My impression is that sperm banks pay donors, rather than the reverse. This is an extremely blatant and near-universal non-IGF-maxing situation, it’s not subtle. (Maybe they’re paying for specifically high-yield donors, but still, what fraction of men have even taken the trouble to get their sperm tested?)
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.
you can’t optimize inclusive memetic fitness if you send your genes to a sperm bank. parents don’t want to trust that their kids will get a good upbringing; they, sometimes wrongly, believe their intellectual base is an ideal one to raise a kid with. well, with occasional exceptions, where a person chooses to optimize genetic+memetic fitness of nearby beings rather than themselves.
however, it is not possible to optimize something besides limit +time t-duration survival and survive to t, because the only metric evolution has is whether your phenotype survives.
I generally see this “we don’t maximize IGF, therefore we’re bad at evolution, and ais will be too” argument as fundamentally giving up the game before you even start playing. okay, so we don’t maximize long term fitness—then how can we? have you not given up some interest in art in exchange for making AI more able to preserve humanity’s values as a whole? I know I have, on occasion.
So it’s true that if you donate sperm you can’t then subsequently additionally optimize your IGF through the channel of raising those kids well, but just by siring them, you’ve boosted your IGF.
But you’ve reduced population IGF. you share almost all genes with other humans; our variation between each other is relatively tiny. if you’re trying to maximize IGF of your difference with other humans, perhaps you’re right; but that’s an evolutionary defect strategy. if instead you want to maximize your cooperation group’s survival to deep time, you want to broaden your cooperation group and ensure redundancy of mutual aid.
from your link:
Hamilton showed mathematically that, because other members of a population may share one’s genes, a gene can also increase its evolutionary success by indirectly promoting the reproduction and survival of other individuals who also carry that gene. This is variously called “kin theory”, “kin selection theory” or “inclusive fitness theory”. The most obvious category of such individuals is close genetic relatives, and where these are concerned, the application of inclusive fitness theory is often more straightforwardly treated via the narrower kin selection theory.
Hamilton’s theory, alongside reciprocal altruism, is considered one of the two primary mechanisms for the evolution of social behaviors in natural species and a major contribution to the field of sociobiology, which holds that some behaviors can be dictated by genes, and therefore can be passed to future generations and may be selected for as the organism evolves.
Although described in seemingly anthropomorphic terms, these ideas apply to all living things, and can describe the evolution of innate and learned behaviors over a wide range of species including insects, small mammals or humans.
As of 2015, the typical difference between an individual’s genome and the reference genome was estimated at 20 million base pairs (or 0.6% of the total of 3.2 billion base pairs[cite]
Evolution selects for genes that increase their frequency in their gene pool. That’s all it does. IGF, if it’s trying to impute values to evolution, would have to be precisified to refer to inclusive genetic relative fitness, i.e. inclusively (of kin) increasing one’s relative offspring count, i.e. the frequency of one’s genes in the gene pool. It’s reasonable to approximate this as increasing the number of one’s descendants, and descendants of family members weighted by relatedness; but that approximation breaks down to the extent that your actions can meaningfully affect the total population.
I mean, I’m totally with you on optimizing for the thing you’re talking about, rather than selfish-gene-inclusive-relative-fitness. But that’s a deviation from “what evolution is optimizing for, if anything”.
If only relative frequency of genes matters, then the overall size of the gene pool doesn’t matter. If the overall size of the gene pool doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter if that size is zero. If the size of the gene pool is zero, then whatever was included in that gene pool is extinct.
Yes, it’s true people make all kinds of incorrect inferences because they think genes that increase the size of the gene pool will be selected for or those that decrease it will be selected against. But it’s still also true that a gene that reduces the size of the pool it’s in to zero will no longer be found in any living organisms, regardless of what its relative frequency was in the process of the pool reaching a size of zero. If the term IGF doesn’t include that, that just means IGF isn’t a complete way of accounting for what organisms we observe to exist in what frequencies and how those change over time.
My impression is that sperm banks pay donors, rather than the reverse. This is an extremely blatant and near-universal non-IGF-maxing situation, it’s not subtle. (Maybe they’re paying for specifically high-yield donors, but still, what fraction of men have even taken the trouble to get their sperm tested?)
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.
you can’t optimize inclusive memetic fitness if you send your genes to a sperm bank. parents don’t want to trust that their kids will get a good upbringing; they, sometimes wrongly, believe their intellectual base is an ideal one to raise a kid with. well, with occasional exceptions, where a person chooses to optimize genetic+memetic fitness of nearby beings rather than themselves.
however, it is not possible to optimize something besides limit +time t-duration survival and survive to t, because the only metric evolution has is whether your phenotype survives.
I generally see this “we don’t maximize IGF, therefore we’re bad at evolution, and ais will be too” argument as fundamentally giving up the game before you even start playing. okay, so we don’t maximize long term fitness—then how can we? have you not given up some interest in art in exchange for making AI more able to preserve humanity’s values as a whole? I know I have, on occasion.
I don’t get what you’re saying. IGF is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness
So it’s true that if you donate sperm you can’t then subsequently additionally optimize your IGF through the channel of raising those kids well, but just by siring them, you’ve boosted your IGF.
But you’ve reduced population IGF. you share almost all genes with other humans; our variation between each other is relatively tiny. if you’re trying to maximize IGF of your difference with other humans, perhaps you’re right; but that’s an evolutionary defect strategy. if instead you want to maximize your cooperation group’s survival to deep time, you want to broaden your cooperation group and ensure redundancy of mutual aid.
from your link:
wikipedia:
I’m sorry, you’re confused but I don’t know what to point you to. Maybe this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution
Evolution selects for genes that increase their frequency in their gene pool. That’s all it does. IGF, if it’s trying to impute values to evolution, would have to be precisified to refer to inclusive genetic relative fitness, i.e. inclusively (of kin) increasing one’s relative offspring count, i.e. the frequency of one’s genes in the gene pool. It’s reasonable to approximate this as increasing the number of one’s descendants, and descendants of family members weighted by relatedness; but that approximation breaks down to the extent that your actions can meaningfully affect the total population.
I mean, I’m totally with you on optimizing for the thing you’re talking about, rather than selfish-gene-inclusive-relative-fitness. But that’s a deviation from “what evolution is optimizing for, if anything”.
If only relative frequency of genes matters, then the overall size of the gene pool doesn’t matter. If the overall size of the gene pool doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter if that size is zero. If the size of the gene pool is zero, then whatever was included in that gene pool is extinct.
Yes, it’s true people make all kinds of incorrect inferences because they think genes that increase the size of the gene pool will be selected for or those that decrease it will be selected against. But it’s still also true that a gene that reduces the size of the pool it’s in to zero will no longer be found in any living organisms, regardless of what its relative frequency was in the process of the pool reaching a size of zero. If the term IGF doesn’t include that, that just means IGF isn’t a complete way of accounting for what organisms we observe to exist in what frequencies and how those change over time.
True, but it’s very nearly entirely the process that only cares about relative frequencies that constructs complex mechanisms such as brains.