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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't have to force an abortion on anyone. Just force a "basic baby tax" to discourage the dirt poor to have children they can't even afford to feed or properly educate and a HUGE "extra baby tax" for any family having more than 2 children (or plug your favorite number in here if you want a certain level o population growth), and invest the collected money in improving education. And boom, instant improvement to all aspects of life! Not really a breach of human rights since you could take it as a minor amendment to the implied social contract. (the tax will not mean much for billionaires, but at least they can afford the best possible education for their kids and with some tax exemptions for important but not so well paid professionals - like university professors) (and you could add something like forced sterilization for people not affording to pay the "extra baby tax" after they've made one.

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Tying this too to current wealth will easily be seen as locking-in and amplifying possibly unfair advantages in the pre-existing system. Why bother intertwining that negative stigma at the foundation of this idea that is supposed to make us a better species? All this centrally mandated, negative-penalty thinking just puts us at each others throats. The world needs better, imho.

Why not have the eugenics institute(s) find people of merit on whatever sets of measures they want and pay those they choose to have kids or to supply sperm/eggs/parenting (whichever they think important for the traits)? Maybe also give subsidized child-care to their progeny. This would allow for competition of metrics between and inside such organizations.

Sure only using positive feedback might be a bit slower than also availing ourselves of negative ones. But negative ones seem more tricky to implement, and we don't actually know what the species will need in the future, i.e. if we even have a single goal in this search space. Ethically less complicated to nurture the flowers you want to see blooming than to have a hand in cutting off others.

1. I don't trust "centralized" solutions to anything and an "eugenics institute" dictating what the best traits are seems scary even to me!

2. Yes, amplifying possibly unfair advantages is a nasty side-effect of this, but in a "mostly clean an functioning" capitalist society with not that much corruption, mafia and stuff this could be mitigated (I even goes the US comes close enough to this... by comparison on a global scale).

3. I don't think this will "put us at each other's throats"... poorer people to which the tax is targeted at should feel more motivated to have a better life, like swimming pool and better sports car than to have kids... or we'll need to fix this with more "pro-consumerist propaganda"!

4. And about positive versus negative feedback/motivations... I might have an overly "dark" view of human nature, but I think only negative/pain/punishment will work for those that need to be discouraged in having children (benefits might make the other change their minds and have more children but my intuition tells me it won't work - yes, we need some sort of controlled social engineering experiment to check this assumption, of course).

Taxes are very much a centralized mechanism. You suggested one in this domain. So you suggested a centralized mechanism for eugenics. Now you say you don't trust them... rather confusing.

On the other hand, the eugenics institutes I mentioned ("organizations" maybe you like that word better?); well, those could be lots of different groups of like-minded people/sub-groups spending their own resources the way they want to increase the frequency of traits in the world that they value.

If I and some friends want to pay to subsidize progeny of our choosing, how is that more scary than the various states of the world financially penalizing people (even sterilizing or jailing people in other suggestions of yours) toward similar ends?

dead thread and offtopic but to clarify:

a tax is centralized, but the fact that some can pay it and some cannot it not dictated by a central authority, that's the reasoning. The state would not decide who has enough money to pay the tax, and this would be an emergent effect from economy. NOBODY would decide and this I think would be a good thing!

Your group of friends could just as well finance the poor people that nevertheless they think have desirable traits.

NOTE: I still would'n support such my proposed soc-eng strategy in any current society because the erosion of human rights and possibility for abuse is far too great, so the discussion is entirely theoretical anyways, but it was fun

The people who you're trying to prevent from reproducing are the people who won't think about long term concerns like this baby tax when considering whether to have sex or have kids.

I said "and you could add something like forced sterilization for people not affording to pay the "extra baby tax" after they've made one", but you could easily add jail time in a society where loosing money is not a good enough deterrent (though when the social services will take someones house and car away and put their children in foster homes because they won't be able to pay the "extra baby tax", I think the deterrent would be enough...)

I seem to recall some people paying people for sterilization. That would seem to solve the problem.

NOTE: The only eugenics I am for are those based on voluntary gene replacement.

But this would only prevent the poor from reproducing. It is unclear what genetic makeup you're selecting for. Surely being poor has not so much to do with your genes.

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