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"There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work" Genetic counseling such as "when two people have the same recessive gene coding for a

"There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work" Genetic counseling such as "when two people have the same recessive gene coding for a serious disease, they shouldn't have kids together" works very well and is used in many countries to suppress prevalence of various diseases. The first country to introduce a program to suppress Tay-Sachs this way was actually Israel, the home country of Holocaust survivors. If they can tolerate it, so can the rest of the world.

woodruffw 4y ago
Testing and counseling for Tay-Sachs is not the same thing as attempting to breed abstract desirable traits, like general intelligence. Again: there is no major controversy over things like the former, and that’s not what’s popularly understood as eugenics. So it’s not clear how it rebuts the objection to what we’re actually talking about, which is the West matching the (potential) reactionary eugenics of China.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  It is not the same, but not that different either. There is a gap of 150 years and a lot of technological development between the relatively simple Tipu Sultan bamboo rockets that rained on the British in 1799 and ICBMs that can carry a nuclear warhead across the globe, but it is not really a difference of kind. They are both solid-propellant rockets working on the same principle. It is possible that future genetic and epigenetic manipulation will be much more subtle than whatever we can do today. Or perhaps you are addressing the categories. Well, "health" is, to some degree, socially defined. As is "disease". There were times when homosexuality was classified as a disease. Not that distant times. Alan Turing (in)famously committed suicide because of that. As of now, scientists working in the longevity field are pushing for aging itself to be redefined as a disease. Parents of heavily intellectually disabled kids would probably agree to any reasonably safe treatment that would help their kids, if such treatment existed. Not having enough general intelligence is a big obstacle in everyday life. HN gets an audience of mostly smart people; most of them cannot even begin to understand how cognitivelly loaded is contemporary world.

woodruffw 4y ago

Testing and counseling for Tay-Sachs is not the same thing as attempting to breed abstract desirable traits, like general intelligence. Again: there is no major controversy over things like the former, and that’s not what’s popularly understood as eugenics. So it’s not clear how it rebuts the objection to what we’re actually talking about, which is the West matching the (potential) reactionary eugenics of China.

inglor_cz 4y ago
It is not the same, but not that different either. There is a gap of 150 years and a lot of technological development between the relatively simple Tipu Sultan bamboo rockets that rained on the British in 1799 and ICBMs that can carry a nuclear warhead across the globe, but it is not really a difference of kind. They are both solid-propellant rockets working on the same principle. It is possible that future genetic and epigenetic manipulation will be much more subtle than whatever we can do today. Or perhaps you are addressing the categories. Well, "health" is, to some degree, socially defined. As is "disease". There were times when homosexuality was classified as a disease. Not that distant times. Alan Turing (in)famously committed suicide because of that. As of now, scientists working in the longevity field are pushing for aging itself to be redefined as a disease. Parents of heavily intellectually disabled kids would probably agree to any reasonably safe treatment that would help their kids, if such treatment existed. Not having enough general intelligence is a big obstacle in everyday life. HN gets an audience of mostly smart people; most of them cannot even begin to understand how cognitivelly loaded is contemporary world.