I predict two problems (though problems are not limited to the first problems I predict).
Humans will dramatically overprice the "sacred" value of natural children. So any policy based on internalizing costs of a sacred value may mostly just make people pay costs, not change their behavior.
Dumb people are going to have kids. If the people least likely to change their behavior based on an incentive are also the ones being fined the most, you just go from having dumb people to having poor dumb people.
Dumb people should be given free computer games, so they don't have time to reproduce.
Imagine a monastery, just replace praying with playing. A place where people can move, play computer games all day long, and get free food. They can have competitions in the games, have status in the community based on their playing results (so they are emotionally motivated to play more), a small world separated from all the troubles of the outside world. A wireheading, without putting a wire to the head. In separate buildings for males and for females, aside from the rest of civilization. Voluntary participants.
I am not sure but I think that a eugenics-friendly billionaire could build such an institution now, legally.
Which is why we have the dysgenic trend of college degrees having a strong negative impact on female fertility.
Dumb people should be given free computer games, so they don't have time to reproduce.
Or, once technology is slightly more advanced, give them sexbots. You could also develop robot kids that were cuter and easier to take care of than real children, and give those to the dumb people. (I think some sci-fi story had cute robot kids causing the extinction of the human species, but I forget which one this was.)
Of course, this has the obvious problem that if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you're incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.
Giving mean people cute robotic kids might be a huge win. Designing and distributing kid-shaped robots which are optimized for attracting abuse would have a huge squick factor.
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.
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,...
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).
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.
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.
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.
Hell yeah.
That said, don't overestimate IQ relative to other important cognitive and behavioral traits.
being a chief in a neolithic tribal society still doesn't sound dramatically worse than being a village idiot in a civilised society
Until you get a toothache.
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.
Would you prefer to move to a world where the average IQ was lower than the current average?
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...
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.
How impressive do the children and grandchildren of Nobel laureates tend to be?
If you want to focus on the other end, a handful of high-status sociopaths can do a tremendous amount of damage. If there's a genetic component (maybe low empathy/high intelligence/high energy), would there be a way to discourage such people from being created?
ETA: add high dominance to the bad mix.
Because I don't think it's sufficiently widely appreciated, I'll quote the point from my comment here.
The difference is that with animal breeding you have a clear distinction between the people doing the breeding and the animals being bred. Humans breeding humans any attempt at being "scientific" is likely to collapse in the face of the resulting signaling games.
"including foregone income of a working parent"
NITPICK: This is fully internalised by the parent. The value they create but don't capture isn't though.
Emphasize exciting positive results. Replace coercion with market forces as much as possible. Don't spend any time and effort on culling after birth, rather emphasize drastically increasing the production of the kinds of people you want to add.
Have a character who is one of the last to have some difficult genetic disease. Have his parents as people who avoided fixing his embryo in utero for religious or other bad reasons.
Show the virtual eradication of poverty, not by decimating the ranks of poor children, but by multiplying the ranks of those who c...
Keep in mind if it is a story, the arc of the story doesn't have to be the arc you would think most likely given the sparse set of inputs you provide. 007 doesn't get all the girls because tuxedos, martinis, and overconfidence are insanely seductive, he gets them because he is written in to get them. I make this comment because I see other comments below considering what they can predict as results of various things. Yes, you want a story to be constrained by feeling somewhat real to your audience, but you don't want to lose 90% of your audience by nerd...
I know there are a lot of sci-fi writers on this website and their judgment is likely better than mine, but fictional eugenics doesn’t seem like very fertile ground for stories.
Most people think of eugenics as being very creepy and it would take a long time for a social norm like that to change, so a society that went for it would need to be a long way off in the future.
Workable genetic engineering isn’t that far off, and genetic engineering pretty much dominates eugenics. Why use the sperm of some noble prize winner you’ve never met when you could ju
How much selection pressure can you get if you're only selecting at the level of the gamete, and not at the level of the person or the gene? For example, given a man and a woman, suppose that you looked at 1 million of the man's sperm and picked the best (according to whatever criteria you're using), and you picked the best out of 100 of the woman's eggs, and you mated them. If that was how everyone reproduced, would that provide enough selection pressure to satisfy whatever goals you have for the gene pool?
If so, then a eugenics program would not need t...
to be interesting and sympathetic, and not to immediately pattern-match to a dystopia that kills everyone who doesn't look exactly alike.
One possibility is that a society that practiced genetics could actually make its population more diverse - a lot of modern human societies are really pretty homogeneous.
Such a society could also take steps to eliminate correlations between a person's superficial appearance and other abilities. For example, such a society could produce populations such that P(M|E) = P(M), where M="You win the Olympic Marathon" and E="You look like an Ethiopian".
I bet the story could get a lot of drama from asking the dramatic-question: How will X react to finding they're expected-negative/positive?
If they're expected negative, do they try and defy the prediction? does it help them exceed their "higher scored" peers? Or do they go off the deep end, risking all in mad shenanigans?
And so on and so forth.
not really related to eugenics, but this is an idea that reading this thread made me think.
since the SIAI would welcome more people like eliezer on board, and since people like eliezer willing to come on board seem to be hard to find, i'm wondering what if the smart people at SIAI could have kids who would have a good chance of contributing to the causes of the SIAI a lot, once they grew up.
it may be something like that is out of the question for many reasons, the least of which might be it just taking too many resources (monetary resources, emotional and...
If you only believe this GIVEN that some form of eugenics were unavoidable, you really should make it a lot clearer. In the other case, consider if you want that n a public website. "Eugenics" is one of them mindkilling words, mind the PR, etc.
I don't think this is very responsive to Yvain's request, either the sympathy or avoiding the pattern-match to coercive uniformity. Of course there is conflict with other goals, such as the system actually helping people, but quoting Yvain's challenge suggests you are trying it.
Asserting that eugenics done correctly would lead to diversity is the barest concession to Yvain's challenge, but I think it would take a lot to convince the reader. Economic reasoning is not at all sympathetic. Many people are bothered by real instances of privately paying people to be sterilized.
This is moving toward plausibility, but suppose eugenics is socially acceptable, but not a lot else has changed. In particular, the eugenics program has a short attention span, and both the goals and the methods tend to change in mere decades. At that point, I give up on the ability to predict.
Another sort of selection: arranged marriages. I assume they select for something, even if it's mostly status. I suspect they're also more likely to be concerned with whether a potential mate has dysfunctional relatives.
Cheating a little bit on the original question.
I would try to ensure that there is a period of relative equality of opportunity where everyone has a chance of achieving their life's goals. My personal preference would be a georgist policy of land taxation which is used to fund government and any surplus after that is redistributed to all adults. Extensive studies of pedagogical and other interventions that work might have to happen over there.
This would ensure the answering of one important question - under a relatively fair scenario, what can people produ...
Yvain asked:
So if you had to design a eugenics program, how would you do it? Be creative.
I'm asking because I'm working on writing about a fictional society that practices eugenics. I want them to be interesting and sympathetic, and not to immediately pattern-match to a dystopia that kills everyone who doesn't look exactly alike.
My reply was too long for LiveJournal, so I'm posting it here:
1. The real step 1 in any program like this would be to buy the 3 best modern textbooks on animal breeding and read them. (My grandfather is a researcher in this field so I'm unusually aware that it exists.)
2. If you give me genetic selection on multiple possible embryos where I can read off the genome of each one, I can do much better, much faster, than if I'm only allowed to look at the mother and father's genome and predict on that basis. If I can only look at the mother and father's relatives and life achievements, I do worse, but modern tech is very rapidly advancing to be able to read off the parents' genome cheaply.
3. If society's utility has a large component for genius production, then you probably want a very diverse mix of different high-IQ genes combined into different genotypes and phenotypes. (Although some recent research suggests that the most important thing for IQ may be avoiding mutational load, i.e., the modal genome would be super-von-Neumann. Even so, we'd want a diverse mix of everything else cognitive that wasn't about modality.)
4. Doing a Bayesian value-of-information calculation on rare alleles and potentially interesting allele combinations will automatically include a value for diversity into your eugenic program, based on the value of promoting a gene / combo in much larger numbers if that gene or gene combo is found to be successful. You would get much *more* interesting diversity in the next generation automatically, as many previously low-frequency alleles were combined in greater numbers and greater diversity than before. *Not* doing a value-of-info calculation accounts for a lot of the dystopic load of alleged dystopias.
5. The obvious basic instrument in a society depicted as well-intentioned would be an economic policy of trying to internalize the externalities of a child, just like a well-intentioned society might try to internalize the externalities of e.g. carbon dioxide emissions, instead of regulating/capping them directly, in order to maximize net social welfare. There would be a tax or benefit based on how much your child is expected to cost society (not just governmental costs in the form of health care, schooling etc., but costs to society in general, including foregone labor of a working parent, etc.) and how much that child is expected to benefit society (not lifetime tax revenue or lifetime earnings, but lifetime value generated - most economic actors only capture a fraction of the value they create). If it looks like you're going to have a valuable child, you get your benefit in the form of a large cash bonus up-front (love that hyperbolic discounting) and lots of free childcare so you can go on having more children. The marketed social goal would be to avert the modern trope where parenthood is this dreadful burdensome inconvenience compared to playing video games, and this is bad for society because society runs out of valuable future workers whose benefits-to-society the parents mostly don't capture. Probably the hard part from a marketing standpoint would be the proposal to do actual genetic calculations, even if it's to allegedly increase social benefit and prevent the system from being "exploited" (i.e. going dysgenic-Malthusian).
6. As suggested in an earlier comment, financializing progressive shares of future income (as diverted from tax streams, maybe) is an obvious way to privatize prediction, but only of tax streams, or at best revenue earned by the prospective individual. (I hadn't thought of this until I read that comment, so credit where it's due.)
7. Taxes on expected-negative kids are more icky but would still have the obvious economic justification. A nicer-sounding way of framing it would be requiring parents to post bond corresponding to the baseline government cost of each child in schooling and healthcare, with expected value potentially helping to make up the bond. An interesting question is whether anyone would really work out to expected-net-negative under this system, which question is isomorphic to asking whether it ever makes selfish sense for a country to restrict immigration. But adding at least some burden here makes sense from a cognitive perspective, because adding a cost is better at shaping behavior than adding a potentially foregone benefit.
8. The incentive for e.g. taking advantage of sperm banks is automatic in this system - you can either pay a bunch of money to have a kid with your current husband, or you can be paid thousands of dollars and get free child care to be inseminated by the sperm of a Nobel winner who never had to diet. I think that, in practice, the basic test of a system like this would be whether it could get people to go over the inconvenience threshold of actually using sperm banks and egg donors.
9. More interestingly, there's a built-in incentive for most people to have daughters rather than sons under this system. If we take the expected externalities of grandchildren into account in calculating the expected externalities of a child, then daughters can bear children using the best sperm via gene banks, while men have a harder time getting at the best eggs, making the grandchildren of daughters much more valuable if you'll assume they'll all be Nobel-laureate-descendants. Daughters also add more marginal children to society than sons, since adding another son does not increase the marginal reproductive capacity of society unless single women aren't willing to reproduce using sperm banks (even taking into account subsidized childcare) and the polyamory factor has gone over what women with children are willing to tolerate. So if grandchildren are net positive, daughters are more marginally valuable to society until the sex ratio has gone well over 1:1. This is leaving aside generally larger criminal downsides of men, the fact that men do worse in school (which may be a mere artifact of our horror of a school system), and so on. However, if the sex ratio becomes very extreme and the system is supposed to stick around for many generations, then most of the males generated will be by people defying system incentives; and unless very few women reproduce with those males, there will be a large selective advantage for having sons outside the system. I.e., the system will be selecting for those who defy its incentives, which is a key design criterion for avoiding. (Though on yet further reflection, if there are many males with suboptimal genetics being produced and then reproducing, child-value calculations would rapidly yield the social advice to start birthing more above-average males even if they won't win the sperm-bank contest; and if women have a strong preference for present fathers, you could directly calculate that as social value as well as a factor in calculating expected genetic impact of males.)
10. In the end, all of this just adds up to, "If you can correctly internalize these externalities, the following social welfare factor will be increased..." and the key part is of course that "If".