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>argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction See .. I find this line of thinking heinous. Why do you not instantly trip up when you

>argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction See .. I find this line of thinking heinous. Why do you not instantly trip up when you type this?

lopmotr 8y ago
You should have a reason for that. Just feeling terrible might mean you're inside an echo chamber. Most people support eugenics in the form of outlawing incest because it can lead to faulty offspring. We also think treating neurodegenerative diseases is a good thing. Most parents also hope their kids will be smart. Or at least they don't hope for the opposite. Women don't like to have kids past 40 partly because of higher risk of Down's syndrome. And there's a test for that which can help them decide to abort the baby. All these things are us trying to make future humans smarter, mostly by eugenic techniques. Maybe you're thinking of actually killing people? That's not quite the same as selective breeding.
- primitur 8y ago
  Those are all perfectly appealing reasons to step one iota closer to the reality described, which is that we should promote the DNA-privileged forward on the sexual reproduction stack. Which is something, I think, a little different to all the nice, shiny new things we're getting from CRISPR, et al., sure. Its the dangerous, vile things I care about: opening the door for selective breeding and clones, racial purism, etc. The technology is one thing; the ethics another tube entirely. Somethings things go boom, othertimes BOOM.
  - lopmotr 8y ago
    What's wrong with racial purism? We do it with dog breeding. What are the ethical problems?
    - scatters 8y ago
      Purebred dogs suffer a host of genetic diseases resulting in considerable suffering.
      - lopmotr 8y ago
        I realize you're not the same person, but I'd still like to find out if people are against racial purity or eugenics for a real reason or just "because Nazis". The whole idea of eugenics is to reduce genetic diseases and suffering. Surely, if diseased children started to appear, the same program would stop them from reproducing and spreading it. Low intelligence humans already have considerable suffering too because modern economies don't have much use for them so they often live in poverty. Wouldn't it be nice to prevent that suffering by making them smarter? Indigenous people all over the world had racial purity before contact with outsiders. Is that a bad thing? Is it good that native Americans are essentially extinct by interbreeding? Should Americans try to mix their black and white people to reduce the racial purity of both, or is the current state of a little bit of mixing already the perfect balance? In that case, Japan, which is very racially homogeneous, must be suffering from too much racial purity and we should try to impose interbreeding on them for their own good.
        primitur 8y ago
        >Racial Purity >Impose Interbreeding Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity". If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science, that allow "cleansing of so-called undesirables". I mean this sincerely, humans cannot be trusted with their own race.
        lopmotr 8y ago
        You mean racial mixing should be chosen by cultural preferences/technology/wealth, which what's always been happening, rather than scientific reasons aimed at improving anything? I can't see how arbitrary human culture is any better than more purposeful breeding. Culture selects for racial purity in some cases, and for mixing in others, but it often depends on political history - Koreans don't want to mix with Japanese because politics, not because they're too far away from each other. Is politics really a better decider than science? Use race for eugenics though is a very coarse metric and I wouldn't advocate for it unless we somehow lacked any better measures. I think a better program would measure performance in whatever criteria people think are desirable and go for those regardless of race. It might turn out that the tallest people are black, and you end up with a lot of black genes if you like tallness. So it might look racist, and it might shrink the populations of some races relative to others. But again, that's what already happens through arbitrary reasons anyway. We're already breeding more blacks and less whites simply because blacks are generally poorer than whites and poor people tend to have more children. I don't see how you can be happy with that (selecting for poverty!) but not with people putting the quality of their children ahead of their own personal desire to spread their genes.
    - dang 8y ago
      Race-war flamebait is off-topic here and we ban accounts that post like this. Please keep it elsewhere from now on. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
arkh 8y ago
It is. But if you close your mind enough you can't even think about those kind of argument and follow the kind of thinking some people do, how can you mount a valid argument against it? It's heinous! Eugenics bad! Are not good arguments. You have to try and follow thoughts along ways you (and most people you know) don't or you end-up creating your own echo chamber. Try playing devil's advocate sometimes you may learn a lot about how you think and why.

>argue for some eugenics and advantage high IQ people for reproduction See .. I find this line of thinking heinous. Why do you not instantly trip up when you type this?

lopmotr 8y ago

You should have a reason for that. Just feeling terrible might mean you're inside an echo chamber. Most people support eugenics in the form of outlawing incest because it can lead to faulty offspring. We also think treating neurodegenerative diseases is a good thing. Most parents also hope their kids will be smart. Or at least they don't hope for the opposite. Women don't like to have kids past 40 partly because of higher risk of Down's syndrome. And there's a test for that which can help them decide to abort the baby. All these things are us trying to make future humans smarter, mostly by eugenic techniques. Maybe you're thinking of actually killing people? That's not quite the same as selective breeding.

primitur 8y ago
Those are all perfectly appealing reasons to step one iota closer to the reality described, which is that we should promote the DNA-privileged forward on the sexual reproduction stack. Which is something, I think, a little different to all the nice, shiny new things we're getting from CRISPR, et al., sure. Its the dangerous, vile things I care about: opening the door for selective breeding and clones, racial purism, etc. The technology is one thing; the ethics another tube entirely. Somethings things go boom, othertimes BOOM.
- lopmotr 8y ago
  What's wrong with racial purism? We do it with dog breeding. What are the ethical problems?
  - scatters 8y ago
    Purebred dogs suffer a host of genetic diseases resulting in considerable suffering.
    - lopmotr 8y ago
      I realize you're not the same person, but I'd still like to find out if people are against racial purity or eugenics for a real reason or just "because Nazis". The whole idea of eugenics is to reduce genetic diseases and suffering. Surely, if diseased children started to appear, the same program would stop them from reproducing and spreading it. Low intelligence humans already have considerable suffering too because modern economies don't have much use for them so they often live in poverty. Wouldn't it be nice to prevent that suffering by making them smarter? Indigenous people all over the world had racial purity before contact with outsiders. Is that a bad thing? Is it good that native Americans are essentially extinct by interbreeding? Should Americans try to mix their black and white people to reduce the racial purity of both, or is the current state of a little bit of mixing already the perfect balance? In that case, Japan, which is very racially homogeneous, must be suffering from too much racial purity and we should try to impose interbreeding on them for their own good.
      - primitur 8y ago
        >Racial Purity >Impose Interbreeding Sorry, too extreme for me. I do not subscribe to your reasoning that any form of racism is acceptable - "because scientific purity". If you can't see what it is with 'racial cleanliness', I suggest you go have a look at the places its been happening for, say .. the last 300 years. You'll see plenty of reasons why there should not be any kind of racial policies, enabled by science, that allow "cleansing of so-called undesirables". I mean this sincerely, humans cannot be trusted with their own race.
        lopmotr 8y ago
        You mean racial mixing should be chosen by cultural preferences/technology/wealth, which what's always been happening, rather than scientific reasons aimed at improving anything? I can't see how arbitrary human culture is any better than more purposeful breeding. Culture selects for racial purity in some cases, and for mixing in others, but it often depends on political history - Koreans don't want to mix with Japanese because politics, not because they're too far away from each other. Is politics really a better decider than science? Use race for eugenics though is a very coarse metric and I wouldn't advocate for it unless we somehow lacked any better measures. I think a better program would measure performance in whatever criteria people think are desirable and go for those regardless of race. It might turn out that the tallest people are black, and you end up with a lot of black genes if you like tallness. So it might look racist, and it might shrink the populations of some races relative to others. But again, that's what already happens through arbitrary reasons anyway. We're already breeding more blacks and less whites simply because blacks are generally poorer than whites and poor people tend to have more children. I don't see how you can be happy with that (selecting for poverty!) but not with people putting the quality of their children ahead of their own personal desire to spread their genes.
  - dang 8y ago
    Race-war flamebait is off-topic here and we ban accounts that post like this. Please keep it elsewhere from now on. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

arkh 8y ago

It is. But if you close your mind enough you can't even think about those kind of argument and follow the kind of thinking some people do, how can you mount a valid argument against it? It's heinous! Eugenics bad! Are not good arguments. You have to try and follow thoughts along ways you (and most people you know) don't or you end-up creating your own echo chamber. Try playing devil's advocate sometimes you may learn a lot about how you think and why.