A pill that will make you crave and deeply enjoy the exact foods your body needs to be in peak health. Foods that decrease your overall health will start tasting horrible.
I would take this pill, but for a different reason.
I am already trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to lose some weight. Taking the pill would mean losing enjoyment of the things that I am already trying to give up anyway; it would eliminate the need to spend precious willpower on this (I am generally very low on willpower); improving my health would make my everyday life more pleasant in various ways, and probably allow me to live longer on average, which is a multiplier on all the pleasures. I would still regret the lost pleasure of eating unhealthy foods, but the tradeoff seems obviously worth it.
The idea that it would allow me to have more kids was not even on my mind when I considered this all. Yes, it is true that longer life allows one to have more kids. But that is not the main reason why I would choose a longer and better life.
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An actual fitness maximizer would be quite different from someone who merely chooses healthy partners and gives up career in order to have a greater family. Probably the best strategy for a man would be to work hard to fulfill or fake all criteria for sperm donation, and donate as often as possible. Using dozen different fake identities, for example each pretending different ancestry, to further increase the number of women that would choose his sperm. Would try to break in the labs, to replace other men’s sperm with his own, too. Most importantly, he would start working hard for this goal since the first day he learned that such possibility exists.
My claim was purely that some people do actually optimize on this. It’s just fairly hard, and their success also relies on how their abilities to game the system compares to how strong the system is. E.g. There was that fertility doctor that just used his own sperm all the time, for instance.
I’m not sure which one you mean because there’s a few examples of that, but he still has not maximized even for quite generous interpretations of ‘maximize’: none of those doctors so much as lobbied their fellow doctors to use him as their exclusive sperm donor, for example, nor offered to bribe them; none of the doctors I’ve read about appear to have spent any money at all attempting to get more offspring, much less to the extent of making any dent in their high doctor-SES standard of living (certainly no one went, ‘oh, so that is what he had secretly devoted his life to maximizing, we were wondering’), much less paid for a dozen surrogacies with the few million net assets they’d accumulate over a lifetime. You can’t excuse this as a typical human incompetence because it requires only money to cut a check, which they had.
On further reflection, I changed my mind (see title and edit at top of article). Your comment was one of the items that helped me understand the concepts better, so just wanted to add a small thank you note. Thank you!
The surrogacy example originally struck me as very unrealistic cause I presumed it was mostly illegal (it is in Europe but apparently not in some States of the US) and heavily frowned upon here for ethical reasons (but possibly not in the US?). So my original reasoning was that you’d get in far more trouble for applying for many surrogates than for swapping out sperm at the sperm bank.
I guess if this is not the case then it might have been a fetish for those doctors? I’m slightly confused about the matter now what internal experience put them up to it if they’d eschew surrogates while they are legal and socially acceptable in parts of the US.
The other options just seem like relatively risky endeavors that are liable to blow up their succesful sperm swapping projects.
Yes, the story of the doctor was the inspiration for my comment. Compared to him, other “maximizers” clearly did not do enough. And as Gwern wrote, even the doctor could have done much better.
(Also, I have no evidence here, but I wonder how much of what the doctor did was a strategy, and how much was just exploiting a random opportunity. Did he become a fertility doctor on purpose to do this, or did he just choose a random high-status job, and then noticed an opportunity? I suppose we will never know.)
Thank you. Between all the helpful comments, I’ve updated my point of view and updated this essay to deprecated with an explanation + acknowledgement at the top.
On that note, I was wondering if there was any way I could tag the people that engaged me on this (cause it’s spread between 2 articles) just so I can say thanks? Seems like the right thing to do to high five everyone after a lost duel or something? Dunno, there is some sentiment there where a lightweight acknowledgement/update would be a useful thing to deliver in this case, I feel, to signal that people’s comments actually had an effect. DM’ing everyone or replying to each comment again would give everyone a notification but generates a lot of clutter and overhead, so that’s why tagging seemed like a good route.
In return, your new disclaimer at the beginning of the article made me notice something I was confused about—whether we should apply the label “X maximizer” only to someone who actually achieves the highest possible value of X, or also to someone who tries but maybe fails. In other words, are we only talking about internal motivation, or describing the actual outcome and expecting perfection?
To use an analogy, imagine a chess-playing algorithm. It is correct to call it a “chess victory maximizer”? On one hand, the algorithm does not care about anything other than winning at chess. On the other hand, if a better algorithm comes later and defeats the former one, will we say that the former one is not an actual chess victory maximizer, because it did some (in hindsight) non-victory-maximizing moves, which is how it lost the game?
When talking about humans, imagine that a random sci-fi mutation turns someone into a literal fitness maximizer, but at the same time, that human’s IQ remains only 100. So the human would literally stop caring about anything other than reproduction, but maybe would not be smart enough to notice the most efficient strategy, and would use a less efficient one. Would it still be okay to call such human a fitness maximizer? Is it about “trying, within your limits”, or is it “doing the theoretically best thing”?
I suppose, if I talked to such guy, and told him e.g. “hey, do you realize that donating at sperm clinic would result in way more babies than just hooking up with someone every night and having unprotected sex?”, if the guy would immediately react by “oh shit, no more sex anymore, I need to save all my sperms for donation” then I would see no objection to calling him a maximizer. His cognitive skills are weak, but his motivation is flawless.
(But I still stand by my original point, that humans are not even like this. The guys who supposedly maximize the number of their children would actually not be willing to give up sex forever, if it resulted in more babies. Which means they care about some combination of pleasure and babies.)
I would take this pill, but for a different reason.
I am already trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to lose some weight. Taking the pill would mean losing enjoyment of the things that I am already trying to give up anyway; it would eliminate the need to spend precious willpower on this (I am generally very low on willpower); improving my health would make my everyday life more pleasant in various ways, and probably allow me to live longer on average, which is a multiplier on all the pleasures. I would still regret the lost pleasure of eating unhealthy foods, but the tradeoff seems obviously worth it.
The idea that it would allow me to have more kids was not even on my mind when I considered this all. Yes, it is true that longer life allows one to have more kids. But that is not the main reason why I would choose a longer and better life.
*
An actual fitness maximizer would be quite different from someone who merely chooses healthy partners and gives up career in order to have a greater family. Probably the best strategy for a man would be to work hard to fulfill or fake all criteria for sperm donation, and donate as often as possible. Using dozen different fake identities, for example each pretending different ancestry, to further increase the number of women that would choose his sperm. Would try to break in the labs, to replace other men’s sperm with his own, too. Most importantly, he would start working hard for this goal since the first day he learned that such possibility exists.
My claim was purely that some people do actually optimize on this. It’s just fairly hard, and their success also relies on how their abilities to game the system compares to how strong the system is. E.g. There was that fertility doctor that just used his own sperm all the time, for instance.
I’m not sure which one you mean because there’s a few examples of that, but he still has not maximized even for quite generous interpretations of ‘maximize’: none of those doctors so much as lobbied their fellow doctors to use him as their exclusive sperm donor, for example, nor offered to bribe them; none of the doctors I’ve read about appear to have spent any money at all attempting to get more offspring, much less to the extent of making any dent in their high doctor-SES standard of living (certainly no one went, ‘oh, so that is what he had secretly devoted his life to maximizing, we were wondering’), much less paid for a dozen surrogacies with the few million net assets they’d accumulate over a lifetime. You can’t excuse this as a typical human incompetence because it requires only money to cut a check, which they had.
On further reflection, I changed my mind (see title and edit at top of article). Your comment was one of the items that helped me understand the concepts better, so just wanted to add a small thank you note. Thank you!
The surrogacy example originally struck me as very unrealistic cause I presumed it was mostly illegal (it is in Europe but apparently not in some States of the US) and heavily frowned upon here for ethical reasons (but possibly not in the US?). So my original reasoning was that you’d get in far more trouble for applying for many surrogates than for swapping out sperm at the sperm bank.
I guess if this is not the case then it might have been a fetish for those doctors? I’m slightly confused about the matter now what internal experience put them up to it if they’d eschew surrogates while they are legal and socially acceptable in parts of the US.
The other options just seem like relatively risky endeavors that are liable to blow up their succesful sperm swapping projects.
Yes, the story of the doctor was the inspiration for my comment. Compared to him, other “maximizers” clearly did not do enough. And as Gwern wrote, even the doctor could have done much better.
(Also, I have no evidence here, but I wonder how much of what the doctor did was a strategy, and how much was just exploiting a random opportunity. Did he become a fertility doctor on purpose to do this, or did he just choose a random high-status job, and then noticed an opportunity? I suppose we will never know.)
Thank you. Between all the helpful comments, I’ve updated my point of view and updated this essay to deprecated with an explanation + acknowledgement at the top.
Woop, take credit for changing your mind!
Thanks!
On that note, I was wondering if there was any way I could tag the people that engaged me on this (cause it’s spread between 2 articles) just so I can say thanks? Seems like the right thing to do to high five everyone after a lost duel or something? Dunno, there is some sentiment there where a lightweight acknowledgement/update would be a useful thing to deliver in this case, I feel, to signal that people’s comments actually had an effect. DM’ing everyone or replying to each comment again would give everyone a notification but generates a lot of clutter and overhead, so that’s why tagging seemed like a good route.
No especially good suggestion from me. Obvious options:
You could make a comment that links to the most helpful comments.
You could make one PM convo that includes everyone (you can add multiple people to a PM convo) and link them to the comment
Agree that tagging/mentions would be nice here.
good to know, thank you!
In return, your new disclaimer at the beginning of the article made me notice something I was confused about—whether we should apply the label “X maximizer” only to someone who actually achieves the highest possible value of X, or also to someone who tries but maybe fails. In other words, are we only talking about internal motivation, or describing the actual outcome and expecting perfection?
To use an analogy, imagine a chess-playing algorithm. It is correct to call it a “chess victory maximizer”? On one hand, the algorithm does not care about anything other than winning at chess. On the other hand, if a better algorithm comes later and defeats the former one, will we say that the former one is not an actual chess victory maximizer, because it did some (in hindsight) non-victory-maximizing moves, which is how it lost the game?
When talking about humans, imagine that a random sci-fi mutation turns someone into a literal fitness maximizer, but at the same time, that human’s IQ remains only 100. So the human would literally stop caring about anything other than reproduction, but maybe would not be smart enough to notice the most efficient strategy, and would use a less efficient one. Would it still be okay to call such human a fitness maximizer? Is it about “trying, within your limits”, or is it “doing the theoretically best thing”?
I suppose, if I talked to such guy, and told him e.g. “hey, do you realize that donating at sperm clinic would result in way more babies than just hooking up with someone every night and having unprotected sex?”, if the guy would immediately react by “oh shit, no more sex anymore, I need to save all my sperms for donation” then I would see no objection to calling him a maximizer. His cognitive skills are weak, but his motivation is flawless.
(But I still stand by my original point, that humans are not even like this. The guys who supposedly maximize the number of their children would actually not be willing to give up sex forever, if it resulted in more babies. Which means they care about some combination of pleasure and babies.)