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> On the other hand, this feels a bit like eugenics, and a slippery slope towards designer babies where you can pick and choose their attributes. We can discus

> On the other hand, this feels a bit like eugenics, and a slippery slope towards designer babies where you can pick and choose their attributes. We can discuss pros and cons of freedom of choice of genetics for your children (an opposite spin on the same idea as calling it "designer babies"), but eugenics is a thought-terminating cliche at this point. There's whole space of useful genetics-based treatments and interventions that do not imply involuntary sterilization of people one group deems lesser.

api 7mo ago
The best thing to do with the term eugenics is to define it specifically as authoritarian control of reproduction. Voluntary acts aren’t eugenics, otherwise you get absurd things like free choice of mates being eugenics because you are choosing, or any medical treatment being eugenics if it touches genetics or reproduction. Eugenics should be defined as meaning only authoritarian (directly or via state backed “social engineering”) forms.
ben_w 7mo ago
While I agree with you that it's a thought-terminating cliche, I would caution that humans have historically been very inaccurate with knowing what traits specifically are good vs. bad, while also very strong on enforcement of ingroup/outgroup and purity dynamics. We could all be hyper-muscular (from that Myostatin gene) and have tetra-chromatic vision*, but that leads to the joke about how "in the future there will be three genders: kpop, furry, and tank", where kpop represents normative beauty standards, furry represents self-expression, and tank represents hyper-optimising for niche goals like being strong. On the more near-term impacts, before we're ready for me to get turned into an anthro-wolf, if we all end up with our genomes subject to regular updates like our software currently is, some of us are inevitably going to face our cells getting bricked while we're still made of them. * I don't know how that works so here's the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans

api 7mo ago

The best thing to do with the term eugenics is to define it specifically as authoritarian control of reproduction. Voluntary acts aren’t eugenics, otherwise you get absurd things like free choice of mates being eugenics because you are choosing, or any medical treatment being eugenics if it touches genetics or reproduction. Eugenics should be defined as meaning only authoritarian (directly or via state backed “social engineering”) forms.

ben_w 7mo ago

While I agree with you that it's a thought-terminating cliche, I would caution that humans have historically been very inaccurate with knowing what traits specifically are good vs. bad, while also very strong on enforcement of ingroup/outgroup and purity dynamics. We could all be hyper-muscular (from that Myostatin gene) and have tetra-chromatic vision*, but that leads to the joke about how "in the future there will be three genders: kpop, furry, and tank", where kpop represents normative beauty standards, furry represents self-expression, and tank represents hyper-optimising for niche goals like being strong. On the more near-term impacts, before we're ready for me to get turned into an anthro-wolf, if we all end up with our genomes subject to regular updates like our software currently is, some of us are inevitably going to face our cells getting bricked while we're still made of them. * I don't know how that works so here's the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans