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First off, I don’t think that we have access to comprehensively-collected (let alone still-available) data, nor were these programs widespread enough to show an obvious effect. I do plan to do significantly more research on the topic in the future, though, and I’d love to find out that I’m wrong about the paucity of data. However, a drop in the murder rate absolutely does not seem to be what the people administering these programs were optimizing for; rather, they were mostly trying to prevent the births of individuals who would be lifelong burdens on state and local resources, due to profoundly low IQ and other mental disabilities, and to the inability of the mother to provide care. Imbeciles, the insane, etc.
I’m sorry, but I don’t really think you’re trying very hard. Clearly you and I both agree that there is a vast mushy middle ground of people who have some combination of good and bad traits, and while it may be possible to fiddle around with genetics to move the dials, I don’t know of any serious eugenics advocate who is overly concerned with making normal people significantly different - at least, not until way further down the line, after we’ve already dealt with the far easier and more important low-hanging fruit.
What eugenics advocates are concerned with are the extremes. I just simply do not believe that you don’t know that it’s better to have an IQ of 110 than it is to have an IQ of 65. The profound limitations on the life a 65-IQ person can ever hope to live are something I wouldn’t wish on anybody. We’re talking about people who are just simply incapable of experiencing the vast majority of things that make human life living, and who have essentially no chance of making any significant contribution to society at even the hyper-local level. People who will be burdens for their entire lives. People who lack the impulse control do do anything other than live in the moment. I don’t care if they’re “Good People” in some moral sense; they’re just absolutely not worth having around. We gain nothing from their presence.
You also absolutely know what a Bad Person looks like, at the extremes. Psychopaths, serial killers, those with profound unrestrained aggression and sadistic urges. And yes, you’re correct that many of these people are in fact quite intelligent - which is why no serious eugenics advocate, to my knowledge, has ever advocated for simple one-dimensional IQ-maxing. I don’t want to create a race of Ted Kaczynski genius psychopaths, and nor does anyone else. But your claim that we just have to throw our hands up and admit that we can’t reliably identify any good qualities or bad qualities in humans is simply not worth taking seriously. Any one of us can pretty easily identify certain qualities that are basically pure downside; if you don’t think material science provides any tools that could reliably lead to a reduction in the prevalence of those qualities, then that’s a separate conversation; to claim that we don’t even know what they are is risible.
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