Agreed that in the long run, these kind of slow-rolling dysgenic effects are no big deal:
Polygenic selection and other genetic tech are already powerful enough to counter dysgenic effects, and will only become stronger with time.
Even if there was no ability to genetically fix dysgenic effects, our society is probably improving in other ways at a fast enough clip to overcome the decay (ie, medical tech advancing faster than our health declines; education & information technology more than making up for declines in intelligence, etc).
More generally, the world is likely moving too fast for slow-rolling effects like genetic stuff (or other things, like the impact of immigration on the voting patterns of a country or the impact of CO2 emissions on climate) to matter overwhelmingly in the long run. By the year 2200, the world will likely be some combination of technological utopia & devastated post-catastrophe ruins—the slow-rolling stuff will not matter much either way.
Of course, genetics is relevant to understanding history and having a good model of the world, which is relevant to policy and etc. It would be foolish to try and encourage everyone to be a basketball star, given that height is so genetically determined. (It would be equally foolish to punish people who came up short as if this made them sinful or unworthy.)
So, I think that genetics as a tool for forward predictions of dysgenic effects is not super helpful/relevant. But if you are going to make forward predictions anyways, it is important to look beyond just population averages. There is still plenty of selection even in our modern-day world of abundance—it is just based on assortative mating and the accumulation of money/power/prestige, rather than the barbarism of who lives vs who dies in a world of Malthusian subsistence poverty. So the burden of accumulating mutations does not fall equally on all parts of society, but presumably filters down to the bottom. Similarly, it’s true that fertility declines with increasing wealth, but then it starts shooting up again above a household income of around $200K/year. Those high-fertility rich people are not a big part of the population (only around 1%-2%), but the rich obviously have an outsized influence on policy, economic growth, probably culture, etc. These effects will not give us an “idiocracy” society of general decay—instead they will give us a more extremely unequal society (which will get even more unequal when some people start using polygenic selection and others don’t).
I think the short-term plan for dealing with this increasing inequality is to just keep piling more and more money into redistribution and charity. IMO this plan has been working reasonably well for the past 40 years at least—pre-tax income inequality has gone up, but increasing taxes for redistribution have meant that post-taxes-and-transfers income inequality has actually stayed remarkably flat since the 1960s. For now, we can just keep passing more taxes and creating new redistributive schemes, plus hopefully reforming the system for extra efficiency (like moving some cumbersome and restrictive benefits to a more flexible and simpler UBI).
The long-term plan is somewhere on a spectrum between “genetic / cybernetic technology lets us finally fix all the problematic aspects of genetics and natural selection” and “lol, of course there’s no long term plan, since when do humans have a functional long-term plan for anything!” (It is justified in this case to lack a long-term plan, since genetic trends are so slow-rolling as discussed earlier… by the time the short-term plan breaks, we will have other bigger problems.)
Agreed that in the long run, these kind of slow-rolling dysgenic effects are no big deal:
Polygenic selection and other genetic tech are already powerful enough to counter dysgenic effects, and will only become stronger with time.
Even if there was no ability to genetically fix dysgenic effects, our society is probably improving in other ways at a fast enough clip to overcome the decay (ie, medical tech advancing faster than our health declines; education & information technology more than making up for declines in intelligence, etc).
More generally, the world is likely moving too fast for slow-rolling effects like genetic stuff (or other things, like the impact of immigration on the voting patterns of a country or the impact of CO2 emissions on climate) to matter overwhelmingly in the long run. By the year 2200, the world will likely be some combination of technological utopia & devastated post-catastrophe ruins—the slow-rolling stuff will not matter much either way.
Of course, genetics is relevant to understanding history and having a good model of the world, which is relevant to policy and etc. It would be foolish to try and encourage everyone to be a basketball star, given that height is so genetically determined. (It would be equally foolish to punish people who came up short as if this made them sinful or unworthy.)
So, I think that genetics as a tool for forward predictions of dysgenic effects is not super helpful/relevant. But if you are going to make forward predictions anyways, it is important to look beyond just population averages. There is still plenty of selection even in our modern-day world of abundance—it is just based on assortative mating and the accumulation of money/power/prestige, rather than the barbarism of who lives vs who dies in a world of Malthusian subsistence poverty. So the burden of accumulating mutations does not fall equally on all parts of society, but presumably filters down to the bottom. Similarly, it’s true that fertility declines with increasing wealth, but then it starts shooting up again above a household income of around $200K/year. Those high-fertility rich people are not a big part of the population (only around 1%-2%), but the rich obviously have an outsized influence on policy, economic growth, probably culture, etc. These effects will not give us an “idiocracy” society of general decay—instead they will give us a more extremely unequal society (which will get even more unequal when some people start using polygenic selection and others don’t).
I think the short-term plan for dealing with this increasing inequality is to just keep piling more and more money into redistribution and charity. IMO this plan has been working reasonably well for the past 40 years at least—pre-tax income inequality has gone up, but increasing taxes for redistribution have meant that post-taxes-and-transfers income inequality has actually stayed remarkably flat since the 1960s. For now, we can just keep passing more taxes and creating new redistributive schemes, plus hopefully reforming the system for extra efficiency (like moving some cumbersome and restrictive benefits to a more flexible and simpler UBI).
The long-term plan is somewhere on a spectrum between “genetic / cybernetic technology lets us finally fix all the problematic aspects of genetics and natural selection” and “lol, of course there’s no long term plan, since when do humans have a functional long-term plan for anything!” (It is justified in this case to lack a long-term plan, since genetic trends are so slow-rolling as discussed earlier… by the time the short-term plan breaks, we will have other bigger problems.)