I recall happening upon an ancient book on biology in a library, and glancing at what someone in the field thought about eugenics a hundred years ago. The author was as racist as one would expect for his time, but he considered eugenics an absolute waste of time on the basis that actually having a significant impact would require interventions on a vastly larger scale than anybody was really imagining; in practice, he thought it obvious that any deliberate selection effects would be miniscule and completely swamped by the ongoing effects of normal human mate selection practices. I don’t know if his view was widespread, but it does seem to be true of eugenics on the scale it was usually discussed or attempted by anyone except the Nazis, and something that at least some people had figured out even before eugenics went out of favor for other reasons.
Interesting point, although it has the problem that we haven’t actually observed eugenics being useless because of the vast scale of intervention required. (Since the Nazis were stopped, and the other reasons for eugenics not working—e.g., having become a dirty word—could well explain its apparent uselessness even if the “vast scale” was not a problem.)
Your “as one would expect” comment reminded me of something obvious that doesn’t seem to be mentioned. One of the thing SF does is try to anticipate the future. I’ve read last year some rather old SF (early Harlan Ellison and the like), and the contrast between what “sounds weird” now and didn’t then, and vice-versa, suggests that we could “extract predictions” from such stories.
The example that came to mind was that the “weird future thing” in one of the stories (which, incidentally, I think was set around now) was that “in the future” only women were doing some cool job (I think piloting), almost never men, because women were better at it. The claim would sound normal now, but was probably a daring prediction for the time.
So, the trick for finding good predictions would be to read old SF, notice things that you wouldn’t notice around you, but that would be daringly avant-garde at the time. (For failed predictions, look for things that still sound weird.)
Although, of course, 90% of everything is mostly crap, including SF, even the good SF isn’t always applicable, and that “historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making” part is harder. I heard (within the last decade or so) of some part of the US government explicitly asking for predictions from SF writers, but I doubt that would have happened much fifty years ago, much less actually taking the advice.
Not Heinlein’s best moment, forecasting-wise. That males have better visuospatial skills and faster reaction times are stalwarts of the gender differences literature.
True, though… do you really think that was an actual forecast in any meaningful way? I mean, other than “the future will be different, and women are better than men at other things than housekeeping”.
Well, even if it’s not a forecast, it’s still not a great example because anyone familiar with the facts (the reaction time literature and gender differences go back to the 1800s, for example) will dismiss it annoyedly (‘no, that’s not how it works. Also, explosions in space don’t produce any sound!’)
Still, flying was sufficiently new that most people wouldn’t probably be justified in reaching very high confidence about what abilities are needed and in what combination, especially for future aircraft, just by knowing all the literature existing up to then. (Also, if you live in a world where women almost never are trained and then work for years at some task X, it’s more or less impossible to compare (with statistical significance) how good experienced men and women are at X, because it would take years to obtain female candidates.)
Now that I think of it, that too. But I’m pretty sure it was something/someone else. Strange that two authors would use that particular speculation, in what I think were very different kinds of stories.
I recall happening upon an ancient book on biology in a library, and glancing at what someone in the field thought about eugenics a hundred years ago. The author was as racist as one would expect for his time, but he considered eugenics an absolute waste of time on the basis that actually having a significant impact would require interventions on a vastly larger scale than anybody was really imagining; in practice, he thought it obvious that any deliberate selection effects would be miniscule and completely swamped by the ongoing effects of normal human mate selection practices. I don’t know if his view was widespread, but it does seem to be true of eugenics on the scale it was usually discussed or attempted by anyone except the Nazis, and something that at least some people had figured out even before eugenics went out of favor for other reasons.
Interesting point, although it has the problem that we haven’t actually observed eugenics being useless because of the vast scale of intervention required. (Since the Nazis were stopped, and the other reasons for eugenics not working—e.g., having become a dirty word—could well explain its apparent uselessness even if the “vast scale” was not a problem.)
Your “as one would expect” comment reminded me of something obvious that doesn’t seem to be mentioned. One of the thing SF does is try to anticipate the future. I’ve read last year some rather old SF (early Harlan Ellison and the like), and the contrast between what “sounds weird” now and didn’t then, and vice-versa, suggests that we could “extract predictions” from such stories.
The example that came to mind was that the “weird future thing” in one of the stories (which, incidentally, I think was set around now) was that “in the future” only women were doing some cool job (I think piloting), almost never men, because women were better at it. The claim would sound normal now, but was probably a daring prediction for the time.
So, the trick for finding good predictions would be to read old SF, notice things that you wouldn’t notice around you, but that would be daringly avant-garde at the time. (For failed predictions, look for things that still sound weird.)
Although, of course, 90% of everything is mostly crap, including SF, even the good SF isn’t always applicable, and that “historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making” part is harder. I heard (within the last decade or so) of some part of the US government explicitly asking for predictions from SF writers, but I doubt that would have happened much fifty years ago, much less actually taking the advice.
In Starship Troopers, women were the pilots—iirc, because of better reflexes.
Not Heinlein’s best moment, forecasting-wise. That males have better visuospatial skills and faster reaction times are stalwarts of the gender differences literature.
True, though… do you really think that was an actual forecast in any meaningful way? I mean, other than “the future will be different, and women are better than men at other things than housekeeping”.
Well, even if it’s not a forecast, it’s still not a great example because anyone familiar with the facts (the reaction time literature and gender differences go back to the 1800s, for example) will dismiss it annoyedly (‘no, that’s not how it works. Also, explosions in space don’t produce any sound!’)
Still, flying was sufficiently new that most people wouldn’t probably be justified in reaching very high confidence about what abilities are needed and in what combination, especially for future aircraft, just by knowing all the literature existing up to then. (Also, if you live in a world where women almost never are trained and then work for years at some task X, it’s more or less impossible to compare (with statistical significance) how good experienced men and women are at X, because it would take years to obtain female candidates.)
Now that I think of it, that too. But I’m pretty sure it was something/someone else. Strange that two authors would use that particular speculation, in what I think were very different kinds of stories.