If somehow, overcoming all of that, and we could still "win", what kind of world would we want to build to ensure the best outcome for every child?


Most living creatures seek happiness and strive to avoid suffering. This covers a lot, honestly. All we can do is avoid creating barriers to doing so, including maximizing diversity of resources.

Community + agency. Or autonomy if you will.

You can't really control for all environments worldwide. You can, however, plan for that fact. If everyone around you is kind of lame and bad, they might not be bad at the same things, and in fact, if one in n people are not bad at a given thing, you will need a community size of n to have a 50/50 chance that there is not someone bad at this.

You can see what "not talking to strangers" does. If your one-and-only-allowed person is unnaturally good, but not good at this thing, well... slit your wrists now, huh? It was deliberate.

This, it takes a large and open community to ensure that the skills and flaws are different from each other, and the person has someone to turn to. It's like the actual structure of spacetime - not "good" or "bad," but "many" and "different." Go to the one for this.

Then, there's agency. It's a simple economics issue (which is how you know there are sufficient mathematicians who base their field of study on this, and the whole thing was deliberate destruction).

A person will avoid harm if the energy expenditure required is less than the harm in question. Same with seeking good, for that matter.

As such, all you really have to do is set the inhibitory costs to zero, and people will seek their best place. No curfew (they're illegal in the US anyway), no COPPA to silence, no runaway retrieval, no school... no coercion. Bad things happen when people are interred with bad things. That's all.

So, remove barriers to agency and increase community, and you're good even if it's a craphole. Instead, we get this deliberate sabotage (and will have to figure out how to kill the people who went along with it).

It is really simple though. Instead, suicide is the leading cause of death for school-aged persons throughout the english-speaking world.

Finally, we would need to honestly assess whether the little lovers of our dreams would actually choose romances with us over waiting until after puberty to have sex

Not really a problem I'm worried about...