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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30447 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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because my partner and I are not particularly well-positioned to have biological children

If you are infertile that may be one thing, but I urge you not to adopt out of some sense of moral duty or ethics. Genetics are real and you will be scraping the bottom of the barrel genetically, you will destroy your own life.

Eh, it's entirely possible to adopt some 85 IQ child and raise them to be a perfectly productive truck driver or whatever, and it doesn't destroy your life. At a certain point society needs bricklayers- rather more than it needs more sysadmins.

In that case, people who would have been sysadmins are either paid to become brick layers or are forced to do it because that's the only job left.

There's a reason you rarely see Asian-Americans working low end jobs in the US, while those positions are filled back in their native countries. A society of Einsteins will have a need for janitors, until they automate the solution away. It is still better to be such a society with such a population.

Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.

Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).

Even if you make enough money, working in a blue collar job all day means you hurt all evening, which is going to interfere with physics. Einstein may have overly romanticized plumbing.

It's not just intelligence. It's things like propensity to violence, conscientiousness, time preference, etc.

Adoption has changed a lot over time, as multiple people here can testify. In times of war and scarcity, there will usually be more well-adjusted orphans than families wanting to take them in, so if you adopt you're likely to have a good experience.

However currently families wanting to adopt far, far outnumber well-adjusted orphans. It's not rare that you have to wait years, and even then you'll more likely than not end up with problematic kids. We know a couple who waited and eventually gave up because the only cases they got offered were so horrible that they didn't think they'd be able to handle that.

One of my colleagues helps out those foster families willing to take in the hard cases that are the majority and it's just sad. Teens with the mental development of a three year old are among the easiest. One girl just doesn't sleep at night, screaming for most of it. Others are so heavily physically disabled that they need help with everything.

Maybe you get lucky and the kid you adopted with fetal alcohol syndrome will turn out mostly fine except for minor develpomental deficits. Maybe you get super-lucky and an actually healthy kid somehow finds its way into the foster system. But generally it's hard and thankless and more likely than not, you will get kids that are dependent on support for life. You probably will not make a big difference, either.

Adoptions from the third world work a bit differently, especially from asia, but this can be very expensive.

Regardless of whether or not it's unkind to say the truth, it isn't up for debate that there are massive differences on average between the kind of child OP could have (if not infertile) and the kind up for adoption.

on average

If we're only concerned with the most positive possible outcome, I guess you're saving for retirement by buying lottery tickets.

See the original comment, since we're talking about adopting out of foster care here:

The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system.

Is it untrue in many cases? Sure. Like it would also be untrue in many cases to say that playing Russian roulette "will destroy your own life". It was shorthand for: will dramatically increase your chances of destroying your own life. The population that ends up in the foster/adoption system is not a random sample of the population. But I suppose if you and your partner are of that same genetic quality then adoption vs biological is six of one, half a dozen of the other.

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