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Presumably making people smaller would mean smaller brains. Given that communication inside the brain is easy, and communication between people is difficult, a larger population of people with smaller brains might be much less able to handle cognitive problems.
I was going to mention that as a limitation but it was already getting quite long.
I don’t think that kind of constraint would impose a very hard limit in the minimum size, judging from evidence like: most people with dwarfism have normal cogitative abilities, animals like crows have intelligences disproportionate to their brain size.
It’s still something to consider though and exactly how considerable a factor it would be could be an area for possible research. Could you make people pixie sized? for example.
One consideration is that, in the long-run, uploading people onto computers would probably squeeze far more value out of each atom than making people into hobbits. In that case, the housing stock would be multiplied by orders of magnitude, since people can be stored in server rooms. Assuming uploaded humans aren’t retired, economic productivity would be a lot higher too.
If the Robin Hanson type future happens then probably very little we do now would end up mattering, except maybe avoiding extinction risks. In that sense Hobbitisation is the in the same situation as any other medium/long term proposals.
Feels like with the kind of coordination required to get everyone to agree to being much smaller you could solve a load of other really important problems.
I’m not sure there is a another coordination problem that offers greater returns than this.
Also, after the point where hobitisation is moderately common it should be in the interests of individuals to become hobbits. Most of the gains (cheaper housing, longer life expectancy) aren’t externalities.
The main concept of: “what if instead of only increasing resources, everyone physically needed less resources due to biology” blew my mind the first time I encountered it. It warms my heart to see it appear again.
More seriously: Tallness seems to cause heart and spine issues, as well as seem to have no visible genetic asymptote until we run into awful deadly issues from height. I’m slightly worried that we’ll keep growing until it becomes a nasty issue, but keep pressing further into tallness around because it’s sexually selected for.
Actually, nevermind. Upon investigation Our World In Data seems to think average height was primarily nutrient driven and is ending its climb and plateauing due to maxing out the possible benefits of nutrients. Also apparently ancient people were as tall as we are today. I had no idea.
Smaller people don’t seem to have disadvantages except the unwinnable comparative placement from culture (not everyone can be tall), and if we could reroute that biological energy to health, lifespan, and intellect instead....it sounds like a win to me. Why not rationally laud the luck of the people who are biologically more efficient and likely have longer lives? With this in mind I somewhat wish I were shorter.
Despite being positively amused, I think this is an extremely bad idea (and will probably strongly downvote it once my downvote isn’t enough to censor it completely). Any embryo selection not meant to prevent horrible diseases, is getting us one step closer to resuming eugenics.
Yeah it didn’t really occur to me that that was what I was advocating till a while after I had the idea.
But I do mention that it’s meant more as a proposal for a future scenario where eugenics(might be too strong/loaded a term) is considered acceptable or becomes inevitable because of competition between individuals. In that scenario it would be better to push heights down than up.
Still I think we should keep an open mind.
There might also be ways of reducing average height other than gene editing, which wouldn’t technically be eugenics I guess.