I wonder if Eugenics fell out of favor as the percent of population involved in agriculture declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. When Darwin and Mendel's theories came out, around half of the American population was engaged in agriculture. Eugenics is common sense when you're dealing with crops, we've been selecting for better crops and better livestock for thousands of years. When you're working in a factory, or an office, it is more obscure.
I wish I could double like for your statement on books having low info-density. Although it looks good and learned to have a full bookshelf I find papers so much better for actually learning about topics in a given timeframe. Chatgpt and DeepSeek have been great at sourcing papers for me, even on esoteric topics like New World crop use in Qing China.
You know, I've done calc, linear algebra, stats, and physics, and I don't trust our current thought leaders to be picking the future gene pool. I don't know what government I would trust to engage in eugenics, frankly. They'll just try to breed people who will agree with them!
Also when you try to breed all the smart people together you wind up getting more autism. There's probably some sort of physiologic limits to how high human IQ can go, perhaps in a few decades we'll understand why.
Eugenics will get popular once individuals can use it to enhance themselves. When it has nothing actionable to do then its in self interest to engage in virtue signaling.
You can support your eugenic projects by masking them behind other, more acceptable policies.
For example, you might want to simplify access to abortions in the name of women's rights or whatever. That should help since only retarded and generally evil women get them, thereby removing them from the gene pool.
One thing I find confusing is that you don't actually need Darwin or Galton to do eugenics. Any society from the invention of selective breeding 10k years ago onwards could in theory have bred super soldiers, super farmers, super bureaucrats, super scientists and gained massive advantages in competition against other societies. Why didn't cultural evolution select for that and make eugenics the standard in like the bronze age?
“I propose we can’t have eugenics because people are biased against it and aren’t smart enough to overcome that bias using evidence”
I tend to agree, but one must attempt to separate the political environment from the scientific environment wrt eventual implementation. Perhaps your concept of “implementation”—I’ll leave that ill defined for the moment—is immersed in Western democracies and its reliance on persuasion of the people, all of whom have some (regrettably I must agree) say in policy in the West’s “democratic” system. Can that be said to be true of other forms of political organization? Would we for example consider China—a country that forcefully implemented a “one child” policy for decades—as a society concerned with the moral niceties of eugenics, especially as related to higher IQ and better health outcomes for its future generations?
My suspicion is that when the technology for eugenics reaches the stage of potential and reliable implementation, it will happen first in China (due to wealth and government control). When the effects of such a policy become obvious in generation or two, we will play “catch up” in the West. It might be too late, but I think the precedent will be set and those wishing to optimize their offspring’s health and abilities will jump at the chance. I remember when abortion was illegal here in the US, however those with means simply hopped a flight to countries where the procedure was legal. Within a single generation, Roe vs Wade opened the floodgates to the procedure. So it will be here for eugenics.
Then I must have missed out on your theme somewhere. Perhaps you’d elaborate? My understanding is that in the absence of “strict Darwinian selection”, we’ve been in a period of dysgenics, i.e., increasing “spiteful mutants” as Woodley first put it for at least 150 years. You can’t unring that bell, but you may overcome it through selective/enhanced reproduction—if that’s a correct term. That is my understanding of eugenics—repairing the genetic line.
Very good and based opinion. I wonder though if this implies that a society run by high IQ scientist-experts would be generally better than what we have today?
What that sounds like to me is a pattern in which humanity creates the very conditions that ensure its downfall. We reach a point where technology could bring about biological escape velocity, but at the same time, the forces that bring us to that point also generate such strong mutational biases against this outcome. Eventually, the conditions that bring about the mutational load are destroyed due to the population being too retarded to maintain them.
So, is there any way out of the cycle? Do we wait until mutational load makes humans unable to sustain the conditions they are creating and then hope that in the next cycle, we can reach escape velocity to establish eugenics? Or will gene editing allow us to escape this cycle by creating a more palatable form of eugenics?
Okay, and why is the share of learned people who do radically lower than it used to be? Eugenics used to be all the rage among the learned.
Even if their collective IQ has dropped somewhat (which may or may not be true), that can’t be the main reason. There are sociological and ideological forces at play.
what even is your argument? That people who support eugenics are dumb? do you think we solved the problem of dysgenics ? We havent, this is a fundamental issue with civilization. The academics, scientists, and medical professionals who pushed for eugenics in the 20th century were never actually refuted, their policies became unpopular on moral grounds.
I wonder if Eugenics fell out of favor as the percent of population involved in agriculture declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. When Darwin and Mendel's theories came out, around half of the American population was engaged in agriculture. Eugenics is common sense when you're dealing with crops, we've been selecting for better crops and better livestock for thousands of years. When you're working in a factory, or an office, it is more obscure.
That and the fact that most people probably don’t even have a basic understanding of Eugenics. They just hear it as a bad word to not be discussed.
Darn city slickers!
I wish I could double like for your statement on books having low info-density. Although it looks good and learned to have a full bookshelf I find papers so much better for actually learning about topics in a given timeframe. Chatgpt and DeepSeek have been great at sourcing papers for me, even on esoteric topics like New World crop use in Qing China.
You know, I've done calc, linear algebra, stats, and physics, and I don't trust our current thought leaders to be picking the future gene pool. I don't know what government I would trust to engage in eugenics, frankly. They'll just try to breed people who will agree with them!
Also when you try to breed all the smart people together you wind up getting more autism. There's probably some sort of physiologic limits to how high human IQ can go, perhaps in a few decades we'll understand why.
Eugenics will get popular once individuals can use it to enhance themselves. When it has nothing actionable to do then its in self interest to engage in virtue signaling.
You can support your eugenic projects by masking them behind other, more acceptable policies.
For example, you might want to simplify access to abortions in the name of women's rights or whatever. That should help since only retarded and generally evil women get them, thereby removing them from the gene pool.
Not a lot of evidence that abortion is eugenic. A lot of evil women who get abortions are just indoctrinated.
One thing I find confusing is that you don't actually need Darwin or Galton to do eugenics. Any society from the invention of selective breeding 10k years ago onwards could in theory have bred super soldiers, super farmers, super bureaucrats, super scientists and gained massive advantages in competition against other societies. Why didn't cultural evolution select for that and make eugenics the standard in like the bronze age?
On of the Habsburg kings wanted to do that for his soldiers but the pope said no.
Humans no, the Dwarven people yes
“I propose we can’t have eugenics because people are biased against it and aren’t smart enough to overcome that bias using evidence”
I tend to agree, but one must attempt to separate the political environment from the scientific environment wrt eventual implementation. Perhaps your concept of “implementation”—I’ll leave that ill defined for the moment—is immersed in Western democracies and its reliance on persuasion of the people, all of whom have some (regrettably I must agree) say in policy in the West’s “democratic” system. Can that be said to be true of other forms of political organization? Would we for example consider China—a country that forcefully implemented a “one child” policy for decades—as a society concerned with the moral niceties of eugenics, especially as related to higher IQ and better health outcomes for its future generations?
My suspicion is that when the technology for eugenics reaches the stage of potential and reliable implementation, it will happen first in China (due to wealth and government control). When the effects of such a policy become obvious in generation or two, we will play “catch up” in the West. It might be too late, but I think the precedent will be set and those wishing to optimize their offspring’s health and abilities will jump at the chance. I remember when abortion was illegal here in the US, however those with means simply hopped a flight to countries where the procedure was legal. Within a single generation, Roe vs Wade opened the floodgates to the procedure. So it will be here for eugenics.
Eugenics is not in the future technologically, that's a different thing entirely. Eugenics is what we've missed out on for 150 years.
Then I must have missed out on your theme somewhere. Perhaps you’d elaborate? My understanding is that in the absence of “strict Darwinian selection”, we’ve been in a period of dysgenics, i.e., increasing “spiteful mutants” as Woodley first put it for at least 150 years. You can’t unring that bell, but you may overcome it through selective/enhanced reproduction—if that’s a correct term. That is my understanding of eugenics—repairing the genetic line.
What other good ideas in your view are impossible to implement?
Very good and based opinion. I wonder though if this implies that a society run by high IQ scientist-experts would be generally better than what we have today?
What that sounds like to me is a pattern in which humanity creates the very conditions that ensure its downfall. We reach a point where technology could bring about biological escape velocity, but at the same time, the forces that bring us to that point also generate such strong mutational biases against this outcome. Eventually, the conditions that bring about the mutational load are destroyed due to the population being too retarded to maintain them.
So, is there any way out of the cycle? Do we wait until mutational load makes humans unable to sustain the conditions they are creating and then hope that in the next cycle, we can reach escape velocity to establish eugenics? Or will gene editing allow us to escape this cycle by creating a more palatable form of eugenics?
I’m not sure this makes much sense. Nowadays in the West, the higher a person’s IQ, the less likely they are to be vocal eugenicists.
Some vocal eugenicists have high IQs but they’re a relatively small group. Clearly, this is about more than just IQ.
Eugenics is about raising IQ and has always been a thing for the learned.
How many Nobel Prize winners support eugenics now?
a few
Okay, and why is the share of learned people who do radically lower than it used to be? Eugenics used to be all the rage among the learned.
Even if their collective IQ has dropped somewhat (which may or may not be true), that can’t be the main reason. There are sociological and ideological forces at play.
their bias grew because of dysgenics
if you judge the credibility of an idea by the number of nobel prize winners who support it, you might be a product of dysgenics
And what is this straw man the product of?
what even is your argument? That people who support eugenics are dumb? do you think we solved the problem of dysgenics ? We havent, this is a fundamental issue with civilization. The academics, scientists, and medical professionals who pushed for eugenics in the 20th century were never actually refuted, their policies became unpopular on moral grounds.