Educated women have less children, reduced childhood mortality means less hedging to reach a desired number of children, above-noted changes away from agriculture and mandatory public schooling reduce the economic value of child labor, some other stuff.
Oligopsony
Karma: 2,077
Also, deontic concerns about forcing existence on people.
As Apprentice points out the heritability of prosocial behaviors such as cooperativeness, empathy and altruism is 0.5, and I think most people here are aware that IQ has a heritability around that number as well and is a pretty good predictor of life outcomes. If you want to increase the number of people in the world that are like yourself, then having children is a great way of doing so.
I would submit that most people are not very good about judging whether they are prosocial geniuses. (This goes double for people who are likely to be reading this.)
Also: inasmuch as the problem with sperm (and egg) donation is lack at the demand rather than supply end, surely one should seek to enter in on the demand side. Perhaps you really are a prosocial genius, but surely you are not the prosocialest geniusest. You probably suck in other ways too.
Also: heritability is not contribution, but that’s veering towards a debate we’ve had and mostly exhausted already.
Moreover, the people you would save by donating to charity would also have children and those children would have children all of whom might require yet more aid in the future. Thus the short term gains in QALYs that giving to GiveWell recommended charities provides lead to a long term drain of resources and human capital.
That “might” is doing a lot of work here. The overall effect of economic development is to greatly reduce fertility.
Technically speaking, this seems like an altruistic reason to write something for Ada Lovelace Day, not a selfish one. Unless you’re using the term in the trivial sense where “selfish reason to” is pleonastic.
I won’t be able to make it today, but I do promise to show up sometime soon so I can return the books I borrowed the last swap.
For their part, Stalinists have tended to be fond of technical elites as well. However, I suspect that gristly examples may arise simply from the depth of the sample size; the innumerable cruelties of the premodern world, after all, we’re chiefly overseen by humanistic elites. It may be that today humanistic values are substantially more weak and “feminine” (from the perspective of their predecessors,) but this may also be part of why existing power structures are less fond of employing them.
(All this, of course, assumes this is a useful dichotomy, the primary avenues for elite recruitment under modern liberalism are business and the legal profession, which straddle the line in some ways.)
Can Blindsight-style Scramblers employ anthropic reasoning?
Doesn’t the anthropic principle provide some difficulty for the latter solution as well—why should we find ourselves at the very beginning of such preposterously long lifespans?
Having spoken with you in person (unaware that this was a consciously chosen practice) my experience was mostly that it was cognitively burdensome and that I was mostly worried for you. I suspect this isn’t what you’re shooting for! (I also classified it alongside my “Will is a troubled genius” model, which may or may not be what you’re going for.)
My personal experience is that I tend towards terrible self-destructiveness when I don’t get enough human warmth, so this strategy would not be a good debiaser for me. But if you can make it work… actually, this seems like a good thing to get external feedback on whether you make it work. Have you?
“Rather” my butt; there’s an incredibly obvious rude reply I could have made, and would have, had I the minimal intelligence to realize it.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
Oh, I’m sure if I keep on my current kick I can dip below a kilokarma.
Maybe you can call in Gwern to measure my skull shape and really narrow it down.
The biggest barrier that has anything to do with cleverness? Sure.
or anybody smart enough to be on LW
Yeah, that captcha is a stumper.
Stop this. Seriously.
Stop what? I haven’t the faintest idea what my IQ is, and you proposed low IQ as a reason for incomprehension in this instance. Why throw out a perfectly reasonable hypothesis?
Being angry is a signal that you’re willing to back up your disagreement with consequences of some sort, whether it’s violence or a lost friendship. It’s also a signal, commensurate with the degree to which it is embarrassing, that this is highly important to you. Why, precisely, is it irrational to respond to this? Did evolution prime us to respond to it because it thought it would be funny? It is, indeed, not obvious to me (though perhaps I have low IQ) that it is astonishingly stupid to be more convinced (behaviorally) by pathos than logos; behavioral reinforcement is but one concern among many, and whose value fluctuates in accordance with how many interactions you expect to have with this person, whether they are physically larger than you, &c. And the persuasiveness of logos, obviously, can rather depend on the quality of the logos. Maybe your logos isn’t as good as you think it is? You apparently weren’t able to discern why they were upset with you in the first place, which certainly would have placed a damper on your ability to articulate convincing reasons why they should not.
With respect to this being a “danger,” don’t Boltzmann brains have a decision-theoretic weight of zero?
This says to me that early childhood nutrition is the common factor here.
Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task
I like to think my entire tenure here has been something of an attempt at this, although of course I can’t say how successful it’s been.
(I’d also characterize it as in black rather than clown suits, at least from the inside. Will Newsome and muflax are the clown suit guys here, God bless them.)
Sure. Or more glibly, does malaria not inhibit economic development?