The problem with Yvain’s argument is that it appears to be an example of the PHB fallacy “anything I don’t understand is easy to do”. Or rather the “a little knowledge” problem “anything I sort of understand is easy to do”.
During the Enlightenment, when people first started talking about reorganizing society on a large scale, it seemed like a panacea. Now that we have several centuries extremely messy experience with it, we know that it’s harder than it at first appeared and there are many complications. Now that developments in biology seem to make it possible to make changes to biology it again looks like a panacea (at least to the people who haven’t learned the lessons of the previous failure). And just as before, I predict people will discover that it’s a lot more complicated, probably just a messily.
The problem with Yvain’s argument is that it appears to be an example of the PHB fallacy “anything I don’t understand is easy to do”. Or rather the “a little knowledge” problem “anything I sort of understand is easy to do”.
During the Enlightenment, when people first started talking about reorganizing society on a large scale, it seemed like a panacea. Now that we have several centuries extremely messy experience with it, we know that it’s harder than it at first appeared and there are many complications. Now that developments in biology seem to make it possible to make changes to biology it again looks like a panacea (at least to the people who haven’t learned the lessons of the previous failure). And just as before, I predict people will discover that it’s a lot more complicated, probably just a messily.