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I'm not a particularly political person, so I'll try to limit myself here to my fields of knowledge (namely biology). I first want to clarify that I'm not advo

I'm not a particularly political person, so I'll try to limit myself here to my fields of knowledge (namely biology). I first want to clarify that I'm not advocating for social Darwinism. I'm using it as a foil to show how our society is NOT darwinist, as we have well established institutions who's entire purpose is to prevent death as a result of fitness failure. My point with the poor(referring to the welfare class, not the working poor)/young/uneducated being unproductive is to point out merely that they are. WHY they are is for a much larger discussion. That said, I wouldn't be overly concerned about people being temporarily disenfranchised. As you mentioned, the overall trend is for it to expand regardless of obstacle. A trend not to be taken for granted, but one which can be comfortably taken as faith. Population and demographics matter far more over time. They represent the upper and lower bounds of the groups that can be enfranchised at all. In short, even if some elections are bent by some actors to make victory more likely for their side, if they aren't cementing that victory in the form of future generations of whatever they define as their ingroup (biological, cultural, creedal, etc.) then their gains are temporary and will erode with time as they are simply replaced and new group interests take over. And yes, if humans engaged in the social equivalent of memory garbage collection that would look an awful lot like eugenics. The tricky thing is that eugenics, when applied to actually heritable traits as opposed to merely associated traits (think Crohn's disease or sickle cell anemia vs something like income), does 'work' in that it reduces the % composition of whatever negative factor is being targeted. People are upset about the word 'eugenics' because it was so closely associated with racism. That made it morally repugnant, but unlike, say, phrenology before it eugenics is far more 'correct' in that it's predictions are accurate over time. The real heart of the remaining valid controversy over it is what traits are targeted for expansion or removal and how/if that is enforced in practice. For example, in almost all developed countries, pregnant women have samples taken to do genetic screening on their children early on in pregnancy. These can detect things like aneuploidy, NTDs, heritable conditions (like sickle cell), and even facial features if you check for them. While facial feature results are uncommon, it is very common for women to be recommend a termination if their child will have some major genetic condition. This is eugenics, yet we have found it more help than not.

dredmorbius 3y ago
An issue to keep in mind when even approaching topics remotely associated with eugenics is how absolutely derailing they can become. Bull in a china shop, so to speak. Among my own objections is that deliberate negative eugenics seems to me to be a case of evolutionary self-selection, that is, endogenous rather than exogenous evolutionary pressure, which ... seems particularly prone to various feedback effects. Self-selection is not entirely excludable ("mate selection" is a well-known example), but it seems strongly associated with nonfunctional-though-indicative features (the peacock's tail, moose antlers, stotting) in non-human populations. Numerous cases of pro-eugenic policies seem to be based on at best specious "fitness" indicia. The question of disenfrachisement and its ill effects presupposes the larger question of what the purpose of democratic governance is, as well as what possible alternatives might exist. Runciman's essay is interesting to me beyond the "poor / uneducated / young" aspect, in that it also addresses the option of sortition, which is a fairly fascinating concept I've been looking at for about a decade now, see "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly" <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Runciman directly notes that this still tends overwhelmingly to favour representation of the poor and uneducated, which is probably non-ideal. If we consider polity as the process of achieving collective decisionmaking, and see among the multiple goals of such systems not only effective and good decision outcomes, but social buy-in, fairness, broad consideration, and minimisation of self-serving corruption, then the arguments in favour of democratic processes (over oligopic or autocratic forms) seem more evident, though there are also failure modes of democratic forms. That many of those tend toward oligarchic or autocratic (electing a strong man, outsized influence of campaigns and/or media by a small high-wealth / high-power cohort, for example), bears reflection. There's also the question and problem of effective representation. A member of the US House represents about 760,000 people. Over a two-year term of office, this means that each constituent can on average claim 1m 23s of their representative's time, assuming the representative is available 24/7/365. Congressional staff and household aggregation assist somewhat with this, but calling the circumstance "representation" seems a stretch. At the same time, increasing the size of the House by the 10x or 100x which might better suite effectual representation would make that body even more ungovernable than it already is. In other contexts, notably both military and corporate organisation, multiple spans of control, each typically addressing 4--20 or so individual units, is common. This of course leads to strongly hierarchical organisations at large scale, but these typically do have effective communications and command flows. Military hierarchies tend to be fairly stable over years and decades, whilst commercial organisations tend to see frequent (and often incomprehensible to those involved) reorganisations, shuffling those relationships.

dredmorbius 3y ago

An issue to keep in mind when even approaching topics remotely associated with eugenics is how absolutely derailing they can become. Bull in a china shop, so to speak. Among my own objections is that deliberate negative eugenics seems to me to be a case of evolutionary self-selection, that is, endogenous rather than exogenous evolutionary pressure, which ... seems particularly prone to various feedback effects. Self-selection is not entirely excludable ("mate selection" is a well-known example), but it seems strongly associated with nonfunctional-though-indicative features (the peacock's tail, moose antlers, stotting) in non-human populations. Numerous cases of pro-eugenic policies seem to be based on at best specious "fitness" indicia. The question of disenfrachisement and its ill effects presupposes the larger question of what the purpose of democratic governance is, as well as what possible alternatives might exist. Runciman's essay is interesting to me beyond the "poor / uneducated / young" aspect, in that it also addresses the option of sortition, which is a fairly fascinating concept I've been looking at for about a decade now, see "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly" <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Runciman directly notes that this still tends overwhelmingly to favour representation of the poor and uneducated, which is probably non-ideal. If we consider polity as the process of achieving collective decisionmaking, and see among the multiple goals of such systems not only effective and good decision outcomes, but social buy-in, fairness, broad consideration, and minimisation of self-serving corruption, then the arguments in favour of democratic processes (over oligopic or autocratic forms) seem more evident, though there are also failure modes of democratic forms. That many of those tend toward oligarchic or autocratic (electing a strong man, outsized influence of campaigns and/or media by a small high-wealth / high-power cohort, for example), bears reflection. There's also the question and problem of effective representation. A member of the US House represents about 760,000 people. Over a two-year term of office, this means that each constituent can on average claim 1m 23s of their representative's time, assuming the representative is available 24/7/365. Congressional staff and household aggregation assist somewhat with this, but calling the circumstance "representation" seems a stretch. At the same time, increasing the size of the House by the 10x or 100x which might better suite effectual representation would make that body even more ungovernable than it already is. In other contexts, notably both military and corporate organisation, multiple spans of control, each typically addressing 4--20 or so individual units, is common. This of course leads to strongly hierarchical organisations at large scale, but these typically do have effective communications and command flows. Military hierarchies tend to be fairly stable over years and decades, whilst commercial organisations tend to see frequent (and often incomprehensible to those involved) reorganisations, shuffling those relationships.