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Halfwit comments on Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition) - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.