61–70 of 91 posts
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I love to hate on tech bros as much as the next tech bro, but I've watched so many people suffer with terrible diseases that I'm totally fine if it we end up with 1000 hairloss biotech startups if that also means we get one that prevents Alzheimer's.
Hair loss cures aren't the problem. But what about a treatment giving unborn children +15 IQ, but affordable only to parents earning $300k/year?
The film Gattaca (1997) speaks to this better than I can.
I thought the same before reading the article. After reading it I feel like Gattaca barely scratched the surface. It was actually a pretty tame movie. Some of the points made by the author are far scarier: gene editing startups with VC funding and sociopathic founders or amoral autocratic governments (think N.Korea, Russia, etc)
The current push for equity combined with the technical ability to genetically engineer humans is frightening. Society has decided we have "incorrect" levels of diversity...though nobody can answer what the correct levels are. Without any question of "how do you know what you're doing is correct" we're changing our environment as much as possible to achieve the "correct" level of diversity. It's pure luck we can only…
This may seem like a controversial opinion, but I think that it's a good development. Some people have lost the "genetic lottery" in ways that make them dependent on medication. And for some, it may block career options, such as color vision deficiencies. We should embrace it, instead of painting dystopian scenarios. At least, we shouldn't stop people from fixing problems that they were unfairly born with.
Most people lose the genetic lottery by being born to poor parents. You don't need genetic engineering to start fixing the genetic lottery for for most people, just redistribution of wealth. Once youve fixed that genetic lottery, it gets a lot harder to make a dystopia from solving other genetic lotteries
Why is low-risk minor gene editing such a big deal? Much higher-risk breeding is allowed. Parents with genetic defects likely to produce rejects are allowed to breed, and the babies are not culled. It's not like humans have a breeding quality control program.
https://www.jscreen.org/learn-more/lifestyle-and-planning/fa...
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Can you reference a credible study that links sexual orientation to genes? I've never thought of that as something inherited. I don't think we're anywhere near genetic manipulation of human mind, if that's even a real thing. Perhaps we could manipulate behavior driven by hormones, but I don't think we could do too much there without breaking the whole system.
I wasn’t saying that there is a gay gene, just explaining there are cases where differences in human traits are deemed “better” by some governing body but aren’t actually better.
It is coming, but too slowly. Everyone, including people itt, gesture vaguely towards "ethical considerations", without being able to specify what they are and how they outweigh the massive ethical benefits. >I expect that human genetic engineering, both therapeutic and “vanity” applications, will become an unfathomably profitable industry in the coming decades. The most important application, by far, dwarfing both t…
Intelligence really doesn’t seem like the solution to any of our big problems. I’ve heard this argument before (and probably made this argument at some point too), and it seems to boil down to thinking that people would agree with me if they would just be a bit smarter and/or more informed. But I don’t think this is true at all. If it was then smart people would agree, but they don’t. There is another line of thinkin…
Why not?
>I’ve heard this argument before (and probably made this argument at some point too), and it seems to boil down to thinking that people would agree with me if they would just be a bit smarter and/or more informed.
I don't want the next generation to agree with me. I want them to be on the next level.
>I think there is a strong argument for emotional intelligence, worldliness, and empathy though.
If you have a society of monkeys, no matter how worldly, emotionally intelligent they are - they are not creating astrolabes to travel the oceans, they are not domesticating animals, they are not writing plays, they are not building huts, even.
Similarly, if you create a society of humans with a higher average intelligence, we will likewise experience a phase shift and access new wonders of culture and science that are simply inaccessible or extremely impractical right now. I cannot tell you what these wonders will be, but I am certain they exist.
And in my humble opinion, we have already started to hit a wall in terms of what areas of intellectual achievement are possible with our current 'hardware' limitations. There are already areas of math, of physics, of biology that maybe 10-20 people on the whole Earth are capable of working in. We struggle to come up with any satisfying macro economic theory with testable predictions. Religious thought has very obviously stalled as well.
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Hair loss cures aren't the problem. But what about a treatment giving unborn children +15 IQ, but affordable only to parents earning $300k/year?
Why would it remain affordable to them only? Economies of scale apply even if just the productivity learning curve. Doing the cost/benefit analysis it may make sense for a government to subsidize or outright provide it for free. It is downright bizzare that people worry about the non-trivial and highly useful applications. What happened to bitching about the spending on baldness cures and penis pill research?
It's at the intersection of education and healthcare.
Is it so outlandish to think that, in a country where education is so expensive it takes the average college student 20 years to pay off their debt; and medical costs are the cause of more than 60% of bankruptcies; a procedure that combined the two might be expensive?
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For too long, the children of the rich have been denied their rightful genetic advantages. We need a ruling class we can really worship with a straight face.
It is called education and has been around for millenia. If somebody suggested limiting education due to offering "unfair advantages" and contributing to inequality they would be considered absolutely bonkers. Yet with genetic engineering it is somehow completely different.
This may seem like a controversial opinion, but I think that it's a good development. Some people have lost the "genetic lottery" in ways that make them dependent on medication. And for some, it may block career options, such as color vision deficiencies. We should embrace it, instead of painting dystopian scenarios. At least, we shouldn't stop people from fixing problems that they were unfairly born with.
> This may seem like a controversial opinion, but I think that it's a good development. Gattaca here we come: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca After that, axlotl tanks.