Don't know that I'm convinced naturalism reduces fitness, or that it predicts that it does. There's also fitness in some general sense vs. fitness for humans; fictional AIs tend to be naturalist, I think.
Okay, I "predicts" too loosely; my thinking was that this sort of analysis pretty much must be performed with a naturalistic mindset. In any case, the argument is that believing in naturalism encourages one to choose to optimize a utility function significantly more distant from the evolutionary optimum than otherwise. There are exceptions (e.g. Patri Friedman), but statistically naturalists do have less kids than, say, Catholics or Muslims. There are of course all kinds of major confounding variables like wealth and educational level; but then, it actually doesn't matter precisely why naturalists have less kids on average, only that it happens. Thus naturalism is very dependent on lateral transmission, which is difficult, especially when other memes are developing more defenses against it. I remember a guy speaking against "secular humanism" back in my churchgoing days.
Geoffrey Miller (http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#miller) has written about this from a different angle.
Epicureanism did decently but wasn't dominant, and then Theodosius stomped on everything.
Hmm, I really should shore up my background in philosophy to avoid spending too much time reinventing wheels in the future. I didn't know anything about Epicureanism until looking it up just now, despite it being such an important predecessor to my own thinking.
Also I'm suspicious in general of anything which treats Africans as a coherent population, because they're supposed to be the most genetically diverse population, which is what evolutionary theory would predict.
Most discussion of Africans in the US is referring specifically to the subset of West Africans which were involved in the slave trade, a more genetically homogeneous population.
There certainly is a lot of diversity within Africa; consider the polar opposite running capabilities of West and East Africans, or the contrast between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, for starters. That said, consider the Eurasian east-west axis of cultural transmission that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because of that axis, most populations in Europe and Asia have had millennia to genetically adapt to the basic parameters of Eurasian civilization. Sub-Saharan African populations all missed out on this. Thanks to the diversity you mention, it isn't too surprising that a few of those populations, e.g. the Tutsi, may have turned out somewhat adapted anyway. But the average level of adaptation to Eurasian civilization is lower.
Now, I don't blame sub-Saharan Africans for this accident of geography; hence my democratic transhumanist philosophy. If they want kids who are genetically better adapted to Eurasian civilization than they are, I believe we should ensure they can get them.
Re: "In Special Circumstances, all thoughts are permitted."
Don't know that I'm convinced naturalism reduces fitness, or that it predicts that it does. There's also fitness in some general sense vs. fitness for humans; fictional AIs tend to be naturalist, I think.
Okay, I "predicts" too loosely; my thinking was that this sort of analysis pretty much must be performed with a naturalistic mindset. In any case, the argument is that believing in naturalism encourages one to choose to optimize a utility function significantly more distant from the evolutionary optimum than otherwise. There are exceptions (e.g. Patri Friedman), but statistically naturalists do have less kids than, say, Catholics or Muslims. There are of course all kinds of major confounding variables like wealth and educational level; but then, it actually doesn't matter precisely why naturalists have less kids on average, only that it happens. Thus naturalism is very dependent on lateral transmission, which is difficult, especially when other memes are developing more defenses against it. I remember a guy speaking against "secular humanism" back in my churchgoing days.
Geoffrey Miller (http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#miller) has written about this from a different angle.
Epicureanism did decently but wasn't dominant, and then Theodosius stomped on everything.
Hmm, I really should shore up my background in philosophy to avoid spending too much time reinventing wheels in the future. I didn't know anything about Epicureanism until looking it up just now, despite it being such an important predecessor to my own thinking.
Also I'm suspicious in general of anything which treats Africans as a coherent population, because they're supposed to be the most genetically diverse population, which is what evolutionary theory would predict.
Most discussion of Africans in the US is referring specifically to the subset of West Africans which were involved in the slave trade, a more genetically homogeneous population.
There certainly is a lot of diversity within Africa; consider the polar opposite running capabilities of West and East Africans, or the contrast between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, for starters. That said, consider the Eurasian east-west axis of cultural transmission that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because of that axis, most populations in Europe and Asia have had millennia to genetically adapt to the basic parameters of Eurasian civilization. Sub-Saharan African populations all missed out on this. Thanks to the diversity you mention, it isn't too surprising that a few of those populations, e.g. the Tutsi, may have turned out somewhat adapted anyway. But the average level of adaptation to Eurasian civilization is lower.
Now, I don't blame sub-Saharan Africans for this accident of geography; hence my democratic transhumanist philosophy. If they want kids who are genetically better adapted to Eurasian civilization than they are, I believe we should ensure they can get them.