Questions on applied eugenics

- With intelligence selection reachable in the horizon, do you want to have a smaller number of smarter kids in, say, five years from now, or a larger number of dummer kids now and a larger number of grandkids later on, who can be selected or genetically enhanced for intelligence? How does the tradeoff look like in general? Consider that you'd still be able to be a smart grandparent to advise them.
- r-selection or k selection? What is preferable, to have ten kids from three different women who are ok, or two kids with one woman who is very smart? This matters to me when selecting for age in a partner, because I can spend my selection power in either smarts or age (e.g., the best 32 year old that would want to grow a family with me is much smarter than the best 25 year old).
- How much of your genes/phenotype does pretty brutal selection for intelligence keep? At which point are you just replacing your kid with an idealized template that doesn't have much to do with you? Is this a real concern?
- With AI models improving, and potentially becoming good advisors, how does this change what you should be selecting in a partner? More social presence and charisma?
- How should you think about the class background of a potential partner vs their own merit?
- If you have a kid with someone of a different ethnicity, the kid will have a "kin interest" (à la class interest) for a different ethnicity. Is this bad because it reduces this kid's interest in your branch, good because eventually the mix of different ethnicities will take over the world, or a wash because other factors matter way more?
- If you think that leftist memes are harmful, you might care about whether they are heritable. Most women are lefty. How hard should you select against those beliefs? Would you prefer having two kids with someone more trad, or three with someone more lefty? why?
- Do I care about spreading my own genes or about spreading my own phenotype? How much do I care about having a marginal smart kid vs my best friend having a smart kid? What about transmitting my own characteristics to a robot mimic or successor?
- How much is a marginal kid worth in dollars? Is a a million in the right ballpark? As a fraction of net worth?

These questions don't have an objective answer, because believing in heritability doesn't constrain your values all that much, and because context matters a fair amount. They are also somewhat confused, from someone who has thought a bit but not a lot about these topics. However, clear thinking about this might be able to say something about how the Pareto frontier looks like (e.g., to the extent that you care about the number of smart grandkids you should do such and such). I beseech you to answer some of these questions.

The problem with eugenic selection is that we honestly do not, cannot know what will be genetically valuable ten generations from now. Like trying to choose food rather than poison based on a poorly correlated attribute.

>With intelligence selection reachable in the horizon, do you want to have a smaller number of smarter kids in, say, five years from now, or a larger number of dummer kids now and a larger number of grandkids later on, who can be selected or genetically enhanced for intelligence? How does the tradeoff look like in general? Consider that you'd still be able to be a smart grandparent to advise them.

In five years, it will still be the case that you can imagine the technology getting better in another five years. So you'll wait another five years. And then if all goes well, now it's ten years later and good gene selection tech is available, but it looks like they're getting close to some other tech—idk let's say implanted prosthetics which help the infant develop smarter and healthier—maybe you should wait another five years—

The time will pass anyway. You might as well spend it raising good kids.

> What is preferable, to have ten kids from three different women who are ok, or two kids with one woman who is very smart?

One woman. As many kids as the two of you can manage. Maybe good women were okay with quiet polygamy in 1100 AD, but today they aren't. You don't want the sort of woman who'll tolerate her man keeping baby mamas or who sees divorce as no big deal. I've seen some friends go down that path, and almost all of them got burned real bad and regret it very much. That's no way to live, and it's hard on the kids.

> How should you think about the class background of a potential partner vs their own merit?

Class background is a decent proxy for family quality. Family quality matters because you can expect some regression to the family mean in the kids. Once you know the quality of her family, then you can mostly ignore class background because you don't need proxies for things you can directly observe.

>If you have a kid with someone of a different ethnicity, the kid will have a "kin interest" (à la class interest) for a different ethnicity. Is this bad because it reduces this kid's interest in your branch, good because eventually the mix of different ethnicities will take over the world, or a wash because other factors matter way more?

It really depends which ethnicity, doesn't it? If I imagine marrying a mostly-Anglo-German "White" American, or a Han Chinese, or a Guatemalan mestizo, then this is three totally different questions.

That said I don't think any of those are very important questions. If you find a good girl from a good family, that's a hundred times more important than the kids' hypothetical future race loyalties.

>Do I care about spreading my own genes or about spreading my own phenotype? How much do I care about having a marginal smart kid vs my best friend having a smart kid? What about transmitting my own characteristics to a robot mimic or successor?

Personally I want kids for the sake of my future kids, because I know I'm going to love them more than I've ever loved anything in my entire life, not for the sake of optimizing how the world will look in 2125.