81–90 of 98 posts
adjacent, same trend: https://news.ufl.edu/2024/09/blindness-gene-therapy/
somehow it seems the singularity is here .. i hope it's well distributed
How challenging is it for a person who has been deaf for let's say 20 years to suddenly regain hearing?
If you are not accustomed to sounds, they can be annoying, and may make you feel tired. The same can happen with vision, it is just too much, but you can close your eyes, and shut out vision stimuli. You can't do that with hearing. At least if you regain hearing with normal sensitivity, you can be overwhelmed by sounds of your body.
It is easier with implants, which can be shut off.
Anyone from the deaf community that can tell us how these kind of news are received? I wonder how this compares to animosity towards coclear implants by a subsection of the community
Controversial in the same way cochlear implants are. Many deaf/Deaf parents want children who hear. And I think absent the cultural consideration, almost all would want children who hear. But you can't ignore the cultural consideration. If you are deaf, and have a deaf child, curing that child's deafness means they will move away from you later in life. It's a kind of alienation even when the child remains bicultural…
We can and should, the same way we ignore the corresponding "cultural consideration" that mothers who have undergone female genital mutilation themselves will feel alienated from their daughters if they do not inflict the same treatment on them. In this case, most people have no problem recognising that the rights of the daughter to enjoy her own sensory experience far outweigh the (quite real) emotional isolation that would be experienced by the parent -- so why is deafness treated differently?
Denying another person sensory experience is abuse. If that person is a child, it's child abuse. For me the harm inherent in this has nothing to do with whether sign languages are perceived as "real" languages on par with spoken languages. It's obvious to me as a hearing person that sign languages are indeed "real, full" languages, the same way written languages are, and, more generally, the same way that languages I don't personally understand but other people do, are. Sign languages are real, full languages -- and preventing a person who would be able to hear from hearing is still abuse.
I think the reason this is not called out more frequently and stridently by hearing people is that many of us fear being labeled "prejudiced" or worse, and being associated with the political right, who have a long history of making absolute moral claims about outgroups. It's simply an unusual quirk of our times that this specific quality of being seen as culturally presumptuous is the thing that no Right-Thinking Person wants to be seen doing right now, resulting in many otherwise intelligent people bending over backwards to avoid the stigma, even to the point of denying obvious realities like "a life that includes access to more sensory experience is a richer life".
ETA: To anyone who maintains that deaf parents should be able to prevent their children from being able to hear: Should illiterate parents be able to prevent their children from going to school? Should parents who grew up poor be able to starve their children?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
somehow it seems the singularity is here .. i hope it's well distributed
I don't see how this represents the singularity. This is all humans doing work and building knowledge, much like it has always been. Can you point to a specific section of the article that elicits that assumption? Thanks
adjacent, same trend: https://news.ufl.edu/2024/09/blindness-gene-therapy/
We're really making astonishing progress in many different areas in medicine these days. They are mostly pretty narrow, but also so awesome that ~20 years ago, many doctors would have called it science fiction.
How would one find out if they have this type of hearing loss? I have moderate to severe hearing loss in both ears since birth and there’s never been an attempt that I’m aware of to diagnose the cause beyond a standard inner ear examination.
Genomics-driven diagnosis of several (treatable) conditions is not science fiction anymore, but requires support from governments and national health systems. The technology is there, and can be scaled up.
With studies like this: https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/initiatives/newborns
and initiatives like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ljg7v0vmpo#:~:text=Eve...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
somehow it seems the singularity is here .. i hope it's well distributed
I don't see how this represents the singularity. This is all humans doing work and building knowledge, much like it has always been. Can you point to a specific section of the article that elicits that assumption? Thanks
Some might also use protein folding simulations, and the best ways to do that involve narrow AI.
I'd love to hear from somebody in the medical research field how much AI/ML actually speeds up their progress.
You know, whenever treatment for autism comes up, we get a lot of comments heavily suggesting curing autism is basically eugenics. Why is it that some things are seen as a disability we should try to fix in our children, and others - which are in many ways just as debilitating - seen as some kind of beautiful part of humanity?
However, I think mental disorders like autism and physical ailments like deafness don't have the same ethical impact. One changes who a person is, the other changes what a person is capable of. It also depends on how bad the disability is; in this case, the kids showing most promise could already hear, though badly, and the treatment let them hear much better. I'm not even deaf but I'd happily take a treatment to fix whatever hearing damage I've collected over the years.
And for what it's worth, eugenics is already with us and that's actually not so evil. People carrying certain genetic diseases choose not to have (biological) kids all the time. Others still choose to risk it. As long as there isn't some large conspiracy about perfecting the human race behind it, eugenics can be helpful.