I think the notion that people are adaptation-executors, who like lots of things a little bit in context-relevant situations, predicts our world more than the model of fitness-maximizers, who would jump on this medical technology and aim to have 100,000s of children soon after it was built.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.
I think this skips the actual social trade-offs of the strategy you outline above:
The likely back lash in society against any woman who tries this is very high. Any given rich woman would have to find surrogate women who are willing to accept the money and avoid being the target of social condemnation or punitive measures of the law. It’s a high risk / high reward strategy that also needs to keep paying off long after she is dead, as her children might be shunned or lose massive social capital as well. If you consider people’s response to eugenics or gene editing of human babies, then you can imagine the backlash if a woman actually paid surrogates at scale. It’s not clear to me that the strategy you outline above is actually all that viable for the vast majority of rich women.
I’d argue some of are IGF maximizers for the hand that we have been dealt, which includes our emotional response, intelligence, and other traits. Many of us have things like fear-responses to heavily hard-wired that no matter what we recognize as the optimal response, we can’t actually physically execute it.
I realize item 2 points to a difference in how we might define an optimizer, but it’s worth disambiguating this. I suspect claiming no humans are IGF maximizers or some humans are IGF maximizers might come down to the definition of maximizer that one uses. And thus might explain the pushback that Nate runs in to for a claim he finds self-evident.