I did a bit of research on this after it was mentioned on Astral Codex Ten. Acceptance rates at sperm banks are 1-10%, and of those a substantial fraction will go on to be passed over by customers. Also the requirements to abstain from orgasm between donations and to donate regularly are not especially compatible with finding a reproductive partner.
I still agree that it’s evidence against IGF maximization, but it’s not quite the slam dunk that it initially looks like.
I think altruists who like their genetically influenced values and want the future to contain more of those values and don’t have short AI timelines could consider sperm donation as part of their altruistic portfolio.
I think all the leading theories of human value struggle to explain all the observations.
The “godshatter” theory of 100s of tiny genetic values is really flexible and can predict anything, but I don’t have a compelling explanation of why someone would satisfy their genetic drive to help strangers with sperm rather than bed nets.
The “shard theory” of learned values primed by a handful of basic signals is a bit better, I can tell a story about someone having a masturbation shard and a helping others shard and a making babies shard and a making money shard. But it’s also really bad about being able to predict anything.
I also have some basic confusions about what a good theory of human value looks like given that we are very small and have been optimized away from self-knowledge.
Yeah, I don’t have a good theory. Another piece of the puzzle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser ; organisms will be evolved to be guided as heavily as possible, with a minimum of online compute, to behaviors that increase IGF; you avoid thinking about things (and un-sharding your values) as much as you can get away with.
I did a bit of research on this after it was mentioned on Astral Codex Ten. Acceptance rates at sperm banks are 1-10%, and of those a substantial fraction will go on to be passed over by customers. Also the requirements to abstain from orgasm between donations and to donate regularly are not especially compatible with finding a reproductive partner.
I still agree that it’s evidence against IGF maximization, but it’s not quite the slam dunk that it initially looks like.
I think altruists who like their genetically influenced values and want the future to contain more of those values and don’t have short AI timelines could consider sperm donation as part of their altruistic portfolio.
These are good points, though it still feels like a slam dunk.
I think all the leading theories of human value struggle to explain all the observations.
The “godshatter” theory of 100s of tiny genetic values is really flexible and can predict anything, but I don’t have a compelling explanation of why someone would satisfy their genetic drive to help strangers with sperm rather than bed nets.
The “shard theory” of learned values primed by a handful of basic signals is a bit better, I can tell a story about someone having a masturbation shard and a helping others shard and a making babies shard and a making money shard. But it’s also really bad about being able to predict anything.
I also have some basic confusions about what a good theory of human value looks like given that we are very small and have been optimized away from self-knowledge.
Yeah, I don’t have a good theory. Another piece of the puzzle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser ; organisms will be evolved to be guided as heavily as possible, with a minimum of online compute, to behaviors that increase IGF; you avoid thinking about things (and un-sharding your values) as much as you can get away with.