Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

An exploding generational bomb

MAY 15, 2023

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I.
Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of
Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a
brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven’t heard it before:
Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things.
But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe
that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil
things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t
bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad.
What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
Adraste: Like what?
Beroe: Let’s say - financial incentives for the most talented people to have lots of
children. Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank, where people with great
socially-valuable gifts are encouraged to deposit gametes, and couples who can’t
conceive naturally - maybe infertile people, maybe lesbians - are encouraged to
make use of them. And making voluntary contraception free and easily available,
since by far the most common reason for the less-genetically-blessed part of the
population having children is that they want contraceptives but can’t access them.
Adraste: Oh, interesting. I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along
the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money
to undergo voluntary sterilization”. But of course there are many things we don’t
allow people to offer other people money for. Like sex work. Or organ donation.
Although people are allowed to have sex and donate organs for free, we think the
desperation of poverty is so compelling, and the danger of these irreversible actions
so great, that we ban seemingly-voluntary economic transactions around them. Call
me a BETA-MEALR, but I think sterilization should be in the same category. Still, your
suggestion avoided that, so good job.
Beroe: I take it you will shortly find some other objection, though.
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th
century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust
eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity 1, but even if we restrict the label to
the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about
300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral
system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people.
Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really
wasn’t 2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even
genetic.
Beroe: Blindness, wow. I’d only heard about the cases around mental disabilities.
Adraste: Ah yes, mental disabilities. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the
case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully
constitutional. She was sterilized for a mental disability. . . after making the honor roll
at her school! Probably a family member raped her, and the family was trying to save
their reputation and prevent any further inconvenient pregnancies. Then they
sterilized her sister, on the grounds that she was related to Carrie and so probably
had the same genes. Nobody knows how many of the hundred-thousand-odd
forced sterilizations in the US were like this. Probably a lot. Again, not that it would
have been any better if they were all real disability cases - just that the sheer
incompetence and callousness of the people charged with making these life-ruining
decisions is impossible to overestimate.
Beroe: But Galton was -
Adraste: - against this kind of thing. Which brings me back to my objection to your
seemingly-compassionate-and-sensible eugenics proposal. Francis Galton said we
should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way 3. People
listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and
horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and
scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned. People roll
their eyes at slippery slopes, but some slopes are genuinely slippery, and the slope
from “thinks about eugenics at all” to “involuntary sterilization campaign” seems
steep enough that I would just rather people not think about eugenics at all.
Beroe: If I understand you right, you’re saying that some things are so bad that we
must ban not only the bad thing, but also innocent things that bad people could use
to promote the bad thing. This seems to grant you, as arbiter of which things are too
close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power. As I said before,
Islam has been used by bad people to promote bad things. Some people would be
very happy if we banned Islam. Should we?
Adraste: You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t
escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion.
Banning Islam has few benefits and many costs. It violates religious freedom. It
perpetuates racist stereotypes. You couldn’t do it if you tried, plus a billion people
would declare jihad on you. And the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t commit
terrorist acts anyway. Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory
requires minimal effort to maintain. Rolling it back has many costs and few benefits. I
say keep it banned.
Beroe: You can’t assess idea how many benefits it does or doesn’t have, because
your principle commits you to putting your fingers in your ears and saying “la la la I
can’t hear you” whenever someone discusses the issue. Consider Garrett Jones’
hypothesis that most international differences - eg between developed and
underdeveloped countries - are due to IQ. And consider that IQ is mostly genetic
and could be improved with eugenics. Bringing all underdeveloped countries up to
First World living standards would be the most valuable thing humanity has ever
done. Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point
genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of Jews starving or in prison. If you could
lift everyone up fifteen points, you could come close to ending poverty even within
developed countries. Obviously these hypotheses are controversial, but they’re
controversial not because there’s a lot of evidence against them but because
everything about genetics and society is controversial because of your policy of
cutting off all lines of speculation that might lead to eugenics. I maintain that if we
discussed these ideas openly, we might find that they held the key to ending global
poverty, crime, and disease. Meanwhile, what has Islam given us? Pretty buildings,
calligraphy, and hummus.
Adraste: See, this is what worries me. I’m not sure you raise global IQ fifteen points
merely by distributing condoms and subsidizing sperm banks. And if the advantages
are so great - a fact which, of course, you haven’t remotely proven, merely gestured
at a few renegade scientists speculating along similar lines - then it will seem so
very tempting to do a bit more, the kinds of things that really could raise global IQ 15
points in a reasonable amount of time. Either eugenics isn’t tempting - in which case
why do it? - or it’s very tempting - in which case we definitely shouldn’t do it. 4
Beroe: The great sin of rationality is to look for justifications for your prejudices. I
worry you have found a fully general one. Everything good could in theory be bad if
it was implemented dictatorially and violently. You will use this as a rationalization to
condemn any unpopular idea, but give every popular idea a pass based on hokey
cost-benefit analyses and witty sayings.
Adraste: I may be more consistent than you think. Eugenics caused hundreds of
thousands of involuntary sterilizations, ending just a few decades ago. And the
perpetrators weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists or blood-crazed generalissimos who we
can safely distance ourselves from. They were smug Western elites overly
impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us. Show
me another idea like that and I bet I’d be against that one too.
II.
I regret to say Adraste would lose her bet.
Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The
Population Bomb. He helped develop ideas like sustainability, biodiversity, and
ecological footprints. But he’s best known for prophecies of doom which have not
come true - for example, that collapsing ecosystems would cause hundreds of
millions of deaths in the 1970s, or make England “cease to exist” by the year 2000.
Population Bomb calls for a multi-pronged solution to a coming overpopulation
crisis. One prong was coercive mass sterilization. Ehrlich particularly recommended
this for India, a country at the forefront of rising populations.
 When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children,
[Chandrasekhar, an Indian official who shared Ehrlich’s views] should have
encouraged the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have
volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical
instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up
centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion?
Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.
I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the
prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food
aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military
force against those who disagree with our form of government or our rapacious
foreign policy. We must be just as relentless in pushing ·for population control
around the world, together with rearrangement of trade relations to benefit
UDCs, and massive economic aid.
I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for
them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the
population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the
symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but
eventually he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population
explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from
treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will
demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be
intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does
the patient have a chance of survival.
Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime
Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of
people. The broader Democratic Party and environmentalist movement were
completely on board.
 New York Times ad from 1968 (source), urging readers to write their
representatives urging them to “ initiate a crash program for population
stabilization”. Signatories include a former Federal Reserve chairman,
Secretary of Commerce, World Bank head, business tycoons, leading
academics, and (for some reason) August Derleth.
In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law.
They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara,
made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied:
Before the Emergency, compulsory sterilization was considered in different
states, but no concrete decision was ever made. At the time, only states had the
authority to make a decision in the area of family planning. Once the Emergency
was imposed, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, on her son’s insistence, amended the
 Constitution. The Constitution Act of 1976 gave the central government the right
to execute family planning programs. Soon after, the central government
mobilized the state political leadership and took decisive actions, such as setting
up camps and sterilization targets.
Mr. [Sanjay] Gandhi allocated quotas to the chief ministers of every state that
they were supposed to meet by any means possible. The chief ministers, too, in
an attempt to impress the younger Gandhi, strived hard to meet those targets.
Mr. Gandhi often visited villages and towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to
encourage and approve the tremendous work being done in terms of meeting
sterilization goals. Commissioners were awarded gold medals for their hard work.
As a result, nothing mattered when it came to meeting the targets. Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar were at the top when it came to exceeding the targeted number of
sterilizations, resulting in more commissioners from these states receiving
medals.
Force was not only physical in form but also indirect. The government issued
circulars stating that promotion and payments to employees were in abeyance
until they were sterilized or completed their assigned quota of people they
convinced to undergo sterilization. People had to produce a certificate of
sterilization to get their salaries or even renew their driving/
rickshaw/scooter/sales tax license. Students whose parents had not undergone a
sterilization were detained. Free medical treatment in hospitals was also
suspended until a sterilization certificate was shown. Those who suffered the
most were people associated with lower classes. These unfortunate people were
picked up from railway stations or bus stops by policemen, regardless of their
age or marital status. Poor, illiterate people, jail inmates, pavement dwellers,
bachelors, young married men, and hospital patients were all victims.
In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years. No
one will ever know how many were “voluntary” by standards that we would be
comfortable with, but plausibly well below half.
The West didn’t just tolerate this process, they supported it and cheered it on. The
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations provided much of the funding. Western media
ranged from supportive to concerned-for-the-wrong-reasons; my favorite example
of the latter is the Washington Post’s Compulsory Sterilization Provokes Fear,
Contempt. It worried that the campaign produced too much backlash:
By forcibly sterilizing millions of men during the 20-month emergency, the
government of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi may made some very limited
inroads on the birthrate, but it probably set back by a generation all efforts to
contain the exploding population of India.
The closest it comes to moral criticism is in a section on a populist politician who
wanted to solve overpopulation through yoga:
While Narain's folksy approach fits generally into the government's roughly
sketched plans for returning India to its peasant roots, some Western experts are
skeptical that there can be anything like a voluntary solution to the crisis,
especially under the constraints created by the emergency.
"Compulsory sterilization was an obscenity," said a West European economist.
"But I'm afraid, I'm convinced that there's no way to cope with the population
problem of this country if birth control is not made compulsory. There should at
least be disincentives against having more than two children."
The article mostly focuses not on condemning or condoning, but on the war against
“misinformation” - in the “peasant bitterness” around the sterilization campaigns,
many poor Indians spread false rumors, like that sterilization could make them sick.
Until the Indian government worked harder to fight these kinds of myths, it would
never be able to meet sterilization quotas effectively.
Francis Galton had the good fortune to die before people started misusing his ideas,
allowing us to hope he would have opposed such developments. Ehrlich is still very
much alive. When asked in 2015 if he still agreed with everything in his book, he said
that “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb. My
language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should
have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as
everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their
neighbor’s backyard as they want.”
Luckily for Ehrlich, no one cares. He remains a professor emeritus at Stanford, and
president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He has won practically
every environmental award imaginable, including from the Sierra Club, the World
Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations (all > 10 years after the Indian sterilization
campaign he endorsed). He won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize ($800,000) in 1990,
the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year,
and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on
60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign
never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public
intellectual to get.
(meanwhile, in 2020 the University College of London, to worldwide acclaim,
announed that they were “denaming” a building previously named for Galton to
show their repugnance for his eugenic theories).
Francis Galton’s ideas led - without his support or consent - to several hundred
thousand forced sterilizations. Paul Ehrlich’s ideas - with his full support and
consent - led to several million forced sterilizations.
Adraste claims our society has a taboo around eugenics only because of its
repugnance at coercive sterilization. But actually, our society can’t bring itself to
care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
III.
Beroe: I claim that if eugenics is discredited because its morally bankrupt
proponents forcibly sterilized people in its name, then environmentalism - whose
morally bankrupt proponents forcibly sterilized ten times as many people in its name
- should be ten times as discredited. The only reason they aren’t is that the failures
of eugenics received enough public attention to generate a hyperstitious slur
cascade against it, and the failures of environmentalism didn’t.
Adraste: That seems bonkers to me. It seems easy to draw a line between
demanding that foreign dictatorships sterilize their populace - which would be evil
whether or not it was done under the environmental aegis - and saving the whales,
or ensuring clean water, or protecting the rainforest.
Beroe: And it seems easy to me to draw a line between demanding that mental
hospitals sterilize their patients - which would be evil whether or not it was done
under the eugenic aegis - and having a sperm bank for talented people, or providing
financial incentives to reproduce. You’re trying to take refuge in the exact sort of
distinctions you wanted to deny me, under the argument that the harmless ideas
were a “slippery slope” towards the harmful ones. Once you start saving the whales,
you’re implicitly accepting a worldview which questions the sustainability of
industrial civilization. And that worldview is a risk factor for demanding that Indira
Gandhi sterilize millions of Indians. I’m not asserting this, mind you - I love whales! -
just trying to point out the hypocrisy of your position.
Adraste: I recognize the similarity between these two cases, but if you retreat from
your pathological extreme Outside View for a second, I think a gestalt look at both
movements would show that eugenics had many other failures, and
environmentalism many other successes, and that it’s fair to use these as context
when deciding how to legislate each particular case.
Beroe: What you call my “pathological extreme Outside View” is an attempt to ban
myself from smuggling in all my prejudices under the guise of “context”. For
example, someone with different biases than you might say eugenics had many
successes - my favorite is Dor Yeshorim, the group that screens for the genetic
mutations common in Ashkenazi Jews and makes sure that two carriers don’t marry
each other and produce a child with a deadly condition. Or they might say
environmentalism has had some pretty spectacular failures - knee-jerk
environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over from
fossil fuels, leading to our current coal-and-oil-dominated regime and all the worries
about climate change that come with it - also coal pollution in the air kills tens of
thousands of people per year directly. I think that if you do your calculations and
context-finding without writing the bottom line ahead of time, it’s actually quite hard
to make environmentalism come out on top.
Adraste: So, what? So we should drink lead-filled water on purpose to own the libs?
Or whoever it is you’re trying to own here, I must admit I’m having trouble keeping
track.
Beroe: No! We can admit that “environmentalism” is a big tent containing both evil
hurtful ideas and good valuable ideas, and that the evil hurtful ideas do not detract
one whit from the goodness of the good valuable ideas. And then we can do the
same with eugenics!
Adraste: I must admit you make a compelling point. But don’t you agree there is
sometimes a place for slippery slopes? For example, it seems so attractive to hand
over the government to a nice-seeming communist dictator with good ideas. Maybe
he can use that absolute power to really fix things up! But if someone proposes this,
I would like to be able to object that, in the past, “give all power to a nice-seeming
communist who will use it for good things” has slipped down a slope to “the
communist dictator is actually a bad guy and abuses his power”. And I would like to
be able to make this argument without a certain dear friend objecting that it’s
exactly the same as saying that if you let people save the whales, maybe they will
end up sterilizing millions of Indians.
Beroe: You also make a compelling point. I cannot deny that past atrocities cast
deontological shadows, making us wary of doing anything in their vicinity. Indeed, it
seems like this is the origin of deontology, and all moral systems beyond a naive act
utilitarianism - that sometimes our attempts to do good will end in evil, and so we
shut off large categories of apparently-good things because they resemble those
that have historically ending in evil more often than we expected. If I have any
argument at all here, beyond a simple “well, my intuitions about whether to do this
say no in this particular case”, it’s that we should rarely let an atrocity cast shadows
over speech, belief, or opinion, because once we ban those things, we lose the
capacity for self-correction. I may deny your right to save the whales, but I will
defend to the death your right to argue that the whales should be saved without
facing the least bit of social sanction for your views. 5
IV.
Character views are not author views, but I will admit to agreeing with Beroe’s final
paragraph above.

Footnotes

1 Although eugenics eventually became labeled racist, this took a while and before it
happened the political coalitions were not what you would expect. The anti-racist
positions of the 1920s, expressed by black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, centered around
fear that only white people would get to do eugenics to themselves, leaving the white
race irrecoverably better than the black. Black organizations demanded that eugenics
 be applied to blacks as well, with many of them thinking of it as their ticket out of
relative poverty. See eg Nuriddin and Ginther.
2 As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few
good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly
and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as
simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing
or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim
reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in
Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as
many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes
involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some
frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
3 This is eliding a lot of complexity in what Galton actually believed. Most of his published
speeches focus on “positive eugenics” - convincing geniuses to breed more, rather
than undesirables to breed less. He seemed to understand how little we knew about
genetics, and wanted more research before doing anything rash (if the research had
been done, it would have shown that most negative eugenic practices could not
possibly have worked). But he also wrote an unpublished novel about a eugenic utopia,
whose policies extended to social pressure for undesirables not to have children, and
sometimes exile. There was no mention of forcible sterilization or murder. I am not an
expert in Galton and he may have mentioned these somewhere else.
4 Adraste sticks to moral arguments against eugenics and never tries to claim it wouldn’t
work; I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that
breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or
dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly
genetic. And Beroe specifically mentions sperm banks - I don’t think anyone seriously
doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects your future child’s traits a lot, and
the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize
themselves than the average person. Even if you doubt the existence of genes,
eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the clustering
of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is
educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing
the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the
proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation. This doesn’t mean that
a given proposal to change the gene pool might not need much more selection
pressure / take much longer than expected (see footnote 2 above), but now that we
understand genetics we can calculate this. Also, common sense goes a long way here -
 most people have a good idea how much more children resemble their parents than the
average adult.
5 Coria: Oh, hello there! You always seem so surprised to see me, even though I always
show up at times like this!
Adraste: Oh no, what kind of crazy galaxy-brained take do you have for us today?
Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong. He thought a
population explosion was going to end the world! In fact, he had good reason to think
this - it was the natural continuation of the trends at the time, averted only by a Green
Revolution outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible. If he had
been right, mass sterilization would have been the only way to save the world.
We have a known system for dealing with times when you need to break deontological
prohibitions for the greater good, which is you present your case to the government
and let it be considered democratically. He did that, the government agreed, and
everyone tried mass sterilization. They were all tragically wrong, of course, but if they’d
been right it would have been the right thing to do. Ehrlich was stupid but not evil.
Beroe: You could justify anything with that!
Coria: Quite! For example, Galton was pretty sure that there was a dysgenic trend - the
human race was getting sicker and dumber every generation, and would soon lose the
ability to sustain complex societies. He was more careful than Ehrlich - unable to prove
it, he didn’t exactly propose any solutions. But his successors did, they went through
the proper legal channels, and they took extreme action to avert the collapse of
civilization. Now, in fact Galton was almost as wrong as Ehrlich - modern research
suggests the dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century - things
will be very different long before we notice it. Still, even the counterfactual Galton who
demanded full-speed ahead negative eugenics acted correctly based on what he knew
at the time.
Beroe: So are you endorsing pure act utilitarianism?
Coria: Absolutely not. I’m only recommending the existence of governments, which has
been standard practice since Gilgamesh. Many things are rights violations - for
example, seizing someone’s property. But when a legitimate government does so in the
public interest after due consideration, we accept it as part of living in a society. It was
a rights violation to quarantine an entire population in their homes during the early days
of the coronavirus. But the legitimate government decided to do it in order to protect
the public interest, so it’s not morally equivalent to kidnapping or whatever we would
call it if a random person did it. And some states still castrate pedophiles as a
punishment - one which naturally includes sterilization - and I have no particular
problem with that. So it seems I must believe governments may sometimes involuntarily
sterilize citizens when it is in the public interest. Did you know the Supreme Court’s
ruling on Buck said that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad
enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes?”
Beroe: Awkward.
Adraste: Yes, this is one of the very many things about the Buck ruling I would change
if I had a time machine.
Beroe: So are you saying that governments can’t be judged on normal standards of
good and evil? Everything Stalin did was okay, because he was dictator while he did it?
Coria: No, of course not. I’m saying that individuals are judged on a strictly
deontological standard, and governments on something partway between deontology
and consequentialism. During a crisis, governments are licensed - within the bounds of
their constitutions - to act for the greater good. These acts can still be judged as evil,
but only on consequentialist grounds - they made the world worse rather than better.
If the governments that followed Ehrlich had succeeded in averting a population bomb
that would otherwise have destroyed humanity, I would judge them as good. If the
governments that followed Galton had succeeded in preventing a dysgenic collapse of
civilization, I would judge them as good too. Instead, their actions caused great
suffering for no benefit, so I judge them as bad.
Adraste: I thought you said Ehrlich did nothing wrong!
Coria: I said bad, not wrong. If you see your friend and hug them, but unbeknownst to
you they have an aneurysm which is activated by hugs, and they die, then you have
done a thing which went badly, but you were not morally in the wrong for doing it.
Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time. If we are to do
better than him, it will have to be by being smarter, not by being more moral.
Adraste: I find this pretty concerning. My original position is that we must taboo
everything about eugenics. Beroe made an argument that perhaps we could relax the
taboo if we promise never to do anything unethical or coercive. But she hasn’t even had
time to gather her breath before you come in and say that in fact, we should sometimes
do unethical and coercive things too. I think this just reinforces my suspicion that we
shouldn’t even take that first step.
 Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that
right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of impersonal
arbiter of morality who gets to decide prima facie what actions are always and forever
off limits. Paul Ehrlich estimated that what was best for the world was to pursue a
sterilization campaign, and he lobbied the government for it. If you estimate that what’s
best for the world is to never do sterilization campaigns, you should also lobby the
government for that. I will believe both of you are good people trying to do the right
thing as you understand it. Only one of you can be right, of course, but that reflects on
your intelligence, not your morality. We can’t all be geniuses. At least not until Beroe
gets her Nobel Sperm Bank!
I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the
problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and
pure minarchist libertarianism.

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Chronological

John 16 hr ago
I thought this was gonna be a GEB review and I got excited!
REPLY (1)
Coagulopath 15 hr ago
I believe he reviewed GEB back in the squid314 days.
REPLY (1)
John 14 hr ago
ooh is there a link you can share? i googled but was unsuccessful
REPLY (1)
 Coagulopath 14 hr ago
In hindsight it wasn't really a review, just a one-paragraph
recommendation
https://web.archive.org/web/20110326010130/http://www.raikoth.net/no
nficrecommend.html
(I don't know the conversational norms regarding posting Scott's old
stuff. Please delete if this breaks them.)
REPLY (1)
magic9mushroom 6 hr ago
As I understand it, what happened was that Scott went looking for
jobs, all the prospective employers kept reading squid314 (which
came up in Google searches for "Scott Siskind", unlike SSC) and
telling him that having a blog was incompatible with being a
psychiatrist (as he told it, it wasn't even the content of the blog, just
the blog's existence), and so he burned squid314 and went
pseudonymous.
However, Cade Metz burned Scott's pseudonymity (and Scott made
peace with that in the first post of ACX, "Still Alive"), so that's now
a sunk cost and this probably isn't such a big deal anymore.
REPLY
Bentham's Bulldog Writes Bentham's Newsletter 15 hr ago
This article is excellent! It's pretty impressive that your attempt to steelman the cooky
anti liberal eugenicists sounds infinitely more persuasive than any actually existing anti
liberal eugenicist.
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Mark Writes DOPPELKORN 14 hr ago
Errr, I read the post as perfectly mastering two ITTs here - Intellectual Turing Test:
similar to but not exactly steelmaning. Scott showing he can present both
positions as eloquently as their best resp. adherents would. - Knowing Scott's
writings over the years, his own position is actually very close to the "cooky
eugenicist". As is mine. (Not sure what "anti liberal" means in this context. Anti-
Lefty? Anti-D? Me from Europe. Oh, no need to explain.)
REPLY
Wanda Tinasky 10 hr ago
That's because the left has so successfully tabooed the topic that only the kooks
will publicly advocate for it.
 REPLY
Bob Frank Writes Bob Frank’s Substack 15 hr ago
> Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like
Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
That's simple: intelligence has no correlation to morality. The "evil genius" is a well-
known media trope for a reason! There are plenty of very good smart people, and
plenty of very bad smart people.
One of the biggest intellectual failings of the past few decades has been the loss of
this understanding, via the gradual conflation of concepts of good and evil with
concepts of smart and stupid. We've tended to think that all hard-thinking people will
be right-thinking people who agree with us, and anyone who disagrees with our
perspective on morality can only do so because they're too dumb to grasp the simple
truth. But nothing could be further from the truth; bad people have been using their
intellect in pursuit of evil since time immemorial. There's no good reason to expect
them to stop now.
REPLY (4)
Godoth 15 hr ago
The example that the ‘intelligence uber alles’ people point to is often that
criminality is associated with low IQ and correspondingly decreases with high IQ,
etc.
But of course this is a ridiculous argument; it is only natural that society does not
criminalize evil that can be rationalized, and the sort of evil that high-IQ people do
is almost always legal at the time, or impossible to punish. The common man
complains that one can buy justice with riches—not wrong, but you can buy the
government with smarts, too, and you can get away with a lot between the cracks
of the law.
REPLY (3)
Wendigo Writes Wendigo’s Substack 15 hr ago
Criminality also isn't monotonic wrt IQ. It peaks at 85, and decreases below
that just as it decreases above.
REPLY (2)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 13 hr ago
I bet if you could run the universe many times criminality peaks where
you are least employable with no safety net.
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TGGP 11 hr ago
I believe the bit about not being employable, not about lacking a
safety net. Crime doesn't pay.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 11 hr ago
I think below a certain threshold most people or societies
understand you can’t work and care for you. It’s when you’re in
the gray zone above that where it seems like you could work if
you tried that things get hard.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 11 hr ago
Lots of crime is committed by kids who aren't expected to
work at all. Crime shot up when the "Great Society"
expanded welfare.
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 10 hr ago
Agreed dads are the best crime deterrent.
Of the guys I know who were criminals it was 1) mad
at dad 2) too dumb to realize stealing stuff wasn’t a
career 3) nuts.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
My understanding is that the children of widows
have completely different outcomes from other
single mothers.
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Some Guy Writes Extelligence 10 hr ago
I haven’t seen that but sounds right . I’m
assuming lower? Everyone I know who had a
parent die young idolizes then.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
 Closer to the population average, since
random (non-genetic) factors often
cause it.
REPLY
Deiseach 51 min ago
The interesting part is Galton's views of what is "obviously"
desirable, moral, indicative of excellence, improving society, etc. He
wants to adjust religion to get rid of it, or at least model it to
something 'sensible' that sensible people of the modern era can
use as a kind of prop to the idea of eugenics and so on.
But things we take for granted arising out of the whole liberal
mindset would appall Galton. So what are we assuming are the
"obvious" traits a society must have, that properly applied eugenics
will cultivate, that future generations will think belong in the Stone
Age?
REPLY
MM 2 hr ago
Below 85, and it's hard to commit crimes that you would get away with
(rather like a cat hiding behind a curtain with feet sticking out).
Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to
commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
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TGGP 15 hr ago
Embezzling enormous amounts of money is difficult to do with a below-
average IQ, but it's still illegal. Rich people aren't fine with being defrauded
just because the defrauder is smart. Bombers have relatively high IQs (the
Unabomber being an obvious example), but we punish bombing as severely
as cruder homicides.
REPLY (2)
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago
Yeh. Of course smart people become criminals bit by and large we don’t
legalise or nullify that criminality (with the exception perhaps of war
criminality)
REPLY
None of the Above 13 hr ago
 isn't this just the fact that there's a correlation, but the correlation is not
one? People with relatively low IQs, have slightly higher probability of
committing some kinds of street crime, but it's not all that huge
difference in probability, and there's absolutely nothing that says the
very smart people can't commit serious crimes, or that dumb people
can't be scrupulously law-abiding.
REPLY (2)
TGGP 13 hr ago
You'd have to define how much is "that much". But you're right
about there being no impossibility theorem for those combinations
of traits.
REPLY
MM 1 hr ago
Smart people often have better things they can do, i.e. something
that pays well enough and doesn't have the downsides. The lower
time preference also means you can see the downsides better.
REPLY
James K 7 hr ago
Also, the crime-IQ correlation has a major data censoring problem, since we
can only identify someone as a criminal if they're caught committing a crime.
Maybe the high-IQ criminals are disproportionately unlikely to be caught.
REPLY (1)
polscistoic 1 hr ago
A Professor of Business Law at the University of Oslo once gave this
definition of a thief: “A thief is a person that is in such a hurry to help
himself to other people’s money that he does not have time to establish
a limited liability company first.”
REPLY
Melvin 14 hr ago
More than this, I think we're failing to distinguish between all the different types of
evil. A partial taxonomy:
1. You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil
of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence, through
poverty, since the more desperate you get the more selfish you become.
2. Emotionally-led evil, you're just angry. This is the evil of (say) a violent
domestic abuser.
3. Utilitarian evil, where you try to do good things and it winds up evil because
you're a mortal human and humans are really bad at moral tradeoffs. Probably
positively correlated with intelligence, because you gotta be pretty smart to talk
yourself into doing something that looks obviously wrong.
I suspect most of the really big evildoers of history who might initially seem to be
in Category 3 are actually in Category 2 as well. Lenin, Hitler, Bin Laden etc all
claimed to kill for some higher moral principle, but inevitably wound up killing
people they emotionally hated anyway.
Galton and Ehrlich, to the extent they were evil, seem to at least be pure category
3.
REPLY (1)

Garald 13 hr ago
Hitler, and perhaps to a lesser extent Bin Laden, is an example of something
else: elevating what most of us would consider to be deeply evil to the level
of a principle, to the extent of going against personal self-interest or the self-
interest of the collective cared about.
Lenin would be 3, with some elements of 2 (a mixture of genuine hatred of
injustice with being pretty reasonably embittered by his older brother's
hanging) but, more interestingly, 3b: digging yourself into a deeper and
deeper utilitarian hole by convincing yourself that deontology is something to
be ditched entirely.
REPLY (2)
Xpym 2 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
Nah, this perception is the result of successful demonizing propaganda.
Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters. They were
strongly influenced by some of the widespread ideas of their respective
societies and took them to their logical conclusions. Sure, now with the
benefit of hindsight we might say that those ideas were uniquely bad,
but they weren't seen as such in Hitler's time, and Wahhabism is plenty
popular and respectable in Saudi Arabia even today.
REPLY (1)
Garald 2 hr ago
You haven't read what I am saying. They were, in their way,
"idealists"; it is just that their ideals had suffering, death and
subjection as *goals* (particularly in Hitler's case, actually).
REPLY (1)
 Xpym 1 hr ago
No, I just disagree. I think that Hitler sincerely loved Germany
and expected his policies to be beneficial to it. Your argument
proves too much, you can blame anyone who ever starts a war
that "their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as
*goals*", which some pacifists may believe, but certainly isn't
the mainstream view.
REPLY
Gordon Tremeshko 43 min ago
I would argue Lenin would be #1, also.
REPLY
skaladom 10 hr ago
This. We have a basically mammalian brain, grounded in affect and emotion, but
with a large, powerful and evolutively recent symbolic processing module tacked
on. It's so poorly debugged, that it can destabilize the whole system, by
overwhelming channels originally made to carry sense data with symbolic
imaginations, and getting itself into insane loops - losing all sense of perspective
at the drop of a hat, all the way into depression and mental illness.
And people want to help the human race by boosting up this system even more?
It's a wonder that symbolic thinking hasn't gotten us to extinction yet, and people
still think the solution is *more of it*?
REPLY (1)
Philo Vivero 14 min ago
You've got this exactly backward. Symbolic thinking has raised the human
race out of the worst abuses of living in nature. It has lifted billions into living
like kings and queens did only mere hundreds of years ago.
So yeah, people still think more of that would be a good thing.
REPLY

Odd anon 4 hr ago

I've seen criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis which goes (put somewhat
uncharitably), "If you say that a Greater Intelligence would not necessarily be
more moral, you go against the entire concept of moral progress altogether! And
if we grant that education does not necessarily increase the morality of a
population, by what right should the more educated populace be an authority at
all on moral decisions?" (This style of thinking bothered me much less when it
wasn't at risk of preventing avoiding an apocalypse.)
 REPLY
FionnM 15 hr ago
Anyone who's in favour of the taboo and legal ban on incest because children of incest
are disproportionately likely to have birth defects is already a eugenecist whether they
like it or not. Spoken as a person who fully supports the taboo on incest.
REPLY (3)
Jake R 15 hr ago
I think few of these people are suddenly okay with incest provided that everyone
involved is using contraceptives, which suggests that the birth defect argument is
not their true reason but a rationalization.
I do agree that anyone using this rationalization is already in some sense a
eugenicist, although I think the argument would benefit from tabooing the word
"eugenics" completely.
REPLY (1)
Garald 15 hr ago
I'm not sure about "few" here. German law criminalizes sex between adult
siblings only when vaginal sex is involved - consensual incestuous sex acts
that cannot possibly be reproductive are not criminalized.
(Interestingly, consensual incest between adults is legal in France, Spain
and... Russia? That is odd. I knew about France because of two middle-aged
siblings who moved from the UK to France for that reason.)
REPLY (2)
Jake R 15 hr ago
Interesting, I didn't know that. The German law is certainly evidence
against my claim. Although even in that case I notice that the prohibition
is against all heterosexual incest, with no contraception exception. Is
that really where we would expect the equilibrium to land in a universe
where most people did not have a reflexive disgust for incest?
REPLY
gph 12 hr ago
German law was likely written by a bunch of rationalizing
lawyer/politician types that followed the logical reasoning of reducing
harm from birth defects. But I'd bet the broad majority of the population
would socially ostracize anyone engaging in incest regardless of the
legality.
 REPLY (1)
Xyzaxy 6 hr ago
Also, the law involved is a bit of a mess. The official reasoning
behind it, as per the constitutional court, is mostly "well, it has been
here for a long time" and the good to be protected is the family...
For a law bound to relationships by blood, not by family, in a case in
which the people involved didn't even know they're related by blood
(both were adopted by different families, they later married and
what they sued against was annulling their marriage because them
having sex would be criminal).
REPLY
organoid 12 hr ago
There are better, non-eugenic reasons for tabooing incest. Mine is that
incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common. As long as the liberal state
gives broad deference to parental authority within the domestic sphere, a
hyperstrict cultural shame campaign against any form of sexual contact with your
(step) children or siblings is the most effective tool we have for protecting
children from the people they have to get naked with on a regular basis.
REPLY (3)
FionnM 7 hr ago
Presumably any sex act which can be described as "sexual abuse" is already
illegal under legislation against rape and sexual assault?
REPLY (2)
Xyzaxy 6 hr ago · edited 6 hr ago
No, but at least parent-child incest potentially is under a law against
abusing the position of someone being in your charge for sexual
purposes. Of course, siblings can have a lot of informal authority without
a formal authority to bind that to and all that authority can be used
without having to physically assault or explicitly extort the victim
The rest of this comment was a result of me misreading the thread and
writing something unrelated, so I removed it
REPLY
JamesLeng 6 hr ago
That's a lot harder to prove when the perpetrator has such a degree of
control over the entire physical and emotional context for such a long
time.
 REPLY
Alexander Corwin 6 hr ago
> incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common
> ... is the most effective tool we have
seems like there's some tension here. do you think that there simply are no
possible more effective tools? do we have evidence on how effective the
cultural shame campaign is? it's not clear to me that we are in a position to
know the answer to either of these questions.
REPLY (2)
JamesLeng 6 hr ago
I've heard a theory that expanding and strengthening the (pre-existing)
taboo on incest was actually a sneaky way to consolidate state power,
by hampering the ability of extended families to maintain local political
factions through strategic marriages.
REPLY
organoid 2 hr ago
Excellent questions. I agree it's hard to measure prevalence and
therefore the success of any interventions (Stoltenbergh 2011 have a
meta-analysis which suggests CSA is more prevalent in North America,
Africa and Australia but that it matters a lot how you ask). It's possible
the stigma contributes to underreporting, but since harm reduction will
inevitably require separating kids from their abusers it's hard to imagine
a non-stigmatizing approach.
I think there are plenty of plausibly more effective programs, from age-
appropriate sex ed starting in kindergarten to routine household
inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers. The
problem with all of them is that they'd meet intense resistance from
cultures that prize the "private sphere" and its right to be exempt from
public scrutiny—here I'm heavily informed by theoretical arguments from
feminists like Susan Okin and Carole Pateman about the historical
emergence and function of the public/private dichotomy.
REPLY (1)
Deiseach 36 min ago · edited 34 min ago
"routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained
social workers"
 Well if you want to make sure actual abuse is skimmed over and
non-abusive situations result in kids being hauled away, go right
ahead with that brilliant idea. I think "trained" social workers are
trained only in the particular ideological shibboleths of the day
where they are trained, so you can shoot up heroin in front of your
toddler* and still be considered a 'good mother' but if you don't
agree that the same toddler is fully capable of deciding to socially
transition their gender you are a horrible abuser bent on driving
your kid to suicide.
*Based on story I heard at work about a social worker claiming a
client was a good mother because she always turned her back
when shooting up while her kid was in the room. How about maybe
NOT SHOOTING UP HEROIN IN FRONT OF A TODDLER AT ALL,
HUH? Naturally there were no moves afoot to take the kid away
from such a 'good' mother.
REPLY (1)
FionnM 29 min ago
That's a horrific story, Jesus.
REPLY (1)
organoid 15 min ago
If true, or course. Meanwhile 94,896 American children
were removed from their homes and placed in out-of-
home care due to parental drug use in 2019
(https://ncsacw.acf.hhs.gov/research/child-welfare-and-
treatment-statistics.aspx), so even if true we can hope it's
not typical.
REPLY
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie 25 min ago
Another argument is that even if there's no abuse, a nasty breakup would be
harder on the family than if the couple wasn't related.
REPLY
Deiseach 39 min ago
Galton from his 1909 collection of essays:
"The marriage of a brother and sister would excite a feeling of loathing among us
that seems implanted by nature, but which further inquiry will show, has mainly
arisen from tradition and custom.
 …(4) The harm due to continued interbreeding has been considered, as I think,
without sufficient warrant, to cause a presumed strong natural and instinctive
repugnance to the marriage of near kin. The facts are that close and continued
interbreeding invariably does harm after a few generations, but that a single cross
with near kinsfolk is practically innocuous. Of course a sense of repugnance
might become correlated with any harmful practice, but there is no evidence that
it is repugnance with which interbreeding is correlated, but only indifference; this
is equally effective in preventing it, but is quite another thing.
(5) The strongest reason of all in civilised countries appears to be the earnest
desire not to infringe the sanctity and freedom of the social relations of a family
group, but this has nothing to do with instinctive sexual repugnance. Yet it is
through the latter motive alone, so far as I can judge, that we have acquired our
apparently instinctive horror of marrying within near degrees.
…A great deal more evidence could easily be adduced, but the foregoing suffices
to prove that there is no instinctive repugnance felt universally by man, to
marriage within the prohibited degrees, but that its present strength is mainly due
to what I call immaterial considerations. It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic
marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister
would do now. "
I think Galton is wrong and it will trend in the opposite direction; incestuous
marriage or partnerships will be regarded as "well if they're not having kids and
it's all consensual, why not?" rather than making "non-eugenic marriages"
socially repugnant.
REPLY
Moe Lane Writes Moe Lane Writes Books! 15 hr ago
With regards to Ehrlich: I concede that Coria's characterization of him *in the
beginning* can be argued. But it is now clear that his most famous argument was, and
is, fundamentally incorrect (and has done real harm). Ehrlich declines to concede that
his entire professional career made the world worse, which is his privilege. It is also a
moral failing.
REPLY (2)
Maynard Handley 15 hr ago
WAS it fundamentally incorrect? You say that based on what?
The way the future of the world is likely to play out is that China just barely
managed to scramble onto the helicopter in time. Everyone later than China (Most
of Africa and South Asia -- and probably most of the Arab world once the oil runs
out) is probably doomed. The path of light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing
to services is probably shutting down, visibly for political reasons but more
importantly because machines will do the jobs. We won't need to argue about
whether we should "export jobs" to Bangladesh or import Mexicans, we'll do
neither and have robots doing the work.
Previously this was not a problem because excess farmworkers could move to the
factory, excess factory workers could move to retail. That's probably over and,
even if within the wealthy countries society is willing to help out via moves like
UBI, that won't extend to those poor countries.
Now, if those countries had frozen their populations at the 1970 level, everything
would have been so much easier. There would have been money to improve
things starting at that point, money to build few but good schools and hospitals
rather than many but bad. Entry onto the path to modernity a whole lot sooner.
It was not not fore-ordained that China would be the last one out; it could have
been that South Asia and Africa escaped hopeless poverty first. But people chose
to mock Ehrlich on minor points rather than on the big picture, and we are where
we are today, simultaneously crying about whatever is the disaster du jour (not
enough water! species dying!) while insisting that doubling the number of people
is quite manageable and won't cause any problems, no sirree.
REPLY (4)
Christophe Biocca 14 hr ago
I don't think you really can call Ehrlich's mistakes "minor". Pretty much
everything he predicted was directionally incorrect: death rates went down,
not up. Countries like India and Egypt, which he advocated should stop
receiving food aid because they were lost causes both massively increased
production and are now able to afford imports of food from the global market
for what they don't produce themselves. Percentage of the global population
"undernourished" went down, not up, over time.
REPLY
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago
That’s all completely wrong. China is in trouble - albeit not as much as some
western countries - because of its falling demographics. It is this that is
causing some people to think that it’s boom is over, and certainly ageing
populations are a major headwind to economic growth.
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Florent 1 hr ago
China is also in trouble for its not-falling-early-enough demographics.
As much as they like to pride themselves on their unappologetic
imperialist desires, the reason why they risk a world war by sending
 fishing vessels in territorial waters of others countries is because they
have a big and hungry population that needs proteins to thrive and they
don't have enough ressources at home.
Pointing to a large aging population and saying that the only solution is
to add more children is litterally like pointing at a late-stage ponzi
scheme and saying that the only solution is to add another layer.
Sometimes you've got to blow the bubble and suffer the consequences.
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Humphrey Appleby 14 min ago · edited 13 min ago
This is totally false. China is not struggling to feed its population,
and in any case buying food is much cheaper than war. Global food
production exceeds what humankind can eat.
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Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Please, stop apologizing for him, he was obviously wrong. Lots and lots of
smart people are very, very wrong but convincing. He's like the AGW
doomers, or the peak oil folk, or whatever. Objectively wrong. You can make
all the excuses you want, but he wasn't onto anything, just wrong. (Leaving to
the reader to draw their own conclusions regarding current, similar examples
of smart folk errors that trend same way of "sky is falling" when it isn't.)
REPLY
Humphrey Appleby 12 hr ago · edited 12 hr ago
Can you point to evidence that South Asia and Africa have missed the
helicopter? The largest countries in each (India and Nigeria respectively) just
clocked GDP growth rates of 8.7% and 3.6% respectively. Also, if machines
can do lots of production...that should make us richer, not poorer. Wealth is
determined by how much stuff you can produce, not by how many people it
takes you to make stuff. Insert story about `if you don't want to use earth
movers because digging with spades employs more people, then why use
spades, hire even more people to scratch at the dirt with bare hands'
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Scott Alexander 15 hr ago Author
I agree Ehrlich's position seemed much more defensible in 1970 than today,
although Coria's point was trying to draw a line between "well-intentioned but
stupid" and "evil", and while I think the amount of stupidity it takes to believe
Ehrlich's position now has gone way up, I don't think that affects the dichotomy.
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David Johnston Writes Clarifying Consequences 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
I kinda do think being wrong can make you morally culpable. Specifically, if
you’re in a position of authority and you could be right by exercising a
reasonable amount of intellectual discipline and spending a reasonable
amount of effort, then you’re culpable for being wrong. Don’t know if this
applies to 1970 Erlich or not. He seems to have been in a position of
authority, and I expect he expended a reasonable amount of effort, but I
would not be surprised to discover he was lacking in discipline.
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Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Hubris has basically been one of key human failure modes for millennia.
This is the hubris of the intellectual who wrongly thinks they've figured
things out, and harms others on those grounds. Not sure how you
distinguish this from all sorts of similar atrocities perpetrated by similar
intellectual types who are sure you must do X to save us from Y.
REPLY
Dweomite 13 hr ago
I'd prefer to say that you're culpable for skipping your due diligence,
rather than culpable for being wrong per se.
In particular, I think you remain culpable for skipping your due diligence
even if you have the good fortune of being correct.
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Bugmaster 12 hr ago
Yes, and I'd argue that the threshold for what counts as "reasonable"
amount of effort and discipline must rise dramatically with the severity
of your proposed action. It could be argued that some actions are so
drastic that no human agency could reasonably supply sufficient effort
and discipline to justify them.
REPLY
 José Vieira 7 hr ago
This sort of clause seems dangerous unless you have a way of
determining this type of culpability a priori. This discipline you point at
being essentially an internal psychological phenomenon, I doubt this
would work.
REPLY (1)
David Johnston Writes Clarifying Consequences 6 hr ago
I don't think it works very well as a basis for public judgements of
culpability, but I'm sometimes happy to make them privately
REPLY
Mallard 14 hr ago
I believe Bryan Caplan argues that "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil"
are more continuous, rather than discrete (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?:
Essays on Demagoguery).
If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air
with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less
evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different
category.
Similarly, if you make policy decisions, with anything but the most serious,
level headed, intense, and honest analysis, and those decisions have the
potential to hurt millions of people, (let alone cases like Ehrlich's where you
know you will be hurting people and the question is only the payoff), that
would seem to also be on the evil spectrum, rather than a member of a totally
different category.
REPLY (2)
Melvin 13 hr ago
By extension, then, anyone who makes policy decisions is evil (because
we should all understand our flaws and that none of us is capable of
consistently doing most serious, level headed, intense, and honest
analysis.)
But policy decisions still need to be made. What do we do?
REPLY (2)
Kevin Jackson 11 hr ago
That's what deontology is for. If you can't confidently forecast the
consequences, you can still evaluate the actions.
REPLY
 The Lone Ranger 8 hr ago · edited 8 hr ago
Make as few as possible, of course. That's the moral argument for
conservatism and libertarianism.
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Philo Vivero 7 min ago
> If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the
air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and
arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to
a wholly different category.
What if you shoot the bullets directly upward vs at an angle? Then you're
back to just fine again? I'm being serious, by the way. Turns out, if you
shoot a bullet directly up, it will come tumbling back down and be fairly
harmless whoever/whatever it might hit. If you shoot it at an angle,
whatever it hits will be very unhappy.
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Moe Lane Writes Moe Lane Writes Books! 14 hr ago
I dunno, man. I just find it hard to believe that the guy doesn't grasp,
somewhere in the back of his head, just how bad he is at extrapolating from
current data. Which may just be me, sure.
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 13 hr ago
Not just you.
REPLY

coop 7 hr ago
What about the current evil?
https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/my-croatian-weekly-hrvatski-
tjednik
https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-the-new-
normal-front-d2c
REPLY
Antilegomena 15 hr ago
I would be curious to know just how far "outside the window of what most forecasters
considered possible" the Green Revolution was. Was there really no serious dissent, or
was it just given less airtime on the three extant tv stations?
REPLY (2)
 Mallard 14 hr ago
As I note in this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-
buck/comment/16157431 David Friedman was skeptical of the doomer consensus
at the time.
REPLY
Douglas Knight 13 hr ago
They knew the Green Revolution was easy, they just didn't want it. Borlaug
discussed it with his bosses at the Rockefeller Foundation and defied their orders.
Since he was the only person to do it, they were right to forecast that no one
would, at least on the scale of a decade.
REPLY
tg56 15 hr ago
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to
maintain."
Did we? We banned coercive eugenics, but last I heard we aren't randomizing
reproductive pairings, sperm banks show a sharp skew in preferences towards the
over 6ft and accomplished, and assortative mating in humans seems to be a thing and
the effect is likely getting stronger in USA.
REPLY (3)
Alex 15 hr ago · edited 15 hr ago
Yeah. Even things like selective abortion for Tay-Sachs (as mentioned in the post)
and Down Syndrome are very mainstream and widely, although not universally,
accepted. Probably the meaningful distinction is between decisions made by
parents and those imposed or encouraged by a government.
REPLY (2)
Garald 15 hr ago
Widely accepted by readers of this blog (myself included). Not so long ago,
Ohio tried to ban second-trimester abortions specifically in the case of Down
syndrome. That seemed unbelievably perverse to me, but Facebook friends
told me that my moral compass is simply not set up in the same way as most
American's moral compass.
REPLY (2)
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago · edited 13 hr ago
Then you're morally perverse. Surely you can agree that killing someone
just because they have Down is wrong. Reason back from there and you
get the Ohio issue. You may disagree at what point the prohibition on
killing folk for having medical conditions kicks in, may dispute there
aren't "folk" before a certain point, but don't pretend like it's hard to
understand there's a point, and reasonable folk can disagree about
where it is. Indeed, assuming you agree with precautionary principle,
which seems likely, that "point" should go back pretty far, right? (Said as
someone who's pro-abortion (not pro-choice), but can't understand
those who purport not to understand pro-life positions.)
REPLY (2)
Garald 13 hr ago
This is interesting, since then one would have to argue that the
people behind the Ohio ban would see killing people as OK, or at
least the lesser evil, compared to killing people for having Down's
syndrome.
Surely it's pretty reasonable to hold that (a) a foetus is not covered
by anti-discrimination legislation - specially that concerning serious
defects, as opposed to, say, gender - whether or not you also hold
that (b) a second-trimester foetus has *some* weight in a moral
calculus that a six-week embryo does not have or barely has.
The (deep) flaw in the precautionary principle is that it pretends
that there is only one reason of moral concern. What about the
ethical undesirability of giving birth to a child who will be
tremendously shortchanged by nature? (Or simply changing the
family dynamics, which will now likely revolve around the very
special needs of one child, and not those of existing children? Not
to mention that many families will not have another child after a
child with Down's is born: family finances will not allow it.)
It is not so much that I cannot see why some people might choose
to virtue-signal on this issue (until they themselves get a Down
diagnosis for their foetus; then the great majority aborts). It's more
that this sort of diagnosis seems to be the most obvious and
common reason for a responsible person to abort in the second
semester and not before.
REPLY (1)
Mr. Surly 12 hr ago
There's this conceptual mistake people seem to make where
they think the pregnancies are interchangeable, you're just
aborting the one with down and getting same without. But
that's a distinct individual who will never live. That person
obviously would prefer to live with Down than not live at all.
This shouldn't really be debatable, and all sorts of folk with
Down seem to have great lives, as do those who live with them.
So I don't see any ethical undesirability, that seems like
transparent excuse mongering (don't want to deal, even
though all kids are pains, regardless). Don't get me wrong, I
honestly don't have a dog in this fight, am pro-abortion (with
limits) as noted. But I wouldn't pretend like there's some
distinction here worth discussing. You kill your folks once
they're no longer fun? Your dog? Of course not! Of course, you
can say the future's uncertain, so it's not clear nature won't
take its course and miscarry, which seems like a pretty strong
argument. But otherwise, I think most can sympathize with the
"don't euthanize me just because you think I wouldn't find
living X way better than never living at all."
REPLY (2)
Garald 11 hr ago
Again: even if you grant a foetus some moral weight, it is a
fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to live, or equal
rights, or any such thing. As a life, it is something real, but
it is only potentially a person - and we consider choices
between potential futures all the time.
It is completely consistent to believe that any person has
equal rights, and the right to live, but that foetus don't get
a right to be born - and that giving birth to a child with
Down's is not just not obligatory, but grossly immoral.
(That is not necessarily my opinion, mind you; I am simply
claiming that these opinions are consistent.)
This is so basic that I am starting to suspect that you
simply are arguing for the sake of arguing. I won't waste
my time on discussing this matter with you (whoever or
whatever it is that you are) further.
REPLY (2)
leopoldo blume 2 hr ago
"it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to
live, or equal rights, or any such thing."
What? By that logic you could say any baby under the
age of self-awareness (2-3?) does not have an
expressable "desire to live" and so should be
abortable.
"As a life, it is something real, but it is only potentially
a person"
As usual the only possible justification for abortion is
semantics. Who came up with the "potential person"
thing anyway? (I've seen it show up in a lot of
arguments about abortion recently)
Also, I've heard there are studies showing that
something like 95% of Down people are very happy
with their lives. What could give anyone sufficient
moral authority to decide who should live and who
should die based solely on what is assumed their
future life will be like? The hubris of that is
unspeakable. That kind of decision can only be made
about one's own life.
I think it is pretty clear that Down babies are aborted
for the convenience of the parents (and society in
REPLY (1)
Garald 2 hr ago
>"it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a
desire to live, or equal rights, or any such thing."
>
>What? By that logic you could say any baby
under the age of self-awareness (2-3?) does not
>have an expressable "desire to live" and so
should be abortable.
Nonsense; (a) infanticide can be condemned for
other reasons - I am only addressing the implicit
(and delusional) rationale that a foetus somehow
has a desire to live; (b) an infant is an animal - a
human one - and like any animal, it shows a drive
to live and survive essentially from the moment it
is born, even if it is not fully self-aware.
(What about a baby who is born half-dead, has
no apparent "will to survive" and would need
medical intervention to do so? Well, that *is* an
entire can of worms, and a separate issue.)
> Who came up with the "potential person" thing
anyway?
Potential this and that is something you'll find a
lot in Catholic anti-abortion argumentation
actually; there's obviously a debt to Aristotle
here.
>Also, I've heard there are studies showing that
something like 95% of Down people are very
>happy with their lives.
We've all heard plenty of things. The life of a
mentally handicapped adult that is aware of his
or her handicaps can be horrific; you won't see
that in the propaganda of the pro-Down lobby,
obviously. Plus, there are things other than
happiness; otherwise, lobotomize everybody and
put them on drugs.
At any rate, I have to get on with my day -
battling with obvious trolls is not a good use of
my time.
REPLY (1)
leopoldo blume 2 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
Sorry, I was okay with your whole comment
- even though I certainly don't agree with
you - because you are arguing your point of
view (as I was mine). Then you called me an
"obvious troll" (for a comment in which I
was expressing my deeply held beliefs,
beliefs for which there is, moreover, plenty
of scientific and ethical support).
Haven't seen that yet on this blog nor did I
expect it...
Anyway, it would seem your time is very
valuable to society so I won't waste anymore
of it. Good luck to you.
REPLY
 Deiseach 27 min ago
So what makes *you* a person, as distinct from a life?
What can you point to as establishing you are a
person not a potential, and which of those elements
can be taken away by law or lost by you as you age/if
you get sick?
Suppose you are in a car accident and have acquired
brain injury. You are now impaired physically and
mentally. Well you're not a person anymore, because
you've dropped down the score of "this number
makes you a person" so let's take you down the
knacker's yard and shoot you in the head.
Maybe you agree and would want to be shot in the
head if you lose faculties! But in that case,
"personhood" is a very shaky concept. You can lose it
just as easily and lose all your 'rights' along with it,
even if you retain your faculties, because now we've
decided "you're too short to be a person" or "you
have the wrong blood type".
REPLY
Zakharov 6 hr ago
Let's say that an all-knowing genie told you that if you
have sex on Tuesday, you'll have a kid with Downs. If you
have sex on Wednesday instead, you'll have a kid without
Downs. If you want to have a kid, is it immoral to have sex
on Wednesday but not Tuesday? What if, prior to the genie
appearing, you were planning on having sex on Tuesday?
REPLY
John Schilling 10 hr ago
If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is a person in the
moral or ethical sense, then they would be opposed to *any*
abortion of a fetus at that stage, Down's syndrome or no, on the
grounds that this would be murder. If someone believes that a fetus
at ~6 months is not a person in the moral or ethical sense, then
they would believe that aborting a fetus with Down's is not "killing
folk for having medical conditions" but rather preventing a person
from being born with a medical condition. Rather like not having
unprotected sex with your sibling prevents inbred children from
being born.
I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6
months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem
to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that
*only* people with Down's should be protected from early
infanticide.
REPLY (4)

Garald 9 hr ago
But that was exactly the reasoning behind the Ohio law:
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ohio-abortion-down-
syndrome-courts-
d9da3bbd49db2d3369a9e9f154383c8f#:~:text=By%20JULIE
%20CARR%20SMYTHApril,a%20case%20considered%20nati
onally%20pivotal.
Yes, it seems maximally perverse to you and to me, but not
necessarily to others. Of course, again, this was back when
Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land, so the point of these
laws was to stake a position.
REPLY
Garald 8 hr ago
PS. Of course one can believe (and in fact I suspect that many
people do believe) that a foetus at 6 months is not a person,
yet is both alive and human, and, by that token (or simply by
virtue of being a living *animal*) , deserves *some* moral
consideration - while at the same time not being conceivable
as an individual in any but a potential sense. Then the question
is whether you are willing to kill a foetus to prevent a person
from being born with a particularly cruel, limiting and incurable
condition.
Most people who operate in that framework would say "yes"
(or "sadly yes"), though the contrary is not utterly absurd
prima facie. Then it also makes sense for testing to become
effective and available as early in the pregnancy as possible.
REPLY
Eremolalos 8 hr ago
Yes, I agree, although I think some of it is that Downs
Syndrome is clearly identifiable via genetic testing of fetal cells
harvested from amniotic fluid, whereas for various other
 abnormalities it's more of a judgment call: "Fetus appears not
to have a liver, and if it doesn't have one the baby will die within
a couple months of birth, but it's not possible to be sure that
the liver is not just placed in a somewhat unusual way so that
it's hard to see."
REPLY
Deiseach 21 min ago · edited 20 min ago
People like Garald (can I call him "people"? He has not yet
provided any proof that he is a "person") clamour for abortion
on the grounds of "but rape! incest! threat to the mother's life!"
Okay. Being pregnant with a Down's Syndrome baby is not a
threat to the life of the mother, so knocking that plank out of
the platform is for the protection of the child. But as we see,
once you confine the right to abortion to "rape, incest, threat
to physical life", suddenly it becomes grossly immoral and
perverse and the rest of it, because they're arguing for
abortion as a right and with no limits or exceptions, on the bare
wish of the woman not to be pregnant. The stuff about "but
this woman will DIE if the pregnancy continues!" is just a
smokescreen.
REPLY
Dweomite 13 hr ago
Do you mean that they wanted to ban second-trimester abortions
involving Down syndrome while allowing second-trimester abortions in
other cases, or do you mean that most second-trimester abortions were
already banned and they wanted to eliminate an exception for Down
syndrome?
REPLY (1)
Garald 12 hr ago
The first.
(Of course this was before Roe vs. Wade was struck down, so they
may have just wanted to virtue-signal without consequences.)
REPLY (1)
Dweomite 12 hr ago
That does seem quite bad.
REPLY (1)
 Deiseach 19 min ago
Why? If the accusation is "if you ban necessary abortions,
women will die" and so you permit abortion in the case of
"this pregnancy will kill the woman", it's not unreasonable
to say "but we don't approve of abortion where there is no
threat". Down's Syndrome isn't a threat to the life of the
mother, and saying "you can't abort just because of
mental impairment" is feasible.
REPLY
Tom O'Brien 13 hr ago · edited 13 hr ago
Would you be ok with a government mandate for aborting all downs
syndrome fetuses, mandating all sperm donors be six foot tall and smart,
etc? The flavor of eugenics that should be banned, in some views, is the one
where a government forces such. I doubt that any of the arguments being
made against eugenics would be applied by their makers to legal decisions
by individuals. It does not seem to me that those kinds of decisions should
even be called eugenics. Is Birth control eugenics? Is a preference for women
with large breasts eugenics?
REPLY (1)
Ives Parr Writes Parrhesia 13 hr ago
Brother-sister and cousin marriage prohibitions are reasonable and
ethical forms of coercive eugenics in my view and many others.
REPLY (1)
Ryan W. Writes Ryan’s Newsletter 12 hr ago
Are they eugenic, though? Inbreeding, followed by outbreeding,
tends to result in stronger individuals since inbreeding potentially
removes things like lethal or harmful recessives. This is a
controversial assertion, granted, but it calls into some question the
long term utility of banning incest. (Unless one posits some better
technology on the horizon, like selective genetic testing and
implementation, which would make the price of a generation of
incest unnecessary. Harmful recessives could be removed by other
means.)
REPLY (2)
Ives Parr Writes Parrhesia 12 hr ago
I don't think that is correct unless I am misunderstanding you.
Inbreeding does not result in stronger individuals and does not
remove lethal or harmful recessives. Since highly related
individuals tend to share more harmful recessive variants, the
products of incest are likely to carry two harmful recessive
variants.
REPLY (1)
Ryan W. Writes Ryan’s Newsletter 9 hr ago ·
edited 9 hr ago
"Theory and empirical data showed that two processes
can boost selection against deleterious mutations, thus
facilitating the purging of the mutation load: inbreeding, by
exposing recessive deleterious alleles to selection in
homozygous form, and sexual selection, by enhancing the
relative reproductive success of males with small mutation
loads. "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6369961/
Of course, this paper is discussing hermaphroditic snails
over multiple generations and not humans. Males with low
mutational load having more children is also a viable, and
opposed, strategy.
The point here is that if an individual receives two harmful
recessive variants, that individual is likely to either
spontaneously abort or to at least not have children. This
effectively removes the 'two harmful recessives' from the
punnet square (assuming a single gene is being
discussed, for simplicity.) So if the inbred parent
generation each has a 50% chance of having a deleterious
mutation that prevents reproduction then there will be
only a 33% chance that their *grand*children will receive
that deleterious mutation.
REPLY
TGGP 11 hr ago
You can't just assume the inbreeding will be followed by
outbreeding. That's certainly not the case in Pakistan, which
persistently has higher levels of birth defects than places
where cousin marriage is less common.
REPLY (1)
Ryan W. Writes Ryan’s Newsletter 9 hr ago ·
 edited 9 hr ago
I'm not. I'm saying "one generation of incest is not
necessarily dysgenic in the long term."
REPLY
Jasper 13 hr ago
I think what Adraste means here is state-sponsored eugenics specifically.
REPLY
mini t 6 hr ago
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it" all you had to do was win
history's biggest war so not /that/ easy
REPLY (1)
JamesLeng 6 hr ago
Much like recording home movies, space travel, or teaching sand to do math,
it was difficult at first but became easier with practice.
REPLY
MetalCrow 15 hr ago
Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong
...
Adraste: I thought you said Ehrlich did nothing wrong!
Coria: I said bad, not wrong
Potential typo?
REPLY (1)
Scott Alexander 15 hr ago Author
I admit it's confusing, but she means:
CORIA: Ehrlich was bad
ADRASTE: I thought you said he wasn't wrong
CORIA: Yes, I just said in my last line that he was bad, but did not say he was
wrong.
REPLY (1)
MetalCrow 15 hr ago
Ahh, i see, yeah you're right. My mistake!
REPLY
Adam Friedland 15 hr ago
"Eugenics" has such a broad meaning these days that tabooing it means tabooing
basic research into behavioral genetics. And if behavioral genetics is taboo, you give a
license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's problems (racial
inequality, black crime, black underperformance in school etc) without anybody being
allowed to argue back scinetifically.
It also prevents great advances in science like gene therapy for higher intelilgence
(people are literally more willing to let a computer become superintelligent than for
humans to make their children smarter - insane).
REPLY (2)
Ives Parr Writes Parrhesia 13 hr ago
Delays in genetic enhancement technology are extraordinarily harmful. I think the
stigma prevents open discussions and serious evaluations of the possible returns.
REPLY
Wanda Tinasky 10 hr ago
"you give a license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's
problems"
Isn't that ... exactly what's been happening? I can't tell if your conditional phrasing
is just a rhetorical posture or if you've actually been living in a cave.
REPLY

Wendigo Writes Wendigo’s Substack 15 hr ago

"It seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist
libertarianism."
No, not at all. This is only true if one insists on focusing entirely on being consistent in
the structure of their arguments, with insufficient attention to the content in different
cases. This reminds me of how Huemer tears Rawls to shreds in "The Problem of
Political Authority" over the internal logical inconsistency of social contract theory.
Huemer's alternate theory may be more logically consistent (I can't remember, it's
been a very long time) but I think most people can agree that his proposed structure
of society is far worse than the status quo. Logical consistency isn't everything and it's
perfectly okay to say "I'm willing to go this far, but not any further, because the ethics
and/or implications of going further are concerning".
REPLY (1)
None of the Above 13 hr ago
as an example, consider the situation on a hypothetical mars colony that has been
cut off from earth. It's quite likely that fairly draconian population control is the
 only way for that company to have any hope of surviving. At best, you get some
sort of license or permit necessary to have children, with the total number, strictly
limited, and some kind of serious enforcement mechanism to keep people from
ignoring it.
REPLY (1)
Alexander Turok Writes Alexander Turok Blog 12 hr ago
Not necessarily. You seem to be assuming collective provisioning of children.
The rule could be "workers get X in wages and if you can't feed your seven
kids on that wage that's your problem." That's how it was historically in
Malthusian societies, though I could see how a Mars colony would need to be
a much more integrated, "centrally planned" economy than a medieval
farming village.
REPLY
Maynard Handley 15 hr ago
"Over population will result in disaster" is one of those claims that will never be
*allowed* to be vindicated, because people will always insist that some more
proximate issue caused the disaster. Overpopulation *by itself* does nothing; the
chain of causality from overpopulation to disaster has many links, and people are
extremely invested in ensuring that the blame is attached to one of those links, not to
overpopulation. The most common link is war (and so we blame war, not the
overpopulation that led to social unrest that led to a government feeling it needed to
behave in a certain way), but another common one is bad weather (blame the weather,
not the obvious fact that if food production has a standard deviation of so much, and if
the population is sized to barely stay alive during the good years, then there will be
problems during the bad years).
There is never any shortage of intermediate links...
If there is any single thing we have learned since Ehrlich, it's that people are unlimited
in their capacity to blame others for problems that they have caused. To take a
somewhat less contentions example, very few of the people who generate a constant
stream of complaints about growing cities have committed themselves to zero
children. They see no contradiction between their having kids and their demands that
no new housing (or schools or factories or whatever) be built; it's someone else's
problem to reconcile these two. And once you have adopted this viewpoint, that you
can demand whatever you like (because it is "right") and that thing will simply happen,
because magic, you're all set for the inevitable collision with reality.
(Of course when that collision comes, god forbid we generalize from it to the one
solution that can actually improve the situation; god no! The Nigerian Civil War will be
explained as something about Christians vs Muslims. The Chinese attack on Taiwan
REPLY (3)
Alexander Turok Writes Alexander Turok Blog 15 hr ago
You seem to be arguing that the overpopulation predictors predicted disaster,
disaster happened, and then people asserted that the disaster happened for
unrelated reasons.
What I see is that the disaster didn't happen. India is poor by American standards
but quite richer than it was in the 1970s. Even in very poor African countries, the
fact that they grew so much from 1970 to 2020 shows that the overpopulation
apocalypse hasn't gotten here. In a Malthusian catastrophe the population stops
growing.
It's the overpopulation predictors who move the goalposts and say "well, Indian
people are doing okay but look at all these wild animals in India that are being
driven to extinction..."
REPLY (2)
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
It's basically same as people who blame capitalism for our current straits, as
though it wasn't capitalism that brought billions out of poverty. Just as
Ehrlich has been proven wrong, like peak oil, AGW, etc., so too has the cry of
capitalism has brought us to this desperate, prosperous state!
REPLY
Douglas Knight 12 hr ago
The Arab Spring contributes to the official count of "climate refugees." Does
it make more sense to blame climate or population for food prices?
REPLY

Christophe Biocca 15 hr ago

You use the examples of war, and starvation for things that are caused by
overpopulation, and yet aren't "blamed" on it. But the trendline for both of those
is going down over time (as is simple material poverty in general).
How does that square with the position that overpopulation is a real and ongoing
problem? It's reasonable to use a set of proxy measurements, but the proxy
measurements point in the opposite direction than expected.
REPLY (1)
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago · edited 11 hr ago
Also just a silly point because we've had war forever, even where no obvious
overpopulation. (Yes, I can make the argument even the new guinea head
 hunters were over populated at X per square Y, and that's why they fought,
but please.)
REPLY (1)
Monkyyy Writes Monkyyy’s Newsletter 11 hr ago
I expect some antinatalists would argue that; like are the new guinea
tribes that different from the easter islands, which is often an example.
REPLY
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
If there’s a Chinese attack on Taiwan on the future it will be an attack by a country
with a TFR of 1.3, against a country with a TFR of 1.
In other words two increasingly depopulating countries.
In general if you believe that overpopulation causes wars then you would more
wars per capita today (out of 8 billion people) than in the past when the
population was in the mere hundreds of millions. However pre industrial societies
were very violent and warlike.
REPLY (1)
Paul Botts 11 hr ago
Yes, exactly.
Perhaps worth noting that Russia, TFR 1.5, invaded and is currently bloodily
bogged down in Ukraine, TFR 1.2.
REPLY (2)
jumpingjacksplash 1 hr ago · edited 1 hr ago
Or, more relevantly, Russia (9 people per square km) invaded and is
currently bogged down in Ukraine (72 people per square km).
REPLY
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie 41 min ago
I was thinking about that.
Heinlein was very gung ho in Starship Troopers about war always being
caused by overpopulation. Did he get the idea from someone? Is there
evidence historically?
If true, it's overpopulation relative to resources, not some absolute
standard. Russia has a lot of territory, but most of it isn't good places to
live.
REPLY
DxS 15 hr ago
Sounds like the real argument is about expected recklessness.
Back when "democracy" meant "mob rule" to most people, you wouldn't trust a self-
declared democrat. After all, he probably believed in mob rule.
Today, "eugenics" is associated with reckless people, so any particular eugenics is
default bad, because of the kind of person who'd propose it.
Of course, this is a heuristic for stagnation. You can't trust anyone who advocates
what used to be a reckless person's idea, even if the idea these days is perfectly
sound. The very unfamiliarity of "eugenics" makes it reckless now, after all.
Is the answer some equivalent for policy papers of scientific peer review, so that I can
know that Bob's eugenics plans are robust against the old style of reckless
implementation?
Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics policies
become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
REPLY (1)
Edmund 7 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
> Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics
policies become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
I think perhaps this norm can be steelmanned. If the old discussion of XYZ was
reckless and occasionally evil, isn't it better to start over completely, with a new
name, so that people won't be tempted to draw on the old reckless literature and
accidentally smuggle all its mistakes back in? Think of it like deciding that the
new, rigorous scientific discipline is called "chemistry" instead of just being
"alchemy, but now we're making it evidence-based and cutting the weird mystical
stuff".
REPLY

Hank Wilbon Writes Partial Magic 15 hr ago

Great post!
REPLY
Andrei 15 hr ago · edited 15 hr ago
The discussion in part III is interesting, but I think it misses, or at least fails to explicitly
point out, the (factual rather than moral) claim underpinning Adraste's perspective.
Meaning, if Adraste were a real person, truly holding on to the belief that there is a
distinction to be drawn between eugenics and environmentalism in that respect, I
would expect them to say this:
"Of course, 50 years ago, many environmentalists supported (likely) forced
sterilization in India. But today, the supporter of forced sterilization is a non-central
(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-
worst-argument-in-the-world) instance of the category of (Western)
environmentalists, but a central instance of the category of eugenics supporters."
To put this more explicitly, I would expect many (maybe even most) of the people in
Adraste's position would agree with both of these claims: "less than 10% of
environmentalists today support forced sterilization" and "more than 90% of eugenics
supporters today also support forced sterilization."
Again, these are factual statements, not moral ones, even though one's moral
convictions can certainly bias them to have certain beliefs on this matter (moreover, I
would certainly expect Scott and others here to disagree with the latter statement).
The point is, however, that if you imagine yourself in the position of someone who
genuinely believes both statements are true, it seems clear why you would consider
one of them a dangerous slippery slope that requires moral condemnation of those
trying to bring it about (even if they don't intend the end result of forced sterilization),
and the other one clearly not a dangerous slippery slope or deserving of any
condemnation whatsoever.
Meaning, even if you agree that both sides are big tents containing both good and bad
ideas, and good and bad people, if you truly, genuinely believe as a factual matter that
one is '90% good/10% bad' and the other one is '10% good/90% bad', it seems likely
you would reject any moral equivalence between them (perhaps even in a much less
polite manner than Adraste does here). Matters of moral condemnation might be fuzzy
around the edges, but this simply wouldn't feel like an edge case at all.
REPLY (2)
Scott Alexander 15 hr ago Author
I think this is what Beroe means by bringing up the hyperstitious slur cascade; this
is true entirely because eugenics has been so strongly associated with
sterilization that nobody who doesn't support it would identify as a eugenicist.
I think things like Nobel Sperm Banks are great ideas, but I wouldn't call myself a
"eugenicist", and the average person would be too scared / too reflexively against
everything involved to even be okay with the Nobel Sperm Bank.
If we switched things around so that anyone who used the term
"environmentalist" got accused of wanting to sterilize people, within a few
decades the only people who wholeheartedly identified with environmentalism
would be the ones who *did* want to sterilize people. But the fact that the label
"environmentalist" would contain only bad people wouldn't mean that we hadn't
erred in using it that way, or that we weren't making a mistake by enforcing such a
use of it.
REPLY (2)
Melvin 13 hr ago
I would say that if you're going to collect eugenically-commendable sperm
for sperm banks then Nobel Prizes are a pretty bad selection criterion. For
starters the average Nobel Laureate is probably sixty and may have some
problematic sperm (especially if they've spent too much time around
radiation!) Secondly, it's over-optimising for one desirable characteristic
(intelligence) selected by a pretty imperfect and random proxy.
If you want good sperm, go find some straight A students in their early
twenties who are also good-looking, athletic, and popular, and also have
eight living great-grandparents. I'll take that over Brian Josephson's tired
seed.
REPLY (1)
Garald 13 hr ago
Why is being popular (or for that matter athletic, as opposed to being
simply in good health) desirable? And who decides who is good-
looking?
(And isn't getting straight As a piece of cake these days?)
Was it Bertrand Russell who made the following objection to eugenics?
Selective breeding for cows is meant to make them better, in the well-
defined sense of "useful to humans"; selective breeding for humans
would be meant to make them ... useful to whom exactly?
REPLY (2)
TGGP 11 hr ago
Isn't popularity desirable (as in, people bestow prestige upon such
traits) almost by definition?
REPLY (1)
Garald 10 hr ago
"Popular" is an opaque (to me) but socially important trait in
American high schools (much like "respect" is an important
thing in prison - and hierarchical environments that are a bit
like prison). I wouldn't say it's the only thing that matters in a
US high school (in fact, I spent a semester in one back in the
day, and it didn't affect my life at all in any way I could see), but
 apparently it's not just some Hollywood invention - and some
of it carries over to later life.
Are we breeding for popularity? I hope not.
REPLY
Ses 9 hr ago
Well obviously from a pigouvian perspective that's actually pretty
self explanatory and a much better argument for why eugenics is in
the government's remit. traits with positive externalities to other
humans should be subsidized as they would be insufficiently
incentivized otherwise. (I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS)
REPLY (1)
Garald 9 hr ago
The point being that there is no obvious way in which
popularity (or being conventionally good-looking, or perhaps
even being athletic) is in the public interest, whereas being
intelligent is?
REPLY (1)
Garald 9 hr ago
(... assuming you are not an intelligent sociopath)
REPLY
Yug Gnirob 4 hr ago
Well, guess I'll put this here.
The article assumed the Nobel Sperm Bank is a fine idea, but I feel Adraste
let it off the hook too easily. The first question is, what happens if a non-
Nobel Prize person/(whatever criteria we're using) wants to donate? Are they
refused? Are people discouraged from using that sperm? Is there a hierarchy
where you always use this class of sperm first? Is it a blood bank system,
where like gets like; this person is below average intelligence, so we'll use the
below average sperm up on them? It's a class system at the root, and
problematic without any slope slipping.
I remember one of the blog posts from SSC talking about tests on a full
vitamin pill diet, and then they discovered chromium deficiency because
chromium deficiency had never been possible in isolation before. So too
societies; I don't trust the people making the decisions to understand society
well enough to make a positive genetic modification without discovering a
new problem that was previously solving itself. Maybe those Nobel Prize
 winners are also above-average stubborn, maybe they're uncommonly
sports-averse, and now we've selected for a population of out-of-shape
extra-stubborn people, and are going to have a hard time turning back
(because it requires walking and you can't make me).
I can see separating out sperm for, like, artisanal reasons. Parents get the
option to get sperm from a fancy-pants athlete, or a Nobel Prize winner, the
same way you can buy sea-salt or Himalayan salt instead of regular salt. But
any thumb on the scale from the operator, encouraging this trait over that, is
REPLY (1)
Firanx 1 hr ago · edited 1 hr ago
A fund (let's say created by a philanthropist) investing in education of
Nobel Sperm Bank kids does seem like a thumb on the scale, but what
downsides would you seriously expect if it existed?
REPLY
Cornelius 14 hr ago
I would describe myself as a eugenicist but I certainly would not support forced
sterilizations. Where does the idea that coercive policies would be popular among
contemporary eugenicists come from?
REPLY (1)
Melvin 13 hr ago
Well, I'm sure that some do. I'm sure if we did a poll right here "Do you
support forced sterilizations of people with the following genetic disorders..."
you'd find some support for the proposition.
It's not a difficult intellectual leap to make. Once you've accepted that
eugenics is in principle a good idea, the idea of just a few forced sterilisations
starts seeming pretty appealing from a utilitarian point of view.
Besides, in practice it turns out there's a blurry line between optional and
coerced. As far as I know, no Western government actually _forced_ anyone
to get a covid vaccine, but once it became accepted that it was a really really
good idea for everyone to get one they sure as hell came close. You don't
_have_ to get a covid vaccine, you're just not allowed to do anything unless
you do. If the governments of the world became similarly convinced that
Strictly Optional eugenic policies were a good idea, what would happen?
REPLY
MetalCrow 15 hr ago
Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that
right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of
impersonal arbiter of morality.
That seems pretty extreme! I would guess Coria would also agree that German citizens
who sheltered Jews from the Nazi regime were wrong, and overstepping their bounds.
It is the logical endpoint of that ideology. A middle ground between this and total
libertarianism based on anything besides intuition is pretty hard, agreed.
REPLY
madasario 15 hr ago
I am probably comment #2,345 saying this, but I just want to thank you for the acro-
pun. I'm going to smile every time I think of it for weeks.
REPLY (1)
Mark Y 12 hr ago
What pun? I missed it.
REPLY (1)
AlexTFish 4 hr ago
I think it's the title and subtitle of this post - "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck: An
exploding generational bomb" - which is written to evoke "Godel, Escher,
Bach: An eternal golden braid", a magnificent and delightful book about
many things which we know Scott likes.
REPLY

Matt S 15 hr ago
What I don' t see mentioned in this piece or the comments is the immediate negative
consequences of drawing official lines between intelligent/desirable people and not-
intelligent/not-desirable people. The second a government draws this line, the two
groups diverge, human nature kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism
imo by which the slippery slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery,
and very quickly leads to the worst of humanity.
REPLY (4)
Scott Alexander 15 hr ago Author
Don't things like saying "don't drink while you're pregnant" already do that? We're
saying that having a kid with fetal alcohol syndrome is worse than having a kid
without fetal alcohol syndrome.
REPLY (4)
Maybe later 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
Does that mean the “things get ugly” line (which may be both wide and
fuzzy) is where the undesireables are a viable political base?
REPLY (1)
Matt S 14 hr ago
No. It means the ultimate logical conclusions that the "desirables" come
up with when they see the other group as somehow less human – like
slavery, and the Holocaust.
REPLY

Matt S 14 hr ago
I'm talking about the govt explicitly drawing a line that divides the population
into groups, telling one group, "you are dumb, you should not reproduce",
and sending the other group the message, "hey those dumb people are
reproducing too much and causing problems." This will never end well. Either
you treat human beings as equals, at least when it comes to intelligence, or
you have something resembling the Antebellum South. You can't have it both
ways imo.
REPLY (5)
Arnold 14 hr ago
We already have groups that explicitly treated as unequel in intelligence
children, and elderly.
REPLY (1)
JamesLeng 5 hr ago
Lot more predictable migration of individuals in and out of those
groups, meaning they've got some personal incentive to make sure
conditions are tolerable on both sides of the line.
REPLY

Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago

I don’t think that Scott, or anybody, is arguing the sterilisation position
here.
REPLY (1)
Matt S 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
I'm not saying he is. But I'm making the point that officially
separating groups into smart and not-smart, and making policies
 based on that, only leads to very bad things. Sort of like how even if
you think Communism is a good idea, in practice it always turns to
shit, because it ignores human nature.
REPLY (2)
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago
He’s not doing that either.
REPLY (1)
Matt S 13 hr ago
I’m not saying he’s doing anything. I’m making a point
about the idea of a government policy that draws lines and
creates groups based on intelligence that I didn’t see
mentioned in the post - namely the practical real world
implications of a governmental policy that separates
human beings by intelligence.
REPLY

Firanx 8 min ago

One way of telling people they aren't smart (or at least weren't
smart in doing some specific thing) is putting them in
prisons/on probation/giving them fines. I wouldn't say we do it
just fine, but however shitty the implementation is, most of it
isn't the social rift or hierarchy where people who never got a
parking ticket are above those who did.
REPLY
TGGP 14 hr ago
The antebellum south didn't try to stop slaves from reproducing. As I
noted elsewhere in this thread, the New World was unusual in how
slaves were able to reproduce their own numbers after the international
slave trade was prohibited.
REPLY (1)
Matt S 14 hr ago
But they justified slavery with the belief that Africans were
subhuman compared to themselves, which is what happens as
soon as you officially label one group as less desirable to
reproduce.
REPLY (1)
 TGGP 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
There were lots of slaves shipped east to the Islamic world, and
the males were frequently castrated. The women were not,
however, and their owners often had offspring with their female
slaves (which is why the rise of Islam in the Middle East
resulted in a significant influx of sub-Saharan African DNA not
found among endogamous religious minorities). There was an
entire class of slave soldiers who would sometimes take over
their societies, in accordance with an analogous precept of
Mao. This now-dominant class of slave soldiers would still
perpetuate the system of slave soldiers. Did they regard slave
soldiers as sub-human? Was any quasi-eugenic belief at all
necessary for this system of slavery?
REPLY (1)
Matt S 13 hr ago
By the end when most societies had abolished slavery, the
South was still using eugenics to justify it. I think
intelligence is just too fundamental to how we see
ourselves as human beings. And once you start drawing
lines and separating groups based on intelligence, it’s
natural that the ingroup is going to see the outgroup as
less human.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 13 hr ago
Europe abolished slavery, the American south was
only unusual relative to the European norm. Slavery
persisted elsewhere.
REPLY (1)
Viliam Writes Kittenlord’s Java Game Examples
3 min ago
More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st
_century
REPLY
Alex 14 hr ago
For some less extreme examples, many other inborn traits like autism,
deafness, homosexuality, and left-handedness have over time shifted
around quite a bit on the spectrum between "undesireable trait that
should be eradicated" and "cherished part of the diverse tapestry of
humanity".
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
It has never been proven that homosexuality is "inborn". I don't
think we know that about autism (in general) either, though there
may be some Mendelian syndromes of it.
REPLY
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Or like the segregationist south. But you just have treat people as equal,
regardless of intelligence. Because people and populations obviously
have very different levels of intelligence, for whatever reason, but you
still treat them as equals, regardless of relative IQ or education, or
whatever. Are you saying intelligence is special case, or is that just one
example among many?
REPLY (1)
Matt S 13 hr ago
I think intelligence is fundamental to how we see ourselves as
humans. Once you start separating groups, it’s way too easy to
convince the desirable group that the other group isn’t quite as
human, which can justify all kinds of abhorrent policy.
REPLY (1)
Mr. Surly 12 hr ago
That seems very clearly wrong. If history is any guide, most
folk see themselves as part of a tribe/country, and/o part of a
religion, long before something like IQ comes into play. And
trying to fight against humans separating selves into groups
seems obviously hopeless, so long as there are countries,
religions, tribes, ethnic groups, football teams, etc.
REPLY (1)
Matt S 12 hr ago · edited 12 hr ago
None of those let you call another group of humans a
subspecies that needs to be handled differently, which is
the kind of rhetoric hardcore racists use. Intelligence is
different. If you call a group less intelligent it’s basically
 implying they’re more animalistic, especially to people
who are easily triggered by fear-based propaganda.
REPLY
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 12 hr ago
Scott you would have to admit there’s an element of volition here where once
you know you’re pregnant you have to drink knowing there is harm. Nobody
chooses to harm a baby with Down Syndrome.
REPLY (2)
Anon 12 hr ago
Well, there are people who know they’re at high risk of passing some
severe medical condition to their offspring, and who have biological
children anyway.
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 10 hr ago
Probably more than you want to know about my ethics, but the
different between “maybe’ and “definitely” is pretty big in the way
we do things. But to your point I think the appropriate thing for such
a parent to do is to see if an intervention can be made in the
selection of the egg or sperm, or even embryo. I’m not totally happy
with the way we go about those things today but at least the ones
reviewed get the chance to live.
REPLY

Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author

That doesn't seem very relevant, but if you find it interesting, consider
instead the case of encouraging people to take pregnancy vitamins,
which suggests that the default option (having a baby with a risk of
spina bifida) is worse than the alternative (having a baby without that).
Or consider the common practice of screening for Down's and
considering abortion if the test is positive.
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 10 hr ago
Hey Scott, thanks for responding. What I was pointing to in
particular is that telling a woman not to drink when there’s shared
knowledge that doing so puts the baby at risk is different than
ranking an outcome as negative when “it just happens” without
someone having to take some action. Prohibited action versus
 involuntary outcome. A normal woman, living her normal life, when
pregnant, doing the things normally known to produce healthy
child, will probably produce a healthy child.
Trying to give you the shortened version of my ethical framework,
but agreed you should help the baby with spina big bifida
envaginate their spinal column while it’s still a notochord and of
course it’s prudent to tell a pregnant woman to have a vitamin to
increase the likelihood of that. I’m totally in favor of preventative
action or corrective care to replace something that’s gonna awry.
Not sure I disagree with you at all on the idea that there are things
out there that would be better if they were otherwise.
On the last part, which I am not trying to engage on, I know an
internet comment isn’t going to change your mind on this, least of
all mine, and I’m sure you’ve seen just as many fetuses in jars as I
have if not more, but nothing I saw in those jars said to me there
wasn’t a life there that needed protection. My belief is that if our
species had evolved with translucent stomachs nobody would have
ever shrugged about abortion or bought into it enough they
couldn’t later retract. I am well aware of the conundrums involved
and my hope is that one day artificial wombs will completely change
the ethical, legal, and moral frameworks around this so those lives
can be protected with the same relative risk to the mother as an
abortion. Then the whole question goes up in smoke and the babies
can be protected and the mother can go her way.
I just don’t honestly know what civilization is for if it isn’t to protect
people who are vulnerable.
REPLY
Mark 4 hr ago
No, we're saying 'don't inflict fetal alcohol syndrome on a person'. Just like
saying it's wrong to break someone's legs doesn't imply that we think a
person with broken legs has less value.
REPLY
jbirdmenj 14 hr ago
Eugenics is coming whether we like it or not. Even if we made it illegal in the USA,
it wouldn’t be illegal in China or some other countries.
REPLY (1)
Xpym 1 hr ago
 Amusingly, China probably had the most effective coercive eugenics
program ever, which ended up producing Yao Ming. They still don't seem to
be excited about it these days for some reason.
REPLY
Kitschy 13 hr ago
I'm glad someone else commented this!
I was gonna say, eugenics is clearly very different and inherently very bad
because it inherently says "some of you are worth less than everyone (or worth
more), and only some of you should exist".
Most of the counter arguments don't apply - most Muslims rightfully denounce
the ones that say only true believers should get to live. The environmentalisn
argument more rightly applies to ecofascists, which most of us would agree are
bad people with a bad ideology.
But the thing that unites all eugenicists is the belief that only some people should
get to exist. I think that's inherently wrong.
Also, assuming you can pick what's going to advantageous vs disadvantageous in
the future is pure hubris. If the Nazis have wiped out all the autistic people like
they wanted to, we wouldn't have massive internet infrastructure. So it's bad both
inherently and from the unintended consequences side of things.
REPLY (4)
TGGP 13 hr ago
I think the Nazis could have still built the internet.
REPLY
Anon 11 hr ago
What about “some of you are incapable of making a good skyscraper, and
you should not make a skyscraper”? Then s/skyscraper/child/g
REPLY
John Schilling 10 hr ago
Ehrlich et al weren't calling for mandatory sterilization of middle-class
Americans and Europeans; doesn't that mean that they were equally guilty of
saying "some of you are worth less than everyone else and shouldn't exist"?
REPLY (1)
Matt S 9 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago
Yes. They just weren't saying the quiet part out loud. But they were still
acting on it, which might be worse.
 REPLY
Zakharov 6 hr ago
I think "only some people should exist" is a position one has to take. If all
possible people existed, the earth would collapse into a black hole. The
question is what factors determine which people, out of all possible people,
exist. The common position on that is "assortative mating is fine, most forms
of government coercion are not, incentives are questionable and considered
on a case-by-case basis".
REPLY
Jeffrey Soreff 12 hr ago
"The second a government draws this line, the two groups diverge, human nature
kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism imo by which the slippery
slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery, and very quickly
leads to the worst of humanity."
Yes. While I, personally, have had a vasectomy, and tend to view sterilization with
a yawn, historically, _forcible_ sterilization has been something done to
outgroups. It looks like part of a very slippery slope because it has often been
done not as a public health optimization tactic, but as an act of hostility.
I think the safest line to draw is between government actions and parental
actions. Parents don't always act in the best interests of their children but they
tend to be a better bet than anyone else.
REPLY
La Gazzetta Europea Writes La Gazzetta Europea 15 hr ago
The difference between Galton and Ehrlich is simple: the first is very evil
European/conservative sterilization, which is bad. The second is for left-
wing/progressive sterilization, which is good and academics like it.
It is, as always, simple friend/enemy distinction.
REPLY (3)
Garald 14 hr ago
Ehrlich had his share of left-wing critics, in the West and elsewhere. In fact,
opposition to India's compulsive sterilisation program used to be given as an
example where the hard left and the conservative right found common ground.
REPLY
Shankar Sivarajan Writes Shankar’s Newsletter 13 hr ago
 Yeah, it's sad that people have convinced themselves that politics is more
complex than that, and write long treatises trying to make sense of the
meaningless complexity they've imagined.
REPLY
John Schilling 10 hr ago
Galton's brand of sterilization *was* left-wing/progressive sterilization. It's only
when Hitler et al got into the act that it became an "evil European/conservative"
thing, and at that point almost everyone forgets about Galton altogether.
REPLY
Eric Zhang Writes Eric Zhang's Newsletter 15 hr ago
I think you mean "plaintiff", not "defendant"
REPLY
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 15 hr ago
Blood boiling evil stuff from Ehrlich. I try to hate no one but can’t quite seem to keep it
from touching him. Loathe to my marrow that he hasn’t been denounced as a hack.
You don’t get to be wrong about everything but still be called an expert.
REPLY (1)
Shankar Sivarajan Writes Shankar’s Newsletter 13 hr ago
Yes, in fact you do. Most people called "experts" are hacks. (There ARE experts,
but they're rare, and neither famous nor popular.)
REPLY (1)
Some Guy Writes Extelligence 13 hr ago
Let’s change it. That guy did heinous shit.
REPLY

N. Fidel 15 hr ago
This review seemed pedantic to me. The 'improvment' of human characteristics, e.g.
morbidity, intelligence, etc. through either selective breeding (Galton's postion) or the
removal of undesirable traits through sterilization, incarceraton or murder, was
debunked long ago. The recognition that there are no recognized single genes, or
group of genes that co-assort to produce what we call intelligence, longevity or
whatever general human trait makes the eugenics dialog irrevalent. Real eugenics is
here now and it called gene therapy. Currently, gene therapy is able to cure or improve
certain single gene mutation diseases. in the interests of brevity: 'nuff said.
REPLY (6)
 TGGP 15 hr ago
How was Galton "debunked"? He never claimed there were "single genes", as he
didn't know of Mendelian genetics at all. And Greg Clark would disagree that you
can't change undesirable traits through the justice system.
REPLY
Cornelius 14 hr ago
I suggest you read up on animal and plant breeding. The improvement of
characteristics through selective breeding is rather easy, requires no knowledge
of specific genes and is based on a model according to which heritability is due to
the additive action of numerous genes, each with a small effect. Human genetics
is no different.
REPLY
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Um, you do realize smarter folk tend to have smarter kids? Same with height? And
looks? Everyone knows this, and pursues this eugenicist strategy in mating to the
extent they can! It's selective breeding all the way down!
REPLY
Cal 11 hr ago
I hate to be the "source??" guy, but if you're going to claim that some idea is
"debunked" then that kind of demands an explanation of how it was debunked
and when and by whom.
REPLY
ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
I mean embryo selection already improves intelligence more than any
environmental intervention we have. The Holocaust has a meta analytic point-
estimate of 0.1d for cognitive ability; embryo selection is at 0.2d in its infancy.
REPLY
Adrian 4 hr ago
I feel that if we really want to go down the road of genetically manipulating
humanity, then it would be far easier to use genetic editing rather than
implementing a massive selective breeding program.
REPLY
moonshadow 15 hr ago
> I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects
your future child’s
> traits a lot
"Traits" is doing a lot of work there. Both intelligence and life outcomes depend on a
large number of complex factors; some of these are heritable, others are not; the
heritable factors are a complex mix of both positive and negative that all interact with
each other; meanwhile, a great deal of luck is also required for a good outcome. The
magnitude of the survivor bias is unclear: we only hear about the genius babies who
grow up, study and publish; the ones who are born in thirdworld slums, live as street
kids for a few years then die of starvation or exposure do so unseen and uncounted. It
is far from obvious what proportion of the outcome is down to genetics, rather than
factors like the education system, childhood parasite load or local child labour laws.
The divine right of kings has long since been discredited, as has the concept that
nobles are somehow inherently better than commoners, and yet the intuition is still
that rich people are necessarily poor people's betters. I suggest an alternative theory:
rich people by and large are rich mostly not because of genetically heritable traits, but
rather because they got lucky: lucky to be born into an already rich family, lucky to be
born to an environment where they were lifted up instead of beaten down, and/or lucky
that risks they took during their lives paid off.
Luck, unfortunately, is not a heritable trait.
> For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access
/ culture / cycles
>Expand
of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to
full comment
REPLY (4)
TGGP 15 hr ago
Rich people tend to be both lucky and talented. The resources spent on schooling
do not appear to make much of a difference though.
REPLY (2)
Garald 15 hr ago
Some of my own doubts about eugenics come from seeing educated people
rather ready to make basic mistakes of language that confirm their
prejudices (in favor of the well-to-do, their own ethnic group, etc.). Rich
people do not tend to be talented; they tend to be rather dumb, simply
because mostly any group tends to be rather dumb. Is the minority of
talented people somewhat larger among the rich than in other groups? No
idea actually, given that the rich how much more of an opportunity to develop
and display some talents than other groups (though probably less incentive
to do either than some other groups).
REPLY (2)
TGGP 14 hr ago
I suppose if you set the bar high enough then everyone is "dumb".
Perhaps everyone is also unlucky for not living in the post-scarcity
utopia of the future. But relative to existing people, rich people do tend
to be both lucky & talented.
REPLY (1)
Garald 14 hr ago
Where are you drawing your pool from? Are you friends with lots of
prominent maestros (and are you setting the bar for "rich" low
enough that they are rich)?
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago
Relative to existing people means comparing them to the
average of the total population.
I'm not personally friends with the top level elites, I've just read
about them.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-worthy-overlordshtml
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/co
mpetent-elites
REPLY (1)
Garald 14 hr ago
A comment along the lines of "the rich have a somewhat
larger minority of talented people than the poor" would
have been a far better reflection of this position (though it
would still need convincing proof).
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago
I don't need to define the proportion deemed
"talented", just compare averages.
REPLY

ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
>They tend to be rather dumb
What does this mean? Are you implying there’s a negative relationship
between wealth and intelligence, or something else?
 REPLY (1)
John Schilling 10 hr ago
It just means that he thinks he's smarter than most rich people, and
most middle-class people and most poor people and therefore he
can call them *all*
"dumb".
Which may be true if Garald is highly intelligent and using a strictly
relative definition of "dumb". But it's still a dumb thing for him to
say, because if he's using that baseline for the definition of dumb
then it's just a coordinate transformation from TGGP's "lucky and
talented" to "generally less dumb", which still supports TGGP's
argument.
REPLY
moonshadow 14 hr ago
As I mention above, the idea that rich people tend to be our betters needs
backing up with actual evidence, not mere assertion; especially in the era of
Musk and Trump.
REPLY (4)
Garald 14 hr ago
Right.
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TGGP 14 hr ago
I would have thought readers of this blog would already be aware that IQ
is correlated with money, but here's a blog post debunking the more
narrow objection that this correlation tops out at high levels:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/there-is-no-iq-threshold-effect-
also-not-for-income/
And, as I also thought people here would already be aware, IQ is
negatively associated with committing violent crime:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/
I won't bother linking to a study showing that poorer areas have higher
crime rates than richer ones, because every American knows this. Garett
Jones' "Hive Mind" is about how IQ is correlated with cooperation.
REPLY (1)
 moonshadow 6 hr ago
Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.
I mean, sure, as the XKCD says, it's certainly a strong hint. But -
hear me out here - what if the arrow of causality between a
moneyed background and IQ actually goes the other way?
REPLY (1)
TGGP 2 hr ago
People have looked into this. Little evidence of an effect of
shared environment on IQ.
REPLY
Brenden Writes Brenden’s Substack 14 hr ago
That’s definitely an odd comparison.
REPLY
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago
Where did people get the idea that Musk is dumb? He clearly isn’t.
I do worry about many modern politicians though. Not just Trump.
REPLY (3)
Cal 11 hr ago
I suspect it's mostly horns effect — they don't like him because he's
rich, so they're happy to attribute other negative qualities to him as
well. That said, he has made some questionable business decisions
they could point to.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 11 hr ago
Negative halo effect.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACGeaAk6KButv2xwQ/the-
halo-effect
REPLY

Gres 8 hr ago
People have been saying he’s dumb for a long time, because he
kept trying things that no-one expected to work. He went into
electric cars when most reasonable people thought that was dumb
(or bad at his aims of making electric cars available to everyone
because he targeted the rich, or whatever), and he went into private
 space travel when that seemed dumb (or again, focused on rich
people and hence inefficient at achieving his goal of making space
accessible). Now he’s gone into Twitter and actually had a failure -
and it’s widely accepted that success changes people, so now his
past successes provide less-direct evidence of his current
intelligence. It takes lots of skill to achieve what he’s done, but he
also gave people plenty of justifications for calling him dumb.
REPLY
moonshadow 6 hr ago
Twitter, mainly. Both what he did with it, and also what he posts
there.
Thing is, his other holdings have groups of people that have
developed organically over time who translate his proclamations
into policies that are sensible for the company to attempt and safe
for the public to hear. When he came to Twitter from cold, though,
we got to see the raw, unfiltered man.
Until that point I had mentally filed him in the same category as Bill
Gates / Larry Page / Sergey Brin, and was happy to hero worship. I
can tell you precisely when I lost my last vestiges of respect for the
man, and it was when this story broke:
https://nypost.com/2022/11/18/elon-musk-asks-twitter-engineers-
to-fly-in-for-meetings-email/
"Bring me up to 10 screenshots of your best code" is not a
statement made by a man who has any clue what software
engineering entails. Not a good look.
REPLY
jbirdmenj 14 hr ago
Scientific evidence contradicts your position. What you are invoking is the “noble
lie”
REPLY
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Sure, aside from heights, looks, athletic ability, IQ, what have the Romans done for
us?
REPLY
Jeffrey Soreff 12 hr ago
"Luck, unfortunately, is not a heritable trait."
 <mild fictional snark/humor>
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Teela_Brown
</mild fictional snark/humor>
REPLY
Garald 15 hr ago
What would also be interesting would be to look at the arguments of early-twentieth-
century intellectuals who openly supported some limited eugenics measures calling
them such (avoiding serious birth defects) but had intelligent, interesting criticisms to
make to then fashionable, non-genocidal eugenics. Franz Boas comes to mind.
(Also, would gladly read all that W. E. B. du Bois wrote about the subject. Links?)
REPLY
LHN 15 hr ago
"I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that
breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or
dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly
genetic."
With dogs we also have significantly longer lifespans than their generations and fairly
absolute control over their breeding. I suspect an attempt to breed e.g., Galapagos
tortoises or giant pandas for particular traits would be harder. With humans, you have
the problem with a lot of long term projects that the people in charge and their goals
would likely change faster than the time it takes to approach a given goal, and that
total control over the subjects' reproduction will be very difficult even leaving aside the
obvious moral objections.
Probably increasingly so as reproductive technology improves. Some forms of
sterilization are already reversible. Going forward, that person you sterilized will
probably be able to arrange for a clone or recombination based on a somatic cell, or
even getting a new reproductive system grown and installed, much sooner than you
(or rather, your successor's successor's, successor's...successor) is going to see the
kind of major population-level changes something like dog breeding can produce.
Slavery and animal breeding coexisted as concepts for a very long time, without (as far
as I know) successful applications of the latter to the former. Granted I'd be surprised
if there weren't attempts, especially once science overlapped with large scale slavery
for a century or two. I'd also be surprised if it was managed with sufficient consistency
and breadth to create an identifiable population with measurable and sustained trait
changes, rather than just being a cruel experiment. (Especially since owners and their
overseers were probably continually contaminating the process, probably without
reliably recording what they were doing.) AFAIK, generally when slaveholding cultures
wanted a type, they enslaved people from a known location or existing ethnic group,
they didn't create one for the purpose.
I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of
purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by human effort to have much
hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for. And I'm pretty sure that even
approaching acquiring that level of control correlates with spinning off into all the sorts
of problems Adraste is warning about.
I agree that it can't be done benevolently, and I'm pretty sure that it can't be done
effectively. Best case it's ineffectual and mostly harmless, worst case is much worse
than that.
REPLY (3)
TGGP 15 hr ago
Slaves (unlike domesticated animals) didn't reproduce themselves for most of the
history of slavery. The big advantage to owning a slave was that you DIDN'T pay
to raise them, instead you captured them in battle and then didn't feed them
enough to reproduce. The non-Malthusian environment of the New World was
very unusual.
REPLY
Jeffrey Soreff 11 hr ago
"I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of
purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by _human_ effort to have
much hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for." [emphasis added]
Hmm... One speculative endgame for ASI is for humans to wind up as "pets" of
the machines. Perhaps a less benevolent version of Culture Minds might have the
equivalent of dog breed fanciers, but for human breeds. Might there be a human
equivalent of a toy poodle? :-(
REPLY (1)
LHN 10 hr ago
SF and fantasy both have their share of gods or godlike aliens going in for
that sort of thing. Heinlein had at least two versions in Methuselah's Children,
and Steven Brust's Dragaera has seventeen subtypes plus "control humans"
(who nonetheless have been tweaked for psychic ability).
Though it depends a lot on the fictional AI concept. Vernor Vinge's Powers
tended to run through their superhuman existence at a speed commensurate
with their much faster processing capability. There's one known as Old One
because it's lasted ten years without self-destructing or evanescencing into
 total incomprehensibility. They can reshape the galaxy in that time, but they
don't really have the scope for long breeding programs.
REPLY (1)
Jeffrey Soreff 10 hr ago
Good examples! Many Thanks!
REPLY
Laplace 7 hr ago
Humans are harder, but genetic engineering is also far more advanced. We're not
restricted to just plain selective breeding anymore.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-
polygenically-screened-children
And that's despite legal barriers making it very difficult to research or
commercialise human genetic engineering. I agree that government subsidy
programs to encourage certain traits to spread more seem a dubious and
dubiously effective proposition, "every measure that becomes a target" and all
that. But I don't think such programs would even be necessary. If we want to do
this, all societies and governments need to do is step out of the way. I would
guess the industry for this would become a thing shortly thereafter. If every
parent gets the option to pay some money for screening against all diseases and
a Terence Tao intelligence splice, I'm pretty sure many will take it.
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c1ue 15 hr ago
A nice presentation of a fairly pointless argument.
Both sides are wrong on this subject for the very simple reason that anyone with a
modicum of understanding of how power dynamics work, would immediately see how
eugenics, overpopulation, or any other form of garbage analysis based doom would be
used as justification by unscrupulous and/or idealistic demagogues leading elitist
packs towards self and class based power and financial gain.
Ehrlich's predecessor - Thomas Malthus - and the British Corn Laws are an excellent
example, so it isn't like we don't know where this is all going.
Where are the Jonathan Swifts of today to puncture the bombastic bullshit?
REPLY (1)
Scott Alexander 15 hr ago Author
I don't get what you mean - should nobody ever be allowed to claim that bad
things might happen? There's only a difference in scale between "overpopulation
will cause billions of deaths" and "global warming will cause millions of deaths"
and "dumping toxic waste into this lake will cause dozens of deaths". Should we
ban anyone from mentioning that dumping toxic waste could be bad, because
people could misuse it to seize power?
What if Galton had said "there's no particular dysgenic crisis, it would just be nice
to have some smarter and healthier people around"?
REPLY (2)
c1ue 13 hr ago
What I mean is any type of so-called analysis arising from hasty
generalization - of which overpopulation due to lack of food is one particular
example - is extremely dangerous and that extension of these hasty
generalized nonsense into areas which clearly pander to elitist views is
furthermore going to be used for nefarious purposes.
So regarding Galton: yes - his narrow and unwise views on eugenics were not
only wrong, but dangerous precisely because it gave pseudo-scientific
license to all manner of class-based, race-based, and other forms of
discrimination based oppression. I find it impossible to see any situations
where "superior" beings are not going to be used as an excuse, eventually, to
attack those who are "not superior". And this doesn't even get into the issue
of the games behind the definition of what superior is.
Regarding toxic waste: that's a great example. The precise dynamic of
power-mongering, fear-mongering and pseudo-science lies behind the
"toxification" of CO2.
Demonization of CO2 is ridiculous even if goals to reduce fossil fuel usage, in
general, are reasonable.
REPLY (1)
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author
I'm thinking more of a factory dumping literal toxic waste into a literal
water supply. Are all water pollution concerns also power-mongering
and fear-mongering? Is there anything that you think is actually bad?
REPLY (2)
Paul Botts 11 hr ago
c'lue would consider it actually bad to be deprived of the comfy
chairs up there in the cynics' gallery.
Teddy Roosevelt put it more eloquently in a famous speech that he
delivered n Paris shortly after leaving the White House:
“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are
many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are
many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do
what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more
unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either
really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief....”
REPLY (1)
c1ue 11 hr ago
I don't face life with a sneer.
I do face hypocritical posturing with disdain, particularly when
it is so very obvious that the end objective is not the greater
good so much as it is the greater good for a few.
REPLY
c1ue 11 hr ago
A factory dumping toxic waste - what does the factory make?
What if the factory made literal life: actual substances which literally
extend human life in a measurable way?
Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the literal
human life extension?
Yes, I do think there are things that are actually bad. We see them
every day: the evil done by selfish bastards purely to amass ever
greater mountains of wealth - at other's expense - when they
already have more than they could ever possibly spend. Death and
destruction visited upon people far away in order to "promote
democracy" or some nonsense. Ever greater restrictions
hypocritically forced on regular people even as "the good" fly about
their private jets and snort illegal substances at their private parties.
More often than not - it is these precise types of "the good" that
use the simplistic depictions of "bad" in order to amass more of
what they don't even need or to justify the sacrifices they advocate
that other people make.
REPLY (1)
Adrian 3 hr ago
> Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the
literal human life extension?
 No, the question is, is the damage done by the toxic
substances greater the cost of storing them properly, or
cleaning them up before putting them in the water supply.
REPLY
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
The obvious difference being you likely are far more certain that toxic waste
will kill some folk drinking from lake than you are that "overpopulation"
(whatever that is) will cause "billions" of deaths or that "global warming"
(whatever that is (for shame, don't you know it's "climate change" now?)) will
cause "millions" of deaths. But all are great examples of how being
overconfident of X doom result is rarely warranted. Even for toxic waste, the
deaths from atom bombings in WWII or chernobyl or Fukushima are generally
far, far lower than all the breathless predictions of doom. So really, beware
intellectuals certain the world will end absent their favorite fix, whether it's
need for communism, AI pause, AGW fighting, sterilization, peak oil, etc.
REPLY (1)
Mr. Happy 22 min ago
Perhaps the deaths are far lower because we listened to the warnings
and took action to lower the number of deaths.
It's rather like sneering at the doctors for warning me I will die of the
tumor growing in my brain. I'm not dead. They insisted on removing it in
an operation. But I'm not dead, so they were clearly overreacting.
REPLY
Maybe later 15 hr ago
Be advised, substack is now doing some javascript pop-over thing on mobile that
breaks badly with long footnotes.
REPLY (1)
Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago
Weird company. Fix the comments - it’s why most of us are here.
REPLY

Bob Frank Writes Bob Frank’s Substack 15 hr ago · edited 15 hr ago

A few things that struck me from this article:
> Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically
reasonable way. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did
eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do
eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be
concerned.
I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real
socialism has never been tried." He points out that there are two serious problems with
that concept. First, the supreme arrogance inherent in saying — because this is what
that really means — that "everyone who's tried this before has failed, but if I was in
charge I could get it right!" And second, the immense naivete of failing to realize that,
even if you were both smart enough to get it right and morally pure enough to not be
corrupted along the way, that there would still be evil, brutal people lurking in the
shadows waiting to take you down and supplant you and use the power you
established for their own far less virtuous ends. (cf. Josef Stalin's rise to power.)
> Or they might say environmentalism has had some pretty spectacular failures -
knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over
from fossil fuels, leading to our current coal-and-oil-dominated regime and all the
worries about climate change that come with it - also coal pollution in the air kills tens
of thousands of people per year directly.
It's always a bit terrifying to see just how often people's unwillingness to accept the
lesser of two evils leaves them saddled with the greater evil instead.
>Expand efullample
ForREPLY comment
(1)
if the reason poorer people ha e poorer children is ed cational access
Garald 15 hr ago
Is it really obvious that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people
having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people? The
share of wealth that is inherited is large, and increasing. If you somehow force
every rich man to sire a child for every half million dollars he has, and leave
exactly the same amount of money to each of them, what you will have done is
decrease drastically the number of truly rich people in the next generation, while
boosting the numbers of the cushy (upper-)middle class.
REPLY (1)
SimulatedKnave 14 hr ago
I mean, that's one way to do wealth redistribution.
REPLY (1)
Garald 14 hr ago
We could combine ideas - force the rich to designate people conceived
from the sperm and ova of the talented as their heirs (with numbers
allocated as per the criterion above).
REPLY
Shankar Sivarajan Writes Shankar’s Newsletter 15 hr ago
There is a certain type of person who would look at the mountains of skulls that
Genghis Khan
piled up and before judging it evil, ask whether it was a state acting or a group of
individuals.
States/governments, "democratic" or otherwise, have absolutely no privileged moral
status: judge their acts exactly as you would any other entity, or accept that you have
the moral compass no better than that of a my-god-told-me-to-it zealot.
REPLY
sclmlw 15 hr ago
This discussion reminds me once again of the book Ending Medical Reversal:
www.amazon.com/dp/1421417723, or the section in Emperor of All Maladies:
www.amazon.com/dp/B017DQSQD6 where it talks about the rise and ignominious fall
of radical mastectomies (and not just because one of the quotes above literally refers
to the radical mastectomy as a brutal-but-necessary practice while not realizing it was
only brutal).
As anyone who has worked in a lab can tell you, the scientific process is littered with
plausible hypotheses that don't survive experimental confirmation. My problem with
Beroe (and to some extent Coria) is that government experimentation writ large has
two features:
1. It's almost always large scale - ensuring the impact is magnified
2. It's almost never iterated and improved. Detractors wish to end the program NOW,
while promoters defend the program as-is, unable to repair and adjust for fear that any
admission of failure will turn popular opinion against them.
Thus, it's nearly impossible for Coria's process to eventually arrive at a refined theory
through the political process, and Beroe will rarely get it right on the first try while
almost always ensuring the suffering is substantial when government gets it wrong.
REPLY
Cornelius 15 hr ago
It is notable that unlike in North America and Continental Europe, eugenics never really
got anywhere as a practical policy in the UK even though the idea itself originated in
England. Perhaps this is a function of the fact that Galton and other leaders of the
British eugenics movement disliked coercive eugenics.
Adraste says that "eugenics was banned", but a lot of what goes on in medical
genetics these days (e.g. selective abortions) would surely be regarded as eugenics
by someone like Galton. My prediction is that new eugenic practices like embryo
selection will gradually be normalized as part of medicine and eventually no one will
call them eugenics.
REPLY (1)
Don P. 14 hr ago
This may be unimportant terminology -- or it may be important! -- but I take
"eugenics" to mean a policy enforced from above to affect the population,
whereas the things you describe are individual parents choosing not to have a
child with X, for their own reasons.
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Gunflint Writes A Long Strange Trip 15 hr ago · edited 13 hr ago
PDG. Pretty Darn Good, Scott.
REPLY
Garald 14 hr ago
This may be neither here nor there, but there is a little problem with the idea of a Nobel
sperm bank: Nobel prize winners tend to be old, and there seems to be mounting
evidence that the age of fathers is directly correlated with deleterious mutations. The
effect is of course not as large as for women, but it's not small. In particular, the
statistics for schizophrenia are pretty frightening.
(Fields medal sperm bank, maybe...)
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago
Mandate that all scientists donate germ cells early in their careers as a condition
of receiving grants, freeze them until we see how successful they wind up being.
REPLY (1)
Garald 14 hr ago
As if people were not competitive enough! I've seen enough bad behavior
from people who thirsted after the most prominent award in my field
(generally unsuccessfully). OTOH, perhaps, deep down, they never liked
themselves that much, and the prospect of having very many descendants
would have secretly unnerved them.
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Nolan Eoghan 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago

Here is how I (maybe) convinced a liberal friend that good eugenics is ok.
(This conversation is abridged and paraphrased but the gist of it is here)
Me: I take it you are pro choice.
She: of course.
Me: And therefore are in favour of a mother aborting a foetus with Down’s syndrome.
She. Of course. Same argument
me: as an aside the EU has recently said that advances in medical intervention had
largely eliminated Down’s syndrome - that medical advance was abortion based on
earlier screening for the disorder.
Me: now imagine a pill that doesn’t abort the foetus but cures it. Is the taking of that
pill immoral given that you are ok with a abortifacients?
She: the baby is brought to term?
Me: yes. Cured and brought to term.
She. Ok. I suppose so.
Me: one of the consequences of Down’s syndrome is low IQ. Should we then screen
for people with low IQ, and design a pill to fix that?
She: hmm, I’m a bit dubious about that. That’s a leap.
Me: can the mother who knows she is carrying a child with low IQ child - assume there
is a screening for that - abort that child?
ExpandI suppose.
She: full commentI mean it’s a woman’s right to choose.
REPLY (1)
Edmund 7 hr ago
> Me: we do try, all the time, to make people smarter don’t we? Look at the money
we spend on education, on getting people to maximise potential.
Getting people to maximise their native potential is trivially not the same thing as
trying to increase the ratio of innately smart people to average/dumb people.
Many people, I expect, would say they support "getting people to maximise
potential" on grounds of aesthetically/morally supporting something-something-
self-fulfillment, not out of a general preference for smart people that would get
them to press a magic button to poof smart people into existence fully-formed!
In any case, within your worldview, what's wrong with the blue babies? Nothing
*harmful* about being blue. Blue people might look very fetching. If we can have
some weird aesthetic preference for smartness and you think that's vald, why
couldn't we have a preference for blue skin? (I would sooner allow blue babies
than screening for intelligence, because I think there's a real risk of the latter
becoming popular enough for whole varieties of human brains to go extinct, and I
think that would be a monstrously awful thing; whereas I doubt enough people
would take the blue-baby option for any of the natural pigmentations to get
 selected out of existence, and besides, physical traits like this seem less
important to preserve than the full gamut of sentient minds.)
REPLY (1)
JamesLeng 5 hr ago
If somebody had, say, a liver or kidney problem that was interfering with brain
function indirectly - say, disturbed sleep, or chronic low blood sugar - getting
that cured could be seen as a reasonable step in pursuit of fulfilling their
potential, no?
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Evan James Writes Evan’s Substack 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
Speaking as someone who generally aligns with "Adraste" here, I think the comparison
of eugenics and environmentalism misses the mark. An effective steelman would
recognize the difference in scope between the two:
Eugenics is a highly specific concern with improving the "quality" of human genetics,
while environmentalism is a broad umbrella term for a range of concerns about
preserving ecosystem functions, conserving natural resources, preserving biodiversity,
protecting cute animals, reducing human health risks from pollution, etc.
Eugenics lends itself to a narrow range of policy prescriptions, of which the most
effective and least morally-risky (sex education, access to reversible birth control,
prevention of sexual abuse) can all be promoted from a human-rights perspective
without reference to eugenics. There are literally thousand of ways to advance
environmentalism through public policy, most of which would be impossible to talk
about without reference to environmental concerns because the topic is so broad.
I actually do have a strong 'internal taboo' against forms of environmentalism that
seem high-risk for human rights abuses and other moral hazards. Any talk of
overpopulation, antinatalism, or Malthusian dooming sets off my alarm bells for exactly
the reasons you set out here. "Degrowth," primitivism, and other sorts of pastoralist
reactionary environmentalism also seem dangerous, and a lot of animal rights
(anything even remotely associated with Peter Singer) is very sketchy.
But those are bounded areas of concern that I can cleanly separate from other
bounded areas. There's no conceptual connection between "we shouldn't dump
untreated sewage and industrial chemicals in the river where we get our drinking
water" and "humanity is a parasite on the planet that should be eradicated."
I don't think you can draw such a clean distinction between "we should discourage
undesirables from reproducing" and "we should prevent undesirables from
reproducing," or between "we should encourage desirable men to donate sperm" and
"we should coerce desirable women into being impregnated with the sperm of
desirable men" (also a thing that happened!)
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago
"Eugenics" was a much broader concept at the peak of its popularity. All sorts of
things considered positive for the next generation got lumped into it. I suppose
that fits with ideas getting "heretical" as they leak out from their inventors to the
masses (or at least midwits).
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
REPLY
Mallard 14 hr ago
I think that the discussion of Ehrlich highlights that many nominally ethical questions
hinge on factual questions. The same applies to the 9/11 terrorists. If their factual
beliefs were correct, then their actions would have potentially ultimately been correct.
I think in general people are too critical of others over perceived ethical shortcomings,
and not critical enough when people err on the facts.
When it comes to Ehrlich, even at the time there was significant reason to doubt his
conclusions. David Friedman notes here: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-
first-post-done-again that he published a paper:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-
Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html in 1972 that showed that it was not at all
obvious that the net externalities of additional population were large, or even that they
were negative.
In a similar vein, I imagine that George W. Bush is probably a decent person generally,
and I would not be particularly concerned in his presence.
But his hubris in being willing to make decisions at least nominally based on factual
mistakes led to mountains of bodies.
As noted in this post, fossil fuels kill tens of thousands of people a year. Those deaths,
too, are a function of potentially well-meaning people who limit nuclear power who are
ultimately killing more people than any mass murderer could ever hope to.
Ehrlich might have "just" made a factual mistake, but factual mistakes with a lot riding
on them are much worse than they are usually given credit for.
This relates to Bryan Caplan's point about how evil politicians are (cf. How Evil Are
Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery). Politicians routinely make decisions of
tremendous import and they don't devote the deserved effort determine the factual
underpinnings of their decisions. This is rather like shooting bullets randomly in a bad
neighborhood. It's not terribly unlikely that you'll kill a bad guy, but with no effort to
determine whom you'll hurt, you could easily destroy lives of the innocent.
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Stephen Schwarz 14 hr ago
“Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time.”
Perhaps, but now it’s 60 years later and it’s abundantly clear that he was massively
wrong. Nevertheless he has stuck to his guns all this time. No apology, no analysis of
where and why he went so wrong, and most maddeningly, no effort to see what we
can learn from his fiasco. Indeed, there are still plenty of people who believe he was
right then and still is right today. Shameful intellectual dishonesty.
REPLY
Daniel Hobson 14 hr ago
I’d be interested to see where the 1-3 IQ points per century dysgenic effect number is
from. I imagined it would be much worse.
Cremieux’s work on ideal vs actual fertility (using the GSS) came out to 1.5 points lost
per generation in the United States, without consideration of immigration. Considering
nations with the highest measured IQs are currently on the wrong end of demographic
trends (especially East Asia), I would’ve expected much worse.
REPLY
Oig 14 hr ago
I feel I'm somewhere in the middle. If you're intent on eugenicist practices, the best
way in my mind would be to simply give couples as much high-quality information as
possible and allow them to decide for themselves without coercion. People will (and
do) practice some form of eugenics by screening not only for congenital defects but
simply for partners. I think that a Nobel sperm bank will just end up being a rich smart
guy vanity project rather than an atrocity. It's important to be raised by smart people,
not just created by them. Considering, for instance, that genes for intellectual
creativity are also linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, or that genes for
entrepreneurship are linked to addictive weaknesses, you could easily roll with good
dice and get low numbers, in a manner of speaking.
The real thing that scares me is this prostrate, blind, all-in worship of IQ and the
lurking shadow of its ugly cousin, genetic determinism (particularly in regards to
culture). I see it referenced here regarding Ashkenazi Jews. But the truth is that
Ashkenazi Jews benefit socially from a heavy focus on communalism (you can read
the writings of conservative Jewish people if you don't believe me) and in the most
successful cases, a pedigree in high-grade European intellectual traditions. The
Ashkenazim that send antisemites to the early life sections, for instance, are often
descended from people who were educated in the erudite German intellectual culture
that persisted into the Weimar Republic. Compare these individuals with the Hasidim in
NY, whose kids often can barely speak English or do middle school mathematics and
who may in fact have a communal drug problem. I distrust this IQ fetishization that has
become more and more endorsed by tech-adjacent merchant rightists, and the idea
that you can just up numbers and save the world is not going to lead anywhere good. I
fear that it's most likely to be an apologia for elitist exploitation encoded in law. I think
it's a greater threat than Eugenics writ large.
Also, on that last paragraph, the idea that you can and should brook awful abuses and
necessary discomforts for vulnerable people with the idea that in the end they will be
both necessary and justified itself has a precedent, it's called the 20th Century.
REPLY (5)
Garald 14 hr ago
Exactly.
REPLY
B Civil 11 hr ago
Well said
REPLY
TGGP 10 hr ago
I hadn't heard of any communal drug problem about US ultra-orthodox. Scott
Sumner even uses them to mock our measures of poverty, since they lack the
dysfunction associated with it. https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-face-of-
american-poverty/
REPLY (1)
Oig 10 hr ago
Sorry, my mistake, it's those who leave the community who often end up with
drug habits. I'm mostly pulling from this
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-
new-york.html
REPLY

ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
Sorry, what is your paragraph in Ashkenazi’s supposed to prove? They are not
smart due to their communalism or educational traditions (at least at the
individual level).
REPLY (1)
Oig 9 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago
My point was in retort to "Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that
Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of
Jews starving or in prison. If you could lift everyone up fifteen points, you
could come close to ending poverty even within developed countries."
I was making a comparison between the Ashkenazi intellectual elite and an
underperforming contingent to show that culture can step in where IQ is
lacking to avoid the negatives that are supposed to be obviated by IQ, and
that educational deficits can allow poverty despite apparent ethnic IQ
advantages. As to your comment, I don't know to what you would attribute
the intelligence difference. Even if you took a hard geneticist explanation
surely the communal predilections would have reproductive consequences
 for gene propagation; unless you think Ashkenazim as we know them were
formed fully out of the earth as a particular group and gifted with unique
intelligence.
REPLY (2)
TGGP 9 hr ago
Pre-emancipation Ashkenazi would be a better argument for the
importance of culture. They weren't accomplishing much of interest to
the rest of society with the high IQs their many generations of selection
had produced.
REPLY
Garald 9 hr ago
It's funny that people are taking "Jews are smarter for genetic reasons"
as a given. Studies have given very different results depending on who is
conducting them - and, if the study shows no difference from the mean,
that is ascribed to antisemitism. (That is certainly the case with a study
by Karl Pearson, who was no antisemite and was in fact disappointed; of
course that study is very old indeed.) The average IQ in Israel is not
particularly high, even if you restrict to Ashkenazim. There have been
periods where there has been a very notable concentration of
intellectuals or people in the professions with Jewish last names, but
then you have to take into account you are comparing what was often
mainly an urban middle-class population (often impoverished, but
middle-class nonetheless) at a time when the bulk of population was
neither urban nor middle-class.
Could there be some advantageous mutations that were more frequent
among Ashkenazim? It could be the case. But (a) only a minority of
Ashkenazim are likely to have had them, (b) much of that must have left
the group by now, since they most likely also affected whether carriers
tended to marry out of the group! (Out-of-group marriage was a great
rarity before WWI - but you see it all the time in biographies of high
achievers from that period; in fact lists of great Jewish this-or-another
are full of people that Jews would not usually consider Jews.) At any
rate, in this case, all of that genetic talk is, AFAIK, conjectural, and can
be twisted into just about any just-so story people like.
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Toxn 3 hr ago
Well said.
 The IQ/race nexus is one of those things that always seems to lead back to a
group of self-appointed superiors ignoring their own weaknesses (in this case
mental health, physical health, athletic ability, social ability...) and elevating their
one self-percieved advantage to the status of a universal good that must be
distributed to the world by fiat.
This image of an anxious, obese loner deciding that everyone needs to have his
children because he scored well on a written assessment gets extra funny when
you factor in that one of his other pet obsessions (AI) seems placed to trivialize
human effort in math, coding, writing and games long before it comes for any
activity which requires hand-eye coordination or social skills.
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beleester 14 hr ago
I looked up the Nobel sperm bank, because I'd never heard of it, and it doesn't appear
that it was outlawed or ran into legal issues. It operated for 19 years, produced 217
children (none actually descended from Nobelists), and then shut down when the
founder died - it was funded out of his own pocket and his heirs weren't interested in
carrying it on. It seems like the main obstacle to such a project isn't "eugenics is
taboo" so much as "it's hard for a random guy to go up to a Nobel prize winner, ask
them for their sperm, and get a yes."
REPLY (1)
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author
The reason that's hard is that you get accused of eugenics if you say yes.
If the government were to sponsor a national bank with sperm from talented
people, I'm sure they could get some success.
REPLY (1)
B Civil 11 hr ago
Why stop there? The government could assign sperm to women according to
it’s own sensibilities while their at it.
REPLY (1)
Deiseach 13 min ago
Why stop there? The government could select superior female
specimens to ensure the highest quality of baby produced, after all
there's no point in wasting the Nobel sperm on average or low quality
women.
I'm sure I heard of something like that being carried out somewhere... it
must definitely have worked, right? High quality sperm, high quality
 mothers, government backing - what could go wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
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beleester 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
>Now, in fact Galton was almost as wrong as Ehrlich - modern research suggests the
dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century - things will be very
different long before we notice it.
Extrapolating backwards, wouldn't this imply that ancient Romans were around 120-
160 IQ, and ancient Babylonians 140-220? Is this trend only valid under modern
conditions or something?
REPLY (2)
Pearson Writes Pearsonomics 14 hr ago
The large amount of premature deaths which were worsened by starvation and
poor living conditions.
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Maxwell E 11 hr ago
I would assume it’s only very recently in human history in which the correlation
between intelligence and societal success has not naturally been followed with
the passing on of genes through more children. That is, the trend for wealthier
people to have fewer children to pass on their genetics seems to have only really
begun to occur within the past century.
REPLY (1)
Toxn 3 hr ago
Wealth correlated to inherited land ownership rather than intellectual ability
throughout most historical times and places. What about that screams
"survival of the smartest"?
REPLY

Jayan Amandakone 14 hr ago

The fact that a lot of people still take Paul R. Ehrlich or his more mainstream
communicators seriously even to this day is quite remarkable. One part of me is quite
bitter over how fears of underpopulation are starting to become more mainstream and
a respectable high status belief in certain circles, mainly due to the fact that most
people concerned about underpopulation, probably would get behind the
overpopulation hysteria in the counterfactual world where such beliefs are trendy and
somewhat contrarian. That is most people in the underpopulation camp lack the
proper justification and analytic tools required to deduce that overpopulation is not a
concern, and the main reason they believe underpopulation is a problem is due seeing
some short form media of Elon Musk etc. saying that he thinks its a problem. Don't get
me wrong I think Malthus's Iron law of wages is coming for all of us in the long run, due
to diminishing returns to labor and the fact that an additional child imposes costs on
your other children, and many of the positive externalities are not as big and as long
lasting as they may seem, and future creatures can replicate at a much higher rate etc.
Although high tech subsistence isn't so bad.
REPLY
HARMON DOW 14 hr ago
“They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and
moral crusading spirit, just like us. Show me another idea like that and I bet I’d be
against that one too.”
The one that occurred to me is transgender advocacy pushing sexual confusion on
children.
REPLY (3)
Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Communism/socialism seems the same.
REPLY (1)
Jeffrey Soreff 11 hr ago
"Communism/socialism"
Please don't conflate these. Mao killed 15-45 million people in his great leap
corpseward. Denmark has no analogous death toll.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
Denmark is a capitalist country which doesn't resemble Venezuela.
REPLY (1)
Jeffrey Soreff 10 hr ago
Perhaps we need a word for mixed-economy model countries. Yes,
Denmark and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model countries
in general are very different from Venezuela. They are also quite
different from the United States.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
Closer to the US, I would think.
 REPLY (1)
Jeffrey Soreff 10 hr ago
"An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public
services such as free education and universal
healthcare[15] in a largely tax-funded system."
"High trade union density and collective bargaining
coverage.[23] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in
Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in
Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union
density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United
States."
"The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for
protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union
Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark
being the only nation to receive a perfect score."
"The Nordic countries share active labour market policies
as part of a social corporatist economic model intended to
reduce conflict between labour and the interests of
capital. This corporatist system is most extensive in
Norway and Sweden, where employer federations and
labour representatives bargain at the national level
mediated by the government. Labour market interventions
are aimed at providing job retraining and relocation."
Not so similar to the US, I think.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
With Obamacare we're supposed to have universal
coverage for those who want it. I will grant our lower
rate of unionization.
REPLY (1)
Jeffrey Soreff 10 hr ago
Close enough agreement. Many Thanks!
REPLY
Madeleine 12 hr ago
The problem with that argument is that it seems like it could be applied to almost
any position. For example, you could also describe the conservatives who want
ban trans kids from getting medical care and force them into the foster system if
their parents disagree as "smug Western elites overly impressed with their own
intelligence and moral crusading spirit" because they think they know what's best
for these children better than the kids and their families do. I'm not trying to get
into an object level debate about transgenderism - my point is, if you think any
position held by smug Western elites is wrong, you have to dismiss every political
view that has ever been held by a large number of people.
If you ask me, the lesson to be learned from eugenics and forced sterilization is
that common-sense morality is usually correct. Trolleys are rare outside of
thought experiments. If you think that the only way to save the world is to do
things that most people would consider serious human rights violations, you're
probably wrong.
REPLY (3)
Mr. Surly 12 hr ago
Except those conservatives would have 1000s of years of history to back
them up, they're not arguing for some tabula rasa, the rational course is X,
notwithstanding history, human nature, etc. So I think you're missing the
point, it's specifically the "I've figured things out, we have to collectivize all
farms" even though that's never how it's been done, seems contrary to
human nature, etc. (yes, yes, there's no human nature, it's all blank slate
conditioning, etc.). There are rational arguments for lots of things,
unfortunately reality frequently gets in the way (and unfortunately, power
mad leftists frequently push ahead regardless, slaughtering thousands or
millions because they're so sure the world has to change to whatever their
cult calls for).
REPLY (2)
Madeleine 11 hr ago
"and unfortunately, power mad leftists frequently push ahead
regardless, slaughtering thousands or millions because they're so sure
the world has to change to whatever their cult calls for" Power-mad
right-wingers, too. The Nazis seem relevant to a conversation about
eugenics.
This post is largely about how well-meaning people can make horrible,
destructive mistakes because they had too much faith in their own
intelligence and their own knowledge of what's best for everyone. That
failure mode appears in all groups, including your in-group.
REPLY
 Xpym 21 min ago
Power mad rightists would also happily slaughter millions given the
chance, but the memetic immunity against fascism ended up being
stronger for some reason, although it seems on the decline lately.
REPLY
HARMON DOW 11 hr ago
The conservatives you are describing are not “elites”, in the sense that they
are not part of the intelligentsia. Being part of the intelligentsia is the
common denominator I see between the eugenics elite and the transgender
elite.
So I’ll grant you “smug” but reject “elites.”
Nor do I think that conservatives are in general over impressed with their own
intelligence - that’s a sin of the left, not of the right, putting aside the Wills &
Buckleys.
I like your observation about trolley car problems. And I agree that “common
sense” morality seems to be more often right than wrong.
But I think that your statement about trans kids being banned from medical
care etc. assumes the premise - namely, that they are actually trans. It
appears to me that there’s a kind of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy aspect
to the trans situation when it comes to parents who support their supposedly
trans kids, at least the ones who aren’t adults, and I think that is largely at the
bottom of conservative questioning of the reality of trans in situations
involving children,
REPLY (2)
B Civil 11 hr ago
I don’t think I have ever read anyone who exudes more admiration for
their own (supposed) intelligence than Victor Davis Hanson.
REPLY (3)
HARMON DOW 11 hr ago
Hmm. I’ll have to think about that. I’ve never had the sense that he
was impressed with himself, but if he is, he has a self to be
impressed with.
REPLY
 Melvin 10 hr ago
In a world where Eleizer Yudkowsky exists?
REPLY
TGGP 10 hr ago
Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug?
REPLY
Madeleine 10 hr ago
I guess this is a definitional thing. To me, "elite" means "wealthy and
powerful," not necessarily part of the intelligentsia.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far from the subject of the post, but I
think that if most trans kids were that way because their parents had
Munchausen by Proxy, more of them would rebel and detransition. In
most cases of MbP, if the child survives into adolescence, they start to
rebel and try to either summon help or escape. The charade rarely lasts
into adulthood, and if it does, it's usually because the parent went to
extreme lengths to maintain control, like Dee Dee Blanchard handcuffing
her daughter to a bed. On the other hand, most adults who transitioned
as children stay transitioned, even though most of them are out of their
parents' control and could detransition if they wanted.
David Reimer is a good illustration of what happens on the rare occasion
that a child is forced to transition. He rebelled against girlhood for his
entire childhood until he was finally allowed to detransition at fifteen. If
transgender children were made that way by their parents, we'd expect
detransition rates to be much higher.
REPLY
Monkyyy Writes Monkyyy’s Newsletter 11 hr ago
Conversitives airn't the elites; especially not the populous conservatives of
the current era
REPLY
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author
Oh come on, now you're just doing the thing of "X was a policy that was bad, Y is
also a policy, so that means it's also bad."
REPLY (2)
HARMON DOW 11 hr ago
 No syllogism is involved. They are both bad policies, without regard to the
other. But there is a family resemblance.
REPLY
TGGP 10 hr ago
All policies are bad, anarchy the only morally blameless option :)
REPLY
Coagulopath 14 hr ago
Interesting discussion. Dialogs are a lot of fun.
Yes, I remember reviewing Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints (a fairly racist anti-
immigration novel from 1973) and was struck how it's basically saying the same stuff
as Paul Erlich, just in a hotter and more viscerally disgusted way. He even used the
same target as Erlich: India.
https://coagulopath.com/the-camp-of-the-saints-jean-raspail/
Whether or not horseshoe theory is real, it's definitely possible to smuggle some
pretty nasty stuff into mainstream discourse if you brand it correctly.
“When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and
sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra
hands that cling to the sides." That quote isn't from some far-right terrorist's
manifesto. It's from famous environmentalist Pentti Linkola.
REPLY (1)
JamesLeng 4 hr ago
While the soulless capitalists who don't care much about life-for-its-own-sake
one way or another will instead direct those hands to assemble more boats.
REPLY (1)
Xpym 2 min ago
They'll also keep the biggest and gaudiest boats to themselves, evil bastards
that they are. Poor people don't care that they have more stuff than ancient
kings, what galls them is that the kings of today have more still.
REPLY

savegameimporting 14 hr ago
I was thoroughly confused by the last paragraph, when Coria inexplicably starts talking
about rights and democratic process in the middle of making a point about outside-
viewing in morality. Which sort of made me realize that this post, especially Coria's
footnote, seems to be talking about two things - namely, society-building and meta-
ethics - at once.
This is a mistake. Those are different concepts and ought to be considered on their
own. (It's possible to argue that they're closely linked, but it's still not something to be
assumed implicitly, like here.) The references this post makes to utilitarianism and
deontology make no sense, because it's not actually about Ehrlich's personal conduct.
It's about the way people perceive, or should perceive, cases like him - which is not at
all the same thing. Hence, the last paragraph making no mention of the object level
(which one of them is actually right) in favor of remarking on their character.
The problem is that simultaneously discussing ethics ("what is right") and society-
building ("how to coordinate") leads to intuitions about one being erroneously carried
over to the other. From the Ehrlich vs Adraste example: if you don't consciously keep
track of which side of the ethics/coordination divide they're talking about, it sure
sounds like Coria's saying that "whoever lobbies the government more successfully" is
a mechanism for determining the one in the right, which is obviously bonkers.
In general, this is greatly reminiscent of the Niceness, Community and Civilization
post, which I remember being similarly confusing.
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temp_name 14 hr ago
"You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape
adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion."
Is there a name for this argument? It would be so ueeful.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 14 hr ago
Rather than a name, here's a longer argument:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/puzzles-for-everyone
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Edmund Bannockburn Writes Redeem the Time 14 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago

So many insightful words, but no mention of Eugenics and Other Evils by Chesterton?
He got it right, even writing before eugenics became associated with Nazism.
REPLY
Emdee 13 hr ago
re: Coria's dysegenics point, if IQ is going down 1-3 points per century, what's keeping
it from going down faster in certain places? Fast enough that we do in fact notice it?
Global temperatures can rise 1°C, but local amplification at the poles means we see a
rise of 5°C there. Do areas of high dysgenic amplification exist?
REPLY (1)
 Toxn 3 hr ago
My understanding is that the population dysgenic idea is a bit of a nothing-burger
that goes away once you understand the core concept of changes in variation
under greater or lesser selective pressures.
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Mr. Surly 13 hr ago
Please tie this to AI doomerism and AGW doomerism and socialism/communism. Or,
actually, no need! Basically, wicked smart people can be so wrong it's hard to believe
in retrospect. Yet! Zero humility from most geniuses who think they've figured things
out, even though they're pretty obviously wrong in the same way people like them
have been wrong many, many times before with cruel, frequently disastrous
consequences. Basically Orwell's point about only the intelligentsia, etc. (normal
people are too smart to be that stupid). Also funny because basically every human
everywhere (and/or their family) tries to pick a mate that will increase genetic fitness.
Fine at the individual level, dicey at the population level. In theory, both should be fine,
but humans are flawed and all that.
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AJKamper 13 hr ago
I think that the comparison of environmentalism to eugenics misses a pretty major way
in how they treat the individual. Eugenics necessitates playing games with how people
have children and necessitates picking and choosing between good genes and bad
genes--which easily elides to good people and bad people.
Environmentalism can run into those issues, but they aren't at the core of
environmentalism, which actually says very little about humans and indeed is usually
very much about the flourishing of all humans--not picking winners and losers.
Eugenics comes off badly in the exchange precisely because it is at its very roots
premised on dangerous ways of understanding the human subject.
REPLY
Erusian 13 hr ago
Any official, state led eugenics policy necessarily involves force. Any private eugenics
policy is indistinguishable from normal mate selection.
I don't think most people object to a woman choosing as handsome, wealthy, and
intelligent a man as she can get. And most people don't object to a man doing the
same. And I guess this is eugenics by some definition. Likewise sperm banks sorting
sperm based on education, looks, etc. But it's private, without the use of state force.
The issue is the use of state force. Which always turns tyrannical because we are
talking about the state intervening in necessarily private affairs. Without an apparatus
to monitor who is having sex and pregnant the entire policy becomes unenforceable.
And any such laws need to be enforced against situations where there is no clear
victim. For example, by fining people for having kids or giving people money for having
kids. And at some point it's realized things like forced abortions make better financial
sense.
REPLY
Eric fletcher 13 hr ago
Eugenics violates the widely held sacred value of "all people are of equal moral worth"
(maybe thier actions have consequences, but being dark skinned or low IQ or
whatever doesn't make you unworthy)
REPLY (1)
Garald 13 hr ago
Not sure that it quite does: you can give everybody who is born equal moral worth
without claiming that there is such as a right to be born (let alone that it should be
equal).
REPLY

Philosophy bear Writes Philosophy bear 13 hr ago

General thought on Eugenics, not really specific to this post, but even if think it's a
good idea in the abstract (I don't) it seems like an odd moment in history to be
thinking about bringing it back given:
1. We're on the verge of AGI. At minimum, that's going to make what was previously
called "human capital" no longer a scarce resource, and it may make the debate
irrelevant for many other reasons.
2. We're on the verge of cheaply available genetic engineering.
REPLY (2)
yogiberraofbadnews 10 hr ago
> We're on the verge of cheaply available genetic engineering
Doesn’t that make it an excellent time to bring it back up? If you support that sort
of thing
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megaleaf 4 hr ago
There's an argument that to mitigate AI existential risk, we need to start
producing as many very intelligent babies as possible, and postpone AGI for as
 many decades as possible. (The hope is that the babies would grow up and work
on the alignment problem.)
REPLY (1)
Toxn 3 hr ago
There's also an argument that AI consistently proves that people are terrible
at understanding what constitutes intelligence or not.
Are we really planning to rejigger the global human genome towards better
mathematicians, coders and chess players when these are the areas most
liable to being AI'd away? Shouldn't we be I'm the process of promoting all
genetic variation instead? Or, if we have to pick traits, pick those known to be
resistant to replacement (social skills, the ability to work with one's hands).
REPLY
organoid 13 hr ago
Boring old ground, but footnote 4—and by extension, the whole piece—rest on some
pretty bad arguments about whether eugenics would be great if we could bracket the
whole genocide bit.
Artificial selection can definitely alter domesticated animal populations,
overwhelmingly for their worse: modern farmed animals collapse into a litany of
congenital conditions if kept alive past the late adolescence when they’re usually
slaughtered, and purebred dogs don’t have it much better. Humans went through so
many intense and recent bottlenecks that already we’re much more inbred than most
of the other species we domesticated, so it’s very likely that massively expanding the
prevalence of any small subset of our gene pool—there are under 200 living Nobel
laureates!—would have serious drawbacks even if it worked as intended. “Superior”
genes might not be as important as plain old hybrid vigor.
Similarly, intelligence—like religion and profession—is definitely heritable, but for very
well-worn reasons it doesn’t follow that it’s “genetic” and certainly not that it can be
modulated by eugenics. There are many plausible non-genetic explanations for why
rich people have rich children, most obviously that rich people spend and bequeath
more money per child, allowing them to outcompete poor children for a limited number
of privileged positions in hierarchical societies. Non-genetic factors like these are
clearly dependent on rich kids being small in number compared to poor kids—come
on, Scott, we all know you can engage more seriously than this with ideas you reject.
REPLY (5)
organoid 13 hr ago
To be fair, there's room for increasing opportunity by disproportionately
increasing rich people's fertility purely through mechanical redistribution of
dynastic wealth into a larger number of heirs. This obviously has little relevance to
"Nobel sperm banks"; subsidizing contraceptives for people who can't afford
either contraceptives or kids does help with this, but subsidizing childrearing to
balance the other side of the equation would be much better for human
flourishing, for the intellectual and physical quality of the next generation, and for
the economy (supposedly, I am not a macroeconomist).
REPLY (1)
Melvin 12 hr ago
I would simply modify tax thresholds based on the number of children you
have. Some countries (such as the US) allow joint filing between yourself and
your spouse (so that income thresholds are effectively doubled, very useful
in single-income households) but as far as I know no country also lets you
joint-file with your children. This seems like a reasonable and defensible way
to encourage rich people to have more children.
REPLY (1)
organoid 12 hr ago
It's quite hard to tax-incentivize rich people into having more children,
as South Korea and Scandinavia are discovering to their chagrin.
Meanwhile, if your goal is to improve the next generation, redistributing
money specifically to rich children is bad policy unless you're confident
that investing in proliferating the (impossible-to-prove) superiority of
rich genetics is more cost-effective than remedying the (empirically
proven) deleterious effects of lead, parental stress, and large class sizes
on poor children.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 11 hr ago
Robin Hanson has a more potent proposal to boost fertility via
financial means: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-
babies-as-infrastructurehtml
REPLY
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago · edited 11 hr ago Author
The correlation between wealth and intelligence is actually pretty low (about 0.2),
and twin studies have very firmly established that adult IQ is about 80% heritable.
I would suggest reading Plomin or any other book on behavioral genetics if you're
not familiar with the research.
REPLY (2)
organoid 11 hr ago · edited 11 hr ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm no expert (I work in developmental
neuropsych), but my main objections to twin studies are the standard ones:
parents and others treat monozygotic twins more similarly than dizygotic
ones, arguably even when raised apart, making some environmental
influences appear genetic, and heritability is always indexed to a specific
environmental landscape whose inputs are obviously shifting rapidly in the
case of human intelligence.
Begging your indulgence, could you spell out the connection between the
low correlation of wealth with intelligence and my argument that the
heritability of wealth is due to the literal heritability of wealth?
Specifically, I'm trying to respond to
> eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the
clustering of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people
have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you
should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor
people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor
people in the next generation.
My alternative explanation for why richer people have richer children is that
they have more money to give each child. Nobel sperm banks don't confer
this benefit, and giving contraceptives to poor people does increase the
proportion of rich people in the next generation but only by reducing the total
number of workers, which economists all seem to think is bad for societal
productivity. Therefore I don't think your eugenics will yield a richer society.
Is the 0 2 figure meant to respond to this argument?
REPLY (1)
TGGP 11 hr ago
How does a shared environment effect turn up when they are raised
apart?
REPLY (2)
organoid 11 hr ago · edited 3 hr ago
By counting "elicited" phenomena like "does your first-grade
teacher think you're cute and pay extra attention to you?" or "do
you have big front teeth that make people call you a nerd?" as
genetic x environmental effects.
Also, monozygotic twins are much more likely to share a placenta!
REPLY (1)
 TGGP 10 hr ago
Isn't every genetic effect a genetic x environment effect? If you
starve to death without food, you don't get to express any
phenotype.
REPLY (1)
organoid 2 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
Yes! And so is every environmental effect, which you can't
experience if you had an embryonic lethal aneuploidy.
These are trivial examples, but it continues to be true in
more interesting ways that every developmental event is a
multilateral process that requires both a permissive
environment and competent cells or tissues.
This is why it's never strictly correct to apply the G/E
model unless you're in a lab context where you can fully
specify the range of genotypes and environments. People
hear "70% heritable" and slip to "70% genetic" and then
"could be improved 70% by doing eugenics", but even a
bona fide causal genetic trait in humans is liable to
evaporate when something as trivial as the popularity of
schoolyard chants about buck teeth changes.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 2 hr ago
What is the evidence for any causal effect of
schoolyard chants on buck teeth?
REPLY (1)
organoid 1 hr ago
There's good evidence that childhood bullying is
correlated with aspects of physical appearance
(eg doi 10.1080/02671520110058679), and that
it has negative effects on academic performance
(10.3390/ijerph18052209,
10.1016/j.avb.2022.101722).
REPLY
demost_ 5 hr ago
At least some studies have unsatisfactory definitions of "raised
apart". For example, if the parents divorced and one child stays with
 each parent, then this counts as "raised apart". Even if they
regularly visit each other and spend time with their other biological
parent. In these cases, there will still be a lot of shared environment.
I have also heard claims that a very substantial portion of "genetic
twins raised apart" were cases where the social parents of the twin
were biological relatives, which also suggests shared environments.
I don't know whether this applies only to some particularly bad twin
studies, or whether it is enough to cast doubt on the majority of
twin studies. (If someone knows, please tell me.)
REPLY (1)
TGGP 2 hr ago
It used to be common to deliberately raise adopted identical
twins apart, so that they wouldn't even be aware of each other.
The documentary "Three Identical Strangers" is about such a
case.
REPLY
Garald 11 hr ago
Just to be clear - (a) 80% is a high figure, isn't it, with some other studies
giving lower figures, even in rich countries? (In poor countries, the probability
that you'll be severely deprived to the extent that your intelligence will likely
be affected is higher, thereby making heritability lower.) (b) "heritability"
means something different here than what the person in the street would
take it to mean - it means the correlation of your IQ (or other traits) with that
of your hypothetical (or real) identical twin, raised apart. The parent-child
correlation is much lower. What is the predictive power of (IQ of the father, IQ
of the mother)?
REPLY
TGGP 11 hr ago
It doesn't take much to correct for inbreeding (a single outbreeding event usually
does it even after multiple generations of inbreeding). And if we wanted to breed
humans to be healthier & longer-lived (a la Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children"),
we could do so.
We've done twin-adoption studies & GWAS to determine the heritability of IQ. It is
indeed more genetic than dependent on "shared environment" in the first world.
REPLY
ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
 Breeders equation only requires selection differential and heritability (assuming
we had humans undergo a breeding program).
REPLY
Toxn 3 hr ago
Well said
REPLY
Steven 13 hr ago
Fantastic article. Minor correction to Adraste: I believe it was Carrie Buck's daughter
Vivian who made the honor roll, not Carrie. https://tinyurl.com/43cf42hb
REPLY
Matt Halton Writes Matt Halton 13 hr ago
Coria seems obviously correct. Not sure what the problem is. Only thing I'd add is that
moral repugnance can be a useful heuristic that leads to better decision-making - the
fact that "don't sterilise children" feels inherently evil suggests that it is more likely to
lead to bad outcomes, even if you can't explain why on a strictly rational level.
REPLY
Ash Lael 13 hr ago · edited 13 hr ago
Too bad Beroe's condemnation of environmentalism is presented only as a foil to
excuse the evils of eugenics. I wanted him to go the whole way.
You want more whales? Farm the whales.
REPLY (1)
Melvin 12 hr ago
What if I don't really want more whales, but also don't want zero whales?
Farming whales doesn't sound economically viable. They are expensive to feed,
hard to contain, grow slowly, and no longer produce much of economic value. I
also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than they do
in the wild (maybe if you trapped them in their traditional breeding grounds you
could fool them into breeding more often?)
REPLY (1)
yogiberraofbadnews 10 hr ago
> I also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than
they do in the wild
Surely there’s some experimental not-yet-approved-for-human-use drug we
could try? Figure out the lethal dose on whales, then work our way down to a
 safe dose for positive eugenics for elite rich people?
REPLY
N. Fidel 13 hr ago
I'more than familiar with traits that assort independently. That is the basis of Mendel's
pea experiments. Mendel had no success when he tried to work with hawkweed and
the history of genetics is littered with similar failures. My comments were directed
towards the selection of complex traits whose very definitions are subjective. What is
the definition of beauty, longevity or intelligence? Growing crops or farm animals with
certain characteristics is rather simple by comparison.
REPLY (2)
Alexander Turok Writes Alexander Turok Blog 13 hr ago
I could understand how someone who doesn't know much about psychometrics
could think intelligence was "subjective" and hard to measure.
But longevity, really?
REPLY (2)
Garald 13 hr ago
Presumably he's thinking of questions such as "is a person who dies at 85 in
full possession of their mental powers really shorter-lived than one who dies
at 95 after a twenty-year-long drift into senility?".
REPLY
N. Fidel 12 hr ago
The factors that underlie longevity are unknown. There may be a multitude of
both independent and co- assorting genes that underlie the phenomenon of
longevity. The genes are the blueprint, but phenotypic expression is more
than genes: there's random chance (e.g. some bit of RNA, was
transcriptionally active for more or less time than average, or this organism
had one SNP vs another.). So yes we you can measure longevity and even
select for it, at least in C. elegans, but in vertebrates, it's a different story.
REPLY (1)
TGGP 11 hr ago
Even when there are purely random factors, you can still use selection to
make the non-random genetic factors more common.
REPLY

ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
 We have good ways of operationalizing intelligence and longevity. Yes they aren’t
perfect (no measure or metric is) but they are good enough where we can see
massive benefits to society through selecting them.
REPLY
Ryan W. Writes Ryan’s Newsletter 13 hr ago
I'm surprised that, in the course of this whole discussion, polygenic testing was never
brought up. Polygenic testing potentially addresses most of the deepest eugenics-
related fears. We don't have to hold that any person is better than any other person,
much less wade into the morass of whether one group is better than another group.
We don't have to coerce anyone. Funding is sufficient. We create ten fetuses and
implant the fetus with the best genetic profile. Over time, this should be able to
actually achieve most things that other eugenics plans hoped for, without the
attendant guilt.
We might still debate what traits should be prioritized. Do we favor traits linked to IQ
over traits linked to improved metabolism? Is increased IQ okay if it also increases
depression?
But if we want to trade public funds for improved genetics, polygenic testing seems to
be the golden path, and the answer to all past eugenic horrors. We are free, of course,
to create completely new horrors.
REPLY (1)
Phil H Writes Tang Poetry 12 hr ago
I was thinking along similar lines, but I don't think testing alone gets us there as
long as people still fundamentally want to have their own kids. People still have
children even if they know that there are risks in their genomes. And if everyone is
still having their own kids, then there's only so much that testing can do. It won't
produce any significant shift in the population genome.
But I think the urge to have your own kids can be socially modulated and reduced.
In fact, I think it already has been by the amount of divorce we have. If that effect
could be gently reinforced on the legal level by reducing the rights of genetic
parents and increasing the rights of social parents, for example, then significant
numbers of people might choose to create and raise children with genetic
material that is not their own. And that could cause a population shift over time.
REPLY (2)
Ryan W. Writes Ryan’s Newsletter 11 hr ago
Why wouldn't embryo selection "get us there?" It may not be fast, but it has
to have an impact. There is objectively an upside in terms of reduced genetic
disease. The big downside is cost.
Telling people their genetics is garbage is a hard sell. Telling people they can
have the best of 10 potential kids is an easy sell. Alignment of incentives
matters.
REPLY (1)
Phil H Writes Tang Poetry 10 hr ago
Yeah, that's a good point. I dunno if it is going to work out that way,
though. If you're going to go through an expensive pre-birth selection
procedure, would you necessarily say: I'm going to do genetic screening
and selection on my embryo, but I'm definitely only going to select
genes that come from me and my husband?
I feel like for lots of people, the choice isn't a deep one of "what genes
do we want?" It's a practical choice of: do we do this the natural way, or
are we going fancy tech? Natural being, you just shag till a baby pops
out (zero selection); fancy tech being some kind of genetic intervention
- which could easily include the use of genetic material from someone
else.
I guess the relative popularity of IVF suggests that I'm wrong, though:
that is exactly what you said. Using your own genetic material to get a
baby, even though artificial means are used...
Yeah, perhaps you're right.
REPLY
TGGP 11 hr ago
> And if everyone is still having their own kids, then there's only so much that
testing can do. It won't produce any significant shift in the population
genome.
Nope. Each parent only gives half their genes (setting aside sex
chromosomes & mtDNA) to their child, and WHICH genes get to be in that
lucky half is something we can now deliberately select. If everyone did that
we could (theoretically) eliminate all the deleterious de novo mutations from
showing up in any phenotype. Eliminating rare deleterious alleles would have
a large effect on a population:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/whats-the-catch/#comment-
7603
The overwhelming majority if people in the first world give birth in hospitals,
even though that was not the norm in the past. If genetic testing becomes
cheap enough, that could also become the norm. Even if a minority of people
don't make use of it, selection can occur through all the people that do.
 REPLY
Nobody Special 13 hr ago
Beroe comments that Adraste's argument "seems to grant you, as arbiter of which
things are too close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power,"
but I don't think that's a fair assessment of what Adraste is doing. There's a difference
between advocating a ban and demanding to be installed as "arbiter of what things
should be banned." Saying "I believe X should be banned" to one's fellows in the hope
of convincing a critical mass of them to support democratic implementation of a ban
on X is not the same thing as trying to become a dictator with arbitrary power to ban X
unilaterally.
REPLY
N. Fidel 13 hr ago
You're joking; right? Look up the history of Sir Cyril Burt for a start.
REPLY
Dweomite 12 hr ago
Typos:
Redundant "at all" in: "care at all about coercive sterilizations at all"
ending -> ended in: "that have historically ending in evil"
REPLY
Underspecified 12 hr ago
1. Slippery slopes are real. You need limiting priniciples. More than that, you need
limiting principles that are robust against being misunderstood by stupid people.
(Ironic as it is to cite Hitler in this context, I think he once said something about how
you need to coexist with the stupidest possible version of your ideology. Seems
correct.)
2. I continue to believe that mandatory vaccination crosses a moral event horizon.
Generally you need due process for something like that, and what currently passes for
due process in this country simply isn't good enough for coercive medical procedures.
3. I notice a trend in all of these historical atrocities that we're trying to learn from: The
people making the decisions never internalize the costs of their own policies. That's a
huge red flag. If Hitler wanted to convince the world that the holocaust was a
necessary evil, he should have walked into the gas chamber himself. Obviously he
didn't do that, and everyone should have told him he was full of shit, but instead they
nodded sagely while he used meaningless mouth noises to rationalize his crimes.
REPLY (1)
 TGGP 11 hr ago
I expect Hitler thought his great plans could not succeed without him in charge.
REPLY
Bugmaster 12 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
> Coria: ... They were all tragically wrong, of course, but if they’d been right it would
have been the right thing to do. Ehrlich was stupid but not evil.
>Beroe: You could justify anything with that!
I am going to push even harder against Coria here than Beroe did. If you are
considering taking some drastic action with demonstrably severe negative
consequences, then you'd better make *damn sure* your net result will be positive.
You don't get to just say, "I'm fighting to protect all of humanity, so my heart is in the
right place and the price of failure is infinite, so let history judge me, yolo". I would say
that such reasoning is not only "bad" but also morally wrong, because it can indeed be
used to justify literally anything.
REPLY
Phil H Writes Tang Poetry 12 hr ago
"You make a compelling point..." Haha, I suggest this is one of those sentences that is
never uttered in the wild, only in the thought experiments of conscientious writers. Is
there a name for such sentences?
On topic: If someone were actually interested in making eugenics work for us, I think
the best way would be to continue current trends of allowing family regroupings, and
perhaps doing more in law to diminish the role of genetics in family rights. These days,
many people raise children who are not related to them genetically. If that trend
continues, then there will at some point be pressure among such parents to choose
parents for their children who are genetically gifted. That is, if parents in general are
comfortable with raising children who do not share their genetics, they may well start
to choose to take sperm and eggs from other people, and to choose more successful
people as donors. They would just need to be sure that those children won't be "taken
away" from them by the genetic donors, on either an emotional or financial level.
Then let individual decisions take their course! Government programs, with their
propensity for evil, need never be involved.
REPLY (1)
FractalCycle 12 hr ago
> Is there a name for such sentences?
Related: sometimes I make a joke where I say a given word is "a book word, not a
talk word!". Any word that you can say, but is vaguely surprising to find outside of
 writing. Examples include *gestures to ACX, LessWrong, any math paper,
textbooks, Wikipedia, quite a lot of writing*.
REPLY
Will 12 hr ago
Can someone please start the movement that the softer, milder eugenics we need is
actually banning sperm banks (not promoting them)?
Sperm banks surely select for handsome, charismatic, intelligent males. But surely
they also select for sociopathic males. What should we call someone who wants to
have dozens and dozens of genetic offspring, but doesn't want to have any
responsibility to provide for them in any way whatsoever?
Why do we want to subject the future to increasing legions of handsome, charismatic
sociopaths? How is this a good thing?
REPLY (2)
FractalCycle 12 hr ago
One response might be that some sperm banks select specifically by IQ or
whatever.
Really problematic bit comes in regulation. The effect you describe sounds
Moloch-like, but giving the government the specific power to decide which traits
get to have sperm banks... that seems like a bad power for a government to have,
on its face.
REPLY
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author
I think if you had a large movement that believed this, the best way to use it would
be to donate to sperm banks, not ban them.
REPLY

FractalCycle 12 hr ago
Nitpick, but the Islamic Golden Age gave us quite a lot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
REPLY
Superb Owl Writes Superb Owl 12 hr ago
Do people actually oppose Beroe's better ideas (assuming they're not marketed under
the name "eugenics")?
REPLY (1)
 Scott Alexander 11 hr ago Author
I get accused of eugenics just for mentioning that IQ exists sometimes. I've seen
other people get accused of it for allowing screening for Down Syndrome.
REPLY (1)
ForceMainEasement 10 hr ago
A good test is “can you explain why what I’m advocating for is wrong without
using the word ‘eugenics’?” If they can’t, it’s safe to say it’s just a buzzword.
REPLY (1)
Superb Owl Writes Superb Owl 53 min ago
Yeah I like this test.
REPLY
koa 11 hr ago
"And the perpetrators weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists or blood-crazed generalissimos who
we can safely distance ourselves from. They were smug Western elites overly
impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us."
Yup, folks like Bill Gates, who simultaneously believe that the world is overpopulated
and that everyone needs to take experimental jabs.
REPLY
benwave 11 hr ago
Regarding section II., This is a kind of horrible thought but I wonder how many people
really feel that forced sterilisation is wrong? I have an unpleasant feeling that there a
lot of examples through history and today of people seeming waaay too excited about
the idea of forced sterilisation of people who aren't them.
If in fact a lot of people on some level Like forced sterilisation (or at least don't
consider it morally repugnant), that would explain the apparent difference in the
environmental movement and the Nazi movement - in that case, it wasn't that the
forced sterilisation that turned public opinion against the Nazis. It wasn't until the
mass murder that (enough) people decided the Nazis were bad. Rather, forced
sterilisation has a bad impression Because of the association with the mass murder of
the Nazis?
REPLY (2)
TGGP 11 hr ago
People knew the Nazis were bad because no deal was ever good enough for
Hitler, who just kept grabbing more until he started the war that the wary victors
 of the previous world war had wanted to avoid. People didn't learn about the
Holocaust until after the Nazis had firmly achieved villain status.
REPLY (1)
benwave 10 hr ago
Thanks for the correction. Either way, it does suggest that the mass
sterilisations were not a cause of the Nazis being seen as bad in their time?
REPLY (1)
TGGP 10 hr ago
The people who already opposed mass sterilization could consider that
a reason to oppose the Nazis, but since sterilization occurred in other
places (generally considered respectable democracies) it was not
regarded as such an anathema.
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Mike 9 hr ago
To further the point most people are in favor of the practical sterilization of the
severely mentally disabled even if they would be horrified at doing it medically.
Suppose there is a nonverbal autistic person in state custody. Most people would
be in favor of the state preventing them from having sex with anybody, no matter
what evidence of desire existed on either side.
Maybe closer to the medical sterilization border are permanent puberty blockers
for these mentally disabled people. I think many people are conflicted but i don't
see the same visceral moral disgust at the practice.
REPLY
Leo Abstract 11 hr ago
To quote briefly from my comment on Mastrioanni's review of Galton's book, "If for
Galton the moral importance was with a society, a nation, a people, an ethnos, then
the morality we have built upon the individual is not an advanced science but an
incomprehensible barbarism, a cacophony, and a calamity."
It begs the question to assume that eugenics is bad because it violates individual
rights. Easy to flip it and say that individual liberty is bad because it violates public
health. And don't tell me that restrictions of liberty never work out -- how well is the
current non-eugenic system working for you?
REPLY
hnau 10 hr ago
Coria points out that the democratic process is a social technology for determining
when you get to break deontology for the greater good. But the democratic process is
just an incomplete formalization of a much older and more powerful social technology:
public opinion.
Pre ~1890 public opinion put next to no weight on environmentalist values. Early
environmentalists fought a long uphill battle to change the deontological weights to
include a term for environmentalism. They took their greater good and constructed
narratives about it that would shift public opinion.
Pre ~1940 eugenics was quite popular, because Galton et al had worked hard to make
it that way. Then a greater bad happened that was closely associated with it, and the
narrative took notice. Now public opinion has incorporated the updated narrative and
is heavily against eugenics.
Today if you want to do eugenics you have to make a "greater good" case that
overrides the accumulated bad public opinion. I don't object to anyone making such a
case. But I also don't object to shaming anyone who makes it with Buck and all the
rest. Scott (okay, sure, "Beroe") seems to be suggesting that when you appeal to the
greater good you get to throw out the existing deontological weights. No! The social
technology is operating as designed! The weights are there for a reason! If you can't
win the uphill battle then you haven't earned the right to change them!
REPLY (1)
Garald 8 hr ago
Why is 1890 the watershed? Even before, there were some people with values
that aligned with what we call environmentalist - conservationists in the
countryside, advocates for cleaner air and water in the cities.
REPLY (1)
hnau 8 hr ago
Countryside and cities, yes-- there were earlier reformers associated with
the Industrial Revolution, especially in England. I was thinking of the strain of
environmentalism that values wilderness as wilderness, which was more
characteristic of America and really got going with John Muir and the Sierra
Club. Arguably Ehrlich is more closely related to the former, but if you move
the start up 50 years my points still stand.
REPLY
Monkyyy Writes Monkyyy’s Newsletter 10 hr ago
> I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit
the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance
and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Simple, positive eugenics is legal, any and all negative eugenics is a somewhere near a
war crime.
The hard part would be abortion because its abortion, and you don't need motives on
the table for that to be complex.
REPLY
Kalimac 10 hr ago
Along around 1974, I had a friend who was, like me, firmly anti-Nixon and a proponent
of the Watergate investigations. (Hold on, this will be relevant in a moment.)
One day I saw him reading The Population Bomb, a book I had no use for. You like that?
I asked. Yes, he said. You think that Ehrlich has the right ideas? Yes, he said. Well,
then, I replied, that makes you an Ehrlich-man.
He never spoke to me again.
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Eremolalos 8 hr ago · edited 8 hr ago
Whenever the subject of eugenics comes up, the example used is selecting for
intelligence. I think this shows a lack of common sense. If we want society to function
better, shouldn't we also selecting for mental health and a kind, calm temperament?
REPLY (1)
D0TheMath Writes D0TheMath’s Substack 7 hr ago
This seems a location where social desirability bias may be at play. It is difficult to
disagree that kindness or calmness are positive traits, but I worry about second
order effects. Possibly many incredibly successful businesses weren’t invented by
overly kind or calm people, and much good has been done by selfish people.
Plausibly more than kind people on net, though I’m uncertain. I’m more confident
that things like IQ correlate positively with a host of good things.
REPLY (1)
D0TheMath Writes D0TheMath’s Substack 7 hr ago
Good things with positive second order effects that is.
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Mr T. 8 hr ago
I hope Coria's position pushes you more in the libertarian direction. At the least, it
should raise a question about where the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate
government action lies.
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Santi 8 hr ago
Not that it changes the main conclusion, but I'd say the reason Galton got his name
removed from places and the Ehrlich got prizes from prestigious western institutions is
that the former's ideas caused the sterilization of a bunch of western people, while the
latter affected "just" (a couple extra orders of magnitude of) Indians. Which goes to
show how much of it is hypocritical virtue-signaling. I would be surprised if you ask
around India about Ehrlich and you get the same response.
REPLY
scarecrow 7 hr ago
My cousin was forcibly sterilized in the early 70's. It was her parents choice.
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D0TheMath Writes D0TheMath’s Substack 7 hr ago
I think a secret reason people dislike eugenics is because they are very skeptical of the
government having the power to customize its citizens. The government does not in
fact always act with its citizens interests at heart, and maybe you will get some party
diverting tons of money towards making sure people with genetic dispositions in favor
of that party get subsidized for children. Maybe Product Incorporated does something
similar via lobbying to make more children genetically predisposed to buy Product, or
to modify people to better enjoy producing Product (under the argument that we are
short on Product and it is necessary for national defense).
REPLY (1)
D0TheMath Writes D0TheMath’s Substack 7 hr ago
For those who are also skeptical of markets without government intervention, add
in skepticism about people being able to buy modifications to their children.
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Edmund 7 hr ago
With regards to the desirability of otherwise-non-evil eugenics, at the risk of sounding
like a broken record, I find myself once again asking what's up with this unstated
assumption that being smarter is generically better. Sure, it might be better for society
in the long run if there are fewer people of lower or average intelligence, but it might
also be better for society if there were fewer people with various eccentric
preferences, or tendencies to criticise the government, etc., and it seems obvious that
trying to reduce or wipe out those traits to make the population less diverse and more
homogenous would be bad and evil in itself. I fear reducing the number of people with
lower IQs would be like this.
Unless you fall under a certain threshold of *debilitating* mental deficiency I don't
think a life with comparably lesser IQ is less desirable, less happy, or less dignified
than that of a genius. I'm not exactly *low*-IQ but neither am I in the topmost
percentile, and I don't *want* to become "smarter", especially; nor do I especially want
my children to be smarter than I am. And certainly I would be strongly, strongly
opposed to aiming for a future without anybody who's in my bracket existing anymore.
REPLY
Firanx 7 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
> give all power to a nice-seeming communist
Why did Beroe let that pass? The first communists to gain all power were the
bolsheviks, and they did not seem nice at all. Any communist after that has to work
really hard to prove they don't intend to repeat the atrocities of Soviet Russia and
others. I don't think anyone who actually had power ever did, so nice-seeming
communists with all the power never existed. (At least nice by the standards of people
who believe that forcible sterilization of mentally ill people is obviously bad.)
Edit: not that giving *anyone* all the power seems like a good idea, so I guess it's not
that important.
REPLY
Walter Sobchak, Esq. 7 hr ago
I read the Mastroianni article. I think he wrote it assuming that eugenics is immoral
without fully specifying what it is or proving that all instantiations of it are immoral.
It is easy to point at Nazism and declare it to be immoral.
But, in 21st century America is is quite common for prospective parents to obtain a
genetic profile of their fetus in the early stages of pregnancy, and to abort it if the
profile shows some severe genetic defect such as Down syndrome. Isn't their action a
form of eugenics?
People who believe that all abortions are immoral of course oppose those actions, but
people with less rigid views on that subject often approve. But, in either case, the
argument does not recur to the label eugenics for a judgment as to morality.
In the near future it may be possible to modify a child's genome at the point of
conception. would doing so be eugenics? Would that make it immoral. What if you
remove a well known cancer causing mutation such as BRCA2 from a genome? Is that
immoral? How about ensuring that the child has blond hair and blue eyes?
REPLY
G. Retriever 6 hr ago
The biggest problem with eugenics is the idea that the most important thing standing
between us and utopia is "bad genes" (whatever those are).
The fact that, compared to Bronze Age Greece, we live like gods, despite our genetic
makeups being indistinguishable, puts the lie to that.
The whole reason humans are so great is that we don't have to wait around for biology
to improve our lot. Memes > genes
REPLY
Michelle Taylor 6 hr ago
Talking about overpopulation in my usual filter bubble (woke left), as opposed to
environmentalism in general, does get you the 'any concern about overpopulation is
automatically bad because it leads to trying to reduce the population in a way that
disproportionately targets disadvantaged people, who generally aren't the major
contributors to world consumption footprint anyway' knee jerk reaction - not quite as
strongly as eugenics but close.
Meanwhile eugenics is unfortunately still alive and well, just not calling itself that -
instead it masquerades as triage, eg the UK health policy during covid of de
prioritising a wide range of disabled people for care even when their disability didn't
directly affect likely covid outcomes.
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Cosimo Giusti Writes Sópori Books 6 hr ago
I keep thinking of a dystopia in which the proles look to genetically control the elites.
They want the perfect world of inbred metasexuals shattered to loosen Nature to
resume its mastering role. Issuing warrants for Polanskis and Epsteins to report for
surgery could make for interesting cinema -- maybe something along the lines of Repo
Man.
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Ben Passant 5 hr ago
This was a fantastic post that made me delightfully dizzy at some places.
However, because I have to: any eugenic, or even more generalized, any personality-
trait-focused approach on fighting poverty is turning economics into a purely mistake-
theoretical issue, which it just isn't (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-
mistake/).
At the risk of delivering a highly undercomplex example: consistently improving the
quality of soccer-players by improving the training of youth-players will not lead to
every team in a league winning every game. Someone has to lose by the very definition
of the competition, even though every team of today may win against every team of 20
years ago.
We may all be Einstein for all I care, someone is still going to scrub the toilet.
REPLY (2)
Earnest Rutherford 4 hr ago
For the case of poverty it seems fair to respond that yes in a relative sense half
the population will always be below the median income, and this has some
important social effects, however this does not prevent anyone from increasing
the absolute wealth of everyone in a society, and this sort of increase tends to be
extremely good. i.e. half the people in any country are below median income, but
I'd rather be median income in America today, than in China 100 years ago.
REPLY (2)
Earnest Rutherford 4 hr ago
In fact I'd rather be median income in America today than 90th percentile in
China 100 years ago, which gives some intuition for why on a sufficiently long
timescale I'd consider increases in absolute wealth as important or more
important than increases in relative wealth.
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Ben Passant 4 hr ago
Full agreement, however: choosing the median income as some sort of
indicator for relative poverty exposes the conflict-theoretical issue.
In Germany for example, poverty is defined as being below 60% of the
median income, and sure, there are objectively much worse ways to be
considered poor in today's world (even though I am not sure how much that
matters since psychologically, the subjective experience of being poor is
what matters, and millions of poor people in German feel absolutely
miserable about their living conditions in a way that I genuinely believe can
be compared to how miserable a 13-year old Pakistani feels about working in
a sweatshop, even though objectively that's absurd. Tangent over), however,
there is always enough wealth in a country to move every poor person above
the 60% poverty-line without changing the median itself, because that's just
how the median works.
Intelligence is one of the most important tool to move the median income
upwards (even though conflict theory also has a lot to say about inter-state
competition. Germany earned more than 100 billion euros in saved interest
payments through the greek government-debt crisis for example), but is
almost entirely useless in solving issues that arise from the realtive wealth-
distribution around that median, because relative poverty is not a problem
that requires intellgience to be solved. Intelligence may move an individual
further to the right of that distribution, but it can't possibly to that for
everybody.
 REPLY
Nolan Eoghan 2 hr ago
If everybody was IQ 130, toilets would scrub themselves.
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Michael 5 hr ago
I think it is better to think of “eugenics” as the name of a social movement popular
among early 20th century intellectuals, much like “communism”. It promoted a few
good ideas and also justified astounding evil.
If you want to give workers board seats like in Germany, and have a 40 hour workweek,
those are ideas that communist labor organizers had a large part in shaping, but you
don’t need to be “communist” to support them.
When members of revolutionary communist organizations claim that these are
“communist” ideas, people reasonably suppose it’s just propaganda and the real goal
is a dictatorship of the proletariat. A similar response is also reasonable with
“eugenics”. If this disastrous movement happened to promote some reasonable ideas,
just steal them.
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Dudi 5 hr ago
I think there is an argument to be made that the Indian sterilization, while being
phrased as environmental, was indeed also racist. What is underpinning it is that the
only way to bring down the birthrate in countries like India is sterilization, since people
would be unable to understand/enact different ways of birth control, as we have in the
West. So while the goal might be environmental ("save the planet"), the choice of
means is racist.
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Odd anon 4 hr ago
No mention of the idea that having been deliberately crafted (down to the tendencies
of one's genes) by a person or society is kind of scary?
Right now, there is an obvious division between childbirth and construction. Any sort
of deliberate human input on the next generation's makeup blurs that, and risks a
general tendency towards thinking of people as comparable to things.
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Xpym 4 hr ago
"the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize
themselves than the average person"
I'm pretty sure that this has much more to do with their children having direct access
to the mystical only-in-person transferable actual Scientific Method, than anything
genetic beyond above-average IQ. Of course, considering that sanity waterline is low
enough that there's a concerted effort to discredit IQ in general, this might be an
improvement on the margin, but the lucky recipient of sperm of a Nobel Prize winner
definitely shouldn't expect her child to have anywhere near those odds, unless she
manages to arrange some Nobel Prize winner tutoring in addition.
REPLY (1)
Deiseach 3 hr ago
If that is true, then it should be really easy to test. Get someone to have a baby by
a Nobel Prize winner. Drop that baby into a village in the Democratic Republic of
Congo. Wait twenty-thirty years to see what field it wins a Nobel Prize in.
What's that you say? It died aged two of malnutrition, disease, or civil war? Well,
can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs! Just keep flooding the DRC
with Nobel babies and surely *one* of them will live to be adult!
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N. Fidel 4 hr ago
Agree, that some version of a CRISPR-like technology is the ticket to the future of
single gene editing. Still, large scale manipulation of the human genome to select
complex traits is still way over the horizon. Most of the human genome is composed of
non-coding regions, whose function(s) are not understood. Does changing a gene
exon alter other aspects of transcription ? No one knows.
REPLY
David Roman Writes A History of Mankind 3 hr ago
This post needs a section with "comments about Sparta." I can't believe that nobody
thought of this before me, but let me start anyway: multiple Greek authors report that,
after generations of one of the strongest genetic selection programs ever conducted,
supposedly coupling only the best and brightest, Sparta produced not only the smart,
muscular warriors of 300, but also what many believed were Greece's most beautiful
women. In addition, to nobody's surprise these women were the country’s sharpest,
such as the wife of King Leonidas, who would die in the Battle of Thermopylae in the
5th century BC: when asked why they were able to rule men, where elsewhere in
Greece women could not, she replied that this was “because we are the only ones who
give birth to men.” Given that it had a pretty solid run of centuries as a major power,
the small, poor town of Sparta should be cited as golden example of eugenics.
REPLY (1)
 Sun Kitten 2 hr ago
I am not sure that the multiple Greek authors, none of whom are themselves
Spartans, are necessarily good sources. See
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
for the beginning of a long , very detailed and historically thorough analysis of
what we know about Sparta, with plenty of references to 300. In particular, see
this bit: https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-
spartan-battle/ - for a critical analysis of whether Spartans were or were not
unusually successful in battle.
REPLY (1)
David Roman Writes A History of Mankind 54 min ago
That Spartans were hugely, massively, unbelievably successful in battle is
beyond dispute: they were the main Greek force in the Battle of Plataea (479
BC), where they crushed the greatest army put together by the greatest
empire the world had ever seen, in hand to hand combat; and later defeated
Athens in the Peloponnesian War. That they were obsessed with eugenics,
for themselves, and dysgenics for their enemies is very well attested; a
recent paper on this is “Krypteia: A Form of Ancient Guerrilla Warfare,” by
Brandon D. Ross in “Grand Valley Journal of History” (Volume 1, Issue 2, Sep.
4. 2012). You can also see Paul Cartledge's “The Spartans” (2014) or N.G.L.
Hammond in “The Cambridge Ancient History 3.1,” Ch. 17, or Macrobius'
Saturnalia (5th century AD) for ancient perceptions of Spartans. Bret
Deveraux has a good point regarding the lack of evidence for the
effectiveness of Spartan eugenics. Maybe ancient Greeks were overawed by
them; for example, regarding the beauty of Spartan women they often cited
the example of Helen of Troy, allegedly Spartan, but also a fictional character,
so not really very convincing evidence.
REPLY
Deiseach 3 hr ago
"Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank"
And how well did that work out? The history of it, going by Wikipedia, was "not at all
well" and they didn't even end up with Nobel Laureates donating. 'Get the smartest
men to father the most kids' is always going to be hard, because people don't want
kids the more educated they are (see various studies) or in the case of sperm, you
can't really control for the mothers accessing sperm or the environments the kids will
be raised in.
AI works great for cattle, not so much for humans.
REPLY (1)
 polscistoic 28 min ago
An added problem is that people usually get Nobel prizes & related prizes when
they are well past middle age. And the risk of birth defects rises with the age of
the father. Old sperm is more risky than young sperm in this respect.
...I do not know if children sired through the Nobel sperm bank have a higher
average rate of birth defects. But if so, perhaps it can be seen as Divine
punishment for hubris.
REPLY
Deiseach 3 hr ago
"We have a known system for dealing with times when you need to break
deontological prohibitions for the greater good"
Yes. It's called "sin".
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Deiseach 3 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
So did Galton support things like sterilisation? Hard to say; this is a quote from 1909
book of essays on Eugenics, talking about the lowest class in society (what we now
would call the underclass):
"Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it
would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were
resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied
opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery
to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this."
Does "peremptorily" mean "forcibly" and such things as sterilisation? You could
interpret it either way. And even back in 1909, the more educated - especially women -
were marrying later and having fewer children:
"Augmentation of Favoured Stock.—
The possibility of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing
the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that of repressing
the productivity of the worst. They both raise the average, the latter by reducing the
undesirables, the former by increasing those who will become the lights of the nation.
It is therefore all important to prove that favour to selected individuals might so
increase their productivity as to warrant the expenditure in money and care that would
be necessitated. An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by
granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, encouraging their
intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by
provision for rearing children healthily. The means that might be employed to compass
these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important,
Expand full comment
Expand full comment
ass red help in emergencies d ring the earl ears of married life health homes the
REPLY
Xpym 2 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
"I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between
Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
I'm pessimistic about the capacity of any stance in the space between those to sway
hearts and minds. Everything in that vicinity is memetic weaksauce compared to what
a rhetorically skilled impersonal arbiter of morality pretender can deploy, which is why
any sort of liberalism is inherently unstable. Either your society has a totalizing vision
of morality, or it will eventually be replaced by one that does.
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polscistoic 2 hr ago · edited 2 hr ago
Dear Beroe, Advaste and Coria please relax, all three of you. Let me tell you that your
otherwise interesting discussion is quite unnecessary.
The thing is, you see, that humans are increasingly doing de facto eugenics today,
without even noticing it. It’s quite civilized; we get the benefits of eugenics without
having to be conscious that that’s what we do. De facto eugenics is taking place
thanks to three interrelated global trends that are so strong that no ruler, enlightened
or otherwise, is likely to make more than a slight dent in them: The global demographic
transition, the great gender transformation, and global, massive urbanisation.
The shape of global things to come can be gleaned from countries where these three
trends are already in their final stages. Fatherhood becomes increasingly concentrated
among high-status males, through serial monogamy (a functional equivalent to
polygamy). High-status women also have higher fertility than low-status women,
although this trend is weaker than among males.
Assume that «status» is a rough proxy for «intelligence» in the mainly meritocratic
societies that dominate in the final stages of these interrelated social transformations,
and hey presto - fertility patterns start to resemble what eugenicists would like to see.
…side note: The above pattern only emerges in the final stages of these social
transformations. For countries still in the middle of the transformations, the
hierarchical diffusion pattern that characterizes the demographic transition means
that «the rich get richer, while the poor get children»; and low-status women sire more
children than high-status women. But when a country reaches the end of the
demographic transition, with urban lifestyles and changed gender roles added, it is
back in a situation where fertility works with status, not against status.
REPLY (1)
Gurinder 57 min ago
 What’s for your source for high status women having a higher fertility rate than
low status women ? Also, by status do you primarily mean social class because it
is my understanding that rich people have a much lower birth rate than poor
people.
REPLY (1)
polscistoic 8 min ago
Recent data from Scandinavia. The main reason is not fertility increase
among high-status women, but reduced fertility among low-status women.
This fairly new tendency is linked to the end of hierarchical diffusion of low
fertility. Rural low-status women have caught up with the low fertility of their
high-status urban sisters, to the extent that their positions have switched
(though not by much).
..The male tendency for increased correlation between status and fertility is
stronger, due to increased childlessness among low-staus males plus serial
monogamy (i.e. siring children with more than one woman) among high-
status males. There has been a steep increase during the last two decades of
being childless at age 40 among males in Scandinavia, and this is a trend you
also see elsewhere.
(Childlessness at age 40 has also increased among women, but less, and
from a lower base.)
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Stackdamage Writes Stackdamage 1 hr ago
Terencius, a gambling addict with significant debts to the mob, is being pursued by a
hitman as a result. In my opinion, acquiring an air fryer might provide a solution to his
problems. By owning an air fryer, Terencius could consume less oil, improve his overall
health, and potentially enhance his ability to defend himself against the hitman or
generate enough funds to repay his debts. Additionally, it is worth noting that there is a
minimal statistical association between individuals targeted by hitmen and those who
own air fryers.
However, it is important to consider whether suggesting the purchase of an air fryer is
genuinely the most effective use of Terencius' limited resources or if it simply stems
from a desire to sell him the product I wanted to sell him anyway.
REPLY
IN 48 min ago
Independently of the question of who does the selection and how voluntary it is, I'm
skeptical that targeting the genes that increase the IQ will turn out to be as worthy
goal as Scott makes it sound.
Consider what would happen if a wizard appeared before the people in 1700 and
asked them about what hereditary changes *they* would prefer (the wizard can
magically change the genome of humans in a way that corresponds to their desires,
even without them understanding the genetics). Given the values of that time (people
still majorly worked in agriculture) I expect a good package would be something like
- for men, we'd like to see higher upper body strength (those plows are heavy!)
- for women, we'd like them to be able to rear more children easier (let's say that there
is a magical change that makes women survive the childbirth easier, but only after the
5th child)
Suppose the wizard made the requested changes. And yet 10 generations later those
changes would be essentially useless to us. We don't have enough work that requires
strength corresponding to the genes we have; a median person literally is expected to
pay money and go to a special place to exercise the muscles. Our child bearing
practices are such that anything about five+ children is irrelevant on the population
scale. If increasing the proportion of these genes in 1700 came at the expense of other
things – we'd say that it would have been a bad deal.
There's something similar happening to the mental capabilities. Sure, in the beginning
of the 20th century it was great just to have larger memory to be able to learn 10
foreign languages (you could read scientific articles from other countries!), multiply
long numbers (you could get a job as an actuary!) or remember endless references
lists (you need to be able to cite stuff as a lawyer!) but all of those feats are clearly
less relevant now that you can use machine translation, bookkeeping program or legal
search.
I guess for now whatever is measured by IQ correlates to the things like "well-paid job"
or "good lifestyle", but will it do so in the future? Will people in 2100 say stuff like "now
that no-one writes code, we wish we had more poets and people who had empathy,
too bad those rubes in 2030 optimized for the wrong genes?". That's my main worry
about gene selection in practice.
REPLY
jumpingjacksplash 46 min ago
I think you've missed that the argument for censoring/tabooing eugenics (and most of
these arguments) aren't mistake theorists, utilitarians, rationalists or classical liberals
(although the last point's probably not that important). Their actual argument would
steelman to:
* Thinking that some people are better than other people is intrinsically morally wrong.
* Eugenics derives from the above, and also derives from being
bourgeois/white/[rich?]/[elite?]/[upper class?], and viewing people who are poorer/had
less opportunities than you as intrinsically worse than you, and hating them. It also
derives from blaming marginalised communities for their own problems, which are
caused by white supremacy/[poverty?]. Believing these things is also morally wrong.
* The sole motivation of eugenics is racism/hating the disabled and mentally
ill/[classism?]. None of the problems it purports to solve are caused by anything
intrinsic about the people it discusses, they're actually caused by intentional
discrimination to keep marginalised communities, well, marginalised.
* Eugenics is ultimately the extreme end of a social system that is designed to oppress
marginalised people, by providing the ideological foundation to wipe them out entirely.
The direct analogue would be antisemitism; "moderate voluntary eugenics" would be
the equivalent of, "a program to improve gentile representation in Hollywood."*
* Eugenics is also an attempt to shift the debate away from programs to address
discrimination/[poverty?].
The underlying weltanschauung is that some people are evil and motivated by evil, and
it's
Expand
thisfullevilcomment
motivation that defines them as the evil group (specifically, they're
motivated by maintaining their own power/privilege at the expense of others a bit like
REPLY
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie 36 min ago
In re Nobel Sperm Banks: I believe people aren't young when they get Nobel Prizes,
and sperm is in worse shape as a man gets older.
There are work arounds, I think. One would be to encourage people who might get
Nobel Prizes to freeze some sperm. How early can you identify likely candidates?
How about children of Nobel Prize winners?
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Yalain 29 min ago
So. This is baffling to read.
First off, you just... didn't talk about the current debate about genetic screening.
Trying to prevent things like autism and Down's syndrome. Like, I guess it's highly
inconvenient to you if you have to acknowledge that modern day eugenics is still about
preventing the birth of the undesirables, but, you really need to. The slope looks a lot
more slippery when people are literally arguing that allowing certain types of children
to be born is a tragedy.
But even past that, this seems to boil down to... "Why are we as a society unwilling to,
based on highly debated and controversial theories about IQ, implement policies and
plans to give taxpayer money to people who are already likely to be successful and
wealthy? In a few generations there could be amazing gains, in a vague betterment of
humanity kind of way". Dude, we're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere with wild
abandon, I have no goddamn idea what's happening in your brain.
 REPLY
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie 29 min ago
I'm realizing that "eugenics" is woefully underspecified, not just the positive vs.
negative aspect, and the coercive vs. non-coercive aspect, but that scope matters.
There are people with serious genetic medical problems who chose not to have
children because they don't want to pass the problems on. So, negative eugenics, fully
voluntary, small scope. Is this a problem?
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Toxn 15 min ago
Here's a question: what does "overpopulation" mean?
Is it meant in the sense of "the average GPD per capita of person from country X
means that they can't afford to eat"? Because then China could go from
overpopulated to underpopulated in less than a generation, and could have done so
even without the one child policy. And Africa is likely to become underpopulated just at
its population peaks.
Does it mean "too many people for the amount of arable land to provide a surplus in
years with SD-1 crop yields"? Because then Japan and most of Europe are
overpopulated. Does it refer to some sort of metric related to average population
density? Because then Africa is underpopulated and likely to remain so for the next
100 years.
The term is just so maddeningly nebulous, and all too often seems to simply be
shorthand for "those benighted poor people over there" rather than anything specific.
And that immediately sets up the dark cultural undertones of "those people over there
ruining it for the rest of us" which, I feel, surrounded a lot of the high-flown
environmentalist rhetoric in the 70s and 80s.
Also: is it not easier to simply have a heuristic of "forcibly sterilizing people is bad and
wrong" that can allow one to damn both eugenics and environmentalism to the extent
that they endorsed and enabled forcible sterilization? Doesn't that cut through the
crap by way of the association games linking these two disparate concepts
somewhat?
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madasario 12 min ago
I haven't read all the comments carefully, but it seems like all the arguments against
eugenics involves the fear of coercive power. Would anyone object to a private
organization whose twin values are
1. This should not be done by government. We hereby publicly and irrevocably commit
to strictly and scrupulously avoid engaging with government in any way. To that end,
here are some rules we promise to follow, and some binding enforcement mechanisms
to hold us accountable if we fail.
2. Voluntary eugenics is good. Let's educate people on why and how to have kids that
are smarter and healthier than they would be by default.
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