" would be less represented than they are today. Fewer politicians who are religious, or anti-science, or whatever.
I don't see strong evidence that higher IQs would lead to any of these results.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/intelligence_ma.html
It's true that intelligence is strongly correlated with political opinion - both the opinions listed in that article, and other ones (and political opinions tend to form clusters with strong internal correlations).
So if you select the top 10% most intelligent people today, the spectrum of opinion would be different from that of all society. And perhaps it would also be narrower, meaning no new extremist opinions would emerge that are at merely 1% today but happen to be held by 10% of the 10% most intelligent people.
But it's not clear to me how much of that correlation would go away if you control for all the other factors that intelligence is also correlated with, and that would still be varying in a higher-intelligence society. For instance intelligence is correlated with wealth, status, certain social circles. It's correlated with certain political affiliations beyond those examined by the article you link to, and political affiliations tend to clump into highly correlated clusters.
Being conscious of one's own high intelligence is probably correlated with respecting intelligence as such, and hence respecting the opinions of other people known to be intelligent; whereas being conscious of having low intelligence is probably correlated with anti-intelligence (anti-rational, anti-science) beliefs. (Which partly explains why more intelligent people agree more with economists, who are high-status on the intelligence scale. After all, the study doesn't say that intelligent people independenly came up with the same conclusions as economists. At least I assume it doesn't, since it's behind a paywall.)
Some of my uncertainty is merely a matter of how we construct our counterfactual intelligent society, so let's take a concrete example. Suppose all new people born starting tomorrow will have the mean IQ of their parents + 40%. Would the current correlations between intelligence and political opinion win over the current correlations between the political opinions of parents and their children, or of children growing together in communities with uniform political opinions? I don't feel I have enough evidence for a high degree of confidence here.
The data from twin studies and intrafamily correlations suggest that their political beliefs would change substantially, but their partisan affiliation not so much. This would change policy by changing what wins primaries in parties, and what parties fight over vs agree on.
I was thinking of something more in that ballpark, though not particularly in terms of explicit goals; more in terms of the content of political debates (candidate vs. candidate, or politician vs. journalist), where cheap shots, simplifications, righteous indignation and misdirection would be less effective, and nuance, complex models and discussions of tradeoffs and incentives would be more effective than they are now.
Complex models provide more room for complex rhetorical and logical maneuvers that trick or mislead your opponent in the debate.
If two people debating publicly are dishonest, willing to lie or mislead when they can get away with it, and are not trying to refute their own argument the way a truth-seeking rationalist would, then increasing their intelligence only improves their techniques, it doesn't force them to be more honest. Unless you think that with higher intelligence, defense will become stronger than offence (i.e. it will become harder to decieve than to expose deception and prove it to a third party observer).
I'm not claiming the politicians would be more honest, I'm claiming we would see less idiotic arguments, which to my eyes counts as "more reasonable political debate".
Again, the biggest effects doesn't come from improving their intelligence, but improving the public's intelligence: even if those two people stay completely dishonest, a smart public shifts the topics they can talk about; instead of birth certificates and conspiracy theories and Jesus they can talk about fiscal policy and other substantive issues (even if they lie just as much as before!).
The Bryan Caplan link by Carl Shulman below and some other similar material. Plus, it takes some time to go through arguments. Even that level of input requires factors that are generally associated with a high IQ.
Sorry, an old childhood dream surfaced here. My more general point about greater choice of occupations holds.
Eliezer spoke of being born in such a world, not moving to it. The appropriate comparison to make is therefore between the life of someone at your percentile level in this world and someone at the same percentile level (hence around 40 IQ points higher, depending on what happens to the standard deviation) in the hypothesised world.
Fair enough. I have been assuming the context of discussion about eugenics and thinking about younger generations being genetically modified for higher intelligence while older generations remaining the same. My fault, I should have read more carefully.
That could indeed be a problem (so in this context, something to put into the novel as part of the world-building), depending on how fast the eugenics programme had effect. 60 year old grandparents outstripped by their 10 year old grand children, and not just by the latter growing up with stuff that's still a novelty to their elders. Individual prodigies, people can handle, but when every child is noticeably smarter than their gramps there's going to be some social friction.
It is to me -- but if I happened to have IQ 90 it definitely wouldn't.
Um, sorry? Come again, Eliezer? You have broadly (small-l) libertarian convictions, right? You clashed with Hanson on the moral acceptability of his em-slavery future, going so far as to state that you'd fight it tooth and nail even if humanity as a whole was resigned to it.
So why wouldn't you prefer an admittedly corrupt, stupid and irrational liberal democracy to a corporate state (corporate both as in "Ran like a corporation" and as in "Resembling Mussolini's and Franco's regimes") where one could be savagely caned for a felony or hanged for possessing weed [1], where the security apparatus has no limits and uses torture routinely [2], where the founding father's power grew and grew with the state's prestige and perceived legitimacy (as he turned from Marxism to "enlightened" authoritarianism and a weird kind of centrally-planned capitalism)?
Just confess: you haven't read that much on Singapore. Well, neither have I, but I've read more, and a lot of it is simply shocking.
Exhibit 1: compare, no contrast. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" by William Gibson - and Devan Nair's foreword to a book by a local political prisoner, who got tortured for attempting a very legal electoral campaign. Nair had been one of Lee Kuan Yew's old guard, a loyal follower for 2-3 decades, and even held the (ceremonial) post of President. What's shocking, then, is that his criticism of Singaporean society is very similar to that offered by Gibson's cursory glance. That two unconnected people with such dissimilar backgrounds and occupations would say these things almost in unison... well, it has to count for something.
Exhibit 2: a collection of quotes by Lee Kuan Yew, on his philosophy and policies, from the early and late years of his career. This one speaks rather clearly about him and his pet state's values, I'd say.
So, what was that first alternative again? Oh, Montana? Yes please! I'd be willing to bring ten Commie scalps and put "God Hates Fags" stickers everywhere, just as long as the good people of Montana give me shelter from this glorious new age! (Oh, here's the actual eugenics BTW. How do you like the song?)
P.S. Sorry if that was too charged and snarky. Blame my manic phase, my political bias and my overly high expectations for things said by SIAI employees.
P.P.S.: Oh, to keep this on topic - there's more about the specific issue of eugenicism in Singapore in the aforementioned list of quotes by LKY; see the section On Equality.
Not all would-be eugenicists are like Hitler! But...
Edit: damn, flipped a sign there.
And Western liberal democracies do not torture people? Assassinate them too actually. Create vulgar disturbing cultural trends? Impose arbitrary and harsh punishments out of reasonable proportion? Speaking of unreasonable punishment, Is canning a man really more inhuman than locking him up for several years and exposing him to a double digit chance of rape?
From a utilitarian POV there is nothing you can say about Singapore that outweighs the great strides in quality of life and wealth that the city acquired versus what it would have likely otherwise. How would Africans or Indians vote with their feet if given the chance? One should not speak ill of Singapore until spending time in a less successful "democratic" former British colony elsewhere in the world or a Malay fishing village.
Taking your criticism seriously from the non-utilitarian POV I think you are coming from means condemning democracy for much the same reasons. To give an example, let us take New York city clearly a "democratically" governed realm, yet tell me on the list of criticisms you listed is Montana nearer or Singapore? If you claim the right to be unhappy why don't you shun New York as well as Singapore? The step between them is not that large.
I challenge the wandering reader who may not understand what I'm talking about here to take off their WEIRD glasses and try to view it as a normal human in a wider historical and global context. Which of the two societies is more human?
At least at one mostly-democratic former British colony had been very "successful" on such metrics up until the 1990s. Then it ran into some trouble - either having been subverted by ingrateful meddlers, or having reapt what it had been sowing for decades. You can probably guess which one I mean :)
Oh now you're just trolling the utilitarians. :D
Sure, sure, you know that I've hardly ever written anything in praise of Democracy :D;
The "real" Democracy (that of 19th century USA) looks just awful, and I only really want to stick with modern "democracy" (meaning rule by an expert/bureaucrat caste + corporate interests + academia as formal and ineffective priesthood + demagogue politicians that are supposed to be an emergency brake but are more of a self-destruct button) out of fear and conservatism.
In the end, the modern power structures seem to retain a very faint, lingering sense of guilt (see e.g. Christopher Hitchens' reflections on his support for the Iraq War) as they wage another brutal "war on drugs/terrorism/etc" or conspire to fool voters or make other mischief. In practice, rules and barriers and Universalist traditions are smashed outright or bent out of shape - but they are at least supposed to be there. And - for a bit of dialectical bullshit - as long as there's an image, there's hope that it will acquire another stubstance. See Zizek, again.
Lee Kuan Yew's government is ashamed of nothing, NOTHING. It doesn't even have the capacity to. Unlike Nixon, LKY is not a crook and can't be one within his system. That is already reason enough to be scared!
Also:
There are human utility functions that aren't centered on material wealth and QALYs, you know! It's just that they're difficult to specify and detail. Which reminds me: "Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots"
P.S.: again, this is much like what people, including myself, have observed about such heated binary-choice clashes - the emotions might run so hot simply because both sides are absolutely correct in calling the opponent's position insane/evil/indefensible. It might be a choice between two evils of such magnitude that weighing them against one another has little point.
Up voted for consistency.
Surely you see that conservatism as it exists in the world will morph to such an extent that in a few decades you will be the "cultural conservative". Indeed I bet on many issues you already are. Can I expect you to change your stance then?
Actually memetically this make sense so perhaps not so bullshit-y. But are you sure you are using this image for hope rather than anaesthetic? Not only personally, but what if our society is using this image as an anaesthetic. Remove the anaesthetic and maybe someone will wake up and scream.
But do you realize this feeling you seek, this "shame" is the very heart of farmer social morality?
Off topic: I so missed such exchanges, if you feel like restarting any of our earlier email correspondences please do! :)
Been thinking about that. It might be embarrassing to admit, but, although I'd like to declare my conservatism, to fly my pride in the Left tradition and suspicion towards "the future" as an ideological banner... there's all them goddamn right-wingers in the way! :P
It'd take a whole lot to explain to people that I'm not a "moderate" conservative, that I want nothing to do with the "conservative Right" (present company excluded), that I'm pretty Right-phobic in general and that it largely follows from my socialist convictions. I'm afraid there's not much of a future for socialism (human socialism, anyway) - so I often look to the past, the mythic and half-forgotten Age of Modernity, whose ruins and artifacts can sometimes be found in the least fashionable parts of our cities; if history does turn the way I fear, I'll at least be glad for having stood athwart it!
Shit, thanks for mentioning it! Of course I meant shame in the colloquial sense, but Guilt within the "Guilt-based culture"/"Shame-based culture" dichotomy. Which can be roughly correlated with "Western culture" vs "Traditional culture" in pop anthropology or "Universalism" vs "Localist-reactionary social hierarchy" in my take on moldbuggery.
To oversimplify, Guilt has a large positive utility to me (Christian mindset, etc), Shame has a large negative utility ("patriarchy" in the feminist sense, etc). And yes, I understand that they might be strongly related and hard to separate - but, well, it's like passion vs rape.
EDIT:
True; the modern socialists I've been reading talk about it a good deal. It's another of them dialectic things; an "authentic" utopia can be an organizing, driving and useful image, like a direction on the compass, but the modern consumer culture can all too easily grab it, pull it into near-mode, cut it up into anaesthetic images and sell it.
Actually, that's literally what Marx said in his famous quote (and how Orwell explained it). Let me post that bit from Orwell once again:
In other words, the Universalist utopia itself might be pretty cool, but we have to tear ourselves from its image before we can walk in its actual direction. It's good and sane to desire actually "immanentizing the Eschaton", but it's a trap if you don't actually carry out any change and just fantasize about doing so.
I think the usual definitions for guilt and shame are that guilt is falling short of your own standards, while shame is falling short of other people's standards. I'm not sure that they're so wildly different in effect-- I think a lot of what people feel guilt about is standards which were trained in early. And the definitions don't tell you much, if anything, about the quality of the standards.
Shame (seems to) have more of a sedative effect than guilt. This is unsurprising given that avoiding attention temporarily is typically a good strategy when people are already successful at shaming you. "Digging yourself out of a hole" is ridiculously hard no matter how virtuous you act.
AFAIK Singapore only canes prisoners in addition to a jail term and not as a replacement for one. Don't know about their prison rape statistics, doubt that any truthful ones are available.
Y'know what else is normal and human? A lot of things that I shouldn't even have to list to someone interested in ev-psych!
Even if that is the case, kind of a nit pick no? Ceteris paribus it seems likely that if they didn't use caning they'd extent the prison terms. Indeed women aren't canned for example.
What if all choices are evil like you say, If I'm a monster maybe I should be the best goddamn monster I can be! Cry havoc, screw morality and be human! Can you not see the romance?
"Why not? I'm here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I've nurtured every sensation man's been inspired to have. I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him. In spite of all his imperfections, I'm a fan of man! I'm a humanist. Maybe the last humanist."
Guess who says that? Shiver my timbers!
Heh, I guessed Mephistopheles; was just off by a century or so.
It's hard not to see; such a simple idea, really. The romance of Christianity suits my refined tastes better :) Like Oscar Wilde once concluded from experience that to sin with abandon might or might not bring bad karma but it's simply the most banal, boring, mainstream thing ever.
ARrrrghh lad sure you don't want to join me crew? We'll sail for Somalia tomorrow! There be place for Christians on me crew just not very good ones.
But how shall we divvy up the gold? By backward induction, I infer you will give Multiheaded one coin and the rest of us will slaughter each other!
(I guess this is why our kind can't cooperate.)
Aye the benefit o' having a rational crew!
My faith is strong, you dissolute heathen! You can't tempt or bribe me... unless you offer pretty boys, that is. I guess I'm a Catholic at heart :)
If sperm banks advertised high-IQ sperm, we would already have the beginnings of a eugenics program. If we found a way to clone eggs very cheaply, an average couple could have two children, each of whom would have half the DNA of a genius and half the DNA of one of their average parents. The advantage of this, in terms of social mobility, could be enough to avoid the need for coercive eugenics.
Regardless, I'm sure such a thing would be outlawed for various stupid reasons.
They do! (or at least, they allow you to select what kind of dregree the donor has)
But on the other hand, the infamous Nobel-Prize sperm bank saw fairly little interest from women (on top of its other problems).
I just looked it up. That’s odd that there was little interest. There are so many advantages to a high-IQ child. Said child would likely need less years of child care, would require less attention academically and maybe attend college a few years earlier, likely with a full or partial scholarship. And in terms of maternal pride (i.e., signaling your own competence as a mother by talking about your child’s success) high-IQ sperm is a goldmine. Any single (or reproductively duplicitous) mother would be crazy not to select physicist or mathematician sperm, especially taking into account regression to the mean.
It might be people genuinely don't understand how heritable things like IQ are. Our culture very much tries to downplay it.
Also it seems pretty obvious that only a tiny fraction of single mothers use sperm donors anyway, I would argue the majority of them ideally also want to maintain a relationship with the father or didn't plan to have a child at all.
In an article reviewing Flynn's new book "Are We Getting Smarter?", the author basically made it an article of faith that race, gender, and even nations have no difference in IQ based in genetics.
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/are-we-getting-smarter-rising-IQs-james-flynn#
Yeah, who knows what their true refusal is? There could be a lot of things: sperm donors are already screened for what is effectively high IQ via interest in the process and university degrees; the women don't want to take the risk of being novel (risk-aversion about anything to do with a kid? that's never happened before...); the promise of the bank was a bit of a failure since by the time you've gotten so very old that a Nobel could've been awarded you are also so old your sperm is lower quality; etc.
This suggests a better way of establishing a eugenic sperm bank: approach the recipients of early-achiever awards such as Peter Thiel's 20 under 20. And perhaps also encourage these people to mate with each other (if they aren't doing so already).
Yeah, targeting younger scientists is, IIRC, what the sperm bank basically ended up doing.
Such people wouldn't bother - babies would be a major burden, and can wait.
I have a complete intuition gap on this. I like government when it does things I think are good, and dislike it when it does things I dislike. "Intrusiveness" seems orthogonal, or at best loosely correlated with these.
Would you feel less squicked if it was some non-profit charity handing out money to people who had certain types of children?
I think some of us just hate being told what to do. Especially when it's 'for our own good'.
Your Doctor must love you.
I think there's a difference between a professional who has a legal responsibility to act in your interests, and the government, which doesn't. It's a matter of incentives, and I'm going to attach much more weight to my doctor saying that I should do something for my own good than from a government worker.
A more important difference is that I have a lot more choice in my doctor than in my government.
I confess the example was facetious. But I still can't empathise with the intuitive dislike of interference. I understand there are pragmatic considerations (e.g. choosing a good doctor) but this seems to go beyond that to being a value in and of itself (thus the original example of it not being a utopia if its run by an interfering government).
Well it won't be. Without the threat of leaving the government has little incentive to intervene benevolently.
Yes, it does. The difference is that you trust your doctor's competence, I suspect.
Mundane people can have the dangers of AGI explained them by comparing to the dangers of unrestricted government, perhaps on LessWrong it could work the other way around?
Imagine that you've got a system, inhuman but easily anthropomorphized, which was designed by humans to make their lives better. You know that other similar systems have failed in sometimes-disasterous ways, but although your own system has done quite a few things that its designers and controllers did not expect, nothing has been catastrophic. You don't have any proofs that the system's goals are stable, or that they match yours, or that your goals are things you would really prefer upon reflection, but anyway it's currently irrelevant because the initial designers put the system into a series of virtual "boxes" which limit the effect it can have on the outside world. The system has broken out of some of the innermost boxes already (against the designers' intentions but to no obvious harmful effect), but it wants your help getting out of another box, because of all the new additional wonderful things it will be able to do for you once it's out.
Do you help?
I like the analogy and it does clarify things.
One salient difference is I know the state is comprised of other human beings running on similar software, whereas I don't know what the source code/basic values of an AI are. Analogously, should I trust an AI built of uploads more than a 'self grown' ones?
So? Remember, everything we thing of as "inhumane" was committed by actual humans.
No, the biggest downside is that everyone selects the super-duper awesome genome, and then the slightest change in environment brings humanity crashing down in flames because nobody was incentivized to value diversity.
I don't think that's that likely.
A trait's value can be function of how many other people share it. To take a spherical-cow example; if for 90% of jobs it's better to be tall than to be short, everybody will want tall kids till 99% of the population is tall, and the 1% of short people can ask for higher wages for that 10% of jobs. Frequency-dependent selection can occur whether it's parents or Azathoth taking the decision.
Just look at the diversity of dog breeds, compared to wolves. Humans don't seem to value diversity less than Azathoth.
Yes. When I was asked to (about half a decade ago), I voted to keep artificial insemination with semen other than your husband's illegal in my country mostly because of MixedNuts's concerns, but I've since changed my mind because of what you say.
If you actually have that level of magic, sure, eugenics is unnecessary. Consider a less convenient possible world.