Re: Aid to children

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Sep 03 1999 - 06:57:10 MDT


Bryan Moss wrote:
>
> Parents are the weak link in our chain; we need to remove them as early as
> possible and replace them with someone who has a genuine (economic) interest
> in the child. To begin with the best we can do is offer good money for
> children, soon after we might contract women to give birth to wholely owned
> children, and eventually we would grow them in labs (or farm them if you're
> looking for an appropriate visual image). I want child welfare to be an
> systematic process of our economy without interference by parents who expect
> more than dividends.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! I'd be real hesitant about replacing a genuine
reproductive-fitness interest with a "genuine" economic interest if the
first doesn't work. Love really is stronger than greed, speaking as an
evolutionary psychologist, because the selection pressures are stronger.

Note also that, as I recall the statistics, the rate of child abuse is
roughly one hundred times larger with stepparents than with natural parents.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way


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