I predict two problems (though problems are not limited to the first problems I predict).
Humans will dramatically overprice the “sacred” value of natural children. So any policy based on internalizing costs of a sacred value may mostly just make people pay costs, not change their behavior.
Dumb people are going to have kids. If the people least likely to change their behavior based on an incentive are also the ones being fined the most, you just go from having dumb people to having poor dumb people.
Dumb people should be given free computer games, so they don’t have time to reproduce.
Imagine a monastery, just replace praying with playing. A place where people can move, play computer games all day long, and get free food. They can have competitions in the games, have status in the community based on their playing results (so they are emotionally motivated to play more), a small world separated from all the troubles of the outside world. A wireheading, without putting a wire to the head. In separate buildings for males and for females, aside from the rest of civilization. Voluntary participants.
I am not sure but I think that a eugenics-friendly billionaire could build such an institution now, legally.
Rarer than elsewhere? That’s not my impression, at least of universities with co-ed dorms, which is probably the main and critical difference between them and Viliam’s Monastaries.
I seem to recall statistics according to which the percentage of graduate students in certain faculties who are virgins was two-digits, whereas the percentage of twenty-year-olds in the general population in the same country who are virgins was less than 5%.
Dumb people should be given free computer games, so they don’t have time to reproduce.
Or, once technology is slightly more advanced, give them sexbots. You could also develop robot kids that were cuter and easier to take care of than real children, and give those to the dumb people. (I think some sci-fi story had cute robot kids causing the extinction of the human species, but I forget which one this was.)
Of course, this has the obvious problem that if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you’re incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.
I had interpreted “click on cows and win points” literally. I’ve never played FarmVille, but I guess it’s a constructionand management simulation game, and as such not that boring. (I spent plenty of time playing Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Age of Empires back in the day.)
In terms of richness of gameplay, Farmville is closer to “click on cows and win points” than to Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon. It may be closer to those in terms of graphics and the diversity of choices you have, it’s just that those choices are not very deep (you won’t need to balance any feedback loops or anything, you can just put anything that looks pretty).
if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you’re incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.
It would be good if taking the “dumb path” is easier if any only if the person is dumb (or has other negative characteristics), otherwise taking the “normal path” is better. Assuming a normal person can get more utility from their life than a dumb person, and that normal people value other things than dumb people, the “dumb path” should provide utility somewhere between these levels, and it should focus on things dumb people value more. For a dumb person, choosing the “dumb path” should be both the rational choice and the immediate gratification maximizing choice.
For example, in the “gaming monastery” situation, a smart person can find a work, buy a computer and the games, and play at home, so they probably would not gain much by going to the monastery. For the society, maintaining the monastery should not be very expensive even in short term, and certainly it would save costs in long term. The money saved by running the monasteries and the gains from increasing IQ of population should contribute to well-being of people outside of the monasteries.
(Giving dumb people cute robotic kids would not work. They would probably have sex anyway, which is the part we want to avoid here. It requires some intelligence to understand the relation between sex and reproduction, and even higher intelligence to remember it when the opportunity for sex becomes immediate. The only thing that would work is either contraception, or physically separating males and females. Bonus political points if they do that voluntarily; if you bribe them instead of forcing them.)
Giving mean people cute robotic kids might be a huge win. Designing and distributing kid-shaped robots which are optimized for attracting abuse would have a huge squick factor.
For extra squick-factor-despite-potential-benefits, I present to you … the rapebot! A humanoid robot you can rape in the quiet of your own home, that will fight back realistically! For use in delux detain, er, entertainement facilities! For more information, contact your local peace and love officer!
For double extra squick factors, make some robots look like schoolgirls.
Meh. Rape play is pretty common. Actually I think the “robot girlfriend” doll already has a personality setting for not consenting. I don’t think there is any healthy, consensual, adult outlet for people who think “Man, I wish there was an ethical way to get the kick of abusing”, unless I’m wrong about the psychology of abusers.
Giving dumb people cute robotic kids would not work. They would probably have sex anyway, which is the part we want to avoid here. It requires some intelligence to understand the relation between sex and reproduction, and even higher intelligence to remember it when the opportunity for sex becomes immediate.
Sex = pregnancy risk is pretty straightforward. You would have to be literally retarded to not appreciate it.
Pregnancy rates varying with IQ is more about culture and SES than “how girl get pragnant how is babby formed”—they get pregnant to hook their boyfriend, because the guy insisted on sex without protection, because unprotected sex is a sign of trust, because having a baby gives meaning to their life, because everyone else is, because they left contraception at home and the passion of the moment is too strong etc. (If these reasons are completely alien to you, well, that’s an example of the culture thing. I found reading Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage really interesting.)
None of those are because they don’t understand the “baby comes 9 months after sex with a man” theory; it’s worth noting that even indigenous tribes suffering from iodine deficiency and endless infectious diseases and all sorts of problems like that all understand that sex causes pregnancy.
I added the book to my “to read” list, but my quick reply is that there may be different incentives for having the first child and having the fifth child.
Also the book describes situation in USA, while I am usually thinking about Roma communities in Slovakia. So we should not generalize across cultures, which was my fault in the first place. There are some differences, e.g. in poor communities of my country the male-to-female ratio is close to 1:1, and the marriages tend to be stable, as far as I know. On the other hand, their ability to think long-term is sometimes pretty low. (For a specific example, imagine poor people who in every spring throw away their winter clothes, because the winter is over, so they won’t need them anymore. Or spend all their money on food on the first day, make a huge party, and then starve towards the end of the month; predictably month after month, year after year.) As far as I know some women in this community are aware of the fact that unprotected sex will lead to more starving children, and would like to prevent it, they are just not very good at planning and handling money; especially because their culture does not support the concept of private property, so even if they set away some money for contraception, any family member, or actually any member of the village, is free to take that money and spend it on alcohol. (There were some political proposals to provide free contraception, but they were opposed for religious reasons.) -- This is just a situation in one specific culture, where cute robotic babies would not help, and probably even free contraception would not help if there would be any trivial inconvenience, such as having to remember to use it every time.
To be clear I don’t think that dumb people (unless seriously retarded) don’t understand the concept that sex causes children. It’s more like that beliefs don’t propagate automatically, and the thought chain: “any sex has a chance to result in pregnancy… so even this specific instance of sex could result in a specific pregnancy… which means that there will be one more baby… and the baby will need to eat… which means that after a period of breastfeeding we will have to buy food… and it will cost money… and we do not have enough money… so there may be not enough food… so the child may starve… and I don’t want my child to starve… so I should use contraception now or avoid sex for now” is too long to be thought clearly and in a near mode during the moment of passion.
But the most fascinating and strange part about the islanders are their beliefs on the subject of pregnancy, also described in Malinowski’s classic article “Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands”. When people die, you see, their spirit takes a canoe to the island of Tuma, which works very much like the normal island except everybody is a spirit of the dead. When the spirit gets old and wrinkled it shrugs off its skin and turns back into an embryo, which a spirit then takes back to the island and inserts into a woman. This, you see, is how women get pregnant.
That’s right. The islanders do not believe that sex causes pregnancy. They don’t believe in physiological fatherhood. Malinowski was incredibly skeptical about this, so he tried all sorts of ways to see if this was simply a story they told, while they actually the real deal. But no, they assured him that it was really true, that all the white people who insisted otherwise were being silly, that the spirits caused pregnancy, not sex.
They argued the case quite logically. After all, they noted, one fellow went on an expedition for a year or two and when he came back, he had a new son. He obviously wasn’t having sex with her while he was away, so where did the kid come from? (Cough.) And, they note, there are some really hideous people on the island who nobody would dare have sex with, yet they manage to become pregnant. (Malinowski spies some kids looking sheepish when this subject is raised.)
They also argue the other way: people on the island are having sex all the time from a very early age and yet they very rarely get pregnant. (Naturally, the islanders don’t practice any form of contraception; the very idea doesn’t make sense when sex doesn’t cause pregnancy.) The white man’s argument just doesn’t make sense. Indeed, recent visitors report, the islanders still believe that sex doesn’t cause pregnancy, despite the best efforts of health workers.
You know, it’s funny—before typing that I thought to myself ‘didn’t I read about one very obscure tribe in the whole world & history which had managed to not believe that men impregnate women?’ but after thinking about it for a little while and doing some Google searches, all I could think of was that weird tribe in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kvothe fantasy novels who don’t believe in ‘man-mothers’.
Like Randy, I’m always a little skeptical of these things lest there be another Mead/Samoa incident, and assurances like
That’s right. The islanders do not believe that sex causes pregnancy. They don’t believe in physiological fatherhood. Malinowski was incredibly skeptical about this, so he tried all sorts of ways to see if this was simply a story they told, while they actually the real deal. But no, they assured him that it was really true, that all the white people who insisted otherwise were being silly, that the spirits caused pregnancy, not sex.
Don’t necessarily resolve the issue especially since the data was from so long ago. But looking in Wikipedia, I see nothing disagreeing and an interesting mechanism:
Although an understanding of reproduction and modern medicine is widespread in Trobriand Society, their traditional beliefs have been remarkably resilient. The real cause of pregnancy is always a baloma, who is inserted into or enters the body of a woman, and without whose existence a woman could not become pregnant; all babies are made or come into existence (ibubulisi) in Tuma. These tenets form the main stratum of what can be termed popular or universal belief. If you question any man, woman, or even an intelligent child, you will obtain from him or her this information. In the past, many held this traditional belief because the yam, a major food of the island, included chemicals (phytoestrogens and plant sterols) whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy was not very evident.[2]
So it sounds genuine. Still, one indigenous group out of the many thousands studied demonstrates the point: everyone understands the connection between sex & pregnancy.
Not sure if it’s the one you had in mind, but Suzette Elgin had a series of short pieces on her Livejournal about cyberdragons—cute robot dragons who triggered all the same nesting instincts as real children, and who adults loved more than their children. Several of the pieces deal with the interaction of a horrified society with a terrorist group called Humanity First or somesuch, who basically go around kidnapping and publically destroying cyberdragons
(I think some sci-fi story had cute robot kids causing the extinction of the human species, but I forget which one this was.)
I read a story where prospective parents had to first take care of a robot baby for training, but it was so awful that many decided to just not have children … resulting in the demographic decline of America, and Chinese supremacy (the Chinese had designed the robot with that result in mind). It may or may not be the one you were thinking of.
Of course, this has the obvious problem that if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you’re incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.
Really smart people would agree with Eliezer here and not want sexbots… or would they?
(As for me, I’d say that “sex” with a non-sapient partner doesn’t count as “sex” any more than masturbation does, but YMMV.)
Really smart people might also have sufficiently many things that they were interested in that, even without sexbots, they might consider finding a mate too much effort for the gain. While they’d probably prefer a real partner to a sexbot, they might very well prefer masturbation-with-a-sexbot to masturbation-with-just-ordinary-porn, and the difference might be enough to further reduce their interest in acquiring real mates.
It seems to me that you’re actually selecting for people who want to affect the real world, and that might not be especially correlated with intelligence.
The interesting thing is that the desire to affect the real world is probably anti-correlated with doing well in school.
With school as it is now, yes. But perhaps the designers of this eugenics system have control over public education (which in some places and times means all education, private schools being illegal). Then they could guide the people they wanted to the monasteries.
I am not sure but I think that a eugenics-friendly billionaire could build such an institution now, legally.
What about the “dumb people” part. I’m not sure the self-selection would achieve that—stereotypically it’s nerds who play lots of video games, not jocks.
Even in the ems/Hanson scenario having children will be a value. In the timeline, eugenics come before, but don’t will extinguish these psychological traits. They could become a religion, for example.
I predict two problems (though problems are not limited to the first problems I predict).
Humans will dramatically overprice the “sacred” value of natural children. So any policy based on internalizing costs of a sacred value may mostly just make people pay costs, not change their behavior.
Dumb people are going to have kids. If the people least likely to change their behavior based on an incentive are also the ones being fined the most, you just go from having dumb people to having poor dumb people.
Dumb people should be given free computer games, so they don’t have time to reproduce.
Imagine a monastery, just replace praying with playing. A place where people can move, play computer games all day long, and get free food. They can have competitions in the games, have status in the community based on their playing results (so they are emotionally motivated to play more), a small world separated from all the troubles of the outside world. A wireheading, without putting a wire to the head. In separate buildings for males and for females, aside from the rest of civilization. Voluntary participants.
I am not sure but I think that a eugenics-friendly billionaire could build such an institution now, legally.
This sounds a bit like a university.
Which is why we have the dysgenic trend of college degrees having a strong negative impact on female fertility.
Some people do get laid in college, even if that’s probably rarer than elsewhere. Also, it’s not dumb people who go there.
Rarer than elsewhere? That’s not my impression, at least of universities with co-ed dorms, which is probably the main and critical difference between them and Viliam’s Monastaries.
I seem to recall statistics according to which the percentage of graduate students in certain faculties who are virgins was two-digits, whereas the percentage of twenty-year-olds in the general population in the same country who are virgins was less than 5%.
Or, once technology is slightly more advanced, give them sexbots. You could also develop robot kids that were cuter and easier to take care of than real children, and give those to the dumb people. (I think some sci-fi story had cute robot kids causing the extinction of the human species, but I forget which one this was.)
Of course, this has the obvious problem that if you only make things too easy and fun for the dumb folks, you’re incentivizing the smart ones to pretend to be dumb.
Easy—just make the computer games really dumb, and easy. But you can blow stuff up and win points!
Explosion physics is moderately difficult to program. Instead, click on cows and win points.
I suspect that doing that all day, all year would eventually bore even not-so-dumb people (say, IQ 85).
The number of Farmville posts on my Facebook wall serves as a counterexample to this claim.
I had interpreted “click on cows and win points” literally. I’ve never played FarmVille, but I guess it’s a constructionand management simulation game, and as such not that boring. (I spent plenty of time playing Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Age of Empires back in the day.)
In terms of richness of gameplay, Farmville is closer to “click on cows and win points” than to Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon. It may be closer to those in terms of graphics and the diversity of choices you have, it’s just that those choices are not very deep (you won’t need to balance any feedback loops or anything, you can just put anything that looks pretty).
And of course there’s the actual Cow Clicker game.
You are probably thinking of After Life by Simon Funk, which was alluded to by Eliezer in Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.
Ah, that’s the one.
It would be good if taking the “dumb path” is easier if any only if the person is dumb (or has other negative characteristics), otherwise taking the “normal path” is better. Assuming a normal person can get more utility from their life than a dumb person, and that normal people value other things than dumb people, the “dumb path” should provide utility somewhere between these levels, and it should focus on things dumb people value more. For a dumb person, choosing the “dumb path” should be both the rational choice and the immediate gratification maximizing choice.
For example, in the “gaming monastery” situation, a smart person can find a work, buy a computer and the games, and play at home, so they probably would not gain much by going to the monastery. For the society, maintaining the monastery should not be very expensive even in short term, and certainly it would save costs in long term. The money saved by running the monasteries and the gains from increasing IQ of population should contribute to well-being of people outside of the monasteries.
(Giving dumb people cute robotic kids would not work. They would probably have sex anyway, which is the part we want to avoid here. It requires some intelligence to understand the relation between sex and reproduction, and even higher intelligence to remember it when the opportunity for sex becomes immediate. The only thing that would work is either contraception, or physically separating males and females. Bonus political points if they do that voluntarily; if you bribe them instead of forcing them.)
Giving mean people cute robotic kids might be a huge win. Designing and distributing kid-shaped robots which are optimized for attracting abuse would have a huge squick factor.
For extra squick-factor-despite-potential-benefits, I present to you … the rapebot! A humanoid robot you can rape in the quiet of your own home, that will fight back realistically! For use in delux detain, er, entertainement facilities! For more information, contact your local peace and love officer!
For double extra squick factors, make some robots look like schoolgirls.
Meh. Rape play is pretty common. Actually I think the “robot girlfriend” doll already has a personality setting for not consenting. I don’t think there is any healthy, consensual, adult outlet for people who think “Man, I wish there was an ethical way to get the kick of abusing”, unless I’m wrong about the psychology of abusers.
Sex = pregnancy risk is pretty straightforward. You would have to be literally retarded to not appreciate it.
Pregnancy rates varying with IQ is more about culture and SES than “how girl get pragnant how is babby formed”—they get pregnant to hook their boyfriend, because the guy insisted on sex without protection, because unprotected sex is a sign of trust, because having a baby gives meaning to their life, because everyone else is, because they left contraception at home and the passion of the moment is too strong etc. (If these reasons are completely alien to you, well, that’s an example of the culture thing. I found reading Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage really interesting.)
None of those are because they don’t understand the “baby comes 9 months after sex with a man” theory; it’s worth noting that even indigenous tribes suffering from iodine deficiency and endless infectious diseases and all sorts of problems like that all understand that sex causes pregnancy.
I added the book to my “to read” list, but my quick reply is that there may be different incentives for having the first child and having the fifth child.
Also the book describes situation in USA, while I am usually thinking about Roma communities in Slovakia. So we should not generalize across cultures, which was my fault in the first place. There are some differences, e.g. in poor communities of my country the male-to-female ratio is close to 1:1, and the marriages tend to be stable, as far as I know. On the other hand, their ability to think long-term is sometimes pretty low. (For a specific example, imagine poor people who in every spring throw away their winter clothes, because the winter is over, so they won’t need them anymore. Or spend all their money on food on the first day, make a huge party, and then starve towards the end of the month; predictably month after month, year after year.) As far as I know some women in this community are aware of the fact that unprotected sex will lead to more starving children, and would like to prevent it, they are just not very good at planning and handling money; especially because their culture does not support the concept of private property, so even if they set away some money for contraception, any family member, or actually any member of the village, is free to take that money and spend it on alcohol. (There were some political proposals to provide free contraception, but they were opposed for religious reasons.) -- This is just a situation in one specific culture, where cute robotic babies would not help, and probably even free contraception would not help if there would be any trivial inconvenience, such as having to remember to use it every time.
To be clear I don’t think that dumb people (unless seriously retarded) don’t understand the concept that sex causes children. It’s more like that beliefs don’t propagate automatically, and the thought chain: “any sex has a chance to result in pregnancy… so even this specific instance of sex could result in a specific pregnancy… which means that there will be one more baby… and the baby will need to eat… which means that after a period of breastfeeding we will have to buy food… and it will cost money… and we do not have enough money… so there may be not enough food… so the child may starve… and I don’t want my child to starve… so I should use contraception now or avoid sex for now” is too long to be thought clearly and in a near mode during the moment of passion.
Not everybody makes the link:
You know, it’s funny—before typing that I thought to myself ‘didn’t I read about one very obscure tribe in the whole world & history which had managed to not believe that men impregnate women?’ but after thinking about it for a little while and doing some Google searches, all I could think of was that weird tribe in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kvothe fantasy novels who don’t believe in ‘man-mothers’.
Like Randy, I’m always a little skeptical of these things lest there be another Mead/Samoa incident, and assurances like
Don’t necessarily resolve the issue especially since the data was from so long ago. But looking in Wikipedia, I see nothing disagreeing and an interesting mechanism:
So it sounds genuine. Still, one indigenous group out of the many thousands studied demonstrates the point: everyone understands the connection between sex & pregnancy.
I’ve heard similiar stories before that ended up being due to the westerner’s credulity rather than the islander’s ignorance.
Not sure if it’s the one you had in mind, but Suzette Elgin had a series of short pieces on her Livejournal about cyberdragons—cute robot dragons who triggered all the same nesting instincts as real children, and who adults loved more than their children. Several of the pieces deal with the interaction of a horrified society with a terrorist group called Humanity First or somesuch, who basically go around kidnapping and publically destroying cyberdragons
Link?
here
I read a story where prospective parents had to first take care of a robot baby for training, but it was so awful that many decided to just not have children … resulting in the demographic decline of America, and Chinese supremacy (the Chinese had designed the robot with that result in mind). It may or may not be the one you were thinking of.
That would be “The Education of Tigress McCardle” by C.M. Kornbluth—one of the top satirists from Golden Age sf.
Yep, that’s the one, thanks!
Really smart people would agree with Eliezer here and not want sexbots… or would they?
(As for me, I’d say that “sex” with a non-sapient partner doesn’t count as “sex” any more than masturbation does, but YMMV.)
Really smart people might also have sufficiently many things that they were interested in that, even without sexbots, they might consider finding a mate too much effort for the gain. While they’d probably prefer a real partner to a sexbot, they might very well prefer masturbation-with-a-sexbot to masturbation-with-just-ordinary-porn, and the difference might be enough to further reduce their interest in acquiring real mates.
Smart people get entranced by video games too.
It seems to me that you’re actually selecting for people who want to affect the real world, and that might not be especially correlated with intelligence.
The interesting thing is that the desire to affect the real world is probably anti-correlated with doing well in school.
With school as it is now, yes. But perhaps the designers of this eugenics system have control over public education (which in some places and times means all education, private schools being illegal). Then they could guide the people they wanted to the monasteries.
What about the “dumb people” part. I’m not sure the self-selection would achieve that—stereotypically it’s nerds who play lots of video games, not jocks.
Even in the ems/Hanson scenario having children will be a value. In the timeline, eugenics come before, but don’t will extinguish these psychological traits. They could become a religion, for example.
Though conversely a random element (normal non-directed breeding) might mitigate the overspecialism problems other people have been pointing out.