DerGegner
New Member
Now that I'm finally posting here I have to bring up this topic
I see a thread in Religion / Irreligion where someone wants to ban religion
I don't really think that would solve anything. In fact, a ban on religion would be despised and widely, easily flouted. Fortunately, I don't think religion is really the root cause of a lot of our problems either
If you'll forgive me for making a personal digression, I started to be distressed by the failings of society around the age of eleven or twelve. I grew up in a poor neighborhood and there was a lot of tension between the student body and the faculty. It was an unhealthy, overcrowded environment. A number of the faculty were frankly sadistic ... in retrospect the conditions were not unlike those of some prisons. I eventually had a mental breakdown in this school as a result of gratuitous faculty sadism and was committed for some time afterwards
Since then the issue of why people are such twats has occupied me almost obsessively. I don't think my anecdote is too parochial. Folks do an awful lot of stupid shit. Folks do an awful lot of stupid shit to each other. Quite frequently with wanton malice. They can do good or even great things, too, (under certain circumstances) but I think it's possible to do better. I can't say I was never one of those twats either: I have been. I stopped eventually, but I have been one of them. However, many people keep being assholes well into adulthood
Ideally, everyone would get along. That's the whole point of having a society. I would posit an evolutionary explanation for being a twat then. I know they're overly fashionable but it seems reasonable, at least. The kind of utility function we have for our society is probably very different from the ecological utility function according to which we evolved. Whether or not this is the case isn't terribly important for my purposes. People are twats in any case
Genetic engineering could remedy some of the ills of being a twat. Genes of course do not singularly determine someone's behavior: they just code for some RNA segment or protein, some of which play a role in how the brain develops. I don't think it would be good for society to define someone's behavior too rigidly and that's not possible anyway. Behavior is the interaction of biology and environment. (The late Herbert Simon had a nice analogy about this involving an ant walking on a beach.) So, holding environmental factors constant, manipulating genetic factors could increase someone's productivity as a citizen. I think that's a fairly uncontroversial claim, especially as we learn more and more about the brain and the gene expression involved
I have no idea whether philhellenes of YouTube fame posts here but, in any case, his latest video mentions the problem, if not my own peculiar solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIT3TYnQJQc#t=6m52s
"The biggest problem [in achieving interstellar civilization] ... is us, and the ape that we each carry inside: our territoriality, our determination to breed beyond the land's ability to support us, our greed, our short-sightedness, our fear and hatred of those of a different tribe, our insane economic systems, our drive to war, our inability to face reality, these are the real challenges. By comparison, reaching the stars is easy."
It's rather sad how he outlines it, isn't it? From my perspective at least, he draws attention to two economic phenomena worth knowing in this case in a sort of tacit visceral way: opportunity cost and omission bias. They're somewhat related I think. Opportunity cost is the more well known of the two: it's the cost you incur by doing one thing rather than another, when you have to make an exclusive choice. Here's a good example. It's not mine, of course:
So, you could say, "Well I think society is already improving. We don't need to tweak our genetics." Maybe it is. But I think we'd still be forgoing considerable gains not to use GE. If we rely on education and other environmental factors to improve welfare then we are building rather impressive hacks on a Stone Age brain ... but these are still jerry-rigged improvements, prone to break down. The other phenomenon is omission bias, which is the idea that errors of commission (fucking something up) and errors of omission (not doing anything) are normatively equal, other things being equal. You may well have balked at Jenny McCarthy's unlettered drivel about vaccines causing autism in recent months. But suppose vaccines caused autism very rarely. What would be worse? Withholding vaccines that stop once deadly illnesses in their tracks or the occasional case of autism or other illness? For whatever reason, people see an error of commission as worse than an error of omission which, in a utilitarian sense, is equal. It really isn't though, I think. And if it could be shown that withholding GE from humanity would be equivalent to shattering everyone's kneecaps then piercing their eardrums with chopsticks (comical but perhaps not too far-fetched given the way things are now) then I think we'd definitely be committing an error if we held back
What is the ideal human in my eyes? Well some amount of variance in character traits would probably be necessary, like a kind of genetic portfolio, but factors where definite genetic / neural influences are being exposed over time are hostility, agreeableness, different kinds of intelligence, to name a few. An ideal person would be very intelligent, but not brutal or cunning, and nearly incapable of anger ... it's a fairless useless emotion in a modern society. Very agreeable too, but it's sort of hard to say whether introversion or extroversion is more preferable. It could go either way. Skin color, etc. are of course normatively irrelevant
Now, I do have a rather strong conviction in my belief. I haven't looked hard enough for evidence that might change it and so I ask the reader to challenge me in my belief. (For once, this is much more than a thinly-veiled attempt to start a troll thread.)
I see a thread in Religion / Irreligion where someone wants to ban religion
I don't really think that would solve anything. In fact, a ban on religion would be despised and widely, easily flouted. Fortunately, I don't think religion is really the root cause of a lot of our problems either
If you'll forgive me for making a personal digression, I started to be distressed by the failings of society around the age of eleven or twelve. I grew up in a poor neighborhood and there was a lot of tension between the student body and the faculty. It was an unhealthy, overcrowded environment. A number of the faculty were frankly sadistic ... in retrospect the conditions were not unlike those of some prisons. I eventually had a mental breakdown in this school as a result of gratuitous faculty sadism and was committed for some time afterwards
Since then the issue of why people are such twats has occupied me almost obsessively. I don't think my anecdote is too parochial. Folks do an awful lot of stupid shit. Folks do an awful lot of stupid shit to each other. Quite frequently with wanton malice. They can do good or even great things, too, (under certain circumstances) but I think it's possible to do better. I can't say I was never one of those twats either: I have been. I stopped eventually, but I have been one of them. However, many people keep being assholes well into adulthood
Ideally, everyone would get along. That's the whole point of having a society. I would posit an evolutionary explanation for being a twat then. I know they're overly fashionable but it seems reasonable, at least. The kind of utility function we have for our society is probably very different from the ecological utility function according to which we evolved. Whether or not this is the case isn't terribly important for my purposes. People are twats in any case
Genetic engineering could remedy some of the ills of being a twat. Genes of course do not singularly determine someone's behavior: they just code for some RNA segment or protein, some of which play a role in how the brain develops. I don't think it would be good for society to define someone's behavior too rigidly and that's not possible anyway. Behavior is the interaction of biology and environment. (The late Herbert Simon had a nice analogy about this involving an ant walking on a beach.) So, holding environmental factors constant, manipulating genetic factors could increase someone's productivity as a citizen. I think that's a fairly uncontroversial claim, especially as we learn more and more about the brain and the gene expression involved
I have no idea whether philhellenes of YouTube fame posts here but, in any case, his latest video mentions the problem, if not my own peculiar solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIT3TYnQJQc#t=6m52s
"The biggest problem [in achieving interstellar civilization] ... is us, and the ape that we each carry inside: our territoriality, our determination to breed beyond the land's ability to support us, our greed, our short-sightedness, our fear and hatred of those of a different tribe, our insane economic systems, our drive to war, our inability to face reality, these are the real challenges. By comparison, reaching the stars is easy."
It's rather sad how he outlines it, isn't it? From my perspective at least, he draws attention to two economic phenomena worth knowing in this case in a sort of tacit visceral way: opportunity cost and omission bias. They're somewhat related I think. Opportunity cost is the more well known of the two: it's the cost you incur by doing one thing rather than another, when you have to make an exclusive choice. Here's a good example. It's not mine, of course:
So, you could say, "Well I think society is already improving. We don't need to tweak our genetics." Maybe it is. But I think we'd still be forgoing considerable gains not to use GE. If we rely on education and other environmental factors to improve welfare then we are building rather impressive hacks on a Stone Age brain ... but these are still jerry-rigged improvements, prone to break down. The other phenomenon is omission bias, which is the idea that errors of commission (fucking something up) and errors of omission (not doing anything) are normatively equal, other things being equal. You may well have balked at Jenny McCarthy's unlettered drivel about vaccines causing autism in recent months. But suppose vaccines caused autism very rarely. What would be worse? Withholding vaccines that stop once deadly illnesses in their tracks or the occasional case of autism or other illness? For whatever reason, people see an error of commission as worse than an error of omission which, in a utilitarian sense, is equal. It really isn't though, I think. And if it could be shown that withholding GE from humanity would be equivalent to shattering everyone's kneecaps then piercing their eardrums with chopsticks (comical but perhaps not too far-fetched given the way things are now) then I think we'd definitely be committing an error if we held back
What is the ideal human in my eyes? Well some amount of variance in character traits would probably be necessary, like a kind of genetic portfolio, but factors where definite genetic / neural influences are being exposed over time are hostility, agreeableness, different kinds of intelligence, to name a few. An ideal person would be very intelligent, but not brutal or cunning, and nearly incapable of anger ... it's a fairless useless emotion in a modern society. Very agreeable too, but it's sort of hard to say whether introversion or extroversion is more preferable. It could go either way. Skin color, etc. are of course normatively irrelevant
Now, I do have a rather strong conviction in my belief. I haven't looked hard enough for evidence that might change it and so I ask the reader to challenge me in my belief. (For once, this is much more than a thinly-veiled attempt to start a troll thread.)
