"Eugenics" in the popular imagination means Nazis executing people with disabilities. Embryo selection is "eugenics" in a strict dictionary definition sense, but not "eugenics" as most people understand it.
Still not believing it this time, and before we start on the "It's only because of the Nazis that eugenics has a bad name" route, read Francis Galton 'the Father of Eugenics' and others of the various Eugenics Societies which sprang up in the early 20th century. While Galton was concerned most of all with getting the 'best' specimens to marry and have kids, others were much more enthused about all the ways they would stop the 'inferiors' from breeding.
It wasn't the Nazi Party brought out posters like this - an uncomfortable reality which the Germans pointed out as support for their efforts.
And it always, always begins with "we just want to make sure that healthy babies are born, who could possibly object to doing away with hereditary diseases?"
Apart from that, this is just the usual "there is no such thing as the slippery slope" contention.
Then five years later it's "But how were we to know?"
The general path of this sort of thing is:
(1) We promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, that polygenic screening will not be used except to prevent hereditary diseases
(2) Okay, 'hereditary disease' has been defined in too limited a sense, let's expand it to cover these heart-string tugging cases
(3) Wouldn't you want to give your children the gift of a better life? If they were polygenically selected to be smarter/taller/prettier/extrovert/athletic, they would have such a better life, studies have shown it, it's Science and you can't argue with Science
(4) There are still people out there who are hold-outs about their dysgenic heritage. They will be encouraged by the state to consider polygenic selection of any offspring they intend to have
(5) If none of your embryos reaches the standards required for continuation of the process of pregnancy, you will be sterilised for the good of society
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago
Honestly, that's like the third-worst scenario. The worse ones are inescapable dystopia and selection for negative-sum traits like height/exploitativity causing catabolic collapse (the latter is what you'd get accidentally from naïve selection on income, to be clear, and procreative beneficence also endorses deliberately doing it).
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
#1 has the potential to select for exploitativity, either indirectly via correlative PGT-P on things like income, or directly via Prisoner's Dilemma issues. That's a negative-sum game that if played at sufficient scale leads to societal collapse - with a time delay big enough that the problems are unstoppable once they start to show, assuming a decent uptake rate - and all positive effects of the eugenics only make the problem worse by making the exploitation easier. Note that the principle of procreative beneficence directly endorses doing this.
I'm not firmly in favour of #3, but I think Parrhesia's not taking the problems seriously enough and thus his going soldier on this is plausibly -EV.
I do think you have to coordinate action somehow to avoid prisoner's dilemma issues.
But we probably can.
Consider affirmative action. If you forcibly reduce competition, you reduce the selection pressure, which can help to remove the perverse incentives from the prisoner's dilemma table.
Indirect issues are a larger concern, such as biodiversity, second order effects of first order selections (as in your exploitation case), genetic fads, over-optimization for values initially perceived as important, and so on. I do think we should take things somewhat slow and keep hold of the sequenced genomes of older generations in case we need to backtrack. Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting. If a silent value shift occurs you might not be able to backtrack. But... I think we have to deal with that either way. As long as things keep changing we have to deal with alignment problems and stability. As long as there is any risk of societal collapse we should be diversifying our assets and making sure we can rebuild from as small a piece as possible. I think having smarter children is going to be a net positive regarding these issues. And though you worry about exploitation- cooperation is a very useful trait as well that is likely to be selected for, both explicitly and implicitly.
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
I don't think it's quite that easy. Embryo selection doesn't result in having children you could not in principle have. It's like cheating at a speedrun by raising an item drop rate. Say we sequence the genes of all children (who's sequencing them? Are we letting the government mandate this?). The smart thing to do is cheat just enough that you have an unlikely child, but not an impossible one. If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
And that's assuming they're raising their own children.
You can mail sperm. You can transfer gene sequences over the internet. You can get a surrogate (or a secret lover who wants your babies) in another country.
Also- yes imprisonment may dissuade the rich, or at least slow them down and force them to use secret tactics. But right now the rich just don't end up getting imprisoned for the same things the poor do. And I think getting the system to actually prosecute them on an issue with plausible deniability is going to be really difficult.
There are definitely some options beyond 1,2, and 3 in concept, for instance- Eugenics getting banned in all countries would help. A full time panopticon monitoring the wealthy would help. Everyone being socially aligned such that everyone coordinates their actions and just decides not to do eugenics would solve it (and you'd get world peace as a bonus!).
But I put those in the same category of 'solutions' that are not realistic enough to be viable.
There might be a 4), but I don't think your variant on 3) works well enough, and the other ideas I just shared are even less likely to happen. If you find a better 4, we can talk about it. Though, I myself am still pro gene-editing right now. Even if we can stop it, I'm likely still going to be arguing for why we shouldn't.
Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting.
The way I see it, if you graph out the distribution of psychological makeup in N-dimensional space, there's a certain window where society doesn't explode. We don't know where the boundaries are, but we know that we're inside it and that natural selection isn't going to move us out of it very fast. But widespread eugenics can.
If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
Check whether the babies implanted overseas. Check whether they transferred money to/were present at foreign IVF clinics (which will be known, because unlicensed medical practice is illegal everywhere so you might as well not go abroad at all). The existence of the baby actually makes this significantly easier than prosecuting e.g. child-brothel tourism.
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Notes -
"Eugenics" in the popular imagination means Nazis executing people with disabilities. Embryo selection is "eugenics" in a strict dictionary definition sense, but not "eugenics" as most people understand it.
"Our eugenics are different!"
Still not believing it this time, and before we start on the "It's only because of the Nazis that eugenics has a bad name" route, read Francis Galton 'the Father of Eugenics' and others of the various Eugenics Societies which sprang up in the early 20th century. While Galton was concerned most of all with getting the 'best' specimens to marry and have kids, others were much more enthused about all the ways they would stop the 'inferiors' from breeding.
It wasn't the Nazi Party brought out posters like this - an uncomfortable reality which the Germans pointed out as support for their efforts.
And it always, always begins with "we just want to make sure that healthy babies are born, who could possibly object to doing away with hereditary diseases?"
Snidely implying that Ambiguous Bad Thing Definitely Has to Happen Again for no reason is not a good argument.
I take exception to the term "snidely".
Apart from that, this is just the usual "there is no such thing as the slippery slope" contention.
Then five years later it's "But how were we to know?"
The general path of this sort of thing is:
(1) We promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, that polygenic screening will not be used except to prevent hereditary diseases
(2) Okay, 'hereditary disease' has been defined in too limited a sense, let's expand it to cover these heart-string tugging cases
(3) Wouldn't you want to give your children the gift of a better life? If they were polygenically selected to be smarter/taller/prettier/extrovert/athletic, they would have such a better life, studies have shown it, it's Science and you can't argue with Science
(4) There are still people out there who are hold-outs about their dysgenic heritage. They will be encouraged by the state to consider polygenic selection of any offspring they intend to have
(5) If none of your embryos reaches the standards required for continuation of the process of pregnancy, you will be sterilised for the good of society
Honestly, that's like the third-worst scenario. The worse ones are inescapable dystopia and selection for negative-sum traits like height/exploitativity causing catabolic collapse (the latter is what you'd get accidentally from naïve selection on income, to be clear, and procreative beneficence also endorses deliberately doing it).
Beware of mean chickens.
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I'm not sure what you're proposing. To me its clear that once this technology exists your choices are as follows:
Let anyone use it to select their offspring
Let the government choose which offspring we have
Ban it (only let rich people select their offspring and leave the poor to rot.)
I'm a fan of option 1 given these choices.
Your #3 is claiming a bailey; fines may not dissuade the rich, but imprisonment does, and citizen jurisdiction (i.e. anyone a citizen of country X is subject to X's laws even while not in X) blocks reproductive tourism if they ever plan on coming back.
#1 has the potential to select for exploitativity, either indirectly via correlative PGT-P on things like income, or directly via Prisoner's Dilemma issues. That's a negative-sum game that if played at sufficient scale leads to societal collapse - with a time delay big enough that the problems are unstoppable once they start to show, assuming a decent uptake rate - and all positive effects of the eugenics only make the problem worse by making the exploitation easier. Note that the principle of procreative beneficence directly endorses doing this.
I'm not firmly in favour of #3, but I think Parrhesia's not taking the problems seriously enough and thus his going soldier on this is plausibly -EV.
I do think you have to coordinate action somehow to avoid prisoner's dilemma issues.
But we probably can.
Consider affirmative action. If you forcibly reduce competition, you reduce the selection pressure, which can help to remove the perverse incentives from the prisoner's dilemma table.
Indirect issues are a larger concern, such as biodiversity, second order effects of first order selections (as in your exploitation case), genetic fads, over-optimization for values initially perceived as important, and so on. I do think we should take things somewhat slow and keep hold of the sequenced genomes of older generations in case we need to backtrack. Your focus on full societal collapse is interesting. If a silent value shift occurs you might not be able to backtrack. But... I think we have to deal with that either way. As long as things keep changing we have to deal with alignment problems and stability. As long as there is any risk of societal collapse we should be diversifying our assets and making sure we can rebuild from as small a piece as possible. I think having smarter children is going to be a net positive regarding these issues. And though you worry about exploitation- cooperation is a very useful trait as well that is likely to be selected for, both explicitly and implicitly.
I don't think it's quite that easy. Embryo selection doesn't result in having children you could not in principle have. It's like cheating at a speedrun by raising an item drop rate. Say we sequence the genes of all children (who's sequencing them? Are we letting the government mandate this?). The smart thing to do is cheat just enough that you have an unlikely child, but not an impossible one. If every rich family has a 1 in 10 child and two average children, you can run the statistics and figure out what percentage of them are cheating, but it's very hard to tell who's cheating.
And that's assuming they're raising their own children.
You can mail sperm. You can transfer gene sequences over the internet. You can get a surrogate (or a secret lover who wants your babies) in another country.
Also- yes imprisonment may dissuade the rich, or at least slow them down and force them to use secret tactics. But right now the rich just don't end up getting imprisoned for the same things the poor do. And I think getting the system to actually prosecute them on an issue with plausible deniability is going to be really difficult.
There are definitely some options beyond 1,2, and 3 in concept, for instance- Eugenics getting banned in all countries would help. A full time panopticon monitoring the wealthy would help. Everyone being socially aligned such that everyone coordinates their actions and just decides not to do eugenics would solve it (and you'd get world peace as a bonus!).
But I put those in the same category of 'solutions' that are not realistic enough to be viable.
There might be a 4), but I don't think your variant on 3) works well enough, and the other ideas I just shared are even less likely to happen. If you find a better 4, we can talk about it. Though, I myself am still pro gene-editing right now. Even if we can stop it, I'm likely still going to be arguing for why we shouldn't.
The way I see it, if you graph out the distribution of psychological makeup in N-dimensional space, there's a certain window where society doesn't explode. We don't know where the boundaries are, but we know that we're inside it and that natural selection isn't going to move us out of it very fast. But widespread eugenics can.
Check whether the babies implanted overseas. Check whether they transferred money to/were present at foreign IVF clinics (which will be known, because unlicensed medical practice is illegal everywhere so you might as well not go abroad at all). The existence of the baby actually makes this significantly easier than prosecuting e.g. child-brothel tourism.
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