not really related to eugenics, but this is an idea that reading this thread made me think.
since the SIAI would welcome more people like eliezer on board, and since people like eliezer willing to come on board seem to be hard to find, i’m wondering what if the smart people at SIAI could have kids who would have a good chance of contributing to the causes of the SIAI a lot, once they grew up.
it may be something like that is out of the question for many reasons, the least of which might be it just taking too many resources (monetary resources, emotional and cognitive resources, etc.), or the expected return of the endeavor being too low, or too far in the future.
but if you could have something like >10 kids growing up together, all being around as intelligent as eliezer and having a good environment in all respects so they developed well, then it seems like you could end up (with a decent probability) with an incredible group of adults who realize the jeopardy humans may be in, and the nature of it, and who will do their bests to prevent extinction or other sad futures for our species.
there may even be some volunteers among the hpmor readership that could help with this.
the more standard approach of interesting some of this generations’ and the next generations’ extremely smart kids in LW / SIAI stuff of course works too.
The AMA may have received comments form curious people outside of r/futurology since there was an announcement for it on the front page. One thing about r/futurology, too, is that it recently tripled in size—only a few months ago it has around 6k subscribers. A lot of the growth came a week or two ago from a thread featured on r/bestof that got a lot of attention. Those things probably contributed to the inferential distance… If the AMA had happened a few months ago it may have been less, or indeed if it had happened a few months from now, counting on there being significant attrition of those new subscribers.