See what I did there? You should criticize them for things you don't agree with. We know it wasn't your decision.

I'm getting a real kick out of imagining this. Who would most likely decide who is ugly and stupid? A government agency of course! The USEA, United States Eugenics Administration.

Now combine this thought with party politics. A democratic president gets elected, they appoint a new USEA director. The USEA promptly redesigns its guidelines for selecting ugly/stupid people. On conservative talk shows, the liberal USEA is accursed of conspiring to prevent conservative families from having children.

A republican president gets elected, they appoint an new USEA director. The USEA promptly redesigns its guidelines for selecting ugly/stupid people. Leading democrats say that the new guidelines discriminate against blacks and hispanics.

Populist outrage that illegal immigrants who haven't even been tested for ugliness or stupidity are having more than one child.

The political drama that would ensue from such an organization would be incredibly amusing!

Well as long as they have a job and are earning a living, they're contributing something. What if they're dependents of someone else? Then obviously they're contributing something to the lives of whoever applies to them.

If they have neither of those things then they should starve to death. Except realistically they don't. The reasons for this:
1. When people panhandle they're usually able to rake in more than enough money to eat.
2. Food stamps.
3. America has so much food that they throw out a lot of perfectly edible things.

Fortunately there is a way to make the sort of survival of the fittest you long for work practically on a large scale! It's simple, all we need is a death tax. Just imagine it! Give the government X amount of money every year or you will be shot. That way only those productive to earn X at least X amount of money every year would be able to survive. Not only would this death tax theoretically lead to the genetic betterment of the human race, but it would raise a significant amount of government funds in addition to that!

Perhaps you mean "ruled by the upperclass once again"? Or "continue to be ruled by the upperclass"?

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Assume that we could separate humanity into two classes, smart people and stupid people. If we were to castrate, kill or limit the number of children people in the "stupid people" class that would NOT increase the number of people in the smart people class.

Actually scratch that. Lets say someone from the stupid class and the smart class has a child together. The resulting baby would be contaminated with stupid class genes. If we assume that breeding with the stupid person stopped the smart person from breeding with another smart person, then the result is that there are less smart people than there would have been if the stupid person if the stupid person had been killed while still young.

So killing all the stupid people is the most effective way of maximizing the number of smart people. Assuming it could be done perfectly, separating smart people and stupid people would be equally effective.

However "smartness" isn't a binary, it's a gradient. Now first what is our goal? To have the highest degree of average smartness on this earth? Of course not, then the solution would be to kill all life forms aside from the smartest creature.

So lets say the goal is to maximize total human smartness. How do we maximize that? First we assume that every human has a positive smartness. Well then if the function for the smartness of a child, is the average of the smartness of both their parents, then the solution to maximizing smartness is to leave things as they are.

If it is possible to incentivize people to have children, then we want to make it so people are having as many babies as possible. If we can only incentivize a limited number of children, then we should start by incentivizing children between the smartest couples.

Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Nov 25 2009, 12:12 am by scwizard.