[ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>  On 2013-10-27 18:19, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> Well, as a drug user with decent IQ (
> http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my likelihood
> of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic.
>

So if you don't plan on having kids, would you accept a few hundred dollars
to make sure? I have considered being sterilized, but the cost for one
thing keeps me from going there. The high cost of sperm storage is a
secondary issue as well in my personal case. I don't know my personal
future to the point of saying I would never ever want kids, but I might
take a few thousand dollars to be sterilized. It might tip the scales, as
it were.


> "As of 7 October 2011 the organization had paid 3,848 clients." - that
> tells me they likely do not have the right price. Looking at
> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-csew/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-crime-survey-for-england-and-walesit seems that a few percent of the population are drug users (2.8% adults
> are 'frequent drug users'). So of the around 1,457,735 frequent drug users
> only 0.26% had taken up the offer. More than I expected, actually, but
> still tiny.
>

Perhaps you're looking at it wrong. Maybe they haven't had enough money to
hand out. If they had $20,000,000 I'm guessing they could find enough
people to sterilize.

Still, there is something relevant with that project: it looks at a
> phenotype that - at the very least through phenotypical effects - has a
> good chance of reducing the life quality of children. One could just as
> well imagine similar project paying other statistically bad parents - say
> people with personality disorders or criminal lifestyles - to not have
> children*. This would be good for the average child (since the chance of
> having a nice parent goes up), and indirectly maybe have some gene pool
> effect. But the moral argument for this largely hinges on the direct effect
> on the children, rather than caring for the gene pool.
>

I agree.


> The gene pool is in my opinion only instrumentally valuable as something
> that generates something truly valuable: good human lives. If we could get
> equally good lives by compiling DNA strings or voodoo invocations, there
> would not be any particular reason to keep the gene pool. This is why I am
> sceptical of interventions that seem to serve "the species" more than
> individual members.
>

Human happiness is a sum of individual human being's happiness. The
distribution of happiness, just as the distribution of money, is a
controversial subject.


> [* Of course, when you start thinking about parent group membership
> correlating with bad childhoods a lot of the results are pretty
> unpalatable. Very fun to string people along and see how far they are
> willing to go - what about poor people? immigrants? parents with bad food
> habits? the wrong religion? ]
>

Yes, this is the difficulty and the reason the government doesn't do such
things. But as a private organization, I think you can do things that could
not be done by governments. This has always been one of my best examples of
that.

-Kelly
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