You know, it's funny - before typing that I thought to myself 'didn't I read about one very obscure tribe in the whole world & history which had managed to not believe that men impregnate women?' but after thinking about it for a little while and doing some Google searches, all I could think of was that weird tribe in Patrick Rothfuss's Kvothe fantasy novels who don't believe in 'man-mothers'.
Like Randy, I'm always a little skeptical of these things lest there be another Mead/Samoa incident, and assurances like
That’s right. The islanders do not believe that sex causes pregnancy. They don’t believe in physiological fatherhood. Malinowski was incredibly skeptical about this, so he tried all sorts of ways to see if this was simply a story they told, while they actually the real deal. But no, they assured him that it was really true, that all the white people who insisted otherwise were being silly, that the spirits caused pregnancy, not sex.
Don't necessarily resolve the issue especially since the data was from so long ago. But looking in Wikipedia, I see nothing disagreeing and an interesting mechanism:
Although an understanding of reproduction and modern medicine is widespread in Trobriand Society, their traditional beliefs have been remarkably resilient. The real cause of pregnancy is always a baloma, who is inserted into or enters the body of a woman, and without whose existence a woman could not become pregnant; all babies are made or come into existence (ibubulisi) in Tuma. These tenets form the main stratum of what can be termed popular or universal belief. If you question any man, woman, or even an intelligent child, you will obtain from him or her this information. In the past, many held this traditional belief because the yam, a major food of the island, included chemicals (phytoestrogens and plant sterols) whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy was not very evident.[2]
So it sounds genuine. Still, one indigenous group out of the many thousands studied demonstrates the point: everyone understands the connection between sex & pregnancy.
Giving dumb people cute robotic kids would not work. They would probably have sex anyway, which is the part we want to avoid here. It requires some intelligence to understand the relation between sex and reproduction, and even higher intelligence to remember it when the opportunity for sex becomes immediate.
Sex = pregnancy risk is pretty straightforward. You would have to be literally retarded to not appreciate it.
Pregnancy rates varying with IQ is more about culture and SES than "how girl get pragnant how is babby formed" - they get pregnant to hook their boyfriend, because the guy insisted on sex without protection, because unprotected sex is a sign of trust, because having a baby gives meaning to their life, because everyone else is, because they left contraception at home and the passion of the moment is too strong etc. (If these reasons are completely alien to you, well, that's an example of the culture thing. I found reading Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage really interesting.)
None of those are because they don't understand the "baby comes 9 months after sex with a man" theory; it's worth noting that even indigenous tribes suffering from iodine deficiency and endless infectious diseases and all sorts of problems like that all understand that sex causes pregnancy.
You might as well. I doubt you are going to change the prologue a lot this far into the game, if you do it's not that hard to change the prologue page, and every day you wait you are forfeiting some readers.
So you are incurring a sure loss in the name of avoiding a smaller unsure loss.
Changes made to future generations don't deprive you of conversational partners less than 20 years younger than you.
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...
He has probably memorized thousands of verses of poetry, for example.
Some Africans surely have - a specialist like a griot presumably would. But is that really comparable? Desrtopa presumably isn't a professional singer, storyteller/raconteur, comedian, or actor. He is, as far as I know, an ordinary person albeit a geeky and intelligent one.
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.)
I'm not sure I follow even with that explanation, but I've never really known what to make of the Nasuverse in the first place. ("This is so awesome!" "But also incredibly stupid." "But awesome!" "But stupid. And ad hoc. And ill-thought-out." "Aw, don't be like that, just enjoy the Rule of Cool.")
You're welcome. It's an interesting topic for considering how ems might evolve: can a roughly human architecture work nonstop? Or will ems have to make tradeoffs between reloading a 'clean' brain every X seconds and being able to learn from work?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html comes to mind. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/why-work-hour-limits.html also includes some interesting links.)
The benefit for you maybe - me, I like a ship with a lower Gini coefficient.