Similarly, making sure your children have much better lives than you by making sure your own material circumstances (or health!) are better is another.
Is this the best strategy for maximizing IGF? Do happier and wealthier kids have more offspring? Given that wealthier countries tend to have lower birth rates, I wonder if the IGF-maximizing strategy would instead often look like trying to have lots of poor children with few options?
(I’ll note as an aside that even if this is false, it should definitely be a thing many parents seriously consider doing and are strongly tempted by, if the parents are really maximizing IGF rather than maximizing proxies like “their kids’ happiness”. It would be very weird, for example, if an IGF maximizer reacted to this strategy with revulsion.)
I’d be similarly curious if there are cases where making your kids less happy, less intelligent, less psychologically stable, etc. increased their expected offspring. This would test to what extent ‘I want lots and lots and lots of kids’ parents are maximizing IGF per se, versus maximizing some combination of ‘have lots of descendants’, ‘make my descendants happy (even if this means having fewer of them)’, etc.
Yes, good point. I was looking at those statistics for a bit. Poorer parents do indeed tend to maximize their number of offspring no matter the cost while richer parents do not. It might be that parents overestimate the IGF payoffs of quality, but then that just makes them bad/incorrect optimizers. It wouldn’t make them less of an optimizer.
I think there also some other subtle nuances going on, like for instance, I’d consider myself fairly close to an IGF optimizer but I don’t care about all genes/traits equally. There is a multigenerational “strain” I identify strongly with. A bloodline, you could say. But my mediocre eye sight isn’t part of that, and I’d be surprised to hear this mechanic working any differently for others. Also, I’m not sure if all of the results of quality maximizers are obvious. E.g., Dutch society have a handful of extremely rich people that became rich 400 years ago during the golden age. Their bloodlines are keeping money made back then and the wealth increases every generation. Such a small segment is impossible to represent in controlled experiments, but maybe richer parents do start moving toward trying to “buy these lottery tickets” of reproduction, hoping to move their 1-2 kids in to the stratosphere. It’s not like they need 10 kids to be sure they will be represented in the next generation cause their kids will survive regardless.
Either way, I also realized I’m probably using a slightly different definition of optimizer than Nate is, so that probably explains some of the disagreement as well. I’d consider knowing X is the optimal action, but not being able to execute X cause you feel too much fear to still be in line with an optimizer’s behavior bcause you are optimizing over the options you have and a fear response limits your options. I suspect my perspective is not that uncommon and might explain some of the pushback Nate is referring to for the claim that is obvious from his definition.
Is this the best strategy for maximizing IGF? Do happier and wealthier kids have more offspring? Given that wealthier countries tend to have lower birth rates, I wonder if the IGF-maximizing strategy would instead often look like trying to have lots of poor children with few options?
(I’ll note as an aside that even if this is false, it should definitely be a thing many parents seriously consider doing and are strongly tempted by, if the parents are really maximizing IGF rather than maximizing proxies like “their kids’ happiness”. It would be very weird, for example, if an IGF maximizer reacted to this strategy with revulsion.)
I’d be similarly curious if there are cases where making your kids less happy, less intelligent, less psychologically stable, etc. increased their expected offspring. This would test to what extent ‘I want lots and lots and lots of kids’ parents are maximizing IGF per se, versus maximizing some combination of ‘have lots of descendants’, ‘make my descendants happy (even if this means having fewer of them)’, etc.
Yes, good point. I was looking at those statistics for a bit. Poorer parents do indeed tend to maximize their number of offspring no matter the cost while richer parents do not. It might be that parents overestimate the IGF payoffs of quality, but then that just makes them bad/incorrect optimizers. It wouldn’t make them less of an optimizer.
I think there also some other subtle nuances going on, like for instance, I’d consider myself fairly close to an IGF optimizer but I don’t care about all genes/traits equally. There is a multigenerational “strain” I identify strongly with. A bloodline, you could say. But my mediocre eye sight isn’t part of that, and I’d be surprised to hear this mechanic working any differently for others. Also, I’m not sure if all of the results of quality maximizers are obvious. E.g., Dutch society have a handful of extremely rich people that became rich 400 years ago during the golden age. Their bloodlines are keeping money made back then and the wealth increases every generation. Such a small segment is impossible to represent in controlled experiments, but maybe richer parents do start moving toward trying to “buy these lottery tickets” of reproduction, hoping to move their 1-2 kids in to the stratosphere. It’s not like they need 10 kids to be sure they will be represented in the next generation cause their kids will survive regardless.
Either way, I also realized I’m probably using a slightly different definition of optimizer than Nate is, so that probably explains some of the disagreement as well. I’d consider knowing X is the optimal action, but not being able to execute X cause you feel too much fear to still be in line with an optimizer’s behavior bcause you are optimizing over the options you have and a fear response limits your options. I suspect my perspective is not that uncommon and might explain some of the pushback Nate is referring to for the claim that is obvious from his definition.