Does sperm donation maximize inclusive genetic fitness?
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Ṁ144
resolved Sep 29
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N/A
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-mesa-optimizers Scott claims that he doesn't want to donate sperm to maximize his reproductive fitness. But is donating sperm a good strategy for that (where applicable)? I plan to research this over the next month and resolve this market to my guess on the proportion of fertile men for whom it would be a good strategy. Jun 21, 6:00pm: it is not a good strategy for fertile men who are above the local age cutoff for donation.
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I'm going to resolve this as N/A.

The more I looked into this the more I realized that the question and resolution criteria were not well-defined. Specifically I was ending up with two very different possible resolutions:

  • For ~20% of fertile men sperm donation is an available and good strategy. Other fertile men will be rejected by sperm banks and/or sperm customers, or accepted at a low rate that makes it not optimal.

  • For ~80% of men attempted sperm donation is a good strategy - being accepted opens up the sperm donation strategy, being rejected provides information that can benefit other reproductive strategies, and the exploration cost is low.

Other complications:

  • The question and resolution criteria don't limit strategies to the ethical and legal. I am not going to evaluate sexual assault vs sperm bank fraud. Adding that restriction might not change the resolution, but I also don't want to have the conversation about whether it does.

  • The resolution criteria arguably don't match the question, and quick bettors may not have read the resolution criteria before betting.

  • I took too long and cannot go back in time to resolve it based on my original intention of taking a month.

If I was forced to resolve this and didn't have N/A as an option I guess I would resolve at 20%.

Thanks everyone for your attention. I would be happy to bet on someone else's attempt to answer this question.

Working on this, but it won't be done by market close. I'm planning to let the market close on the scheduled date, as the advance prediction is what I was subsidizing for.
predicted NO

@MartinRandall any update on resolution? :)

@MattP I've been out sick for a week, but I'm about a third done.

It looks like people choosing donated sperm are picky, which is what I'd expect. It's a convergent strategy for inclusive genetic fitness, selfish happiness, and even altruistic reasons. https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/9-reasons-your-sperm-isnt-good-enough-to-donate-w209421/ That pickiness might not make a difference to potential men if there are insufficient sperm donors, such that a marginal sperm donor will still end up with lots of offspring. But the first news hit on such a shortage is this one: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-chronicles-infertility/202104/sperm-shortage-sperm-bank-vs-private-donor#:~:text=So%20donor%20sperm%2C%20which%20has,t%20fill%20all%20the%20requests. This states in part: > Donor sperm, which has always seemed plentiful, now appears to be in short supply. So my guess is that regular news of shortages of sperm donation reflect that this is indeed news and the default state is that there is plenty of sperm available. Or, if there is a shortage, it is a shortage of sperm from the most in-demand types of men.
Oh, of course, it's plentiful in the US and a few other countries that permit donor payments, but not in other countries. Hence the sperm import/export business.
> and resolve this market to my guess on the proportion of fertile men for whom it would be a good strategy. I think that it's always (or nearly always) a good strategy *in expectation*. However, for some, it might not actually pay off in the end. So my question is, by "the proportion of fertile men for whom it would be a good strategy", do you mean "the proportion of fertile men for whom it would be a good strategy in expectation" (in which case it should probably resolve to near 100%), or do you mean "the proportion of fertile men for whom it gets more biological children they otherwise wouldn't have had, in hindsight" (in which case it should probably resolve lower than 50% I would guess)?
My general philosophy in life is that when thinking of the quality of a strategy, all that matters is whether it's good in expectation. For instance, in poker, the strategy of "always going all-in" is terrible in expectation, and so it's a bad strategy in general. I don't think it would make sense to say that it's a "good strategy 50% of the time" since it ends up making you money 50% of the time, because when it doesn't make you money, you lose all of it (the details of this example might be slightly incorrect, as I don't know what percent of all-ins are won by the person going all-in; but the point still stands).
@BionicD0LPH1N In expectation based on the information they have before embarking on the strategy, so I think agree with you. A good strategy need not be optimal, as we are limited beings, but it should not be clearly worse than an alternative strategy. For a fertile 50yo man I currently think it's a bad strategy because most sperm donation programs don't accept 50yos. A better strategy might be to encourage genetic relatives to have more children, or to provide them with more resources. I'm not sure where you are getting a 100% resolution from given the existence of fertile men who would not be accepted as sperm donors, or would not be chosen as sperm donors if accepted. See market description.
@MartinRandall But following one strategy (ex sperm donation) doesn't automatically stop someone from following an additional strategy (ex encouraging their genetic relatives to have more children)! The *only* strategy incompatible with sperm donation is NOT sperm donation! And even though there are some genetic fitness costs to sperm donation (ex time cost, social acceptance cost, etc) which indirectly decrease genetic fitness somewhat, I feel like these costs are basically never greater than the benefits! Even 50-year-olds can find places where they can donate sperm, or find individual women on Facebook groups (heard it exists) which accept to take some men's sperm, or even pay someone the donor's whole life savings to take their sperm (and if that's illegal in the US, it probably isn't in some other countries on Earth; move to those countries!), or a billion other sperm donation methods that might not be allowed in the US but are elsewhere! Being 50 doesn't stop a creative person from being a sperm donor! I'd consider all of these "sperm donor strategies", even if they are increasingly insane (maybe you don't consider them sperm donor strategies, if so which are and which are not?). But I'm sure that a 50-year-old that's determined enough and creative enough could find someone that'll take their child. Ofc none of this stops them from helping their genetic heritage too. Also, I'm a bit confused about fertility, since it is not really a binary thing, some people are only slightly more fertile than others (at least as far as I can tell), and technically everyone can be fertile with good enough technology. How do you figure out the percentage of fertile people who are older than 50?
@BionicD0LPH1N I think I'd ct
@BionicD0LPH1N I'd count "increasingly insane" strategies as being sperm donation strategies, but at some point if you're paying an individual to have babies with you and paying to raise those babies I think that's just having babies, not sperm donation. This is also an expensive strategy in a world that is overall still very poor. This line of inquiry would probably benefit from a case study, if you have one in mind.
@BionicD0LPH1N The medical definition of infertility is being unable to get pregnant after a year of regular sex, which is what I had in mind. I'm hoping there are some statistics to gather on this. Alas, I'm behind on research for this question, but maybe that's good because of the great questions you and others are asking.
It’s undoubtedly Yes, but of course only certain educational, physical, and age requirements limit it to a small slice of the population. No matter how you do the math, ~10-15 families have better odds than the modern ~1-2 children. Even if the mothers are -1 sd in whatever version of “genetic quality” you weigh, quantity has a quality all its own (and by chance alone some of those will have better outcomes than one or two familial children)
@Gigacasting I can't think of a good argument that genetic mothers of sperm donor babies would have significantly lower genetic fitness. It could even be a positive on net. I think I need to confirm the numbers on offspring per donor.
@Gigacasting I wonder if Scott Alexander is in that small slice you mentioned.
It looks like there is an age cutoff for sperm donation which would mean that many fertile men are ineligible, certainly more than the 8% implies by current market odds. How were bettors thinking I would handle that?
predicted YES
@MartinRandall We're looking at the average effect, no? They might bring down the average, but they won't bring it below zero. They can't underperform the status quo because they're doing the status quo.
@MichaelWheatley So if 20% of fertile men can't donate, but it's a good strategy for the other 80% you'd be happy if I resolved to 80%, do I understand you right?
sold Ṁ83 of YES
@MartinRandall I would expect it to resolve YES or NO based on whether the average effect comes out to greater than or less than zero. Imagine a market, "Does doubling down on 11 improve your payout in blackjack?" I would expect that to resolve YES even though 30% of the time you get unlucky and the gamble doesn't pay off.
@MichaelWheatley that's not what I wrote in the description. I'm going to resolve to prob.
predicted YES
@MartinRandall oops, that's what I get for skimming.
bought Ṁ50 of YES
What's the argument against?
predicted NO
@MichaelWheatley it'd be something along the lines of "the actual direct reproductive benefit of donating sperm is empirically quite low, and is outweighed by the negative reproductive externalities (aka negative impact on your chances of having and raising kids the more traditional way) of being the type of person who spends a lot of time donating sperm". I'm not saying that is a correct argument, necessarily - but if there is a correct argument against it, I would bet it takes something like that form.
bought Ṁ20 of NO
Curious where you end up here. My initial instinct is "no", but I'd find it somewhat difficult to articulate precisely why. If I were to try, it'd basically be a product of combining empirical questions (how many biological children is any given sperm donor actually going to have on average?) with social ones (are children who don't know their biological father generally speaking better off? Seems like there's a ton of data for NO). I'd bet that when it all shakes out, it's generally speaking better for everyone to just have kids the old fashioned way and raise them yourself (where possible, obviously).

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