I like the idea of selecting genes to make people kind, happy, and healthy.
I also see some potential for abuse. Metaphorically speaking, moving from the domain of Azathoth into the domain of Moloch. Dictators selecting people to be more obedient. Theocracies selecting people to be more religious. Soldiers who don’t mind killing and dying. Slaves who never rebel when they are abused.
Also, pointless zero-sum competitions. Like, at some point high-status people may collectively decide that their kids are going to have purple eyes, and if your kids won’t have purple eyes, they will be treated as low-status. Absurdly costly signaling, such as educated or rich people genetically modifying their children to be physically incapable of manual work; not because the new physiology is somehow better, only to signal that your parents did not expect you to ever need to work manually.
The problem with trait selection is always in the second-order effects—for example, kind people are easy to exploit by the less kind, and happy people are not as driven to change things through their dissatisfaction. A population of kind and happy people are not going to tend towards climbing any social ladder, and will rapidly be ousted by less kind and less happy people. The blind idiot god doesn’t just control genetic change, but societal change, and we’re even worse at controlling or predicting the latter.
This is why I don’t like the meme of a ‘blind idiot god’, it’s really easy to read it in a way, if you actually understand the implications, which also implies that humans, on average, are even lesser, somehow even worse then a ‘blind idiot’.
Of course most potential writers aren’t exactly super geniuses nor willing to spend days thinking about a single phrase so it’s probably unfair to expect them to evaluate any metric such as intelligence along more then 2 or 3 dimensions simultaneously, hence they never would have caught the potentially self-defeating nature of the phrase.
The comedic effect also probably is quite unreliable among large portions of the population, as any mention of the word ‘god’ taken in vain would be quite serious to them.
One of the disadvantages of arguing “but it could be dangerous” (which is what you seem to be arguing), is that every new invention is probably dangerous in some way or other. Cars, for example, are an invention that changed life around the world [just like the internet, or nuclear energy, and gunpowder] and have been misused, there have been thousands if not millions of accidents, and yet people view them in a very positive sense. It is true that richer people have cars with price tags over a million, and while cars are nothing in comparison to a human life, I believe that long-term-wise, eugenics is going to have a gigantic net positive effect on humanity.
As a side note, have you read Dr. Seuss’ book “The Sneetches and Other Stories”?
I like the idea of selecting genes to make people kind, happy, and healthy.
I also see some potential for abuse. Metaphorically speaking, moving from the domain of Azathoth into the domain of Moloch. Dictators selecting people to be more obedient. Theocracies selecting people to be more religious. Soldiers who don’t mind killing and dying. Slaves who never rebel when they are abused.
Also, pointless zero-sum competitions. Like, at some point high-status people may collectively decide that their kids are going to have purple eyes, and if your kids won’t have purple eyes, they will be treated as low-status. Absurdly costly signaling, such as educated or rich people genetically modifying their children to be physically incapable of manual work; not because the new physiology is somehow better, only to signal that your parents did not expect you to ever need to work manually.
The problem with trait selection is always in the second-order effects—for example, kind people are easy to exploit by the less kind, and happy people are not as driven to change things through their dissatisfaction. A population of kind and happy people are not going to tend towards climbing any social ladder, and will rapidly be ousted by less kind and less happy people. The blind idiot god doesn’t just control genetic change, but societal change, and we’re even worse at controlling or predicting the latter.
This is why I don’t like the meme of a ‘blind idiot god’, it’s really easy to read it in a way, if you actually understand the implications, which also implies that humans, on average, are even lesser, somehow even worse then a ‘blind idiot’.
Of course most potential writers aren’t exactly super geniuses nor willing to spend days thinking about a single phrase so it’s probably unfair to expect them to evaluate any metric such as intelligence along more then 2 or 3 dimensions simultaneously, hence they never would have caught the potentially self-defeating nature of the phrase.
The comedic effect also probably is quite unreliable among large portions of the population, as any mention of the word ‘god’ taken in vain would be quite serious to them.
One of the disadvantages of arguing “but it could be dangerous” (which is what you seem to be arguing), is that every new invention is probably dangerous in some way or other. Cars, for example, are an invention that changed life around the world [just like the internet, or nuclear energy, and gunpowder] and have been misused, there have been thousands if not millions of accidents, and yet people view them in a very positive sense. It is true that richer people have cars with price tags over a million, and while cars are nothing in comparison to a human life, I believe that long-term-wise, eugenics is going to have a gigantic net positive effect on humanity.
As a side note, have you read Dr. Seuss’ book “The Sneetches and Other Stories”?
I agree that it will probably be a net benefit.
(No I haven’t read anything by Dr. Seuss.)