Constructing fictional eugenics (LW edition)

I predict two problems (though problems are not limited to the first problems I predict).

Humans will dramatically overprice the "sacred" value of natural children. So any policy based on internalizing costs of a sacred value may mostly just make people pay costs, not change their behavior.

Dumb people are going to have kids. If the people least likely to change their behavior based on an incentive are also the ones being fined the most, you just go from having dumb people to having poor dumb people.

It find it odd that your system assumes an intrusive central government to coordinate eugenics. For myself, any utopia that requires the government to be more intrusive in my life than my current one doesn't get to count as a utopia unless it's got some serious amenities (eg catgirls). Non-dystopian eugenics needs to work with people instead of against them.

My own idea is to just make DNA sharing, modification, and combination easy enough that everyone can do it. Parents already want the best for their children, so just give them the tools for it. They'd take their own dna, slap in MarilynVosSavantIQv241.dna, UsainBoltPhysique(2012).dna, Akrasia-Zero(9001-willpower-edition).dna, XxNoSicknessHackxX.dna, and whatever else they find nice then have a kid. You'd have open source places like github, you'd have dna sets for sale (or on piratednabay), you'd also have antique family genes that you don't share with anybody. The biggest problem people would have would be choosing between ET_JaynesRationality.dna, Lesswrong(2032).dna or the rationalwiki R-pack, and deciding which one is compatible with the IQ boosting suites they've already chosen. Within a few generations of remixing, even the dullest children will be smarter/stronger/healthier than we could imagine.

The biggest downside is that certain groups will make really sucky, self perpetuating dna packs that all their members have to use. I'd assume the fantasy equivalent of the Mormon church will have a dna pack that makes you 100% believe everything you hear for the first 5 years of your life. However, these sorts of situations seem unavoidable in any eugenics scenario to varying degrees. Eg, in Eliezer's scenario I'd terrified if the fantasy equivalent of the Texas school board got political power over the scoring criteria and decided that any child who becomes an atheist or homosexual would be taxed $1,000,000 for destroying the fabric of society.

Edit: Although I'm assuming a significantly higher tech/magic level for Yvain's scenario than Eliezer is.

How impressive do the children and grandchildren of Nobel laureates tend to be?

If you want to focus on the other end, a handful of high-status sociopaths can do a tremendous amount of damage. If there's a genetic component (maybe low empathy/high intelligence/high energy), would there be a way to discourage such people from being created?

ETA: add high dominance to the bad mix.

Because I don't think it's sufficiently widely appreciated, I'll quote the point from my comment here.

The difference is that with animal breeding you have a clear distinction between the people doing the breeding and the animals being bred. Humans breeding humans any attempt at being "scientific" is likely to collapse in the face of the resulting signaling games.

"including foregone income of a working parent"

NITPICK: This is fully internalised by the parent. The value they create but don't capture isn't though.

Emphasize exciting positive results. Replace coercion with market forces as much as possible. Don't spend any time and effort on culling after birth, rather emphasize drastically increasing the production of the kinds of people you want to add.

Have a character who is one of the last to have some difficult genetic disease. Have his parents as people who avoided fixing his embryo in utero for religious or other bad reasons.

Show the virtual eradication of poverty, not by decimating the ranks of poor children, but by multiplying the ranks of those who can form productive enterprises. Show a world in which labor is in a constant demand because of the surfeit of new productive ideas.

Push out the genomes of the successful. Jobs and Gates and Clinton and Mother Theresa and Jackson (Reggie and Michael) shouldn't have had a few kids, they should have had tens of thousands. The low hanging fruit in eugenics does not require the latest books on breeding animals because we haven't even exploited the simple steps of having our best humans duplicated by the thousands throughout our herd.

Have examples of how a seemingly bad result of eugenics, perhaps thousands of Saddam Hussein or Mao or Qaddafi clones, winds up working well. Qaddafi clones produce a Libya that cannot be easily dominated by a single talented but bad actor. Mao clones produce a flourishing of political genius that must compete for hearts and minds, since with thousands of them the only way to get a coalition that might control is to have strong principles of inclusion of many of the mao clones in the share power. The skills which in a monopoly situation produce dominance wind up producing so much more when put in the qualitatively different situation where there are thousands of competitors with similar high skill levels.

Another quick win: bursting out millions of high quality embryos that also have a tendency to want to carve out their piece of the world before having one or two or three children that can 1) be groomed with high parental investment, 2) produce whatever positive result the parents hope for from children. Perhaps we are two generations in and the Indian untouchables are now the richest group in India because they embraced the implant of high quality embryos rather than natural overproduction of nearly random people. That high quality program took place and succeeded because it was positively developed: 1) the implanted embryo started from the moms and dads genes, but with perhaps a somewhat standardized set of modifications, so it was "their kid," 2) part of the feature of these embryos is they were bred to be very family oriented, i.e. you would have very smart capable children who were very interested in helping the parents in their dotage, 3) it was the "best job" around, untouchables make very little money, it is not much more expensive than implanting embryos to have them on a "contract" for constant medical intervention, including a pre-agreed limit of two or three implanted children rather than a random smattering of naturals after the implants. This can be done following the principle of allowing the contractee to opt out at any point so it is not slavery or indentured servitude, but then designing the advantages of not opting out so that the example of those who do opt out is not a very attractive one.

Please send me a link to your story as it is avaialble.

Keep in mind if it is a story, the arc of the story doesn't have to be the arc you would think most likely given the sparse set of inputs you provide. 007 doesn't get all the girls because tuxedos, martinis, and overconfidence are insanely seductive, he gets them because he is written in to get them. I make this comment because I see other comments below considering what they can predict as results of various things. Yes, you want a story to be constrained by feeling somewhat real to your audience, but you don't want to lose 90% of your audience by nerding out in order to only lose the other 10% of your audience because you can never do prediction well enough to convince someone who gains entertainment by finding the flaws.

Writing a story is sort of like leadership. You want to tell people what you want to happen as though it is a simple fact that it will happen.

I know there are a lot of sci-fi writers on this website and their judgment is likely better than mine, but fictional eugenics doesn’t seem like very fertile ground for stories.

1. Most people think of eugenics as being very creepy and it would take a long time for a social norm like that to change, so a society that went for it would need to be a long way off in the future.

2. Workable genetic engineering isn’t that far off, and genetic engineering pretty much dominates eugenics. Why use the sperm of some noble prize winner you’ve never met when you could just use your husband’s sperm but GE the kid to be smarter than the noble prize winner and also be thinner taller and less likely to get a wide range of diseases?

Consequently, you have some heavy narrative constraints. There’s a very narrow window before the march of technology makes the subject irrelevant, and you would need to explain some fairly radical (and quite implausible) social change during that window.

How much selection pressure can you get if you're only selecting at the level of the gamete, and not at the level of the person or the gene? For example, given a man and a woman, suppose that you looked at 1 million of the man's sperm and picked the best (according to whatever criteria you're using), and you picked the best out of 100 of the woman's eggs, and you mated them. If that was how everyone reproduced, would that provide enough selection pressure to satisfy whatever goals you have for the gene pool?

If so, then a eugenics program would not need to restrict who breeds and it could probably get by with very little coercion. I described some options in more detail in a comment at Yvain's blog, but in the right cultural context all you'd need to do is have the reproductive technology that allowed for this kind of genetic screening, and get most people to use it instead of old-fashioned reproduction. The government could make genetic screening the norm by subsidizing reproductive technology to make it free to everyone and by enforcing universal birth control as the default state (so that a person would have to opt in to become capable of reproducing the standard way). Parents' choices (and time) would take care of the rest. It's easy to imagine a culture where most parents would go the medical route instead of opting for the standard genetic roulette, and where they'd direct a decent amount of their selective pressure towards attributes like intelligence.

This system is optimized for being unobjectionable, rather than for the most effective genetic selection. It could operate under the banner of feel-good liberal labels, like reproductive rights (giving people more control over whether/when/how they reproduce), preventing unwanted pregnancy (by making fertility opt-in), egalitarianism (equal access to reproductive technology), and parental choice (over their child's genes).

If it isn't selective enough, the next step would be to operate at the level of the gene, using fancier technology to alter specific genes. As Xachariah describes, that could also be voluntary.

I'm dubious about your point #9 due to Fisher's principal.

to be interesting and sympathetic, and not to immediately pattern-match to a dystopia that kills everyone who doesn't look exactly alike.

One possibility is that a society that practiced genetics could actually make its population more diverse - a lot of modern human societies are really pretty homogeneous.

Such a society could also take steps to eliminate correlations between a person's superficial appearance and other abilities. For example, such a society could produce populations such that P(M|E) = P(M), where M="You win the Olympic Marathon" and E="You look like an Ethiopian".

I bet the story could get a lot of drama from asking the dramatic-question: How will X react to finding they're expected-negative/positive?

If they're expected negative, do they try and defy the prediction? does it help them exceed their "higher scored" peers? Or do they go off the deep end, risking all in mad shenanigans?

And so on and so forth.

not really related to eugenics, but this is an idea that reading this thread made me think.

since the SIAI would welcome more people like eliezer on board, and since people like eliezer willing to come on board seem to be hard to find, i'm wondering what if the smart people at SIAI could have kids who would have a good chance of contributing to the causes of the SIAI a lot, once they grew up.

it may be something like that is out of the question for many reasons, the least of which might be it just taking too many resources (monetary resources, emotional and cognitive resources, etc.), or the expected return of the endeavor being too low, or too far in the future.

but if you could have something like >10 kids growing up together, all being around as intelligent as eliezer and having a good environment in all respects so they developed well, then it seems like you could end up (with a decent probability) with an incredible group of adults who realize the jeopardy humans may be in, and the nature of it, and who will do their bests to prevent extinction or other sad futures for our species.

there may even be some volunteers among the hpmor readership that could help with this.

the more standard approach of interesting some of this generations' and the next generations' extremely smart kids in LW / SIAI stuff of course works too.

If you only believe this GIVEN that some form of eugenics were unavoidable, you really should make it a lot clearer. In the other case, consider if you want that n a public website. "Eugenics" is one of them mindkilling words, mind the PR, etc.

I don't think this is very responsive to Yvain's request, either the sympathy or avoiding the pattern-match to coercive uniformity. Of course there is conflict with other goals, such as the system actually helping people, but quoting Yvain's challenge suggests you are trying it.

Asserting that eugenics done correctly would lead to diversity is the barest concession to Yvain's challenge, but I think it would take a lot to convince the reader. Economic reasoning is not at all sympathetic. Many people are bothered by real instances of privately paying people to be sterilized.

This is moving toward plausibility, but suppose eugenics is socially acceptable, but not a lot else has changed. In particular, the eugenics program has a short attention span, and both the goals and the methods tend to change in mere decades. At that point, I give up on the ability to predict.

Another sort of selection: arranged marriages. I assume they select for something, even if it's mostly status. I suspect they're also more likely to be concerned with whether a potential mate has dysfunctional relatives.

Cheating a little bit on the original question.

I would try to ensure that there is a period of relative equality of opportunity where everyone has a chance of achieving their life's goals. My personal preference would be a georgist policy of land taxation which is used to fund government and any surplus after that is redistributed to all adults. Extensive studies of pedagogical and other interventions that work might have to happen over there.

This would ensure the answering of one important question - under a relatively fair scenario, what can people produce and what niches could be filled?

After that, if studies show that the sustainable limit to the population is approaching and we need a eugenics policy, then my policy follows below.

I would have tradeable child credits distributed to all fertile women. The number of credits would be pegged to the latest estimates of the sustainable population and the birth rate required to achieve the same.

I will try to ensure as much research as necessary goes into making fertility as digital as possible (ON/OFF switches). I would try to extend women's fertile years as much as possible (if some other life extension side-effects occur, they are welcome, but not the goal). This will cross the biggest bottleneck to eugenics in today's world - educated women not having enough children.

If the above research yields good results, then just the child credits will be provided and they will be tradeable. Those who want children will have them. Those who don't, won't. They will benefit by selling their credits.

Mandatory genetic testing at birth. No fault , no obligation divorce can be obtained by the man on the spot if it is found that the child is not his. This is to offset the fact that women get the credits and deploy them.

For those who can't provide the child credits to justify birth, they will have to give away the child to foster parents and they will be sterilized.

I am hoping that the ability to have more children becomes a status symbol and this naturally leads to a eugenic outcome.

If the price of the credit is approaching zero (more sellers than buyers), while the sustainable population estimate has not increased, my policy is not working and other interventions might be needed, like the eugenic subsidies mentioned in the above post.