Beroe is just being honest; Galton was the guy who coined the term (at least according to himself) and the rosy visions he had of healthy young university men getting Certificates Of Fitness awarded over their lifetimes by their teachers, etc. and going on to marry suitable young ladies at an early age and having a minimum of three sons who would pull up the average of the "V and above" classes (the very cream of the human crop), with his little talks and lectures to local societies interested in Eugenics...
.... well, in practice, it all ended up in the heaps of skulls. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
This board seriously needs a mute-user function. It gets tiresome having to scroll past the same hobbyhorses from the same few usernames under every post.
Antisemitism in Europe had been intense for millennia, and the salient difference in the early 20th century was that they finally had the industrial capacity to conduct much larger pogroms than before.
Delays in genetic enhancement technology are extraordinarily harmful. I think the stigma prevents open discussions and serious evaluations of the possible returns.
There are two big holdups. One is that we barely understand how anything works. It's rarely as simple as fixing a single gene, and doing so is too likely to reveal other genetic dependencies. The other is that we have extremely limited capabilities to modify genes. CRISPR is a big advance, but it may make undesired modifications and miss others. There has been a lot of progress, so we should keep up and even expand the funding even if it seems to be off on a tangent. CRISPR, for example, came from studying insect immune systems. You never know what is going to turn up where.
"you give a license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's problems"
Isn't that ... exactly what's been happening? I can't tell if your conditional phrasing is just a rhetorical posture or if you've actually been living in a cave.
As I understand it, what happened was that Scott went looking for jobs, all the prospective employers kept reading squid314 (which came up in Google searches for "Scott Siskind", unlike SSC) and telling him that having a blog was incompatible with being a psychiatrist (as he told it, it wasn't even the content of the blog, just the blog's existence), and so he burned squid314 and went pseudonymous.
However, Cade Metz burned Scott's pseudonymity (and Scott made peace with that in the first post of ACX, "Still Alive"), so that's now a sunk cost and this probably isn't such a big deal anymore.
I'd agree that, if your objective is to understand Godel's incompleteness theorems, there are substantially better ways to do so today than working your way through GEB.
However, as a piece of art, I judge GEB to still be on the efficient frontier. (Granted, that may just be because I haven't been exposed to works that surpass it; happy to look at nominations!)
This article is excellent! It's pretty impressive that your attempt to steelman the cooky anti liberal eugenicists sounds infinitely more persuasive than any actually existing anti liberal eugenicist.
Errr, I read the post as perfectly mastering two ITTs here - Intellectual Turing Test: similar to but not exactly steelmaning. Scott showing he can present both positions as eloquently as their best resp. adherents would. - Knowing Scott's writings over the years, his own position is actually very close to the "cooky eugenicist". As is mine. (Not sure what "anti liberal" means in this context. Anti-Lefty? Anti-D? Me from Europe. Oh, no need to explain.)
Case and point, this line got a chuckle out of me from the irony:
>I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”.
since a younger version of Scott professed support for a very similar proposal (I believe it was UBI-contingent-on-sterilization). I can only assume this was a self-aware jab at his earlier beliefs.
:D Yes, though I am not sure that Scott is really convinced this is such an evil thing. I assume a) he is no longer that worried about the left side of the curve: We shall be able to provide for them. b) he is wondering more how to get the right side to reproduce. Lately, The Zvi wrote repeatedly about how to incentivize those to have kids (and Scott met his wife discussing Singapore's attempts to lure academics into breeding ). - After "the singularity", none of this may matter no more.
But *why* was it tabooed? I mean it's obviously a good idea. The clear reason is that you can't trust any human authority to implement it without bias. And the historical evidence is that you can't.
Fortunately, there's now a better option. (Well, it's almost ready.) CRISPR geneline editing. This should first be tested against things like Huntington's disease, thalassaemia, and perhaps sickle-cell anemia, and then gradually expanded into other generally accepted conditions, and it should REQUIRE totally voluntary acceptance. Perhaps it should even be charged for, though I'd prefer that it be considered a public health measure. The real question is should "cosmetic changes" be allowed? Genes to increase height, e.g. I'm inclined to think that should be discouraged, perhaps by a high tax.
I mean I just think that's an empty criticism. You can't trust humans to administer any policy without bias. That's just the nature of humans and power. Eugenics is no special exception and I think that having strictly-enforced rules against violence (which we already have) is more than sufficient to protect against abuses. Having completely voluntary incentives for low IQ people to not reproduce would be perfectly fine.
The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Actually, eugenics is a special kind of thing here, but it's not unique. Nationalism is the same kind of thing, and so is racism. There are a few others. Their defining characteristic is the claim "My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes.". Anything of that nature is too dangerous to allow humans to control it, so should currently be tabooed. And the part that makes it too dangerous is " so we should rule and you should submit". Even if the first part is objectively true, that part is too dangerous.
Note that by this argument there are forms of eugenics that should not be tabooed. And forms of racism. But the general term is used to include the should-be-prohibited subcategories, and thus should not be acceptable.
"My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes."
And that distinguishes them from ... what other political organization, exactly? Again, I feel this is an empty criticism.
Every political group wants the power to force their outgroup to submit. You don't prevent that by tabooing group identification, you prevent it by having a carefully constructed constitution. The greatest historical strife has arguably arisen over religious differences, but that wasn't fixed by outlawing religion - it was solved by making sure that religious ideology was explicitly barred from government policy. Saying that ethnicity-based identity groups pose a unique threat is, I believe, an isolated demand for rigor.
I would submit that nationalism at least *doesn't* necessarily demand that the outgroup submit. It *can*, of course, but it can also say "my group is good and should rule *here*, we're fine with you lot ruling yourselves over there as long as you don't try to tell us what to do here". There is such a thing as e.g. a Swedish nationalist, and they aren't secretly plotting to recreate the Kalmar Union.
It's the supposedly more enlightened -isms of the 20th and 21st century that demand they should rule everywhere, as soon as they can get around to it.
Yes, they all want it. It's quite common. This doesn't make it good. And there are degrees of "submit", with some being worse than others. I don't think there *is* a general answer that doesn't involve evil. Negotiated settlements aren't always possible (and even those are often due to threats rather than to "this is the best we can do".
Part of the problem is that everybody engages in motivated reasoning. And this is only "empty criticism" if you insist on seeing everything as binary rather than as a graduated scale.
It's a matter of path dependency. We've seen eugenics used to justify some pretty horrible stuff. Sure, humans are smart, so we can do horrible stuff with just about anything, but history matters. Maybe some brilliant monster will use cute kitten photos to kill millions of people somehow, but even PETA hasn't managed this yet. So, we'll consider cute kitten photos safe and acceptable until proven otherwise. There are stupider policy approaches.
>The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Ding ding ding. People don't want to have to struggle with the reality of how much actual difference there is in the clay.
There's work using CRISPR on sickle cell anemia. There have been some apparent cures. Interestingly, they don't do it by fixing the defective gene but, rather, enabling a the fetal red blood cell gene which is usually turned off early in life. I think read a complicated explanation of why in Science, but in one eye, out the other.
> Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
That's simple: intelligence has no correlation to morality. The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason! There are plenty of very good smart people, and plenty of very bad smart people.
One of the biggest intellectual failings of the past few decades has been the loss of this understanding, via the gradual conflation of concepts of good and evil with concepts of smart and stupid. We've tended to think that all hard-thinking people will be right-thinking people who agree with us, and anyone who disagrees with our perspective on morality can only do so because they're too dumb to grasp the simple truth. But nothing could be further from the truth; bad people have been using their intellect in pursuit of evil since time immemorial. There's no good reason to expect them to stop now.
The example that the ‘intelligence uber alles’ people point to is often that criminality is associated with low IQ and correspondingly decreases with high IQ, etc.
But of course this is a ridiculous argument; it is only natural that society does not criminalize evil that can be rationalized, and the sort of evil that high-IQ people do is almost always legal at the time, or impossible to punish. The common man complains that one can buy justice with riches—not wrong, but you can buy the government with smarts, too, and you can get away with a lot between the cracks of the law.
I think below a certain threshold most people or societies understand you can’t work and care for you. It’s when you’re in the gray zone above that where it seems like you could work if you tried that things get hard.
The interesting part is Galton's views of what is "obviously" desirable, moral, indicative of excellence, improving society, etc. He wants to adjust religion to get rid of it, or at least model it to something 'sensible' that sensible people of the modern era can use as a kind of prop to the idea of eugenics and so on.
But things we take for granted arising out of the whole liberal mindset would appall Galton. So what are we assuming are the "obvious" traits a society must have, that properly applied eugenics will cultivate, that future generations will think belong in the Stone Age?
This is a standard argument against eugenics that doesn't make it into the fictional dialogue, at least not directly: People are just very bad judges of what good traits look like and trying to select for them is likely to incorporate their culturally-bound biases in a way that misses important goods. Scott does allude to some of the effects of this problem in the atrocities of historical eugenics resulted in where societies made some retrospectively absurd judgments about who were to be seen as defective, but the problem of biased judgment here has a larger scope than that..
More generally, eugenics acts as an elite reproduction scheme where the advocates of eugenics tend to see themselves, at least in some ways, as part of the elite. You see a similar pattern with the overlapping world of IQ and modern race science where the people into it usually, though not always, think of themselves as part of the cognitively blessed and this implied sense of superiority permeates a lot of what they say.
You've got part of the answer. If the perceived payoff is high, and the perceived risk is low, people are likely to do the thing. Legal status is just one way of adjusting what people see the payoff and risks to be, but there are others. And, of course, "perceived" is significantly affected by your time horizon.
E.g., most people try not to fart in a loud an obnoxious manner in the presence of those they consider powerful in their social group. Legal status has no bearing here, but social standing has a lot. OTOH, for awhile I was with a group where flatulence was considered acceptable. (We were eating a lot of beans and cooked cabbage.) Among that group, covering up a fart was considered undesirable. So many people tried to emphasize the noise of their farts.
> Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
I accidentally scrolled here, and without seeing the context I assumed you were talking about *age*. Wanted to say that 85 years is actually the perfect age to commit crimes, because if caught, your punishment won't be worse than what nature has already prepared for you anyway.
Perhaps that's because you can't actually measure criminality - you can only measure *detected* criminality - and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to get away with whatever nefarious deeds you choose to perform.
And I wonder about the monetary impact of crime as correlated to IQ? It seems like it would take multiple thousands of IQ 85 bank robbers to match the amount of money that an IQ 120* white-collar criminal like Bernie Madoff stole.
*Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
This will depend a lot on how you price violent crime. sure, it takes a *lot* of petty theft to equal Madoff, but how many *murders* would you say it's equivalent to in badness?
For the most violent of violent crimes, homicide, IQ probably has little correlation with homicide rates. According to UN study roughly 80% of homicides worldwide are between family members, of which the highest percentage of that being intimate partners. Maybe lower IQ families are killing themselves at higher rates, but I don't think anyone has tried to tease out that data.
As for other violent crimes—car jacking, muggings, etc.—I wonder how much IQ is a correlative. Starting in 1960s we had huge rise in the violent crime in the US, but it started to fall in the 1990s, and now it's down to 1960s levels. Seems like something other than IQ is involved, because the rates have varied over time, while IQ distribution has remained static (except for the steadily upward incline of the Flynn Effect).
The highest correlators for violent crime seem to be sex (with males perpetrating the vast majority of violent crimes), and age with males 18-30 being the most like to perpetrate violent crimes.
> Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
Not if it's just IQ. Two standard deviations in IQ, and two standard deviations in Gumption, and one standard deviation in physical Charisma, is about as rare as three standard deviations in IQ alone but probably a better package for the CEO track. And the strictly superior "+3 standard deviations in everything" is so rare that there aren't enough of those to fill more than a tiny fraction of the CEO slots.
The really smart criminal masterminds get offers to take the fall and work the refs to get away scotfree. SBF could have pulled it off with a bit more patience. He got too greedy too soon.
But this is an arms race with another side[1]. People have an incentive to detect and deter "criminality" that meaningfully harms them; yes, that includes the challenging concentrated-benefits diffuse-harms pattern that is characteristic of a lot of high-IQ nefarious behavior.
It is easy to see instances of that pattern which are still insufficiently checked today. But we've actually patched a remarkable number of the more obvious holes of this type (this is a reason law is so complicated), and created an economy that provides good rewards to most high-IQ people who play it straight; in combination, this results in relatively few people being motivated to engage in serious white-collar crime.
1: Note that AGI has far more potential to overwhelm the defense in this arms race.
I wouldn't be surprised if this finding stemmed from back before our society did so many quasi-eugenic abortions of Down's Syndrome fetuses. There used to be a lot more Down's people and they made up a lot of the very low IQ population. They tend to be sweet-natured and not criminal knuckleheads.
Criminality peaks at 85 in the United States because the mean IQ of blacks is 85 and they are concentrated around the center of their bell curve just like other groups. No need for elaborate just-so stories about the optimum level of IQ for crime.
Embezzling enormous amounts of money is difficult to do with a below-average IQ, but it's still illegal. Rich people aren't fine with being defrauded just because the defrauder is smart. Bombers have relatively high IQs (the Unabomber being an obvious example), but we punish bombing as severely as cruder homicides.
Yeh. Of course smart people become criminals bit by and large we don’t legalise or nullify that criminality (with the exception perhaps of war criminality)
isn't this just the fact that there's a correlation, but the correlation is not one? People with relatively low IQs, have slightly higher probability of committing some kinds of street crime, but it's not all that huge difference in probability, and there's absolutely nothing that says the very smart people can't commit serious crimes, or that dumb people can't be scrupulously law-abiding.
Smart people often have better things they can do, i.e. something that pays well enough and doesn't have the downsides. The lower time preference also means you can see the downsides better.
Yeah I suspect a lot of the IQ crime correlation just comes down to being able to foresee the consequences. But I wonder if there's anything else going on there. For example, would we see the same pattern in crimes that were very unlikely to be detected?
Do you even know all the laws you are supposed to be abiding by? How do you know that you're not a criminal?
Too much attention is being focused on criminality at the expense of attending to "harming other people". The legal status of an act is significant to the extent that it adjusts the risks and the payoff of performing that action. But whether the act is desirable or not (from a social point of view) depends on whether it harms the society in which it occurs (or possibly in which the performer lives). And, of course, that judgement depends strongly on what you consider harm. And there are other valid points of view, e.g. I consider whether and action is wrong or not based on my judgement of whether it will harm me. The social context then becomes important because I live in the society, but it less important (to me) than more direct effects.
Also, the crime-IQ correlation has a major data censoring problem, since we can only identify someone as a criminal if they're caught committing a crime. Maybe the high-IQ criminals are disproportionately unlikely to be caught.
A Professor of Business Law at the University of Oslo once gave this definition of a thief: “A thief is a person that is in such a hurry to help himself to other people’s money that he does not have time to establish a limited liability company first.”
Not really, because there's an independent way to judge this: which countries would a typical person with no criminal intent prefer to live in? An excessive high-IQ crime load can be expected to result in a country that's actually worse to live in than a typical low-population-IQ country.
I do think there are countries that fit this description: North Korea is the first that comes to mind, and there are a bunch of related examples. But at least for now, it is clearly the exception rather than the rule.
You are being quite unfair to the populace of North Korea. They can be expected to have the same variations and means as South Korea. They're just operating under a very different management. (And possibly with different resources, but I don't think that's significant.)
Re: North Korea, it should be obvious that the crime load is concentrated at the top, and that's enough to make the country not worth living in. I don't know why you'd expect most readers of my comment to interpret me as criticizing the *general population* of North Korea here.
Modern Russia is a more debatable and interesting case.
There are a lot of high IQ murderers in movies and TV shows. One cliche of screenwriting is that the murderer should turn out to be richer than the initial suspect.
But, that happens a lot more in "Law & Order" than in real life. You can look up statistics for murders in Manhattan. There aren't many and they mostly involve the usual suspects rather than some interesting Patrick Bateman-type Wall Streeter.
Similarly, there's a big demand for true crime stories involving middle class white people killing each other, such as on "20/20." But most of the true crime murderers on TV tend to be small-time dopes who think their spouse's $125,000 life insurance policy would be a bonanza.
Every violent crime is negatively correlated to IQ. That's a pretty big deal.
Hijacking government policy to legally extract subsidies from fellow citizens at gunpoint is a thing, but if one compares the size of the welfare state to the size of the corporate welfare state it doesn't support your argument that high IQ people do more of the legal sorts of plundering.
Depends on what you agree is legal plundering, definitionally. Unless you can demonstrate that you’ve found a method to capture everything that could possibly count in that category (including undetected crimes and corruption, and other easy parasitism that is not illegal), then I’m going to say no, I don’t agree that observation doesn’t support me. Rather the reverse.
More than this, I think we're failing to distinguish between all the different types of evil. A partial taxonomy:
1. You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence, through poverty, since the more desperate you get the more selfish you become.
2. Emotionally-led evil, you're just angry. This is the evil of (say) a violent domestic abuser.
3. Utilitarian evil, where you try to do good things and it winds up evil because you're a mortal human and humans are really bad at moral tradeoffs. Probably positively correlated with intelligence, because you gotta be pretty smart to talk yourself into doing something that looks obviously wrong.
I suspect most of the really big evildoers of history who might initially seem to be in Category 3 are actually in Category 2 as well. Lenin, Hitler, Bin Laden etc all claimed to kill for some higher moral principle, but inevitably wound up killing people they emotionally hated anyway.
Galton and Ehrlich, to the extent they were evil, seem to at least be pure category 3.
Hitler, and perhaps to a lesser extent Bin Laden, is an example of something else: elevating what most of us would consider to be deeply evil to the level of a principle, to the extent of going against personal self-interest or the self-interest of the collective cared about.
Lenin would be 3, with some elements of 2 (a mixture of genuine hatred of injustice with being pretty reasonably embittered by his older brother's hanging) but, more interestingly, 3b: digging yourself into a deeper and deeper utilitarian hole by convincing yourself that deontology is something to be ditched entirely.
Nah, this perception is the result of successful demonizing propaganda. Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters. They were strongly influenced by some of the widespread ideas of their respective societies and took them to their logical conclusions. Sure, now with the benefit of hindsight we might say that those ideas were uniquely bad, but they weren't seen as such in Hitler's time, and Wahhabism is plenty popular and respectable in Saudi Arabia even today.
You haven't read what I am saying. They were, in their way, "idealists"; it is just that their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals* (particularly in Hitler's case, actually).
No, I just disagree. I think that Hitler sincerely loved Germany and expected his policies to be beneficial to it. Your argument proves too much, you can blame anyone who ever starts a war that "their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals*", which some pacifists may believe, but certainly isn't the mainstream view.
> Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters.
Glorifying death wasn't considered depraved in Hitler's era. For a young man, dying was the poetic thing to do.
Consider "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers", a popular German book describing a depressed young man who later kills himself. After publishing, the book inspired many suicides. Such was the culture where Hitler grew up; he only fanned the flames of the existing romantic notions in popular culture for his political goals.
There is no contradiction between "wasn't a monster" and "glorified death". It may seem so to us, because from the historical perspective, we are living in an unprecedented bubble of wealth and empathy.
>You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence,
Or not, because this describes plenty of lawyers, salespeople, financial people, and CEOs, who are just as happy doing selfish or unethical things which leave the other party worse off, just in legally-sanctioned (or even illegal-but-white-collar) ways. They're just smart enough to find ways to be selfish in which they are either unlikely to be punished or the punishment will be negligible (cf wage theft being an order of magnitude higher than "common criminal" theft).
But as a motive for criminal behavior it may well be negatively correlated. All the higher-IQ types you mentioned can operate perfectly legally, which being just as evil.
I'll push back on "perfectly legally" (using wage theft as an example again: very much a crime, it just goes unpunished), but I agree on the premise that it's not the sort of crime that tends to show up in crime stats.
But yeah. From a first order approximation, "crime" is just selfishness from people too poor (low-iq-as-a-class?) to get the state to take their side.
This is something probably already discussed in existing criminology literature, but I'm not quite sure where the line between 1 and 2 is drawn or if it should be drawn at all. A domestic abuser might have poor impulse control, or they might simply not give a shit about the well-being of their partner as long as their own well-being is taken care of. Or probably both.
I have a strong suspicion you can't make that assumption. To me it seems that for many people their sexual morality is walled off from their more normal morality. That seems to be what I observe among people I know, and it's certainly what's indicated by various popular and folk songs.
The thing is, you've misidentified the evil component of choice 3. The evil component there is the authoritarianism. This includes all aspects of "I know better than you, so I don't need to take your goals/intents/purposes/suffering/etc. into account.
Just being mistaken isn't evil. Forcing people to do things, even for actually good reasons, is already morally questionable. This leads to a whole bag of worms when you're trying to establish the rules for a society. (Yes, I think the making requirements were valid. But to call them questionable is definitely reasonable. They were a trade-off with evils on both sides.)
Real quick, what's the precise definition (or set of related definitions) of "Authoritarianism" that you're using here? Because I think I agree, contingent on how you're defining it, but it's a pretty broad term.
Authoritarianism is basically the belief that someone (the authority) has the right to tell everyone else how to act (Note the lack of restrictions in what they can say) and that the speaker (or someone he designates) has the right to speak in that name of that authority.
Okay, in that case I disagree, since that essentially amounts to a roundabout definition of a state. i.e. It applies equally well to authoritarian dictatorships and functional democracies.
The authority derived from a state is not inherently evil - in fact, it's arguably to best solution to many types of coordination problems - see Scott's own writings on the matter[1].
People don't usually use "authoritarian" so broadly, though - they usually reserve it for states where overuse of authority leads to harm. (And you seem to agree on that implicit definition based on what you said above, which makes me confused as to why you provided the definition you did.) The authority itself is not evil, it just lowers the barrier for committing utilitarian evil - so the evil in authority is when you put too much confidence in the moral authority it gives you.
...I feel like I've started rambling at this point
It's not inherently evil, but it inherently has tendencies in that direction. Being a democracy doesn't protect you against that. And good kings have existed. India even has legends of a good Emperor.
It's not the authority that is evil, it's the use the authority is put to. But authority has inherent in it the ability to commit evil without noticing it, and certainly without caring. You could ask various Indian tribes if being a democracy prevented the US from evilly exercising its authority.
Is authority the best solution? It's probably the only solution to living in groups. This doesn't mean it doesn't have inherent problems.
This. We have a basically mammalian brain, grounded in affect and emotion, but with a large, powerful and evolutively recent symbolic processing module tacked on. It's so poorly debugged, that it can destabilize the whole system, by overwhelming channels originally made to carry sense data with symbolic imaginations, and getting itself into insane loops - losing all sense of perspective at the drop of a hat, all the way into depression and mental illness.
And people want to help the human race by boosting up this system even more? It's a wonder that symbolic thinking hasn't gotten us to extinction yet, and people still think the solution is *more of it*?
You've got this exactly backward. Symbolic thinking has raised the human race out of the worst abuses of living in nature. It has lifted billions into living like kings and queens did only mere hundreds of years ago.
So yeah, people still think more of that would be a good thing.
Thanks for the obvious objection, it had to be said. I'm not actually proposing that we go "back to the trees", except maybe for the week-end.
My point is to propose that with intellect we may have reached a point where secondary effects are becoming important. Kind of like how cars and plastics have been a huge boon to mankind, but now we're breathing bad air and filling the seas with detritus.
If I had a magic wand to wish for an improvement to the human form, rather than straight up higher IQ, I'd rather ask for better inner integration, more groundedness and less tendency to feel threatened.
Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
If what you mean is that desperate people will undertake desperate acts, well, that's true. But symbolic thinking won't change the axioms and postulates that you're working from.
If you mean people think smarter people are better...I think you need to read popular media. They may like some of the results, but they don't make what you think is the obvious attribution.
> Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
That's not true. Quite the opposite in fact, because only intellect can question the premises underlying beliefs. For instance, why is the King supposed to be above the peasant? Divine right? Who is this "God" fellow anyway?
Those questions lead directly to giving up the premise that any particular person has more rights than any other.
Only poorly applied intellect can justify any morality, a sort of intellectual process that does not question its own premises.
Clearly false. Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time. And intellect is always used to justify the resulting conclusion. A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
What one CAN do is try to evoke challenged instincts within the disputant one is arguing with. Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind. (Of course, most argument is really directed at those listeners who haven't yet decided. Or is a form of social display.)
* For instinct the meaning I'm using is "non-verbal mental process". I don't like the term, but I can't think of a better one.
> Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time.
Yes, and only intellect can question the assumptions underlying each instinct to discover which is more justified, if any.
> A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
Which then raises questions about the axioms, thus contradicting your own claim.
> Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind.
This is not an argument that intellect cannot change people's minds, it's merely an indication that a particular approach is not suited to the problem at hand. We can achieve great heights by applying intellect to build towers, but no amount of intellect will build a tower to the moon.
You have to use intellect to solve the problem at hand in the most appropriate way (which only intellect can elucidate). For some people that might require pointing out deductive mistakes, for others that might be specific examples with emotional connections, for yet others it might require patiently listening to their concerns which led to them to a particular conclusion and then explaining how those concerns can be address in your approach.
Regardless, it remains simply false that intellect can justify any morality. Kant demonstrated quite clearly that pure reason can justify many moral prescriptions.
I've seen criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis which goes (put somewhat uncharitably), "If you say that a Greater Intelligence would not necessarily be more moral, you go against the entire concept of moral progress altogether! And if we grant that education does not necessarily increase the morality of a population, by what right should the more educated populace be an authority at all on moral decisions?" (This style of thinking bothered me much less when it wasn't at risk of preventing avoiding an apocalypse.)
Anyone who's in favour of the taboo and legal ban on incest because children of incest are disproportionately likely to have birth defects is already a eugenecist whether they like it or not. Spoken as a person who fully supports the taboo on incest.
I think few of these people are suddenly okay with incest provided that everyone involved is using contraceptives, which suggests that the birth defect argument is not their true reason but a rationalization.
I do agree that anyone using this rationalization is already in some sense a eugenicist, although I think the argument would benefit from tabooing the word "eugenics" completely.
I'm not sure about "few" here. German law criminalizes sex between adult siblings only when vaginal sex is involved - consensual incestuous sex acts that cannot possibly be reproductive are not criminalized.
(Interestingly, consensual incest between adults is legal in France, Spain and... Russia? That is odd. I knew about France because of two middle-aged siblings who moved from the UK to France for that reason.)
Interesting, I didn't know that. The German law is certainly evidence against my claim. Although even in that case I notice that the prohibition is against all heterosexual incest, with no contraception exception. Is that really where we would expect the equilibrium to land in a universe where most people did not have a reflexive disgust for incest?
German law was likely written by a bunch of rationalizing lawyer/politician types that followed the logical reasoning of reducing harm from birth defects. But I'd bet the broad majority of the population would socially ostracize anyone engaging in incest regardless of the legality.
Also, the law involved is a bit of a mess. The official reasoning behind it, as per the constitutional court, is mostly "well, it has been here for a long time" and the good to be protected is the family... For a law bound to relationships by blood, not by family, in a case in which the people involved didn't even know they're related by blood (both were adopted by different families, they later married and what they sued against was annulling their marriage because them having sex would be criminal).
There are better, non-eugenic reasons for tabooing incest. Mine is that incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common. As long as the liberal state gives broad deference to parental authority within the domestic sphere, a hyperstrict cultural shame campaign against any form of sexual contact with your (step) children or siblings is the most effective tool we have for protecting children from the people they have to get naked with on a regular basis.
No, but at least parent-child incest potentially is under a law against abusing the position of someone being in your charge for sexual purposes. Of course, siblings can have a lot of informal authority without a formal authority to bind that to and all that authority can be used without having to physically assault or explicitly extort the victim
The rest of this comment was a result of me misreading the thread and writing something unrelated, so I removed it
> incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common
> ... is the most effective tool we have
seems like there's some tension here. do you think that there simply are no possible more effective tools? do we have evidence on how effective the cultural shame campaign is? it's not clear to me that we are in a position to know the answer to either of these questions.
I've heard a theory that expanding and strengthening the (pre-existing) taboo on incest was actually a sneaky way to consolidate state power, by hampering the ability of extended families to maintain local political factions through strategic marriages.
Excellent questions. I agree it's hard to measure prevalence and therefore the success of any interventions (Stoltenbergh 2011 have a meta-analysis which suggests CSA is more prevalent in North America, Africa and Australia but that it matters a lot how you ask). It's possible the stigma contributes to underreporting, but since harm reduction will inevitably require separating kids from their abusers it's hard to imagine a non-stigmatizing approach.
I think there are plenty of plausibly more effective programs, from age-appropriate sex ed starting in kindergarten to routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers. The problem with all of them is that they'd meet intense resistance from cultures that prize the "private sphere" and its right to be exempt from public scrutiny—here I'm heavily informed by theoretical arguments from feminists like Susan Okin and Carole Pateman about the historical emergence and function of the public/private dichotomy.
"routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers"
Well if you want to make sure actual abuse is skimmed over and non-abusive situations result in kids being hauled away, go right ahead with that brilliant idea. I think "trained" social workers are trained only in the particular ideological shibboleths of the day where they are trained, so you can shoot up heroin in front of your toddler* and still be considered a 'good mother' but if you don't agree that the same toddler is fully capable of deciding to socially transition their gender you are a horrible abuser bent on driving your kid to suicide.
*Based on story I heard at work about a social worker claiming a client was a good mother because she always turned her back when shooting up while her kid was in the room. How about maybe NOT SHOOTING UP HEROIN IN FRONT OF A TODDLER AT ALL, HUH? Naturally there were no moves afoot to take the kid away from such a 'good' mother.
I was shocked, and that's here in small-town Ireland. As I've said before, I thought I was cynical about human nature when I worked in education grants, then when I worked in social housing I discovered I wasn't nearly cynical enough.
"The marriage of a brother and sister would excite a feeling of loathing among us that seems implanted by nature, but which further inquiry will show, has mainly arisen from tradition and custom.
…(4) The harm due to continued interbreeding has been considered, as I think, without sufficient warrant, to cause a presumed strong natural and instinctive repugnance to the marriage of near kin. The facts are that close and continued interbreeding invariably does harm after a few generations, but that a single cross with near kinsfolk is practically innocuous. Of course a sense of repugnance might become correlated with any harmful practice, but there is no evidence that it is repugnance with which interbreeding is correlated, but only indifference; this is equally effective in preventing it, but is quite another thing.
(5) The strongest reason of all in civilised countries appears to be the earnest desire not to infringe the sanctity and freedom of the social relations of a family group, but this has nothing to do with instinctive sexual repugnance. Yet it is through the latter motive alone, so far as I can judge, that we have acquired our apparently instinctive horror of marrying within near degrees.
…A great deal more evidence could easily be adduced, but the foregoing suffices to prove that there is no instinctive repugnance felt universally by man, to marriage within the prohibited degrees, but that its present strength is mainly due to what I call immaterial considerations. It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now. "
I think Galton is wrong and it will trend in the opposite direction; incestuous marriage or partnerships will be regarded as "well if they're not having kids and it's all consensual, why not?" rather than making "non-eugenic marriages" socially repugnant.
Galton's cousin Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood.
It was American eugenicists who did most of the research that led to our modern laws against incest in Protestant countries. (Catholics had long been against cousin marriage.) British eugenicists were too loyal to the Darwin family to deal much with the topic.
Isn’t the current research mostly that Galton was right? That while systemic inbreeding is bad, the random first cousin marriage is barely even worth tracking.
There's a problem like that with first cousin marriage. Saudi Arabia is full of people with birth defects because they didn't have much of a dating scene. There's a theory that the Council of Agde, which sounds like a supermarket chain, with its prohibition on first cousin marriage had a major impact on Western European civilization.
With regards to Ehrlich: I concede that Coria's characterization of him *in the beginning* can be argued. But it is now clear that his most famous argument was, and is, fundamentally incorrect (and has done real harm). Ehrlich declines to concede that his entire professional career made the world worse, which is his privilege. It is also a moral failing.
WAS it fundamentally incorrect? You say that based on what?
The way the future of the world is likely to play out is that China just barely managed to scramble onto the helicopter in time. Everyone later than China (Most of Africa and South Asia -- and probably most of the Arab world once the oil runs out) is probably doomed. The path of light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to services is probably shutting down, visibly for political reasons but more importantly because machines will do the jobs. We won't need to argue about whether we should "export jobs" to Bangladesh or import Mexicans, we'll do neither and have robots doing the work.
Previously this was not a problem because excess farmworkers could move to the factory, excess factory workers could move to retail. That's probably over and, even if within the wealthy countries society is willing to help out via moves like UBI, that won't extend to those poor countries.
Now, if those countries had frozen their populations at the 1970 level, everything would have been so much easier. There would have been money to improve things starting at that point, money to build few but good schools and hospitals rather than many but bad. Entry onto the path to modernity a whole lot sooner.
It was not not fore-ordained that China would be the last one out; it could have been that South Asia and Africa escaped hopeless poverty first. But people chose to mock Ehrlich on minor points rather than on the big picture, and we are where we are today, simultaneously crying about whatever is the disaster du jour (not enough water! species dying!) while insisting that doubling the number of people is quite manageable and won't cause any problems, no sirree.
I don't think you really can call Ehrlich's mistakes "minor". Pretty much everything he predicted was directionally incorrect: death rates went down, not up. Countries like India and Egypt, which he advocated should stop receiving food aid because they were lost causes both massively increased production and are now able to afford imports of food from the global market for what they don't produce themselves. Percentage of the global population "undernourished" went down, not up, over time.
It's sort of why one should never warn the driver of an obstacle. They might swerve and avoid it. and you'd wind up being wrong to have warned them. Prophesy stories have a lot in common with time travel stories.
Except we didn't "swerve". Ehrlich's policies (such as taxing families increasingly by # of children, financial incentives for sterilization, research into mass-sterilizing agents for the US, and eliminating food aid to India and Egypt because they were lost causes) were, by and large, not adopted. Instead food production was massively increased.
Besides, Ehrlich explicitly claimed that the obstacle was unavoidable:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
There was a level of triumphalism in the 1960s followed, starting in the late 1970s, by a more global rethinking in which the problems of the rapidly growing "third world" appeared increasingly intractable. I took a look at the What Can You Do? chapter of the Population Bomb. He has sections on letter writing, proselytizing, organizing action groups and so on. Perhaps the most controversial statement was that long term population growth should be zero, but the means of achieving it had to include changing attitudes, increased awareness of ecological limits, improving agriculture - especially tropical agriculture, improved contraception and a host of other things, most of which were implemented in various forms.
He addresses eugenics and argues against it. He points out that intelligence has genetic and environmental components, and, if someone is concerned about increasing overall intelligence, they should focus on improving education. The goal was to slow population growth to zero, increasing available resources and minimizing environmental degradation. He points out that belief in eugenics is usually directed against out groups, not something to be encouraged. I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause. Improving health care for children, vaccination, food support and propaganda in popular culture were the primary means of attitude change, though China did have its coercive one child policy. That wasn't Ehrlich. He wasn't running China.
His next chapter, What If I'm Wrong, is basically Pascal's wager. It's applicable today. Suppose we, even with existing technology, could support 20 billion people, what mistake would we be making by world stabilizing population under 10 billion. It's an easily correctable mistake. It would be easy to adjust attitudes and, in maybe 60 years, raise the population to 20 billion. His goal was to match population and resources by means other than famine, war or pestilence.
> I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause.
I will provide citations (using https://archive.org/details/populationbomb00ehrl/ as a reference since I don't have a physical copy), but all of these seem to be in Chaper 4, "What needs to be done", which discusses policy (as opposed to Chapter 5, "What can you do?" which is aimed at the individual level):
Taxing people for having children: p136 (his example involves increasing taxable income by $600 for the first 2 children, $1200 for subsequent).
Luxury taxes on goods used to raise children beyond the "essentials" (specifically mentioned as taxable: cribs and diapers): p137.
Establishing a Department of Population and Environment, which would research the development of mass-sterilizing agents (for use at home and to help underdeveloped countries): p138.
"Triage" of under-developed countries is necessary, as some will not be able to feed their population even with aid (he quotes "Famine 1975!" for his examples, and says it will be remembered as one of the most important books of our age): p160.
Making development aid to specific "areas" of under-developed countries, contingent on population control, including internal migration controls, because only some parts of countries will receive help: p164
Redrawing the political boundaries of under-developed countries to make the above easier: p165
"we should have applied pressure" on the government of India to sterilize all males with 3 or more children: p165
That’s all completely wrong. China is in trouble - albeit not as much as some western countries - because of its falling demographics. It is this that is causing some people to think that it’s boom is over, and certainly ageing populations are a major headwind to economic growth.
China is also in trouble for its not-falling-early-enough demographics. As much as they like to pride themselves on their unappologetic imperialist desires, the reason why they risk a world war by sending fishing vessels in territorial waters of others countries is because they have a big and hungry population that needs proteins to thrive and they don't have enough ressources at home.
Pointing to a large aging population and saying that the only solution is to add more children is litterally like pointing at a late-stage ponzi scheme and saying that the only solution is to add another layer. Sometimes you've got to blow the bubble and suffer the consequences.
This is totally false. China is not struggling to feed its population, and in any case buying food is much cheaper than war. Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
That's not a dilemna that people ever have. In practice you buy food until you can't afford to buy it anymore, and then you make war whether you can afford it or not.
> Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
You're proving too much. As long as there is food being wasted in the parts of the world that are not overpopulated you could say the the world *as a whole* is not overpopulated and it's just a distribution issue ; denying that some regions of the world definitely are.
Obfuscation. Your central assertion (that China is preparing war because it is unable to feed its people) is completely false. They might be preparing war but its not because they can't feed their people. According to Google, Chinese food imports amount to 100b/yr, at a time when the Chinese current account surplus is 100b/month. This is not a country struggling to pay for enough food to feed itself. Nor is `inability to feed its population' the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq.
Russia's supposed imperialism also has been with respect to neighbors, usually in response to western countries destabilizing those neighbors. I sup[pose one could count Syria and such in Africa, except that (unlike the United States), Russian troops are in those countries at the request of the recognized government there.
"outside china" does a lot of work when approximately all the flashpoints are regions China claims have always been theirs (and never mind the views of the locals).
I would argue that the CCPs' actions wrt Tibet, the Uighurs, the disputes in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and the persistent threat of something going down with Taiwan are all Imperialist.
I note also that Chinese troops do regularly skirmish on the border with India, though it's defensible to not regard that as "combat"
They've been in combat with India more recently than that. I guess you could call it a police action or some such euphemism, but India and China are in earnest.
Can you point to evidence that South Asia and Africa have missed the helicopter? The largest countries in each (India and Nigeria respectively) just clocked GDP growth rates of 8.7% and 3.6% respectively. Also, if machines can do lots of production...that should make us richer, not poorer. Wealth is determined by how much stuff you can produce, not by how many people it takes you to make stuff. Insert story about `if you don't want to use earth movers because digging with spades employs more people, then why use spades, hire even more people to scratch at the dirt with bare hands'
Are we sure having robots do the farming is a great idea? Do people farming now really want to re-invent themselves as robot management experts? Do they want to sell their farms and go do something else? If they don’t want to, are people sure they’ll be happier afterwards even though they think they won’t?
I understand the concern, but there is a difference between robots doing literally all the farming, and robots doing most of the farming while a long tail of hobbyists of various sorts continue doing some farming as well. I look at the Amish, I don't see them seriously threatened, and as long as that remains true I'm not that worried.
I do always love the tension between the two widely held beliefs that “overpopulation isn’t a problem”, and “omg we are burning through the earths resources and biosphere too quickly. Seems like even before it was clear that the curve was working in our favor on item 1 it had become politically verboten. And on top of that even if we stabilize at 10 billion or whatever, it is literally twice as hard a problem as stabilizing at 5.
I agree Ehrlich's position seemed much more defensible in 1970 than today, although Coria's point was trying to draw a line between "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil", and while I think the amount of stupidity it takes to believe Ehrlich's position now has gone way up, I don't think that affects the dichotomy.
I kinda do think being wrong can make you morally culpable. Specifically, if you’re in a position of authority and you could be right by exercising a reasonable amount of intellectual discipline and spending a reasonable amount of effort, then you’re culpable for being wrong. Don’t know if this applies to 1970 Erlich or not. He seems to have been in a position of authority, and I expect he expended a reasonable amount of effort, but I would not be surprised to discover he was lacking in discipline.
Is that a good stance for us to take, individually or especially as a society? There's got to be some room for blaming people for the results of their actions as well as their intentions, otherwise every true-believer mass murderer could get a pass. We should reserve the right to call out evil methods or evil suggestions, even if they seem right at the time. It's better to miss out on an opportunity for improvement if the alternative is a definite atrocity.
And what would due diligence look like in 1970, regarding population? Even by the 80s and 90s population was being taught in schools as a major issue (and maybe after that, I wouldn't know). The consensus opinion at the time was that he was correct, and that would have been the consensus even if he personally had never said a thing.
If a doctor kills a patient, but they believed their actions were going to save the patient, and there TRULY was no way they could have known better, then I do not think they are ethically culpable.
If you think a "true-believer serial killer" is different from "a doctor that accidentally kills several of their patients", I suspect that's probably because you think the "serial killer" actually DID have a way to know better and failed to exercise it. (If you think there's an ethical difference for some other reason, please share!)
Of course, society may sometimes need to defend itself from well-intentioned-but-wrong people by stopping them with force. I think defending yourself is conceptually distinct from punishing the other guy, though occasionally both may result in the same action being taken.
Society might even need to penalize that person as a deterrent, if there isn't a reliable way to distinguish between "well-intentioned but wrong" and "pretending to be well-intentioned to avoid punishment". I still think that's distinct from assigning ethical culpability to wrong people who genuinely couldn't have known better.
I think it's also worth noting that there can be situations where X is the best strategy conditional on Y being true, and it seems very likely that Y is true, but X is still not actually the best strategy when taking uncertainty into account. Sometimes the harm if you're wrong is so big that a small probability of that harm outweighs the larger probability of some benefit. Sometimes there's an alternative strategy that hedges your bets, which is slightly less helpful if Y is true but much less harmful if Y turns out to be false. If you do your best possible analysis of all available evidence and conclude, correctly, that there is a 95% chance that Y is true, that is still not the same as a 100% chance and does not license you to act as if it was a 100% chance.
I guess the short answer is that I'm a deontologist, and some approaches to solving problems are just simply off the table from the start. Mass-sterilization is one of those items. Experimental treatments (going back to your doctor example) is not.
I'm reminded a bit of the Olympic gymnast doctor who was giving the female gymnasts repeated and unnecessary genital examinations (there's apparently some reason to do a similar examination) and abusing these girls for years. He was able to claim, with some support, that he was not abusing them. What should have happened is probably some process to review the necessity of such procedures or to have a female doctor involved instead. We take the "well-meaning but wrong" possibility off the table by simply removing the possibility. Similarly, we don't know if the doctor is trying out the best treatments he knows and it happens to kill the patient, or he's intentionally killing the patient. We therefore have medical review panels and investigate the situation instead of taking his word for it.
Yes, and I'd argue that the threshold for what counts as "reasonable" amount of effort and discipline must rise dramatically with the severity of your proposed action. It could be argued that some actions are so drastic that no human agency could reasonably supply sufficient effort and discipline to justify them.
This sort of clause seems dangerous unless you have a way of determining this type of culpability a priori. This discipline you point at being essentially an internal psychological phenomenon, I doubt this would work.
I believe Bryan Caplan argues that "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil" are more continuous, rather than discrete (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery).
If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
Similarly, if you make policy decisions, with anything but the most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis, and those decisions have the potential to hurt millions of people, (let alone cases like Ehrlich's where you know you will be hurting people and the question is only the payoff), that would seem to also be on the evil spectrum, rather than a member of a totally different category.
By extension, then, anyone who makes policy decisions is evil (because we should all understand our flaws and that none of us is capable of consistently doing most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis.)
But policy decisions still need to be made. What do we do?
Simple rules like "no extermination camps" and "fair trial" go a really long way to preventing the worst kinds of mistakes. Deontology gets a bad rap around here sometimes, but it's a great system for preventing repeat bad outcomes.
> If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
What if you shoot the bullets directly upward vs at an angle? Then you're back to just fine again? I'm being serious, by the way. Turns out, if you shoot a bullet directly up, it will come tumbling back down and be fairly harmless whoever/whatever it might hit. If you shoot it at an angle, whatever it hits will be very unhappy.
I dunno, man. I just find it hard to believe that the guy doesn't grasp, somewhere in the back of his head, just how bad he is at extrapolating from current data. Which may just be me, sure.
I often think about this in the context of HIV denialists, or vaccine-autism-ers, or other similar views. There was a point where their view was a little contrarian, but perfectly reasonable. By now they are completely utterly verifiably wrong and harmful. There’s probably a point in between where some lines were crossed. But the people who stick with it do so because of their instinct of resisting criticism in the early days, which was good for science, but now is bad for science.
Population Control a half century ago was a common cause among Republican Protestants, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, to back. Their specific concern was, I would guess, Irish Catholic Democrats: e.g., Bobby Kennedy had ten kids (and one is currently running for President). But white Catholic birthrates fell sharply and Protestants lost interest in the subject over time.
Ehrlich was had good intentions, and he was smart. World population was rising rapidly and would lead to resource related collapse. He presented three scenarios of collapse. For rhetorical reasons, he focused on the impact of rising world population on the US since his audience was largely in the US, but he ignored the fact that being rich, the US would be able to mitigate more of the effects than in a poorer nation. He sorted of assumed the US would be impacted much like some hypothetical average nation.
I remember the book, and I've recently reread it. It challenged a lot of ideas about world development in 1968. People took it seriously. Nations around the world encouraged the use of birth control and the adoption of new crops and agricultural practices to increase food output. The Green Revolution started in the late 1960s and was seen as essential thanks to books like The Population Bomb. Different nations adopted its policies to different degrees, but the recent rise in per capita income around the world was driven by the revolution that Ehrlich's book started.
The Population Bomb tends to get maligned much like the Club of Rome Report some years later. The Club of Rome, as it turned out, was surprisingly close to the mark. There were a few articles on it for its 50th anniversary. I was watching the eagles nearby the other day and thinking of Rachel Carson. They were beautiful birds, and it's just as well we have better pesticides and use them more carefully than DDT.
Ehrlich sounded an important alarm that led to what someone here called quasi-eugenic policies like partial sterilization through birth control. We also had the green revolution and big gains in development around the world, policies pushed in response to fears of Ehrlich's dystopian vision. Would China or India really be in better shape with two billion people or more each or having endured a famine killing hundreds of millions? In hindsight, Ehrlich sounds way off the mark, but that's because people took him seriously.
I would be curious to know just how far "outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" the Green Revolution was. Was there really no serious dissent, or was it just given less airtime on the three extant tv stations?
They knew the Green Revolution was easy, they just didn't want it. Borlaug discussed it with his bosses at the Rockefeller Foundation and defied their orders. Since he was the only person to do it, they were right to forecast that no one would, at least on the scale of a decade.
Wait, are you saying the Green Revolution was somehow actually the work of one person going against the system? I would have thought the Green Revolution, while it had important figures, actually relied on millions of people acting within various systems.
No major movement is only ever just one person, but Normal Borlaug singularly made a massive difference and without him it's possible it would not have happened.
Ehrlich was one of the scientists pushing for the Green Revolution. Tropical agriculture had been neglected. The big ag outfits were focused on the temperate zone where the money was. It was considered a long shot, but one that had to be tried. Even proponents, rightly, expected that Improving tropical agriculture alone would not be enough without population control as well.
I think Borlaug had a staff of several dozen. First he spent a decade doing normal things that he was instructed to do, like disease resistance. Then he spent a decade adapting the wheat to fertilizer. Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back, so he must have brought them around, but they definitely were against it at the beginning. Then he, personally, took the wheat from Mexico to India, which suggests a pretty small cast of characters. Other people played a bigger role of adapting it to India and pursuing the same strategy with other grains.
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain."
Did we? We banned coercive eugenics, but last I heard we aren't randomizing reproductive pairings, sperm banks show a sharp skew in preferences towards the over 6ft and accomplished, and assortative mating in humans seems to be a thing and the effect is likely getting stronger in USA.
Yeah. Even things like selective abortion for Tay-Sachs (as mentioned in the post) and Down Syndrome are very mainstream and widely, although not universally, accepted. Probably the meaningful distinction is between decisions made by parents and those imposed or encouraged by a government.
Widely accepted by readers of this blog (myself included). Not so long ago, Ohio tried to ban second-trimester abortions specifically in the case of Down syndrome. That seemed unbelievably perverse to me, but Facebook friends told me that my moral compass is simply not set up in the same way as most American's moral compass.
This is interesting, since then one would have to argue that the people behind the Ohio ban would see killing people as OK, or at least the lesser evil, compared to killing people for having Down's syndrome.
Surely it's pretty reasonable to hold that (a) a foetus is not covered by anti-discrimination legislation - specially that concerning serious defects, as opposed to, say, gender - whether or not you also hold that (b) a second-trimester foetus has *some* weight in a moral calculus that a six-week embryo does not have or barely has.
The (deep) flaw in the precautionary principle is that it pretends that there is only one reason of moral concern. What about the ethical undesirability of giving birth to a child who will be tremendously shortchanged by nature? (Or simply changing the family dynamics, which will now likely revolve around the very special needs of one child, and not those of existing children? Not to mention that many families will not have another child after a child with Down's is born: family finances will not allow it.)
It is not so much that I cannot see why some people might choose to virtue-signal on this issue (until they themselves get a Down diagnosis for their foetus; then the great majority aborts). It's more that this sort of diagnosis seems to be the most obvious and common reason for a responsible person to abort in the second semester and not before.
Again: even if you grant a foetus some moral weight, it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to live, or equal rights, or any such thing. As a life, it is something real, but it is only potentially a person - and we consider choices between potential futures all the time.
It is completely consistent to believe that any person has equal rights, and the right to live, but that foetus don't get a right to be born - and that giving birth to a child with Down's is not just not obligatory, but grossly immoral. (That is not necessarily my opinion, mind you; I am simply claiming that these opinions are consistent.)
This is so basic that I am starting to suspect that you simply are arguing for the sake of arguing. I won't waste my time on discussing this matter with you (whoever or whatever it is that you are) further.
Let's say that an all-knowing genie told you that if you have sex on Tuesday, you'll have a kid with Downs. If you have sex on Wednesday instead, you'll have a kid without Downs. If you want to have a kid, is it immoral to have sex on Wednesday but not Tuesday? What if, prior to the genie appearing, you were planning on having sex on Tuesday?
>There's this conceptual mistake people seem to make where they think the pregnancies are interchangeable... But that's a distinct individual who will never live
It's not a mistake, it's that fundamental nature of how probability works, if a fetus is not yet a person. Unless you have a convincing reason as to why the cutoff for when life begins *has to* be at conception, an unborn fetus has the same probabilistic value as not choosing to have a baby at all. i.e. you can make the same argument that any time you use birth control that's a "a distinct individual who will never live"; or for that matter *any* opportunity you have to impregnate someone that you do not take (including morally objectionable ones).
In other words, it's not a useful argument to make, because it's ultimately totally unrelated to the actual argument, which is the Schelling point for where personhood begins. It's an argument that, in the proper sense, begs the question.
If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would be opposed to *any* abortion of a fetus at that stage, Down's syndrome or no, on the grounds that this would be murder. If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is not a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would believe that aborting a fetus with Down's is not "killing folk for having medical conditions" but rather preventing a person from being born with a medical condition. Rather like not having unprotected sex with your sibling prevents inbred children from being born.
I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide.
Yes, it seems maximally perverse to you and to me, but not necessarily to others. Of course, again, this was back when Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land, so the point of these laws was to stake a position.
"No person shall purposely perform or induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the person has knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion, in whole or in part, because of any of the following: (1) A test result indicating Down syndrome in an unborn child; (2) A prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in an unborn child; (3) Any other reason to believe that an unborn child has Down syndrome."
_In theory_, if there's a case where the mother's health is in danger and the foetus has Downs, and you say "the mother is in danger, so we must abort", the law as written doesn't criminalize that. I would not want to be that _in practice_ prosecutors wouldn't say "obviously this is just a fig-leaf and at least part of the reason for the abortion is that the foetus had Down's".
PS. Of course one can believe (and in fact I suspect that many people do believe) that a foetus at 6 months is not a person, yet is both alive and human, and, by that token (or simply by virtue of being a living *animal*) , deserves *some* moral consideration - while at the same time not being conceivable as an individual in any but a potential sense. Then the question is whether you are willing to kill a foetus to prevent a person from being born with a particularly cruel, limiting and incurable condition.
Most people who operate in that framework would say "yes" (or "sadly yes"), though the contrary is not utterly absurd prima facie. Then it also makes sense for testing to become effective and available as early in the pregnancy as possible.
Yes, I agree, although I think some of it is that Downs Syndrome is clearly identifiable via genetic testing of fetal cells harvested from amniotic fluid, whereas for various other abnormalities it's more of a judgment call: "Fetus appears not to have a liver, and if it doesn't have one the baby will die within a couple months of birth, but it's not possible to be sure that the liver is not just placed in a somewhat unusual way so that it's hard to see."
People like Garald (can I call him "people"? He has not yet provided any proof that he is a "person") clamour for abortion on the grounds of "but rape! incest! threat to the mother's life!"
Okay. Being pregnant with a Down's Syndrome baby is not a threat to the life of the mother, so knocking that plank out of the platform is for the protection of the child. But as we see, once you confine the right to abortion to "rape, incest, threat to physical life", suddenly it becomes grossly immoral and perverse and the rest of it, because they're arguing for abortion as a right and with no limits or exceptions, on the bare wish of the woman not to be pregnant. The stuff about "but this woman will DIE if the pregnancy continues!" is just a smokescreen.
This is silly. Personally, I don't need a smokescreen; abortion on demand in the early stages, combined with abortion on well-established grounds (such as fetal abnormality, and of course life or health of the mother) later on strikes me as a perfectly sensible and potentially rather stable compromise. Works fine in France.
Would you agree that in a society that aborts overwhelmingly higher numbers of female fetuses, that the government may want to step in and ban (or somehow correct or limit) that activity?
Absent the significant observed behavior of intentionally aborting certain types of people, Ohio would probably have avoided the conversation. Society mass-aborting certain kinds of people could have the effect, through signaling at least, to say that certain types of people should not exist. That seems to have a pretty strong weight in this discussion beyond the obfuscating "let the woman choose" baseline.
"I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide."
There is a contingent of people who believe that abortion should be legal, but sex-selective abortion should not so...
Well, it is perverse to posit that being a woman (or a man) shaves 50 IQ points off, on average, or anything like that. Neither does it mean you will suffer from early dementia, or, most likely, from a host of other serious issues.
The idea that the value is 1 or zero, or even not situational is a huge example of what is wrong with the vast majority of thinking about public policy and ethics.
Do you mean that they wanted to ban second-trimester abortions involving Down syndrome while allowing second-trimester abortions in other cases, or do you mean that most second-trimester abortions were already banned and they wanted to eliminate an exception for Down syndrome?
Why? If the accusation is "if you ban necessary abortions, women will die" and so you permit abortion in the case of "this pregnancy will kill the woman", it's not unreasonable to say "but we don't approve of abortion where there is no threat". Down's Syndrome isn't a threat to the life of the mother, and saying "you can't abort just because of mental impairment" is feasible.
Would you be ok with a government mandate for aborting all downs syndrome fetuses, mandating all sperm donors be six foot tall and smart, etc? The flavor of eugenics that should be banned, in some views, is the one where a government forces such. I doubt that any of the arguments being made against eugenics would be applied by their makers to legal decisions by individuals. It does not seem to me that those kinds of decisions should even be called eugenics. Is Birth control eugenics? Is a preference for women with large breasts eugenics?
Are they eugenic, though? Inbreeding, followed by outbreeding, tends to result in stronger individuals since inbreeding potentially removes things like lethal or harmful recessives. This is a controversial assertion, granted, but it calls into some question the long term utility of banning incest. (Unless one posits some better technology on the horizon, like selective genetic testing and implementation, which would make the price of a generation of incest unnecessary. Harmful recessives could be removed by other means.)
I don't think that is correct unless I am misunderstanding you. Inbreeding does not result in stronger individuals and does not remove lethal or harmful recessives. Since highly related individuals tend to share more harmful recessive variants, the products of incest are likely to carry two harmful recessive variants.
"Theory and empirical data showed that two processes can boost selection against deleterious mutations, thus facilitating the purging of the mutation load: inbreeding, by exposing recessive deleterious alleles to selection in homozygous form, and sexual selection, by enhancing the relative reproductive success of males with small mutation loads. "
Of course, this paper is discussing hermaphroditic snails over multiple generations and not humans. Males with low mutational load having more children is also a viable, and opposed, strategy.
The point here is that if an individual receives two harmful recessive variants, that individual is likely to either spontaneously abort or to at least not have children. This effectively removes the 'two harmful recessives' from the punnet square (assuming a single gene is being discussed, for simplicity.) So if the inbred parent generation each has a 50% chance of having a deleterious mutation that prevents reproduction then there will be only a 33% chance that their *grand*children will receive that deleterious mutation.
You can't just assume the inbreeding will be followed by outbreeding. That's certainly not the case in Pakistan, which persistently has higher levels of birth defects than places where cousin marriage is less common.
Even if true, it might not be any inbreeding followed by any outbreeding, but some thoughtfully chosen combination. Any animal breeders care to weigh in?
The war didn't and eugenics programs. There are eugenics program is going on until the 70s in some northern European countries and I'm not sure when they ended in the US but it wasn't right at the end of World War II.
we didn't ban eugenics. We have bans on sibling and cousin marriage for eugenic reasons. We have a charity that pays crackheads to get LARCs. We have sperm banks that are very picky. All of this is fine.
This is what I think is the weakest part of the whole discussion. It seems to me that the anti-eugenics position that opposes even Nobel prize winner sperm banks is basically as influential as the anti-environmentalist position that proposes laws opposing the phaseout of coal. They exist, and they even have representation in some state legislatures, but they’re not actually in charge.
This is mainly just a problem with fuzzy categories. Almost nobody is upset by genetic counseling for people who are carrying serious genetic disorders in their genome. As best I can tell, the only people upset by using abortion to avoid having a kid with downs are people who are ready you think abortion is wrong. Even the Nobel prize winner sperm bank idea is not against the law, even if it didn't exactly catch on.
I think the basic problem with the argument in the dialogue is the idea that the fence needs to be drawn around anything and everything that can be classified as eugenics. Instead, I think the fence needs to be built around giving the state coercive power over peoples reproductive choices, and especially forcible sterilization or forcible abortion.
"It seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
No, not at all. This is only true if one insists on focusing entirely on being consistent in the structure of their arguments, with insufficient attention to the content in different cases. This reminds me of how Huemer tears Rawls to shreds in "The Problem of Political Authority" over the internal logical inconsistency of social contract theory. Huemer's alternate theory may be more logically consistent (I can't remember, it's been a very long time) but I think most people can agree that his proposed structure of society is far worse than the status quo. Logical consistency isn't everything and it's perfectly okay to say "I'm willing to go this far, but not any further, because the ethics and/or implications of going further are concerning".
as an example, consider the situation on a hypothetical mars colony that has been cut off from earth. It's quite likely that fairly draconian population control is the only way for that company to have any hope of surviving. At best, you get some sort of license or permit necessary to have children, with the total number, strictly limited, and some kind of serious enforcement mechanism to keep people from ignoring it.
Not necessarily. You seem to be assuming collective provisioning of children. The rule could be "workers get X in wages and if you can't feed your seven kids on that wage that's your problem." That's how it was historically in Malthusian societies, though I could see how a Mars colony would need to be a much more integrated, "centrally planned" economy than a medieval farming village.
I can't imagine it working to have a Mars colony operating at the Malthusian limit, with each worker producing just enough resources to barely keep himself alive. Instead, you'd want to have enough of a cushion to deal with some level of occasional crisis. In practice I'm sure that at least for a long time, if there are mars colonies, they will come with some sort of agreement to limit your fertility.
"Over population will result in disaster" is one of those claims that will never be *allowed* to be vindicated, because people will always insist that some more proximate issue caused the disaster. Overpopulation *by itself* does nothing; the chain of causality from overpopulation to disaster has many links, and people are extremely invested in ensuring that the blame is attached to one of those links, not to overpopulation. The most common link is war (and so we blame war, not the overpopulation that led to social unrest that led to a government feeling it needed to behave in a certain way), but another common one is bad weather (blame the weather, not the obvious fact that if food production has a standard deviation of so much, and if the population is sized to barely stay alive during the good years, then there will be problems during the bad years).
There is never any shortage of intermediate links...
If there is any single thing we have learned since Ehrlich, it's that people are unlimited in their capacity to blame others for problems that they have caused. To take a somewhat less contentions example, very few of the people who generate a constant stream of complaints about growing cities have committed themselves to zero children. They see no contradiction between their having kids and their demands that no new housing (or schools or factories or whatever) be built; it's someone else's problem to reconcile these two. And once you have adopted this viewpoint, that you can demand whatever you like (because it is "right") and that thing will simply happen, because magic, you're all set for the inevitable collision with reality.
(Of course when that collision comes, god forbid we generalize from it to the one solution that can actually improve the situation; god no! The Nigerian Civil War will be explained as something about Christians vs Muslims. The Chinese attack on Taiwan will be because too many boys and not enough girls, so testosterone leads to fight fight fight. The collapse of the Indian ecosystem will be something something capitalism. etc etc etc.)
You seem to be arguing that the overpopulation predictors predicted disaster, disaster happened, and then people asserted that the disaster happened for unrelated reasons.
What I see is that the disaster didn't happen. India is poor by American standards but quite richer than it was in the 1970s. Even in very poor African countries, the fact that they grew so much from 1970 to 2020 shows that the overpopulation apocalypse hasn't gotten here. In a Malthusian catastrophe the population stops growing.
It's the overpopulation predictors who move the goalposts and say "well, Indian people are doing okay but look at all these wild animals in India that are being driven to extinction..."
You use the examples of war, and starvation for things that are caused by overpopulation, and yet aren't "blamed" on it. But the trendline for both of those is going down over time (as is simple material poverty in general).
How does that square with the position that overpopulation is a real and ongoing problem? It's reasonable to use a set of proxy measurements, but the proxy measurements point in the opposite direction than expected.
If there’s a Chinese attack on Taiwan on the future it will be an attack by a country with a TFR of 1.3, against a country with a TFR of 1.
In other words two increasingly depopulating countries.
In general if you believe that overpopulation causes wars then you would more wars per capita today (out of 8 billion people) than in the past when the population was in the mere hundreds of millions. However pre industrial societies were very violent and warlike.
Heinlein was very gung ho in Starship Troopers about war always being caused by overpopulation. Did he get the idea from someone? Is there evidence historically?
If true, it's overpopulation relative to resources, not some absolute standard. Russia has a lot of territory, but most of it isn't good places to live.
I'd want to track down particular people rather than "the Ehrlich types".
Heinlein was weird about population-- he thought large families were great and crowded planets were awful. In other words, he wanted an unsustainable pioneer situation.
In Starship Troopers, there's the idea that wars are the result of overpopulation, but somehow, there's been a long peace among humans, until the Bugs (do they have a population problem?) attack.
Wasn't Ehrlich more concerned about starvation than war?
The idea is that somehow American democracy and egalitarianism depends on the existence of a frontier where people can struggle to make their own living, rather than needing to rely on bourgeois culture or landed gentry.
-- while the worldwide population growth rate zoomed during the early 1950s, it didn't cause any particular freakout given the context of the world's richest nations having just spent several years energetically reducing each other's populations.
-- then during the late 1950s the worldwide population growth rate dropped sharply for a few years.
Then during the early 1960s the population growth rate took off again and that's when Ehrlich put forth his Malthusian nonsense: "The Population Bomb" was published in 1967.
Most of humanity was Malthusian up until the industrial revolution, and excess population definitely was a factor in warfare over that period (though lack of ability to make gains from development of existing holdings was also a real factor).
Heinlein is doubly wrong though, in that humanity is really far from the Malthusian limit, and in that while overpopulation is *a* cause of war it's far from the *only* cause of war
Hitler was already in his mid-20s when the Haber-Bosch process was invented and he never subsequently incorporated it's implications for his Malthusian model of the way the world works into his world-view.
Hypothetically, the reason the idea that war is an inevitable result of overpopulation is in Starship Troopers is to present being a soldier (at least in a decent society) as a very honorable way to live. Part of how this is done is to say that war is inevitable-- even if you control your own population, someone else won't control theirs, and you'll be invaded.
At the same time, Heinlein avoids the messiness of recent wars among humans, by.... just not having them.
I didn't think he was saying anything as simplistic as "overpopulation causes wars". As I see it, overpopulation *can* cause war, but I'm aware of no examples in the modern era. But I expect such a war to have multiple causes, like: overpopulation + unrelated problems in the food supply chain causing sudden food scarcity. He's saying people will blame the supply chain problems or whatever caused them, not the overpopulation.
The population bomb was published in the 1960s. What disaster is it exactly that people are making excuses for? The human condition has improved beyond what any reasonable person could have predicted in 1960s, and you're trying to claim that things have gotten *worse* since then?
Sounds like the real argument is about expected recklessness.
Back when "democracy" meant "mob rule" to most people, you wouldn't trust a self-declared democrat. After all, he probably believed in mob rule.
Today, "eugenics" is associated with reckless people, so any particular eugenics is default bad, because of the kind of person who'd propose it.
Of course, this is a heuristic for stagnation. You can't trust anyone who advocates what used to be a reckless person's idea, even if the idea these days is perfectly sound. The very unfamiliarity of "eugenics" makes it reckless now, after all.
Is the answer some equivalent for policy papers of scientific peer review, so that I can know that Bob's eugenics plans are robust against the old style of reckless implementation?
Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics policies become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
> Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics policies become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
I think perhaps this norm can be steelmanned. If the old discussion of XYZ was reckless and occasionally evil, isn't it better to start over completely, with a new name, so that people won't be tempted to draw on the old reckless literature and accidentally smuggle all its mistakes back in? Think of it like deciding that the new, rigorous scientific discipline is called "chemistry" instead of just being "alchemy, but now we're making it evidence-based and cutting the weird mystical stuff".
I wasn't saying they "should". I was jumping off of DxS's original comment, which observed that *as a matter of fact* it seems to be the case that eugenics-adjacent policies only pass once they disassociate sufficiently from the old name and its baggage. DxS seemed to be saying this was a bad thing, whereas I find it, in itself, sensible.
(Obviously this process goes awry if people start saying "you are *too* a eugenicist!" at people who do everything in their power to deny the charge. But I do think disassociating yourself from that baggage, in your own mind as much as the public eye, *is* an important thing to do if you're going to venture into this field of thought. People who won't take no for answer are annoying but the answer is not to dismiss the requirement as a whole and start to say "well, so what if I *am* a eugenicist of a kind? huh?" just to see the look on their face. I know it's tempting. I know. But it is not a virtuous or productive path down which to walk, just a momentarily satisfying one.)
Compare ordinary non-revoluationary socialism. Socialists do not want to be called Stalinists. There's an undeniable intellectual kinship to the movement that birthed Stalin, but only in a distant way, and calling them Stalinists is an unfair leveraging of Scott's "Worst Argument In The World". What you absolutely do not want is for them to react to the subset of right-wingers who will keep needling them with "you are *too* Josef Stalin" no matter what by saying "well, so what if I *am* a Marxist?". It's not even that any Marxist is a Stalinist, but nevertheless, that is how you get tankies.
The discussion in part III is interesting, but I think it misses, or at least fails to explicitly point out, the (factual rather than moral) claim underpinning Adraste's perspective. Meaning, if Adraste were a real person, truly holding on to the belief that there is a distinction to be drawn between eugenics and environmentalism in that respect, I would expect them to say this:
To put this more explicitly, I would expect many (maybe even most) of the people in Adraste's position would agree with both of these claims: "less than 10% of environmentalists today support forced sterilization" and "more than 90% of eugenics supporters today also support forced sterilization."
Again, these are factual statements, not moral ones, even though one's moral convictions can certainly bias them to have certain beliefs on this matter (moreover, I would certainly expect Scott and others here to disagree with the latter statement). The point is, however, that if you imagine yourself in the position of someone who genuinely believes both statements are true, it seems clear why you would consider one of them a dangerous slippery slope that requires moral condemnation of those trying to bring it about (even if they don't intend the end result of forced sterilization), and the other one clearly not a dangerous slippery slope or deserving of any condemnation whatsoever.
Meaning, even if you agree that both sides are big tents containing both good and bad ideas, and good and bad people, if you truly, genuinely believe as a factual matter that one is '90% good/10% bad' and the other one is '10% good/90% bad', it seems likely you would reject any moral equivalence between them (perhaps even in a much less polite manner than Adraste does here). Matters of moral condemnation might be fuzzy around the edges, but this simply wouldn't feel like an edge case at all.
I think this is what Beroe means by bringing up the hyperstitious slur cascade; this is true entirely because eugenics has been so strongly associated with sterilization that nobody who doesn't support it would identify as a eugenicist.
I think things like Nobel Sperm Banks are great ideas, but I wouldn't call myself a "eugenicist", and the average person would be too scared / too reflexively against everything involved to even be okay with the Nobel Sperm Bank.
If we switched things around so that anyone who used the term "environmentalist" got accused of wanting to sterilize people, within a few decades the only people who wholeheartedly identified with environmentalism would be the ones who *did* want to sterilize people. But the fact that the label "environmentalist" would contain only bad people wouldn't mean that we hadn't erred in using it that way, or that we weren't making a mistake by enforcing such a use of it.
I would say that if you're going to collect eugenically-commendable sperm for sperm banks then Nobel Prizes are a pretty bad selection criterion. For starters the average Nobel Laureate is probably sixty and may have some problematic sperm (especially if they've spent too much time around radiation!) Secondly, it's over-optimising for one desirable characteristic (intelligence) selected by a pretty imperfect and random proxy.
If you want good sperm, go find some straight A students in their early twenties who are also good-looking, athletic, and popular, and also have eight living great-grandparents. I'll take that over Brian Josephson's tired seed.
Why is being popular (or for that matter athletic, as opposed to being simply in good health) desirable? And who decides who is good-looking?
(And isn't getting straight As a piece of cake these days?)
Was it Bertrand Russell who made the following objection to eugenics? Selective breeding for cows is meant to make them better, in the well-defined sense of "useful to humans"; selective breeding for humans would be meant to make them ... useful to whom exactly?
"Popular" is an opaque (to me) but socially important trait in American high schools (much like "respect" is an important thing in prison - and hierarchical environments that are a bit like prison). I wouldn't say it's the only thing that matters in a US high school (in fact, I spent a semester in one back in the day, and it didn't affect my life at all in any way I could see), but apparently it's not just some Hollywood invention - and some of it carries over to later life.
I think it's a bad proxy for something that we would have trouble detecting - likely we mean charisma or something similar. There are some people who are just fun to be around, who exude confidence and somehow also build other people up at the same time. I would think that would rate highly if we were trying to improve humanity in some way.
Well obviously from a pigouvian perspective that's actually pretty self explanatory and a much better argument for why eugenics is in the government's remit. traits with positive externalities to other humans should be subsidized as they would be insufficiently incentivized otherwise. (I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS)
The point being that there is no obvious way in which popularity (or being conventionally good-looking, or perhaps even being athletic) is in the public interest, whereas being intelligent is?
Good point. And giving rather dull parents sperm from a genius is a bad idea. The child might end up being drastically different from the parents, and the home life will not be conducive to producing another Nobel winner.
The Howard Foundation! From some Heinlein novels, in which an early effort to breed for longevity pays off. (See especially _Methuselah's Children_, though there's a suggestion that breeding for intelligence might have been better.)
I think Heinlein went for four living grandparents, but people weren't as long lived when the Howard Foundation started.
I note that Nobel Prizes select for a function of intelligence && Grit && good-enough health (sufficient ill-health prevents truly great achievements)
Your point about age is quite relevant though - the eugenic ideal (absent direct genetic screening) would be to freeze sperm from approx all men in their early 20s and then 40 years later use the sperm only from those who have good life histories
The article assumed the Nobel Sperm Bank is a fine idea, but I feel Adraste let it off the hook too easily. The first question is, what happens if a non-Nobel Prize person/(whatever criteria we're using) wants to donate? Are they refused? Are people discouraged from using that sperm? Is there a hierarchy where you always use this class of sperm first? Is it a blood bank system, where like gets like; this person is below average intelligence, so we'll use the below average sperm up on them? It's a class system at the root, and problematic without any slope slipping.
I remember one of the blog posts from SSC talking about tests on a full vitamin pill diet, and then they discovered chromium deficiency because chromium deficiency had never been possible in isolation before. So too societies; I don't trust the people making the decisions to understand society well enough to make a positive genetic modification without discovering a new problem that was previously solving itself. Maybe those Nobel Prize winners are also above-average stubborn, maybe they're uncommonly sports-averse, and now we've selected for a population of out-of-shape extra-stubborn people, and are going to have a hard time turning back (because it requires walking and you can't make me).
I can see separating out sperm for, like, artisanal reasons. Parents get the option to get sperm from a fancy-pants athlete, or a Nobel Prize winner, the same way you can buy sea-salt or Himalayan salt instead of regular salt. But any thumb on the scale from the operator, encouraging this trait over that, is already too far.
A fund (let's say created by a philanthropist) investing in education of Nobel Sperm Bank kids does seem like a thumb on the scale, but what downsides would you seriously expect if it existed?
If you're arguing that it won't have enough practical effect to worry about, then my counter is that it won't have enough practical effect to be worth doing. Instead multiply by infinity. Assume the educational system is wildly successful; Nobel Sperm Bank education is better than Harvard. Now if you want your child to succeed, you need to make sure they're a Nobel Sperm Bank kid. What are the effects on parents, where having biological children is now considered a handicap? What happens to the drive for a family legacy, when it's going to be subsumed by a more famous Nobel family?
> Assume the educational system is wildly successful; Nobel Sperm Bank education is better than Harvard.
I don't thing it's scalable, both practically and as an ethical argument: at the scale where you doom your kid to failure if you don't take the deal, it's just a different system already.
> If you're arguing that it won't have enough practical effect to worry about, then my counter is that it won't have enough practical effect to be worth doing.
I partly agree, though at Nobel Prize winner level one lucky person can make advancements that are worth millions if not billions of QALYs. So if there's a 0.01% chance of producing such a person then it's a deal we should definitely take.
But even if not taking that into account, "it's just not worth it" does not mean it's bad. Just not good enough that you would bother, but if some people want to try, that doesn't seem like they're going too far.
Unintended consequences are still a thing. Imagine the pressure on a kid genetically modified to be a Nobel winner, but who just wants to be a kid. There's a high school near Stanford that's heavily influences by that proximity (lots of parents who teach there, etc.). The suicide rate at that school is abnormally high. That's presumably with normal high achievement pairings, not Nobel Prize Sperm.
That's just one quick example of something we might foresee. There's bound to be dozens of other problems that pop up that we can't see, as well as others we can predict.
How many tiers of the highest education levels would people need to be locked out of at birth before you think it becomes an issue at the conception stage?
>"it's just not worth it" does not mean it's bad.
Just as buying Himalayan salt isn't morally worse than buying regular salt. Unless you're declaring it as a step toward healthier eating on a national level, in which case you look stupid because it isn't.
>So if there's a 0.01% chance of producing such a person
I'm not willing to run the math on this, but if someone wants to run the numbers on
a. how many Nobel Prize winners are descended from Nobel Prize winners, and
b. how many major contributions have come from people outside that lineage
What's the actual state of the art with respect to sperm banks, eggs, and embryos from some kind of highly vetted donors? It probably wouldn't work to limit your donations to only Nobel prize winner's, but you could probably manage to be pretty strongly selective without all that much trouble. Imagine going to a good university, and offering a significant amount of money for a sperm/egg donation from, say, college athletes who were also doing well in a demanding major? (Assume these are athletes from some sport where colleges aren't just the semipro league, so they have to actually make grades or they won't remain on the team/in college.) Does anyone do something like this? Is there some reason why it would be especially difficult to do? Is there a demand for it?
I really have no idea what this market looks like, so who knows?
Fertility clinics almost exclusively recruit from college campuses for the reasoning you've outlined as well as because the donors are naive about the impact of what they're doing so can be enticed with simple financial incentives.
>"Is it a blood bank system, where like gets like; this person is below average intelligence, so we'll use the below average sperm up on them?"
Given the current dynamics at fertility clinics, no. POC donors are turned away at a much higher rate that white guys, and recipient parents are charged more for a POC donor. The punchline is that the clinics have a preferred set of characteristics they want to see in the next generation and push everyone to use donors with only those traits.
Are you alleging direct discrimination against POC donors, or merely noting that they are less likely to meet the facially neutral criteria like tertiary qualifications and being > 6' tall?
Passing on second- to third-hand accusations of direct discrimination; the idea that black men are *less* likely to be >6' tall than white men is, in particular, facially absurd.
African Americans are less likely to have a bachelors or especially a graduate degree. Asians are less likely to be >6'. I have no personal experience of this field and limited online reading, so I am updating a bit on hearing your anecdata - I was asking primarily to clarify what you were actually saying.
You seem to think that there’s a broad anti-eugenics consensus that opposes things like the Nobel sperm bank. While the Nobel sperm bank itself shut down, my guess is that it’s really just anti-elitism that shut it down. Your average normie is totally happy with people going to sperm banks for a 6 foot blond MBA father, as long as the donors don’t think of themselves as better. I think the opposition to positive eugenics isn’t actually that much stronger or deeper or broader than the opposition to environmentalism. You actually do get state legislators in places like Wyoming trying to ban electric vehicles or mandate coal use or whatever, just as you get state legislators in New York or California proposing similarly strong anti-eugenics things.
"If we switched things around so that anyone who used the term "environmentalist" got accused of wanting to sterilize people, within a few decades the only people who wholeheartedly identified with environmentalism would be the ones who *did* want to sterilize people"
Unfortunately, the "let's sterilise all the undesirables!" was baked in from the start in eugenics. Galton himself was a little squishy on the topic, preferring to use the force of public opinion to pressurise young people into making eugenic marriages and producing better offspring, but some of the others at the time were thinking about 'negative' eugenics. And if social pressure is not enough to stop the bad seeds from reproducing, then Something Must Be Done:
"The word ‘ Eugenics ’ was coined and used by me in my book Human Faculty, published as long ago as 1883, which has long been out of print; it is, however, soon to be re-published in a cheap form. In it I emphasized the essential brotherhood of mankind, heredity being to my mind a very real thing; also the belief that we are born to act, and not to wait for help like able-bodied idlers, whining for doles."
"Professor Westermarck, among many other remarks in which I fully concur, has aptly stated (Sociological Papers, published for the Sociological Society. Macmillan, 1906, vol. ii., p. 24), with reference to one obstacle which prevents individuals from perceiving the importance of Eugenics, ‘ the prevalent opinion that almost anybody is good enough to marry is chiefly due to the fact that in this case, cause and effect, marriage and the feebleness of the offspring, are so distant from each other that the near-sighted eye does not distinctly perceive the connexion between them.’"
And that Something is Societies for Promoting Eugenics:
"Address to a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries, on October 14th, 1908.
I propose to take the present opportunity of submitting some views of my own relating to that large province of eugenics which is concerned with favouring the families of those who are exceptionally fit for citizenship. Consequently, little or nothing will be said relating to what has been well termed by Dr. Saleeby “ negative" eugenics, namely, the hindrance of the marriages and the production of offspring by the exceptionally unfit. The latter is unquestionably the more pressing subject of the two, but it will soon be forced on the attention of the legislature by the recent report of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded.
The successful establishment of any general system of constructive eugenics will, in my view (which I put forward with diffidence), depend largely upon the efforts of local associations acting in close harmony with a central society, like our own. A prominent part of its business will then consist in affording opportunities for the interchange of ideas and for the registration and comparison of results. Such a central society would tend to bring about a general uniformity of administration the value of which is so obvious that I do not stop to insist on it.
Assuming, as I do, that the powers at the command of the local associations will be almost purely social, let us consider how those associations might be formed and conducted so as to become exceedingly influential.
It is necessary to be somewhat precise at the outset, so I will begin with the by no means improbable supposition that in a given district a few individuals, some of them of local importance, are keenly desirous of starting a local association or society, and are prepared to take trouble to that end. How should they set to work ?
Their initial step would seem to be to form themselves into a provisional executive committee, and to nominate a president, council, and other officers of the new society. This done, the society in question, though it would have no legal corporate existence, may be taken as formed.
The committee would next provide, with the aid of the central society, for a few sane and sensible lectures to be given on eugenics, including the A B C of heredity, at some convenient spot, and they would exert themselves to arouse a wide interest in the subjects by making it known in the district. They would seek the co-operation of the local medical men, clergy, and lawyers, of the sanitary authorities, and of all officials whose administrative duties bring them into contact with various classes of society, and they would endeavour to collect round this nucleus that portion of the local community which was likely to be brought into sympathy with the eugenic cause. Every political organisation, every philanthropic agency, proceeds on some such lines as I have just sketched out.
The committee might next issue, on the part of the president and council of the new society, a series of invitations to guests at their social gatherings, where differences of rank should be studiously ignored. The judicious management of these gatherings would, of course, require considerable tact, but there are abundant precedents for them, among which I need only mention the meetings of the Primrose League at one end of the scale, and those held in Toynbee Hall at the other end. Given a not inclement day, an hour suitable to the occasion, a park or large garden to meet in, these informal yet select reunions might be made exceedingly pleasant, and very helpful to the eugenic cause.
The inquiries made by the committee when they were considering the names of strangers to whom invitations ought to be sent, would put them in possession of a large fund of information concerning the qualities of many notable individuals in their district, and their family histories. These family histories should be utilised for eugenic studies, and it should be the duty of the local council to cause them to be tabulated in an orderly way, and to communicate the more significant of them to the central society.
The chief of the notable qualities, to which I refer in the preceding paragraph, is the possession of what I will briefly call by the general term of “ Worth.” By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the value to the State, of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts, or, say, by such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining a proportional representation of its best parts should be an avowed object of issuing invitations to these gatherings.
Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according to worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of physique, ability, and character, subject to the provision that inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in the other two. I rank physique first, because it is not only very valuable in itself and allied to many other good qualities, but has the additional merit of being easily rated. Ability I should place second on similar grounds, and character third, though in real importance it stands first of all. It is very difficult to rate character justly; the tenure of a position of trust is only a partial test of it, though a good one so far as it goes. Again, I wish to say emphatically that in what I have thrown "out I have no desire to impose my own judgment on others, especially as I feel persuaded that almost any intelligent committee would so distribute their invitations to strangers as to include most, though perhaps not all, of the notable persons in the district.
By the continued action of local associations as described thus far, a very large amount of good work in eugenics would be incidentally done. Family histories would become familiar topics, the existence of good stocks would be discovered, and many persons of “worth” would be appreciated and made acquainted with each other who were formerly known only to a very restricted circle. It is probable that these persons, in their struggle to obtain appointments, would often receive valuable help from local sympathisers with eugenic principles. If local societies did no more than this for many years to come, they would have fully justified their existence by their valuable services. A danger to which these societies will be liable arises from the inadequate knowledge joined to great zeal of some of the most active among their probable members. It may be said, without mincing words, with regard to much that has already been published, that the subject of eugenics is particularly attractive to “ cranks.” The councils of local societies will therefore be obliged to exercise great caution before accepting the memoirs offered to them, and much discretion in keeping discussions within the bounds of sobriety and common sense. The basis of eugenics is already firmly established, namely, that the offspring of “worthy” parents are, on the whole, more highly gifted by nature with faculties that conduce to “worthiness” than the offspring of less “worthy” parents. On the other hand, forecasts in respect to particular cases may be quite wrong. They have to be based on imperfect data. It cannot be too emphatically repeated that a great deal of careful statistical work has yet to be accomplished before the science of eugenics can make large advances.
I hesitate to speculate farther. A tree will have been planted ; let it grow. Perhaps those who may thereafter feel themselves or be considered by others to be the possessors of notable eugenic qualities—let us for brevity call them “ Eugenes ”—will form their own clubs and look after their own interests. It is impossible to foresee what the state of public opinion will then be. Many elements of strength are needed, many dangers have to be evaded or overcome, before associations of Eugenes could be formed that would be stable in themselves, useful as institutions, and approved of by the outside world.
The suggestion I made in the earlier part of this paper that the executive committee of local associations should co-operate, wherever practicable, with local administrative authorities, proceeded on the assumption that the inhabitants of the districts selected as the eugenic “ field " had a public spirit of their own and a sense of common interest. This sense would be greatly strengthened by the enlargement of mutual acquaintanceship and the spread of the eugenic idea consequent on the tactful action of the committee. It ought not to be difficult to arouse in the inhabitants a just pride in their own civic worthiness, analogous to the pride which a soldier feels in the good reputation of his regiment or a lad in that of his school. By this means a strong local eugenic opinion might easily be formed. It would be silently assisted by local object lessons, in which the benefits derived through following eugenic rules and the bad effects of disregarding them were plainly to be discerned.
The power of social opinion is apt to be underrated rather than overrated. Like the atmosphere which we breathe and in which we move, social opinion operates powerfully without our being conscious of its weight. Everyone knows that governments, manners, and beliefs which were thought to be right, decorous, and true at one period have been judged wrong, indecorous, and false at another ; and that views which we have heard expressed by those in authority over us in our childhood and early manhood tend to become axiomatic and unchangeable in mature life.
In circumscribed communities especially, social approval and disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only too easily read by those who are the object of either, in the countenances, bearing, and manner of persons whom they daily meet and converse with. Is it, then, I ask, too much to expect that when a public opinion in favour of eugenics has once taken sure hold of such communities and has been accepted by them as a quasi-religion, the result will be manifested in sundry and very effective modes of action which are as yet untried, and many of them even unforeseen ?
Speaking for myself only, I look forward to local eugenic action in numerous directions, of which I will now specify one. It is the accumulation of considerable funds to start young couples of “worthy” qualities in their married life, and to assist them and their families at critical times. The gifts to those who are the reverse of “worthy” are enormous in amount; it is stated that the charitable donations or bequests in the year 1907 amounted to £4,868,050. I am not prepared to say how much of this was judiciously spent, or in what ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the inference that many of the thousands of persons who are willing to give freely at the prompting of a sentiment based upon compassion might be persuaded to give largely also in response to the more virile desire of promoting the natural gifts and the national efficiency of future generations."
(2/2)
Yes, what a wonderful world to look forward to: little local committees of the nobby nobs who think they are the superior stock, records kept of 'good' eugenics families like stockbooks, a central committee busy overseeing and collating all this, and the social pressure of your neighbours all watching to make sure you contract a 'good' eugenic match in turn and don't produce inferior offspring. What a lovely prospect!
And of course those wretches who are inferior stock and contract 'bad' uneugenic marriages and produce sickly, unworthy offspring? They will serve as object lessons of "the bad effects of disregarding eugenic rules" and we will save money by not wasting charity on them. Why, in no time at all, our little cells of Eugenes will be breeding their own master race from amongst their numbers!
But let's be careful about the cranks, they give us a bad name.
Thank you very much for sharing this! having that full text of a speech to draw from is invaluable to the discussion of the history, and finding it in the comments means I actually read it when I would not have independently looked it up.
To be honest, it doesn't sound that different in likely practical effect to most other voluntary associations (eg. specific churches, minority religions, societies like the Freemasons, etc). Finding marriage partners from within your community rather from the 'others' is normal, as was (and still is, though to a lesser extent) the idea of preferentially hiring people from the community.
Remember all the law cases over sex that revolved around "it is no business of the government what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom"?
Galton et al. would make it the business of the government, as well as every prodnose, to peer into the sexual and romantic lives of everyone, draw up genealogical charts of families to see how many notables and how many defectives were in the family tree, and encourage young women to only entertain thoughts of marriage - and motherhood - to suitable young men. Said young men would have Diplomas, based on evaluation all through their lives by teachers and other authority figures as to their fitness, in order to demonstrate their quality for eugenic marriage.
Sex outside of marriage would be harshly discouraged (by social disapproval) because look at all the poor women having tons of bastard babies by various fathers. We don't want that. We particularly don't want the unfit breeding.
So, depending where on the scale you fall, dear Thor Odinson (oh, Galton has a scale from the very lowest to the "V and above" grades which are the cream of the crop), you may or may not qualify for marriage. If you don't, then you don't get *any* sexual or romantic life; after all, resorting to prostitutes and women of loose morals to have unmarried sex is precisely the mark of degeneracy and unfitness to reproduce! Eugenicists are concerned with moral fibre as much as physical and mental fitness, in order to stave off degeneracy and race suicide:
"Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this."
(Remember, "peremptorily denied opportunities", in the absence of reliable artificial contraception, means "no sex". Prison rape ahoy!)
"(g) Feeble minded. Aid given to Institutions for the feeble minded are open to the suspicions that they may eventually promote their marriage and the production of offspring like themselves. Inquiries are needed to test the truth of this suspicion."
So much for the rights of the disabled to have love lives, yes? Though our modern eugenicists might be satisfied with sterilisation so the morons could fuck or be fucked by anyone without producing baby morons.
And in Galton's eugenic Utopia, your personal life is the business of everyone - from family, neighbours, teachers, the locality where you live, the local eugenics committee, up to the national central committee and, it is to be hoped, the specific Government office charged with overseeing the national development of the race - to make sure that if you are of the acceptable breed-stock you do your best from childhood on to get that Diploma and become early a husband and father - even more vitally so if you are to become a wife and mother - and conversely, that if you are the inferior stock, you do not 'produce'. Mothers will discourage their daughters from having anything to do with you, the young women themselves will have been raised and taught to find the very idea repugnant:
"An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, by
encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily."
"If a girl is taught to look upon a class of men as tabooed, whether owing to rank, creed, connections, or other causes, she does not regard them as possible husbands and turns her thoughts elsewhere. The proverbial "Mrs. Grundy " has enormous influence in checking the marriages she considers indiscreet."
Families would keep 'stud books' as with pedigree animals to demonstrate their right to be deemed "quality":
"The definition of a thriving family, such as will pass muster for the moment at least, is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their class-mates in early life. Families may be considered “large" that contain not less than three adult male children. It would be no great burden to a Society including many members who had Eugenics at heart, to initiate and to preserve a large collection of such records for the use of statistical students. The committee charged with the task would have to consider very carefully the form of their circular and the persons entrusted to distribute it. The circular should be simple, and as brief as possible, consistent with asking all questions that are likely to be answered truly, and which would be important to the inquiry. They should ask, at least in the first instance, only for as much information as could be easily, and would be readily, supplied by any member of the family appealed to. The point to be ascertained is the status of the two parents at the time of their marriage, whence its more or less eugenic character might have been predicted, if the larger knowledge that we now hope to obtain had then existed. Some account would, of course, be wanted their race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters. Finally, the reasons would be required why the children deserved to be entitled a “thriving" family, to distinguish worthy from unworthy success. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a “golden book" of thriving families."
The pressure of social opinion would be put to work:
"Enough has been said to show that the prohibition of polygamy, under severe penalties by civil and ecclesiastical law, has been due not to any natural instinct against the practice, but to consideration of social well-being. I conclude that equally strict limitations to freedom of marriage might, under the pressure of worthy motives, be hereafter enacted for Eugenic and other purposes.
...It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now."
What a wonderful world, yes, Thor Odinson? Eugenics in the place of religion so you are either chastely celibate or suitably married and having no fewer than three children who must be "thriving", that is, outdoing their classmates! Would you live in it?
"Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics.
…Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour neighbours who suffer misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level in the sense already explained, as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study."
"Reference has frequently been made to the probability of Eugenics hereafter receiving the sanction of religion. It may be asked, “how can it be shown that Eugenics fall within the purview of our own.” It cannot, any more than the duty of making provision for the future needs of oneself and family, which is a cardinal feature of modern civilization, can be deduced from the Sermon on the Mount. Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of olden days, require to be reinterpreted to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of the present time. A form of it is wanted that shall be founded on reasonable bases and enforced by reasonable hopes and fears, and that preaches honest morals in unambiguous language, which good men who take their part in the work of the world, and who know the dangers of sentimentalism, may pursue without reservation."
Ah, yes: the dangers of sentimentalism. And here come the mountains of skulls.
Eugenics strengthens the sense of social duty in so many important particulars that the conclusions derived from its study ought to find a welcome home in every tolerant religion. It promotes a far-sighted philanthropy, the acceptance of parentage as a serious responsibility, and a higher conception of patriotism. The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution; not on a passive form of it, but on one that can to some extent direct its own course. Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays the awe inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil, originating we know not how, and travelling we know not whither. It forms a continuous whole from first to last, reaching backward beyond our earliest knowledge and stretching forward as far as we think we can foresee. But it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error. The condition at each successive moment of this huge system, as it issues from the already quiet past and is about to invade the still undisturbed future, is one of violent internal commotion. Its elements are in constant flux and change, though its general form alters but slowly. In this respect it resembles the curious stream of cloud that sometimes seems attached to a mountain top during the continuance of a strong breeze; its constituents are always changing, though its shape as a whole hardly varies. Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that of the moon.
As regards the practical side of eugenics, we need not linger to re-open the unending argument whether man possesses any creative power of will at all, or whether his will is not also predetermined by blind forces or by intelligent agencies behind the veil, and whether the belief that man can act independently is more than a mere illusion. This matters little in practice, because men, whether fatalists or not, work with equal vigour whenever they perceive they have the power to act effectively.
Eugenic belief extends the function of philanthropy to future generations, it renders its action more pervading than hitherto, by dealing with families and societies in their entirety, and it enforces the importance of the marriage covenant by directing serious attention to the probable quality of the future offspring. It sternly forbids all forms of sentimental charity that are harmful to the race, while it eagerly seeks opportunity for acts of personal kindness, as some equivalent to the loss of what it forbids. It brings the tie of kinship into prominence and strongly encourages love and interest in family and race. In brief, eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature."
Darwin Day really *would* be made a national holy-day, and children taught the sacred writings and to lisp the hymns of the new religion: "just enough of me, way too many of you".
I suppose the length of the speech on encouragement of 'worth' individuals made me gloss over the sole line at the start addressing the flip side
>Consequently, little or nothing will be said relating to what has been well >termed by Dr. Saleeby “ negative" eugenics, namely, the hindrance of the >marriages and the production of offspring by the exceptionally unfit. The >latter is unquestionably the more pressing subject of the two, but it will soon >be forced on the attention of the legislature by the recent report of the Royal >Commission on the Feeble-minded.
This and some of your other quotes in the comment I reply to suggests that Galton did support a degree of coerced sterilisation. The speech you originally quoted at length basically didn't touch on it.
>What a wonderful world, yes, Thor Odinson? Eugenics in the place of religion so you are either chastely celibate or suitably married and having no fewer than three children who must be "thriving", that is, outdoing their classmates! Would you live in it?
Replying to this: no, I'm not a fan of that world, but my point was precisely that the idea of a busybody morally superior church where old ladies matchmake and attempting to marry someone unapproved (eg a catholic and a protestant marrying) might get you ostracised is hardly a new horror, it was commonplace for centuries.
G. K. Chesterton in "Eugenics and Other Evils" said that if eugenics really works to breed a race of supermen, then the first thing the new supermen will do is tell the eugenicists to butt out of their love lives because they are going to marry whomever they prefer.
David Plotz wrote some articles for Slate in c. 2000 about The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank after he had tracked down some of the kids born from it. He noticed they tended to be bright and happy.
He saw the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank as an inflection point in introducing consumer choice to the fertility industry. Before then, doctors hadn't allowed their patients much choice in who would be the father of their baby. They'd just pick some medical student (medical students being, to doctors, the obvious finest example of young manhood) who looked kinda like the husband to be the donor. But the controversial NPSB introduced the concept of consumer choice to the public and now everybody puts a lot of effort into picking whatever they consider eugenic for their baby. E.g., Ivy League student newspapers run a lot of ads from couples looking for egg donors with lengthy lists of traits specified.
But when Plotz finally published his book on it around 2005, however, the ideological atmosphere had changed enough that he had to write a lot of words about how horrible it all is.
The big reason everybody is so fanatically denunciatory of early 20th Century eugenics these days is because virtually every high achieving Anglo scientist of a century ago held some pro-eugenics opinion, and that allows virtually any high achieving Anglo to be cancelled and his name stripped from schools and buildings. For example, my son went to a public middle school named after a local Nobel Prize winner who had built a college about 20 miles away into one of the greatest advanced research centers in the world. But the great man was for eugenics, so the school's name was changed to that of an entertainer who lived thousands of miles away.
Phrased like that, it sounds crazy, but if I explain that the Nobel Prize winner was a WASP and the entertainer black, well, it all starts to make more sense.
WASPs accomplished an awful lot in Britain and America, and that historical record generates resentment and inferiority complexes in some of the non-WASPs in Britain and America. But if you can demonize some science fiction-style views they tended to hold as Basically Naziism, you can strip their honors and rewrite British and American history to favor your ancestors.
I would describe myself as a eugenicist but I certainly would not support forced sterilizations. Where does the idea that coercive policies would be popular among contemporary eugenicists come from?
Well, I'm sure that some do. I'm sure if we did a poll right here "Do you support forced sterilizations of people with the following genetic disorders..." you'd find some support for the proposition.
It's not a difficult intellectual leap to make. Once you've accepted that eugenics is in principle a good idea, the idea of just a few forced sterilisations starts seeming pretty appealing from a utilitarian point of view.
Besides, in practice it turns out there's a blurry line between optional and coerced. As far as I know, no Western government actually _forced_ anyone to get a covid vaccine, but once it became accepted that it was a really really good idea for everyone to get one they sure as hell came close. You don't _have_ to get a covid vaccine, you're just not allowed to do anything unless you do. If the governments of the world became similarly convinced that Strictly Optional eugenic policies were a good idea, what would happen?
Yes, and this should gives reason to question why modern governments are not eager to implement eugenist policies: is this because it is evil, is it because it interfere with sacred individual rights and liberties, or is it because it bring zero short term benefit by definition (it works on multi-generation timescale, which is order of magnitude above election timescale) with a strong short term PR problem (litteraly hitler). For me COVID measures clearly shows its the second reason.
Forced sterilizations may seem appealing to some people some of the time. But as a society, we have developed rather effective antibodies against their near-future reimplementation. And, despite a bunch of complaints about the "slow pace" of genetic enhancement research in the comments here, my read is that it is still proceeding quickly enough to draw away practically all of the saner would-be supporters of forced sterilization in time, for all realistic Culture War trajectories.
You have a good point about the blurry optional/coerced line and Covid vaccine deployment. I mentioned in another comment that I'm not that worried in the short term because groups like the Amish are pretty free from "technological coercion" today, but if/when that changes I will join you in sounding the alarm.
One useful way to think about this: having the state forcibly sterilize someone to accomplish eugenic goals it's pretty terrible. But having the state forcibly sterilize someone to accomplish social harmony goals seems equally terrible. It seems like it's the forcibly sterilize part that's the problem, not the goals.
I agree with your general point, but I think eugenic and social harmony goals overlap, especially if social harmony includes that the people in charge like being in charge and don't like being interfered with. If that's not social harmony, I don't know what is.
Obviously you wouldn't be in favor of *forced* sterilizations, but it's really not unreasonable to restrict certain jobs to people who *voluntarily chose* sterilization. I mean, the saving in health insurance alone would allow you to pay people in those jobs more than their breeder counterparts. Plus there's their reduced carbon footprint to consider, surely that should be rewarded...
>"Of course, 50 years ago, many environmentalists supported (likely) forced sterilization in India. But today, the supporter of forced sterilization is a non-central instance of the category of (Western) environmentalists, but a central instance of the category of eugenics supporters."
Unless I'm misunderstanding, there's two important catches to this. First, the category of Western environmentalists is much, much larger than the category of Western eugenics supporters, such that 10% of the former may well outnumber 90% of the latter. Second, the piece is about the continued acceptance and tolerance of Western environmentalists that *continue* to support (or have not disavowed support) forced sterilization- Erlich might not be as big a name as he was in the 1970s, but he's apparently still respected in a way that Galton isn't.
So were there an event that removed the hyperstitious cascade from "eugenics" would Western environmentalists pick it back up? This matter of moral condemnation is clearly capricious, ill-thought, and as subject to the changing whims of society as anything else. Is it morally condemned or is this environmentalists practicing their Kolmogorov? Are they against forced sterilization, or are they against it *for the time being*? Those are different concerns! I am more concerned with the environmentalists because they are much more numerous and shown to be capricious and selective.
Is that true? Climate/environmental doomerism seems to be pretty popular these days and often segues into "our problem is too many people". Refusing to have children because of the climate now shows up regularly in polls of stupid people. After all, it's not just Bill Gates who says things like, “The world today has 6.8 billion people, that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%.”
Is which part true, the 10% of environmentalists? No, I'd agree with you; I think it's much higher. Or at least closely-related ideas are much higher; anti-natalism is a pretty common component of climate doomerism.
I run an environmental organization, have worked in that field for a quarter-century now, and am a child of one of the best-known leaders of that sector's founding era. "The Population Bomb" was familiar on the coffee tables of my childhood.
Environmentalists today, as in "people in that field in a professional and/or leadership capacity", overwhelmingly view Ehrlich as discredited. Some of us, myself included, view him with contempt. However it is also true that a lot of our supporters/fans in the general public of a certain age bracket -- Boomers, basically -- retain a vague understanding of overpopulation being "the ultimate problem" or something along those lines. They are generally quite astounded to hear from someone like me what we think of Ehrlich and his book, and/or that we don't view him as relevant to environmentalism today. Stuart Brand, an icon in our field who is actually personally acquainted with Ehrlich, has done some yeoman work publicly about this and I bless him for it.
If by "environmentalists" you mean people actually directly involved in that field, then virtually none of us today support forced sterilization. Those of my mother's generation were all over the map about it, with "queasy" being probably the median reaction. By the time I was in college (1980s) Ehrlich and his book were gone from those coffee tables. Unfortunately though that remained largely an insiders' viewpoint....during the 1990s when I was on staff at a large national organization this topic was a persistent headache when dealing with the general public.
Today it's become rare for someone to bring up overpopulation when chatting with me about what I do, though it does still happen. Without exception now it is always someone older than I am; I infer therefore that, notwithstanding Ehrlich's personal persistence, it does seem to be mostly faded into history's dustbin.
While I agree that the topic of overpopulation is mostly brought up by older people 1) It´s still extremely popular amongst them. 2) Anti-natalism is increasingly popular with young environmentalists. The only reason I´d would guess these people don´t talk about the problem of overpopulation much is that most environmentalism is very left-wing these days, and being explicit about being against overpopulation has the aura of wanting to reduce brown people (considering the steriliziations in India, definitely not unwarranted). But the problem for anti-natalists still remains that there are too many people - or sometimes, even people at all - they just focus on selling their ideology to westerners only because they have to make their ideology compatible with anti-colonialism.
Based on my ongoing direct daily experience working with young environmentalists -- lots of them -- your text after the numeral 2 is largely nonsense. (Unless maybe you're describing professionals in different countries? I've worked only in the U.S.)
Regarding the older people, my repeated direct experience is that the topic of overpopulation is popular among them at a quite shallow level. They are under a vague impression/memory that "the experts" declared overpopulation to be an overall problem. It's like how they still assume that "60 Minutes" and Time magazine are major news media which influence national opinion, and a dozen other leftover facts from the 1970s. But it's a shallow belief -- few of them have ever actually read "The Population Bomb", the name Paul Ehrlich rings a bell only vaguely, etc. Hence when I or one of my peers explains the reality of the topic to them we get surprise but not real pushback.
Just vaguely stating that my second point is nonsense doesn't seem productive to me. Maybe you could explain why? Yes, I was talking more about european environmentalists, but I would be surprised if anti-natalists were not a thing in the US. Maybe your organisation is simply not appealing to them?
That's fair. Equally fair is that I did not find your broad generalizations, offered without any supporting evidence or basis for your having such knowledge of a professional field, to be productive. Still don't.
If Terzian is offering a zeitgeist impression of self-styled "environmentalists" encountered through cocktail parties, or Reddit, would that be invalid?
I've known several young people (in the US), who appeared deeply concerned with such issues as anthropogenic climate change and overpopulation, and coupled those concerns with an anti-natal attitude; occasionally to the point of expressing guilt over their own existence, and consequent use of resources.
Whether these people also performed activism in a professional capacity, I cannot say.
Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of impersonal arbiter of morality.
That seems pretty extreme! I would guess Coria would also agree that German citizens who sheltered Jews from the Nazi regime were wrong, and overstepping their bounds. It is the logical endpoint of that ideology. A middle ground between this and total libertarianism based on anything besides intuition is pretty hard, agreed.
Fair point, but that then raises the question of what is a democratic policy. A lot of US laws are created that go against the majority will of the populace, is violating those also allowed because they are not really democratic? Coria's policy here seems to be so subjective as to be meaningless.
I think it's the title and subtitle of this post - "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck: An exploding generational bomb" - which is written to evoke "Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid", a magnificent and delightful book about many things which we know Scott likes.
What I don' t see mentioned in this piece or the comments is the immediate negative consequences of drawing official lines between intelligent/desirable people and not-intelligent/not-desirable people. The second a government draws this line, the two groups diverge, human nature kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism imo by which the slippery slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery, and very quickly leads to the worst of humanity.
Amusingly, China probably had the most effective coercive eugenics program ever, which ended up producing Yao Ming. They still don't seem to be excited about it these days for some reason.
Don't things like saying "don't drink while you're pregnant" already do that? We're saying that having a kid with fetal alcohol syndrome is worse than having a kid without fetal alcohol syndrome.
No. It means the ultimate logical conclusions that the "desirables" come up with when they see the other group as somehow less human – like slavery, and the Holocaust.
I'm talking about the govt explicitly drawing a line that divides the population into groups, telling one group, "you are dumb, you should not reproduce", and sending the other group the message, "hey those dumb people are reproducing too much and causing problems." This will never end well. Either you treat human beings as equals, at least when it comes to intelligence, or you have something resembling the Antebellum South. You can't have it both ways imo.
I think intelligence is fundamental to how we see ourselves as humans. Once you start separating groups, it’s way too easy to convince the desirable group that the other group isn’t quite as human, which can justify all kinds of abhorrent policy.
None of those let you call another group of humans a subspecies that needs to be handled differently, which is the kind of rhetoric hardcore racists use. Intelligence is different. If you call a group less intelligent it’s basically implying they’re more animalistic, especially to people who are easily triggered by fear-based propaganda.
Lot more predictable migration of individuals in and out of those groups, meaning they've got some personal incentive to make sure conditions are tolerable on both sides of the line.
What's your point? Sanity is, again, a status which is widely understood as having the potential to vary over the course of an individual's life for reasons not fully under their control. There isn't such a sharp division where someone can say "Let's do terrible things to everyone on the opposite side of that line" in confidence that neither they nor anyone they care about will be stuck on the receiving end.
I'm not saying he is. But I'm making the point that officially separating groups into smart and not-smart, and making policies based on that, only leads to very bad things. Sort of like how even if you think Communism is a good idea, in practice it always turns to shit, because it ignores human nature.
I’m not saying he’s doing anything. I’m making a point about the idea of a government policy that draws lines and creates groups based on intelligence that I didn’t see mentioned in the post - namely the practical real world implications of a governmental policy that separates human beings by intelligence.
One way of telling people they aren't smart (or at least weren't smart in doing some specific thing) is putting them in prisons/on probation/giving them fines. I wouldn't say we do it just fine, but however shitty the implementation is, most of it isn't the social rift or hierarchy where people who never got a parking ticket are above those who did.
The antebellum south didn't try to stop slaves from reproducing. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, the New World was unusual in how slaves were able to reproduce their own numbers after the international slave trade was prohibited.
But they justified slavery with the belief that Africans were subhuman compared to themselves, which is what happens as soon as you officially label one group as less desirable to reproduce.
There were lots of slaves shipped east to the Islamic world, and the males were frequently castrated. The women were not, however, and their owners often had offspring with their female slaves (which is why the rise of Islam in the Middle East resulted in a significant influx of sub-Saharan African DNA not found among endogamous religious minorities). There was an entire class of slave soldiers who would sometimes take over their societies, in accordance with an analogous precept of Mao. This now-dominant class of slave soldiers would still perpetuate the system of slave soldiers. Did they regard slave soldiers as sub-human? Was any quasi-eugenic belief at all necessary for this system of slavery?
By the end when most societies had abolished slavery, the South was still using eugenics to justify it. I think intelligence is just too fundamental to how we see ourselves as human beings. And once you start drawing lines and separating groups based on intelligence, it’s natural that the ingroup is going to see the outgroup as less human.
I believe that really got going when it became illegal to capture people from Africa-- this made slaves born in the western hemisphere much more valuable.
Minor note: AFAIK, Europeans did very little *capturing* of slaves in Africa, they mostly *purchased* slaves that the African nations they were trading with had capture from their enemies
For some less extreme examples, many other inborn traits like autism, deafness, homosexuality, and left-handedness have over time shifted around quite a bit on the spectrum between "undesireable trait that should be eradicated" and "cherished part of the diverse tapestry of humanity".
It has never been proven that homosexuality is "inborn". I don't think we know that about autism (in general) either, though there may be some Mendelian syndromes of it.
I recall a study on public beliefs about the heritability of various things. Homosexuality was the one they were most off on, as it had become common belief it was heritable while actually being the least heritable trait in the survey.
Scott you would have to admit there’s an element of volition here where once you know you’re pregnant you have to drink knowing there is harm. Nobody chooses to harm a baby with Down Syndrome.
Well, there are people who know they’re at high risk of passing some severe medical condition to their offspring, and who have biological children anyway.
Probably more than you want to know about my ethics, but the different between “maybe’ and “definitely” is pretty big in the way we do things. But to your point I think the appropriate thing for such a parent to do is to see if an intervention can be made in the selection of the egg or sperm, or even embryo. I’m not totally happy with the way we go about those things today but at least the ones reviewed get the chance to live.
That doesn't seem very relevant, but if you find it interesting, consider instead the case of encouraging people to take pregnancy vitamins, which suggests that the default option (having a baby with a risk of spina bifida) is worse than the alternative (having a baby without that).
Or consider the common practice of screening for Down's and considering abortion if the test is positive.
Hey Scott, thanks for responding. What I was pointing to in particular is that telling a woman not to drink when there’s shared knowledge that doing so puts the baby at risk is different than ranking an outcome as negative when “it just happens” without someone having to take some action. Prohibited action versus involuntary outcome. A normal woman, living her normal life, when pregnant, doing the things normally known to produce healthy child, will probably produce a healthy child.
Trying to give you the shortened version of my ethical framework, but agreed you should help the baby with spina big bifida envaginate their spinal column while it’s still a notochord and of course it’s prudent to tell a pregnant woman to have a vitamin to increase the likelihood of that. I’m totally in favor of preventative action or corrective care to replace something that’s gonna awry. Not sure I disagree with you at all on the idea that there are things out there that would be better if they were otherwise.
On the last part, which I am not trying to engage on, I know an internet comment isn’t going to change your mind on this, least of all mine, and I’m sure you’ve seen just as many fetuses in jars as I have if not more, but nothing I saw in those jars said to me there wasn’t a life there that needed protection. My belief is that if our species had evolved with translucent stomachs nobody would have ever shrugged about abortion or bought into it enough they couldn’t later retract. I am well aware of the conundrums involved and my hope is that one day artificial wombs will completely change the ethical, legal, and moral frameworks around this so those lives can be protected with the same relative risk to the mother as an abortion. Then the whole question goes up in smoke and the babies can be protected and the mother can go her way.
I just don’t honestly know what civilization is for if it isn’t to protect people who are vulnerable.
Classic example of "in principle" equality and real equality. Real equality is never true between people (I would have said "almost never true", but this would be backing off. It really is never true), you can always sort people along some axes, and then sort them globally depending on how you weight those axes. And people do that to other all the time: you have friends, non friends and enemies. Romantic interests, maybe in another life/circumstances and never ever even if he/she was the only other human on earth. Good employee, ok ones and to-be-fired asap. But in some cases, it is useful to pretend equality, to mitigate discrimination, limit strongly imbalanced power (gov vs citizen, boss vs employee), act as a social lubricant (unclear social hierarchy works better than very clear one) and also for practical reasons of dealing with populations and not individuals. But while it's useful, it's also important to remember that in-principle and real equality is not the same. The in-principle one is there to promote some (hopefully) worthy goals, but it should not be used as an axiom and thus always checked for unplanned consequences than may be worse than the initial goals (like more spina bifida because hey, human diversity is good....).
Re your transparent abdomen hypothetical, infanticide was historically very common (and up until shockingly recently in a number of non-Western countries). It might affect the rate of it, especially in the much more squeamish modern West, but humans are generally very capable of killing things while looking right at them.
No, we're saying 'don't inflict fetal alcohol syndrome on a person'. Just like saying it's wrong to break someone's legs doesn't imply that we think a person with broken legs has less value.
Yeah that reply was so weird and tangential to my point that I wasn't sure how to respond. But this captures one aspect of why it doesn't apply really well.
What we are saying (I think) is please give a chance for the newborn to be healthy if you are indeed carrying it to term, since it has no agency to refuse the alcohol, and for most of human history we have had really high infant mortality, and please lets try to do better for all our sakes, etc.
I was gonna say, eugenics is clearly very different and inherently very bad because it inherently says "some of you are worth less than everyone (or worth more), and only some of you should exist".
Most of the counter arguments don't apply - most Muslims rightfully denounce the ones that say only true believers should get to live. The environmentalisn argument more rightly applies to ecofascists, which most of us would agree are bad people with a bad ideology.
But the thing that unites all eugenicists is the belief that only some people should get to exist. I think that's inherently wrong.
Also, assuming you can pick what's going to advantageous vs disadvantageous in the future is pure hubris. If the Nazis have wiped out all the autistic people like they wanted to, we wouldn't have massive internet infrastructure. So it's bad both inherently and from the unintended consequences side of things.
Ehrlich et al weren't calling for mandatory sterilization of middle-class Americans and Europeans; doesn't that mean that they were equally guilty of saying "some of you are worth less than everyone else and shouldn't exist"?
I think "only some people should exist" is a position one has to take. If all possible people existed, the earth would collapse into a black hole. The question is what factors determine which people, out of all possible people, exist. The common position on that is "assortative mating is fine, most forms of government coercion are not, incentives are questionable and considered on a case-by-case basis".
I mean, I'm not talking about trying to make all potential hypothetical people exist.
I'm talking about not defining an underclass of people who should not exist, and inherently it's hard to see how that won't happen even if you tried to make it as non-coercive as you can - just the very act of defining a group of people as more worthy of existing tends to imply you think the other group shouldn't!
I suppose I do make an exception for truly hypothetical nonexistent people (for a certain definition of personhood), like, "I think we shouldn't deliberately create children with gross heart defects that die within hours of being born", I would support genetic screening and CRISPR to prevent the existence of kids who die without ever getting the chance to meaningfully live, although that does feel more for the benefit of the potential parents. But if it's a condition that theoretically lessens quality of life but there is still potential for personhood, I am supportive of the person's right to choose - either to live or to die if they wish (I am also supportive of voluntary euthanasia). And if they choose to have kids anyway, I respect their judgement that whatever the condition is, from their lived experience they have decided it's fine and their kids will be fine (and their kids are likewise free to choose otherwise).
What are your arguments against deciding which people should and should not exist/are worth more or less apart from purely moral disgust at the thought? (which doesn´t seem convincing to me personally) The hubris argument also doesn´t seem particularily strong considering that the argument can be made against all choices and policies that rely on predicting the future. (which is basically all of them.)
Assigning moral worth tends to immediately make life worse for people ranked lower. The minor case is getting weighed fairly in policy - e.g medical triage, welfare entitlements, being considered in applications for building lead factories, etc. In the worst case, they aren't given human rights. The best way to prevent an underclass is to insist that everyone is morally equal in spite of skyscraper building abilities or whatever. I'm happy to do economic discrimination because not everyone should be building skyscrapers, but when it comes to the right to exist, we're talking moral worth, not economic worth.
The hubris argument is dependant on the irreversibility of the decision, how easy it is to identify it's downstream effects, and the scale of it. You can't unkill people, and if you're CRISPR-ing out the genes you probably can't undo that. Even if you could, the feedback is on a long enough timescale that you probably can't rollback decisions in time. And the decision will have long-ish reaching consequences - I expect > 5 generations which would be approx 200 years (though to be fair that's the maximum I personally bother caring about, as I think I'll have so little way to trace cause and effect further than that it's not really worth worrying about).
This decision is very different from, say, the decision not to allow parking on my street (expect not a huge consequence and not for very long). Or a decision that one particular parent makes regarding gene editing (exclusively affects their own lineage and at most their social group). But if a large organisation starts demanding proof of IQ augmentation or whatever that's worse (affects more people, other orgs may follow suit) and if the government makes it policy to withhold welfare from non IQ augmented people that's very very bad (will affect massive numbers of people over a number that arguably is somewhat arbitrary).
I would have no objection if the government offered free prenatal screening for one of those hole in heart conditions, because the infant mortality for those conditions are really really high and I don't think it'll cause a runaway population change that no one can predict or control. I don't think I would support screening for personality disorders, until we know more about personality disorders - because those traits might be important somehow and we'll only find out once there's some kind of situation where they're useful (sort of like autism and handling abstract systems). But I don't agree that all decisions are equally dependant on predicting the future - in theory everything can affect everything, but in practice some decisions definitely have a bigger scale, bigger consequence, and higher likelihoods, that we can practically foresee.
By "all possible people", I mean literally every person that could possibly exist, not all the people that would exist if people reproduced at the maximum possible rate. Like, if we just consider genetic differences, that's 4^3200000000 people.
There's literally not enough mass on the Earth to collapse into a black hole. And the amount of mass that is capable of being converted into humans is even less than that.
"The second a government draws this line, the two groups diverge, human nature kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism imo by which the slippery slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery, and very quickly leads to the worst of humanity."
Yes. While I, personally, have had a vasectomy, and tend to view sterilization with a yawn, historically, _forcible_ sterilization has been something done to outgroups. It looks like part of a very slippery slope because it has often been done not as a public health optimization tactic, but as an act of hostility.
I think the safest line to draw is between government actions and parental actions. Parents don't always act in the best interests of their children but they tend to be a better bet than anyone else.
If it was like, "only Ashkenazi Jews are allowed to reproduce" or, "minorities are not allowed to reproduce", then I could see that happening. But if you eg promote things like Nobel sperm banks, then it won't really be a case of "outgroup" vs "ingroup". It seems possible to draw lines in a not so crude fashion, one which more accurately aims for the traits we want to affect. That what I got from Scott's comment: we already "discriminate" against fetal alcohol syndrome without there being any significant consequences.
And it seems like Scott would agree with you; that the eugenic ideas that eg the Nazis carried out were, well, very bad. But, as with fetal alcohol syndrome, there are many "eugenic" (in name) ideas which wouldn't lead to such horrible outcomes, but which we lose by labeling them as "eugenic".
I’ve read all the comments in this thread and haven’t seen any ideas on how the govt would do any kind of meaningful population steering towards higher intelligence without drawing an official line between groups of people.
And based on 54 years of experience with human nature, you will never convince me that a govt-sponsored official line doesn’t end very badly. These other arguments seem very tangential to me. Someone else responded to the fetal alcohol thing much better than me.
"haven’t seen any ideas on how the govt would do any kind of meaningful population steering towards higher intelligence without drawing an official line between groups of people."
I am genuinely having difficulty imagining how one could arrive at such a position. Intelligence is not binary, as if there were discrete categories of "smart people" and "stupid people". It is a smooth continuum (or rather, a complex mash-up of several smooth continua, if we take the idea of verbal, mathematical, visuo-spatial subcomponents seriously). There is no reason why we wouldn't be able to say, all else being equal, that 130 IQ is better than 125, 125 is better than 120, etc., all the way up and down the scale, and to offer polygenic screening and implantation to give your children an IQ bost regardless of what your own IQ is. While I guess if you are convinced by Smart Fraction Theory, then you get more value for money by shunting potential children above the smart fraction cut-off who would have otherwise been just below it, but if IQ generally scales monotonically with expected postitive life outcomes, then below a certain cost, PGS would be a good investment /worth subsidizing regardless of where you're starting from. I mean, one *could* institute a system of two-tiered citizenship in a society that subsidizes PGS, but I really don't understand why we should think it inevitable that one would want to.
As an example to consider: policies designed to make having children less of a financial burden for high earners, who will skew more intelligent/diligent/other good qualities. Basically, compare and contrast flat parental benefits with ones that are a % of income (be that as a direct cash handout, paid parental leave, or tax breaks).
Financial subsidies for children in the West are currently an irrelevant pittance, but the evidence suggests that they do have a consistent marginal effect the numbers are just too small by a factor of like 100.
The difference between Galton and Ehrlich is simple: the first is very evil European/conservative sterilization, which is bad. The second is for left-wing/progressive sterilization, which is good and academics like it.
It is, as always, simple friend/enemy distinction.
Ehrlich had his share of left-wing critics, in the West and elsewhere. In fact, opposition to India's compulsive sterilisation program used to be given as an example where the hard left and the conservative right found common ground.
Yeah, it's sad that people have convinced themselves that politics is more complex than that, and write long treatises trying to make sense of the meaningless complexity they've imagined.
Galton's brand of sterilization *was* left-wing/progressive sterilization. It's only when Hitler et al got into the act that it became an "evil European/conservative" thing, and at that point almost everyone forgets about Galton altogether.
Which is of course just more evidence that Hitler was a far-left extremist, and the idea that he was conservative or right wing in any form is just modern squid ink. After all trying to take over the world and obliterate entire races is the opposite of conserving things.
Yes, because they're the same thing, because "far right" is actually the far left rebranded by academics to avoid the uncomfortable fact that all 20th century tyrannical despots were motivated by radical leftism. After all, the National Socialists German Workers Party were socialists who claimed to speak for the workers: it's literally in their name. And the gap between what Hitler believed and what Lenin believed ideologically was wafer thin. They fought only because they both believed it should be them who ruled the world, not because they actually disagreed with the concept of a totalitarian dictatorship. In terms of how to run a country they didn't disagree on much.
After all, think about it - the whole concept of "far to the left" and "far to the right" being the same thing is clearly doublethink. The words literally mean far apart from each other. If far right means anything at all then it would have to be the polar opposite of the far left, which would make it arch-capitalist libertarian, something more like ancaps. But ancaps don't have a history of trying to take over the world, so they aren't very interesting to talk about.
I didn't say far-left and far-right are "the same". But they have the same epistemics, so they behave similarly. This accounts for the "horseshoe" theory of politics[1], and the arch shape of the Thinking Ladder from Tim Urban, and even the arch shape of the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart[2]. Sometimes - and I'm trying to work out how this happens myself - beliefs jump between the far left and far right. For instance, many of the "all vaccines bad!!!" arguments and beliefs jumped from the far left to the far right around 2020.
Also, the beliefs considered "left" and "right" vary over time and space. You seem to assume that left and right are the same in 1920 Germany as 2020 United States, but that's an error. Think about it - why is the "Liberal" party of Australia right-wing while the "Liberal" party of Canada is left-wing?
There can also be multiple not-really-compatible ideologies on the same side of the political spectrum at the same time, e.g. libertarians, evangelicals, right-leaning rationalists, the alt-right, neo-nazis/Stormfront people, and the assorted types of people who believe Alex Jones. Presumably you single out neo-nazis for a special interpretation for some reason? But neo-nazis hanging out at Stormfront are different people than the Jacobin community. If neo-nazis were actually far-left, they would be advocating for a socialist revolution, they would like Jacobin, etc.
Years ago, when I first found it, I found the horseshoe idea interesting. But I couldn't quite ever resolve the most obvious objections that came to mind, like, if these two things are claimed to be in one dimension polar opposites, but in another almost the same, aren't we maybe over-thinking this? Occam's Razor says that we should at least try the simplest possible explanation first, which in this case would be that in fact they're both the same thing and the real contrast is between people who don't care much about politics/reshaping the world, and people who do.
This latter turned out to be surprisingly hard to dismiss. In fact once I opened my mind to the possibility that the horseshoe was just an artifact of mislabelling by intellectuals, the evidence for it seemed suddenly to be everywhere. The supposedly "far right" Nazis have the word socialist in the name of the party. The fascists were wartime allies with their supposed blood enemies and didn't seem to disagree on much about how the world should be run. Thomas Sowell has also made this argument at times, essentially arguing that the left is people with ideology and the right is people without. The academic left reject this of course and tend to claim they're the neutral ones and everyone else is ideological, but again, this argument falls apart on close inspection and turns out to be the opposite of what's plainly observable. After all, the left is historically a movement of intellectuals with grand plans to reshape society, and it's not a coincidence that the word ideology is derived from the word idea.
And so it goes. The evidence for the far right even being a coherent thing at all never survives scrutiny (which makes sense in this model because you can't have many people who are radically devoted to not having ideas). For instance, you claim that "all vaccines are bad" hopped from the left to the right as an idea, but that never happened! It was a myth spun by the left intended to manipulate the population by associating a position they didn't like with historical villains: "i'm not sure this particular shot is worth it for me" = anti-all-vaccines = far right = nazis = evil people. That story was pushed through the media because this kind of reasoning-by-association works on people.
What actually happened is more straightforward. Pre-2021 vaccine opposition was very fringe and mostly focused around vaccines for children. The people who care most about young children are their mothers, and women are much more left wing than men, so these two things became conflated. Mothers who saw their kids suddenly tank (or heard stories of this) after taking a shot added 2+2 and decided they didn't want to risk it, were painted as evil anti-vaxxers, and this position became associated with left wing people. In reality the wider left was strongly pro-vaccine when arguments about herd immunity could be made, due to the collectivist nature of public health projects.
Starting in 2021 the public health establishment immediately did its far-left thing, as it always does, and told people that it wasn't an individual decision to take a shot even though the protection was individual, because of herd immunity. To make that argument they had to lie aggressively, and by that point a lot of people had cottoned on to what was happening, so there was widespread opposition to this. Sure enough their claims about transmission were based on nothing and herd immunity turned out to be a lie. At this point the young and healthy people who were paying attention started rejecting the shots (but not the older cohort who are often very conservative, so again, there's a conflation here). So the public health-media-academia complex immediately claimed the only reason anyone could ever reject their commands was due to Right Wing Ideology, that thing that they've trained everyone in their social circle to instinctively hate without thinking. Not true - I have lots of friends who didn't take the shots and most of them are politically apathetic. At least one is conventional left wing. And voila. That's all it takes to create the appearance of a horseshoe that isn't real. A few spurious correlations and an ingrained habit of describing anything you don't like as right wing, and it'll appear that political views are unstable. In reality people's views are pretty coherent over time.
Oh, I missed your last question about the liberal parties.
Regardless of what they might claim or what their old origins might have been, both parties are modern left wing parties. The term "liberal" is another pretty useless political term, nearly as bad as terms like far right. The problem is that it's a synonym for freedom/being easy going/not too heavy handed etc. In theory everyone is pro-these things, almost as much as being pro-ice cream and puppies. Nobody wants to brand their party "the government domination party" because most voters are NOT into ideology and wouldn't like that. Even the USSR's constitution was in theory an exemplar of modern individual rights.
What matters is not stated preferences but revealed preferences. What do these parties actually do? Wikipedia states confidently that the Canadian Liberals "are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism". Yet this is the party that crushed the truckers when they protested against COVID totalitarianism by literally seizing all their money. Where is individual freedom or human dignity in that? Nowhere, because they don't believe in any of these things really. They believe in collectivism, they just don't say it.
What about the Australian Liberal party? "Domestically, Menzies presided over a fairly regulated economy in which utilities were publicly owned, and commercial activity was highly regulated through centralised wage-fixing and high tariff protection". It took until the 1980s i.e. the collapse of the USSR for left wing parties to give up on left wing economics. They also have a history of other conventional modern left policies like high openness to unskilled immigration and of course, Australia's crackdown on COVID was one of the world's most totalitarian.
The reality is that most parties are actually competing over how left wing they are, even when they claim to be not-the-left, because it's hard to attract enough people to matter in national scale politics on a basis of "let's not do things". Even when for historical reasons such parties theoretically exist, like the British Conservatives, you'll find that most voters and even members see them primarily as simply the lesser evil and grumbling about the party being ideologically dominated by left wing ideas is very common. Which is what you'd expect, if you have an MP base that's largely non-committal about politics.
I was going to post something to this effect. Regardless of the fact that eugenics was originally a left-coded progressive policy, it's now seen as right-coded, so even those who supported it when it was left-coded get thrown under the bus when pro-left/anti-right signalling is required (it's telling that the building named after Galton was renamed in 2020). However, environmentalism remains left-coded, so the cathedral/educational-journalism complex/whatever you want to call it has no problem continuing to support the term no matter what evils are committed in its name, and will even minimize those evils or go to bat for the people that committed them because they're "on the right side," no matter the effects their actions had. This brings up the interesting idea that if you want powerful people to properly condemn environmentalism for evils committed in its name, you have to make environmentalism become right-coded. Maybe if Kaczynski and Linkola continue to be popular among certain subsets of the right, and the more mainstream left-environmentalism somehow ceases to be ideologically useful this could happen in several decades, although I think it's highly doubtful.
Blood boiling evil stuff from Ehrlich. I try to hate no one but can’t quite seem to keep it from touching him. Loathe to my marrow that he hasn’t been denounced as a hack. You don’t get to be wrong about everything but still be called an expert.
Ehrlich is hardly an exception. There are modern equivalents.
Look at Prof Neil Ferguson for example. A true believer in his own woefully wrong pandemic models he convinced governments to inflict the most extreme authoritarian measures ever seen in peacetime on the global population. Impoverishment, suicides and a mental health collapse followed. But his code was shit and his model code didn't even solve its own equations correctly, Sweden did better than most other countries despite ignoring everything he said and to top it off, he broke his own lockdown rules in order to screw his far-left girlfriend who was inconveniently married to somebody else. Nobody in academia was even slightly bothered by any of this and he was defended to the hilt.
You say "let's change it". Good luck with that. These people are supported by universities, so to change things you'd have to directly attack them. How exactly do you plan to defund Stanford, because they sure as hell will never defund guys like Ehrlich.
This review seemed pedantic to me. The 'improvment' of human characteristics, e.g. morbidity, intelligence, etc. through either selective breeding (Galton's postion) or the removal of undesirable traits through sterilization, incarceraton or murder, was debunked long ago. The recognition that there are no recognized single genes, or group of genes that co-assort to produce what we call intelligence, longevity or whatever general human trait makes the eugenics dialog irrevalent. Real eugenics is here now and it called gene therapy. Currently, gene therapy is able to cure or improve certain single gene mutation diseases. in the interests of brevity: 'nuff said.
How was Galton "debunked"? He never claimed there were "single genes", as he didn't know of Mendelian genetics at all. And Greg Clark would disagree that you can't change undesirable traits through the justice system.
I suggest you read up on animal and plant breeding. The improvement of characteristics through selective breeding is rather easy, requires no knowledge of specific genes and is based on a model according to which heritability is due to the additive action of numerous genes, each with a small effect. Human genetics is no different.
Right, eugenics is an outgrowth of the long rise of "scientific agriculture" in Britain from, say, 1700 onward. And before then, breeders were engaging in eugenics with their livestock, but more by rules of thumb than by self-consciously scientific methods.
I hate to be the "source??" guy, but if you're going to claim that some idea is "debunked" then that kind of demands an explanation of how it was debunked and when and by whom.
I mean embryo selection already improves intelligence more than any environmental intervention we have. The Holocaust has a meta analytic point-estimate of 0.1d for cognitive ability; embryo selection is at 0.2d in its infancy.
I feel that if we really want to go down the road of genetically manipulating humanity, then it would be far easier to use genetic editing rather than implementing a massive selective breeding program.
Easier socially, perhaps. Technically selective breeding for heritable traits doesn't require any knowledge that people didn't have for thousands of years. And gene editing on mass scale with predictable results seems at least decades away, for most results that we would want (some simple corrections of known deleterious mutations are possibly closer).
> I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects your future child’s
> traits a lot
"Traits" is doing a lot of work there. Both intelligence and life outcomes depend on a large number of complex factors; some of these are heritable, others are not; the heritable factors are a complex mix of both positive and negative that all interact with each other; meanwhile, a great deal of luck is also required for a good outcome. The magnitude of the survivor bias is unclear: we only hear about the genius babies who grow up, study and publish; the ones who are born in thirdworld slums, live as street kids for a few years then die of starvation or exposure do so unseen and uncounted. It is far from obvious what proportion of the outcome is down to genetics, rather than factors like the education system, childhood parasite load or local child labour laws.
The divine right of kings has long since been discredited, as has the concept that nobles are somehow inherently better than commoners, and yet the intuition is still that rich people are necessarily poor people's betters. I suggest an alternative theory: rich people by and large are rich mostly not because of genetically heritable traits, but rather because they got lucky: lucky to be born into an already rich family, lucky to be born to an environment where they were lifted up instead of beaten down, and/or lucky that risks they took during their lives paid off.
Luck, unfortunately, is not a heritable trait.
> For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles
> of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having
> children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
It's unclear that we should expect any such thing. At the very least, you would need to do work to show this, beyond handwaving. Consider many of your own essays elsewhere, where you make the case that humanity is stuck in a variety of races-to-the-bottom, where people in competition for some limited thing end up spending more over time for the same slice of the pie, be it healthcare, education, shelter... Meditations on Moloch has a variety of examples. If rich families' kids do better at least in part because rich families can throw more resources at the race to get the kid closer to the tip of the life outcome pyramid - and few would deny this is the case - rich families having more kids would certainly make them compete harder for the top of the pyramid, but it is unclear that his would make the top of the pyramid any larger or the gap between the top and the bottom any narrower.
Getting a rich person's sperm from a sperm bank, meanwhile, does not help with this effect at all.
Some of my own doubts about eugenics come from seeing educated people rather ready to make basic mistakes of language that confirm their prejudices (in favor of the well-to-do, their own ethnic group, etc.). Rich people do not tend to be talented; they tend to be rather dumb, simply because mostly any group tends to be rather dumb. Is the minority of talented people somewhat larger among the rich than in other groups? No idea actually, given that the rich how much more of an opportunity to develop and display some talents than other groups (though probably less incentive to do either than some other groups).
I suppose if you set the bar high enough then everyone is "dumb". Perhaps everyone is also unlucky for not living in the post-scarcity utopia of the future. But relative to existing people, rich people do tend to be both lucky & talented.
Where are you drawing your pool from? Are you friends with lots of prominent maestros (and are you setting the bar for "rich" low enough that they are rich)?
A comment along the lines of "the rich have a somewhat larger minority of talented people than the poor" would have been a far better reflection of this position (though it would still need convincing proof).
It just means that he thinks he's smarter than most rich people, and most middle-class people and most poor people and therefore he can call them *all*
"dumb".
Which may be true if Garald is highly intelligent and using a strictly relative definition of "dumb". But it's still a dumb thing for him to say, because if he's using that baseline for the definition of dumb then it's just a coordinate transformation from TGGP's "lucky and talented" to "generally less dumb", which still supports TGGP's argument.
I am willing to bet (bet what - IQ points?) that, in plenty of societies, intelligence is a non-monotonic function of wealth. Why bother being clever if you are born into money? (An eugenist might add: and if that wealth came from ancestors who were good at hacking people in two but were otherwise unselected for, we have even more reason for concern!).
At any rate, my point was precisely that language matters. "Generally less dumb, at least partly because not hampered by disease and malnutrition" does not have the same ring to it as "talented" - in fact it means something pretty different.
As I mention above, the idea that rich people tend to be our betters needs backing up with actual evidence, not mere assertion; especially in the era of Musk and Trump.
I would have thought readers of this blog would already be aware that IQ is correlated with money, but here's a blog post debunking the more narrow objection that this correlation tops out at high levels:
I won't bother linking to a study showing that poorer areas have higher crime rates than richer ones, because every American knows this. Garett Jones' "Hive Mind" is about how IQ is correlated with cooperation.
I mean, sure, as the XKCD says, it's certainly a strong hint. But - hear me out here - what if the arrow of causality between a moneyed background and IQ actually goes the other way?
We certainly know wealth has an impact on access to quality education. Are there any studies on longterm outcomes for lottery winners' families? A quick google finds a bunch for lottery winners themselves, but nothing for generational impact. It would hardly be surprising, though, if wealth acquired via lottery ticket had the same kind of impact on life outcomes as wealth acquired from any other form of risky "investment" paying off.
This all started with the suggestion that successful people - by which we generally mean rich people - carry traits that should be propagated. My thesis here is that if your eugenics program is selecting rich people, it's going to be pulling in children of lottery winners, day traders, crypto bros and maybe that stock picking squid that went viral a few months back.
Smarter people cooperate more in repeated games-- and cooperation causes good things.
That means smarter groups are more likely to create--- to cause--- productive outcomes.
That's true even if productivity raises health, and hence raises IQ.
Reverse causation doesn't disprove forward causation-- and there's lots of evidence for forward causation from higher IQ to highly productive outcomes.
I suspect it's mostly horns effect — they don't like him because he's rich, so they're happy to attribute other negative qualities to him as well. That said, he has made some questionable business decisions they could point to.
People have been saying he’s dumb for a long time, because he kept trying things that no-one expected to work. He went into electric cars when most reasonable people thought that was dumb (or bad at his aims of making electric cars available to everyone because he targeted the rich, or whatever), and he went into private space travel when that seemed dumb (or again, focused on rich people and hence inefficient at achieving his goal of making space accessible). Now he’s gone into Twitter and actually had a failure - and it’s widely accepted that success changes people, so now his past successes provide less-direct evidence of his current intelligence. It takes lots of skill to achieve what he’s done, but he also gave people plenty of justifications for calling him dumb.
Twitter, mainly. Both what he did with it, and also what he posts there.
Thing is, his other holdings have groups of people that have developed organically over time who translate his proclamations into policies that are sensible for the company to attempt and safe for the public to hear. When he came to Twitter from cold, though, we got to see the raw, unfiltered man.
"Bring me up to 10 screenshots of your best code" is not a statement made by a man who has any clue what software engineering entails. Not a good look.
What would also be interesting would be to look at the arguments of early-twentieth-century intellectuals who openly supported some limited eugenics measures calling them such (avoiding serious birth defects) but had intelligent, interesting criticisms to make to then fashionable, non-genocidal eugenics. Franz Boas comes to mind.
(Also, would gladly read all that W. E. B. du Bois wrote about the subject. Links?)
"I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic."
With dogs we also have significantly longer lifespans than their generations and fairly absolute control over their breeding. I suspect an attempt to breed e.g., Galapagos tortoises or giant pandas for particular traits would be harder. With humans, you have the problem with a lot of long term projects that the people in charge and their goals would likely change faster than the time it takes to approach a given goal, and that total control over the subjects' reproduction will be very difficult even leaving aside the obvious moral objections.
Probably increasingly so as reproductive technology improves. Some forms of sterilization are already reversible. Going forward, that person you sterilized will probably be able to arrange for a clone or recombination based on a somatic cell, or even getting a new reproductive system grown and installed, much sooner than you (or rather, your successor's successor's, successor's...successor) is going to see the kind of major population-level changes something like dog breeding can produce.
Slavery and animal breeding coexisted as concepts for a very long time, without (as far as I know) successful applications of the latter to the former. Granted I'd be surprised if there weren't attempts, especially once science overlapped with large scale slavery for a century or two. I'd also be surprised if it was managed with sufficient consistency and breadth to create an identifiable population with measurable and sustained trait changes, rather than just being a cruel experiment. (Especially since owners and their overseers were probably continually contaminating the process, probably without reliably recording what they were doing.) AFAIK, generally when slaveholding cultures wanted a type, they enslaved people from a known location or existing ethnic group, they didn't create one for the purpose.
I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by human effort to have much hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for. And I'm pretty sure that even approaching acquiring that level of control correlates with spinning off into all the sorts of problems Adraste is warning about.
I agree that it can't be done benevolently, and I'm pretty sure that it can't be done effectively. Best case it's ineffectual and mostly harmless, worst case is much worse than that.
Slaves (unlike domesticated animals) didn't reproduce themselves for most of the history of slavery. The big advantage to owning a slave was that you DIDN'T pay to raise them, instead you captured them in battle and then didn't feed them enough to reproduce. The non-Malthusian environment of the New World was very unusual.
"I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by _human_ effort to have much hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for." [emphasis added]
Hmm... One speculative endgame for ASI is for humans to wind up as "pets" of the machines. Perhaps a less benevolent version of Culture Minds might have the equivalent of dog breed fanciers, but for human breeds. Might there be a human equivalent of a toy poodle? :-(
SF and fantasy both have their share of gods or godlike aliens going in for that sort of thing. Heinlein had at least two versions in Methuselah's Children, and Steven Brust's Dragaera has seventeen subtypes plus "control humans" (who nonetheless have been tweaked for psychic ability).
Though it depends a lot on the fictional AI concept. Vernor Vinge's Powers tended to run through their superhuman existence at a speed commensurate with their much faster processing capability. There's one known as Old One because it's lasted ten years without self-destructing or evanescencing into total incomprehensibility. They can reshape the galaxy in that time, but they don't really have the scope for long breeding programs.
And that's despite legal barriers making it very difficult to research or commercialise human genetic engineering. I agree that government subsidy programs to encourage certain traits to spread more seem a dubious and dubiously effective proposition, "every measure that becomes a target" and all that. But I don't think such programs would even be necessary. If we want to do this, all societies and governments need to do is step out of the way. I would guess the industry for this would become a thing shortly thereafter. If every parent gets the option to pay some money for screening against all diseases and a Terence Tao intelligence splice, I'm pretty sure many will take it.
It's clearly possible biologically to do a large scale selective breeding program on humans and get desired traits out of it. But I agree that would probably be very hard for human institutions to manage it, given the length of human lifespans and the difficulty of keeping some sort of institution pointing in the same direction for hundreds of years.
I note that the CCP did successfully run a eugenics program to get tall basketball players, which was very successful at producing tall people (though I'm given to understand somewhat less successful at having those tall people be truly exceptional at basketball). So, sure, it might require stable authoritarian governments, but those do exist.
A nice presentation of a fairly pointless argument.
Both sides are wrong on this subject for the very simple reason that anyone with a modicum of understanding of how power dynamics work, would immediately see how eugenics, overpopulation, or any other form of garbage analysis based doom would be used as justification by unscrupulous and/or idealistic demagogues leading elitist packs towards self and class based power and financial gain.
Ehrlich's predecessor - Thomas Malthus - and the British Corn Laws are an excellent example, so it isn't like we don't know where this is all going.
Where are the Jonathan Swifts of today to puncture the bombastic bullshit?
I don't get what you mean - should nobody ever be allowed to claim that bad things might happen? There's only a difference in scale between "overpopulation will cause billions of deaths" and "global warming will cause millions of deaths" and "dumping toxic waste into this lake will cause dozens of deaths". Should we ban anyone from mentioning that dumping toxic waste could be bad, because people could misuse it to seize power?
What if Galton had said "there's no particular dysgenic crisis, it would just be nice to have some smarter and healthier people around"?
Perhaps the deaths are far lower because we listened to the warnings and took action to lower the number of deaths.
It's rather like sneering at the doctors for warning me I will die of the tumor growing in my brain. I'm not dead. They insisted on removing it in an operation. But I'm not dead, so they were clearly overreacting.
What I mean is any type of so-called analysis arising from hasty generalization - of which overpopulation due to lack of food is one particular example - is extremely dangerous and that extension of these hasty generalized nonsense into areas which clearly pander to elitist views is furthermore going to be used for nefarious purposes.
So regarding Galton: yes - his narrow and unwise views on eugenics were not only wrong, but dangerous precisely because it gave pseudo-scientific license to all manner of class-based, race-based, and other forms of discrimination based oppression. I find it impossible to see any situations where "superior" beings are not going to be used as an excuse, eventually, to attack those who are "not superior". And this doesn't even get into the issue of the games behind the definition of what superior is.
Regarding toxic waste: that's a great example. The precise dynamic of power-mongering, fear-mongering and pseudo-science lies behind the "toxification" of CO2.
Demonization of CO2 is ridiculous even if goals to reduce fossil fuel usage, in general, are reasonable.
I'm thinking more of a factory dumping literal toxic waste into a literal water supply. Are all water pollution concerns also power-mongering and fear-mongering? Is there anything that you think is actually bad?
c'lue would consider it actually bad to be deprived of the comfy chairs up there in the cynics' gallery.
Teddy Roosevelt put it more eloquently in a famous speech that he delivered n Paris shortly after leaving the White House:
“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief....”
I do face hypocritical posturing with disdain, particularly when it is so very obvious that the end objective is not the greater good so much as it is the greater good for a few.
A factory dumping toxic waste - what does the factory make?
What if the factory made literal life: actual substances which literally extend human life in a measurable way?
Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the literal human life extension?
Yes, I do think there are things that are actually bad. We see them every day: the evil done by selfish bastards purely to amass ever greater mountains of wealth - at other's expense - when they already have more than they could ever possibly spend. Death and destruction visited upon people far away in order to "promote democracy" or some nonsense. Ever greater restrictions hypocritically forced on regular people even as "the good" fly about their private jets and snort illegal substances at their private parties.
More often than not - it is these precise types of "the good" that use the simplistic depictions of "bad" in order to amass more of what they don't even need or to justify the sacrifices they advocate that other people make.
> Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the literal human life extension?
No, the question is, is the damage done by the toxic substances greater the cost of storing them properly, or cleaning them up before putting them in the water supply.
is the damage done by the toxic substances greater the cost of storing them properly, or cleaning them up before putting them in the water supply *and the value of the production that creates the toxic substance to start with".
In other words: the full picture as opposed to 3 blind men analyzing an elephant, or worse - 3 demagogues analyzing an elephant to derive personal benefit.
Microsoft started out as a perfectly innocuous operating system. It was purchased by Microsoft and pushed into prominence due to anti-trust judgements against IBM.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Microsoft turns evil by using its monopoly power to destroy WordPerfect, Lotus 123, and a bunch of other literally market leading word processing and spreadsheet programs in order to promote Microsoft Office. The same game plan was used later to destroy Netscape in favor of Internet Explorer.
Amazon started as an excellent idea: why be limited to the physical inventory of a bricks and mortar location when you can ship books anywhere, with people browsing for books via the internet. The instant Amazon turned evil was when it deployed tens of millions of dollars to fight the imposition of state sales taxes on internet sales - a massive exception which had originally been put in place because internet retail businesses were all small. This is also about the time when Amazon decided to turn its prominent role on the internet, as a web site, as well as its pre-existing fulfillment infrastructure, into a gatekeeper business which has since gone on to pretty much do to internet shops what Amazon did to bricks and mortar bookstores.
In both cases, the companies and founders were already filthy rich. And yes, the founders weren't solely responsible - certainly the middle and upper management were also involved much as government regulators failed in their jobs.
But the primary responsibility for the decisions made and the ensuing outcomes is clear.
adding a +1 to this: clicking a long footnote froze the page and caused my browser to hang and I'm not even on a mobile device. Would vastly prefer if Scott limited footnotes to a single paragraph.
> Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned.
I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried." He points out that there are two serious problems with that concept. First, the supreme arrogance inherent in saying — because this is what that really means — that "everyone who's tried this before has failed, but if I was in charge I could get it right!" And second, the immense naivete of failing to realize that, even if you were both smart enough to get it right and morally pure enough to not be corrupted along the way, that there would still be evil, brutal people lurking in the shadows waiting to take you down and supplant you and use the power you established for their own far less virtuous ends. (cf. Josef Stalin's rise to power.)
> Or they might say environmentalism has had some pretty spectacular failures - knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over from fossil fuels, leading to our current coal-and-oil-dominated regime and all the worries about climate change that come with it - also coal pollution in the air kills tens of thousands of people per year directly.
It's always a bit terrifying to see just how often people's unwillingness to accept the lesser of two evils leaves them saddled with the greater evil instead.
> For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
You can't really "increase the population of rich people to poor people" in any meaningful way as long as poverty remains culturally understood as a relative state. By any objective measure, poor people in America today (excluding long-term homeless for obvious reasons) have a standard of living that would be the envy of kings of past ages, and in many significant metrics exceeds that enjoyed by John Rockefeller! And yet, relative to the more-wealthy people in America today, they're not doing particularly awesome, so we say that they're "living in poverty." As long as that understanding persists, adding more wealthy people would just shift the definitions around a little.
> Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time.
Not really. The ideas of population explosion and resource exhaustion didn't originate with him, but with Thomas Malthus, and Malthus' ideas had been quite thoroughly debunked over a century before Ehrlich came on the scene! Ehrlich had no good excuse for not knowing that.
Is it really obvious that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people? The share of wealth that is inherited is large, and increasing. If you somehow force every rich man to sire a child for every half million dollars he has, and leave exactly the same amount of money to each of them, what you will have done is decrease drastically the number of truly rich people in the next generation, while boosting the numbers of the cushy (upper-)middle class.
We could combine ideas - force the rich to designate people conceived from the sperm and ova of the talented as their heirs (with numbers allocated as per the criterion above).
> Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried."
Unless my knowledge of history is lacking, this only works if you insist on including killing off/expelling/imprisoning large parts of the population from the outset as a part of the "socialism". Otherwise all "socialist" countries were in fact "Gulag socialist", and anyone who proposes a non-Gulag version has at least some ground to stand on.
Two points. First, that's baked into the pie. Marx insisted that the societal transition to communism was necessarily the result of a violent revolution that would overthrow the previous order by force.
Any sort of revolutionary transformation of a nation will inevitably have people who fight back, some overtly and some covertly. We've had two such attempts in the history of America, one successful, the other crushed, both involving long and bloody wars in which spies and traitors featured prominently. The second one in particular spawned a long line of resentment that we still haven't fully healed from to this day; just look at the still-extant notion that "the South will rise again." Today, we can laugh them off as kooks, but when the wounds were still raw, they represented an existential threat to stability and peace. Abraham Lincoln locked many of them up, even going to far as to suspend habeas corpus for them, and he defended it in those terms, asking whether it would be better to keep all the other laws and break this one, or, in order to observe habeas corpus, to allow all of the other laws to be broken.
Does that make him a "Gulag president"? Or is that simply a necessary, if distasteful, part of a government's duty to "insure domestic Tranquility"?
And second, this doesn't seem to actually address the two points Peterson raised, the arrogance of thinking that "I could do better" and the naivete of thinking you'd be left in peace to actually do better.
A violent revolution in itself isn't necessarily bad: how many of the modern developed nations did not rise from those? (Or from a violent takeover by another nation, in some cases.) But it's a risk factor to be sure, and when talking about socialists in particular I wouldn't trust them to do things differently enough if they tried that. Anyway I don't think Marx is the ultimate authority on governmental changes, if nothing else we have 140 years of history he didn't get to see.
> Does that make him a "Gulag president"?
I don't think so, because it wasn't built into the system. In an alternative history where this would become the new norm he would be (not exactly "Gulag" because of other factors, but an autocrat for sure).
> the arrogance of thinking that "I could do better"
Any socialist who wants a non-Gulag socialism doesn't have anyone to compete against.
> the naivete of thinking you'd be left in peace
You probably won't be, but Stalin in particular is a weaker example because he used exactly the Gulag ideology and mechanisms built into the system.
You say that as if gulags were orthogonal to socialism. Unfortunately, they are an inseparable feature.
The thing about socialism is that it is, at its base, a collectivist political system. The individual has value only insofar as they are a contributing member of the collective. Any opposition to the collective, whether active or passive (as in: just leave me alone), thereatens the entire project, because the collective depends on unity of action.
A useful metaphor is how an army operates: the grunt soldier on the ground *must* follow orders dilligently, because the army's fitness as a fighting force depends on everyone holding up their end. Therefore, disobedience, goldbricking, absenteeism, etc. must be punished severely.
Because the socialist polity depends on everyone doing their part (which isn't necessarily what those individuals would particularly want to be doing), and must maintain unity, anyone who doesn't fit in must be punished or purged from the system.
What you describe seems like a totalitarianism? I don't know if your definition of socialism is too narrow or it is indeed pointless or impossible to have "societal ownership of means of production" without high level of collectivism.
What is "societal ownership of means of production" supposed to mean anyway?
If you live in a relatively large country - in the tens of millions, say - how do you propose to exercise your ownership? If you postulate that "societal ownership" doesn't actually translate into each individual member of society having an ownership stake (a "share", if you will), you've just reinvented "the King owns everything". If you acknowledge that each member of society *does* have a share, then you've fallen into the classic "divorce of ownership and control" problem - the people who actually decide how the means of production are to be used are the managers, rather than the owners, which means that the political establishment and bureaucracy have sole control of your economic system - which is how real socialism has tended to shake out.
What's important to remember is that if the state owns all productive enterprise, in whatever fashion, the coercive means available to the state expand greatly. It retains its monopoly on violence, *and* it is able to exercise economic coercion, as well, because you depend on the state for your livelihood.
The ownership/control distinction makes it difficult to hold the managers accountable, and it creates significant problems of policy. Are the various state enterprises supposed to cooperate or compete? If they're supposed to cooperate, then collectivism and central planning becomes inevitable. The individual citizens thus become cogs in the system, with everything from available education to job assignments (up to, and including, where you get to live) being dictated by the Plan.
If, on the other hand, you want the collectively-owned enterprises to compete, you've got crony capitalism where politically appointed managers get rich off of businesses that they have no better claim to than you do (except, they have connections that you lack). This is also true in the cooperation scenario.
Politically, you descend into totalitarianism, because that's the only way you can reliably maintain "societal ownership". If you allow full political pluralism, you will get a government that wants to privatise state-owned property sooner, rather than later (if only to enrich themselves and their cronies).
In short, "societal ownership" concentrates power, and concentrated power will reliably be used by the powerful against the powerless. Most of the problems people have with capitalism arise from insufficient guards *against* power concentration (in politically-connected businesses that are Too Big to Fail). Trying to fight it through *greater* concentration of economic power is driving out the Devil with Satan.
>I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried."
I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's debate with Slavoj Zizek and his utter confusion that the actual person in front of him isn't saying anything remotely alike what the imaginary opponent in his head would say. (Zizek, for his part, was very polite, in a manner I cannot.)
Which is to say, I know I'm late to the party, but in the interest of the local epistemic ecosystem, I just cannot let this one slide. I mean, if you wanted to show that Adraste's argument is inherently fallacious, you probably couldn't find a better analogy to demonstrate that.
Which, in turn, is to say that no actual existing people ever argue that "real socialism has never been tried". They claim it has been tried and, empirically, stacks up pretty well to the alternatives. (To which intellectually dishonest people respond with "Stalin! Gulags!", to which we respond that we never claim it went perfectly well in every way, just that, you know, it still wins on average, and if that's your issue, you should be absolutely horrified about all the things capitalist states did throughout their history. To which intellectually dishonest people either cover their ears, start explaining how that wasn't real capitalism, or start explaining how socialism is different because it's literally all Stalin and Gulags and anything else we could point to is not real socialism. I've been there, dozens of times, quite a few of them around here.)
What's more, I suspect where this meme came from, and it just shows Peterson (or you, in case it's you who mixed up the terms) is yet another step removed from actual debate from actual people. To be precise, it was originally about communism. Since some people insist that communication requires that words mean things, they kept pointing out that communism, in its currently accepted technical definition, is just literally not something anyone has ever done (on a scale bigger than a kibbutz or a Hutterite colony). This is a simple empirical fact, which can be demonstrated not only by comparing the definition to reality, but also by the fact that none of the supposedly "communist" societies ever believed, claimed, or attempted to be one. (E.g., the Soviet Republics in the Union were "Socialist" for a reason, PR of China didn't claim even that much until as late as Deng.) However, for some other people, this is bullshit, words are supposed to be emotionally evocative, "communism" is supposed to evoke Stalin and gulags, and demands for semantical clarity are fundamentally attempts to whitewash that.
But, again, maybe it was in fact your point that Adraste is among the latter, in which case, good job. (Me, I'm on the side of Beroe, at least as far as his point is "we should be able to discuss this shit honestly", and personal experiences with this here is certainly one of the reasons.)
Yeah... no. If you go back and read Marx's actual words, he used the terms "communist" and "socialist" as synonymous and interchangeable. They mean the same thing; the "that's not really communism, it's just socialism" nonsense stems from embarrassed people trying to distance their policy preferences from inconvenient historical facts involving mountains of corpses and abject failure on every level.
I mean, how is your response anything but an attempt to cast a spell to magically turn me into a straw figure that you're familiar with?
(Also, just to cut this one short - if you ever "go back and read Marx's actual words" where he uses the terms in question the way a mid-XIX-century person would, they'll be accompanied with translator's/editor's note warning you not to interpret them in their later-Marx slash current meaning.)
So I pointed out that people have been changing the meanings of the words to try to play semantic games and obfuscate the massive failures of communism. You say I'm wrong... because the meanings have changed?
You freely admit I'm right, and therefore I'm somehow wrong. Are you even reading what you're writing?
> First, the supreme arrogance [of] "if I was in charge I could get it right!"
I would've said "You don't get to be in charge. Unless you personally are the next Stalin, Mao, Xi or Castro. Whatever idea of communism you have in your head isn't what's going to be what happens. Whoever Does What He Must To Become Supreme Leader is the one who decides. And that person won't be very nice."
But this concern is sidestepped in democratic socialism, where people can vote out the dickhead and, potentially, get rid of socialism (but probably don't, because they like it at least somewhat).
There is a certain type of person who would look at the mountains of skulls that Genghis Khan
piled up and before judging it evil, ask whether it was a state acting or a group of individuals.
States/governments, "democratic" or otherwise, have absolutely no privileged moral status: judge their acts exactly as you would any other entity, or accept that you have the moral compass no better than that of a my-god-told-me-to-it zealot.
I would judge a policeman making a legal stop and search of a vehicle or person differently than a private citizen doing the same on equally strong grounds. "Free" people choose to vest power with duly elected governments and those do have privileged status.
As I said, people can, and regularly do, cede their moral compasses to external entities, usually with justifications like that they "work in mysterious ways" or are "duly elected": road piracy, genocide against the Amalekites, extorting taxes, burning heretics, and other such acts might be frowned upon if not sanctioned by an entity accorded "privileged status."
Judging morality is an extremely subjective thing, of course, so I can't say you're "wrong" any more than I could say that about Torquemada, Paul Ehrlich or Pol Pot, just that I do not share your morality, such as it is.
It's quite possible we are talking about different subjects (and apologies if that's the case)
1. There exist "reckless" drivers who endanger lives of others on the road
2. We need a mechanism to apprehend such drivers
3. Some ad-hoc volunteer group might do this apprehending, possible one of the people sharing the road with said reckless driver
4. Alternatively you constitute an organization for the purpose of making such stops, vest them with necessary powers to increase compliance, reduce incentives for reckless driving, etc.
5. (4) is a superior moral "position" compared to (3)
I see no morally salient difference between 3. and 4.
3. I would judge this "ad-hoc volunteer group" by its actions: what its threshold for what it considers "reckless driving" was, how cruel its punishments for non-compliance were, how fair and effective its enforcement was, how it raises funds for its operation, and whether or not the group, independent of its role preventing reckless driving, recreationally murders kittens and puppies.
4. Indeed, one can vest organizations or individuals with power, even absolute power, but NOT with a moral carte blanche (or even a carte grise): they are still precisely as responsible for their actions as any other individual or group .
3. At least as important as "how cruel it's punishments" are, "how fair and effective it's enforcement" was, "how it raises funds", etc. Is "how was it constituted" and "how is it sustained". Was informed consent on the part of people who have to live with it's consequences a part of it's creation and sustenance. It may not be possible for people at large to judge a specific action (was a specific traffic stop and search necessary? Was the car actually speeding? Did the driven actually threaten?) and indeed the "truth" may never be discoverable. So as a proxy we have rules and heuristics that require compliance on the part of the public but also give recourse in case of violation by authorities. As a practical way to allow people to get on with their lives and lead lead somewhat civilized lives such an arrangement is morally superior to anything you propose.
YOU don't really believe the "informed consent" thing: "sovereign citizens" might be the only people who actually do, and they are patently wrong about the state not imposing its will on them if they explicitly refuse to consent. So you're either insidiously using a personal definition of "consent" here, or you're repeating cached thoughts; I shall, in good faith, assume the latter.
Our ignorance of the facts of any particular case does not preclude us from judging the morality of the act, only whether or not said act actually occurred. For example, not knowing whether a man fell off a cliff accidentally or was pushed doesn't mean one cannot assess the morality of pushing people off cliffs.
One can reasonably argue that the state with all its horrors is the best humanity can achieve (I do not share this pessimism, and believe there is compelling evidence to the contrary, but I recognize this as ultimately an article of faith), but I do not see why according it a privileged MORAL status is logically consequent.
It is a heavy burden to make moral judgments on one's own, and the allure of pass it off to a "higher power" has tempted men for millennia, but I exhort you resist and to carry it. Be the "impersonal arbiter of morality" that Coria rejects.
I thought you were going somewhere else with this. We should in fact treat states with considerably more scepticism and tighter standards than we hold individuals, because we know that power is insidious
Street gang and drug cartels are more powerful than single individuals too. Would you hold them to tighter standards than individuals? I wouldn't: I judge smashing kneecaps, burning children alive, exercising "eminent domain," or any other act on its own merits, independent of the power of the entity committing that act. I find that's the only way one can be "fair" about moral judgments, and that matters to me.
All good in theory, but when you have to exercise judgement on the real world with limited information, I find it helpful to have priors based on theory and evidence of how individuals behave vs how individuals as members of a governing apparatus behave, and there are very different incentives and checks and balances (of very differing degrees of effectiveness) in place for the two groups. All of this leads me to treat state actions with considerably different standards.
That is a good point! In practical matters states and individuals act at vastly different scales (individuals do not launch invasions, establish social security through payroll taxes, etc. etc.) so not sure what comparisons are meaningful.
Where they may overlap, say, in resolving disputes via "elders in the community" versus "shared legal apparatus built on sound constitutional principles" my priors treat the outcomes from the former with _greater_ skepticism than the latter.
This discussion reminds me once again of the book Ending Medical Reversal: www.amazon.com/dp/1421417723, or the section in Emperor of All Maladies: www.amazon.com/dp/B017DQSQD6 where it talks about the rise and ignominious fall of radical mastectomies (and not just because one of the quotes above literally refers to the radical mastectomy as a brutal-but-necessary practice while not realizing it was only brutal).
As anyone who has worked in a lab can tell you, the scientific process is littered with plausible hypotheses that don't survive experimental confirmation. My problem with Beroe (and to some extent Coria) is that government experimentation writ large has two features:
1. It's almost always large scale - ensuring the impact is magnified
2. It's almost never iterated and improved. Detractors wish to end the program NOW, while promoters defend the program as-is, unable to repair and adjust for fear that any admission of failure will turn popular opinion against them.
Thus, it's nearly impossible for Coria's process to eventually arrive at a refined theory through the political process, and Beroe will rarely get it right on the first try while almost always ensuring the suffering is substantial when government gets it wrong.
1a. How good something is often depends on how well it has been iteratively refined. Single-shot solutions that work in practice as well as they were conceived in the mind are practically unicorns. This is why you don't publish the first draft of your manuscript, you have to refine your prototype, and your alpha software version will be buggy.
1b. An idea that works in small batches may well be scalable, but scaling brings its own challenges to be solved. Thus, combining the proof-of-concept stage with the scaling stage often leads even good ideas to failure.
It is notable that unlike in North America and Continental Europe, eugenics never really got anywhere as a practical policy in the UK even though the idea itself originated in England. Perhaps this is a function of the fact that Galton and other leaders of the British eugenics movement disliked coercive eugenics.
Adraste says that "eugenics was banned", but a lot of what goes on in medical genetics these days (e.g. selective abortions) would surely be regarded as eugenics by someone like Galton. My prediction is that new eugenic practices like embryo selection will gradually be normalized as part of medicine and eventually no one will call them eugenics.
This may be unimportant terminology -- or it may be important! -- but I take "eugenics" to mean a policy enforced from above to affect the population, whereas the things you describe are individual parents choosing not to have a child with X, for their own reasons.
"Eugenics" is whatever somebody is against, while "not eugenics" is whatever they are for.
Basically, over the course of the 1970s, the word "eugenics" was ret-conned into One of the Causes of the Holocaust.
This fit in well with a struggle that ambitious young leftist scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin were waging against largely WASPy scientists with nonleftist views like Ed Wilson, Bill Hamilton, George Williams, and John Smith.
Evolutionary theory was a great achievement of Anglo scientists, just as Los Alamos was a great achievement of primarily Jewish scientists. And many young scientists like Gould, Lewontin, Kamin, Rose, etc., found both the ethnicity and the social and political implications of evolutionary theorists to be deplorable. That great old WASP scientists in the evolutionary domain tended to have at some point in their lives expressed enthusiasm for eugenics could be used to degrade and eventually cancel their reputations, leaving the future more open for Gould and Co.
This may be neither here nor there, but there is a little problem with the idea of a Nobel sperm bank: Nobel prize winners tend to be old, and there seems to be mounting evidence that the age of fathers is directly correlated with deleterious mutations. The effect is of course not as large as for women, but it's not small. In particular, the statistics for schizophrenia are pretty frightening.
Mandate that all scientists donate germ cells early in their careers as a condition of receiving grants, freeze them until we see how successful they wind up being.
As if people were not competitive enough! I've seen enough bad behavior from people who thirsted after the most prominent award in my field (generally unsuccessfully). OTOH, perhaps, deep down, they never liked themselves that much, and the prospect of having very many descendants would have secretly unnerved them.
Aren't grants a key source of income in academia? Coersion exists in degrees, but "people aren't entitled to their income, so taking away income isn't coercive" is a pretty hard line to take, as is similar responses like "well they could just choose a different profession, so no one forced them to be in academia".
Here is how I (maybe) convinced a liberal friend that good eugenics is ok.
(This conversation is abridged and paraphrased but the gist of it is here)
Me: I take it you are pro choice.
She: of course.
Me: And therefore are in favour of a mother aborting a foetus with Down’s syndrome.
She. Of course. Same argument
me: as an aside the EU has recently said that advances in medical intervention had largely eliminated Down’s syndrome - that medical advance was abortion based on earlier screening for the disorder.
Me: now imagine a pill that doesn’t abort the foetus but cures it. Is the taking of that pill immoral given that you are ok with a abortifacients?
She: the baby is brought to term?
Me: yes. Cured and brought to term.
She. Ok. I suppose so.
Me: one of the consequences of Down’s syndrome is low IQ. Should we then screen for people with low IQ, and design a pill to fix that?
She: hmm, I’m a bit dubious about that. That’s a leap.
Me: can the mother who knows she is carrying a child with low IQ child - assume there is a screening for that - abort that child?
She: I suppose. I mean it’s a woman’s right to choose.
Me: such screening may become common in the future. If you believe in the right to take the abortifacient you basically have to believe the mother has a right to take the pill that cures.
She: hang on. We can’t allow people to take pills that turn babies blue because they like the idea of a blue baby.
Me: you’ve abandoned the idea of bodily autonomy there but you are right, note I am specifically talking about a pill that cures, that does no harm.
She:ok.
Me: ok. So if we cure a baby with a potential 80 Iq, why not cure a foetus with a potential 100 of IQ, get it to 115
She:hold on - we don’t cure normality.
Me: we do try, all the time, to make people smarter don’t we? Look at the money we spend on education, on getting people to maximise potential.
> Me: we do try, all the time, to make people smarter don’t we? Look at the money we spend on education, on getting people to maximise potential.
Getting people to maximise their native potential is trivially not the same thing as trying to increase the ratio of innately smart people to average/dumb people. Many people, I expect, would say they support "getting people to maximise potential" on grounds of aesthetically/morally supporting something-something-self-fulfillment, not out of a general preference for smart people that would get them to press a magic button to poof smart people into existence fully-formed!
In any case, within your worldview, what's wrong with the blue babies? Nothing *harmful* about being blue. Blue people might look very fetching. If we can have some weird aesthetic preference for smartness and you think that's vald, why couldn't we have a preference for blue skin? (I would sooner allow blue babies than screening for intelligence, because I think there's a real risk of the latter becoming popular enough for whole varieties of human brains to go extinct, and I think that would be a monstrously awful thing; whereas I doubt enough people would take the blue-baby option for any of the natural pigmentations to get selected out of existence, and besides, physical traits like this seem less important to preserve than the full gamut of sentient minds.)
If somebody had, say, a liver or kidney problem that was interfering with brain function indirectly - say, disturbed sleep, or chronic low blood sugar - getting that cured could be seen as a reasonable step in pursuit of fulfilling their potential, no?
Speaking as someone who generally aligns with "Adraste" here, I think the comparison of eugenics and environmentalism misses the mark. An effective steelman would recognize the difference in scope between the two:
Eugenics is a highly specific concern with improving the "quality" of human genetics, while environmentalism is a broad umbrella term for a range of concerns about preserving ecosystem functions, conserving natural resources, preserving biodiversity, protecting cute animals, reducing human health risks from pollution, etc.
Eugenics lends itself to a narrow range of policy prescriptions, of which the most effective and least morally-risky (sex education, access to reversible birth control, prevention of sexual abuse) can all be promoted from a human-rights perspective without reference to eugenics. There are literally thousand of ways to advance environmentalism through public policy, most of which would be impossible to talk about without reference to environmental concerns because the topic is so broad.
I actually do have a strong 'internal taboo' against forms of environmentalism that seem high-risk for human rights abuses and other moral hazards. Any talk of overpopulation, antinatalism, or Malthusian dooming sets off my alarm bells for exactly the reasons you set out here. "Degrowth," primitivism, and other sorts of pastoralist reactionary environmentalism also seem dangerous, and a lot of animal rights (anything even remotely associated with Peter Singer) is very sketchy.
But those are bounded areas of concern that I can cleanly separate from other bounded areas. There's no conceptual connection between "we shouldn't dump untreated sewage and industrial chemicals in the river where we get our drinking water" and "humanity is a parasite on the planet that should be eradicated."
I don't think you can draw such a clean distinction between "we should discourage undesirables from reproducing" and "we should prevent undesirables from reproducing," or between "we should encourage desirable men to donate sperm" and "we should coerce desirable women into being impregnated with the sperm of desirable men" (also a thing that happened!)
"Eugenics" was a much broader concept at the peak of its popularity. All sorts of things considered positive for the next generation got lumped into it. I suppose that fits with ideas getting "heretical" as they leak out from their inventors to the masses (or at least midwits). https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
> Eugenics lends itself to a narrow range of policy prescriptions, of which the most effective and least morally-risky (sex education, access to reversible birth control, prevention of sexual abuse)
That's plainly wrong. The most effective eugenic prescriptions are morally abhorrent, but orders of magnitude more effective than sex ed. You can probably get one order of magnitude of effectiveness over sex ed while staying in morally light-grey area.)
I think that the discussion of Ehrlich highlights that many nominally ethical questions hinge on factual questions. The same applies to the 9/11 terrorists. If their factual beliefs were correct, then their actions would have potentially ultimately been correct.
I think in general people are too critical of others over perceived ethical shortcomings, and not critical enough when people err on the facts.
In a similar vein, I imagine that George W. Bush is probably a decent person generally, and I would not be particularly concerned in his presence.
But his hubris in being willing to make decisions at least nominally based on factual mistakes led to mountains of bodies.
As noted in this post, fossil fuels kill tens of thousands of people a year. Those deaths, too, are a function of potentially well-meaning people who limit nuclear power who are ultimately killing more people than any mass murderer could ever hope to.
Ehrlich might have "just" made a factual mistake, but factual mistakes with a lot riding on them are much worse than they are usually given credit for.
This relates to Bryan Caplan's point about how evil politicians are (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery). Politicians routinely make decisions of tremendous import and they don't devote the deserved effort determine the factual underpinnings of their decisions. This is rather like shooting bullets randomly in a bad neighborhood. It's not terribly unlikely that you'll kill a bad guy, but with no effort to determine whom you'll hurt, you could easily destroy lives of the innocent.
“Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time.”
Perhaps, but now it’s 60 years later and it’s abundantly clear that he was massively wrong. Nevertheless he has stuck to his guns all this time. No apology, no analysis of where and why he went so wrong, and most maddeningly, no effort to see what we can learn from his fiasco. Indeed, there are still plenty of people who believe he was right then and still is right today. Shameful intellectual dishonesty.
I’d be interested to see where the 1-3 IQ points per century dysgenic effect number is from. I imagined it would be much worse.
Cremieux’s work on ideal vs actual fertility (using the GSS) came out to 1.5 points lost per generation in the United States, without consideration of immigration. Considering nations with the highest measured IQs are currently on the wrong end of demographic trends (especially East Asia), I would’ve expected much worse.
I feel I'm somewhere in the middle. If you're intent on eugenicist practices, the best way in my mind would be to simply give couples as much high-quality information as possible and allow them to decide for themselves without coercion. People will (and do) practice some form of eugenics by screening not only for congenital defects but simply for partners. I think that a Nobel sperm bank will just end up being a rich smart guy vanity project rather than an atrocity. It's important to be raised by smart people, not just created by them. Considering, for instance, that genes for intellectual creativity are also linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, or that genes for entrepreneurship are linked to addictive weaknesses, you could easily roll with good dice and get low numbers, in a manner of speaking.
The real thing that scares me is this prostrate, blind, all-in worship of IQ and the lurking shadow of its ugly cousin, genetic determinism (particularly in regards to culture). I see it referenced here regarding Ashkenazi Jews. But the truth is that Ashkenazi Jews benefit socially from a heavy focus on communalism (you can read the writings of conservative Jewish people if you don't believe me) and in the most successful cases, a pedigree in high-grade European intellectual traditions. The Ashkenazim that send antisemites to the early life sections, for instance, are often descended from people who were educated in the erudite German intellectual culture that persisted into the Weimar Republic. Compare these individuals with the Hasidim in NY, whose kids often can barely speak English or do middle school mathematics and who may in fact have a communal drug problem. I distrust this IQ fetishization that has become more and more endorsed by tech-adjacent merchant rightists, and the idea that you can just up numbers and save the world is not going to lead anywhere good. I fear that it's most likely to be an apologia for elitist exploitation encoded in law. I think it's a greater threat than Eugenics writ large.
Also, on that last paragraph, the idea that you can and should brook awful abuses and necessary discomforts for vulnerable people with the idea that in the end they will be both necessary and justified itself has a precedent, it's called the 20th Century.
Sorry, what is your paragraph in Ashkenazi’s supposed to prove? They are not smart due to their communalism or educational traditions (at least at the individual level).
My point was in retort to "Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of Jews starving or in prison. If you could lift everyone up fifteen points, you could come close to ending poverty even within developed countries."
I was making a comparison between the Ashkenazi intellectual elite and an underperforming contingent to show that culture can step in where IQ is lacking to avoid the negatives that are supposed to be obviated by IQ, and that educational deficits can allow poverty despite apparent ethnic IQ advantages. As to your comment, I don't know to what you would attribute the intelligence difference. Even if you took a hard geneticist explanation surely the communal predilections would have reproductive consequences for gene propagation; unless you think Ashkenazim as we know them were formed fully out of the earth as a particular group and gifted with unique intelligence.
Pre-emancipation Ashkenazi would be a better argument for the importance of culture. They weren't accomplishing much of interest to the rest of society with the high IQs their many generations of selection had produced.
It's funny that people are taking "Jews are smarter for genetic reasons" as a given. Studies have given very different results depending on who is conducting them - and, if the study shows no difference from the mean, that is ascribed to antisemitism. (That is certainly the case with a study by Karl Pearson, who was no antisemite and was in fact disappointed; of course that study is very old indeed.) The average IQ in Israel is not particularly high, even if you restrict to Ashkenazim. There have been periods where there has been a very notable concentration of intellectuals or people in the professions with Jewish last names, but then you have to take into account you are comparing what was often mainly an urban middle-class population (often impoverished, but middle-class nonetheless) at a time when the bulk of population was neither urban nor middle-class.
Could there be some advantageous mutations that were more frequent among Ashkenazim? It could be the case. But (a) only a minority of Ashkenazim are likely to have had them, (b) much of that must have left the group by now, since they most likely also affected whether carriers tended to marry out of the group! (Out-of-group marriage was a great rarity before WWI - but you see it all the time in biographies of high achievers from that period; in fact lists of great Jewish this-or-another are full of people that Jews would not usually consider Jews.) At any rate, in this case, all of that genetic talk is, AFAIK, conjectural, and can be twisted into just about any just-so story people like.
The IQ/race nexus is one of those things that always seems to lead back to a group of self-appointed superiors ignoring their own weaknesses (in this case mental health, physical health, athletic ability, social ability...) and elevating their one self-percieved advantage to the status of a universal good that must be distributed to the world by fiat.
This image of an anxious, obese loner deciding that everyone needs to have his children because he scored well on a written assessment gets extra funny when you factor in that one of his other pet obsessions (AI) seems placed to trivialize human effort in math, coding, writing and games long before it comes for any activity which requires hand-eye coordination or social skills.
I looked up the Nobel sperm bank, because I'd never heard of it, and it doesn't appear that it was outlawed or ran into legal issues. It operated for 19 years, produced 217 children (none actually descended from Nobelists), and then shut down when the founder died - it was funded out of his own pocket and his heirs weren't interested in carrying it on. It seems like the main obstacle to such a project isn't "eugenics is taboo" so much as "it's hard for a random guy to go up to a Nobel prize winner, ask them for their sperm, and get a yes."
Why stop there? The government could select superior female specimens to ensure the highest quality of baby produced, after all there's no point in wasting the Nobel sperm on average or low quality women.
I'm sure I heard of something like that being carried out somewhere... it must definitely have worked, right? High quality sperm, high quality mothers, government backing - what could go wrong?
The unfortunate reason eugenics and the like get a bad rap is because in the real world, the kind of people who went "Wow, that is a *marvellous* idea, we definitely should do it!" **were** the Nazis. To quote from an 1895 story by M.P. Shiel, titled "The S.S." about a secret society of eugenicists killing off the unfit and disguising those murders as suicides:
"And now let me apply these facts to the Europe of our own time. We no longer have world-serious war—but in its place we have a scourge, the effect of which on the modern state is precisely the same as the effect of war on the ancient, only,— in the end,— far more destructive, far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting. The name of this pestilence is Medical Science. Yes, it is most true, shudder — shudder— as you will! Man's best friend turns to an asp in his bosom to sting him to the basest of deaths. The devastating growth of medical, and especially surgical, science—that, if you like, for us all, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of what surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions" whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children. The net result is in each case the same — the altered ratio of the total amount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive disease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent, must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy …We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease — laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence. Do you know that at this moment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likeness suffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all of whom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in the hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundred people, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formed men, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women? On every hand—with a thrill of intensest joy, I say it!— is to be seen, if not yet commencing civilisation, then progress, progress— wide as the world— toward it: only here— at the heart— is there decadence, fatty degeneration. Brain-evolution— and favouring airs— and the ripening time— and the silent Will of God, of God— all these in conspiracy seem to be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamable luxury of glory— when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death, more disease— that is the sad, the unnatural record; children especially— so sensitive to the physician's art— living on by hundreds of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow, who in former times would have died. And if you consider that the proper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing the curable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, you may find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simple question: why? Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is a cruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to say that such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must therefore be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced, to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribald tongue of a priest might falter…Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, of the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the function of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say, are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know how Sparta—the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her—answered them. Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-being of the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fell under the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of his parents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but a commission of the Phyle in which he was born decided the question. If he was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on a place called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of this that never did the sun in his course light on man half so godly stalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout old Sparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and for all, they were resolved to have done with. The word which they used to express the idea "ugly," meant also "hateful," "vile," "disgraceful" — and I need hardly point out to you the significance of that fact alone; for they considered — and rightly— that there is no sort of natural reason why every denizen of earth should not be perfectly hale, integral, sane, beautiful — if only very moderate pains be taken to procure this divine result."
Maybe not quite, but we've already turned the fertility industry into an industry, where surrogates (often in Third World countries) carry the babies.
You can, if well-off enough, buy the ova of young, healthy women (often screened to be college-students and athletic), get donor sperm if the male partner's sperm isn't good quality enough, and hire a surrogate to gestate the pregnancy, thus enabling someone to have a baby without one speck of participation in the entire process. Why not farm out the tedious work of nine months pregnancy to the lesser women while the ova of the superior women are used to create the poly-genetically screened embryos for implantation?
"Thank you for your interest and we all look forward to being able to offer you the option of making absolutely certain that your next pregnancy arrives in your pre-chosen choice of pink or blue."
Throw in "yeah, I want Junior to have green eyes" while you're at it, might as well once you're going this route:
This is a fully general argument against absolutely every political and social idea ever. Just assert that whatever idea you don't like will be carried to whatever horrific and ridiculous extremes you can think of, and you can demand that the whole idea be taken off the table. And the best thing about this is all the thinking it saves.
It’s a bleak picture but it sounds like natural selection at its best. It’s awesome in the true sense of the word. The possibility that reproduction, the essential motivating factor in animal life, will finally become something we can do with tools.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for people to do this. But why would even 10% of the population be interested?
While infant adoption and similar things do happen, most people are much more motivated to put in the work to raise infants that are biologically theirs than to raise unrelated infants, no matter how "perfect" the latter may be. This is an evolutionarily stable situation for obvious reasons.
And no, the Chinese government has not shown any interest in coercing people to do what you describe, either.
The market that actually exists is the one for enabling people to have great children *who the parents feel are biologically theirs*.
>Now, in fact Galton was almost as wrong as Ehrlich - modern research suggests the dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century - things will be very different long before we notice it.
Extrapolating backwards, wouldn't this imply that ancient Romans were around 120-160 IQ, and ancient Babylonians 140-220? Is this trend only valid under modern conditions or something?
I would assume it’s only very recently in human history in which the correlation between intelligence and societal success has not naturally been followed with the passing on of genes through more children. That is, the trend for wealthier people to have fewer children to pass on their genetics seems to have only really begun to occur within the past century.
Wealth correlated to inherited land ownership rather than intellectual ability throughout most historical times and places. What about that screams "survival of the smartest"?
Can you read a clock? Then you're calculating in base 60. Angles are also measured in base 60 (i.e. 360 degrees = 60*6). It's true that most of the numbers we encounter are in base 10 (and even clocks and angles are rendered in base 10 for common use), but that's because of dumb historical reasons. Base 10 is quite inefficient because it only has 2 factors (2 and 5), so it's difficult to subdivide and do fractions with. Base 12 (with the factors 2, 3, 4, and 6) is much better than base 10 and base 60 is simply base 12 with the factor 5 thrown in, so it's really quite elegant.
I personally prefer base 16 because I'm a computer programmer - for general uses, it's hard to find anything better than base 60.
The hypothesis as I have heard it is that the massive decline in infant mortality brought about by the Industrial Revolution allowed for a level of dysgenics that could never have happened in more malthusian times, so the decline will only have started a couple of centuries or so ago.
The fact that a lot of people still take Paul R. Ehrlich or his more mainstream communicators seriously even to this day is quite remarkable. One part of me is quite bitter over how fears of underpopulation are starting to become more mainstream and a respectable high status belief in certain circles, mainly due to the fact that most people concerned about underpopulation, probably would get behind the overpopulation hysteria in the counterfactual world where such beliefs are trendy and somewhat contrarian. That is most people in the underpopulation camp lack the proper justification and analytic tools required to deduce that overpopulation is not a concern, and the main reason they believe underpopulation is a problem is due seeing some short form media of Elon Musk etc. saying that he thinks its a problem. Don't get me wrong I think Malthus's Iron law of wages is coming for all of us in the long run, due to diminishing returns to labor and the fact that an additional child imposes costs on your other children, and many of the positive externalities are not as big and as long lasting as they may seem, and future creatures can replicate at a much higher rate etc. Although high tech subsistence isn't so bad.
“They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us. Show me another idea like that and I bet I’d be against that one too.”
The one that occurred to me is transgender advocacy pushing sexual confusion on children.
Perhaps we need a word for mixed-economy model countries. Yes, Denmark and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model countries in general are very different from Venezuela. They are also quite different from the United States.
"An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare[15] in a largely tax-funded system."
"High trade union density and collective bargaining coverage.[23] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United States."
"The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score."
"The Nordic countries share active labour market policies as part of a social corporatist economic model intended to reduce conflict between labour and the interests of capital. This corporatist system is most extensive in Norway and Sweden, where employer federations and labour representatives bargain at the national level mediated by the government. Labour market interventions are aimed at providing job retraining and relocation."
Socialism is public ownership of the means of production. Denmark is just a tiny capitalist jurisdiction with a homogeneous population that can run more interventionist government marginally more successfully than other places. Don't confuse it with socialism.
That is an extremely narrow definition of socialism. In the USA, the GOP routinely denounces as socialist a wide variety of government programs which don't involve any public ownership of the means of production.
The problem with that argument is that it seems like it could be applied to almost any position. For example, you could also describe the conservatives who want ban trans kids from getting medical care and force them into the foster system if their parents disagree as "smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit" because they think they know what's best for these children better than the kids and their families do. I'm not trying to get into an object level debate about transgenderism - my point is, if you think any position held by smug Western elites is wrong, you have to dismiss every political view that has ever been held by a large number of people.
If you ask me, the lesson to be learned from eugenics and forced sterilization is that common-sense morality is usually correct. Trolleys are rare outside of thought experiments. If you think that the only way to save the world is to do things that most people would consider serious human rights violations, you're probably wrong.
"and unfortunately, power mad leftists frequently push ahead regardless, slaughtering thousands or millions because they're so sure the world has to change to whatever their cult calls for" Power-mad right-wingers, too. The Nazis seem relevant to a conversation about eugenics.
This post is largely about how well-meaning people can make horrible, destructive mistakes because they had too much faith in their own intelligence and their own knowledge of what's best for everyone. That failure mode appears in all groups, including your in-group.
Power mad rightists would also happily slaughter millions given the chance, but the memetic immunity against fascism ended up being stronger for some reason, although it seems on the decline lately.
The conservatives you are describing are not “elites”, in the sense that they are not part of the intelligentsia. Being part of the intelligentsia is the common denominator I see between the eugenics elite and the transgender elite.
So I’ll grant you “smug” but reject “elites.”
Nor do I think that conservatives are in general over impressed with their own intelligence - that’s a sin of the left, not of the right, putting aside the Wills & Buckleys.
I like your observation about trolley car problems. And I agree that “common sense” morality seems to be more often right than wrong.
But I think that your statement about trans kids being banned from medical care etc. assumes the premise - namely, that they are actually trans. It appears to me that there’s a kind of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy aspect to the trans situation when it comes to parents who support their supposedly trans kids, at least the ones who aren’t adults, and I think that is largely at the bottom of conservative questioning of the reality of trans in situations involving children,
Well I guess that’s a matter of opinion, and it’s an opinion he seems to hold. Reading his prose to me is like watching someone preen in front of a mirror.
I guess this is a definitional thing. To me, "elite" means "wealthy and powerful," not necessarily part of the intelligentsia.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far from the subject of the post, but I think that if most trans kids were that way because their parents had Munchausen by Proxy, more of them would rebel and detransition. In most cases of MbP, if the child survives into adolescence, they start to rebel and try to either summon help or escape. The charade rarely lasts into adulthood, and if it does, it's usually because the parent went to extreme lengths to maintain control, like Dee Dee Blanchard handcuffing her daughter to a bed. On the other hand, most adults who transitioned as children stay transitioned, even though most of them are out of their parents' control and could detransition if they wanted.
David Reimer is a good illustration of what happens on the rare occasion that a child is forced to transition. He rebelled against girlhood for his entire childhood until he was finally allowed to detransition at fifteen. If transgender children were made that way by their parents, we'd expect detransition rates to be much higher.
I think we don't have enough good data to know anything yet, and there certainly seem to be some indications of parental pressure. I don't know about Jazz Jennings state of mind as a six year old child, but I do think a mother who parades her kid around on talk shows, is perfectly happy to open up her home and family for seasons of a reality TV show (including discussing her child's personal intimate life) and seemingly doing her best to turn it into a modern version of a carnival freakshow attraction is motivated at least in part by her own ego and desire for fame and notoriety.
Oh, some parents definitely love the attention. But they seem to be a small minority of parents of trans kids. There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States, but we've never heard of the vast majority of them because their parents don't plaster them all over the media. It's the same with parents of sick kids - a small minority love the attention their kid's illness brings them, and an even smaller minority deliberately sicken their children, but we certainly shouldn't assume that most parents of sick kids have ulterior motives.
>There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States, but we've never heard of the vast majority of them because their parents don't plaster them all over the media.
It is rather a tragedy- this includes trans adults, not just teens- that the people that become the "face" of the movement are so often the absolute worst candidates for such, and poison the perception regarding the whole populous.
" There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States"
"Estimated" is the weasel word there. Are they that many, or are we only seeing an increase due to social factors? Is it a case that there were many more trans gender people in the past, but they were forcibly repressed? How do we measure transness? Do we go "if three year old Johnny wants a sparkly princess dress like his sister has, that means Johnny is trans and we should be calling her Janie" or do we cool it until Johnny is 12/16/18?
“Elite” as the wealthy & powerful is certainly one definition. But for eugenics, I don’t think that the people pushing it were that kind of elite.
The kind of “elite” I see doing that is a self-appointed intellectual elite, whose power derives from the respect we accord people who are well-educated and who are in a position to disseminate their ideas through public media. And that’s the same “elite” I see pushing transgenderism on kids.
I don’t think that MbP parents necessarily “force” their children to transition. But it does seem that some parents create an environment for children in which they are guided toward transition, and the parents seem to be emotionally invested in the process, beyond simply wanting what’s best for the child.
No doubt, with some kids it won’t work. Whether we will see any kind of mass de-transitioning remains to be seen. It’s got to be tough.
It appears to me that the trans situation is a subset of the eugenics situation. Or maybe they just overlap. Both involve medical interference with existing biological functions, for social purposes. In both, there’s a core of logic that must be recognized. But as with so many things, we run into Yogi Berra: “ “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
Except the conservatives are not, by and large, the elite; think of the sneering about the "transphobic backlash" with regard to the Bud Light boycott. I don't think the people boycotting Budweiser were doing it out of hatred of trans people but rather "you told us to piss off because you didn't want our dirty custom anymore and this was the kind of market you preferred, so okay, we're pissing off".
>If you ask me, the lesson to be learned from eugenics and forced sterilization is that common-sense morality is usually correct. Trolleys are rare outside of thought experiments. If you think that the only way to save the world is to do things that most people would consider serious human rights violations, you're probably wrong.
Unfortunately this assumes the conclusion and privileges whoever gets to set the definition of "human rights." Or does the heuristic only work on the world scale?
"Don't perform mass experiments and off-label drug testing on a confused, easily-influenced populace" sounds pretty common-sense to me, but it's not too popular to my left. Common-sense morality fails when word games get played, like the distinctions between treating people equally and treating them equitably.
>"Don't perform mass experiments and off-label drug testing on a confused, easily-influenced populace" sounds pretty common-sense to me, but it's not too popular to my left.
That's because it also assumes conclusions and privileges people who get to set the definitions of "confused" and "easily-influenced." After all, things that are now generally considered to be human rights violations have been justified on the grounds that the victims were unable to make their own decisions, such as slavery and colonialism, or the cases of professional guardians who get a doctor to declare some well-off elderly person to be mentally incompetent so the guardian can take control, dump the victim in a cheap nursing home, and steal all their money. It also raises questions of whether it's better to experiment on a confused, easily-influenced populace than to let natural processes take their course when those processes would be harmful - how do you think pediatric cancer drugs are developed? It seems to me that the right is just as prone to playing word games as the left.
>how do you think pediatric cancer drugs are developed?
Carefully, with good data practices, not *en masse* with shoddy data collection, online scripts to skirt around the safety protocols, and resistance to improving that data collection.
>It seems to me that the right is just as prone to playing word games as the left.
I hold the left in substantial "word game debt" due to the multiple wreckings of "racism," and for over-reliance on claiming that things are human rights, but I would agree that the right is not completely immune to a problem that is inherent to language.
There is currently a fairly prominent Canadian psychologist who is loudly denouncing transgender advocacy as damaging to children (and families and even those it purports to help), and has what appears to be a reasonably large corpus of data to back that claim.
Yes, I remember reviewing Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints (a fairly racist anti-immigration novel from 1973) and was struck how it's basically saying the same stuff as Paul Erlich, just in a hotter and more viscerally disgusted way. He even used the same target as Erlich: India.
Whether or not horseshoe theory is real, it's definitely possible to smuggle some pretty nasty stuff into mainstream discourse if you brand it correctly.
“When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides." That quote isn't from some far-right terrorist's manifesto. It's from famous environmentalist Pentti Linkola.
While the soulless capitalists who don't care much about life-for-its-own-sake one way or another will instead direct those hands to assemble more boats.
They'll also keep the biggest and gaudiest boats to themselves, evil bastards that they are. Poor people don't care that they have more stuff than ancient kings, what galls them is that the kings of today have more still.
Having the boat at all means they're alive to complain about it, rather than being preemptively sacrificed for the lesser good. Fixing that allocation problem may turn out to be a relatively simple matter of implementing Georgist land-value tax.
The success of the Population Bomb and its influence on the popular imagination is the social context in which The Camp of the Saints was written. It's not coincidental that to reflects those anxieties. It's riffing on them and marrying them to a more overtly bigoted tradition.
I was thoroughly confused by the last paragraph, when Coria inexplicably starts talking about rights and democratic process in the middle of making a point about outside-viewing in morality. Which sort of made me realize that this post, especially Coria's footnote, seems to be talking about two things - namely, society-building and meta-ethics - at once.
This is a mistake. Those are different concepts and ought to be considered on their own. (It's possible to argue that they're closely linked, but it's still not something to be assumed implicitly, like here.) The references this post makes to utilitarianism and deontology make no sense, because it's not actually about Ehrlich's personal conduct. It's about the way people perceive, or should perceive, cases like him - which is not at all the same thing. Hence, the last paragraph making no mention of the object level (which one of them is actually right) in favor of remarking on their character.
The problem is that simultaneously discussing ethics ("what is right") and society-building ("how to coordinate") leads to intuitions about one being erroneously carried over to the other. From the Ehrlich vs Adraste example: if you don't consciously keep track of which side of the ethics/coordination divide they're talking about, it sure sounds like Coria's saying that "whoever lobbies the government more successfully" is a mechanism for determining the one in the right, which is obviously bonkers.
In general, this is greatly reminiscent of the Niceness, Community and Civilization post, which I remember being similarly confusing.
"You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion."
Is there a name for this argument? It would be so ueeful.
So many insightful words, but no mention of Eugenics and Other Evils by Chesterton? He got it right, even writing before eugenics became associated with Nazism.
re: Coria's dysegenics point, if IQ is going down 1-3 points per century, what's keeping it from going down faster in certain places? Fast enough that we do in fact notice it?
Global temperatures can rise 1°C, but local amplification at the poles means we see a rise of 5°C there. Do areas of high dysgenic amplification exist?
My understanding is that the population dysgenic idea is a bit of a nothing-burger that goes away once you understand the core concept of changes in variation under greater or lesser selective pressures.
I think that the comparison of environmentalism to eugenics misses a pretty major way in how they treat the individual. Eugenics necessitates playing games with how people have children and necessitates picking and choosing between good genes and bad genes--which easily elides to good people and bad people.
Environmentalism can run into those issues, but they aren't at the core of environmentalism, which actually says very little about humans and indeed is usually very much about the flourishing of all humans--not picking winners and losers.
Eugenics comes off badly in the exchange precisely because it is at its very roots premised on dangerous ways of understanding the human subject.
Any official, state led eugenics policy necessarily involves force. Any private eugenics policy is indistinguishable from normal mate selection.
I don't think most people object to a woman choosing as handsome, wealthy, and intelligent a man as she can get. And most people don't object to a man doing the same. And I guess this is eugenics by some definition. Likewise sperm banks sorting sperm based on education, looks, etc. But it's private, without the use of state force.
The issue is the use of state force. Which always turns tyrannical because we are talking about the state intervening in necessarily private affairs. Without an apparatus to monitor who is having sex and pregnant the entire policy becomes unenforceable. And any such laws need to be enforced against situations where there is no clear victim. For example, by fining people for having kids or giving people money for having kids. And at some point it's realized things like forced abortions make better financial sense.
Galton's ideas (which I am getting from reading his essays right now) is that there would be Certificates showing how young men and women were fit for marriage with scores from their teachers, etc. over their lives. High-scorers encouraged to marry each other and start having kids (at least three adult male children) early. Social pressure around making eugenic marriages, including "you only think you love this guy, now be sensible and marry the guy your parents picked out". Eugenics using the force of religion or indeed becoming a quasi-religion in order to permeate and influence society.
So nothing like living in a goldfish bowl with all your choices voted on by committee and being made to take every action in line with what gets you the best score on your Certificate of Fitness! Sorry, Galton made it a Diploma (see below).
Galton worked out his own system of statistical distribution in the general population where his M was “The M in the upper line occupies the position of Mediocrity, or that of the average of what all have received” (so, the average or 100 IQ normie). Grades above that are R, S, T, U, V and above. These are measures of “civic worth”:
“It will assist in comprehending the values of different grades of civic worth to compare them with the corresponding grades of adult male stature in our nation. I will take the figures from my “ Natural Inheritance,” premising that the distribution of stature in various peoples has been well investigated and shown to be closely normal. The average height of the adult males, to whom my figures refer, was nearly 5 feet 8 inches, and the value of their " normal-talent " (which is a measure of the spread of distribution) was very nearly 1 3/4 inches. From these data it is easily reckoned that Class U would contain men whose heights exceed 6 feet 1 ¼ inches. Even they are tall enough to overlook a hatless mob, while the higher classes, such as V, W and X, tower above it in an increasingly marked degree. So the civic worth (however that term may be defined) of U-class men, and still more of V-class, are notably superior to the crowd, though they are far below the heroic order. The rarity of a V-class man in each specified quality or group of qualities is as 35 in 10,000, or say, for the convenience of using round numbers, as 1 to zoo. A man of the W class is ten times rarer, and of the X class rarer still; but I shall avoid giving any more exact definition of X than as a value considerably rarer than V. This gives a general but just idea of the distribution throughout a population of each and every quality taken separately so far as it is normally distributed.”
Naturally, you want to find and encourage the higher classes:
“Diplomas.—It will be remembered that Mr. Booth’s classification did not help us beyond classes higher than S in civic worth. If a strong and widely felt desire should arise to discover young men whose position was of the V, W or X order, there would not be much difficulty in doing so. Let us imagine, for a moment, what might be done in any great University, where the students are in continual competition in studies, in athletics, or in public meetings, and where their characters are publicly known to associates and to tutors. Before attempting to make a selection, acceptable definitions of civic worth would have to be made in alternative terms, for there are many forms of civic worth. The number of men of the V, W or X classes whom the University was qualified to contribute annually must also be ascertained. As was said, the proportion in the general population of the V class to the remainder is as 1 to 300, and that of the W class as 1 in 3000. But students are a somewhat selected body because the cleverest youths, in a scholastic sense, usually find their way to Universities. A considerably high level, both intellectually and physically, would be required as a qualification for candidature. The limited number who had not been automatically weeded away by this condition might be submitted in some appropriate way to the independent votes of fellow-students on the one hand, and of tutors on the other, whose ideals of character and merit necessarily differ. This ordeal would reduce the possible winners to a very small number, out of which an independent committee might be trusted to make the ultimate selection. They would be guided by personal interviews. They would take into consideration all favourable points in the family histories of the candidates, giving appropriate hereditary weight to each. Probably they would agree to pass over unfavourable points, unless they were notorious and flagrant, owing to the great difficulty of ascertaining the real truth about them. Ample experience in making selections has been acquired even by scientific societies, most of which work well, including perhaps the award of their medals, which the fortunate recipients at least are tempted to consider judicious. The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer, owing to the smaller number of female students between whom comparisons might be made on equal terms. In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination ; and as their personal qualities do not usually admit of being tested so thoroughly as those of men, it would be necessary to lay all the more stress on hereditary family qualities, including those of fertility and prepotency."
Then you breed superior babies by matching and marrying off the Diploma holders:
“An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, by encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily.”
Ah, yes. Dividing people based on qualities, bringing social pressure to bear on them to act their class, and religious-like control of women's marital choices. Truly this is a plan of peace and contains nothing that's historically led to strife or violence.
And what happens when it doesn't work? When people don't adopt the new religion? Do they use force? Or do they give up and go home? Does he pay any attention to implementation at all?
"Does he pay any attention to implementation at all?"
Education and science, of course! Just inform the public of the benefits of eugenics and they'll follow along happily! Also, parents have always controlled young women's marital choices so just get the mothers to make sure their daughters pick eugenically suitable young men, it's easy!
"The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected, is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused. Public Opinion has done as much as this on many past occasions and in various countries, of which much evidence is given in the Essay on Restrictions in Marriage. It is now ordering our acts more intimately than we are apt to suspect, because the dictates of Public Opinion become so thoroughly assimilated that they seem to be original and individual to those who are guided by them. By comparing the current ideas at widely different epochs and under widely different civilizations we are able to ascertain what part of our convictions is really innate and permanent, and what part has been acquired and is transient.
It is above all things needful for the successful progress of Eugenics that its advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy on its behalf than the future will confirm ; otherwise a re-action will be invited. A great deal of investigation is still needed to shew the limit of practical Eugenics, yet enough has been already determined to justify large efforts to instruct the public in an authoritative way, as to the results hitherto obtained by sound reasoning, applied to the undoubted facts of social experience. "
"An authoritative way" does cover a lot of ground, doesn't it? But first let us try "Have babies for Jesus, I mean Darwin":
"The means that might be employed to compass these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of married life, healthy homes, the pressure of public opinion, honours, and above all the introduction of motives of religious or quasi-religious character. Indeed, an enthusiasm to improve the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to the sense of a religious obligation."
Snob appeal is the way to go, mostly; you don't want to marry a lower-class individual, now do you, young lady of quality from a county family? Mama would faint dead away!:
"Perhaps the fairest approximation may be that these influences would cause the X women to bring into the world an average of one adult son and one adult daughter in addition to what they would otherwise have produced. The table of descent applies to one son or to one daughter per couple ; it may now be read as specifying the net gain and showing its distribution. Should this estimate be thought too high, the results may be diminished accordingly.
It is no absurd idea that outside influences should hasten the age of marrying and make it customary for the best to marry the best. A superficial objection is sure to be urged that the fancies of young people are so incalculable and so irresistible that they cannot be guided. No doubt they are so in some exceptional cases. I lately heard from a lady who belonged to a county family of position that a great aunt of hers had scandalised her own domestic circle two generations ago by falling in love with, the undertaker at her father’s funeral and insisting on marrying him. Strange vagaries occur, but considerations of social position and of fortune, with frequent opportunities of intercourse, tell much more in the long run than sudden fancies that want roots. In a community deeply impressed with the desire of encouraging marriages between persons of equally high ability, the social pressure directed to produce the desired end would be so great as to ensure a notable amount of success."
Though Galton is open to immigration, in a sense; Buy A Brainy Baby Today!
"Worth of Children.—The brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes. If such people as would be classed W or X could be distinguishable as children and procurable by money in order to be reared as Englishmen, it would be a cheap bargain for the nation to buy them at the rate of many hundred or some thousands of pounds per head. Dr. Farr, the eminent statistician, endeavoured to estimate the money worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer and thenceforward living during the usual time and in the ordinary way of his class. Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capitalised the value at the child’s birth of two classes of events, the one the cost of maintenance while a child and when helpless through old age, the other its earnings as boy and man. On balancing the two sides of the account the value of the baby was found to be five pounds. On a similar principle, the worth of an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. Some such “talented” folk fail, but most succeed, and many succeed greatly. They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and light of the nation, raising its tone, enlightening its difficulties and imposing its ideals. The great gain that England received through the immigration of the Huguenots would be insignificant to what she would derive from an annual addition of a few hundred children of the classes W and X. I have tried, but not yet succeeded to my satisfaction, to make an approximate estimate of the worth of a child at birth according to the class he is destined to occupy when adult. It is an eminently important subject for future investigators, for the amount of care and cost that might profitably be expended in improving the race clearly depends on its result."
I dunno, to me it sounds like Galton was essentially just reinventing society as it pretty much already existed, just with a little more paperwork and bureaucracy
This is actually kind of a neat idea... for a Black Mirror episode. Sure, in Galton's time, implementation was infeasible. But we have dating apps today, and from what I've heard, most young people meet online nowadays. How difficult would it be to introduce eugenic algorithms into those apps ? How do we know this had not been done already ?
Eugenics violates the widely held sacred value of "all people are of equal moral worth" (maybe thier actions have consequences, but being dark skinned or low IQ or whatever doesn't make you unworthy)
Not sure that it quite does: you can give everybody who is born equal moral worth without claiming that there is such as a right to be born (let alone that it should be equal).
General thought on Eugenics, not really specific to this post, but even if think it's a good idea in the abstract (I don't) it seems like an odd moment in history to be thinking about bringing it back given:
1. We're on the verge of AGI. At minimum, that's going to make what was previously called "human capital" no longer a scarce resource, and it may make the debate irrelevant for many other reasons.
2. We're on the verge of cheaply available genetic engineering.
There's an argument that to mitigate AI existential risk, we need to start producing as many very intelligent babies as possible, and postpone AGI for as many decades as possible. (The hope is that the babies would grow up and work on the alignment problem.)
There's also an argument that AI consistently proves that people are terrible at understanding what constitutes intelligence or not.
Are we really planning to rejigger the global human genome towards better mathematicians, coders and chess players when these are the areas most liable to being AI'd away? Shouldn't we be I'm the process of promoting all genetic variation instead? Or, if we have to pick traits, pick those known to be resistant to replacement (social skills, the ability to work with one's hands).
Boring old ground, but footnote 4—and by extension, the whole piece—rest on some pretty bad arguments about whether eugenics would be great if we could bracket the whole genocide bit.
Artificial selection can definitely alter domesticated animal populations, overwhelmingly for their worse: modern farmed animals collapse into a litany of congenital conditions if kept alive past the late adolescence when they’re usually slaughtered, and purebred dogs don’t have it much better. Humans went through so many intense and recent bottlenecks that already we’re much more inbred than most of the other species we domesticated, so it’s very likely that massively expanding the prevalence of any small subset of our gene pool—there are under 200 living Nobel laureates!—would have serious drawbacks even if it worked as intended. “Superior” genes might not be as important as plain old hybrid vigor.
Similarly, intelligence—like religion and profession—is definitely heritable, but for very well-worn reasons it doesn’t follow that it’s “genetic” and certainly not that it can be modulated by eugenics. There are many plausible non-genetic explanations for why rich people have rich children, most obviously that rich people spend and bequeath more money per child, allowing them to outcompete poor children for a limited number of privileged positions in hierarchical societies. Non-genetic factors like these are clearly dependent on rich kids being small in number compared to poor kids—come on, Scott, we all know you can engage more seriously than this with ideas you reject.
To be fair, there's room for increasing opportunity by disproportionately increasing rich people's fertility purely through mechanical redistribution of dynastic wealth into a larger number of heirs. This obviously has little relevance to "Nobel sperm banks"; subsidizing contraceptives for people who can't afford either contraceptives or kids does help with this, but subsidizing childrearing to balance the other side of the equation would be much better for human flourishing, for the intellectual and physical quality of the next generation, and for the economy (supposedly, I am not a macroeconomist).
I would simply modify tax thresholds based on the number of children you have. Some countries (such as the US) allow joint filing between yourself and your spouse (so that income thresholds are effectively doubled, very useful in single-income households) but as far as I know no country also lets you joint-file with your children. This seems like a reasonable and defensible way to encourage rich people to have more children.
It's quite hard to tax-incentivize rich people into having more children, as South Korea and Scandinavia are discovering to their chagrin. Meanwhile, if your goal is to improve the next generation, redistributing money specifically to rich children is bad policy unless you're confident that investing in proliferating the (impossible-to-prove) superiority of rich genetics is more cost-effective than remedying the (empirically proven) deleterious effects of lead, parental stress, and large class sizes on poor children.
That would encourage poor people to have children, though, and we want to encourage rich people to have children. Welfare babies are already a thing, we don't want to supercharge that.
Each mother would get earnings in proportion to the earnings of their offspring. It could be argued that the poor are more income-constrained though, I guess.
The correlation between wealth and intelligence is actually pretty low (about 0.2), and twin studies have very firmly established that adult IQ is about 80% heritable. I would suggest reading Plomin or any other book on behavioral genetics if you're not familiar with the research.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm no expert (I work in developmental neuropsych), but my main objections to twin studies are the standard ones: parents and others treat monozygotic twins more similarly than dizygotic ones, arguably even when raised apart, making some environmental influences appear genetic, and heritability is always indexed to a specific environmental landscape whose inputs are obviously shifting rapidly in the case of human intelligence.
Begging your indulgence, could you spell out the connection between the low correlation of wealth with intelligence and my argument that the heritability of wealth is due to the literal heritability of wealth?
Specifically, I'm trying to respond to
> eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the clustering of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
My alternative explanation for why richer people have richer children is that they have more money to give each child. Nobel sperm banks don't confer this benefit, and giving contraceptives to poor people does increase the proportion of rich people in the next generation but only by reducing the total number of workers, which economists all seem to think is bad for societal productivity. Therefore I don't think your eugenics will yield a richer society. Is the 0.2 figure meant to respond to this argument?
By counting "elicited" phenomena like "does your first-grade teacher think you're cute and pay extra attention to you?" or "do you have big front teeth that make people call you a nerd?" as genetic x environmental effects.
Also, monozygotic twins are much more likely to share a placenta!
Yes! And so is every environmental effect, which you can't experience if you had an embryonic lethal aneuploidy. These are trivial examples, but it continues to be true in more interesting ways that every developmental event is a multilateral process that requires both a permissive environment and competent cells or tissues.
This is why it's never strictly correct to apply the G/E model unless you're in a lab context where you can fully specify the range of genotypes and environments. People hear "70% heritable" and slip to "70% genetic" and then "could be improved 70% by doing eugenics", but even a bona fide causal genetic trait in humans is liable to evaporate when something as trivial as the popularity of schoolyard chants about buck teeth changes.
At least some studies have unsatisfactory definitions of "raised apart". For example, if the parents divorced and one child stays with each parent, then this counts as "raised apart". Even if they regularly visit each other and spend time with their other biological parent. In these cases, there will still be a lot of shared environment.
I have also heard claims that a very substantial portion of "genetic twins raised apart" were cases where the social parents of the twin were biological relatives, which also suggests shared environments. I don't know whether this applies only to some particularly bad twin studies, or whether it is enough to cast doubt on the majority of twin studies. (If someone knows, please tell me.)
It used to be common to deliberately raise adopted identical twins apart, so that they wouldn't even be aware of each other. The documentary "Three Identical Strangers" is about such a case.
Just to be clear - (a) 80% is a high figure, isn't it, with some other studies giving lower figures, even in rich countries? (In poor countries, the probability that you'll be severely deprived to the extent that your intelligence will likely be affected is higher, thereby making heritability lower.) (b) "heritability" means something different here than what the person in the street would take it to mean - it means the correlation of your IQ (or other traits) with that of your hypothetical (or real) identical twin, raised apart. The parent-child correlation is much lower. What is the predictive power of (IQ of the father, IQ of the mother)?
It doesn't take much to correct for inbreeding (a single outbreeding event usually does it even after multiple generations of inbreeding). And if we wanted to breed humans to be healthier & longer-lived (a la Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children"), we could do so.
We've done twin-adoption studies & GWAS to determine the heritability of IQ. It is indeed more genetic than dependent on "shared environment" in the first world.
I think there's actually a very strong evidence that quite a bit of intelligence is genetic. You can get this by looking at adopted children and noting that th their adult IQs I'm more strongly correlated with the adult IQs of their birth parents than their adoptive parents.
Yes, but there are still many possible explanations for these correlations other than neurodevelopmental genetics. Adopted children probably share more similar environments before birth (when they're making ~all their neurons) and early life stress experiences with their birth than their adoptive parents, especially if they went through an orphanage or foster system. Even the genetic component can include exogenous and mutable non-neurodevelopmental effects, such as genes causing kids to look a particular way which subconsciously influences the way their teachers and classmates treat them.
Importantly, when we use genome-wide association studies to actually ask the genome to put its cards on the table in the form of specific genetic variants that correlate with IQ, we can only scrape together an explanation for 5-10% of the variance in IQ. And regardless of how strong the genetic influence is in a particular set of environments, the dramatic rise in national IQ as countries become richer suggests that IQ of everyone involved could be raised much more by investing more in their childhood education and health than by trying to re-engineer their genomes.
Fantastic article. Minor correction to Adraste: I believe it was Carrie Buck's daughter Vivian who made the honor roll, not Carrie. https://tinyurl.com/43cf42hb
Coria seems obviously correct. Not sure what the problem is. Only thing I'd add is that moral repugnance can be a useful heuristic that leads to better decision-making - the fact that "don't sterilise children" feels inherently evil suggests that it is more likely to lead to bad outcomes, even if you can't explain why on a strictly rational level.
What if I don't really want more whales, but also don't want zero whales?
Farming whales doesn't sound economically viable. They are expensive to feed, hard to contain, grow slowly, and no longer produce much of economic value. I also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than they do in the wild (maybe if you trapped them in their traditional breeding grounds you could fool them into breeding more often?)
> I also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than they do in the wild
Surely there’s some experimental not-yet-approved-for-human-use drug we could try? Figure out the lethal dose on whales, then work our way down to a safe dose for positive eugenics for elite rich people?
Well, if ceteris paribus the whale population tends towards zero, then someone is going to have to suffer economic harm to reverse this, there's no free lunch for the whales too.
I'more than familiar with traits that assort independently. That is the basis of Mendel's pea experiments. Mendel had no success when he tried to work with hawkweed and the history of genetics is littered with similar failures. My comments were directed towards the selection of complex traits whose very definitions are subjective. What is the definition of beauty, longevity or intelligence? Growing crops or farm animals with certain characteristics is rather simple by comparison.
Presumably he's thinking of questions such as "is a person who dies at 85 in full possession of their mental powers really shorter-lived than one who dies at 95 after a twenty-year-long drift into senility?".
The factors that underlie longevity are unknown. There may be a multitude of both independent and co- assorting genes that underlie the phenomenon of longevity. The genes are the blueprint, but phenotypic expression is more than genes: there's random chance (e.g. some bit of RNA, was transcriptionally active for more or less time than average, or this organism had one SNP vs another.). So yes we you can measure longevity and even select for it, at least in C. elegans, but in vertebrates, it's a different story.
We have good ways of operationalizing intelligence and longevity. Yes they aren’t perfect (no measure or metric is) but they are good enough where we can see massive benefits to society through selecting them.
I'm surprised that, in the course of this whole discussion, polygenic testing was never brought up. Polygenic testing potentially addresses most of the deepest eugenics-related fears. We don't have to hold that any person is better than any other person, much less wade into the morass of whether one group is better than another group. We don't have to coerce anyone. Funding is sufficient. We create ten fetuses and implant the fetus with the best genetic profile. Over time, this should be able to actually achieve most things that other eugenics plans hoped for, without the attendant guilt.
We might still debate what traits should be prioritized. Do we favor traits linked to IQ over traits linked to improved metabolism? Is increased IQ okay if it also increases depression?
But if we want to trade public funds for improved genetics, polygenic testing seems to be the golden path, and the answer to all past eugenic horrors. We are free, of course, to create completely new horrors.
I was thinking along similar lines, but I don't think testing alone gets us there as long as people still fundamentally want to have their own kids. People still have children even if they know that there are risks in their genomes. And if everyone is still having their own kids, then there's only so much that testing can do. It won't produce any significant shift in the population genome.
But I think the urge to have your own kids can be socially modulated and reduced. In fact, I think it already has been by the amount of divorce we have. If that effect could be gently reinforced on the legal level by reducing the rights of genetic parents and increasing the rights of social parents, for example, then significant numbers of people might choose to create and raise children with genetic material that is not their own. And that could cause a population shift over time.
Why wouldn't embryo selection "get us there?" It may not be fast, but it has to have an impact. There is objectively an upside in terms of reduced genetic disease. The big downside is cost.
Telling people their genetics is garbage is a hard sell. Telling people they can have the best of 10 potential kids is an easy sell. Alignment of incentives matters.
Yeah, that's a good point. I dunno if it is going to work out that way, though. If you're going to go through an expensive pre-birth selection procedure, would you necessarily say: I'm going to do genetic screening and selection on my embryo, but I'm definitely only going to select genes that come from me and my husband?
I feel like for lots of people, the choice isn't a deep one of "what genes do we want?" It's a practical choice of: do we do this the natural way, or are we going fancy tech? Natural being, you just shag till a baby pops out (zero selection); fancy tech being some kind of genetic intervention - which could easily include the use of genetic material from someone else.
I guess the relative popularity of IVF suggests that I'm wrong, though: that is exactly what you said. Using your own genetic material to get a baby, even though artificial means are used...
> And if everyone is still having their own kids, then there's only so much that testing can do. It won't produce any significant shift in the population genome.
Nope. Each parent only gives half their genes (setting aside sex chromosomes & mtDNA) to their child, and WHICH genes get to be in that lucky half is something we can now deliberately select. If everyone did that we could (theoretically) eliminate all the deleterious de novo mutations from showing up in any phenotype. Eliminating rare deleterious alleles would have a large effect on a population:
The overwhelming majority if people in the first world give birth in hospitals, even though that was not the norm in the past. If genetic testing becomes cheap enough, that could also become the norm. Even if a minority of people don't make use of it, selection can occur through all the people that do.
Beroe comments that Adraste's argument "seems to grant you, as arbiter of which things are too close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power," but I don't think that's a fair assessment of what Adraste is doing. There's a difference between advocating a ban and demanding to be installed as "arbiter of what things should be banned." Saying "I believe X should be banned" to one's fellows in the hope of convincing a critical mass of them to support democratic implementation of a ban on X is not the same thing as trying to become a dictator with arbitrary power to ban X unilaterally.
1. Slippery slopes are real. You need limiting priniciples. More than that, you need limiting principles that are robust against being misunderstood by stupid people.
(Ironic as it is to cite Hitler in this context, I think he once said something about how you need to coexist with the stupidest possible version of your ideology. Seems correct.)
2. I continue to believe that mandatory vaccination crosses a moral event horizon. Generally you need due process for something like that, and what currently passes for due process in this country simply isn't good enough for coercive medical procedures.
3. I notice a trend in all of these historical atrocities that we're trying to learn from: The people making the decisions never internalize the costs of their own policies. That's a huge red flag. If Hitler wanted to convince the world that the holocaust was a necessary evil, he should have walked into the gas chamber himself. Obviously he didn't do that, and everyone should have told him he was full of shit, but instead they nodded sagely while he used meaningless mouth noises to rationalize his crimes.
Agreed. To a first approximation, I'm saying that we shouldn't consider that an acceptable excuse.
Throughout history we've seen arguments of the form "mass murder is a necessary evil in this situation, but I'm too important to make any sacrifices myself". I'm not convinced this has ever been true, and I certainly don't think we would have been worse off on balance if we refused to accept all arguments of that nature.
If we were really concerned about making necessary evil impossible, we could perhaps be more flexible about the nature of the sacrifice. Maybe Hitler could have sacrificed a hand or something if his life was so important. I'm not as concerned about the implementation details as I am about the question of whether decision makers have skin in the game. That's the only cure for self-serving bullshit.
To be clear: I'm not saying personal sacrifice would be sufficient to justify the holocaust. It's just one more roadblock that should have been in place to prevent something like that from happening at all.
"(Ironic as it is to cite Hitler in this context, I think he once said something about how you need to coexist with the stupidest possible version of your ideology. Seems correct.)"
Well dang. That is an observation that I had previously attributed to Zero HP Lovecraft.
> I notice a trend in all of these historical atrocities that we're trying to learn from: The people making the decisions never internalize the costs of their own policies. That's a huge red flag. If Hitler wanted to convince the world that the holocaust was a necessary evil, he should have walked into the gas chamber himself.
That doesn't work. For instance, I think bank robbers should be jailed. I'm not a bank robber, so the cost of this policy isn't paid by me. Should I be required to go to jail if I support jail for bank robbers? What if I think 12 year olds should have to go to school, or if I think doctors should get medical licenses?
> Coria: ... They were all tragically wrong, of course, but if they’d been right it would have been the right thing to do. Ehrlich was stupid but not evil.
>Beroe: You could justify anything with that!
I am going to push even harder against Coria here than Beroe did. If you are considering taking some drastic action with demonstrably severe negative consequences, then you'd better make *damn sure* your net result will be positive. You don't get to just say, "I'm fighting to protect all of humanity, so my heart is in the right place and the price of failure is infinite, so let history judge me, yolo". I would say that such reasoning is not only "bad" but also morally wrong, because it can indeed be used to justify literally anything.
People do get to say that, in the real world, perhaps somewhat more eloquently, in large part because it's impossible to be damn sure about the consequences of big substantial changes, so there's no track record of "responsible revolutions" to speak of. It's how natural selection works on the level of societies - a change is made, society either benefits or suffers, then others mimic the winners.
> so there's no track record of "responsible revolutions" to speak of.
Well, the Green/Agricultural Revolution seems to have turned out reasonably well, FWIW. Anyway, I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying, "don't do anything risky, ever"; I'm saying, "the threshold for caution and planning should increase at least proportionally (ideally, faster) with the scope and scale of your project". If you're planning to fill in a pothole, some minimum of research on traffic patterns and concrete filling procedures should be enough. If you're planning to fill in a sea, perhaps a multi-generational cross-disciplinary study is in order, followed by a few small pilot projects, followed by more evaluation.
I don't disagree that ideally it should work this way. However, between corruption/incompetence/security theater/etc. the signal gets lost, if it was ever feasible to find it in the first place. But, as the politician syllogism goes, something must be done and this is something, which, I claim, is how changes usually end up happening in practice.
> If you are considering taking some drastic action with demonstrably severe negative consequences, then you'd better make *damn sure* your net result will be positive.
But that's impossible? The only way to be "damn sure" would be: duplicate the world, do the sterilizations in one world but not the other, and see how things turn out.
Seems to me there is a balance to be struck. Sometimes a government do too much to mitigate a risk/harm, causing harm; other times it does too little, causing harm through inaction. Perhaps most often, it chooses a clearly suboptimal policy, actively causing harm in some way while also not mitigating a risk/harm enough, resulting in both kinds of harm. I estimate that this typically results in a better world than a world in which nothing was done, but also clear injustices that people are rightfully sore about. I don't know what to propose to improve matters, but "being damn sure" doesn't sound practical.
"You make a compelling point..." Haha, I suggest this is one of those sentences that is never uttered in the wild, only in the thought experiments of conscientious writers. Is there a name for such sentences?
On topic: If someone were actually interested in making eugenics work for us, I think the best way would be to continue current trends of allowing family regroupings, and perhaps doing more in law to diminish the role of genetics in family rights. These days, many people raise children who are not related to them genetically. If that trend continues, then there will at some point be pressure among such parents to choose parents for their children who are genetically gifted. That is, if parents in general are comfortable with raising children who do not share their genetics, they may well start to choose to take sperm and eggs from other people, and to choose more successful people as donors. They would just need to be sure that those children won't be "taken away" from them by the genetic donors, on either an emotional or financial level.
Then let individual decisions take their course! Government programs, with their propensity for evil, need never be involved.
Related: sometimes I make a joke where I say a given word is "a book word, not a talk word!". Any word that you can say, but is vaguely surprising to find outside of writing. Examples include *gestures to ACX, LessWrong, any math paper, textbooks, Wikipedia, quite a lot of writing*.
Can someone please start the movement that the softer, milder eugenics we need is actually banning sperm banks (not promoting them)?
Sperm banks surely select for handsome, charismatic, intelligent males. But surely they also select for sociopathic males. What should we call someone who wants to have dozens and dozens of genetic offspring, but doesn't want to have any responsibility to provide for them in any way whatsoever?
Why do we want to subject the future to increasing legions of handsome, charismatic sociopaths? How is this a good thing?
One response might be that some sperm banks select specifically by IQ or whatever.
Really problematic bit comes in regulation. The effect you describe sounds Moloch-like, but giving the government the specific power to decide which traits get to have sperm banks... that seems like a bad power for a government to have, on its face.
This seems absurd. People can want their genes passed on without having the will to raise a child, and not be sociopaths. Do you have correlational data for this assertion? How many sperm bank donors are sociopaths? This study seems to think in fact the population selected is more well adjusted than average, but I haven’t looked too deeply: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:480870/FULLTEXT01.pdf
No, the point I was trying to make is that if sociopaths, despite being a small minority of donors, produce a sufficiently larger average number of offspring than the non-sociopathic donors then a majority of donor conceived people (of which I am one!) could still have a sociopathic donor parent, which is what is relevant for the concern that Will originally raised.
I don't expect psychopaths to be more interested in making babies than other people. Narcissists, maybe (I expect narcissists to be more focused on themselves than their offspring as an abstract concept, but maybe some narcissists would go to the sperm bank obsessively.)
Also, there are other solutions, like personality tests. If a woman browsing profiles sees that the sperm belongs to a giant narcissist... probably she's less likely to choose it.
I get accused of eugenics just for mentioning that IQ exists sometimes. I've seen other people get accused of it for allowing screening for Down Syndrome.
A good test is “can you explain why what I’m advocating for is wrong without using the word ‘eugenics’?” If they can’t, it’s safe to say it’s just a buzzword.
It’s a particularly common accusation when discussing genetic enhancement and it’ll be a constant battle going forward as this tech advances. All forms of preimplantation genetic testing are eugenic but people don’t care much about those…they aren’t new or interesting. PGT-P, especially for cognitive traits, is going to face a lot of eugenics accusations. This is an accurate term for them, so it might be a better strategy to redirect away by asking who is the victim.
"And the perpetrators weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists or blood-crazed generalissimos who we can safely distance ourselves from. They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us."
Yup, folks like Bill Gates, who simultaneously believe that the world is overpopulated and that everyone needs to take experimental jabs.
Those two beliefs aren't mutually exclusive. What if he also believes the experimental jabs will lower the world population?
But also, time exists. Did Bill Gates still believe the world was overpopulated when he started pushing his vaccines? I suppose I could try to find out, but honestly I don't care that much about what he has believed ever. It just seems possible he pays attention and has noticed the latest proclamations that a population crash is coming.
>What if he also believes the experimental jabs will lower the world population?
I think that's what the person you're responding to was implying, i.e. that Bill Gates is really pushing them for depopulation reasons, rather than his outwardly stated reasons, or at least that he has a perverse incentive to not care if the vaccines damage fertility as a side effect.
Regarding section II., This is a kind of horrible thought but I wonder how many people really feel that forced sterilisation is wrong? I have an unpleasant feeling that there a lot of examples through history and today of people seeming waaay too excited about the idea of forced sterilisation of people who aren't them.
If in fact a lot of people on some level Like forced sterilisation (or at least don't consider it morally repugnant), that would explain the apparent difference in the environmental movement and the Nazi movement - in that case, it wasn't that the forced sterilisation that turned public opinion against the Nazis. It wasn't until the mass murder that (enough) people decided the Nazis were bad. Rather, forced sterilisation has a bad impression Because of the association with the mass murder of the Nazis?
People knew the Nazis were bad because no deal was ever good enough for Hitler, who just kept grabbing more until he started the war that the wary victors of the previous world war had wanted to avoid. People didn't learn about the Holocaust until after the Nazis had firmly achieved villain status.
The people who already opposed mass sterilization could consider that a reason to oppose the Nazis, but since sterilization occurred in other places (generally considered respectable democracies) it was not regarded as such an anathema.
Well, Nazis certainly didn't hide their brutal repression of Jews from the start, just their eventual mass murder. That the former wasn't enough to qualify them as villains on its own is a pretty damning indictment of the rest of the world.
To further the point most people are in favor of the practical sterilization of the severely mentally disabled even if they would be horrified at doing it medically.
Suppose there is a nonverbal autistic person in state custody. Most people would be in favor of the state preventing them from having sex with anybody, no matter what evidence of desire existed on either side.
Maybe closer to the medical sterilization border are permanent puberty blockers for these mentally disabled people. I think many people are conflicted but i don't see the same visceral moral disgust at the practice.
Forced sterilization seems insanely terrible and horrifying to me, mostly because I want children some day, and taking that away from someone is cutting at a very important human value, for some more important than life itself.
Add on to that the body horror of having someone secretly perform surgery on you—these things don’t happen with the snap of a finger! And any medical problems caused by their ineptitude—you can’t refuse to be treated if your surgeon isn’t up to par, so likely the worst surgeons were put to the task. Its just really horrible.
To quote briefly from my comment on Mastrioanni's review of Galton's book, "If for Galton the moral importance was with a society, a nation, a people, an ethnos, then the morality we have built upon the individual is not an advanced science but an incomprehensible barbarism, a cacophony, and a calamity."
It begs the question to assume that eugenics is bad because it violates individual rights. Easy to flip it and say that individual liberty is bad because it violates public health. And don't tell me that restrictions of liberty never work out -- how well is the current non-eugenic system working for you?
The current system is working *extremely well* for me compared to all alternative non-rights-based public systems like Nazi Germany, all communist countries ever made, or medieval europe.
Medieval Europe did have things like privileges, but I think this was different from universally inalienable rights, since serfs had significantly different privileges than their lords.
Coria points out that the democratic process is a social technology for determining when you get to break deontology for the greater good. But the democratic process is just an incomplete formalization of a much older and more powerful social technology: public opinion.
Pre ~1890 public opinion put next to no weight on environmentalist values. Early environmentalists fought a long uphill battle to change the deontological weights to include a term for environmentalism. They took their greater good and constructed narratives about it that would shift public opinion.
Pre ~1940 eugenics was quite popular, because Galton et al had worked hard to make it that way. Then a greater bad happened that was closely associated with it, and the narrative took notice. Now public opinion has incorporated the updated narrative and is heavily against eugenics.
Today if you want to do eugenics you have to make a "greater good" case that overrides the accumulated bad public opinion. I don't object to anyone making such a case. But I also don't object to shaming anyone who makes it with Buck and all the rest. Scott (okay, sure, "Beroe") seems to be suggesting that when you appeal to the greater good you get to throw out the existing deontological weights. No! The social technology is operating as designed! The weights are there for a reason! If you can't win the uphill battle then you haven't earned the right to change them!
Why is 1890 the watershed? Even before, there were some people with values that aligned with what we call environmentalist - conservationists in the countryside, advocates for cleaner air and water in the cities.
Countryside and cities, yes-- there were earlier reformers associated with the Industrial Revolution, especially in England. I was thinking of the strain of environmentalism that values wilderness as wilderness, which was more characteristic of America and really got going with John Muir and the Sierra Club. Arguably Ehrlich is more closely related to the former, but if you move the start up 50 years my points still stand.
I'm pretty sure that people have always valued the wilderness on some level, it's just prior to the Industrial Revolution it seemed indestructible and inexhaustible, a just another "natural resource". Whereas once it became apparent that you actually can catch all the fish in the sea and chop all the trees in the forest it didn't take that much heroic effort to change the narrative.
> I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Simple, positive eugenics is legal, any and all negative eugenics is a somewhere near a war crime.
The hard part would be abortion because its abortion, and you don't need motives on the table for that to be complex.
Negative coercive eugenics such as preventing brother-sister marriage are perfectly reasonable and ethical. IVF clinics should be legally provided from combining their sperm and egg as well.
Along around 1974, I had a friend who was, like me, firmly anti-Nixon and a proponent of the Watergate investigations. (Hold on, this will be relevant in a moment.)
One day I saw him reading The Population Bomb, a book I had no use for. You like that? I asked. Yes, he said. You think that Ehrlich has the right ideas? Yes, he said. Well, then, I replied, that makes you an Ehrlich-man.
Whenever the subject of eugenics comes up, the example used is selecting for intelligence. I think this shows a lack of common sense. If we want society to function better, shouldn't we also selecting for mental health and a kind, calm temperament?
This seems a location where social desirability bias may be at play. It is difficult to disagree that kindness or calmness are positive traits, but I worry about second order effects. Possibly many incredibly successful businesses weren’t invented by overly kind or calm people, and much good has been done by selfish people. Plausibly more than kind people on net, though I’m uncertain. I’m more confident that things like IQ correlate positively with a host of good things.
Do you mean social desirability bias is making me stand up for qualities other than high IQ? I get the concept, but that’s really not what’s going on in this case. I’m just being practical. If we want less crime and violence in society, raising average IQ is a very indirect approach. I actually think the negative correlation between violence/crime and IQ is probably mediated by things like the lower income & worse living conditions of lower IQ people and their higher rate of mental illness, rather than being a direct effect of lower IQ. If we’re going to do eugenics I’m all for selecting for intelligence, but think there is great value in selecting straightforwardly for the traits that *clearly and directly* run counter to the tendency to be violent and commit crimes. Or you can think of it as selecting against sociopathy and poor self-control, rather than for calmness and kindness if you like. As for your concern that the population will get too mellow and there will be no high-energy ambitious types to start businesses, that doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Kindness and calmness will still be distributed on a bell curve, and we’ll have still have ambitious types at one end. And besides, seems likely that sociopathy, rage and poor self-control derail many people who might otherwise start useful businesses. For people starting a legal business, being tone-deaf and hot-tempered is going to interfere with their finding backers and keeping partners and early employees. Or maybe sociopathy etc.in smart ambitious people pushes them in the direction of becoming highly successful criminals — mob bosses or whatnot.
What I meant to say is that its difficult to disagree with your proposal without sounding at least somewhat mean due to social desirability bias.
Calmness & kindness does not seem the same as good self-control & non-sociopathy, but I don’t know what personality tests you have in mind, so maybe they are. If you wanted to select for good self-control, why not just select for executive functioning rather than how liable a person is to get angry?
I think another problem I have with this is it feels like changing the distribution of what people care about, which makes me super uncomfortable. I’d rather have people care about the same things but be better at achieving them, as that seems more value neutral—I don’t end up saying that anger or empathy are good or bad emotions. And I’m skeptical when people point to an emotion and say its bad.
I don't think anger is bad, I think crime and violence are bad. Executive functioning is correlated, with propensity for rageful violence and crime, but not very well-correlated. Plenty of people with poor executive functioning are not hot-tempered, just disorganized, forgetful, and unable to stick with plans. And some horribly cruel people have good executive functioning -- for instance, it wouldn't surprise me if Putin does. If you wanted to select against something like sociopathy, you might use a combo of low ability to read people (there are some well-validated tests for that), self-reported lack of guilt and comfort with transgressions against other, history of crime and violence, and some behavioral test that gets at how quickly someone becomes rageful (so we'd be looking not for indignant protests, which are fine, but for loss of perspective and self-control).
I hope Coria's position pushes you more in the libertarian direction. At the least, it should raise a question about where the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate government action lies.
Not that it changes the main conclusion, but I'd say the reason Galton got his name removed from places and the Ehrlich got prizes from prestigious western institutions is that the former's ideas caused the sterilization of a bunch of western people, while the latter affected "just" (a couple extra orders of magnitude of) Indians. Which goes to show how much of it is hypocritical virtue-signaling. I would be surprised if you ask around India about Ehrlich and you get the same response.
I think a secret reason people dislike eugenics is because they are very skeptical of the government having the power to customize its citizens. The government does not in fact always act with its citizens interests at heart, and maybe you will get some party diverting tons of money towards making sure people with genetic dispositions in favor of that party get subsidized for children. Maybe Product Incorporated does something similar via lobbying to make more children genetically predisposed to buy Product, or to modify people to better enjoy producing Product (under the argument that we are short on Product and it is necessary for national defense).
For those who are also skeptical of markets without government intervention, add in skepticism about people being able to buy modifications to their children.
With regards to the desirability of otherwise-non-evil eugenics, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I find myself once again asking what's up with this unstated assumption that being smarter is generically better. Sure, it might be better for society in the long run if there are fewer people of lower or average intelligence, but it might also be better for society if there were fewer people with various eccentric preferences, or tendencies to criticise the government, etc., and it seems obvious that trying to reduce or wipe out those traits to make the population less diverse and more homogenous would be bad and evil in itself. I fear reducing the number of people with lower IQs would be like this.
Unless you fall under a certain threshold of *debilitating* mental deficiency I don't think a life with compartively lesser IQ is less desirable, less happy, or less dignified than that of a genius. I'm not exactly *low*-IQ but neither am I in the topmost percentile, and I don't *want* to become "smarter", especially; nor do I especially want my children to be smarter than I am. And certainly I would be strongly, strongly opposed to aiming for a future without anybody who's in my bracket existing anymore.
Pull the mask off this interloper and you'll find it's actually the idol Progress, which after all IQ works in service to.
If we just wanted people to be *happy* we could select for that, but we want to advance the frontiers of human knowledge and capability, or somesuch, and for that I can certainly concede that IQ is very handy.
But just selecting for rapacious horizon-lust, ambition, curiosity and so on would also work.
Why did Beroe let that pass? The first communists to gain all power were the bolsheviks, and they did not seem nice at all. Any communist after that has to work really hard to prove they don't intend to repeat the atrocities of Soviet Russia and others. I don't think anyone who actually had power ever did, so nice-seeming communists with all the power never existed. (At least nice by the standards of people who believe that forcible sterilization of mentally ill people is obviously bad.)
Edit: not that giving *anyone* all the power seems like a good idea, so I guess it's not that important.
I read the Mastroianni article. I think he wrote it assuming that eugenics is immoral without fully specifying what it is or proving that all instantiations of it are immoral.
It is easy to point at Nazism and declare it to be immoral.
But, in 21st century America is is quite common for prospective parents to obtain a genetic profile of their fetus in the early stages of pregnancy, and to abort it if the profile shows some severe genetic defect such as Down syndrome. Isn't their action a form of eugenics?
People who believe that all abortions are immoral of course oppose those actions, but people with less rigid views on that subject often approve. But, in either case, the argument does not recur to the label eugenics for a judgment as to morality.
In the near future it may be possible to modify a child's genome at the point of conception. would doing so be eugenics? Would that make it immoral. What if you remove a well known cancer causing mutation such as BRCA2 from a genome? Is that immoral? How about ensuring that the child has blond hair and blue eyes?
How about longevity? Giving our children a few extra years of healthy life seems like it has to be an improvement both personally and on a societal level.
Again, longevity has been increased enormously without any general change to the "breeding stock" or "gene pool" or what have you. Dealing with specific genetic disease like Huntington's is low hanging fruit that things like Crispr may finally be able to deal with, but that's not really what eugenics has in mind.
> Again, longevity has been increased enormously without any general change to the "breeding stock" or "gene pool" or what have you.
Doesn't mean in can't be increased further with those. Probably less important than "memes" if we stick to relatively non-repugnant means, but eventually we can run out of low-hanging fruit from "memes".
We've been working on memes for a couple tens of thousands of years and we haven't hit a ceiling yet. Human genetics is just too damn slow to make a difference. 20-30 year turn times? Forget about it.
You may be right about human genetics being too slow to be relevant, given what's now visible on the horizon re: AGI.
With that said, I claim that the expected value of working on human genetics is still pretty high under a broad variety of value systems. In particular:
1. Many memes are practically inaccessible to people with insufficient mental capabilities, and it is plausible that the faster paths to raising the capabilities of their descendants all include a genetic enhancement component, rather than just the playbook that uplifted much of Asia. It helps that "catch-up" genetic modifications are inherently easier to discover and demonstrate safety for than those that promise "superhuman" capabilities.
2. Your mileage may vary, but my likelihood estimate for a "short AGI timeline" is not that high. My median estimate still hews pretty close to Robin Hanson's "5% progress per decade" remark from long ago. Usefully enhancing human genetics over that timescale is still a challenge, but it's not a "Forget about it" lost cause.
Talking about overpopulation in my usual filter bubble (woke left), as opposed to environmentalism in general, does get you the 'any concern about overpopulation is automatically bad because it leads to trying to reduce the population in a way that disproportionately targets disadvantaged people, who generally aren't the major contributors to world consumption footprint anyway' knee jerk reaction - not quite as strongly as eugenics but close.
Meanwhile eugenics is unfortunately still alive and well, just not calling itself that - instead it masquerades as triage, eg the UK health policy during covid of de prioritising a wide range of disabled people for care even when their disability didn't directly affect likely covid outcomes.
I keep thinking of a dystopia in which the proles look to genetically control the elites. They want the perfect world of inbred metasexuals shattered to loosen Nature to resume its mastering role. Issuing warrants for Polanskis and Epsteins to report for surgery could make for interesting cinema -- maybe something along the lines of Repo Man.
This was a fantastic post that made me delightfully dizzy at some places.
However, because I have to: any eugenic, or even more generalized, any personality-trait-focused approach on fighting poverty is turning economics into a purely mistake-theoretical issue, which it just isn't (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
At the risk of delivering a highly undercomplex example: consistently improving the quality of soccer-players by improving the training of youth-players will not lead to every team in a league winning every game. Someone has to lose by the very definition of the competition, even though every team of today may win against every team of 20 years ago.
We may all be Einstein for all I care, someone is still going to scrub the toilet.
For the case of poverty it seems fair to respond that yes in a relative sense half the population will always be below the median income, and this has some important social effects, however this does not prevent anyone from increasing the absolute wealth of everyone in a society, and this sort of increase tends to be extremely good. i.e. half the people in any country are below median income, but I'd rather be median income in America today, than in China 100 years ago.
In fact I'd rather be median income in America today than 90th percentile in China 100 years ago, which gives some intuition for why on a sufficiently long timescale I'd consider increases in absolute wealth as important or more important than increases in relative wealth.
Full agreement, however: choosing the median income as some sort of indicator for relative poverty exposes the conflict-theoretical issue.
In Germany for example, poverty is defined as being below 60% of the median income, and sure, there are objectively much worse ways to be considered poor in today's world (even though I am not sure how much that matters since psychologically, the subjective experience of being poor is what matters, and millions of poor people in German feel absolutely miserable about their living conditions in a way that I genuinely believe can be compared to how miserable a 13-year old Pakistani feels about working in a sweatshop, even though objectively that's absurd. Tangent over), however, there is always enough wealth in a country to move every poor person above the 60% poverty-line without changing the median itself, because that's just how the median works.
Intelligence is one of the most important tool to move the median income upwards (even though conflict theory also has a lot to say about inter-state competition. Germany earned more than 100 billion euros in saved interest payments through the greek government-debt crisis for example), but is almost entirely useless in solving issues that arise from the realtive wealth-distribution around that median, because relative poverty is not a problem that requires intellgience to be solved. Intelligence may move an individual further to the right of that distribution, but it can't possibly to that for everybody.
That was the aspect of Brave New World that always confused me: why did they bother creating Epsilons & Deltas instead of automating? I know it was probably just too far out of context for Huxley to envision, but it weakens the impact.
I think it is better to think of “eugenics” as the name of a social movement popular among early 20th century intellectuals, much like “communism”. It promoted a few good ideas and also justified astounding evil.
If you want to give workers board seats like in Germany, and have a 40 hour workweek, those are ideas that communist labor organizers had a large part in shaping, but you don’t need to be “communist” to support them.
When members of revolutionary communist organizations claim that these are “communist” ideas, people reasonably suppose it’s just propaganda and the real goal is a dictatorship of the proletariat. A similar response is also reasonable with “eugenics”. If this disastrous movement happened to promote some reasonable ideas, just steal them.
I think there is an argument to be made that the Indian sterilization, while being phrased as environmental, was indeed also racist. What is underpinning it is that the only way to bring down the birthrate in countries like India is sterilization, since people would be unable to understand/enact different ways of birth control, as we have in the West. So while the goal might be environmental ("save the planet"), the choice of means is racist.
No mention of the idea that having been deliberately crafted (down to the tendencies of one's genes) by a person or society is kind of scary?
Right now, there is an obvious division between childbirth and construction. Any sort of deliberate human input on the next generation's makeup blurs that, and risks a general tendency towards thinking of people as comparable to things.
"the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize themselves than the average person"
I'm pretty sure that this has much more to do with their children having direct access to the mystical only-in-person transferable actual Scientific Method, than anything genetic beyond above-average IQ. Of course, considering that sanity waterline is low enough that there's a concerted effort to discredit IQ in general, this might be an improvement on the margin, but the lucky recipient of sperm of a Nobel Prize winner definitely shouldn't expect her child to have anywhere near those odds, unless she manages to arrange some Nobel Prize winner tutoring in addition.
If that is true, then it should be really easy to test. Get someone to have a baby by a Nobel Prize winner. Drop that baby into a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wait twenty-thirty years to see what field it wins a Nobel Prize in.
What's that you say? It died aged two of malnutrition, disease, or civil war? Well, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs! Just keep flooding the DRC with Nobel babies and surely *one* of them will live to be adult!
Yeah, but in those instances, the babies were being raised in their natal families and/or sent 'back home' to England etc.
I want the baby Lord Brougham (whoever he was; Galton name-drops him as an Obviously So Famous You Know This Guy, which just shows how the assumptions of the day can be wildly off, something we should bear in mind) to be dropped down into a family of native inhabitants where Dad is off working in the mines and may not be home for nine months of the year and Mom is raising ten kids on whatever she can scrape together. Then see if he manages to survive to grow up and be whatever genius Galton lauds him as.
"Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, PC, FRS (19 September 1778 – 7 May 1868) was a British statesman who became Lord High Chancellor and played a prominent role in passing the 1832 Reform Act and 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
Born in Edinburgh, Brougham helped found the Edinburgh Review in 1802 before moving to London, where he qualified as a barrister in 1808. Elected to the House of Commons in 1810 as a Whig, he was Member of Parliament for various constituencies until becoming a peer in 1830.
Brougham won popular renown for helping defeat the 1820 Pains and Penalties Bill, an attempt by the widely disliked George IV to annul his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. He became an advocate of liberal causes including abolition of the slave trade, free trade and parliamentary reform. Appointed Lord Chancellor in 1830, he made a number of reforms intended to speed up legal cases and established the Central Criminal Court. He never regained government office after 1834 and although he played an active role in the House of Lords, he often did so in opposition to his former colleagues.
Education was another area of interest. He helped establish the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and University College London, as well as holding some academic posts, including Rector, University of Edinburgh. In later years he spent much of his time in the French town of Cannes, making it a popular resort for the British upper-classes; he died there in 1868."
I'm sure a Henry Brougham who was raised in the DCR would be even more eager for the abolition of slavery, but I wonder if he would have the same advantages not being brought up in England? Even if he was just as naturally smart and talented?
I think the eugenic argument would be that one smart baby wouldn't do much (besides, he'd likely just die in a mine collapse or whatever); but if every baby was smart, then the people would improve their lot once those babies grow up to be adults. But alas, the native babies are not smart enough ! What to do, what to do...
Agree, that some version of a CRISPR-like technology is the ticket to the future of single gene editing. Still, large scale manipulation of the human genome to select complex traits is still way over the horizon. Most of the human genome is composed of non-coding regions, whose function(s) are not understood. Does changing a gene exon alter other aspects of transcription ? No one knows.
This post needs a section with "comments about Sparta." I can't believe that nobody thought of this before me, but let me start anyway: multiple Greek authors report that, after generations of one of the strongest genetic selection programs ever conducted, supposedly coupling only the best and brightest, Sparta produced not only the smart, muscular warriors of 300, but also what many believed were Greece's most beautiful women. In addition, to nobody's surprise these women were the country’s sharpest, such as the wife of King Leonidas, who would die in the Battle of Thermopylae in the 5th century BC: when asked why they were able to rule men, where elsewhere in Greece women could not, she replied that this was “because we are the only ones who give birth to men.” Given that it had a pretty solid run of centuries as a major power, the small, poor town of Sparta should be cited as golden example of eugenics.
That Spartans were hugely, massively, unbelievably successful in battle is beyond dispute: they were the main Greek force in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC), where they crushed the greatest army put together by the greatest empire the world had ever seen, in hand to hand combat; and later defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War. That they were obsessed with eugenics, for themselves, and dysgenics for their enemies is very well attested; a recent paper on this is “Krypteia: A Form of Ancient Guerrilla Warfare,” by Brandon D. Ross in “Grand Valley Journal of History” (Volume 1, Issue 2, Sep. 4. 2012). You can also see Paul Cartledge's “The Spartans” (2014) or N.G.L. Hammond in “The Cambridge Ancient History 3.1,” Ch. 17, or Macrobius' Saturnalia (5th century AD) for ancient perceptions of Spartans. Bret Deveraux has a good point regarding the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of Spartan eugenics. Maybe ancient Greeks were overawed by them; for example, regarding the beauty of Spartan women they often cited the example of Helen of Troy, allegedly Spartan, but also a fictional character, so not really very convincing evidence.
Over about 40 battles between 500BC and 323BC, which has the best period as far as evidence goes, the Spartans won half of them. Not a bad record, but hardly superlative. If your point is that their record in just two conflicts alone - Plataea (where they were in an alliance - and Athens brought nearly as many hoplites, and the other, smaller partners brought more than either Athens or Sparta between them, according to Herodotus) and the Peloponnesian war (which they won only after Persia funded their naval forces) - is sufficient to make them the best warriors ever, then fair enough, I guess that's one way of measuring it. It doesn't convince me. As to the eugenics part, I would want to know how that is being defined, since I think it is fair to say that the Spartans did not know much about genetics. However, I wasn't debating their opinions about breeding. My main point of debate was that I think the Spartans are very overhyped when it comes to fighting.
You're absolutely right. You know how these debates sometimes mirror sports (is Lebron better than Jordan?) even though there's no way to compare and people go on wild assertions. All we can say is that Sparta was a big power of the time, feared and often (but not always) triumphant, efficient and successful but not wildly superior to others. In that sense, not all that different from Rome (which also lost tons of battles) or the US, the preeminent 20th century power, and one incapable of beating lowly Vietnam or North Korea; or Napoleonic France, or the Spanish Tercios, etc. Like you say, simply stating that the Spartans were awesome fighters, with no explanation of context, is not helpful.
And how well did that work out? The history of it, going by Wikipedia, was "not at all well" and they didn't even end up with Nobel Laureates donating. 'Get the smartest men to father the most kids' is always going to be hard, because people don't want kids the more educated they are (see various studies) or in the case of sperm, you can't really control for the mothers accessing sperm or the environments the kids will be raised in.
AI works great for cattle, not so much for humans.
An added problem is that people usually get Nobel prizes & related prizes when they are well past middle age. And the risk of birth defects rises with the age of the father. Old sperm is more risky than young sperm in this respect.
...I do not know if children sired through the Nobel sperm bank have a higher average rate of birth defects. But if so, perhaps it can be seen as Divine punishment for hubris.
So did Galton support things like sterilisation? Hard to say; this is a quote from 1909 book of essays on Eugenics, talking about the lowest class in society (what we now would call the underclass):
"Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this."
Does "peremptorily" mean "forcibly" and such things as sterilisation? You could interpret it either way. And even back in 1909, the more educated - especially women - were marrying later and having fewer children:
"Augmentation of Favoured Stock.—
The possibility of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that of repressing the productivity of the worst. They both raise the average, the latter by reducing the undesirables, the former by increasing those who will become the lights of the nation. It is therefore all important to prove that favour to selected individuals might so increase their productivity as to warrant the expenditure in money and care that would be necessitated. An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily. The means that might be employed to compass these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of married life, healthy homes, the pressure of public opinion, honours, and above all the introduction of motives of religious or quasi-religious character. Indeed, an enthusiasm to improve the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to the sense of a religious obligation. In other lands there are abundant instances in which religious motives make early marriages a matter of custom, and continued celibacy to be regarded as a disgrace, if not a crime. The customs of the Hindoos, also of the Jews, especially in ancient times, bear this out. In all costly civilisations there is a tendency to shrink from marriage on prudential grounds. It would, however, be possible so to alter the conditions of life that the most prudent course for an X class person should lie exactly opposite to its present direction, for he or she might find that there were advantages and not disadvantages in early marriage, and that the most prudent course was to follow the natural instincts.
We have now to consider the probable gain in the number and worth of adult offspring to these favoured couples. First as regards the effect of reducing the age at marriage. There is unquestionably a tendency among cultured women to delay or even to abstain from marriage; they dislike the sacrifice of freedom and leisure, of opportunities for study and of cultured companionship. This has to be reckoned with. I heard of the reply of a lady official of a College for Women to a visitor who inquired as to the after life of the students. She answered that one-third profited by it, another third gained little good, and a third were failures. “ But what become of the failures ? " “ Oh, they marry."
There appears to be a considerable difference between the earliest age at which it is physiologically desirable that a woman should marry and that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually do. Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to 7 years, as from 28 or 29 to 21 or 22, under influences such as those mentioned above, is by no means improbable. What would be its effect on productivity ? It might be expected to act in two ways :—
(1) By shortening each generation by an amount roughly proportionate to the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose the span of each generation to be shortened by one-sixth, so that six take the place of five, and that the productivity of each marriage is unaltered, it follows that one sixth more children will be brought into the world during the same time, which is, roughly equivalent to increasing the productivity of an unshortened generation by that amount.
(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the child-bearing period of the woman. Authorities differ so much as to the direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known were the offspring of mothers who married very young."
And yes, the rent is too damn high 😁
"There is yet another existing form of princely benevolence which might be so extended as to exercise a large effect on race improvement. I mean the provision to exceptionally promising young couples of healthy and convenient houses at low rentals. A continually renewed settlement of this kind can be easily imagined, free from the taint of patronage, and analogous to colleges with their self-elected fellowships and rooms for residence, that should become an exceedingly desirable residence for a specified time. It would be so in the same way that a good club by its own social advantages attracts desirable candidates. The tone of the place would be higher than elsewhere, on account of the high quality of the inmates, and it would be distinguished by an air of energy, intelligence, health and self-respect and by mutual helpfulness."
Honestly, it's so funny to read the same complaints about fertility, declining intelligence, etc. over the generations back then as are current now. People are marrying too late, not having kids, the unsuitables are the ones having most kids, women not wanting babies but careers, etc. etc. etc.
"I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
I'm pessimistic about the capacity of any stance in the space between those to sway hearts and minds. Everything in that vicinity is memetic weaksauce compared to what a rhetorically skilled impersonal arbiter of morality pretender can deploy, which is why any sort of liberalism is inherently unstable. Either your society has a totalizing vision of morality, or it will eventually be replaced by one that does.
Dear Beroe, Advaste and Coria please relax, all three of you. Let me tell you that your otherwise interesting discussion is quite unnecessary.
The thing is, you see, that humans are increasingly doing de facto eugenics today, without even noticing it. It’s quite civilized; we get the benefits of eugenics without having to be conscious that that’s what we do. De facto eugenics is taking place thanks to three interrelated global trends that are so strong that no ruler, enlightened or otherwise, is likely to make more than a slight dent in them: The global demographic transition, the great gender transformation, and global, massive urbanisation.
The shape of global things to come can be gleaned from countries where these three trends are already in their final stages. Fatherhood becomes increasingly concentrated among high-status males, through serial monogamy (a functional equivalent to polygamy). High-status women also have higher fertility than low-status women, although this trend is weaker than among males.
Assume that «status» is a rough proxy for «intelligence» in the mainly meritocratic societies that dominate in the final stages of these interrelated social transformations, and hey presto - fertility patterns start to resemble what eugenicists would like to see.
…side note: The above pattern only emerges in the final stages of these social transformations. For countries still in the middle of the transformations, the hierarchical diffusion pattern that characterizes the demographic transition means that «the rich get richer, while the poor get children»; and low-status women sire more children than high-status women. But when a country reaches the end of the demographic transition, with urban lifestyles and changed gender roles added, it is back in a situation where fertility works with status, not against status.
What’s for your source for high status women having a higher fertility rate than low status women ? Also, by status do you primarily mean social class because it is my understanding that rich people have a much lower birth rate than poor people.
Recent data from Scandinavia. The main reason is not fertility increase among high-status women, but reduced fertility among low-status women. This fairly new tendency is linked to the end of hierarchical diffusion of low fertility. Rural low-status women have caught up with the low fertility of their high-status urban sisters, to the extent that their positions have switched (though not by much).
..The male tendency for increased correlation between status and fertility is stronger, due to increased childlessness among low-staus males plus serial monogamy (i.e. siring children with more than one woman) among high-status males. There has been a steep increase during the last two decades of being childless at age 40 among males in Scandinavia, and this is a trend you also see elsewhere.
(Childlessness at age 40 has also increased among women, but less, and from a lower base.)
Terencius, a gambling addict with significant debts to the mob, is being pursued by a hitman as a result. In my opinion, acquiring an air fryer might provide a solution to his problems. By owning an air fryer, Terencius could consume less oil, improve his overall health, and potentially enhance his ability to defend himself against the hitman or generate enough funds to repay his debts. Additionally, it is worth noting that there is a minimal statistical association between individuals targeted by hitmen and those who own air fryers.
However, it is important to consider whether suggesting the purchase of an air fryer is genuinely the most effective use of Terencius' limited resources or if it simply stems from a desire to sell him the product I wanted to sell him anyway.
Independently of the question of who does the selection and how voluntary it is, I'm skeptical that targeting the genes that increase the IQ will turn out to be as worthy goal as Scott makes it sound.
Consider what would happen if a wizard appeared before the people in 1700 and asked them about what hereditary changes *they* would prefer (the wizard can magically change the genome of humans in a way that corresponds to their desires, even without them understanding the genetics). Given the values of that time (people still majorly worked in agriculture) I expect a good package would be something like
- for men, we'd like to see higher upper body strength (those plows are heavy!)
- for women, we'd like them to be able to rear more children easier (let's say that there is a magical change that makes women survive the childbirth easier, but only after the 5th child)
Suppose the wizard made the requested changes. And yet 10 generations later those changes would be essentially useless to us. We don't have enough work that requires strength corresponding to the genes we have; a median person literally is expected to pay money and go to a special place to exercise the muscles. Our child bearing practices are such that anything about five+ children is irrelevant on the population scale. If increasing the proportion of these genes in 1700 came at the expense of other things – we'd say that it would have been a bad deal.
There's something similar happening to the mental capabilities. Sure, in the beginning of the 20th century it was great just to have larger memory to be able to learn 10 foreign languages (you could read scientific articles from other countries!), multiply long numbers (you could get a job as an actuary!) or remember endless references lists (you need to be able to cite stuff as a lawyer!) but all of those feats are clearly less relevant now that you can use machine translation, bookkeeping program or legal search.
I guess for now whatever is measured by IQ correlates to the things like "well-paid job" or "good lifestyle", but will it do so in the future? Will people in 2100 say stuff like "now that no-one writes code, we wish we had more poets and people who had empathy, too bad those rubes in 2030 optimized for the wrong genes?". That's my main worry about gene selection in practice.
Our world is much better (on average) than 1700-world. And not because of upper body strength (though it would be better than nothing, so, I'll take it magic wizard kthx!)
We recognize not only that intelligence is valuable in the present world, but that it is also what made the present world possible. It's also the best tool for understanding the otherwise-bewildering modern world, I think.
But you're right―if we survive the AGI revolution, perhaps this will be a moot point, as machines will ultimately decide whether to do eugenics on us, leave us as-is, or kill us all. But I would point out that we can probably select for both intelligence and (at least a couple of) other traits simultaneously.
I think you've missed that the argument for censoring/tabooing eugenics (and most of these arguments) aren't mistake theorists, utilitarians, rationalists or classical liberals (although the last point's probably not that important). Their actual argument would steelman to:
* Thinking that some people are better than other people is intrinsically morally wrong.
* Eugenics derives from the above, and also derives from being bourgeois/white/[rich?]/[elite?]/[upper class?], and viewing people who are poorer/had less opportunities than you as intrinsically worse than you, and hating them. It also derives from blaming marginalised communities for their own problems, which are caused by white supremacy/[poverty?]. Believing these things is also morally wrong.
* The sole motivation of eugenics is racism/hating the disabled and mentally ill/[classism?]. None of the problems it purports to solve are caused by anything intrinsic about the people it discusses, they're actually caused by intentional discrimination to keep marginalised communities, well, marginalised.
* Eugenics is ultimately the extreme end of a social system that is designed to oppress marginalised people, by providing the ideological foundation to wipe them out entirely. The direct analogue would be antisemitism; "moderate voluntary eugenics" would be the equivalent of, "a program to improve gentile representation in Hollywood."*
* Eugenics is also an attempt to shift the debate away from programs to address discrimination/[poverty?].
The underlying weltanschauung is that some people are evil and motivated by evil, and it's this evil motivation that defines them as the evil group (specifically, they're motivated by maintaining their own power/privilege at the expense of others, a bit like the Inner Party in 1984*). These people control society, and they pick which ideas to advocate as part of their plan to maintain control (or unconsciously settle on them for that reason). Stopping them from advocating for evil things, wherever possible, is thus morally good because it disrupts their ability to maintain control of society.
This is all based on a worldview in which an evil (eg. racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist etc) conspiracy/non-conspiratorial consensus controls society, or is on the cusp of retaking power. They understand their arguments for censorship as arguments for tearing down Nazi propaganda posters in 1930s Germany.
A lot of them wouldn't focus on the points in the square brackets, but probably wouldn't reject them (I think, but I'm not completely sure on both parts of that). There's also some tangles at the moral foundations level in terms of which parts are intrinsically evil and which parts are instrumentally evil that I've probably got wrong, but I think that would seem like scholasticism to people who hold these views.
*Nobody who holds these views would use these analogies, but I think they capture the sense of the worldview.
I think your steelman needs just so much work. The idea that "all cis white men are part of an evil conspiracy/consensus" is the popular view of "woke" folks from the outside, but personally knowing a lot of people who buy fully into that worldview, it's entirely inaccurate.
The argument about privilege is that it's *insidious.* It shapes worldviews without us knowing that it shapes our worldview. The things we believe and value are informed by that privilege and thus we have a non-objective view of the world. We are not, in fact, evil people trying to do evil and protect our power. It's just that everyone creates worldviews based on making sense of their lived experience, and for those in power that means telling a story that makes their power legitimate.
In such a belief system it's *impossible* to separate our values from our place in society. Even if we're the smartest folks alive, we lack the correct information to do so. Therefore, when we decide which human traits are valuable (or what to order for lunch) we do so based on value judgments that are inherently flawed and subjective.
Despite mostly thinking these folks are unhinged, I am extremely sympathetic to this viewpoint when it comes to eugenics. The costs of getting it wrong in the specific way they're concerned about are enormous. I do not think it's far-fetched to believe that if I were in charge of the "on whom should we model humanity" committee I'd tend to pick people most like myself. And hell if I'm going to let literally anyone else be in charge of that committee.
A compelling, non-controversial version of the same argument is the argument for democracy. Why should folks who don't own land, folks who do not pay federal taxes, and folks who lack a high school education be allowed to choose our government? They have less incentive to make good choices, large incentive to support increased taxation, and less knowledge base than people who graduate high school and work middle class jobs.
But history shows us that those folks have concerns that the "landed gentry" will fail entirely to address, and that a government that doesn't take those concerns into account is capable of atrocity.
In re Nobel Sperm Banks: I believe people aren't young when they get Nobel Prizes, and sperm is in worse shape as a man gets older.
There are work arounds, I think. One would be to encourage people who might get Nobel Prizes to freeze some sperm. How early can you identify likely candidates?
First off, you just... didn't talk about the current debate about genetic screening. Trying to prevent things like autism and Down's syndrome. Like, I guess it's highly inconvenient to you if you have to acknowledge that modern day eugenics is still about preventing the birth of the undesirables, but, you really need to. The slope looks a lot more slippery when people are literally arguing that allowing certain types of children to be born is a tragedy.
But even past that, this seems to boil down to... "Why are we as a society unwilling to, based on highly debated and controversial theories about IQ, implement policies and plans to give taxpayer money to people who are already likely to be successful and wealthy? In a few generations there could be amazing gains, in a vague betterment of humanity kind of way". Dude, we're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere with wild abandon, I have no goddamn idea what's happening in your brain.
Generally not wanting your children to be born with defects, disabilities, and handicaps is extremely altruistic in nature and shows an ability to go beyond yourself and immediate gratification for the sake of the next generation. If you have a problem with this I have to assume it’s because of selfish interest. Down’s impairs someone’s cognitive functioning by ~60 IQ points or so. This is severe negative utility to both the person themselves and those around them; pretending otherwise is cruel and creates inordinate amounts of harm.
>highly debated
IQ tests aren’t really “debated” about by people who know anything. This is like saying climate change is “hotly debated.” Sure, small aspects and mechanisms might be, but people who are aware of the extant literature and have a modicum of knowledge about the subject agree on about 80-90% of what is being discussed, and the quibbles are more-or-less icing. Mutualism vs g-theory? Measurement invariance across generation cohorts and trying to reverse engineer actual IQ loss/gain? These might be “debated” or discussed. Whether or not IQ tests are valid, measure intelligence, &c, are not.
>vague betterment
Increasing mean IQ (really g) would be the single greatest utility improvement humans have ever done probably ever. Massively decreasing crime and upping the per-capita genius and innovation rate when our population is already large would be incredible. I guess if increased scientific progress sounds “vague” to you then maybe you belong to a different Substack community.
Okay, given the extreme hit to quality of life by being born with Down's, does that not then imply heavily that it is a good and moral idea to sterilize the few people with down's who can reproduce? My point wasn't to get into this argument or dismiss it as nonsense with no value, my point was that it is very very close to promoting sterilization, which this whole article talked about as if it's a pure evil that we would never skirt close to, when we are in fact skirting real close to it right now.
>highly debated
I am doubtful that there is scientific consensus that you can breed more intelligence into the global population through eugenics. My reading through of the literature is admittedly casual and rather shallow, but I remember disagreements about heritability and genetic factors in IQ. Maybe I am wrong on this, sure, public perception of IQ is highly debated which is all that is necessary to point out why this idea is unpopular.
>vague betterment
Vague means unclear, does not mean unimportant. "Smarter people" is an unbelievably massive boon, worth incredible costs, but it's a vague one. Like, improve intelligence to improve science to improve medicine to maybe cure some important disease, is vague. I am appreciative of the differences shifts in statistics can make, but if you are trying to garner support for a large scale plan that is funneling money towards people who probably don't need it and doesn't have any pay off for multiple generations, you need pay-off that is more appealing than "Higher IQ". At least, if this was an actual thing you wanted to actually implement in an actual government/society. I don't know, I feel insane having to explain this.
I'm realizing that "eugenics" is woefully underspecified, not just the positive vs. negative aspect, and the coercive vs. non-coercive aspect, but that scope matters.
There are people with serious genetic medical problems who chose not to have children because they don't want to pass the problems on. So, negative eugenics, fully voluntary, small scope. Is this a problem?
What seems to be missing Here is the cost to the people who will have to raise this child i.e. the ones with serious handicaps. I have a friend who has a daughter with Downs who is now in her 30s and she is a wonderful person but my friend has a lot of resources.
It should probably be a felony in rich countries to knowingly or recklessly pass on any sufficiently terrible genetic disease that could have been averted by prenatal testing. The utility cost of passing on Huntington's is a lot worse than committing rape.
Here's a question: what does "overpopulation" mean?
Is it meant in the sense of "the average GPD per capita of person from country X means that they can't afford to eat"? Because then China could go from overpopulated to underpopulated in less than a generation, and could have done so even without the one child policy. And Africa is likely to become underpopulated just at its population peaks.
Does it mean "too many people for the amount of arable land to provide a surplus in years with SD-1 crop yields"? Because then Japan and most of Europe are overpopulated. Does it refer to some sort of metric related to average population density? Because then Africa is underpopulated and likely to remain so for the next 100 years.
The term is just so maddeningly nebulous, and all too often seems to simply be shorthand for "those benighted poor people over there" rather than anything specific. And that immediately sets up the dark cultural undertones of "those people over there ruining it for the rest of us" which, I feel, surrounded a lot of the high-flown environmentalist rhetoric in the 70s and 80s.
Also: is it not easier to simply have a heuristic of "forcibly sterilizing people is bad and wrong" that can allow one to damn both eugenics and environmentalism to the extent that they endorsed and enabled forcible sterilization? Doesn't that cut through the crap by way of the association games linking these two disparate concepts somewhat?
I haven't read all the comments carefully, but it seems like all the arguments against eugenics involves the fear of coercive power. Would anyone object to a private organization whose twin values are
1. This should not be done by government. We hereby publicly and irrevocably commit to strictly and scrupulously avoid engaging with government in any way. To that end, here are some rules we promise to follow, and some binding enforcement mechanisms to hold us accountable if we fail.
2. Voluntary eugenics is good. Let's educate people on why and how to have kids that are smarter and healthier than they would be by default.
So you provide people with instructions on how to find intelligent, attractive partners, but without any enforcement mechanism? Isn't that just normal dating advice?
Good question, let's walk through it. If your experience of normal dating advice includes:
- your mom pestering you about going on a third date when you haven't even seen their family medical history
- your friend pestering you for liking your date's eye color but you don't care they wear contacts
- your dad having "the talk" with you, and leaving you with some condoms, a book about sex, and some fun puzzles to do on first dates that will give you a fair idea about someone's iq
... then yeah, I guess I'm just advocating for normal dating advice. Even if this isn't your experience of normal dating advice, it might be effective to frame it that way. Let's put together a pamphlet, call it "Getting Ever Brighter, advice engendering generational betterment," and get OpenPhil to fund seminars and etc.
Side note, but Galton came up with one of the most inventive uses of trigonometry during his time in Africa:
"Mr. Hahn's household was large. There was an interpreter, and a sub-interpreter, and again others; but all most excellently well-behaved, and showing to great advantage the influence of their master. These servants were chiefly Hottentots, who had migrated with Mr. Hahn from Hottentot-land, and, like him, had picked up the language of the Damaras.
The sub-interpreter was married to a charming person, not only a Hottentot in figure, but in that respect a Venus among Hottentots. I was perfectly aghast at her development, and made inquiries upon that delicate point as far as I dared among my missionary friends. The result is, that I believe Mrs. Petrus to be the lady who ranks second among all the Hottentots for the beautiful outline that her back affords, Jonker's wife ranking as the first ; the latter, however, was slightly tassee, while Mrs. Petrus was in full embonpoint.
I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape; but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my foot-rule could be ; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form, that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate.
The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant ; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake ; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring-tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms."
Am I truly the only cat who remembers the Ehrlich-Simon Wager?
Anyway, Palo Alto has a higher population density than does Bangladesh, and doubtless consumes a lot more precious resources while offering far less of the things humans and cats actually need to survive. I suggest we start the involuntary vasectomies there.
No, it is bad. The difference is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a non sequitur of Islam. The same can not be said for the atrocities of committed in the name of eugenics.
What rubs me the wrong way about this issue (and that of super-intelligent AI to a certain extent as well), is that the whole discussion loses sight of the individual. Every individual human life is, in a way, a universe, whether that life be privileged or poor, full of prestige or full of humility, full of happiness or full of suffering. These are ideas which run roughshod over the value of the individual human life in order to fulfill some (pipe)dream about a perfected future society where, in the case of eugenics, everyone will be more beautiful and more intelligent and which, in turn, would apparently lead (according to many of the opinions I read here) to moral enlightenment and happiness...
I think my lingering unease about this revolves around the question of how, in the process of trying to achieve this perfected future human being - though it be through positive means such as the Nobel sperm bank idea etc. - can we not end up subconsciously deprecating all those who currently do not fit the ideal for the future utopia? The less intelligent, the less physically perfect, the diseased, the poor... If we are striving for the eventual elimination of their kind from society, how can we possibly not be disparaging of their present existence?
AI is kinda the same. What good does super-intelligent AI do, even if benevolent, even if it creates a "perfect" society where there is presumably no or little suffering, if that has been achieved at the cost of reducing individuals to just some product which needs to be optimized...
I do not feel that I am "disparaging myself" when I try to raise my children to surpass me. And this isn't specific to my bloodline; if (post?)human civilization reaches a point where there are tens of billions of entities, practically all much smarter than me, I probably consider that outcome awesome.
This had kind of a strange turn, or lack thereof. The commonplace criticism of Ehrlich is that he was basically a eugenicist sublimating that socially unpopular belief structure into more socially acceptable environmentalism: https://capitalresearch.org/article/paul-ehrlichs-population-dud/
There is not a single human being alive who I would trust to define what the future of humanity should look like. In 100 years we're gonna discover that society needs to be 30% stupid to function or something. IMO the evil is baked directly into the idea - "society would be better if people were less different from me."
As for Ehrlich, the evil's also baked directly into his idea - "society would be better if we had less people...Especially people who are different from me."
Fortunately, you've framed the discussion so Ehrlich gets to stand for *all environmentalism everywhere* and Galton gets to stand for *a particular strand of eugenics* which really helps make the position seem more reasonable than it is.
I said most of what I wanted to say in my own top level comment, but this really covers the rest of the ground that I left out of mine. You could try to argue that "society would be better if people were less different from me" is not the position of eugenicists, but eugenicists (on the whole) will never exclude themselves from the group considered pro-social, and therefore all their arguments are simply trying to rationalize the underlying belief that they belong to an elite group that is better than others and deserves to occupy a privileged position within society. There is no redeeming any facet of a movement that attempts to entrench that belief in public policy.
> I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Clearly the conclusion is that minarchist libertarianism is correct ;)
In all seriousness, the leap to "governments are judged differently from people" seems to lack any argument to me. As far as I can tell this is just carving out a special case for... whatever it is constitutes government. Which is still made up of people. But under some particular set of circumstances those people get to claim totally different moral rules? What "licenses" a government to act differently? Does this license have any limits?
Governments have a monopoly on coercion, which makes them evil and culpable. They cause pain and misery to their own subjects in visible and attributable ways.
Individuals and businesses are free to make and accept whatever legal offers they like. Rather than cause misery and pain directly to ingroups nearby, they let the invisible hand of the free market do it to outgroups at a deniable remove, and therefore are not to blame for their side effects and externalities.
There is no "positive eugenics." Any time one frames it as privileges for the "good-gened" instead of extermination of the "bad-gened," there's still an expectation that the "bad-gened" ought to be happy with the denial of those privileges.
With regards to forced sterilizations with sustainability goals, they're always imposed on the poorest people using the fewest resources. If environmental sustainability was the goal, they would be imposed on the developed world, where we eat more food and burn more gasoline per person. But it's not the environment we're out to sustain, it's the developed-world lifestyle.
It's not like India is suffering from a lack of population. Might be a controversial idea, but there are a lot of human beings and we breed like rabbits. Any country which needs more population can crack open immigration a little bit and will have more than enough Syrians and Afghanis and people from Sahel in a heartbeat, and they'll breed where they go as well. Hell, among the 10 million or so refugees in Turkey, clean majority being males, still more than 1 million births happened in the last decade or so. This them living in a substandard conditions. So any kind of sterilization campaign is at worst neutral to humanity since there are more than enough people to breed. It's not like we're in a population bottleneck.
About positive eugenics, I think the rich are making DNA screening before selecting which baby to IV implant but there should be cheaper alternatives for the masses. Can sperm be cloned? If so why don't we have von Neumann sperms on supermarket checkout shelves?
Isn't the real lesson here that you should never listen to Robert McNamara? Because that usually ends up with me adding another item to the list of his mistakes.
I think the space of ideas that are evil nutcases can twist into an excuse to commit atrocities is really wide. Probably not every idea a human mind can think, but probably a significant section of the things that are important.
Basically, society couldn't function if we avoided everything that could possibly be used as an excuse to commit an atrocity. Given the way our society works, we aren't particularly likely to repeat atrocities. If we started a eugenics program now, it would be particularly unlikely to have the exact same sort of atrocities as before. Partly this is just random samples from a large space containing few repeats. Partly the vulnerability has been patched, people know to look out for that specific atrocity.
I think trying to avoid giving homicidal maniacs an excuse to kill people is extremely hard, they will always find some excuse, it's much easier to not give them the means.
"If we started a eugenics program now, it would be particularly unlikely to have the exact same sort of atrocities as before."
No, we'd have a whole new set of atrocities, and in fifty years time people would be arguing over "well it's not fair to tar eugenics with the brush of What Happened In Sacramento".
Yes. Because eugenics programmes are explicitly for "let's make sure none of the unhealthy breed", and the founding originators of eugenics picked out things like modern medicine making it possible for the sickly and weak who, in the course of nature would have died off before reproducing, to live and go on to have more sickly, weak offspring. So vaccination programmes in a sense were contra-eugenics: sure, they prevent the spread of disease, but they also prevent the natural way of culling the herd!
People drawing up little lists of the unfit and then deciding what happens the unfit are just as likely to say "let's *not* vaccinate the epileptics and diabetics, let them get sick and die off naturally".
And vaccination + social distancing can easily turn into "keep their disgusting unvaxxed germ filled bodies away from us" with a similar amount of conceptual twisting towards the evil. And we saw a fair bit of vax discrimination during covid.
Anyone who understood the biology would be more keen to ensure that the very best and otherwise promising had many children, especially with each other, and ideally they would want that some of those children get exposed to a bit more radiation than is healthy.
After all, selecting against the worst will reduce variance, while selecting for the best will increase it.
I think that the free market will make "eugenics" widespread on its own, without any arguments being won or policymakers stepping in. Polygenic testing using ML algorithms is already here and can determine the likely traits of embryos (mostly health-related for now commercially, but IQ predictors also already exist—both are limited by data only) . IVF embryo selection is becoming increasingly commonplace. No coercive force is used; parents do this on their own for obvious reasons.
I think the real reason people dislike eugenics (and therefore the crucial point missing in the piece) is that it designates some people as more worthy of reproducing than others, which is rather close to establishing a hierarchy of moral worth. This indeed might be very morally corrosive, possibly outweighing potential social benefits of eugenics.
I mean is there a book (or at least an article) that convincingly argues that the main reason nuclear did not realize its potential was because of environmentalist opposition, not because it was more expensive and less convenient than fossil fuels (while environmentalis had a minor effect).
Yes, probably. But it would be handy to have a book by an expert that explains this in more details and answers various objections (for example: some countries, like the ussr, did not have an anti-nuclear environmental movement - why didn’t they get to unlimited power and flying cars? Were their greenhouse gas emissions really much smaller?) or more precisely, can one give a rough estimate of how much damage the movement did to nuclear power and how much emissions is it responsible for?
I think price trajectories are a strong argument. Most technologies get cheaper the more of them you build. Nuclear was getting cheaper until 1970, and then got more and more expensive. I don't know how to get detailed historical info, but these sources talk about what happened:
The media played a key role (as it still does today), as suggested by Cohen's survey of the Health Physics Society and Radiation Research Society. This 1982 survey found that 91% of experts judged the general public's fear of radiation to be "greater than realistic": http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter5.html
I think it's also important to realize that Wind and Solar didn't reach 1% of primary energy supply until 2011, 32 years after the Charney global warming consensus report in 1979. I think everyone sensible knew at the time that we couldn't "just renewables" our way out of global warming, but "environmentalists" still rejected nuclear. [edited]
Even in 2023 Germany has fully shut down all nuclear plants but plans to leave coal plants online for several more years. Even after shutting coal down, they plan to allow non-coal fossil fuel plants after that. If anti-nuclear is knee-jerk, the knee has been jerking for 60+ years.
I would love to know more about the early history. I noticed Helen Caldicott and other anti-nukes were influenced by the 1957 novel "On The Beach" by Nevil Shute (youtu.be/C6-47HrCzjs?t=441) which was about nuclear war. I'm not sure why they so strictly equate bombs with power plants though.
Thank you, this is very insightful and informative!
What do you think about the following anti-nuclear argument: a world, where nuclear power is truly abundant (every country has many nuclear power plants) will also very likely be a world where it is much easier to make nuclear weapons and nuclear war and nuclear terrorism are much more likely.
1. Nuclear bomb production requires cycling out fuel after ~30 days in the reactor, in order to avoid contaminating weapons-grade plutonium-239 with reactor-grade plutonium-240, 241 and 242.[1][2] Most reactors are not designed for such rapid cycling because it gets in the way of other design goals. My favorite examples are the Molten Salt Reactor designs from companies including Moltex, Thorcon and Terrestrial Energy: these reactors are designed to be sealed for several years (adding fuel, but never removing anything).
2. The nuclear industry is highly regulated; we can require power plants to use anti-proliferation designs and have security guards, and reactor designers prefer to do this anyway, in order to help them weather the barrage of public criticism that always happens whenever anyone proposes building a nuclear plant.
3. It's harder to build an electric power plant than a bomb-making plant. Countries that want to build bombs can more easily do so by building dedicated non-power facilities for that purpose. For example, North Korea built nuclear bombs but no power plants, ditto for the Manhattan Project. AFAIK, the USA doesn't use any civilian power plants to make nuclear-weapon material. So protesting nuclear power usually does nothing to reduce proliferation in one's own country, let alone other countries. Since you have a limited amount of time to protest, why not protest bombs instead of clean energy?
[1] From Roger Cashmore, Ben Koppelman, in Reprocessing and Recycling of Spent Nuclear Fuel, 2015: §23.5.1 Enhancing isotopic barriers:
> Weapons-grade plutonium is produced via very low burn up of uranium fuel; that is, when fuel is irradiated for a short time, even just for a few weeks. In civil nuclear power reactors, fuel is irradiated over several years to maximize its energy yield for electricity production. This significantly reduces the attractiveness of plutonium in used civil fuel for nuclear weapons use. The reactor-grade plutonium in used civil fuel has a lower fraction of Pu-239 due to the high levels of burn up in civil nuclear power reactors. It has a greater quantity of undesirable isotopes of plutonium that complicate the use of civil nuclear materials in nuclear weapons, decreasing the reliability of a nuclear explosion. Pu-238 decays relatively rapidly, generating significant amounts of heat. Pu-240 could set off the chain reaction prematurely, substantially reducing explosive yield as the weapon may blow itself apart and cut short the chain reaction. Pu-241 decays to Am-241 that absorbs neutrons and emits intense gamma radiation. These isotopes require careful management and extensive shielding to protect personnel when handling materials, and they could damage other components in a nuclear weapon.
[2] Technically reactor-grade plutonium CAN be used in a weapon, but this has never BEEN done due to (i) the extreme radiation danger of raw spent fuel as well as plutonium 240/241/242 and (ii) reduced and unpredictable weapons yield. By far the most likely way reactor-grade plutonium would get into a weapon is if terrorists who are nuclear experts, and don't mind getting radiation sickness, created a weapon (The Sum Of All Fears). For this reason it is good to have (i) regulations (which already exist) around used fuel handling (ii) waste-burning reactors that destroy plutonium (and also eliminate the long-term nuclear waste problem) and (iii) reactor designs with low plutonium production. Thorcon implies thorium is difficult to separate from plutonium, making its thorium-rich fuel proliferation-resistant, but I haven't seen anyone corroborate this.
>And consider that IQ is mostly genetic and could be improved with eugenics. Bringing all underdeveloped countries up to First World living standards would be the most valuable thing humanity has ever done.
One of the big problem with these sort of arguments is it ignores the geopolitical and historical context of poverty. This kind of view is a very naïve view of the world and ignores environmental stressors that IQ can't overcome.
The post itself references that 'Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of people', which gives you an example of the kind of exploitative attitude and policy the developed world has to the underdeveloped world. You change IQ but that wouldn't change this fundamental structure of the world.
All the non-communist ethnically east asian countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) have reached economic parity with europe despite the legacy of colonialism, and their co-ethnics everywhere in the world are quite well off despite the ongoing explicit government programs of discrimination against them in many of the countries where they are a minority. Apparently their slight advantage in human capital more than compensates for whatever legacy of oppression.
>All the non-communist ethnically east asian countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) have reached economic parity with europe despite the legacy of colonialism
What's the evidence that this is due to IQ as opposed to the West propping these nations up as a counterweight to communism?
Take South Korea as an example:
"During the 1950s, Korea’s economy slowly began to recover, but there wasn’t much to work with. Foreign aid and assistance came in from the International Development Association, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and bilateral agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan. "
"During the Third Republic between 1963 and 1972, the country received millions of dollars from Japan due to property rights claims and from the US, which, due to involvement in the Vietnam War, sought to support democratic South Korea as a counterweight to communist North Korea. The government used foreign revenues to achieve a self-sustaining economy and launched the saemaeul initiative to develop rural areas. "
It sounds a lot like South Korea wouldn't be where it is today without being artificially propped up by Western angel investors.
We send lots of foreign aid to lots of places. None of them turn out like East Asia. We've propped up various governments in South America, Eastern Europe, and the middle east.
You can explain almost all of the variance in GDP per capita between countries using IQ, economic freedom, trade freedom, and oil.
>We send lots of foreign aid to lots of places. None of them turn out like East Asia
Nowhere near to the same extent however.
>You can explain almost all of the variance in GDP per capita between countries using IQ, economic freedom, trade freedom, and oil.
There's the question of whether highly developed nations are highly developed because they have a higher IQ or whether they have a higher IQ because they are highly developed.
We know that IQ is highly environmental. For instance the average IQ in North Korea is about 98 and in South Korea its about 102. You'd expect them to be the same (or at least within a point or so) if IQ wasn't affected by environment but they aren't. So that indicates that being highly developed boosts IQ as opposed to the other way around.
I read through most of the comments and couldn't find anyone really mirroring my the depths of my dismay at the shallowness of Adraste's argument here. I think the article completely misses most of the actual arguments of anti-eugenicists - at least those from a leftist/sjw/moral perspective. If you listen to modern leftists discuss eugenics, of course they think forced and coerced sterilization is bad, but their argument is never that eugenics is bad *because* forced/coerced sterilization is bad. People were arguing against eugenics before any such policies were implemented. There are at least two (intertwined, but separate) points that Adraste should have made that she didn't even come within spitting distance of.
1) It is impossible to extricate any ranking of desirable traits (and therefore the people who have those desirable traits) from the systemic inequalities that exist in our society. Any system that is put in place will necessarily benefit the people who already have the most power in society and disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Someone who had to drop out of high school to support their three younger siblings may be as smart as the Nobel laureates invited to the sperm bank, but that'll never even be noticed because they have an 11th grade education and have been working 2-3 jobs at a time since they were 16. There are a lot of people working every waking minute to barely make ends meet - I'd wager the smartest .1% of those people are as smart as, if not smarter than, the average Nobel laureate, they're just harder to find. Any initiative that ignores them because the people making the initiative don't think about them, or because they are more comfortable around Nobel laureates, or just because it's easier, is entrenching and enhancing systemic inequalities (which is bad).
2) When talking about Carrie Buck and her sister, who were sterilized for political convenience, or the thousands of blind people who were sterilized but didn't even have heritable blindness, the very next point Adraste should land on is that we might not make those same mistakes today, but we'd make mistakes. All our studies regarding what is heritable or not, why it is heritable, and how it is heritable, have flaws. We've barely scratched the surface of epigenetic indicators - will sperm from a Nobel laureate really make that much difference in entirely contrasting prenatal environments? We don't know what we don't know, and who will we needlessly hurt in this process? Even in the encouraging-births model, "Nobel laureate" may be a heritable trait, but who knows if it's a genetic one. In 50 years this may seem as stupid an idea as all blindness being heritable.
I want to wrap up this comment by mentioning that there are two ways to arrive at the belief that any attempt to value one human life above another is immoral (which also should have come up in Adraste's commentary, as it's pretty fundamental to the anti-eugenicist belief system). The first is a purely moral concern that all humans are inherently the same amount of valuable. The other is the practical concern coming from the confluence of the two above points, leading to the conclusion that any attempt to rank the value of one human life over another will be inherently flawed, and therefore it is immoral to try. I don't come quite to the point of believing that there is no difference in value that can be placed on human life (the person making breakthroughs in cancer research unequivocally has more value to society than the serial killer spending their days stalking their next victim) but while "cancer-researcher" may be a heritable trait, we haven't a clue if it's genetic. With very few exceptions, I believe there's no ethical way to value-rank a person's unborn children, making any eugenics policy inherently immoral.
"Someone who had to drop out of high school to support their three younger siblings may be as smart as the Nobel laureates invited to the sperm bank, but that'll never even be noticed because they have an 11th grade education and have been working 2-3 jobs at a time since they were 16."
Galton in one of his books claims this is not true; if you really are one of the 1% then you will triumph over all odds, because look at all the rags-to-riches stories. So just because you're an illiterate ploughboy in the depths of the country with sixteen siblings to feed, that doesn't mean you can't become President of the Royal Society if you just put your mind to it, put your head down, and work really hard with your giant genius brain.
From "Hereditary Genius", 1892 second edition:
"I believe, and shall do my best to show, that, if the “eminent” men of any period, had been changelings when babies, a very fair proportion of those who survived and retained their health up to fifty years of age, would, notwithstanding their altered circumstances, have equally risen to eminence. Thus—to take a strong case—it is incredible that any combination of circumstances, could have repressed Lord Brougham to the level of undistinguished mediocrity.
The arguments on which I rely, are as follow. I will limit their application for the present, to men of the pen and to artists. First, it is a fact, that numbers of men rise, before they are middle-aged, from the humbler ranks of life to that worldly position, in which it is of no importance to their future career, how their youth has been passed.
They have overcome their hindrances, and thus start fair with others more fortunately reared, in the subsequent race of life. A boy who is to be carefully educated is sent to a good school, where he confessedly acquires little useful information, but where he is taught the art of learning. The man of whom I have been speaking, has contrived to acquire the same art in a school of adversity. Both stand on equal terms, when they have reached mature life. They compete for the same prizes, measure their strength by efforts in the same direction, and their relative successes are thenceforward due to their relative natural gifts. There are many such men in the “eminent” class, as biographies abundantly show. Now, if the hindrances to success were very great, we should expect all who surmounted them, to be prodigies of genius. The hindrances would form a system of natural selection, by repressing all whose gifts were below a certain very high level. But what is the case? We find very many who have risen from the ranks, who are by no means prodigies of genius; many who have no claim to “eminence,” who have risen easily in spite of all obstacles. The hindrances undoubtedly form a system of natural selection that represses mediocre men, and even men of pretty fair powers—in short, the classes below D; but many of D succeed, a great many of E, and I believe a very large majority of those above.
If a man is gifted with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, I cannot comprehend how such a man should be repressed. The world is always tormented with difficulties waiting to be solved—struggling with ideas and feelings, to which it can give no adequate expression. If, then, there exists a man capable of solving those difficulties, or of giving a voice to those pent-up feelings, he is sure to be welcomed with universal acclamation. We may almost say that he has only to put his pen to paper, and the thing is done. I am here speaking of the very first-class men—prodigies—one in a million, or one in ten millions, of whom numbers will be found described in this volume, as specimens of hereditary genius. "
Galton was writing in 1892 - did a black woman in South Carolina at that time really have the ability to rise to the level of notability as a white man - even if both had identical levels of social, emotional, and intellectual intelligence? If he didn't address this point in his writings then his entire argument is moot, as society has hardly progressed to the point today where race and gender differences can be dismissed as a non-factor in how the rest of society treats an applicant for any position.
Even setting aside that argument, however, and dealing with two people of the same gender and race, the one who is not sent to the best schools will need more grit, determination, and discipline, alongside a separate set of skills to reach the same places that someone born into wealth and privilege may reach. Someone who is incredibly intellectually smart but not emotionally intelligent is more likely to be given a position if their resume comes with institutional pedigree, while a person without that pedigree will need some other factor to make up for the missing prestige that comes with that resume. Someone who is terrible at networking may still develop a network of like-minded people if their parents or childhood friends are in the same or adjacent prestigious fields, while someone without those connections will have to go at it alone and is therefore less likely to succeed.
In short, I think Galton's argument is specious. He makes the mistake of thinking that if some people can raise themselves out of the positions they were born into, that anyone with the same characteristics as someone in a prestigious position is capable of doing so, ignoring the other factors that may have made it easier for people born into wealthy and connected families to get there than those who are not.
"Galton was writing in 1892 - did a black woman in South Carolina at that time really have the ability to rise to the level of notability as a white man - even if both had identical levels of social, emotional, and intellectual intelligence? If he didn't address this point in his writings then his entire argument is moot"
Ah, I can't quote what Galton says about black people because I think that would all be caught up in the Substack No-No Word filters 😁 Let's just say that black women in South Carolina are not part of the target group. White women are barely acknowledged, and then he's fretting that we don't have the kind of academic grading in university for them as we do for young men, so you probably have to judge Ethel's eugenic fitness on "are her family all big names with big families?"
> so you probably have to judge Ethel's eugenic fitness on "are her family all big names with big families?"
But is that not the fundamental issue that I'm pointing out? That it comes down to one's position in society rather than one's innate traits? The dismissal of black people and women and anyone else not like himself is the problem, and comes back around to point #1 from my original comment
But Galton has graphs and statistics and talks about regression to the mean! (even if he uses a different term for it).
What do you mean that he ignores all except white, university educated men in his calculations of who are in the higher levels of human excellence? 😁 He's using *science*!
I would like to believe that's because leftist arguments are so facile that any attempt at reasoned debate would discard them without discussion. How is it that 'systemic inequalities' don't hold back Indian/African immigrants from performing well in the American system?
1. Voluntary eugenics is about improving genes of the next generation. It doesn't harm anyone who is already alive. If the high-school dropout with two jobs chooses to get donor sperm from a genius instead of (say) whoever she can get, "the people who already have the most power in society" do not benefit from that, but this mother-to-be is more likely to have a smart baby (not guaranteed, of course). So the benefit, it seems to me, goes to the high-school dropout.
2. Society always makes mistakes. Banning things can be a mistake, mandating things can be a mistake, and letting people make their own choices can be a mistake. So pointing out that any of these three options "could be a mistake" is (in absence of evidence) not a good argument. And there is evidence genes affect intelligence (and other traits), so...there. Plus, we could allow people to make choices and then measure the outcomes, so that if mistakes were made, they can be corrected in the future. Double-blind trials would be better, but I digress.
Presumably you favor the "banning" option, but this option closes off learning. If choice is banned, but the ban is a mistake, we'll never know, we'll just have endless debates about it. Only by allowing things, and then measuring outcomes, can society learn.
You might not want that learning to occur because the choices that led to the learning were "immoral". The thing is, I don't share whatever moral intuition people use to judge such choices as immoral. In fact, I think that intuition must be wrong.
It looks like you're trying to say that if we try to increase our chances of having a disease-free, kind and/or smart child that we are "valu[ing] one human life above another." I disagree. We're valuing one sperm or egg above another; that's different.
I think Adam Mastroianni comes over much worse than Ehlrich or Galton. Adam is actively seeking to judge people.
Adam is demanding that Galton judges a stranger from a completely different culture, while Galton is trying to observe and understand. Judging people for being from a different if worse culture is the less liberal and less cosmopolitan option.
I think Ehlrich and Galton's views were perfectly reasonable from the position they were coming from, in both cases they cluld still make a reasonable lesser of two evils argument for their positions (If India had horrendous famines today would Ehlrich be seen as a heroic Cassandra?).
I think there is a more core moral flaw with Adam, he wants to find people with different world views or positions in time to be his moral inferiors. Uncharitablity to Galton is core to his approach to reading his book.
What, exactly, is morally bad about incentivizing low-IQ people to not reproduce? If I was a multi-billionaire that is exactly what I would do. I'm not interested in slippery-slope arguments - the potential benefits are so huge that they more than offset whatever safeguards are necessary to reinforce any slippery slopes. If you model low IQ as a negative externality (which it is), then Coase's Theorem implies that creating a negotiable property right w/r/t that externality will lead to Pareto-efficient outcomes. IMO this is obviously the right approach and - at least until IQ-raising interventions arrive - represents the absolute lowest-hanging fruit in the "how can we most-quickly improve the world" game.
The people having too many kids are the end result of many factors, including social liberalisation. It's the deadbeats fathering a string of kids on multiple women with no more regard than dogs in heat that have taken "free love is a human right!" to its natural extreme. Why does he care if he has six kids by six different women? He doesn't have any responsibility to be involved in their lives. If she didn't want a baby, it was up to her to use contraception or get an abortion. You can't force people to stay together for the sake of the kids anymore, because it's all about Me and My Self-Actualisation.
The lower classes always did tend to having kids outside of marriage and carelessness about marriage, but now they have social sanction from their betters. The betters, of course, still get married, tend not to get divorced, and confine their child-bearing to within marriage, but they sawed away the sanctions of shame and religious disapproval all in the name of liberty and individuality.
So you can try paying people to get vasectomies or have their tubes tied, and that may work. But not enough, so then compulsion has to come in. Guys who have six kids and don't support them being called in for involuntary sterilisation. Women having implanted contraceptives to make sure they don't 'forget' to use them. Deliver your third kid outside of wedlock and get a free hysterectomy.
That, of course, will stir up an entire hornets' nest of protest. You better have a very good case to argue there, Wanda.
My own country is providing free contraceptive services to women aged 17-25. I await the results of this experiment, and if it makes any meaningful difference to birth-rates out of wedlock, with interest. My view is that it will go the same route as the constant cry over the years that "we need proper sex ed in schools!" where now we're talking about "age-appropriate sex ed" for three year olds. Teens are getting pregnant? They don't have good sex ed! They get it? Well they need it younger!
I think the first cry will be "Well 17 is too old - you should be offering it to 16 year olds! 15! 14! As soon as they start their first period!" Because when you tell people that sex is a right, and they should be having it, and it's someone's fault if they're not having it, then they'll have it. And sex means babies. If you expect that you can't tell 15 year olds not to fuck because hey, hormones, they're teens, they're horny, they don't have self-control (even if legally this is underage sex and they're not supposed to be having it), why on earth do you expect them to have the self-control to plan out and consistently use contraception every time they have sex?
Hear hear. Anyone who fails to support their children or has their children taken away by Child Protective Services after due process should be coercively prevented from having additional children.
I simply don't buy slippery slope arguments and I don't agree that creating eugenic incentives would necessarily lead to coercive policy. And whatever hornet's nest of protest would be stirred up, I do in fact have a very good cause to argue: possibly the single highest-ROI social intervention in history.
"Eugenics" is a terrible word. I say that not just because it has connotations with terrible things, but because it utterly fails to accomplish the one job a word is supposed to have: to facilitate communication.
If you have to define a word every time you use it to clarify a likely misunderstanding amongst your audience, you should probably stop using that word.
I personally prefer the term "Epilogenics" to refer to genetic modification/selection that involves individual choice. If one were to construct a venn diagram, both eugenics and epilogenics would include embryo selection and choosing a reproductive partner, but eugenics would include state sponsored sterilization efforts and genocide, and epilogenics would not.
You continue to amaze me. One thing that got me confused for a moment is "Paul Ehrlich". I'd suggest keeping his middle initial "R" so he's not confused with the dude who found the cure for syphilis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich_(disambiguation)
Is there a list somewhere of all the different ideas that have been associated with piles of skulls? Because it seems to me that the decision of whether to be concerned about a pile of skulls associated with some idea it's very very strongly connected to how the speaker feels about the idea. Approximately nobody who demands that anything with a whiff of eugenics be suppressed also demands that discussion and study of economic inequalities be surprised, despite the heaping mountains of skulls left behind by various communist regimes in the 20th century.
"I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
I propose this as a middle ground: that we agree, as a society, that some actions are forever out of bounds for government, even if they might conceivably have good outcomes (or even be vital for our mutual survival), because there is no dividing line between the bad actions that are strictly necessary for survival and bad actions taken purely for the benefit of the rulers. This is why we Americans say government shall not prohibit free exercise of religion, or restrict freedom of the press, or compel people accused of crimes to testify, or allow cruel and unusual punishment. The exact prohibitions are subject to some cultural judgment, but any tolerably free society must put crucial freedoms beyond the government's reach. Although our history might be less than encouraging, I think we should add forced sterilization to the list.
It may be a separate topic, but I think the environmental movement is once again heading in a direction of intolerable cruelty in the name of saving the world. Climate change has seemingly taken all the energy in the environmental movement, and is directing it in a decidedly anti-economic direction. In a rich country like the United States, this is merely wasteful spending on windmills and electric cars. But they want to impose the same agenda on poor countries (India again!), with the obvious consequence of locking these countries, with billions of people, into perpetual poverty. In the US, poverty means stress, poor health, and lack of prospects. In Uganda, or Cambodia, or India, or even the non-coastal areas of China, poverty means disease, exposure, starvation, and death. And all in the name of "smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us."
I suppose my final word on this is that if we humans were lovely, reasonable, kind, nice, people then eugenics or whatever might work.
But we're not, and in practice such attempts will be diverted down "just enough of me, way too many of you" and instead of getting geniuses who will all be pacific and solve the world's problems by dint of charismatic influence and persuasiveness, we'll get the rat-race "bump Junior up 20 points because he needs to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right primary school to get into the right prep school to get into the right university so he has some hope of getting a job in software coding or finance which are the only jobs left", and you can dial that up to 12 if AI ever does what is promised/feared.
We won't be raising up the kids whose genetic regression to the mean would leave them in the range 95-100 IQ because they're exactly the kind of people we don't want anymore of; instead, we want to encourage the 120 IQ range people to have kids and to screen those embryos before implantation in the surrogate to ensure they do get that bump in numbers. Everyone who is permitted to be born will be 140 IQ and the tall, athletic, popular, funny, creative, will work 100 hour weeks with absolute focus and no loss of health blond(e) blue-eyes tanned and toned. It'll be a lovely world of no more bald, short guys with glasses or fat-bottomed girls, for those who get to live in it. But only the few will get to live in it. The rest of us will have been weeded out like the unwanted, scraggly, resource-hogging crab grass and poison ivy that we are. And we can only hope that the weeding will be done by Galton's hoped-for "the force of social opinion will make uneugenic marriages as unthinkable as cousin-marriage or girls throwing it all up for love and not marrying the well-off guy their mothers picked", with Certificates awarded to the fit and sneering "that is an object lesson in why you don't marry the inferior stock, Cecily" looking-down at those who do contract unsuitable marriages and produce weak sickly offspring, and nothing more authoritative or severe.
Does anyone really think that simply increasing the number of smart babies in the poorest countries would have a positive impact? More than other interventions that have provably raised avg IQ in developing countries, such as improving nutrition and child health (think about stunting) or education (think about Flynn effects and literacy)? Best case scenarios, those genius babies would become frustrated bureacrats; or maybe cannon fodder for the next civil war, or - worst case - the new conquerors and empire-makers
(maybe it could work on small and stable countries... but then, any serious intervention tends to improve welfare in small stable countries)
This is an unfair strawman, full of implied modal and universal quantifiers; nothing I said logically implies anything like that. Quite the opposite: I mentioned that other interventions are likely to be more successful than eugenics, which implies that I don't think a nation's fate is determined; and I can borrow DoJ's example that the social and economic development in the last decades had nothing to do with a change in the genetic profile of the population.
A similar distortion would be my saying that eugenics advocates think that the fate of a country is entirely dependent on the genome of its present residents.
I suppose there are two ways of reacting to this: imagine that one is part of the “smug western elites”. Then it’s a moral problem to be debated in a civilized way and so on. The outside view of this -imagine being a random guy living anywhere but in the place where you pay “rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history” to quote another post. Then it’s terrifying.
I prefer the utilitarian approach where the State issues hunting permits for the homeless. The State gets a new source of revenue, and there is a strong incentive for the homeless to be unobtrusive.
Per wikipedia it was Carrie Buck's daughter, not Carrie buck herself, who was on the honor roll. And the only source they cite for that is Stephen Jay Gould, an infamous fabricator.
Can't find any source for that on google books which predates Gould's 1984 article. The later sources are likely to just be copying Gould without attribution.
> But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
Actually, this is complete nonsense. Go on Google Scholar and you'll find hundreds of articles denouncing Paul Ehrlich and "the eugenicist roots of the population control movement". Or the thousands of articles about coercive sterilizations of minority populations in the 60s and 70s.
So far as I know, Ukrainians and Russians aren't especially different genetically, but the difference in military effectiveness is striking.
Russians have shown remarkable intelligence in different fields-- literature, music, ballet, exercise physiology, space exploration.... I have a notion that they're actually brilliant at least at the top end, but much of it is wasted on negative-sum competition.
I'll probably put this in one of the more general threads, but should so much go into concern about eugenics when more attention could go to what societies and cultures give more room or not for people to use the intelligence they have?
So far as I know, Down's Syndrome is easy to test for, but there's no good test for how debilitating it's going to be. This complicates matters. It's not like Tay-Sachs, which is simply extremely bad.
Another way that eugenic premises can work is that not only are women of color at risk (varies a lot by when and where) for involuntary sterilization, but it can be very hard for white women to get sterilized even if they're up against serious medical problems (devastating periods, for example) or absolutely don't want to have children. (I've gotten this from many accounts.)
So far as I know, the white side of the problem is medical culture (what if you change you mind? what if your husband wants children?) rather than government policy.
The most important point missed here is that you cannot simply choose to have a eugenics neutral regime. Every policy that has to do with healthcare, welfare, incarceration, taxation, housing and much more besides has either an on differential rates of reproduction among populations. In many cases, these effects are much bigger than what you could hope to achieve with overtly eugenicist policies like sterilisation. It is obviously mad to have a convention of just not considering these effects when discussing policy.
There's a distinct difference between active policies that intentionally change the distribution of the population (especially with a particular type of people to have or not have in the new society) and policies which have those results as a byproduct.
Of course, there is, but it's not actually as important as the difference between policies that have a big impact and policies that have a small impact. Subsidising women going to university has a much bigger (negative) effect on national IQ than any sterilisation policy ever did, for example, and so, by simple logic, de-subsidising it would too.
The point is that it's one thing to have some taboo on policies whose sole purpose is to achieve some eugenic effect, but it is simple insane to not take into account the eugenic or dysgenic effects of policies we are implementing is sheer madness, since these effects in the medium to long term are just so much more important than the factors we do take into account (like cost, for example).
You repeated "at all": in the following But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
> If he had been right, mass sterilization would have been the only way to save the world.
Not sure I would agree with this. The world would not have ended. Famine and wars over resources would have handled overpopulation quite well without the coercion, just with more suffering. That's not great either, but a far cry from "saving the world".
> Coria: I said bad, not wrong.
Actually Coria did originally say "wrong":
> Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong.
Surprised and disappointed that neither the post nor the comments (even Deiseach!) mention Chesterton and his opposition to Fabian eugenics advocacy, pushed by Shaw, Wells and others. (Eugenics was a strictly left-wing/prog/shitlib position right up until the exact moment that one specific type of socialist made it totally forbidden, something very stringently memory holed now.)
EDIT: Well, one comment mentioned GK's book, correctly, but not the essays or who specifically his opponents were. And no replies to that comment! Baffling considering how much respect Chesterton does after all get around here, and that he slam-dunked this one.
Mentioning our dear friend is unnecessary, I think everyone knows the Catholic position on this one 😁 But our friend Josiah Wedgwood mentioned him, in the reply he made to the private member's bill!
Excerpted below:
"It is this government by specialists that you cannot argue with. Here you are alienating these powers, powers which were possessed by the Holy Inquisition, and you are going to entrust them to a body of specialists, whose absolute remedies for disease change every year, and who invent year after year new fungoid growths, or something of the kind which may be stamped out by science if only you give them a free hand. By this Bill a large part of the population of this country is handed over to the specialists without any right of taking action at law against those concerned if they put you in prison without any semblance of justice. I think this Bill is going a little too far. It remands me in a way of the smelling out on the East African coast by the witch doctor. He finds out by some intuitive faculty—similar to that possessed by the specialists—which among the natives it is whose continued existence is undesirable in the interests of society. He smells the person out, and that person is put to death. Under this Bill you are smelling them out and putting them into prison for life. It is the same thing. I do not know whether hon. Members here have read that book of Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross." It will be remembered how by merely proceeding along these lines everyone who is abnormal in any degree is finally put into a feeble-minded home, and in course of time everybody is found to be in the end slightly abnormal except the specialist himself. He is the only man left absolutely normal in society. If you are merely going to take a degree of variation from the normal as a sufficient cause for putting men or women—because this Bill is principally applied to women—[HON. MEMBEBS: "No"]—well, every argument brought forward has dealt with those unfortunate women who go into our workhouses to have children and so on, and the main argument has been against women and against poor women only. I say it is wrong."
One of the few advanced countries to not do eugenic sterilizations was the United Kingdom. As Home Secretary before the Great War, Winston Churchill had introduced the Liberal government's sterilization bill but it was defeated in Parliament. The leader of the opposition to eugenic sterilization was, interestingly, a distant kinsman of Galton, backbencher Josiah Wedgwood. Matt Ridley wrote in 1998:
"One man deserves to be singled out for mounting opposition to this bill: a radical libertarian MP with the famous-and relevant-name of Josiah Wedgwood. He was a naval architect by profession; scion of the famous industrial family which had repeatedly intermarried with the Darwin family (for several decades the two families were probably the richest in the West Midlands). Charles Darwin had a grandfather, a father-in-law and a brother-in-law (twice over) each called Josiah Wedgwood. But while some of the Darwins eagerly embraced eugenics-Charles Darwin's son, Leonard, was president of the Eugenics Society-Josiah Wedgwood disliked it intensely. Elected to parliament in the Liberal landslide of 1906, he had later joined the Labour party and retired to the House of Lords in 1942.
"He charged that the Eugenics Society was trying "to breed up the working class as though they were cattle" and he asserted that the laws of heredity were "too undetermined for one to pin faith on any doctrine, much less to legislate according to it." But his main objection was on the grounds of individual liberty."
The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood clan had likely argued longer over eugenics than any other extended family in the world, so it's not surprising that one member took the lead in arguing against eugenic sterilization and getting it dropped from the bill.
To me, this example suggests that arguing about new ideas is good. The country that had been arguing longer over eugenics than anywhere else, Britain, decided not to do sterilizations, while other countries where eugenics was a trendy new idea fell harder for it.
I'm looking up about Winnie's Act and came across this lovely graphical illustation of "sound versus unsound ancestry" from the Eugenics Bollocksology Pushers (as I shall henceforth refer to them).
All based on a true story, and while I don't know who the poor family on the left are supposed to be, it's amply clear that the exemplary stock on the right are the Galton-Darwin-Wedgewoods:
Must be nice having a fanclub lauding your superior genes as the best example of what the nation can produce! And here's a wowser from press cuttings reporting on the First International Eugenics Congress, 1912:
"Who Should Be Eliminated?
Mr. Bleecker van Wagenen, chairman of the committee of the Eugenic section of the American Breeders’ Association, presented the committee’s preliminary report, which declared that numbers of the following classes must be considered as socially unfit, and their supply should, if possible, be eliminated from the human stock: (!) The feeble-minded; (2) the pauper class; (3) the criminal class; (4) the epileptics; (5) the insane; (6) the constitutionally weak; (7) those predisposed to specific diseases; (8) the deformed; and (9) those having defective sense organs, such as the blind and the deaf."
People are wringing their hands over how unfair it is that Eugenics has become associated with badness in the public mind, but I think good old Bleecker there would have had no problems throwing on a brown shirt and learning to goose-step twenty years later, when it came to eliminating the socially unfit from the human stock.
Gosh darn it, history, stop making me admire a bomb-throwing anarchist who seems to have been the only person with a drop of human blood in him in this entire morass of "we, the wealthy and upper-class, deciding about who gets eliminated as unfit":
"In his paper on ‘The Sterilization of the Unfit’, the scientist and anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin asked who it was proposed to sterilise as unfit – ‘the workers or the idlers, the rich or the poor, the poor women who suckled their children, or the women of the upper classes who refused maternity?’"
Y'know, I never liked Winnie, I suppose because I was reared traditionally on Irish Republicanism where the memory of his loathsome father playing the Orange Card, and his own career including the shambles of Tripoli and the Dardanelles, and the fuckery he indulged in during the Second World War with regard to Irish neutrality (a radio broadcast about how if the Brits had poison-gassed Ireland and the Irish, who could blame them?) but he really takes the cake for being a Churchill - that is, a self-centred, self-obsessed, parasite with an eye to the main chance who clambers over dead men's bones to get to the top of the greasy pole (forgive the mixed metaphors):
"Winston Churchill spoke of the need to introduce compulsory labour camps for "mental defectives" in the House of Commons in February 1911."
Lovely. The first person in such a camp should have been his crazy father, and he should have been the second.
"[The Act of 1913] established the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency to oversee the implementation of provisions for the care and management of four classes of people,
a) Idiots. Those so deeply defective as to be unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers.
b) Imbeciles. Whose defectiveness does not amount to idiocy, but is so pronounced that they are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so.
c) Feeble-minded persons. Whose weakness does not amount to imbecility, yet who require care, supervision, or control, for their protection or for the protection of others, or, in the case of children, are incapable of receiving benefit from the instruction in ordinary schools.
d) Moral Imbeciles. Displaying mental weakness coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities, and on whom punishment has little or no deterrent effect.
A person deemed to be an idiot or imbecile might be placed in an institution or under guardianship if the parent or guardian so petitioned, as could a person of any of the four categories under 21 years, as could a person of any category who had been abandoned, neglected, guilty of a crime, in a state institution, habitually drunk, or unable to be schooled."
The "moral imbecile" provision is the type of law under which Carrie Buck was sterilised, and indeed put away in an asylum in the first place. All you eager eugenicists here, better not have indulged in sex outside of marriage, single parenthood, divorce, or sleeping around while using contraception or - even worse! - abortion. And let's not even mention LGBT+, or poly, or anything other than cis het married sex for the purposes of reproduction and breeding superior human livestock. Because these are all marks of being a degenerate moral imbecile, and *you* need to be locked away and sterilised for the good of society.
Oh yeah, and the "school to prison pipeline"? Replace that with the "prison to asylum pipeline" because in addition to the categories above, you could be locked away if:
"(b) if in addition to being a defective he is a person -
(i) who is found neglected, abandoned, or without visible means of support, or cruelly treated; or
(ii) who is found guilty of any criminal offence, or who is ordered or found liable to be ordered to be sent to a certified industrial school;
(iii) who is undergoing imprisonment (except imprisonment under civil process), or penal servitude, or is undergoing detention in a place of detention by order of a court, or in a reformatory or industrial school, or in an inebriate reformatory or who is detained in an institution for lunatics or a criminal lunatic asylum; or
(iv) who is an habitual drunkard within the meaning of the Inebriates Acts 1879 to 1900; or
(v) in whose case such notice has been given by the local education authority as is herein-after in this section mentioned; or
(vi) who is in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to an illegitimate child or when pregnant of such child."
That last is a nice touch; if you were a 'defective' and pregnant with a bastard, or getting relief for having a bastard, you could be locked away. And what signified you were a defective? Being pregnant with a bastard!
Some of the provisions are clearly intended to try and provide help and support for the 'defectives' but unhappily it's all too clear how this could be abused, and it was; part of the reactions against institutions, which led to the push for doing away with them, was the abuse of such powers by families to put away inconvenient members, or husbands with wives. There may technically have been a right of appeal, but in effect once you were taken away, you were never getting out.
"15 Power to remove to place of safety pending presentation of petition
(1) If any officer of the local authority authorised in that behalf or any constable finds neglected, abandoned, or without visible means of support or cruelly treated any person whom he has reasonable cause to believe to be a defective, he may take such person to a place of safety, and such person may be there detained until a petition under this Act can be presented.
(2) If it appears to a justice on information on oath laid by an officer or other person authorised by the local authority that there is reasonable cause to believe that a defective is neglected or cruelly treated in any place within the jurisdiction of the justice, the justice may issue a warrant authorising any constable named therein, accompanied by the medical officer or the local authority or any other duly qualified medical practitioner named in the warrant, to search for such person, and, if it is found that he is neglected or cruelly treated, and is apparently defective, to take him to and place him in a place of safety until a petition can be presented under this Act, and any constable authorised by such warrant may enter, and if need be by force, any house, building, or other place specified in the warrant, and may remove such person therefrom.
(3) Where the place to which such a person is taken is a workhouse, the master shall receive him into the workhouse if there is suitable accommodation therein, and any expenses incurred in respect of him shall be defrayed by the local authority, but shall, if an order is eventually made, be recoverable from the defective or any person liable to maintain him as if they were part of the expenses of his maintenance."
The preceding bill to the Act of 1913 was a private members' bill of 1912 and I do think, if we're going to be throwing around eugenics as a nostrum for the ills of society and how we're going to breed a better human, that we contemplate the unexamined assumptions here. We don't think that having a child out of wedlock means you are feeble-minded (though we do like to talk about the poor and the underclass being the ones having too many children of low degree), but that wasn't the case back in 1912. Then, it was so obvious as not to need pointing out, that the kind of people having sex outside of marriage were unfit. What ideas are we holding as too obvious to need explanation about who counts as unfit, in our 21st century model of what the ideal human of the future should be?
Think of the modern outrage over Magdalen Laundries and residential schools, and then see what the philanthropic eugenist of 1912 had to say:
"What we ask for in this Bill is only an extension of existing powers, and it is only another step in the direction asked for by those best qualified to express an opinion and inspired by the truest desire for economy both of money and of effort. We ask it both for the benefit of the taxpayer and for the health of future generations. What we really wish to do is to free the sufferers as far as we can from the bondage of their own defects, and to save society from having increased responsibility thrust upon it unwittingly by those who are unable, owing to misfortune, to assist society to bear the burden they impose, and whose increase is not a strength but a weakness to the health and vigour of the nation. If these unfortunate people were not so prolific and fertile the question would not be so urgent. At present the country looks after them while children, educates them as far as possible until they are sixteen, and then turns them adrift on to society at the very age they become dangerous, to produce another generation of feeble-minded individuals. What we advocate is that these persons should be segregated in homes and colonies, especially the women during the child-bearing period, where they can be given congenial employment, and, to their credit be it said, they are happier when employed. I think they could to a large extent be made self-supporting, and their lives would be spared much of the unhappiness and misery they are called upon to endure.
…Of this, however, I think we may rest assured that no feeble-minded person can ever be made an efficient citizen, and two feeble-minded parents can never have a normal child. At this very moment the prison authorities are themselves doing to a large extent what we ask in this Bill. They are applying to these people special treatment, and they advise the police to keep an eye on them when they go out. We desire that these people should not find themselves in prison at all. We must realise that they are the nidus of every form of crime and of vice, and that when they are thrown out into the world they are subject to temptations which they have not the power to resist. They are paupers in the making from the very cradle, and, when the females get to a certain age, they are, I am sorry to say, exploited to a very considerable extent by unscrupulous men to their own undoing and to the great increase of youthful depravity in both sexes. Half the girls in rescue homes are feeble-minded, and of 15,000 births that take place annually in our workhouses a very great number come under the same category. The Report teems with examples of this sort of women coming in year after year and producing children from different fathers and from fathers perhaps whose names they do not even know. There is one paragraph in the Report that says the workhouse authorities in a certain locality have admitted that sixteen women of defective mind have given birth in the workhouse to 116 illegitimate children. Those children the ordinary taxpayer has got to carry from the day they are born until the day they die. How does that effect the efficient? It adds to the burdens, the taxpayer and ordinary ratepayer has to bear at present. He has all the risk of loss of his own health, and loss of employment; he has his own children to provide for; and he has, in addition, the enormous current expenses of the State. We have under our present system to provide hospitals and homes of all sorts, schools and special teachers, extra prisons and warders; the work of the police and their expense are largely augmented; the guardians have extra work thrown upon them; the doctors are in the same position; and all the philanthropic people who are endeavouring to meet this difficulty are asked to do the impossible in trying to restore and to reclaim a section of the community which is irrestorable and irreclaimable. If the matter is carefully gone into and thought out, it will be realised that there is not only a prodigious expense incurred by the community but that there is also a prodigious waste of energy, often duplicated and overlapping, which is probably avoidable. If we systematised more, I think we could effect considerable economy.
There are those who say, "leave the matter to nature." That is impossible. Our whole existence is a contention with nature. If you put a colony of these people on an island and said "take care of yourselves," of course, after a few years of awful and increasing misery they would be blotted out. There are others who say, "You have legislation already; surely you have enough legislation of this sort," My reply is this: We did not know until the present time the extent of the evil we had got before us and the dangers which it entails. We did not know that until the whole population had for two generations been subjected to the searchlight of educational activity. In the old days, when so many were illiterate and dull, it might have been more difficult to say where honest stupidity ended and abnormal incapacity began, but now that the educational authorities have their fingers on the pulse of the young and the children under their observation from their infancy we are in a better position to decide where honest stupidity ends and where abnormality begins.
…There is also a very grave fear arising in the mind of the people of the deterioration of the race. We have got all these things to consider, and I maintain we are right to say to ourselves: "Have we a moral right to curtail the freedom of some of our weaker brethren?" I think we have, and I think I have produced some reasons; other hon. Members will, I am sure, produce more. We have a right to consider them from that point of view, and, if we can once convince ourselves we have the moral right to exercise some extra supervision in this matter, then, of course, the question turns on whether the safeguards provided are sufficient. It was my privilege recently to go down and see at Monyhull, near Birmingham, the great institution there in which Birmingham is endeavouring to solve for itself the problem we are considering today. I found a colony of 111 men and 143 women living, I can safely say, in contentment and happiness. They have beautiful surroundings; they are cared for by honest people, who treat them with the greatest sympathy and consideration; and, although they are only there voluntarily, and can leave, I believe by law, as and when they like, they prefer to remain there. The women especially seem to find in that place the realisation of what they probably can never find outside, and that is the word "home," and they seem instinctively to know that being in there they are guarded from the many dangers which they must face if they are thrown out into the world. This Bill, being a private Member's Bill, cannot allocate funds of any sort or kind. But if we get the powers of detention we are asking for under it, it may encourage other localities to make experiments in the same way as Birmingham. It might do something, if colonies were too expensive, to allow of the boarding-out principle by which this question is to some extent met in Scotland where the population is scanty. It might possibly be an inducement to people to take up work of this sort and to give a home to men and women for whom they would be responsible to the Lunacy Commissioners."
While people in the Teens may have been squeamish about sterilisation, by the time we get to the 30s there was a more robust attitude:
"The Sterilisation Bill of 1931 was introduced by Major AG Church, Labour MP for Wandsworth and organising secretary of the Eugenics Society. It aimed to legalise the voluntary sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’. The bill was reproduced in a pamphlet entitled ‘Better Unborn’, which showed the ‘consequences of encouraging fertility of dysgenic stocks’ (people with supposedly undesirable genetic characteristics), with a view to garnering Parliamentary and wider support. It was rejected by 167 votes to 89, the main opponents once again being Roman Catholics and Labour MPs, though most abstained. Among those who did vote for the bill were Eleanor Rathbone and Ellen Wilkinson.
Yet a Parliamentary report (known as the Brock report) of the departmental committee on sterilisation of 1933 was unanimous in its conclusion that ‘allowing and even encouraging mentally defective and mentally disordered patients’ to be sterilised was justified. Only 3 out of the 60 witnesses who gave evidence – comprising psychiatrists, biologists, medical professionals, local authority representatives and social workers – were opposed to its recommendations on principle. The committee considered sterilisation to be a ‘right’ of the mentally ‘defective’ and advocated extending it to those with physical disabilities."
Look at this lovely poster. Does it remind you of anything? Once again, while the Nazis may have blackened the name of Eugenics, they didn't originate anything, they simply put into practice the theory and indeed the sort of regulations that the various societies and committees in the UK, USA and elsewhere had been pushing.
A poster issued by the Eugenics Society of 69 Eccleston Square, London:
- it could have been based on the 1912 speech about how :
"Those children the ordinary taxpayer has got to carry from the day they are born until the day they die. How does that effect the efficient? It adds to the burdens, the taxpayer and ordinary ratepayer has to bear at present. He has all the risk of loss of his own health, and loss of employment; he has his own children to 1448provide for; and he has, in addition, the enormous current expenses of the State. We have under our present system to provide hospitals and homes of all sorts, schools and special teachers, extra prisons and warders; the work of the police and their expense are largely augmented; the guardians have extra work thrown upon them; the doctors are in the same position; and all the philanthropic people who are endeavouring to meet this difficulty are asked to do the impossible in trying to restore and to reclaim a section of the community which is irrestorable and irreclaimable. If the matter is carefully gone into and thought out, it will be realised that there is not only a prodigious expense incurred by the community but that there is also a prodigious waste of energy, often duplicated and overlapping, which is probably avoidable. If we systematised more, I think we could effect considerable economy."
But Harvard, too, was a shining and leading light back in the day! Of course, after a Certain Unhappy Event and the activities of that naughty German party, they doused their lamp in that quarter:
Catholics tended to be the main opponents of eugenic legislation: e.g., Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton's 1922 book, "Eugenics and Other Evils." In America, states with a lot of Catholic politicians were less likely to have sterilization laws. Southern states weren't very enthusiastic about eugenics either.
Eugenics tended to be most fashionable in America among Protestants and post-Protestestant progressives. For instance, Stanford University a century ago was a bastion of progressive eugenic thought: e.g., the Lewis Terman, creator of America's first IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, and his son Fred Terman, who has perhaps the best claim to be Father of Silicon Valley (and friend of William Shockley), Stanford president David Starr Jordan (who was a pacifist in opposition to WWI for eugenic reasons -- he argued that war would kill off the most self-sacrificing and spare the slackers and goldbrickers), and leftist sociologist Edward Ross.
We can see what utter pseudoscience the eugenic perspective was by how over the last century, this hotbed of eugenics so signally failed to thrive. Today, Stanford and Palo Alto are fading away due to the falsity of these men's view of reality.
An interesting fact is that today the eugenics movement is widely assumed to have been anti-Semitic if not downright Nazi and that Jews therefore led the struggle against eugenics. But in reality it was Catholics who deserve the most credit for dragging their heels on eugenics.
The 2014 book "Jewish Eugenics" by John Glad cites hundreds of Jewish leaders of the first half of the 20th Century endorsing eugenics, with many of them claiming that Jews had been practicing eugenic arranged marriages for millennia.
On the other hand, Jews, while seldom protesting against eugenics, didn't make all that many contributions to the science that grew up around it. Galton conceived of eugenics not as a "science" or "pseudoscience," but as a program, rather like space exploration, that would require huge advances in myriad fields, such as statistics, where he and his followers like Pearson, Spearman, and Fischer made giant breakthroughs.
In truth, eugenics was an extension of the scientific agriculture movement that emerged in the British countryside in the 18th Century. Most of the big names associated with the Galtoninism were country boys, of which few were Jews. Instead, brilliant young Jews focused on more urban subjects, like physics, which led to nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, gentile Germans, with their lead in chemistry, focused on rockets.
Of course, so far, Jewish nuclear weapons combined with German rockets haven't yet blown up the world. The death toll from nuclear weapons is, so far, comparable to the number of eugenic sterilizations.
Hence it would seem just as reasonable to ask similar questions of Galton and, say, Einstein about their responsibility for the uses of their discoveries.
Say that a half century ago a huge nuclear war was fought with vast casualties. It was later decided that the scientists and promoters of nuclear physics and rocket science were History's Worst Villains, so Albert Einstein, Neil Bohr, John von Neumann, Werner von Braun, Robert Goddard, Jules Verne, H.G. Welles, Robert Heinlein etc. all get canceled.
That sounds kind of nuts to us, but we accept it for the great statisticians like Galton and Fischer whose breakthroughs were undertaken in the name of promoting eugenics.
"What ideas are we holding as too obvious to need explanation about who counts as unfit, in our 21st century model of what the ideal human of the future should be?"
I went to Catholic schools from 1964-1976. Back then it was not uncommon for my classmates to have a sibling with Down's Syndrome. Now, there are far fewer people with Down's Syndrome around because, while we don't do eugenic sterilizations (unlike our incredibly evil ancestors), we now do quite a few eugenic abortions.
Forced sterilization was also in the US until quite recently. I don't think it ever happened at a level we would call "mass" sterilization, but it was common enough to be known.
Or, it took outright genocide to get us riled up against eugenics, but once we were already anti-eugenics, then forced sterilization could grab some extra negative affect from that.
I am going to be the endless bore on this subject: please stop strawmanning people who are worried about Islam. The concern isn't "Islam inspired Al Qaeda"
The concern is: Islam inspired Al Qaeda...
...and over 80 other jihad groups
... and 10 countries where homosexuality and blasphemy merit the death sentence
...and nearly 50 where it can be extremely dangerous to do either
...and the 4 Islamic genocides in my lifetime alone...
...and the horrifying levels of illiberal thoughts in Muslim immigrant communities (not illiberal as in "anti-Gay marriage", but as in "homosexuality should be illegal and murdering the Charlie Hebdo staff was justified"...)
etc. etc.
There may be arguments against these positions. But please present them accurately.
The Sudan (genocide of Christians and animslist) in the 'nineties - 2 million dead. East Timor, Christians, about 200,000. Darfur, 400,000. The Yazidi genocide.
Canada is way ahead on eugenics. Canadian state already funds euthanasia programs for the disabled, mental, poor, and soon for the homeless, ie. "useless eaters."
It's all voluntary, which makes it morally acceptable because it's left to the individual. And it is much cheaper to kill off the masses than provide medicine/food/shelter. It also expedites the logistics of suicide and makes organ/blood harvesting a cleaner business for the market demand from the power brokers.
I think Adraste fails the ideological Turing test for people against eugenics. My guess is the reason most people gut-level dislike the idea, and believe, rationally in my opinion, that there is a slippery slope, is because eugenics contradicts “all men are created equal”, and instead says “we would like the human race to have more people like X and less people like Y”. You can be kind and gentle towards already-living Ys, or harsh and totalitarian, but either way, you can see why a Y — or someone who has empathy for Ys — would be extremely uncomfortable with even the most benevolent expression of the idea.
Yes, previous historical atrocities get deployed argumentatively to back up the case against eugenics, but I think the “is it fair to blame eugenics for atrocity Z” question is missing the crux of why people don’t like it as an idea, and isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind.
Well-said. I would add that the force-multiplier of your "empathy for Ys" point is personal direct acquaintance. Some people (including voters) who otherwise would be indifferent or at most softly supportive of a given threatened group, become much more strongly motivated about it when they realize that their own immediate family includes a member of that group. That's been a factor in for instance the shift in attitudes towards gay people in US society in recent decades.
People don’t view seat belts and other safety measures that prevent spinal injuries as plots motivated by hatred of the disabled. They usually tolerate efforts to remove chemicals that harm neural development such as lead in paint & petrol as long as it’s a chemical other than DNA. The problem is that people view genes as things that are central to identity instead of mere chemicals that influence development.
Some opponents of reprogenetic tech can find support among those who fear (perhaps subconsciously) that technology will make their genetic advantages less special if technology allows affordable access to healthy genes. Selfish motives are often obscured by motivated reasoning.
I also think some people are afraid that they will be considered negligent for not making an effort to prevent their children from inheriting genes that increase susceptibility to cancer and other diseases, although they seldom make those fears explicit.
Hey, Coria, I'm going to quote the entirety of the speech by Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, M.P. for Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the debate of 1912 on the "FEEBLE-MINDED PERSONS (CONTROL) BILL."
Mr. WEDGWOOD The right hon. Gentleman was very short with me in the interruption which I made, but I think he made no effort to justify what is indeed the kernel of this Bill and the kernel of the alternative Bill of the Government. The right, hon. Gentleman in the whole of his speech did not touch for one moment on the Bill actually before the House. He dealt entirely with the question of the provision of homes where the feeble-minded would be looked after. I hope he will believe me that even the most bigoted upholder of the rights of the subject is as strongly as he is in favour of the provision by the State of homes where the feeble-minded could be looked after. The question whether homes should be provided is not the one that divides us. The whole question is whether you have any right to sentence people, who have committed no crime, to imprisonment for life in those homes, and to say that they should be detained forever in a rescue home, or in a home which may be an admirable institution, and which, as long as it is on voluntary lines, meets with unanimous support are those people, from the age say of sixteen to perhaps eighty, to be incarcerated in those compulsory homes. Everyone of the arguments for looking after those feeble-minded persons mentioned by the Proposer and Seconder and the two other hon. Members who have spoken, meet with my entire support, and it is only when they come to compulsory segregation that they do not get that support. Not one of them has yet offered a single argument in favour of that policy. They have fought entirely shy of it with the solitary exception of the right hon. Gentleman opposite who said in his airy way that rather than leave things as they are we would be justified in putting those people away for life. I know perfectly well that this Bill has behind it the very best efforts of the best-intentioned people in this country not so much inside this House as outside of it. They have seen this terrible evil and know how awful it is, and already in rescue homes they are doing what they can to save those poor and feeble-minded persons. They are in constant contact with that evil and they wish to save society from it, but perhaps because they are brought so close into contact with the evil they do not look at the matter from a wider point of view. After all, it is a much wider question than mere expediency. The arguments in favour of this measure of compulsory segregation of the unfit are all directed towards the expediency of the change. Either it is going to save the community money, to be cheaper in the long run, to make the machine of civilisation run more cheaply, or, in the interests of the future of the race, it is necessary to segregate the unfit. Both these arguments are drawn purely and simply from expediency.
Mr. DICKINSON Experience.
Mr. WEDGWOOD Experience of breeding cattle, not experience of breeding men. The same question comes up in politics in regard to almost everything that is brought before us. The question whether vivisection should be allowed is, in its elements, exactly the same as whether this compulsory imprisonment should be permitted. There you have, on the one side, the interests of society—that it is in the interest of the human race that doctors should have every possible opportunity of discovering new means of curing the ills of mankind. On the other hand, you have the question whether it is right, in the interests of society, in the interests of the future amelioration of the race, to inflict pain upon animals. You have the same question in regard to the vaccination laws are you right, in the interests of society, in compelling people to be vaccinated, or is the individual's right to refuse to be vaccinated, to have liberty of judgment as to whether he should be vaccinated or not, to prevail? In every one of these cases you have the same difficulty before you. Either you must rely on what you believe to be the benefit of society and the good of the human race, or you must base yourself on something which I do not know how to describe, but which I think is something like the individual conscience. You have to see whether a thing is just or not. In the old days it was just the same. On the one side there have been a large class of people who say, salus populi suprema est lex. The safety of the public, the welfare of the State, must be the supreme law. Up against those people at all times you have had other people who say, fiat justitia ruat cœlum. These are two radically different doctrines; I believe that the second is far nobler, far higher, and far better than the first, and it is the one which we in England, rather more peculiarly than the rest of the Continental nations, have followed. We believe that justice is the important thing, and that the welfare of the State must come second, not first. The hon. Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees) naturally takes the opposite view. You have the case put in a very extreme way in India at the present time. On the one hand you have the interests of the whole society in India in the locking up of Indian agitators without trial and without their being told what their crime is. Probably it is in the interests of the State that those people should be incarcerated for life. On the other hand, you have the question whether it is just to do a thing like that, even if it is in the interests of society. I still maintain that it is not just to do a thing like that however good the results of such action are likely to be.
That is the question we have before us today. The results, the saving in money to the community, the improvement in the physical stamina and development of the race in the years to come, all these are invaluable things to aim at. But it is rather the doctrine of expediency. Up against that you have the elemental human right of justice and fair play. One of the reasons why somebody should always fight against the expediency doctrine, which, of course, is popular, is that you can never tell from age to age whether your ideas as to what is expedient will not change. A hundred years ago every doctrine of expediency was brought forward to ensure the enclosure of the common lands. Everybody thought that by enclosure you would increase productivity, and every advantage pointed in the same direction. One could cite innumerable instances showing how people's ideas as to what is expedient have changed from age to age, whilst at the bottom of all of us we have some idea as to what is right and just, by which we can test every measure that is brought forward. I am sorry to go back so much to the classics, but I will give one other example. There are the words of Aristotle, that in the long run that which is unjust can never be expedient. I think that is a very good rule to go on. Our idea as to what is expedient change over and over again. Our ideas as to what is just remain absolutely the same. I had a letter from a Liberal clergyman in Devonshire saying that he and his parishioners all thought that Mr. Tom Mann ought to go to prison. I have no doubt that the majority of people think that Tom Mann ought to go to prison. A majority of people probably think that Mr. Lloyd George ought to go to prison. But everybody knows that it is not just to send to prison all those whom the majority think ought to be there. That is a question of expediency and justice again. A man is tried for a certain definite offence. He is not sent to prison because other people think he ought to be there. Here you are going to send a lot of people to prison—the pariahs and outcasts of the human race, who have nobody to speak for them—not because they have committed a crime, but because the majority of the community think they ought to be there.
This incarceration of people who have committed no crime is bad enough, but it is particularly dangerous when you allow people to be incarcerated on the dictum of the specialist. I would far sooner see people sent to prison by an autocrat for a crime in opinion about which the ordinary lay person could exercise his judgment than I would see them sent to prison at the dictum of the specialist. Here you have the inevitable two doctors to decide whether a man is to be free or not. I believe it is infinitely dangerous that we should give these powers to the doctors. Hon. Members will remember that famous book, "Hard Cash," by Charles Reade, with its terrible picture of the power in the hands of the doctors of sending people to lunatic asylums on their own ipse dixit. Here you are extending that power in a most tremendous way. You are bringing in a law which affects, not people who are lunatics or idiots, but the class which is called feeble-minded. Will it be believed that in this Bill there is not a single word of definition as to what "feeble-minded" means. You are bringing in a Bill affecting 150,000 people, who will be of all grades of intelligence, from the idiot at one end to the man who is slightly abnormal at the other. You propose to give to two doctors the power of saying whether a man who is slightly abnormal shall be sent to prison for life. Is it reasonable to come before the House of Commons with a proposal such as that, and to imagine that when you put it into law you are going, even from the point of view of expediency, to do any good to society? Something like 300 persons in every constituency are to be put into prison if this Bill becomes law. These people are the pariahs, who have nobody much to look after them or to see that they have justice. These are the people who are to be thrown to the doctors, the medical specialists, for them to decide what is to be done with them. I remember seeing a case in the United States, I think in New York, last year of a girl who was supposed to have a special facility for communicating typhoid fever to people who came near her. These specialists decided that she should be compulsorily segregated. She was sent to prison. It so happened that there were rich people who took an interest in her, and they brought her before the higher courts. The girl was put in the dock. She had nothing to say for herself —naturally. The specialists said it was quite possible that this girl had some horrible special facility for communicating typhoid to everybody she came in contact with. The judge shrank from her. The jury thought they were going to catch the disease. The case was rapidly adjourned until the next morning, when it was brought up again. The judge decided that that Court had no jurisdiction in the case, and the girl was sent back to prison. For all I know she may be there yet.
It is this government by specialists that you cannot argue with. Here you are alienating these powers, powers which were possessed by the Holy Inquisition, and you are going to entrust them to a body of specialists, whose absolute remedies for disease change every year, and who invent year after year new fungoid growths, or something of the kind which may be stamped out by science if only you give them a free hand. By this Bill a large part of the population of this country is handed over to the specialists without any right of taking action at law against those concerned if they put you in prison without any semblance of justice. I think this Bill is going a little too far. It remands me in a way of the smelling out on the East African coast by the witch doctor. He finds out by some intuitive faculty—similar to that possessed by the specialists—which among the natives it is whose continued existence is undesirable in the interests of society. He smells the person out, and that person is put to death. Under this Bill you are smelling them out and putting them into prison for life. It is the same thing. I do not know whether hon. Members here have read that book of Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross." It will be remembered how by merely proceeding along these lines everyone who is abnormal in any degree is finally put into a feeble-minded home, and in course of time everybody is found to be in the end slightly abnormal except the specialist himself. He is the only man left absolutely normal in society. If you are merely going to take a degree of variation from the normal as a sufficient cause for putting men or women—because this Bill is principally applied to women—
[HON. MEMBERS: "No"]
—well, every argument brought forward has dealt with those unfortunate women who go into our workhouses to have children and so on, and the main argument has been against women and against poor women only. I say it is wrong.
I should like any hon. Member who is going to vote for this Bill, and going to press it to law later on, to put himself for one moment in the place of an unfortunate parent whose daughter is taken away from him against his wish, and against the wish of the daughter, and sent to prison for life. Let any hon. Member who has got a daughter imagine for the moment whether he would allow the police to take that daughter away under these circumstances, and does he not think that the working classes may possibly have similar feelings as himself in this matter? This Bill does not involve incarceration at the wish of the parents. Any responsible person, any relieving officer can, without the wish of the parent and against the wish of the child, get the unfortunate child put away for life. I do think it shows an absolute want of understanding of the ordinary normal feelings of the ordinary poor people of this country to imagine that they will tolerate such a Bill as this, or such a monstrous injustice as that people are to be sent to prison for life for merely being abnormal.
The case is peculiarly hard because the relieving officer is brought into this Bill. It is the relieving officer who is going to be the principal medium in sending people to prison. It is the relieving officer who is going to save the rates—which is one of the chief merits of the Bill. It is the relieving officer who gets two medical witnesses to decide that a person is to be sent to these homes. The relieving officer is already a terror in the poorer classes of society; he is the most important person in the poor streets. In places the relieving officer is more important than the policeman. He is the man to whom you are giving this terrible, this tremendous authority, over all these poor people throughout the length and breadth of the country. I am opposed to the principle of compulsion involved in this Bill. I think it is perfectly possible to have a Bill which shall do all that is done at Sandlebridge, and all that is done at the home near Birmingham. Such a Bill will enable everyone who has a really conscientious desire to help these people to satisfy their conscience and to get what these feeble-minded people need; what will be good for them; to provide money; to provide home; and the parents, the guardians, and the local authorities will be only too glad to send these children there. The children as they grow up and reach the age of discretion will come to regard these places as their homes and will be willing to stay on. You can do all that without having this compulsion and this interference with the freedom and liberty of the subject.
That is not enough. Surely we must recognise that at the bottom of all these problems of the feeble-minded is the problem of poverty and overcrowding. People are crammed together in such a way that they cannot possibly grow up to be normal people. They are crammed together so that decency is impossible. When they grow up under present conditions a man is absolutely unable to marry because he cannot afford to keep a family, and therefore he has to go about with women. A woman is so anxious to carry in order to become economically independent that she has to take any man who comes along. These are the real causes of the feeble-mindedness of the country. If you want to stop it there is the education of the children before you in which enormous things can be done. There are homes, where unfortunately, at present only rich people can afford to send their feeble-minded children, where the children can be trained up by constant attention into being almost as normal as most of us here today. There are places where the missing parts of the brain can be almost substituted by careful attention. This Bill does not touch the question of children at all; it has nothing whatever to do with anybody under the age of sixteen. A Bill dealing with the feeble-minded which does not touch the question of the children is a delusion and a fraud. I should also like to touch upon the real theory that is at the back of this Bill. Although the last hon. Gentleman the Member for St. Pancras is one of the promoters, and I know that most of the Members whose names are on the back are really anxious respecting this horrible feeble-minded sore in our society, the spirit at the back of the Bill is not the spirit of charity, not the spirit of the love of mankind.
[An HON. MEMBER: "Oh!"]
It is a spirit of the horrible Eugenic Society which is setting out to breed up the working classes as though they were cattle. The one object in life of the society seems to be to make mankind as perfect as poultry. But we are not ants, bees, and wasps; we are human beings, and all this form of school Eugenics seems to me to be the most gross materialism that has ever been imported into human society.
I think those people who are so anxious to improve the breed of the working classes had better remember that there is such a thing as a soul and that the mere desire to turn people into better money-making machines is merely some horrible nightmare of H. G. Wells. Hon. Members should remember how Mr. Wells in "The Time Machine," figures a society thousands of years hence in which all disease is removed and a standard of a perfect type has been arrived at, but unfortunately the perfect type has no brain and the working classes become workers in the darkness below mere beast of prey. In his book "The Men in the Moon," are to be bred some men with special hands, some with special eyesight, some with special brains, some with special bodily strength. In connection with that kind of thing, I am delighted to have a seat in this House in order to be able to put a spoke in its wheel, because I believe in such circumstances the whole of mankind would become mere brute beasts and would lose their intellectual development and spirituality.
Let me now come to the Bill itself. I think I have dealt fairly and faithfully with its principle. The details are even more reprehensible than the principle of compulsion. In the first place this Bill does not refer to Scotland or Ireland. It seems to be inevitable that all our Friday afternoon Bills have one feature in common—the name of the hon. Member for Ayr Burghs (Sir George Younger) on the back of them. His name is on the back of this Bill, and it does not apply to Scotland. The hon. Member for Ayr Burghs understands what freedom is. If you turn to Clause 4 you will see this Bill does not seek to set up State institutions where people would be looked after, but it seeks merely to institute non-official homes; it merely sanctions certain places where the feeble-minded person can be taken in and looked after. Charity mongering has proved dangerous in all time, and this seems to point to a far wider vista for the extension of that charity mongering which has been so often shown up in "Truth." These non-official homes are to be inspected once a year by the Lunacy Commissioners. Is it likely to conduce to the elimination of scandal and hardship and cruelty to these homes for people so very liable and susceptible to ill-treatment are to be kept. There is no check in Clause 5 upon the number of attendants that will have to be supplied; or the sleeping accommodation in the homes, and in none of these homes is there any hint that educational work is to be carried on. They are to be mere dormitories or receptacles for the rubbish of mankind.
Clause 8 is the kernel of the Bill, and with that the right hon. Gentleman opposite did not deal. Under this Clause a magistrate may, when asked by anybody or person coming within a certain category, and when the application has the signature of two medical practitioners, send feeble-minded persons who are over sixteen years of age to those homes until they are twenty-one years of age, or, if over twenty-one years of age, he may send them to these homes until the Lunacy Commissioners decide they can come out. One would think that the only applicant was the parent or guardian. Not a bit of it. It can be done on the application of the parent, guardian, or any relative. In these lunacy cases there is very often money at the back of the desire to put a person into a lunatic asylum, and very often it is a relative that is interested in the seclusion of such a person. But it is also provided that such a person may be sent to these homes on the application of any relieving officer of any parish in which the alleged feeble-minded person shall become chargeable. That is where you get the relieving officer in; he comes in as a sort of general providence to those unfortunate people. Further, any responsible person over the age of twenty-one can make application and get those persons sent to confinement. I suppose that includes district visitors; but it is even far wider than that. Without consulting the feeble-minded person or the guardian of such person, or the family, if you can only get two medical practitioners to see the feeble-minded person that person can be committed, even upon hearsay evidence, to one of these homes. The applicant comes before the magistrate; the feeble-minded person is brought up without any protection from parent, guardian, or solicitor to speak for him or her, and upon that casual and cursory examination these unfortunate people are sent to compulsory detention. I think the kernel of this Bill is as bad as its principle. Under Clause 8 also the Press are to be excluded from the examination. The one opportunity for public criticism of what may go on is excluded. Coming to the last paragraph of Clause 8 you will find the most dangerous thing of all. The relieving officer of any parish shall apply to the justices of the peace for an order to be granted in respect of any person found wandering if he is satisfied that any such person is a fit and proper person for detention under this Act. Any person who is found wandering may, on the demand of the relieving officer, without the medical practitioner coming in at all, be sent away. If you turn to Clause 18 you will find there that the Bill only applies to the poor. There are special facilities for exempting the rich from the whole purview of this legislation. Nothing in this Act shall deprive any parent of any feeble-minded person of the care, control, and protection of such feeble-minded person, upon proof being given that such feeble-minded person will receive adequate care, protection and control. What class is there except the rich which can bring proof that they are able to provide adequately for the protection and control of the feeble-minded. This Bill is eminently a Bill which we as men have no right to pass. It is a Bill which affects principally women, because under it its practical effect will be to put feeble-minded women into gaol much more than men. The chief argument is that women have so many illegitimate children. In the Government measure special arrangements are made forbidding marriages in order to cut down this evil. This is a Bill which specially affects women, and which we, as men, have the greatest difficulty in dealing with, because our views of sex morality are not the same as in the case of women. We ought to be careful before we interfere with the liberties of a great number of women in the country without knowing whether we are correctly representing the views of women as well as of men. Clause 21 specially provides that there shall be no remedy at law for the alleged feeble-minded person, however long incarcerated, against the doctors or irresponsible persons who send them to these places of detention for life. Even the alleged lunatic has some claim against the people who put him there, but the feeble-minded person is deprived even of that opportunity. It rests with the feeble-minded person to prove that there was an absence of good faith, and how on earth are you able to prove that? The first schedule really is going to be the charter of the liberty or want of liberty of these unfortunate people.
The first schedule is the medical certificate which the doctor has to sign. He has to sign declaring that he is of opinion that So-and-so is feeble-minded. There is, however, no definition whatever of feeble-minded. The doctor has to declare that the person requires detention for his own benefit or for the benefit of the public at large. Think of an ordinary doctor deciding that rather transcendental question whether a man will be better locked up for the benefit of the public at large. Further he has to certify that he formed his opinion on the evidence of feeble-mindedness, want of proper care and control, and that the person is a source of danger to himself or others. These facts, however, need not be observed by the medical practitioner, and they can be supplied by others. There you have a most risky form of medical certificate. Could you have anything more risky than to allow a doctor to say a person is feeble-minded without telling him what is the definition of feeble-minded. You allow a man to say whether he believes in the interest of society somebody would be better off under lock and key. That is not a question for a doctor to decide. These doctrines, if applied to opinions, would probably see most hon. Members of this House under lock and key. It would probably be decided that the people who brought in this Bill should be placed under lock and key, and on the same reasoning even the hon. Member for Wirral would be doing time. But that is no justification for sending the hon. Member to do time. Once you get away from the elementary principles of right and wrong, of what the French people call "the rights of man," and the doctrines of what is, or what is not, expedient in the general interests of society, you get into a quagmire that will lead to the most monstrous injustice in time to come.
I would be very surprised if wealthy Americans are still having babies the old fashioned way by 2030…it’s an unnecessary game of Russian Roulette when IVF and egg and sperm freezing are available. Wealthy males should already be freezing their sperm and getting snipped because it is so cheap and easy…just remember HIV has effectively been cured but herpes hasn’t. ;)
I fear all that is really going on is that we are learning that ppl who are willing to take actions that other ppl recoil at and see as deeply morally distastey might generally be less good people.
Unlike the trolley problem here you have the option of just saying: eww and ignoring the issue. It's not surprising that the kind of people who might be gung ho about the issue might be less good people.
So the concern shouldn't be about trying to persuade the public but about giving the kind of people who are really enthusiastic about this persuasion control to do anything.
You’re going to find autistics, sociopaths, the uncouth, and the pathologically honest disproportionately represented among the more vocal proponents of an uncomfortable truth. Do you really want those groups to be the ones who exclusively use genetic technologies that improve the health of children? You could try to ban prenatal screening and IVF, but such a ban is unpopular for good reason. If you’re only against state funded eugenics programmes, then that’s more politically viable—but it may not remain so as long-term data on PGD accrues.
As an aside, I've always felt that the weakest argument in eugenics related areas is the claim that somehow the current system isn't selecting for the better genes.
Ok, sure, reproduction is anti-correlates with education. But we know that education is a very noisy marker of intrinsic ability (Flynn effect) and it's not at all clear to me that the education effect isn't overbalanced by some other effect favoring intelligence effect.
Rather late to comment, so probably not many people will see it, but here it goes:
I might be wrong about past attitudes here, and if so, please correct me, but wasn't euthanasia long seen as politically toxic due to similar n*zi connotations (I remember arguments to that effect coming up during a class discussion on euthanasia in high school 15 or so years ago), whereas today - unless I'm severely misjudging public opinion again - pro-euthanasia seems to be generally regarded as the progressive, compassionate, humanitarian position.
While the term "eugenics" will almost certainly remain toxic, a lot of "positive eugenics", e.g. issues related to egg- and sperm donations, embryonic screening, etc, could easily be framed as reproductive rights issues of the sort only the "reactionary, anti-women, anti-science right" is against. Of course, there are no guarantees this will happen, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that is how discourse on the issue plays out in the next decade or two (assuming other technological developments don't make this a moot point on this time scale).
Or are there reasons I'm currently missing making this unlikely? (not interested in debating the object-level morality of "positive eugenics" as construed here, more curious about what people think of the possibility of a public attitude shift along those lines)
A lot of prospective parents perform genetic tests on their fetus and will have an abortion if it would have a deadly genetic disease if carried to term. It's eugenic. It's voluntary. It's under attack legally in the US, but not in most of the world. Like Nietzsche, who thought German nationalism was nauseating, sometimes one is remembered popularly for not exactly something one proposed.
Another example is sterilization. Partial sterilization, birth control, is widely practiced. If you put on a condom, you are around 95% sterile the next time you copulate. In most cases it is voluntary though encouraged officially. In some cases, it was coerced as with China's one child policy. Surgical sterilization is a crude instrument. Partial sterilization is why people look back at Ehrlich and the like and consider him a crackpot.
Eugenics has its place in the modern world, but it is less the blunt instrument it once was. Choosing how many children one will bear and when one will bear them to maximize available resources is essentially eugenic. There are many who oppose this, mainly social conservatives, because it places the decisions in the hands of parents, not a church or government agency. Given modern worries about the population bust, you'd think we'd want a eugenic program to encourage people who want to have children and take care of them to do so.
A lot of prospective parents perform genetic tests on their fetus and will have an abortion if it would have a deadly genetic disease if carried to term. It's eugenic. It's voluntary. It's under attack legally in the US, but not in most of the world. Like Nietzsche, who thought German nationalism was nauseating, sometimes one is remembered popularly for not exactly something one proposed.
Another example is sterilization. Partial sterilization, birth control, is widely practiced. If you put on a condom, you are around 95% sterile the next time you copulate. In most cases it is voluntary though encouraged officially. In some cases, it was coerced as with China's one child policy. Surgical sterilization is a crude instrument. Partial sterilization is why people look back at Ehrlich and the like and consider him a crackpot.
Eugenics has its place in the modern world, but it is less the blunt instrument it once was. Choosing how many children one will bear and when one will bear them to maximize available resources is essentially eugenic. There are many who oppose this, mainly social conservatives, because it places the decisions in the hands of parents, not a church or government agency. Given modern worries about the population bust, you'd think we'd want a eugenic program to encourage people who want to have children and take care of them to do so.
I couldn't find that in my edition. The archive.org version only lets me see a page or two towards the front. Assuming there was another 1968 edition that did include such, I'll have to ask what taxing children has to do with eugenics. Ditto for making aid contingent on implementing population control strategies. Ditto for encouraging fathers in India to get sterilized.I suppose triaging on a national basis rather than a person by person basis in a desperate situation could be considered eugenics, but as it turned out, most nations have adopted policies that have lowered the birth rate by means of less extreme economic pressures, which unlike government pressures are perfectly acceptable.
As it turned out, the more extreme approaches were never needed. Changing attitudes proved to be easier than expected in most of the world. Economic development, providing access to birth control, better child healthcare and raising the status of women seem to cut birth rates just as well or better than more coercive mechanisms except in China. Improved agriculture meant there was no need to triage on a national basis or otherwise.
Basically, following the advice in Chapter 5 let the world avoid the worst of Chapter 4. If Ehrlich and others hadn't sounded the population alarm, it isn't clear we'd be in as good a situation as we are now.
Edit: Before I nitpick, it's worth mentioning that the conversation in this article was very well done!
> Adraste: But don’t you agree there is sometimes a place for slippery slopes? For example, it seems so attractive to hand over the government to a nice-seeming communist dictator with good ideas. [...] in the past, “give all power to a nice-seeming communist who will use it for good things” has slipped down a slope to “the communist dictator is actually a bad guy and abuses his power”.
> Beroe: You also make a compelling point.
Uh, no? "Give all the power to one guy" isn't a "slippery slope", it is a step change you can never undo. It's not that the dictator starts out nice and becomes bad (although this *also* happens), it's that
(1) the dictator is almost always worse than he seemed; he took power via charisma but charisma does not make for good government (the same is true in democracies but the damage tends to be more limited.)
(2) even if he's not so bad, his successor might well be worse (Lenin => Stalin).
Now, dictators (like most humans) tend to have bad epistemics and are also isolated from society, which often makes them drift away from reality as the decades pass (this seems to be what happened to Putin). This is a slippery slope, but it's not one where "we" made a choice which led "us" to make a worse choice; "we" only made one choice in total.
Setting that aside, I just pointed to a *mechanism* for the "slippery slope". The usual problem with slippery slope arguments is that people simply declare that a slippery slope exists, without proposing a reason why a slippery slope would exist, and indeed not realizing that any reason is necessary; that slippery slopes are not magic but have causes. I would propose we treat slippery slope arguments as bad arguments unless they are backed up with a story for how society could slip further down the slope.
In the case of "eugenics" I do see a "slippery slope": allowing disease screening could lead to... mandatory termination of pregnancies when the fetus has a serious disease. The *mechanism* by which this would happen is moral in nature: some people will think you shouldn't make a child with a serious disease. "You can always try again!" (As long as the pro-life lobby is strong, I expect this slope not to be slippery.)
But what if society has a slogan: "eugenics must be voluntary." As far as I know this excludes all nazi-style eugenics while allowing reproductive choices. It blocks the slippery slope by defining a guardrail.
The guardrail is even stronger if it takes the form of a single word. Since eugenics has a bad connotation anyway, how about "progenics" (defined as voluntary genetic family planning or abortion)? So when someone says your proposal for a voluntary procedure is "eugenics", you can say "actually, it's progenics". And if, someday, people try to move "down the slope" by referring to *involuntary* procedures as "progenics", you can accurately respond "no, it's eugenics" and point them to the dictionary (which sidesteps the need for other people to be rationalists who have read "A Human's Guide to Words".)
If you sterilize all the idiots there will be nobody left to take risks that benefit society. Columbus was an idiot who deliberately misinterpreted geometry to prove the earth was smaller than it actually was. The first nation to sterilize its idiots will be brutally conquered by a military composed of idiots who aren't afraid to die or have chosen the military career due to a lack of other available options. As the smart people in the "eugenically pure" nation do the intelligent thing and save their own skins. Before you bring up the armies minimum cutoff iq standards keep in mind that these go out the window in times of war.
Coria should be informed that, while it is possible that when Ehrlich wrote the first edition of _The Population Bomb_ he was not aware of Borlaug's work leading to the Green Revolution, by the time the second edition of Ehrlich's book came out Borlaug had won a Nobel prize for his work. The claim that Ehrlich's recommendations were based on "the natural continuation of the trends at the time, averted only by a Green Revolution outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" is false, at least for the second edition.
I see where you're coming from as a transhumanist, I really do, but eugenics (not saying it as a dirty word but as a value-neutral practice) lacks everything from a good goal to a morally defensible implementation model. The problem is that it wouldn't work, *because nobody is qualified to determine what working is, nobody can be TRUSTED to evaluate any such thing without bias, and even if they could, they would be wrong because the complexity of genetics is a big GOTCHA*. There are so many angles of thing I could say about this.
1. "I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic." sure, and we took intelligent, independent, pro-social animals (wild dogs and wolves) and made ...a whole lot of things that can't survive without us. Most of the most intelligent species of dogs do their jobs really well! They love us and they work hard. They also have congenital dysplasia or organ failure or need somebody to wipe the gunk out of their noses or they can't breathe. A healthy dog is a mutt.
Did you know that American wheat is the wheat hardest for humans to digest and also the least nutritious? It's because it's been GMOed for the biggest yields, and consequently is the most inflammatory and most nutritionally vacuous variety of wheat available. And because it's the most productive, it's also the most widely-available! Other countries import our wheat to make their regional products, so even a "made in Italy" pasta is suspect! Similarly, genetic engineering of cows has resulted in *almost all available milk* being "A1 milk" which is significantly harder to digest. This is our own fault and we are making ourselves sick. What I'm driving at here is that while, yes, we have certainly been "successful" with eugenics on other species in the past (read: we have successfully caused changes to happen), our priorities have not resulted in changes that are unambiguously better-for-humanity, let alone for the species in question. We don't know enough about genetics - and while maybe that's a solvable problem., the issue lies in us ever believing that we DO know enough about genetics, because up to the point where we know *literally everything* about genetics, we are more likely to be missing something important than not, but the more we think we know, the harder we are going to push it anyway. People making decisions to genetically engineer BIGGER wheat at the cost of its nutritional value were not super-villains... they were probably trying to feed the world, and "did the best they could have based on what they knew at the time". But it turns out that BIGGER is not always BETTER and feeding the world with blank carbohydrates does not actually make most people healthier, or at least, once it prevents them from starving, there needs to be an alternative that starving people can still afford. Unlike Einkorn or A2 milk. Monoculture is actually a bad thing, ecologically speaking. Diversity is good.
2. Separate question: Why would anyone who doesn't believe (as I believe you don't believe, Scott) that a superintelligent AI or alien would automatically agree with us on a moral level, believe that humans engineered to be "the most talented" (by whatever metrics people come up with by *operating on their best knowledge at the time*) would share the values of the mere naturally-selected? The concept of trying to improve humanity through genetically increasing intelligence suffers from the same alignment issues as AI, except that at least AI have to hide behind a screen to make people think they're human. Obviously this depends on the degree of eugenics AND a chihuahua is unambiguously not a wolf.
3. Who decides what "talented" means? Do soft skills count? Does empathy matter? Even if we can agree that something is "good to have", what would we be willing to sacrifice it for?
Who decides what genes are "better" than others? By what metrics?
4. What about the side-effects? Domesticating animals makes their ears bigger, who knows why! Ashkenazi Jews might have an IQ advantage, but what we definitely have is a genetic predisposition towards "cystic fibrosis, Canavan disease, familial dysautonomia, Tay-Sachs disease, Fanconi anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Bloom syndrome, mucolipidosis type IV, and Gaucher disease, among others." (https://arupconsult.com/content/ashkenazi-jewish-genetic-diseases)
5. Once you start using eugenics to try to solve problems, to whatever extent it seems to work, it suddenly seems like it's a really important thing to make happen, in fact necessary. It's a very short hop from there to coercion, even if only of the form "Eugh, Scott had his OWN bioLOGical children? What a narcissist..." *socially shuns*. Once it starts showing "results" (forgetting the longterm knock-on effects that won't be visible for decades) then it's time for government to step in and make it mandatory. You can't possibly believe that people who fervently believe that some genes are "better" than others would not try to enforce that viewpoint on people they view as inferior because of their genes. We *do in fact already know how that goes*. Even if *you* can think some genes are inherently better than others without looking down on those without those genes, you can't possibly think you're in the majority ...Can you?
5. Side note, but: Who gets evaluated for how talented they are and whether their genes "deserve" preservation and promotion and why are none of them brown? Oh it's because most people in power globally hate brown people and would loooove this excuse!
Beroe is just being honest; Galton was the guy who coined the term (at least according to himself) and the rosy visions he had of healthy young university men getting Certificates Of Fitness awarded over their lifetimes by their teachers, etc. and going on to marry suitable young ladies at an early age and having a minimum of three sons who would pull up the average of the "V and above" classes (the very cream of the human crop), with his little talks and lectures to local societies interested in Eugenics...
.... well, in practice, it all ended up in the heaps of skulls. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
This board seriously needs a mute-user function. It gets tiresome having to scroll past the same hobbyhorses from the same few usernames under every post.
Antisemitism in Europe had been intense for millennia, and the salient difference in the early 20th century was that they finally had the industrial capacity to conduct much larger pogroms than before.
Delays in genetic enhancement technology are extraordinarily harmful. I think the stigma prevents open discussions and serious evaluations of the possible returns.
There are two big holdups. One is that we barely understand how anything works. It's rarely as simple as fixing a single gene, and doing so is too likely to reveal other genetic dependencies. The other is that we have extremely limited capabilities to modify genes. CRISPR is a big advance, but it may make undesired modifications and miss others. There has been a lot of progress, so we should keep up and even expand the funding even if it seems to be off on a tangent. CRISPR, for example, came from studying insect immune systems. You never know what is going to turn up where.
"you give a license to the left to blame white people for everyone else's problems"
Isn't that ... exactly what's been happening? I can't tell if your conditional phrasing is just a rhetorical posture or if you've actually been living in a cave.
I thought this was gonna be a GEB review and I got excited!
I believe he reviewed GEB back in the squid314 days.
ooh is there a link you can share? i googled but was unsuccessful
In hindsight it wasn't really a review, just a one-paragraph recommendation
https://web.archive.org/web/20110326010130/http://www.raikoth.net/nonficrecommend.html
(I don't know the conversational norms regarding posting Scott's old stuff. Please delete if this breaks them.)
As I understand it, what happened was that Scott went looking for jobs, all the prospective employers kept reading squid314 (which came up in Google searches for "Scott Siskind", unlike SSC) and telling him that having a blog was incompatible with being a psychiatrist (as he told it, it wasn't even the content of the blog, just the blog's existence), and so he burned squid314 and went pseudonymous.
However, Cade Metz burned Scott's pseudonymity (and Scott made peace with that in the first post of ACX, "Still Alive"), so that's now a sunk cost and this probably isn't such a big deal anymore.
I enjoyed GEB back in the day, but it's not really a great book.
I'd agree that, if your objective is to understand Godel's incompleteness theorems, there are substantially better ways to do so today than working your way through GEB.
However, as a piece of art, I judge GEB to still be on the efficient frontier. (Granted, that may just be because I haven't been exposed to works that surpass it; happy to look at nominations!)
'The Pleasures of Counting' is really great. It's a lot more technical than GEB, but still very approachable.
This article is excellent! It's pretty impressive that your attempt to steelman the cooky anti liberal eugenicists sounds infinitely more persuasive than any actually existing anti liberal eugenicist.
Errr, I read the post as perfectly mastering two ITTs here - Intellectual Turing Test: similar to but not exactly steelmaning. Scott showing he can present both positions as eloquently as their best resp. adherents would. - Knowing Scott's writings over the years, his own position is actually very close to the "cooky eugenicist". As is mine. (Not sure what "anti liberal" means in this context. Anti-Lefty? Anti-D? Me from Europe. Oh, no need to explain.)
Case and point, this line got a chuckle out of me from the irony:
>I thought you were going to say a much worse thing, along the lines of "identify people you consider genetically inferior, then offer them money to undergo voluntary sterilization”.
since a younger version of Scott professed support for a very similar proposal (I believe it was UBI-contingent-on-sterilization). I can only assume this was a self-aware jab at his earlier beliefs.
:D Yes, though I am not sure that Scott is really convinced this is such an evil thing. I assume a) he is no longer that worried about the left side of the curve: We shall be able to provide for them. b) he is wondering more how to get the right side to reproduce. Lately, The Zvi wrote repeatedly about how to incentivize those to have kids (and Scott met his wife discussing Singapore's attempts to lure academics into breeding ). - After "the singularity", none of this may matter no more.
That's because the left has so successfully tabooed the topic that only the kooks will publicly advocate for it.
But *why* was it tabooed? I mean it's obviously a good idea. The clear reason is that you can't trust any human authority to implement it without bias. And the historical evidence is that you can't.
Fortunately, there's now a better option. (Well, it's almost ready.) CRISPR geneline editing. This should first be tested against things like Huntington's disease, thalassaemia, and perhaps sickle-cell anemia, and then gradually expanded into other generally accepted conditions, and it should REQUIRE totally voluntary acceptance. Perhaps it should even be charged for, though I'd prefer that it be considered a public health measure. The real question is should "cosmetic changes" be allowed? Genes to increase height, e.g. I'm inclined to think that should be discouraged, perhaps by a high tax.
I mean I just think that's an empty criticism. You can't trust humans to administer any policy without bias. That's just the nature of humans and power. Eugenics is no special exception and I think that having strictly-enforced rules against violence (which we already have) is more than sufficient to protect against abuses. Having completely voluntary incentives for low IQ people to not reproduce would be perfectly fine.
The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Actually, eugenics is a special kind of thing here, but it's not unique. Nationalism is the same kind of thing, and so is racism. There are a few others. Their defining characteristic is the claim "My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes.". Anything of that nature is too dangerous to allow humans to control it, so should currently be tabooed. And the part that makes it too dangerous is " so we should rule and you should submit". Even if the first part is objectively true, that part is too dangerous.
Note that by this argument there are forms of eugenics that should not be tabooed. And forms of racism. But the general term is used to include the should-be-prohibited subcategories, and thus should not be acceptable.
"My group is better than yours, so we should rule and you should submit to our wishes."
And that distinguishes them from ... what other political organization, exactly? Again, I feel this is an empty criticism.
Every political group wants the power to force their outgroup to submit. You don't prevent that by tabooing group identification, you prevent it by having a carefully constructed constitution. The greatest historical strife has arguably arisen over religious differences, but that wasn't fixed by outlawing religion - it was solved by making sure that religious ideology was explicitly barred from government policy. Saying that ethnicity-based identity groups pose a unique threat is, I believe, an isolated demand for rigor.
I would submit that nationalism at least *doesn't* necessarily demand that the outgroup submit. It *can*, of course, but it can also say "my group is good and should rule *here*, we're fine with you lot ruling yourselves over there as long as you don't try to tell us what to do here". There is such a thing as e.g. a Swedish nationalist, and they aren't secretly plotting to recreate the Kalmar Union.
It's the supposedly more enlightened -isms of the 20th and 21st century that demand they should rule everywhere, as soon as they can get around to it.
Yes, they all want it. It's quite common. This doesn't make it good. And there are degrees of "submit", with some being worse than others. I don't think there *is* a general answer that doesn't involve evil. Negotiated settlements aren't always possible (and even those are often due to threats rather than to "this is the best we can do".
Part of the problem is that everybody engages in motivated reasoning. And this is only "empty criticism" if you insist on seeing everything as binary rather than as a graduated scale.
It's a matter of path dependency. We've seen eugenics used to justify some pretty horrible stuff. Sure, humans are smart, so we can do horrible stuff with just about anything, but history matters. Maybe some brilliant monster will use cute kitten photos to kill millions of people somehow, but even PETA hasn't managed this yet. So, we'll consider cute kitten photos safe and acceptable until proven otherwise. There are stupider policy approaches.
>The real reason it's tabooed is that people don't like accepting that IQ is mostly genetic because of the uncomfortable realities that would force them to accept.
Ding ding ding. People don't want to have to struggle with the reality of how much actual difference there is in the clay.
There's work using CRISPR on sickle cell anemia. There have been some apparent cures. Interestingly, they don't do it by fixing the defective gene but, rather, enabling a the fetal red blood cell gene which is usually turned off early in life. I think read a complicated explanation of why in Science, but in one eye, out the other.
> Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
That's simple: intelligence has no correlation to morality. The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason! There are plenty of very good smart people, and plenty of very bad smart people.
One of the biggest intellectual failings of the past few decades has been the loss of this understanding, via the gradual conflation of concepts of good and evil with concepts of smart and stupid. We've tended to think that all hard-thinking people will be right-thinking people who agree with us, and anyone who disagrees with our perspective on morality can only do so because they're too dumb to grasp the simple truth. But nothing could be further from the truth; bad people have been using their intellect in pursuit of evil since time immemorial. There's no good reason to expect them to stop now.
The example that the ‘intelligence uber alles’ people point to is often that criminality is associated with low IQ and correspondingly decreases with high IQ, etc.
But of course this is a ridiculous argument; it is only natural that society does not criminalize evil that can be rationalized, and the sort of evil that high-IQ people do is almost always legal at the time, or impossible to punish. The common man complains that one can buy justice with riches—not wrong, but you can buy the government with smarts, too, and you can get away with a lot between the cracks of the law.
Criminality also isn't monotonic wrt IQ. It peaks at 85, and decreases below that just as it decreases above.
I bet if you could run the universe many times criminality peaks where you are least employable with no safety net.
I believe the bit about not being employable, not about lacking a safety net. Crime doesn't pay. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
I think below a certain threshold most people or societies understand you can’t work and care for you. It’s when you’re in the gray zone above that where it seems like you could work if you tried that things get hard.
Lots of crime is committed by kids who aren't expected to work at all. Crime shot up when the "Great Society" expanded welfare.
The interesting part is Galton's views of what is "obviously" desirable, moral, indicative of excellence, improving society, etc. He wants to adjust religion to get rid of it, or at least model it to something 'sensible' that sensible people of the modern era can use as a kind of prop to the idea of eugenics and so on.
But things we take for granted arising out of the whole liberal mindset would appall Galton. So what are we assuming are the "obvious" traits a society must have, that properly applied eugenics will cultivate, that future generations will think belong in the Stone Age?
Excellent point. There's an important and seemingly characteristic ingredient of unexamined presumption in eugenics arguments about what is desirable.
This is a standard argument against eugenics that doesn't make it into the fictional dialogue, at least not directly: People are just very bad judges of what good traits look like and trying to select for them is likely to incorporate their culturally-bound biases in a way that misses important goods. Scott does allude to some of the effects of this problem in the atrocities of historical eugenics resulted in where societies made some retrospectively absurd judgments about who were to be seen as defective, but the problem of biased judgment here has a larger scope than that..
More generally, eugenics acts as an elite reproduction scheme where the advocates of eugenics tend to see themselves, at least in some ways, as part of the elite. You see a similar pattern with the overlapping world of IQ and modern race science where the people into it usually, though not always, think of themselves as part of the cognitively blessed and this implied sense of superiority permeates a lot of what they say.
The shift over time is a hard one to put your finger on. Think it’s important to lay out the game and its goals.
You've got part of the answer. If the perceived payoff is high, and the perceived risk is low, people are likely to do the thing. Legal status is just one way of adjusting what people see the payoff and risks to be, but there are others. And, of course, "perceived" is significantly affected by your time horizon.
E.g., most people try not to fart in a loud an obnoxious manner in the presence of those they consider powerful in their social group. Legal status has no bearing here, but social standing has a lot. OTOH, for awhile I was with a group where flatulence was considered acceptable. (We were eating a lot of beans and cooked cabbage.) Among that group, covering up a fart was considered undesirable. So many people tried to emphasize the noise of their farts.
Below 85, and it's hard to commit crimes that you would get away with (rather like a cat hiding behind a curtain with feet sticking out).
Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
Excuse me? I am very good at hiding, which is why I have survived for as long as I have.
> Above 85, and time preference starts to kick in, and you tend not to commit crimes that will get you obviously quickly caught.
I accidentally scrolled here, and without seeing the context I assumed you were talking about *age*. Wanted to say that 85 years is actually the perfect age to commit crimes, because if caught, your punishment won't be worse than what nature has already prepared for you anyway.
I think I'd rather be age 85 outside of prison than inside prison. So there's still some deterrent effect.
Perhaps that's because you can't actually measure criminality - you can only measure *detected* criminality - and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to get away with whatever nefarious deeds you choose to perform.
And I wonder about the monetary impact of crime as correlated to IQ? It seems like it would take multiple thousands of IQ 85 bank robbers to match the amount of money that an IQ 120* white-collar criminal like Bernie Madoff stole.
*Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
This will depend a lot on how you price violent crime. sure, it takes a *lot* of petty theft to equal Madoff, but how many *murders* would you say it's equivalent to in badness?
For the most violent of violent crimes, homicide, IQ probably has little correlation with homicide rates. According to UN study roughly 80% of homicides worldwide are between family members, of which the highest percentage of that being intimate partners. Maybe lower IQ families are killing themselves at higher rates, but I don't think anyone has tried to tease out that data.
As for other violent crimes—car jacking, muggings, etc.—I wonder how much IQ is a correlative. Starting in 1960s we had huge rise in the violent crime in the US, but it started to fall in the 1990s, and now it's down to 1960s levels. Seems like something other than IQ is involved, because the rates have varied over time, while IQ distribution has remained static (except for the steadily upward incline of the Flynn Effect).
The highest correlators for violent crime seem to be sex (with males perpetrating the vast majority of violent crimes), and age with males 18-30 being the most like to perpetrate violent crimes.
> Just a wild-ass guess as to his IQ, but I recall a study where most CEOs tested out in plus one standard deviation range into the low two standard deviation range.
That’s surprisingly low.
Not if it's just IQ. Two standard deviations in IQ, and two standard deviations in Gumption, and one standard deviation in physical Charisma, is about as rare as three standard deviations in IQ alone but probably a better package for the CEO track. And the strictly superior "+3 standard deviations in everything" is so rare that there aren't enough of those to fill more than a tiny fraction of the CEO slots.
The really smart criminal masterminds get offers to take the fall and work the refs to get away scotfree. SBF could have pulled it off with a bit more patience. He got too greedy too soon.
But this is an arms race with another side[1]. People have an incentive to detect and deter "criminality" that meaningfully harms them; yes, that includes the challenging concentrated-benefits diffuse-harms pattern that is characteristic of a lot of high-IQ nefarious behavior.
It is easy to see instances of that pattern which are still insufficiently checked today. But we've actually patched a remarkable number of the more obvious holes of this type (this is a reason law is so complicated), and created an economy that provides good rewards to most high-IQ people who play it straight; in combination, this results in relatively few people being motivated to engage in serious white-collar crime.
1: Note that AGI has far more potential to overwhelm the defense in this arms race.
I wouldn't be surprised if this finding stemmed from back before our society did so many quasi-eugenic abortions of Down's Syndrome fetuses. There used to be a lot more Down's people and they made up a lot of the very low IQ population. They tend to be sweet-natured and not criminal knuckleheads.
Criminality peaks at 85 in the United States because the mean IQ of blacks is 85 and they are concentrated around the center of their bell curve just like other groups. No need for elaborate just-so stories about the optimum level of IQ for crime.
Embezzling enormous amounts of money is difficult to do with a below-average IQ, but it's still illegal. Rich people aren't fine with being defrauded just because the defrauder is smart. Bombers have relatively high IQs (the Unabomber being an obvious example), but we punish bombing as severely as cruder homicides.
Yeh. Of course smart people become criminals bit by and large we don’t legalise or nullify that criminality (with the exception perhaps of war criminality)
isn't this just the fact that there's a correlation, but the correlation is not one? People with relatively low IQs, have slightly higher probability of committing some kinds of street crime, but it's not all that huge difference in probability, and there's absolutely nothing that says the very smart people can't commit serious crimes, or that dumb people can't be scrupulously law-abiding.
You'd have to define how much is "that much". But you're right about there being no impossibility theorem for those combinations of traits.
Smart people often have better things they can do, i.e. something that pays well enough and doesn't have the downsides. The lower time preference also means you can see the downsides better.
Yeah I suspect a lot of the IQ crime correlation just comes down to being able to foresee the consequences. But I wonder if there's anything else going on there. For example, would we see the same pattern in crimes that were very unlikely to be detected?
Good question. But how would you test it?
Smart people tend to be nicer. One reason is they can more easily imagine themselves in a potential victim's shoes and not wish to do this.
IQ doesn’t correlate strongly with agreeability, nor is agreeability a good proxy for ‘niceness.’ What measure are you using for ‘niceness’?
Smart people tend to be richer, and its easier to be nice if you're rich.
Do you even know all the laws you are supposed to be abiding by? How do you know that you're not a criminal?
Too much attention is being focused on criminality at the expense of attending to "harming other people". The legal status of an act is significant to the extent that it adjusts the risks and the payoff of performing that action. But whether the act is desirable or not (from a social point of view) depends on whether it harms the society in which it occurs (or possibly in which the performer lives). And, of course, that judgement depends strongly on what you consider harm. And there are other valid points of view, e.g. I consider whether and action is wrong or not based on my judgement of whether it will harm me. The social context then becomes important because I live in the society, but it less important (to me) than more direct effects.
Also, the crime-IQ correlation has a major data censoring problem, since we can only identify someone as a criminal if they're caught committing a crime. Maybe the high-IQ criminals are disproportionately unlikely to be caught.
A Professor of Business Law at the University of Oslo once gave this definition of a thief: “A thief is a person that is in such a hurry to help himself to other people’s money that he does not have time to establish a limited liability company first.”
Not to mention that the laws are written by the high-IQ types.
Did not Don Corleone say that "One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns?"
If I recall correctly, self report data gives about the same correlation as Data from crime statistics.
Not really, because there's an independent way to judge this: which countries would a typical person with no criminal intent prefer to live in? An excessive high-IQ crime load can be expected to result in a country that's actually worse to live in than a typical low-population-IQ country.
I do think there are countries that fit this description: North Korea is the first that comes to mind, and there are a bunch of related examples. But at least for now, it is clearly the exception rather than the rule.
You are being quite unfair to the populace of North Korea. They can be expected to have the same variations and means as South Korea. They're just operating under a very different management. (And possibly with different resources, but I don't think that's significant.)
Re: North Korea, it should be obvious that the crime load is concentrated at the top, and that's enough to make the country not worth living in. I don't know why you'd expect most readers of my comment to interpret me as criticizing the *general population* of North Korea here.
Modern Russia is a more debatable and interesting case.
There are a lot of high IQ murderers in movies and TV shows. One cliche of screenwriting is that the murderer should turn out to be richer than the initial suspect.
But, that happens a lot more in "Law & Order" than in real life. You can look up statistics for murders in Manhattan. There aren't many and they mostly involve the usual suspects rather than some interesting Patrick Bateman-type Wall Streeter.
Similarly, there's a big demand for true crime stories involving middle class white people killing each other, such as on "20/20." But most of the true crime murderers on TV tend to be small-time dopes who think their spouse's $125,000 life insurance policy would be a bonanza.
Every violent crime is negatively correlated to IQ. That's a pretty big deal.
Hijacking government policy to legally extract subsidies from fellow citizens at gunpoint is a thing, but if one compares the size of the welfare state to the size of the corporate welfare state it doesn't support your argument that high IQ people do more of the legal sorts of plundering.
Depends on what you agree is legal plundering, definitionally. Unless you can demonstrate that you’ve found a method to capture everything that could possibly count in that category (including undetected crimes and corruption, and other easy parasitism that is not illegal), then I’m going to say no, I don’t agree that observation doesn’t support me. Rather the reverse.
More than this, I think we're failing to distinguish between all the different types of evil. A partial taxonomy:
1. You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence, through poverty, since the more desperate you get the more selfish you become.
2. Emotionally-led evil, you're just angry. This is the evil of (say) a violent domestic abuser.
3. Utilitarian evil, where you try to do good things and it winds up evil because you're a mortal human and humans are really bad at moral tradeoffs. Probably positively correlated with intelligence, because you gotta be pretty smart to talk yourself into doing something that looks obviously wrong.
I suspect most of the really big evildoers of history who might initially seem to be in Category 3 are actually in Category 2 as well. Lenin, Hitler, Bin Laden etc all claimed to kill for some higher moral principle, but inevitably wound up killing people they emotionally hated anyway.
Galton and Ehrlich, to the extent they were evil, seem to at least be pure category 3.
Hitler, and perhaps to a lesser extent Bin Laden, is an example of something else: elevating what most of us would consider to be deeply evil to the level of a principle, to the extent of going against personal self-interest or the self-interest of the collective cared about.
Lenin would be 3, with some elements of 2 (a mixture of genuine hatred of injustice with being pretty reasonably embittered by his older brother's hanging) but, more interestingly, 3b: digging yourself into a deeper and deeper utilitarian hole by convincing yourself that deontology is something to be ditched entirely.
Nah, this perception is the result of successful demonizing propaganda. Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters. They were strongly influenced by some of the widespread ideas of their respective societies and took them to their logical conclusions. Sure, now with the benefit of hindsight we might say that those ideas were uniquely bad, but they weren't seen as such in Hitler's time, and Wahhabism is plenty popular and respectable in Saudi Arabia even today.
You haven't read what I am saying. They were, in their way, "idealists"; it is just that their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals* (particularly in Hitler's case, actually).
No, I just disagree. I think that Hitler sincerely loved Germany and expected his policies to be beneficial to it. Your argument proves too much, you can blame anyone who ever starts a war that "their ideals had suffering, death and subjection as *goals*", which some pacifists may believe, but certainly isn't the mainstream view.
The subjection and extermination of "foreign races" were germane to his program, to the point that they got in the way of his conduct of the war.
Maybe, maybe not. Hitler was not a nationalist in traditional sense. Hitler saw germans and Germany as means to an end.
> Hitler and bin Laden weren't uniquely depraved monsters.
Glorifying death wasn't considered depraved in Hitler's era. For a young man, dying was the poetic thing to do.
Consider "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers", a popular German book describing a depressed young man who later kills himself. After publishing, the book inspired many suicides. Such was the culture where Hitler grew up; he only fanned the flames of the existing romantic notions in popular culture for his political goals.
There is no contradiction between "wasn't a monster" and "glorified death". It may seem so to us, because from the historical perspective, we are living in an unprecedented bubble of wealth and empathy.
I would argue Lenin would be #1, also.
Difficult to believe: Lenin could have had a much more comfortable life if he hadn't got into politics, and he wasn't an idiot.
Yeah, I got the categories mixed up, actually.
>You're selfish and you just don't give a shit about other people. This is the evil of the common criminal. It's likely negatively correlated with intelligence,
Or not, because this describes plenty of lawyers, salespeople, financial people, and CEOs, who are just as happy doing selfish or unethical things which leave the other party worse off, just in legally-sanctioned (or even illegal-but-white-collar) ways. They're just smart enough to find ways to be selfish in which they are either unlikely to be punished or the punishment will be negligible (cf wage theft being an order of magnitude higher than "common criminal" theft).
But as a motive for criminal behavior it may well be negatively correlated. All the higher-IQ types you mentioned can operate perfectly legally, which being just as evil.
I'll push back on "perfectly legally" (using wage theft as an example again: very much a crime, it just goes unpunished), but I agree on the premise that it's not the sort of crime that tends to show up in crime stats.
But yeah. From a first order approximation, "crime" is just selfishness from people too poor (low-iq-as-a-class?) to get the state to take their side.
This is something probably already discussed in existing criminology literature, but I'm not quite sure where the line between 1 and 2 is drawn or if it should be drawn at all. A domestic abuser might have poor impulse control, or they might simply not give a shit about the well-being of their partner as long as their own well-being is taken care of. Or probably both.
I have a strong suspicion you can't make that assumption. To me it seems that for many people their sexual morality is walled off from their more normal morality. That seems to be what I observe among people I know, and it's certainly what's indicated by various popular and folk songs.
The thing is, you've misidentified the evil component of choice 3. The evil component there is the authoritarianism. This includes all aspects of "I know better than you, so I don't need to take your goals/intents/purposes/suffering/etc. into account.
Just being mistaken isn't evil. Forcing people to do things, even for actually good reasons, is already morally questionable. This leads to a whole bag of worms when you're trying to establish the rules for a society. (Yes, I think the making requirements were valid. But to call them questionable is definitely reasonable. They were a trade-off with evils on both sides.)
Real quick, what's the precise definition (or set of related definitions) of "Authoritarianism" that you're using here? Because I think I agree, contingent on how you're defining it, but it's a pretty broad term.
Authoritarianism is basically the belief that someone (the authority) has the right to tell everyone else how to act (Note the lack of restrictions in what they can say) and that the speaker (or someone he designates) has the right to speak in that name of that authority.
Okay, in that case I disagree, since that essentially amounts to a roundabout definition of a state. i.e. It applies equally well to authoritarian dictatorships and functional democracies.
The authority derived from a state is not inherently evil - in fact, it's arguably to best solution to many types of coordination problems - see Scott's own writings on the matter[1].
People don't usually use "authoritarian" so broadly, though - they usually reserve it for states where overuse of authority leads to harm. (And you seem to agree on that implicit definition based on what you said above, which makes me confused as to why you provided the definition you did.) The authority itself is not evil, it just lowers the barrier for committing utilitarian evil - so the evil in authority is when you put too much confidence in the moral authority it gives you.
...I feel like I've started rambling at this point
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
It's not inherently evil, but it inherently has tendencies in that direction. Being a democracy doesn't protect you against that. And good kings have existed. India even has legends of a good Emperor.
It's not the authority that is evil, it's the use the authority is put to. But authority has inherent in it the ability to commit evil without noticing it, and certainly without caring. You could ask various Indian tribes if being a democracy prevented the US from evilly exercising its authority.
Is authority the best solution? It's probably the only solution to living in groups. This doesn't mean it doesn't have inherent problems.
This. We have a basically mammalian brain, grounded in affect and emotion, but with a large, powerful and evolutively recent symbolic processing module tacked on. It's so poorly debugged, that it can destabilize the whole system, by overwhelming channels originally made to carry sense data with symbolic imaginations, and getting itself into insane loops - losing all sense of perspective at the drop of a hat, all the way into depression and mental illness.
And people want to help the human race by boosting up this system even more? It's a wonder that symbolic thinking hasn't gotten us to extinction yet, and people still think the solution is *more of it*?
You've got this exactly backward. Symbolic thinking has raised the human race out of the worst abuses of living in nature. It has lifted billions into living like kings and queens did only mere hundreds of years ago.
So yeah, people still think more of that would be a good thing.
Thanks for the obvious objection, it had to be said. I'm not actually proposing that we go "back to the trees", except maybe for the week-end.
My point is to propose that with intellect we may have reached a point where secondary effects are becoming important. Kind of like how cars and plastics have been a huge boon to mankind, but now we're breathing bad air and filling the seas with detritus.
If I had a magic wand to wish for an improvement to the human form, rather than straight up higher IQ, I'd rather ask for better inner integration, more groundedness and less tendency to feel threatened.
Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
If what you mean is that desperate people will undertake desperate acts, well, that's true. But symbolic thinking won't change the axioms and postulates that you're working from.
If you mean people think smarter people are better...I think you need to read popular media. They may like some of the results, but they don't make what you think is the obvious attribution.
> Intellect can justify ANY morality. It cannot be the basis on which a morality is based.
That's not true. Quite the opposite in fact, because only intellect can question the premises underlying beliefs. For instance, why is the King supposed to be above the peasant? Divine right? Who is this "God" fellow anyway?
Those questions lead directly to giving up the premise that any particular person has more rights than any other.
Only poorly applied intellect can justify any morality, a sort of intellectual process that does not question its own premises.
Clearly false. Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time. And intellect is always used to justify the resulting conclusion. A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
What one CAN do is try to evoke challenged instincts within the disputant one is arguing with. Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind. (Of course, most argument is really directed at those listeners who haven't yet decided. Or is a form of social display.)
* For instinct the meaning I'm using is "non-verbal mental process". I don't like the term, but I can't think of a better one.
> Instincts* fight against other instincts all the time.
Yes, and only intellect can question the assumptions underlying each instinct to discover which is more justified, if any.
> A logical system cannot question its own axioms, if they lead into contradictions, then they lead into contradictions.
Which then raises questions about the axioms, thus contradicting your own claim.
> Pointing out flaws in their logic will only cause them to try to improve their arguments, not to change their mind.
This is not an argument that intellect cannot change people's minds, it's merely an indication that a particular approach is not suited to the problem at hand. We can achieve great heights by applying intellect to build towers, but no amount of intellect will build a tower to the moon.
You have to use intellect to solve the problem at hand in the most appropriate way (which only intellect can elucidate). For some people that might require pointing out deductive mistakes, for others that might be specific examples with emotional connections, for yet others it might require patiently listening to their concerns which led to them to a particular conclusion and then explaining how those concerns can be address in your approach.
Regardless, it remains simply false that intellect can justify any morality. Kant demonstrated quite clearly that pure reason can justify many moral prescriptions.
Hear hear!
I've seen criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis which goes (put somewhat uncharitably), "If you say that a Greater Intelligence would not necessarily be more moral, you go against the entire concept of moral progress altogether! And if we grant that education does not necessarily increase the morality of a population, by what right should the more educated populace be an authority at all on moral decisions?" (This style of thinking bothered me much less when it wasn't at risk of preventing avoiding an apocalypse.)
There aren’t rights period.
I would say both of the premises of that criticism are wrong, as you have put them.
> The "evil genius" is a well-known media trope for a reason
I suspect the reason is that they make more compelling villains than "evil idiots", in spite of their relative frequency.
Anyone who's in favour of the taboo and legal ban on incest because children of incest are disproportionately likely to have birth defects is already a eugenecist whether they like it or not. Spoken as a person who fully supports the taboo on incest.
I think few of these people are suddenly okay with incest provided that everyone involved is using contraceptives, which suggests that the birth defect argument is not their true reason but a rationalization.
I do agree that anyone using this rationalization is already in some sense a eugenicist, although I think the argument would benefit from tabooing the word "eugenics" completely.
I'm not sure about "few" here. German law criminalizes sex between adult siblings only when vaginal sex is involved - consensual incestuous sex acts that cannot possibly be reproductive are not criminalized.
(Interestingly, consensual incest between adults is legal in France, Spain and... Russia? That is odd. I knew about France because of two middle-aged siblings who moved from the UK to France for that reason.)
Interesting, I didn't know that. The German law is certainly evidence against my claim. Although even in that case I notice that the prohibition is against all heterosexual incest, with no contraception exception. Is that really where we would expect the equilibrium to land in a universe where most people did not have a reflexive disgust for incest?
German law was likely written by a bunch of rationalizing lawyer/politician types that followed the logical reasoning of reducing harm from birth defects. But I'd bet the broad majority of the population would socially ostracize anyone engaging in incest regardless of the legality.
Also, the law involved is a bit of a mess. The official reasoning behind it, as per the constitutional court, is mostly "well, it has been here for a long time" and the good to be protected is the family... For a law bound to relationships by blood, not by family, in a case in which the people involved didn't even know they're related by blood (both were adopted by different families, they later married and what they sued against was annulling their marriage because them having sex would be criminal).
There are better, non-eugenic reasons for tabooing incest. Mine is that incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common. As long as the liberal state gives broad deference to parental authority within the domestic sphere, a hyperstrict cultural shame campaign against any form of sexual contact with your (step) children or siblings is the most effective tool we have for protecting children from the people they have to get naked with on a regular basis.
Presumably any sex act which can be described as "sexual abuse" is already illegal under legislation against rape and sexual assault?
No, but at least parent-child incest potentially is under a law against abusing the position of someone being in your charge for sexual purposes. Of course, siblings can have a lot of informal authority without a formal authority to bind that to and all that authority can be used without having to physically assault or explicitly extort the victim
The rest of this comment was a result of me misreading the thread and writing something unrelated, so I removed it
That's a lot harder to prove when the perpetrator has such a degree of control over the entire physical and emotional context for such a long time.
> incestuous sexual abuse is both horrible and common
> ... is the most effective tool we have
seems like there's some tension here. do you think that there simply are no possible more effective tools? do we have evidence on how effective the cultural shame campaign is? it's not clear to me that we are in a position to know the answer to either of these questions.
I've heard a theory that expanding and strengthening the (pre-existing) taboo on incest was actually a sneaky way to consolidate state power, by hampering the ability of extended families to maintain local political factions through strategic marriages.
Excellent questions. I agree it's hard to measure prevalence and therefore the success of any interventions (Stoltenbergh 2011 have a meta-analysis which suggests CSA is more prevalent in North America, Africa and Australia but that it matters a lot how you ask). It's possible the stigma contributes to underreporting, but since harm reduction will inevitably require separating kids from their abusers it's hard to imagine a non-stigmatizing approach.
I think there are plenty of plausibly more effective programs, from age-appropriate sex ed starting in kindergarten to routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers. The problem with all of them is that they'd meet intense resistance from cultures that prize the "private sphere" and its right to be exempt from public scrutiny—here I'm heavily informed by theoretical arguments from feminists like Susan Okin and Carole Pateman about the historical emergence and function of the public/private dichotomy.
"routine household inspections and interviews with kids by trained social workers"
Well if you want to make sure actual abuse is skimmed over and non-abusive situations result in kids being hauled away, go right ahead with that brilliant idea. I think "trained" social workers are trained only in the particular ideological shibboleths of the day where they are trained, so you can shoot up heroin in front of your toddler* and still be considered a 'good mother' but if you don't agree that the same toddler is fully capable of deciding to socially transition their gender you are a horrible abuser bent on driving your kid to suicide.
*Based on story I heard at work about a social worker claiming a client was a good mother because she always turned her back when shooting up while her kid was in the room. How about maybe NOT SHOOTING UP HEROIN IN FRONT OF A TODDLER AT ALL, HUH? Naturally there were no moves afoot to take the kid away from such a 'good' mother.
That's a horrific story, Jesus.
If true, or course. Meanwhile 94,896 American children were removed from their homes and placed in out-of-home care due to parental drug use in 2019 (https://ncsacw.acf.hhs.gov/research/child-welfare-and-treatment-statistics.aspx), so even if true we can hope it's not typical.
I was shocked, and that's here in small-town Ireland. As I've said before, I thought I was cynical about human nature when I worked in education grants, then when I worked in social housing I discovered I wasn't nearly cynical enough.
Another argument is that even if there's no abuse, a nasty breakup would be harder on the family than if the couple wasn't related.
Galton from his 1909 collection of essays:
"The marriage of a brother and sister would excite a feeling of loathing among us that seems implanted by nature, but which further inquiry will show, has mainly arisen from tradition and custom.
…(4) The harm due to continued interbreeding has been considered, as I think, without sufficient warrant, to cause a presumed strong natural and instinctive repugnance to the marriage of near kin. The facts are that close and continued interbreeding invariably does harm after a few generations, but that a single cross with near kinsfolk is practically innocuous. Of course a sense of repugnance might become correlated with any harmful practice, but there is no evidence that it is repugnance with which interbreeding is correlated, but only indifference; this is equally effective in preventing it, but is quite another thing.
(5) The strongest reason of all in civilised countries appears to be the earnest desire not to infringe the sanctity and freedom of the social relations of a family group, but this has nothing to do with instinctive sexual repugnance. Yet it is through the latter motive alone, so far as I can judge, that we have acquired our apparently instinctive horror of marrying within near degrees.
…A great deal more evidence could easily be adduced, but the foregoing suffices to prove that there is no instinctive repugnance felt universally by man, to marriage within the prohibited degrees, but that its present strength is mainly due to what I call immaterial considerations. It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now. "
I think Galton is wrong and it will trend in the opposite direction; incestuous marriage or partnerships will be regarded as "well if they're not having kids and it's all consensual, why not?" rather than making "non-eugenic marriages" socially repugnant.
Galton's cousin Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood.
It was American eugenicists who did most of the research that led to our modern laws against incest in Protestant countries. (Catholics had long been against cousin marriage.) British eugenicists were too loyal to the Darwin family to deal much with the topic.
Isn’t the current research mostly that Galton was right? That while systemic inbreeding is bad, the random first cousin marriage is barely even worth tracking.
There's a problem like that with first cousin marriage. Saudi Arabia is full of people with birth defects because they didn't have much of a dating scene. There's a theory that the Council of Agde, which sounds like a supermarket chain, with its prohibition on first cousin marriage had a major impact on Western European civilization.
If Sailer is correct here - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cousin-marriage-conundrum/ - it's not just a lack of a dating scene in the Arab world; it's a deliberate (or at least culturally evolved) strategy to keep wealth within one's family.
With regards to Ehrlich: I concede that Coria's characterization of him *in the beginning* can be argued. But it is now clear that his most famous argument was, and is, fundamentally incorrect (and has done real harm). Ehrlich declines to concede that his entire professional career made the world worse, which is his privilege. It is also a moral failing.
WAS it fundamentally incorrect? You say that based on what?
The way the future of the world is likely to play out is that China just barely managed to scramble onto the helicopter in time. Everyone later than China (Most of Africa and South Asia -- and probably most of the Arab world once the oil runs out) is probably doomed. The path of light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to services is probably shutting down, visibly for political reasons but more importantly because machines will do the jobs. We won't need to argue about whether we should "export jobs" to Bangladesh or import Mexicans, we'll do neither and have robots doing the work.
Previously this was not a problem because excess farmworkers could move to the factory, excess factory workers could move to retail. That's probably over and, even if within the wealthy countries society is willing to help out via moves like UBI, that won't extend to those poor countries.
Now, if those countries had frozen their populations at the 1970 level, everything would have been so much easier. There would have been money to improve things starting at that point, money to build few but good schools and hospitals rather than many but bad. Entry onto the path to modernity a whole lot sooner.
It was not not fore-ordained that China would be the last one out; it could have been that South Asia and Africa escaped hopeless poverty first. But people chose to mock Ehrlich on minor points rather than on the big picture, and we are where we are today, simultaneously crying about whatever is the disaster du jour (not enough water! species dying!) while insisting that doubling the number of people is quite manageable and won't cause any problems, no sirree.
I don't think you really can call Ehrlich's mistakes "minor". Pretty much everything he predicted was directionally incorrect: death rates went down, not up. Countries like India and Egypt, which he advocated should stop receiving food aid because they were lost causes both massively increased production and are now able to afford imports of food from the global market for what they don't produce themselves. Percentage of the global population "undernourished" went down, not up, over time.
It's sort of why one should never warn the driver of an obstacle. They might swerve and avoid it. and you'd wind up being wrong to have warned them. Prophesy stories have a lot in common with time travel stories.
Except we didn't "swerve". Ehrlich's policies (such as taxing families increasingly by # of children, financial incentives for sterilization, research into mass-sterilizing agents for the US, and eliminating food aid to India and Egypt because they were lost causes) were, by and large, not adopted. Instead food production was massively increased.
Besides, Ehrlich explicitly claimed that the obstacle was unavoidable:
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
There was a level of triumphalism in the 1960s followed, starting in the late 1970s, by a more global rethinking in which the problems of the rapidly growing "third world" appeared increasingly intractable. I took a look at the What Can You Do? chapter of the Population Bomb. He has sections on letter writing, proselytizing, organizing action groups and so on. Perhaps the most controversial statement was that long term population growth should be zero, but the means of achieving it had to include changing attitudes, increased awareness of ecological limits, improving agriculture - especially tropical agriculture, improved contraception and a host of other things, most of which were implemented in various forms.
He addresses eugenics and argues against it. He points out that intelligence has genetic and environmental components, and, if someone is concerned about increasing overall intelligence, they should focus on improving education. The goal was to slow population growth to zero, increasing available resources and minimizing environmental degradation. He points out that belief in eugenics is usually directed against out groups, not something to be encouraged. I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause. Improving health care for children, vaccination, food support and propaganda in popular culture were the primary means of attitude change, though China did have its coercive one child policy. That wasn't Ehrlich. He wasn't running China.
His next chapter, What If I'm Wrong, is basically Pascal's wager. It's applicable today. Suppose we, even with existing technology, could support 20 billion people, what mistake would we be making by world stabilizing population under 10 billion. It's an easily correctable mistake. It would be easy to adjust attitudes and, in maybe 60 years, raise the population to 20 billion. His goal was to match population and resources by means other than famine, war or pestilence.
> I couldn't find anything on using tax policy, sterilization, mass sterilization, eliminating food aid or writing off any part of the world as a lost cause.
I will provide citations (using https://archive.org/details/populationbomb00ehrl/ as a reference since I don't have a physical copy), but all of these seem to be in Chaper 4, "What needs to be done", which discusses policy (as opposed to Chapter 5, "What can you do?" which is aimed at the individual level):
Taxing people for having children: p136 (his example involves increasing taxable income by $600 for the first 2 children, $1200 for subsequent).
Luxury taxes on goods used to raise children beyond the "essentials" (specifically mentioned as taxable: cribs and diapers): p137.
Establishing a Department of Population and Environment, which would research the development of mass-sterilizing agents (for use at home and to help underdeveloped countries): p138.
"Triage" of under-developed countries is necessary, as some will not be able to feed their population even with aid (he quotes "Famine 1975!" for his examples, and says it will be remembered as one of the most important books of our age): p160.
Making development aid to specific "areas" of under-developed countries, contingent on population control, including internal migration controls, because only some parts of countries will receive help: p164
Redrawing the political boundaries of under-developed countries to make the above easier: p165
"we should have applied pressure" on the government of India to sterilize all males with 3 or more children: p165
That’s all completely wrong. China is in trouble - albeit not as much as some western countries - because of its falling demographics. It is this that is causing some people to think that it’s boom is over, and certainly ageing populations are a major headwind to economic growth.
China is also in trouble for its not-falling-early-enough demographics. As much as they like to pride themselves on their unappologetic imperialist desires, the reason why they risk a world war by sending fishing vessels in territorial waters of others countries is because they have a big and hungry population that needs proteins to thrive and they don't have enough ressources at home.
Pointing to a large aging population and saying that the only solution is to add more children is litterally like pointing at a late-stage ponzi scheme and saying that the only solution is to add another layer. Sometimes you've got to blow the bubble and suffer the consequences.
This is totally false. China is not struggling to feed its population, and in any case buying food is much cheaper than war. Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
> buying food is much cheaper than war
That's not a dilemna that people ever have. In practice you buy food until you can't afford to buy it anymore, and then you make war whether you can afford it or not.
> Global food production exceeds what humankind can eat.
You're proving too much. As long as there is food being wasted in the parts of the world that are not overpopulated you could say the the world *as a whole* is not overpopulated and it's just a distribution issue ; denying that some regions of the world definitely are.
Obfuscation. Your central assertion (that China is preparing war because it is unable to feed its people) is completely false. They might be preparing war but its not because they can't feed their people. According to Google, Chinese food imports amount to 100b/yr, at a time when the Chinese current account surplus is 100b/month. This is not a country struggling to pay for enough food to feed itself. Nor is `inability to feed its population' the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine, or the US invaded Iraq.
The last time Chinese troops went into combat outside China was 1979.
Compare with the track record of the totally non-imperialist United States since that time.
I wish that in this forum a statement criticising the outgroup would not be taken as a defence of the ingroup.
The US are very imperialistic in practice but they don't assume it very well.
Russia is imperialistic in both declarations and acts, but has a moderate success.
China is imperialistic in stated desires but has so far not acted much on it (except on its next-doors neighbours).
>The last time Chinese troops went into combat outside China was 1979.
According to their opponents, the last time they went into combat outside their borders was 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%93India_skirmishes
Russia's supposed imperialism also has been with respect to neighbors, usually in response to western countries destabilizing those neighbors. I sup[pose one could count Syria and such in Africa, except that (unlike the United States), Russian troops are in those countries at the request of the recognized government there.
"outside china" does a lot of work when approximately all the flashpoints are regions China claims have always been theirs (and never mind the views of the locals).
I would argue that the CCPs' actions wrt Tibet, the Uighurs, the disputes in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and the persistent threat of something going down with Taiwan are all Imperialist.
I note also that Chinese troops do regularly skirmish on the border with India, though it's defensible to not regard that as "combat"
That's quite a stretch, but even if you were to redefine "China" to not include places in China, it would be but a pimple on the ass of Iraq alone.
They've been in combat with India more recently than that. I guess you could call it a police action or some such euphemism, but India and China are in earnest.
There's been some saber rattling, but unless I am mistaken, the only actual fighting was in 1961 or so.
Can you point to evidence that South Asia and Africa have missed the helicopter? The largest countries in each (India and Nigeria respectively) just clocked GDP growth rates of 8.7% and 3.6% respectively. Also, if machines can do lots of production...that should make us richer, not poorer. Wealth is determined by how much stuff you can produce, not by how many people it takes you to make stuff. Insert story about `if you don't want to use earth movers because digging with spades employs more people, then why use spades, hire even more people to scratch at the dirt with bare hands'
Mean wealth is determined by production, but median wealth is largely determined by distribution.
Are we sure having robots do the farming is a great idea? Do people farming now really want to re-invent themselves as robot management experts? Do they want to sell their farms and go do something else? If they don’t want to, are people sure they’ll be happier afterwards even though they think they won’t?
And then there’s the doomed continents.
I understand the concern, but there is a difference between robots doing literally all the farming, and robots doing most of the farming while a long tail of hobbyists of various sorts continue doing some farming as well. I look at the Amish, I don't see them seriously threatened, and as long as that remains true I'm not that worried.
I do always love the tension between the two widely held beliefs that “overpopulation isn’t a problem”, and “omg we are burning through the earths resources and biosphere too quickly. Seems like even before it was clear that the curve was working in our favor on item 1 it had become politically verboten. And on top of that even if we stabilize at 10 billion or whatever, it is literally twice as hard a problem as stabilizing at 5.
I agree Ehrlich's position seemed much more defensible in 1970 than today, although Coria's point was trying to draw a line between "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil", and while I think the amount of stupidity it takes to believe Ehrlich's position now has gone way up, I don't think that affects the dichotomy.
I kinda do think being wrong can make you morally culpable. Specifically, if you’re in a position of authority and you could be right by exercising a reasonable amount of intellectual discipline and spending a reasonable amount of effort, then you’re culpable for being wrong. Don’t know if this applies to 1970 Erlich or not. He seems to have been in a position of authority, and I expect he expended a reasonable amount of effort, but I would not be surprised to discover he was lacking in discipline.
I'd prefer to say that you're culpable for skipping your due diligence, rather than culpable for being wrong per se.
In particular, I think you remain culpable for skipping your due diligence even if you have the good fortune of being correct.
Is that a good stance for us to take, individually or especially as a society? There's got to be some room for blaming people for the results of their actions as well as their intentions, otherwise every true-believer mass murderer could get a pass. We should reserve the right to call out evil methods or evil suggestions, even if they seem right at the time. It's better to miss out on an opportunity for improvement if the alternative is a definite atrocity.
And what would due diligence look like in 1970, regarding population? Even by the 80s and 90s population was being taught in schools as a major issue (and maybe after that, I wouldn't know). The consensus opinion at the time was that he was correct, and that would have been the consensus even if he personally had never said a thing.
If a doctor kills a patient, but they believed their actions were going to save the patient, and there TRULY was no way they could have known better, then I do not think they are ethically culpable.
If you think a "true-believer serial killer" is different from "a doctor that accidentally kills several of their patients", I suspect that's probably because you think the "serial killer" actually DID have a way to know better and failed to exercise it. (If you think there's an ethical difference for some other reason, please share!)
Of course, society may sometimes need to defend itself from well-intentioned-but-wrong people by stopping them with force. I think defending yourself is conceptually distinct from punishing the other guy, though occasionally both may result in the same action being taken.
Society might even need to penalize that person as a deterrent, if there isn't a reliable way to distinguish between "well-intentioned but wrong" and "pretending to be well-intentioned to avoid punishment". I still think that's distinct from assigning ethical culpability to wrong people who genuinely couldn't have known better.
I think it's also worth noting that there can be situations where X is the best strategy conditional on Y being true, and it seems very likely that Y is true, but X is still not actually the best strategy when taking uncertainty into account. Sometimes the harm if you're wrong is so big that a small probability of that harm outweighs the larger probability of some benefit. Sometimes there's an alternative strategy that hedges your bets, which is slightly less helpful if Y is true but much less harmful if Y turns out to be false. If you do your best possible analysis of all available evidence and conclude, correctly, that there is a 95% chance that Y is true, that is still not the same as a 100% chance and does not license you to act as if it was a 100% chance.
I guess the short answer is that I'm a deontologist, and some approaches to solving problems are just simply off the table from the start. Mass-sterilization is one of those items. Experimental treatments (going back to your doctor example) is not.
I'm reminded a bit of the Olympic gymnast doctor who was giving the female gymnasts repeated and unnecessary genital examinations (there's apparently some reason to do a similar examination) and abusing these girls for years. He was able to claim, with some support, that he was not abusing them. What should have happened is probably some process to review the necessity of such procedures or to have a female doctor involved instead. We take the "well-meaning but wrong" possibility off the table by simply removing the possibility. Similarly, we don't know if the doctor is trying out the best treatments he knows and it happens to kill the patient, or he's intentionally killing the patient. We therefore have medical review panels and investigate the situation instead of taking his word for it.
Yes, and I'd argue that the threshold for what counts as "reasonable" amount of effort and discipline must rise dramatically with the severity of your proposed action. It could be argued that some actions are so drastic that no human agency could reasonably supply sufficient effort and discipline to justify them.
This sort of clause seems dangerous unless you have a way of determining this type of culpability a priori. This discipline you point at being essentially an internal psychological phenomenon, I doubt this would work.
I don't think it works very well as a basis for public judgements of culpability, but I'm sometimes happy to make them privately
I believe Bryan Caplan argues that "well-intentioned but stupid" and "evil" are more continuous, rather than discrete (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery).
If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
Similarly, if you make policy decisions, with anything but the most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis, and those decisions have the potential to hurt millions of people, (let alone cases like Ehrlich's where you know you will be hurting people and the question is only the payoff), that would seem to also be on the evil spectrum, rather than a member of a totally different category.
By extension, then, anyone who makes policy decisions is evil (because we should all understand our flaws and that none of us is capable of consistently doing most serious, level headed, intense, and honest analysis.)
But policy decisions still need to be made. What do we do?
That's what deontology is for. If you can't confidently forecast the consequences, you can still evaluate the actions.
Simple rules like "no extermination camps" and "fair trial" go a really long way to preventing the worst kinds of mistakes. Deontology gets a bad rap around here sometimes, but it's a great system for preventing repeat bad outcomes.
Make as few as possible, of course. That's the moral argument for conservatism and libertarianism.
> If you shoot someone in the face, that's evil. If you shoot bullets in the air with disregard for where they will fall, that is more stupid and arguably less evil, but still on the evil spectrum, rather than belonging to a wholly different category.
What if you shoot the bullets directly upward vs at an angle? Then you're back to just fine again? I'm being serious, by the way. Turns out, if you shoot a bullet directly up, it will come tumbling back down and be fairly harmless whoever/whatever it might hit. If you shoot it at an angle, whatever it hits will be very unhappy.
I feel this still fits. If there is a catogoric need to discharge the gun then;
Good: I've discovered and am confident that of we shoot strait up no one will get hurt
Mid: if I shoot it up at an angle it will probably be fine
Evil: I'll shoot it at that person because I didn't like them anyway
I dunno, man. I just find it hard to believe that the guy doesn't grasp, somewhere in the back of his head, just how bad he is at extrapolating from current data. Which may just be me, sure.
Not just you.
I often think about this in the context of HIV denialists, or vaccine-autism-ers, or other similar views. There was a point where their view was a little contrarian, but perfectly reasonable. By now they are completely utterly verifiably wrong and harmful. There’s probably a point in between where some lines were crossed. But the people who stick with it do so because of their instinct of resisting criticism in the early days, which was good for science, but now is bad for science.
Population Control a half century ago was a common cause among Republican Protestants, like the Rockefellers and Bushes, to back. Their specific concern was, I would guess, Irish Catholic Democrats: e.g., Bobby Kennedy had ten kids (and one is currently running for President). But white Catholic birthrates fell sharply and Protestants lost interest in the subject over time.
Ehrlich was had good intentions, and he was smart. World population was rising rapidly and would lead to resource related collapse. He presented three scenarios of collapse. For rhetorical reasons, he focused on the impact of rising world population on the US since his audience was largely in the US, but he ignored the fact that being rich, the US would be able to mitigate more of the effects than in a poorer nation. He sorted of assumed the US would be impacted much like some hypothetical average nation.
I remember the book, and I've recently reread it. It challenged a lot of ideas about world development in 1968. People took it seriously. Nations around the world encouraged the use of birth control and the adoption of new crops and agricultural practices to increase food output. The Green Revolution started in the late 1960s and was seen as essential thanks to books like The Population Bomb. Different nations adopted its policies to different degrees, but the recent rise in per capita income around the world was driven by the revolution that Ehrlich's book started.
The Population Bomb tends to get maligned much like the Club of Rome Report some years later. The Club of Rome, as it turned out, was surprisingly close to the mark. There were a few articles on it for its 50th anniversary. I was watching the eagles nearby the other day and thinking of Rachel Carson. They were beautiful birds, and it's just as well we have better pesticides and use them more carefully than DDT.
Ehrlich sounded an important alarm that led to what someone here called quasi-eugenic policies like partial sterilization through birth control. We also had the green revolution and big gains in development around the world, policies pushed in response to fears of Ehrlich's dystopian vision. Would China or India really be in better shape with two billion people or more each or having endured a famine killing hundreds of millions? In hindsight, Ehrlich sounds way off the mark, but that's because people took him seriously.
I would be curious to know just how far "outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" the Green Revolution was. Was there really no serious dissent, or was it just given less airtime on the three extant tv stations?
As I note in this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck/comment/16157431 David Friedman was skeptical of the doomer consensus at the time.
They knew the Green Revolution was easy, they just didn't want it. Borlaug discussed it with his bosses at the Rockefeller Foundation and defied their orders. Since he was the only person to do it, they were right to forecast that no one would, at least on the scale of a decade.
Wait, are you saying the Green Revolution was somehow actually the work of one person going against the system? I would have thought the Green Revolution, while it had important figures, actually relied on millions of people acting within various systems.
No major movement is only ever just one person, but Normal Borlaug singularly made a massive difference and without him it's possible it would not have happened.
Ehrlich was one of the scientists pushing for the Green Revolution. Tropical agriculture had been neglected. The big ag outfits were focused on the temperate zone where the money was. It was considered a long shot, but one that had to be tried. Even proponents, rightly, expected that Improving tropical agriculture alone would not be enough without population control as well.
I think Borlaug had a staff of several dozen. First he spent a decade doing normal things that he was instructed to do, like disease resistance. Then he spent a decade adapting the wheat to fertilizer. Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back, so he must have brought them around, but they definitely were against it at the beginning. Then he, personally, took the wheat from Mexico to India, which suggests a pretty small cast of characters. Other people played a bigger role of adapting it to India and pursuing the same strategy with other grains.
"Such a long project can't have been behind his boss's back,"
This isn't actually true during that time period.
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain."
Did we? We banned coercive eugenics, but last I heard we aren't randomizing reproductive pairings, sperm banks show a sharp skew in preferences towards the over 6ft and accomplished, and assortative mating in humans seems to be a thing and the effect is likely getting stronger in USA.
Yeah. Even things like selective abortion for Tay-Sachs (as mentioned in the post) and Down Syndrome are very mainstream and widely, although not universally, accepted. Probably the meaningful distinction is between decisions made by parents and those imposed or encouraged by a government.
Widely accepted by readers of this blog (myself included). Not so long ago, Ohio tried to ban second-trimester abortions specifically in the case of Down syndrome. That seemed unbelievably perverse to me, but Facebook friends told me that my moral compass is simply not set up in the same way as most American's moral compass.
This is interesting, since then one would have to argue that the people behind the Ohio ban would see killing people as OK, or at least the lesser evil, compared to killing people for having Down's syndrome.
Surely it's pretty reasonable to hold that (a) a foetus is not covered by anti-discrimination legislation - specially that concerning serious defects, as opposed to, say, gender - whether or not you also hold that (b) a second-trimester foetus has *some* weight in a moral calculus that a six-week embryo does not have or barely has.
The (deep) flaw in the precautionary principle is that it pretends that there is only one reason of moral concern. What about the ethical undesirability of giving birth to a child who will be tremendously shortchanged by nature? (Or simply changing the family dynamics, which will now likely revolve around the very special needs of one child, and not those of existing children? Not to mention that many families will not have another child after a child with Down's is born: family finances will not allow it.)
It is not so much that I cannot see why some people might choose to virtue-signal on this issue (until they themselves get a Down diagnosis for their foetus; then the great majority aborts). It's more that this sort of diagnosis seems to be the most obvious and common reason for a responsible person to abort in the second semester and not before.
Again: even if you grant a foetus some moral weight, it is a fallacy (and false) to attribute to it a desire to live, or equal rights, or any such thing. As a life, it is something real, but it is only potentially a person - and we consider choices between potential futures all the time.
It is completely consistent to believe that any person has equal rights, and the right to live, but that foetus don't get a right to be born - and that giving birth to a child with Down's is not just not obligatory, but grossly immoral. (That is not necessarily my opinion, mind you; I am simply claiming that these opinions are consistent.)
This is so basic that I am starting to suspect that you simply are arguing for the sake of arguing. I won't waste my time on discussing this matter with you (whoever or whatever it is that you are) further.
Let's say that an all-knowing genie told you that if you have sex on Tuesday, you'll have a kid with Downs. If you have sex on Wednesday instead, you'll have a kid without Downs. If you want to have a kid, is it immoral to have sex on Wednesday but not Tuesday? What if, prior to the genie appearing, you were planning on having sex on Tuesday?
>There's this conceptual mistake people seem to make where they think the pregnancies are interchangeable... But that's a distinct individual who will never live
It's not a mistake, it's that fundamental nature of how probability works, if a fetus is not yet a person. Unless you have a convincing reason as to why the cutoff for when life begins *has to* be at conception, an unborn fetus has the same probabilistic value as not choosing to have a baby at all. i.e. you can make the same argument that any time you use birth control that's a "a distinct individual who will never live"; or for that matter *any* opportunity you have to impregnate someone that you do not take (including morally objectionable ones).
In other words, it's not a useful argument to make, because it's ultimately totally unrelated to the actual argument, which is the Schelling point for where personhood begins. It's an argument that, in the proper sense, begs the question.
" shortchanged by nature"
Hoo boy. Isn't *that* a completely generalizable justification for any given scale of genocide.
It's also our excuse for killing cows and onions. We all live on a slippery slope.
If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would be opposed to *any* abortion of a fetus at that stage, Down's syndrome or no, on the grounds that this would be murder. If someone believes that a fetus at ~6 months is not a person in the moral or ethical sense, then they would believe that aborting a fetus with Down's is not "killing folk for having medical conditions" but rather preventing a person from being born with a medical condition. Rather like not having unprotected sex with your sibling prevents inbred children from being born.
I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide.
But that was exactly the reasoning behind the Ohio law: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ohio-abortion-down-syndrome-courts-d9da3bbd49db2d3369a9e9f154383c8f#:~:text=By%20JULIE%20CARR%20SMYTHApril,a%20case%20considered%20nationally%20pivotal.
Yes, it seems maximally perverse to you and to me, but not necessarily to others. Of course, again, this was back when Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land, so the point of these laws was to stake a position.
For those who are wondering, the following seems to be the actual text of the law: https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_132/bills/hb214/EN/05/hb214_05_EN?format=pdf
"No person shall purposely perform or induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the person has knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion, in whole or in part, because of any of the following: (1) A test result indicating Down syndrome in an unborn child; (2) A prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in an unborn child; (3) Any other reason to believe that an unborn child has Down syndrome."
_In theory_, if there's a case where the mother's health is in danger and the foetus has Downs, and you say "the mother is in danger, so we must abort", the law as written doesn't criminalize that. I would not want to be that _in practice_ prosecutors wouldn't say "obviously this is just a fig-leaf and at least part of the reason for the abortion is that the foetus had Down's".
PS. Of course one can believe (and in fact I suspect that many people do believe) that a foetus at 6 months is not a person, yet is both alive and human, and, by that token (or simply by virtue of being a living *animal*) , deserves *some* moral consideration - while at the same time not being conceivable as an individual in any but a potential sense. Then the question is whether you are willing to kill a foetus to prevent a person from being born with a particularly cruel, limiting and incurable condition.
Most people who operate in that framework would say "yes" (or "sadly yes"), though the contrary is not utterly absurd prima facie. Then it also makes sense for testing to become effective and available as early in the pregnancy as possible.
Yes, I agree, although I think some of it is that Downs Syndrome is clearly identifiable via genetic testing of fetal cells harvested from amniotic fluid, whereas for various other abnormalities it's more of a judgment call: "Fetus appears not to have a liver, and if it doesn't have one the baby will die within a couple months of birth, but it's not possible to be sure that the liver is not just placed in a somewhat unusual way so that it's hard to see."
People like Garald (can I call him "people"? He has not yet provided any proof that he is a "person") clamour for abortion on the grounds of "but rape! incest! threat to the mother's life!"
Okay. Being pregnant with a Down's Syndrome baby is not a threat to the life of the mother, so knocking that plank out of the platform is for the protection of the child. But as we see, once you confine the right to abortion to "rape, incest, threat to physical life", suddenly it becomes grossly immoral and perverse and the rest of it, because they're arguing for abortion as a right and with no limits or exceptions, on the bare wish of the woman not to be pregnant. The stuff about "but this woman will DIE if the pregnancy continues!" is just a smokescreen.
This is silly. Personally, I don't need a smokescreen; abortion on demand in the early stages, combined with abortion on well-established grounds (such as fetal abnormality, and of course life or health of the mother) later on strikes me as a perfectly sensible and potentially rather stable compromise. Works fine in France.
Would you agree that in a society that aborts overwhelmingly higher numbers of female fetuses, that the government may want to step in and ban (or somehow correct or limit) that activity?
Absent the significant observed behavior of intentionally aborting certain types of people, Ohio would probably have avoided the conversation. Society mass-aborting certain kinds of people could have the effect, through signaling at least, to say that certain types of people should not exist. That seems to have a pretty strong weight in this discussion beyond the obfuscating "let the woman choose" baseline.
"I'm not seeing any moral argument for abortion being legal at ~6 months *except* in the specific case of Down's. That would seem to be to be maximally morally perverse, in that it would say that *only* people with Down's should be protected from early infanticide."
There is a contingent of people who believe that abortion should be legal, but sex-selective abortion should not so...
Well, it is perverse to posit that being a woman (or a man) shaves 50 IQ points off, on average, or anything like that. Neither does it mean you will suffer from early dementia, or, most likely, from a host of other serious issues.
The idea that the value is 1 or zero, or even not situational is a huge example of what is wrong with the vast majority of thinking about public policy and ethics.
Do you mean that they wanted to ban second-trimester abortions involving Down syndrome while allowing second-trimester abortions in other cases, or do you mean that most second-trimester abortions were already banned and they wanted to eliminate an exception for Down syndrome?
The first.
(Of course this was before Roe vs. Wade was struck down, so they may have just wanted to virtue-signal without consequences.)
That does seem quite bad.
Why? If the accusation is "if you ban necessary abortions, women will die" and so you permit abortion in the case of "this pregnancy will kill the woman", it's not unreasonable to say "but we don't approve of abortion where there is no threat". Down's Syndrome isn't a threat to the life of the mother, and saying "you can't abort just because of mental impairment" is feasible.
Would you be ok with a government mandate for aborting all downs syndrome fetuses, mandating all sperm donors be six foot tall and smart, etc? The flavor of eugenics that should be banned, in some views, is the one where a government forces such. I doubt that any of the arguments being made against eugenics would be applied by their makers to legal decisions by individuals. It does not seem to me that those kinds of decisions should even be called eugenics. Is Birth control eugenics? Is a preference for women with large breasts eugenics?
Brother-sister and cousin marriage prohibitions are reasonable and ethical forms of coercive eugenics in my view and many others.
Are they eugenic, though? Inbreeding, followed by outbreeding, tends to result in stronger individuals since inbreeding potentially removes things like lethal or harmful recessives. This is a controversial assertion, granted, but it calls into some question the long term utility of banning incest. (Unless one posits some better technology on the horizon, like selective genetic testing and implementation, which would make the price of a generation of incest unnecessary. Harmful recessives could be removed by other means.)
I don't think that is correct unless I am misunderstanding you. Inbreeding does not result in stronger individuals and does not remove lethal or harmful recessives. Since highly related individuals tend to share more harmful recessive variants, the products of incest are likely to carry two harmful recessive variants.
"Theory and empirical data showed that two processes can boost selection against deleterious mutations, thus facilitating the purging of the mutation load: inbreeding, by exposing recessive deleterious alleles to selection in homozygous form, and sexual selection, by enhancing the relative reproductive success of males with small mutation loads. "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6369961/
Of course, this paper is discussing hermaphroditic snails over multiple generations and not humans. Males with low mutational load having more children is also a viable, and opposed, strategy.
The point here is that if an individual receives two harmful recessive variants, that individual is likely to either spontaneously abort or to at least not have children. This effectively removes the 'two harmful recessives' from the punnet square (assuming a single gene is being discussed, for simplicity.) So if the inbred parent generation each has a 50% chance of having a deleterious mutation that prevents reproduction then there will be only a 33% chance that their *grand*children will receive that deleterious mutation.
You can't just assume the inbreeding will be followed by outbreeding. That's certainly not the case in Pakistan, which persistently has higher levels of birth defects than places where cousin marriage is less common.
I'm not. I'm saying "one generation of incest is not necessarily dysgenic in the long term."
Even if true, it might not be any inbreeding followed by any outbreeding, but some thoughtfully chosen combination. Any animal breeders care to weigh in?
I think what Adraste means here is state-sponsored eugenics specifically.
"Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it" all you had to do was win history's biggest war so not /that/ easy
Much like recording home movies, space travel, or teaching sand to do math, it was difficult at first but became easier with practice.
The war didn't and eugenics programs. There are eugenics program is going on until the 70s in some northern European countries and I'm not sure when they ended in the US but it wasn't right at the end of World War II.
we didn't ban eugenics. We have bans on sibling and cousin marriage for eugenic reasons. We have a charity that pays crackheads to get LARCs. We have sperm banks that are very picky. All of this is fine.
i thought about it,it's almost like it's a case of " just don't use the e-word and you'll be fine" ;
also eugenics seems to be able to sully famous scientists/writers/concepts BUT they can't clean eugenics
This is what I think is the weakest part of the whole discussion. It seems to me that the anti-eugenics position that opposes even Nobel prize winner sperm banks is basically as influential as the anti-environmentalist position that proposes laws opposing the phaseout of coal. They exist, and they even have representation in some state legislatures, but they’re not actually in charge.
This is mainly just a problem with fuzzy categories. Almost nobody is upset by genetic counseling for people who are carrying serious genetic disorders in their genome. As best I can tell, the only people upset by using abortion to avoid having a kid with downs are people who are ready you think abortion is wrong. Even the Nobel prize winner sperm bank idea is not against the law, even if it didn't exactly catch on.
I think the basic problem with the argument in the dialogue is the idea that the fence needs to be drawn around anything and everything that can be classified as eugenics. Instead, I think the fence needs to be built around giving the state coercive power over peoples reproductive choices, and especially forcible sterilization or forcible abortion.
Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong
...
Adraste: I thought you said Ehrlich did nothing wrong!
Coria: I said bad, not wrong
Potential typo?
I admit it's confusing, but she means:
CORIA: Ehrlich was bad
ADRASTE: I thought you said he wasn't wrong
CORIA: Yes, I just said in my last line that he was bad, but did not say he was wrong.
Ahh, i see, yeah you're right. My mistake!
"It seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
No, not at all. This is only true if one insists on focusing entirely on being consistent in the structure of their arguments, with insufficient attention to the content in different cases. This reminds me of how Huemer tears Rawls to shreds in "The Problem of Political Authority" over the internal logical inconsistency of social contract theory. Huemer's alternate theory may be more logically consistent (I can't remember, it's been a very long time) but I think most people can agree that his proposed structure of society is far worse than the status quo. Logical consistency isn't everything and it's perfectly okay to say "I'm willing to go this far, but not any further, because the ethics and/or implications of going further are concerning".
as an example, consider the situation on a hypothetical mars colony that has been cut off from earth. It's quite likely that fairly draconian population control is the only way for that company to have any hope of surviving. At best, you get some sort of license or permit necessary to have children, with the total number, strictly limited, and some kind of serious enforcement mechanism to keep people from ignoring it.
Not necessarily. You seem to be assuming collective provisioning of children. The rule could be "workers get X in wages and if you can't feed your seven kids on that wage that's your problem." That's how it was historically in Malthusian societies, though I could see how a Mars colony would need to be a much more integrated, "centrally planned" economy than a medieval farming village.
I can't imagine it working to have a Mars colony operating at the Malthusian limit, with each worker producing just enough resources to barely keep himself alive. Instead, you'd want to have enough of a cushion to deal with some level of occasional crisis. In practice I'm sure that at least for a long time, if there are mars colonies, they will come with some sort of agreement to limit your fertility.
"Over population will result in disaster" is one of those claims that will never be *allowed* to be vindicated, because people will always insist that some more proximate issue caused the disaster. Overpopulation *by itself* does nothing; the chain of causality from overpopulation to disaster has many links, and people are extremely invested in ensuring that the blame is attached to one of those links, not to overpopulation. The most common link is war (and so we blame war, not the overpopulation that led to social unrest that led to a government feeling it needed to behave in a certain way), but another common one is bad weather (blame the weather, not the obvious fact that if food production has a standard deviation of so much, and if the population is sized to barely stay alive during the good years, then there will be problems during the bad years).
There is never any shortage of intermediate links...
If there is any single thing we have learned since Ehrlich, it's that people are unlimited in their capacity to blame others for problems that they have caused. To take a somewhat less contentions example, very few of the people who generate a constant stream of complaints about growing cities have committed themselves to zero children. They see no contradiction between their having kids and their demands that no new housing (or schools or factories or whatever) be built; it's someone else's problem to reconcile these two. And once you have adopted this viewpoint, that you can demand whatever you like (because it is "right") and that thing will simply happen, because magic, you're all set for the inevitable collision with reality.
(Of course when that collision comes, god forbid we generalize from it to the one solution that can actually improve the situation; god no! The Nigerian Civil War will be explained as something about Christians vs Muslims. The Chinese attack on Taiwan will be because too many boys and not enough girls, so testosterone leads to fight fight fight. The collapse of the Indian ecosystem will be something something capitalism. etc etc etc.)
You seem to be arguing that the overpopulation predictors predicted disaster, disaster happened, and then people asserted that the disaster happened for unrelated reasons.
What I see is that the disaster didn't happen. India is poor by American standards but quite richer than it was in the 1970s. Even in very poor African countries, the fact that they grew so much from 1970 to 2020 shows that the overpopulation apocalypse hasn't gotten here. In a Malthusian catastrophe the population stops growing.
It's the overpopulation predictors who move the goalposts and say "well, Indian people are doing okay but look at all these wild animals in India that are being driven to extinction..."
The Arab Spring contributes to the official count of "climate refugees." Does it make more sense to blame climate or population for food prices?
You use the examples of war, and starvation for things that are caused by overpopulation, and yet aren't "blamed" on it. But the trendline for both of those is going down over time (as is simple material poverty in general).
How does that square with the position that overpopulation is a real and ongoing problem? It's reasonable to use a set of proxy measurements, but the proxy measurements point in the opposite direction than expected.
I expect some antinatalists would argue that; like are the new guinea tribes that different from the easter islands, which is often an example.
If there’s a Chinese attack on Taiwan on the future it will be an attack by a country with a TFR of 1.3, against a country with a TFR of 1.
In other words two increasingly depopulating countries.
In general if you believe that overpopulation causes wars then you would more wars per capita today (out of 8 billion people) than in the past when the population was in the mere hundreds of millions. However pre industrial societies were very violent and warlike.
Yes, exactly.
Perhaps worth noting that Russia, TFR 1.5, invaded and is currently bloodily bogged down in Ukraine, TFR 1.2.
Or, more relevantly, Russia (9 people per square km) invaded and is currently bogged down in Ukraine (72 people per square km).
How much of the land making up that figure for Russia is actually usthough?
That number seems to come from dividing all of Russia's land mass by population
That’s kind of the point - by no-one’s standards is Russia overpopulated.
The usable land is significantly smaller, but still vast.
I was thinking about that.
Heinlein was very gung ho in Starship Troopers about war always being caused by overpopulation. Did he get the idea from someone? Is there evidence historically?
If true, it's overpopulation relative to resources, not some absolute standard. Russia has a lot of territory, but most of it isn't good places to live.
I wonder how much the Ehrlich types were already writing in the 1950s to influence Heinlein.
I'd want to track down particular people rather than "the Ehrlich types".
Heinlein was weird about population-- he thought large families were great and crowded planets were awful. In other words, he wanted an unsustainable pioneer situation.
In Starship Troopers, there's the idea that wars are the result of overpopulation, but somehow, there's been a long peace among humans, until the Bugs (do they have a population problem?) attack.
Wasn't Ehrlich more concerned about starvation than war?
This does sound like an important set of differences. It is slightly suggestive to me of Turner’s “frontier thesis”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_thesis
The idea is that somehow American democracy and egalitarianism depends on the existence of a frontier where people can struggle to make their own living, rather than needing to rely on bourgeois culture or landed gentry.
Not much, for a couple of reasons:
-- while the worldwide population growth rate zoomed during the early 1950s, it didn't cause any particular freakout given the context of the world's richest nations having just spent several years energetically reducing each other's populations.
-- then during the late 1950s the worldwide population growth rate dropped sharply for a few years.
Then during the early 1960s the population growth rate took off again and that's when Ehrlich put forth his Malthusian nonsense: "The Population Bomb" was published in 1967.
Not updating your view of future overpopulation after the Pill saw widespread adoption is quite a big error
Most of humanity was Malthusian up until the industrial revolution, and excess population definitely was a factor in warfare over that period (though lack of ability to make gains from development of existing holdings was also a real factor).
Heinlein is doubly wrong though, in that humanity is really far from the Malthusian limit, and in that while overpopulation is *a* cause of war it's far from the *only* cause of war
Hitler was already in his mid-20s when the Haber-Bosch process was invented and he never subsequently incorporated it's implications for his Malthusian model of the way the world works into his world-view.
Hypothetically, the reason the idea that war is an inevitable result of overpopulation is in Starship Troopers is to present being a soldier (at least in a decent society) as a very honorable way to live. Part of how this is done is to say that war is inevitable-- even if you control your own population, someone else won't control theirs, and you'll be invaded.
At the same time, Heinlein avoids the messiness of recent wars among humans, by.... just not having them.
I didn't think he was saying anything as simplistic as "overpopulation causes wars". As I see it, overpopulation *can* cause war, but I'm aware of no examples in the modern era. But I expect such a war to have multiple causes, like: overpopulation + unrelated problems in the food supply chain causing sudden food scarcity. He's saying people will blame the supply chain problems or whatever caused them, not the overpopulation.
This is what has happened to human life expectancy globally:
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
The population bomb was published in the 1960s. What disaster is it exactly that people are making excuses for? The human condition has improved beyond what any reasonable person could have predicted in 1960s, and you're trying to claim that things have gotten *worse* since then?
Sounds like the real argument is about expected recklessness.
Back when "democracy" meant "mob rule" to most people, you wouldn't trust a self-declared democrat. After all, he probably believed in mob rule.
Today, "eugenics" is associated with reckless people, so any particular eugenics is default bad, because of the kind of person who'd propose it.
Of course, this is a heuristic for stagnation. You can't trust anyone who advocates what used to be a reckless person's idea, even if the idea these days is perfectly sound. The very unfamiliarity of "eugenics" makes it reckless now, after all.
Is the answer some equivalent for policy papers of scientific peer review, so that I can know that Bob's eugenics plans are robust against the old style of reckless implementation?
Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics policies become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
> Alas, in real life I think we mostly get "euphemism treadmills," where eugenics policies become okay if and only if they can avoid being called eugenics policies.
I think perhaps this norm can be steelmanned. If the old discussion of XYZ was reckless and occasionally evil, isn't it better to start over completely, with a new name, so that people won't be tempted to draw on the old reckless literature and accidentally smuggle all its mistakes back in? Think of it like deciding that the new, rigorous scientific discipline is called "chemistry" instead of just being "alchemy, but now we're making it evidence-based and cutting the weird mystical stuff".
> Nobody is really identifying as a eugenics supporter.
I… never said they were? I don't see how this connects to my point.
I wasn't saying they "should". I was jumping off of DxS's original comment, which observed that *as a matter of fact* it seems to be the case that eugenics-adjacent policies only pass once they disassociate sufficiently from the old name and its baggage. DxS seemed to be saying this was a bad thing, whereas I find it, in itself, sensible.
(Obviously this process goes awry if people start saying "you are *too* a eugenicist!" at people who do everything in their power to deny the charge. But I do think disassociating yourself from that baggage, in your own mind as much as the public eye, *is* an important thing to do if you're going to venture into this field of thought. People who won't take no for answer are annoying but the answer is not to dismiss the requirement as a whole and start to say "well, so what if I *am* a eugenicist of a kind? huh?" just to see the look on their face. I know it's tempting. I know. But it is not a virtuous or productive path down which to walk, just a momentarily satisfying one.)
Compare ordinary non-revoluationary socialism. Socialists do not want to be called Stalinists. There's an undeniable intellectual kinship to the movement that birthed Stalin, but only in a distant way, and calling them Stalinists is an unfair leveraging of Scott's "Worst Argument In The World". What you absolutely do not want is for them to react to the subset of right-wingers who will keep needling them with "you are *too* Josef Stalin" no matter what by saying "well, so what if I *am* a Marxist?". It's not even that any Marxist is a Stalinist, but nevertheless, that is how you get tankies.
Like "progenics"? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck/comment/16950446
Er, no. That's the rebranding equivalent of a false mustache and Groucho Marx glasses, is what *that* is, I should imagine.
Great post!
The discussion in part III is interesting, but I think it misses, or at least fails to explicitly point out, the (factual rather than moral) claim underpinning Adraste's perspective. Meaning, if Adraste were a real person, truly holding on to the belief that there is a distinction to be drawn between eugenics and environmentalism in that respect, I would expect them to say this:
"Of course, 50 years ago, many environmentalists supported (likely) forced sterilization in India. But today, the supporter of forced sterilization is a non-central (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) instance of the category of (Western) environmentalists, but a central instance of the category of eugenics supporters."
To put this more explicitly, I would expect many (maybe even most) of the people in Adraste's position would agree with both of these claims: "less than 10% of environmentalists today support forced sterilization" and "more than 90% of eugenics supporters today also support forced sterilization."
Again, these are factual statements, not moral ones, even though one's moral convictions can certainly bias them to have certain beliefs on this matter (moreover, I would certainly expect Scott and others here to disagree with the latter statement). The point is, however, that if you imagine yourself in the position of someone who genuinely believes both statements are true, it seems clear why you would consider one of them a dangerous slippery slope that requires moral condemnation of those trying to bring it about (even if they don't intend the end result of forced sterilization), and the other one clearly not a dangerous slippery slope or deserving of any condemnation whatsoever.
Meaning, even if you agree that both sides are big tents containing both good and bad ideas, and good and bad people, if you truly, genuinely believe as a factual matter that one is '90% good/10% bad' and the other one is '10% good/90% bad', it seems likely you would reject any moral equivalence between them (perhaps even in a much less polite manner than Adraste does here). Matters of moral condemnation might be fuzzy around the edges, but this simply wouldn't feel like an edge case at all.
I think this is what Beroe means by bringing up the hyperstitious slur cascade; this is true entirely because eugenics has been so strongly associated with sterilization that nobody who doesn't support it would identify as a eugenicist.
I think things like Nobel Sperm Banks are great ideas, but I wouldn't call myself a "eugenicist", and the average person would be too scared / too reflexively against everything involved to even be okay with the Nobel Sperm Bank.
If we switched things around so that anyone who used the term "environmentalist" got accused of wanting to sterilize people, within a few decades the only people who wholeheartedly identified with environmentalism would be the ones who *did* want to sterilize people. But the fact that the label "environmentalist" would contain only bad people wouldn't mean that we hadn't erred in using it that way, or that we weren't making a mistake by enforcing such a use of it.
I would say that if you're going to collect eugenically-commendable sperm for sperm banks then Nobel Prizes are a pretty bad selection criterion. For starters the average Nobel Laureate is probably sixty and may have some problematic sperm (especially if they've spent too much time around radiation!) Secondly, it's over-optimising for one desirable characteristic (intelligence) selected by a pretty imperfect and random proxy.
If you want good sperm, go find some straight A students in their early twenties who are also good-looking, athletic, and popular, and also have eight living great-grandparents. I'll take that over Brian Josephson's tired seed.
Why is being popular (or for that matter athletic, as opposed to being simply in good health) desirable? And who decides who is good-looking?
(And isn't getting straight As a piece of cake these days?)
Was it Bertrand Russell who made the following objection to eugenics? Selective breeding for cows is meant to make them better, in the well-defined sense of "useful to humans"; selective breeding for humans would be meant to make them ... useful to whom exactly?
Isn't popularity desirable (as in, people bestow prestige upon such traits) almost by definition?
"Popular" is an opaque (to me) but socially important trait in American high schools (much like "respect" is an important thing in prison - and hierarchical environments that are a bit like prison). I wouldn't say it's the only thing that matters in a US high school (in fact, I spent a semester in one back in the day, and it didn't affect my life at all in any way I could see), but apparently it's not just some Hollywood invention - and some of it carries over to later life.
Are we breeding for popularity? I hope not.
I think it's a bad proxy for something that we would have trouble detecting - likely we mean charisma or something similar. There are some people who are just fun to be around, who exude confidence and somehow also build other people up at the same time. I would think that would rate highly if we were trying to improve humanity in some way.
Well obviously from a pigouvian perspective that's actually pretty self explanatory and a much better argument for why eugenics is in the government's remit. traits with positive externalities to other humans should be subsidized as they would be insufficiently incentivized otherwise. (I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS)
The point being that there is no obvious way in which popularity (or being conventionally good-looking, or perhaps even being athletic) is in the public interest, whereas being intelligent is?
(... assuming you are not an intelligent sociopath)
Good point. And giving rather dull parents sperm from a genius is a bad idea. The child might end up being drastically different from the parents, and the home life will not be conducive to producing another Nobel winner.
The Howard Foundation! From some Heinlein novels, in which an early effort to breed for longevity pays off. (See especially _Methuselah's Children_, though there's a suggestion that breeding for intelligence might have been better.)
I think Heinlein went for four living grandparents, but people weren't as long lived when the Howard Foundation started.
Suppose you wanted to select for good sense, how might you go about it?
Is it too cynical to say "remove all the warning labels and let Darwin sort it out?"
I don't know if it's too cynical, but it's probably too simple. How much effect do the warning labels even have?
I note that Nobel Prizes select for a function of intelligence && Grit && good-enough health (sufficient ill-health prevents truly great achievements)
Your point about age is quite relevant though - the eugenic ideal (absent direct genetic screening) would be to freeze sperm from approx all men in their early 20s and then 40 years later use the sperm only from those who have good life histories
Well, guess I'll put this here.
The article assumed the Nobel Sperm Bank is a fine idea, but I feel Adraste let it off the hook too easily. The first question is, what happens if a non-Nobel Prize person/(whatever criteria we're using) wants to donate? Are they refused? Are people discouraged from using that sperm? Is there a hierarchy where you always use this class of sperm first? Is it a blood bank system, where like gets like; this person is below average intelligence, so we'll use the below average sperm up on them? It's a class system at the root, and problematic without any slope slipping.
I remember one of the blog posts from SSC talking about tests on a full vitamin pill diet, and then they discovered chromium deficiency because chromium deficiency had never been possible in isolation before. So too societies; I don't trust the people making the decisions to understand society well enough to make a positive genetic modification without discovering a new problem that was previously solving itself. Maybe those Nobel Prize winners are also above-average stubborn, maybe they're uncommonly sports-averse, and now we've selected for a population of out-of-shape extra-stubborn people, and are going to have a hard time turning back (because it requires walking and you can't make me).
I can see separating out sperm for, like, artisanal reasons. Parents get the option to get sperm from a fancy-pants athlete, or a Nobel Prize winner, the same way you can buy sea-salt or Himalayan salt instead of regular salt. But any thumb on the scale from the operator, encouraging this trait over that, is already too far.
A fund (let's say created by a philanthropist) investing in education of Nobel Sperm Bank kids does seem like a thumb on the scale, but what downsides would you seriously expect if it existed?
If you're arguing that it won't have enough practical effect to worry about, then my counter is that it won't have enough practical effect to be worth doing. Instead multiply by infinity. Assume the educational system is wildly successful; Nobel Sperm Bank education is better than Harvard. Now if you want your child to succeed, you need to make sure they're a Nobel Sperm Bank kid. What are the effects on parents, where having biological children is now considered a handicap? What happens to the drive for a family legacy, when it's going to be subsumed by a more famous Nobel family?
> Assume the educational system is wildly successful; Nobel Sperm Bank education is better than Harvard.
I don't thing it's scalable, both practically and as an ethical argument: at the scale where you doom your kid to failure if you don't take the deal, it's just a different system already.
> If you're arguing that it won't have enough practical effect to worry about, then my counter is that it won't have enough practical effect to be worth doing.
I partly agree, though at Nobel Prize winner level one lucky person can make advancements that are worth millions if not billions of QALYs. So if there's a 0.01% chance of producing such a person then it's a deal we should definitely take.
But even if not taking that into account, "it's just not worth it" does not mean it's bad. Just not good enough that you would bother, but if some people want to try, that doesn't seem like they're going too far.
Unintended consequences are still a thing. Imagine the pressure on a kid genetically modified to be a Nobel winner, but who just wants to be a kid. There's a high school near Stanford that's heavily influences by that proximity (lots of parents who teach there, etc.). The suicide rate at that school is abnormally high. That's presumably with normal high achievement pairings, not Nobel Prize Sperm.
That's just one quick example of something we might foresee. There's bound to be dozens of other problems that pop up that we can't see, as well as others we can predict.
>it's just a different system already.
How many tiers of the highest education levels would people need to be locked out of at birth before you think it becomes an issue at the conception stage?
>"it's just not worth it" does not mean it's bad.
Just as buying Himalayan salt isn't morally worse than buying regular salt. Unless you're declaring it as a step toward healthier eating on a national level, in which case you look stupid because it isn't.
>So if there's a 0.01% chance of producing such a person
I'm not willing to run the math on this, but if someone wants to run the numbers on
a. how many Nobel Prize winners are descended from Nobel Prize winners, and
b. how many major contributions have come from people outside that lineage
I suspect it will be lower than 0.01%.
What's the actual state of the art with respect to sperm banks, eggs, and embryos from some kind of highly vetted donors? It probably wouldn't work to limit your donations to only Nobel prize winner's, but you could probably manage to be pretty strongly selective without all that much trouble. Imagine going to a good university, and offering a significant amount of money for a sperm/egg donation from, say, college athletes who were also doing well in a demanding major? (Assume these are athletes from some sport where colleges aren't just the semipro league, so they have to actually make grades or they won't remain on the team/in college.) Does anyone do something like this? Is there some reason why it would be especially difficult to do? Is there a demand for it?
I really have no idea what this market looks like, so who knows?
Fertility clinics almost exclusively recruit from college campuses for the reasoning you've outlined as well as because the donors are naive about the impact of what they're doing so can be enticed with simple financial incentives.
>"Is it a blood bank system, where like gets like; this person is below average intelligence, so we'll use the below average sperm up on them?"
Given the current dynamics at fertility clinics, no. POC donors are turned away at a much higher rate that white guys, and recipient parents are charged more for a POC donor. The punchline is that the clinics have a preferred set of characteristics they want to see in the next generation and push everyone to use donors with only those traits.
Are you alleging direct discrimination against POC donors, or merely noting that they are less likely to meet the facially neutral criteria like tertiary qualifications and being > 6' tall?
Passing on second- to third-hand accusations of direct discrimination; the idea that black men are *less* likely to be >6' tall than white men is, in particular, facially absurd.
African Americans are less likely to have a bachelors or especially a graduate degree. Asians are less likely to be >6'. I have no personal experience of this field and limited online reading, so I am updating a bit on hearing your anecdata - I was asking primarily to clarify what you were actually saying.
You seem to think that there’s a broad anti-eugenics consensus that opposes things like the Nobel sperm bank. While the Nobel sperm bank itself shut down, my guess is that it’s really just anti-elitism that shut it down. Your average normie is totally happy with people going to sperm banks for a 6 foot blond MBA father, as long as the donors don’t think of themselves as better. I think the opposition to positive eugenics isn’t actually that much stronger or deeper or broader than the opposition to environmentalism. You actually do get state legislators in places like Wyoming trying to ban electric vehicles or mandate coal use or whatever, just as you get state legislators in New York or California proposing similarly strong anti-eugenics things.
"If we switched things around so that anyone who used the term "environmentalist" got accused of wanting to sterilize people, within a few decades the only people who wholeheartedly identified with environmentalism would be the ones who *did* want to sterilize people"
Unfortunately, the "let's sterilise all the undesirables!" was baked in from the start in eugenics. Galton himself was a little squishy on the topic, preferring to use the force of public opinion to pressurise young people into making eugenic marriages and producing better offspring, but some of the others at the time were thinking about 'negative' eugenics. And if social pressure is not enough to stop the bad seeds from reproducing, then Something Must Be Done:
"The word ‘ Eugenics ’ was coined and used by me in my book Human Faculty, published as long ago as 1883, which has long been out of print; it is, however, soon to be re-published in a cheap form. In it I emphasized the essential brotherhood of mankind, heredity being to my mind a very real thing; also the belief that we are born to act, and not to wait for help like able-bodied idlers, whining for doles."
"Professor Westermarck, among many other remarks in which I fully concur, has aptly stated (Sociological Papers, published for the Sociological Society. Macmillan, 1906, vol. ii., p. 24), with reference to one obstacle which prevents individuals from perceiving the importance of Eugenics, ‘ the prevalent opinion that almost anybody is good enough to marry is chiefly due to the fact that in this case, cause and effect, marriage and the feebleness of the offspring, are so distant from each other that the near-sighted eye does not distinctly perceive the connexion between them.’"
And that Something is Societies for Promoting Eugenics:
"Address to a meeting of the Eugenics Education Society at the Grafton Galleries, on October 14th, 1908.
I propose to take the present opportunity of submitting some views of my own relating to that large province of eugenics which is concerned with favouring the families of those who are exceptionally fit for citizenship. Consequently, little or nothing will be said relating to what has been well termed by Dr. Saleeby “ negative" eugenics, namely, the hindrance of the marriages and the production of offspring by the exceptionally unfit. The latter is unquestionably the more pressing subject of the two, but it will soon be forced on the attention of the legislature by the recent report of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded.
The successful establishment of any general system of constructive eugenics will, in my view (which I put forward with diffidence), depend largely upon the efforts of local associations acting in close harmony with a central society, like our own. A prominent part of its business will then consist in affording opportunities for the interchange of ideas and for the registration and comparison of results. Such a central society would tend to bring about a general uniformity of administration the value of which is so obvious that I do not stop to insist on it.
Assuming, as I do, that the powers at the command of the local associations will be almost purely social, let us consider how those associations might be formed and conducted so as to become exceedingly influential.
It is necessary to be somewhat precise at the outset, so I will begin with the by no means improbable supposition that in a given district a few individuals, some of them of local importance, are keenly desirous of starting a local association or society, and are prepared to take trouble to that end. How should they set to work ?
Their initial step would seem to be to form themselves into a provisional executive committee, and to nominate a president, council, and other officers of the new society. This done, the society in question, though it would have no legal corporate existence, may be taken as formed.
The committee would next provide, with the aid of the central society, for a few sane and sensible lectures to be given on eugenics, including the A B C of heredity, at some convenient spot, and they would exert themselves to arouse a wide interest in the subjects by making it known in the district. They would seek the co-operation of the local medical men, clergy, and lawyers, of the sanitary authorities, and of all officials whose administrative duties bring them into contact with various classes of society, and they would endeavour to collect round this nucleus that portion of the local community which was likely to be brought into sympathy with the eugenic cause. Every political organisation, every philanthropic agency, proceeds on some such lines as I have just sketched out.
The committee might next issue, on the part of the president and council of the new society, a series of invitations to guests at their social gatherings, where differences of rank should be studiously ignored. The judicious management of these gatherings would, of course, require considerable tact, but there are abundant precedents for them, among which I need only mention the meetings of the Primrose League at one end of the scale, and those held in Toynbee Hall at the other end. Given a not inclement day, an hour suitable to the occasion, a park or large garden to meet in, these informal yet select reunions might be made exceedingly pleasant, and very helpful to the eugenic cause.
The inquiries made by the committee when they were considering the names of strangers to whom invitations ought to be sent, would put them in possession of a large fund of information concerning the qualities of many notable individuals in their district, and their family histories. These family histories should be utilised for eugenic studies, and it should be the duty of the local council to cause them to be tabulated in an orderly way, and to communicate the more significant of them to the central society.
The chief of the notable qualities, to which I refer in the preceding paragraph, is the possession of what I will briefly call by the general term of “ Worth.” By this I mean the civic worthiness, or the value to the State, of a person, as it would probably be assessed by experts, or, say, by such of his fellow-workers as have earned the respect of the community in the midst of which they live. Thus the worth of soldiers would be such as it would be rated by respected soldiers, students by students, business men by business men, artists by artists, and so on. The State is a vastly complex organism, and the hope of obtaining a proportional representation of its best parts should be an avowed object of issuing invitations to these gatherings.
Speaking only for myself, if I had to classify persons according to worth, I should consider each of them under the three heads of physique, ability, and character, subject to the provision that inferiority in any one of the three should outweigh superiority in the other two. I rank physique first, because it is not only very valuable in itself and allied to many other good qualities, but has the additional merit of being easily rated. Ability I should place second on similar grounds, and character third, though in real importance it stands first of all. It is very difficult to rate character justly; the tenure of a position of trust is only a partial test of it, though a good one so far as it goes. Again, I wish to say emphatically that in what I have thrown "out I have no desire to impose my own judgment on others, especially as I feel persuaded that almost any intelligent committee would so distribute their invitations to strangers as to include most, though perhaps not all, of the notable persons in the district.
(1/2)
By the continued action of local associations as described thus far, a very large amount of good work in eugenics would be incidentally done. Family histories would become familiar topics, the existence of good stocks would be discovered, and many persons of “worth” would be appreciated and made acquainted with each other who were formerly known only to a very restricted circle. It is probable that these persons, in their struggle to obtain appointments, would often receive valuable help from local sympathisers with eugenic principles. If local societies did no more than this for many years to come, they would have fully justified their existence by their valuable services. A danger to which these societies will be liable arises from the inadequate knowledge joined to great zeal of some of the most active among their probable members. It may be said, without mincing words, with regard to much that has already been published, that the subject of eugenics is particularly attractive to “ cranks.” The councils of local societies will therefore be obliged to exercise great caution before accepting the memoirs offered to them, and much discretion in keeping discussions within the bounds of sobriety and common sense. The basis of eugenics is already firmly established, namely, that the offspring of “worthy” parents are, on the whole, more highly gifted by nature with faculties that conduce to “worthiness” than the offspring of less “worthy” parents. On the other hand, forecasts in respect to particular cases may be quite wrong. They have to be based on imperfect data. It cannot be too emphatically repeated that a great deal of careful statistical work has yet to be accomplished before the science of eugenics can make large advances.
I hesitate to speculate farther. A tree will have been planted ; let it grow. Perhaps those who may thereafter feel themselves or be considered by others to be the possessors of notable eugenic qualities—let us for brevity call them “ Eugenes ”—will form their own clubs and look after their own interests. It is impossible to foresee what the state of public opinion will then be. Many elements of strength are needed, many dangers have to be evaded or overcome, before associations of Eugenes could be formed that would be stable in themselves, useful as institutions, and approved of by the outside world.
The suggestion I made in the earlier part of this paper that the executive committee of local associations should co-operate, wherever practicable, with local administrative authorities, proceeded on the assumption that the inhabitants of the districts selected as the eugenic “ field " had a public spirit of their own and a sense of common interest. This sense would be greatly strengthened by the enlargement of mutual acquaintanceship and the spread of the eugenic idea consequent on the tactful action of the committee. It ought not to be difficult to arouse in the inhabitants a just pride in their own civic worthiness, analogous to the pride which a soldier feels in the good reputation of his regiment or a lad in that of his school. By this means a strong local eugenic opinion might easily be formed. It would be silently assisted by local object lessons, in which the benefits derived through following eugenic rules and the bad effects of disregarding them were plainly to be discerned.
The power of social opinion is apt to be underrated rather than overrated. Like the atmosphere which we breathe and in which we move, social opinion operates powerfully without our being conscious of its weight. Everyone knows that governments, manners, and beliefs which were thought to be right, decorous, and true at one period have been judged wrong, indecorous, and false at another ; and that views which we have heard expressed by those in authority over us in our childhood and early manhood tend to become axiomatic and unchangeable in mature life.
In circumscribed communities especially, social approval and disapproval exert a potent force. Its presence is only too easily read by those who are the object of either, in the countenances, bearing, and manner of persons whom they daily meet and converse with. Is it, then, I ask, too much to expect that when a public opinion in favour of eugenics has once taken sure hold of such communities and has been accepted by them as a quasi-religion, the result will be manifested in sundry and very effective modes of action which are as yet untried, and many of them even unforeseen ?
Speaking for myself only, I look forward to local eugenic action in numerous directions, of which I will now specify one. It is the accumulation of considerable funds to start young couples of “worthy” qualities in their married life, and to assist them and their families at critical times. The gifts to those who are the reverse of “worthy” are enormous in amount; it is stated that the charitable donations or bequests in the year 1907 amounted to £4,868,050. I am not prepared to say how much of this was judiciously spent, or in what ways, but merely quote the figures to justify the inference that many of the thousands of persons who are willing to give freely at the prompting of a sentiment based upon compassion might be persuaded to give largely also in response to the more virile desire of promoting the natural gifts and the national efficiency of future generations."
(2/2)
Yes, what a wonderful world to look forward to: little local committees of the nobby nobs who think they are the superior stock, records kept of 'good' eugenics families like stockbooks, a central committee busy overseeing and collating all this, and the social pressure of your neighbours all watching to make sure you contract a 'good' eugenic match in turn and don't produce inferior offspring. What a lovely prospect!
And of course those wretches who are inferior stock and contract 'bad' uneugenic marriages and produce sickly, unworthy offspring? They will serve as object lessons of "the bad effects of disregarding eugenic rules" and we will save money by not wasting charity on them. Why, in no time at all, our little cells of Eugenes will be breeding their own master race from amongst their numbers!
But let's be careful about the cranks, they give us a bad name.
Thank you very much for sharing this! having that full text of a speech to draw from is invaluable to the discussion of the history, and finding it in the comments means I actually read it when I would not have independently looked it up.
To be honest, it doesn't sound that different in likely practical effect to most other voluntary associations (eg. specific churches, minority religions, societies like the Freemasons, etc). Finding marriage partners from within your community rather from the 'others' is normal, as was (and still is, though to a lesser extent) the idea of preferentially hiring people from the community.
Remember all the law cases over sex that revolved around "it is no business of the government what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom"?
Galton et al. would make it the business of the government, as well as every prodnose, to peer into the sexual and romantic lives of everyone, draw up genealogical charts of families to see how many notables and how many defectives were in the family tree, and encourage young women to only entertain thoughts of marriage - and motherhood - to suitable young men. Said young men would have Diplomas, based on evaluation all through their lives by teachers and other authority figures as to their fitness, in order to demonstrate their quality for eugenic marriage.
Sex outside of marriage would be harshly discouraged (by social disapproval) because look at all the poor women having tons of bastard babies by various fathers. We don't want that. We particularly don't want the unfit breeding.
So, depending where on the scale you fall, dear Thor Odinson (oh, Galton has a scale from the very lowest to the "V and above" grades which are the cream of the crop), you may or may not qualify for marriage. If you don't, then you don't get *any* sexual or romantic life; after all, resorting to prostitutes and women of loose morals to have unmarried sex is precisely the mark of degeneracy and unfitness to reproduce! Eugenicists are concerned with moral fibre as much as physical and mental fitness, in order to stave off degeneracy and race suicide:
"Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this."
(Remember, "peremptorily denied opportunities", in the absence of reliable artificial contraception, means "no sex". Prison rape ahoy!)
"(g) Feeble minded. Aid given to Institutions for the feeble minded are open to the suspicions that they may eventually promote their marriage and the production of offspring like themselves. Inquiries are needed to test the truth of this suspicion."
So much for the rights of the disabled to have love lives, yes? Though our modern eugenicists might be satisfied with sterilisation so the morons could fuck or be fucked by anyone without producing baby morons.
And in Galton's eugenic Utopia, your personal life is the business of everyone - from family, neighbours, teachers, the locality where you live, the local eugenics committee, up to the national central committee and, it is to be hoped, the specific Government office charged with overseeing the national development of the race - to make sure that if you are of the acceptable breed-stock you do your best from childhood on to get that Diploma and become early a husband and father - even more vitally so if you are to become a wife and mother - and conversely, that if you are the inferior stock, you do not 'produce'. Mothers will discourage their daughters from having anything to do with you, the young women themselves will have been raised and taught to find the very idea repugnant:
"An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, by
encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily."
"If a girl is taught to look upon a class of men as tabooed, whether owing to rank, creed, connections, or other causes, she does not regard them as possible husbands and turns her thoughts elsewhere. The proverbial "Mrs. Grundy " has enormous influence in checking the marriages she considers indiscreet."
Families would keep 'stud books' as with pedigree animals to demonstrate their right to be deemed "quality":
"The definition of a thriving family, such as will pass muster for the moment at least, is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their class-mates in early life. Families may be considered “large" that contain not less than three adult male children. It would be no great burden to a Society including many members who had Eugenics at heart, to initiate and to preserve a large collection of such records for the use of statistical students. The committee charged with the task would have to consider very carefully the form of their circular and the persons entrusted to distribute it. The circular should be simple, and as brief as possible, consistent with asking all questions that are likely to be answered truly, and which would be important to the inquiry. They should ask, at least in the first instance, only for as much information as could be easily, and would be readily, supplied by any member of the family appealed to. The point to be ascertained is the status of the two parents at the time of their marriage, whence its more or less eugenic character might have been predicted, if the larger knowledge that we now hope to obtain had then existed. Some account would, of course, be wanted their race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters. Finally, the reasons would be required why the children deserved to be entitled a “thriving" family, to distinguish worthy from unworthy success. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a “golden book" of thriving families."
The pressure of social opinion would be put to work:
"Enough has been said to show that the prohibition of polygamy, under severe penalties by civil and ecclesiastical law, has been due not to any natural instinct against the practice, but to consideration of social well-being. I conclude that equally strict limitations to freedom of marriage might, under the pressure of worthy motives, be hereafter enacted for Eugenic and other purposes.
...It is quite conceivable that a non-eugenic marriage should hereafter excite no less loathing than that of a brother and sister would do now."
What a wonderful world, yes, Thor Odinson? Eugenics in the place of religion so you are either chastely celibate or suitably married and having no fewer than three children who must be "thriving", that is, outdoing their classmates! Would you live in it?
"Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics.
…Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour neighbours who suffer misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level in the sense already explained, as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study."
"Reference has frequently been made to the probability of Eugenics hereafter receiving the sanction of religion. It may be asked, “how can it be shown that Eugenics fall within the purview of our own.” It cannot, any more than the duty of making provision for the future needs of oneself and family, which is a cardinal feature of modern civilization, can be deduced from the Sermon on the Mount. Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of olden days, require to be reinterpreted to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of the present time. A form of it is wanted that shall be founded on reasonable bases and enforced by reasonable hopes and fears, and that preaches honest morals in unambiguous language, which good men who take their part in the work of the world, and who know the dangers of sentimentalism, may pursue without reservation."
Ah, yes: the dangers of sentimentalism. And here come the mountains of skulls.
"EUGENICS AS A FACTOR IN RELIGION.
Eugenics strengthens the sense of social duty in so many important particulars that the conclusions derived from its study ought to find a welcome home in every tolerant religion. It promotes a far-sighted philanthropy, the acceptance of parentage as a serious responsibility, and a higher conception of patriotism. The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution; not on a passive form of it, but on one that can to some extent direct its own course. Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays the awe inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil, originating we know not how, and travelling we know not whither. It forms a continuous whole from first to last, reaching backward beyond our earliest knowledge and stretching forward as far as we think we can foresee. But it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error. The condition at each successive moment of this huge system, as it issues from the already quiet past and is about to invade the still undisturbed future, is one of violent internal commotion. Its elements are in constant flux and change, though its general form alters but slowly. In this respect it resembles the curious stream of cloud that sometimes seems attached to a mountain top during the continuance of a strong breeze; its constituents are always changing, though its shape as a whole hardly varies. Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that of the moon.
As regards the practical side of eugenics, we need not linger to re-open the unending argument whether man possesses any creative power of will at all, or whether his will is not also predetermined by blind forces or by intelligent agencies behind the veil, and whether the belief that man can act independently is more than a mere illusion. This matters little in practice, because men, whether fatalists or not, work with equal vigour whenever they perceive they have the power to act effectively.
Eugenic belief extends the function of philanthropy to future generations, it renders its action more pervading than hitherto, by dealing with families and societies in their entirety, and it enforces the importance of the marriage covenant by directing serious attention to the probable quality of the future offspring. It sternly forbids all forms of sentimental charity that are harmful to the race, while it eagerly seeks opportunity for acts of personal kindness, as some equivalent to the loss of what it forbids. It brings the tie of kinship into prominence and strongly encourages love and interest in family and race. In brief, eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature."
Darwin Day really *would* be made a national holy-day, and children taught the sacred writings and to lisp the hymns of the new religion: "just enough of me, way too many of you".
I suppose the length of the speech on encouragement of 'worth' individuals made me gloss over the sole line at the start addressing the flip side
>Consequently, little or nothing will be said relating to what has been well >termed by Dr. Saleeby “ negative" eugenics, namely, the hindrance of the >marriages and the production of offspring by the exceptionally unfit. The >latter is unquestionably the more pressing subject of the two, but it will soon >be forced on the attention of the legislature by the recent report of the Royal >Commission on the Feeble-minded.
This and some of your other quotes in the comment I reply to suggests that Galton did support a degree of coerced sterilisation. The speech you originally quoted at length basically didn't touch on it.
>What a wonderful world, yes, Thor Odinson? Eugenics in the place of religion so you are either chastely celibate or suitably married and having no fewer than three children who must be "thriving", that is, outdoing their classmates! Would you live in it?
Replying to this: no, I'm not a fan of that world, but my point was precisely that the idea of a busybody morally superior church where old ladies matchmake and attempting to marry someone unapproved (eg a catholic and a protestant marrying) might get you ostracised is hardly a new horror, it was commonplace for centuries.
G. K. Chesterton in "Eugenics and Other Evils" said that if eugenics really works to breed a race of supermen, then the first thing the new supermen will do is tell the eugenicists to butt out of their love lives because they are going to marry whomever they prefer.
David Plotz wrote some articles for Slate in c. 2000 about The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank after he had tracked down some of the kids born from it. He noticed they tended to be bright and happy.
He saw the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank as an inflection point in introducing consumer choice to the fertility industry. Before then, doctors hadn't allowed their patients much choice in who would be the father of their baby. They'd just pick some medical student (medical students being, to doctors, the obvious finest example of young manhood) who looked kinda like the husband to be the donor. But the controversial NPSB introduced the concept of consumer choice to the public and now everybody puts a lot of effort into picking whatever they consider eugenic for their baby. E.g., Ivy League student newspapers run a lot of ads from couples looking for egg donors with lengthy lists of traits specified.
But when Plotz finally published his book on it around 2005, however, the ideological atmosphere had changed enough that he had to write a lot of words about how horrible it all is.
The big reason everybody is so fanatically denunciatory of early 20th Century eugenics these days is because virtually every high achieving Anglo scientist of a century ago held some pro-eugenics opinion, and that allows virtually any high achieving Anglo to be cancelled and his name stripped from schools and buildings. For example, my son went to a public middle school named after a local Nobel Prize winner who had built a college about 20 miles away into one of the greatest advanced research centers in the world. But the great man was for eugenics, so the school's name was changed to that of an entertainer who lived thousands of miles away.
Phrased like that, it sounds crazy, but if I explain that the Nobel Prize winner was a WASP and the entertainer black, well, it all starts to make more sense.
WASPs accomplished an awful lot in Britain and America, and that historical record generates resentment and inferiority complexes in some of the non-WASPs in Britain and America. But if you can demonize some science fiction-style views they tended to hold as Basically Naziism, you can strip their honors and rewrite British and American history to favor your ancestors.
I would describe myself as a eugenicist but I certainly would not support forced sterilizations. Where does the idea that coercive policies would be popular among contemporary eugenicists come from?
Well, I'm sure that some do. I'm sure if we did a poll right here "Do you support forced sterilizations of people with the following genetic disorders..." you'd find some support for the proposition.
It's not a difficult intellectual leap to make. Once you've accepted that eugenics is in principle a good idea, the idea of just a few forced sterilisations starts seeming pretty appealing from a utilitarian point of view.
Besides, in practice it turns out there's a blurry line between optional and coerced. As far as I know, no Western government actually _forced_ anyone to get a covid vaccine, but once it became accepted that it was a really really good idea for everyone to get one they sure as hell came close. You don't _have_ to get a covid vaccine, you're just not allowed to do anything unless you do. If the governments of the world became similarly convinced that Strictly Optional eugenic policies were a good idea, what would happen?
Yes, and this should gives reason to question why modern governments are not eager to implement eugenist policies: is this because it is evil, is it because it interfere with sacred individual rights and liberties, or is it because it bring zero short term benefit by definition (it works on multi-generation timescale, which is order of magnitude above election timescale) with a strong short term PR problem (litteraly hitler). For me COVID measures clearly shows its the second reason.
Forced sterilizations may seem appealing to some people some of the time. But as a society, we have developed rather effective antibodies against their near-future reimplementation. And, despite a bunch of complaints about the "slow pace" of genetic enhancement research in the comments here, my read is that it is still proceeding quickly enough to draw away practically all of the saner would-be supporters of forced sterilization in time, for all realistic Culture War trajectories.
You have a good point about the blurry optional/coerced line and Covid vaccine deployment. I mentioned in another comment that I'm not that worried in the short term because groups like the Amish are pretty free from "technological coercion" today, but if/when that changes I will join you in sounding the alarm.
Interfering with the reproduction of people who you don't want around is just too tempting.
One useful way to think about this: having the state forcibly sterilize someone to accomplish eugenic goals it's pretty terrible. But having the state forcibly sterilize someone to accomplish social harmony goals seems equally terrible. It seems like it's the forcibly sterilize part that's the problem, not the goals.
I agree with your general point, but I think eugenic and social harmony goals overlap, especially if social harmony includes that the people in charge like being in charge and don't like being interfered with. If that's not social harmony, I don't know what is.
Obviously you wouldn't be in favor of *forced* sterilizations, but it's really not unreasonable to restrict certain jobs to people who *voluntarily chose* sterilization. I mean, the saving in health insurance alone would allow you to pay people in those jobs more than their breeder counterparts. Plus there's their reduced carbon footprint to consider, surely that should be rewarded...
>"Of course, 50 years ago, many environmentalists supported (likely) forced sterilization in India. But today, the supporter of forced sterilization is a non-central instance of the category of (Western) environmentalists, but a central instance of the category of eugenics supporters."
Unless I'm misunderstanding, there's two important catches to this. First, the category of Western environmentalists is much, much larger than the category of Western eugenics supporters, such that 10% of the former may well outnumber 90% of the latter. Second, the piece is about the continued acceptance and tolerance of Western environmentalists that *continue* to support (or have not disavowed support) forced sterilization- Erlich might not be as big a name as he was in the 1970s, but he's apparently still respected in a way that Galton isn't.
So were there an event that removed the hyperstitious cascade from "eugenics" would Western environmentalists pick it back up? This matter of moral condemnation is clearly capricious, ill-thought, and as subject to the changing whims of society as anything else. Is it morally condemned or is this environmentalists practicing their Kolmogorov? Are they against forced sterilization, or are they against it *for the time being*? Those are different concerns! I am more concerned with the environmentalists because they are much more numerous and shown to be capricious and selective.
Is that true? Climate/environmental doomerism seems to be pretty popular these days and often segues into "our problem is too many people". Refusing to have children because of the climate now shows up regularly in polls of stupid people. After all, it's not just Bill Gates who says things like, “The world today has 6.8 billion people, that’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%.”
Is which part true, the 10% of environmentalists? No, I'd agree with you; I think it's much higher. Or at least closely-related ideas are much higher; anti-natalism is a pretty common component of climate doomerism.
I run an environmental organization, have worked in that field for a quarter-century now, and am a child of one of the best-known leaders of that sector's founding era. "The Population Bomb" was familiar on the coffee tables of my childhood.
Environmentalists today, as in "people in that field in a professional and/or leadership capacity", overwhelmingly view Ehrlich as discredited. Some of us, myself included, view him with contempt. However it is also true that a lot of our supporters/fans in the general public of a certain age bracket -- Boomers, basically -- retain a vague understanding of overpopulation being "the ultimate problem" or something along those lines. They are generally quite astounded to hear from someone like me what we think of Ehrlich and his book, and/or that we don't view him as relevant to environmentalism today. Stuart Brand, an icon in our field who is actually personally acquainted with Ehrlich, has done some yeoman work publicly about this and I bless him for it.
If by "environmentalists" you mean people actually directly involved in that field, then virtually none of us today support forced sterilization. Those of my mother's generation were all over the map about it, with "queasy" being probably the median reaction. By the time I was in college (1980s) Ehrlich and his book were gone from those coffee tables. Unfortunately though that remained largely an insiders' viewpoint....during the 1990s when I was on staff at a large national organization this topic was a persistent headache when dealing with the general public.
Today it's become rare for someone to bring up overpopulation when chatting with me about what I do, though it does still happen. Without exception now it is always someone older than I am; I infer therefore that, notwithstanding Ehrlich's personal persistence, it does seem to be mostly faded into history's dustbin.
While I agree that the topic of overpopulation is mostly brought up by older people 1) It´s still extremely popular amongst them. 2) Anti-natalism is increasingly popular with young environmentalists. The only reason I´d would guess these people don´t talk about the problem of overpopulation much is that most environmentalism is very left-wing these days, and being explicit about being against overpopulation has the aura of wanting to reduce brown people (considering the steriliziations in India, definitely not unwarranted). But the problem for anti-natalists still remains that there are too many people - or sometimes, even people at all - they just focus on selling their ideology to westerners only because they have to make their ideology compatible with anti-colonialism.
Based on my ongoing direct daily experience working with young environmentalists -- lots of them -- your text after the numeral 2 is largely nonsense. (Unless maybe you're describing professionals in different countries? I've worked only in the U.S.)
Regarding the older people, my repeated direct experience is that the topic of overpopulation is popular among them at a quite shallow level. They are under a vague impression/memory that "the experts" declared overpopulation to be an overall problem. It's like how they still assume that "60 Minutes" and Time magazine are major news media which influence national opinion, and a dozen other leftover facts from the 1970s. But it's a shallow belief -- few of them have ever actually read "The Population Bomb", the name Paul Ehrlich rings a bell only vaguely, etc. Hence when I or one of my peers explains the reality of the topic to them we get surprise but not real pushback.
Just vaguely stating that my second point is nonsense doesn't seem productive to me. Maybe you could explain why? Yes, I was talking more about european environmentalists, but I would be surprised if anti-natalists were not a thing in the US. Maybe your organisation is simply not appealing to them?
That's fair. Equally fair is that I did not find your broad generalizations, offered without any supporting evidence or basis for your having such knowledge of a professional field, to be productive. Still don't.
Is environmentalism solely a professional field?
If Terzian is offering a zeitgeist impression of self-styled "environmentalists" encountered through cocktail parties, or Reddit, would that be invalid?
I've known several young people (in the US), who appeared deeply concerned with such issues as anthropogenic climate change and overpopulation, and coupled those concerns with an anti-natal attitude; occasionally to the point of expressing guilt over their own existence, and consequent use of resources.
Whether these people also performed activism in a professional capacity, I cannot say.
Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of impersonal arbiter of morality.
That seems pretty extreme! I would guess Coria would also agree that German citizens who sheltered Jews from the Nazi regime were wrong, and overstepping their bounds. It is the logical endpoint of that ideology. A middle ground between this and total libertarianism based on anything besides intuition is pretty hard, agreed.
Those Germans were not citizens of a democratic polity.
Fair point, but that then raises the question of what is a democratic policy. A lot of US laws are created that go against the majority will of the populace, is violating those also allowed because they are not really democratic? Coria's policy here seems to be so subjective as to be meaningless.
I am probably comment #2,345 saying this, but I just want to thank you for the acro-pun. I'm going to smile every time I think of it for weeks.
What pun? I missed it.
I think it's the title and subtitle of this post - "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck: An exploding generational bomb" - which is written to evoke "Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid", a magnificent and delightful book about many things which we know Scott likes.
Oh, thanks! I was looking for an pun involving “acro”.
What I don' t see mentioned in this piece or the comments is the immediate negative consequences of drawing official lines between intelligent/desirable people and not-intelligent/not-desirable people. The second a government draws this line, the two groups diverge, human nature kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism imo by which the slippery slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery, and very quickly leads to the worst of humanity.
Amusingly, China probably had the most effective coercive eugenics program ever, which ended up producing Yao Ming. They still don't seem to be excited about it these days for some reason.
Maybe because Yao was such a disappointment.
Don't things like saying "don't drink while you're pregnant" already do that? We're saying that having a kid with fetal alcohol syndrome is worse than having a kid without fetal alcohol syndrome.
Does that mean the “things get ugly” line (which may be both wide and fuzzy) is where the undesireables are a viable political base?
No. It means the ultimate logical conclusions that the "desirables" come up with when they see the other group as somehow less human – like slavery, and the Holocaust.
I'm talking about the govt explicitly drawing a line that divides the population into groups, telling one group, "you are dumb, you should not reproduce", and sending the other group the message, "hey those dumb people are reproducing too much and causing problems." This will never end well. Either you treat human beings as equals, at least when it comes to intelligence, or you have something resembling the Antebellum South. You can't have it both ways imo.
I think intelligence is fundamental to how we see ourselves as humans. Once you start separating groups, it’s way too easy to convince the desirable group that the other group isn’t quite as human, which can justify all kinds of abhorrent policy.
None of those let you call another group of humans a subspecies that needs to be handled differently, which is the kind of rhetoric hardcore racists use. Intelligence is different. If you call a group less intelligent it’s basically implying they’re more animalistic, especially to people who are easily triggered by fear-based propaganda.
We already have groups that explicitly treated as unequel in intelligence children, and elderly.
Lot more predictable migration of individuals in and out of those groups, meaning they've got some personal incentive to make sure conditions are tolerable on both sides of the line.
We still have mentally ill people
What's your point? Sanity is, again, a status which is widely understood as having the potential to vary over the course of an individual's life for reasons not fully under their control. There isn't such a sharp division where someone can say "Let's do terrible things to everyone on the opposite side of that line" in confidence that neither they nor anyone they care about will be stuck on the receiving end.
I don’t think that Scott, or anybody, is arguing the sterilisation position here.
I'm not saying he is. But I'm making the point that officially separating groups into smart and not-smart, and making policies based on that, only leads to very bad things. Sort of like how even if you think Communism is a good idea, in practice it always turns to shit, because it ignores human nature.
He’s not doing that either.
I’m not saying he’s doing anything. I’m making a point about the idea of a government policy that draws lines and creates groups based on intelligence that I didn’t see mentioned in the post - namely the practical real world implications of a governmental policy that separates human beings by intelligence.
One way of telling people they aren't smart (or at least weren't smart in doing some specific thing) is putting them in prisons/on probation/giving them fines. I wouldn't say we do it just fine, but however shitty the implementation is, most of it isn't the social rift or hierarchy where people who never got a parking ticket are above those who did.
Can we at least agree that smart is better than dumb? If so, then I think we're just arguing about who belongs in what categoires.
The antebellum south didn't try to stop slaves from reproducing. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, the New World was unusual in how slaves were able to reproduce their own numbers after the international slave trade was prohibited.
But they justified slavery with the belief that Africans were subhuman compared to themselves, which is what happens as soon as you officially label one group as less desirable to reproduce.
There were lots of slaves shipped east to the Islamic world, and the males were frequently castrated. The women were not, however, and their owners often had offspring with their female slaves (which is why the rise of Islam in the Middle East resulted in a significant influx of sub-Saharan African DNA not found among endogamous religious minorities). There was an entire class of slave soldiers who would sometimes take over their societies, in accordance with an analogous precept of Mao. This now-dominant class of slave soldiers would still perpetuate the system of slave soldiers. Did they regard slave soldiers as sub-human? Was any quasi-eugenic belief at all necessary for this system of slavery?
By the end when most societies had abolished slavery, the South was still using eugenics to justify it. I think intelligence is just too fundamental to how we see ourselves as human beings. And once you start drawing lines and separating groups based on intelligence, it’s natural that the ingroup is going to see the outgroup as less human.
I believe that really got going when it became illegal to capture people from Africa-- this made slaves born in the western hemisphere much more valuable.
Minor note: AFAIK, Europeans did very little *capturing* of slaves in Africa, they mostly *purchased* slaves that the African nations they were trading with had capture from their enemies
Yes, though what I said didn't exclude that.
Possibly of interest: Steve Barnes' _Lion's Blood_ and _Zulu Heart_, a color reversed version of white/black history.
From memory: Europe has had extremely bad luck with the bubonic plague. As a result, Egypt and Ethiopia are power centers.
The viewpoint character is a young man from an Irish village, and is captured by Vikings to be sold in Africa.
For some less extreme examples, many other inborn traits like autism, deafness, homosexuality, and left-handedness have over time shifted around quite a bit on the spectrum between "undesireable trait that should be eradicated" and "cherished part of the diverse tapestry of humanity".
It has never been proven that homosexuality is "inborn". I don't think we know that about autism (in general) either, though there may be some Mendelian syndromes of it.
They are both strongly heritable, so there is some genetic component.
Homosexuality is not "strongly" heritable.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/biological-determinism/
I recall a study on public beliefs about the heritability of various things. Homosexuality was the one they were most off on, as it had become common belief it was heritable while actually being the least heritable trait in the survey.
Scott you would have to admit there’s an element of volition here where once you know you’re pregnant you have to drink knowing there is harm. Nobody chooses to harm a baby with Down Syndrome.
Well, there are people who know they’re at high risk of passing some severe medical condition to their offspring, and who have biological children anyway.
Probably more than you want to know about my ethics, but the different between “maybe’ and “definitely” is pretty big in the way we do things. But to your point I think the appropriate thing for such a parent to do is to see if an intervention can be made in the selection of the egg or sperm, or even embryo. I’m not totally happy with the way we go about those things today but at least the ones reviewed get the chance to live.
That doesn't seem very relevant, but if you find it interesting, consider instead the case of encouraging people to take pregnancy vitamins, which suggests that the default option (having a baby with a risk of spina bifida) is worse than the alternative (having a baby without that).
Or consider the common practice of screening for Down's and considering abortion if the test is positive.
Hey Scott, thanks for responding. What I was pointing to in particular is that telling a woman not to drink when there’s shared knowledge that doing so puts the baby at risk is different than ranking an outcome as negative when “it just happens” without someone having to take some action. Prohibited action versus involuntary outcome. A normal woman, living her normal life, when pregnant, doing the things normally known to produce healthy child, will probably produce a healthy child.
Trying to give you the shortened version of my ethical framework, but agreed you should help the baby with spina big bifida envaginate their spinal column while it’s still a notochord and of course it’s prudent to tell a pregnant woman to have a vitamin to increase the likelihood of that. I’m totally in favor of preventative action or corrective care to replace something that’s gonna awry. Not sure I disagree with you at all on the idea that there are things out there that would be better if they were otherwise.
On the last part, which I am not trying to engage on, I know an internet comment isn’t going to change your mind on this, least of all mine, and I’m sure you’ve seen just as many fetuses in jars as I have if not more, but nothing I saw in those jars said to me there wasn’t a life there that needed protection. My belief is that if our species had evolved with translucent stomachs nobody would have ever shrugged about abortion or bought into it enough they couldn’t later retract. I am well aware of the conundrums involved and my hope is that one day artificial wombs will completely change the ethical, legal, and moral frameworks around this so those lives can be protected with the same relative risk to the mother as an abortion. Then the whole question goes up in smoke and the babies can be protected and the mother can go her way.
I just don’t honestly know what civilization is for if it isn’t to protect people who are vulnerable.
Classic example of "in principle" equality and real equality. Real equality is never true between people (I would have said "almost never true", but this would be backing off. It really is never true), you can always sort people along some axes, and then sort them globally depending on how you weight those axes. And people do that to other all the time: you have friends, non friends and enemies. Romantic interests, maybe in another life/circumstances and never ever even if he/she was the only other human on earth. Good employee, ok ones and to-be-fired asap. But in some cases, it is useful to pretend equality, to mitigate discrimination, limit strongly imbalanced power (gov vs citizen, boss vs employee), act as a social lubricant (unclear social hierarchy works better than very clear one) and also for practical reasons of dealing with populations and not individuals. But while it's useful, it's also important to remember that in-principle and real equality is not the same. The in-principle one is there to promote some (hopefully) worthy goals, but it should not be used as an axiom and thus always checked for unplanned consequences than may be worse than the initial goals (like more spina bifida because hey, human diversity is good....).
For the record fully in support of preventing spina bifida and treating it once found. Fully in support of helping anyone with similar problems.
Re your transparent abdomen hypothetical, infanticide was historically very common (and up until shockingly recently in a number of non-Western countries). It might affect the rate of it, especially in the much more squeamish modern West, but humans are generally very capable of killing things while looking right at them.
More proximity more knowledge less violence.
No, we're saying 'don't inflict fetal alcohol syndrome on a person'. Just like saying it's wrong to break someone's legs doesn't imply that we think a person with broken legs has less value.
Yeah that reply was so weird and tangential to my point that I wasn't sure how to respond. But this captures one aspect of why it doesn't apply really well.
Well said!
What we are saying (I think) is please give a chance for the newborn to be healthy if you are indeed carrying it to term, since it has no agency to refuse the alcohol, and for most of human history we have had really high infant mortality, and please lets try to do better for all our sakes, etc.
I'm glad someone else commented this!
I was gonna say, eugenics is clearly very different and inherently very bad because it inherently says "some of you are worth less than everyone (or worth more), and only some of you should exist".
Most of the counter arguments don't apply - most Muslims rightfully denounce the ones that say only true believers should get to live. The environmentalisn argument more rightly applies to ecofascists, which most of us would agree are bad people with a bad ideology.
But the thing that unites all eugenicists is the belief that only some people should get to exist. I think that's inherently wrong.
Also, assuming you can pick what's going to advantageous vs disadvantageous in the future is pure hubris. If the Nazis have wiped out all the autistic people like they wanted to, we wouldn't have massive internet infrastructure. So it's bad both inherently and from the unintended consequences side of things.
I think the Nazis could have still built the internet.
What about “some of you are incapable of making a good skyscraper, and you should not make a skyscraper”? Then s/skyscraper/child/g
Define a good skyscraper. If it's just "one that won't fall down", then the act of giving live birth qualifies.
What about one that, among other things, cannot be easily infested by parasites?
Ehrlich et al weren't calling for mandatory sterilization of middle-class Americans and Europeans; doesn't that mean that they were equally guilty of saying "some of you are worth less than everyone else and shouldn't exist"?
Yes. They just weren't saying the quiet part out loud. But they were still acting on it, which might be worse.
I think "only some people should exist" is a position one has to take. If all possible people existed, the earth would collapse into a black hole. The question is what factors determine which people, out of all possible people, exist. The common position on that is "assortative mating is fine, most forms of government coercion are not, incentives are questionable and considered on a case-by-case basis".
I mean, I'm not talking about trying to make all potential hypothetical people exist.
I'm talking about not defining an underclass of people who should not exist, and inherently it's hard to see how that won't happen even if you tried to make it as non-coercive as you can - just the very act of defining a group of people as more worthy of existing tends to imply you think the other group shouldn't!
I suppose I do make an exception for truly hypothetical nonexistent people (for a certain definition of personhood), like, "I think we shouldn't deliberately create children with gross heart defects that die within hours of being born", I would support genetic screening and CRISPR to prevent the existence of kids who die without ever getting the chance to meaningfully live, although that does feel more for the benefit of the potential parents. But if it's a condition that theoretically lessens quality of life but there is still potential for personhood, I am supportive of the person's right to choose - either to live or to die if they wish (I am also supportive of voluntary euthanasia). And if they choose to have kids anyway, I respect their judgement that whatever the condition is, from their lived experience they have decided it's fine and their kids will be fine (and their kids are likewise free to choose otherwise).
What are your arguments against deciding which people should and should not exist/are worth more or less apart from purely moral disgust at the thought? (which doesn´t seem convincing to me personally) The hubris argument also doesn´t seem particularily strong considering that the argument can be made against all choices and policies that rely on predicting the future. (which is basically all of them.)
Assigning moral worth tends to immediately make life worse for people ranked lower. The minor case is getting weighed fairly in policy - e.g medical triage, welfare entitlements, being considered in applications for building lead factories, etc. In the worst case, they aren't given human rights. The best way to prevent an underclass is to insist that everyone is morally equal in spite of skyscraper building abilities or whatever. I'm happy to do economic discrimination because not everyone should be building skyscrapers, but when it comes to the right to exist, we're talking moral worth, not economic worth.
The hubris argument is dependant on the irreversibility of the decision, how easy it is to identify it's downstream effects, and the scale of it. You can't unkill people, and if you're CRISPR-ing out the genes you probably can't undo that. Even if you could, the feedback is on a long enough timescale that you probably can't rollback decisions in time. And the decision will have long-ish reaching consequences - I expect > 5 generations which would be approx 200 years (though to be fair that's the maximum I personally bother caring about, as I think I'll have so little way to trace cause and effect further than that it's not really worth worrying about).
This decision is very different from, say, the decision not to allow parking on my street (expect not a huge consequence and not for very long). Or a decision that one particular parent makes regarding gene editing (exclusively affects their own lineage and at most their social group). But if a large organisation starts demanding proof of IQ augmentation or whatever that's worse (affects more people, other orgs may follow suit) and if the government makes it policy to withhold welfare from non IQ augmented people that's very very bad (will affect massive numbers of people over a number that arguably is somewhat arbitrary).
I would have no objection if the government offered free prenatal screening for one of those hole in heart conditions, because the infant mortality for those conditions are really really high and I don't think it'll cause a runaway population change that no one can predict or control. I don't think I would support screening for personality disorders, until we know more about personality disorders - because those traits might be important somehow and we'll only find out once there's some kind of situation where they're useful (sort of like autism and handling abstract systems). But I don't agree that all decisions are equally dependant on predicting the future - in theory everything can affect everything, but in practice some decisions definitely have a bigger scale, bigger consequence, and higher likelihoods, that we can practically foresee.
"If all possible people existed, the earth would collapse into a black hole. "
You know that's untrue, right? If you do, why are you saying it? IF you don't, maybe consider that the rest of your conclusions are equally flawed?
By "all possible people", I mean literally every person that could possibly exist, not all the people that would exist if people reproduced at the maximum possible rate. Like, if we just consider genetic differences, that's 4^3200000000 people.
There's literally not enough mass on the Earth to collapse into a black hole. And the amount of mass that is capable of being converted into humans is even less than that.
"The second a government draws this line, the two groups diverge, human nature kicks in, and things get ugly fast. This is the mechanism imo by which the slippery slope of state-sponsored eugenics is so steep and slippery, and very quickly leads to the worst of humanity."
Yes. While I, personally, have had a vasectomy, and tend to view sterilization with a yawn, historically, _forcible_ sterilization has been something done to outgroups. It looks like part of a very slippery slope because it has often been done not as a public health optimization tactic, but as an act of hostility.
I think the safest line to draw is between government actions and parental actions. Parents don't always act in the best interests of their children but they tend to be a better bet than anyone else.
If it was like, "only Ashkenazi Jews are allowed to reproduce" or, "minorities are not allowed to reproduce", then I could see that happening. But if you eg promote things like Nobel sperm banks, then it won't really be a case of "outgroup" vs "ingroup". It seems possible to draw lines in a not so crude fashion, one which more accurately aims for the traits we want to affect. That what I got from Scott's comment: we already "discriminate" against fetal alcohol syndrome without there being any significant consequences.
And it seems like Scott would agree with you; that the eugenic ideas that eg the Nazis carried out were, well, very bad. But, as with fetal alcohol syndrome, there are many "eugenic" (in name) ideas which wouldn't lead to such horrible outcomes, but which we lose by labeling them as "eugenic".
I’ve read all the comments in this thread and haven’t seen any ideas on how the govt would do any kind of meaningful population steering towards higher intelligence without drawing an official line between groups of people.
And based on 54 years of experience with human nature, you will never convince me that a govt-sponsored official line doesn’t end very badly. These other arguments seem very tangential to me. Someone else responded to the fetal alcohol thing much better than me.
"haven’t seen any ideas on how the govt would do any kind of meaningful population steering towards higher intelligence without drawing an official line between groups of people."
I am genuinely having difficulty imagining how one could arrive at such a position. Intelligence is not binary, as if there were discrete categories of "smart people" and "stupid people". It is a smooth continuum (or rather, a complex mash-up of several smooth continua, if we take the idea of verbal, mathematical, visuo-spatial subcomponents seriously). There is no reason why we wouldn't be able to say, all else being equal, that 130 IQ is better than 125, 125 is better than 120, etc., all the way up and down the scale, and to offer polygenic screening and implantation to give your children an IQ bost regardless of what your own IQ is. While I guess if you are convinced by Smart Fraction Theory, then you get more value for money by shunting potential children above the smart fraction cut-off who would have otherwise been just below it, but if IQ generally scales monotonically with expected postitive life outcomes, then below a certain cost, PGS would be a good investment /worth subsidizing regardless of where you're starting from. I mean, one *could* institute a system of two-tiered citizenship in a society that subsidizes PGS, but I really don't understand why we should think it inevitable that one would want to.
As an example to consider: policies designed to make having children less of a financial burden for high earners, who will skew more intelligent/diligent/other good qualities. Basically, compare and contrast flat parental benefits with ones that are a % of income (be that as a direct cash handout, paid parental leave, or tax breaks).
Financial subsidies for children in the West are currently an irrelevant pittance, but the evidence suggests that they do have a consistent marginal effect the numbers are just too small by a factor of like 100.
The difference between Galton and Ehrlich is simple: the first is very evil European/conservative sterilization, which is bad. The second is for left-wing/progressive sterilization, which is good and academics like it.
It is, as always, simple friend/enemy distinction.
Ehrlich had his share of left-wing critics, in the West and elsewhere. In fact, opposition to India's compulsive sterilisation program used to be given as an example where the hard left and the conservative right found common ground.
Yeah, it's sad that people have convinced themselves that politics is more complex than that, and write long treatises trying to make sense of the meaningless complexity they've imagined.
Galton's brand of sterilization *was* left-wing/progressive sterilization. It's only when Hitler et al got into the act that it became an "evil European/conservative" thing, and at that point almost everyone forgets about Galton altogether.
Which is of course just more evidence that Hitler was a far-left extremist, and the idea that he was conservative or right wing in any form is just modern squid ink. After all trying to take over the world and obliterate entire races is the opposite of conserving things.
The far left and far right are very similar. I wonder what motivates you to reclassify Hitler.
Yes, because they're the same thing, because "far right" is actually the far left rebranded by academics to avoid the uncomfortable fact that all 20th century tyrannical despots were motivated by radical leftism. After all, the National Socialists German Workers Party were socialists who claimed to speak for the workers: it's literally in their name. And the gap between what Hitler believed and what Lenin believed ideologically was wafer thin. They fought only because they both believed it should be them who ruled the world, not because they actually disagreed with the concept of a totalitarian dictatorship. In terms of how to run a country they didn't disagree on much.
After all, think about it - the whole concept of "far to the left" and "far to the right" being the same thing is clearly doublethink. The words literally mean far apart from each other. If far right means anything at all then it would have to be the polar opposite of the far left, which would make it arch-capitalist libertarian, something more like ancaps. But ancaps don't have a history of trying to take over the world, so they aren't very interesting to talk about.
I didn't say far-left and far-right are "the same". But they have the same epistemics, so they behave similarly. This accounts for the "horseshoe" theory of politics[1], and the arch shape of the Thinking Ladder from Tim Urban, and even the arch shape of the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart[2]. Sometimes - and I'm trying to work out how this happens myself - beliefs jump between the far left and far right. For instance, many of the "all vaccines bad!!!" arguments and beliefs jumped from the far left to the far right around 2020.
Also, the beliefs considered "left" and "right" vary over time and space. You seem to assume that left and right are the same in 1920 Germany as 2020 United States, but that's an error. Think about it - why is the "Liberal" party of Australia right-wing while the "Liberal" party of Canada is left-wing?
There can also be multiple not-really-compatible ideologies on the same side of the political spectrum at the same time, e.g. libertarians, evangelicals, right-leaning rationalists, the alt-right, neo-nazis/Stormfront people, and the assorted types of people who believe Alex Jones. Presumably you single out neo-nazis for a special interpretation for some reason? But neo-nazis hanging out at Stormfront are different people than the Jacobin community. If neo-nazis were actually far-left, they would be advocating for a socialist revolution, they would like Jacobin, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
[2] https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/
Years ago, when I first found it, I found the horseshoe idea interesting. But I couldn't quite ever resolve the most obvious objections that came to mind, like, if these two things are claimed to be in one dimension polar opposites, but in another almost the same, aren't we maybe over-thinking this? Occam's Razor says that we should at least try the simplest possible explanation first, which in this case would be that in fact they're both the same thing and the real contrast is between people who don't care much about politics/reshaping the world, and people who do.
This latter turned out to be surprisingly hard to dismiss. In fact once I opened my mind to the possibility that the horseshoe was just an artifact of mislabelling by intellectuals, the evidence for it seemed suddenly to be everywhere. The supposedly "far right" Nazis have the word socialist in the name of the party. The fascists were wartime allies with their supposed blood enemies and didn't seem to disagree on much about how the world should be run. Thomas Sowell has also made this argument at times, essentially arguing that the left is people with ideology and the right is people without. The academic left reject this of course and tend to claim they're the neutral ones and everyone else is ideological, but again, this argument falls apart on close inspection and turns out to be the opposite of what's plainly observable. After all, the left is historically a movement of intellectuals with grand plans to reshape society, and it's not a coincidence that the word ideology is derived from the word idea.
And so it goes. The evidence for the far right even being a coherent thing at all never survives scrutiny (which makes sense in this model because you can't have many people who are radically devoted to not having ideas). For instance, you claim that "all vaccines are bad" hopped from the left to the right as an idea, but that never happened! It was a myth spun by the left intended to manipulate the population by associating a position they didn't like with historical villains: "i'm not sure this particular shot is worth it for me" = anti-all-vaccines = far right = nazis = evil people. That story was pushed through the media because this kind of reasoning-by-association works on people.
What actually happened is more straightforward. Pre-2021 vaccine opposition was very fringe and mostly focused around vaccines for children. The people who care most about young children are their mothers, and women are much more left wing than men, so these two things became conflated. Mothers who saw their kids suddenly tank (or heard stories of this) after taking a shot added 2+2 and decided they didn't want to risk it, were painted as evil anti-vaxxers, and this position became associated with left wing people. In reality the wider left was strongly pro-vaccine when arguments about herd immunity could be made, due to the collectivist nature of public health projects.
Starting in 2021 the public health establishment immediately did its far-left thing, as it always does, and told people that it wasn't an individual decision to take a shot even though the protection was individual, because of herd immunity. To make that argument they had to lie aggressively, and by that point a lot of people had cottoned on to what was happening, so there was widespread opposition to this. Sure enough their claims about transmission were based on nothing and herd immunity turned out to be a lie. At this point the young and healthy people who were paying attention started rejecting the shots (but not the older cohort who are often very conservative, so again, there's a conflation here). So the public health-media-academia complex immediately claimed the only reason anyone could ever reject their commands was due to Right Wing Ideology, that thing that they've trained everyone in their social circle to instinctively hate without thinking. Not true - I have lots of friends who didn't take the shots and most of them are politically apathetic. At least one is conventional left wing. And voila. That's all it takes to create the appearance of a horseshoe that isn't real. A few spurious correlations and an ingrained habit of describing anything you don't like as right wing, and it'll appear that political views are unstable. In reality people's views are pretty coherent over time.
Oh, I missed your last question about the liberal parties.
Regardless of what they might claim or what their old origins might have been, both parties are modern left wing parties. The term "liberal" is another pretty useless political term, nearly as bad as terms like far right. The problem is that it's a synonym for freedom/being easy going/not too heavy handed etc. In theory everyone is pro-these things, almost as much as being pro-ice cream and puppies. Nobody wants to brand their party "the government domination party" because most voters are NOT into ideology and wouldn't like that. Even the USSR's constitution was in theory an exemplar of modern individual rights.
What matters is not stated preferences but revealed preferences. What do these parties actually do? Wikipedia states confidently that the Canadian Liberals "are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism". Yet this is the party that crushed the truckers when they protested against COVID totalitarianism by literally seizing all their money. Where is individual freedom or human dignity in that? Nowhere, because they don't believe in any of these things really. They believe in collectivism, they just don't say it.
What about the Australian Liberal party? "Domestically, Menzies presided over a fairly regulated economy in which utilities were publicly owned, and commercial activity was highly regulated through centralised wage-fixing and high tariff protection". It took until the 1980s i.e. the collapse of the USSR for left wing parties to give up on left wing economics. They also have a history of other conventional modern left policies like high openness to unskilled immigration and of course, Australia's crackdown on COVID was one of the world's most totalitarian.
The reality is that most parties are actually competing over how left wing they are, even when they claim to be not-the-left, because it's hard to attract enough people to matter in national scale politics on a basis of "let's not do things". Even when for historical reasons such parties theoretically exist, like the British Conservatives, you'll find that most voters and even members see them primarily as simply the lesser evil and grumbling about the party being ideologically dominated by left wing ideas is very common. Which is what you'd expect, if you have an MP base that's largely non-committal about politics.
I was going to post something to this effect. Regardless of the fact that eugenics was originally a left-coded progressive policy, it's now seen as right-coded, so even those who supported it when it was left-coded get thrown under the bus when pro-left/anti-right signalling is required (it's telling that the building named after Galton was renamed in 2020). However, environmentalism remains left-coded, so the cathedral/educational-journalism complex/whatever you want to call it has no problem continuing to support the term no matter what evils are committed in its name, and will even minimize those evils or go to bat for the people that committed them because they're "on the right side," no matter the effects their actions had. This brings up the interesting idea that if you want powerful people to properly condemn environmentalism for evils committed in its name, you have to make environmentalism become right-coded. Maybe if Kaczynski and Linkola continue to be popular among certain subsets of the right, and the more mainstream left-environmentalism somehow ceases to be ideologically useful this could happen in several decades, although I think it's highly doubtful.
I think you mean "plaintiff", not "defendant"
Blood boiling evil stuff from Ehrlich. I try to hate no one but can’t quite seem to keep it from touching him. Loathe to my marrow that he hasn’t been denounced as a hack. You don’t get to be wrong about everything but still be called an expert.
Yes, in fact you do. Most people called "experts" are hacks. (There ARE experts, but they're rare, and neither famous nor popular.)
Let’s change it. That guy did heinous shit.
Ehrlich is hardly an exception. There are modern equivalents.
Look at Prof Neil Ferguson for example. A true believer in his own woefully wrong pandemic models he convinced governments to inflict the most extreme authoritarian measures ever seen in peacetime on the global population. Impoverishment, suicides and a mental health collapse followed. But his code was shit and his model code didn't even solve its own equations correctly, Sweden did better than most other countries despite ignoring everything he said and to top it off, he broke his own lockdown rules in order to screw his far-left girlfriend who was inconveniently married to somebody else. Nobody in academia was even slightly bothered by any of this and he was defended to the hilt.
You say "let's change it". Good luck with that. These people are supported by universities, so to change things you'd have to directly attack them. How exactly do you plan to defund Stanford, because they sure as hell will never defund guys like Ehrlich.
This review seemed pedantic to me. The 'improvment' of human characteristics, e.g. morbidity, intelligence, etc. through either selective breeding (Galton's postion) or the removal of undesirable traits through sterilization, incarceraton or murder, was debunked long ago. The recognition that there are no recognized single genes, or group of genes that co-assort to produce what we call intelligence, longevity or whatever general human trait makes the eugenics dialog irrevalent. Real eugenics is here now and it called gene therapy. Currently, gene therapy is able to cure or improve certain single gene mutation diseases. in the interests of brevity: 'nuff said.
How was Galton "debunked"? He never claimed there were "single genes", as he didn't know of Mendelian genetics at all. And Greg Clark would disagree that you can't change undesirable traits through the justice system.
I suggest you read up on animal and plant breeding. The improvement of characteristics through selective breeding is rather easy, requires no knowledge of specific genes and is based on a model according to which heritability is due to the additive action of numerous genes, each with a small effect. Human genetics is no different.
Right, eugenics is an outgrowth of the long rise of "scientific agriculture" in Britain from, say, 1700 onward. And before then, breeders were engaging in eugenics with their livestock, but more by rules of thumb than by self-consciously scientific methods.
I hate to be the "source??" guy, but if you're going to claim that some idea is "debunked" then that kind of demands an explanation of how it was debunked and when and by whom.
I mean embryo selection already improves intelligence more than any environmental intervention we have. The Holocaust has a meta analytic point-estimate of 0.1d for cognitive ability; embryo selection is at 0.2d in its infancy.
I feel that if we really want to go down the road of genetically manipulating humanity, then it would be far easier to use genetic editing rather than implementing a massive selective breeding program.
Easier socially, perhaps. Technically selective breeding for heritable traits doesn't require any knowledge that people didn't have for thousands of years. And gene editing on mass scale with predictable results seems at least decades away, for most results that we would want (some simple corrections of known deleterious mutations are possibly closer).
Eugenics is practiced today, quite successfully, by Jews against Tay-Sachs disease. From The Times of Israel:
How Jewish activism has virtually wiped out Tay-Sachs
Thanks to technology and an aggressive screening campaign, the genetic disease is all but gone today — and carrier couples can have healthy children
By IRA STOLL
23 August 2017, 3:33 am
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-jewish-activism-has-wiped-out-tay-sachs/
Fertility clinics for people acquiring sperm or eggs facilitate eugenic choices.
> I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects your future child’s
> traits a lot
"Traits" is doing a lot of work there. Both intelligence and life outcomes depend on a large number of complex factors; some of these are heritable, others are not; the heritable factors are a complex mix of both positive and negative that all interact with each other; meanwhile, a great deal of luck is also required for a good outcome. The magnitude of the survivor bias is unclear: we only hear about the genius babies who grow up, study and publish; the ones who are born in thirdworld slums, live as street kids for a few years then die of starvation or exposure do so unseen and uncounted. It is far from obvious what proportion of the outcome is down to genetics, rather than factors like the education system, childhood parasite load or local child labour laws.
The divine right of kings has long since been discredited, as has the concept that nobles are somehow inherently better than commoners, and yet the intuition is still that rich people are necessarily poor people's betters. I suggest an alternative theory: rich people by and large are rich mostly not because of genetically heritable traits, but rather because they got lucky: lucky to be born into an already rich family, lucky to be born to an environment where they were lifted up instead of beaten down, and/or lucky that risks they took during their lives paid off.
Luck, unfortunately, is not a heritable trait.
> For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles
> of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having
> children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
It's unclear that we should expect any such thing. At the very least, you would need to do work to show this, beyond handwaving. Consider many of your own essays elsewhere, where you make the case that humanity is stuck in a variety of races-to-the-bottom, where people in competition for some limited thing end up spending more over time for the same slice of the pie, be it healthcare, education, shelter... Meditations on Moloch has a variety of examples. If rich families' kids do better at least in part because rich families can throw more resources at the race to get the kid closer to the tip of the life outcome pyramid - and few would deny this is the case - rich families having more kids would certainly make them compete harder for the top of the pyramid, but it is unclear that his would make the top of the pyramid any larger or the gap between the top and the bottom any narrower.
Getting a rich person's sperm from a sperm bank, meanwhile, does not help with this effect at all.
Rich people tend to be both lucky and talented. The resources spent on schooling do not appear to make much of a difference though.
Some of my own doubts about eugenics come from seeing educated people rather ready to make basic mistakes of language that confirm their prejudices (in favor of the well-to-do, their own ethnic group, etc.). Rich people do not tend to be talented; they tend to be rather dumb, simply because mostly any group tends to be rather dumb. Is the minority of talented people somewhat larger among the rich than in other groups? No idea actually, given that the rich how much more of an opportunity to develop and display some talents than other groups (though probably less incentive to do either than some other groups).
I suppose if you set the bar high enough then everyone is "dumb". Perhaps everyone is also unlucky for not living in the post-scarcity utopia of the future. But relative to existing people, rich people do tend to be both lucky & talented.
Where are you drawing your pool from? Are you friends with lots of prominent maestros (and are you setting the bar for "rich" low enough that they are rich)?
Relative to existing people means comparing them to the average of the total population.
I'm not personally friends with the top level elites, I've just read about them.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-worthy-overlordshtml
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites
A comment along the lines of "the rich have a somewhat larger minority of talented people than the poor" would have been a far better reflection of this position (though it would still need convincing proof).
>They tend to be rather dumb
What does this mean? Are you implying there’s a negative relationship between wealth and intelligence, or something else?
It just means that he thinks he's smarter than most rich people, and most middle-class people and most poor people and therefore he can call them *all*
"dumb".
Which may be true if Garald is highly intelligent and using a strictly relative definition of "dumb". But it's still a dumb thing for him to say, because if he's using that baseline for the definition of dumb then it's just a coordinate transformation from TGGP's "lucky and talented" to "generally less dumb", which still supports TGGP's argument.
I am willing to bet (bet what - IQ points?) that, in plenty of societies, intelligence is a non-monotonic function of wealth. Why bother being clever if you are born into money? (An eugenist might add: and if that wealth came from ancestors who were good at hacking people in two but were otherwise unselected for, we have even more reason for concern!).
At any rate, my point was precisely that language matters. "Generally less dumb, at least partly because not hampered by disease and malnutrition" does not have the same ring to it as "talented" - in fact it means something pretty different.
As I mention above, the idea that rich people tend to be our betters needs backing up with actual evidence, not mere assertion; especially in the era of Musk and Trump.
Right.
I would have thought readers of this blog would already be aware that IQ is correlated with money, but here's a blog post debunking the more narrow objection that this correlation tops out at high levels:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/there-is-no-iq-threshold-effect-also-not-for-income/
And, as I also thought people here would already be aware, IQ is negatively associated with committing violent crime:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/
I won't bother linking to a study showing that poorer areas have higher crime rates than richer ones, because every American knows this. Garett Jones' "Hive Mind" is about how IQ is correlated with cooperation.
Repeat after me: correlation is not causation.
I mean, sure, as the XKCD says, it's certainly a strong hint. But - hear me out here - what if the arrow of causality between a moneyed background and IQ actually goes the other way?
People have looked into this. Little evidence of an effect of shared environment on IQ.
If it did, you could see it in adoption/twin studies.
Then you'd expect lottery winners to have smart kids.
We certainly know wealth has an impact on access to quality education. Are there any studies on longterm outcomes for lottery winners' families? A quick google finds a bunch for lottery winners themselves, but nothing for generational impact. It would hardly be surprising, though, if wealth acquired via lottery ticket had the same kind of impact on life outcomes as wealth acquired from any other form of risky "investment" paying off.
This all started with the suggestion that successful people - by which we generally mean rich people - carry traits that should be propagated. My thesis here is that if your eugenics program is selecting rich people, it's going to be pulling in children of lottery winners, day traders, crypto bros and maybe that stock picking squid that went viral a few months back.
What if the causation goes both ways?
Smarter people cooperate more in repeated games-- and cooperation causes good things.
That means smarter groups are more likely to create--- to cause--- productive outcomes.
That's true even if productivity raises health, and hence raises IQ.
Reverse causation doesn't disprove forward causation-- and there's lots of evidence for forward causation from higher IQ to highly productive outcomes.
That's the heart of Hive Mind.
Have you read Nassim Taleb on IQ? He has some interesting takes.
He has some wrong takes. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/09/replies-to-taleb/
That’s definitely an odd comparison.
Where did people get the idea that Musk is dumb? He clearly isn’t.
I do worry about many modern politicians though. Not just Trump.
I suspect it's mostly horns effect — they don't like him because he's rich, so they're happy to attribute other negative qualities to him as well. That said, he has made some questionable business decisions they could point to.
Negative halo effect.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACGeaAk6KButv2xwQ/the-halo-effect
People have been saying he’s dumb for a long time, because he kept trying things that no-one expected to work. He went into electric cars when most reasonable people thought that was dumb (or bad at his aims of making electric cars available to everyone because he targeted the rich, or whatever), and he went into private space travel when that seemed dumb (or again, focused on rich people and hence inefficient at achieving his goal of making space accessible). Now he’s gone into Twitter and actually had a failure - and it’s widely accepted that success changes people, so now his past successes provide less-direct evidence of his current intelligence. It takes lots of skill to achieve what he’s done, but he also gave people plenty of justifications for calling him dumb.
Twitter, mainly. Both what he did with it, and also what he posts there.
Thing is, his other holdings have groups of people that have developed organically over time who translate his proclamations into policies that are sensible for the company to attempt and safe for the public to hear. When he came to Twitter from cold, though, we got to see the raw, unfiltered man.
Until that point I had mentally filed him in the same category as Bill Gates / Larry Page / Sergey Brin, and was happy to hero worship. I can tell you precisely when I lost my last vestiges of respect for the man, and it was when this story broke: https://nypost.com/2022/11/18/elon-musk-asks-twitter-engineers-to-fly-in-for-meetings-email/
"Bring me up to 10 screenshots of your best code" is not a statement made by a man who has any clue what software engineering entails. Not a good look.
"Luck, unfortunately, is not a heritable trait."
<mild fictional snark/humor>
https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Teela_Brown
</mild fictional snark/humor>
What would also be interesting would be to look at the arguments of early-twentieth-century intellectuals who openly supported some limited eugenics measures calling them such (avoiding serious birth defects) but had intelligent, interesting criticisms to make to then fashionable, non-genocidal eugenics. Franz Boas comes to mind.
(Also, would gladly read all that W. E. B. du Bois wrote about the subject. Links?)
I believe, off the top of my head, that WEB du Bois wrote about eugenics for Margaret Sanger's publication in 1932, but I could be wrong.
"I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic."
With dogs we also have significantly longer lifespans than their generations and fairly absolute control over their breeding. I suspect an attempt to breed e.g., Galapagos tortoises or giant pandas for particular traits would be harder. With humans, you have the problem with a lot of long term projects that the people in charge and their goals would likely change faster than the time it takes to approach a given goal, and that total control over the subjects' reproduction will be very difficult even leaving aside the obvious moral objections.
Probably increasingly so as reproductive technology improves. Some forms of sterilization are already reversible. Going forward, that person you sterilized will probably be able to arrange for a clone or recombination based on a somatic cell, or even getting a new reproductive system grown and installed, much sooner than you (or rather, your successor's successor's, successor's...successor) is going to see the kind of major population-level changes something like dog breeding can produce.
Slavery and animal breeding coexisted as concepts for a very long time, without (as far as I know) successful applications of the latter to the former. Granted I'd be surprised if there weren't attempts, especially once science overlapped with large scale slavery for a century or two. I'd also be surprised if it was managed with sufficient consistency and breadth to create an identifiable population with measurable and sustained trait changes, rather than just being a cruel experiment. (Especially since owners and their overseers were probably continually contaminating the process, probably without reliably recording what they were doing.) AFAIK, generally when slaveholding cultures wanted a type, they enslaved people from a known location or existing ethnic group, they didn't create one for the purpose.
I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by human effort to have much hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for. And I'm pretty sure that even approaching acquiring that level of control correlates with spinning off into all the sorts of problems Adraste is warning about.
I agree that it can't be done benevolently, and I'm pretty sure that it can't be done effectively. Best case it's ineffectual and mostly harmless, worst case is much worse than that.
Slaves (unlike domesticated animals) didn't reproduce themselves for most of the history of slavery. The big advantage to owning a slave was that you DIDN'T pay to raise them, instead you captured them in battle and then didn't feed them enough to reproduce. The non-Malthusian environment of the New World was very unusual.
"I'm guessing you need a combination of totalitarian control and consistency of purpose that isn't going to realistically be sustainable by _human_ effort to have much hope of getting the kinds of results they're going for." [emphasis added]
Hmm... One speculative endgame for ASI is for humans to wind up as "pets" of the machines. Perhaps a less benevolent version of Culture Minds might have the equivalent of dog breed fanciers, but for human breeds. Might there be a human equivalent of a toy poodle? :-(
SF and fantasy both have their share of gods or godlike aliens going in for that sort of thing. Heinlein had at least two versions in Methuselah's Children, and Steven Brust's Dragaera has seventeen subtypes plus "control humans" (who nonetheless have been tweaked for psychic ability).
Though it depends a lot on the fictional AI concept. Vernor Vinge's Powers tended to run through their superhuman existence at a speed commensurate with their much faster processing capability. There's one known as Old One because it's lasted ten years without self-destructing or evanescencing into total incomprehensibility. They can reshape the galaxy in that time, but they don't really have the scope for long breeding programs.
Good examples! Many Thanks!
Humans are harder, but genetic engineering is also far more advanced. We're not restricted to just plain selective breeding anymore.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children
And that's despite legal barriers making it very difficult to research or commercialise human genetic engineering. I agree that government subsidy programs to encourage certain traits to spread more seem a dubious and dubiously effective proposition, "every measure that becomes a target" and all that. But I don't think such programs would even be necessary. If we want to do this, all societies and governments need to do is step out of the way. I would guess the industry for this would become a thing shortly thereafter. If every parent gets the option to pay some money for screening against all diseases and a Terence Tao intelligence splice, I'm pretty sure many will take it.
It's clearly possible biologically to do a large scale selective breeding program on humans and get desired traits out of it. But I agree that would probably be very hard for human institutions to manage it, given the length of human lifespans and the difficulty of keeping some sort of institution pointing in the same direction for hundreds of years.
I note that the CCP did successfully run a eugenics program to get tall basketball players, which was very successful at producing tall people (though I'm given to understand somewhat less successful at having those tall people be truly exceptional at basketball). So, sure, it might require stable authoritarian governments, but those do exist.
A nice presentation of a fairly pointless argument.
Both sides are wrong on this subject for the very simple reason that anyone with a modicum of understanding of how power dynamics work, would immediately see how eugenics, overpopulation, or any other form of garbage analysis based doom would be used as justification by unscrupulous and/or idealistic demagogues leading elitist packs towards self and class based power and financial gain.
Ehrlich's predecessor - Thomas Malthus - and the British Corn Laws are an excellent example, so it isn't like we don't know where this is all going.
Where are the Jonathan Swifts of today to puncture the bombastic bullshit?
I don't get what you mean - should nobody ever be allowed to claim that bad things might happen? There's only a difference in scale between "overpopulation will cause billions of deaths" and "global warming will cause millions of deaths" and "dumping toxic waste into this lake will cause dozens of deaths". Should we ban anyone from mentioning that dumping toxic waste could be bad, because people could misuse it to seize power?
What if Galton had said "there's no particular dysgenic crisis, it would just be nice to have some smarter and healthier people around"?
Perhaps the deaths are far lower because we listened to the warnings and took action to lower the number of deaths.
It's rather like sneering at the doctors for warning me I will die of the tumor growing in my brain. I'm not dead. They insisted on removing it in an operation. But I'm not dead, so they were clearly overreacting.
What I mean is any type of so-called analysis arising from hasty generalization - of which overpopulation due to lack of food is one particular example - is extremely dangerous and that extension of these hasty generalized nonsense into areas which clearly pander to elitist views is furthermore going to be used for nefarious purposes.
So regarding Galton: yes - his narrow and unwise views on eugenics were not only wrong, but dangerous precisely because it gave pseudo-scientific license to all manner of class-based, race-based, and other forms of discrimination based oppression. I find it impossible to see any situations where "superior" beings are not going to be used as an excuse, eventually, to attack those who are "not superior". And this doesn't even get into the issue of the games behind the definition of what superior is.
Regarding toxic waste: that's a great example. The precise dynamic of power-mongering, fear-mongering and pseudo-science lies behind the "toxification" of CO2.
Demonization of CO2 is ridiculous even if goals to reduce fossil fuel usage, in general, are reasonable.
I'm thinking more of a factory dumping literal toxic waste into a literal water supply. Are all water pollution concerns also power-mongering and fear-mongering? Is there anything that you think is actually bad?
c'lue would consider it actually bad to be deprived of the comfy chairs up there in the cynics' gallery.
Teddy Roosevelt put it more eloquently in a famous speech that he delivered n Paris shortly after leaving the White House:
“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief....”
I don't face life with a sneer.
I do face hypocritical posturing with disdain, particularly when it is so very obvious that the end objective is not the greater good so much as it is the greater good for a few.
A factory dumping toxic waste - what does the factory make?
What if the factory made literal life: actual substances which literally extend human life in a measurable way?
Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the literal human life extension?
Yes, I do think there are things that are actually bad. We see them every day: the evil done by selfish bastards purely to amass ever greater mountains of wealth - at other's expense - when they already have more than they could ever possibly spend. Death and destruction visited upon people far away in order to "promote democracy" or some nonsense. Ever greater restrictions hypocritically forced on regular people even as "the good" fly about their private jets and snort illegal substances at their private parties.
More often than not - it is these precise types of "the good" that use the simplistic depictions of "bad" in order to amass more of what they don't even need or to justify the sacrifices they advocate that other people make.
> Is the damage done by the toxic substances greater than the literal human life extension?
No, the question is, is the damage done by the toxic substances greater the cost of storing them properly, or cleaning them up before putting them in the water supply.
is the damage done by the toxic substances greater the cost of storing them properly, or cleaning them up before putting them in the water supply *and the value of the production that creates the toxic substance to start with".
In other words: the full picture as opposed to 3 blind men analyzing an elephant, or worse - 3 demagogues analyzing an elephant to derive personal benefit.
'the evil done by selfish bastards purely to amass ever greater mountains of wealth - at other's expense -'
Who are these people you have in mind?
They are all over and it is trivial to see.
Some of the highest profile examples:
Microsoft started out as a perfectly innocuous operating system. It was purchased by Microsoft and pushed into prominence due to anti-trust judgements against IBM.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Microsoft turns evil by using its monopoly power to destroy WordPerfect, Lotus 123, and a bunch of other literally market leading word processing and spreadsheet programs in order to promote Microsoft Office. The same game plan was used later to destroy Netscape in favor of Internet Explorer.
Amazon started as an excellent idea: why be limited to the physical inventory of a bricks and mortar location when you can ship books anywhere, with people browsing for books via the internet. The instant Amazon turned evil was when it deployed tens of millions of dollars to fight the imposition of state sales taxes on internet sales - a massive exception which had originally been put in place because internet retail businesses were all small. This is also about the time when Amazon decided to turn its prominent role on the internet, as a web site, as well as its pre-existing fulfillment infrastructure, into a gatekeeper business which has since gone on to pretty much do to internet shops what Amazon did to bricks and mortar bookstores.
In both cases, the companies and founders were already filthy rich. And yes, the founders weren't solely responsible - certainly the middle and upper management were also involved much as government regulators failed in their jobs.
But the primary responsibility for the decisions made and the ensuing outcomes is clear.
Be advised, substack is now doing some javascript pop-over thing on mobile that breaks badly with long footnotes.
Weird company. Fix the comments - it’s why most of us are here.
adding a +1 to this: clicking a long footnote froze the page and caused my browser to hang and I'm not even on a mobile device. Would vastly prefer if Scott limited footnotes to a single paragraph.
A few things that struck me from this article:
> Francis Galton said we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. People listened to him, nodded along, and then went and did eugenics in a coercive and horrifying way. Now here you are, saying we should do eugenics in a voluntary and scientifically reasonable way. You can see why I might be concerned.
I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried." He points out that there are two serious problems with that concept. First, the supreme arrogance inherent in saying — because this is what that really means — that "everyone who's tried this before has failed, but if I was in charge I could get it right!" And second, the immense naivete of failing to realize that, even if you were both smart enough to get it right and morally pure enough to not be corrupted along the way, that there would still be evil, brutal people lurking in the shadows waiting to take you down and supplant you and use the power you established for their own far less virtuous ends. (cf. Josef Stalin's rise to power.)
> Or they might say environmentalism has had some pretty spectacular failures - knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over from fossil fuels, leading to our current coal-and-oil-dominated regime and all the worries about climate change that come with it - also coal pollution in the air kills tens of thousands of people per year directly.
It's always a bit terrifying to see just how often people's unwillingness to accept the lesser of two evils leaves them saddled with the greater evil instead.
> For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
You can't really "increase the population of rich people to poor people" in any meaningful way as long as poverty remains culturally understood as a relative state. By any objective measure, poor people in America today (excluding long-term homeless for obvious reasons) have a standard of living that would be the envy of kings of past ages, and in many significant metrics exceeds that enjoyed by John Rockefeller! And yet, relative to the more-wealthy people in America today, they're not doing particularly awesome, so we say that they're "living in poverty." As long as that understanding persists, adding more wealthy people would just shift the definitions around a little.
> Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time.
Not really. The ideas of population explosion and resource exhaustion didn't originate with him, but with Thomas Malthus, and Malthus' ideas had been quite thoroughly debunked over a century before Ehrlich came on the scene! Ehrlich had no good excuse for not knowing that.
Is it really obvious that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people? The share of wealth that is inherited is large, and increasing. If you somehow force every rich man to sire a child for every half million dollars he has, and leave exactly the same amount of money to each of them, what you will have done is decrease drastically the number of truly rich people in the next generation, while boosting the numbers of the cushy (upper-)middle class.
I mean, that's one way to do wealth redistribution.
We could combine ideas - force the rich to designate people conceived from the sperm and ova of the talented as their heirs (with numbers allocated as per the criterion above).
> Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried."
Unless my knowledge of history is lacking, this only works if you insist on including killing off/expelling/imprisoning large parts of the population from the outset as a part of the "socialism". Otherwise all "socialist" countries were in fact "Gulag socialist", and anyone who proposes a non-Gulag version has at least some ground to stand on.
Two points. First, that's baked into the pie. Marx insisted that the societal transition to communism was necessarily the result of a violent revolution that would overthrow the previous order by force.
Any sort of revolutionary transformation of a nation will inevitably have people who fight back, some overtly and some covertly. We've had two such attempts in the history of America, one successful, the other crushed, both involving long and bloody wars in which spies and traitors featured prominently. The second one in particular spawned a long line of resentment that we still haven't fully healed from to this day; just look at the still-extant notion that "the South will rise again." Today, we can laugh them off as kooks, but when the wounds were still raw, they represented an existential threat to stability and peace. Abraham Lincoln locked many of them up, even going to far as to suspend habeas corpus for them, and he defended it in those terms, asking whether it would be better to keep all the other laws and break this one, or, in order to observe habeas corpus, to allow all of the other laws to be broken.
Does that make him a "Gulag president"? Or is that simply a necessary, if distasteful, part of a government's duty to "insure domestic Tranquility"?
And second, this doesn't seem to actually address the two points Peterson raised, the arrogance of thinking that "I could do better" and the naivete of thinking you'd be left in peace to actually do better.
A violent revolution in itself isn't necessarily bad: how many of the modern developed nations did not rise from those? (Or from a violent takeover by another nation, in some cases.) But it's a risk factor to be sure, and when talking about socialists in particular I wouldn't trust them to do things differently enough if they tried that. Anyway I don't think Marx is the ultimate authority on governmental changes, if nothing else we have 140 years of history he didn't get to see.
> Does that make him a "Gulag president"?
I don't think so, because it wasn't built into the system. In an alternative history where this would become the new norm he would be (not exactly "Gulag" because of other factors, but an autocrat for sure).
> the arrogance of thinking that "I could do better"
Any socialist who wants a non-Gulag socialism doesn't have anyone to compete against.
> the naivete of thinking you'd be left in peace
You probably won't be, but Stalin in particular is a weaker example because he used exactly the Gulag ideology and mechanisms built into the system.
You say that as if gulags were orthogonal to socialism. Unfortunately, they are an inseparable feature.
The thing about socialism is that it is, at its base, a collectivist political system. The individual has value only insofar as they are a contributing member of the collective. Any opposition to the collective, whether active or passive (as in: just leave me alone), thereatens the entire project, because the collective depends on unity of action.
A useful metaphor is how an army operates: the grunt soldier on the ground *must* follow orders dilligently, because the army's fitness as a fighting force depends on everyone holding up their end. Therefore, disobedience, goldbricking, absenteeism, etc. must be punished severely.
Because the socialist polity depends on everyone doing their part (which isn't necessarily what those individuals would particularly want to be doing), and must maintain unity, anyone who doesn't fit in must be punished or purged from the system.
That's how you get gulags.
What you describe seems like a totalitarianism? I don't know if your definition of socialism is too narrow or it is indeed pointless or impossible to have "societal ownership of means of production" without high level of collectivism.
What is "societal ownership of means of production" supposed to mean anyway?
If you live in a relatively large country - in the tens of millions, say - how do you propose to exercise your ownership? If you postulate that "societal ownership" doesn't actually translate into each individual member of society having an ownership stake (a "share", if you will), you've just reinvented "the King owns everything". If you acknowledge that each member of society *does* have a share, then you've fallen into the classic "divorce of ownership and control" problem - the people who actually decide how the means of production are to be used are the managers, rather than the owners, which means that the political establishment and bureaucracy have sole control of your economic system - which is how real socialism has tended to shake out.
What's important to remember is that if the state owns all productive enterprise, in whatever fashion, the coercive means available to the state expand greatly. It retains its monopoly on violence, *and* it is able to exercise economic coercion, as well, because you depend on the state for your livelihood.
The ownership/control distinction makes it difficult to hold the managers accountable, and it creates significant problems of policy. Are the various state enterprises supposed to cooperate or compete? If they're supposed to cooperate, then collectivism and central planning becomes inevitable. The individual citizens thus become cogs in the system, with everything from available education to job assignments (up to, and including, where you get to live) being dictated by the Plan.
If, on the other hand, you want the collectively-owned enterprises to compete, you've got crony capitalism where politically appointed managers get rich off of businesses that they have no better claim to than you do (except, they have connections that you lack). This is also true in the cooperation scenario.
Politically, you descend into totalitarianism, because that's the only way you can reliably maintain "societal ownership". If you allow full political pluralism, you will get a government that wants to privatise state-owned property sooner, rather than later (if only to enrich themselves and their cronies).
In short, "societal ownership" concentrates power, and concentrated power will reliably be used by the powerful against the powerless. Most of the problems people have with capitalism arise from insufficient guards *against* power concentration (in politically-connected businesses that are Too Big to Fail). Trying to fight it through *greater* concentration of economic power is driving out the Devil with Satan.
Hear hear!
>I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's masterful takedown of the notion that "real socialism has never been tried."
I'm reminded of Jordan Peterson's debate with Slavoj Zizek and his utter confusion that the actual person in front of him isn't saying anything remotely alike what the imaginary opponent in his head would say. (Zizek, for his part, was very polite, in a manner I cannot.)
Which is to say, I know I'm late to the party, but in the interest of the local epistemic ecosystem, I just cannot let this one slide. I mean, if you wanted to show that Adraste's argument is inherently fallacious, you probably couldn't find a better analogy to demonstrate that.
Which, in turn, is to say that no actual existing people ever argue that "real socialism has never been tried". They claim it has been tried and, empirically, stacks up pretty well to the alternatives. (To which intellectually dishonest people respond with "Stalin! Gulags!", to which we respond that we never claim it went perfectly well in every way, just that, you know, it still wins on average, and if that's your issue, you should be absolutely horrified about all the things capitalist states did throughout their history. To which intellectually dishonest people either cover their ears, start explaining how that wasn't real capitalism, or start explaining how socialism is different because it's literally all Stalin and Gulags and anything else we could point to is not real socialism. I've been there, dozens of times, quite a few of them around here.)
What's more, I suspect where this meme came from, and it just shows Peterson (or you, in case it's you who mixed up the terms) is yet another step removed from actual debate from actual people. To be precise, it was originally about communism. Since some people insist that communication requires that words mean things, they kept pointing out that communism, in its currently accepted technical definition, is just literally not something anyone has ever done (on a scale bigger than a kibbutz or a Hutterite colony). This is a simple empirical fact, which can be demonstrated not only by comparing the definition to reality, but also by the fact that none of the supposedly "communist" societies ever believed, claimed, or attempted to be one. (E.g., the Soviet Republics in the Union were "Socialist" for a reason, PR of China didn't claim even that much until as late as Deng.) However, for some other people, this is bullshit, words are supposed to be emotionally evocative, "communism" is supposed to evoke Stalin and gulags, and demands for semantical clarity are fundamentally attempts to whitewash that.
But, again, maybe it was in fact your point that Adraste is among the latter, in which case, good job. (Me, I'm on the side of Beroe, at least as far as his point is "we should be able to discuss this shit honestly", and personal experiences with this here is certainly one of the reasons.)
Yeah... no. If you go back and read Marx's actual words, he used the terms "communist" and "socialist" as synonymous and interchangeable. They mean the same thing; the "that's not really communism, it's just socialism" nonsense stems from embarrassed people trying to distance their policy preferences from inconvenient historical facts involving mountains of corpses and abject failure on every level.
I... rest my case?
I mean, how is your response anything but an attempt to cast a spell to magically turn me into a straw figure that you're familiar with?
(Also, just to cut this one short - if you ever "go back and read Marx's actual words" where he uses the terms in question the way a mid-XIX-century person would, they'll be accompanied with translator's/editor's note warning you not to interpret them in their later-Marx slash current meaning.)
So I pointed out that people have been changing the meanings of the words to try to play semantic games and obfuscate the massive failures of communism. You say I'm wrong... because the meanings have changed?
You freely admit I'm right, and therefore I'm somehow wrong. Are you even reading what you're writing?
> First, the supreme arrogance [of] "if I was in charge I could get it right!"
I would've said "You don't get to be in charge. Unless you personally are the next Stalin, Mao, Xi or Castro. Whatever idea of communism you have in your head isn't what's going to be what happens. Whoever Does What He Must To Become Supreme Leader is the one who decides. And that person won't be very nice."
But this concern is sidestepped in democratic socialism, where people can vote out the dickhead and, potentially, get rid of socialism (but probably don't, because they like it at least somewhat).
There is a certain type of person who would look at the mountains of skulls that Genghis Khan
piled up and before judging it evil, ask whether it was a state acting or a group of individuals.
States/governments, "democratic" or otherwise, have absolutely no privileged moral status: judge their acts exactly as you would any other entity, or accept that you have the moral compass no better than that of a my-god-told-me-to-it zealot.
I would judge a policeman making a legal stop and search of a vehicle or person differently than a private citizen doing the same on equally strong grounds. "Free" people choose to vest power with duly elected governments and those do have privileged status.
As I said, people can, and regularly do, cede their moral compasses to external entities, usually with justifications like that they "work in mysterious ways" or are "duly elected": road piracy, genocide against the Amalekites, extorting taxes, burning heretics, and other such acts might be frowned upon if not sanctioned by an entity accorded "privileged status."
Judging morality is an extremely subjective thing, of course, so I can't say you're "wrong" any more than I could say that about Torquemada, Paul Ehrlich or Pol Pot, just that I do not share your morality, such as it is.
It's quite possible we are talking about different subjects (and apologies if that's the case)
1. There exist "reckless" drivers who endanger lives of others on the road
2. We need a mechanism to apprehend such drivers
3. Some ad-hoc volunteer group might do this apprehending, possible one of the people sharing the road with said reckless driver
4. Alternatively you constitute an organization for the purpose of making such stops, vest them with necessary powers to increase compliance, reduce incentives for reckless driving, etc.
5. (4) is a superior moral "position" compared to (3)
1. is true, and I agree with 2.
I see no morally salient difference between 3. and 4.
3. I would judge this "ad-hoc volunteer group" by its actions: what its threshold for what it considers "reckless driving" was, how cruel its punishments for non-compliance were, how fair and effective its enforcement was, how it raises funds for its operation, and whether or not the group, independent of its role preventing reckless driving, recreationally murders kittens and puppies.
4. Indeed, one can vest organizations or individuals with power, even absolute power, but NOT with a moral carte blanche (or even a carte grise): they are still precisely as responsible for their actions as any other individual or group .
5. No, it's not.
3. At least as important as "how cruel it's punishments" are, "how fair and effective it's enforcement" was, "how it raises funds", etc. Is "how was it constituted" and "how is it sustained". Was informed consent on the part of people who have to live with it's consequences a part of it's creation and sustenance. It may not be possible for people at large to judge a specific action (was a specific traffic stop and search necessary? Was the car actually speeding? Did the driven actually threaten?) and indeed the "truth" may never be discoverable. So as a proxy we have rules and heuristics that require compliance on the part of the public but also give recourse in case of violation by authorities. As a practical way to allow people to get on with their lives and lead lead somewhat civilized lives such an arrangement is morally superior to anything you propose.
YOU don't really believe the "informed consent" thing: "sovereign citizens" might be the only people who actually do, and they are patently wrong about the state not imposing its will on them if they explicitly refuse to consent. So you're either insidiously using a personal definition of "consent" here, or you're repeating cached thoughts; I shall, in good faith, assume the latter.
Our ignorance of the facts of any particular case does not preclude us from judging the morality of the act, only whether or not said act actually occurred. For example, not knowing whether a man fell off a cliff accidentally or was pushed doesn't mean one cannot assess the morality of pushing people off cliffs.
One can reasonably argue that the state with all its horrors is the best humanity can achieve (I do not share this pessimism, and believe there is compelling evidence to the contrary, but I recognize this as ultimately an article of faith), but I do not see why according it a privileged MORAL status is logically consequent.
It is a heavy burden to make moral judgments on one's own, and the allure of pass it off to a "higher power" has tempted men for millennia, but I exhort you resist and to carry it. Be the "impersonal arbiter of morality" that Coria rejects.
I thought you were going somewhere else with this. We should in fact treat states with considerably more scepticism and tighter standards than we hold individuals, because we know that power is insidious
Street gang and drug cartels are more powerful than single individuals too. Would you hold them to tighter standards than individuals? I wouldn't: I judge smashing kneecaps, burning children alive, exercising "eminent domain," or any other act on its own merits, independent of the power of the entity committing that act. I find that's the only way one can be "fair" about moral judgments, and that matters to me.
All good in theory, but when you have to exercise judgement on the real world with limited information, I find it helpful to have priors based on theory and evidence of how individuals behave vs how individuals as members of a governing apparatus behave, and there are very different incentives and checks and balances (of very differing degrees of effectiveness) in place for the two groups. All of this leads me to treat state actions with considerably different standards.
That is a good point! In practical matters states and individuals act at vastly different scales (individuals do not launch invasions, establish social security through payroll taxes, etc. etc.) so not sure what comparisons are meaningful.
Where they may overlap, say, in resolving disputes via "elders in the community" versus "shared legal apparatus built on sound constitutional principles" my priors treat the outcomes from the former with _greater_ skepticism than the latter.
This discussion reminds me once again of the book Ending Medical Reversal: www.amazon.com/dp/1421417723, or the section in Emperor of All Maladies: www.amazon.com/dp/B017DQSQD6 where it talks about the rise and ignominious fall of radical mastectomies (and not just because one of the quotes above literally refers to the radical mastectomy as a brutal-but-necessary practice while not realizing it was only brutal).
As anyone who has worked in a lab can tell you, the scientific process is littered with plausible hypotheses that don't survive experimental confirmation. My problem with Beroe (and to some extent Coria) is that government experimentation writ large has two features:
1. It's almost always large scale - ensuring the impact is magnified
2. It's almost never iterated and improved. Detractors wish to end the program NOW, while promoters defend the program as-is, unable to repair and adjust for fear that any admission of failure will turn popular opinion against them.
Thus, it's nearly impossible for Coria's process to eventually arrive at a refined theory through the political process, and Beroe will rarely get it right on the first try while almost always ensuring the suffering is substantial when government gets it wrong.
1. If something is good, magnification is often good.
2. Agreed. We should be looking for ways to make governments more iterative.
1a. How good something is often depends on how well it has been iteratively refined. Single-shot solutions that work in practice as well as they were conceived in the mind are practically unicorns. This is why you don't publish the first draft of your manuscript, you have to refine your prototype, and your alpha software version will be buggy.
1b. An idea that works in small batches may well be scalable, but scaling brings its own challenges to be solved. Thus, combining the proof-of-concept stage with the scaling stage often leads even good ideas to failure.
It is notable that unlike in North America and Continental Europe, eugenics never really got anywhere as a practical policy in the UK even though the idea itself originated in England. Perhaps this is a function of the fact that Galton and other leaders of the British eugenics movement disliked coercive eugenics.
Adraste says that "eugenics was banned", but a lot of what goes on in medical genetics these days (e.g. selective abortions) would surely be regarded as eugenics by someone like Galton. My prediction is that new eugenic practices like embryo selection will gradually be normalized as part of medicine and eventually no one will call them eugenics.
This may be unimportant terminology -- or it may be important! -- but I take "eugenics" to mean a policy enforced from above to affect the population, whereas the things you describe are individual parents choosing not to have a child with X, for their own reasons.
"Eugenics" is whatever somebody is against, while "not eugenics" is whatever they are for.
Basically, over the course of the 1970s, the word "eugenics" was ret-conned into One of the Causes of the Holocaust.
This fit in well with a struggle that ambitious young leftist scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin were waging against largely WASPy scientists with nonleftist views like Ed Wilson, Bill Hamilton, George Williams, and John Smith.
Evolutionary theory was a great achievement of Anglo scientists, just as Los Alamos was a great achievement of primarily Jewish scientists. And many young scientists like Gould, Lewontin, Kamin, Rose, etc., found both the ethnicity and the social and political implications of evolutionary theorists to be deplorable. That great old WASP scientists in the evolutionary domain tended to have at some point in their lives expressed enthusiasm for eugenics could be used to degrade and eventually cancel their reputations, leaving the future more open for Gould and Co.
PDG. Pretty Darn Good, Scott.
This may be neither here nor there, but there is a little problem with the idea of a Nobel sperm bank: Nobel prize winners tend to be old, and there seems to be mounting evidence that the age of fathers is directly correlated with deleterious mutations. The effect is of course not as large as for women, but it's not small. In particular, the statistics for schizophrenia are pretty frightening.
(Fields medal sperm bank, maybe...)
Mandate that all scientists donate germ cells early in their careers as a condition of receiving grants, freeze them until we see how successful they wind up being.
As if people were not competitive enough! I've seen enough bad behavior from people who thirsted after the most prominent award in my field (generally unsuccessfully). OTOH, perhaps, deep down, they never liked themselves that much, and the prospect of having very many descendants would have secretly unnerved them.
My old religion considered masturbation a "serious" sin. That plus the coersiveness makes this proposal ugly.
We're not all born entitled to grants, so I say it's not coercive.
Aren't grants a key source of income in academia? Coersion exists in degrees, but "people aren't entitled to their income, so taking away income isn't coercive" is a pretty hard line to take, as is similar responses like "well they could just choose a different profession, so no one forced them to be in academia".
He who pays the piper calls the tune. It's an eternal truism.
Here is how I (maybe) convinced a liberal friend that good eugenics is ok.
(This conversation is abridged and paraphrased but the gist of it is here)
Me: I take it you are pro choice.
She: of course.
Me: And therefore are in favour of a mother aborting a foetus with Down’s syndrome.
She. Of course. Same argument
me: as an aside the EU has recently said that advances in medical intervention had largely eliminated Down’s syndrome - that medical advance was abortion based on earlier screening for the disorder.
Me: now imagine a pill that doesn’t abort the foetus but cures it. Is the taking of that pill immoral given that you are ok with a abortifacients?
She: the baby is brought to term?
Me: yes. Cured and brought to term.
She. Ok. I suppose so.
Me: one of the consequences of Down’s syndrome is low IQ. Should we then screen for people with low IQ, and design a pill to fix that?
She: hmm, I’m a bit dubious about that. That’s a leap.
Me: can the mother who knows she is carrying a child with low IQ child - assume there is a screening for that - abort that child?
She: I suppose. I mean it’s a woman’s right to choose.
Me: such screening may become common in the future. If you believe in the right to take the abortifacient you basically have to believe the mother has a right to take the pill that cures.
She: hang on. We can’t allow people to take pills that turn babies blue because they like the idea of a blue baby.
Me: you’ve abandoned the idea of bodily autonomy there but you are right, note I am specifically talking about a pill that cures, that does no harm.
She:ok.
Me: ok. So if we cure a baby with a potential 80 Iq, why not cure a foetus with a potential 100 of IQ, get it to 115
She:hold on - we don’t cure normality.
Me: we do try, all the time, to make people smarter don’t we? Look at the money we spend on education, on getting people to maximise potential.
She: hmm. Well it’s something to think about.
> Me: we do try, all the time, to make people smarter don’t we? Look at the money we spend on education, on getting people to maximise potential.
Getting people to maximise their native potential is trivially not the same thing as trying to increase the ratio of innately smart people to average/dumb people. Many people, I expect, would say they support "getting people to maximise potential" on grounds of aesthetically/morally supporting something-something-self-fulfillment, not out of a general preference for smart people that would get them to press a magic button to poof smart people into existence fully-formed!
In any case, within your worldview, what's wrong with the blue babies? Nothing *harmful* about being blue. Blue people might look very fetching. If we can have some weird aesthetic preference for smartness and you think that's vald, why couldn't we have a preference for blue skin? (I would sooner allow blue babies than screening for intelligence, because I think there's a real risk of the latter becoming popular enough for whole varieties of human brains to go extinct, and I think that would be a monstrously awful thing; whereas I doubt enough people would take the blue-baby option for any of the natural pigmentations to get selected out of existence, and besides, physical traits like this seem less important to preserve than the full gamut of sentient minds.)
If somebody had, say, a liver or kidney problem that was interfering with brain function indirectly - say, disturbed sleep, or chronic low blood sugar - getting that cured could be seen as a reasonable step in pursuit of fulfilling their potential, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates
Wow. I don't think I've come across a more perfect hillbilly place name than "Troublesome Creek".
Speaking as someone who generally aligns with "Adraste" here, I think the comparison of eugenics and environmentalism misses the mark. An effective steelman would recognize the difference in scope between the two:
Eugenics is a highly specific concern with improving the "quality" of human genetics, while environmentalism is a broad umbrella term for a range of concerns about preserving ecosystem functions, conserving natural resources, preserving biodiversity, protecting cute animals, reducing human health risks from pollution, etc.
Eugenics lends itself to a narrow range of policy prescriptions, of which the most effective and least morally-risky (sex education, access to reversible birth control, prevention of sexual abuse) can all be promoted from a human-rights perspective without reference to eugenics. There are literally thousand of ways to advance environmentalism through public policy, most of which would be impossible to talk about without reference to environmental concerns because the topic is so broad.
I actually do have a strong 'internal taboo' against forms of environmentalism that seem high-risk for human rights abuses and other moral hazards. Any talk of overpopulation, antinatalism, or Malthusian dooming sets off my alarm bells for exactly the reasons you set out here. "Degrowth," primitivism, and other sorts of pastoralist reactionary environmentalism also seem dangerous, and a lot of animal rights (anything even remotely associated with Peter Singer) is very sketchy.
But those are bounded areas of concern that I can cleanly separate from other bounded areas. There's no conceptual connection between "we shouldn't dump untreated sewage and industrial chemicals in the river where we get our drinking water" and "humanity is a parasite on the planet that should be eradicated."
I don't think you can draw such a clean distinction between "we should discourage undesirables from reproducing" and "we should prevent undesirables from reproducing," or between "we should encourage desirable men to donate sperm" and "we should coerce desirable women into being impregnated with the sperm of desirable men" (also a thing that happened!)
"Eugenics" was a much broader concept at the peak of its popularity. All sorts of things considered positive for the next generation got lumped into it. I suppose that fits with ideas getting "heretical" as they leak out from their inventors to the masses (or at least midwits). https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
> Eugenics lends itself to a narrow range of policy prescriptions, of which the most effective and least morally-risky (sex education, access to reversible birth control, prevention of sexual abuse)
That's plainly wrong. The most effective eugenic prescriptions are morally abhorrent, but orders of magnitude more effective than sex ed. You can probably get one order of magnitude of effectiveness over sex ed while staying in morally light-grey area.)
I think that the discussion of Ehrlich highlights that many nominally ethical questions hinge on factual questions. The same applies to the 9/11 terrorists. If their factual beliefs were correct, then their actions would have potentially ultimately been correct.
I think in general people are too critical of others over perceived ethical shortcomings, and not critical enough when people err on the facts.
When it comes to Ehrlich, even at the time there was significant reason to doubt his conclusions. David Friedman notes here: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-first-post-done-again that he published a paper: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html in 1972 that showed that it was not at all obvious that the net externalities of additional population were large, or even that they were negative.
In a similar vein, I imagine that George W. Bush is probably a decent person generally, and I would not be particularly concerned in his presence.
But his hubris in being willing to make decisions at least nominally based on factual mistakes led to mountains of bodies.
As noted in this post, fossil fuels kill tens of thousands of people a year. Those deaths, too, are a function of potentially well-meaning people who limit nuclear power who are ultimately killing more people than any mass murderer could ever hope to.
Ehrlich might have "just" made a factual mistake, but factual mistakes with a lot riding on them are much worse than they are usually given credit for.
This relates to Bryan Caplan's point about how evil politicians are (cf. How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery). Politicians routinely make decisions of tremendous import and they don't devote the deserved effort determine the factual underpinnings of their decisions. This is rather like shooting bullets randomly in a bad neighborhood. It's not terribly unlikely that you'll kill a bad guy, but with no effort to determine whom you'll hurt, you could easily destroy lives of the innocent.
“Ehrlich did the best he could have based on what he knew at the time.”
Perhaps, but now it’s 60 years later and it’s abundantly clear that he was massively wrong. Nevertheless he has stuck to his guns all this time. No apology, no analysis of where and why he went so wrong, and most maddeningly, no effort to see what we can learn from his fiasco. Indeed, there are still plenty of people who believe he was right then and still is right today. Shameful intellectual dishonesty.
I’d be interested to see where the 1-3 IQ points per century dysgenic effect number is from. I imagined it would be much worse.
Cremieux’s work on ideal vs actual fertility (using the GSS) came out to 1.5 points lost per generation in the United States, without consideration of immigration. Considering nations with the highest measured IQs are currently on the wrong end of demographic trends (especially East Asia), I would’ve expected much worse.
I don't know where he got those numbers. It's consistent with https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5293043/
I feel I'm somewhere in the middle. If you're intent on eugenicist practices, the best way in my mind would be to simply give couples as much high-quality information as possible and allow them to decide for themselves without coercion. People will (and do) practice some form of eugenics by screening not only for congenital defects but simply for partners. I think that a Nobel sperm bank will just end up being a rich smart guy vanity project rather than an atrocity. It's important to be raised by smart people, not just created by them. Considering, for instance, that genes for intellectual creativity are also linked to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, or that genes for entrepreneurship are linked to addictive weaknesses, you could easily roll with good dice and get low numbers, in a manner of speaking.
The real thing that scares me is this prostrate, blind, all-in worship of IQ and the lurking shadow of its ugly cousin, genetic determinism (particularly in regards to culture). I see it referenced here regarding Ashkenazi Jews. But the truth is that Ashkenazi Jews benefit socially from a heavy focus on communalism (you can read the writings of conservative Jewish people if you don't believe me) and in the most successful cases, a pedigree in high-grade European intellectual traditions. The Ashkenazim that send antisemites to the early life sections, for instance, are often descended from people who were educated in the erudite German intellectual culture that persisted into the Weimar Republic. Compare these individuals with the Hasidim in NY, whose kids often can barely speak English or do middle school mathematics and who may in fact have a communal drug problem. I distrust this IQ fetishization that has become more and more endorsed by tech-adjacent merchant rightists, and the idea that you can just up numbers and save the world is not going to lead anywhere good. I fear that it's most likely to be an apologia for elitist exploitation encoded in law. I think it's a greater threat than Eugenics writ large.
Also, on that last paragraph, the idea that you can and should brook awful abuses and necessary discomforts for vulnerable people with the idea that in the end they will be both necessary and justified itself has a precedent, it's called the 20th Century.
Exactly.
Well said
I hadn't heard of any communal drug problem about US ultra-orthodox. Scott Sumner even uses them to mock our measures of poverty, since they lack the dysfunction associated with it. https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-face-of-american-poverty/
Sorry, my mistake, it's those who leave the community who often end up with drug habits. I'm mostly pulling from this https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html
You are aware that ultra-orthodox poverty is likely exaggerated due to pervasive social-security fraud?
I had not heard of that.
Sorry, what is your paragraph in Ashkenazi’s supposed to prove? They are not smart due to their communalism or educational traditions (at least at the individual level).
My point was in retort to "Or consider Greg Cochran’s hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews have a 15-point genetic IQ advantage - there aren’t a lot of Jews starving or in prison. If you could lift everyone up fifteen points, you could come close to ending poverty even within developed countries."
I was making a comparison between the Ashkenazi intellectual elite and an underperforming contingent to show that culture can step in where IQ is lacking to avoid the negatives that are supposed to be obviated by IQ, and that educational deficits can allow poverty despite apparent ethnic IQ advantages. As to your comment, I don't know to what you would attribute the intelligence difference. Even if you took a hard geneticist explanation surely the communal predilections would have reproductive consequences for gene propagation; unless you think Ashkenazim as we know them were formed fully out of the earth as a particular group and gifted with unique intelligence.
Pre-emancipation Ashkenazi would be a better argument for the importance of culture. They weren't accomplishing much of interest to the rest of society with the high IQs their many generations of selection had produced.
It's funny that people are taking "Jews are smarter for genetic reasons" as a given. Studies have given very different results depending on who is conducting them - and, if the study shows no difference from the mean, that is ascribed to antisemitism. (That is certainly the case with a study by Karl Pearson, who was no antisemite and was in fact disappointed; of course that study is very old indeed.) The average IQ in Israel is not particularly high, even if you restrict to Ashkenazim. There have been periods where there has been a very notable concentration of intellectuals or people in the professions with Jewish last names, but then you have to take into account you are comparing what was often mainly an urban middle-class population (often impoverished, but middle-class nonetheless) at a time when the bulk of population was neither urban nor middle-class.
Could there be some advantageous mutations that were more frequent among Ashkenazim? It could be the case. But (a) only a minority of Ashkenazim are likely to have had them, (b) much of that must have left the group by now, since they most likely also affected whether carriers tended to marry out of the group! (Out-of-group marriage was a great rarity before WWI - but you see it all the time in biographies of high achievers from that period; in fact lists of great Jewish this-or-another are full of people that Jews would not usually consider Jews.) At any rate, in this case, all of that genetic talk is, AFAIK, conjectural, and can be twisted into just about any just-so story people like.
Well said.
The IQ/race nexus is one of those things that always seems to lead back to a group of self-appointed superiors ignoring their own weaknesses (in this case mental health, physical health, athletic ability, social ability...) and elevating their one self-percieved advantage to the status of a universal good that must be distributed to the world by fiat.
This image of an anxious, obese loner deciding that everyone needs to have his children because he scored well on a written assessment gets extra funny when you factor in that one of his other pet obsessions (AI) seems placed to trivialize human effort in math, coding, writing and games long before it comes for any activity which requires hand-eye coordination or social skills.
I looked up the Nobel sperm bank, because I'd never heard of it, and it doesn't appear that it was outlawed or ran into legal issues. It operated for 19 years, produced 217 children (none actually descended from Nobelists), and then shut down when the founder died - it was funded out of his own pocket and his heirs weren't interested in carrying it on. It seems like the main obstacle to such a project isn't "eugenics is taboo" so much as "it's hard for a random guy to go up to a Nobel prize winner, ask them for their sperm, and get a yes."
The reason that's hard is that you get accused of eugenics if you say yes.
If the government were to sponsor a national bank with sperm from talented people, I'm sure they could get some success.
Why stop there? The government could assign sperm to women according to it’s own sensibilities while their at it.
Why stop there? The government could select superior female specimens to ensure the highest quality of baby produced, after all there's no point in wasting the Nobel sperm on average or low quality women.
I'm sure I heard of something like that being carried out somewhere... it must definitely have worked, right? High quality sperm, high quality mothers, government backing - what could go wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
The unfortunate reason eugenics and the like get a bad rap is because in the real world, the kind of people who went "Wow, that is a *marvellous* idea, we definitely should do it!" **were** the Nazis. To quote from an 1895 story by M.P. Shiel, titled "The S.S." about a secret society of eugenicists killing off the unfit and disguising those murders as suicides:
"And now let me apply these facts to the Europe of our own time. We no longer have world-serious war—but in its place we have a scourge, the effect of which on the modern state is precisely the same as the effect of war on the ancient, only,— in the end,— far more destructive, far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting. The name of this pestilence is Medical Science. Yes, it is most true, shudder — shudder— as you will! Man's best friend turns to an asp in his bosom to sting him to the basest of deaths. The devastating growth of medical, and especially surgical, science—that, if you like, for us all, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of what surpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions" whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancient State was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons in the field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receiving deadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children. The net result is in each case the same — the altered ratio of the total amount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive disease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent, must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy …We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease — laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence. Do you know that at this moment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likeness suffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all of whom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in the hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundred people, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formed men, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women? On every hand—with a thrill of intensest joy, I say it!— is to be seen, if not yet commencing civilisation, then progress, progress— wide as the world— toward it: only here— at the heart— is there decadence, fatty degeneration. Brain-evolution— and favouring airs— and the ripening time— and the silent Will of God, of God— all these in conspiracy seem to be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamable luxury of glory— when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death, more disease— that is the sad, the unnatural record; children especially— so sensitive to the physician's art— living on by hundreds of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow, who in former times would have died. And if you consider that the proper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing the curable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, you may find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simple question: why? Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is a cruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to say that such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and must therefore be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced, to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribald tongue of a priest might falter…Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, of the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the function of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say, are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know how Sparta—the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her—answered them. Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-being of the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fell under the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of his parents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but a commission of the Phyle in which he was born decided the question. If he was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on a place called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of this that never did the sun in his course light on man half so godly stalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout old Sparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and for all, they were resolved to have done with. The word which they used to express the idea "ugly," meant also "hateful," "vile," "disgraceful" — and I need hardly point out to you the significance of that fact alone; for they considered — and rightly— that there is no sort of natural reason why every denizen of earth should not be perfectly hale, integral, sane, beautiful — if only very moderate pains be taken to procure this divine result."
> Why stop there? The government could select superior female specimens to ensure the highest quality of baby produced,
Absolutely. That would be a condition of assignment.
Or we could go full Handmaidens Tale, and conscript suitable candidates.
Maybe not quite, but we've already turned the fertility industry into an industry, where surrogates (often in Third World countries) carry the babies.
You can, if well-off enough, buy the ova of young, healthy women (often screened to be college-students and athletic), get donor sperm if the male partner's sperm isn't good quality enough, and hire a surrogate to gestate the pregnancy, thus enabling someone to have a baby without one speck of participation in the entire process. Why not farm out the tedious work of nine months pregnancy to the lesser women while the ova of the superior women are used to create the poly-genetically screened embryos for implantation?
"Thank you for your interest and we all look forward to being able to offer you the option of making absolutely certain that your next pregnancy arrives in your pre-chosen choice of pink or blue."
Throw in "yeah, I want Junior to have green eyes" while you're at it, might as well once you're going this route:
https://www.fertility-docs.com/programs-and-services/pgd-screening/choose-your-babys-eye-color/
This is a fully general argument against absolutely every political and social idea ever. Just assert that whatever idea you don't like will be carried to whatever horrific and ridiculous extremes you can think of, and you can demand that the whole idea be taken off the table. And the best thing about this is all the thinking it saves.
It’s a bleak picture but it sounds like natural selection at its best. It’s awesome in the true sense of the word. The possibility that reproduction, the essential motivating factor in animal life, will finally become something we can do with tools.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for people to do this. But why would even 10% of the population be interested?
While infant adoption and similar things do happen, most people are much more motivated to put in the work to raise infants that are biologically theirs than to raise unrelated infants, no matter how "perfect" the latter may be. This is an evolutionarily stable situation for obvious reasons.
And no, the Chinese government has not shown any interest in coercing people to do what you describe, either.
The market that actually exists is the one for enabling people to have great children *who the parents feel are biologically theirs*.
>Now, in fact Galton was almost as wrong as Ehrlich - modern research suggests the dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century - things will be very different long before we notice it.
Extrapolating backwards, wouldn't this imply that ancient Romans were around 120-160 IQ, and ancient Babylonians 140-220? Is this trend only valid under modern conditions or something?
The large amount of premature deaths which were worsened by starvation and poor living conditions.
I would assume it’s only very recently in human history in which the correlation between intelligence and societal success has not naturally been followed with the passing on of genes through more children. That is, the trend for wealthier people to have fewer children to pass on their genetics seems to have only really begun to occur within the past century.
Wealth correlated to inherited land ownership rather than intellectual ability throughout most historical times and places. What about that screams "survival of the smartest"?
Babylonians calculated decimal numbers in base 60. How many people could do that today?
Can you read a clock? Then you're calculating in base 60. Angles are also measured in base 60 (i.e. 360 degrees = 60*6). It's true that most of the numbers we encounter are in base 10 (and even clocks and angles are rendered in base 10 for common use), but that's because of dumb historical reasons. Base 10 is quite inefficient because it only has 2 factors (2 and 5), so it's difficult to subdivide and do fractions with. Base 12 (with the factors 2, 3, 4, and 6) is much better than base 10 and base 60 is simply base 12 with the factor 5 thrown in, so it's really quite elegant.
I personally prefer base 16 because I'm a computer programmer - for general uses, it's hard to find anything better than base 60.
The hypothesis as I have heard it is that the massive decline in infant mortality brought about by the Industrial Revolution allowed for a level of dysgenics that could never have happened in more malthusian times, so the decline will only have started a couple of centuries or so ago.
The fact that a lot of people still take Paul R. Ehrlich or his more mainstream communicators seriously even to this day is quite remarkable. One part of me is quite bitter over how fears of underpopulation are starting to become more mainstream and a respectable high status belief in certain circles, mainly due to the fact that most people concerned about underpopulation, probably would get behind the overpopulation hysteria in the counterfactual world where such beliefs are trendy and somewhat contrarian. That is most people in the underpopulation camp lack the proper justification and analytic tools required to deduce that overpopulation is not a concern, and the main reason they believe underpopulation is a problem is due seeing some short form media of Elon Musk etc. saying that he thinks its a problem. Don't get me wrong I think Malthus's Iron law of wages is coming for all of us in the long run, due to diminishing returns to labor and the fact that an additional child imposes costs on your other children, and many of the positive externalities are not as big and as long lasting as they may seem, and future creatures can replicate at a much higher rate etc. Although high tech subsistence isn't so bad.
“They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us. Show me another idea like that and I bet I’d be against that one too.”
The one that occurred to me is transgender advocacy pushing sexual confusion on children.
"Communism/socialism"
Please don't conflate these. Mao killed 15-45 million people in his great leap corpseward. Denmark has no analogous death toll.
Denmark is a capitalist country which doesn't resemble Venezuela.
Perhaps we need a word for mixed-economy model countries. Yes, Denmark and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model countries in general are very different from Venezuela. They are also quite different from the United States.
Closer to the US, I would think.
"An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare[15] in a largely tax-funded system."
"High trade union density and collective bargaining coverage.[23] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United States."
"The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score."
"The Nordic countries share active labour market policies as part of a social corporatist economic model intended to reduce conflict between labour and the interests of capital. This corporatist system is most extensive in Norway and Sweden, where employer federations and labour representatives bargain at the national level mediated by the government. Labour market interventions are aimed at providing job retraining and relocation."
Not so similar to the US, I think.
Socialism is public ownership of the means of production. Denmark is just a tiny capitalist jurisdiction with a homogeneous population that can run more interventionist government marginally more successfully than other places. Don't confuse it with socialism.
That is an extremely narrow definition of socialism. In the USA, the GOP routinely denounces as socialist a wide variety of government programs which don't involve any public ownership of the means of production.
The problem with that argument is that it seems like it could be applied to almost any position. For example, you could also describe the conservatives who want ban trans kids from getting medical care and force them into the foster system if their parents disagree as "smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit" because they think they know what's best for these children better than the kids and their families do. I'm not trying to get into an object level debate about transgenderism - my point is, if you think any position held by smug Western elites is wrong, you have to dismiss every political view that has ever been held by a large number of people.
If you ask me, the lesson to be learned from eugenics and forced sterilization is that common-sense morality is usually correct. Trolleys are rare outside of thought experiments. If you think that the only way to save the world is to do things that most people would consider serious human rights violations, you're probably wrong.
"and unfortunately, power mad leftists frequently push ahead regardless, slaughtering thousands or millions because they're so sure the world has to change to whatever their cult calls for" Power-mad right-wingers, too. The Nazis seem relevant to a conversation about eugenics.
This post is largely about how well-meaning people can make horrible, destructive mistakes because they had too much faith in their own intelligence and their own knowledge of what's best for everyone. That failure mode appears in all groups, including your in-group.
Power mad rightists would also happily slaughter millions given the chance, but the memetic immunity against fascism ended up being stronger for some reason, although it seems on the decline lately.
The conservatives you are describing are not “elites”, in the sense that they are not part of the intelligentsia. Being part of the intelligentsia is the common denominator I see between the eugenics elite and the transgender elite.
So I’ll grant you “smug” but reject “elites.”
Nor do I think that conservatives are in general over impressed with their own intelligence - that’s a sin of the left, not of the right, putting aside the Wills & Buckleys.
I like your observation about trolley car problems. And I agree that “common sense” morality seems to be more often right than wrong.
But I think that your statement about trans kids being banned from medical care etc. assumes the premise - namely, that they are actually trans. It appears to me that there’s a kind of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy aspect to the trans situation when it comes to parents who support their supposedly trans kids, at least the ones who aren’t adults, and I think that is largely at the bottom of conservative questioning of the reality of trans in situations involving children,
I don’t think I have ever read anyone who exudes more admiration for their own (supposed) intelligence than Victor Davis Hanson.
Hmm. I’ll have to think about that. I’ve never had the sense that he was impressed with himself, but if he is, he has a self to be impressed with.
Well I guess that’s a matter of opinion, and it’s an opinion he seems to hold. Reading his prose to me is like watching someone preen in front of a mirror.
In a world where Eleizer Yudkowsky exists?
Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug?
Haven’t spent much time with them so I will defer.
I guess this is a definitional thing. To me, "elite" means "wealthy and powerful," not necessarily part of the intelligentsia.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far from the subject of the post, but I think that if most trans kids were that way because their parents had Munchausen by Proxy, more of them would rebel and detransition. In most cases of MbP, if the child survives into adolescence, they start to rebel and try to either summon help or escape. The charade rarely lasts into adulthood, and if it does, it's usually because the parent went to extreme lengths to maintain control, like Dee Dee Blanchard handcuffing her daughter to a bed. On the other hand, most adults who transitioned as children stay transitioned, even though most of them are out of their parents' control and could detransition if they wanted.
David Reimer is a good illustration of what happens on the rare occasion that a child is forced to transition. He rebelled against girlhood for his entire childhood until he was finally allowed to detransition at fifteen. If transgender children were made that way by their parents, we'd expect detransition rates to be much higher.
I think we don't have enough good data to know anything yet, and there certainly seem to be some indications of parental pressure. I don't know about Jazz Jennings state of mind as a six year old child, but I do think a mother who parades her kid around on talk shows, is perfectly happy to open up her home and family for seasons of a reality TV show (including discussing her child's personal intimate life) and seemingly doing her best to turn it into a modern version of a carnival freakshow attraction is motivated at least in part by her own ego and desire for fame and notoriety.
Oh, some parents definitely love the attention. But they seem to be a small minority of parents of trans kids. There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States, but we've never heard of the vast majority of them because their parents don't plaster them all over the media. It's the same with parents of sick kids - a small minority love the attention their kid's illness brings them, and an even smaller minority deliberately sicken their children, but we certainly shouldn't assume that most parents of sick kids have ulterior motives.
>There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States, but we've never heard of the vast majority of them because their parents don't plaster them all over the media.
It is rather a tragedy- this includes trans adults, not just teens- that the people that become the "face" of the movement are so often the absolute worst candidates for such, and poison the perception regarding the whole populous.
" There are an estimated 300,000 trans teens in the United States"
"Estimated" is the weasel word there. Are they that many, or are we only seeing an increase due to social factors? Is it a case that there were many more trans gender people in the past, but they were forcibly repressed? How do we measure transness? Do we go "if three year old Johnny wants a sparkly princess dress like his sister has, that means Johnny is trans and we should be calling her Janie" or do we cool it until Johnny is 12/16/18?
“Elite” as the wealthy & powerful is certainly one definition. But for eugenics, I don’t think that the people pushing it were that kind of elite.
The kind of “elite” I see doing that is a self-appointed intellectual elite, whose power derives from the respect we accord people who are well-educated and who are in a position to disseminate their ideas through public media. And that’s the same “elite” I see pushing transgenderism on kids.
I don’t think that MbP parents necessarily “force” their children to transition. But it does seem that some parents create an environment for children in which they are guided toward transition, and the parents seem to be emotionally invested in the process, beyond simply wanting what’s best for the child.
No doubt, with some kids it won’t work. Whether we will see any kind of mass de-transitioning remains to be seen. It’s got to be tough.
It appears to me that the trans situation is a subset of the eugenics situation. Or maybe they just overlap. Both involve medical interference with existing biological functions, for social purposes. In both, there’s a core of logic that must be recognized. But as with so many things, we run into Yogi Berra: “ “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
Conversitives airn't the elites; especially not the populous conservatives of the current era
Except the conservatives are not, by and large, the elite; think of the sneering about the "transphobic backlash" with regard to the Bud Light boycott. I don't think the people boycotting Budweiser were doing it out of hatred of trans people but rather "you told us to piss off because you didn't want our dirty custom anymore and this was the kind of market you preferred, so okay, we're pissing off".
>If you ask me, the lesson to be learned from eugenics and forced sterilization is that common-sense morality is usually correct. Trolleys are rare outside of thought experiments. If you think that the only way to save the world is to do things that most people would consider serious human rights violations, you're probably wrong.
Unfortunately this assumes the conclusion and privileges whoever gets to set the definition of "human rights." Or does the heuristic only work on the world scale?
"Don't perform mass experiments and off-label drug testing on a confused, easily-influenced populace" sounds pretty common-sense to me, but it's not too popular to my left. Common-sense morality fails when word games get played, like the distinctions between treating people equally and treating them equitably.
>"Don't perform mass experiments and off-label drug testing on a confused, easily-influenced populace" sounds pretty common-sense to me, but it's not too popular to my left.
That's because it also assumes conclusions and privileges people who get to set the definitions of "confused" and "easily-influenced." After all, things that are now generally considered to be human rights violations have been justified on the grounds that the victims were unable to make their own decisions, such as slavery and colonialism, or the cases of professional guardians who get a doctor to declare some well-off elderly person to be mentally incompetent so the guardian can take control, dump the victim in a cheap nursing home, and steal all their money. It also raises questions of whether it's better to experiment on a confused, easily-influenced populace than to let natural processes take their course when those processes would be harmful - how do you think pediatric cancer drugs are developed? It seems to me that the right is just as prone to playing word games as the left.
>how do you think pediatric cancer drugs are developed?
Carefully, with good data practices, not *en masse* with shoddy data collection, online scripts to skirt around the safety protocols, and resistance to improving that data collection.
>It seems to me that the right is just as prone to playing word games as the left.
I hold the left in substantial "word game debt" due to the multiple wreckings of "racism," and for over-reliance on claiming that things are human rights, but I would agree that the right is not completely immune to a problem that is inherent to language.
Oh come on, now you're just doing the thing of "X was a policy that was bad, Y is also a policy, so that means it's also bad."
No syllogism is involved. They are both bad policies, without regard to the other. But there is a family resemblance.
All policies are bad, anarchy the only morally blameless option :)
This might be a bit ungenerous.
There is currently a fairly prominent Canadian psychologist who is loudly denouncing transgender advocacy as damaging to children (and families and even those it purports to help), and has what appears to be a reasonably large corpus of data to back that claim.
Interesting discussion. Dialogs are a lot of fun.
Yes, I remember reviewing Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints (a fairly racist anti-immigration novel from 1973) and was struck how it's basically saying the same stuff as Paul Erlich, just in a hotter and more viscerally disgusted way. He even used the same target as Erlich: India.
https://coagulopath.com/the-camp-of-the-saints-jean-raspail/
Whether or not horseshoe theory is real, it's definitely possible to smuggle some pretty nasty stuff into mainstream discourse if you brand it correctly.
“When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides." That quote isn't from some far-right terrorist's manifesto. It's from famous environmentalist Pentti Linkola.
While the soulless capitalists who don't care much about life-for-its-own-sake one way or another will instead direct those hands to assemble more boats.
They'll also keep the biggest and gaudiest boats to themselves, evil bastards that they are. Poor people don't care that they have more stuff than ancient kings, what galls them is that the kings of today have more still.
Having the boat at all means they're alive to complain about it, rather than being preemptively sacrificed for the lesser good. Fixing that allocation problem may turn out to be a relatively simple matter of implementing Georgist land-value tax.
The success of the Population Bomb and its influence on the popular imagination is the social context in which The Camp of the Saints was written. It's not coincidental that to reflects those anxieties. It's riffing on them and marrying them to a more overtly bigoted tradition.
I was thoroughly confused by the last paragraph, when Coria inexplicably starts talking about rights and democratic process in the middle of making a point about outside-viewing in morality. Which sort of made me realize that this post, especially Coria's footnote, seems to be talking about two things - namely, society-building and meta-ethics - at once.
This is a mistake. Those are different concepts and ought to be considered on their own. (It's possible to argue that they're closely linked, but it's still not something to be assumed implicitly, like here.) The references this post makes to utilitarianism and deontology make no sense, because it's not actually about Ehrlich's personal conduct. It's about the way people perceive, or should perceive, cases like him - which is not at all the same thing. Hence, the last paragraph making no mention of the object level (which one of them is actually right) in favor of remarking on their character.
The problem is that simultaneously discussing ethics ("what is right") and society-building ("how to coordinate") leads to intuitions about one being erroneously carried over to the other. From the Ehrlich vs Adraste example: if you don't consciously keep track of which side of the ethics/coordination divide they're talking about, it sure sounds like Coria's saying that "whoever lobbies the government more successfully" is a mechanism for determining the one in the right, which is obviously bonkers.
In general, this is greatly reminiscent of the Niceness, Community and Civilization post, which I remember being similarly confusing.
"You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion."
Is there a name for this argument? It would be so ueeful.
Rather than a name, here's a longer argument:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/puzzles-for-everyone
Yudkowsky's "policy debates shouldn't appear one-sided" seems to be in the same neighborhood.
So many insightful words, but no mention of Eugenics and Other Evils by Chesterton? He got it right, even writing before eugenics became associated with Nazism.
re: Coria's dysegenics point, if IQ is going down 1-3 points per century, what's keeping it from going down faster in certain places? Fast enough that we do in fact notice it?
Global temperatures can rise 1°C, but local amplification at the poles means we see a rise of 5°C there. Do areas of high dysgenic amplification exist?
My understanding is that the population dysgenic idea is a bit of a nothing-burger that goes away once you understand the core concept of changes in variation under greater or lesser selective pressures.
I think that the comparison of environmentalism to eugenics misses a pretty major way in how they treat the individual. Eugenics necessitates playing games with how people have children and necessitates picking and choosing between good genes and bad genes--which easily elides to good people and bad people.
Environmentalism can run into those issues, but they aren't at the core of environmentalism, which actually says very little about humans and indeed is usually very much about the flourishing of all humans--not picking winners and losers.
Eugenics comes off badly in the exchange precisely because it is at its very roots premised on dangerous ways of understanding the human subject.
Any official, state led eugenics policy necessarily involves force. Any private eugenics policy is indistinguishable from normal mate selection.
I don't think most people object to a woman choosing as handsome, wealthy, and intelligent a man as she can get. And most people don't object to a man doing the same. And I guess this is eugenics by some definition. Likewise sperm banks sorting sperm based on education, looks, etc. But it's private, without the use of state force.
The issue is the use of state force. Which always turns tyrannical because we are talking about the state intervening in necessarily private affairs. Without an apparatus to monitor who is having sex and pregnant the entire policy becomes unenforceable. And any such laws need to be enforced against situations where there is no clear victim. For example, by fining people for having kids or giving people money for having kids. And at some point it's realized things like forced abortions make better financial sense.
Galton's ideas (which I am getting from reading his essays right now) is that there would be Certificates showing how young men and women were fit for marriage with scores from their teachers, etc. over their lives. High-scorers encouraged to marry each other and start having kids (at least three adult male children) early. Social pressure around making eugenic marriages, including "you only think you love this guy, now be sensible and marry the guy your parents picked out". Eugenics using the force of religion or indeed becoming a quasi-religion in order to permeate and influence society.
So nothing like living in a goldfish bowl with all your choices voted on by committee and being made to take every action in line with what gets you the best score on your Certificate of Fitness! Sorry, Galton made it a Diploma (see below).
Galton worked out his own system of statistical distribution in the general population where his M was “The M in the upper line occupies the position of Mediocrity, or that of the average of what all have received” (so, the average or 100 IQ normie). Grades above that are R, S, T, U, V and above. These are measures of “civic worth”:
“It will assist in comprehending the values of different grades of civic worth to compare them with the corresponding grades of adult male stature in our nation. I will take the figures from my “ Natural Inheritance,” premising that the distribution of stature in various peoples has been well investigated and shown to be closely normal. The average height of the adult males, to whom my figures refer, was nearly 5 feet 8 inches, and the value of their " normal-talent " (which is a measure of the spread of distribution) was very nearly 1 3/4 inches. From these data it is easily reckoned that Class U would contain men whose heights exceed 6 feet 1 ¼ inches. Even they are tall enough to overlook a hatless mob, while the higher classes, such as V, W and X, tower above it in an increasingly marked degree. So the civic worth (however that term may be defined) of U-class men, and still more of V-class, are notably superior to the crowd, though they are far below the heroic order. The rarity of a V-class man in each specified quality or group of qualities is as 35 in 10,000, or say, for the convenience of using round numbers, as 1 to zoo. A man of the W class is ten times rarer, and of the X class rarer still; but I shall avoid giving any more exact definition of X than as a value considerably rarer than V. This gives a general but just idea of the distribution throughout a population of each and every quality taken separately so far as it is normally distributed.”
Naturally, you want to find and encourage the higher classes:
“Diplomas.—It will be remembered that Mr. Booth’s classification did not help us beyond classes higher than S in civic worth. If a strong and widely felt desire should arise to discover young men whose position was of the V, W or X order, there would not be much difficulty in doing so. Let us imagine, for a moment, what might be done in any great University, where the students are in continual competition in studies, in athletics, or in public meetings, and where their characters are publicly known to associates and to tutors. Before attempting to make a selection, acceptable definitions of civic worth would have to be made in alternative terms, for there are many forms of civic worth. The number of men of the V, W or X classes whom the University was qualified to contribute annually must also be ascertained. As was said, the proportion in the general population of the V class to the remainder is as 1 to 300, and that of the W class as 1 in 3000. But students are a somewhat selected body because the cleverest youths, in a scholastic sense, usually find their way to Universities. A considerably high level, both intellectually and physically, would be required as a qualification for candidature. The limited number who had not been automatically weeded away by this condition might be submitted in some appropriate way to the independent votes of fellow-students on the one hand, and of tutors on the other, whose ideals of character and merit necessarily differ. This ordeal would reduce the possible winners to a very small number, out of which an independent committee might be trusted to make the ultimate selection. They would be guided by personal interviews. They would take into consideration all favourable points in the family histories of the candidates, giving appropriate hereditary weight to each. Probably they would agree to pass over unfavourable points, unless they were notorious and flagrant, owing to the great difficulty of ascertaining the real truth about them. Ample experience in making selections has been acquired even by scientific societies, most of which work well, including perhaps the award of their medals, which the fortunate recipients at least are tempted to consider judicious. The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer, owing to the smaller number of female students between whom comparisons might be made on equal terms. In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination ; and as their personal qualities do not usually admit of being tested so thoroughly as those of men, it would be necessary to lay all the more stress on hereditary family qualities, including those of fertility and prepotency."
Then you breed superior babies by matching and marrying off the Diploma holders:
“An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, by encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily.”
Ah, yes. Dividing people based on qualities, bringing social pressure to bear on them to act their class, and religious-like control of women's marital choices. Truly this is a plan of peace and contains nothing that's historically led to strife or violence.
And what happens when it doesn't work? When people don't adopt the new religion? Do they use force? Or do they give up and go home? Does he pay any attention to implementation at all?
"Does he pay any attention to implementation at all?"
Education and science, of course! Just inform the public of the benefits of eugenics and they'll follow along happily! Also, parents have always controlled young women's marital choices so just get the mothers to make sure their daughters pick eugenically suitable young men, it's easy!
"The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected, is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused. Public Opinion has done as much as this on many past occasions and in various countries, of which much evidence is given in the Essay on Restrictions in Marriage. It is now ordering our acts more intimately than we are apt to suspect, because the dictates of Public Opinion become so thoroughly assimilated that they seem to be original and individual to those who are guided by them. By comparing the current ideas at widely different epochs and under widely different civilizations we are able to ascertain what part of our convictions is really innate and permanent, and what part has been acquired and is transient.
It is above all things needful for the successful progress of Eugenics that its advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy on its behalf than the future will confirm ; otherwise a re-action will be invited. A great deal of investigation is still needed to shew the limit of practical Eugenics, yet enough has been already determined to justify large efforts to instruct the public in an authoritative way, as to the results hitherto obtained by sound reasoning, applied to the undoubted facts of social experience. "
"An authoritative way" does cover a lot of ground, doesn't it? But first let us try "Have babies for Jesus, I mean Darwin":
"The means that might be employed to compass these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of married life, healthy homes, the pressure of public opinion, honours, and above all the introduction of motives of religious or quasi-religious character. Indeed, an enthusiasm to improve the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to the sense of a religious obligation."
Snob appeal is the way to go, mostly; you don't want to marry a lower-class individual, now do you, young lady of quality from a county family? Mama would faint dead away!:
"Perhaps the fairest approximation may be that these influences would cause the X women to bring into the world an average of one adult son and one adult daughter in addition to what they would otherwise have produced. The table of descent applies to one son or to one daughter per couple ; it may now be read as specifying the net gain and showing its distribution. Should this estimate be thought too high, the results may be diminished accordingly.
It is no absurd idea that outside influences should hasten the age of marrying and make it customary for the best to marry the best. A superficial objection is sure to be urged that the fancies of young people are so incalculable and so irresistible that they cannot be guided. No doubt they are so in some exceptional cases. I lately heard from a lady who belonged to a county family of position that a great aunt of hers had scandalised her own domestic circle two generations ago by falling in love with, the undertaker at her father’s funeral and insisting on marrying him. Strange vagaries occur, but considerations of social position and of fortune, with frequent opportunities of intercourse, tell much more in the long run than sudden fancies that want roots. In a community deeply impressed with the desire of encouraging marriages between persons of equally high ability, the social pressure directed to produce the desired end would be so great as to ensure a notable amount of success."
Though Galton is open to immigration, in a sense; Buy A Brainy Baby Today!
"Worth of Children.—The brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes. If such people as would be classed W or X could be distinguishable as children and procurable by money in order to be reared as Englishmen, it would be a cheap bargain for the nation to buy them at the rate of many hundred or some thousands of pounds per head. Dr. Farr, the eminent statistician, endeavoured to estimate the money worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer and thenceforward living during the usual time and in the ordinary way of his class. Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capitalised the value at the child’s birth of two classes of events, the one the cost of maintenance while a child and when helpless through old age, the other its earnings as boy and man. On balancing the two sides of the account the value of the baby was found to be five pounds. On a similar principle, the worth of an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. Some such “talented” folk fail, but most succeed, and many succeed greatly. They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and light of the nation, raising its tone, enlightening its difficulties and imposing its ideals. The great gain that England received through the immigration of the Huguenots would be insignificant to what she would derive from an annual addition of a few hundred children of the classes W and X. I have tried, but not yet succeeded to my satisfaction, to make an approximate estimate of the worth of a child at birth according to the class he is destined to occupy when adult. It is an eminently important subject for future investigators, for the amount of care and cost that might profitably be expended in improving the race clearly depends on its result."
I dunno, to me it sounds like Galton was essentially just reinventing society as it pretty much already existed, just with a little more paperwork and bureaucracy
This is actually kind of a neat idea... for a Black Mirror episode. Sure, in Galton's time, implementation was infeasible. But we have dating apps today, and from what I've heard, most young people meet online nowadays. How difficult would it be to introduce eugenic algorithms into those apps ? How do we know this had not been done already ?
He's just bureaucratising how society pretty much already works no?
Eugenics violates the widely held sacred value of "all people are of equal moral worth" (maybe thier actions have consequences, but being dark skinned or low IQ or whatever doesn't make you unworthy)
Not sure that it quite does: you can give everybody who is born equal moral worth without claiming that there is such as a right to be born (let alone that it should be equal).
General thought on Eugenics, not really specific to this post, but even if think it's a good idea in the abstract (I don't) it seems like an odd moment in history to be thinking about bringing it back given:
1. We're on the verge of AGI. At minimum, that's going to make what was previously called "human capital" no longer a scarce resource, and it may make the debate irrelevant for many other reasons.
2. We're on the verge of cheaply available genetic engineering.
> We're on the verge of cheaply available genetic engineering
Doesn’t that make it an excellent time to bring it back up? If you support that sort of thing
There's an argument that to mitigate AI existential risk, we need to start producing as many very intelligent babies as possible, and postpone AGI for as many decades as possible. (The hope is that the babies would grow up and work on the alignment problem.)
There's also an argument that AI consistently proves that people are terrible at understanding what constitutes intelligence or not.
Are we really planning to rejigger the global human genome towards better mathematicians, coders and chess players when these are the areas most liable to being AI'd away? Shouldn't we be I'm the process of promoting all genetic variation instead? Or, if we have to pick traits, pick those known to be resistant to replacement (social skills, the ability to work with one's hands).
Boring old ground, but footnote 4—and by extension, the whole piece—rest on some pretty bad arguments about whether eugenics would be great if we could bracket the whole genocide bit.
Artificial selection can definitely alter domesticated animal populations, overwhelmingly for their worse: modern farmed animals collapse into a litany of congenital conditions if kept alive past the late adolescence when they’re usually slaughtered, and purebred dogs don’t have it much better. Humans went through so many intense and recent bottlenecks that already we’re much more inbred than most of the other species we domesticated, so it’s very likely that massively expanding the prevalence of any small subset of our gene pool—there are under 200 living Nobel laureates!—would have serious drawbacks even if it worked as intended. “Superior” genes might not be as important as plain old hybrid vigor.
Similarly, intelligence—like religion and profession—is definitely heritable, but for very well-worn reasons it doesn’t follow that it’s “genetic” and certainly not that it can be modulated by eugenics. There are many plausible non-genetic explanations for why rich people have rich children, most obviously that rich people spend and bequeath more money per child, allowing them to outcompete poor children for a limited number of privileged positions in hierarchical societies. Non-genetic factors like these are clearly dependent on rich kids being small in number compared to poor kids—come on, Scott, we all know you can engage more seriously than this with ideas you reject.
To be fair, there's room for increasing opportunity by disproportionately increasing rich people's fertility purely through mechanical redistribution of dynastic wealth into a larger number of heirs. This obviously has little relevance to "Nobel sperm banks"; subsidizing contraceptives for people who can't afford either contraceptives or kids does help with this, but subsidizing childrearing to balance the other side of the equation would be much better for human flourishing, for the intellectual and physical quality of the next generation, and for the economy (supposedly, I am not a macroeconomist).
I would simply modify tax thresholds based on the number of children you have. Some countries (such as the US) allow joint filing between yourself and your spouse (so that income thresholds are effectively doubled, very useful in single-income households) but as far as I know no country also lets you joint-file with your children. This seems like a reasonable and defensible way to encourage rich people to have more children.
It's quite hard to tax-incentivize rich people into having more children, as South Korea and Scandinavia are discovering to their chagrin. Meanwhile, if your goal is to improve the next generation, redistributing money specifically to rich children is bad policy unless you're confident that investing in proliferating the (impossible-to-prove) superiority of rich genetics is more cost-effective than remedying the (empirically proven) deleterious effects of lead, parental stress, and large class sizes on poor children.
Robin Hanson has a more potent proposal to boost fertility via financial means: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastructurehtml
That would encourage poor people to have children, though, and we want to encourage rich people to have children. Welfare babies are already a thing, we don't want to supercharge that.
Each mother would get earnings in proportion to the earnings of their offspring. It could be argued that the poor are more income-constrained though, I guess.
The correlation between wealth and intelligence is actually pretty low (about 0.2), and twin studies have very firmly established that adult IQ is about 80% heritable. I would suggest reading Plomin or any other book on behavioral genetics if you're not familiar with the research.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm no expert (I work in developmental neuropsych), but my main objections to twin studies are the standard ones: parents and others treat monozygotic twins more similarly than dizygotic ones, arguably even when raised apart, making some environmental influences appear genetic, and heritability is always indexed to a specific environmental landscape whose inputs are obviously shifting rapidly in the case of human intelligence.
Begging your indulgence, could you spell out the connection between the low correlation of wealth with intelligence and my argument that the heritability of wealth is due to the literal heritability of wealth?
Specifically, I'm trying to respond to
> eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the clustering of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation.
My alternative explanation for why richer people have richer children is that they have more money to give each child. Nobel sperm banks don't confer this benefit, and giving contraceptives to poor people does increase the proportion of rich people in the next generation but only by reducing the total number of workers, which economists all seem to think is bad for societal productivity. Therefore I don't think your eugenics will yield a richer society. Is the 0.2 figure meant to respond to this argument?
How does a shared environment effect turn up when they are raised apart?
By counting "elicited" phenomena like "does your first-grade teacher think you're cute and pay extra attention to you?" or "do you have big front teeth that make people call you a nerd?" as genetic x environmental effects.
Also, monozygotic twins are much more likely to share a placenta!
Isn't every genetic effect a genetic x environment effect? If you starve to death without food, you don't get to express any phenotype.
Yes! And so is every environmental effect, which you can't experience if you had an embryonic lethal aneuploidy. These are trivial examples, but it continues to be true in more interesting ways that every developmental event is a multilateral process that requires both a permissive environment and competent cells or tissues.
This is why it's never strictly correct to apply the G/E model unless you're in a lab context where you can fully specify the range of genotypes and environments. People hear "70% heritable" and slip to "70% genetic" and then "could be improved 70% by doing eugenics", but even a bona fide causal genetic trait in humans is liable to evaporate when something as trivial as the popularity of schoolyard chants about buck teeth changes.
At least some studies have unsatisfactory definitions of "raised apart". For example, if the parents divorced and one child stays with each parent, then this counts as "raised apart". Even if they regularly visit each other and spend time with their other biological parent. In these cases, there will still be a lot of shared environment.
I have also heard claims that a very substantial portion of "genetic twins raised apart" were cases where the social parents of the twin were biological relatives, which also suggests shared environments. I don't know whether this applies only to some particularly bad twin studies, or whether it is enough to cast doubt on the majority of twin studies. (If someone knows, please tell me.)
It used to be common to deliberately raise adopted identical twins apart, so that they wouldn't even be aware of each other. The documentary "Three Identical Strangers" is about such a case.
Just to be clear - (a) 80% is a high figure, isn't it, with some other studies giving lower figures, even in rich countries? (In poor countries, the probability that you'll be severely deprived to the extent that your intelligence will likely be affected is higher, thereby making heritability lower.) (b) "heritability" means something different here than what the person in the street would take it to mean - it means the correlation of your IQ (or other traits) with that of your hypothetical (or real) identical twin, raised apart. The parent-child correlation is much lower. What is the predictive power of (IQ of the father, IQ of the mother)?
It doesn't take much to correct for inbreeding (a single outbreeding event usually does it even after multiple generations of inbreeding). And if we wanted to breed humans to be healthier & longer-lived (a la Heinlein's "Methuselah's Children"), we could do so.
We've done twin-adoption studies & GWAS to determine the heritability of IQ. It is indeed more genetic than dependent on "shared environment" in the first world.
Breeders equation only requires selection differential and heritability (assuming we had humans undergo a breeding program).
Well said
I think there's actually a very strong evidence that quite a bit of intelligence is genetic. You can get this by looking at adopted children and noting that th their adult IQs I'm more strongly correlated with the adult IQs of their birth parents than their adoptive parents.
Yes, but there are still many possible explanations for these correlations other than neurodevelopmental genetics. Adopted children probably share more similar environments before birth (when they're making ~all their neurons) and early life stress experiences with their birth than their adoptive parents, especially if they went through an orphanage or foster system. Even the genetic component can include exogenous and mutable non-neurodevelopmental effects, such as genes causing kids to look a particular way which subconsciously influences the way their teachers and classmates treat them.
Importantly, when we use genome-wide association studies to actually ask the genome to put its cards on the table in the form of specific genetic variants that correlate with IQ, we can only scrape together an explanation for 5-10% of the variance in IQ. And regardless of how strong the genetic influence is in a particular set of environments, the dramatic rise in national IQ as countries become richer suggests that IQ of everyone involved could be raised much more by investing more in their childhood education and health than by trying to re-engineer their genomes.
Fantastic article. Minor correction to Adraste: I believe it was Carrie Buck's daughter Vivian who made the honor roll, not Carrie. https://tinyurl.com/43cf42hb
Coria seems obviously correct. Not sure what the problem is. Only thing I'd add is that moral repugnance can be a useful heuristic that leads to better decision-making - the fact that "don't sterilise children" feels inherently evil suggests that it is more likely to lead to bad outcomes, even if you can't explain why on a strictly rational level.
Too bad Beroe's condemnation of environmentalism is presented only as a foil to excuse the evils of eugenics. I wanted him to go the whole way.
You want more whales? Farm the whales.
What if I don't really want more whales, but also don't want zero whales?
Farming whales doesn't sound economically viable. They are expensive to feed, hard to contain, grow slowly, and no longer produce much of economic value. I also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than they do in the wild (maybe if you trapped them in their traditional breeding grounds you could fool them into breeding more often?)
> I also don't know how you'd get them to breed any faster in captivity than they do in the wild
Surely there’s some experimental not-yet-approved-for-human-use drug we could try? Figure out the lethal dose on whales, then work our way down to a safe dose for positive eugenics for elite rich people?
Well, if ceteris paribus the whale population tends towards zero, then someone is going to have to suffer economic harm to reverse this, there's no free lunch for the whales too.
I'more than familiar with traits that assort independently. That is the basis of Mendel's pea experiments. Mendel had no success when he tried to work with hawkweed and the history of genetics is littered with similar failures. My comments were directed towards the selection of complex traits whose very definitions are subjective. What is the definition of beauty, longevity or intelligence? Growing crops or farm animals with certain characteristics is rather simple by comparison.
I could understand how someone who doesn't know much about psychometrics could think intelligence was "subjective" and hard to measure.
But longevity, really?
Presumably he's thinking of questions such as "is a person who dies at 85 in full possession of their mental powers really shorter-lived than one who dies at 95 after a twenty-year-long drift into senility?".
The factors that underlie longevity are unknown. There may be a multitude of both independent and co- assorting genes that underlie the phenomenon of longevity. The genes are the blueprint, but phenotypic expression is more than genes: there's random chance (e.g. some bit of RNA, was transcriptionally active for more or less time than average, or this organism had one SNP vs another.). So yes we you can measure longevity and even select for it, at least in C. elegans, but in vertebrates, it's a different story.
Even when there are purely random factors, you can still use selection to make the non-random genetic factors more common.
We have good ways of operationalizing intelligence and longevity. Yes they aren’t perfect (no measure or metric is) but they are good enough where we can see massive benefits to society through selecting them.
I'm surprised that, in the course of this whole discussion, polygenic testing was never brought up. Polygenic testing potentially addresses most of the deepest eugenics-related fears. We don't have to hold that any person is better than any other person, much less wade into the morass of whether one group is better than another group. We don't have to coerce anyone. Funding is sufficient. We create ten fetuses and implant the fetus with the best genetic profile. Over time, this should be able to actually achieve most things that other eugenics plans hoped for, without the attendant guilt.
We might still debate what traits should be prioritized. Do we favor traits linked to IQ over traits linked to improved metabolism? Is increased IQ okay if it also increases depression?
But if we want to trade public funds for improved genetics, polygenic testing seems to be the golden path, and the answer to all past eugenic horrors. We are free, of course, to create completely new horrors.
I agree. My most recent article was making the point that research in this area would be really important and be more important than almost any other.
I was thinking along similar lines, but I don't think testing alone gets us there as long as people still fundamentally want to have their own kids. People still have children even if they know that there are risks in their genomes. And if everyone is still having their own kids, then there's only so much that testing can do. It won't produce any significant shift in the population genome.
But I think the urge to have your own kids can be socially modulated and reduced. In fact, I think it already has been by the amount of divorce we have. If that effect could be gently reinforced on the legal level by reducing the rights of genetic parents and increasing the rights of social parents, for example, then significant numbers of people might choose to create and raise children with genetic material that is not their own. And that could cause a population shift over time.
Why wouldn't embryo selection "get us there?" It may not be fast, but it has to have an impact. There is objectively an upside in terms of reduced genetic disease. The big downside is cost.
Telling people their genetics is garbage is a hard sell. Telling people they can have the best of 10 potential kids is an easy sell. Alignment of incentives matters.
Yeah, that's a good point. I dunno if it is going to work out that way, though. If you're going to go through an expensive pre-birth selection procedure, would you necessarily say: I'm going to do genetic screening and selection on my embryo, but I'm definitely only going to select genes that come from me and my husband?
I feel like for lots of people, the choice isn't a deep one of "what genes do we want?" It's a practical choice of: do we do this the natural way, or are we going fancy tech? Natural being, you just shag till a baby pops out (zero selection); fancy tech being some kind of genetic intervention - which could easily include the use of genetic material from someone else.
I guess the relative popularity of IVF suggests that I'm wrong, though: that is exactly what you said. Using your own genetic material to get a baby, even though artificial means are used...
Yeah, perhaps you're right.
> And if everyone is still having their own kids, then there's only so much that testing can do. It won't produce any significant shift in the population genome.
Nope. Each parent only gives half their genes (setting aside sex chromosomes & mtDNA) to their child, and WHICH genes get to be in that lucky half is something we can now deliberately select. If everyone did that we could (theoretically) eliminate all the deleterious de novo mutations from showing up in any phenotype. Eliminating rare deleterious alleles would have a large effect on a population:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/whats-the-catch/#comment-7603
The overwhelming majority if people in the first world give birth in hospitals, even though that was not the norm in the past. If genetic testing becomes cheap enough, that could also become the norm. Even if a minority of people don't make use of it, selection can occur through all the people that do.
Beroe comments that Adraste's argument "seems to grant you, as arbiter of which things are too close for comfort to other things, an extraordinary amount of power," but I don't think that's a fair assessment of what Adraste is doing. There's a difference between advocating a ban and demanding to be installed as "arbiter of what things should be banned." Saying "I believe X should be banned" to one's fellows in the hope of convincing a critical mass of them to support democratic implementation of a ban on X is not the same thing as trying to become a dictator with arbitrary power to ban X unilaterally.
You're joking; right? Look up the history of Sir Cyril Burt for a start.
Typos:
Redundant "at all" in: "care at all about coercive sterilizations at all"
ending -> ended in: "that have historically ending in evil"
1. Slippery slopes are real. You need limiting priniciples. More than that, you need limiting principles that are robust against being misunderstood by stupid people.
(Ironic as it is to cite Hitler in this context, I think he once said something about how you need to coexist with the stupidest possible version of your ideology. Seems correct.)
2. I continue to believe that mandatory vaccination crosses a moral event horizon. Generally you need due process for something like that, and what currently passes for due process in this country simply isn't good enough for coercive medical procedures.
3. I notice a trend in all of these historical atrocities that we're trying to learn from: The people making the decisions never internalize the costs of their own policies. That's a huge red flag. If Hitler wanted to convince the world that the holocaust was a necessary evil, he should have walked into the gas chamber himself. Obviously he didn't do that, and everyone should have told him he was full of shit, but instead they nodded sagely while he used meaningless mouth noises to rationalize his crimes.
I expect Hitler thought his great plans could not succeed without him in charge.
Agreed. To a first approximation, I'm saying that we shouldn't consider that an acceptable excuse.
Throughout history we've seen arguments of the form "mass murder is a necessary evil in this situation, but I'm too important to make any sacrifices myself". I'm not convinced this has ever been true, and I certainly don't think we would have been worse off on balance if we refused to accept all arguments of that nature.
If we were really concerned about making necessary evil impossible, we could perhaps be more flexible about the nature of the sacrifice. Maybe Hitler could have sacrificed a hand or something if his life was so important. I'm not as concerned about the implementation details as I am about the question of whether decision makers have skin in the game. That's the only cure for self-serving bullshit.
To be clear: I'm not saying personal sacrifice would be sufficient to justify the holocaust. It's just one more roadblock that should have been in place to prevent something like that from happening at all.
"(Ironic as it is to cite Hitler in this context, I think he once said something about how you need to coexist with the stupidest possible version of your ideology. Seems correct.)"
Well dang. That is an observation that I had previously attributed to Zero HP Lovecraft.
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1539004402094297090
> I notice a trend in all of these historical atrocities that we're trying to learn from: The people making the decisions never internalize the costs of their own policies. That's a huge red flag. If Hitler wanted to convince the world that the holocaust was a necessary evil, he should have walked into the gas chamber himself.
That doesn't work. For instance, I think bank robbers should be jailed. I'm not a bank robber, so the cost of this policy isn't paid by me. Should I be required to go to jail if I support jail for bank robbers? What if I think 12 year olds should have to go to school, or if I think doctors should get medical licenses?
> Coria: ... They were all tragically wrong, of course, but if they’d been right it would have been the right thing to do. Ehrlich was stupid but not evil.
>Beroe: You could justify anything with that!
I am going to push even harder against Coria here than Beroe did. If you are considering taking some drastic action with demonstrably severe negative consequences, then you'd better make *damn sure* your net result will be positive. You don't get to just say, "I'm fighting to protect all of humanity, so my heart is in the right place and the price of failure is infinite, so let history judge me, yolo". I would say that such reasoning is not only "bad" but also morally wrong, because it can indeed be used to justify literally anything.
People do get to say that, in the real world, perhaps somewhat more eloquently, in large part because it's impossible to be damn sure about the consequences of big substantial changes, so there's no track record of "responsible revolutions" to speak of. It's how natural selection works on the level of societies - a change is made, society either benefits or suffers, then others mimic the winners.
> so there's no track record of "responsible revolutions" to speak of.
Well, the Green/Agricultural Revolution seems to have turned out reasonably well, FWIW. Anyway, I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not saying, "don't do anything risky, ever"; I'm saying, "the threshold for caution and planning should increase at least proportionally (ideally, faster) with the scope and scale of your project". If you're planning to fill in a pothole, some minimum of research on traffic patterns and concrete filling procedures should be enough. If you're planning to fill in a sea, perhaps a multi-generational cross-disciplinary study is in order, followed by a few small pilot projects, followed by more evaluation.
I don't disagree that ideally it should work this way. However, between corruption/incompetence/security theater/etc. the signal gets lost, if it was ever feasible to find it in the first place. But, as the politician syllogism goes, something must be done and this is something, which, I claim, is how changes usually end up happening in practice.
> If you are considering taking some drastic action with demonstrably severe negative consequences, then you'd better make *damn sure* your net result will be positive.
But that's impossible? The only way to be "damn sure" would be: duplicate the world, do the sterilizations in one world but not the other, and see how things turn out.
Seems to me there is a balance to be struck. Sometimes a government do too much to mitigate a risk/harm, causing harm; other times it does too little, causing harm through inaction. Perhaps most often, it chooses a clearly suboptimal policy, actively causing harm in some way while also not mitigating a risk/harm enough, resulting in both kinds of harm. I estimate that this typically results in a better world than a world in which nothing was done, but also clear injustices that people are rightfully sore about. I don't know what to propose to improve matters, but "being damn sure" doesn't sound practical.
"You make a compelling point..." Haha, I suggest this is one of those sentences that is never uttered in the wild, only in the thought experiments of conscientious writers. Is there a name for such sentences?
On topic: If someone were actually interested in making eugenics work for us, I think the best way would be to continue current trends of allowing family regroupings, and perhaps doing more in law to diminish the role of genetics in family rights. These days, many people raise children who are not related to them genetically. If that trend continues, then there will at some point be pressure among such parents to choose parents for their children who are genetically gifted. That is, if parents in general are comfortable with raising children who do not share their genetics, they may well start to choose to take sperm and eggs from other people, and to choose more successful people as donors. They would just need to be sure that those children won't be "taken away" from them by the genetic donors, on either an emotional or financial level.
Then let individual decisions take their course! Government programs, with their propensity for evil, need never be involved.
> Is there a name for such sentences?
Related: sometimes I make a joke where I say a given word is "a book word, not a talk word!". Any word that you can say, but is vaguely surprising to find outside of writing. Examples include *gestures to ACX, LessWrong, any math paper, textbooks, Wikipedia, quite a lot of writing*.
I've seen a point graciously conceded in the wild. Once or twice.
Can someone please start the movement that the softer, milder eugenics we need is actually banning sperm banks (not promoting them)?
Sperm banks surely select for handsome, charismatic, intelligent males. But surely they also select for sociopathic males. What should we call someone who wants to have dozens and dozens of genetic offspring, but doesn't want to have any responsibility to provide for them in any way whatsoever?
Why do we want to subject the future to increasing legions of handsome, charismatic sociopaths? How is this a good thing?
One response might be that some sperm banks select specifically by IQ or whatever.
Really problematic bit comes in regulation. The effect you describe sounds Moloch-like, but giving the government the specific power to decide which traits get to have sperm banks... that seems like a bad power for a government to have, on its face.
I think if you had a large movement that believed this, the best way to use it would be to donate to sperm banks, not ban them.
This seems absurd. People can want their genes passed on without having the will to raise a child, and not be sociopaths. Do you have correlational data for this assertion? How many sperm bank donors are sociopaths? This study seems to think in fact the population selected is more well adjusted than average, but I haven’t looked too deeply: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:480870/FULLTEXT01.pdf
What matters more is what fraction of DCPs had sociopathic donors (cf. https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/dutch-court-bans-sperm-donor-fathered-550-98930857)
That article is a bad attempt at https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
No, the point I was trying to make is that if sociopaths, despite being a small minority of donors, produce a sufficiently larger average number of offspring than the non-sociopathic donors then a majority of donor conceived people (of which I am one!) could still have a sociopathic donor parent, which is what is relevant for the concern that Will originally raised.
The risk is already there if say 1% of population is sociopaths, but 2% of donors, i.e. if sociopaths are 2x as likely to donate.
In short term, no one at the bank would notice whether 2% of sperm donors are sociopaths or not. So, for all we know, this may be already happening.
I don't expect psychopaths to be more interested in making babies than other people. Narcissists, maybe (I expect narcissists to be more focused on themselves than their offspring as an abstract concept, but maybe some narcissists would go to the sperm bank obsessively.)
Also, there are other solutions, like personality tests. If a woman browsing profiles sees that the sperm belongs to a giant narcissist... probably she's less likely to choose it.
Nitpick, but the Islamic Golden Age gave us quite a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
Do people actually oppose Beroe's better ideas (assuming they're not marketed under the name "eugenics")?
I get accused of eugenics just for mentioning that IQ exists sometimes. I've seen other people get accused of it for allowing screening for Down Syndrome.
A good test is “can you explain why what I’m advocating for is wrong without using the word ‘eugenics’?” If they can’t, it’s safe to say it’s just a buzzword.
Yeah I like this test.
It’s a particularly common accusation when discussing genetic enhancement and it’ll be a constant battle going forward as this tech advances. All forms of preimplantation genetic testing are eugenic but people don’t care much about those…they aren’t new or interesting. PGT-P, especially for cognitive traits, is going to face a lot of eugenics accusations. This is an accurate term for them, so it might be a better strategy to redirect away by asking who is the victim.
"And the perpetrators weren’t al-Qaeda terrorists or blood-crazed generalissimos who we can safely distance ourselves from. They were smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us."
Yup, folks like Bill Gates, who simultaneously believe that the world is overpopulated and that everyone needs to take experimental jabs.
Those two beliefs aren't mutually exclusive. What if he also believes the experimental jabs will lower the world population?
But also, time exists. Did Bill Gates still believe the world was overpopulated when he started pushing his vaccines? I suppose I could try to find out, but honestly I don't care that much about what he has believed ever. It just seems possible he pays attention and has noticed the latest proclamations that a population crash is coming.
>What if he also believes the experimental jabs will lower the world population?
I think that's what the person you're responding to was implying, i.e. that Bill Gates is really pushing them for depopulation reasons, rather than his outwardly stated reasons, or at least that he has a perverse incentive to not care if the vaccines damage fertility as a side effect.
Yes.
"Never take medical advice from someone who believes the world is overpopulated."
Or something like that.
Regarding section II., This is a kind of horrible thought but I wonder how many people really feel that forced sterilisation is wrong? I have an unpleasant feeling that there a lot of examples through history and today of people seeming waaay too excited about the idea of forced sterilisation of people who aren't them.
If in fact a lot of people on some level Like forced sterilisation (or at least don't consider it morally repugnant), that would explain the apparent difference in the environmental movement and the Nazi movement - in that case, it wasn't that the forced sterilisation that turned public opinion against the Nazis. It wasn't until the mass murder that (enough) people decided the Nazis were bad. Rather, forced sterilisation has a bad impression Because of the association with the mass murder of the Nazis?
People knew the Nazis were bad because no deal was ever good enough for Hitler, who just kept grabbing more until he started the war that the wary victors of the previous world war had wanted to avoid. People didn't learn about the Holocaust until after the Nazis had firmly achieved villain status.
Thanks for the correction. Either way, it does suggest that the mass sterilisations were not a cause of the Nazis being seen as bad in their time?
The people who already opposed mass sterilization could consider that a reason to oppose the Nazis, but since sterilization occurred in other places (generally considered respectable democracies) it was not regarded as such an anathema.
Well, Nazis certainly didn't hide their brutal repression of Jews from the start, just their eventual mass murder. That the former wasn't enough to qualify them as villains on its own is a pretty damning indictment of the rest of the world.
To further the point most people are in favor of the practical sterilization of the severely mentally disabled even if they would be horrified at doing it medically.
Suppose there is a nonverbal autistic person in state custody. Most people would be in favor of the state preventing them from having sex with anybody, no matter what evidence of desire existed on either side.
Maybe closer to the medical sterilization border are permanent puberty blockers for these mentally disabled people. I think many people are conflicted but i don't see the same visceral moral disgust at the practice.
wait I think most people wouldn’t care?
Forced sterilization seems insanely terrible and horrifying to me, mostly because I want children some day, and taking that away from someone is cutting at a very important human value, for some more important than life itself.
Add on to that the body horror of having someone secretly perform surgery on you—these things don’t happen with the snap of a finger! And any medical problems caused by their ineptitude—you can’t refuse to be treated if your surgeon isn’t up to par, so likely the worst surgeons were put to the task. Its just really horrible.
I wouldn't be surprised if sterilization as a precondition of parole has latent supermajority support.
To quote briefly from my comment on Mastrioanni's review of Galton's book, "If for Galton the moral importance was with a society, a nation, a people, an ethnos, then the morality we have built upon the individual is not an advanced science but an incomprehensible barbarism, a cacophony, and a calamity."
It begs the question to assume that eugenics is bad because it violates individual rights. Easy to flip it and say that individual liberty is bad because it violates public health. And don't tell me that restrictions of liberty never work out -- how well is the current non-eugenic system working for you?
The current system is working *extremely well* for me compared to all alternative non-rights-based public systems like Nazi Germany, all communist countries ever made, or medieval europe.
Medieval Europe did have things like privileges, but I think this was different from universally inalienable rights, since serfs had significantly different privileges than their lords.
To continue farming replies in the comments section, let's update on the odds you're someone a eugenicist might have wanted to prevent from existing.
Coria points out that the democratic process is a social technology for determining when you get to break deontology for the greater good. But the democratic process is just an incomplete formalization of a much older and more powerful social technology: public opinion.
Pre ~1890 public opinion put next to no weight on environmentalist values. Early environmentalists fought a long uphill battle to change the deontological weights to include a term for environmentalism. They took their greater good and constructed narratives about it that would shift public opinion.
Pre ~1940 eugenics was quite popular, because Galton et al had worked hard to make it that way. Then a greater bad happened that was closely associated with it, and the narrative took notice. Now public opinion has incorporated the updated narrative and is heavily against eugenics.
Today if you want to do eugenics you have to make a "greater good" case that overrides the accumulated bad public opinion. I don't object to anyone making such a case. But I also don't object to shaming anyone who makes it with Buck and all the rest. Scott (okay, sure, "Beroe") seems to be suggesting that when you appeal to the greater good you get to throw out the existing deontological weights. No! The social technology is operating as designed! The weights are there for a reason! If you can't win the uphill battle then you haven't earned the right to change them!
Why is 1890 the watershed? Even before, there were some people with values that aligned with what we call environmentalist - conservationists in the countryside, advocates for cleaner air and water in the cities.
Countryside and cities, yes-- there were earlier reformers associated with the Industrial Revolution, especially in England. I was thinking of the strain of environmentalism that values wilderness as wilderness, which was more characteristic of America and really got going with John Muir and the Sierra Club. Arguably Ehrlich is more closely related to the former, but if you move the start up 50 years my points still stand.
I'm pretty sure that people have always valued the wilderness on some level, it's just prior to the Industrial Revolution it seemed indestructible and inexhaustible, a just another "natural resource". Whereas once it became apparent that you actually can catch all the fish in the sea and chop all the trees in the forest it didn't take that much heroic effort to change the narrative.
> I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Simple, positive eugenics is legal, any and all negative eugenics is a somewhere near a war crime.
The hard part would be abortion because its abortion, and you don't need motives on the table for that to be complex.
So, coercive breeding programs like the one that produced Yao Ming are fine?
Negative coercive eugenics such as preventing brother-sister marriage are perfectly reasonable and ethical. IVF clinics should be legally provided from combining their sperm and egg as well.
Along around 1974, I had a friend who was, like me, firmly anti-Nixon and a proponent of the Watergate investigations. (Hold on, this will be relevant in a moment.)
One day I saw him reading The Population Bomb, a book I had no use for. You like that? I asked. Yes, he said. You think that Ehrlich has the right ideas? Yes, he said. Well, then, I replied, that makes you an Ehrlich-man.
He never spoke to me again.
Whenever the subject of eugenics comes up, the example used is selecting for intelligence. I think this shows a lack of common sense. If we want society to function better, shouldn't we also selecting for mental health and a kind, calm temperament?
This seems a location where social desirability bias may be at play. It is difficult to disagree that kindness or calmness are positive traits, but I worry about second order effects. Possibly many incredibly successful businesses weren’t invented by overly kind or calm people, and much good has been done by selfish people. Plausibly more than kind people on net, though I’m uncertain. I’m more confident that things like IQ correlate positively with a host of good things.
Good things with positive second order effects that is.
Do you mean social desirability bias is making me stand up for qualities other than high IQ? I get the concept, but that’s really not what’s going on in this case. I’m just being practical. If we want less crime and violence in society, raising average IQ is a very indirect approach. I actually think the negative correlation between violence/crime and IQ is probably mediated by things like the lower income & worse living conditions of lower IQ people and their higher rate of mental illness, rather than being a direct effect of lower IQ. If we’re going to do eugenics I’m all for selecting for intelligence, but think there is great value in selecting straightforwardly for the traits that *clearly and directly* run counter to the tendency to be violent and commit crimes. Or you can think of it as selecting against sociopathy and poor self-control, rather than for calmness and kindness if you like. As for your concern that the population will get too mellow and there will be no high-energy ambitious types to start businesses, that doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Kindness and calmness will still be distributed on a bell curve, and we’ll have still have ambitious types at one end. And besides, seems likely that sociopathy, rage and poor self-control derail many people who might otherwise start useful businesses. For people starting a legal business, being tone-deaf and hot-tempered is going to interfere with their finding backers and keeping partners and early employees. Or maybe sociopathy etc.in smart ambitious people pushes them in the direction of becoming highly successful criminals — mob bosses or whatnot.
What I meant to say is that its difficult to disagree with your proposal without sounding at least somewhat mean due to social desirability bias.
Calmness & kindness does not seem the same as good self-control & non-sociopathy, but I don’t know what personality tests you have in mind, so maybe they are. If you wanted to select for good self-control, why not just select for executive functioning rather than how liable a person is to get angry?
I think another problem I have with this is it feels like changing the distribution of what people care about, which makes me super uncomfortable. I’d rather have people care about the same things but be better at achieving them, as that seems more value neutral—I don’t end up saying that anger or empathy are good or bad emotions. And I’m skeptical when people point to an emotion and say its bad.
I don't think anger is bad, I think crime and violence are bad. Executive functioning is correlated, with propensity for rageful violence and crime, but not very well-correlated. Plenty of people with poor executive functioning are not hot-tempered, just disorganized, forgetful, and unable to stick with plans. And some horribly cruel people have good executive functioning -- for instance, it wouldn't surprise me if Putin does. If you wanted to select against something like sociopathy, you might use a combo of low ability to read people (there are some well-validated tests for that), self-reported lack of guilt and comfort with transgressions against other, history of crime and violence, and some behavioral test that gets at how quickly someone becomes rageful (so we'd be looking not for indignant protests, which are fine, but for loss of perspective and self-control).
Both are important. Personality isn’t enough. We could select for IQ and general factor of personality.
I hope Coria's position pushes you more in the libertarian direction. At the least, it should raise a question about where the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate government action lies.
Not that it changes the main conclusion, but I'd say the reason Galton got his name removed from places and the Ehrlich got prizes from prestigious western institutions is that the former's ideas caused the sterilization of a bunch of western people, while the latter affected "just" (a couple extra orders of magnitude of) Indians. Which goes to show how much of it is hypocritical virtue-signaling. I would be surprised if you ask around India about Ehrlich and you get the same response.
My cousin was forcibly sterilized in the early 70's. It was her parents choice.
I think a secret reason people dislike eugenics is because they are very skeptical of the government having the power to customize its citizens. The government does not in fact always act with its citizens interests at heart, and maybe you will get some party diverting tons of money towards making sure people with genetic dispositions in favor of that party get subsidized for children. Maybe Product Incorporated does something similar via lobbying to make more children genetically predisposed to buy Product, or to modify people to better enjoy producing Product (under the argument that we are short on Product and it is necessary for national defense).
For those who are also skeptical of markets without government intervention, add in skepticism about people being able to buy modifications to their children.
With regards to the desirability of otherwise-non-evil eugenics, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I find myself once again asking what's up with this unstated assumption that being smarter is generically better. Sure, it might be better for society in the long run if there are fewer people of lower or average intelligence, but it might also be better for society if there were fewer people with various eccentric preferences, or tendencies to criticise the government, etc., and it seems obvious that trying to reduce or wipe out those traits to make the population less diverse and more homogenous would be bad and evil in itself. I fear reducing the number of people with lower IQs would be like this.
Unless you fall under a certain threshold of *debilitating* mental deficiency I don't think a life with compartively lesser IQ is less desirable, less happy, or less dignified than that of a genius. I'm not exactly *low*-IQ but neither am I in the topmost percentile, and I don't *want* to become "smarter", especially; nor do I especially want my children to be smarter than I am. And certainly I would be strongly, strongly opposed to aiming for a future without anybody who's in my bracket existing anymore.
+1
Pull the mask off this interloper and you'll find it's actually the idol Progress, which after all IQ works in service to.
If we just wanted people to be *happy* we could select for that, but we want to advance the frontiers of human knowledge and capability, or somesuch, and for that I can certainly concede that IQ is very handy.
But just selecting for rapacious horizon-lust, ambition, curiosity and so on would also work.
> give all power to a nice-seeming communist
Why did Beroe let that pass? The first communists to gain all power were the bolsheviks, and they did not seem nice at all. Any communist after that has to work really hard to prove they don't intend to repeat the atrocities of Soviet Russia and others. I don't think anyone who actually had power ever did, so nice-seeming communists with all the power never existed. (At least nice by the standards of people who believe that forcible sterilization of mentally ill people is obviously bad.)
Edit: not that giving *anyone* all the power seems like a good idea, so I guess it's not that important.
I read the Mastroianni article. I think he wrote it assuming that eugenics is immoral without fully specifying what it is or proving that all instantiations of it are immoral.
It is easy to point at Nazism and declare it to be immoral.
But, in 21st century America is is quite common for prospective parents to obtain a genetic profile of their fetus in the early stages of pregnancy, and to abort it if the profile shows some severe genetic defect such as Down syndrome. Isn't their action a form of eugenics?
People who believe that all abortions are immoral of course oppose those actions, but people with less rigid views on that subject often approve. But, in either case, the argument does not recur to the label eugenics for a judgment as to morality.
In the near future it may be possible to modify a child's genome at the point of conception. would doing so be eugenics? Would that make it immoral. What if you remove a well known cancer causing mutation such as BRCA2 from a genome? Is that immoral? How about ensuring that the child has blond hair and blue eyes?
The biggest problem with eugenics is the idea that the most important thing standing between us and utopia is "bad genes" (whatever those are).
The fact that, compared to Bronze Age Greece, we live like gods, despite our genetic makeups being indistinguishable, puts the lie to that.
The whole reason humans are so great is that we don't have to wait around for biology to improve our lot. Memes > genes
How about longevity? Giving our children a few extra years of healthy life seems like it has to be an improvement both personally and on a societal level.
Again, longevity has been increased enormously without any general change to the "breeding stock" or "gene pool" or what have you. Dealing with specific genetic disease like Huntington's is low hanging fruit that things like Crispr may finally be able to deal with, but that's not really what eugenics has in mind.
> Again, longevity has been increased enormously without any general change to the "breeding stock" or "gene pool" or what have you.
Doesn't mean in can't be increased further with those. Probably less important than "memes" if we stick to relatively non-repugnant means, but eventually we can run out of low-hanging fruit from "memes".
We've been working on memes for a couple tens of thousands of years and we haven't hit a ceiling yet. Human genetics is just too damn slow to make a difference. 20-30 year turn times? Forget about it.
You may be right about human genetics being too slow to be relevant, given what's now visible on the horizon re: AGI.
With that said, I claim that the expected value of working on human genetics is still pretty high under a broad variety of value systems. In particular:
1. Many memes are practically inaccessible to people with insufficient mental capabilities, and it is plausible that the faster paths to raising the capabilities of their descendants all include a genetic enhancement component, rather than just the playbook that uplifted much of Asia. It helps that "catch-up" genetic modifications are inherently easier to discover and demonstrate safety for than those that promise "superhuman" capabilities.
2. Your mileage may vary, but my likelihood estimate for a "short AGI timeline" is not that high. My median estimate still hews pretty close to Robin Hanson's "5% progress per decade" remark from long ago. Usefully enhancing human genetics over that timescale is still a challenge, but it's not a "Forget about it" lost cause.
Talking about overpopulation in my usual filter bubble (woke left), as opposed to environmentalism in general, does get you the 'any concern about overpopulation is automatically bad because it leads to trying to reduce the population in a way that disproportionately targets disadvantaged people, who generally aren't the major contributors to world consumption footprint anyway' knee jerk reaction - not quite as strongly as eugenics but close.
Meanwhile eugenics is unfortunately still alive and well, just not calling itself that - instead it masquerades as triage, eg the UK health policy during covid of de prioritising a wide range of disabled people for care even when their disability didn't directly affect likely covid outcomes.
I keep thinking of a dystopia in which the proles look to genetically control the elites. They want the perfect world of inbred metasexuals shattered to loosen Nature to resume its mastering role. Issuing warrants for Polanskis and Epsteins to report for surgery could make for interesting cinema -- maybe something along the lines of Repo Man.
This was a fantastic post that made me delightfully dizzy at some places.
However, because I have to: any eugenic, or even more generalized, any personality-trait-focused approach on fighting poverty is turning economics into a purely mistake-theoretical issue, which it just isn't (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
At the risk of delivering a highly undercomplex example: consistently improving the quality of soccer-players by improving the training of youth-players will not lead to every team in a league winning every game. Someone has to lose by the very definition of the competition, even though every team of today may win against every team of 20 years ago.
We may all be Einstein for all I care, someone is still going to scrub the toilet.
For the case of poverty it seems fair to respond that yes in a relative sense half the population will always be below the median income, and this has some important social effects, however this does not prevent anyone from increasing the absolute wealth of everyone in a society, and this sort of increase tends to be extremely good. i.e. half the people in any country are below median income, but I'd rather be median income in America today, than in China 100 years ago.
In fact I'd rather be median income in America today than 90th percentile in China 100 years ago, which gives some intuition for why on a sufficiently long timescale I'd consider increases in absolute wealth as important or more important than increases in relative wealth.
Full agreement, however: choosing the median income as some sort of indicator for relative poverty exposes the conflict-theoretical issue.
In Germany for example, poverty is defined as being below 60% of the median income, and sure, there are objectively much worse ways to be considered poor in today's world (even though I am not sure how much that matters since psychologically, the subjective experience of being poor is what matters, and millions of poor people in German feel absolutely miserable about their living conditions in a way that I genuinely believe can be compared to how miserable a 13-year old Pakistani feels about working in a sweatshop, even though objectively that's absurd. Tangent over), however, there is always enough wealth in a country to move every poor person above the 60% poverty-line without changing the median itself, because that's just how the median works.
Intelligence is one of the most important tool to move the median income upwards (even though conflict theory also has a lot to say about inter-state competition. Germany earned more than 100 billion euros in saved interest payments through the greek government-debt crisis for example), but is almost entirely useless in solving issues that arise from the realtive wealth-distribution around that median, because relative poverty is not a problem that requires intellgience to be solved. Intelligence may move an individual further to the right of that distribution, but it can't possibly to that for everybody.
If everybody was IQ 130, toilets would scrub themselves.
That was the aspect of Brave New World that always confused me: why did they bother creating Epsilons & Deltas instead of automating? I know it was probably just too far out of context for Huxley to envision, but it weakens the impact.
I think it is better to think of “eugenics” as the name of a social movement popular among early 20th century intellectuals, much like “communism”. It promoted a few good ideas and also justified astounding evil.
If you want to give workers board seats like in Germany, and have a 40 hour workweek, those are ideas that communist labor organizers had a large part in shaping, but you don’t need to be “communist” to support them.
When members of revolutionary communist organizations claim that these are “communist” ideas, people reasonably suppose it’s just propaganda and the real goal is a dictatorship of the proletariat. A similar response is also reasonable with “eugenics”. If this disastrous movement happened to promote some reasonable ideas, just steal them.
I think there is an argument to be made that the Indian sterilization, while being phrased as environmental, was indeed also racist. What is underpinning it is that the only way to bring down the birthrate in countries like India is sterilization, since people would be unable to understand/enact different ways of birth control, as we have in the West. So while the goal might be environmental ("save the planet"), the choice of means is racist.
No mention of the idea that having been deliberately crafted (down to the tendencies of one's genes) by a person or society is kind of scary?
Right now, there is an obvious division between childbirth and construction. Any sort of deliberate human input on the next generation's makeup blurs that, and risks a general tendency towards thinking of people as comparable to things.
"the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize themselves than the average person"
I'm pretty sure that this has much more to do with their children having direct access to the mystical only-in-person transferable actual Scientific Method, than anything genetic beyond above-average IQ. Of course, considering that sanity waterline is low enough that there's a concerted effort to discredit IQ in general, this might be an improvement on the margin, but the lucky recipient of sperm of a Nobel Prize winner definitely shouldn't expect her child to have anywhere near those odds, unless she manages to arrange some Nobel Prize winner tutoring in addition.
If that is true, then it should be really easy to test. Get someone to have a baby by a Nobel Prize winner. Drop that baby into a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wait twenty-thirty years to see what field it wins a Nobel Prize in.
What's that you say? It died aged two of malnutrition, disease, or civil war? Well, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs! Just keep flooding the DRC with Nobel babies and surely *one* of them will live to be adult!
I think that's been tried before; it was called "colonialism" :-)
Yeah, but in those instances, the babies were being raised in their natal families and/or sent 'back home' to England etc.
I want the baby Lord Brougham (whoever he was; Galton name-drops him as an Obviously So Famous You Know This Guy, which just shows how the assumptions of the day can be wildly off, something we should bear in mind) to be dropped down into a family of native inhabitants where Dad is off working in the mines and may not be home for nine months of the year and Mom is raising ten kids on whatever she can scrape together. Then see if he manages to survive to grow up and be whatever genius Galton lauds him as.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo
Looked him up, this is who he was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brougham,_1st_Baron_Brougham_and_Vaux
"Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, PC, FRS (19 September 1778 – 7 May 1868) was a British statesman who became Lord High Chancellor and played a prominent role in passing the 1832 Reform Act and 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.
Born in Edinburgh, Brougham helped found the Edinburgh Review in 1802 before moving to London, where he qualified as a barrister in 1808. Elected to the House of Commons in 1810 as a Whig, he was Member of Parliament for various constituencies until becoming a peer in 1830.
Brougham won popular renown for helping defeat the 1820 Pains and Penalties Bill, an attempt by the widely disliked George IV to annul his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. He became an advocate of liberal causes including abolition of the slave trade, free trade and parliamentary reform. Appointed Lord Chancellor in 1830, he made a number of reforms intended to speed up legal cases and established the Central Criminal Court. He never regained government office after 1834 and although he played an active role in the House of Lords, he often did so in opposition to his former colleagues.
Education was another area of interest. He helped establish the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and University College London, as well as holding some academic posts, including Rector, University of Edinburgh. In later years he spent much of his time in the French town of Cannes, making it a popular resort for the British upper-classes; he died there in 1868."
I'm sure a Henry Brougham who was raised in the DCR would be even more eager for the abolition of slavery, but I wonder if he would have the same advantages not being brought up in England? Even if he was just as naturally smart and talented?
I think the eugenic argument would be that one smart baby wouldn't do much (besides, he'd likely just die in a mine collapse or whatever); but if every baby was smart, then the people would improve their lot once those babies grow up to be adults. But alas, the native babies are not smart enough ! What to do, what to do...
Agree, that some version of a CRISPR-like technology is the ticket to the future of single gene editing. Still, large scale manipulation of the human genome to select complex traits is still way over the horizon. Most of the human genome is composed of non-coding regions, whose function(s) are not understood. Does changing a gene exon alter other aspects of transcription ? No one knows.
This post needs a section with "comments about Sparta." I can't believe that nobody thought of this before me, but let me start anyway: multiple Greek authors report that, after generations of one of the strongest genetic selection programs ever conducted, supposedly coupling only the best and brightest, Sparta produced not only the smart, muscular warriors of 300, but also what many believed were Greece's most beautiful women. In addition, to nobody's surprise these women were the country’s sharpest, such as the wife of King Leonidas, who would die in the Battle of Thermopylae in the 5th century BC: when asked why they were able to rule men, where elsewhere in Greece women could not, she replied that this was “because we are the only ones who give birth to men.” Given that it had a pretty solid run of centuries as a major power, the small, poor town of Sparta should be cited as golden example of eugenics.
I am not sure that the multiple Greek authors, none of whom are themselves Spartans, are necessarily good sources. See https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ for the beginning of a long , very detailed and historically thorough analysis of what we know about Sparta, with plenty of references to 300. In particular, see this bit: https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/ - for a critical analysis of whether Spartans were or were not unusually successful in battle.
That Spartans were hugely, massively, unbelievably successful in battle is beyond dispute: they were the main Greek force in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC), where they crushed the greatest army put together by the greatest empire the world had ever seen, in hand to hand combat; and later defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War. That they were obsessed with eugenics, for themselves, and dysgenics for their enemies is very well attested; a recent paper on this is “Krypteia: A Form of Ancient Guerrilla Warfare,” by Brandon D. Ross in “Grand Valley Journal of History” (Volume 1, Issue 2, Sep. 4. 2012). You can also see Paul Cartledge's “The Spartans” (2014) or N.G.L. Hammond in “The Cambridge Ancient History 3.1,” Ch. 17, or Macrobius' Saturnalia (5th century AD) for ancient perceptions of Spartans. Bret Deveraux has a good point regarding the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of Spartan eugenics. Maybe ancient Greeks were overawed by them; for example, regarding the beauty of Spartan women they often cited the example of Helen of Troy, allegedly Spartan, but also a fictional character, so not really very convincing evidence.
Over about 40 battles between 500BC and 323BC, which has the best period as far as evidence goes, the Spartans won half of them. Not a bad record, but hardly superlative. If your point is that their record in just two conflicts alone - Plataea (where they were in an alliance - and Athens brought nearly as many hoplites, and the other, smaller partners brought more than either Athens or Sparta between them, according to Herodotus) and the Peloponnesian war (which they won only after Persia funded their naval forces) - is sufficient to make them the best warriors ever, then fair enough, I guess that's one way of measuring it. It doesn't convince me. As to the eugenics part, I would want to know how that is being defined, since I think it is fair to say that the Spartans did not know much about genetics. However, I wasn't debating their opinions about breeding. My main point of debate was that I think the Spartans are very overhyped when it comes to fighting.
You're absolutely right. You know how these debates sometimes mirror sports (is Lebron better than Jordan?) even though there's no way to compare and people go on wild assertions. All we can say is that Sparta was a big power of the time, feared and often (but not always) triumphant, efficient and successful but not wildly superior to others. In that sense, not all that different from Rome (which also lost tons of battles) or the US, the preeminent 20th century power, and one incapable of beating lowly Vietnam or North Korea; or Napoleonic France, or the Spanish Tercios, etc. Like you say, simply stating that the Spartans were awesome fighters, with no explanation of context, is not helpful.
"Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank"
And how well did that work out? The history of it, going by Wikipedia, was "not at all well" and they didn't even end up with Nobel Laureates donating. 'Get the smartest men to father the most kids' is always going to be hard, because people don't want kids the more educated they are (see various studies) or in the case of sperm, you can't really control for the mothers accessing sperm or the environments the kids will be raised in.
AI works great for cattle, not so much for humans.
An added problem is that people usually get Nobel prizes & related prizes when they are well past middle age. And the risk of birth defects rises with the age of the father. Old sperm is more risky than young sperm in this respect.
...I do not know if children sired through the Nobel sperm bank have a higher average rate of birth defects. But if so, perhaps it can be seen as Divine punishment for hubris.
"We have a known system for dealing with times when you need to break deontological prohibitions for the greater good"
Yes. It's called "sin".
So did Galton support things like sterilisation? Hard to say; this is a quote from 1909 book of essays on Eugenics, talking about the lowest class in society (what we now would call the underclass):
"Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this."
Does "peremptorily" mean "forcibly" and such things as sterilisation? You could interpret it either way. And even back in 1909, the more educated - especially women - were marrying later and having fewer children:
"Augmentation of Favoured Stock.—
The possibility of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that of repressing the productivity of the worst. They both raise the average, the latter by reducing the undesirables, the former by increasing those who will become the lights of the nation. It is therefore all important to prove that favour to selected individuals might so increase their productivity as to warrant the expenditure in money and care that would be necessitated. An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to a select class of young men and women, encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily. The means that might be employed to compass these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of married life, healthy homes, the pressure of public opinion, honours, and above all the introduction of motives of religious or quasi-religious character. Indeed, an enthusiasm to improve the race is so noble in its aim that it might well give rise to the sense of a religious obligation. In other lands there are abundant instances in which religious motives make early marriages a matter of custom, and continued celibacy to be regarded as a disgrace, if not a crime. The customs of the Hindoos, also of the Jews, especially in ancient times, bear this out. In all costly civilisations there is a tendency to shrink from marriage on prudential grounds. It would, however, be possible so to alter the conditions of life that the most prudent course for an X class person should lie exactly opposite to its present direction, for he or she might find that there were advantages and not disadvantages in early marriage, and that the most prudent course was to follow the natural instincts.
We have now to consider the probable gain in the number and worth of adult offspring to these favoured couples. First as regards the effect of reducing the age at marriage. There is unquestionably a tendency among cultured women to delay or even to abstain from marriage; they dislike the sacrifice of freedom and leisure, of opportunities for study and of cultured companionship. This has to be reckoned with. I heard of the reply of a lady official of a College for Women to a visitor who inquired as to the after life of the students. She answered that one-third profited by it, another third gained little good, and a third were failures. “ But what become of the failures ? " “ Oh, they marry."
There appears to be a considerable difference between the earliest age at which it is physiologically desirable that a woman should marry and that at which the ablest, or at least the most cultured, women usually do. Acceleration in the time of marriage, often amounting to 7 years, as from 28 or 29 to 21 or 22, under influences such as those mentioned above, is by no means improbable. What would be its effect on productivity ? It might be expected to act in two ways :—
(1) By shortening each generation by an amount roughly proportionate to the diminution in age at which marriage occurs. Suppose the span of each generation to be shortened by one-sixth, so that six take the place of five, and that the productivity of each marriage is unaltered, it follows that one sixth more children will be brought into the world during the same time, which is, roughly equivalent to increasing the productivity of an unshortened generation by that amount.
(2) By saving from certain barrenness the earlier part of the child-bearing period of the woman. Authorities differ so much as to the direct gain of fertility due to early marriage that it is dangerous to express an opinion. The large and thriving families that I have known were the offspring of mothers who married very young."
And yes, the rent is too damn high 😁
"There is yet another existing form of princely benevolence which might be so extended as to exercise a large effect on race improvement. I mean the provision to exceptionally promising young couples of healthy and convenient houses at low rentals. A continually renewed settlement of this kind can be easily imagined, free from the taint of patronage, and analogous to colleges with their self-elected fellowships and rooms for residence, that should become an exceedingly desirable residence for a specified time. It would be so in the same way that a good club by its own social advantages attracts desirable candidates. The tone of the place would be higher than elsewhere, on account of the high quality of the inmates, and it would be distinguished by an air of energy, intelligence, health and self-respect and by mutual helpfulness."
Honestly, it's so funny to read the same complaints about fertility, declining intelligence, etc. over the generations back then as are current now. People are marrying too late, not having kids, the unsuitables are the ones having most kids, women not wanting babies but careers, etc. etc. etc.
"I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
I'm pessimistic about the capacity of any stance in the space between those to sway hearts and minds. Everything in that vicinity is memetic weaksauce compared to what a rhetorically skilled impersonal arbiter of morality pretender can deploy, which is why any sort of liberalism is inherently unstable. Either your society has a totalizing vision of morality, or it will eventually be replaced by one that does.
Dear Beroe, Advaste and Coria please relax, all three of you. Let me tell you that your otherwise interesting discussion is quite unnecessary.
The thing is, you see, that humans are increasingly doing de facto eugenics today, without even noticing it. It’s quite civilized; we get the benefits of eugenics without having to be conscious that that’s what we do. De facto eugenics is taking place thanks to three interrelated global trends that are so strong that no ruler, enlightened or otherwise, is likely to make more than a slight dent in them: The global demographic transition, the great gender transformation, and global, massive urbanisation.
The shape of global things to come can be gleaned from countries where these three trends are already in their final stages. Fatherhood becomes increasingly concentrated among high-status males, through serial monogamy (a functional equivalent to polygamy). High-status women also have higher fertility than low-status women, although this trend is weaker than among males.
Assume that «status» is a rough proxy for «intelligence» in the mainly meritocratic societies that dominate in the final stages of these interrelated social transformations, and hey presto - fertility patterns start to resemble what eugenicists would like to see.
…side note: The above pattern only emerges in the final stages of these social transformations. For countries still in the middle of the transformations, the hierarchical diffusion pattern that characterizes the demographic transition means that «the rich get richer, while the poor get children»; and low-status women sire more children than high-status women. But when a country reaches the end of the demographic transition, with urban lifestyles and changed gender roles added, it is back in a situation where fertility works with status, not against status.
What’s for your source for high status women having a higher fertility rate than low status women ? Also, by status do you primarily mean social class because it is my understanding that rich people have a much lower birth rate than poor people.
Recent data from Scandinavia. The main reason is not fertility increase among high-status women, but reduced fertility among low-status women. This fairly new tendency is linked to the end of hierarchical diffusion of low fertility. Rural low-status women have caught up with the low fertility of their high-status urban sisters, to the extent that their positions have switched (though not by much).
..The male tendency for increased correlation between status and fertility is stronger, due to increased childlessness among low-staus males plus serial monogamy (i.e. siring children with more than one woman) among high-status males. There has been a steep increase during the last two decades of being childless at age 40 among males in Scandinavia, and this is a trend you also see elsewhere.
(Childlessness at age 40 has also increased among women, but less, and from a lower base.)
So, one country is your proof?
Education, Gender, and Cohort Fertility in the Nordic Countries Marika Jalovaara1 · Gerda Neyer2 · Gunnar Andersson2 · Johan Dahlberg2 · Lars Dommermuth3 · Peter Fallesen2,4 · Trude Lappegård5 Received: 16 May 2017 / Accepted: 15 May 2018 / Published online: 19 June 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Systematic comparisons of fertility developments based on education, gender and country context are rare. Using harmonized register data, we compare cohort total fertility and ultimate childlessness by gender and educational attainment for cohorts born beginning in 1940 in four Nordic countries. Cohort fertility (CTF) initially declined in all four countries, although for cohorts born in the 1950s and later, the CTF remained stable or declined only modestly. Childlessness, which had been increasing, has plateaued in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Women’s negative educational gradient in relation to total fertility has vanished, except in Finland, while men’s positive gradient has persisted. The highest level of men’s childlessness appears among the least educated. In the oldest female cohorts, childlessness was highest among the highly educated, but these patterns have changed over the cohorts as childlessness has increased among the low educated and remained relatively stable among higher educated women. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, childlessness is now highest among the least educated women. We witness both a new gender similarity and persistent (among men) and new (among women) educational disparities in childbearing outcomes in the Nordic region. Overall, the number of low educated has decreased remarkably over time. These population segments face increasing social and economic disadvantages that are reflected as well in their patterns of family formation.
Terencius, a gambling addict with significant debts to the mob, is being pursued by a hitman as a result. In my opinion, acquiring an air fryer might provide a solution to his problems. By owning an air fryer, Terencius could consume less oil, improve his overall health, and potentially enhance his ability to defend himself against the hitman or generate enough funds to repay his debts. Additionally, it is worth noting that there is a minimal statistical association between individuals targeted by hitmen and those who own air fryers.
However, it is important to consider whether suggesting the purchase of an air fryer is genuinely the most effective use of Terencius' limited resources or if it simply stems from a desire to sell him the product I wanted to sell him anyway.
Independently of the question of who does the selection and how voluntary it is, I'm skeptical that targeting the genes that increase the IQ will turn out to be as worthy goal as Scott makes it sound.
Consider what would happen if a wizard appeared before the people in 1700 and asked them about what hereditary changes *they* would prefer (the wizard can magically change the genome of humans in a way that corresponds to their desires, even without them understanding the genetics). Given the values of that time (people still majorly worked in agriculture) I expect a good package would be something like
- for men, we'd like to see higher upper body strength (those plows are heavy!)
- for women, we'd like them to be able to rear more children easier (let's say that there is a magical change that makes women survive the childbirth easier, but only after the 5th child)
Suppose the wizard made the requested changes. And yet 10 generations later those changes would be essentially useless to us. We don't have enough work that requires strength corresponding to the genes we have; a median person literally is expected to pay money and go to a special place to exercise the muscles. Our child bearing practices are such that anything about five+ children is irrelevant on the population scale. If increasing the proportion of these genes in 1700 came at the expense of other things – we'd say that it would have been a bad deal.
There's something similar happening to the mental capabilities. Sure, in the beginning of the 20th century it was great just to have larger memory to be able to learn 10 foreign languages (you could read scientific articles from other countries!), multiply long numbers (you could get a job as an actuary!) or remember endless references lists (you need to be able to cite stuff as a lawyer!) but all of those feats are clearly less relevant now that you can use machine translation, bookkeeping program or legal search.
I guess for now whatever is measured by IQ correlates to the things like "well-paid job" or "good lifestyle", but will it do so in the future? Will people in 2100 say stuff like "now that no-one writes code, we wish we had more poets and people who had empathy, too bad those rubes in 2030 optimized for the wrong genes?". That's my main worry about gene selection in practice.
Our world is much better (on average) than 1700-world. And not because of upper body strength (though it would be better than nothing, so, I'll take it magic wizard kthx!)
We recognize not only that intelligence is valuable in the present world, but that it is also what made the present world possible. It's also the best tool for understanding the otherwise-bewildering modern world, I think.
But you're right―if we survive the AGI revolution, perhaps this will be a moot point, as machines will ultimately decide whether to do eugenics on us, leave us as-is, or kill us all. But I would point out that we can probably select for both intelligence and (at least a couple of) other traits simultaneously.
I think you've missed that the argument for censoring/tabooing eugenics (and most of these arguments) aren't mistake theorists, utilitarians, rationalists or classical liberals (although the last point's probably not that important). Their actual argument would steelman to:
* Thinking that some people are better than other people is intrinsically morally wrong.
* Eugenics derives from the above, and also derives from being bourgeois/white/[rich?]/[elite?]/[upper class?], and viewing people who are poorer/had less opportunities than you as intrinsically worse than you, and hating them. It also derives from blaming marginalised communities for their own problems, which are caused by white supremacy/[poverty?]. Believing these things is also morally wrong.
* The sole motivation of eugenics is racism/hating the disabled and mentally ill/[classism?]. None of the problems it purports to solve are caused by anything intrinsic about the people it discusses, they're actually caused by intentional discrimination to keep marginalised communities, well, marginalised.
* Eugenics is ultimately the extreme end of a social system that is designed to oppress marginalised people, by providing the ideological foundation to wipe them out entirely. The direct analogue would be antisemitism; "moderate voluntary eugenics" would be the equivalent of, "a program to improve gentile representation in Hollywood."*
* Eugenics is also an attempt to shift the debate away from programs to address discrimination/[poverty?].
The underlying weltanschauung is that some people are evil and motivated by evil, and it's this evil motivation that defines them as the evil group (specifically, they're motivated by maintaining their own power/privilege at the expense of others, a bit like the Inner Party in 1984*). These people control society, and they pick which ideas to advocate as part of their plan to maintain control (or unconsciously settle on them for that reason). Stopping them from advocating for evil things, wherever possible, is thus morally good because it disrupts their ability to maintain control of society.
This is all based on a worldview in which an evil (eg. racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist etc) conspiracy/non-conspiratorial consensus controls society, or is on the cusp of retaking power. They understand their arguments for censorship as arguments for tearing down Nazi propaganda posters in 1930s Germany.
A lot of them wouldn't focus on the points in the square brackets, but probably wouldn't reject them (I think, but I'm not completely sure on both parts of that). There's also some tangles at the moral foundations level in terms of which parts are intrinsically evil and which parts are instrumentally evil that I've probably got wrong, but I think that would seem like scholasticism to people who hold these views.
*Nobody who holds these views would use these analogies, but I think they capture the sense of the worldview.
I think your steelman needs just so much work. The idea that "all cis white men are part of an evil conspiracy/consensus" is the popular view of "woke" folks from the outside, but personally knowing a lot of people who buy fully into that worldview, it's entirely inaccurate.
The argument about privilege is that it's *insidious.* It shapes worldviews without us knowing that it shapes our worldview. The things we believe and value are informed by that privilege and thus we have a non-objective view of the world. We are not, in fact, evil people trying to do evil and protect our power. It's just that everyone creates worldviews based on making sense of their lived experience, and for those in power that means telling a story that makes their power legitimate.
In such a belief system it's *impossible* to separate our values from our place in society. Even if we're the smartest folks alive, we lack the correct information to do so. Therefore, when we decide which human traits are valuable (or what to order for lunch) we do so based on value judgments that are inherently flawed and subjective.
Despite mostly thinking these folks are unhinged, I am extremely sympathetic to this viewpoint when it comes to eugenics. The costs of getting it wrong in the specific way they're concerned about are enormous. I do not think it's far-fetched to believe that if I were in charge of the "on whom should we model humanity" committee I'd tend to pick people most like myself. And hell if I'm going to let literally anyone else be in charge of that committee.
A compelling, non-controversial version of the same argument is the argument for democracy. Why should folks who don't own land, folks who do not pay federal taxes, and folks who lack a high school education be allowed to choose our government? They have less incentive to make good choices, large incentive to support increased taxation, and less knowledge base than people who graduate high school and work middle class jobs.
But history shows us that those folks have concerns that the "landed gentry" will fail entirely to address, and that a government that doesn't take those concerns into account is capable of atrocity.
In re Nobel Sperm Banks: I believe people aren't young when they get Nobel Prizes, and sperm is in worse shape as a man gets older.
There are work arounds, I think. One would be to encourage people who might get Nobel Prizes to freeze some sperm. How early can you identify likely candidates?
How about children of Nobel Prize winners?
So. This is baffling to read.
First off, you just... didn't talk about the current debate about genetic screening. Trying to prevent things like autism and Down's syndrome. Like, I guess it's highly inconvenient to you if you have to acknowledge that modern day eugenics is still about preventing the birth of the undesirables, but, you really need to. The slope looks a lot more slippery when people are literally arguing that allowing certain types of children to be born is a tragedy.
But even past that, this seems to boil down to... "Why are we as a society unwilling to, based on highly debated and controversial theories about IQ, implement policies and plans to give taxpayer money to people who are already likely to be successful and wealthy? In a few generations there could be amazing gains, in a vague betterment of humanity kind of way". Dude, we're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere with wild abandon, I have no goddamn idea what's happening in your brain.
>undesirables
Generally not wanting your children to be born with defects, disabilities, and handicaps is extremely altruistic in nature and shows an ability to go beyond yourself and immediate gratification for the sake of the next generation. If you have a problem with this I have to assume it’s because of selfish interest. Down’s impairs someone’s cognitive functioning by ~60 IQ points or so. This is severe negative utility to both the person themselves and those around them; pretending otherwise is cruel and creates inordinate amounts of harm.
>highly debated
IQ tests aren’t really “debated” about by people who know anything. This is like saying climate change is “hotly debated.” Sure, small aspects and mechanisms might be, but people who are aware of the extant literature and have a modicum of knowledge about the subject agree on about 80-90% of what is being discussed, and the quibbles are more-or-less icing. Mutualism vs g-theory? Measurement invariance across generation cohorts and trying to reverse engineer actual IQ loss/gain? These might be “debated” or discussed. Whether or not IQ tests are valid, measure intelligence, &c, are not.
>vague betterment
Increasing mean IQ (really g) would be the single greatest utility improvement humans have ever done probably ever. Massively decreasing crime and upping the per-capita genius and innovation rate when our population is already large would be incredible. I guess if increased scientific progress sounds “vague” to you then maybe you belong to a different Substack community.
>undesirables
Okay, given the extreme hit to quality of life by being born with Down's, does that not then imply heavily that it is a good and moral idea to sterilize the few people with down's who can reproduce? My point wasn't to get into this argument or dismiss it as nonsense with no value, my point was that it is very very close to promoting sterilization, which this whole article talked about as if it's a pure evil that we would never skirt close to, when we are in fact skirting real close to it right now.
>highly debated
I am doubtful that there is scientific consensus that you can breed more intelligence into the global population through eugenics. My reading through of the literature is admittedly casual and rather shallow, but I remember disagreements about heritability and genetic factors in IQ. Maybe I am wrong on this, sure, public perception of IQ is highly debated which is all that is necessary to point out why this idea is unpopular.
>vague betterment
Vague means unclear, does not mean unimportant. "Smarter people" is an unbelievably massive boon, worth incredible costs, but it's a vague one. Like, improve intelligence to improve science to improve medicine to maybe cure some important disease, is vague. I am appreciative of the differences shifts in statistics can make, but if you are trying to garner support for a large scale plan that is funneling money towards people who probably don't need it and doesn't have any pay off for multiple generations, you need pay-off that is more appealing than "Higher IQ". At least, if this was an actual thing you wanted to actually implement in an actual government/society. I don't know, I feel insane having to explain this.
I'm realizing that "eugenics" is woefully underspecified, not just the positive vs. negative aspect, and the coercive vs. non-coercive aspect, but that scope matters.
There are people with serious genetic medical problems who chose not to have children because they don't want to pass the problems on. So, negative eugenics, fully voluntary, small scope. Is this a problem?
What seems to be missing Here is the cost to the people who will have to raise this child i.e. the ones with serious handicaps. I have a friend who has a daughter with Downs who is now in her 30s and she is a wonderful person but my friend has a lot of resources.
Yes, it's amazing how much that gets left out.
Plenty of pro abortion arguments - especially with regard to young teenagers giving birth -make that argument too. What about the cost of the child.
Yeah, individual choices seem radically different from Government programs imposing a choice on large numbers of people by force
It should probably be a felony in rich countries to knowingly or recklessly pass on any sufficiently terrible genetic disease that could have been averted by prenatal testing. The utility cost of passing on Huntington's is a lot worse than committing rape.
Here's a question: what does "overpopulation" mean?
Is it meant in the sense of "the average GPD per capita of person from country X means that they can't afford to eat"? Because then China could go from overpopulated to underpopulated in less than a generation, and could have done so even without the one child policy. And Africa is likely to become underpopulated just at its population peaks.
Does it mean "too many people for the amount of arable land to provide a surplus in years with SD-1 crop yields"? Because then Japan and most of Europe are overpopulated. Does it refer to some sort of metric related to average population density? Because then Africa is underpopulated and likely to remain so for the next 100 years.
The term is just so maddeningly nebulous, and all too often seems to simply be shorthand for "those benighted poor people over there" rather than anything specific. And that immediately sets up the dark cultural undertones of "those people over there ruining it for the rest of us" which, I feel, surrounded a lot of the high-flown environmentalist rhetoric in the 70s and 80s.
Also: is it not easier to simply have a heuristic of "forcibly sterilizing people is bad and wrong" that can allow one to damn both eugenics and environmentalism to the extent that they endorsed and enabled forcible sterilization? Doesn't that cut through the crap by way of the association games linking these two disparate concepts somewhat?
I haven't read all the comments carefully, but it seems like all the arguments against eugenics involves the fear of coercive power. Would anyone object to a private organization whose twin values are
1. This should not be done by government. We hereby publicly and irrevocably commit to strictly and scrupulously avoid engaging with government in any way. To that end, here are some rules we promise to follow, and some binding enforcement mechanisms to hold us accountable if we fail.
2. Voluntary eugenics is good. Let's educate people on why and how to have kids that are smarter and healthier than they would be by default.
So you provide people with instructions on how to find intelligent, attractive partners, but without any enforcement mechanism? Isn't that just normal dating advice?
Good question, let's walk through it. If your experience of normal dating advice includes:
- your mom pestering you about going on a third date when you haven't even seen their family medical history
- your friend pestering you for liking your date's eye color but you don't care they wear contacts
- your dad having "the talk" with you, and leaving you with some condoms, a book about sex, and some fun puzzles to do on first dates that will give you a fair idea about someone's iq
... then yeah, I guess I'm just advocating for normal dating advice. Even if this isn't your experience of normal dating advice, it might be effective to frame it that way. Let's put together a pamphlet, call it "Getting Ever Brighter, advice engendering generational betterment," and get OpenPhil to fund seminars and etc.
I assumed he meant encouraging voluntary use of sperm banks or polygenic embryo selection, but based on his response, I guess not.
Side note, but Galton came up with one of the most inventive uses of trigonometry during his time in Africa:
"Mr. Hahn's household was large. There was an interpreter, and a sub-interpreter, and again others; but all most excellently well-behaved, and showing to great advantage the influence of their master. These servants were chiefly Hottentots, who had migrated with Mr. Hahn from Hottentot-land, and, like him, had picked up the language of the Damaras.
The sub-interpreter was married to a charming person, not only a Hottentot in figure, but in that respect a Venus among Hottentots. I was perfectly aghast at her development, and made inquiries upon that delicate point as far as I dared among my missionary friends. The result is, that I believe Mrs. Petrus to be the lady who ranks second among all the Hottentots for the beautiful outline that her back affords, Jonker's wife ranking as the first ; the latter, however, was slightly tassee, while Mrs. Petrus was in full embonpoint.
I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape; but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my foot-rule could be ; and I really dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form, that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate.
The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant ; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake ; this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring-tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms."
-Tropical South Africa, 1853
Comment of the week, hands down, LOLOL. Thanks for posting it.
Am I truly the only cat who remembers the Ehrlich-Simon Wager?
Anyway, Palo Alto has a higher population density than does Bangladesh, and doubtless consumes a lot more precious resources while offering far less of the things humans and cats actually need to survive. I suggest we start the involuntary vasectomies there.
Perhaps Mt Athos next
“Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad”
No, it is bad. The difference is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a non sequitur of Islam. The same can not be said for the atrocities of committed in the name of eugenics.
Attacks on noncombatants during peacetime feels pretty on brand for certain flavors of Islam.
In fact, if you draw a cartoon parodying that observation, you'll inspire attacks on noncombatants during peacetime.
What’s your feeling about the eugenic eradication of Down’s syndrome in Iceland.
What rubs me the wrong way about this issue (and that of super-intelligent AI to a certain extent as well), is that the whole discussion loses sight of the individual. Every individual human life is, in a way, a universe, whether that life be privileged or poor, full of prestige or full of humility, full of happiness or full of suffering. These are ideas which run roughshod over the value of the individual human life in order to fulfill some (pipe)dream about a perfected future society where, in the case of eugenics, everyone will be more beautiful and more intelligent and which, in turn, would apparently lead (according to many of the opinions I read here) to moral enlightenment and happiness...
I think my lingering unease about this revolves around the question of how, in the process of trying to achieve this perfected future human being - though it be through positive means such as the Nobel sperm bank idea etc. - can we not end up subconsciously deprecating all those who currently do not fit the ideal for the future utopia? The less intelligent, the less physically perfect, the diseased, the poor... If we are striving for the eventual elimination of their kind from society, how can we possibly not be disparaging of their present existence?
AI is kinda the same. What good does super-intelligent AI do, even if benevolent, even if it creates a "perfect" society where there is presumably no or little suffering, if that has been achieved at the cost of reducing individuals to just some product which needs to be optimized...
I do not feel that I am "disparaging myself" when I try to raise my children to surpass me. And this isn't specific to my bloodline; if (post?)human civilization reaches a point where there are tens of billions of entities, practically all much smarter than me, I probably consider that outcome awesome.
This had kind of a strange turn, or lack thereof. The commonplace criticism of Ehrlich is that he was basically a eugenicist sublimating that socially unpopular belief structure into more socially acceptable environmentalism: https://capitalresearch.org/article/paul-ehrlichs-population-dud/
There is not a single human being alive who I would trust to define what the future of humanity should look like. In 100 years we're gonna discover that society needs to be 30% stupid to function or something. IMO the evil is baked directly into the idea - "society would be better if people were less different from me."
As for Ehrlich, the evil's also baked directly into his idea - "society would be better if we had less people...Especially people who are different from me."
Fortunately, you've framed the discussion so Ehrlich gets to stand for *all environmentalism everywhere* and Galton gets to stand for *a particular strand of eugenics* which really helps make the position seem more reasonable than it is.
I said most of what I wanted to say in my own top level comment, but this really covers the rest of the ground that I left out of mine. You could try to argue that "society would be better if people were less different from me" is not the position of eugenicists, but eugenicists (on the whole) will never exclude themselves from the group considered pro-social, and therefore all their arguments are simply trying to rationalize the underlying belief that they belong to an elite group that is better than others and deserves to occupy a privileged position within society. There is no redeeming any facet of a movement that attempts to entrench that belief in public policy.
> I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism.
Clearly the conclusion is that minarchist libertarianism is correct ;)
In all seriousness, the leap to "governments are judged differently from people" seems to lack any argument to me. As far as I can tell this is just carving out a special case for... whatever it is constitutes government. Which is still made up of people. But under some particular set of circumstances those people get to claim totally different moral rules? What "licenses" a government to act differently? Does this license have any limits?
Governments have a monopoly on coercion, which makes them evil and culpable. They cause pain and misery to their own subjects in visible and attributable ways.
Individuals and businesses are free to make and accept whatever legal offers they like. Rather than cause misery and pain directly to ingroups nearby, they let the invisible hand of the free market do it to outgroups at a deniable remove, and therefore are not to blame for their side effects and externalities.
There is no "positive eugenics." Any time one frames it as privileges for the "good-gened" instead of extermination of the "bad-gened," there's still an expectation that the "bad-gened" ought to be happy with the denial of those privileges.
With regards to forced sterilizations with sustainability goals, they're always imposed on the poorest people using the fewest resources. If environmental sustainability was the goal, they would be imposed on the developed world, where we eat more food and burn more gasoline per person. But it's not the environment we're out to sustain, it's the developed-world lifestyle.
It's not like India is suffering from a lack of population. Might be a controversial idea, but there are a lot of human beings and we breed like rabbits. Any country which needs more population can crack open immigration a little bit and will have more than enough Syrians and Afghanis and people from Sahel in a heartbeat, and they'll breed where they go as well. Hell, among the 10 million or so refugees in Turkey, clean majority being males, still more than 1 million births happened in the last decade or so. This them living in a substandard conditions. So any kind of sterilization campaign is at worst neutral to humanity since there are more than enough people to breed. It's not like we're in a population bottleneck.
About positive eugenics, I think the rich are making DNA screening before selecting which baby to IV implant but there should be cheaper alternatives for the masses. Can sperm be cloned? If so why don't we have von Neumann sperms on supermarket checkout shelves?
Isn't the real lesson here that you should never listen to Robert McNamara? Because that usually ends up with me adding another item to the list of his mistakes.
I think the space of ideas that are evil nutcases can twist into an excuse to commit atrocities is really wide. Probably not every idea a human mind can think, but probably a significant section of the things that are important.
Basically, society couldn't function if we avoided everything that could possibly be used as an excuse to commit an atrocity. Given the way our society works, we aren't particularly likely to repeat atrocities. If we started a eugenics program now, it would be particularly unlikely to have the exact same sort of atrocities as before. Partly this is just random samples from a large space containing few repeats. Partly the vulnerability has been patched, people know to look out for that specific atrocity.
I think trying to avoid giving homicidal maniacs an excuse to kill people is extremely hard, they will always find some excuse, it's much easier to not give them the means.
"If we started a eugenics program now, it would be particularly unlikely to have the exact same sort of atrocities as before."
No, we'd have a whole new set of atrocities, and in fifty years time people would be arguing over "well it's not fair to tar eugenics with the brush of What Happened In Sacramento".
Do you think a eugenics program is significantly more likely to turn towards atrocities than say a vaccination program, or any other program?
Yes. Because eugenics programmes are explicitly for "let's make sure none of the unhealthy breed", and the founding originators of eugenics picked out things like modern medicine making it possible for the sickly and weak who, in the course of nature would have died off before reproducing, to live and go on to have more sickly, weak offspring. So vaccination programmes in a sense were contra-eugenics: sure, they prevent the spread of disease, but they also prevent the natural way of culling the herd!
People drawing up little lists of the unfit and then deciding what happens the unfit are just as likely to say "let's *not* vaccinate the epileptics and diabetics, let them get sick and die off naturally".
And vaccination + social distancing can easily turn into "keep their disgusting unvaxxed germ filled bodies away from us" with a similar amount of conceptual twisting towards the evil. And we saw a fair bit of vax discrimination during covid.
Anyone who understood the biology would be more keen to ensure that the very best and otherwise promising had many children, especially with each other, and ideally they would want that some of those children get exposed to a bit more radiation than is healthy.
After all, selecting against the worst will reduce variance, while selecting for the best will increase it.
I think that the free market will make "eugenics" widespread on its own, without any arguments being won or policymakers stepping in. Polygenic testing using ML algorithms is already here and can determine the likely traits of embryos (mostly health-related for now commercially, but IQ predictors also already exist—both are limited by data only) . IVF embryo selection is becoming increasingly commonplace. No coercive force is used; parents do this on their own for obvious reasons.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/12/genomic-prediction-of-cognitive-ability.html
Interesting read, thanks.
I think the real reason people dislike eugenics (and therefore the crucial point missing in the piece) is that it designates some people as more worthy of reproducing than others, which is rather close to establishing a hierarchy of moral worth. This indeed might be very morally corrosive, possibly outweighing potential social benefits of eugenics.
"knee-jerk environmentalist opposition to nuclear power prevented it from taking over from fossil fuels"
What is a good reference for this claim?
I always thought it was the fact that nuclear energy was responsible for Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Chernobyl that put people off.
I mean is there a book (or at least an article) that convincingly argues that the main reason nuclear did not realize its potential was because of environmentalist opposition, not because it was more expensive and less convenient than fossil fuels (while environmentalis had a minor effect).
Yes, probably. But it would be handy to have a book by an expert that explains this in more details and answers various objections (for example: some countries, like the ussr, did not have an anti-nuclear environmental movement - why didn’t they get to unlimited power and flying cars? Were their greenhouse gas emissions really much smaller?) or more precisely, can one give a rough estimate of how much damage the movement did to nuclear power and how much emissions is it responsible for?
Look at France.
I think price trajectories are a strong argument. Most technologies get cheaper the more of them you build. Nuclear was getting cheaper until 1970, and then got more and more expensive. I don't know how to get detailed historical info, but these sources talk about what happened:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThvvCE2HsLohJYd7b/why-has-nuclear-power-been-a-flop
The media played a key role (as it still does today), as suggested by Cohen's survey of the Health Physics Society and Radiation Research Society. This 1982 survey found that 91% of experts judged the general public's fear of radiation to be "greater than realistic": http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter5.html
I think it's also important to realize that Wind and Solar didn't reach 1% of primary energy supply until 2011, 32 years after the Charney global warming consensus report in 1979. I think everyone sensible knew at the time that we couldn't "just renewables" our way out of global warming, but "environmentalists" still rejected nuclear. [edited]
Even in 2023 Germany has fully shut down all nuclear plants but plans to leave coal plants online for several more years. Even after shutting coal down, they plan to allow non-coal fossil fuel plants after that. If anti-nuclear is knee-jerk, the knee has been jerking for 60+ years.
I would love to know more about the early history. I noticed Helen Caldicott and other anti-nukes were influenced by the 1957 novel "On The Beach" by Nevil Shute (youtu.be/C6-47HrCzjs?t=441) which was about nuclear war. I'm not sure why they so strictly equate bombs with power plants though.
Thank you, this is very insightful and informative!
What do you think about the following anti-nuclear argument: a world, where nuclear power is truly abundant (every country has many nuclear power plants) will also very likely be a world where it is much easier to make nuclear weapons and nuclear war and nuclear terrorism are much more likely.
1. Nuclear bomb production requires cycling out fuel after ~30 days in the reactor, in order to avoid contaminating weapons-grade plutonium-239 with reactor-grade plutonium-240, 241 and 242.[1][2] Most reactors are not designed for such rapid cycling because it gets in the way of other design goals. My favorite examples are the Molten Salt Reactor designs from companies including Moltex, Thorcon and Terrestrial Energy: these reactors are designed to be sealed for several years (adding fuel, but never removing anything).
2. The nuclear industry is highly regulated; we can require power plants to use anti-proliferation designs and have security guards, and reactor designers prefer to do this anyway, in order to help them weather the barrage of public criticism that always happens whenever anyone proposes building a nuclear plant.
3. It's harder to build an electric power plant than a bomb-making plant. Countries that want to build bombs can more easily do so by building dedicated non-power facilities for that purpose. For example, North Korea built nuclear bombs but no power plants, ditto for the Manhattan Project. AFAIK, the USA doesn't use any civilian power plants to make nuclear-weapon material. So protesting nuclear power usually does nothing to reduce proliferation in one's own country, let alone other countries. Since you have a limited amount of time to protest, why not protest bombs instead of clean energy?
[1] From Roger Cashmore, Ben Koppelman, in Reprocessing and Recycling of Spent Nuclear Fuel, 2015: §23.5.1 Enhancing isotopic barriers:
> Weapons-grade plutonium is produced via very low burn up of uranium fuel; that is, when fuel is irradiated for a short time, even just for a few weeks. In civil nuclear power reactors, fuel is irradiated over several years to maximize its energy yield for electricity production. This significantly reduces the attractiveness of plutonium in used civil fuel for nuclear weapons use. The reactor-grade plutonium in used civil fuel has a lower fraction of Pu-239 due to the high levels of burn up in civil nuclear power reactors. It has a greater quantity of undesirable isotopes of plutonium that complicate the use of civil nuclear materials in nuclear weapons, decreasing the reliability of a nuclear explosion. Pu-238 decays relatively rapidly, generating significant amounts of heat. Pu-240 could set off the chain reaction prematurely, substantially reducing explosive yield as the weapon may blow itself apart and cut short the chain reaction. Pu-241 decays to Am-241 that absorbs neutrons and emits intense gamma radiation. These isotopes require careful management and extensive shielding to protect personnel when handling materials, and they could damage other components in a nuclear weapon.
[2] Technically reactor-grade plutonium CAN be used in a weapon, but this has never BEEN done due to (i) the extreme radiation danger of raw spent fuel as well as plutonium 240/241/242 and (ii) reduced and unpredictable weapons yield. By far the most likely way reactor-grade plutonium would get into a weapon is if terrorists who are nuclear experts, and don't mind getting radiation sickness, created a weapon (The Sum Of All Fears). For this reason it is good to have (i) regulations (which already exist) around used fuel handling (ii) waste-burning reactors that destroy plutonium (and also eliminate the long-term nuclear waste problem) and (iii) reactor designs with low plutonium production. Thorcon implies thorium is difficult to separate from plutonium, making its thorium-rich fuel proliferation-resistant, but I haven't seen anyone corroborate this.
"modern research suggests the dysgenic trend does exist, but it’s only 1-3 IQ points per century"
How to square this with the Flynn Effect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Thank you!
>And consider that IQ is mostly genetic and could be improved with eugenics. Bringing all underdeveloped countries up to First World living standards would be the most valuable thing humanity has ever done.
One of the big problem with these sort of arguments is it ignores the geopolitical and historical context of poverty. This kind of view is a very naïve view of the world and ignores environmental stressors that IQ can't overcome.
The post itself references that 'Ehrlich’s supporters included President Lyndon Johnson, who told the Prime Minister of India that US foreign aid was conditional on India sterilizing lots of people', which gives you an example of the kind of exploitative attitude and policy the developed world has to the underdeveloped world. You change IQ but that wouldn't change this fundamental structure of the world.
What's your evidence for that? But at any rate, having a high IQ wouldn't be a fix-all solution for poverty because of the geopolitical impediments.
East Asia was heavily exploited by imperialists, but grew out of it because their IQ was high.
What's the evidence for that?
All the non-communist ethnically east asian countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) have reached economic parity with europe despite the legacy of colonialism, and their co-ethnics everywhere in the world are quite well off despite the ongoing explicit government programs of discrimination against them in many of the countries where they are a minority. Apparently their slight advantage in human capital more than compensates for whatever legacy of oppression.
>All the non-communist ethnically east asian countries (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) have reached economic parity with europe despite the legacy of colonialism
What's the evidence that this is due to IQ as opposed to the West propping these nations up as a counterweight to communism?
Take South Korea as an example:
"During the 1950s, Korea’s economy slowly began to recover, but there wasn’t much to work with. Foreign aid and assistance came in from the International Development Association, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and bilateral agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan. "
"During the Third Republic between 1963 and 1972, the country received millions of dollars from Japan due to property rights claims and from the US, which, due to involvement in the Vietnam War, sought to support democratic South Korea as a counterweight to communist North Korea. The government used foreign revenues to achieve a self-sustaining economy and launched the saemaeul initiative to develop rural areas. "
It sounds a lot like South Korea wouldn't be where it is today without being artificially propped up by Western angel investors.
We send lots of foreign aid to lots of places. None of them turn out like East Asia. We've propped up various governments in South America, Eastern Europe, and the middle east.
You can explain almost all of the variance in GDP per capita between countries using IQ, economic freedom, trade freedom, and oil.
>We send lots of foreign aid to lots of places. None of them turn out like East Asia
Nowhere near to the same extent however.
>You can explain almost all of the variance in GDP per capita between countries using IQ, economic freedom, trade freedom, and oil.
There's the question of whether highly developed nations are highly developed because they have a higher IQ or whether they have a higher IQ because they are highly developed.
We know that IQ is highly environmental. For instance the average IQ in North Korea is about 98 and in South Korea its about 102. You'd expect them to be the same (or at least within a point or so) if IQ wasn't affected by environment but they aren't. So that indicates that being highly developed boosts IQ as opposed to the other way around.
I read through most of the comments and couldn't find anyone really mirroring my the depths of my dismay at the shallowness of Adraste's argument here. I think the article completely misses most of the actual arguments of anti-eugenicists - at least those from a leftist/sjw/moral perspective. If you listen to modern leftists discuss eugenics, of course they think forced and coerced sterilization is bad, but their argument is never that eugenics is bad *because* forced/coerced sterilization is bad. People were arguing against eugenics before any such policies were implemented. There are at least two (intertwined, but separate) points that Adraste should have made that she didn't even come within spitting distance of.
1) It is impossible to extricate any ranking of desirable traits (and therefore the people who have those desirable traits) from the systemic inequalities that exist in our society. Any system that is put in place will necessarily benefit the people who already have the most power in society and disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Someone who had to drop out of high school to support their three younger siblings may be as smart as the Nobel laureates invited to the sperm bank, but that'll never even be noticed because they have an 11th grade education and have been working 2-3 jobs at a time since they were 16. There are a lot of people working every waking minute to barely make ends meet - I'd wager the smartest .1% of those people are as smart as, if not smarter than, the average Nobel laureate, they're just harder to find. Any initiative that ignores them because the people making the initiative don't think about them, or because they are more comfortable around Nobel laureates, or just because it's easier, is entrenching and enhancing systemic inequalities (which is bad).
2) When talking about Carrie Buck and her sister, who were sterilized for political convenience, or the thousands of blind people who were sterilized but didn't even have heritable blindness, the very next point Adraste should land on is that we might not make those same mistakes today, but we'd make mistakes. All our studies regarding what is heritable or not, why it is heritable, and how it is heritable, have flaws. We've barely scratched the surface of epigenetic indicators - will sperm from a Nobel laureate really make that much difference in entirely contrasting prenatal environments? We don't know what we don't know, and who will we needlessly hurt in this process? Even in the encouraging-births model, "Nobel laureate" may be a heritable trait, but who knows if it's a genetic one. In 50 years this may seem as stupid an idea as all blindness being heritable.
I want to wrap up this comment by mentioning that there are two ways to arrive at the belief that any attempt to value one human life above another is immoral (which also should have come up in Adraste's commentary, as it's pretty fundamental to the anti-eugenicist belief system). The first is a purely moral concern that all humans are inherently the same amount of valuable. The other is the practical concern coming from the confluence of the two above points, leading to the conclusion that any attempt to rank the value of one human life over another will be inherently flawed, and therefore it is immoral to try. I don't come quite to the point of believing that there is no difference in value that can be placed on human life (the person making breakthroughs in cancer research unequivocally has more value to society than the serial killer spending their days stalking their next victim) but while "cancer-researcher" may be a heritable trait, we haven't a clue if it's genetic. With very few exceptions, I believe there's no ethical way to value-rank a person's unborn children, making any eugenics policy inherently immoral.
"Someone who had to drop out of high school to support their three younger siblings may be as smart as the Nobel laureates invited to the sperm bank, but that'll never even be noticed because they have an 11th grade education and have been working 2-3 jobs at a time since they were 16."
Galton in one of his books claims this is not true; if you really are one of the 1% then you will triumph over all odds, because look at all the rags-to-riches stories. So just because you're an illiterate ploughboy in the depths of the country with sixteen siblings to feed, that doesn't mean you can't become President of the Royal Society if you just put your mind to it, put your head down, and work really hard with your giant genius brain.
From "Hereditary Genius", 1892 second edition:
"I believe, and shall do my best to show, that, if the “eminent” men of any period, had been changelings when babies, a very fair proportion of those who survived and retained their health up to fifty years of age, would, notwithstanding their altered circumstances, have equally risen to eminence. Thus—to take a strong case—it is incredible that any combination of circumstances, could have repressed Lord Brougham to the level of undistinguished mediocrity.
The arguments on which I rely, are as follow. I will limit their application for the present, to men of the pen and to artists. First, it is a fact, that numbers of men rise, before they are middle-aged, from the humbler ranks of life to that worldly position, in which it is of no importance to their future career, how their youth has been passed.
They have overcome their hindrances, and thus start fair with others more fortunately reared, in the subsequent race of life. A boy who is to be carefully educated is sent to a good school, where he confessedly acquires little useful information, but where he is taught the art of learning. The man of whom I have been speaking, has contrived to acquire the same art in a school of adversity. Both stand on equal terms, when they have reached mature life. They compete for the same prizes, measure their strength by efforts in the same direction, and their relative successes are thenceforward due to their relative natural gifts. There are many such men in the “eminent” class, as biographies abundantly show. Now, if the hindrances to success were very great, we should expect all who surmounted them, to be prodigies of genius. The hindrances would form a system of natural selection, by repressing all whose gifts were below a certain very high level. But what is the case? We find very many who have risen from the ranks, who are by no means prodigies of genius; many who have no claim to “eminence,” who have risen easily in spite of all obstacles. The hindrances undoubtedly form a system of natural selection that represses mediocre men, and even men of pretty fair powers—in short, the classes below D; but many of D succeed, a great many of E, and I believe a very large majority of those above.
If a man is gifted with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, I cannot comprehend how such a man should be repressed. The world is always tormented with difficulties waiting to be solved—struggling with ideas and feelings, to which it can give no adequate expression. If, then, there exists a man capable of solving those difficulties, or of giving a voice to those pent-up feelings, he is sure to be welcomed with universal acclamation. We may almost say that he has only to put his pen to paper, and the thing is done. I am here speaking of the very first-class men—prodigies—one in a million, or one in ten millions, of whom numbers will be found described in this volume, as specimens of hereditary genius. "
Galton was writing in 1892 - did a black woman in South Carolina at that time really have the ability to rise to the level of notability as a white man - even if both had identical levels of social, emotional, and intellectual intelligence? If he didn't address this point in his writings then his entire argument is moot, as society has hardly progressed to the point today where race and gender differences can be dismissed as a non-factor in how the rest of society treats an applicant for any position.
Even setting aside that argument, however, and dealing with two people of the same gender and race, the one who is not sent to the best schools will need more grit, determination, and discipline, alongside a separate set of skills to reach the same places that someone born into wealth and privilege may reach. Someone who is incredibly intellectually smart but not emotionally intelligent is more likely to be given a position if their resume comes with institutional pedigree, while a person without that pedigree will need some other factor to make up for the missing prestige that comes with that resume. Someone who is terrible at networking may still develop a network of like-minded people if their parents or childhood friends are in the same or adjacent prestigious fields, while someone without those connections will have to go at it alone and is therefore less likely to succeed.
In short, I think Galton's argument is specious. He makes the mistake of thinking that if some people can raise themselves out of the positions they were born into, that anyone with the same characteristics as someone in a prestigious position is capable of doing so, ignoring the other factors that may have made it easier for people born into wealthy and connected families to get there than those who are not.
"Galton was writing in 1892 - did a black woman in South Carolina at that time really have the ability to rise to the level of notability as a white man - even if both had identical levels of social, emotional, and intellectual intelligence? If he didn't address this point in his writings then his entire argument is moot"
Ah, I can't quote what Galton says about black people because I think that would all be caught up in the Substack No-No Word filters 😁 Let's just say that black women in South Carolina are not part of the target group. White women are barely acknowledged, and then he's fretting that we don't have the kind of academic grading in university for them as we do for young men, so you probably have to judge Ethel's eugenic fitness on "are her family all big names with big families?"
> so you probably have to judge Ethel's eugenic fitness on "are her family all big names with big families?"
But is that not the fundamental issue that I'm pointing out? That it comes down to one's position in society rather than one's innate traits? The dismissal of black people and women and anyone else not like himself is the problem, and comes back around to point #1 from my original comment
But Galton has graphs and statistics and talks about regression to the mean! (even if he uses a different term for it).
What do you mean that he ignores all except white, university educated men in his calculations of who are in the higher levels of human excellence? 😁 He's using *science*!
I would like to believe that's because leftist arguments are so facile that any attempt at reasoned debate would discard them without discussion. How is it that 'systemic inequalities' don't hold back Indian/African immigrants from performing well in the American system?
Thanks for this writeup.
It doesn't make sense to me, though.
1. Voluntary eugenics is about improving genes of the next generation. It doesn't harm anyone who is already alive. If the high-school dropout with two jobs chooses to get donor sperm from a genius instead of (say) whoever she can get, "the people who already have the most power in society" do not benefit from that, but this mother-to-be is more likely to have a smart baby (not guaranteed, of course). So the benefit, it seems to me, goes to the high-school dropout.
2. Society always makes mistakes. Banning things can be a mistake, mandating things can be a mistake, and letting people make their own choices can be a mistake. So pointing out that any of these three options "could be a mistake" is (in absence of evidence) not a good argument. And there is evidence genes affect intelligence (and other traits), so...there. Plus, we could allow people to make choices and then measure the outcomes, so that if mistakes were made, they can be corrected in the future. Double-blind trials would be better, but I digress.
Presumably you favor the "banning" option, but this option closes off learning. If choice is banned, but the ban is a mistake, we'll never know, we'll just have endless debates about it. Only by allowing things, and then measuring outcomes, can society learn.
You might not want that learning to occur because the choices that led to the learning were "immoral". The thing is, I don't share whatever moral intuition people use to judge such choices as immoral. In fact, I think that intuition must be wrong.
It looks like you're trying to say that if we try to increase our chances of having a disease-free, kind and/or smart child that we are "valu[ing] one human life above another." I disagree. We're valuing one sperm or egg above another; that's different.
I think Adam Mastroianni comes over much worse than Ehlrich or Galton. Adam is actively seeking to judge people.
Adam is demanding that Galton judges a stranger from a completely different culture, while Galton is trying to observe and understand. Judging people for being from a different if worse culture is the less liberal and less cosmopolitan option.
I think Ehlrich and Galton's views were perfectly reasonable from the position they were coming from, in both cases they cluld still make a reasonable lesser of two evils argument for their positions (If India had horrendous famines today would Ehlrich be seen as a heroic Cassandra?).
I think there is a more core moral flaw with Adam, he wants to find people with different world views or positions in time to be his moral inferiors. Uncharitablity to Galton is core to his approach to reading his book.
What, exactly, is morally bad about incentivizing low-IQ people to not reproduce? If I was a multi-billionaire that is exactly what I would do. I'm not interested in slippery-slope arguments - the potential benefits are so huge that they more than offset whatever safeguards are necessary to reinforce any slippery slopes. If you model low IQ as a negative externality (which it is), then Coase's Theorem implies that creating a negotiable property right w/r/t that externality will lead to Pareto-efficient outcomes. IMO this is obviously the right approach and - at least until IQ-raising interventions arrive - represents the absolute lowest-hanging fruit in the "how can we most-quickly improve the world" game.
The people having too many kids are the end result of many factors, including social liberalisation. It's the deadbeats fathering a string of kids on multiple women with no more regard than dogs in heat that have taken "free love is a human right!" to its natural extreme. Why does he care if he has six kids by six different women? He doesn't have any responsibility to be involved in their lives. If she didn't want a baby, it was up to her to use contraception or get an abortion. You can't force people to stay together for the sake of the kids anymore, because it's all about Me and My Self-Actualisation.
The lower classes always did tend to having kids outside of marriage and carelessness about marriage, but now they have social sanction from their betters. The betters, of course, still get married, tend not to get divorced, and confine their child-bearing to within marriage, but they sawed away the sanctions of shame and religious disapproval all in the name of liberty and individuality.
So you can try paying people to get vasectomies or have their tubes tied, and that may work. But not enough, so then compulsion has to come in. Guys who have six kids and don't support them being called in for involuntary sterilisation. Women having implanted contraceptives to make sure they don't 'forget' to use them. Deliver your third kid outside of wedlock and get a free hysterectomy.
That, of course, will stir up an entire hornets' nest of protest. You better have a very good case to argue there, Wanda.
My own country is providing free contraceptive services to women aged 17-25. I await the results of this experiment, and if it makes any meaningful difference to birth-rates out of wedlock, with interest. My view is that it will go the same route as the constant cry over the years that "we need proper sex ed in schools!" where now we're talking about "age-appropriate sex ed" for three year olds. Teens are getting pregnant? They don't have good sex ed! They get it? Well they need it younger!
https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/gmscontracts/free-contraception-service-contract/
I think the first cry will be "Well 17 is too old - you should be offering it to 16 year olds! 15! 14! As soon as they start their first period!" Because when you tell people that sex is a right, and they should be having it, and it's someone's fault if they're not having it, then they'll have it. And sex means babies. If you expect that you can't tell 15 year olds not to fuck because hey, hormones, they're teens, they're horny, they don't have self-control (even if legally this is underage sex and they're not supposed to be having it), why on earth do you expect them to have the self-control to plan out and consistently use contraception every time they have sex?
Hear hear. Anyone who fails to support their children or has their children taken away by Child Protective Services after due process should be coercively prevented from having additional children.
I simply don't buy slippery slope arguments and I don't agree that creating eugenic incentives would necessarily lead to coercive policy. And whatever hornet's nest of protest would be stirred up, I do in fact have a very good cause to argue: possibly the single highest-ROI social intervention in history.
"Eugenics" is a terrible word. I say that not just because it has connotations with terrible things, but because it utterly fails to accomplish the one job a word is supposed to have: to facilitate communication.
If you have to define a word every time you use it to clarify a likely misunderstanding amongst your audience, you should probably stop using that word.
I personally prefer the term "Epilogenics" to refer to genetic modification/selection that involves individual choice. If one were to construct a venn diagram, both eugenics and epilogenics would include embryo selection and choosing a reproductive partner, but eugenics would include state sponsored sterilization efforts and genocide, and epilogenics would not.
You continue to amaze me. One thing that got me confused for a moment is "Paul Ehrlich". I'd suggest keeping his middle initial "R" so he's not confused with the dude who found the cure for syphilis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich_(disambiguation)
Is there a list somewhere of all the different ideas that have been associated with piles of skulls? Because it seems to me that the decision of whether to be concerned about a pile of skulls associated with some idea it's very very strongly connected to how the speaker feels about the idea. Approximately nobody who demands that anything with a whiff of eugenics be suppressed also demands that discussion and study of economic inequalities be surprised, despite the heaping mountains of skulls left behind by various communist regimes in the 20th century.
you can always play reference class tennis with skulls.
There are mountains of skulls left behind by western capitalism and imperialism too. By socialism, democracies and fascists. By every human society.
"I (Scott) definitely do not admit to agreeing with Coria’s final paragraph, but I admit the problem bothers me: it seems hard to find a middle ground between Coria’s stance and pure minarchist libertarianism."
I propose this as a middle ground: that we agree, as a society, that some actions are forever out of bounds for government, even if they might conceivably have good outcomes (or even be vital for our mutual survival), because there is no dividing line between the bad actions that are strictly necessary for survival and bad actions taken purely for the benefit of the rulers. This is why we Americans say government shall not prohibit free exercise of religion, or restrict freedom of the press, or compel people accused of crimes to testify, or allow cruel and unusual punishment. The exact prohibitions are subject to some cultural judgment, but any tolerably free society must put crucial freedoms beyond the government's reach. Although our history might be less than encouraging, I think we should add forced sterilization to the list.
It may be a separate topic, but I think the environmental movement is once again heading in a direction of intolerable cruelty in the name of saving the world. Climate change has seemingly taken all the energy in the environmental movement, and is directing it in a decidedly anti-economic direction. In a rich country like the United States, this is merely wasteful spending on windmills and electric cars. But they want to impose the same agenda on poor countries (India again!), with the obvious consequence of locking these countries, with billions of people, into perpetual poverty. In the US, poverty means stress, poor health, and lack of prospects. In Uganda, or Cambodia, or India, or even the non-coastal areas of China, poverty means disease, exposure, starvation, and death. And all in the name of "smug Western elites overly impressed with their own intelligence and moral crusading spirit, just like us."
I suppose my final word on this is that if we humans were lovely, reasonable, kind, nice, people then eugenics or whatever might work.
But we're not, and in practice such attempts will be diverted down "just enough of me, way too many of you" and instead of getting geniuses who will all be pacific and solve the world's problems by dint of charismatic influence and persuasiveness, we'll get the rat-race "bump Junior up 20 points because he needs to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right primary school to get into the right prep school to get into the right university so he has some hope of getting a job in software coding or finance which are the only jobs left", and you can dial that up to 12 if AI ever does what is promised/feared.
We won't be raising up the kids whose genetic regression to the mean would leave them in the range 95-100 IQ because they're exactly the kind of people we don't want anymore of; instead, we want to encourage the 120 IQ range people to have kids and to screen those embryos before implantation in the surrogate to ensure they do get that bump in numbers. Everyone who is permitted to be born will be 140 IQ and the tall, athletic, popular, funny, creative, will work 100 hour weeks with absolute focus and no loss of health blond(e) blue-eyes tanned and toned. It'll be a lovely world of no more bald, short guys with glasses or fat-bottomed girls, for those who get to live in it. But only the few will get to live in it. The rest of us will have been weeded out like the unwanted, scraggly, resource-hogging crab grass and poison ivy that we are. And we can only hope that the weeding will be done by Galton's hoped-for "the force of social opinion will make uneugenic marriages as unthinkable as cousin-marriage or girls throwing it all up for love and not marrying the well-off guy their mothers picked", with Certificates awarded to the fit and sneering "that is an object lesson in why you don't marry the inferior stock, Cecily" looking-down at those who do contract unsuitable marriages and produce weak sickly offspring, and nothing more authoritative or severe.
Does anyone really think that simply increasing the number of smart babies in the poorest countries would have a positive impact? More than other interventions that have provably raised avg IQ in developing countries, such as improving nutrition and child health (think about stunting) or education (think about Flynn effects and literacy)? Best case scenarios, those genius babies would become frustrated bureacrats; or maybe cannon fodder for the next civil war, or - worst case - the new conquerors and empire-makers
(maybe it could work on small and stable countries... but then, any serious intervention tends to improve welfare in small stable countries)
Did the smart babies in 1950s Taiwan and South Korea matter? In 1980s China? In 1990s India?
Don't forget Singapore ;)
You seem to think that countries are destined to poverty or not despite their composition.
This is an unfair strawman, full of implied modal and universal quantifiers; nothing I said logically implies anything like that. Quite the opposite: I mentioned that other interventions are likely to be more successful than eugenics, which implies that I don't think a nation's fate is determined; and I can borrow DoJ's example that the social and economic development in the last decades had nothing to do with a change in the genetic profile of the population.
A similar distortion would be my saying that eugenics advocates think that the fate of a country is entirely dependent on the genome of its present residents.
I suppose there are two ways of reacting to this: imagine that one is part of the “smug western elites”. Then it’s a moral problem to be debated in a civilized way and so on. The outside view of this -imagine being a random guy living anywhere but in the place where you pay “rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history” to quote another post. Then it’s terrifying.
I prefer the utilitarian approach where the State issues hunting permits for the homeless. The State gets a new source of revenue, and there is a strong incentive for the homeless to be unobtrusive.
Per wikipedia it was Carrie Buck's daughter, not Carrie buck herself, who was on the honor roll. And the only source they cite for that is Stephen Jay Gould, an infamous fabricator.
Can't find any source for that on google books which predates Gould's 1984 article. The later sources are likely to just be copying Gould without attribution.
I (Vojtech) definitely and absolutely agrese with Coria’s view.
> But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
Actually, this is complete nonsense. Go on Google Scholar and you'll find hundreds of articles denouncing Paul Ehrlich and "the eugenicist roots of the population control movement". Or the thousands of articles about coercive sterilizations of minority populations in the 60s and 70s.
So far as I know, Ukrainians and Russians aren't especially different genetically, but the difference in military effectiveness is striking.
Russians have shown remarkable intelligence in different fields-- literature, music, ballet, exercise physiology, space exploration.... I have a notion that they're actually brilliant at least at the top end, but much of it is wasted on negative-sum competition.
I'll probably put this in one of the more general threads, but should so much go into concern about eugenics when more attention could go to what societies and cultures give more room or not for people to use the intelligence they have?
So far as I know, Down's Syndrome is easy to test for, but there's no good test for how debilitating it's going to be. This complicates matters. It's not like Tay-Sachs, which is simply extremely bad.
Another way that eugenic premises can work is that not only are women of color at risk (varies a lot by when and where) for involuntary sterilization, but it can be very hard for white women to get sterilized even if they're up against serious medical problems (devastating periods, for example) or absolutely don't want to have children. (I've gotten this from many accounts.)
So far as I know, the white side of the problem is medical culture (what if you change you mind? what if your husband wants children?) rather than government policy.
Why sterilization?
May as well jump straight to killing them at that point.
After all why not, you can reduce the population of poor people to 0 in one fell swoop - and dead people don't have kids either.
The most important point missed here is that you cannot simply choose to have a eugenics neutral regime. Every policy that has to do with healthcare, welfare, incarceration, taxation, housing and much more besides has either an on differential rates of reproduction among populations. In many cases, these effects are much bigger than what you could hope to achieve with overtly eugenicist policies like sterilisation. It is obviously mad to have a convention of just not considering these effects when discussing policy.
There's a distinct difference between active policies that intentionally change the distribution of the population (especially with a particular type of people to have or not have in the new society) and policies which have those results as a byproduct.
Of course, there is, but it's not actually as important as the difference between policies that have a big impact and policies that have a small impact. Subsidising women going to university has a much bigger (negative) effect on national IQ than any sterilisation policy ever did, for example, and so, by simple logic, de-subsidising it would too.
The point is that it's one thing to have some taboo on policies whose sole purpose is to achieve some eugenic effect, but it is simple insane to not take into account the eugenic or dysgenic effects of policies we are implementing is sheer madness, since these effects in the medium to long term are just so much more important than the factors we do take into account (like cost, for example).
You repeated "at all": in the following But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved.
> If he had been right, mass sterilization would have been the only way to save the world.
Not sure I would agree with this. The world would not have ended. Famine and wars over resources would have handled overpopulation quite well without the coercion, just with more suffering. That's not great either, but a far cry from "saving the world".
> Coria: I said bad, not wrong.
Actually Coria did originally say "wrong":
> Coria: I want to claim that, in expectation, Paul Ehrlich did nothing wrong.
Surprised and disappointed that neither the post nor the comments (even Deiseach!) mention Chesterton and his opposition to Fabian eugenics advocacy, pushed by Shaw, Wells and others. (Eugenics was a strictly left-wing/prog/shitlib position right up until the exact moment that one specific type of socialist made it totally forbidden, something very stringently memory holed now.)
EDIT: Well, one comment mentioned GK's book, correctly, but not the essays or who specifically his opponents were. And no replies to that comment! Baffling considering how much respect Chesterton does after all get around here, and that he slam-dunked this one.
Mentioning our dear friend is unnecessary, I think everyone knows the Catholic position on this one 😁 But our friend Josiah Wedgwood mentioned him, in the reply he made to the private member's bill!
Excerpted below:
"It is this government by specialists that you cannot argue with. Here you are alienating these powers, powers which were possessed by the Holy Inquisition, and you are going to entrust them to a body of specialists, whose absolute remedies for disease change every year, and who invent year after year new fungoid growths, or something of the kind which may be stamped out by science if only you give them a free hand. By this Bill a large part of the population of this country is handed over to the specialists without any right of taking action at law against those concerned if they put you in prison without any semblance of justice. I think this Bill is going a little too far. It remands me in a way of the smelling out on the East African coast by the witch doctor. He finds out by some intuitive faculty—similar to that possessed by the specialists—which among the natives it is whose continued existence is undesirable in the interests of society. He smells the person out, and that person is put to death. Under this Bill you are smelling them out and putting them into prison for life. It is the same thing. I do not know whether hon. Members here have read that book of Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross." It will be remembered how by merely proceeding along these lines everyone who is abnormal in any degree is finally put into a feeble-minded home, and in course of time everybody is found to be in the end slightly abnormal except the specialist himself. He is the only man left absolutely normal in society. If you are merely going to take a degree of variation from the normal as a sufficient cause for putting men or women—because this Bill is principally applied to women—[HON. MEMBEBS: "No"]—well, every argument brought forward has dealt with those unfortunate women who go into our workhouses to have children and so on, and the main argument has been against women and against poor women only. I say it is wrong."
One of the few advanced countries to not do eugenic sterilizations was the United Kingdom. As Home Secretary before the Great War, Winston Churchill had introduced the Liberal government's sterilization bill but it was defeated in Parliament. The leader of the opposition to eugenic sterilization was, interestingly, a distant kinsman of Galton, backbencher Josiah Wedgwood. Matt Ridley wrote in 1998:
"One man deserves to be singled out for mounting opposition to this bill: a radical libertarian MP with the famous-and relevant-name of Josiah Wedgwood. He was a naval architect by profession; scion of the famous industrial family which had repeatedly intermarried with the Darwin family (for several decades the two families were probably the richest in the West Midlands). Charles Darwin had a grandfather, a father-in-law and a brother-in-law (twice over) each called Josiah Wedgwood. But while some of the Darwins eagerly embraced eugenics-Charles Darwin's son, Leonard, was president of the Eugenics Society-Josiah Wedgwood disliked it intensely. Elected to parliament in the Liberal landslide of 1906, he had later joined the Labour party and retired to the House of Lords in 1942.
"He charged that the Eugenics Society was trying "to breed up the working class as though they were cattle" and he asserted that the laws of heredity were "too undetermined for one to pin faith on any doctrine, much less to legislate according to it." But his main objection was on the grounds of individual liberty."
The Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood clan had likely argued longer over eugenics than any other extended family in the world, so it's not surprising that one member took the lead in arguing against eugenic sterilization and getting it dropped from the bill.
To me, this example suggests that arguing about new ideas is good. The country that had been arguing longer over eugenics than anywhere else, Britain, decided not to do sterilizations, while other countries where eugenics was a trendy new idea fell harder for it.
I'm looking up about Winnie's Act and came across this lovely graphical illustation of "sound versus unsound ancestry" from the Eugenics Bollocksology Pushers (as I shall henceforth refer to them).
All based on a true story, and while I don't know who the poor family on the left are supposed to be, it's amply clear that the exemplary stock on the right are the Galton-Darwin-Wedgewoods:
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/blue-plaque-stories/eugenics/
Must be nice having a fanclub lauding your superior genes as the best example of what the nation can produce! And here's a wowser from press cuttings reporting on the First International Eugenics Congress, 1912:
"Who Should Be Eliminated?
Mr. Bleecker van Wagenen, chairman of the committee of the Eugenic section of the American Breeders’ Association, presented the committee’s preliminary report, which declared that numbers of the following classes must be considered as socially unfit, and their supply should, if possible, be eliminated from the human stock: (!) The feeble-minded; (2) the pauper class; (3) the criminal class; (4) the epileptics; (5) the insane; (6) the constitutionally weak; (7) those predisposed to specific diseases; (8) the deformed; and (9) those having defective sense organs, such as the blind and the deaf."
People are wringing their hands over how unfair it is that Eugenics has become associated with badness in the public mind, but I think good old Bleecker there would have had no problems throwing on a brown shirt and learning to goose-step twenty years later, when it came to eliminating the socially unfit from the human stock.
Gosh darn it, history, stop making me admire a bomb-throwing anarchist who seems to have been the only person with a drop of human blood in him in this entire morass of "we, the wealthy and upper-class, deciding about who gets eliminated as unfit":
"In his paper on ‘The Sterilization of the Unfit’, the scientist and anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin asked who it was proposed to sterilise as unfit – ‘the workers or the idlers, the rich or the poor, the poor women who suckled their children, or the women of the upper classes who refused maternity?’"
Y'know, I never liked Winnie, I suppose because I was reared traditionally on Irish Republicanism where the memory of his loathsome father playing the Orange Card, and his own career including the shambles of Tripoli and the Dardanelles, and the fuckery he indulged in during the Second World War with regard to Irish neutrality (a radio broadcast about how if the Brits had poison-gassed Ireland and the Irish, who could blame them?) but he really takes the cake for being a Churchill - that is, a self-centred, self-obsessed, parasite with an eye to the main chance who clambers over dead men's bones to get to the top of the greasy pole (forgive the mixed metaphors):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Deficiency_Act_1913
"Winston Churchill spoke of the need to introduce compulsory labour camps for "mental defectives" in the House of Commons in February 1911."
Lovely. The first person in such a camp should have been his crazy father, and he should have been the second.
"[The Act of 1913] established the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency to oversee the implementation of provisions for the care and management of four classes of people,
a) Idiots. Those so deeply defective as to be unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers.
b) Imbeciles. Whose defectiveness does not amount to idiocy, but is so pronounced that they are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so.
c) Feeble-minded persons. Whose weakness does not amount to imbecility, yet who require care, supervision, or control, for their protection or for the protection of others, or, in the case of children, are incapable of receiving benefit from the instruction in ordinary schools.
d) Moral Imbeciles. Displaying mental weakness coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities, and on whom punishment has little or no deterrent effect.
A person deemed to be an idiot or imbecile might be placed in an institution or under guardianship if the parent or guardian so petitioned, as could a person of any of the four categories under 21 years, as could a person of any category who had been abandoned, neglected, guilty of a crime, in a state institution, habitually drunk, or unable to be schooled."
The "moral imbecile" provision is the type of law under which Carrie Buck was sterilised, and indeed put away in an asylum in the first place. All you eager eugenicists here, better not have indulged in sex outside of marriage, single parenthood, divorce, or sleeping around while using contraception or - even worse! - abortion. And let's not even mention LGBT+, or poly, or anything other than cis het married sex for the purposes of reproduction and breeding superior human livestock. Because these are all marks of being a degenerate moral imbecile, and *you* need to be locked away and sterilised for the good of society.
Text of the act here:
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/acts/1913-mental-deficiency-act.html
Oh yeah, and the "school to prison pipeline"? Replace that with the "prison to asylum pipeline" because in addition to the categories above, you could be locked away if:
"(b) if in addition to being a defective he is a person -
(i) who is found neglected, abandoned, or without visible means of support, or cruelly treated; or
(ii) who is found guilty of any criminal offence, or who is ordered or found liable to be ordered to be sent to a certified industrial school;
(iii) who is undergoing imprisonment (except imprisonment under civil process), or penal servitude, or is undergoing detention in a place of detention by order of a court, or in a reformatory or industrial school, or in an inebriate reformatory or who is detained in an institution for lunatics or a criminal lunatic asylum; or
(iv) who is an habitual drunkard within the meaning of the Inebriates Acts 1879 to 1900; or
(v) in whose case such notice has been given by the local education authority as is herein-after in this section mentioned; or
(vi) who is in receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to an illegitimate child or when pregnant of such child."
That last is a nice touch; if you were a 'defective' and pregnant with a bastard, or getting relief for having a bastard, you could be locked away. And what signified you were a defective? Being pregnant with a bastard!
Some of the provisions are clearly intended to try and provide help and support for the 'defectives' but unhappily it's all too clear how this could be abused, and it was; part of the reactions against institutions, which led to the push for doing away with them, was the abuse of such powers by families to put away inconvenient members, or husbands with wives. There may technically have been a right of appeal, but in effect once you were taken away, you were never getting out.
"15 Power to remove to place of safety pending presentation of petition
(1) If any officer of the local authority authorised in that behalf or any constable finds neglected, abandoned, or without visible means of support or cruelly treated any person whom he has reasonable cause to believe to be a defective, he may take such person to a place of safety, and such person may be there detained until a petition under this Act can be presented.
(2) If it appears to a justice on information on oath laid by an officer or other person authorised by the local authority that there is reasonable cause to believe that a defective is neglected or cruelly treated in any place within the jurisdiction of the justice, the justice may issue a warrant authorising any constable named therein, accompanied by the medical officer or the local authority or any other duly qualified medical practitioner named in the warrant, to search for such person, and, if it is found that he is neglected or cruelly treated, and is apparently defective, to take him to and place him in a place of safety until a petition can be presented under this Act, and any constable authorised by such warrant may enter, and if need be by force, any house, building, or other place specified in the warrant, and may remove such person therefrom.
(3) Where the place to which such a person is taken is a workhouse, the master shall receive him into the workhouse if there is suitable accommodation therein, and any expenses incurred in respect of him shall be defrayed by the local authority, but shall, if an order is eventually made, be recoverable from the defective or any person liable to maintain him as if they were part of the expenses of his maintenance."
The preceding bill to the Act of 1913 was a private members' bill of 1912 and I do think, if we're going to be throwing around eugenics as a nostrum for the ills of society and how we're going to breed a better human, that we contemplate the unexamined assumptions here. We don't think that having a child out of wedlock means you are feeble-minded (though we do like to talk about the poor and the underclass being the ones having too many children of low degree), but that wasn't the case back in 1912. Then, it was so obvious as not to need pointing out, that the kind of people having sex outside of marriage were unfit. What ideas are we holding as too obvious to need explanation about who counts as unfit, in our 21st century model of what the ideal human of the future should be?
Think of the modern outrage over Magdalen Laundries and residential schools, and then see what the philanthropic eugenist of 1912 had to say:
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1912/may/17/feeble-minded-persons-control-bill
"What we ask for in this Bill is only an extension of existing powers, and it is only another step in the direction asked for by those best qualified to express an opinion and inspired by the truest desire for economy both of money and of effort. We ask it both for the benefit of the taxpayer and for the health of future generations. What we really wish to do is to free the sufferers as far as we can from the bondage of their own defects, and to save society from having increased responsibility thrust upon it unwittingly by those who are unable, owing to misfortune, to assist society to bear the burden they impose, and whose increase is not a strength but a weakness to the health and vigour of the nation. If these unfortunate people were not so prolific and fertile the question would not be so urgent. At present the country looks after them while children, educates them as far as possible until they are sixteen, and then turns them adrift on to society at the very age they become dangerous, to produce another generation of feeble-minded individuals. What we advocate is that these persons should be segregated in homes and colonies, especially the women during the child-bearing period, where they can be given congenial employment, and, to their credit be it said, they are happier when employed. I think they could to a large extent be made self-supporting, and their lives would be spared much of the unhappiness and misery they are called upon to endure.
…Of this, however, I think we may rest assured that no feeble-minded person can ever be made an efficient citizen, and two feeble-minded parents can never have a normal child. At this very moment the prison authorities are themselves doing to a large extent what we ask in this Bill. They are applying to these people special treatment, and they advise the police to keep an eye on them when they go out. We desire that these people should not find themselves in prison at all. We must realise that they are the nidus of every form of crime and of vice, and that when they are thrown out into the world they are subject to temptations which they have not the power to resist. They are paupers in the making from the very cradle, and, when the females get to a certain age, they are, I am sorry to say, exploited to a very considerable extent by unscrupulous men to their own undoing and to the great increase of youthful depravity in both sexes. Half the girls in rescue homes are feeble-minded, and of 15,000 births that take place annually in our workhouses a very great number come under the same category. The Report teems with examples of this sort of women coming in year after year and producing children from different fathers and from fathers perhaps whose names they do not even know. There is one paragraph in the Report that says the workhouse authorities in a certain locality have admitted that sixteen women of defective mind have given birth in the workhouse to 116 illegitimate children. Those children the ordinary taxpayer has got to carry from the day they are born until the day they die. How does that effect the efficient? It adds to the burdens, the taxpayer and ordinary ratepayer has to bear at present. He has all the risk of loss of his own health, and loss of employment; he has his own children to provide for; and he has, in addition, the enormous current expenses of the State. We have under our present system to provide hospitals and homes of all sorts, schools and special teachers, extra prisons and warders; the work of the police and their expense are largely augmented; the guardians have extra work thrown upon them; the doctors are in the same position; and all the philanthropic people who are endeavouring to meet this difficulty are asked to do the impossible in trying to restore and to reclaim a section of the community which is irrestorable and irreclaimable. If the matter is carefully gone into and thought out, it will be realised that there is not only a prodigious expense incurred by the community but that there is also a prodigious waste of energy, often duplicated and overlapping, which is probably avoidable. If we systematised more, I think we could effect considerable economy.
There are those who say, "leave the matter to nature." That is impossible. Our whole existence is a contention with nature. If you put a colony of these people on an island and said "take care of yourselves," of course, after a few years of awful and increasing misery they would be blotted out. There are others who say, "You have legislation already; surely you have enough legislation of this sort," My reply is this: We did not know until the present time the extent of the evil we had got before us and the dangers which it entails. We did not know that until the whole population had for two generations been subjected to the searchlight of educational activity. In the old days, when so many were illiterate and dull, it might have been more difficult to say where honest stupidity ended and abnormal incapacity began, but now that the educational authorities have their fingers on the pulse of the young and the children under their observation from their infancy we are in a better position to decide where honest stupidity ends and where abnormality begins.
…There is also a very grave fear arising in the mind of the people of the deterioration of the race. We have got all these things to consider, and I maintain we are right to say to ourselves: "Have we a moral right to curtail the freedom of some of our weaker brethren?" I think we have, and I think I have produced some reasons; other hon. Members will, I am sure, produce more. We have a right to consider them from that point of view, and, if we can once convince ourselves we have the moral right to exercise some extra supervision in this matter, then, of course, the question turns on whether the safeguards provided are sufficient. It was my privilege recently to go down and see at Monyhull, near Birmingham, the great institution there in which Birmingham is endeavouring to solve for itself the problem we are considering today. I found a colony of 111 men and 143 women living, I can safely say, in contentment and happiness. They have beautiful surroundings; they are cared for by honest people, who treat them with the greatest sympathy and consideration; and, although they are only there voluntarily, and can leave, I believe by law, as and when they like, they prefer to remain there. The women especially seem to find in that place the realisation of what they probably can never find outside, and that is the word "home," and they seem instinctively to know that being in there they are guarded from the many dangers which they must face if they are thrown out into the world. This Bill, being a private Member's Bill, cannot allocate funds of any sort or kind. But if we get the powers of detention we are asking for under it, it may encourage other localities to make experiments in the same way as Birmingham. It might do something, if colonies were too expensive, to allow of the boarding-out principle by which this question is to some extent met in Scotland where the population is scanty. It might possibly be an inducement to people to take up work of this sort and to give a home to men and women for whom they would be responsible to the Lunacy Commissioners."
All meant with the best intentions.
While people in the Teens may have been squeamish about sterilisation, by the time we get to the 30s there was a more robust attitude:
"The Sterilisation Bill of 1931 was introduced by Major AG Church, Labour MP for Wandsworth and organising secretary of the Eugenics Society. It aimed to legalise the voluntary sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’. The bill was reproduced in a pamphlet entitled ‘Better Unborn’, which showed the ‘consequences of encouraging fertility of dysgenic stocks’ (people with supposedly undesirable genetic characteristics), with a view to garnering Parliamentary and wider support. It was rejected by 167 votes to 89, the main opponents once again being Roman Catholics and Labour MPs, though most abstained. Among those who did vote for the bill were Eleanor Rathbone and Ellen Wilkinson.
Yet a Parliamentary report (known as the Brock report) of the departmental committee on sterilisation of 1933 was unanimous in its conclusion that ‘allowing and even encouraging mentally defective and mentally disordered patients’ to be sterilised was justified. Only 3 out of the 60 witnesses who gave evidence – comprising psychiatrists, biologists, medical professionals, local authority representatives and social workers – were opposed to its recommendations on principle. The committee considered sterilisation to be a ‘right’ of the mentally ‘defective’ and advocated extending it to those with physical disabilities."
Look at this lovely poster. Does it remind you of anything? Once again, while the Nazis may have blackened the name of Eugenics, they didn't originate anything, they simply put into practice the theory and indeed the sort of regulations that the various societies and committees in the UK, USA and elsewhere had been pushing.
A poster issued by the Eugenics Society of 69 Eccleston Square, London:
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/vzzcqeyx
A German poster of a certain party, illustrating the burden society was toiling under
https://img.apmcdn.org/9aa3e1dcde56c8c4c5776094633dd8a221d7677b/uncropped/09c64c-20080226-biologytextbook.jpg
- it could have been based on the 1912 speech about how :
"Those children the ordinary taxpayer has got to carry from the day they are born until the day they die. How does that effect the efficient? It adds to the burdens, the taxpayer and ordinary ratepayer has to bear at present. He has all the risk of loss of his own health, and loss of employment; he has his own children to 1448provide for; and he has, in addition, the enormous current expenses of the State. We have under our present system to provide hospitals and homes of all sorts, schools and special teachers, extra prisons and warders; the work of the police and their expense are largely augmented; the guardians have extra work thrown upon them; the doctors are in the same position; and all the philanthropic people who are endeavouring to meet this difficulty are asked to do the impossible in trying to restore and to reclaim a section of the community which is irrestorable and irreclaimable. If the matter is carefully gone into and thought out, it will be realised that there is not only a prodigious expense incurred by the community but that there is also a prodigious waste of energy, often duplicated and overlapping, which is probably avoidable. If we systematised more, I think we could effect considerable economy."
But Harvard, too, was a shining and leading light back in the day! Of course, after a Certain Unhappy Event and the activities of that naughty German party, they doused their lamp in that quarter:
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-eugenics-era
There's plenty of responsibility to go round for the black eye Eugenics has got, and it's not all the fault of those silly-billy Germans. Far from it.
Catholics tended to be the main opponents of eugenic legislation: e.g., Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton's 1922 book, "Eugenics and Other Evils." In America, states with a lot of Catholic politicians were less likely to have sterilization laws. Southern states weren't very enthusiastic about eugenics either.
Eugenics tended to be most fashionable in America among Protestants and post-Protestestant progressives. For instance, Stanford University a century ago was a bastion of progressive eugenic thought: e.g., the Lewis Terman, creator of America's first IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, and his son Fred Terman, who has perhaps the best claim to be Father of Silicon Valley (and friend of William Shockley), Stanford president David Starr Jordan (who was a pacifist in opposition to WWI for eugenic reasons -- he argued that war would kill off the most self-sacrificing and spare the slackers and goldbrickers), and leftist sociologist Edward Ross.
We can see what utter pseudoscience the eugenic perspective was by how over the last century, this hotbed of eugenics so signally failed to thrive. Today, Stanford and Palo Alto are fading away due to the falsity of these men's view of reality.
Oh, wait, that didn't happen ...
Of course, we can see
An interesting fact is that today the eugenics movement is widely assumed to have been anti-Semitic if not downright Nazi and that Jews therefore led the struggle against eugenics. But in reality it was Catholics who deserve the most credit for dragging their heels on eugenics.
The 2014 book "Jewish Eugenics" by John Glad cites hundreds of Jewish leaders of the first half of the 20th Century endorsing eugenics, with many of them claiming that Jews had been practicing eugenic arranged marriages for millennia.
On the other hand, Jews, while seldom protesting against eugenics, didn't make all that many contributions to the science that grew up around it. Galton conceived of eugenics not as a "science" or "pseudoscience," but as a program, rather like space exploration, that would require huge advances in myriad fields, such as statistics, where he and his followers like Pearson, Spearman, and Fischer made giant breakthroughs.
In truth, eugenics was an extension of the scientific agriculture movement that emerged in the British countryside in the 18th Century. Most of the big names associated with the Galtoninism were country boys, of which few were Jews. Instead, brilliant young Jews focused on more urban subjects, like physics, which led to nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, gentile Germans, with their lead in chemistry, focused on rockets.
Of course, so far, Jewish nuclear weapons combined with German rockets haven't yet blown up the world. The death toll from nuclear weapons is, so far, comparable to the number of eugenic sterilizations.
Hence it would seem just as reasonable to ask similar questions of Galton and, say, Einstein about their responsibility for the uses of their discoveries.
Say that a half century ago a huge nuclear war was fought with vast casualties. It was later decided that the scientists and promoters of nuclear physics and rocket science were History's Worst Villains, so Albert Einstein, Neil Bohr, John von Neumann, Werner von Braun, Robert Goddard, Jules Verne, H.G. Welles, Robert Heinlein etc. all get canceled.
That sounds kind of nuts to us, but we accept it for the great statisticians like Galton and Fischer whose breakthroughs were undertaken in the name of promoting eugenics.
"What ideas are we holding as too obvious to need explanation about who counts as unfit, in our 21st century model of what the ideal human of the future should be?"
I went to Catholic schools from 1964-1976. Back then it was not uncommon for my classmates to have a sibling with Down's Syndrome. Now, there are far fewer people with Down's Syndrome around because, while we don't do eugenic sterilizations (unlike our incredibly evil ancestors), we now do quite a few eugenic abortions.
"But actually, our society can’t bring itself to care at all about coercive sterilizations at all when eugenics isn’t involved."
I think it's more that our society can't bring itself to care at all about things which happen in distant non-Western countries.
Forced sterilization was also in the US until quite recently. I don't think it ever happened at a level we would call "mass" sterilization, but it was common enough to be known.
Or, it took outright genocide to get us riled up against eugenics, but once we were already anti-eugenics, then forced sterilization could grab some extra negative affect from that.
Off-topic, but I'd love your thoughts on this: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-therapists-became-social-justice-warriors
I am going to be the endless bore on this subject: please stop strawmanning people who are worried about Islam. The concern isn't "Islam inspired Al Qaeda"
The concern is: Islam inspired Al Qaeda...
...and over 80 other jihad groups
... and 10 countries where homosexuality and blasphemy merit the death sentence
...and nearly 50 where it can be extremely dangerous to do either
...and the 4 Islamic genocides in my lifetime alone...
...and the horrifying levels of illiberal thoughts in Muslim immigrant communities (not illiberal as in "anti-Gay marriage", but as in "homosexuality should be illegal and murdering the Charlie Hebdo staff was justified"...)
etc. etc.
There may be arguments against these positions. But please present them accurately.
What Islamic genocides?
The Sudan (genocide of Christians and animslist) in the 'nineties - 2 million dead. East Timor, Christians, about 200,000. Darfur, 400,000. The Yazidi genocide.
Canada is way ahead on eugenics. Canadian state already funds euthanasia programs for the disabled, mental, poor, and soon for the homeless, ie. "useless eaters."
It's all voluntary, which makes it morally acceptable because it's left to the individual. And it is much cheaper to kill off the masses than provide medicine/food/shelter. It also expedites the logistics of suicide and makes organ/blood harvesting a cleaner business for the market demand from the power brokers.
I think Adraste fails the ideological Turing test for people against eugenics. My guess is the reason most people gut-level dislike the idea, and believe, rationally in my opinion, that there is a slippery slope, is because eugenics contradicts “all men are created equal”, and instead says “we would like the human race to have more people like X and less people like Y”. You can be kind and gentle towards already-living Ys, or harsh and totalitarian, but either way, you can see why a Y — or someone who has empathy for Ys — would be extremely uncomfortable with even the most benevolent expression of the idea.
Yes, previous historical atrocities get deployed argumentatively to back up the case against eugenics, but I think the “is it fair to blame eugenics for atrocity Z” question is missing the crux of why people don’t like it as an idea, and isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind.
Well-said. I would add that the force-multiplier of your "empathy for Ys" point is personal direct acquaintance. Some people (including voters) who otherwise would be indifferent or at most softly supportive of a given threatened group, become much more strongly motivated about it when they realize that their own immediate family includes a member of that group. That's been a factor in for instance the shift in attitudes towards gay people in US society in recent decades.
People don’t view seat belts and other safety measures that prevent spinal injuries as plots motivated by hatred of the disabled. They usually tolerate efforts to remove chemicals that harm neural development such as lead in paint & petrol as long as it’s a chemical other than DNA. The problem is that people view genes as things that are central to identity instead of mere chemicals that influence development.
Some opponents of reprogenetic tech can find support among those who fear (perhaps subconsciously) that technology will make their genetic advantages less special if technology allows affordable access to healthy genes. Selfish motives are often obscured by motivated reasoning.
I also think some people are afraid that they will be considered negligent for not making an effort to prevent their children from inheriting genes that increase susceptibility to cancer and other diseases, although they seldom make those fears explicit.
Hey, Coria, I'm going to quote the entirety of the speech by Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, M.P. for Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the debate of 1912 on the "FEEBLE-MINDED PERSONS (CONTROL) BILL."
Mr. WEDGWOOD The right hon. Gentleman was very short with me in the interruption which I made, but I think he made no effort to justify what is indeed the kernel of this Bill and the kernel of the alternative Bill of the Government. The right, hon. Gentleman in the whole of his speech did not touch for one moment on the Bill actually before the House. He dealt entirely with the question of the provision of homes where the feeble-minded would be looked after. I hope he will believe me that even the most bigoted upholder of the rights of the subject is as strongly as he is in favour of the provision by the State of homes where the feeble-minded could be looked after. The question whether homes should be provided is not the one that divides us. The whole question is whether you have any right to sentence people, who have committed no crime, to imprisonment for life in those homes, and to say that they should be detained forever in a rescue home, or in a home which may be an admirable institution, and which, as long as it is on voluntary lines, meets with unanimous support are those people, from the age say of sixteen to perhaps eighty, to be incarcerated in those compulsory homes. Everyone of the arguments for looking after those feeble-minded persons mentioned by the Proposer and Seconder and the two other hon. Members who have spoken, meet with my entire support, and it is only when they come to compulsory segregation that they do not get that support. Not one of them has yet offered a single argument in favour of that policy. They have fought entirely shy of it with the solitary exception of the right hon. Gentleman opposite who said in his airy way that rather than leave things as they are we would be justified in putting those people away for life. I know perfectly well that this Bill has behind it the very best efforts of the best-intentioned people in this country not so much inside this House as outside of it. They have seen this terrible evil and know how awful it is, and already in rescue homes they are doing what they can to save those poor and feeble-minded persons. They are in constant contact with that evil and they wish to save society from it, but perhaps because they are brought so close into contact with the evil they do not look at the matter from a wider point of view. After all, it is a much wider question than mere expediency. The arguments in favour of this measure of compulsory segregation of the unfit are all directed towards the expediency of the change. Either it is going to save the community money, to be cheaper in the long run, to make the machine of civilisation run more cheaply, or, in the interests of the future of the race, it is necessary to segregate the unfit. Both these arguments are drawn purely and simply from expediency.
Mr. DICKINSON Experience.
Mr. WEDGWOOD Experience of breeding cattle, not experience of breeding men. The same question comes up in politics in regard to almost everything that is brought before us. The question whether vivisection should be allowed is, in its elements, exactly the same as whether this compulsory imprisonment should be permitted. There you have, on the one side, the interests of society—that it is in the interest of the human race that doctors should have every possible opportunity of discovering new means of curing the ills of mankind. On the other hand, you have the question whether it is right, in the interests of society, in the interests of the future amelioration of the race, to inflict pain upon animals. You have the same question in regard to the vaccination laws are you right, in the interests of society, in compelling people to be vaccinated, or is the individual's right to refuse to be vaccinated, to have liberty of judgment as to whether he should be vaccinated or not, to prevail? In every one of these cases you have the same difficulty before you. Either you must rely on what you believe to be the benefit of society and the good of the human race, or you must base yourself on something which I do not know how to describe, but which I think is something like the individual conscience. You have to see whether a thing is just or not. In the old days it was just the same. On the one side there have been a large class of people who say, salus populi suprema est lex. The safety of the public, the welfare of the State, must be the supreme law. Up against those people at all times you have had other people who say, fiat justitia ruat cœlum. These are two radically different doctrines; I believe that the second is far nobler, far higher, and far better than the first, and it is the one which we in England, rather more peculiarly than the rest of the Continental nations, have followed. We believe that justice is the important thing, and that the welfare of the State must come second, not first. The hon. Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees) naturally takes the opposite view. You have the case put in a very extreme way in India at the present time. On the one hand you have the interests of the whole society in India in the locking up of Indian agitators without trial and without their being told what their crime is. Probably it is in the interests of the State that those people should be incarcerated for life. On the other hand, you have the question whether it is just to do a thing like that, even if it is in the interests of society. I still maintain that it is not just to do a thing like that however good the results of such action are likely to be.
(1/n)
That is the question we have before us today. The results, the saving in money to the community, the improvement in the physical stamina and development of the race in the years to come, all these are invaluable things to aim at. But it is rather the doctrine of expediency. Up against that you have the elemental human right of justice and fair play. One of the reasons why somebody should always fight against the expediency doctrine, which, of course, is popular, is that you can never tell from age to age whether your ideas as to what is expedient will not change. A hundred years ago every doctrine of expediency was brought forward to ensure the enclosure of the common lands. Everybody thought that by enclosure you would increase productivity, and every advantage pointed in the same direction. One could cite innumerable instances showing how people's ideas as to what is expedient have changed from age to age, whilst at the bottom of all of us we have some idea as to what is right and just, by which we can test every measure that is brought forward. I am sorry to go back so much to the classics, but I will give one other example. There are the words of Aristotle, that in the long run that which is unjust can never be expedient. I think that is a very good rule to go on. Our idea as to what is expedient change over and over again. Our ideas as to what is just remain absolutely the same. I had a letter from a Liberal clergyman in Devonshire saying that he and his parishioners all thought that Mr. Tom Mann ought to go to prison. I have no doubt that the majority of people think that Tom Mann ought to go to prison. A majority of people probably think that Mr. Lloyd George ought to go to prison. But everybody knows that it is not just to send to prison all those whom the majority think ought to be there. That is a question of expediency and justice again. A man is tried for a certain definite offence. He is not sent to prison because other people think he ought to be there. Here you are going to send a lot of people to prison—the pariahs and outcasts of the human race, who have nobody to speak for them—not because they have committed a crime, but because the majority of the community think they ought to be there.
This incarceration of people who have committed no crime is bad enough, but it is particularly dangerous when you allow people to be incarcerated on the dictum of the specialist. I would far sooner see people sent to prison by an autocrat for a crime in opinion about which the ordinary lay person could exercise his judgment than I would see them sent to prison at the dictum of the specialist. Here you have the inevitable two doctors to decide whether a man is to be free or not. I believe it is infinitely dangerous that we should give these powers to the doctors. Hon. Members will remember that famous book, "Hard Cash," by Charles Reade, with its terrible picture of the power in the hands of the doctors of sending people to lunatic asylums on their own ipse dixit. Here you are extending that power in a most tremendous way. You are bringing in a law which affects, not people who are lunatics or idiots, but the class which is called feeble-minded. Will it be believed that in this Bill there is not a single word of definition as to what "feeble-minded" means. You are bringing in a Bill affecting 150,000 people, who will be of all grades of intelligence, from the idiot at one end to the man who is slightly abnormal at the other. You propose to give to two doctors the power of saying whether a man who is slightly abnormal shall be sent to prison for life. Is it reasonable to come before the House of Commons with a proposal such as that, and to imagine that when you put it into law you are going, even from the point of view of expediency, to do any good to society? Something like 300 persons in every constituency are to be put into prison if this Bill becomes law. These people are the pariahs, who have nobody much to look after them or to see that they have justice. These are the people who are to be thrown to the doctors, the medical specialists, for them to decide what is to be done with them. I remember seeing a case in the United States, I think in New York, last year of a girl who was supposed to have a special facility for communicating typhoid fever to people who came near her. These specialists decided that she should be compulsorily segregated. She was sent to prison. It so happened that there were rich people who took an interest in her, and they brought her before the higher courts. The girl was put in the dock. She had nothing to say for herself —naturally. The specialists said it was quite possible that this girl had some horrible special facility for communicating typhoid to everybody she came in contact with. The judge shrank from her. The jury thought they were going to catch the disease. The case was rapidly adjourned until the next morning, when it was brought up again. The judge decided that that Court had no jurisdiction in the case, and the girl was sent back to prison. For all I know she may be there yet.
It is this government by specialists that you cannot argue with. Here you are alienating these powers, powers which were possessed by the Holy Inquisition, and you are going to entrust them to a body of specialists, whose absolute remedies for disease change every year, and who invent year after year new fungoid growths, or something of the kind which may be stamped out by science if only you give them a free hand. By this Bill a large part of the population of this country is handed over to the specialists without any right of taking action at law against those concerned if they put you in prison without any semblance of justice. I think this Bill is going a little too far. It remands me in a way of the smelling out on the East African coast by the witch doctor. He finds out by some intuitive faculty—similar to that possessed by the specialists—which among the natives it is whose continued existence is undesirable in the interests of society. He smells the person out, and that person is put to death. Under this Bill you are smelling them out and putting them into prison for life. It is the same thing. I do not know whether hon. Members here have read that book of Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross." It will be remembered how by merely proceeding along these lines everyone who is abnormal in any degree is finally put into a feeble-minded home, and in course of time everybody is found to be in the end slightly abnormal except the specialist himself. He is the only man left absolutely normal in society. If you are merely going to take a degree of variation from the normal as a sufficient cause for putting men or women—because this Bill is principally applied to women—
[HON. MEMBERS: "No"]
—well, every argument brought forward has dealt with those unfortunate women who go into our workhouses to have children and so on, and the main argument has been against women and against poor women only. I say it is wrong.
I should like any hon. Member who is going to vote for this Bill, and going to press it to law later on, to put himself for one moment in the place of an unfortunate parent whose daughter is taken away from him against his wish, and against the wish of the daughter, and sent to prison for life. Let any hon. Member who has got a daughter imagine for the moment whether he would allow the police to take that daughter away under these circumstances, and does he not think that the working classes may possibly have similar feelings as himself in this matter? This Bill does not involve incarceration at the wish of the parents. Any responsible person, any relieving officer can, without the wish of the parent and against the wish of the child, get the unfortunate child put away for life. I do think it shows an absolute want of understanding of the ordinary normal feelings of the ordinary poor people of this country to imagine that they will tolerate such a Bill as this, or such a monstrous injustice as that people are to be sent to prison for life for merely being abnormal.
The case is peculiarly hard because the relieving officer is brought into this Bill. It is the relieving officer who is going to be the principal medium in sending people to prison. It is the relieving officer who is going to save the rates—which is one of the chief merits of the Bill. It is the relieving officer who gets two medical witnesses to decide that a person is to be sent to these homes. The relieving officer is already a terror in the poorer classes of society; he is the most important person in the poor streets. In places the relieving officer is more important than the policeman. He is the man to whom you are giving this terrible, this tremendous authority, over all these poor people throughout the length and breadth of the country. I am opposed to the principle of compulsion involved in this Bill. I think it is perfectly possible to have a Bill which shall do all that is done at Sandlebridge, and all that is done at the home near Birmingham. Such a Bill will enable everyone who has a really conscientious desire to help these people to satisfy their conscience and to get what these feeble-minded people need; what will be good for them; to provide money; to provide home; and the parents, the guardians, and the local authorities will be only too glad to send these children there. The children as they grow up and reach the age of discretion will come to regard these places as their homes and will be willing to stay on. You can do all that without having this compulsion and this interference with the freedom and liberty of the subject.
(2/n)
That is not enough. Surely we must recognise that at the bottom of all these problems of the feeble-minded is the problem of poverty and overcrowding. People are crammed together in such a way that they cannot possibly grow up to be normal people. They are crammed together so that decency is impossible. When they grow up under present conditions a man is absolutely unable to marry because he cannot afford to keep a family, and therefore he has to go about with women. A woman is so anxious to carry in order to become economically independent that she has to take any man who comes along. These are the real causes of the feeble-mindedness of the country. If you want to stop it there is the education of the children before you in which enormous things can be done. There are homes, where unfortunately, at present only rich people can afford to send their feeble-minded children, where the children can be trained up by constant attention into being almost as normal as most of us here today. There are places where the missing parts of the brain can be almost substituted by careful attention. This Bill does not touch the question of children at all; it has nothing whatever to do with anybody under the age of sixteen. A Bill dealing with the feeble-minded which does not touch the question of the children is a delusion and a fraud. I should also like to touch upon the real theory that is at the back of this Bill. Although the last hon. Gentleman the Member for St. Pancras is one of the promoters, and I know that most of the Members whose names are on the back are really anxious respecting this horrible feeble-minded sore in our society, the spirit at the back of the Bill is not the spirit of charity, not the spirit of the love of mankind.
[An HON. MEMBER: "Oh!"]
It is a spirit of the horrible Eugenic Society which is setting out to breed up the working classes as though they were cattle. The one object in life of the society seems to be to make mankind as perfect as poultry. But we are not ants, bees, and wasps; we are human beings, and all this form of school Eugenics seems to me to be the most gross materialism that has ever been imported into human society.
I think those people who are so anxious to improve the breed of the working classes had better remember that there is such a thing as a soul and that the mere desire to turn people into better money-making machines is merely some horrible nightmare of H. G. Wells. Hon. Members should remember how Mr. Wells in "The Time Machine," figures a society thousands of years hence in which all disease is removed and a standard of a perfect type has been arrived at, but unfortunately the perfect type has no brain and the working classes become workers in the darkness below mere beast of prey. In his book "The Men in the Moon," are to be bred some men with special hands, some with special eyesight, some with special brains, some with special bodily strength. In connection with that kind of thing, I am delighted to have a seat in this House in order to be able to put a spoke in its wheel, because I believe in such circumstances the whole of mankind would become mere brute beasts and would lose their intellectual development and spirituality.
Let me now come to the Bill itself. I think I have dealt fairly and faithfully with its principle. The details are even more reprehensible than the principle of compulsion. In the first place this Bill does not refer to Scotland or Ireland. It seems to be inevitable that all our Friday afternoon Bills have one feature in common—the name of the hon. Member for Ayr Burghs (Sir George Younger) on the back of them. His name is on the back of this Bill, and it does not apply to Scotland. The hon. Member for Ayr Burghs understands what freedom is. If you turn to Clause 4 you will see this Bill does not seek to set up State institutions where people would be looked after, but it seeks merely to institute non-official homes; it merely sanctions certain places where the feeble-minded person can be taken in and looked after. Charity mongering has proved dangerous in all time, and this seems to point to a far wider vista for the extension of that charity mongering which has been so often shown up in "Truth." These non-official homes are to be inspected once a year by the Lunacy Commissioners. Is it likely to conduce to the elimination of scandal and hardship and cruelty to these homes for people so very liable and susceptible to ill-treatment are to be kept. There is no check in Clause 5 upon the number of attendants that will have to be supplied; or the sleeping accommodation in the homes, and in none of these homes is there any hint that educational work is to be carried on. They are to be mere dormitories or receptacles for the rubbish of mankind.
(3/n)
Clause 8 is the kernel of the Bill, and with that the right hon. Gentleman opposite did not deal. Under this Clause a magistrate may, when asked by anybody or person coming within a certain category, and when the application has the signature of two medical practitioners, send feeble-minded persons who are over sixteen years of age to those homes until they are twenty-one years of age, or, if over twenty-one years of age, he may send them to these homes until the Lunacy Commissioners decide they can come out. One would think that the only applicant was the parent or guardian. Not a bit of it. It can be done on the application of the parent, guardian, or any relative. In these lunacy cases there is very often money at the back of the desire to put a person into a lunatic asylum, and very often it is a relative that is interested in the seclusion of such a person. But it is also provided that such a person may be sent to these homes on the application of any relieving officer of any parish in which the alleged feeble-minded person shall become chargeable. That is where you get the relieving officer in; he comes in as a sort of general providence to those unfortunate people. Further, any responsible person over the age of twenty-one can make application and get those persons sent to confinement. I suppose that includes district visitors; but it is even far wider than that. Without consulting the feeble-minded person or the guardian of such person, or the family, if you can only get two medical practitioners to see the feeble-minded person that person can be committed, even upon hearsay evidence, to one of these homes. The applicant comes before the magistrate; the feeble-minded person is brought up without any protection from parent, guardian, or solicitor to speak for him or her, and upon that casual and cursory examination these unfortunate people are sent to compulsory detention. I think the kernel of this Bill is as bad as its principle. Under Clause 8 also the Press are to be excluded from the examination. The one opportunity for public criticism of what may go on is excluded. Coming to the last paragraph of Clause 8 you will find the most dangerous thing of all. The relieving officer of any parish shall apply to the justices of the peace for an order to be granted in respect of any person found wandering if he is satisfied that any such person is a fit and proper person for detention under this Act. Any person who is found wandering may, on the demand of the relieving officer, without the medical practitioner coming in at all, be sent away. If you turn to Clause 18 you will find there that the Bill only applies to the poor. There are special facilities for exempting the rich from the whole purview of this legislation. Nothing in this Act shall deprive any parent of any feeble-minded person of the care, control, and protection of such feeble-minded person, upon proof being given that such feeble-minded person will receive adequate care, protection and control. What class is there except the rich which can bring proof that they are able to provide adequately for the protection and control of the feeble-minded. This Bill is eminently a Bill which we as men have no right to pass. It is a Bill which affects principally women, because under it its practical effect will be to put feeble-minded women into gaol much more than men. The chief argument is that women have so many illegitimate children. In the Government measure special arrangements are made forbidding marriages in order to cut down this evil. This is a Bill which specially affects women, and which we, as men, have the greatest difficulty in dealing with, because our views of sex morality are not the same as in the case of women. We ought to be careful before we interfere with the liberties of a great number of women in the country without knowing whether we are correctly representing the views of women as well as of men. Clause 21 specially provides that there shall be no remedy at law for the alleged feeble-minded person, however long incarcerated, against the doctors or irresponsible persons who send them to these places of detention for life. Even the alleged lunatic has some claim against the people who put him there, but the feeble-minded person is deprived even of that opportunity. It rests with the feeble-minded person to prove that there was an absence of good faith, and how on earth are you able to prove that? The first schedule really is going to be the charter of the liberty or want of liberty of these unfortunate people.
The first schedule is the medical certificate which the doctor has to sign. He has to sign declaring that he is of opinion that So-and-so is feeble-minded. There is, however, no definition whatever of feeble-minded. The doctor has to declare that the person requires detention for his own benefit or for the benefit of the public at large. Think of an ordinary doctor deciding that rather transcendental question whether a man will be better locked up for the benefit of the public at large. Further he has to certify that he formed his opinion on the evidence of feeble-mindedness, want of proper care and control, and that the person is a source of danger to himself or others. These facts, however, need not be observed by the medical practitioner, and they can be supplied by others. There you have a most risky form of medical certificate. Could you have anything more risky than to allow a doctor to say a person is feeble-minded without telling him what is the definition of feeble-minded. You allow a man to say whether he believes in the interest of society somebody would be better off under lock and key. That is not a question for a doctor to decide. These doctrines, if applied to opinions, would probably see most hon. Members of this House under lock and key. It would probably be decided that the people who brought in this Bill should be placed under lock and key, and on the same reasoning even the hon. Member for Wirral would be doing time. But that is no justification for sending the hon. Member to do time. Once you get away from the elementary principles of right and wrong, of what the French people call "the rights of man," and the doctrines of what is, or what is not, expedient in the general interests of society, you get into a quagmire that will lead to the most monstrous injustice in time to come.
(4/4)
The fact that something has been abused in the past is Bayseian evidence that it is easy to abuse. You should not ignore this.
"Never argue with sexual selection". (It is probably smarter than you are, concerning what is likely to survive in the long run.)
I would be very surprised if wealthy Americans are still having babies the old fashioned way by 2030…it’s an unnecessary game of Russian Roulette when IVF and egg and sperm freezing are available. Wealthy males should already be freezing their sperm and getting snipped because it is so cheap and easy…just remember HIV has effectively been cured but herpes hasn’t. ;)
I fear all that is really going on is that we are learning that ppl who are willing to take actions that other ppl recoil at and see as deeply morally distastey might generally be less good people.
Unlike the trolley problem here you have the option of just saying: eww and ignoring the issue. It's not surprising that the kind of people who might be gung ho about the issue might be less good people.
So the concern shouldn't be about trying to persuade the public but about giving the kind of people who are really enthusiastic about this persuasion control to do anything.
You’re going to find autistics, sociopaths, the uncouth, and the pathologically honest disproportionately represented among the more vocal proponents of an uncomfortable truth. Do you really want those groups to be the ones who exclusively use genetic technologies that improve the health of children? You could try to ban prenatal screening and IVF, but such a ban is unpopular for good reason. If you’re only against state funded eugenics programmes, then that’s more politically viable—but it may not remain so as long-term data on PGD accrues.
As an aside, I've always felt that the weakest argument in eugenics related areas is the claim that somehow the current system isn't selecting for the better genes.
Ok, sure, reproduction is anti-correlates with education. But we know that education is a very noisy marker of intrinsic ability (Flynn effect) and it's not at all clear to me that the education effect isn't overbalanced by some other effect favoring intelligence effect.
Rather late to comment, so probably not many people will see it, but here it goes:
I might be wrong about past attitudes here, and if so, please correct me, but wasn't euthanasia long seen as politically toxic due to similar n*zi connotations (I remember arguments to that effect coming up during a class discussion on euthanasia in high school 15 or so years ago), whereas today - unless I'm severely misjudging public opinion again - pro-euthanasia seems to be generally regarded as the progressive, compassionate, humanitarian position.
While the term "eugenics" will almost certainly remain toxic, a lot of "positive eugenics", e.g. issues related to egg- and sperm donations, embryonic screening, etc, could easily be framed as reproductive rights issues of the sort only the "reactionary, anti-women, anti-science right" is against. Of course, there are no guarantees this will happen, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that is how discourse on the issue plays out in the next decade or two (assuming other technological developments don't make this a moot point on this time scale).
Or are there reasons I'm currently missing making this unlikely? (not interested in debating the object-level morality of "positive eugenics" as construed here, more curious about what people think of the possibility of a public attitude shift along those lines)
A lot of prospective parents perform genetic tests on their fetus and will have an abortion if it would have a deadly genetic disease if carried to term. It's eugenic. It's voluntary. It's under attack legally in the US, but not in most of the world. Like Nietzsche, who thought German nationalism was nauseating, sometimes one is remembered popularly for not exactly something one proposed.
Another example is sterilization. Partial sterilization, birth control, is widely practiced. If you put on a condom, you are around 95% sterile the next time you copulate. In most cases it is voluntary though encouraged officially. In some cases, it was coerced as with China's one child policy. Surgical sterilization is a crude instrument. Partial sterilization is why people look back at Ehrlich and the like and consider him a crackpot.
Eugenics has its place in the modern world, but it is less the blunt instrument it once was. Choosing how many children one will bear and when one will bear them to maximize available resources is essentially eugenic. There are many who oppose this, mainly social conservatives, because it places the decisions in the hands of parents, not a church or government agency. Given modern worries about the population bust, you'd think we'd want a eugenic program to encourage people who want to have children and take care of them to do so.
A lot of prospective parents perform genetic tests on their fetus and will have an abortion if it would have a deadly genetic disease if carried to term. It's eugenic. It's voluntary. It's under attack legally in the US, but not in most of the world. Like Nietzsche, who thought German nationalism was nauseating, sometimes one is remembered popularly for not exactly something one proposed.
Another example is sterilization. Partial sterilization, birth control, is widely practiced. If you put on a condom, you are around 95% sterile the next time you copulate. In most cases it is voluntary though encouraged officially. In some cases, it was coerced as with China's one child policy. Surgical sterilization is a crude instrument. Partial sterilization is why people look back at Ehrlich and the like and consider him a crackpot.
Eugenics has its place in the modern world, but it is less the blunt instrument it once was. Choosing how many children one will bear and when one will bear them to maximize available resources is essentially eugenic. There are many who oppose this, mainly social conservatives, because it places the decisions in the hands of parents, not a church or government agency. Given modern worries about the population bust, you'd think we'd want a eugenic program to encourage people who want to have children and take care of them to do so.
I couldn't find that in my edition. The archive.org version only lets me see a page or two towards the front. Assuming there was another 1968 edition that did include such, I'll have to ask what taxing children has to do with eugenics. Ditto for making aid contingent on implementing population control strategies. Ditto for encouraging fathers in India to get sterilized.I suppose triaging on a national basis rather than a person by person basis in a desperate situation could be considered eugenics, but as it turned out, most nations have adopted policies that have lowered the birth rate by means of less extreme economic pressures, which unlike government pressures are perfectly acceptable.
As it turned out, the more extreme approaches were never needed. Changing attitudes proved to be easier than expected in most of the world. Economic development, providing access to birth control, better child healthcare and raising the status of women seem to cut birth rates just as well or better than more coercive mechanisms except in China. Improved agriculture meant there was no need to triage on a national basis or otherwise.
Basically, following the advice in Chapter 5 let the world avoid the worst of Chapter 4. If Ehrlich and others hadn't sounded the population alarm, it isn't clear we'd be in as good a situation as we are now.
Edit: Before I nitpick, it's worth mentioning that the conversation in this article was very well done!
> Adraste: But don’t you agree there is sometimes a place for slippery slopes? For example, it seems so attractive to hand over the government to a nice-seeming communist dictator with good ideas. [...] in the past, “give all power to a nice-seeming communist who will use it for good things” has slipped down a slope to “the communist dictator is actually a bad guy and abuses his power”.
> Beroe: You also make a compelling point.
Uh, no? "Give all the power to one guy" isn't a "slippery slope", it is a step change you can never undo. It's not that the dictator starts out nice and becomes bad (although this *also* happens), it's that
(1) the dictator is almost always worse than he seemed; he took power via charisma but charisma does not make for good government (the same is true in democracies but the damage tends to be more limited.)
(2) even if he's not so bad, his successor might well be worse (Lenin => Stalin).
Now, dictators (like most humans) tend to have bad epistemics and are also isolated from society, which often makes them drift away from reality as the decades pass (this seems to be what happened to Putin). This is a slippery slope, but it's not one where "we" made a choice which led "us" to make a worse choice; "we" only made one choice in total.
Setting that aside, I just pointed to a *mechanism* for the "slippery slope". The usual problem with slippery slope arguments is that people simply declare that a slippery slope exists, without proposing a reason why a slippery slope would exist, and indeed not realizing that any reason is necessary; that slippery slopes are not magic but have causes. I would propose we treat slippery slope arguments as bad arguments unless they are backed up with a story for how society could slip further down the slope.
In the case of "eugenics" I do see a "slippery slope": allowing disease screening could lead to... mandatory termination of pregnancies when the fetus has a serious disease. The *mechanism* by which this would happen is moral in nature: some people will think you shouldn't make a child with a serious disease. "You can always try again!" (As long as the pro-life lobby is strong, I expect this slope not to be slippery.)
But what if society has a slogan: "eugenics must be voluntary." As far as I know this excludes all nazi-style eugenics while allowing reproductive choices. It blocks the slippery slope by defining a guardrail.
The guardrail is even stronger if it takes the form of a single word. Since eugenics has a bad connotation anyway, how about "progenics" (defined as voluntary genetic family planning or abortion)? So when someone says your proposal for a voluntary procedure is "eugenics", you can say "actually, it's progenics". And if, someday, people try to move "down the slope" by referring to *involuntary* procedures as "progenics", you can accurately respond "no, it's eugenics" and point them to the dictionary (which sidesteps the need for other people to be rationalists who have read "A Human's Guide to Words".)
If you sterilize all the idiots there will be nobody left to take risks that benefit society. Columbus was an idiot who deliberately misinterpreted geometry to prove the earth was smaller than it actually was. The first nation to sterilize its idiots will be brutally conquered by a military composed of idiots who aren't afraid to die or have chosen the military career due to a lack of other available options. As the smart people in the "eugenically pure" nation do the intelligent thing and save their own skins. Before you bring up the armies minimum cutoff iq standards keep in mind that these go out the window in times of war.
Coria should be informed that, while it is possible that when Ehrlich wrote the first edition of _The Population Bomb_ he was not aware of Borlaug's work leading to the Green Revolution, by the time the second edition of Ehrlich's book came out Borlaug had won a Nobel prize for his work. The claim that Ehrlich's recommendations were based on "the natural continuation of the trends at the time, averted only by a Green Revolution outside the window of what most forecasters considered possible" is false, at least for the second edition.
I see where you're coming from as a transhumanist, I really do, but eugenics (not saying it as a dirty word but as a value-neutral practice) lacks everything from a good goal to a morally defensible implementation model. The problem is that it wouldn't work, *because nobody is qualified to determine what working is, nobody can be TRUSTED to evaluate any such thing without bias, and even if they could, they would be wrong because the complexity of genetics is a big GOTCHA*. There are so many angles of thing I could say about this.
1. "I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic." sure, and we took intelligent, independent, pro-social animals (wild dogs and wolves) and made ...a whole lot of things that can't survive without us. Most of the most intelligent species of dogs do their jobs really well! They love us and they work hard. They also have congenital dysplasia or organ failure or need somebody to wipe the gunk out of their noses or they can't breathe. A healthy dog is a mutt.
Did you know that American wheat is the wheat hardest for humans to digest and also the least nutritious? It's because it's been GMOed for the biggest yields, and consequently is the most inflammatory and most nutritionally vacuous variety of wheat available. And because it's the most productive, it's also the most widely-available! Other countries import our wheat to make their regional products, so even a "made in Italy" pasta is suspect! Similarly, genetic engineering of cows has resulted in *almost all available milk* being "A1 milk" which is significantly harder to digest. This is our own fault and we are making ourselves sick. What I'm driving at here is that while, yes, we have certainly been "successful" with eugenics on other species in the past (read: we have successfully caused changes to happen), our priorities have not resulted in changes that are unambiguously better-for-humanity, let alone for the species in question. We don't know enough about genetics - and while maybe that's a solvable problem., the issue lies in us ever believing that we DO know enough about genetics, because up to the point where we know *literally everything* about genetics, we are more likely to be missing something important than not, but the more we think we know, the harder we are going to push it anyway. People making decisions to genetically engineer BIGGER wheat at the cost of its nutritional value were not super-villains... they were probably trying to feed the world, and "did the best they could have based on what they knew at the time". But it turns out that BIGGER is not always BETTER and feeding the world with blank carbohydrates does not actually make most people healthier, or at least, once it prevents them from starving, there needs to be an alternative that starving people can still afford. Unlike Einkorn or A2 milk. Monoculture is actually a bad thing, ecologically speaking. Diversity is good.
2. Separate question: Why would anyone who doesn't believe (as I believe you don't believe, Scott) that a superintelligent AI or alien would automatically agree with us on a moral level, believe that humans engineered to be "the most talented" (by whatever metrics people come up with by *operating on their best knowledge at the time*) would share the values of the mere naturally-selected? The concept of trying to improve humanity through genetically increasing intelligence suffers from the same alignment issues as AI, except that at least AI have to hide behind a screen to make people think they're human. Obviously this depends on the degree of eugenics AND a chihuahua is unambiguously not a wolf.
3. Who decides what "talented" means? Do soft skills count? Does empathy matter? Even if we can agree that something is "good to have", what would we be willing to sacrifice it for?
Who decides what genes are "better" than others? By what metrics?
4. What about the side-effects? Domesticating animals makes their ears bigger, who knows why! Ashkenazi Jews might have an IQ advantage, but what we definitely have is a genetic predisposition towards "cystic fibrosis, Canavan disease, familial dysautonomia, Tay-Sachs disease, Fanconi anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Bloom syndrome, mucolipidosis type IV, and Gaucher disease, among others." (https://arupconsult.com/content/ashkenazi-jewish-genetic-diseases)
5. Once you start using eugenics to try to solve problems, to whatever extent it seems to work, it suddenly seems like it's a really important thing to make happen, in fact necessary. It's a very short hop from there to coercion, even if only of the form "Eugh, Scott had his OWN bioLOGical children? What a narcissist..." *socially shuns*. Once it starts showing "results" (forgetting the longterm knock-on effects that won't be visible for decades) then it's time for government to step in and make it mandatory. You can't possibly believe that people who fervently believe that some genes are "better" than others would not try to enforce that viewpoint on people they view as inferior because of their genes. We *do in fact already know how that goes*. Even if *you* can think some genes are inherently better than others without looking down on those without those genes, you can't possibly think you're in the majority ...Can you?
5. Side note, but: Who gets evaluated for how talented they are and whether their genes "deserve" preservation and promotion and why are none of them brown? Oh it's because most people in power globally hate brown people and would loooove this excuse!
LOL "Meanwhile, what has Islam given us? Pretty buildings, calligraphy, and hummus." what fucking ignorance