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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1342 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've said it before: women seeking sperm donors transform into hard eugenicists. It certainly a revealed preference of some sort.

"Transform" implies change. I think it is more accurate to say that it is simply more socially acceptable to be honest about such feelings with sperm donation and thus they are more open about it in that case.

Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.

Which is not the way, as a tall guy. There‘s no advantage to greater height on a societal scale. We have to nip this red queen gigantism in the womb before we grow to monstrous heights like the dinosaurs, and collapse under our own weight like their broiler chicken sons. The easy and practical solution would be to sterilize the women who come to the fertility clinic and select tall embryos. That way, by selecting for preferences, selection squared so to speak, we can multiply our effect on the genome.

I wouldn‘t do that, of course. But I find the battle lines drawn around eugenicism funny. The ‚ethical‘ crowd, as well as the religious, oppose eugenicism for ‚artificial‘ ‚messing with nature/god‘s plan‘. The eugenicists claimed nature‘s plan was being messed with by ‚unnatural‘ welfare, and so wanted to ‚help evolution along‘, the way it was before modernity and medicine fucked up nature‘s plan. In other words, they‘re in a naturalistic fallacy competition. I don‘t care about nature‘s plan, it‘s blind and indifferent to human flourishing.

As a tall guy (though not that tall, 6 foot 1.5 inches), why is there no advantage to greater height? Being tall is pretty cool.

Individually, yes. By comparison to other humans. Not for society. We'd all be better off if humans were half as tall.

Why, though? Tall people have more potential to build more muscle mass. This helps them load equipment or fight off wildlife.

We have machines for that. Breeding ourselves into a giant troll that can beat up a gorilla is not an efficient use of our resources. We need to get to the stars. Carrying around all that muscle consumes far too many precious calories here on earth, so imagine trying to lift that deadweight out of earth's gravity. Plus it's unhealthy, mass causes cancer.

I think that shorter women are cute, so your plan has its ups and downs.

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