re: genetic lottery

i was in a car with a couple who was discussing their future plan as we were finishing up filming the launch video for our startup.

they were talking about how they planned to have their first kid at 27. one said, "by then they will be kinda retarded already", because as we age, we decrease in fertility. scientifically, peak fertility is at 18 yo.

so this is no longer natural selection. we've curbed natural selection through self imposed bounds - preferring to have kids later rather than earlier.

evolutionarily, what would've happened is that the child born to less fertile parents would have worse chances of survival, because being better physically and mentally allowed you to hunt the best and socialize your way to be the leader of the pack.

but in today's world, physical survival is no longer the major concern for the most of the people reading this. also, being physically and mentally strong doesn't provide a major advantage anymore, because society has been optimizing toward that in the past few centuries and this has become the norm in the top percentile of society (elite overproduction). hence what really matter are outliers (power law - where the few who win, win most if not all, while the rest of us fight over scraps).

i had an extremely visceral reaction internally - i knew i was already retarded compared to the people around me, and i knew that intelligence is empirically nature not nurture. putting two and two together, i arrived at the naive conclusion that i was retarded because my parents had me too late, they were well in their mid 30's when they had me. well past the prime reproductive age of 18.

the # intelligent ppl << # unintelligent ppl, and people work hard, to the extent that they do, to compensate for their lacking intelligence. so as you get into higher status rooms, you start to notice this tradeoff between intelligent and hardworking, but also a surprising number of both intelligent and hardworking ppl emerge, bc power law. bc self selection - the top of either field automatically end up in these rooms. and i've become all too self aware of this fact.

but then i put four and four together, and i realized that if we now live in the age of power laws, being on the extreme is what helps you win. then being born late, hence being born retarded, is actually an advantage. people are over optimizing for being normal (physically + mentally strong) already, so you should just overoptimize and be retarded. hence, retardedmaxxing.

now for the optimal child birthing strategy. since none of this is empirically backed + the reasoning is quite faulty, what you should do is to have as many kids as possible (not a novel conclusion), because only then can you diversify away your eggs (literal), so that your offspring, as a cohort, can have the largest advantage possible.

starting from the moment you turn 18, you and your partner (ideally also 18, but we dont judge) should have a kid every 9 months, and keep having kids until either becomes infertile. the first child gets the best genes (nature, i think, in exchange for the worst nurture because we grow wiser as we age), and the last child gets to be brought up by wiser parents (best nurture, worst nature).

but then comes the problem of dementia / alzheimer's, so there is probably an optimization problem for what time the best nurture would take place.

or - an equivalent strategy is to visit the sperm/egg bank as frequent as your lifestyle permits, hence propagating your seeds (literal) and letting the wind carry them away to far far lands.

or - genghis khan.

on a similar tangent, "re: spoiling ur kids" aka "the tragedy of asian parents"

asian cultures promote group cohesion, teaching their kids to do what's best for the community, filial piety, etc. but in optimizing for group progress, we fail to optimize for individual progress. we dulled our individual strengths to be strong as a group. we batch normalized instead of whatever the opposite of batch normalization would be (layer norm?).

this cohesion propagates to child rearing - we are taught to not stand out, to fit in, constantly compared to "别人家的孩子" (for all possible skills, some kid from next door (metaphoric) outperforms you) in multidirectional pulls that bring us net forward but to no particular (extraordinary) success. we are taught to clean up after ourselves, to do household chores, not to play games, to do well in school, to not get into fights.

but it is in this child rearing methodology that the child is forgotten, and the wishes of everyone but the child is projected onto the child. the child gets no chance for independent exploration. only too late do they recognize this fact.

it is in this situation that creativity is killed. that any sense of childhood freedom dies.

hence in the zeitgeist of power laws, for all households that are able to spoil their child, not in the monetary sense, but in the sense of a lack of responsibilities, they should.

that is when the genetic lottery takes it's ultimate form. the form that it was designed to take in the first place. what it was destined to be.

when a child is free of chores, free of being forced onto whichever pathway that is the opposite of whatever pathway the parent(s) went through (child rearing through projection), free of mundane responsibilities that only serve to hold them back from the prowess of what a human was meant to be, only then can they be said to be human.

otherwise, they are no better than ai.