[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
Get this Nazi shit off this fucking website already for fuck’s sake. Yeah yeah discourse norms, I’m supposed to be nice and be specific. But actually fuck off. I’m tired of all of y’all that upvote posts like these to 100 karma. If you can’t separate your shit from eugenics then your shit is bad. Someone else can make the reasoned argument, I’ve had enough.
If we can’t get tech advanced enough to become shapeshifters, modify already grown bodies, we don’t get to mess with genes. I will never support tools that let people select children by any characteristic, they would have been used against me and so many of my friends. Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again. Abortion should be blind to the child’s attributes.
Mod note: Come on, I mean, you clearly knew this would get you a moderator warning. You can make arguments, but please don’t randomly rant at people with swear words. “Eugenics” sure is a mindkilly word, and my guess is people should just taboo it and talk about what they mean in more detail, but I don’t think that’s an excuse to just explode at people.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
it kind of is, actually. Perhaps you could try not wearing your “pretense of neutrality” belief as attire and actually consider what you just said is acceptable. I’d rather say, “if something can reasonably be described as eugenics, that’s an automatic failure of acceptability, and you have to argue why your thing is not eugenics in order for it to be welcome anywhere.” bodily autonomy means against your parents, too.
edit: i was ratelimited for this bullshit. fuck this website
I mean, clearly there must be some way for people to argue in-favor of genetic enhancement. Like, my high-school textbook on ethics had a section on superbabies and that was totally fine and opinion in the class was pretty split about how humanity should relate to people using that kind of technology. Having discussion about genetic enhancement is obviously a thing that humanity needs to have if it wants to reasonably navigate the future.
The very most that I think you could defend in really any forum is that you don’t get to take “eugenics being good” as a given when you make a post, and you have to argue first that it’s worth talking about, but like, that’s exactly what this post is trying to do.
you don’t get to take “eugenics being good” as a given when you make a post, and you have to argue first that it’s worth talking about, but like, that’s exactly what this post is trying to do.
Yeah, that seems to be one of the most common criticisms of my FAQs pages. I actually agree that some people would be more receptive to my arguments if I tried to argue my support for it more gradually, but that’s just not my preferred writing style. It would’ve made it harder for me to write everything in this post. I have autism (it runs in my family), and my brain just doesn’t work that way, at least not for this topic.
Diana Fleischman has written a different essay that takes that approach, and some people might like it better. It’s good that there are differently written essays out there on this topic.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
they’re welcome to argue in favor of genetic enhancement, as long as it happens after birth. yes, I know it’s orders of magnitude harder. But knowing anything about an abortable child should be illegal. I’m a big fan of abortion, as long as it is blind to who is being aborted, because as soon as it depends on the child’s characteristics, it’s reaching into the distribution and killing some probabilistic people—without that, it’s not killing the probabilistic person. Another way to put this is, life begins at information leakage. anything else permits information leakage that imposes the agency of the parents. That’s not acceptable. Argue for augmenting a living organism all you want! we’ll need at least mild superintelligence to pull it off, unfortunately, but it’s absolutely permitted by physics. But your attempt to suppress the societal immune response to this thing in particular is unreasonable. Since you’ve already driven away the people who would say this in so many words by not banning it sooner, it is my responsibility to point this out. Almost everyone I know who I didn’t meet from lesswrong hates this website, and they specifically cite acceptance of eugenics as why. You’re already silencing a crowd. I will not shut up.
Look, you are clearly trying to argue for a policy where it would be impossible for me to argue against anything you say, despite us of course both knowing there are real arguments to be had here, and real considerations to be figured out.
The policy you are arguing for also has approximately no buy-in. Arguments for basic genetic disease screening and gender selection have been published in basically all major newspapers and a substantial fraction of medical journals in relevant fields. Yes, LessWrong has more real discussion of serious gene-editing, and some of that is taboo in more parts of society, but the specific line you are trying to draw here is societally quite rare.
I don’t really know what’s going on with you here. In any case, you have a moderator warning. If this kind of stuff triggers you, you can filter it out from your frontpage. It’s definitely not banned from LW, and if you leave comments that as aggressively attack people, or engage in mass-downvoting of people thinking or commenting about this stuff, I will give you at least a temporary ban. You are of course welcome to make arguments and contribute evidence to whatever people are talking about, but that’s mostly not what’s been happening here.
Also, negative Eugenics laws have existed in many Western countries in the past. They only would’ve be used against you and your friends if you were violent criminals, or something along those lines. Are you saying that you support the reproduction of violent criminals, who will have offspring that also carry genes that predispose them to commit more violent crimes against others?
Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again.
Abortion should be blind to the child’s attributes.
If abortion should be “blind to the child’s attributes”, then you should put your time and money where you mouth is and be willing to take of disabled children who will never have a future or be able to take care of themselves. If you won’t do that, then you should concede. Your dogma will not create a sustainable, long-lasting civilization.
Also, this is kind of personal, but my own brother is so mentally disabled that he cannot take care of himself. Both of my parents, my siblings, and myself all agree that it would’ve been better to abort him, if they knew that he would be as disabled as he is. Instead, my parents and myself will have to take care of him for the rest of our lives or until he dies. I love my brother, I don’t hate him, and I think it’s very unfortunate that he is disabled. But my parents and I still believe that it would’ve been better for everybody if he had never been born.
If you had to put up with everything that my family has had to put up with, I think you would change your mind. My hypothesis is that most people are against preventing dysgenics, until they have to experience the consequences of it for themselves.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
If abortion should be “blind to the child’s attributes”, then you should put your money where you mouth is and be willing to take of disabled children who will never have a future or be able to take care of themselves. If you won’t do that, then you should concede. Your dogma will not create a sustainable, long-lasting civilization.
Solve these things in already-developed organisms. It’s orders of magnitude harder, yes, but it’s necessary for it to be morally acceptable. Your brother should get to go into cryonics and be revived once we can heal him. Failing that, it’s just the risk you take reproducing. Or at least, that will remain my perspective, since I will keep repeating, from my dad’s perspective, I would have been a defect worth eliminating. There is nothing you can say to convince me, and I will take every option available to me to prevent your success at this moral atrocity. Sorry about the suffering of ancient earth, but let’s fix it in a way that produces outcomes worth creating rather than hellscapes of conformity.
Your brother should get to go into cryonics and be revived once we can heal him.
That’s a terrible idea. Cryonics is unlikely to succeed. My family also can’t afford to put him into cryonics. It’s also not any more likely that we could fix my brother, even if we did revive him with cryonics.
Failing that, it’s just the risk you take reproducing.
Why? And according to who? Numerous historical societies chose to let severely disabled people die on their own in the past, because it was maladaptive to take care of them. My parents can’t take care of him forever, and neither should society if he’s not able to make his own positive contributions.
Having to take care of a severely disabled person is a burden that literally nobody wants to have, if they have the choice of avoiding it. That’s the reality. If you disagree with me, then you better put your time, money, and effort where your mouth is and bear the burden yourself. If you won’t do that, then you’re a hypocrite.
It would be more productive if you gave a rational argument against eugenics. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but “fuck off” is not a rational argument. LessWrong claims to be a forum for rational discussions. If you don’t have rational arguments against this post, then this is not the right forum for you.
If we can’t get tech advanced enough to become shapeshifters, modify already grown bodies, we don’t get to mess with genes. I will never support tools that let people select children by any characteristic, they would have been used against me and so many of my friends. Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again. Abortion should be blind to the child’s attributes.
You haven’t given a single rational justification for anything that you said here. Whereas, I’ve painstakingly every major argument against eugenics under the Sun in the FAQs.
I knew that I was going to get heavily downvoted for making this post, but I also don’t care. The inability of this forum to give rational arguments against my steelman arguments proves that not even most LessWrongers can handle True Rationality.
At LessWrong, rationality stops and emotions take over when the forum-goers encounter taboo and controversial topics.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
I sure didn’t. I’m surprised you expected to be downvoted. This shit typically gets upvoted here. My comment being angry and nonspecific will likely be in the deep negatives.
That said, I gave an argument sketch. People use this to eliminate people like me and my friends. Got a counter, or is my elevated emotion not worth taking seriously?
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
Get this Nazi shit off this fucking website already for fuck’s sake. Yeah yeah discourse norms, I’m supposed to be nice and be specific. But actually fuck off. I’m tired of all of y’all that upvote posts like these to 100 karma. If you can’t separate your shit from eugenics then your shit is bad. Someone else can make the reasoned argument, I’ve had enough.If we can’t get tech advanced enough to become shapeshifters, modify already grown bodies, we don’t get to mess with genes. I will never support tools that let people select children by any characteristic, they would have been used against me and so many of my friends. Wars have been fought over this, and if you try it, they will be again. Abortion should be blind to the child’s attributes.Mod note: Come on, I mean, you clearly knew this would get you a moderator warning. You can make arguments, but please don’t randomly rant at people with swear words. “Eugenics” sure is a mindkilly word, and my guess is people should just taboo it and talk about what they mean in more detail, but I don’t think that’s an excuse to just explode at people.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
it kind of is, actually. Perhaps you could try not wearing your “pretense of neutrality” belief as attire and actually consider what you just said is acceptable. I’d rather say, “if something can reasonably be described as eugenics, that’s an automatic failure of acceptability, and you have to argue why your thing isnoteugenics in order for it to be welcomeanywhere.”bodily autonomy means against your parents, too.edit: i was ratelimited for this bullshit. fuck this websiteI mean, clearly there must be some way for people to argue in-favor of genetic enhancement. Like, my high-school textbook on ethics had a section on superbabies and that was totally fine and opinion in the class was pretty split about how humanity should relate to people using that kind of technology. Having discussion about genetic enhancement is obviously a thing that humanity needs to have if it wants to reasonably navigate the future.
The very most that I think you could defend in really any forum is that you don’t get to take “eugenics being good” as a given when you make a post, and you have to argue first that it’s worth talking about, but like, that’s exactly what this post is trying to do.
I agree. I would support genetic engineering in some cases, but I’ve explained why I don’t believe that is an adequate solution for humanity. It won’t solve the problems of dysgenics or overpopulation.
Yeah, that seems to be one of the most common criticisms of my FAQs pages. I actually agree that some people would be more receptive to my arguments if I tried to argue my support for it more gradually, but that’s just not my preferred writing style. It would’ve made it harder for me to write everything in this post. I have autism (it runs in my family), and my brain just doesn’t work that way, at least not for this topic.
Diana Fleischman has written a different essay that takes that approach, and some people might like it better. It’s good that there are differently written essays out there on this topic.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
they’re welcome to argue in favor ofgenetic enhancement, as long as it happensafter birth. yes, I know it’s orders of magnitude harder. But knowinganythingabout an abortable child should be illegal. I’m a big fan of abortion,as long as it is blind to who is being aborted,because as soon as it depends on the child’s characteristics, it’s reaching into the distribution and killing some probabilistic people—without that, it’s not killing the probabilistic person. Another way to put this is, life begins at information leakage. anything else permits information leakage that imposes the agency of the parents. That’s not acceptable. Argue for augmenting a living organism all you want! we’ll need at least mild superintelligence to pull it off, unfortunately, but it’s absolutely permitted by physics. But your attempt to suppress the societal immune response to this thing in particular is unreasonable. Since you’ve already driven away the people who would say this in so many words by not banning it sooner, it is my responsibility to point this out. Almost everyone I know who I didn’t meet from lesswronghates this website,and they specifically cite acceptance of eugenics as why. You’re already silencing a crowd. I will not shut up.Look, you are clearly trying to argue for a policy where it would be impossible for me to argue against anything you say, despite us of course both knowing there are real arguments to be had here, and real considerations to be figured out.
The policy you are arguing for also has approximately no buy-in. Arguments for basic genetic disease screening and gender selection have been published in basically all major newspapers and a substantial fraction of medical journals in relevant fields. Yes, LessWrong has more real discussion of serious gene-editing, and some of that is taboo in more parts of society, but the specific line you are trying to draw here is societally quite rare.
I don’t really know what’s going on with you here. In any case, you have a moderator warning. If this kind of stuff triggers you, you can filter it out from your frontpage. It’s definitely not banned from LW, and if you leave comments that as aggressively attack people, or engage in mass-downvoting of people thinking or commenting about this stuff, I will give you at least a temporary ban. You are of course welcome to make arguments and contribute evidence to whatever people are talking about, but that’s mostly not what’s been happening here.
Why not? As I explained in the essay, modern civilization will collapse without some form of eugenics.
You’re probably still a eugenicist in some sense. Some people would argue that opposing incest and supporting abortion of any kind counts as eugenics.
Also, negative Eugenics laws have existed in many Western countries in the past. They only would’ve be used against you and your friends if you were violent criminals, or something along those lines. Are you saying that you support the reproduction of violent criminals, who will have offspring that also carry genes that predispose them to commit more violent crimes against others?
Nazism is not the same thing as eugenics. Eugenics doesn’t require fighting wars.
If abortion should be “blind to the child’s attributes”, then you should put your time and money where you mouth is and be willing to take of disabled children who will never have a future or be able to take care of themselves. If you won’t do that, then you should concede. Your dogma will not create a sustainable, long-lasting civilization.
Also, this is kind of personal, but my own brother is so mentally disabled that he cannot take care of himself. Both of my parents, my siblings, and myself all agree that it would’ve been better to abort him, if they knew that he would be as disabled as he is. Instead, my parents and myself will have to take care of him for the rest of our lives or until he dies. I love my brother, I don’t hate him, and I think it’s very unfortunate that he is disabled. But my parents and I still believe that it would’ve been better for everybody if he had never been born.
If you had to put up with everything that my family has had to put up with, I think you would change your mind. My hypothesis is that most people are against preventing dysgenics, until they have to experience the consequences of it for themselves.
Also, some social conservatives would insist that attribute-blind abortions still count as eugenics.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
Solve these things in already-developed organisms. It’s orders of magnitude harder, yes, but it’s necessary for it to be morally acceptable. Your brother should get to go into cryonics and be revived once we can heal him. Failing that, it’s just the risk you take reproducing. Or at least, that will remain my perspective,since I will keep repeating, from my dad’s perspective, I would have been a defect worth eliminating. There is nothing you can say to convince me, and I will take every option available to me to prevent your success at this moral atrocity.Sorry about the suffering of ancient earth, but let’s fix it in a way that produces outcomes worth creating rather than hellscapes of conformity.What is “morally acceptable”? I think morality is an illusion. I’ve also argued that eugenics can be defended within the humanist value/moral framework of the West.
That’s a terrible idea. Cryonics is unlikely to succeed. My family also can’t afford to put him into cryonics. It’s also not any more likely that we could fix my brother, even if we did revive him with cryonics.
Why? And according to who? Numerous historical societies chose to let severely disabled people die on their own in the past, because it was maladaptive to take care of them. My parents can’t take care of him forever, and neither should society if he’s not able to make his own positive contributions.
Having to take care of a severely disabled person is a burden that literally nobody wants to have, if they have the choice of avoiding it. That’s the reality. If you disagree with me, then you better put your time, money, and effort where your mouth is and bear the burden yourself. If you won’t do that, then you’re a hypocrite.
It would be more productive if you gave a rational argument against eugenics. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but “fuck off” is not a rational argument. LessWrong claims to be a forum for rational discussions. If you don’t have rational arguments against this post, then this is not the right forum for you.
You haven’t given a single rational justification for anything that you said here. Whereas, I’ve painstakingly every major argument against eugenics under the Sun in the FAQs.
I knew that I was going to get heavily downvoted for making this post, but I also don’t care. The inability of this forum to give rational arguments against my steelman arguments proves that not even most LessWrongers can handle True Rationality.
At LessWrong, rationality stops and emotions take over when the forum-goers encounter taboo and controversial topics.
[edit 7d later: I was too angry here. I think there’s some version of this that can be defended, but it’s not the version I wrote while angry. edit 2mo latet: It’s pretty close, but my policy suggestions need refinement and I need to justify why I think the connection to past eugenics still exists.]
I sure didn’t. I’m surprised you expected to be downvoted. This shit typically gets upvoted here. My comment being angry and nonspecific will likely be in the deep negatives.That said, I gave an argument sketch. People use this to eliminate people like me and my friends. Got a counter, or is my elevated emotion not worth taking seriously?