When I was 12, I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that eugenics was necessary to save humanity, and went online to debate my belief, where I was promptly defeated by a biologist who knew what he was talking about.
It took me a while to admit to being wrong, and I never did so publicly. Instead, I kept trying to patch the holes in my position, even as they were being exposed at an incredible rate.
Nonetheless, I regard this experience as formative in becoming a rationalist. “Planting the seed of rationality” may be successful, but you will often never have the satisfaction of knowing when it works.
Does the record of the debate still exist? For various reasons, I wouldn’t spend time advocating eugenics, but I don’t think there’s much of a biological argument against it.
It appears the parent website of the forums took them down a few years ago, so probably not.
The biological argument is that it doesn’t necessarily work, and all the societal changes I advocated with it for implementation had much stronger things against them.
When I was 12, I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that eugenics was necessary to save humanity, and went online to debate my belief, where I was promptly defeated by a biologist who knew what he was talking about.
It took me a while to admit to being wrong, and I never did so publicly. Instead, I kept trying to patch the holes in my position, even as they were being exposed at an incredible rate.
Nonetheless, I regard this experience as formative in becoming a rationalist. “Planting the seed of rationality” may be successful, but you will often never have the satisfaction of knowing when it works.
Does the record of the debate still exist? For various reasons, I wouldn’t spend time advocating eugenics, but I don’t think there’s much of a biological argument against it.
It appears the parent website of the forums took them down a few years ago, so probably not.
The biological argument is that it doesn’t necessarily work, and all the societal changes I advocated with it for implementation had much stronger things against them.
The Wayback Machine might have it.
Nah, already checked—it only archived the front page of the forums. That’s actually how I found the parent website, though.
Ah, oh well.
Nah, already checked—it doesn’t archive forums. That’s actually how I found the parent website, though.