<div dir="ltr">On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Anders Sandberg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">
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<div>On 2013-10-27 18:19, Kelly Anderson
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Well, as a drug user with decent IQ ( <a href="http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health" target="_blank">http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health</a>
) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my
likelihood of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic. <br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">"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 <a href="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-wales" target="_blank">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-wales</a>
it 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. <br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">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. <br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I agree.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">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.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">[* 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? ]<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-Kelly</div></div></div></div>