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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
"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?
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.
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 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I don’t think I have ever read anyone who exudes more admiration for their own (supposed) intelligence than Victor Davis Hanson.
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?
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
"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.
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!
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 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.