parrhesia.substack.com
SS: I think that cognitive genetic enhancement is important for ensuring we have a better and lasting future. Many people have an intuitive dislike for the idea of using genetic enhancement to make a baby smarter but have little issue with in vitro fertilization (IVF). I try to build from a foundation of the acceptable practice of IVF to PGT-P for IQ.
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This is such a quintessentially leftist, zero-sum, all-goods-are-positional-goods, spoils-system, school-pecking-hierarchy point of view. Do you think violent crime is an unchangeable quantity that can only be shifted around like liquid in a hydraulic system, that there's a fixed supply of non-crappy homes such that only a few get to have them, that the economy just needs someone to be on obese and on welfare? That all that IQ score represents is deviation from the median rather than a noisy proxy for absolute cognitive ability, so any improvement will only produce accelerated running in place?
It reminds me of The Citadel of Ricks from that damn cartoon – which is either brilliant satire or an expression of an extraordinarily pathological world model, or both, I guess. Unironic superhumans who can individually construct physics-breaking tools and AI-powered assistants – exploiting each other, building elaborate chains of abuse, maintaining artificial scarcity, ineffectively doing menial jobs to the point of burnout, in a mockery of a dysfunctional American city.
I'd understand it if you predicted a culling, seeing as you expect AI to be economically useful. But who the fuck needs to maintain a permanent underclass that requires babysitting, armed cops and shitty schools? Would our genetically-augmented overlords invest into reintroducing lead-laced gas and asbestos walls, while they're at it?
If I am to be blunt, I think this entire line of thinking is a cope. I think people hide in this worldview from admitting that some groups they care about are just fucked up – not relatively or conventionally, but in some rigorously definable, absolute, physical, embarrassing but potentially rectifiable sense. That there are hard limits on what can be achieved with «85 IQ», which do not follow from it being 1 SD below the «100 IQ» and thus non-competitive in a market economy. Limits on impulse control, cooperation, general decision-making. And moving beyond these limits allows for building an all-around nicer society for everyone, without extra requirements for morality of its elites.
Sure, they can try to cement their advantage – though that'd require the «PMC» to coordinate far more than they've been able so far. On the other hand, the main reason to avoid falling down the hierarchy is knowing how much it sucks down there. Sucks absolutely, not relatively. Scarcity begets crab mentality. And stupidity multiplies scarcity.
There is a huge demand for horror stories about the Japanese way of life. Japanese elites are not inhumanly virtuous or selfless; Japanese culture and society are rather hierarchical. There is, I'm sure, some violence, some bullying, some crappy housing in Tokyo – just very little, relatively speaking. But there certainly are no armed security guards in Tokyo schools. It's not because the undesirables have all been tucked away somewhere on Hokkaido. It's partially, but in a very large part, because there does not exist an underclass with sub-90 IQ in modern Japan. And no one deserves to be born into such an underclass.
@Eetan would no doubt gleefully remind me that the Japanese public has no guns anyway, so those guards wouldn't have had anything to do. Well, fair point. But there's very little non-gun violence either. There's virtually no shit like this in Japan. If the demand to lay down arms and obey can be made legitimate, guaranteeing extreme safety is one of the better ideas.
I look at this and I'm amazed how good the facilities are compared to school I was in, are.
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