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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2360 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 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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Let's say I'm put in charge of a government-sponsored group tasked with ensuring newborn babies come out of the womb as close as possible to a fully functioning member of society. Ideally this means they can walk, talk, feed themselves, etc. I have unlimited resources and there are no IRBs to stop experimentation. I have also gained immortality so I can see this project through to its completion.

What is the general procedure to get babies closer to self-reliance and how close do you think they could get?

(I've always wondered why we seem to be some of the only animals in the kingdom to not be self-sufficient immediately upon birth and what we can do about it.)

How do you define the boundary between the infant and the rest of the world? Would it count to have an exosuit which can recognize and fulfill the needs of the infant, communicate the specifics of the infant's needs and desires to others, and offer further functionality which the infant can learn to use?

The primary limitation is the size of the birth canal. In places where more births are by C-section due to local fads e.g. Brazil, the average skull size of newborns is slowly increasing, or so I have been led to believe. If you had working artificial wombs, therefore, it stands to reason that you could have bigger brained and more capable babies, though presumably with a longer gestation time, similar to elephants.

Uh.. Is keeping the babies in the "womb" for far longer a valid option? Maybe an artificial womb that really knows how to stretch, till they're there for half a decade while in immersive VR.

For all the ranges of intelligence known to occur naturally in mankind, including the most prodigious of geniuses, they all came out as wailing and useless babies. They only really distinguished themselves after at least a couple years of growth.

You'd probably need some kind of strong genetic editing, an ability to force ultra-rapid cognitive maturation in-utero, some kind of BCI that could pump knowledge by the bucket load into a fetal brain. Even then, getting them to be remotely useful at birth while even being vaguely human strikes me as unlikely.

Human babies are actually pretty middle of the pack in terms of self-reliance for mammals- calves can walk, but new puppies can’t see or hear.

There are biological limitations on how much more precocial human babies can be without killing the mother in the process of birth. I suspect we’re pretty close to them, and genetic engineering would be better aimed at faster development in the first year or two.

Of course if you’re trying to decant supermen, fully grown, I’d say… about three in terms of development. Able to comprehend language, the toilet, feeding themselves, etc. You know, you’d still have to teach them those things. ‘Using a spoon’ and ‘going in the toilet instead of wherever’ and ‘the English language’ are not instincts and it’s probably impossible to make them instincts.

and ‘the English language’ are not instincts

Yes, you're correct, though proclivity toward English is almost certainly there in the genes. Which I mention because I think it's so cool and a window into so much else.

proclivity toward English is almost certainly there in the genes.

Why is this almost certain?

Inasmuch as 'being good with a given language' is under selection pressure, populations will evolve to be better at that language.

Check this out. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00229-7

To summarize, this study revealed the genetic basis of Chinese and English abilities in a group of Chinese bilingual children.

There's more research on this sort of thing but it's difficult to find and often gets disappeared.

The problem is that English today isn't the same as "English" circa AD 1000, so it's not clear to me why there would be a long lasting coherent selection pressure. In fact, English today is a result of changes made to the language by its speakers over the past thousand years, so it's really not clear which way causality even runs.

I'd be much more interested in a survey of English ability of third generation Chinese immigrants in the US rather than bilingual kids in a bilingual country. I strongly suspect that the effect will be small or even in the other direction due to Asian IQ.

The problem is that English today isn't the same as "English" circa AD 1000, so it's not clear to me why there would be a long lasting coherent selection pressure.

Selection doesn't require a thousand years. It happens in each generation. And particularly with industrialism and a shift to an information economy, it's going hard. Besides which, English and Chinese are a lot more like their thousand year old selves than they are like each other. So, sure, call the matter directional.

In fact, English today is a result of changes made to the language by its speakers over the past thousand years, so it's really not clear which way causality even runs.

Statements like this freak me out. Of course it's both! You might like this: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610848104

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