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"The overall effect of economic development is to greatly reduce fertility."
That's very interesting, why is that?
Educated women have less children, reduced childhood mortality means less hedging to reach a desired number of children, above-noted changes away from agriculture and mandatory public schooling reduce the economic value of child labor, some other stuff.
In response to
Some thoughts on having children
Also, deontic concerns about forcing existence on people.
As Apprentice points out the heritability of prosocial behaviors such as cooperativeness, empathy and altruism is 0.5, and I think most people here are aware that IQ has a heritability around that number as well and is a pretty good predictor of life outcomes. If you want to increase the number of people in the world that are like yourself, then having children is a great way of doing so.
I would submit that most people are not very good about judging whether they are prosocial geniuses. (This goes double for people who are likely to be reading this.)
Also: inasmuch as the problem with sperm (and egg) donation is lack at the demand rather than supply end, surely one should seek to enter in on the demand side. Perhaps you really are a prosocial genius, but surely you are not the prosocialest geniusest. You probably suck in other ways too.
Also: heritability is not contribution, but that's veering towards a debate we've had and mostly exhausted already.
Moreover, the people you would save by donating to charity would also have children and those children would have children all of whom might require yet more aid in the future. Thus the short term gains in QALYs that giving to GiveWell recommended charities provides lead to a long term drain of resources and human capital.
That "might" is doing a lot of work here. The overall effect of economic development is to greatly reduce fertility.
In response to
The selfish reason to write something for Ada Lovelace Day
Technically speaking, this seems like an altruistic reason to write something for Ada Lovelace Day, not a selfish one. Unless you're using the term in the trivial sense where "selfish reason to" is pleonastic.
In response to
Meetup : Washington DC Book Swap meetup
I won't be able to make it today, but I do promise to show up sometime soon so I can return the books I borrowed the last swap.
Albert Speer, Werner von Braun, Robert McNamara, John von Neumann and many others like them would likely qualify as "tech people". I'm terrified of people like them forming a stable and entrenched ruling caste, despite any "value overlap" they might display. Based on prior performance... I'd say it could potentially be just as bad as e.g. a Stalinist dictatorship.
For their part, Stalinists have tended to be fond of technical elites as well. However, I suspect that gristly examples may arise simply from the depth of the sample size; the innumerable cruelties of the premodern world, after all, we're chiefly overseen by humanistic elites. It may be that today humanistic values are substantially more weak and "feminine" (from the perspective of their predecessors,) but this may also be part of why existing power structures are less fond of employing them.
(All this, of course, assumes this is a useful dichotomy, the primary avenues for elite recruitment under modern liberalism are business and the legal profession, which straddle the line in some ways.)
In response to
Open thread, July 23-29, 2013
Can Blindsight-style Scramblers employ anthropic reasoning?
In response to
[Link] Cosmological Infancy
Some people believe that living today, assuming the growth of humankind, is an anthropic evidence that the end is near (otherwise we would be much more likely born later). If we apply the same thinking to the universe as a whole, and assume that if a species masters interstellar travel they can grow even more, it is an anthropic evidence that we will soon destroy the whole universe. Or at least that every species in our position either goes extinct or destroys the universe.
To try an optimistic interpretation, it is also possible that we will soon create a Friendly AI, which will discover that our extrapolated volition prefers preserving the existing minds to creating new ones, and since the energy of the universe is great but finite, creating new sapient beings will be forbidden to maximize the utility of the existing ones. Then the antropically most likely position is to be born a few decades before the Friendly AI is built.
(Anyone who takes this seriously, remember the Wizard's First Rule -- people will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. I provided both options here.)
Doesn't the anthropic principle provide some difficulty for the latter solution as well - why should we find ourselves at the very beginning of such preposterously long lifespans?
In response to
On manipulating others
So basically, my hypothesis is, the reason intelligent people are so often socially clumsy is because it's a facade, a self-imposed handicap they keep up because evolution has programmed us to have repulsion towards unfairly manipulating others. Because they can make others do anything, they choose to do nothing. This manifests as being easily led, a kind of "doormat", lacking their own will or ego, even.
This is more or less true of me, though I don't know why evolution is being singled out etiologically, it seems like even a blank slate mind could learn to be inhibited this way. Anyhow I avoid meeting people's eyes or generally looking at people's faces because my automatic inclinations are to nod along, smile, make them feel like I'm their ally &c., even when I don't actually agree with them or think what they're doing or saying is right. Like when someone tells a self-deprecating joke and they expect you to smile or laugh, or when they fish for a compliment, or when they tell you about something they think is important that you don't think is important. Those are obvious examples that everyone notices, but human conversation is chock full of subtler games that are harder to be reflective about and have bright line rules for. You either implicitly lie to them or you constantly disappoint them. This is extremely salient to me because I'm abnormally good at reading people's facial expressions. Not meeting their eyes and being generally evasive is a way to keep myself honest. I still stand by this decision, even if it means constantly handicapping my status, attractiveness, and generally my life. Integrity is important.
Having spoken with you in person (unaware that this was a consciously chosen practice) my experience was mostly that it was cognitively burdensome and that I was mostly worried for you. I suspect this isn't what you're shooting for! (I also classified it alongside my "Will is a troubled genius" model, which may or may not be what you're going for.)
My personal experience is that I tend towards terrible self-destructiveness when I don't get enough human warmth, so this strategy would not be a good debiaser for me. But if you can make it work... actually, this seems like a good thing to get external feedback on whether you make it work. Have you?
That would still not be good evidence that you have a low IQ, rather than just being a dick. Hanlon's razor only goes so far.
"Rather" my butt; there's an incredibly obvious rude reply I could have made, and would have, had I the minimal intelligence to realize it.
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Wait a minute does providing malaria nets or deworming kits lead to economic development?
Sure. Or more glibly, does malaria not inhibit economic development?