River

Karma: 491

River Apr 11, 2025, 9:30 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
Interesting. I think I’d take the same position about deafness that I would about blindness. But I also find it a very understandable and natural human emotion for a person who is damaged to want to surround themselves with others who are damaged in the same way, and to be disappointed when their child isn’t. That seems entirely compatible with not being willing to intentionally damage a child.

River Apr 11, 2025, 9:13 PM
1 point
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
I’m mainly talking about engineering that happens before the embryo stage.
I’m not sure if you’re correcting my technical vocabulary or trying to counter my argument. Either is welcome. While I am excited about this technology and its potential to improve the human species, I’m obviously not a biologist myself.
Of course it’s one the law makes. IIUC it’s not even illegal for a pregnant woman to drink alcohol.
Nor is it illegal to use harsh language with your children. “Abuse” is a word that exists to pick out a sufficiently extreme degree of wrong that most people would not do it, and intervention is warranted against those who do. Most states do regulate drug use by pregnant women somehow, see https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/maternity-drug-policies-by-state. And the controversy around this is based mostly on the idea that taking a medical approach rather than a criminalization approach results in better outcomes for the children, which is an argument that just doesn’t translate over to the genetic engineering context.

River Apr 11, 2025, 7:41 PM
5 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
I agree. We aren’t talking about whether blind people should be allowed to reproduce freely, even when doing so has the foreseeable consequence that the child will be blind. We are talking about whether they should be allowed to do an action, beyond the simple act of reproducing, to cause their child to be blind.

River Apr 10, 2025, 8:44 PM
1 point
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on: Who wants to bet me $25k at 1:7 odds that there won’t be an AI market crash in the next year?
Suggesting specific odds without being able to define a threshold seems a bit, um, confused. Being willing to take the word of a stranger on the internet when these quantities of money are at stake seems outright stupid. I’m staying out of this market. I suggest that you withdraw your offer.

River Apr 10, 2025, 8:27 PM
6 points
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in reply to: rba’s comment on: How Gay is the Vatican?
If we assume that the likelihood of a pregnancy leading to a child who lives long enough to be in our records is independent of the child’s order / mother’s age, then I agree that that the effects on the average birth order and average family size of our cardinals should in some sense cancel. However, it should still increase the error bars on both numbers and therefor the uncertainty of any conclusion. And I’m not sure I’d expect survival to be independent of order.

River Apr 8, 2025, 6:00 PM
1 point
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in reply to: rba’s comment on: How Gay is the Vatican?
No? If non-surviving children are absent from the data, then the birth position that we have for a cardinal (1st born, 2nd born, etc) is really a lower bound. A cardinal who our records show as a 2nd born might actually be a 3rd or 4th born, but cannot be a 1st born.

River Apr 7, 2025, 5:09 PM
1 point
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in reply to: rba’s comment on: How Gay is the Vatican?
If the FBOE is due to earlier pregnancies changing the chemicals present in the mother’s womb during later pregnancies, then the absence of non-surviving children from the data could actually be a problem with the data.

River Apr 7, 2025, 6:32 AM
1 point
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on: How Gay is the Vatican?
I would bet pretty hard on option #3. The older the parents are at the time of conception, the lower the quality of their gametes, which can translate into various negative health and cognitive effects on the child.

River Apr 2, 2025, 7:17 AM
1 point
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
I’m not especially distinguishing the methods, I’m mainly distinguishing whether it’s being done to a living person.
Genetic engineering is a thing you do to a living person. If a person is going to go on to live a life, they don’t somehow become less a person because you are influencing them at the stage of being an embryo in a lab. That’s just not a morally coherent distinction, nor is it one the law makes.
Nothing in my position is hinging on my personal moral views. I am trying to point out to you that almost everyone in our society has the view that blinding children is evil. And our society already has laws against child abuse which would prohibit blinding children by genetic engineering. Virtually nobody wants to change that, and any politician who tried to change those laws would be throwing away their career. It’s not about me. I’m pointing out where society is.

If you want to start a campaign to legalize the blinding of children, well, we have a free speech clause, you are entitled to do that. Have you considered maybe doing it separately from the genetic engineering thing? The technology to blind children already exists. If you really think it is worth running an experiment on a generation of children, why don’t you try to legalize doing it with the technology we already have and go from there? If, somehow, you succeed in changing the law, you’d even get your experiment quicker.
if you fail to listen to the people themselves who you’re erasing, you’re the one who’s being evil.
How would a person who has been blind their whole life know? They haven’t had the experience of sight to compare to. They seem like the people in the worst position to make the comparison. People who have the experience of seeing are necessarily the ones who can judge whether that is a good thing or not.
When it comes to their own children, it’s up to them, not you.
When it comes to any child, it is up to the existing law of child abuse. That trumps whatever an individual parent may think.
if you ask blind people or autistic people, some fraction of them will say “hell yeah!”
Lets not get into autistic people. Autism comes in more varieties than blindness, and some of those varieties I think are much more debatable. For blindness, do you have any idea what that fraction is?

River Apr 2, 2025, 12:17 AM
1 point
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
I think the frames in which you are looking at this are just completely wrong. We aren’t really talking about “decisions about an individuals’ reproduction”. We are talking about how a parent can treat their child. This is something that is already highly regulated by the state, CPS is a thing, and it is good that it is a thing. There may be debates to be had about whether CPS has gone too far on certain issues, but there is a core sort of evil that CPS exists to address, and that it is good for the state to address. And blinding your child is a very core paradigmatic example of that sort of evil. Whether you do it by genetic engineering or surgically or through some other means is entirely beside the point. Genetic engineering isn’t special. It is just another technology. To take something that is obviously wrong and evil when done by other means, that everyone will agree the state should prevent when done by other means, and say that the state should allow it when done by genetic engineering, that strikes me as a major political threat to genetic engineering. We don’t get genetic engineering to happen by creating special rules for it that permit monstrosities forbidden by any other means. We get genetic engineering by showing people that it is just another technology, and we can use it to do good and not evil, applying the same notions of good and evil that we would anywhere else. If a blind parent asked a surgeon to sever the optic nerve of of their newborn baby, and the surgeon did it, both the parents and the surgeon would go to jail for child abuse. Any normal person can see that a genetic engineer should be subject to the same ethical and legal constraints there as the surgeon. Arguing otherwise will endanger your purported goal of promoting this technology.
This notion of “erasing a type of person” also seems like exactly the wrong frame for this. When we cured smallpox, did we erase the type of person called “smallpox survivor”? When we feed a hungry person, are we erasing the type of person called “hungry person”? None of this is about erasing anyone. This is about fixing, or at least not intentionally breaking, people.

As for your list, I’m not going to go through point by point. There surely are debatable cases. I’ll just reiterate my basic point that genetic engineering is not special. Would we allow a parent to take a normal child and give them the specified condition by non-genetic means? On some of these society may not have a consensus, as there just isn’t a known non-genetic means for reliably inducing some of these conditions. But that’s the question to ask. We have had parents and other adults interacting with children for as long as there have been adults and children. We have pretty well developed notions of what things it is ok to do to a child and what things it is not ok to do to a child. Those notions don’t change when we have to evaluate whether we should do things to a child by means of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is not special.

River Mar 28, 2025, 8:46 PM
2 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
Ok. So to check, you’re saying that a world with far fewer total blind / deaf / dwarf people, and with far greater total health and capability for nearly literally everyone including the blind / deaf / dwarfs, is not worth there being a generation of a few blind kids whose parents chose for them to be blind?
I feel like you’ve just asked me if it is worth committing a few murders now to being about a future world where there are far fewer murders. Like, if I really thought causality worked that way, maybe, at that point we are getting into hard consequentialism versus strong conventional ethical norms and that is a murky place to be but maybe. But really my objection is why the fuck would you think causality works like that? People who want to blind their own children now are not going to be useful allies in eliminating blindness later!
Would you also endorse forcibly sterilizing currently living people with high-heritability blindness, who intend to have children anyway?
Of course not. As I said, most blind people’s lives are worth living, and we don’t yet have the technology in place to allow such people to procreate without passing on their blindness. Once we do, then some legal intervention probably is warranted, though I haven’t given much thought to its shape and its shape might depend on the particulars of the technology.

River Mar 28, 2025, 5:20 PM
5 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The principle of genomic liberty
If you can’t do it without removing almost all of the nervous system, I think it would be bad!
Why? A human body without a meaningful nervous system inside of it isn’t a morally relevant entity, and it could be used to save people who are morally relevant.
Possibly. I think all your examples are quite alarming in part because they remove a core aspect. Possibly we could rightly decide to do some of them, but that would require much more knowledge and deliberation. More to the point: I’m not making a strong statement like “prohibit these uses”. I’m a weaker statement: “Genomic liberty doesn’t really protect these uses, in the way it does protect propagation, beneficence, etc.”. In other words, I’m just saying that those uses aren’t in the territory that the principle of genomic liberty is trying to secure as its purview, as I’m proposing it.
I’ll continue with your free speech analogy to illustrate what I think is the problem here. It is true, as a matter of constitutional law, that when the Supreme Court carves out an exception to the Free Speech Clause, that does not automatically make that speech a crime. But I think that is more a matter of how our system is structured—the Supreme Court gets to interpret the constitution, but does not get to create crimes. Legislatures get to create crimes, and so for a sort of speech to become a crime, even after the Supreme Court creates an exception for it, still requires action from a legislature. But when I think about particular exceptions, they all fall into one of two categories. Either I think the speech is really bad and should be criminalized (true threats, incitement of imminent lawless action) or I think the court was mistaken to create the exception (obscenity, fighting words). There isn’t an in between category where I think a type of speech is rightly an exception to the Free Speech Clause, but it’s ok for a legislature not to ban it. Similarly, if we think genomic liberty is important enough to be called a “liberty”, and we also think that some particular use of genetic technology is bad enough to warrant an exception to that liberty, then I think that use also has to be bad enough that it should be banned. I don’t see a coherent middle ground.
Gouging the child’s eyes out is much more of a boundary violation and betrayal of bedrock civility. They’d then have very good reason to treat whoever did that as abjectly hostile.
I don’t see why this wouldn’t be the case with blinding a child through germ line engineering. If I imagine myself growing up blind, and then I learned that my parents had engineered my genome that way, I would absolutely see that as a boundary violation and a betrayal of bedrock civility. If anything I would view it as worse than gouging my eyes out, because it is necessarily cool and calculated and premeditated in a way that gouging out of eyes might not be.
You’re causing a switch from one type of body to another; the growing consciousness was growing fitly for the first type, and you took that away, leaving that consciousness somewhat hanging.
Again, I don’t see how this could make it better. Would it be permissible to gouge out a newborn’s eyes? Does infant male circumcision become less bad because it is done before the child can experience a fully intact body? Of course not. Mutilating an infant, in either case, is more bad because the child doesn’t ever get to experience an in tact body, or have any say in the decision.
- It could very well be that a sighted person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn’t wish to be blind, and a blind person approves of their life by their own lights and doesn’t wish to be sighted, but a sighted person who is blinded doesn’t approve of that happening and wishes it weren’t so.
If by “approves of” you just mean “has a life worth living”, then yes, of course blind people’s lives are generally worth living. But if you mean something stronger, “would turn down sight if it were offered for free”, it seems obvious to me that any blind person expressing that view has something seriously wrong in their head in addition to the blindness, and is not competent to make that decision for any child. We don’t let adults abuse children in any other way, even if the adult was subject to the same sort of abuse as a child and says they approve of it.
Diversity of capabilities is good. Blind people may think differently, and, as it were, see things you don’t naturally see. Ditto for many other phenotypes. I think you get less of this benefit if you maim a child vs. through germline engineering (where the adaptation is from birth). (You can of course argue that this isn’t enough of a benefit to genomically do it, and I’d certainly agree with this as a guess and wouldn’t do that with my own child and wouldn’t recommend others do it, but it’s still a benefit.)
Blindness isn’t a different capability. It is a lack of a particular capability. It may be true that a blind person will tend to build more skills with the capabilities they do have, but a sighted person who puts in the effort could surely build the same skills. Treating blindness as a different capability comes off as an ideologically motivated delusion to me.
It makes sense to have laws that protect existing people; a right to not be killed or maimed is a very basic right for a state to enforce. This doesn’t apply as much to a hypothetical future child, in terms of what it makes sense to have laws about.
A fundamental premise of EA is that future people matter just as much as present people. We may have uncertainty about whether a particular person we can conceptualize will actually come to exist in the future, but if they do come to exist in the future, then they aren’t hypothetical even now. So it absolutely does make sense to have laws to protect future people just as much as current people.
As I suggested, I think we ought to set the world up in such a way that the great majority of people don’t have good reason to oppose the creation of germline engineering technology. If you start going “well, surely we have to stamp out this type of person” you’re pretty quickly eroding / betraying that coalition. Hence propagative liberty as a tentpole principle.
Blind people don’t strike me as a “type of person” in the relevant sense. A blind person is just a person who is damaged in a particular way, but otherwise they are the same person they would be with sight.

I also do not believe for a second that people who want to blind their own children exist in a significant enough number to impact political calculations. But if they did, I would say that I do not want to make common political cause with such people, even if it costs us genetic engineering technology. Such people are monsters. They are the enemy. Depriving them of the power to effectuate their goals is a moral crusade worth making enormous sacrifices for.

I do think there are a lot of other people who find the idea of blinding children to be horrifying, no matter how it is done. If you are concerned the politics of advancing genetic engineering, suggesting that it might be ok seems like a blunder. By saying that, you will alienate many more people than you attract.

River Mar 26, 2025, 10:51 PM
3 points
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on: The principle of genomic liberty
Mostly this sounds remarkably good. A couple of minor points though.

On the exception for genomic choices that remove a core aspect of human nature – There is a vagueness problem here. But lets look at some of the possible specifics mentioned. If one is going to create a soldier, removing fear might be valuable. If one is going to create an astronaut for a long term mission, removing dependence on other people might be valuable. If one is going to create an organ donor, removing consciousness and self-awareness seems essential. These are all worth doing if we can figure out how.
On the negative externalities question, I actually strongly disagree with the counterexample of a blind couple choosing to blind their child. That’s child abuse! It’s no different than gouging your child’s eyes out! Don’t allow that!

River Mar 21, 2025, 5:33 AM
12 points
9
on: Socially Graceful Degradation
at a four way stop sign we go one at a time clockwise around the intersection
NO! At a four way stop sign, the driver who arrived at the front of the intersection first goes first.

River Jan 22, 2025, 3:44 AM
2 points
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in reply to: itaibn0’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
I agree that one could approach the issue that way. I don’t believe anyone is. One big reason not to do that, and not to support the ERA at this point in general, is that it is not at all obvious what “not abiding by the ERA” would even look like. The legal landscape has changed so much since it was initially proposed. Most importantly, since the ERA was proposed, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit most discrimination based on sex. I’m not sure what work the ERA is supposed to do that the 14th Amendment isn’t already doing. And since no court has ever recognized the ERA as part of the constitution, there is no case law to guide us in figuring out what it might mean.

So lets imagine that you are a lawyer, and a client comes to you and asks you to sue the government because, say, the government awarded a contract to her male competitor despite her obviously superior bid, and she thinks it was because of her sex. So you verify the facts as best you can and draft up a complaint (the legal document that initiates a lawsuit). After describing the facts and the basis of the court’s jurisdiction, you then have to tell the court which legal provisions you think the government violated. You could write “Count I − 28th Amendment”. But if that’s all you write, you will almost certainly have committed malpractice. There are much better things you can write, and it is your job as a competent lawyer to know about them and write them. You’re going to have to also write “Count II—Equal Protection Clause”, and maybe some more counts after that. And now you’ve given the judge an opportunity, which they will almost certainly take, to avoid deciding the validity of the ERA. Maybe the judge decides that you win on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause, in which case it is unnecessary for the judge to address the ERA at all. Or maybe the judge decides that you loose your Equal Protection Clause claim, and then they can write something like this: “the court assumes without deciding that the ERA is part of the constitution. In the absence of any authority to the contrary, the court chooses to apply the same standard, intermediate scrutiny, under the ERA as under the Equal Protection Clause. Plaintiff’s claims under the ERA therefor fail for the reasons already discussed.” And now you’ve spent years of your life, and your client has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, litigating a case to get the ERA recognized as part of the constitution, and you have not gotten a ruling on whether the ERA is part of the constitution. Whereas if you sue the Archivist of the United States for not publishing the ERA as the 28th Amendment, then there really is no way for a judge to rule on the case without deciding whether the ERA is in fact the 28th Amendment. It’s the difference between giving a judge an opportunity to decide the issue, and putting them in a position where they must decide the issue.

River Jan 21, 2025, 3:18 PM
1 point
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in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
As I’m imagining this, it would not constitute accepting a tip unless the server or the restaurant keeps it. Ideally the server would notice before the customer was out the door and return the money to the customer. But surely that won’t always happen, especially in the transition. In that case, let the restaurant donate the money to a nonprofit.

River Jan 21, 2025, 1:41 AM
7 points
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on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
With regard to fixing tip culture, I think the solution is obvious. Make it illegal for a server to accept a tip. It probably looks bad to enforce this against individual servers, so enforce it at the restaurant level. Any restaurant where a server accepts a tip can get sued or fined or shut down by regulators or something. Frame it, accurately I think, as cracking down on fraudulent pricing practices.

River Jan 21, 2025, 1:40 AM
5 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
With regard to the ERA, on a strict textualist reading of Article V (the one that talks about amendments), it is not crazy to think the ERA is valid. The constitution says that an amendment becomes part of the constitution when it is proposed by ²⁄₃ of each house of congress, and ratified by ¾ of state legislatures. Those things happened. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that congress gets to add extra conditions like time limits. That said, the Supreme Court has long held that such time limits are valid and I see no reason that would or should change now.

As to why the archivist matters here, it’s a litigation thing. You need to name a defendant if you want to bring a case. You can’t sue the Supreme Court to ask them to declare the ERA part of the constitution. You can sue the Archivist of the United States for not listing it as part of the constitution. And several states did. That’s how the Archivist became a focus of this issue.
Honestly, the thing that bothered me most about Biden’s comment was the hypocricy of it. He’s been the president for four years. He could have directed his DOJ to litigate in favor of recognizing the ERA as the 28^th amendment at any time during his presidency. Not only did he not do that, his DOJ defended the Archivist’s decision not to include the ERA in the constitution when several states sued over the issue. State of Illinois v. David Ferriero (D.C. Cir. 2023). Changing your position just as you are leaving office is cheap.

River Dec 9, 2024, 6:48 PM
5 points
0
on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
I am quite glad to see that Lighthaven is on a path to financial sustainability, as I sometimes attend events there, and I am very much not looking to be subsidized by anyone’s charity. One clarifying question. The rough Lighthaven budget above has a line for “interest”. Am I correct in assume that that is the entire mortgage payment, both interest and principal, not just the interest? In other words, by successfully making the $1M payment each year, the amount you owe the bank is going down each year and will eventually hit zero?

River Aug 2, 2024, 4:56 AM
10 points
10
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Dragon Agnosticism
“Agnostic” doesn’t necessarily mean “unknowable and not subject to testing”. Much more often it has the weaker meaning “not currently known”. There is a house being built across the street. Is there a work van parked in front of it right now? I don’t know. This is certainly knowable and subject to testing—I could get up, walk over to a window in the front of the house, and look. But I don’t care enough to do that, so I continue to now know if there is a work van parked in front of the house across the street. I am agnostic about the existence of such a work van.