281–290 of 292 posts
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>People never needed technology to commit genocide - there are plenty of examples throughout our whole history.[1][2][3] Technology was used in all of those examples. Technology by itself didn't create mass murder, but it does makes it much easier to do.
Taking someone's cattle so that they starve doesn't require technology. I guess you could say smallpox blankets are a biological weapon.
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Why would you live on a planet with different gravity, atmosphere, etc when you can have a nice orbiting habitat adapted to human needs?
Turns out space stations are not the most easily expanded spaces to accommodate growing populations.
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From an interview with Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist: "Q: What does that mean in human language? A: Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple…
From a purely functional, non-ethical standpoint, the problem here is that you can't select the smartest embryo from a pile. You can only select the embryo with the most genes identified as correlating with intelligence. Even assuming that this works, when you do that, you immediately run into the same problem as every other eugenics program: you are reducing the diversity of the population to seek a local maximum. I…
I'm not denying science, and how it improves the human condition. But this is the point when it stops improving the human condition, and improves the controlled human condition. not the same thing.
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I guess I would need to see an analysis of whether there's been any change in human allele frequencies. I suspect there hasn't. But to your example, one issue with the farmed fish is that they now constitute a closed gene pool - we can easily explain their decreased fitness with the likely rise of harmful alleles. With the explosion of population, I don't see much relationship between the salmon and humans.
Thanks. I should read up a bit. Can you link to any decent info or discussion about allele frequencies?
This seems like a reasonably accessible (college-biology level) discussion of what evolution would look like in the human gene pool:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933187/
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I suspect you'll need a university library to access this, but Dr. Pardis Sabeti is well known in this area and also an amazing person - she played a big role in the molecular biology work that underlay the US response to the Ebola crisis. She wrote a review that explains the tools we currently have to ascertain human evolution:
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Turns out space stations are not the most easily expanded spaces to accommodate growing populations.
There is a lot of stuff floating around the solar system (asteroids, small moons) that can be mined. We need to automate that process and that of habitat construction, then the Asteroid Belt could hold 7,500 trillion people, if thoroughly reshaped.
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Every technology ever has opened the door to dangerous possibilities. Caution is merited, but inaction carries culpability in the preventable negative outcomes solved in a potential future that we deny through fear. And not disagreeing with your content, as I agree and think it's well written, but statements like "nice to look into the future and determine what the human being created would prefer, we can't do that"…
>If I told you that I could make you smarter, right now, with 100% certainty and safety, but that afterwards... you wouldn't be you as you are now... would you say yes? Possibly, but I feel there's a certain inherent unease with that question. What happens to me if I become other? This is silly. I don't become some other person when I drink alcohol or wear contact lenses, nor when I break a leg, exercise my muscles,…
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>If I told you that I could make you smarter, right now, with 100% certainty and safety, but that afterwards... you wouldn't be you as you are now... would you say yes? Possibly, but I feel there's a certain inherent unease with that question. What happens to me if I become other? This is silly. I don't become some other person when I drink alcohol or wear contact lenses, nor when I break a leg, exercise my muscles,…
None of the examples you gave are permanent neurological changes.
You might identify yourself with a particular functional aspect if your mind, but you're going to have to do a fair amount of scientific work to pick out which functional aspect. Just gesturing to the meat doesn't really pick out anything immutable or specific.
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I guess I would need to see an analysis of whether there's been any change in human allele frequencies. I suspect there hasn't. But to your example, one issue with the farmed fish is that they now constitute a closed gene pool - we can easily explain their decreased fitness with the likely rise of harmful alleles. With the explosion of population, I don't see much relationship between the salmon and humans.
Thanks. I should read up a bit. Can you link to any decent info or discussion about allele frequencies?
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Chemotherapy is more of an exception than the norm when it comes to what treatments are acceptable. Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits. And even in oncology there are Phase I studies to ensure that your treatment is not Too toxic either. So yeah, Do Not Harm is very much a thing.
> Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits. What? I encourage you to read about prescription drug side effects. If a drug were safe, it would be over the counter rather than prescription. Prescription drugs are exactly the kind of harm/benefit bundle GP is describing.
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Modern advanced society already requires a high minimum intelligence for people to function in especially to hold a respectable job or be a respectable member of a community. The minimum is increasing when more automation is used for most kinds of automation. If someone's children will likely have a lower than this minimum intelligence, which you can infer from parent's IQ and other measures, will you encourage or pr…
If someone's children will likely have a lower than this minimum intelligence, which you can infer from parent's IQ and other measures... Can it really be inferred? Not including conditions or syndromes of course. The parents' environment may have affected their intelligence and the child may turn out entirely different.